The Tell (10 page)

“Shit,” Owen mumbled and turned away. He wanted to kick something for how he'd been played, for how he'd held his breath and counted his heartbeats.

“Not so funny, Wilton,” Mira said, but she was laughing now, her hands on her knees. “Really, don't do that again.”

“Do what? If you could do one thing for me,” Wilton said, turning to Owen. “You can drive this back to the house because I'm going to walk. I could use the exercise; you taught me that the other day. I have to get in shape. Just make sure my pot wears a seat belt. I don't want anything to happen to my beautiful new baby.”

Just before Wilton left, Owen saw him out in the foyer with his hands on his knees, working to catch his breath and ease some obvious pain when he thought no one was watching. His spine had an ancient, brittle arc to it, and it occurred to Owen that maybe the near-disaster had not been such a distant possibility at all. If he'd hurt himself, that meant he'd lost his touch, and the man was too proud to admit that. Mira stood looking at a shelf of small ceramic objects. Her head was angled with dissatisfaction as she flapped Wilton's check against her thigh.

“That little clay dog,” she said to Owen. “The one that doesn't look like a dog at all? It's gone. Someone stole it. Why the hell would someone do that?”

Owen suspected the guy in the army jacket, but he didn't say anything, and instead led Mira up to the roof so they could look at the night. He always stayed back from the two-foot-high edge while Mira always stood against it to look down. His stomach flipped. He couldn't bear to watch her bend forward with her heels lifting slightly.

“I wish Wilton hadn't given me this,” she said, letting the check wave in the breeze. She could easily let it go. “I'm locked in now, O. I can't be done. Not with this.”

“Locked in? If you feel that way, then give it back.”

“Is that what you think I should do?” She slipped off her shoes and walked through the puddles. “Tell me. Tell me what I should do, O, because I have no idea.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I'm lost. I don't think I've ever been so lost. And yet here's the answer.” Mira waved the check again and held her dress up above her knees, as though the water were deeper than an inch. She rarely got dressed up, and he was struck by how elegant and beautiful she could be without trying. “It's enough money for a good while, so how can I not take it?” She let her dress fall. “Really, how can I not?”

Owen was afraid of the gift's unspoken obligation to Wilton, what the man might expect in return. “You could give it back and sell the Nadelmans instead.” They were a pair of white marble busts in the living room with eerie lensless eyes. Wilton had mentioned them one night.

“The Nadelmans?” She gave him the kind of skeptical look that was part curiosity and part suspicion. “I can't do that. Anyway, there's no art market these days. It's tanked like everything else.” It was a while before she said anything more, and then not to Owen, but to the city before them. “Do you want to know why I can't sell them?”

“Yes, I would love to know. I've always wanted to understand.”

“Because I'm still waiting for my parents to come home. They went out for awhile, but they'll be back. And if I start getting rid of their things, what does that mean? That they're not coming back.”

Her confession stunned him. “They're not coming back, Mira.”

He put his arms around her, close enough to the edge to make him light-headed. But it was as if she dissolved against him, so that when the wind died down, he was holding only some notion of his wife.

A
s he backed the car out of the driveway, a narrow black shape, motionless as an assassin, appeared in Owen's rearview mirror. He jammed the brakes and pebbles flung themselves against the underside of the car. His whiplashed heart banged against his ribs. Wilton was inches from the bumper.

“What the hell are you doing?” Owen demanded. Adrenaline's watery rush left him parched and furious. “You scared the shit out of me. Do you know I almost hit you?”

Wilton came around to the driver's side. He half tamped down a grin. “Never. Would I let that happen? On the day before I finally get to see my daughter? Would that make any sense?” He studied Owen. “Ah, you're angry. I've never seen this before in you. And look at how you're sweating.”

“That's because it's ninety-five fucking degrees out here.” Owen hated being played like this, and he had the urge to step on the gas so that Wilton would be flung backward. He took a deep breath instead. “What's up? I'm sort of busy.”

“I can see that. Have you ever seen what surprise looks like? This is you.” Wilton stretched his mouth wide with the hooks of his index fingers and made his eyes bulge. His hair was a static cloud the sun peeked through. “Somewhere between ecstasy and agony.”

“That's really great. Thanks a lot. What are you doing out here anyway?”

“Waiting for my daughter.”

“I thought she wasn't coming until tomorrow,” Owen said.

“That doesn't mean I wasn't waiting.”

Since the day he'd arrived, Wilton had been waiting—for his daughter, Anya, his packages (UPS had just delivered another Styrofoam box of steaks for the dinner tomorrow), for the start of his life here. Now he was like a kid before his own party, trying to fill up the anticipatory minutes by squirming into every one of them. Mira had offered their house as neutral territory and themselves as buffers for tomorrow's reunion of father and child. She offered everything to Wilton these days, post fundraiser, the donation check cashed. His money's grease was impossible to wash off her hands.

Wilton pointed at the bent arm from the first floor's leaking toilet sitting on the passenger seat. “I see you're fixing something. May I come with you? I know how nothing works. You can show me.”

Wilton's eagerness could be hard to deflect, and Owen told him to get in. At Home Depot, Wilton acted like a man who'd never been out of the secured desert compound. He gawked at the aisles of bathtubs and sliding doors, followed the sedating twirl of a hundred ceiling fans, ran his hands over the rug samples, tile samples, aluminum siding, lightbulbs, giant sponges. For a few minutes, he watched Owen match parts for the bent arm, and then he disappeared. But in his peach-colored polo shirt and long white shorts he was not hard to spot at the front of the store, where patio furniture, umbrellas, grills, and tiki torches were set out awaiting imaginary guests. Awaiting Wilton, who reclined in a chair that offered a matching rest for his feet. His arms were linked behind his head as though he were poolside, waiting for his iced tea.

“Look at those birds,” he said, and pointed to the rafters. “They love it here.”

Owen gazed up. “What makes you think they love it?”

“Would they be singing if they didn't?” Wilton wasn't about to give up his optimism or get up from his bird watcher's seat, and he patted the chair next to him for Owen to sit down. Owen was uneasy with how people stared at them, and he scratched his chin, bristly from not shaving. His shirt had holes. The school year was over and the days had a different rhythm. He tutored a few nights a week in air-conditioned houses.

“The birds must come down and eat when no one's around,” Wilton said.

It was an attractive scenario, but the truth was, Owen told him, that the birds either made it out, taking a kamikaze dive for the sliding glass doors, or they died. Owen had once found the stiff, weightless body of a finch in a box of rheostats.

“How is it that you've never been to a place like this before?” Owen asked. “I don't mean just here, but out in the world. Everything you see is something new to you. You come to Rhode Island and you act as if it's a state full of miracles.”

“Maybe it is. Tomorrow night, for example. That could be a miracle. And I don't mean the kind with angels either, because I don't believe in that stuff. But Anya. She's my miracle.” Wilton looked into the distance as if he were contemplating a dip in the waterless hot tub. “By the way,” he said, “that lady over by the grills is giving you the eye. Has been for a while now.”

A middle-aged woman in a pink tank top leaned on her cart, out of which stuck the long red handle of a mop. But she wasn't eyeing him at all. It was perfectly clear that she was looking at Wilton, who had to know that, but still needed Owen to see. Many people, in fact, had slowed to look at Wilton. They knew he was someone they recognized.

“You ready to go?” Owen asked, and stood.

“This question of miracles,” Wilton said, “is an interesting one. Mira says you also came to Providence looking for something miraculous to happen.” He plucked at the webbing under him, and said he was going to buy a few chairs for his porch. “She said you were in rough shape when you two met.”

“Maybe.” Owen's impulse was to dodge, evade. He was unnerved by Mira's having told his most private story to Wilton. “No big deal. Let's go.”

“The first night we met, you said something about a friend who had died. Mira said your friend had been murdered and that you were there. She said you don't like to talk about it.”

“Jesus. Why would I?”

“You're much better at asking questions than answering them,” Wilton said. “They say talking is healing, but that just sounds like something a gossip came up with. Mira told me you don't have many friends, by choice, that you're the most private person she's ever known. But I hoped that maybe, as my friend, you'd talk to me. You'd open up some. But I won't push.”

Owen sat down again and listened to the birds. They sounded trapped. If he gave a little, Wilton might be satisfied. “I was in a restaurant with a woman, a friend, when a guy came in to rob the place with a gun. He shot and killed her. That's the whole story.” The words left a breezy space in his skull.

“Mira said she was your girlfriend.”

Was disaster more understandable, more meaningful, if love was involved? Was that how Mira made sense of it? “They never caught the shooter and they never will. It's been way too long. There's not a whole lot more to say about it.” Owen watched the woman in the pink tank top circling back.

“What about you? What happened to you, Owen?” Wilton asked. “There's much more to say about that. Do you ever talk about yourself? My god, that's all I ever do.”

Owen had come to Rhode Island because he knew no one there, because no history would follow him, and no grief would need tending if no one knew about it. He would arrive cleanly. But there was something about Wilton now, a man who was awed by life's unexpected beauties—mica in the sidewalk concrete, crack vials they'd seen on their way in, the geometry of artichokes, doomed urban birds, Mira, perhaps even Owen—who might understand how an instant of hesitation was all it took for life to change. He made Owen think it was okay to speak out loud, just this once, what he could never say before, what he'd never even told Mira. Was it how the man played with danger—the car's bumper inches from his legs—so adeptly? Was it all about timing?

“I didn't do what I should have,” Owen said. “I froze when I should have moved. I should have said something, done something, but I didn't do anything. Nothing at all. Useless.”

He saw again Caroline's pinched face when she said
fuck you
to the man, her expression when she hit the floor, and how her disappointment was not about being shot—that was over and done and she was strangely serene—but about him. She'd looked through him as though he were nothing.

“And if you'd done differently, then you would have gotten yourself killed,” Wilton said.

“I was a coward. Too terrified. Too selfish. I wanted to save my own life.” He hesitated, sensing danger in his confession “I've never even told Mira this.” How could she love a man she couldn't trust to save her?

“Who knows if you could have done anything anyway? Are you that powerful? You can't blame yourself.”

“But I do.”

He didn't know what he wanted from Wilton just then, but the man's attention was gone anyway, turned instead to the circling woman who was coming at him. Wilton issued a bright hello. The woman, caught, yanked herself out of her famous-person stupor, but as she swung her cart around, the mop handle swiped through a pyramid of plastic citronella bottles. The collapse had a nice beat to it, the bottles on top plunging over like cliff divers, the others wobbling and gulping as they hit the floor. She paled and then turned fiercely red. This was free entertainment, and people stopped to watch. Wilton went over to her, whispered something, and righted a couple of bottles for effect.