by Edward Dee
“I know that. I was just thinking that maybe she confided in you. Sisters tell each other about their love lives, don’t they?”
“Some, I guess,” she said, and touched the bottle against her forehead, as if seeking relief from a fever.
“But not you two.”
“Blame that on our mother. Maybe if we had grown up together, we could have talked like that.”
“We have a witness who says she saw Winters sneaking into her apartment on a regular basis.”
“There you have it. You don’t need me.”
“You’re not helping, acting like this.”
“I thought you came here to see me. I thought we were simpatico.”
“We are,” he said. The beer tasted creamy smooth going down his throat, better than any beer he could remember. His taste buds were wired, seemingly intense enough to delineate the malt from the hops.
“You have no idea how I feel,” she said.
“Don’t be so sure.”
“Of what, your deep hurt? Your pooch got hit by a car?” Then, after a deep, resigned sigh, she said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
Ryan ignored her. “Gillian argued with Winters before she called you, we know that.”
“She said he was supposed to be on her side, but he wasn’t. She said he was a prick because he was making her take a drug test, and she didn’t trust what was going on.”
“I thought you said she wasn’t worried?”
“She wasn’t. She said it was an insult.”
“Somebody is lying, Faye. They found cocaine in her apartment today.”
Ryan waited; the air was stale and difficult to breathe.
“No!” she screamed, and threw the bottle at Ryan. It smashed against the far wall. “No, no, no! That’s a fucking lie.”
Faye swung her fist at him, and he caught it as he was getting up from the chair. She pulled away, then flopped on the bed and rolled onto her side.
“I agree with you,” Ryan said softly.
She lay there quietly, rubbing her right wrist, her black hair across her face. He remembered the first time he saw her sister, her face was covered by her hair. Ryan sat back down.
“You have to talk about it,” he said. “Talking about it will make it easier.”
Faye was still. Except for the deep contractions of her chest she could have been dead.
“Then you start,” she said, her voice muffled. “You say what hurts you.”
The smell of spilled beer rose from the carpet. Ryan wondered if there was air enough for the grief of two.
“My son died a year ago,” he said with surprising ease to this woman he hardly knew.
“Oh, Jesus,” Faye said. She got off the bed and knelt in front of Ryan. She folded her arms across his thighs and leaned in until she was inches away from his face. “I’m sorry. So sorry. Tell me what happened, please.”
He tried to lift her by her elbows.
“Please, please,” she said, pushing his hands away. “Please, help me. I don’t know how to deal with this. Just tell me I’m not a freak.”
She smelled of cigarettes and a perfume that seemed astringent, more chemical than natural.
“You’re not a freak,” he said. “My son died in a hang-gliding accident in Utah last year. It still eats me up inside.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “Did you hurt him? Was he mad? Not speaking, or something?”
“No. We got along fine.”
“Then why do you feel so bad?”
“Like you said about your sister. It’s about the things I missed. He missed. The things I didn’t say or do. I feel guilty about that.”
“But you didn’t hurt him. You were a good father to him, right?”
“Not as good as I should have been.”
She leaned into him, and Ryan had to hold her to keep from falling backward. Her hair smelled of a fruity shampoo, the same as her sister.
“Like what?” she said. “How were you bad to him?”
He didn’t have to think hard; he was a nightmare multiplex, a dozen horrors playing at all times. He told her about a Sunday morning when his son was eight years old and getting ready for his first mass as an altar boy. Ryan had stopped going to church years before, but he was dressed and ready to go this day. Then the phone rang. He answered it in the upstairs bedroom. It was Joe Gregory, hot on the trail of something he couldn’t even remember anymore. What he did remember was pushing aside the bedroom curtains and looking down into the backyard. His son was looking up at the window, his hair slicked down, his face so shiny it glowed. He stood there, waiting. Looking up. Holding his black cassock and starched white surplice high, so it wouldn’t touch the ground. With those skinny arms. Those big brown eyes. He saw those eyes in his sleep now. Hopeful, imploring, frightened, but still loving him without condition.
“But that’s nothing,” Faye said. “He forgave you, right? He knew you really loved him.”
“When I got home that night he ran outside and jumped into my arms. Telling me all about it. When I put him down he kept holding on to my leg. Hugging it, really squeezing. I looked down at him, and he had his eyes closed. That’s the way he always hugged, even when he grew up, with his eyes closed.”
She put her head against Ryan’s chest and closed her eyes.
“Gillian made me promise not ever to tell this,” she said. “It was our secret. She told me that Trey Winters was her lover. I didn’t want to betray her.”
“You didn’t betray anything,” Ryan said.
“Do you have a picture of your son?” she said.
He took the picture from his wallet. Rip about twelve, wearing a Baltimore Orioles warm-up jacket, the impish smile, winking into the camera, his mouth full of the bubble gum he called his “chew.”
“He looks happy,” she said. “The big baseball player.”
“Biggest Oriole fan in New York.”
“You miss that, right?” she said. “Doing all the dad things, like I missed the sister things. I bet you played catch, stuff like that.”
“Even when he was older. We shot baskets. Played golf. Went to ball games.”
Faye jumped up and ran into the kitchen. He heard her behind him, opening cabinet doors. She came back and stood in front of him, holding a half-empty loaf of Wonder bread, the open end tied in a knot. She handed the bread to Ryan, then picked up the signed Bobby Bonilla baseball bat. With one big step she bounded onto the unmade bed and faced him, swinging the bat.
“Pitch it,” she said.
“No, Faye. Don’t. You’ll break something in here.”
“I don’t care.”
“This is thoughtful, really,” Ryan said, getting to his feet. “I know what you’re trying to do.”
He reached out for the bat and took it as carefully as if it were a loaded gun. He put it against the wall. She jumped down and snatched the bread from his hands, then she walked backward, stumbling over the covers on the floor. When she got as far as the window she threw the bread. He caught it and held it.
“Wait,” he said.
“No, no,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Please don’t stop. This is good for both of us. Play catch with me.”
Ryan threw the half-empty bag of bread back to her. She caught it with her hands way out in front and threw it back with a big, roundhouse motion. At first he thought it was silly, then he decided he would go along, because it would stop her from questioning him about his son. Stop her from breaking his heart. It felt strangely good. A simple game of catch. The bag in the air, yellow and blue circles on the wrapper floating like birthday party balloons, as it passed through the flickering candlelight.
In the quiet of the room the only sound was the pop of a half-empty loaf of bread, caught and then thrown across an open bed by a sad, aging cop and a young woman, in a frayed black slip, who’d been found and lost again.
21
When the red-eye from JFK landed in Phoenix before dawn on Saturday, the pilot announce
d the temperature was 103 degrees. Summer in the desert, he added, what else can you expect? Danny Eumont followed his fellow travelers through the wee-hour solitude of Sky Harbor Airport. The terminal was silent except for the hum of vacuum cleaners running over Indian-blanket carpet.
“I can’t believe you didn’t bring sunglasses,” Lainie Mossberg from Tempe, Arizona, said. “You’d better buy a pair.”
Lainie Mossberg had boarded the flight in Denver, fresh from a taping session for a rock band she managed. In her late thirties, she was the type of woman who’d come into a bar and take a seat under the TV, so men would look her way.
“I’m not buying sunglasses for one day,” Danny said. “Because I’m certainly not wearing them back in New York. Look like some hipster doofus back there. Some West Coast wannabe.”
“You’re going to regret it,” Lainie said.
“I got your regret right here.”
“Let’s see it,” she said.
They were both light travelers. Lainie carried her purse and a small pink duffel. Danny’s only luggage was a black canvas briefcase containing an electric razor, toothbrush, tape recorder, two notebooks, a change of socks, underwear, and a tin of Altoid mints. Not even an extra shirt. He’d booked a room in the Phoenix Hilton but figured he might not even stay the night.
“Is that blazer wool?” Lainie said, grabbing the sleeve of Danny’s jacket.
“Why, the old cattle rancher mentality? I don’t want to start a range war or anything.”
“You’ve got a lot to learn, Eumont.”
She said she’d give him his first lesson on the ride home, a ride he hadn’t offered or considered. But when she puckered her pouty lips into a promise, he was putty. At that moment Danny thought he understood why young men went west.
At the Avis counter, Lainie held on to Danny’s arm while her breasts got acquainted with his elbow. Although he enjoyed the soft pummeling, he wondered why everyone on his flights always chose the same car rental company he did. The young woman behind the counter was far too helpful, patiently describing various auto options to a French couple, who were oblivious of the etiquette of the American queue. The clerk kept squealing, “I love your accent. So cooo-ell.”
She apparently didn’t dig the inherent hipness of the New York accent because her smile disappeared when she handed Danny his contract and keys. She told him he’d find Soto outside. Soto would point him to the Chrysler LHS he’d just rented.
Danny and Lainie stepped arm in arm through automatic doors and out into the exhaust fan of hell. A pure physical shock. The heat was an actual living, breathing thing. Breathing fire. Danny’s shirt immediately attached itself to his ribs. Lainie told him to quit whining, a little spritz of heat never hurt anybody.
They found Soto of Avis sitting in front of a kiosk in a chaise longue. Soto was a tiny bowlegged man wearing a sweat-stained straw cowboy hat, long-sleeved denim shirt, and Kmart jeans stuffed in dusty cowboy boots. He was listening to tejano music and squeezing water from a sponge onto the back of a huge lizard. He introduced the lizard, whose name was Mañana.
“Americans think mañana means tomorrow,” Soto explained, lubricating his leathery pet. “All it means is not today.”
“And maybe not anytime in the near future,” Danny said, suddenly impatient.
They followed Soto along a line of rental cars parked under a metal overhang. “Not good to hurry in this heat,” Soto said. “One fifteen yesterday. Maybe one seventeen today.”
“But a dry one seventeen,” Danny said.
Lainie tossed her pink duffel in the backseat and fumbled in her purse. She told him not to take the freeway but stick to Washington Avenue, a dark wide street lined with factories and car repair shops. Fewer eyes this way, she said. She leaned into the dashboard and inhaled the white powder she’d formed into a straight line. Then Lainie Mossberg’s entire body flew back from the dash as if she’d been shot out of a cannon. It scared the hell out of Danny. Her head bounced off the roof and slammed back against the headrest, and kept bouncing. “Whew!” she screamed, her head bouncing as though it were on a spring. “Whew, whew, whew.”
“I gotta get you home,” Danny said.
“Don’t be so impatient. Whew!”
“No, seriously,” he said. “You need to be home.”
“Don’t you want to know why they call me twin forty-fours?”
Lainie yanked the sleeveless sweater over her head and proved her breasts were large-caliber. In the flicker of the streetlights they seemed unworldly, too shiny and milk white, the skin stretched dangerously thin. Lainie blinked and rubbed her nose. Then she rolled over onto her left side and threw herself across the center console, her head banging into his sore right shoulder. Danny checked the rearview mirror. Lainie unbuckled his belt.
“Let’s wait until we get you home,” he said.
“Can’t,” she said, lowering her head. Her hands felt ice cold sliding down into his shorts.
“I can’t drive like this.”
“Pull over,” she said.
Danny swerved toward the curb, then swerved back. Lainie didn’t seem to notice that she’d banged her head against the steering wheel several times. Confusion reigned as cold hands and warm breath descended. Fully facedown, Lainie squirmed to get into position, her legs outstretched, the back of her feet thudding against the underside of the glove compartment.
“Let’s wait until we get you home,” Danny said. “More room to stretch out.”
“My husband hasn’t left for work yet,” she said.
“Your husband,” Danny said. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and bent her head backward. Her eyes opened, and she looked up at him.
“That’s my hotel, straight ahead,” Danny said. “Right there, next corner. See it? We can go nuts in my room.”
Lainie sat up as Danny pulled under the lighted overhang of the Rio Bravo Inn. He waited while Lainie casually put on her sweater. He told her to meet him inside at the bar; he’d park and register. She grabbed her purse and stepped out. When she was safely inside he floored it and drove away. Lainie Moss-berg would find a way home. She could take care of herself.
Danny wasn’t surprised to see lights on all over the Stone house. No one slept on funeral days. The Stone compound in Scottsdale was a low-slung grouping of stucco buildings set well back off the road behind iron gates, against the foot of a small beige mountain. He stared at the place where Gillian grew up, remembering pictures of her outside in front of the saguaro cactus, wearing prom gowns, graduation gowns, play costumes.
He remembered her pelican story, which he refused to believe. But it’s true, she’d always squealed. She’d said that after a big storm blew in from the west, they’d find pelicans on their property. Pelicans were weak fliers, and they’d get caught up in the strong winds over the Pacific and get carried all the way to the desert. Local people crated them up. America West flew them back to California. After every big storm Gillian borrowed her father’s Jeep and scoured the desert, searching for lost pelicans.
As the sun rose, in the hours before Gillian’s funeral, Danny cruised the geometric streets, talking into his tape recorder. The first thing he noticed was the cleanliness, everything squared off neatly. A strip mall on every block, a gas station and convenience store on every corner. Plants, trees, grass along the highways, somehow growing out of sand. And flat. So flat you could clearly see a traffic light miles ahead.
At Gillian’s high school he took the opportunity to get out and brush Lainie’s makeup off his pants. He walked around the concrete-block school building that covered enough real estate for two city blocks. Underground sprinklers hissed over an inconceivably green lawn. He made a note that the students’ lockers were outside the school, along the outer walls of the building under a small overhang. He could imagine Gillian, a stack of books under her arms, long legs racing to catch her friends, yelling, “But it’s true!”
Back in the car, the air conditioner seemed to be losin
g the battle to the climbing thermometer. Maybe if he kept driving. Everybody seemed to be driving; the freeways were filled with fast-moving cars. Nine out of ten of the cars were white, the drivers hidden behind dark, tinted windows. He whizzed past a road-killed jackrabbit, one long ear stuck upright, waving in the breeze.
The main streets of the Valley of the Sun were endless and arrow straight, flanked by wide, clean, concrete sidewalks. No bums, no vendors, no litter or graffiti. In fact, nothing. No people, no dogs, cats, or signs of life. Just miles and miles of empty sidewalk, houses hidden behind endless block walls. It struck him that except for Lainie Mossberg, the last human being he’d seen was the lizard king, Soto of Avis. Marginally eerie. Where the hell was everybody?
Danny’s sources on the Arizona Republic had told him that the Stone family had opted for a closed ceremony in a private chapel. It was scheduled for ten A.M., followed by burial in the family plot. He drove straight to the cemetery, thinking he’d get a few minutes of shut-eye before the crowd arrived.
The cemetery was situated between a freeway and a cotton field. All the headstones were flat for easy maintenance. Two rows of chairs were set up under a dark blue canopy. He parked beneath an olive tree, cranked the AC to the max, and waited for Gillian. The last time he’d ever wait for Gillian.
Exhausted, Danny reclined the seat back as far as it would go. He was glad he’d picked a big, comfortable car. A short nap would do the trick. Then he caught a glimpse of something on the floor of the backseat. Something pink. Lainie Moss-berg’s duffel bag.
Hoping for an address, he unzipped it. The bag contained dirty clothes, makeup, and hairspray. The side pocket had a tube of lipstick called Pagan Pink and a tightly rolled joint. He sniffed the joint; it had the horseshit aroma of quality marijuana. Maybe he’d check the phone book or just mail it to twin forty-fours. He figured the mailmen would know. He tossed it into the backseat.
He’d just started to doze when a long line of cars followed the hearse around a circular driveway. Danny waited until the very last minute, until the pallbearers reached the bier. Then he got out of the chilled Chrysler.