Tethered

by Amy MacKinnon

  So that was all. “No.”

  Mike ruffles his hair, exhaling loudly. “I sent most of the tapes out to the FBI. They have profilers there who can break them down. They’ll look for jewelry, tattoos, birthmarks—anything about the perp or victims that can help ID them. It’ll take about a month. But from what I saw, it’s a room of horrors, a regular setup. This guy’s a pro, probably working within a ring.”

  “Victims?” I say, before covering my mouth. I didn’t intend to speak.

  “Yeah, there’s another girl.” Mike’s gaze shifts away, his expression growing slack. The iridescent shadows under his eyes match my own. It’s clear neither of us slept last night, knowing what we do. I wait for him to return and then he does, raising his chin, straightening his shoulders as he speaks. “How about looking at some photos? We need to positively identify the girl.”

  “I’m sure it was Trecie.” The child must be afforded some dignity.

  Mike has already lifted the cover of the box and is rummaging through files.

  “Please,” I say, backing away, “don’t.”

  Mike’s fingers stop their searching; his face softens. “Just some head shots, nothing else. I wouldn’t do that.”

  He turns back to the files. He’s all business, and that’s why I’ve forgotten my manners. Even today, his day off, he’s wearing a button-down shirt and tie. His badge is clipped to his belt, and the gun is in its holster. It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve never had a gun in my home.

  “Would you like some tea? There’s cake, too.”

  Mike’s hands leave the box to perch on his waist, and he turns to me. It seems as if minutes, hours, pass as he considers this. I’ve often thought there’s something reptilian about Mike’s eyes. No, not the coldness, it’s more about the layers. There’s a certain ambiguous quality to them. Like an alligator before it slips underwater, hiding its intent beneath a transparent shield that covers the cornea, allowing the animal to see as it protects itself from harm. It’s the same with Mike. But right now there’s no shield. Now his eyes are naked, wild, still, and deeply, deeply pained. It’s impossible for me to look away.

  “Tea, huh?” he says. “Yeah, let’s have some tea first.”

  I walk the few steps to the kitchen and stack everything onto a tray. My back is to him, and I wonder if he’s chosen to sit at the table or on the couch. The roar in my ears makes it impossible to hear. The table would be easier with its straight-backed chairs and curved oak between us, but it’s small, a round pedestal that seats only two; our knees might brush. Steadying my hands, resisting the urge, I place the last dish on the tray. I turn and he’s seated at the table, his blazer hanging over the back of his chair.

  “You didn’t have to go to any trouble,” he says.

  “Alma sends me too many leftovers. I could never eat this cake alone.”

  “Boy.” Mike rubs a hand along his cheek and there’s an audible scratch of bristles against his weathered palm: a nod to his day off. “I haven’t had tea in years.”

  A long pause is filled with the sounds of spoons against china, the clink of fork against dish, Mike clearing his throat. The heat of the Earl Grey rises in my cheeks as the time passes in silence. Finally, he speaks.

  “Can I ask you something?” The cup is at my lips, so he simply continues. “Do you like your job?”

  I return the cup to its saucer. “I suppose.”

  “I mean . . .” Mike pushes his plate away and grasps his tea as if it were a coffee mug, his index finger looped all the way through the handle. “It’s got to be pretty hard sometimes, what you do.”

  “Not really,” I say, surveying the box he’s brought with him. “I would think your job is harder.”

  He stops and drops his chin, his free hand scratching absently at his cheek. His eyes are still bare. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  There’s another long silence, but I can feel him setting up. My mind races to deflect the questions I sense coming. His leg is too close to mine under this table.

  “Have you ever been down there,” he says, nodding in the direction of the funeral home, “and thought you were being watched? Like they’re waiting to see what’s happening to their bodies?”

  I wonder if he’s thinking about his Jenny, if he thinks she materialized as I prepared her body. Does he hope she hovered nearby while I laid her out in her mahogany casket with alstroemeria (devotion) alongside her thigh?

  “No, I don’t believe in that sort of thing.”

  Mike leans forward, all of him motionless. “You don’t believe in what?”

  “In any of it.”

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  I can’t answer. How can there be such a thing when one little girl lies unclaimed in a grave across the street and another is forced to lie in that bed, dying a little more each time someone lies beside her? I know how it is to die in bits and pieces. But it’s a terrible thing to kill hope, especially when it’s all that sustains a man.

  Mike slumps in his chair, setting the cup on the table, his finger gliding along the rim. He’s no longer looking at me. His gaze is fixed downward, on visions only he can see. “I guess, sometimes, I don’t either.”

  There are no words to console a man with nothing. Platitudes are worse than silence.

  “Did you know my wife was pregnant when she died? Just a couple months. I’ve always wondered if you knew.”

  It was in the medical examiner’s notes. I was careful with the trocar that day, careful not to disturb all that was in her abdomen. It’s too much to tell Mike, no one really cares to know the details of my work. I remain silent.

  “She always wanted kids, you know?” As he speaks, three fingers of his left hand hold aside his tie while the forefinger creeps between the buttonholes nearest his heart. Where it gapes, there’s a splash of freckles. “But seeing what I see, I couldn’t.” His voice is thick, one finger circling the rim of his cup, his other hand restless under his shirt, until Mike clears his throat. “So, what do you believe?”

  I look again to the box Mike brought with him, then through the window to the back entrance of the funeral home, and beyond that, to Colebrook Cemetery.

  “I believe it’s important to breathe.”

  Mike’s head jerks up and his eyes drag me back. I want to turn away, but they’ve pulled taut the thread between us. “Breathe?”

  “Yes.” I don’t know why I continue, but no one has ever asked, and it’s all I can give him. “When we concentrate on the breath, we’re aware only of that moment. And that’s all we ever have, really, is a moment. And when we no longer breathe, we no longer exist.”

  Mike’s eyes are full now. If I could look away, I wouldn’t see his lip tremble, but he pulls the thread tighter. “Do you ever find it hard to breathe?”

  “Yes,” I say, “it’s always hard to breathe.”

  “Me too.”

  He’s quiet for what seems like an endless stretch, too much. He then springs from his seat, his back to me. He gestures to the box. “You’re going to help me, right? You’re going to help this Trecie?”

  I think back to Mother Greene, to her warning about sending away the little girl. I don’t truly think someone will try to kill me, or that someone will risk his life to save mine. And though I don’t believe in Mother Greene and her ghosts, I do know that the image of Trecie in that video would haunt me the rest of my life if I were to abandon her. I won’t do that. Not me of all people.

  “Yes,” I say, “I will.”

  He nods, pausing before closing the few feet between himself and the box. He removes a photo from the top folder and hands it to me. “Is this Trecie?”

  It is, of course it is. Her hair, nose, even the same expression. I will have to help, though it’s a terrible burden to be needed. Mike and I talk for a while, or rather he does about what it is I’m supposed to do when she shows again. He starts by asking me to relay every conversation I’ve had with Trecie, pressing for details about her clothing, her ac
cent, any distinguishing marks, earrings. I don’t tell him that I could barely look at the child, how I tried to turn her away again and again. He explains how the next time she comes by I should draw her out: find out where she lives, her last name, names of friends and family members, her school. That I should check for a bicycle leaning against the funeral home’s wrought-iron fence, see if it’s a simple rebuilt version or something with a pretty white basket and handlebars with streaming pink ribbons. Ask her if she’s willing to talk to either Mike or one of the women detectives. He hands me his card with his cell phone number.

  “Call me day or night, whenever you make contact,” he says. “I live just a few miles away.”

  “I will.”

  “Anytime, day or night.”

  He removes his sports jacket from the back of the kitchen chair and swings his arms through the sleeves. The muscles of his chest strain against the thinness of his cotton shirt. I can’t help myself, I look for those speckles along his breastbone, but they’re hidden away, tucked beneath the surface again.

  I hold the door for him as I did when he arrived (less than an hour ago?), but he pauses after saying good-bye. “Thanks for the tea, Clara. It was nice.”

  I hug my sweater around me and nod. I have no more words for him. After closing the door, I step back to my kitchen window and watch as he walks back to the Crown Vic. He replaces the box on the passenger seat and lowers himself into the driver’s side. Before starting the car, he bows his head and touches his forehead, heart, left and right sides. I see his lips move, and then he crosses himself again, starts the engine, and drives away. From me.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I’ve been kissed before.

  The first time was in high school. I was a sophomore at North Smithfield Junior-Senior High, just over the state line in Rhode Island. After my mother died, I lived with her mother in the village of Slatersville. Though the town’s proper name had been North Smithfield since 1871, my grandmother and other locals held firmly to Slatersville, as if one could take pride in a name.

  Slatersville was, and is, a small town, not quite ten thousand residents when I lived there. Most were older: middle-aged housewives working mother’s hours as receptionists or substituting in the schools, and their blue-collar husbands, thirsty for a six-pack on their way home from union jobs. Narragansett was bottled nearby. There were few children, a thousand maybe, and so, few opportunities for a fifteen-year-old girl, especially one as different as me.

  Many afternoons were spent in the school library, doing my homework, biding my time until dinner and then bed, until I turned eighteen and could lose the past. I told my grandmother I earned extra credit after school. I’d purposefully failed an English test; the resulting welts that laced the backs of my legs were worth the price of those precious hours away from her house. After that, I was sure to earn A’s and suffered only a few quick strikes of her wooden spoon across my wrist when Mrs. Daher gave check minuses in gym. The library was where I met Thoreau and Austen, Heathcliff and Cathy, where I read and read again Sonnets from the Portuguese, where a girl could dream of her first kiss. At my grandmother’s house, the only books allowed were the Bible and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.

  That October, Tom McGee sat two tables away, surrounded by textbooks. He was a junior and it was well known around school—even to me—that he had been benched from the football team because of poor grades. For several days we sat there while Miss Talbot restocked the shelves and scrubbed away pornographic graffiti in the easy-reader section. Miss Talbot was as close to a friend as I had. Once she told me that my mother also had been a frequent visitor to the library. A part of me wanted to know if she had known my mother’s circle of friends, if she suspected who among the boys might have been my father. Perhaps my mother was the kind of girl who confided her secrets to the silent well that was Miss Talbot; my mother hadn’t told anyone else. I never asked Miss Talbot, of course; it was enough to wonder, to hope my mother had had friends. Though Miss Talbot and I hardly spoke, we were comfortable together in that everyday silence, each in our too-big cardigans, enveloped within the intimate world of books. Tom’s presence disrupted this world of ours.

  While Tom pretended to ignore the sounds of his team practicing in the field beyond the library, I pretended to ignore him. He was broad with dark hair and Irish blue eyes. His beauty reminded me of the fashion magazines that sat on the racks of the general store. Once I looked inside those pages and saw a sumptuous coat. It was red with black fur trim, long and sleek. The woman who modeled it was unlike any of the women around town. Only Mrs. Hansen with her flaxen hair and Nordic cheekbones was close. When I read the caption beneath the photograph, $8,175, I replaced the magazine on the rack and was never tempted to look again.

  One day while Miss Talbot took a call at her desk, Tom approached me. “You got a pencil?”

  A stack of books formed a barrier between us: novels, memoirs, poetry, some biographies. I kept my eyes trained on the page before me while my fingers sought the beveled edges of a number two from my book bag. I raised my hand but not my eyes, and extended the pencil to him. When he took it, his fingers brushed mine. I could feel the chafe of his dead skin against my own smoothness.

  He didn’t leave. Instead, he lowered my wall by lifting my science text. “Hey, aren’t you in my chemistry class?”

  I didn’t bother to respond. It would have taken too many words to explain why I was in an advanced class. No need to carry on when the conversation would end within seconds anyway. It was delusional to think otherwise.

  “Did you already do the homework? I’m stuck on number three.”

  Still, I pretended to read. I wasn’t coy enough to play hard to get. The first couple of weeks after I’d arrived in Slatersville, following my mother’s funeral, a few of the children tried to befriend me. In the end, none had the patience.

  But Tom persisted. “You a mute? My cousin’s retarded. You dumb or something?”

  I looked up then. “No.”

  “Did you do number three?”

  I handed him my chemistry notebook and he brought it to his desk. He kept it there, turning the pages as he copied my work. After Miss Talbot returned the phone to its cradle and rounded the corner with her spray bottle and sponge, Tom came back. He slapped my notebook down, but by then I’d spent too many years living with my grandmother to be caught off guard by the startle of a bare smack.

  “You ever read this book?” He was clutching a worn school copy of Hamlet in his right hand. I noticed a page was dog-eared, something Mrs. Johnson forbade. Seeing Tom’s folded page thrilled me in a way I’d never known possible.

  “It’s my favorite,” I said.

  “You’re not into that Romeo and Juliet stuff?”

  I tried not to cringe, knowing most of the other girls swooned over the lovelorn pair. “We’re reading it now in Mrs. Johnson’s class. Hamlet’s better.”

  Tom leaned his thigh into the corner of my table. I noticed his flesh didn’t give against the hardness of the wood. When he bent over me, I could smell the sourness emanating from his mouth, feel the heat radiating from his body. “You get this?”

  I nodded, sensing as he looked to his right and left, and then out to the football field, where the coach’s whistle trilled across the schoolyard. Tom finally settled on me, or so I hoped. It was too much to look up. It was as if I’d taken my first breath when he said, “Maybe you and I could read it together.”

  We met like that every day. I’d hand over my chemistry notebook and answer his English lit handouts, and in return, he’d talk to me. I’d listen to his stories of our classmates, stories I’d never been privy to before. Stereotypes are born of truth, and so it was with high school, where football players made it with cheerleaders, chugged from kegs, and sought their neighbors’ high-and-inside mailboxes with their Louisville Sluggers.

  As he spoke, I’d let my eyes drift over the broadness of his chest, glance at his hand spread-eagled across his
thigh. I’d inhale his sweat and the musk of his cologne, which had faded by the late afternoon. After many days, I could almost meet his eyes. I remember that first time, when he asked me to show him where the biographies of his sports idols were kept, I stood on unsteady legs, hugging my too-long sweater against me as I walked ahead, conscious of his bulk behind me.

  When I turned to him, pointing to the shelf, he caught me in his arms. He bent low to reach my mouth, tilting my chin upward before he kissed me. I felt everything in that instant: his tongue prying open my chaste lips; the press of hard muscles against my own bones; an awakening of something long ago put to rest. I felt tiny and alive. Every sense was keenly attuned, but none more so than my hearing, listening as Miss Talbot pushed her squeaky cart, paused to return books to their shelves, and then the pop of her knees as she stood again.

  That first kiss was as unexpected as a crocus baring itself during a February balm. I’ve seen some bloom from time to time in my own garden, straining through a crack in winter’s soil. They are so hopeful, so lavender lovely, so blithely unprepared for the brutality of an approaching nor’easter.

  After that first time, Tom and I would return to the stacks once I finished his homework. Each day his hands grew bolder, more insistent. After a couple of weeks, I took to wearing skirts with high cotton socks, providing easy access and a ready cover should Miss Talbot round the corner. Though he’d thrust himself inside of me again and again and again, it was his kisses that filled me whole.

  During school, if we passed each other in the halls, neither of us would acknowledge the other. I might stare for the briefest flash as Tom surrounded himself with teammates and the cheerleaders who wore their letter jackets. I wasn’t jealous of the cotton candy girls and their easy banter. I knew our afternoons in the library were beyond the scope of their simple experiences.

  That day, that Friday, he arrived at the library as usual, though this time he brought a friend, someone I recognized from the halls. He had the same thick neck and muscled shoulders as Tom, the same football insignia on his letter jacket.