The Tell (36 page)

Later, when they were sitting with the remains of dinner and the bones of conversation, Owen was sure he'd imagined the knock on the door until he saw Mira freeze. They were jumpy, fiddling too much, strangely shy with each other since they'd left the closet and stood in the light. Could their collective hope make Wilton appear now just as he had the first time at their back door? They stared at each other until Owen got up.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Anya said, the cold yard behind her. She seemed about to step inside but saw Mira and drew back. “Out here? Alone?”

“No, come inside. Talk in here. With both of us.”

“It's okay, O,” Mira told him. “Whatever she wants.”

Owen followed Anya onto the bricks. They stood with their backs against the clapboards for warmth. “Have you heard anything?” he asked.

“No. I saw you through the window,” she said. “I thought you didn't live here anymore.”

“You're freezing. Come in or at least let me get you a coat.”

She shook her head. “I just wanted to tell you that I called some people in Wilton's address book, but no one's heard from him. No one's spoken to him in years. What's he been doing all this time? Who has he been with? Do you think anyone has ever loved him?” she asked, her voice pinched and rising.

“You're shivering. Come inside, please.”

Anya refused. On the other side of the back fence, the woman with the yappy dog passed by, talking on the phone. It was so perfectly ordinary that Owen longed to hop the barrier and be taken in. He knew that Wilton could see the things other people had—wives, husbands, lovers, children, dinners, a sense of what a day was worth and where you were needed, and who was waiting for you, a glow over a front door—but he couldn't have that for himself. Wilton had been most real to his daughter as an idea, as the notion of abandonment. She'd been so loyal to an absent father that she hadn't known what to do with the present one.

“Mira left him at that fucking casino,” Anya said. “I just don't understand that.”

“He wanted her to leave him. He told her to.”

“It doesn't matter. You don't leave someone if you think they're not safe alone or in trouble, even if they want you to. How can you forgive her for that? How can you forgive her for anything she's done?”

“Because I love her.”

In the glow pouring over them from the kitchen window, he saw how young she was and, now, how determined. “I just wanted to let you know I'll be sleeping over there, in case he comes back. In case you see lights and think he's home.”

Anya returned to her father's house, and Owen watched as light after light went on. Inside, Mira stood at the sink. It was clear she'd heard their conversation.

Owen put his coat on. “I should go.”

“It's a good question, you know,” she said. “How can you forgive me? For anything, for everything?” She turned to look at him. “Why did you come by earlier?”

Owen sat at the table; he didn't have the will to leave, but maybe the will to confess what he'd done, what he'd told Wilton. Mira might never forgive him if he told her, but she might not ever forgive herself if he didn't.

“I wanted to see you,” he said.

She gave him a gentle smile. “You can stay if you want.”

He knew she didn't want to be alone in the house, so he slept that night in her old bedroom in the back. The bed sagged against the booty under the springs. He woke later to Wilton's voice, deeply relieved to know the man was finally back. He had taken a vacation from his life, and who could blame him? Tomorrow Owen would apologize. But too soon he realized he was hearing Bruno Macon, not Wilton at all, and his lungs deflated, his throat closed. Down the hall, Mira was watching reruns of
Ancient Times
, her useless remedy. Next door, Anya was doing the same thing, and the gray and blue shadows of Wilton on the screen lived it up in the space between the two houses,

Three days later, there was still no word from Wilton or the police. Owen had left Spruance after lunch, claiming a stomach bug, and now he drove down Route 6 to his father's house. The bare trees revealed what summer foliage always obscured—raw new construction and old houses faded into gray, streets that curved against the bay on his left and the ocean on his right, everything dusted with winter sand. The waterfall at the miniature golf course was off, its cataract blocked by a patch of black plastic. The drive-in screen loomed over the deserted parking lot.

How was it possible for a man to just vanish? Could Wilton slide off a bar stool at the casino, leave a fifty as tip, check into a hotel and check out the next morning, and there be no record of any of it? Could he push through a set of glass doors at the casino entrance without anyone ever seeing him leave? Could he take a cab to a motel, have a shower, get some ice from the machine, watch some free cable, and not only kill himself but also hide his own body? A detective had told Mira that bodies weren't so easy to get rid of, they held on stubbornly to their place in the world. They—or some small part of themselves—almost always showed up eventually in one form or another. Wilton was officially a missing person now. To Owen, though, Wilton was hovering somewhere between lost and found, still undecided about which way to go.

Owen had allowed the car to wander over the center line and now he yanked the wheel back. The tires squealed. Another car honked. Owen tasted the salt of fear. This was the season of fatal head-ons, the end of winter losing against the insistence of spring and drivers made inattentive by their own impatience. Everyone out here knew at least one person killed this way. The brother of a friend, the husband of the third-grade math teacher. As a kid, this was the season Owen sat in the classroom and willed the trees to burst into blossom, while through the open windows, he could hear the cars on Route 6. On this Wednesday afternoon, the roads had only a dribble of traffic and “See You in June” banners swooped across restaurant doors.

His ringing cell phone made him cringe. He wasn't ready for any kind of news; he wanted to float in that time when nothing was known and everything was still possible. Mike Levi was calling again—Owen had been dodging him for weeks. He'd too easily canceled his tutoring sessions at the last minute, amazed at how bountifully he lied to his students: a family emergency, a minor surgery, a school meeting. They never suspected him of dishonesty. He didn't have the face for it, apparently. At Spruance, he was not quite so prolific with his fictions, but he didn't need to be. His body was present at the head of the room, which was some kind of sad but useful standard by which job performance was measured in these last months of the place. He spent his class time reading
The Call of the Wild
out loud and letting the sleepy ones sleep, the dreamy ones doodle. He brought them food. He told them stories. He had some vague sense that someone in charge would eventually come into his classroom and catch him and throw him out on his ass. That it hadn't happened yet was almost a disappointment, and certainly an indictment.

In the warm weather, the strip of land that ran down the middle of the dirt road to his father's house was tall with grass and wildflowers that musically played on the underbelly of the car. But the grass was still dormant, and the road unattended. Large ruts hadn't been filled in, and some of the stones he and Edward laid every few years to hold the silt in place had been washed away by winter. He parked between the twisted locust trees. The eucalyptus smell in the air was heady, and soon, the sound of mewing reached him like a hundred violins playing on the other side of the pond. The bushes shivered with kittens. They appeared from around the house and from under it, circling his ankles and hooking their skinny tails over his shoes. They were fanged and starving. In the past, Edward would not have let the cats grow feral, fuck with abandon, and give endless, slippery birth. The kittens were evidence of how quickly a man's place gets taken over when he leaves it. His father had moved in with Katherine, and the cozy habitat of a woman was his natural world now. There would be softness and mystery to explore, and he might ask himself why he'd waited so long for it.

Owen looked for some cat food inside, but everything edible had been cleared out. He drove to Dutra's, where he bought bags of cat food, bread, peanut butter, a six-pack of Rolling Rock, some licorice, a can of baked beans. He joked to the man behind the counter that his selection looked like what you'd buy if you were planning on running away with a lion. It was the same man who'd always worked there and who never showed any signs that he recognized Owen.

“You'd need a can opener if that's what you were going to do,” he said, humorlessly tapping the tin of beans.

At the house, Owen used a collection of clamshells for bowls and filled them with the greasy pellets of food. The kittens swarmed, and the sound of their crunching rose in the trees like some horrible banquet. When they were done, they wobbled off to the last patches of sun. In the room where his father wrote, the desk was clear and the single bed, which had always served as a landing pad for junk, was bare. An Indian print bedspread was faded in a line where the sun hit it. Three of Rey's tennis balls waited in the corner. The stillness of the place was an enticement for Owen to see his life a little more clearly. He'd come here for that.

The pond was pewter. As he stood on the beach, the reflection of the trees on its surface grew narrower, and very soon what was mirror would be all shadow. He walked the perimeter and wasn't surprised to see that since Porter's death the path had become overgrown. Edward had no reason to walk it anymore. Everything had changed and neighbors accused one another of trespassing and small crimes these days. According to Edward, they could pull out the maps they'd gotten from the county office showing exactly where their indisputable property lines were, where their floating docks were allowed. Some of the houses had been fussed up with skylights and decks. Still, winter debris collected at the base of their doors. Halfway around was Porter's old place, cleaned of furniture and the man's collection of nautical charts and bird photos. A few feet of old orange carpeting in the bedroom had been peeled back to reveal water-stained plywood. The house steeled itself for demolition.

Past Porter's was the house that had been going up the summer before. It was enormous, glass and cedar with a strange buffed metal girth that rose over several neatly planted topographies. The place sat directly on the path. Owen saw no way around it. A woman appeared in the kitchen window. He wasn't close enough to know if she was the naked companion of the barking, naked man on the dock, but she had the same brilliant orange hair. She put on a white apron and began to work at the counter. A loose ponytail ran down her back. He heard faint strains of Latin drumming. With his father at Katherine's, this woman might be the only person on the pond now, except for him. When she looked up, as if she'd heard his thoughts, he darted back.

The only thing to do then was turn around and go back through the arbor that was dotted with silver winterberries. But he didn't want to—and he was angry now because his plan had been to walk the entire circumference. He'd had it in mind for a while. He didn't understand how the house could claim its place so thoroughly and indifferently. He hadn't considered swimming, but now he was compelled to. His jacket was the hardest to take off; it introduced that first blast of cold. His fingers were stiff at the buttons of his shirt, his belt, his boxers. He was naked when he took the gun from his pants pocket. He filled his lungs and talked himself in. His body clenched, his skin drew next to his bones, and his balls retreated up as he forced himself under where it was warmer than the air. He couldn't take a full breath, and the cold made him laugh in short barks. He swam to the center of the pond, his stroke off-balance because of his grip on the gun. His breathing slowed and his organs huddled for warmth; soon his stroke relaxed and the iciness was glorious. Everything in his head was easing out, floating away on the surface, and when he dove, the bottom of the pond rose up to him. He'd never seen it before because he'd never dared to go that deep. He touched the ancient fronds and the nodules on sunken branches. When he looked up, the sun sat on the water. The bottom was under his feet, and he was all right. He let go of the gun, watched it sink until it was gone, and then rose to the top.

The woman from the house stood on the beach, a bright red coat over her apron. She held a blanket and yelled at him. “Get out. It's too cold. Are you crazy?”

“Yes.” It took most of his energy to answer.

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

His joints began to creak, half frozen. The cold was seeping in through some crack in his body. He didn't know what he'd intended, taking this crazy swim—instead of just chucking the gun into the water as he'd planned—but he saw just how stupid it was. Stupid and perfect. He was exultant, alive, thrilled. But the water was lethal and fear was all over the woman's face.

“I don't like this. You're making me nervous,” she yelled and gestured him in. “I'll call the police if you don't come out.” She crossed her arms and waited. Her feet were bare in the sand. “I mean it. Get the hell out of the water.”

He swam toward her and when he rose from the water, his arms and legs were rocks. The woman took steps back from him. She was the same woman from the dock. She took in his nakedness, his shrunken penis, his face and his size, and tossed him the blanket.