She gave me that slow smile again. It was one of those smiles that took a long time to gather itself and a long time to disappear. It was as if she had chosen to ration her expressions with care, or rather as if she valued each one individually, which wasn’t precisely the same thing. And then she made a little murmuring motion with her lips without saying anything, and I instantly remembered that she would do this all the time when we were children, too—moving her lips infinitesimally for a moment before she spoke, as if she were rehearsing what she was about to say. It made her look a little like a bunny rabbit that twitches a bit about the mouth as it contemplates a tender dandelion.
“I’m doing good, Charlie. How are you?” Her voice, too, was not unfamiliar, though of course it was the voice of an adult woman. It sounded like soft, crumbled petals.
“I’m okay.”
“Would you be better than okay if you didn’t have that black eye?”
I laughed. “Yeah.” I suddenly realized my hand hadn’t really succeeded in covering my eye as I’d thought it would and, worse, that it was very evident to Willa that I was trying to hide it. I dropped my hand to my side, but the sun was so strong that I lost Willa in the glare and brought my hand up to my forehead again.
“Did your girlfriend sock you?”
“Were you on the beach yesterday?”
“Me? No. Why?”
“Because I was on the beach yesterday with my girlfriend, and she socked me.”
She laughed. “Oh, she really literally did! I was just like trying to make a joke.”
“Well, you nailed it. She socked me and we tried to drown each other.”
“Wow, same old Charlie.”
I suddenly felt a powerful wave of acid wash through my stomach. Somehow, in the course of this brief conversation in the blinding sun, I had almost forgotten how my connection with Willa had originally come about. I said, cautiously, “What do you mean?”
She laughed lightly. “You know, the fistfight with Winfred, that tall German kid with like the seven-foot wingspan. Among others. You always seemed to be in some kind of tussle.”
I thought about this for a moment. “Winfred? I remember that fight, but I was in high school then. How do you know about it?”
“Know about it? I witnessed it, Charlie. I was proud of you Charlie, you beat him down.” She laughed lightly.
“You witnessed it? But you moved away after, I mean somewhere during the time when I moved back to Argentina, because when I came back to Chicago I was only twelve and you were gone.”
She laughed again. “Gone from your mind, apparently. I think that I just wasn’t on your radar screen is all. Yeah, my family moved a few blocks away, but I graduated from grade school when you did, and I went to high school with you. I can’t believe you don’t remember that.”
I was stunned. How could I not have noticed her back then?
And then I thought to myself, Well, maybe I blocked her out because we shared something awful. Or because I was angry with her mother and, through her mother, with her. Maybe I just didn’t want to be reminded by seeing her every day of what she and I had done, and what I’d been blamed for. Maybe I noticed her then, but I forgot it later. But out loud, I just said, “Hey, it was a big school. What was it, 3,400 students or something? At least I recognized you now on the beach.” I stood up from the towel then, so we could talk eye to eye, without me having to squint up at her, and her down at me.
She looked at me closely and smiled again.
“Funny I didn’t notice your black eye at the club.”
“A little dark, I guess.” I paused, nervous and hopeful that she’d say something about my performance, and quite a bit more nervous that she’d get started on the real purpose of her visit, but she did neither.
“So you’re here with your girlfriend?”
“Uh huh. It was just a fight. I mean, she’s never hit me before and I’ve never hit her, but I guess it was just one of those things that happens. She’s terrified of the water and she panicked. How about you?”
“How about me what?”
“Who you here with?”
She shook her head. “You know, you’re lucky. My last three boyfriends broke up with me either by text message or e-mail. I guess e-mail’s a little more formal and businesslike these days, so that makes it okay. Nobody does anything face-to-face anymore because they’re all too cowards. I’d almost rather be socked in the eye, but I guess it’s easier just to, you know, disappear.”
I felt incredibly nervous at this moment, standing there squinting into the strong sun with my left hand shielding my eyes. My left arm was dripping with sweat, and most of it was running down my arm and off my elbow, but some of the sweat from my hand was running into my left eye and making it sting. I was trying to say something to her.
I was trying to say, “I’m not a coward, and I’m willing to talk face-to-face if you’re also not a coward. I’m willing to discuss Elizabeth.”
But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. So I guess I was a coward after all.
But then, what did that make Willa?
As if to change the subject from what it was we weren’t, in fact, actually discussing, Willa said, “So, I don’t mean to probe, but did you and your girlfriend like break up or something?”
“No. I mean, not really. It’s just really awkward because my show you saw last night was kind of amateur hour…”
“I thought it was good.”
At last. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
“No, I mean, thank you, that backing band was great, I just mean, it’s earning me less than what it’s costing for me and Alisa—that’s her name—to stay here, plus I mentioned she’s terrified of the water, and she doesn’t even want to be here to begin with.”
Willa suddenly put the three middle fingers of her right hand on my left forearm, and as she did, I suddenly had a terrible thought that I was forgetting something very important. She must have sensed my sudden stiffening or abstraction, because she said, a little defensively, “No, I was just gonna say, we’re standing here in the hot sun, and I’ve got somewhere to be, but how about we meet at the beach, right at this spot, tomorrow at this time?”
“I’m good with that.”
“Let me give you my cell in case something changes. What’s yours?”
I told her my number and she called it. “There, now my number’s on yours and yours is on mine. And wear some sunglasses tomorrow, okay?” She laughed, and I did too. Who comes to Hawaii without sunglasses? Only a morose, country-soul singer-songwriter from Chicago, I suppose.
And then she walked away, leaving behind, like a vapor trail, the words, “I think we both need to catch up.”
Indeed we did.
2
That night, Alisa came downstairs to the club as promised. I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed to see that Willa was not there, though she hadn’t said she would be.
Don was still on bass, but Chad was sitting in on drums instead of Zach, and maybe that threw me off a bit. Where the hell was Zach? Another gig, again? That pissed me off, though what could you expect from a house band? Plus, I’d decided at the last minute to switch to my Guild D-40 because I thought the sound would be a little mellower for my originals, which everyone last night had seemed to like. But I’d changed the strings just before leaving for Hawaii, so I kept on going flat at the beginning of songs; I couldn’t even form a chord because the G and D were both off.
I was able to vamp a bit on the honky-tonk stuff, but when I started “You Don’t Know What Love Is” in the wrong key, I had to start all over again, and Don shot me a look. Though I couldn’t really see Alisa in the audience, I knew she was probably giving me a look, too. I only hoped that she wasn’t actually holding her head in her hands, like she sometimes did when I p
erformed.
I thought about switching back to my Martin DM, but I could picture myself glancing down at the tuner all night and seeing that damned red light every time I went flat and getting obsessed about it. I decided, instead, to tough it out with the D-40, and, with my back to Alisa and the rest of the audience, I took the three middle fingers of my right hand and pulled the strings really, really hard to get the slack out, which made me think of the way Alisa had taken her fingers and twisted the skin around my eye, just as hard.
But God and Don must have been smiling on me, not to mention Leon and Willie, because the stretching worked, and I played the rest of my set in tune. I felt soulful and relaxed and high, and my eye didn’t hurt, and I kept on picturing Alisa in the audience, smiling, except in my mind the face kept on shifting from Alisa to Willa. After the set was over, she—Alisa, that is—said, “Great job, sweetie,” and didn’t even mention the early songs that I’d started out of tune. She and I and Don and Zach—who’d reappeared after the set was over, even as Chad had disappeared—hung around the club after the crowd cleared out and threw back a few tequila shots, and I’d made some reference to “fuckin’ drummers,” and Zach laughed heartily and it was all good.
The next day I went back to the same spot on the beach. I swear I was standing on the precise same patch of sand I’d lain on yesterday, because that was how much I didn’t want to miss Willa. She showed up only a couple of minutes late, and I didn’t want to start out of tune, so to speak, so I began our second adult conversation with something I’d rehearsed while waiting for her.
“Listen, I don’t know if you remember this or not, but my family used to have one of those big, round aboveground pools that smelled of plastic and would take three hours to fill with a garden hose. And you came over a couple of times and we splashed around and played Marco Polo.”
“What’s Marco Polo?”
“You know, the kid’s game.”
“Yeah, I guess I remember.” She laughed. “Well, not really. I loved your show, by the way. I didn’t really tell you that when we talked yesterday, but I should’ve. Especially those slow, kind of lonely songs.”
“What else do you remember? I mean, not about the show, I wanna talk about when we were kids.” That didn’t come out right at all. Just as I’d feared, my strings were loose and I was, once again, abrupt and off-key.
She looked at me a little wearily.
“Charlie, instead of talking about all of that right now, why don’t we go for a swim?”
I smiled in relief. “Good idea.”
We walked into the water together but apart—there was a good three or four feet between us all the way into the ocean. An observer on the shore would have assumed we didn’t know each other at all, which I guess had been our point, intentional or otherwise.
But the moment we slipped into the water, it became difficult to determine where her body ended and mine began. I had never swum so beautifully before with another human being; I felt like we were a pair of sleek Monterey Bay otters, spinning around each other and through the vortices our spinning left behind and then back out again, as if we were untying a very complicated knot. We swam farther out than any of the other bathers, who in any event were mostly obese or timid tourist types, and we stayed in the water for a long time. Now and again, as we swam closer to shore, we stood facing each other just as I had with Alisa, but I of course felt no need to protect Willa from the waves, and yet I had this tender feeling about Willa, as if she were still the child I remembered. So I wanted to protect her in some deeper way I couldn’t articulate, and when I held my hand up to my forehead to block out the sun, I felt for a moment like the one-armed man, inspecting the slice of tangerine against the sun lest his little daughter choke on a seed.
After we were finished with the water, we lay on my turquoise towel for a while, and then I said, “That was nice.”
“Yeah, it really was.”
“So Willa, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a nurse in a long-term-care facility for the mentally and physically challenged in Seattle. Hawaii’s not a huge trip for me like it is for someone like you from Chicago, so I come here once every couple of years.”
“I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but seems a little weird to see someone come to Hawaii by herself.”
“It’s the whole ex-boyfriend thing. I guess I got tired of the whole routine of breaking up and being broken up with. So the past two times, I’ve just come to Hawaii by myself. Off-season like this, it’s super-cheap, I can just swim all day and club all night and not worry about running into someone I know on the beach wondering what I’m doing all by myself.” She laughed. “Well, at least until you.” Then she laughed again. “Not that I exactly ‘ran into’ you, though.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to make you self-conscious.”
“You didn’t, Charlie.”
“So you wanna know what I do?”
“Sure. I mean, I guess I didn’t ask because I know you’re a musician.”
This pleased me immensely. Immensely. “No, I just do that as a kind of hobby or whatever. I got this gig here just as a sort of accident. I have a day job in marketing.”
She smiled her slow smile. “Do you enjoy it?”
“Eh, when I’m not on the verge of being fired, and when my boss isn’t…listen, I hope you don’t mind my being too direct, but are you ready to talk about what happened that day?” My heart was pounding and I felt sick to my stomach.
She did that little murmur-y thing again with her lips. “With my sister? I guess so, sure. I mean, that’s what I came here for. I guess Hawaii’s sort of neutral territory, right?”
“That’s why you picked here?”
“Yeah, I guess. I Googled you once in a while for about a year after I finally decided we should talk, you know, trying to get my courage up, and when I saw you’d be here, I figured it’d be more relaxed or whatever.”
“Look, I don’t want to cover old ground or anything, but I want to tell you what I remember.”
“Okay.”
“We went ‘butterfly hunting’ is what we called it, right in the middle of the babysitting, but basically it involved just wandering around the empty lots in the neighborhood. We both had those Fla-Vor-Ice pops from your freezer because it was as hot then as it is today, and at some point, we ate them, and we must’ve thrown the plastic tubes in the garbage somewhere, because I don’t remember having them when we came back to your house.”
“You mean, came back and discovered that Elizabeth wasn’t in her crib.”
“Yeah. And I guess what I really don’t remember at all was placing her on your bed, or even why we decided to do that. Or even finding her jammed up against the wall.” I suddenly saw that Willa was quietly weeping. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. You said you were willing to talk about it.”
“And I am. I just can’t help it. I don’t cry that often, maybe once or twice a year when I remember, but then I remind myself that it was a long time ago. I just feel so fucking guilty, that’s all.”
“We were too young to be watching a baby. We have no reason to feel guilty.”
“No, I know. It’s not so much about me, because I know we were too young. I mean more like guilty about you, because I remember what happened with my mother.”
What happened with her mother will never leave me, ever. The evening of the accident, after everyone had returned from the hospital, Mrs. Dunleavy—in front of Willa and in front of my own parents—had waved her forefinger in front of my face and said, “I never should have trusted you with a baby, never. There is something wrong with you! Wrong! You are not normal! You are a sick, sick child and you belong in a mental institution!” And who knows what she’d said directly to my parents—something as bad, probably, or perhaps far worse, because in their shame and cowardice t
hey’d packed up shortly thereafter and fled to Buenos Aires and into the waiting arms of their precious wine.
How could that leave anyone, ever, the words themselves, or the sudden flight that I couldn’t comprehend at the time, and the sudden shamefaced goodbyes to all my school friends? It clearly had not left Willa because she looked at me and said, “I’m sorry. It must have been very difficult for you after that.”
“It was, I guess. But more in later years.” What I had no intention of telling Willa was that in my early twenties a UPS delivery person dropped off a long, white box, the kind that contains a dozen red roses. From time to time I’d sent roses to a few girls, but of course had never received any, but my girlfriend at the time was the playful type, so I’d assumed it was just a loving little joke, a turning of the tables. So I’d signed for the package, set it on the kitchen table of my old apartment, and snipped off the ribbon with a scissors. I was excited and flattered, to be honest. I pulled off the lid, and inside I saw the complete skeleton of an infant human being.
I screamed and fell backward from the table and knocked over a chair as I backed away from that cardboard coffin and the horror it contained. After about a half hour, I called the police, and they told me to bring the box of bones to the station, but not to touch the bones myself—as if I needed to be told that.
I told them all I could surmise was that the box, which of course bore no return address, had been sent by Mrs. Dunleavy to punish and terrify me, and of course I told them of the last address I knew of where she, her husband, and the girls had lived. After a few minutes of bemused examination, a couple of the policemen informed me that the skeleton, though seemingly real, was a high-quality replica that had been purchased at a medical-supply shop. They thought it was some kind of expensive prank. I buried the whole mess, bones and box and ribbon and all, in the backyard of my apartment, and when I was just finishing up with the spade and shovel, my landlord came by and asked me what I was doing, and I told him it was a deceased pet guinea pig.
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