The Executor (20 page)

“Oh my God.”

“‘... like we did last yeeeaaar.”’

“Move it,” I said, wrestling with him.

“I’m not done,” my father said.

“You’re done, all right.”

“Shitbird.”

Though I had been taller than him for years, this was the first real-world application of our strength differential. He had no choice but to stumble along with me as I walked him to the stairs.

“I’m gonna kick your ass,” he said to me.

“All right,” I said.

“Think you can lip off to me.”

I pinned his arms to his sides as we toddled down the hall.

“Goddammit. Let me go.”

“Almost there.”

“Let me the fuck go.”

We reached the base of the stairs. I released him and he fell down, moaning and holding his head.

“I can’t carry you up the stairs,” I said.

He stopped moaning, looked at me, grinned. “I know.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that, but it unnerved and insulted me, and I felt my neck growing hot. “Do what you want,” I said. “I don’t care.”

“You look like my father,” he said.

I’d never met my paternal grandfather—never seen him, not even a picture—so I could not vouch for the truth of this statement. I braced myself for what came next. A secret of some sort, a key piece of family history that would, if not justify, at least explain how it was we had all come to this point.

“He was a piece of shit,” said my father.

I turned my back on him and walked away.

My mother was on her knees in the living room, picking glass out of the carpet, her hands spotted with blood. I told her I was leaving.

“Your flight’s not till morning,” she said.

I shrugged.

“You’re going to sleep at the airport?”

“I guess so.”

Silence.

“What about me?” she asked.

I looked at her. “I can’t answer that.”

She made a broken noise, then went back to work.

I ordered a cab, gathered my things, and left without saying goodbye.

 

 

I BOARDED the first leg of my flight sore from sleeping in a hard plastic chair. There were no working pay phones in the terminal, though I did manage to call Alma’s house during my layover in Cincinnati. No one answered. While dialing Drew’s number, I heard the boarding announcement for my second flight and had to hang up.

Normally I would have taken the T, but I felt antsy enough to spring for a second cab. Down through the Ted Williams, along Storrow, under the irrelevant graffito bemoaning the Curse. What would happen to Sox fans now that they had nothing to complain about, the driver asked.

“They’ll think of somethin to complain about,” he said. “People always do.”

In no mood to chat, I overtipped him, taking the front steps in a single bound, calling her name as I entered.

Silence.

Her bedroom door was closed. I resisted the urge to knock by telling myself that if I needed to see her, it was mainly for my own gratification. To distract myself I did laundry. On my way back through the kitchen, I stopped to cut myself a piece of Sachertorte; finding it close to stale, all the whipped cream gone, I made a note to go out and get fresh supplies. I rinsed my plate, dried it. It seemed impossible that only twenty minutes had elapsed since I’d gotten home. I waited until the wash was done, then transferred my clothes to the dryer and went out for a walk, returning ninety minutes later with groceries in hand, utterly beside myself. I dropped the bags in the entry hall and went upstairs. I knocked. Silence. I knocked again, turned the handle. Her room was pitch black and the shades down and the air rank and I saw her bent shape in the bed, touched by a sliver of hallway light. She was lying oddly, one arm propped up by the pillow and jutting like a mast or a branch, her face angled away so that she showed me the back of her head, strands of white silk limp and dry and I knew that it was all wrong and I ran in, barking my shin against the bedframe, an injury I did not notice until later that night, or I should say rather the next morning, when I would see that I had gashed the flesh wide open. That was all later. Now I turned her over. Her nightgown was scaled with dried vomit and her lips parted as though she was breathing but she was not and I found her wrist and then said to myself call an ambulance, you are not equipped to make decisions. I called the ambulance. I sat on the floor, holding her hand, and though my mind became aware of the approaching siren and the ringing bell I could not stand or move, and believe it or not they broke down the front door, two nice young men in blue uniforms who sent me downstairs while they confirmed what I already knew to be true.

I
can’t say, like people sometimes do, that what happened next was a blur. The opposite: time slowed way way
way
down, every second stretched out like taffy, and thus my memory of the ensuing hours is sharp, painfully so. Perhaps that’s what “it was all a blur” really means, for I have a hard time going back to that night without feeling overloaded, as though my brain cannot handle the amount of information packed into a single frame and wants to capitulate and shut down. Clarity requires the ability to filter out extraneous information. When I think back on the first part of that night, I see not a smooth series of events but thousands upon thousands of jump cuts: an amoebic smudge on the living-room table, the interval of the ambulance’s lights’ pulse, the jerk of the minute hand on the mantel clock whenever time, officially, advanced. I see the house empty and then instantly full of people. I hear myself spoken to, asked questions, told to relax, told to be patient, juggled from room to room. Cell phones ringing. Croaky three A.M. laughter. The startling blue of a flashbulb. Water in a cup, in my hand, down my dry throat. My leg, bleeding; do I need to go to the hospital? No, thank you.

Eventually I landed in the library, in one of the easy chairs, sitting across from a uniformed patrolman—a disorienting sight, as I had grown accustomed to seeing Alma in that very spot. He said nothing and I said nothing and we sat there like a couple of gargoyles until the library door opened and a man with a beagleish face appeared. He took one step into the room before reacting visibly to its contents.

“Jesus Maria,” he said, goggling. Then, remembering himself, he cleared his throat and told the patrolman he’d take it from here.

“Detective Zitelli,” he said, sitting down. “I understand you’re pretty shaken up.”

I said nothing.

“You don’t want to go to the hospital?”

I shook my head.

“What about your leg.”

I looked down at the bloodstain.

“Looks bad,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

He studied me. “All right,” he said, flipping open his notebook. “Let’s begin at the beginning.”

Pressured by a sense of duty, and by his authority, I willed myself to answer his questions, and as I did, my brain started to regain its normal operating speed. This was not a good thing. Psychological shock serves an important purpose, cushioning the psyche from a reality it is not ready to face, a process analogous to an injured joint filling up with fluid. It might look frightening when someone’s knee balloons to twice its normal size, but that’s the body’s way of preventing further damage. In the wake of Alma’s death, my mind had behaved similarly, and to have the swelling forcibly reduced—to have my emotions iced—was singularly horrible.

“So you’re a caretaker.”

“... sort of.”

“Sort of how.”

I told him about the ad.

“She must have felt pretty comfortable with you, letting you live here.”

“We were close.”

“Close in what way.”

I looked at him.

“Was your relationship of a sexual nature?”

“... excuse me?”

“Did you and Ms. Spielmann hav—”

“No. No. Of course not.”

“All right.”

“I can’t believe you’d even think to ask that.”

“It’s a question,” he said. “That’s all. You answered it, and now that’s that.”

Silence.

“Did she ever talk about harming herself?” the detective asked.

I shook my head.

“Was she depressed?”

Silence.

“I think so,” I said. I paused. “I don’t know.”

“You said she was sick, though.”

“She was in terrible pain. Talk to her doctor, she can tell you more than I can. Paulette Cargill. The number’s in the kitchen.”

He was scribbling. “Take me through what happened when you got here.”

I did.

“Did you read the note?”

I nodded.

He flipped back a few pages. “‘Know that what I do, I do freely. You above all ought to understand.’”

Silence.

“It’s something we talked about,” I said.

“Suicide?”

“Free will.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

Silence.

He said, “Is there something else you want to tell me?”

 

 

“HOW COME you didn’t call the police before?”

“He said he would tell them it was my idea.”

“Was it?”

I recoiled. “No.”

“All right.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Hold up, now.”

“And frankly, I find it offensive—”

“Hold up.”

“I took care of her. I made her food, I spent hours—”

“They’re just questions.”

“Okay, well, I don’t like what your questions imply.”

“They don’t imply anything,” he said. “I’m just asking.”

“And I’m answering, aren’t I?”

“Excellent,” he said. “Then we’re both doing our jobs.”

Silence.

“Keep going,” he said.

Silence.

“Alma didn’t want me to say anything, either.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. To protect him, I think.”

“From ...”

“He’s had trouble with the police before.”

“That seems like a good reason to let someone know.”

“That’s exactly what I told her.”

“But ...”

“She didn’t think he was serious.”

“But you did.”

I paused. “It was hard to tell.”

The policeman raised his eyebrows.

“If you heard him, you’d understand.”

“Tell me again what you were doing out of town.”

“I was home for a family event. I told you. You can call anyone; there were fifty people there. Call the church. Father Fred Hammond. Call my parents.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Look, he’s the one you need to talk to. Him. Eric. Not me. If anyone did anything to her, he’s the one responsible.”

“Is that what you think? Someone did something to her?”

“I don’t know. How should I know? I don’t know. I’m saying
if.”

“Okay, fine. So, you don’t know if something happened. But if it did, then you didn’t do it. Right?”

“Right.”

“And it wasn’t your idea, this thing that may or may not have happened.”

“Correct.”

“Okay, well. Glad we’ve cleared that up.” Zitelli rubbed his nose. “Now, let’s go over this for a second. Cause first I come in here, you’re telling me she’s in pain—”

“She was.”

“She’s in pain, she’s depressed, she leaves a note. Fine. But then you want me to think he killed her—”

“I don’t want you to think one way or the other, I—”

“So which is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, but you must have an opinion.”

“I don’t. I’m speaking hypothetically. I’m—please, this is hard enough as it is.”

He held up his hands. “I’m just repeating back what you said.”

“That’s not what I said. I said to look into it. Look: I’m trying to help.”

“I appreciate that, I do. Now, let’s say I do talk to him—”

“Are you?”

“Am I what.”

“Going to talk to him.”

“That depends.”

“On?”

“Lots of things. But let’s say I do talk to him. What’s he going to tell me?”

“... that it was my idea.”

“What was.”

“Whatever happened.”

“But you don’t know what happened.”

“Isn’t that the whole point of this process? To find out what actually happened?”

The detective stared at me. “It sounds pretty important to you.”

“I—”

“You seem pretty wound up.”

“It is important to me. Of course it’s important to me. I care about her. And no, I’m not wound up. I mean, I’m wound up, I’m just, I’m not,
wound up.”

“... all right.”

“I mean, you’d be like this, too, if you had to endure this.”

“Endure what.”

“Being interrogated.”

“Is that what you think this is?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Let’s say this,” he said. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, something
didn’t
happen....”

Around and around we went, two hours’ worth of dizzying ontological games, until I put my head in my hands.

“Can I take a break, please.”

“No problem.” He walked around the room, browsing. “Nice stuff,” he said.

Something occurred to me then.

“What happened to the thesis?”