Suspicious River (28 page)

In one photograph, my uncle’s eyebrows looked darker than they were in real life, knitted together. He looked desperately tired, ill with desire, like a man who would stab you if you didn’t love him enough. A man who would press your wrist against the wall and tear your blouse if you told him no. A man who could seduce you away from your ordinary husband—your ordinary husband who would never make enough money to take you on vacation somewhere warm, while November curled the edges of the horizon like frozen steam rising from an iron as it passes over a man’s cotton shirt, pinned to the ironing board. Seven months of winter on the way.

“You better get back in the bedroom,” Gary’s friend says, looking at my bare feet as he says it. A few more men are waiting on the front steps to come in. Quiet, but I can hear their boots on the stoop’s wood planks. I can hear them breathe.

I turn off the light in the bedroom when I go back, and I get in the bed, roll onto my stomach, and press my face into the pillow. I close my eyes, and I don’t open them when I hear someone open the bedroom door.

I don’t open them when he sits at the edge of the bed.

I hear him kick off his shoes. “Take off your dress,” he says, and I roll onto my back and unbutton it, fold it, put it at the foot of the bed, on the floor, so it won’t get wrinkled, my eyes closed tight the whole time. Hovering above my body, ready to be born.

Ladies’-Man Killer
. There he was.
Pleads guilty to manslaughter
.

Killing was accidental, he claims
.

High cheekbones. Boyish, murder-you eyes: He is the handsome, younger one, the spoiled and sexy one with a fast red car, the one who doesn’t care that your husband is his brother. He wants you that bad. He’s a man you will never meet, a man you can think about as you type, or cook dinner in a skillet, or drive your children to school in the dark, in the morning, in November, after another hard frost has finally killed everything.

Even I could see that, and why those women wrote to him in prison, why they probably sent him tins of oatmeal cookies that never made it past the prison guards. Even I could see that, and I was the one who’d also seen him sitting dull-eyed, with his mouth open, at the foot of a bed, my mother’s blood on his chest.

I peered into the microfilm—a lost month, a decade earlier, projected and lit up in front of me while the librarian chewed his fingernails in the silence—and, in it, I could also see a hundred women a day sit down with ballpoint pens at their kitchen tables while their infant daughters slept and their husbands read damp newspapers in dens.
You don’t know me
, they might begin,
but I read about you in the
Kalamazoo Gazette.

Those women thought they wanted a man like that, but what they really wanted was to die.

T
HE LETTER
was written on both sides of one piece of notebook paper with jagged edges. The printing was small and hard, all capitals, and black. It said:
Dear Leila, You probably will not remember me since you were just a little girl when I left. But I am your father’s brother. I have just learned that my brother Jack died last week, and I wanted to send you this letter to tell you I’m sorry. He was a good man, and I’m sure you must be missing him. You probably know that I was in jail for eight and a half years. Manslaughter. But I have a new life now in Indianapolis. I am enclosing my phone number if you ever need anything I hope you will call. Despite all that has happened I am still your family. I will be thinking of you during these hard times, sincerely, Andy Murray
.

I folded the paper along the exact lines it had originally been folded along, and I put it back in the envelope, then I put the envelope in the pocket of my coat. I could hear snow melting off the roof, trickling down the clapboard. The sun was even higher by now, and the windows glistened, prismatic with old ice, daggers of it hanging and dripping off the eaves.

I went to their bedroom and opened the door.

In the dark, with the shades pulled and so much light behind them, the sheets on the bed looked faded and blue.

But nothing had changed.

I closed my eyes.

My mother’s shadow still hovered over the bed—silk slip soaked with blood and black by now, but not a slip. Her eyes were open, and she was smiling. Legs long and white. I could hear my heart thud, underwater, in my chest, and the sound of my breath was like the hissing whine of wind through cracked walls. When I opened my eyes and turned, he was standing in the hall behind me.

Older now.

His hair had gone prison gray.

The same good trousers, though. A nice white shirt with a button-down collar. I could smell him. Powder, and the alcohol underneath his cologne. He looked surprised to see me when I screamed.

“Open your eyes,” he says, and his breath is hot with vodka and something else like white fire over my face, but I can’t open my eyes. Too much light. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You a nut case or something?”

He rolls off of me, onto his side, and runs his hand up and down my body like a man polishing a counter. “Jesus Christ,” he says. He slaps me lightly on the side of my face a few times. The sound of water clapping ripples in the river, but I can’t move.

“Fine,” he says and whips the sheet off me. To someone else, someone who must have been in the room with us all along, he says, “She’s all yours, Bud. A fucking nut case.”

The bedroom door opens and closes while a bare white weight presses down on me, spreads my legs. Wind outside. Something rattling leaves off the trees until they’re skeletons again. Someone says, “Open your mouth,” and he laughs when I do. “She can open her mouth, anyway.” More laughter. Outside, more wind.

Light from the kitchen window shimmered with ash ahead of me as I walked toward the back door, fast—past my Uncle Andy, past my own bedroom, straight out the door, breathing hard. I let the screen door slap shut behind me.

Outside, the air was sharp and chilled, too fresh, and so bright I couldn’t lift my face as I walked. My eyes watered, making the world a strange, warped mirror, but, watching the white ground, I could see my own boot prints make ruins of the melting cat prints where my father had died, and I kept walking—past my own house and down the street. I unzipped my black coat and stuffed my mittens into the pockets of it while I walked, but the sun still felt too warm, like something dropped heavy, invisible but burning on my back. I kept walking until I’d gotten to the end of the block, to the front door of the only house on that block I’d ever been inside except my own—the only neighbor on that block I’d ever known. I rang the doorbell and waited, hands stuffed along with the soft suffocation of mittens into the deep pockets of my coat.

When he finally came to the door, Reverend Roberts was wearing a bathrobe, but he opened the screen door for me, looking worried, squinting behind me to the street as I stepped in.

“Leila,” he said, “you shouldn’t just come by here, you know. No one’s home, but if my wife—” He lifted his hands to the ceiling as if the rest were too obvious to mention, as if it were written all over the beige above us. He looked annoyed when he saw the look on my face. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, impatient, and then, just remembering, “I’m sorry.” He touched my shoulder and mumbled, “I’m sorry. Again. About your father.”

I could smell his breath. Musty and yellow. His feet and shins were bare under the white bulky robe, and his house was warm, all off-white wallpaper and deep brown carpet that looked clean and soft—and every inch of every wall was covered with a photograph of someone framed in fake, sprayed gold, or a little oil painting of the ocean, a dopey cow, a young girl in a white dress on a swing in summer, a cross, or a sepia-tinted portrait of Jesus, looking authentic and old.

I looked up at him, and he looked afraid this time when he saw my face. He shrugged before I’d asked him anything, then said, “Leila, I don’t think I can help you. What we’ve been doing is really a terrible mistake. I could lose my church, you know. You can’t stop by here. I thought you understood that. If anyone found out about this, it would ruin my life.”

I looked down at my boots and saw that the snow was melting off them onto the Robertses’ nice carpet, pooling under me, and I started to cry.

Reverend Roberts stood up straighter when I put my arms around his neck and pressed myself into him, sobbing. He tried to push me away with his hands above my hips, shaking his head back and forth fast, but I held to him harder, kissing the side of his face, his neck. Finally he said, “Look, Leila, let me get dressed and we’ll get out of here. You go down to your father’s house and wait for me, O.K.? There’s no one there, is there?”

I shook my head, wiped my eyes on the black wool sleeve of my coat and drew a breath that trembled. “O.K.,” I said.

Walking back down the block, I felt cold again. The sun had tucked itself briefly behind a cloud, then peered out—the cloud moving fast and high across the pure blue sky. I couldn’t go back into my father’s house alone, so I stood in the back yard and looked up at all that sky. When I closed my eyes I saw black circles against a yellow backdrop, like faces in a snapshot taken on a too-bright day—ruined, blanked out, the camera aimed straight into too much light.

“She won’t open her eyes.”

“I’ll open her goddamn eyes. Get outta here.”

I know it’s him without opening them. I recognize his voice. The blond. From 31. The one who’d slapped me until I tasted blood. I can smell him. Soft leather and denim. I can hear him pull off his boots, unbuckle his belt, the cold clanging of an old bell.

The light is on in the bedroom again, and it burns yellow through my eyelids. The bedroom door is open behind him, and I hear voices at the end of the hallway. Laughter and tinny music on a radio. Water running in the bathroom sink. And, beyond that, the river, snaking past.

He straddles my chest. The flesh of his thighs presses against my naked breasts, and he hits me over and over again with a fist. The sound of his knuckles on the bones of my face. The dead drum of something solid on something solid, until I open my eyes. When I do, he smiles.

I can see water swollen over my cheekbones, around my open eyes.

“Leila,” Reverend Roberts said. He had stepped out of his long blue car, idling. My face was still turned toward the sky, but I looked over at him when he said my name. He looked angry, and in a hurry.

“Leila, we can’t stay here.” He looked toward the back door of the house. “Lock it up and we’ll go get some lunch somewhere. Then we have to go straight to the church.” He got back into his car.

I pulled the door to my father’s house shut, not looking in when I did, and I locked it with a cold silver key on a loop of string, then put the key in my coat pocket.

When I got into the car next to him, Reverend Roberts wouldn’t look at me, but it was warm there, and he had the radio on. The music came from behind us, all violin and flute. I could hear someone breathe into the flute, gasping before each note. I looked at Reverend Roberts. A short man with a round face, round hands, round thighs. He was wearing a nice black suit, red tie. Hair thin and white as a baby’s. He didn’t look back at me.

“Now it’s very important that you not touch me in public, Leila, you understand, and that, now that you’ve come over to my house like this and any of the neighbors might have seen it—it’s essential that we are seen in public together. As if we don’t have anything to hide. We’ll go to the Golden Dragon for lunch; then it’s essential that we are seen together at the church, too—linking us to the church, so to speak—so it looks like I am helping you in your time of need as I would any other parishioner. Do you understand?”

I nodded—awed, wondering how he’d had so much time to think it all out while he was hurrying to get dressed. He sighed, then, shaking his head as if I’d said something childish. But I hadn’t said anything at all.

We turned out of the block and he drove west, in the direction of the river. There were no other cars around. The snow was packed down so hard on the road, I could hardly tell if it was the road or field grass under snow and wheels. Only in a few patches had it begun to melt, and the red sand of the road bled up through it, damp. The trees overhead looked wet, clawing at the sky. Reverend Roberts looked behind him, over his left shoulder, but whatever he’d been looking for wasn’t there, and he turned down the winding road to Riverside Park, which would be empty in the winter, during the week, in the middle of the day. I knew that.

“Take your coat off,” he said, “we have to hurry,” parking the car. The river ahead of us was jeweled with ice, glistening, as if it had been made more valuable by the first sun shining on it in so long.