The Risk Pool (55 page)

Once we entered the library, Mrs. Ward left us so thoroughly alone that I began to suspect the older woman’s motives. An early riser, she retired, or claimed to, shortly after nine o’clock, and
once her bedroom door closed softly behind her, it never opened again, almost as if she were observing the conditions of a contract. She even announced her retirement each evening by knocking quietly on the door of the library and advising us not to work too hard or too late. Each night Tria would say, “I love you, Mother,” to which Mrs. Ward would reply, “And I you, Dear,” all of this rendered even more bizarre by the fact that the library door remained closed, their protestations of affection thus required to penetrate wood.

One late July evening, after we’d been working together for several weeks, I couldn’t get in gear. I’d been struggling with the same passage for over half an hour under flickering lights. A dry electrical storm was approaching and we could hear the wind coming up outside, even though the library was windowless. Mrs. Ward had already retired, and when I handed Tria the still flawed page I’d been working on, I pretended to begin another, but watched her type instead. She carried herself the same way she had when she was fourteen and I’d fallen in love with her, as if she hadn’t revised her opinion of herself significantly in the intervening decade, a notion that I found quite charming, I don’t remember why. She seemed to be keeping something at bay, and the result was beautiful, mildly disconcerting only if one recalled the photographs of her mother, who appeared to have done the same thing. I couldn’t help wondering if, like Mrs. Ward, Tria would be transformed, almost overnight, from a young woman to an old one.

From where I sat that evening, the question was academic. Much more to the point was the smell of her perfume in the close room, the extraordinarily pale white skin of her throat, the enticing silhouette created by the table lamp which backlit the loose, peasant-style Mexican blouse she was wearing. Then the lights went out entirely, and along with them the hum of the electric typewriter.

“Great,” I heard her mutter in the dark, then, “where are you?”

“Right here,” I said, not having moved.

“I’ve always hated the dark.”

I found her by smell and took her hand. “Let’s go out on the patio and watch the storm,” I suggested.

“Why?”

“No reason,” I admitted.

“Mother has candles somewhere.”

“To hell with them,” I said.

The rest of the house was not so dark. Each of the long picture windows of the living room let in enough gray light for us to locate the sliding glass door that led out onto the patio. Heat lightning glowed yellow and orange in the night sky, each charge powerful enough to illuminate one quadrant of low clouds.

“It’s just us,” Tria said, pointing to the other side of the highway below where there were still lights from streetlamps and houses.

“What was it like to grow up here?” I said. I was still holding her cool hand, grateful that she had made no effort to withdraw it.

“What do you mean?”

I could feel her studying me and felt the strangeness of my own question. “I don’t know exactly what I mean,” I admitted. “Being up here, above it all, I guess. Having money, in a place like Mohawk.”

When she said nothing, I decided to take a chance, and pointed to a dark place in what was the uppermost reaches of Myrtle Park. “I used to wonder about this house when I was a kid. You can see it from up there in the park. I thought of it as the white jewel house because of the way the sun reflected off it. I wondered what sort of people lived here, what they might be like. I must have been about ten.”

“It wasn’t anything like you imagined,” she said slowly, as if choosing her words with care. “Like you imagine.”

She pressured my hand lightly. It might have been a signal to let go, or an invitation. I decided it meant the latter and drew her to me. She neither returned my kiss nor drew away.

“And you’ve wanted to do that since you were ten?”

“I didn’t know you then.”

“But you were already in love with the house.”

The possibility that this might be true stopped me dead, and the hot wind rattled the patio furniture urgently. For the first time I smelled rain. “Maybe we should go back in,” I admitted. “We may be in for it.”

“No,” she said with surprising conviction. “It’s not going to rain. The wind is going to howl and howl and nothing is going to come of it.”

There seemed to me another invitation somewhere in this, and I was right, because this time she kissed me back, allowed herself to melt toward me, and we stayed there under the heat lightning
until the low, fast-moving clouds that came at us from behind the park were blown over our heads toward the southeast and the invisible black band of trees that marked the river.

I dozed, for an hour perhaps, and awakened to soft drumming on the roof. Or maybe it was Tria stirring that had awakened me. I could tell that she was awake now and that she may have been since we made love. She lay with her back to me facing the window, its blinds three quarters drawn. When I drew her toward me at the waist, she turned and burrowed into me as if she couldn’t get close or warm enough. It took me a minute to realize that she was crying. I let her, not saying anything for quite a while, just stroking her hair.

When she finally stopped, I said, “I guess this wasn’t such a hot idea.”

“It’s … not … you,” she whispered. “Please believe that. It’s just …”

“I know,” I told her, though I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was. I was just glad it wasn’t me.

“It’s strange to be a woman in the same room where you were a child,” she said, after she’d had a chance to think. “My father used to come in here and tuck me in and say that someday there’d be boys in my life, and I’d say no, never—”

“I liked your father,” I told her.

She wiped her eyes and raised up on one elbow, charmingly, breathtakingly immodest. “Really? Why?”

I had to think about it. “He was different,” I said finally. “I didn’t know anyone like him. I was pretty impressed.”

“And your own father?”

“He’s different too,” I said.

“You love him?”

“Sure,” I said. “I mean yes, very much. I’m trying to decide if he has any feelings for me, though.”

“I bet he does.”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “He gets along so well without me that I can never be sure. I don’t think he’s ever had a bad night worrying about me, for instance.”

“I wish I could remember my father better,” Tria said. “According to my mother, he was an empty man. All charm and style and looks and nothing inside.”

“You should talk to my father about him someday. They were together a lot in the war. Anyway,” I said, “I doubt he was empty. There was something that kept those guys going, the ones who made it all the way to Berlin.”

“Sometimes,” Tria said, rolling over onto her back again and staring up at the ceiling, “I think that Mother is right about him being empty because I feel so empty myself.” She looked over at me in the semidark with the same scared look she’d had as a girl learning to drive. “Do you ever feel like you’re nobody at all?”

“No,” I admitted. “There are times when I feel like I’m somebody I don’t like very much.”

“But always somebody,” she said sadly, then added, “I never dislike myself. When I was younger and first began to understand that my father was doing something behind Mother’s back, I thought that if I could make him love me more, he’d love her too. I even told her that once, and she smiled at me like I didn’t understand a thing in the whole wide world. You don’t count, was what she said. Later that night when she heard me crying, she came in and explained what she’d meant. That Daddy was an adult, and that even though he loved me as a little girl, I didn’t count as a big girl because I wasn’t one. But it was too late. I’d already understood it the other way, and it had made the whole world make sense. All I had to do was understand that I didn’t count and then everything fell into place. When he died, that’s all I could think of.”

It had stopped raining out, and somewhere below, on the highway, we heard a hot rod downshifting gears.

“I was here that night, with my father,” I heard myself tell her. “The night half the town came out. I never felt so sorry for anybody. I couldn’t face you I felt so bad.”

She covered her face with both hands, remembering. “It was awful. I’ll never forget it. All those people. They wouldn’t go home. My mother was glad they were there, so she could say look, he’s done it for the last time. How I hated her that night. How I hated everybody.”

“Me too,” I said, remembering the woman who’d stolen the book from the Ward library.

For some reason, I told Tria about it, though it did not surprise her. “All sorts of things disappeared that night. You wouldn’t believe the things they took.”

“Yes I would,” I said, thinking that it hadn’t been just Drew
Littler who resented the Money People. Most people who stole weren’t taking what they believed to be others’ property. They were taking what they themselves deserved, all the things they’d been cheated out of. That, now that I thought about it, was why I’d raided Klein’s. It had been an act of revenge, not avarice.

“The car was the one that got us,” she said.

I blinked. “What?”

“Somebody swiped Daddy’s Lincoln,” she said. “That afternoon. When we got back from the funeral home it was gone.”

She was looking at me so strangely—as if she thought it might be within my power to explain such maliciousness—that I felt a sudden, inexplicable wave of guilt so powerful that I imagined for a brief moment that maybe I
had
stolen the Lincoln and willed myself to forget the deed. This bizarre conviction was so real that I had to force myself to reason it out, that it could not be true. I’d been thirteen when Jack Ward died. I hadn’t taken driver ed until two years later in Mohawk High.

The more I tried to shake the feeling of responsibility, the more guilty I felt about my present posture. Was I not at this moment a thief in the Ward house? Hadn’t I insinuated my way into their midst, misrepresented myself, stolen into Tria’s bedroom, taken … what? Nothing that hadn’t been freely given, surely. And maybe it had done some good. Maybe confiding in me about that horrible day was something Tria needed to do. I realized that her breathing had become regular and that she was asleep. I stayed awake watching the patterns made on her bedroom wall by the sliver of moon darting in and out of the clouds outside. At one point, what my imagination took to be a human form passed outside the window, but I did not dare disturb Tria, whose head lay on my shoulder, her gentle breathing providing a rhythm that I tried, without much success, to match.

Tria woke me early. Her bedside clock said it was a few minutes before six and the clear sky outside the bedroom window was not quite blue yet.

“I just heard Mother in the bathroom,” she said, up on one elbow to smooth hair away from my forehead, a gentle, wonderful intimacy that took my breath away.

“You don’t make it easy for a guy to break camp,” I said.

She covered herself, or tried to, with the sheet. “You better had, though, unless you want to meet her in the hall.”

I could hear water running in another part of the house. “Let me take you to dinner tonight,” I said.

“No,” she said. “But call me later.”

“She’s liable to hear me drive away,” I said.

“She’s probably seen the car out there anyway,” Tria said. “Don’t worry, though. She’ll pretend she doesn’t know. Things are always normal here, no matter how abnormal.”

I got dressed and out the door quickly. My father’s Cadillac gave me a bad moment when it refused to turn over or even acknowledge that a key had turned in the ignition, but then the engine coughed to life with a plume of purple smoke from the exhaust. It hung there, intact, utterly refusing to dissipate, when I drove away, between the stone pillars and down the hill.

The first thing to do was return the car. It was Saturday morning though, and there was no hurry. I’d left my father at Greenie’s with half a load on around 7:30 the night before, which meant that Saturday wouldn’t get under way for him much before noon. I didn’t want the car for anything, though, so I left it at the curb across the street from his flat where he couldn’t miss it. Then I walked to the corner and left on Main toward the Mohawk Grill. Out of habit I peeked in on my way by, and there was my father sitting at the counter eating eggs. The only other person was Harry, who was nursing his ritual Saturday morning hangover, the very apparent pain of which changed his personality not one jot.

“Here’s the car thief now,” my father said when I slid onto the stool next to him. “How about some eggs?”

“Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Not a thing,” he said. “Just sitting here wishing I had a car is all. I walked all the way over to your mother’s and it wasn’t there either.”

“You didn’t wake her up, I hope.”

“You shitting me?” he said, as if to suggest that perhaps I’d forgotten that he was acquainted with her. “What’d you do, wreck it?”

“It’s sitting right out in front of your place,” I told him.

“Like hell. I walked all around the block. Two blocks.”

I shrugged. “I’ve got twenty bucks says it’s right out front.”

“Then you just put it there.”

Harry set my eggs in front of me and went back to frying bacon and sausage, which he had sputtering in long even rows on the grill. My father finished his breakfast and amused himself by watching me eat mine, nodding as if he knew something worth knowing.

“So,” he said. “You finally found a better place to park my car at night than your mother’s.”

“Who, me?” I said. I liked those rare occasions when he didn’t know what was up. It was pure pleasure not helping him figure it out. “I’d check the battery cables,” I told him. “It wouldn’t start, at first. I think you got a loose connection.”

“He
is
a loose connection,” Harry offered without turning around.

My father ignored him. “Does that in the morning sometimes. When it’s damp. Rain out where you were?”

“Yup,” I said.