Criminals

by Valerie Trueblood

  “So there they are, without a clue, in the house with this scam artist.”

  Kieran was two years younger but he had always been the responsible one, the one in charge. He had married a good Catholic girl with some money—it appeared she had some, enough to have “Kim and Kieran” embroidered on a cloth napkin for each guest at their wedding in the old church, which Kieran now called “a working-class parish,” where the smell of stew from the soup kitchen filtered through the heating ducts to mingle with the freesias as Kim was kneeling in the folds of her wedding dress. To marry Kieran! So love was something that could lead you to marry—Kieran. And could change you: as the husband of Kim, Kieran had learned not to argue with his sister.

  The rabbit was the same color as the leaves blown around the grove the fall before and lying in scales on the tree roots. It did not move when Bridget bent to look at it, inhaling the smell of the hutch. I won’t jump to any conclusions, she said to herself. I’ll get a sense of what’s going on. She could start with the rabbit, which must belong to Aiken; her parents wouldn’t have pets. Her father steered clear of dogs because of having been bitten when he was a mite delivering milk, and cats scratched up the garden and squatted in it.

  Bridget let herself into the house and stood for a minute. You were smack in the tiny living room when you stepped inside the door. There were her mother’s magazines on the coffee table with the TV remote, her father’s cardigan on the back of the recliner, there on the mantelpiece the Infant of Prague and the two little varnished saints, Ciaran and Brigid, underfoot the green carpet, bald in patches, that Kieran threatened to rip out with his own hands, and on the wall two seascapes in frames lined with shells, bought by Bridget herself with her allowance on some school vacation, and breathlessly given.

  There seemed to be no smell, certainly not the remembered smell that stood for this house, of moths baked in the porch light fixture, of lake mud drying on tennis shoes, of wet sheets and tablecloths strung across the cellar on rainy days. All the life so repetitive and dim, the life in which Saint Brigid, who had taken out her eye, their mother always said, and put it back again only when she won some favor for the poor, and Saint Ciaran, who had left home as a little tyke to be a monk, looked down on them from the mantel with painted blue eyes and silly chipped smiles they made fun of in their rooms. All that they had escaped, and dipped up now and then, before the tin cup disappeared, in leaf-clogged, dark water they downed on visits as a medicine, a weakened strain of that life.

  She went down the narrow hall and opened the door to Kieran’s room. It was dark, with the shade pulled down and plastered against the sweating window so that it had stained at the edges. The room was hot; the baseboard heater hummed. Here was a smell she couldn’t identify. She didn’t want to take it down into her lungs. The bookcase had been pulled away from the wall so that a gun—she jumped—so that a gun—it must be a shotgun, in the instant of seeing she noted the two barrels, smooth tubes lying side by side like organ pipes—a gun could be propped in the narrow space and held upright by the doorframe.

  Don’t think of that.

  Of someone coming in and living close, close by, part of the household, and then, and then . . .

  She was filled with wrath at her parents, for bringing about a dark, wet day in which, instead of going away to work on things with Nat, a lovers’ weekend—but Nat had not invited her. He wanted to get away from her. Why would she not apologize for herself, the contentious self she felt ready to discard at any moment, and laugh her forgiveness when he admitted his own faults: his endless pleasure-seeking at the edge of safety, his wish to tease God, in whom he did not believe, past that edge? Why not hike beside him, and sleep beside him while rain beat on the tent fly? But instead she must drive the interstate in blinding rain, in the roar of tire spray, to arrive in this dark smelly room, her own little brother’s room, and make this discovery.

  The spines of Kieran’s ordeal-and-triumph books slumped under piles of Popular Mechanics and Car and Driver—so many that dozens of the magazines had dropped onto the floor, and on the wall where their mother had tacked Kieran’s drawings of robots hung a tapestry depicting slim does drinking from a mountain stream while a muscular stag stood guard.

  The smell in the room reminded Bridget of the onions her father had kept in a bin in the store, when one or two had a soft patch and they had to start bringing them home fast, and peeling off layers so they wouldn’t be wasted. She bent to see what was crunching under her shoes. Nutshells. They were all over the carpet.

  The bed was made. Sticking out from under the pillow was the fringe of a blanket. She raised the pillow to look at it. It was a baby blanket, pink faded to gray. She shivered, slid her hand under the bedspread. No, the bed was not actually made, just covered up.

  Instead of opening the door of her own room across the hall, she went into her parents’ room and stood in front of their dresser. There it was, as it had always been. The milk glass Pietà. Nothing of her father’s out to be seen. Her mother’s tortoiseshell mirror, brought from Ireland wrapped in the rags they used and laundered in those days, lay in the middle of a litter of sales slips, pill bottles, Vicks inhalers, and pink stocking tabs. Bridget had one of the tabs in her fingers before she even noticed, smoothing the rubber button with her thumb as she gazed. You slid them into the slots on girdle legs. One girdle succeeding another, through changing sizes, for an unimaginable number of years. Her heart contracted. Why did she not beg her mother, before it was too late, “Tell me. Tell me what happened.”

  She picked up a cloth-covered lump, a beanbag of some kind, with a satin bow on it and a tag on a plastic thread. “Healing Heart,” read the tag. “Place me on your chest when you are lying down, my gentle weight will help to heal your sorrow.” She read the run-on sentence again, and looked at herself in the mirror with the lump in her hand, heavier than it looked, her hair frizzy and damp from the watery air outside. She thought the gingham-covered blob with the bow had made her smile but her face was tired and sullen.

  She jumped at the sound of a key in the front door, and the next minute heard her brother’s voice. “Bridget? Bridget? She’s in here somewhere, that’s her car.” She dropped the heart on the dresser and quickly shut the door behind her.

  Kieran was already in the kitchen rummaging in grocery bags.

  “Hello there!” Bridget cried. “Mom, Dad! What’s this? I thought you were going out to dinner!” She hugged them, trying to avoid looking straight at her mother’s puffy face. She helped her work her arms out of her coat sleeves. “Why Bridget!” her mother said hoarsely, as if surprised by an encounter on the street. “Dear,” she added, patting Bridget’s cheek. Her father kissed her and said, “How long did it take you? Did you stay on the freeway all the way up?” He always followed the details of her route with frowning concentration, for use on the trip they were planning to make to Portland, “though we daren’t do the speeds.” She knew they shrank from coming to her apartment, where they would see Nat’s things. And this year, instead of coming at Christmas, she had left them to Kieran. “Five hours, because of the rain. I thought you’d go out to eat with Kier. I wasn’t sure what time I’d make it.”

  “We were going to go out to dinner, Bridget, after we saw the dentist and shopped,” Kieran called from the kitchen. “But we decided to come back on the chance that you’d be here, and have spaghetti. Bridget? Lenten spaghetti of course. You haven’t eaten, have you, Bridget?”

  Kieran sounded manic, repeating her name that way. He had always been excitable, irritable, in need of some appeasement supplied by their mother and now by his wife Kim. He came to the door of the kitchen, a balding man with raised eyebrows. Was this the boy all bones and curls, two years younger than she but a little pike in the water, their father bragged, who had taught his big sister to swim? In one long afternoon, flinging drops of sunlight off his head? Bridget could remember his endless game of Monopoly on the coffee table, and her furious pitying love for him
when they took away his prize for the soapbox derby because he had oiled the wheels of his car. “Bridget?”

  “Well, I stopped for coffee . . .”

  “Let’s just whip it together, then, Mom. Mom? Then if Aiken does get back there’ll be some for him, too. Now that we know he might. I’m sure I’ve bought enough. Bridget! You haven’t met Aiken!”

  “No. No, I haven’t been up since he got here, but I’ve heard about him from Mom and Dad.” That was not true.

  “You’ll meet him,” her father said with a bob of his head and a sly humble look, as if they were discussing the new priest, while her mother looked around vaguely. Kieran came out, kissed Bridget—“No, you stay there and relax with Dad”—and steered their mother into the kitchen with him.

  “She’s slowed down a bit,” her father said.

  “Is she all right, Dad? She looks . . . her face looks stiff.”

  “She’s fine, she’s fine. She’s been to the dentist. No problem of the sort for me, I just take ’em out and put ’em in her hand—we’ve a girl now for a dentist. And how are you, me girl?”

  “I’m fine.” And how’s your friend? she thought.

  “How’s your friend?”

  “He’s well. He sends his best. He wants to come up next time if he can get away for a couple of days.” They both mulled that over for a moment. Here there was no question of her sharing a room with Nat, and now the couch would be the only place for him. If he would ever come. If he would put down his crampons and his kayak and all the rest of it and just come with her, once, to see her family, instead of saying, “You don’t exactly make it sound like a treat.”

  She heard her father’s thoughts. Just marry him! Just marry, me girl! Have your baby or it will be too late. Don’t ye know that, ye modern girl? Don’t ye know time? Your own mother knew it, and past forty she was when she had you, and then went on for her boy.

  And if he won’t, the devil take him.

  They had finished their plates of spaghetti and as a second course eaten Kieran’s salad made of four kinds of lettuce with no tomatoes or cucumbers, or anything really except greens. Bridget knew this was how salads often were now but her parents didn’t. “Did you find all you needed for the salad, Kieran dear?” her mother kept saying. “I can’t think I put everything out for you. Weren’t there some carrits?” Bridget had always, except in high school, liked to hear her mother say “carrits.”

  Kieran said, “This is the salad, dear, in its entirety.”

  They were eating at the kitchen table as they always had, but they had lit candles and drunk the burgundy Kieran had poured, and they were flushed from it, as they all got, in the family. They all drank too much. Nat said so. “Even Mr. Clean,” he said, meaning Kieran. We do it because . . . Bridget could get no further. Rain was drumming steadily on the shingles. Out the sink window she could see the lake water heaving in lighted patches, so the lily pads crowded up to the edge, sagged back, and jostled up again. She liked the familiar shiver it gave her to look out from inside the kitchen. Momentarily she liked even the cone of yellow light from the pull-down copper fixture. Her mother seemed more herself, bustling to the refrigerator to get milk for their coffee. “Oh, but we’ve no dessert!” she cried, her hands falling into a gesture from the Pietà on the dresser, and Kieran rolled up his eyes as their father said, “And we’d be wanting more?”

  There were thuds on the porch steps and the doorknob rattled. Bridget jumped up from the table and Kieran hissed, “I knew it!”

  “Hoo! It’s raining out there!”

  Her parents turned in their chairs. Bridget stared at the smiling, dripping man, who looked like an actor coming onstage in makeup: black, wet eyelashes you could see across the room, deep lines drawn on the cheeks. As he shed water on the linoleum she almost laughed. He seemed to know his looks were excessive and silly, the handsomeness of a comic book figure, and to have partially covered them up in long hair that didn’t look clean and a day or two’s growth of beard. He turned away from them as if he might undress in the doorway, not just pull off his windbreaker.

  “I’m a mess,” he said. “I better shower before I even set down.” He had a drawl that was not really Southern. Western, maybe. Cowboy. Fake, it might be. Movie cowboy.

  He crossed to her father’s side in two steps and shook his hand. “How’s it going, Thomas?” “Right as rain,” her father said, whereupon the man executed a gradual turn like a bullfighter, saying as he drew his heels together in front of her mother, “Mary Frances!” and then with another half turn, “Hot dog! This must be Bridget.”

  “Why—! You know Bridget!” her mother said with genuine reproach.

  “Well, it feels as if we’ve met—” Bridget began, to spare her mother confusion, and gripped the chair back in case the man should try to shake hands with her.

  “I had heard you were out of town,” she said. Kieran had risen from the table and thrown a dishtowel over his shoulder.

  “Fell through on me. Don’t let me get in your way. You’re eating! Here, set down, Mary Frances. Eat up! You—! If you don’t look like a rose, with your rosy cheeks. What’s up, Kieran?” He pronounced the name as if it were Karen. He hung his windbreaker on the calendar nail to drip. “Mary Frances! All right if I shower? Enough hot water?”

  “Oh, whenever you need, Aiken, and you know that.”

  “Daddy,” Bridget said, nudged by Kieran into the living room when the man had disappeared into the back of the house, “who is he?”

  “Who, Aiken? A chap from the church. The dinner, ye know.” Every week, in canvas aprons, spattered glasses sliding down their noses, her parents chopped vegetables and stood on tiptoe to stir the tall pots on the church’s ancient range. Dozens their age did it, retired people with old Reagan bumper stickers, whose concern was not the dirty lineup outside the social hall but the chunks of ground beef to be thawed, the potatoes and carrots to be chopped and boiled, the pots to be washed.

  Bridget waited with an expression of encouragement, until her father added, “Works down there with your mother and me. Needed a place.”

  “Well, do you like having him here?”

  “Sure. I’d say we do.”

  “Is it your idea, or Mom’s?”

  “Well, both. Both, I’d say. What, ye don’t care for the man? Barely got a glimpse of him.”

  “Of course. I don’t know one way or the other. He seems fine.”

  “Kieran thinks well of him.”

  “Oh?” There was sloshing and clattering from the kitchen as Kieran washed the dishes. Her mother’s voice wavering on alone. No word from Kieran, who must be straining to hear them. “And he fits in, with you and Mom? Your life?”

  “Sure he does. We don’t have so very much going on. We can make room.”

  “I guess you can. Well, does he help out?”

  “He pays his room and board!”

  “I mean, is he a help to you?” She had strayed close to the subject of their being old. Her father did not like any reference to his actual self to be made, and shied from it. He hid himself in “your-mother-and-I,” a friendly entity that went about in the world leaving him free to work out his unspoken views.

  “He does this and that. And your mother does this and that for him. And if it’s to inspect the lease you’ve come, we haven’t one.”

  “Oh, Dad.”

  “Now then, girlie, let’s hear about those students of yours and their nonsense.” Her father liked to have her quote to him the ungrammatical and godless writings of her composition students. He liked her to bring their papers with her and grade them in the living room; he approved of the red “Help!” she scrawled in the margin when a student wrote, “the triple murder of three people,” or “she lay the baby,” or “Organized religion, throughout history.” She knew he liked to see her this way, as daring and up-to-date, but at the same time rather soberly guiding and shepherding the young as she had been shepherded herself by the nuns, keeping the young from some p
it with stakes at the bottom, of illiteracy and indifference and license. Because even though she shared an apartment with a man, she knew her father still considered her absolutely, indefinably, unchangeably pure and immaculate.

  “Well?” He was rubbing his stone-colored hands lightly and incessantly now, so that she had to stop her own hands from grabbing them to keep them still.

  “I do have a couple of zingers for you to look at but they’re in the car. I left my suitcase out there.”

  *

  “Did you look in my room?” Kieran was whispering, buttoning his raincoat at the door, his eyes bulging. “Did you see under the bed, the rabbit shit?”

  “Kier, go home. Just go home to Kim. I’ll take care of everything.”

  When she came back into the living room she said, getting tiredness and finality into her voice, “I’ll show you in the morning, Daddy. My students’ papers,” she said to Aiken, shaved now and with his longish hair comb-tracked, the little black teeth of it slowly dripping into the collar of the white shirt he had put on for some reason. For an hour or so he had been settling deeper and deeper into the couch beside her mother.

  The man fancied himself a storyteller. Until Kieran abruptly got up, Aiken had been telling stories, stories of characters who double-crossed him, of rodeos, purchases of unreachable swampland, mysteriously hindered border crossings that kept him from ever getting into one of the swank air-conditioned combines that ran all night on the Canadian plains during the mustard harvest. Going on and on, abandoning himself to loud, juvenile laughter with his head back, showing newly shaven neck and jawbone, and then soberly straightening up to say, “Whew! It takes all kinds!”