by Ivy Pochoda
The congregation turns. A few of Julianna’s friends don’t bother to conceal their laughter. One calls Anneke a fucking cunt and heads in her direction, claws out, before two friends restrain her.
Anneke’s eye has stopped twitching. She relaxes her mouth and heads for the paved path out of the cemetery.
She feels calmed. She has spoken and she has been heard. Her feet strike the ground with precision and purpose. She doesn’t turn when she hears someone behind her.
At the gates a hand grasps her arm. Anneke slows, pulled to a halt by Dorian. She looks down at the fingers on her sleeve.
“That was unnecessary.”
“Was it? You don’t believe that nonsense about the Lord?”
“I don’t,” Dorian says.
“Then there’s one thing we can agree on,” Anneke says.
“Today isn’t about what I or you believe.”
Anneke slides her arm from Dorian’s grasp. “Isn’t it?”
“It’s about Julianna’s family and their grief. You should respect that.”
“I don’t need you to scold me,” Anneke says. “I’ve got nothing but respect. I have more respect for their daughter’s life than they did.”
Dorian’s eyes widen. “You’re blaming them.”
“I’m just saying things should have been done differently.”
2.
THERE ARE RULES IN ANNEKE’S HOUSE. THEY KEEP THE WORLD on its axis. Sit down to all meals. Breakfast is just juice, coffee, bread, butter, maybe cheese and a piece of fruit or possibly a boiled egg. Lunch is usually cold, sandwiches and salad. Once in a while soup. Dinner is a simple ceremony. The table is always set, water glasses, wineglasses, linen napkins. One glass of wine at the meal. A glass of sherry or brandy after.
There is always a pause before the start of dinner—a brief moment in which Anneke can check that everything is in order. A secular grace for what she has achieved through control.
Anneke has her own benediction:
Preserve your house.
Preserve your family.
Preserve your boundaries.
Preserve order and order will be reflected in you.
Preserve privacy.
Preserve appearances and everything will be preserved for you.
Upstairs, beds are made. Laundry folded, never left in the hamper to wrinkle.
Windows remain closed. No sense in letting the inside out or vice versa.
These are the minor things. There are others—things you don’t discuss. You have to be rigid, set boundaries.
It’s not a lot to ask but imperative. If you let one thing slide, then what? Well, Anneke knows. She’s seen firsthand what happens when you live without rules, without structure or self-respect. There’s a way to carry yourself with dignity in a tent, on the street, in a slum.
It never ceases to amaze her how here in Los Angeles, a cosmopolitan and metropolitan city, people fail to elevate themselves. They don’t alter or improve their surroundings, their circumstances.
Preserve appearances.
Preserve order.
Then you have done enough.
Roger is home. Tomorrow he will leave early for the charter school where he teaches ESL—a brutalist building wedged beneath a freeway on-ramp. A chaotic tumult of kids caught between cultures. It suits him. The regimented lessons. The practicality. A goal—to speak better, clearly, intelligently, as opposed to the more abstract lessons of literature or history. With language there is no interpretation, no improvisation. The same class year after year. The same workbooks, the same tests.
At least his black mood lifted the day before when he’d turned off his ponderous war history, taken off his headphones, and headed out in the rain to see Marella’s art show. She’d worried when he’d gone out.
Anneke worries. That’s her crutch. That is the crack through which the chaos seeps in. The disorder of her worried mind.
But Roger turned up where he was supposed to.
Anneke can hear him now in the backyard pruning the hedge, the slashing of the metal blades amplifying the tension in her head.
She puts on water for tea. When it boils, she lets it steep for twice as long as she should.
She assumes there will be a wake next door. It will start quiet and respectful and then explode into one of those parties that keeps the block up into the night with people shouting over loud music. As if death should be celebrated.
The noise of the shears in the backyard is grating—a slice-slice sound. She discovers that someone has opened the kitchen window.
Tomorrow he will return to teaching. It’s too much for the two of them to be home all day together. The house seems to shrink. Anneke often finds herself making excuses to run errands, do her citizen patrols on the women working Western.
Through the gauzy kitchen curtain she watches her husband—his dull gray hair, the steady movement of his hands bringing the handles of the shears together as the vines rain down on his feet. Like the cemetery, the garden is a mess of muddy grass and soggy plants. But Roger is meticulous and won’t track a drop into the house.
Roger was her first boyfriend, long after her mother had given up on her meeting anyone. At twenty-six, Anneke was working as a women’s health coordinator in a flimsy NGO in the Philippines. Roger was teaching English at a small international school in Lipa. He was boring, unadventurous. That was the attraction. He wasn’t a danger seeker or an evangelist like her father or like a lot of the men she met. He didn’t want to save people or change the world.
Anneke goes to the living room, her cup of tea cradled in her hands.
Even here the sound of Roger’s pruning grates on her.
She closes her eyes as if the darkness might relieve the tension. Three deep breaths, blowing out the pain as the holistic therapist in San Salvador instructed her when her migraines intensified during her pregnancy. It never works, but Anneke keeps trying. As if pain is something she or anyone can control.
Marella didn’t come home again last night. Anneke had driven to the gallery on Western to retrieve Roger in the storm. She’d waited for her daughter. But there had been a wild look in Marella’s eyes, one of fear and recognition but also of defiance.
I’m not coming with you. I’m never coming with you.
All this because Anneke had not attended the opening? All this anger for that.
Marella hasn’t picked up her calls. She hasn’t appeared. But she will. Anneke’s certain. Through all the tough love, the bitter lessons, the insistence that Marella hold herself to a higher standard, Anneke has carved out a safe space for her daughter in the house on Twenty-Ninth, a nest to which she can and will return.
I’ll see you at home, then, Anneke had said.
There’s a knock at the door. Anneke spills her tea and brushes off the liquid. She goes to the door and looks through the heavy leaded glass. At first it seems as if no one is there. A prank. Or someone who thought better of appearing. Or perhaps a delivery. She looks down to check for a package.
There’s a child or a young person standing in front of the door. Her head barely reaches the window.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Colwin? Do you mind opening up?”
This voice isn’t a child’s.
“What is this about?”
Anneke watches as the visitor steps back. She is not a child at all or even a teenager, but a woman. She reaches into her suit pocket and holds something up to the window. “LAPD,” she says. “Detective Perry. Can I come in?”
Anneke opens the door.
Detective Perry comes up to her chin. She looks around, taking in the dark stained wood, the tasteful period furniture and décor.
“So,” Detective Perry says. She unwraps a piece of gum and pops it in her mouth. The smacking noise is distasteful. Then she looks at Anneke as if seeing her for the first time. “You are Anneke Colwin?”
“Yes.”
The detective’s manner is off-putting, like she’s not entirely sure w
hy she’s here, like she’d come without a true purpose. “Do you mind if we sit down?”
“I’ve already asked you what this is about,” Anneke says.
Less than a minute inside her house and this detective has already done the thing that Anneke dislikes most about the police—she has ignored her. She has not answered Anneke’s question.
That is another house rule: If you want to know something, ask. If you are afraid of the answer, don’t.
“I’d rather sit, if that’s okay.” She pulls out her cell phone and starts tapping away at the screen, the click-clicking alternating with the slice-slice of Roger’s shears.
“So?” Detective Perry makes a sweeping gesture with a hand toward the couch as if she is inviting Anneke to sit in her own home.
Anneke makes no move toward the living room. It’s a height thing, most likely, this aggressive need to sit. It levels the playing field. Anneke feels no need to give in to someone else’s insecurity.
“I don’t think this should take long,” Anneke says. “You’re here about the birds, correct?”
Keep your house neat.
Keep the world in order and your world will be orderly.
Detective Perry is back looking at her phone, snapping her gum in time with her tapping. “Excuse me?”
“Aren’t you here about those silly hummingbirds?”
From time to time Anneke had been brazen enough to return to check her work, satisfied to see the tiny creatures lying in the dirt behind Dorian’s restaurant. Yet Dorian didn’t take the hint. She kept feeding the women. The women kept coming.
Keep your surroundings safe.
Keep your surroundings neat.
Take measures to preserve order.
Preserve order so that order might be reflected through you.
The detective glances from her phone. “Hummingbirds,” she says as if she’s never heard the word before. “No.” She resumes clicking.
The sound of Detective Perry’s nail on the glass is infuriating. Anneke’s hand goes to her eye to try to stop the tremor before it starts.
The detective keeps tapping. “Dorian saves them, you know. In shoeboxes. To do that I think she bakes them in an oven at a low temperature. Why do you think she would do something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.” Detective Perry drops her phone in her pocket. “Now can we sit?” Without waiting for Anneke’s reply, she settles herself in the wing chair facing the couch.
“I poisoned them.”
There are things you have to do to keep the chaos out. Small sacrifices. Risks.
“I don’t care about the birds.” The detective stops chewing her gum. She’s not scrolling on her phone. The only noise now is the slice-slice of Roger’s shears.
Anneke puts her hand to her temple.
“Are you all right?” Detective Perry asks.
“My husband is gardening. The noise is intolerable.”
“I don’t hear anything,” the detective says. Then she looks toward the backyard. “He’s home?”
“I just told you he’s gardening.”
“Right,” Detective Perry says. “You did.” She pulls out a notepad and flips it open.
“I had no other choice,” Anneke says.
“About?”
“Dorian had to stop feeding those women. The birds were a sacrifice. Like Isaac.”
The sound in the yard is louder now. The shears are shrieking. Anneke half stands to check for an open window again but everything is shut.
Suddenly the detective’s focus is razor sharp. She’s not tapping or chewing or scrolling. She’s crossed her legs, leaned forward, joining the conversation for the first time. “I’m not here about the birds, I’m here about something else you did. On July sixteenth of 1998, you made a phone call.”
Anneke laughs. “A phone call?”
The detective slides a piece of paper from her pad and unfolds it. “I pored through hundreds of pages for this.” She holds it out.
Anneke takes the page. She sees her name scrawled in the margin alongside her phone number.
Bring order into the world and order will follow you home.
“They didn’t call back, did they?”
Anneke laughs again. “You’re following up on a fifteen-year-old phone call?”
“You tried once more, didn’t you, in early 1999?”
“I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I imagined you were going to do your job.”
“That time you didn’t leave your name. But this is you, isn’t it?” The detective passes over a copy of a small typescripted memo. “Woman caller, says she’s called before but no one returned her call. Has information about her husband. Will give it if her previous call is returned.”
“As I said, I was waiting for you to do your job and when you didn’t call back, I figured my information wasn’t important. I assumed I was wrong.”
It’s what she tells her family, don’t ask a question if you don’t want to hear the answer. Don’t open yourself up to disappointment. She’d answered a question no one had asked, and in return no one had paid attention. That was the confirmation she needed.
Detective Perry clicks her pen twice. “And what was it you were going to say?”
Anneke inclines her head toward the garden. “You really don’t hear that?”
“I don’t.”
“What I had to say didn’t seem to matter then, so it doesn’t now.”
“You were calling about the murders around Western.”
“Yes,” Anneke says.
She wants to stand up and scream at Roger. He knows better than to make so much noise and to disturb the sanctuary of their house.
Keep your doors closed.
Keep your family to yourself.
Keep your problems inside.
Keep your world in order.
“It was about your husband.”
Anneke blinks twice.
“It was about your husband, Roger,” Detective Perry says.
Anneke glances around the room. The organization of things is startling. The precision with which the Rookwood vases are displayed on the mantel. The spacing between the Mission-style picture frames. She examines how the seams on the Morris wallpaper are actually seamless, no line between the sheets.
“Mrs. Colwin, were you or were you not calling the station about your husband?”
Anneke closes her eyes.
Sometimes you wait so long for something you forget all about it. The waiting devours you, then it becomes part of you, and then you cease to notice it. It’s absorbed into the everyday, accommodated and then overlooked. And eventually you aren’t waiting anymore. And you almost forget about the thing you expected for so long.
Then it happens.
Then it releases you.
The hollow feeling is gone. The sound of the shears stops. Anneke almost feels as if she’s floating above the couch. It feels almost possible, to levitate, to lie back and fly. “Yes.”
“Lecia Williams was babysitting next door. Julianna Vargas lived next door.”
Anneke keeps her eyes closed. It’s peaceful in the dark. She wishes the detective would stop talking.
“Mrs. Colwin? Mrs. Colwin? Did he know you called?”
Anneke opens her eyes. “I told him. He asked me so I told him.”
“And he stopped because you called?”
Anneke glances around the room, looking for something out of place that she can hang this mess on.
“Or did he stop because of Orphelia Jefferies?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“I imagine that you do. She’s the one who survived.”
That was Roger’s mistake. That was how disorder might have got in.
“That’s why you called,” Detective Perry says.
“I keep my world in order and order is reflected through me.”
Detective Perry clicks her pen rapidly as her eyes scan the room. “Is that what sets h
im off, disorder?”
“You haven’t seen the world, Detective. You haven’t seen the chaos and desperation. You haven’t seen the squalor and the deprivation, the things people—women—do to survive. It’s repulsive. But still you try to help.”
“That’s what Roger was doing? Helping? He was purifying the world?”
Anneke laughs. “You are looking for something rational. Something noble. Roger was attracted to the chaos, the depravity. And he hated himself for it. So he did what he had to do.”
“He killed these women because he couldn’t help his attraction to them?”
“Roger is weak. He has a weakness. But he understands it. He knows which parts of the world are worth preserving and which only lead to corruption. He knows how to maintain order. He knows he needs to maintain order for our daughter.”
“Your daughter,” the detective says. “Marella.”
As if Anneke needs reminding.
“You sent her away right after you called the station. Now she’s back.”
Why is this woman telling her all the things she already knows?
Now the detective looks Anneke in the eye. The full force of her attention is unsettling. “I’ve been asking myself the wrong question,” she says. “Actually, I’ve missed part of the question. I have been so busy wondering why someone stops killing that I never considered why he might start.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You do,” Detective Perry says. “Marella. He hates himself more for what he desires in those women when his daughter is around.”
Anneke’s eye is pulsing. Her head pounds. “I said I don’t know. I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“You tried to stop him. You called the station to tell them this.”
“And no one listened.”
Detective Perry whips out her phone and clicks through, looking for something. “You know they arrested Morgan Tillett?”
“Who?”
“The woman who staged the protest on the top of the arch on the Brooklyn Bridge. They got her for trespassing.” The detective is clicking away at her phone. “She also made a phone call. She was telling us without telling us. No one heard what she was saying.”
“I don’t know who Morgan Tillett is,” Anneke says.