Don't I Know You?

by Karen Shepard

  Michael got his jacket and went out in his slippers. Louise couldn’t tell if anyone noticed.

  The officers lingered. One of them carried the broken china into the kitchen and came back out with the dustpan and hand broom. The other righted the coffee table.

  Here they are, Louise thought. Tell them what you know.

  “He’s not dangerous,” Muriel said. “Just a little troubled.”

  “Who isn’t?” one officer said, sweeping.

  “You should meet my brother,” said the other.

  Everyone smiled, and the tension continued to drain from the room. Michael was odd. He was eccentric. He was a disappointment to his mother. He wasn’t a murderer. Everything would be fine. They’d be okay. They always had.

  The officers left. Louise watched from the window. Steven was back on his stoop, watching the cop car, and the cops. How long had he been there?

  Her son was like a toy train she was trying to keep on its tiny rails. She was exhausted. It was exhausting.

  Muriel was next to her. Louise put her head on her friend’s shoulder. She didn’t think Muriel would recognize Steven. Still, she said she needed to sit, and led her back to the sofa.

  “You need to get help,” Muriel said.

  Louise bent to pick up a teacup piece the officers had missed.

  “For yourself, and for Michael,” she said.

  Louise didn’t say anything. It was her special talent.

  “I’ll call the doctor tomorrow,” she said. Deflection, distraction: other things she was good at.

  Muriel left, and Steven was still there. Michael came home and passed her without a word, closing the door to his room firmly if not loudly. Steven was still there. She almost expected to see his mother sitting next to him. They’d both been gone for years, but in another way they’d both been there all this time, waiting for her to come out and play.

  Michael didn’t come out of his room for two days. He dragged the tiny kitchen TV in there. He had his music. He had his cereal boxes. She came home from the store or the laundry and found evidence that he’d emerged. A bowl of picked over grapes on the coffee table or an unwrapped packet of cold cuts on the counter. At night in bed, she heard him moving around the apartment.

  The first night, she went out to the living room and he wasn’t able to look at her. He just sat there. When she asked if she could sit with him, he didn’t say yes.

  Steven was on his stoop both nights. She found herself thinking that God was offering some kind of deal, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. Who did she think she was, making deals with God?

  Muriel got tired of Louise putting her off, and hand-delivered her to the doctor. He filled a prescription for morphine, writing out the dosages in block print. He reminded her about hospice, about social workers. She nodded, even wrote things down.

  The morphine gave her headaches, made her feel like she was moving when she wasn’t. Even though Michael wasn’t talking to her, she worried that a mother on morphine made him nervous. She took three doses and then stopped. The symptoms of cancer or the side effects of drugs: what difference did it make? Everything was a version of pain.

  She called from the pay phone at the coffee shop on 112th and talked to Miss Samantha Cook and told her what she knew. Her dime ran out. She fished out another and called back. Louise was plain and clear. She tried to sound rational and intelligent. She tried not to cry when asked why she’d waited so long. She could hear the woman taking notes on the other end. Things to check. Muriel had said she had to let the professionals do their jobs. This wasn’t what Muriel had meant, but it seemed to Louise that the principle applied. She described what she’d seen. What she thought it might’ve meant stretched between herself and the young woman like a rope with any number of uses.

  The trial was a week away. Miss Cook wanted to meet with Michael.

  Louise faltered for the first time during the conversation. She hadn’t imagined that, though she understood it was stupid that she hadn’t. What had she thought? They’d hear her out, let Benjamin Engel go, and never bother any of them again?

  She agreed to bring him to the office the next day at three. She replaced the handset, opened the booth door, and sank to her rear end. Maybe she was dying right here, right now. Why not? It made perfect sense. When had she been more ashamed?

  thirteen

  The frightened waitress had called the ambulance. The paramedics had taken her to Columbia Presbyterian. The emergency room doctor had admitted her. Things were happening. The phone call had made her life less her own.

  Muriel was there. Michael wasn’t. She was going to die without family.

  “Where’s Michael?” she said.

  Muriel came to the edge of the bed. The top of Louise’s hand was sore. There were tubes and bandages. Machines making their noises. The whole thing seemed like too much fuss.

  “He’s home,” she said. She saw Louise’s face and added, “He did the right thing. He said to call when we knew something.”

  “What is there to know?” Louise asked, closing her eyes again.

  Her friend didn’t answer. The woman on the other side of the curtain was moaning softly. Louise nodded in her direction. “How long has that been going on?”

  “She doesn’t know she’s doing it,” Muriel said. “She’s pretty out of it.”

  “That’s better?” Louise said. She sat up. She hunted around in the sheets for the nurse’s bell.

  Louise had never seen Muriel at a loss. “I must be in bad shape,” Louise said.

  Muriel tried unsuccessfully to change her expression. Louise was moved by the attempt.

  The nurse arrived, a young woman with dark red hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “I need to get outta here,” Louise said. “Be a good girl and get my clothes.”

  The nurse and Muriel exchanged looks.

  “You’re where you need to be,” Muriel said. The nurse nodded, glad to have someone who seemed to know what she was doing on her side.

  “I’m dying,” Louise said. “I don’t have to die here.” She struggled with the bars on the side of her bed, then gave up and tried to swing her legs over them. A foot got stuck. The hospital gown twisted.

  She turned her eyes on Muriel, her best and only friend. “Help me,” she said. And then she was crying, for what she had done and for what she knew about herself. Had she brought this down on herself, or had it been handed to her? And this death coming for her: whose responsibility was that?

  They wouldn’t let her leave until they were satisfied that the situation at home was adequate to meet her needs. Louise asked Muriel what they cared about what her needs were. What did they care where she died? Muriel told her to humor them, which made Louise know her friend was humoring her.

  And so, hospice. Less than a month after the young doctor had given her the news, her own bed pushed aside to make room for a hospital one. IV stand, oxygen, monitors. A nurse qualified to give sponge baths and dole out morphine lined up to come and go a few hours a day. Referrals for specialists in emotional support and pamphlets about family groups, other people in the same little boat of misery. All of it paid for by insurance.

  Gerli, the—Filipino? Singaporean?—nurse was smaller than Louise, but lifted her from wheelchair to bed with an ease that made Louise nervous. She made competent Muriel seem irrelevant.

  Michael hadn’t come out of his room. Muriel had knocked as they’d passed, saying it was only them, but he hadn’t responded, his music playing softly behind the closed door.

  She’d been in the hospital for four days. Had he been in his room the whole time? The house smelled different. As if he’d been eating out of cans for four days. He probably had.

  Muriel told her that neighbors had been filling their freezer and fridge with ready-to-go dinners. Even the unfriendly girls downstairs. The thought of other people feeding Michael made her dizzy with grief.

  Had Miss Cook tried to get in touch with her? Had she talked to
Michael? She sent Muriel away, thanking her, telling her to come back later, promising her she would rest.

  She lay in her at-home hospital bed, Gerli taping tubes here and there around her. What kind of woman gave herself to the dying? Louise guessed she should admire the behavior, but she didn’t. It angered her.

  Today was Thursday. The trial began on Monday. She hadn’t given the lawyer her phone number, but she had given her name. Had she called? Had she talked to Michael?

  “I need the phone,” she said to Gerli.

  Gerli stared at her. She didn’t speak English all that well. Louise wondered how much she’d understood. “Phone,” Louise said, making dialing motions with her finger, holding a fist to her ear.

  “I understand,” the tiny woman said. “No phone.” She pointed to the pillow beneath Louise’s head. “You sleep.”

  And as if she were some kind of fairy or witch, Louise did.

  When she woke, it was dark. The room was hot. Apparently Gerli believed in heat. And humidity. There were two metal pans filled with water steaming and hissing at either end of the heater. Louise recognized them from her kitchen.

  She felt worse than when she’d gone to sleep. Drugged, thick. Her eyes were sore.

  Michael was there.

  Seeing him made her happy.

  “How ya doing?” she asked.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on the last time she’d seen him, and holding that plastic puzzle cube she’d given him the last time she’d gone to the hospital, for her gallstones. He liked puzzles.

  “You want to talk?” she said.

  “Not really,” he said. He wasn’t being rude.

  She tried to guess what time it was. Late. Almost early. The sky was that blue.

  “Steven’s been coming around,” he said.

  The thickness in her head cleared. “Yeah, I saw him,” she said. Like they were talking about the mailman or the plumber. “You talked?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “What did he say?” she asked.

  He shrugged and she recognized her own gesture. What had she given him? What would she leave him with?

  “He lives in New Mexico,” he said. “He works in a mountain bike shop.”

  “New Mexico,” she repeated.

  “He liked bikes,” he said. “He seemed okay,” he added.

  Her head was foggy again. She wasn’t sure what this conversation was about.

  “He said he had been wrong,” Michael said.

  “About what?” she asked.

  “He said the worst thing wasn’t that his mom was gone.”

  Michael must not have heard right. Of course that was the worst thing.

  “He said the worst thing was that he never knew anything.”

  Michael seemed uninterested in what she thought of the comment, but just like that, Steven went from being an image of Michael to being an image of herself.

  “Could you open the window?” she asked.

  A channel of cold air worked its way through the room.

  “His dad’s lawyer’s looking for you, he said. He said you called her.” Michael’s face was like none of this had anything to do with him.

  She thought about lying. After all this, she thought about lying to her only son. Amazing was one word for it.

  So she told him the truth. She told him about the phone call from Gina. How, if she was being really really honest, she had to admit that she’d probably known who it was.

  He frowned. “How could you know?” he said. “Those kind of sounds?”

  “She said my name,” she said.

  He was quiet. Then he said, “Still.”

  He wasn’t acting like someone talking about a murder he’d committed. He was trying to make her feel better. But she couldn’t be sure. Why couldn’t she be sure? Her heart was breaking.

  “So why didn’t you call anyone?” he asked.

  “Telling the truth is hard,” she said. It was the truth.

  He nodded and raised his eyebrows like she’d said something remarkably smart.

  “I told the lawyer,” she said. “She wants to talk to you, go over what you know.” In the midst of her self-hatred, she watched him for signs. Of what? What did she know about the signs a murderer gave out?

  “Sure,” he said.

  Louise closed her eyes. She was on her deathbed manipulating her son. And she was worried about what he’d done?

  Miss Cook came to the house on Friday. Outside, the sun was staggeringly bright. It was colder than it looked. Brown and red leaves fell from the trees.

  She was wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater, and some makeup. She looked too young to be a lawyer. Or too young to be any good. She was blonde and fit.

  She said she’d grown up a few blocks away. She shook their hands, even Gerli’s. She told Louise she was sorry about her illness. She included Gerli in the small talk. She was kind to Michael in a matter-of-fact way, and Louise felt judged and chastised. She said to call her Sam.

  She suggested that she and Michael talk in the living room. Let Louise get some rest.

  Once, Louise heard laughing. “What are they doing?” she said to Gerli.

  Gerli looked up from her magazine. “Talking?” she offered.

  Louise realized that she had no idea what would happen next. The girl called Sam could go away and never come back or lead Michael away in handcuffs.

  She appeared at the door alone. Michael was in his room, she said. She was holding a yellow pad.

  “Thank you,” she said. “For calling.” She said that Benjamin wanted her to express his gratitude.

  Louise had heard that the inmates at Rikers Island could hear the jets taking off and landing right over them.

  “You did the right thing,” Sam said.

  “What did he say?” Louise asked, her heart lurching and rocking in its little cage.

  Sam shook her head a little. She would check things out, talk to her partners. She’d be in touch.

  The whole thing had taken less than an hour.

  That night Michael sat with her. Across the small room, in the armchair that had been Elia’s mother’s, he sat with his hands over his knees.

  She had a low fever. Her vision went from clear to cloudy with what started to seem like the regularity of breaking waves. Gerli seemed unsurprised. She pointed at Louise’s head. “Brain,” she said. “Little bit swelling.”

  “It’s okay,” she said before leaving for the night, and in the strangeness of the night, they believed her.

  Outside, it was raining. No thunder or lightning, just heavy, heavy rain, coming straight down. The trees darkened and bowed, the last of their leaves falling wetly to the ground. The sky went from washed-out green to cloudy gray, and then something darker. Louise had no idea what time it was.

  Sometimes he talked, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes she heard and understood him, sometimes she didn’t, her mind lost in the predictable wanderings of morphine, illness, and age. She chose not to bore him with the details. Elia had always wanted to tell her his dreams. In a man otherwise so reticent, she’d found it an unappealing habit. She was glad that his early death had spared her his aging.

  “What did you tell Sam?” she asked.

  He tilted his head—an odd and giant bird. “What do you think I told her?”

  “What you knew?” she suggested.

  “What I knew,” he said.

  There wasn’t anything in his voice.

  Go ahead, it said. Ask me what you want to know.

  “Did you kill her?” she asked.

  Her eyes were closed, and there was silence from him for so long that she thought she might not have spoken out loud. The rain made its metallic noises against the fire escape. Water poured through the drainage pipe loud as a waterfall. There was the smell of wet earth and waste. Up above, past the birds and monkeys on their high perches, the snakes coiled around limbs like thick, brilliant bracelets around native a
rms, the swarms of insects veering their way between branch, leaf, and flower. Past all that, a small patch of sky, white and flat, too bright to look at.

  Michael was next to her. She opened her eyes. The sadness on his face was like pain.

  “You think I did,” he said.

  Answer him, she thought.

  She reached out and held his finger with her hand. He pulled away and wiped at his face.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been such a mess,” he said, stepping away from the bed.

  She’d never heard him sadder. His face was a vast field of defeat.

  “I gotta go,” he said. His voice sounded like it did sometimes, an animal pacing a cage.

  “Oh, stay,” she said, her voice full of longing.

  He shook his head sadly. “I gotta go,” he said again, as if it were all the vocabulary he could manage.

  Sit up, she thought, her eyes closed, trying harder. Get out of this bed and tell him what he’s been for you.

  She said his name. She opened her eyes. She was alone.

  In the morning, he was gone.

  He hadn’t left a note, but Gerli was holding the coffee can from the kitchen where the fifty dollars used to be. “We call someone,” she kept saying, and Louise kept agreeing, though neither of them moved for the phone.

  A fist closed around her heart. What had she done? What had she brought upon herself? This and other moments that were coming. And when it was her turn to leave this world she’d be like Gina: She’d know who she wanted to talk to and what she wanted to say. And he wouldn’t be there.

  His whole life he’d been waiting for her to show him that he was damaged, that he inspired nothing but shame. And now she had. She didn’t care what happened to Benjamin Engel. She didn’t care what Michael had done. That was the truth. He wouldn’t be there. Now or later. She would die without him.

  “You want see his room?” Gerli asked.

  She shook her head. His room would look the way it had always looked.

  IV

  Memorial Day 1972

  fourteen

  The weather was cooperating. The picnic blankets and lawn chairs were spread and set on dry ground not yet covered by summer ants. The sun was warm. The breeze was light. The clouds were big and white. Memorial Day: everyone enjoying a reprieve from their regular lives. Nothing unusual about it, but still, they felt blessed. Or at the very least, lucky.