by Sue Miller
‘Well, there is. It was Uncle Cam. He was driving.’
His mouth opens.
‘He was … It was a freak thing. He was driving up the driveway, and she just stepped out. He wasn’t even going fast. Apparently she just stepped out in front of him.’
‘Oh, Mom.’ His voice sounds almost whiny, as though he were complaining about Lottie’s exaggeration of something, as though he wanted her to stop now and tell him the smaller, less dramatic, truth.
‘It’s so awful, I know,’ Lottie says. ‘It’s just … Well, it is.’
He picks up his cup and holds it. After a moment he sets it down. He runs his finger through the spilled coffee, spreading it on the table’s surface. Involuntarily, Lottie’s hands lift a little, as if reaching to protect her papers. ‘I don’t know what to feel,’ he says. ‘I don’t.’ He looks up at his mother. He’s frowning. ‘I never knew someone who died before. I mean, someone my age.’
‘Well,’ she answers, straining for any sympathetic response. ‘And you knew her too.’
The way he’s looking at Lottie changes abruptly. It sharpens. Something you could not quite call a smile lifts the corners of his mouth. He wipes his hands slowly on his pants. ‘I didn’t know her, Mom,’ he says. ‘I hardly knew her at all. I know Uncle Cam about sixty times better than I knew Jessica.’
‘Oh, I understand that. I just mean …’ She trails off.
He’s sitting up straighter and staring directly across the table at Lottie. His face is closed to her in the way it seems he’s grown expert at making it sometime in his teens. ‘You just mean I fucked her, right?’
Lottie looks back at him.
‘Right? That’s what you meant, wasn’t it, Lottie?’
Lottie swings her head in confusion. ‘Look, honey,’ she begins, hoping he’ll give her a chance to start over. ‘I know that I don’t really understand how you felt about Jessica …’
‘That makes two of us, then, thanks,’ he says. He stands up and carries his cup into the kitchen.
Lottie sits alone at the dining room table. She lets a rush of air out of her lungs. From her chair she can see the abandoned furniture in the living room. She has dropped the opened newspaper on to one of the chairs, though she can remember doing no such thing. It seems to float there, tented over the chair like a huge bird just landing on a nest. In a minute, she thinks, I’ll have to get up and pick that up, start to work.
Abruptly she feels a tug of revulsion at herself for being this kind of person. For moving cowlike, thickly, through chores as she has all this summer – puttering – while real sorrows, real tragedies, play themselves out around her. How has she let this happen to her?
Then the kitchen explodes in a crash that dwindles to the sound of a few things rolling to the corners of the room. Lottie’s heart has already seized as she moves to the doorway. In time to see Ryan turn and bend and clear the table too, everything flying and smashing. ‘Fuck!’ he yells. ‘Fuck! Fuck!’
She crosses the room in two steps and grabs his arms from behind, speaking his name. He freezes in her grasp, waiting; she feels a muscle jerk spasmodically under her grip, and she releases him, lets her own hands drop. She’s discovered in that moment that she’s afraid of him.
He steps a few feet away from Lottie and stands there, his back to her. His breathing is uneven and loud. Then he drops suddenly to his knees and starts to pick up the junk scattered on the floor. Lottie looks down at him as he moves around, blindly grabbing stuff and putting it on the table. His shoulders are shaking. He coughs, and then sobs.
Lottie crouches quickly next to him. ‘Darling,’ she says.
‘Don’t comfort me, Mom,’ he says in a ragged voice. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I did this. But I can’t stand for you to comfort me.’
For a moment more, Lottie watches him work. Then she shifts forward to her knees too, amid the broken glass and tins and plates and bowls, and starts to help him clean up. Silently they work together. Every now and then Ryan shudders or wipes his face with the back of his hand, and Lottie stops, helpless, and watches him. They’ve nearly finished, stacking all the things on the table, when she looks over and sees that his hand is bleeding, that he’s smeared blood on his face and jeans.
‘Oh! Ryan,’ she cries, and when he looks up at her, she points at the blood.
He looks down at his hand as though it bears no connection to him. ‘Forget it,’ he says.
‘You need a bandage or something, though,’ she says.
He stands up and walks to the back door. He pulls the hem of his T-shirt up and wipes his face, then wraps the fabric around the heel of his hand. ‘Forget it,’ he says, and goes outside.
For a moment Lottie kneels there alone on the littered floor. She can hear her son outside, hear the bang of the big aluminum ladder, hear the metallic clatter as he raises it. She pulls herself to her feet and goes upstairs to the bathroom she shares with Richard Lester. There’s a box of Band Aids in the medicine chest, jumbled with Richard’s many bottles of prescription pills. She carries it back downstairs, through the kitchen. She’s just opening the wooden screen door when Ryan shouts from up on the ladder, ‘Don’t come out here with any Band Aids, Lottie! I told you I don’t want a fucking Band Aid!’
Lottie lets the door bang shut and turns around. She stands in the kitchen, uselessly holding the little metal box. The bright sunlight lies over the pots and pans, the ancient cookie tins and rusty flour sifter, the cracked rolling pin. The glass on the floor glitters, and reflected pinpoints of light dance on the walls. A minute passes, or more, she can’t tell. She feels as though she were frozen.
But then the doorbell rings, and she sets the box down and steps across the bits of broken glass to go and answer it.
CHAPTER III
‘Well, come into my parlor,’ Lottie says, and she gestures into the living room. The policemen laugh. It looks, she suddenly realizes, like a derelict doctor’s waiting room, the way the sprung, worn-out chairs are pushed in a row against the white wall. She snatches the newspaper up off the chair that was her mother’s, and the policemen pull two other sagging chairs forward a little so they’ll all be more or less facing one another. They’re agreeable and loud, middle-aged, and Lottie appreciates their careful politeness to her, though she knows it’s automatic for women her age. Even dressed as she is, she’s ‘ma’am’ to them.
‘You’re redoing things, then,’ says one of them, looking around at the freshly painted, bare walls, at the emptied rooms. He has a red face; the flesh of his cheeks is angrily cratered, seared by acne. A difficult youth, Lottie thinks.
‘It was my mother’s house. We’re going to sell it. You interested?’
He laughs. ‘I might be if I didn’t have a guess as to what you were going to ask.’
They joke about real estate prices, about how outrageous they are. How that won’t last. Lottie can’t keep the nervousness out of her voice. When she laughs, it sounds like a whinny.
The other policeman is big too, but not as beefy. Tall and thick around the middle, like someone who played basketball in his youth and has gone to seed. Danehy, he said his name was. Lottie didn’t get the larger man’s name. Danehy shifts in his chair now, and the leather of his holster creaks. ‘Your brother,’ he says. ‘Mr Reed?’
Here it comes. Lottie tenses. ‘Yes.’
‘You say you don’t know where he is at the moment?’
‘No. I’ve actually been looking for him too. I’ve called his work and his home …’ She turns her empty palms up. ‘Nothing.’
‘Anyplace else you can think of he might be?’
‘No. I don’t know. He’s not in trouble about the accident, is he?’
‘No, ma’am, nothing like that,’ the beefy cop says. ‘He did seem’ – he pauses – ‘distraught, the officers said, last night.’
This odd, elegant word leaps up at Lottie, and she imagines Cameron as she’d seen him a few times in adolescence: white-lipped, silent, his eyes mo
ving too fast. He punched a hole in the living room wall once, in such a state. It was after he was too big for their mother to hit anymore.
‘So we wanted to let you know that.’
Danehy speaks up. ‘You know, that it might be good to kinda keep an eye on him when you find him. It’s a terrible thing, a young girl like that. He must be feeling terrible. You have no idea where he is.’ It’s a statement.
‘No,’ Lottie says. And then because she suddenly imagines that this might cause them to go in search of him, she says quickly, ‘I’m sure he’ll turn up, though.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Danehy says. ‘Probably out driving around. Trying to shake it off, you know.’
Lottie decides not to mention the car left in the driveway. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I expect he’ll be in touch.’
‘He knew the girl?’
Lottie nods. Then adds, ‘Well, not well, really. But yes, he knew her some. Elizabeth – Mrs Butterfield? She was … well, we all grew up together. On this street, actually. She was a friend. And so we all knew Jessica a little. Just because she was around, essentially.’ Though none of this is untrue, Lottie feels somehow that she’s lying, and it seems to her a guilty heat must be visible in her face. She shrugs, stupidly.
The bigger man, the beefy one, takes over again. ‘Well, we just had a question or two that we needed to ask. Just routine stuff. Somebody screwed up the paperwork.’
‘Yeah,’ Danehy says. They’re both grinning, as though this were a familiar story; but now he sobers. ‘And then there was the family – the girl’s family?’
Lottie nods.
‘They wanted to talk to him. And we wanted to clear that with him, giving them his number and all.’
This alarms Lottie. ‘What do they want?’
‘Oh, it’s not that they think it was his fault,’ Danehy says quickly. ‘They understand that it was, you know, like the officer explained to them, unavoidable. But I think it’s just he was the last one, really, to see her alive. And they just wondered, you know, the stuff we’d all wonder about: did she suffer, did she speak, was she conscious for just a few seconds? Those kind of things. The doctor already told them no, that the injury was massive. Death was instantaneous. But I think they just needed to know that, direct from him.’ His heavy hands lift from his thighs. ‘And then we just have these few loose ends.’
‘And you’re the one to tell, I guess,’ the larger one says. ‘He’s not married? He has no family?’
‘No,’ Lottie says. ‘Just me.’
‘Okay, then, just so you know that he was … very upset. And he left his wallet too. His wallet and his keys. Just left without them, I guess, when they said he was free to go.’
Now Danehy pushes himself with effort out of the deeply sprung armchair he’s been in. He stands towering over Lottie, pulling the wallet out of his own back pocket. He hands it to her. It’s brown leather, worn almost white around the edges, warm from his body. ‘If it’s okay with you, we thought we’d just leave them here.’ He unbuttons his shirt pocket and pulls the keys out, hands them over too. ‘Assuming, you know, that he’d rather not have to come in and deal with us again.’
‘Yes; that’s fine,’ she says. ‘I’ll see that he gets them.’
‘So,’ says the bigger one, standing up. Together the men seem to fill the room. ‘I guess that’s it.’
Lottie rises too.
‘When you see him, have him call the station, if you would,’ the bigger man says. ‘He can ask for me or’ – he gestures – ‘my partner here.’
Lottie walks behind them to the front door, feeling suddenly small and childish in the wake of their creaking, jingling bulk. They smell of cigarettes, of leather. She feels a peculiar relief when she closes the door after them.
She returns to the living room and pushes the chairs back where they were. She stands alone in the middle of the room, watching the men out on the street. They laugh at something over the roof of the car as they open its doors.
When they have driven off, she picks up the wallet from the threadbare arm of her mother’s chair. She hesitates for only a moment before she opens it. There’s about fifty dollars in cash, and some ATM slips – his checking account has seven hundred dollars, his savings account three thousand. More, actually, than Lottie would have thought. He has a license, a MasterCard and a Visa, a card for an HMO. He has business cards from another used-book dealer, in Fall River, and from an interior decorator in New York. This seems odd for a moment, but then Lottie remembers that he sometimes sells whole libraries of beautifully bound books to people who are furnishing elegant studies, who want that cultured, Ralph Lauren look. There are several other scraps of paper with names and addresses on them, but nothing that suggests anything to Lottie about where he might have gone or what he might be doing.
Distraught, the policeman said. A clear picture of him in his bathroom, cutting himself, rises quickly in her mind. Lottie winces and immediately dismisses it; but she also decides, at that moment, to go over to his place. Maybe he’s there, just not answering the telephone; maybe he’s asleep. Lottie feels she needs to know, one way or another.
She goes upstairs to get her purse. When she comes back down, she stands in the hallway for a moment, trying to make up her mind whether to tell Ryan where she’s going. She can hear the noise of the paint scraper, pulling in hard regular strokes. Finally she decides to write him a note saying she’ll be back at lunch. She props it up on the kitchen table, where they usually leave messages for each other. Maybe after a morning of work he’ll calm down and they’ll be able to talk more peaceably about all this.
Her car, a dark-blue Saab she bought used four years earlier, is slow to start. It always is after a rain, and Lottie feels a kind of near affection for its predictability. When it finally catches, she leaves it in neutral for a few minutes, to let it warm up. There are people out on the street now; a man walking his dog, and two little kids on one of the wide lawns farther up the hill, throwing a big pink plastic ball back and forth. As she drives past Elizabeth’s house, she looks closely at it, but it still has its sleepy, blank look.
Everywhere on the sidewalks and along the river, people are already out, jogging, walking dogs, lying on blankets in the sun. It’s been raining for three days straight in a summer in which every week brings at least two or three days of rain; on sunny days like this, no one wants to be inside. The South End, where Cam lives, is quieter, though. More people work nine-to-five jobs; there are few students. Cam’s apartment is at the southern edge of this neighborhood, next to the expressway. All around it are warehouses and abandoned buildings. In the littered entryways along his street, the alcoholics and homeless people from the shelter on the corner, turned out after breakfast, sit and smoke and tip their faces up to the sun, as grateful as everyone else for its healing touch.
The stairwell outside Cameron’s apartment is ugly: dirty, covered with graffiti. Here and there, the stairs’ metal railing has been hammered out of shape. With such great effort! Lottie thinks. What would make you want to take the time? She’s a little breathless by the time she reaches the top, she’s been going so fast. She knocks on the door, and waits. She knocks once more and calls out: ‘Cam! Are you there? Cameron!’ She can hear a door open below, and someone is silent a moment, listening for her. She is frozen, listening back. Then the man’s voice yells up, ‘He ain’t home. Okay?’ A door bangs shut.
Lottie takes Cameron’s keys out of her purse. She tries several before she gets the right one. The scarred door swings open. There is an envelope lying on the floor a few feet in front of her. Even from where she stands, Lottie can tell by the bold, nearly calligraphic writing in the center of the envelope – Cameron, it says – that it’s from Elizabeth. She shuts the door behind her and calls Cam’s name again. Her voice echoes in the open space. The inside of Cameron’s apartment is huge: he actually bought two lofts and knocked out the walls between. To Lottie it has always seemed beautiful. He did most of the work himse
lf, years before. There must be twenty warehouse-size windows, spaced at regular intervals – tall, narrow, curved at the top. From the middle of the room, all you see outside is air. The floors are painted a light gray; there are skylights. In the far corner of the space, a green cast-iron Victorian spiral stair climbs to the opening for the roof deck. Though it’s a completely different kind of place from the apartment Lottie lived in with Ryan in Chicago, it reminds her of it. Everything has the same quality of having been rescued, claimed from old age and heavy use with effort and care.
She bends over and picks Elizabeth’s letter up. The paper is creamy, heavy. A letter she wrote at home, then, not something composed in haste here. Carrying it with her, Lottie walks through the open space that comprises the apartment, calling Cameron’s name. The bathroom door is ajar. She pushes it, moves slowly forward. The room is empty, antiseptically clean. Lottie expels her breath so loudly it echoes in the tiled space.
She goes into the bedroom last, the only area besides the bathroom that’s walled off in any way. The bed is made. There are full, fat red roses in an old pitcher on the nightstand next to it. Of course: he must have been expecting Elizabeth. Their erotic perfume floats in the room. The phone machine on the bedside table is blinking steadily. Lottie comes back into the living room and sits down.
After a moment she opens the envelope. She feels justified. She’s worried about Cameron. She doesn’t understand fully what happened at Elizabeth’s house the night before or why he’s disappeared. She assumes that Elizabeth doesn’t know where he is either – what was it she said? ‘I thought maybe he was with you’ – but Lottie hopes the letter will help her, will tell her something about what he might be doing and why. The paper is creamy too; it matches the envelope. There are four or five sheets covered on both sides with the big, bold letters.
‘Darling Cameron,’ it begins.
I can only imagine what you’re feeling, what you’re going through right now. The most important thing you must hear is that it wasn’t your fault, and it’s worth all the risk I’m taking now – to me, to my marriage – to try to let you know that. Jessica was very drunk, we have learned. I found several bottles under her bed, and the doctors feel the blood test will show it too. Dear Cam, she obviously wasn’t thinking straight. I had asked her to stop you, to talk to you – and she was so drunk she somehow thought stepping out in front of the car was a not unreasonable way to do that. [There are several words crossed out here.] Forgive yourself, Cameron. You truly couldn’t have prevented it.