Ring of Years

by Grant Oliphant

  It’s an impressive house, at least from here, but somehow unforeseen. She expected country rich, not urban chic; pastures and white fences and paintings of foxhunts, not tight city spaces and indecipherable abstracts.

  Despite the nausea churning its way from her stomach to her throat, Natalie forces her eyes to focus on the source of the voice. Standing in front of the red Marilyn Monroe-as-a-divan, arms letting go of a sobbing Marida Latham, is the man who presumably is the grieving husband. There’s another man to his right, an obvious cop in a gray suit, presumably a detective, but Natalie barely sees him. Her attention is riveted on the husband. Pockets of weary gray bulge out from beneath his eyes, which are red with grief and rage. He hasn’t shaved, and his khakis and blue button-down shirt have a slept-in rumpled look. Not at all the worldly man she met yesterday, not so focused on her nose piercing and her breasts, but utterly recognizable.

  The dirtball.

  Phil.

  * * *

  “Who is this woman?” the gray-suited cop asks. The question is directed to one of his uniformed officers, who has come running through the front door.

  The embarrassed cop shrugs. “I was down on the street talking with some of the neighborhood people like you asked,” she pants. “She came out of nowhere.”

  “Natalie,” Marida says with wide eyes. She is one of those people who can pose an entire question just by saying your name, in this case the question being much the same as Phil’s – What the fuck are you doing here? – minus the profanity, perhaps.

  Natalie wants to be anywhere but here, but she stammers out an explanation, which she addresses to Marida. “You ran right by me outside. You looked so frightened, panicked. I thought you might need someone.”

  Wild-eyed, Phil turns on his neighbor. “You know this woman?” he asks incredulously.

  “I only just met her,” Marida answers defensively, as if knowing Natalie is something shameful, which at this moment it probably is. “Abby told me about her last night. She said she knew someone who might be able to help me find Selena.”

  “Would someone please tell me what’s going on?” Detective Gray Suit asks.

  “This is the bitch I told you about,” Phil answers. “The one in the bar last night.” His voice is rising as he speaks and he edges forward menacingly. “So, tell me,” he sneers at Natalie, “killing my wife wasn’t enough? You had to come admire your handiwork and knock her body around a bit while you’re at it, is that It? How dare you come into my house like this, who the hell do you think you are?”

  Natalie, stunned, steps back. “Killing your wife?” she says hoarsely, suppressing the urge to vomit. “What are you—" But of course she knows.

  “Talking about?” he asks, completing her thought. “This.” He reaches inside his shirt pocket and pulls out an audiocassette. Natalie recognizes it immediately as the tape she made in the nightclub.

  “I went out for a couple of hours this morning,” he continues. “When I came back I found Abby—" He fights back a sob. “She was listening to this when she died. She didn’t tell me about it, about you, didn’t confront me. First I knew anything was when I listened to this while I sat there with her, with her body—"

  He stops moving and his eyes lose their focus, like something inside of him has suddenly shut down.

  ‘‘I’m so sorry,” Natalie says miserably.

  That brings him back. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” he hisses. He begins waving the tape in the air. “Did you think about this before you gave it to her? Did you consider what it could do to a person, to be given something like this?”

  Natalie is desperate. It’s like she’s being punched in the stomach, blow after blow after blow, and she can’t fight back, can’t find the words to defend herself. Suddenly, all she can think to do is lash out. “I was just giving her the information she wanted,” she insists. “All she wanted to know was the truth. You created that reality, not me.”

  Phil laughs bitterly, almost hysterically. “That’s just so convenient for you, isn’t it? You think what you gave her was reality—I’m the sleaze, she’s the victim? Nothing’s that easy. That’s just not how it was. I loved her. She was a difficult woman, but I loved her.” A huge tear rolls down his cheek and his voice breaks.

  “You picked a funny way to show it.”

  An angry calm settles over him, and he responds in a cool, almost detached tone. “You know the difference between you and me? I know what I did. What about you? Maybe I did load the gun, but you handed it to her. No support, no therapy, no words of wisdom. Just here, go have fun with this.” He flings the cassette onto the floor between them. “A tape like that it becomes everything. She left me a note, you know. Can you guess what it said?”

  Natalie doesn’t reply. He’s going to tell her anyway, whether she responds or not.

  “It said,” he continues, “‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ Just like that. Five words, a question mark, and all of it in quotes. You know who she was quoting? You. From that tape. There’s your precious reality. My whole life, our whole marriage, measured by that one lousy moment. You must be proud. Now, please, get the hell out of my house.”

  * * *

  Carter is still waiting for her outside. “You look like you saw a ghost” he remarks.

  She shakes her head. No, she thinks, just created one. He starts asking her questions but she waves him off. “It was private, just people grieving. I shouldn’t have intruded.”

  It’s clear now, what she has to do. She knew it before she went inside the house but didn’t admit it to herself then. That’s a skill you pick up in a life like hers, the subtle art of denial, not telling yourself what you’re thinking, what you’re planning.

  Wouldn’t you like to know?

  What was Abby thinking when she wrote that? As in-your-face kiss-offs go, it’s first rate. It nails Phil dead-on, makes him the heavy without actually giving him any insight at all into the tumult inside her brain. And it teases him cruelly, invoking in a knowing way the need he will have to understand, to explain. It invites him to spend an eternity attempting to bleed from her parting words every conceivable ounce of meaning in the full knowledge that he will never really know anything.

  And he just might fall into that trap. Because that’s one thing Natalie took away from her brief conversation with Phil, that in a totally twisted and bizarre way he really did care about his wife. Of course, there’s no reason Natalie should believe that, his protestations of love. They met as liars, after all, and what cheating husband, confronted with his wife’s suicide, wouldn’t try to reinvent the facts of their relationship in memory?

  Maybe it’s just another lie. Maybe. Natalie wishes she could believe that. She wishes she could dismiss the accusatory finger that Phil pointed at her as just so much blame-sharing by an overwrought scumbag.

  Except that his isn’t the only finger pointing her way.

  Wouldn’t you like to know?

  It was the line that so incensed Abby when she first listened to the tape, the line that made her think Natalie had been leading Phil on. To Abby, Natalie was more than just a messenger; on that tape, she was–God forbid–the other woman. And it was that version of her that Abby drolly cursed on her way to her grave, the woman who had revealed the depths to which Abby’s husband could sink by taking him there.

  Jerk that he is, Phil is right. Abby’s blood is on Natalie’s hands, too. She has always known the world as a carnival of lies, but in fighting it, in playing her pathetic little game of gotcha with errant husbands, she has merely joined the troupe, a clown only playing at revealing the truth. Every lie has a price, even her own.

  What has she ever done in her life that’s positive?

  “Let’s go,” she says.

  “To see the boyfriend?” Carter asks, delighted.

  “What else?”

  9

  Noises in a Prison

  It starts the first week after Natalie comes home from the hospital. Actual
ly, it starts before that, but this is the first time she knows about it.

  She is upstairs reading when the doorbell rings. At first she tries to ignore it. Her aunt had to run out for a few minutes, just a quick trip to the store, and this was one of the rules she laid down: don’t answer the door. Don’t pick up the phone is the other one. Like Natalie is a kid or something. She is enjoying her newfound freedom, her ability to say no occasionally, and she feels silly hiding inside the house this way. When the doorbell rings a second time, she decides to answer it. What harm could it do? And after all, it might be important. Perhaps even someone coming to see her, like her father maybe.

  But it’s not her father. And no one else she knows, either. Standing on her doorstep are a man and a woman, neither of them much older than Aunt Emily. They have chubby fingers and sad looking faces and the woman practically swoons at the sight of Natalie when she opens the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you Natalie?” the man asks.

  She nods suspiciously.

  The woman makes an odd sort of sound, almost a squeak, and dabs at her eyes with a wadded-up handkerchief. “We’re the Nasts,” the man explains. “Yvonne’s parents. May we come in?” Without waiting for permission, he pushes past her and pulls his wife in with him. Natalie, horrified, doesn’t know what to say. She trails them into the living room.

  Aunt Yvonne. Natalie never thought of her as having parents, but of course she must have. And now here they are, wanting what?

  To talk with her, as it turns out. To learn if there was anything the police and the papers haven’t told them, the personal details that inevitably get left out of the collective narratives of mass tragedy. They sit on Aunt Emily’s couch, Mrs. Nast weeping constantly, Mr. Nast throwing out questions.

  Did Yvonne ever talk about us?

  Do you know if she suffered?

  Did she ever talk about leaving the group? She wasn’t really happy there, was she?

  She was kind, wasn’t she? She was a good girl, always a good girl.

  Did she say good-bye? She must have said good-bye.

  Is there anything, anything at all. you can give us to remember her by?

  And then there’s the question Natalie reads in their eyes. in the trembling of their voices and the undirected rage that seems to lurk inside them: Why did our beautiful daughter die while you lived?

  Why you?

  On and on. They are here because they want the child whose survival they can’t help but resent to make sense of it all for them.

  Natalie can’t, of course. But she sits there anyway, submitting to their frustration and disappointment, not just because she’s barely thirteen but also because she has no idea how to overcome her own guilt long enough to say no.

  How can she begrudge these people what they want to know? in the end, she does, though. It’s not intentional—her brain just shuts down. And the next thing she remembers Aunt Emily is sitting next to her, gently shaking her shoulder and asking what’s wrong.

  “What happened to the Nasts?” Natalie asks, looking around the empty room.

  Emily seems confused. “Who?”

  For the next two weeks Natalie wonders if she dreamed them, until one day another woman—someone’s grandmother, she doesn’t hear whose—shows up on their doorstep asking for Natalie and Emily angrily sends her away. “Leave us alone, would you?” she says, practically shrieking.

  “It’s been like this ever since it happened,” she tells Natalie later, “relatives, friends, even people who didn’t lose anybody. I’ve tried to keep them away from you. Most of them have the decency to call first but some of them, it’s unbelievable, they just come by. They’re so pathetic—it’s like you’re some kind of shrine.”

  * * *

  Carter doesn’t know much about the boyfriend, other than that his name is Bret Hartlow and his girlfriend’s name was Alima. As it turns out Hartlow lives on the second floor of a South Side apartment building victimized sometime in the recent past by an urban art project that left its facade covered in sheet metal dancing stick figures. Downstairs, there’s a coffee shop that doubles as an occasional concert venue for undiscovered alternative bands. Natalie has been here a couple of times, although she can’t remember the groups that played or who she was with. No one memorable, she’s sure, on both counts.

  “Whatever you do, don’t push him too hard,” she tells Carter as they climb the stairs to Hartlow’s apartment.

  “Who, me?” he jokes, and raps on a thick metal door.

  As if on cue, the door immediately swings open and a young man with an enormous grin greets them. “More guests!” he delights. “To what do I owe the pleasure? I’ve already spoken with the police. Are you two with the police as well?”

  He’s a little younger than Natalie, and he has a boyish face, even for his age. His dress is grad student casual, and Natalie guesses that’s what he is. He quickly seems to lose interest in his visitors, who apparently haven’t responded quickly enough, and abruptly pads away from the door back toward his desk, humming the bars to a song that Natalie thinks she recognizes as “Jesus Loves Me.”

  Carter twirls his finger around the side of his head. “Loco,” he mouths.

  Natalie shakes her head. “Ripped,” she whispers. Then, more loudly, she adds, “My friend here’s a reporter. I’m just along for the ride. Mind if we talk?”

  “Fun ride,” Hartlow comments, spinning around and around in his swivel chair. “But short. I don’t know where the girl is, I have no clue where they took her. Wish I did, but I don’t. Sorry. Bye.” He gives a little finger wave, throws in a “Ta-ta,” and starts humming again, this time letting lyrics sneak in: “—‘cause the Bible tells me so.”

  Carter won’t have any part of being dismissed. “Maybe you could tell us what’s supposed to happen now that Tethys is dead,” he suggests.

  “Tethys, dead?” Hartlow laughs. “Oh God, you are naïve. Tethys isn’t dead.”

  “I meant, what’s the plan? Who’s handling things on this end now that she’s in Atlantis?”

  “Don’t patronize me, Mr. Reporter,” Hartlow says pleasantly. “I’m tripping, not stupid. You think she’s dead, that’s okay, everyone’s entitled to their opinion.”

  Annoyed by the kid’s attitude, Carter switches into interrogation mode. “The cops say there are twelve people in the second group. Is that right?”

  “If you count the girl.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Because she’s too perfect. What better way to make us look bad than saying we kidnapped some little girl? When I was around, Roger never even mentioned her. Personally, I don’t even think she’s real.”

  “She is.” Natalie says softly.

  “Whatever. Even if she is. I’ll tell you right now she’s with us because she wants to be. No one’s coerced. I know that’s what you people think, but that’s not how it works.”

  “She’s just a child.”

  “Children aren’t stupid. They can make decisions.”

  She’s tempted to walk over and smack his smug little face. but Natalie knows better than to bother. And in a way, she feels for him. Us. He keeps saying us. He still thinks of himself as one of the Guardians. In exile, perhaps. but his grief-stricken heart lies with them right now.

  “This second group she’s with,” Carter says. ‘“How long before they take their turn?”

  Hartlow isn’t so quick to answer this time. “I don’t know,” he says quietly, his tone suddenly introspective. “They won’t wait long.”

  Natalie can see what’s happening. It’s the Nasts all over again. And Carter’s tell-me-what-I-want-to-know tone is driving the boy inward, forcing him to think of his friends and picture himself wherever they are at this moment. All he can see there, though, is his own absence. Whatever Carter asks, Hartlow’s mind will hear it as, Why aren’t I with them? After all, if he had stayed with them, he would know the answers to these questions, and he wouldn’t be here, bein
g interrogated by strangers.

  “Why have they waited this long?” Carter presses before Natalie can stop him.

  They actually can see Hartlow crash. His eyes glaze over, he slowly stops spinning and his head sags forward until his chin is on his chest. Carter, who doesn’t understand what’s happening, demands, “Come on, Bret. Tell us why.”

  Natalie gestures to him to stop. “You won’t get anything more out of him.”

  “Why not?” He walks further into the apartment and taps Hartlow on the shoulder. “Hey, kid, sorry, give me a break. I just thought maybe you knew something.”

  Hartlow doesn’t respond.

  “Shit” Carter says. “He’s catatonic.”

  Natalie nods. “I told you not to push.”

  The reporter nudges the boy a couple of times, then turns away in disgust. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “You go. Give me a second, I’ll be right down.”

  “Fine,” he sighs. As his footsteps recede down the stairs, Natalie kneels next to Hartlow and gently lays a hand on his arm. “Alima must have been very special. You loved her, didn’t you? I’m sure she loved you, too.”

  There is a slight flicker in his eyes.

  “I know you may not believe it right now, but it was very brave of you to leave when you did.”

  His lower lip quivers. “No,” he whispers hoarsely, without looking up. “She was the brave one. I was a coward. That’s why I left, I was afraid. I’m still afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  He doesn’t reply, and for a second Natalie thinks she has lost him again. But then, almost inaudibly, he mutters something. Natalie has to ask him to repeat lt. “She wrote me a note,” he says. His tone changes, and he begins to speak as though he’s reciting something from memory. “My dearest Bret, if you change your mind and want to join me—and how I pray you will—do not despair. Tethys says that because of our love for you, because we have gone first, you can still follow. And it will be easier for you! Wherever you find water and the courage to follow us, your own small Portal will open. Do you see? You can still be a part of this! Water is all around you, my sweet. Bathe in it, in me, in our love, and come home with me. Please, please, please, come home.”