The Tell (15 page)

“I promise.”

“Because we can't have it in the house.”

For a while they listened to the sounds of the woods and the nocturnal wanderings of the cats. They whispered about Edward and his new girlfriend, and their speculation and release from their own discord made them giddy. Owen knew you couldn't talk about someone else falling in love without feeling a pinch of envy and a need to confirm what it was you had. He kissed Mira and stroked the length of her silvered body, which felt vaguely resistant to him, like the skin over a rising bruise, tight and too warm. He wondered if she was worried about Edward hearing them, if she felt, as he did, like a kid in this house, but now a kid who wanted to possess, control, and devour, without knowing what any of that really meant. When Mira opened her legs, the sheets whispered their routine beneath her, but it sounded wary to him, or maybe more like a rehearsal. He locked his mouth on hers, and she was insistent then as she released herself from the top down so he didn't so much enter her as slip down her throat and into her. But her insistence wasn't about desire or that tingly, aching drive; it was about appeasing him in some way, for what she hadn't told him, for how she was moving away from him; and he came powerfully, loud and selfish and married, and he didn't care if his father heard him.

“Nice,” Mira said, softly, distractedly, and it broke his heart.

I
don't like the book because it makes me tired to read it.” That sounded about right to Owen, who looked up from Reggie's paper, tired himself. One school year was getting to be too much like another, the repetition of aspirations and their gradual deflation. He turned in the desk chair to the window onto Whittier Street and saw a woman coming down the sidewalk. The rolling walk that presented slim hips first, long upper body next, the casual angle of elbow and forearm—this was Wilton's essence in female form. She had to be Anya. Her head, angled slightly up, might have been a kind of overconfidence until she stumbled on an uneven seam of sidewalk hidden under October's first crisped leaves. Her grace was clumsy, her clumsiness graceful, and she looked at her feet, those long Wiltonesque culprits. She stopped in front of her father's dark house but didn't move toward the door.

When she crept around to the side porch, Owen went out to the backyard where he could watch her from his garden of puckered tomatoes. If she saw him there, he wouldn't look like he was spying on her. The season over, most of the fruit was overripe, split and dribbling, while some was still an implacable green that would hold on through the first frost. There was a flash of hair, more reddish than brown, and a gray sweatshirt in the reaches of his vision. He was eager to see her face, but she cupped her hands against a window, her back to him. Wilton's rooms were mostly empty still, with a distracted placement of furniture and the boxes that contained all the things he ordered online but didn't always bother to open. In one upstairs room, there was nothing but a pair of new leather shoes in the middle of the floor, as if the person wearing them had evaporated. In another was the clay pot Wilton had paid Brindle so much for. Owen guessed that what Anya saw to make her hands fall to her sides was the unsettled, bereft life of her father, a scattering of intentions that could leave you chilled.

“He's not home,” Owen called.

Anya's hand flew to her throat as she took a step back from his voice emerging from the foliage. He saw only the side of her face; the balance of forehead, nose, and eye was coolly beautiful. He came to the fence to show himself. “I'm sorry if I scared you,” he said.

“Well, you did.” She jammed her hands in her sweatshirt pockets and started for the front of the porch. “You really did.”

He apologized again to keep her from leaving and showed his hands, not empty but full of unripe tomatoes—nothing to find menacing. Her face was not icy at all, but soft in the wide expanse of her cheekbones and chin. He realized, though, that he was expecting the child in Wilton's stories, a little girl in pajamas, a three-year-old swimming in the pool, a child in a party dress the night of the accident. He knew about the birthmark on her hip, the size of her baby hands. He knew that she used to stroke her father's cheek. He knew nothing about the adult.

“Do you know him?” she asked. “The guy who lives here?”

“Wilton? Yes. I'm Owen, by the way. And I think you're probably Anya, right?”

She gave him a skeptical look and then nodded. Her body, at a three-quarter turn, was ready to run but was also curious about what else he might know. Did he know the troubled history of father and daughter? “Just him in here?” she asked, ticking her head at Wilton's house.

“Just him in all that space. Crazy, isn't it?”

He didn't know what more to say or how much to reveal, but he wanted to keep her there. She shivered in the dubious, cool air, while his heart thumped away. Would she like a glass of wine, or some tea, while she waited? he asked. Anya was clearly trained to consider all the dangers in the world to a woman, and here was a man she didn't know, but who knew who she was, asking her in for a drink.

“I don't think so, but thanks anyway,” she said. “I'm going to go.”

“Another time, I hope.” He hesitated. “Your father will be really glad to know you stopped by.”

“Actually,” she started, and in her hesitation assessed his hands full of tomatoes, his rangy, nonmenacing height, his mention of Wilton, and she took him up on the offer. He pointed to the gate that was permanently angled open these days. Where its foot had drawn a ragged scar into the grass, thick clover had grown. As Anya passed through, a corner of her sweatshirt pocket caught on an iron curlicue. It yanked her back with a hiss. She held up the inch-long tear and rolled her eyes. The way she poked fun at herself and put mishap next to poise was pure Wilton. Where was her mother in all this biology?

In the kitchen, she leaned against a counter near the door and took in the room's dated details in the same way Wilton had done his first time there. She held the beer bottle below her chin. That morning, Mira had lined some tomatoes up on the table in ascending order. The last was no bigger than a green pea. The Edible Vanishing Point, she'd called it and kissed him on the mouth before going upstairs to get ready to go to Brindle. She'd been breezy, hard to hold down. Owen picked up the two biggest tomatoes, which were almost purple in density. He was self-conscious about the way they sat so plump and cleaved in his palms before he cut them open. He showed Anya the best way to eat one, always at room temperature and sprinkled with sea salt. The gelatinous pillow of seeds surprised her as it slid over her lower lip and fell to the floor. They talked about food, a neutral passion—the Portuguese bread she'd found in Fox Point, where she had an apartment, the meat market on Gano Street that reeked of fresh blood—as they ate crackers, goat cheese Wilton had ordered from Vermont, a jar of jalapeño almonds. Fancy, ridiculous food, all of it from her father. Anya sucked spice powder off her fingertips. She wore a ring—a silver band—around her thumb. Owen knew he was staring; she was very pretty, with a streak of seriousness that cut across her forehead and her father's determined jawline.

“These were also a present from your father,” Owen said, spilling some chocolate-covered espresso beans onto her palm. She bit into one with her front teeth, as if she were halving a pill. “And all that wine.” He pointed to the collection on the counter.

She looked over at her father's house. Her wavering confidence was appealing—and young. “Why does he give you all this stuff?” she asked.

Owen shrugged. “It's what he does. He orders online and gives in person. The ASPCA and Amnesty International and Oxfam and Planned Parenthood and the food bank send him letters and he gives. The Fireman's Fund and the Sierra Club and PBS call and he never hangs up on them.”

“My father and I aren't exactly close,” she said.

“I know.”

“You do? Do you know we haven't seen each other in years?”

“He's told me some things. I know he's been waiting to see you for months.”

“You're not scolding me, are you?”

“Nope.”

Anya nodded and seemed to understand that she had nothing else to go on but what he told her. Owen was aware of his vaguely corrupting power, if he opted to use it. What it was like to have a father drop out of your life, and what story had Anya been given or told herself about why it happened? Whatever it was could never fully satisfy. Especially the true story. Death was one thing—his own mother was dead before he even knew her—but this wasn't death. This was so much murkier, and still alive and beating. Wilton's remove from her had to be a kind of chronic pain for both of them. Anya held her hair back with one hand, exposing two piercings and two tiny diamonds in one ear as she examined the painting of a sturdy, sour woman with a dark upper lip.

“Mira's—my wife's—grandmother,” Owen said. “The esteemed Agnes Thrasher. She could use a shave, don't you think?” Anya smiled. “My wife is out somewhere with your father, as it turns out. They're very good friends.”

Somewhere
being the formless word Owen said to himself these days when he knew exactly where they were together. It was always the casino and about Mira's keeping company with Wilton, who was so deprived of his daughter that he needed her constant consolation. And how could she say no when he continued to be so generous to Brindle? And if she liked to play for ten or fifteen minutes on the slots when she was there, well so fucking what, right? It was an exhausting, stupid conversation. Owen had stopped counting how often she went; inexactitude was like a mild painkiller, just enough to take the edge off but not enough to forget the ache was there. It distressed him, but what could he say anymore? It wasn't about the money; she didn't win anything and she didn't lose anything, she claimed. But he knew gambling didn't work that way: everyone lost eventually, and usually lost big. Was Mira being dumb, or did she just think he was dumb enough to believe it? Gambling was the stuff of a million tragic stories, he told her, and he didn't want it to be hers. She shook her head at his crazy exaggerations, and said he was ridiculous; she said she hardly played at all. He hated that she liked the packaged towelettes they gave you to wipe the muck of money off your hands, and how she always brought some home and left them on the kitchen table as if she'd picked them up as souvenirs for him.
Thinking of you. Wish you were here
.

One night last week, Mira had called from Evil Ruin, which is what he'd renamed the hellhole, to say how much she loved him, and that she'd be home soon. He'd just that minute come back from another mind-numbing session of tutoring, that hushed, coercive profession, and he'd flinched at how her voice rose to be heard above the chiming clamor of the slot machines. Was she just making sure he was still there to return to, that he was something real when everything around her wasn't? Was he a safe home base?

If he delivered Anya to Wilton, would Wilton release Mira?

A car door slamming on the street made Anya look up. It was enough to make her announce that she had to go. She was anxious to get out of there, and her eye was already on the front door.

“Are you sure you don't want to wait?” he asked.

“I'm sure.” She stepped outside. “Will you tell Wilton I was here? I'm going to call him soon. Maybe. I don't know when.” She paused to acknowledge his confusion and her own. “Look, I know it sounds kind of crazy. He's my father, and all, but I can't explain it.”

“You don't have to explain,” he said. He thought she might understand that you couldn't cure the throbbing of loss with reunion—you might only make it beat harder and hotter. “I'll tell him you were here.”

But Anya didn't call Wilton the next day, or the day after, and Owen didn't tell him that she'd been by. He didn't tell Mira either, but held on to the fact like a prize he might have to trade in later. Tonight, he was out tutoring, restless in the kid's room as he watched the dark eat up the Cranston neighborhood. Behind him, the boy, leaning back in a chair, was too stoned, once more, to notice anything disappearing, including the expensive minutes his parents were paying for. Down in the kitchen, noisy family life was taking place and a dog barked, but it felt far away from Owen's own life and this carpeted bedroom that still reeked of pot. When Owen gave up trying to rouse the kid, he went downstairs to explain to the boy's father why he was leaving thirty minutes into the session. Your son is high again, he said, one foot already out of the house. Nothing was familiar in this silent neighborhood, not the tight air, not the streets named after the developer's eight daughters, not the perfect lawns, not the fuming, pitiable father who was watching him out the window by the door. Owen got into his car, and at the end of Phenix Avenue, he realized that he had a choice that suddenly seemed novel and significant to him, though he'd been at this same intersection many times before: go north or south? He didn't have to go home and wait like some idiot for his wife to waltz in, blithe and casino-blinded, so he turned the car south toward Eagle Run—Evil Ruin, where he would find his wife. He didn't mind being a caveman about it and dragging her out if he had to. He felt as stunned and inarticulate as one when it came to understanding what she was up to, and what had happened to his marriage, which was now all evasion and excuse.