Don't I Know You?

by Karen Shepard

  He shrugged.

  “How did you get in?” he asked. His dress shoes were soaked and looked permanently misshapen. He’d left the house in them this morning even though it had already been snowing for hours. His closet was lined with multiple pairs of the same shoes in black and brown. She’d never seen him in anything else.

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out the key. “Tina’s,” she said.

  “Okay then,” he said. He shook out of his coat and threw it over a chair. He toed his shoes off and pulled his socks off inside-out.

  He held his hand out. She held his eye and handed over the key.

  “I’ll make tea,” he said, heading to the kitchen.

  It had only been this morning when she’d seen him last, but she felt as if she’d been alone for days. Here he was, someone with opinions and counterarguments of his own. He had a gun. It made her thoughts tumble out of formation like unruly children. She thought about padding by the kitchen door, letting herself out. She thought about staying put and lying about what she wanted to talk about. She could tell him she wanted to elope. By tomorrow, they could be married.

  He came back in carrying a mug for her, a cup and saucer for himself. She watched him sip from the black cup, his fingers too large for the delicate handle. He looked like a trained animal.

  Her heartbeat was thumping in her head. What did she want most? Most people passed their whole lives without even asking this question. He sat on the couch and patted the seat next to him. He seemed to feel there wasn’t a surprising thing she could say, but that was okay because surprises had not been her draw in the first place.

  A strategy she used with the preschoolers came to her. Don’t demand. Ask. Let them think it’s you who need the help, they who hold the solutions.

  Just tell the truth, her father used to say to her.

  “I’m confused,” she said. This was the truth. “And I need your help figuring things out.”

  He sat up like this was some kind of quiz.

  “I need for you to tell me about you and Gina Engel. I need to know why Tina Hernandez would want me to read Gina Engel’s journal. I need to know why you even had it. I need to know what you were looking for in my apartment. I need to know why you’re having me followed.”

  And once the litany was under way, the big question stepped forward as if standing in the wings the entire time. “I need to know that you had nothing to do with Gina Engel’s murder.”

  She could leave him. It was just a bigger version of leaving Matthew. If he couldn’t give her what she needed, she could leave him, and do so without being destroyed. They’d changed her. This certainty of hers had come from them.

  But if he could give her this, there’d be a wedding, she’d have a husband, there’d be a life, a glorious life. Because it wouldn’t be a broken bone that had been incorrectly set, but something rebuilt, stronger than before.

  There was nothing. He was still. He was breathing.

  She opened her eyes and he was weeping.

  She was skeptical. He wept all the time. But he was scared. This was not something she’d seen before.

  He put his cup and saucer down. His fingers tapped against his knees. “I have things to tell you,” he said.

  Her anxiety elbowed aside the comedy of the line. She waited, watching. Watching was a way to learn. Surely the face of the man she loved more than she’d loved anyone would be eloquent.

  He seemed to know not to touch her. He kept his hands laced. He did not hang his head, did not look at his feet. He looked at her. She did not know whether to interpret this as a good sign or a bad one. Sincerity or performance?

  “I met her in May of seventy-six,” he said.

  “Who?” she said.

  “Gina,” he said.

  She nodded. Okay, she thought. So he knew her.

  “Okay,” he said. “Don’t interrupt. I just talk.”

  She leaned back to reassure him that he wouldn’t be hearing another sound out of her.

  “I met her at the bar. At our bar,” he said. He looked past her to the bookcases. “I’m sorry about that part.”

  “Me too,” Lily said.

  The apartment was growing darker. Neither of them moved to turn on the lights.

  “What else are you sorry about?” Lily asked.

  He looked pained. How, his expression seemed to say, had he become the kind of man who caused damage to the people he cared about most?

  “What am I not sorry about?” he said, stirring his tea with his middle finger.

  He was not asking for sympathy. His upset seemed genuine. She loved him. It made her want to pursue her questions more, not less. She owed them that. The two of them were worth at least that kind of rigorous care.

  “Where do I begin?” he asked.

  “The murder part,” Lily said. She was remarkably calm.

  So was he. “I didn’t kill her,” he said.

  She studied him. There were no bells going off inside her either way, but nothing about her insides had relaxed. How would they ever get out from under all of this?

  “But,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

  He was beating on her heart with the heels of his hands.

  He seemed to have lost his train of thought.

  “What?” she said. “What? You didn’t kill her, but? Was there a problem because of your drinking?” she prompted.

  “There’s always a problem,” he said like a disappointed parent.

  She waited, trying not to be impatient with matter-of-fact statements and sweeping generalities.

  He took a breath. “There was a disagreement,” he said.

  The passive voice bothered her. “Between whom?” she asked.

  He glanced at her as if to say that if she kept asking questions like this, he’d never say what he had to.

  “It was idiotic,” he said. “I am idiotic. It was about shirts.” He shrugged, embarrassed.

  Lily looked at him.

  “She was supposed to pick up my shirts at the cleaner, and she didn’t, so I didn’t have a clean shirt, and I had to be somewhere, I forget where now, and—” He looked to the ceiling. “And. So.” He shrugged again. “So there was a disagreement.”

  “Are you using the right word?” Lily asked.

  He looked at her quizzically, as if it were entirely plausible that he was using all the wrong words.

  “Disagreement,” she said. “Do you mean disagreement?”

  He was unsure. “I think it’s right,” he said. “One person thinks one thing, the other thinks something else.”

  “I’m just trying to hurry this narrative along a bit,” she said. “Are you talking about thoughts or actions?”

  He was miserable. She couldn’t imagine feeling as she had felt the other day in his hallway, pressed up against the wall. She couldn’t believe she had thought about running for the door. She couldn’t imagine him committing murder.

  “I hit her,” he said. “Very hard.” He raised his arm across his face, the back of his hand facing Lily. “Like this,” he said. He swung his arm. The air moved across Lily’s face.

  “And like this,” he said. He cupped his hand and swung it back through the space between them.

  Backhanded, she thought. Cuffed. Sentences filled her mind like bricks. She was backhanded. He cuffed her.

  “What did she do?” she asked.

  He was crying. “She was so small,” he said. “What could she do? I am big.” He squeezed his eyes shut and took breaths through his mouth as if he’d been jogging for miles. “I don’t like to think about it,” he said.

  “Neither do I,” said Lily.

  “I wish it were a different story,” he said.

  “So do I,” she said.

  He opened his eyes, as if she’d hit on the heart of the issue. “You see why I was scared,” he said.

  Lily wasn’t sure what the heart of this issue was.

  “Even now,” he said. “You’re thinking you’ll have to lea
ve.”

  He was right. She was. It wasn’t the only thing she was thinking.

  She held up the card with the photo of the rice bowl. “What about this?” she said.

  “I wrote them to Gina’s son. I wanted him to feel not so alone.” He shrugged. “I liked him,” he added.

  “Why didn’t you sign your name?” she asked.

  “I didn’t want to be connected with his mother,” he said. “Selfish. I know.”

  They sat there with the card between them.

  “Without you, I cannot live,” he said.

  She had been thinking the same thing. She’d survive, but living a life where every day she woke up lucky and charmed, as if beneath everything she did or said, she could feel her blood running its roundabout course? That life she wouldn’t have without him.

  She took his hand. He began crying again. She was crying too. It was like after they made love, when they were astonished, when tears were the only available response and turned out to be appropriate.

  “I believe you didn’t do it,” she said.

  He kissed her hand, knuckle by knuckle. He kissed the spot on her third finger where her wedding ring would go.

  It was not just his kisses. She was telling the truth: she didn’t believe it. Though he was capable of it.

  She was going to marry a man capable of murder. It was sitting at the edge of a cliff, feet dangling. It was swinging so high, your bottom lifted from the seat. It was the drastic dip of an airplane before it righted itself.

  It was nothing she’d ever dreamed of. It was nothing she’d known to ask for. It was something she wouldn’t give up.

  III

  September 1988

  ten

  Louise Carpanetti had cancer. Her young doctor had told her that morning in a dimly lit room in the clinic. The Cancer, her mother and aunts used to call it, as if referring to the president. Because the doctor had a soft spot for Italian grandmother types, at first he’d told her a year, maybe more. He’d also told her about treatment: radiation, chemotherapy, surgery. Louise was seventy-three, a widow for forty-four years, a mother for fifty-five, a smoker for fifty-eight. Her gut told her it would be much less than a year, with or without treatment. When pressed, the kind young doctor had agreed. Well. She’d lived most of her life expecting the worst. She wasn’t worried about herself. She was worried about her son.

  She got off the M104 bus on 102nd and Broadway, taking the deep steps carefully. She thanked the driver, checked the latch on her good handbag, and headed west to the apartment on the fifth floor where she lived alone with her son.

  It was an Indian summer day. School started the next day, and the neighborhood kids ran a little wilder than usual, fighting what they knew was coming. The street was swarming with strollers, mothers, and nannies. Dirty, gritty Broadway was getting cleaner and cleaner. When Louise and her Elia had moved into this apartment, you never saw strollers like these—fancy, with sunshades. You never saw nannies. The stores on Broadway were tiny things in a row. A dairy grocery next to a bakery next to a meat market next to a Chinese food shop. Tall apartment buildings next to five-story walk-ups. Apartment hotels with single-room occupants. Now, she could be anywhere. What difference did it make that sixteen-year-old Louise had sneaked out of her parents’ house in Gravesend to join Jewish Elia on the Upper West Side? Her Catholic mother and father and her five Catholic younger brothers hadn’t spoken to her again. She saw them at funerals, where her father would give her a small nod and her mother would look at her and weep. Now, her parents, Elia’s parents, and Elia were all dead, her brothers moved to suburbs she’d never seen. After the war, after Elia died, she’d thought about leaving the city. But what for? Big beautiful houses with nobody there. If you wanted to take a walk, you walked with a squirrel. Everyone lived everywhere. She didn’t feel one way or another about the change. It was change. What could you do?

  The breeze off the river lifted the scarf on her hair. She had to go to the parlor. Her hair was a mess. She would lose her hair, she thought, closing her eyes for a minute. The breeze still smelled like summer, like heat and day-old food, sweaty children, and metal. But there were leaves on the ground already, more turning colors above her. Last winter, the movies had come to their block. Trailers and cables, people and chairs everywhere. No one famous. No one from her magazines. But the whole block, transformed out of winter. The bare limbs of trees dressed in leaves, like her mother’s lacework in orange and gold.

  She was glad for the red light at West End. A chance to catch her breath. She read the flyers on the light post. Lost cats, English classes, guitar lessons, roommates wanted. So much need, so many desires. She felt embarrassed reading about them.

  Her son was sitting in a folding chair outside their building. He was wearing his gray sweatpants, his undershirt, a Yankees cap. Everything about him looked like it needed to be hitched up by the belt loops. The chest hairs over the top of the shirt were gray. He was a middle-aged man. She could see him the way the world saw him—a lost, sad figure. Strangers sometimes looked at him as if looking at a dog she’d assured them didn’t bite. An odd mix of Italian and Italian Jew, the deck stacked against him from the beginning. It’s not your fault, she wanted to tell him. Your mother loved your father, your father loved her back. A child gets to say nothing about who his parents love, for how long or in what ways.

  She reached out and cupped his cheek. He leaned into it and closed his eyes like a cat.

  Charlie, the boy from upstairs, was sitting next to him. In front of them, they’d spread out her comforter with the lilac print. On that, in disarray, some of her things. The wooden turtle whose shell lifted to reveal a candy dish. The Japanese glass ball Elia had brought back on his first leave. “Fishing buoys,” he’d said, unwrapping it in their living room. “Can you believe how beautiful?” he’d said.

  Her nightgowns were spread out as if by a maid. Below them, her knee-highs, toes pointing out like Charlie Chaplin at rest. Over some of the nightgowns, her bras, hooked carefully, stuffed with rolled-up socks.

  The sign, written on a small green chalkboard in Charlie’s ten-year-old handwriting, said: MAKE US AN OFFER WE CAN’T REFUSE.

  Michael was taken with the old Godfather movies. “We’re Sicilian; they’re Sicilian,” he’d tried to explain to her. “His name is Michael. My name is Michael.”

  “Half Sicilian,” she always said. “Your father’s family was from Ferrara.”

  “You’re Sicilian,” he would say.

  Something about the movies felt vaguely insulting, and she thought that maybe watching that violence wasn’t such a good idea for him, but she kept her opinions to herself. They made him happy. What did it matter what she did or didn’t understand?

  Here were her underclothes on the sidewalk. She sighed, scanning the items. “Sell anything?” she asked, trying to guess what might be missing.

  “Lots,” Michael said. He didn’t offer specifics. He unzipped the black fanny pack that was hanging from the arm of his chair and held out a handful of ones.

  She waved at him. “You keep it,” she said. “You did the work.”

  She could feel the cancer in her lungs. His hands were soft and smooth, nothing like the hands of the men in her family—dockworkers and laborers. His hands were like homemades she’d pressed into shape at her kitchen table.

  She wouldn’t tell him about the cancer. What good would it do? She’d figure out how to take care of him after she was gone. Then she’d tell him. Change made him nervous. So did loud noises and rooms that were too quiet, fancy clothes, and most grown-ups. He preferred children. He hated doctors and dentists. He hated teachers. She’d moved their living room furniture around once, and when he’d seen it, she’d had to move it back again. Before she told him anything, she wanted to have lots of information to offer.

  She lowered herself to the stoop. He was whistling. She never recognized the tune. She leaned forward. “How you doing, Charlie?” she asked the boy. His
hair was a rat’s nest of dreadlocks. His father was black; his mother was white. They seemed happy, but what did she know?

  He smiled at her. “Good, Mrs. C. And you?”

  She closed her eyes. Nice boy, she thought. Polite. Too bad about the hair.

  The mornings just after waking were the best and the worst part of the day. For a minute the little paws of cancer pressing on her chest were gone. The images of her insides eaten away hadn’t yet formed. The sounds of the building and the street below were just sounds.

  And then the knowledge returned in a slow march. The nice doctor. The genuine pain in his eyes. The way his fancy wristwatch had beeped and he’d ignored it. She had been glad for him then, was glad for him each morning. She imagined the cancer like a school of those yellow eating machines from the video game Michael liked to play at the Puerto Rican store on the corner.

  She would lie in her bed, trying to keep the remembering from infecting everything. It seemed uninterested in her desires.

  Then, slowly, the sounds of the children going to school made her nauseous. She had lost three babies after Michael, despite prayer after prayer to Saint Anne. She’d been willing to lose more, but Elia had shook his head, sad and heavy, like a horse, and put up his hand like a crossing guard.

  There were the sounds of her neighbors’ water rushing through the pipes, or the heat clanging its way out of the radiators. But the sounds of Michael in the kitchen making his toast, soaking his cereal, pouring his juice terrified her. What would happen? What would happen to him?

  Her whole life as a mother had been spent asking this question in one context or another.

  She thought of what she could make happen. Lying there in bed, Elia’s side of the bed smooth and undisturbed, she made lists in her head. She did calculations with her office-girl mind. She wrote in the air with a fingernail yellow from smoke.

  There was enough money for him, a rent-controlled apartment, Elia’s life insurance and army pension, her savings from years at Weinberger and Sons, Certified Public Accountants, her pension. What had they ever needed? A roof, some food, furniture built to last, a movie a week. La miseria, her mother had called it—a way of life that included malaria, cholera, earthquakes, volcanos, tidal waves. Louise’s life was far from that.