by Delia Ephron
I stood outside the car. The quiet was daunting. “Sergeant McKee?” I called softly.
The air was cool, a damp cool, and the breeze chilly. I zipped my jacket and tried to walk. If I pressed only the ball of my right foot on the ground, I could move along briskly. Holding the railing for support, I hopped up the front steps, and then, following McKee’s trail, jerked my way across the front porch and around to the back, where I stopped. Everyone knew this was beachfront property, but the contrast between the manicured, civilized front and this wildness behind was startling. Had a kind of truth-telling to it. This is what’s really here. This is what’s hidden. I half expected to hear Twilight Zone music, but the moment passed quickly and then it was only beach. Beach on a gray day. Waves choppy, sand strewn with detritus left by low tide and angry water. Beyond the porch and a tangle of beach plums, I could see tire marks in the wet sand.
A French door in the back stood partly open. “Sergeant McKee? Tom?” I wasn’t sure how I was expected to address him, but made my voice sound both inquiring and cheerful. No answer. I stepped in.
The restrained exterior turned out to be a cover for extravagance: overstuffed couches upholstered in richly textured damask, gilt coffee tables and end tables, gold-painted porcelain lamps with silk shades. The living room was large enough for two formal geometric seating areas, one in front of a pink marble fireplace that must have replaced a carved oak original, the other by a picture window offering a splendid ocean view.
I wandered into the foyer, where a chandelier of glass teardrops descended from the double-height ceiling, and then located the powder room off it. Shiny red walls, brass sconces, and a bowl of scented soaps next to a sink shaped like a scallop shell. No medicine cabinet.
I didn’t see McKee anywhere, not in the dining room on the other side of the foyer or on the second-floor landing. The Bactine must be in an upstairs bathroom.
I was beginning to enjoy myself. I loved traipsing along with Jane to Open Houses. I had occupied a few Saturdays that way, fantasizing about owning places I couldn’t afford. This house was clearly unoccupied. There was no personal scent, no cooking or cleaning smells, no natural or artificial perfumes. I moved up the stairs slowly, using the waxed walnut banister as a crutch, and then opened the first door that presented itself.
The master bedroom. It stretched out to my left in a long rectangle. Directly ahead, across from the door, my eye was drawn to a beautiful twelve-paned window behind a satin-covered settee. The glass was old or slightly tinted, and the ocean beyond changed color as though I were looking through a prism. The window was slightly open, and white lace curtains billowed inward, caressing the burnt orange of the satin couch. I heard footsteps behind me, and as I turned to confront McKee, to explain my presence, I noticed the canopied bed at the far end of the room. There was a naked woman on it, asleep. I halted mid-turn and began to retreat, when I sensed McKee’s body behind mine. I stepped on his foot and stifled a whoop of surprise. He caught me by the shoulders as he saw the young woman, too. She lay faceup on top of the covers, one arm flung out dramatically. My eyes landed on her breasts, got stuck there, then jumped the rest of her body to her toes. Each nail was painted a different color. I was about ten feet away, and as McKee pulled me backward, her body became topographic—valleys, mountains, undergrowth. I smelled something heady … realized it was McKee’s aftershave, felt his warm breath on my neck. I was almost faint while he steered me out and, with one hand gripping my arm, closed the bedroom door behind us. He had a silken touch, turning the knob quickly, silently.
I twisted away and took the stairs at a clip, but the pain in my ankle erupted with ferocity. So I grabbed the banister and hopped. The plush carpet muffled my thumps like a silencer.
We left by the back, the way we had come in. I limped after McKee, around the porch, down the front steps, and to the car. Following his example, I closed my door gently. He gave the car the barest hit of gas, and we rolled out of the driveway.
I kept my eyes on the road ahead, and assumed he did, too. I had the feeling that I should start laughing, turn the encounter into one big joke, but I kept envisioning that naked body, displayed like some sort of feast. The downy, smooth, coppery skin. The ample breasts sinking comfortably sideways, legs provocatively apart, an arm unfurled. Her waist was tiny, accentuating her curves. My waist was tiny, too, and I always imagined that one day I would meet a man whose hands could circle it. Not a man with big hands, that wasn’t part of the fantasy—it was the idea of a lover finding my waist as delicate as the stems of a small bouquet.
McKee suddenly pulled the car over and parked. He plucked a Mynten from his shirt pocket and licked it off the paper.
“Could I have one?”
“You’re crazy.”
“But my mouth is dry.”
“What?”
“I’m asking for one of your Myntens.”
He punched open the glove compartment and removed an entire bag. “Take them. What were you doing in that house?”
“I don’t need all these.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I was looking for some Bactine.”
“Bactine.” He repeated the brand name as though he had never heard of it.
“I thought I could fix my ankle, you know, I thought they’d have some antiseptic in the medicine cabinet.” I could see the nugget nestling inside his cheek.
“You went in that house to write about it.”
“I did not.”
“Come on.”
“I told you, Bactine.”
His arms rested on the steering wheel and he twisted the Mynten wrapper, spun it between his fingers. He occupied himself this way while I sat there. “You could have been killed,” he said finally.
“Oh, please, by whom?”
“See, you don’t take anything seriously.”
“What are you talking about? You told me that alarm had been deactivated.”
“You never know what’s going down.”
What’s going down? Honestly. This was ridiculous. There was only one thing to say. “I’m sorry.” I spoke contritely. I knew what was bugging him. Suppose that woman had awakened to find us? My trespass would have cost him an account. “Who was she?”
He started the car again. “None of your business.”
“I just wondered.” This whole thing was getting upsetting, what with him so short with me. I was wounded, I had a serious dog bite, thanks to his carelessness. I tried to open the bag of lozenges. The slick paper wouldn’t tear. “This is like plastic on a new CD. A person could spend a year trying to strip that off. I always wanted to write a short story in which a woman gets murdered because she can’t get the plastic wrapping off in time.” My words hung around unanswered, McKee correctly identifying them as nervous babble. I noticed a big blue vein snaking across the back of my hand, which was lying in my lap, clutching the Mynten bag. The woman on the bed didn’t have fat bulging veins, I bet. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
Now I was feeling unaccountably deflated.
“Cheer up.”
“What? What are you talking about?” How did he know?
“Just generally. It’s no big deal, right?” He flashed a smile.
“Right.” I could see the medical center ahead. What a relief. I would welcome a shot of novocaine. Perhaps directly into my brain.
He kept the car idling while I stuffed the Myntens in my purse. “Thanks for these.”
“Do you have someone to come and get you?”
“Yes. Don’t worry about it.”
“You should drink vinegar tonight. One teaspoon of cider vinegar with a tablespoon of honey.”
“Is that a health potion?”
“For your ankle. In case you have a boron deficiency. And take it easy.”
“I do.”
He laughed, as though it was absolutely clear that I was full of it. “If you ever need help on stories, other stories, call.
�
��Sure.”
“If it’s not my shift, leave a message.”
“Okay.” He must have been buttering me up so I wouldn’t betray him.
I put out my hand to shake his. Too formal for what we’d just experienced, and very awkward in the confines of the car. “Take care,” he said.
“I will. Thanks for the ride.”
CHAPTER 2
THE EMERGENCY room was a fast twenty minutes. Clean, considerate, efficient. After getting a tetanus shot and a butterfly bandage, I took a cab to my car, drove to my house, and decided to stay there. Some days it is a mistake to leave home. I phoned the paper and told Peg, the receptionist, that I wouldn’t be in.
I felt peculiar, off-kilter. I had a routine for moments when I felt especially vulnerable, like the time my wallet was lifted on the crosstown bus. Close down. Eat comfort food. In the city I would have ordered takeout, wonton soup and spare ribs. Here I scavenged through the refrigerator, locating one of the many hero sandwiches I kept on standby for Sam. I did not dine at the sink, where I consumed most lunches. Instead, I cut the sandwich into small pieces and placed them on a favorite plate with a border of pansies. I lit a Duraflame log in the living room fireplace so I would feel warm and toasty, and stretched out on the couch under a quilt, with the plate and a cup of chamomile tea nearby on the coffee table.
Chewing slowly (part of the rehabilitation involved proceeding at a leisurely pace), selecting bits of marinated pepper and dropping them onto my tongue, I reviewed events at the summer house. My mind drifted to them and was very happy there, stopping first at the moment of shock when I realized the bedroom was inhabited, and by a nude woman in a state of glorious abandon. Those toenails looked like squares of paint in a watercolor box, a bit of dubious taste on a body that was otherwise exquisite. I remember sensing McKee’s stepping in behind me, his body shutting off the flow of air. The prosaic aroma of his aftershave became a fragrance of intoxicating sensuality. Our rush down the stairs. As if we’d bumbled into something ominous. My upper arm still tingled from the pressure of his grasp. I thought about him nervously spinning that Mynten wrapper—his hands, rough, with chunky fingers, incongruously twirling a strip of waxy paper, while he chided me. I was out of line, had inadvertently put both his business and his job in jeopardy.
McKee had a trash-compactor grip, that handshake when we parted was brutal—my fingers nearly welded together, then mercifully released. My gold ring, set with the single pearl, had been turned sideways, and I examined the memento of our parting, a round indentation in my pinkie where the flesh was almost punctured.
Time flew by while I was in this reverie. I liked reexperiencing events more than experiencing them, because they were safely over. I was in charge then, mulling, speculating, examining. I could embroider, imagine things that hadn’t happened, enjoy the possibility that they might have, and be relieved that they never, ever could. Say, for example, McKee and I, overcome by the unexpected peep-show thrill, retreating to his car and having passionate sex. Clothes and his weapons (as well as reserve, restraint, common sense, even lack of affinity) would be shed as easily as leaves off a tree.
In the short time since I’d moved here, my tendency toward elaborate postmortems had grown. My eyes were not trained to appreciate the outdoors, and spectacular foliage reminded me of the thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles that I used to complete as a child, dense autumn treescapes and me hunched over a folding table trying to find the interlocking match for each piece. Being unfamiliar with nature, living with my taciturn son, having only the ephemeral e-mail connection to my previous city existence had put my brain in overdrive. I was on a mental treadmill, running miles every day.
At four in the afternoon, I was still on the couch, now dozing, when Jane called. “I heard you lost it in the market,” she said.
“Who told you?”
“Let’s see. I stopped at LePater’s to buy cheese, so Matt at checkout and Lionel at the counter. Ginger, at work, heard it from Coral at the café, and then I stopped at the post office to mail food packages to Simon and Carrie, so Leanne there—”
“Okay, enough.” I couldn’t think how to explain myself. The word “misspoke” did cross my mind, but since I wasn’t running for office … I admitted it. Blamed it on the pain. On Baby.
“That is a wretched little dog,” said Jane. “I’ve seen him through the window yapping at customers. He acts like he’s about to eat their feet.”
I heard the front door. “Sam?”
“Yeah.” There was a thunk, probably his backpack dropping to the floor.
“Upstairs,” he said, not to me.
“Hold on,” I told Jane. I lifted myself up on my hands, still treating my ankle as if it had sustained a major injury. Over the couch, I could glimpse the front hall and a slice of person disappearing up the stairs. The tread was almost as heavy as Sam’s. Boots, I concluded. “Sam brought someone home.”
“I knew he’d make friends,” said Jane.
“I just said he brought someone home.”
Jane didn’t argue. “So you called the cops shits.”
I started to correct her, to point out that, in fact, I’d called them idiots, but then I wondered which was preferable—to have called them shits or idiots. Shits, I supposed. More general, less insulting professionally. So I let it stand. If “idiot” was lost as it traveled the grapevine, that was to my advantage. But would McKee forget? He might be someone who collected resentments. Did I care? Momentum was building. For every line of conversation with Jane, there were sixteen with myself.
“Are you going to sue?” she asked.
“Who? Claire? The cops? I’d really sue the cops. That would cement my popularity. Not to mention that I cover them, so if they refused to speak to me, I couldn’t work. Of course, they may not be speaking to me already. Besides, I have a butterfly bandage. Don’t I need at least one stitch to sue?”
“You could say you had attack-dog nightmares.”
“I’m—” I started to say “fine,” but finished the sentence with “okay.” “Okay” was not really a synonym for fine. It was less spunky.
I have always been worried that I am spunky. Like girl gymnasts. However clumsily they land, flying off that vault, they immediately snap up proudly, arms aloft; toes pivot into a perfect first position. Like them I’m small, only five-one, and although thin and agile, I am completely unathletic. I’ve always tried to counteract any spunky tendencies by being irritating—slightly grating, often provocative—to keep the cute adjectives at bay. I am resilient, however. Which is a very spunky thing to be. Like girl gymnasts. That’s how I ended up in Sakonnet Bay. Believing problems have solutions, which is dreadfully naive.
“How did you get to the hospital?” Jane asked.
This was the opening. The time to spill the secret, the time to turn raconteur. “One of the cops drove me, and I took a cab back to my car afterward.”
“You have to rest?”
“Just for a day.”
“Call if you need anything.”
“Thanks, I will.”
I hung up. I had told Jane nothing, and I had no idea why.
From my horizontal position, I called to Sam. I lay there bellowing. No response. His door must be closed.
As I was about to hobble upstairs, my editor phoned to ask what had happened, in a tone that indicated he already knew. Art was solicitous. In his weary, patient voice, he inquired how I was feeling, then announced that he wanted me to write up the incident and be photographed in front of Claire’s Collectibles with my ankle bandage showing. It would be the Sakonnet Times picture of the week.
I explained that I wasn’t inclined to write it, at least my part in it, but I could hear Art’s chair clanking.
The office desk chairs, all with swivel seats, had been purchased at a close-out sale. Whenever an employee shifted his or her weight, there was a loud noise and the seat tilted. Art’s passive-aggressive method of persuasion was to shift back and forth without sa
ying anything until his victim agreed to whatever Art wanted.
“I’m not the story. Baby’s the story.” I did not want to be the picture of the week. Last week’s had been a basket of newborn rabbits with bows on their ears. He kept clanking, an effective gambit, even over the telephone. “How do you expect me to handle it, exactly?” I asked.
“What?”
“My rudeness to the police.”
“You mean that you told them to go fuck themselves?”
“What? I did not say that, who said I said that? That is a lie. My God, who said that?”
“Bernadette.”
“Bernadette, the intern? And you believed her? Where did she hear it?”
“At the Muffin Shop.”
“I said, ‘I don’t give a shit.’” I left it at that and he didn’t add or correct.
“You should set the record straight,” Art said mildly.
“I guess so.”
We hung up. Those two calls, Jane and Art, managed to undo the repair work on my state of mind. I tried to conjure up the Nicholas bedroom, the woman’s legs enticingly spread, her arm draped across the bed in a flamboyant gesture of surrender. The vision no longer worked its playful magic.
“Sam,” I shouted.
Still no answer.
I usually avoided his bedroom. Sam had left his clothes packed. He simply pulled something to wear out of a cardboard box every morning, and threw it back in that general direction every night. I should go up. Be introduced to his classmate. I was curious.
On the way, I stopped at the bookshelf. “Boron: a soft, brown, amorphous nonmetallic element.” That told me absolutely nothing. I shut the dictionary and tackled the stairs, swinging my injured limb from step to step like a peg leg.
“Sam?” I knocked.
He peeked out. His face was flushed. “What is it?”
“I wanted to say hi.”