At the mention of her students’ papers he sat forward, as if the subject had a special interest for him. Quickly she looked away lest he launch into tales of his own schooling. Lies, all of it.
“And what have the rascals come up with now?” Her father turned to Aiken. “Bridget brings me this and that for my amusement.” He prided himself on his reading; he liked it when Bridget didn’t know who had written a best seller, he liked to make a certain face when she uttered faculty-meeting words, “diversity,” “norm.” He liked to correct her if she ever said “you know” or “I mean.” She had noticed all evening that he did not correct Aiken’s speech, or look her way as the “ain’ts” and “he don’ts” rolled off the man’s tongue, punctuated with knee-slapping and her mother’s marveling “I never!” and “Don’t tell me!” while all three of them went on oblivious of Kieran’s baleful look and Bridget’s coldness.
“The ones I have with me aren’t as funny as some,” she said. “It’s getting late in the year for the real howlers. Or I hope it is. I hope I’ve taught them something.”
“Now there’ve been one or two,” her father said, winking at her and finally getting around to loosening the tie he had put on to go to the dentist. Her mother had poured a bag of his peanuts into a good glass bowl, for Bridget’s sake, and he began to crack them. “The one that tickled me was the personage”—he turned his mouth up impishly—“without a face.”
“Oh, that was when they had to invent. They stretch so hard,” she said, turning to her mother but speaking to Aiken when she saw her mother had begun to doze, “for the most unlikely thing. It’s partly to shock me.”
“And doomed to failure it is,” her father said.
“Like Darkman,” Aiken said decidedly, lounging back and sticking out his legs. “That got me. Guy with a messed-up face.”
“No, no. No, this one didn’t lose a face, he never had it.”
“What’s so funny about that?” Aiken said.
“It wasn’t supposed to be funny. They were supposed to write about a lack. First write about a character who possesses something, anything, and then about one who lacks something. It was just an assignment,” she said as the man continued to look at her. “The point was—” She came to a stop. It was no use.
“The lad was a little off, she’s tryin’ to say,” her father declared peaceably.
“I have to get my suitcase.”
“I’ll get it!” Aiken said, jumping up.
“No!” she said, and all but ran to the door. Outside it was damp and mild. She shook her arms and shoulders. For the time being the rain had stopped, but the trees were dripping musically onto the car roof, and pine needles sent up clicking bubbles where she stepped. She saw the patch of toadstools wet and gleaming, and behind them the rabbit hutch. With some relief she saw that it had a pitched roof with an overhang to keep the rabbit dry. It was dark outside the ring of dim, brownish porch light, though the houses to left and right, through the trees, had white radiant spotlights illuminating their docks.
When she came back in, her parents were on their way to bed. They kissed her in the hallway. Her father said, “In the morning we’ll be fit to be seen, with our wits about us.” The expedition with Kieran, it turned out, had involved not only groceries and the dentist but driving miles in search of a muscle ointment they had seen on television, which could not be found. Bridget could imagine Kieran’s sighs, his edgy driving, coupled with his insistence on trying the next place, and the next.
She sat down. Aiken picked up a magazine with a long breath, the way she had always done herself once her parents went off to bed.
“Why do you have that gun? Do you hunt?” With her hopeless, specialized talent for giving an out.
“No, ma’am!” he said, dropping the magazine. “I’m keeping it for somebody.”
“Who?” she said.
“My buddy.” He gave her a guarded smile. “At the church.”
“Somebody at the church has a gun, and doesn’t have room for it. So—” He looked at her. She was not sure he was faking the slow reactions. “So you have to store it,” she prompted.
“Right.”
“That’s odd, Aiken.” Using his name, like a teacher.
“I mean he can’t keep it, where he’s at.”
“Where is that?”
“He’s in the shelter.”
She sat back. “Well. Well, thank God for that, at least. They don’t let them have shotguns in the shelter.”
“They sure as hell don’t!” He laughed, throwing back his head.
“Why would he need a shotgun?”
“I never asked him.” He cracked his knuckles, though he held onto his grin as if she were an entertainment. “I bet you don’t ask your girlfriends why they need stuff they have.”
“I would ask my girlfriends, as you call them, if one of them tried to get me to keep a gun.”
“They probably have someplace to keep it. But I’ll ask him, I’ll say, ‘How come you got that thing, anyway, dude?’” He palmed the smile off his cheeks. “Did you feel how it turned warm out there? Pretty near a spring night.”
“I did,” she said, in the voice she used when one of her students tried to make fun of something serious in class. Aiken seemed younger than her nineteen- and twenty-year-olds but she knew from Kieran that he was in his mid-thirties at least, maybe more, maybe her own age. “It’s yours, isn’t it,” she said.
“What? The shotgun? I told you.”
“I know but I think you’re afraid I’ll say you can’t live here with a gun in your room.”
He put his elbows on his knees and sank his jaw into his hands while he looked up at her, grinning. “Uh, are you the landlady?”
“Let’s say I’m the daughter of the landlady and I try to take care of her. And the landlord.”
“Well, I can’t say that shotgun’s mine because if I did, I would’ve stole it. And if you don’t want it in here go ahead and say so. I mean that. If you think it would upset Mary Frances.”
“Don’t mind me, I’ve just come back to take my pill,” said her mother’s voice from the door. She peeked in.
“Good night, sleep tight now,” Bridget said, blowing her a kiss. When her mother had finished in the bathroom and felt her way back along the hall, Bridget said, “I do want to say something. Not just about what you keep in your room—and it could use a little work, couldn’t it? The rug, the nutshells? I mean about them. My parents. Just come outside for a minute, would you?”
She waited under the porch light, and when he shut the door behind him she led the way across the wet grass to the soft boards of the dock. Behind her he said genially, “I’ve been telling them they oughta put a light right there where the step is. See those lights, those spots they have at the other docks? Those are on account of prowlers.”
I bet they’re because you moved in, she thought, but she said, “All these boats. On this little lake. It’s hardly big enough for boats any more.”
“Oh, I see, it’s smaller than it was?” He used her father’s tone, her father’s rhythm. Her face went hot. He, with his gun and his baby blanket! His fights, his black eye, his stupidity. Mimicking her father.
The water hit the dock’s legs with a clock, clock, and the air had only an invisible slow spray revolving in it.
Bridget turned abruptly up the dark yard to the hutch, where the rabbit crouched in the same position. But the self-feeder was empty, and it had eaten the lettuce as well. For some reason this made her feel like crying. “This poor animal—it’s sick, isn’t it?” she said loudly over her shoulder, but he was right behind her. “What use is it to you out here? It’s not much of a pet. And doesn’t it get cold?”
“Well, right now she’s warm as toast. But if it’s nippy we have her come in.” The smell in his room. “And she’s not mine, she’s theirs, your parents’.”
“Wait a minute. My parents never had a pet in their lives.”
“Aw, come on. Your mother
loves animals. She gave her kid an animal name. Your mother loves this girl.” He brought the animal out, hanging the length of a sweater sleeve, with its back legs tucked up in its matted belly fur, and draped it over his arm.
“My mother loves a rabbit? My mother? That’s ludicrous. She spent years here fighting the squirrels and the deer—”
“That was your father.” Aiken had the rabbit balanced on his forearm and was giving it a heavy stroking.
“Seriously, my parents don’t care for animals.”
“They had a cat hanging around when I got here.”
“They hate cats. My father does.”
“I bet he doesn’t. People who hate cats hate women.”
She laughed in exasperation. “What if they’re women, who hate cats? And what animal name?” Had she ever had a nickname, other than “girlie” or “dearie?”
“Their daughter. Robin.”
“Look, Aiken. I’m their daughter.”
“Uh-uh. The other one.”
“They have no other daughter. They have me and Kieran.”
“The one that died.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean the one they lost. Robin.”
“They never lost a child.”
“Damn, I’m not doing so good here.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Well . . .” He watched her with speculative pity. “You got me.”
“This is unbelievable.”
“Hey, I don’t know. Maybe they never told their other kids. Maybe they didn’t want ’em to know.”
“Them? I’m them! I’m serious, Aiken. You’re not hearing what I’m saying. No such thing ever happened!”
She tripped on the slick roots. He put a hand out but she shook it off. Did he want her to believe her parents had told him a family secret? But it wasn’t true.
“My parents married late in life,” she said sharply, holding onto the tree. “My mother was forty-two when I was born! Kieran was born two years later.”
“Whoa, I didn’t mean nothing. All’s I was saying—”
“There was no other child!” She unclenched her fists. “So let’s drop it.”
Or he was lying to her, for some reason, pretending her parents had told him such a thing?
Or was it possible? Was it possible her mother had indeed told him there had been another daughter? Her mother, not her father. Her father could never make anything up.
What was the matter with her? Already she was imagining that her mother had made something up to tell this man. “So,” she said harshly. “What happened to the cat?”
“Cat?”
“The cat you said was here.” She felt certain there had been no cat.
“Folks up the way took it in. Kids wanted it.”
“Probably to torture it,” she said bitterly.
“Now why would you say that?” he said, with interest.
“Oh, forget it. Forget it.”
“I might. Or I might remember it. Look at that there.” The lilies were sloshing against the bank. “Big old bullfrog.” He was smiling as if nothing had happened, as if he had not made Bridget argue angrily with him until she tripped over a root, about a nonexistent child.
“You have a lot of things you’re very sure about,” she said, her voice shaking. She felt herself digging in, getting ready to wrangle pointlessly the way she did with her brother, and certain students, and Nat.
A half-moon had come out and thrown a glaze onto the lily pads. The water had slowed its tossing. “Well, I’ll tell you a story about this here lake,” he said easily, but with a note in his voice that let her know he was up to something, the way her students often were, wanting to exhibit some cleverness. “A kid got out there in a boat and pushed his friend’s sister in. In this exact lake. Kid had trouble with his dad, had trouble in school, got out there one day and whoosh, there she went.”
To her distaste Bridget was imagining it.
“When?” she said in the practical voice she used to make students account for what they turned in.
“Long time ago.”
“And what happened? Did she drown?”
“Yes ma’am.”
So he had come back here. That was why he was here. “And that was you.”
He laughed loudly enough to wake her parents. “Whoo. Like to have you for a teacher.”
“Why is that?”
“You’re a funny gal.”
“Not so funny. Was it you?”
“No, it was not me. It was a feller I met. It ain’t always me. Every-place I go they want to say, ‘You did time, it musta been you. You musta done it, you’re the type.’”
“You did time.” Of course he had been in prison.
“I did. But I didn’t put no peanuts in the bedroom, your dad did.”
“My dad?”
“He’ll be in there talking to me, and you know him and his nuts.”
Bridget felt a sag inside her. She could see it exactly, her father knocking on Aiken’s door, sitting down in the chair by Kieran’s little desk with his bag of peanuts. Trusting. Not even looking at the shotgun, for fear of being rude.
“I’ll be honest with you, Aiken. I’m suspicious of you. You don’t seem to have a good reason to be living here. It might be you want something from my parents and I don’t know what that would be. Or how you might plan to get it. Maybe you’re planning to drown somebody.”
He made a turn into her path so that she bumped into him. The eyes were right in front of her. He was close enough that when he ran his hand through his hair she could smell the shampoo. She stood still. She couldn’t tell if she was afraid or not. Finally he said, “Some people wouldn’t get away with what you just said. I’ll let it go because you don’t mean it. So I’ll let it go.”
“My parents don’t have any money.” She went on reasonably, like a person with no fear, herself, of being drowned. “Can’t you see, from this house, how they live? They have this house, and that car, and an income that can’t be any bigger than yours. Just one little check that comes every month. But you probably know that.”
“I don’t want their goddamn check.”
“OK, I’ll take your word for it. Why do you live here? What do you want from them?”
“I like ’em.” He had narrowed his eyes so that the exaggerated lashes met.
“You—like them.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you like my brother?”
“He’s all right.”
“Do you like him?”
“No.”
She began to laugh soundlessly. “Oh, God. If you had said you liked him . . .” But at the same time she was thinking of how she might explain Kieran to him, show Kieran in a different light. She could describe the afternoon Kieran had taught her to swim, or the way the scoutmaster had taken back his soapbox derby prize, lifting the silver-painted trophy out of his hands.
“Your brother gives them a hard time. He’s always after them. Can’t do nothing about it but I don’t like it.”
“What’s in your van?”
“Weed. Yeah. Guess you caught me.”
“So I hear you spend time in there.”
He sighed, looking around the dark grove. The air was moving in the firs with a soft ticking. Then he grinned, shaking his head as if he had run out of ways to stall her, and carefully transferred the rabbit to his shoulder, where it laid its ears back and performed a soft scramble for footing. “Come here.”
“What?”
“Come take a look.”
“What do you mean?”
“I like to lie down in there and look out through the trees. I like the view.” He cupped his fingers and wagged them toward himself once, twice, as if he were guiding somebody backing a car. “Come on and take a look.”
“Oh, no way. No, thanks. No.” She folded her arms.
His hand closed over her wrist. He got hold of her elbow with the other hand and pulled her by the folded arm, until she felt the
rabbit press her shoulder with a forepaw to keep its balance. “Let go.”
With his other hand he unlatched the door of the hutch. He eased the rabbit down his arm and in, and started, holding Bridget by the wrist, toward the van. “Wait a minute here, Aiken,” she said. “Hey.” If she had to slap him she would. What would a man like this do, if you slapped his face?
But he let go of her arm, or he didn’t so much let go of it as hand it back to her. He put it against her chest, upright between her breasts, and reached for her other hand and crossed it over so that she was holding the arm like a bottle. Shaking his head, he wrenched the handle and opened both doors into the back of the van.
For some reason, instead of walking away Bridget said, “All right, I will. I’ll sit. I’ll look at the view, only there’s no view.” She hoisted herself up and sat with her legs dangling, while he grasped his lower back with his hands and bent to one side. “Back trouble?” she said. “You can sit.”
“Yeah? I can sit?”
“It’s your van.”
“It’s my van. I maybe stole it, though.”
“Thou shalt not steal,” she said.
“Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house,” he said over his shoulder, walking away. “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass.”
“Where are you going? And it’s ‘shalt.’ ‘Shalt not.’ I bet you’re not even a Catholic.”
“What makes you say that?” He came back.
“Catholics don’t quote. I bet you’re some kind of evangelical.”
“Not me.”
“Lots of the people who work in the soup kitchen aren’t Catholic.”
“Not me.”
“Say the Hail Mary.”
“Come again?”
“Say it.”
“I’m gonna say it for your entertainment?”
“Say the Act of Contrition.”
“You say it.”
“Hey. I bet you don’t have anything you’re ashamed of.”
“If I do it’s none of your business. Yeah, I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed of a lot of things. Yeah, though, see, but if I am it’s my business.”
She swung her legs childishly. She couldn’t help it. “Say it.”
Criminals Page 16