by L. R. Wright
Alberg sat in the middle of the sofa, holding the snapshot. “Mrs. O’Brea, are you sure you want to find him?” She accepted this calmly; he watched her consider it. She looked away from him, around the room, her gaze touching on the furnishings, the carpet, the curtains at the window, and through the doorway into the hall.
“Am I sure that I want to find him.” She gave a sigh and folded her hands in her lap. She was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt. Her hair gleamed, and her face was bare of makeup. She looked directly at Alberg again. He thought she probably believed herself to be a perfectly honest and straightforward person with nothing whatsoever to hide. “No, I’m not sure I want to find him. But I have to do it, anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because—I don’t know. To ask him why he left, I guess. To see if he really means it, maybe.”
Bernie entered the room bearing a tray on which she’d placed two cups of coffee, cream and sugar, and a plate of what Alberg recognized as her own homemade oatmeal cookies. Bernie put down the tray and held out the plate to Emma, who shook her head.
But Bernie said, “You don’t need to tell me you had no breakfast, and I got no guarantee you’ll eat the supper I’ll make for you, so at least let me see you eat one of these cookies.”
Emma took one and began to nibble at it.
Bernie left, and they heard her lugging something upstairs, and then the vacuum cleaner went on up there.
Alberg took out his notebook. “Okay. Let’s get started.” And Emma went through it again: the morning of Charlie’s departure; calling his office on Monday; checking the bank accounts. When she’d finished, she sank back in her chair, and Alberg saw her exhaustion.
“What do you think’s happened here, Emma?” he said quietly.
Emma got up, slowly, and moved across the room to the white upright piano that stood in the corner. She played a few notes with her right hand. “Charlie bought me this piano. I was just about to start taking lessons.” She sat on the stool, her back to the piano. “He’s left me,” she said, almost matter-of-fact. “That’s what’s happened.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know.” Tears flooded her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She pulled a tissue from the pocket of her jeans and wiped them away.
“Are you angry with him?”
“Well, what on earth do you think?” She ducked her head. “I don’t think that’s pertinent,” she said, brushing nonexistent crumbs from her thigh.
Alberg looked curiously around the living room, which felt like a department store display. This was partly due to its spectacular cleanliness, for which he could blame Bernie; but due, also, to the peculiar feeling of emptiness that pervaded it. He imagined Charlie making his escape from here, slipping from this room into his own private future: the room would never miss him.
“Exactly what is it that you’ll be doing?” said Emma.
“First I’ll need a letter from you, authorizing me to make inquiries,” he said. “Then I’ll want information about your bank accounts. I’ve got the details on his car. I need names of friends and relatives. His business address, his partner’s name. Also, who’s his doctor, his dentist, his lawyer, his mechanic, et cetera. And a list of every place you know of that he’s ever been.”
“I can give you all that.”
“Plus I want to look through everything he left behind. Clothes, desk drawers, filing cabinets—everything.”
“Of course,” said Emma, nodding.
“Finally I need you to tell me every single thing you know about him. Hobbies. Educational background. His medical and family history. Sexual habits.”
Emma placed her feet close together, side by side, and examined her sneakers. They were dark gray, with shiny gray patterns shaped like flames, and heels and toes that were dark pink.
Alberg said, “I’ll also be checking airports, airlines, buses, trains—okay?” He was smiling at her, trying to be reassuring.
Emma looked up at him. “You won’t lie to me, will you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you find out that—that he’s… ”
“If I find out that something’s happened to him?” He shook his head. “No. Of course I won’t lie to you. I think that’s unlikely, though. I think, if anything had happened to him, you would have been notified by now.”
She nodded wearily. “I know. I think so too.”
“Emma—are you sure you can’t tell me something that might explain why he’d want to leave?”
She shook her head and knew immediately that she’d done it too quickly. She tried to look thoughtful. It was hard not to tell him about that business with the gun. The only reason she didn’t was so as not to confuse him. It would sound positively melodramatic, and he’d never be able to get it out of his mind, and probably he’d decide, privately, that she was better off without Charlie, and he wouldn’t look for him at all, he’d just pretend to look for him, and then eventually he’d come back to the house and report his failure.
“I honestly can’t. No.” She moved away from the piano and sat down in the easy chair again, reaching for her coffee cup. “I know this is a cliché, but I thought we had a very good marriage. I really did. And I deserve to know if I was wrong.”
“Sometimes there just aren’t any good answers,” said Alberg, “no matter how important the questions are.”
“People should be required to provide some, though,” Emma said sharply, “as unsatisfactory as they may be.”
“You’re right,” he said, flipping open his notebook. “Okay. Let’s get started. Tell me about Charlie. Don’t leave anything out,” he said, but he knew she would.
25
“SOMETIMES I TALK to myself,” Eddie confided to Sylvia.
“Me too.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Really?” Then he saw her grinning at him and understood that she was making a joke. Of course she didn’t talk to herself. A person living with those kids would never get a chance to talk to herself.
“You should have another pet, maybe,” said Sylvia, glancing up at him from her supper. He’d cooked pasta, and a sauce made from tomatoes, zucchini, bacon, and onion. Usually he just ate easy stuff, but whenever Sylvia came over he did up something special. “You could get one free, from the SPCA.”
“That’s a dumb idea,” Eddie scoffed. “I got my job. I got the gym. I got my project.” He slathered margarine over one of the rolls he’d picked up from the Safeway on his way home. “I got no time for pets.” He’d had gerbils once. Woke up one morning and, instead of two of them, he had fourteen. This had rattled Eddie, and he hadn’t wanted a pet since.
“What is this project, anyway?”
He made his eyes very narrow, and peeked at her. Sylvia was wearing jeans and a yellow sweater, and she’d let her long brown hair fall loose. He wished he could confide in her about the notes, about having to do surveillance on that house full of girls. But he’d gone past that point now, the point where Sylvia could help him. Melanie dying like that—he knew Sylvia wouldn’t stand for it.
“Oh, you know,” he said vaguely. He blotted up the last of the pasta sauce on his plate with a chunk of roll and stuffed the roll into his mouth. “A project. Nothing.”
He knew how much he owed Sylvia. He trusted her more than anybody else in the world.
“It must be pretty important, you need a new envelope for it,” she said. “Why can’t you just take from MISCELLANEOUS?”
But he didn’t trust her completely. That would be too much responsibility for anybody, Eddie thought: to be trusted completely.
He grunted, instead of answering her, and stood up to clear the table. “I got ice cream for dessert. And a nice cantaloupe.”
“So did you do it?” she asked him, casually, over dessert. “Apologize?”
He’d been expecting this, of course, so he was ready for it. “She came into the drugstore one day,” he said, digging into his cantaloupe. “And I spoke to her.
Yeah.”
Sylvia was looking at him fondly, with a little smile. “There. You see?”
And he hadn’t lied, either.
When Sylvia had left, Eddie washed the dishes and put them away, and wiped off the cracked linoleum that covered the kitchen countertop, and he even cleaned the tiny window above the sink, the one that looked into the bottom of a hydrangea bush.
Then he sat at the kitchen table with his shoe box of envelopes and went through them carefully, one by one. They were full of money. He’d cashed his paycheck today—that was why Sylvia had come over for supper. She came once a month to help him organize his finances, and in real life—that is to say, when things were normal, not all jerked around, like now—these were Eddie’s favorite days. He felt very wealthy, peering into his envelopes, as though he could afford anything in the world.
He also had a bank account. He used to have two of them, one for paying for stuff and one for saving, but that got too confusing, so Sylvia said he could make do with just one, the one for saving. A little book came with it, in which it got written down how much money was in there. Which wasn’t much. But Sylvia said it was important to put in a little bit every time he got paid. She said that gradually it would pile up on itself, and one day he’d look in the little book and be flabbergasted at how much was there. “Flabbergasted.” That was the word she’d said. He’d be “just flabbergasted” to find out how much money he had, all of a sudden. This made Eddie laugh and shake his head. But he did it. Every two weeks. He took his paycheck into the bank and cashed it and then put a little bit into his savings account. And when Sylvia came he showed her the book. The pile of money did get bigger too, he had to admit it. But so far he wasn’t flabbergasted.
The envelopes in the shoe box were four inches high and nine and a half inches long. They had to be that size so the bills inside didn’t get all squeezed. Each one had a word printed on it, and a number: for example, one said RENT, $450. There were envelopes that said FOOD; TELEPHONE; CIGARETTES; MOVIES—all spelled right, all with figures on them worked out by Eddie and Sylvia together. And if one of the envelopes came up empty before he got another paycheck—well, then, like Sylvia said, putting on a deep voice, pretending to be Dad, “that’s how the cookie crumbles, my man, that’s how she crumbles.”
Eddie often thought about how different things might be—things like his life, and the way he lived it—if his dad hadn’t died.
Eddie didn’t have to worry about stuff like heat and electricity, because they were included in his rent. He didn’t have to worry about remembering to pay the rent, because the man who lived upstairs (or sometimes it was the woman) came down on the first day of the month and knocked on his door and Eddie went to the shoe box and got the envelope marked RENT—which he never touched except for then—and took the money out of it and handed it to the landlord, and that would be that.
He might even still be living at home if his dad hadn’t died. This had happened a long, long time ago. Eddie had trouble remembering his dad, which was why Sylvia, who was older, did his voice from time to time. She could remember him, and she tried to bring him back a little bit for Eddie.
He didn’t have to worry about his medical insurance, either, because the drugstore looked after that for him. Same with his taxes.
He’d been worried when he first learned about all the stuff you had to do, living on your own. But Sylvia had gotten him so well organized he hardly worried about anything anymore. He considered himself to be a very happy person. And so it was no damn wonder…
His mom hadn’t died, but he hadn’t seen her for years. She’d run off with some guy. Well, she’d run off with several guys. But the last time, when Eddie was fourteen and Sylvia was twenty, she hadn’t bothered to come back.
The PROJECTS envelope had fifty dollars in it. He didn’t know whether this would be enough or not.
Hell, he could always use some of the money in his bank account, if he had to. Sylvia wouldn’t like that. But it was his money after all.
He used to have a car payment to look after too, but he never had an envelope for that. And now the Camaro was all his, thought Eddie, and he felt a great whuff of pride in his chest, even though he couldn’t drive his car right now. It was lucky Sylvia hadn’t asked him about his Camaro. But then why would she? Sylvia wasn’t much interested in cars, which always surprised Eddie, because of her job.
He’d had to get a loan to buy the Camaro—a bronze ’81 Z28, with a hatch roof, which was two removable glass panels. Sylvia went to the bank with him. He hadn’t gotten things quite straight in his mind, though, not right away. He hadn’t understood that he was supposed to put all this extra money in his bank account so that the bank could take it out to pay for his loan. And so when the bank poked around in his bank account looking for its money, it wasn’t there. He got in trouble about that.
It started eating away at him, that damn loan. He hated the idea that he was driving around in this car that really wasn’t his at all but the damn bank’s.
It happened there was a big snowstorm right about then, and Eddie hired himself out as a snow shoveler. He worked hard at that; and he put in extra time at work, as much as they’d give him; and when the snow melted he looked in the paper and got other kinds of work. He didn’t do anything for months except work. All he had in his mind was paying the bank as fast as he could. And finally one day the loan was gone and the Camaro was his.
It wasn’t just not really owning the car that had bothered him. It was also the fact that the bank could go snuffling around in his private account like they had. He was outraged to find this out. It was very, very wrong. It was just as wrong as if his landlord had come downstairs and unlocked Eddie’s door and snuffled around in Eddie’s private stuff just because the landlord owned the house Eddie was living in.
He said this over and over to Sylvia, and finally she agreed that he was right. But she told him being right wasn’t going to change anything: the bank was still going to poke around in his accounts if he owed them money.
So he decided to make damn sure never to owe them money again. From now on, he told Sylvia grimly, he’d save up his damn money until he had what he needed to buy stuff with.
“Even a house?” Sylvia had said with a grin.
But Eddie just looked disgusted at her, because what would he want with a house?
Sitting outside the girl’s house with his notebook and pen, he’d thought it again: what would he ever want with a house? Too damn big. Too damn scary. Who the hell would ever want a whole house folded around them?
Eddie looked into the envelope marked CIGARETTES. Now, here was a depressing state of affairs. He could only afford one package of cigarettes a week. That worked out to three smokes a day every day but Sunday, when he only got to have two. Which made him pretty damn mad.
This was partly what the fifty dollars in his PROJECTS envelope was for. Extra cigarettes. You couldn’t stand watch for hours on end without having a few extra smokes to pass the time.
The MOVIES envelope contained forty-five dollars. That was enough for three movies, including a small bag of popcorn and a diet Sprite every time. If he got real busy with the surveillance project, he might not be able to go to three movies, and then he could use some of that money for more smokes.
He put the lid on the shoe box and pushed it into the middle of the table. He held on to the edge of the tabletop and tilted his chair back so that it was resting on only its back legs. The shoe box was a symbol of peace and good order. He looked around the kitchen with a little sigh.
After a while he stood up and got a beer from the fridge. He went over to the TV and turned it on, then went to the hook on the wall by the door and got the notebook and pen out of his jacket pocket. He sat down in a big stuffed chair that was covered with a plaid blanket. He put the beer on the coffee table and put his feet up next to it and opened the notebook.
There were just the three of them, no more. That much he’d found out.
> Now he had to keep on watching the house until he’d figured out when they were all likely to be away at the same time. And then he’d go up to the door, carrying his repairman’s toolbox, and get inside, one way or another, forcing the lock or breaking the window or something…
Commotion began occurring in Eddie’s stomach. He closed the notebook, focused on the TV, and drank from his can of beer with one hand, while gently rubbing his gut with the other.
26
EMMA WAS ASLEEP, dreaming. In her dream she became aware of place: bedroom; and of self: Emma in the bedroom, in the bed, covered up by the quilt, sleeping…
Gradually she drifted, in her dream, out of sleep and into wakefulness. She began hearing sounds—someone, somewhere, was crying. At first she thought it was a baby, then in her dream reminded herself that they didn’t have any babies yet. And then she thought maybe it was an animal, and reminded herself that animals don’t weep. Maybe it’s me, then, she thought; maybe it’s me weeping. But she was aware in her dream that her closed eyes were empty of tears.
The sound had been far away. Now it got closer…and a terrible cold thrill swept over Emma in her dream as she realized that it wasn’t weeping at all she was hearing, but laughter. The laughter was becoming louder, moving nearer and nearer to her bed. Emma tried to open her eyes but couldn’t: it was as though they’d been stuck shut with glue. She struggled to see through her forehead, or through the upper part of her cheeks, but couldn’t. She began clawing at her face—trying to claw her eyes open—and the laughter was very close now, almost on top of her—
Emma’s eyes flew open, and she stared with them, seeing and not seeing, her heart beating fast and her hands all sweaty, clutched together between her breasts.
She was lying on her side, looking at the bedside table, seeing that the clock read 6:19.
She threw back the quilt and got up and went into the bathroom.
When she came out, she put on a robe and got a glass of orange juice from the kitchen, then climbed back into bed and sat there, leaning against two pillows, watching the light filter through the curtains that covered the French doors and the window.