The Tell (31 page)

“Yes, I know. You think Mira's in trouble. I don't know, maybe she is, maybe you're right about that. But if it's money, I'll give her what she needs. That's the simplest part. That can be fixed tomorrow. If Mira needs help, we'll get her help. Everything can be fixed.”

It was tempting to think everything could be solved with a large enough check, apologies and compassion dealt all around, trips to a therapist, weekly confessions in a fusty church basement, just a big fuck-up by all of them. They'd look back and smirk at the mess they'd made; they'd been too incautiously excited. But Mira would never be the same, and his marriage was broken. If he stayed, he'd always live with a liar, and how would he get past that? Her betrayal ached like the flu in his bones, in his jaw, his eyes. Wilton went into the room where his desk and laptop were. His imbalance from the bum hip had mysteriously disappeared. Owen seized the idea that he'd been fooled again.

“Some things can't be fixed,” Owen said from the doorway. “You can't fix things with Anya.” He saw Wilton's shoulders lift slightly, then fall again.

“You don't know that.” Wilton stared at his computer screen.

“Yes, I do. It's what Anya said.” The gun was a useless menace, after all, when words could better rip Wilton apart. “So what's left for you now? The older you get, the fewer people are going to know who you are, and soon no one will remember, and you'll be just some batty old fuck who claims he was on television once. You'll have done nothing with your life, left nothing, not even a daughter who thinks of you as her father, a daughter who wants nothing to do with you.”

The computer threw light onto Wilton's thin fingers trembling on the keyboard, as though they were about to type his way out of this.

“I've seen how it works,” Owen went on. “People look twice at you not because they admire you, but because they can't believe a man would spend his life being an idiot and a clown—and who now just hopes someone will recognize him. It's pathetic, actually. They wonder where your self-respect is.”

“Self-respect?” Wilton laughed and wheeled his chair away from the desk. “It's a slippery beast. Do you really think most people wouldn't trade places with me in a second? That they wouldn't act the fool just to be on television? It's a national pastime, making an asshole of yourself. Just like you're doing now.” He paused. “I think you're making the old ‘we're laughing at you, not with you' observation, which makes you sound like the batty old fuck.”

When he tried to stand, Owen pushed him down. With his hand on Wilton's shoulder, he felt how much stronger he was and how he could crush him.

“You seem to have forgotten one thing,” Wilton said, as though the idea to sit again had been his. “That I'm your friend. We've depended on each other, helped each other, confided in each other.”

“I told Anya what happened,” Owen said, and watched as Wilton, for the first time, looked resigned, not to his helplessness, or to Owen's twitching muscles, but to the inevitability of this hour when everything would collapse. It was as if he'd been waiting for it all along, from the moment he'd arrived in Providence.

“I don't believe you.”

“Well, you should.” The floor beneath Owen's feet became a cloud. Anger was transporting him, lifting him. What he wanted Wilton to see was that death was less terrifying than the moment when it was still being decided. When the gun was in your face, and it might go off.

“No, I know you,” Wilton said, trying a last appeal. His expression said that he knew Owen would always be a coward. With the chair in the center of the room, Wilton had found his stage. “And I know you wouldn't do that.”

Maybe Owen wasn't capable of much in the end; he couldn't threaten the man with death. Death was easy by comparison to living with the threat of being killed. Death was gone; pain was being alive. He took a swing at Wilton's face. The contact of skin against skin and bone against bone was dense and satisfying. He itched to do it again, to pummel the man. But Wilton had fallen off his chair, head bent, legs twisted under him, one wrist cocked against the floor, his robe open. This was the final, humiliated slump as Owen stood over him.

“Get up,” Owen said.

“I can't.”

“Get up,” Owen commanded.

Wilton ignored his angry bark, rolled onto all fours and crawled into the bathroom, hoisting himself up first on the toilet, then the sink. He examined his purpling cheek and nose in the mirror. He spoke to Owen's reflection.

“I could use some ice.” Wilton ran water in the sink and watched it circle down the drain. “Do you know that's the first time I've ever been punched? Lots have wanted to before, but you're the only one who's actually done it. I didn't know you had it in you.”

“I told Anya about the accident.”

“So you said.” Wilton touched the twisted skin under his eye. “Maybe I'll even have a shiner. That's dramatic.”

“Do you know what she said? She said, ‘Of course. He always chooses himself first, and always will.' And after that? She could barely talk, she was sick with the truth. Remember the day we were in the Bright and she saw us and fled across the street? It was
you
she didn't want to see. You saw her expression. How else does a child look at a parent who's tried to kill her? She doesn't want anything to do with you. She wishes you'd never moved here, she wishes she'd never written you that goddam postcard.”

With Wilton still hanging over the sink, Owen went downstairs. He took off his own coat and put the suede one on. It was luxurious and heavy.

Wilton stood at the top of the stairs looking down at him. “Tell me you didn't,” he pleaded. “Tell me she didn't say that. Tell me.”

Wilton had been that first shadow in the lungs on the X-ray, the first sound of dripping water behind the wall, the first sniff of mold coming from the basement. Wilton had appeared the first time Mira turned on the television, and he was that electric sizzle haunting the air after the set had been turned off. He was Owen's first prescience of ruin by the lilacs a year ago.

“She said all of it. Every word.” He hesitated. “Anya wishes you weren't alive.”

Wilton spoke, but it didn't seem to be at Owen anymore. “Then maybe I should just go. I should disappear and pretend I was never even here.”

“Yes, why not?” Owen said. “Go all the way. Kill yourself and don't fuck it up this time.”

Wilton stared at him open-mouthed. He didn't have anything to say now. Owen felt disturbingly calm as he left the house, as though the riot had passed through his neighborhood, leaving the damage behind. He let himself into his own house through the back door and waited for Mira in the kitchen. The air was stale, and the tangerines in a bowl on the table wore sweaters of mold. Soon he heard Mira's footsteps crunching on the snow, and her hesitation as she discovered the door was unlocked. She would have seen the light on but wasn't sure who was inside. In his rush to the door, he scared her and she ran.

“It's me,” he called. “It's just me.”

“God, you terrified me. Don't do that.” She stood at the far end of the yard and looked up at the starless night.

“Come inside.”

Her hand was at her chest. She was tight with the slow ebbing of fear, and then her face softened into something that looked like relief. “You're back?” she asked. “Are you here to stay?”

“I just wanted to see that you made it home.”

“Did you think I wouldn't? Don't go, please, Owen. I've told you everything. It's over now. Stay.”

But he wanted to be in his apartment in Fox Point on Mrs. Tevas's third floor. He wanted to go back to where he'd begun when he came to Providence, so that maybe he could see what it would be like to start over again.

O
n the Friday of vacation week, the elementary school across the street from the Bright was childless and closed up tight, a bank of snow blocking the door. The front mural was scabbed over with ice. Owen could have made coffee in Mrs. Tevas's son's Mr. Coffee and cooked himself something in one of the boy's pans that George Tevas had arranged by size in the cabinet with all handles pointing in the same direction. But the smells of cooking in the apartment made his landlords antsy, and each time they turned up CNN as though to block the odor and the reminder that it was still not their son upstairs. Owen understood that he was not meant to actually live too much up there. When he'd been at work, George had come upstairs to clean. It unnerved Owen, but how could he stop the man?

He had become a temporary regular in the Bright in the two weeks since he'd left Mira, but it was no friendlier a place to him than it had been. He picked at his muffin, a dry mulchy thing left over from the morning that the woman at the counter had chosen for him. She'd witnessed his bullying of the man in the army jacket weeks before and she wasn't going to forget it.
Enjoy
, she'd said, serving him the rock tipped on a plate. Anya's classmate, who was often in there, was studiously icy. There were other spots he could have gone to sit in his self-exiled state, but being here was some kind of way to stop time while he waited for Anya. Fox Point had welcomed him back in its perfectly indifferent way. He hated and loved the neighborhood for its reminders of his darkest times when he'd found himself shivering in the heat, hungry but unable to eat. The coin-op laundry had puffed endless sweet steam, and the houses were covered with the octopus suckers of satellite dishes. Not much had changed.

On the corner where he and Mira had first met, a dog without a collar sniffed a snow bank. It was a summer night back then, Mira on her gearless bicycle trying to track down the kid with the sticky fingers. I was ridiculous, she'd later said, and admitted that she'd been showing off for Owen, trying to look tough and determined. Last night, she'd called at 2:00 a.m., the time completely lost to her until he'd pointed it out. In the apartment below him, the television had still been on, keeping its twenty-four-hour vigil of the wars. From the way Mira's voice echoed, he imagined she was up on the third floor, but he didn't ask; he didn't want to know. She said she hadn't seen anyone in days, not even Wilton, who hadn't come by and whose house was often dark; she hadn't been to Brindle or anywhere. She didn't ask Owen to come back; he sensed that she was waiting him out in her penitence. He hadn't been able to get back to sleep after the call, suffering his own form of withdrawal from her. He'd been sitting in the Bright for hours, and the day had slowly drained away down the slushy gutters.

Anya appeared in the noisy doorway and made her way over to her friend. Owen had been waiting every afternoon to see her, and to see how far the lies he'd told Wilton had spread. Had Wilton talked to Anya and begged her forgiveness for a crime she didn't even know he'd committed? But she looked untouched and beautiful, laughing at something as she unwound the thick wool scarf from around her head. Ruin had fallen all around her, but she didn't know it. Her father was not on her mind. When she and her friend looked over at Owen, blood rushed to his face. He could only blink dumbly at Anya for how he'd used her once again to get what he wanted. His nerve grew weak at the knees—he didn't know what he would say to her. She came over and rested her hands on the back of the vacant chair where he'd put his suede jacket.

“What's going on?” she asked. “Please tell me that Wilton didn't send you to spy on me.”

“He didn't send me.” Owen's mouth was dry.

“But isn't this his coat?” She gave the thing a quick tap.

“No. He gave this one to me.”

“But it's just like his, right?” She looked out to the street. “The other day, when I saw both of you in here, I couldn't come in. It was too much. I can't have him following me or waiting for me, just lurking around for a glimpse. It's too creepy. It's like my own father's a stalker.”

“Have you talked to him recently?”

“Not in a while, a week and a half, two maybe? He calls, but I've had exams. I ignore him.” She looked out at the street. Owen couldn't tell if she felt guilty about dodging her father. “You think I'm being ridiculous about all this, about him, don't you. You think I should just be nicer, more forgiving.”