The Tell (29 page)

The dead woman's living room was packed with people who'd taken on the hush of a memorial service. The correct stance was a gaze averted from everything, a two-handed hold on the caterer's gold-rimmed coffee cup, a shaking of the head when there was nothing left to say, the pinch of a triangle of sandwich. Mira, a pro at these things, had gone to funerals and wakes with her parents when she was a kid, while life on the pond with his father didn't include traveling anywhere for any death. If you lived far enough away from everyone, then you never had to attend a funeral, his father said, as a selling point for solitude. Or stand mute at a sick bed, or smile at a wedding, or clap at a retirement party.

Last year, Owen had gone with Mira to a service for a friend of her mother's, at the Slavin Memorial Chapel, which sat on the corner across from the Y. They'd lingered on the walk bordered with leggy impatiens that, like the line of aging patriarchs in their fine clothes still smelling of mothballs, held on even in November when their stalks were thin and translucent. Owen had been immensely moved by the gathering and the solemnity of the morning. His father had been wrong to cut himself off from this part of life.

For some in the room now, conjuring up the appropriate mood wasn't so easy though; there was plenty of other people's current grief and troubles to go on about, and plenty of happiness, too. Pictures of grandchildren were slipped into hands like drugs. Good news was whispered—a condo in Florida, a show at the Art Club—while the bad news was said out loud. Cancer. A daughter's divorce. Mira joined a circle of women. Jim Peabody, a stiff who had been a close friend of Mira's father, approached Owen. He leaned in when he said that Ellie and Thrasher had particularly liked the lunch hour—“if you know what I mean.” He winked at Owen.

“No, what do you mean?” Owen asked, though he knew exactly what the man was saying.

“Screwing,” he whispered, and made a poking motion with his finger.

Owen was struck by how Peabody, who was now examining the tip of his striped tie, assumed Owen knew about the affair. It was likely everyone in the room did. It gave Owen some sense of what Mira's father must have been like: suspiciously well-shaven like all the men here, a bastard, a boaster, careless with people, entitled. Owen watched a woman stroke Mira's cheek. It was the gesture everyone always made at the motherless child, for luck maybe, or for their own consolation. Another woman touched Mira's hair. It had never occurred to Owen that she needed and liked this attention, and that their past was hers, too. That her mother might be part of them still if she were alive. If the women thought she looked particularly sad as she leaned into their comfort, they couldn't imagine the nature of her own private distress.

When the circle dispersed, Mira came over to the bench where he was perched on the silk cushion. “You saw the coven?” she asked. She took a sip of his coffee. “I spent a lot of time in this house when I was a kid because Ellie and my mother were best friends. I used to play with the twins. That's what everyone called Mack and Conrad—the twins.” She nodded toward Ellie's two grown sons in dark suits who stood just inside the front door, ready to greet people but more eager to get them out. They were clearly impatient with a woman who kept thinking of one more thing to say to them about their mother.

“They're putting the house on the market next week,” Mira said. “If you grow up in Rhode Island, you either can't wait to get out or you can't imagine living anywhere else. There's no in-between. Too bad they couldn't have combined events today: memorial and open house. Saved on the refreshments.”

“They could call it ‘You say good-bye, and I say, how much?'”

“Maybe I should have left, too, O, gone somewhere else. I skipped that step. I was always here. I still am here. Do you realize that I haven't seen anything in my life?”

“We could go somewhere else,” he said. “Anywhere. We don't have to stay.”

His words floated right by her. “Did I ever tell you that after my parents died, Ellie asked me to come live here with her? Can you believe it? That's guilt for you. People think they can just erase it, but it sticks around forever.” She paused. “You wanted to leave the pond, didn't you? You didn't want to stay there forever.”

“I remember being seven or eight—very young—and out on the water on my raft,” he said, “and thinking I would leave someday. But kids—they're supposed to think they're going to live with their parents forever. They don't see the end of anything, not even the day at bedtime. It's too terrifying. Did you hear what I said before, Mira? We could go anywhere. We could live on the pond.” The idea gripped him. He saw her standing at the head of the arbor, the water behind her. It thrilled him.

All the reasons he'd wanted to leave the pond—its pewter winter broken only by cawing; its flash of summer, which brought more enviable lives—had become all the reasons he'd take Mira back there with him now. He didn't know how it would work, but he could keep her safe there.

Mira's tear fell onto her boots. “It's crazy,” she whispered. “People think I'm crying for Ellie, but I'm not. She was such a bitch.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“For us. But more for you now, such a lonely, motherless kid. I want to take care of that boy. I wish I could take care of that little boy. I'm crying for him. That I didn't know him. That I can't know him now.”

The air had disappeared around her. Owen turned her away from the curious crowd. He got their coats and pulled Mira through the kitchen, where platters of food rested on cheery red counters, and out into the backyard to avoid the lugubrious twins at the front door. Mira, still crying, stopped to look at the birdbath erupting with winter's detritus. On Power Street, at the high point of the hill, they looked over the city and at the new construction that spread across the horizon. Mira, red-eyed, pointed out what had changed in the last decade. He knew he could live here for the rest of his life and still never feel this was his, not in the way she did. They started down the hill to Brindle; she wanted to show him something. On the slick cobblestones just before Benefit Street, she slipped and took his arm. The aristocratic John Brown house looked down at them.

“Ellie's heart killed her,” Mira said, as though they'd been talking about the woman the entire time. “Fitting for her because she had a ticker like a cunt—wrinkled and greedy.”

Owen laughed. “I'm sure the twins would have appreciated hearing that about their mother.”

“They should put it on her headstone. ‘Here lies a greedy cunt.' Do you think they know I saw their mother with her legs spread and my father between them?” She stopped. “Do you know how my mother finally found out about Ellie? We had a fight and I told her. It was the meanest thing I could think to do, so I did it. I wanted to hurt her so she'd fight back. But she wouldn't. Ever. I hated that about her. I had no respect for it. She could be so passive.” They crossed South Main Street and made their way down to the river.

“She claimed she already knew,” Mira went on. “Maybe she knew about other women my father had fucked over the years, but not Ellie, who was her friend. She was trying so hard not to be humiliated. And I was trying so hard to shame her. I even included the lovely detail of oral sex. It was my father I should have been angry at, but I was angriest at her. She was living with a liar and a cheater and she didn't do anything about it. I could see how my father hated her for it.”

Squares of ice floated by, like discarded pizza boxes. Owen imagined Mira's parents slinking in and out of overstuffed rooms, dragging their resentment with them. It seemed to him that he and Mira had been colonized by their ghosts, and now they were also playing out the single story the house allowed.

“You know what my mother and I had been fighting about? I wanted to live in a dorm my senior year. I wanted to get out so badly, and my mother didn't want me to go. I think she didn't want to be left alone with my father. So I tried to make her hate me. I told my mother about Ellie two days before she died.” She ran her gloved hands along the railing. “You're going to think I'm melodramatic, O, but I know that's why they had the accident. My mother had been walking around the house like a zombie, leaving a trail of used Kleenex everywhere. She'd go into the bathroom and run the water so no one could hear her wail. She'd go up to the third floor into the closet. But of course we could hear her. You know how the sound runs up and down the pipes—you can hear everything. My father pretended that nothing was wrong. He swiveled in his desk chair. He talked on the phone. There was a party they'd been invited to. My mother didn't want to go because she was too upset and her face was wrecked, but my father said that people would talk if she didn't show up.

“He blamed me for having said something to her in the first place. I'd made all this mess. He'd confessed nothing to her and then played on the fact that she cared way too much about what other people thought of her. So she went to the party. She had me clasp her necklace for her, which I think was something of a truce. This was the first time we'd touched or said anything to each other in days. And then there was the accident that night on their way home.” She put her fingers together as though she were still struggling with the clasp of the necklace, trying to make the last connection.

“Anything could have happened. Who knows? Maybe a deer on the road or your father had too much to drink.” He wanted to envelop her, protect her from pain. “You didn't make it happen, Mira.”

“I'm not going to change my mind, O. This is something I just know. I could have kept Ellie a secret, but I didn't. It could have gone differently, but I wouldn't let it. I can't change that.”

“Why didn't you ever tell me this before?”

“Would you have loved me if you'd known?”

She charged ahead to the pigeoned underpass at the bottom of Wickenden Street. She didn't stop on the bridge, but hurried to Brindle. It was only at the door that she hesitated. From the way she looked left and right, it was possible that she might change her mind and not go in at all. She picked up some trash and scraped a cigarette butt into the gutter with her foot. Owen sat on the granite steps out of the wind. Cold rose up his spine.

She unlocked Brindle's door—if she didn't do it now, she said, she might never do it at all. Owen felt like he was being taken to identify a body. He was afraid of what he might see. There was grit under his shoes, and no echoes of activity. The air was chilled and pulseless. He followed Mira to her office. Out in the icy back parking lot, the Dumpster overflowed. Other people were dumping their garbage there now, she told him. She hadn't paid the hauling bill—because she couldn't.

“I want to tell you something,” she said. “Brindle has no more money. None at all. It's done.”

The wind inflated a trio of plastic bags caught on the fencing as he waited for her to say more. Traffic moved by the river at Sunday's desultory pace, and she was silent, staring at the garbage. He went up to the studio where stools were pushed in a corner, easels tipped. On the shelves, corpses of clay lay under white sheets. The faucet he'd fixed once dripped and dripped. He took the last stairs to the roof and sat on the bench with his back against the bulkhead. In a few minutes, Mira appeared. She didn't go to the edge to look down or out but instead sat next to him.

“I lost all the money,” she said, finally. She could have been speaking to the clouds tumbling in or the finch tiptoeing on the ledge, for how airy her voice was. “Everything Wilton gave Brindle—almost seventy thousand dollars—and then what was left in the account.” She paused, and forced her eyes to widen. “But I can get it back. I know I can.”

“Do you hear yourself? ‘If I can win this one, everything will be okay. I'm close, I know it's going to happen. Just one more chance.' It's not going to happen, Mira. It's done. It's over. You lost.”

“I'm going to lose Brindle.”

“So you lose it.”

“Look what I've done, O. Look what I've ruined.” Her voice rose. He could hear how tight her throat was. She leaned back against the bulkhead and closed her eyes. She was breaking down. “Oh, my kids! Those poor, poor kids. What have I done?”

“Not you,” he insisted. He saw it clearly now. “It's what Wilton's done.”

She shook her head and then covered her face with her hands. “No, he didn't do anything. I did it. All me.”

“But he holds out more and more money to you, and he knows you won't refuse it because you can't.”

“That's crazy.”

“Brindle is your baby, and you've lost it, Mira. And when Wilton couldn't get Anya, he took you instead. He bought you. Do you see that? Everything was fine before Wilton.”

“Everything wasn't fine.”

“It was. This is his fault.”

“No, I couldn't breathe, O. I was suffocating.”

She stood and went to the edge, taking in everything in front of her. Her history was laid over the grid of these streets and the seven hills of Providence. Maybe she couldn't see farther than that, or take a deep enough breath. Maybe he'd held on to her too tightly, but what else could he have done? She didn't turn or call after him as he left the roof. He made sure that the front door locked behind him so that if he changed his mind about what he was about to do, he wouldn't be able to get back in. He didn't know how long she would stay up there, but he didn't have to worry. He knew she wasn't interested anymore in how far she could lean over without falling. She'd done that already—and she'd fallen as far as she could go.