by Jenna Blum
"The last thing Will said to me was, 'He's a good kid.' Then he walked back to the bike, horsed around with Matt for a few minutes, couldn't have been nicer. Broke my heart, you know, because it's just me and him, no particular men, and no nice ones when there are, and we had to pack up and leave that pretty spot of ours a week later, because it was almost June and the owners had a big plumbing job to do so they could jack up the rent for summer." She took a long time sighing—smoke went in and out of her lungs—and I thought that might be the end of it. She said, "You want to sit down on that bench?" and started to walk that way, about thirty steps to the middle of the church yard, but when I asked, "Is that it? Is that the story?" she stopped and turned to face me.
"Don't I wish."
It was the end of Will's visit, and she and her son moved, on schedule, a week later, to her sister's house on the outskirts of Cummington, five or six blocks from Will's house. The college kids hadn't shown up yet, so there were empty bedrooms for them, and the cousins all got along, played Nintendo till their eyes crossed, planned a treasure hunt, and had a funeral in the backyard for a dead hamster. Crystal didn't say and I didn't ask, but it all sounded too idyllic for the fractured, boozy life she'd described. There must have been a lot she wasn't saying, a lot of truth going by the boards.
She lit a wooden match against the zipper of her jeans and held it to the tip of a Camel. "I ran into him at Millie's Place the third night we were living in town." Her face was cloaked in smoke until the whorls rose and broke apart. "He recognized me at the bar and said he'd mailed me a letter a few days before. How'd you know where I live? I was there, he said. Well, I'm gone for the summer from there, maybe the post office'll forward it. What'd your letter say? Give me a call sometime, that's what it said. He asked about my kid. And the usual island stuff. Where you from, what do you do. At first it's like he's coming on to me, until he starts talking about you. A lot. Don't worry, I won't tell you what he said. And you don't want to know either. But what do you expect? You ditched him. He saw you in New York the day before on the street with some guy. You're entitled, right? People don't own each other. And he's entitled to be pissed off. I was pissed off about something or other that night, what else is new? My landlord, my sister, my kid's father, but that's a whole other story. We had enough in common to get loaded. I don't remember a whole hell of a lot of the stuff later, at his house. I didn't spend the night. That's about it. Hard to believe he's dead. They think it was a heart attack?"
But that couldn't have been the end of the story. She had ended too abruptly; I could hear it in the rhythm of her speech, the sudden rushing, the summary. Did she think I wouldn't want to know they'd slept together? Did she think I'd care? Or was she hiding something? Then I remembered: "Why did you call him and apologize?"
"When?"
"A few weeks ago. You left a message on his answering machine apologizing for 'the other night.' What else happened?"
"I thought you don't live there anymore."
"I don't. After he died, I had to listen to the messages. There were some for me."
"When did you hear mine?"
"Yesterday."
"When did he die?"
"A few weeks ago. What else happened that night?"
"I don't remember all the details."
"You remembered enough to apologize a few days later."
"Now I get it." Her voice changed; it got lower and sharper, like an animal growling. "You think he killed himself and you're looking for someone besides yourself to blame. Yeah? Well, fuck you. I've got enough guilt about all the dead people in my life, I don't need yours too." She sprang up from the bench, and I lurched in her direction, reaching for her elbow, her arm, but I missed. I got air. She was moving across the church yard, away from the meeting room toward the church itself.
"Crystal, no, that's not it." But it was, sort of. I ran after her, not knowing what I'd say or do.
She stopped at a set of three stairs leading up to a double door and lit a cigarette. "I don't know why I started talking to you to begin with. I must've felt sorry for you for a minute, or sorry for Will." Smoke poured from her mouth as she spoke, no shape, no direction, just those witchy tendrils. She shot me a look. "How the hell did you know I know him? I don't believe this whole thing is a coincidence. You've been following me or you've gotten someone else to, haven't you?"
Her hysteria calmed me, as did her misinterpretation of the evidence, because it was so far off, because I had been telling the truth. "I told you, I had to go through his mail after he died. He'd written you a letter that got returned." I plunged my hand into my shoulder bag and groped for it. "I've been carrying it around for days, but I may have left it at the motel." I did find it, though, and let her see it. She calmed down; she believed me and softened up. And when she did, I felt terrible for her, getting ensnared in this. "No one knows if he killed himself. If he did, it wasn't in any obvious way. He might've swallowed something, but they can't tell yet. The thing is"—we were standing at the foot of those three stairs, talking almost comfortably—"I hadn't seen him in three months, since I left. You saw him three weeks ago. I thought maybe you had some—some impressions. That's all. I didn't have anything in mind to ask when I found you. I'd given up thinking I would." I was leaving aside her apologetic phone call, unsure what to say about it. But something I said must have touched her.
"He wanted to fuck me," she said quietly, her eyes down. "Or he thought he did. But he couldn't. That's the story." And she added something that surprised me even more: "But not the whole story. The whole story is"—another long pause, and I could almost feel the words straining to come out of her—"I wasn't too nice about it." Said so softly, I almost asked her to repeat it. "I was kind of a shit. I get mean. A lot of times I don't remember stuff I say and do. People tell me. But I remember that. How much more do you want to know?"
"That's why you called to apologize?"
"Yeah."
"He was upset."
"Yeah. He was as drunk as I was. You know how it gets." No pronouns: how it gets. Disavow responsibility. He cried, I made him cry. That's what she wasn't saying. How do I know that? I don't. But why else would she have remembered it, and what else would she have had to apologize for? I couldn't bear to ask. I'd already put her through too much, and it wasn't her fault that I'd left him or that he died, or that he killed himself, if he had.
"I left in the middle of the night. Walked back to my sister's. Only a few blocks. The morning after—or the afternoon after—I got my ass back here. I won't bore you with the details, like my sister and my kid about to divorce me for the three-hundredth time. After a few days on the wagon I called to apologize. I was hoping he wouldn't be home. I wanted to leave the message and get it over with. You know, making a few amends like they say you should. But I guess I was too late with that one, because you're telling me he was dead by then." I nodded. "But no one knows how he died? How does that happen?"
I told her how it happened in Will's case, and about the conversation I'd had with the coroner, and the one I was to have later in the week. Just as I was getting to the end, the double door to the church flew open, released by a tall young man in a tux. He was handsome in an attenuated, Jimmy Stewart–Philadelphia Story way, and professed to be delighted to see us there. He fiddled with rings on the hydraulic hinges to keep the doors from closing, and explained that a wedding ceremony was about to begin, and it was such a beautiful day, everyone wanted the doors wide open. Behind him the pews were beginning to fill, and there was a decorous bustle and hum and a number of long-limbed, blond-haired women in lavender dresses.
We drifted back to the meeting house on the other side of the yard, and I saw Crystal smile for the first time.
"Before and after," she said. "Should we go back and tell them you start in the church in your tux, and you end up in the meeting room with a cup of coffee and an Oreo?"
"Let's let them find out on their own."
"You remember the last ti
me you wanted all the doors open so the sun could shine on your life? I sure don't."
As we walked down the vestibule toward the meeting room, it was too quiet. Everyone had gone. The coffeepots and bags of cookies had been put away. So had the folding chairs. "Shit," Crystal said with great vehemence, "I'm late." She must have seen the clock on the far wall. "I've got to run. I just started a new job." She turned to say something more than goodbye, but I could see she was frantic.
"Go. I'll find you again. And thanks." I made to shoo her away; I didn't want her to feel I'd get schmaltzy or twelve-steppy and try to hug her. "Thanks for talking to me. For telling me what you did." I watched her bolt from the building, and I stood for a while in the empty room. What had happened between us made me feel that we were almost friends: the eerie conjunction of our lives around Will's death, my finding her here today, the moments she had suspected me of spying, the story she had not wanted to tell, the story she had told.
But then I remembered that I hadn't asked her about the dog. She was at Will's house three weeks ago and might know whether the dog was there. I ran out the door, as she had, and jogged back to my car as if I could catch up with her or knew where to find her, but looking at the intersection fifty feet ahead, I realized I didn't know her sister's name or where she worked. And I admitted to myself that she, drunk as she'd been, wouldn't have noticed the dog even if he had been there.
All the things I still didn't know were lining up like the Rockettes or more like suspects in a police line-up, raggedy, unruly, unreliable. I had found the dog and the dog was dead, had found Crystal and she was half-broken herself. And had found Will, in Crystal's story, more alone, more bruised than when I'd left him.
The only thing for me to do was read his diary, yet now I hoped that when I got back to the motel, Henderson would still be out. I wanted to read it alone; it was something private, between the two of us. I didn't want anyone else, even Henderson, to know the depth of Will's pain. Or of my own.
But Henderson was in my room, waiting for me on one of the beds, sections of the Sunday Times arrayed around him like autumn leaves. He apologized for his absence that morning and said that Ginny, who answered when he'd called Will's house looking for me, had passed on the good news about Vicki.
"I forgive you everything if you're in love," I said lightly and flopped down on the other bed, exhausted, depleted, and relieved to see him, even though I couldn't yet talk about what had happened in the last few hours.
"Love? What are you talking about?"
"All right, lust."
"I went out for the paper and a bagel at the crack of dawn, and who should be at Swansea Bagels & Buns, but—Oh, yeah, I got your note. What happened to the dog?" The poor dog was everyone's afterthought, in death as he'd been in life.
"I'm not ready to talk about him. Didn't you spend the night out?"
"In my dreams, Sophy."
"Really?"
"Of course. I told you, I went out for a bagel, and you'll never guess who recognized me in the line for cream cheese."
"Do I know him?"
"No."
"That narrows it down."
"Major house on the bluffs overlooking Chillum's Point."
"Claude Perry."
"How'd you know?"
"He's the only one up there. But he's married. He plays tennis with his wife in public and holds her hand on the ferry. There's a rumor going around that they sleep together."
"I told you, it has nothing to do with love. Or lust. He wants to syndicate my show. He came up to me in the bagel store and said he's been watching the show for years. He has a houseful of guests in the TV biz. Execs. CEOs. He invited me on the spot to breakfast. I'd barely brushed my teeth. I was there all morning. I don't have a contract, but I have three days of meetings next week with these guys. I called you at Will's to let you know where I was, but you'd already left, and when I called here, you were gone. You must tell me where you've been; you look deeply burdened. But before I forget, your stepdaughter invited us to dinner tonight. Said she and her sister want to talk to you about the funeral."
"What could that mean?"
"It means they're contemplating something horrid and they want to prépare you for it."
"What could be worse than a Catholic funeral for an atheist? What do you think I should read tomorrow? Are there any funeral favorites besides Corinthians?"
"Sure, depending on the themes you want to highlight. Miss Manners would not approve, but under the circumstances, you might get away with reading 'Dover Beach' because of the seaside setting. 'Let us be true to one another, for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams something something something hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, And we are here as on—"
The phone ringing interrupted him briefly "—a darkling plain." He picked up the receiver, because it was closer to him. "My dear," I heard him say tenderly, "you had all of us, but especially Sophy, apoplectic with worry. She's right here, I'll put her on. What? No, honey, I don't think she's mad at you."
"I'm not" were my first words to her.
"Are you sure?" Vicki asked.
"I'm sure I want to know what happened."
"My dad says I have to apologize. I have to say, 'I'm sorry for causing so much trouble.'"
"I accept your apology. Did you try to come to Swansea?"
"No, I read about it on the Internet. It was too, far away."
"Where did you go?"
"Nowhere."
"What?"
When she was silent, I thought she may not have heard me. At last she said, "I didn't leave New York. I was at my friend Bettina's. She was hiding me upstairs like Anne Frank in the attic. She has a house like ours. There's a whole floor where no one ever goes, because her sister died and her brother is a summer intern in France. She's in kind of a lot of trouble. I am too. My dad and her parents had this meeting today."
"My heavens. I can see why." I thought of the detectives flying to Swansea and showing up at Evan's door, of the stake-out at Will's house last night, of the pints of adrenaline all of us had secreted. It was enough to make me mad, but I stopped myself. What I had to admit was that my anger was about how we felt, we grown-ups. To Vicki, it was something entirely different. To her, it was about getting our attention; it was a cri de coeur, blood-curdling in its way.
"My dad wants to talk to you."
Before he said hello, I heard him tell Vicki to go downstairs with the other kids. "I'll be down soon. Sophy?"
"What a story," I said.
"I think she has a great future as a novelist or a mastermind criminal. An honorary member of the Lavender Hill Mob. My parents would have shipped me off to boarding school for that. They shipped me off for less than that."
It occurred to me that Vicki's disappearance, for which I had quietly been blamed, had turned out to be something of a practical joke. I was no longer the villainous girlfriend whose silence had led the child into realms of unspeakable danger. I was nice again. Trustworthy again. Kind to small children again. Maybe he would care for me again. But I didn't know in what way I could care for him. That woman I'd been three days ago, the funny one who pretended to be Dorothy and Toto, the sexy one who pretended not to care that her lover's only term of endearment for her was Ducks—that woman had lost her voice. Daniel was speaking now to someone else.
"How are you managing?" he said. "I know it's been absolute hell for you. And I know this business with Vicki was the last thing you needed. Have you found out anything about Will's death? Have you settled on a date for the funeral?"
I gestured to Henderson that I needed some privacy, and he scurried off the bed, carrying his shoes and an armful of the Times to the connecting room. Yet once he closed the door behind him, I didn't know what to say to Daniel, except to re-count some of what I had discovered. It was not nothing, and it took a while to cover the territory, but it was hardly intimate. I could have been telling the sto
ry to anyone.
He listened patiently, asked questions, and was in every way attentive, considerate, well-mannered. He said finally, "When do you think you'll be home?" but the very idea of home was haunted, and I didn't know what to answer. My home wasn't here on the island. But was it there, on the outskirts of his life, in the suburbs of his affections?
"Maybe the end of the week," I said casually. "I should be finished with what I need to do here. If I can figure out what that is."
"The children will be happy to see you. And I shall, too."
"That's all?"
"I can't think of anything else. Can you?" When I didn't reply, he added, "If you want to talk between now and then, ring me. I'll be here."
Clearly he hadn't understood my question, and I wasn't up to saying, I mean, that's all you feel? All you're willing to say? To offer? I wasn't about to write the script for him. The other day, when he'd called me "darling," that was an accident, a slip, something I wasn't likely to hear again soon. "And I'll be here," I said.
"Good enough."
"Not quite."
"Sorry?"
"Nothing," I said, and I'm sure I hung up with him in a state of mild befuddlement. But it would pass and he would slide back to the state of profound befuddlement in which he ordinarily resided.
Within a minute, the phone rang again, and I let it go for four or five rings before answering. There was no one I wanted to speak to except Will. The last phone call he'd made was at ten o'clock four Wednesday nights before. I figured now that he'd gone out afterward to Millie's Place and spent the rest of the night with Crystal. And died after she left. But died how? A heart attack? A seizure? A handful of pills?
The phone call was from someone who had never called me on Sunday: the Eighth Deadly Sin. "How did you find me here?"
"You left a number on your answering machine."
"Are you serious?" I had no recollection of doing so, but with his prompting I remembered that late last night, I called my machine in New York and changed the message moments before falling asleep on Will's couch.