by Maile Meloy
“Why are you doing this to me?” she whined.
He was up out of his chair, and had grabbed her by the shoulders. He could tolerate anything except her acting like a victim. “Your boyfriend killed my daughter,” he said, close to her face. “Do you understand? There’s nothing I can do to you to match that. You encouraged him, and you lied for him in court. You have no heart, you’re rotting. Do you see that?”
She was crying.
“Stop crying!” He shook her, and threw her back against her flowered chair. She winced, though he hadn’t hurt her. The chairs were soft. She curled up against the upholstery and watched him, like an animal waiting to make her next move.
He went into the bathroom, regretting his violence, and sat on the closed toilet lid. The loose end of the toilet paper was folded in a neat triangle, unused. He checked that his wallet was in his pocket, that he had left nothing of his in the room with the girl. He had to keep his guard up. At fifty-three he felt himself an innocent, out of his depth. He should have flown home with Helen the moment the trial ended, and he would have, if he had anything to go back to. Work had been his way of making order: drafting something out of nothing, finding practical solutions. Since Emily’s death, the world seemed all chaos and accident. Helen managed to console herself with a hardy, low-level feeling about energy in the universe, but Leo had been deformed by grief, his thoughts of the future shaped only by what they had lost.
He realized Helen would expect him soon, smelling of chlorine from the pool. He took the box of Kleenex out to the girl, and she was still there, amazingly. But maybe he hadn’t been gone long. It was hard to gauge time. She blew her nose, her smudged eyes never leaving him. He sat down in his chair.
“What will you do now?” he asked. “Will you go to college?”
She shrugged, folding a tissue around her wet snot. “I can’t afford it.”
“People work their way through. Have you talked to your guidance counselors?”
She smirked. “They only care about the rich kids and the smart kids,” she said. “The rest of us are supposed to get pregnant or married.” She was delivering a line she had heard somewhere. She pulled her foot up on the chair again, but more carelessly this time; he caught a length of pale thigh and white panties as she did it. White underwear under all the black. He thought she really would fuck him, right there on the double bed, for very little money. He didn’t want to feel protective, he wanted still to hate her, but if she was going to proposition strange, unhappy men, things were going to go badly.
“You have to be more careful,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Things like this, like coming to meet me. And men like Troy Grayling. You have to recognize danger.”
“You’re not dangerous.”
“I could have been. There will be enough danger in your life without you seeking it out.”
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t,” he said. “I don’t even like you. But I don’t see where you’re going to get any other concern or advice, so you should take mine. Think about the future. Make some plans.”
But Sasha already had a plan, at least a short-term one, and when she spoke, he realized why she had stayed. “I can call the police,” she said. “I’ll tell them you tried to rape me.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell them you beat me up. You almost did.”
“I shook you, once.”
“I can give myself bruises.”
He felt a surge of panic. He should have seen this coming. “For what, for money?” he said, the anger choking his voice. “You just try it. You’ve already committed perjury, and could go to prison. Do you understand that?”
Her eyes widened slightly with fear, and he thought he had finally struck home. She was right to be scared. He’d show her what an expensive lawyer looked like—a whole team of expensive lawyers, no newly minted DAs.
“Prison,” he said, brandishing the word like a stick, since it had worked. “A women’s prison. A double cell. You think high school girls are mean? You just wait.”
She bit her lip, contemplating him, if that sullen glower could be called contemplative. He had the wild thought that if he did fuck her, he could control her. And if he could control one small part of the situation, he might come out the other side a man who could live with himself, a man who could sleep. Or he might destroy what life he had left. He felt locked with her, in the silence, unable to find the next move. Then Sasha found it.
“You want to know what happened?” she asked.
He paused in surprise. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I do.”
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“I promise.”
“Troy didn’t mean to hurt her.”
He sat waiting, feeling very still. He was aware of the size of the room, the distance of the walls.
“He took her somewhere,” she said. “I don’t know where. And then he was driving her back to that house. I didn’t know anything about it. I really didn’t.” She stopped.
“Go on,” he said.
“She was fine, and Troy was bringing her home. But then he saw the cop cars outside her house and got scared.”
The chill of this information settled on him. “You’re lying.”
“You wanted to know.”
“You’re lying.” She knew Leo was the reason the cop cars were there, that he had called them, and she was trying to punish him.
“No,” she said.
“So he saw the cop cars, but they didn’t see him.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said. “They’re already locking him up. You promise?”
“I promise. He saw the cop cars. He had raped her at this point? Somewhere else?” He tasted acid in his throat and felt his mind floating above his body, to the right.
She nodded.
“Where did he take her? Why didn’t he stay at her house?”
“I dunno.”
“But he wasn’t planning to kill her.”
She shook her head.
“He saw the cars and he got scared.”
She nodded again, and he thought a look of sorrow passed over her face. She was telling the truth.
“And then he took her away and killed her.”
She said nothing.
He heard his voice rise in anger. “Did he think that if he took her home alive, she wouldn’t identify him?” he half shouted. “What did he think?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“And you’re still this fuckhead killer’s girlfriend?” He wanted to strike her for her pathetic lack of imagination. He thought suddenly that this was the kind of loyalty that Troy Grayling had expected from Emily—Sasha had led him to expect it. We’ll play at rape, I’ll drop you at home, it will be our secret. Leo also knew, from his floating perspective, that his anger with her was nothing compared to the reckoning with himself that would come later, for the rest of his life. He had cracked Emily’s code, he had called the cops, and he had killed her.
He imagined telling Helen what he knew, but his mind went blank with fear. He thought he could smell the anger and wretchedness on his body, coming from his damp armpits, and he wished he had gone to the pool, where now he would smell like bleach and know nothing. He thought fleetingly that if they had never had a child, none of this could have happened.
The girl blew her nose again, nervously triumphant, now that she had played her card and won. She took another tissue and ran it under her eyes to tidy the black smear of her makeup. He had never stood a chance against this budding psychopath. He had tried to give her college advice, for God’s sake. He had to get out of the room. It was like the urgency of nausea; he felt sick with closeness and regret.
“I have to leave now,” he said. “You do, too. Get your bag.”
“I told you what you wanted,” she said, immovable, waiting for her compensation. He couldn’t drag her out; he couldn’t be seen with a teenager in ruined makeup. But he wanted he
r gone. He pulled out his wallet, which had six twenties in it.
“Here,” he said. He shoved the bills into her handbag. “That’s all I have. Get out. And try not to draw attention.” He hung the bag on her shoulder and pushed her out the door.
When she was gone, his legs gave out, and he had to sit down on the bed. He never should have come. Ignorance had been bad, but it had been infinitely better than this. He sat until he thought his legs would hold him, and then he went to the lobby, which was quiet in the middle of the afternoon. He dropped the key at the desk and thanked the clerk, who asked him to sign the bill. The sky outside was vast and cloudless blue and he squinted against it. No policemen came to arrest him, no girl was waiting with bruises on her arms. He was going to be left alone, to try to explain to Helen about the girl, and what she had told him.
He put on his sunglasses. He had thought his faith in order was gone, but it wasn’t true. He had sought consolation in knowing and arranging the facts. He wanted a story and he got one. His daughter had stumbled into danger, and he had tried to fix things and got it wrong. And now she was dead. It was a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with cause and effect.
The pain was still settling in, making its home in his body, in his bones, but he was healthy, in spite of Helen’s fears for his heart. There might be decades left for him not to forgive himself. He steadied himself and then started to walk back, with uneven steps, to his wife.
ON A HAZY SUMMER AFTERNOON in Los Angeles, while my wife was at work and our children were napping, I answered the ringing doorbell to find my grandmother, two months dead, standing on the stoop. She gave me a happy smile of self-welcome, then turned and waved to a black car with dark windows that purred at the curb. The car pulled away.
“Liliana,” I said.
“Darling!” she said.
She reached for my face, so I bent to be kissed, thinking that the woman I was kissing should be dead, her ashes sealed in an expensive vault. But her lips on my cheek were warm, and she smelled like her old perfume and new wool.
“Are you going to ask me in?” she asked.
I stepped back from the door, and she clicked past me on high heels, carrying a small black handbag. She looked great for eighty-seven, let alone for being dead. Her blond hair still seemed plausible, and she held her face in the alert, wide-eyed attitude in which it looked youngest. Under her coat she wore a black cocktail dress, as if she had come from her own funeral. But there had been no service, yet.
She stopped in the living room. “So this is how you live,” she said, surveying the piles of half-read newspapers, the children’s small jackets hanging on doorknobs, the stain from a wet glass on the leather couch. She spun to face me, then dropped into the big yellow chair.
“I’m very tired,” she said. “They lost my bags.”
“Do you know what they’re saying?”
“It’s all a mistake,” she said.
I nodded, and thought about what that might mean. “But,” I finally said, “there was an autopsy.” I didn’t want to offend, and here she was, but there had been an autopsy.
“Some lemonade would be nice,” my grandmother said.
I went to the kitchen for a glass of cranberry juice, which was what I had besides the kids’ boxes of Juicy Juice, and when I returned, Liliana had slipped off her shoes. The way she took the glass and drained it seemed very corporeal.
“The obituaries are here somewhere,” I said, before realizing that they might embarrass her. They were from English papers and they described her impoverished London childhood with a German mother and an English father, and her flight at sixteen to become a cabaret girl in Berlin. She had appeared in two movies under the Nazi studio system, and left for Switzerland in 1939. The articles ran briskly through her marriage to a Swiss industrialist, her brief move to the United States, and the five additional husbands she outlived or discarded. They described her famous parties and her expensive houses, and ended with her death as an aged socialite at her remote house in Spain. Men loved her, and she made efficient use of them. With the only American husband, she had a child—my father—and variously unsuitable nurses and nannies had raised him. My father loathed her, but that wasn’t in the obituaries. They mentioned his early death of a brain tumor. He would have hated appearing with his mother in print.
Liliana brushed the suggestion away with one hand. “I’ve seen them all,” she said. “Not a word about what I did for the animals.”
“The animals,” I said stupidly.
“Not a single mention,” she said. “Isn’t that rich? I gave them everything. And now they don’t want to give the money back.”
I had tried not to think about the money. There had been so much of it, and it had gone in its breathtaking entirety to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. An apologetic lawyer had told me on the phone that in Spain, two-thirds of an estate had to go to family members—here hope rose in my heart—but that as a British subject, Liliana was exempt from the rule, and I would get nothing. The call left me shaken, off--balance. I didn’t see Liliana often. Mina hadn’t wanted her money, and I told myself I hadn’t counted on it, but that was a lie. The photography magazine I worked for had folded, and we were living on Mina’s teaching salary while I took care of the kids and looked for a new job. Even a small inheritance—some forgotten sweepings from the giant pile of cash—would have made such a difference. How much did the dogs and cats really need?
“It’s so silly,” Liliana said. “My lawyer has been my friend for so long, and he was never on time for a luncheon in his life, but now he sets speed records. He pays the Spanish taxes, and sells my house, and gives away the money. And the RSPCA didn’t even write a press release. They’re not getting a cent from me next time.”
“Next time?”
“When I really die.”
“Ah,” I said, and again I felt a flutter in my heart, but I also heard Mina’s voice saying, Don’t get your hopes up. Liliana was likely, next time, to leave it all to the Royal Ballet.
“I had friends in Los Angeles,” Liliana said, gazing out the window at our weedy backyard. “King Vidor, you knew him?”
“No,” I admitted.
“And Darryl Zanuck—who was a pig. Garbo and Chaplin, of course. They’re all dead.” She sighed for her lost past. “It’s so different now. I was here ten years ago, when a few of my friends were still alive, and we went to Trader Vic’s. At the very next table, there were six gay Negroes. Can you imagine?”
I couldn’t tell if she had been thrilled or horrified by the sight. It could have been either. I was going to tell her not to say Negro but instead I asked, “How did you know they were gay?”
She looked at me as if I were simple, with pity. “How is your mother, darling?” she asked.
Since my father’s death, my mother had been living in an ashram outside New Delhi. She sent us postcards about how deeply at peace she was, in the land of the caste system and the dowry murder. “She’s fine,” I said. “She’s in India.”
“India,” Liliana said. “How unpleasant. I hope she has those little hand wipes.”
“I’m sure she does,” I said. I was sure she didn’t.
“Listen, darling,” Liliana said. “I don’t want to impose, but do you have a room for me?”
I said of course we did. She could have our bedroom, and Mina could sleep with the children. I would sleep on the couch. Liliana’s house in Spain had seven guest bedrooms, or eight. A whole guest wing, where plates of fruit from the gardens appeared in the rooms: apricots and fat grapes. I tried to imagine who had bought the place. I told myself it was good I hadn’t inherited it. It would rot the children’s souls, sap their independence, destroy their work ethic. It was the most wonderful place I had ever spent the night. “I’ll just be a minute,” I said.
While I stripped the master bed and carried the sheets to the wash, I thought about Jesus and Elvis. People had wanted them back, badly, and still
did. But who would have willed Liliana back? Even Garbo and Chaplin had stayed gracefully dead, and Liliana had left no movies to love. My wife, whose family is Jewish, says that I tricked her into falling in love with me by withholding my grandmother’s Nazi movie past until it was too late, which is entirely true—I’m not an idiot.
When the sheets were agitating in the washer, I found my grandmother curled up in the yellow chair, asleep. Her makeup was simpler than I remembered, her lipstick a little blurred, her face smoothed by surgeons and sleep. She looked like the cabaret girl she had been. Her hands gave her away, their spotted, swollen knuckles impossible to hide with heavy rings. She woke and stretched her arms, smiling.
“Cat nap!” she said.
I sat down and spoke carefully. “I just want to understand,” I said. “Your lawyer called me from France and said you had drowned in the pool.”
Liliana frowned, with her old disdain. “It was my care-taker’s wife,” she said. “She was wearing my clothes and my jewels, and she was drunk. She fell in.”
“But the caretaker?”
“He thought he was in my will. He fired all the servants and told those idiot country police I had drowned. He was deranged, clearly. I was at a retreat in Bali, where the whole idea was to be out of touch, and it worked! It was madness on everyone’s part.”
There was a muffled thumping of small, socked feet in the hall. On her fourth birthday, Bethie had decided she was too old for naps. She would wake from them early, then shake Marcus, who was five but still willing to sleep. The children trundled in, blinking and shy, and looked in confusion at the lady in black in their big yellow chair.
Liliana held her arms out wide. “Hello darlings,” she said. “It’s your Granny Liliana!”
I had told the children about their great-grandmother’s death. Mina said they didn’t really understand death yet, but I thought it was important to be direct about these things. We had read a book called The Tenth Good Thing About Barney, about a beloved cat who dies and helps make the flowers grow up from the ground. Now my son stood with clasped hands and looked at his dead granny hard, as if enough thinking would make everything clear. Bethie burst into tears.