Red Light Run

by Baird Harper

  “What?” he said. “What’s so funny?”

  “You are, Raymond. You’re an absolute joke. I can’t have those poor people worrying over some crooked old sponge.”

  Bello yanked the drapes shut. “If you don’t stop this,” he said, “I’ll . . .” His pink eyes shook in their sockets, then jumped away.

  “You’ll what, Raymond?”

  His gaze settled along the far wall. A leather tool belt full of screwdrivers and claw hammers hung from a hook behind the easel.

  “Tell me,” she said. “What is it exactly that you’ll do?”

  //

  The coming days passed in preparations. A meeting with the appraiser, a man to fix the railing, another to finish wallpapering the dining room. On Sunday, she drove to her storage unit where she kept all the furniture her ex-husband had inherited from his mother. A cache of antique lamps, end tables, and Oriental rugs Mona had won in the divorce, a late-stage windfall after Leonard threw his public fit on the lawn. These were items she didn’t actually want to live with but which dressed up the houses she intended to sell. But when she got to the storage facility and raised the big door, her unit was completely empty.

  At the front desk, the clerk shrugged. “Sorry,” he said. “The cameras in that area haven’t been functioning all week.”

  “But did you see an old man skulking around?” Mona asked. “With wire-rim glasses? Always wringing his hands?”

  “Ringing what now?”

  “It would have been in the last day or two,” she said. “This man has been trying to threaten me recently.”

  The clerk motioned to the bank of screens on his desk, half of which played static. He leafed through a ring-bound log. “No one’s mentioned anything to me,” he said, “but if you think a crime has been committed, it’s best to call the police.”

  //

  As she drove toward the Lowerys’, Mona wondered whether she’d underestimated him. If he’d keyed her car and stolen her staging furniture, was it not also possible that Raymond Bello had snipped her brakes? She felt suddenly afraid that if she didn’t slow down heading into the light she too might be killed at a sleepy suburban intersection.

  There was a rumor going around that Sonia had been complicit somehow—traveling too fast on that wet street or talking on her phone—in some kind of hurry, people made it sound, to get herself killed. And maybe she had been culpable. Maybe she’d seduced the minister to begin with. Maybe the cordial young trader wasn’t so much to blame. Mona pressed the brake cautiously, wondering what people would say if Bello had sabotaged her car.

  Yes, they’d say, but was she not also complicit in her own death?

  But then the light turned green and her thinking changed, and she turned, no longer bound for the Lowerys’, but headed south into the trendy half-urban town that bordered the city.

  Leonard answered the apartment door in stretch pants and a neon hoodie.

  “Are you running a five-K or something?” she asked.

  “Mona,” he said, already exhausted, “you can’t just show up here.”

  She pressed into the girlfriend’s apartment, down the dim hallway full of movie posters to where a pair of Leonard’s mother’s lamps bookended a yellow leather couch. “Okay, phew.” She scanned the room, noting also some familiar end tables, and the padded Victorian bench.

  Leonard stalked onto the red Persian rug. “These were my mother’s things, Mona, and you weren’t even using them—”

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “This stuff,” he continued, “it’s got sentimental value, to me.”

  “I said it’s okay, Leonard. I’m just relieved that—I don’t know—I thought this crazed man was . . .” She swiveled to take in the whole ridiculous apartment, Leonard’s mother’s antiques mixed with the girlfriend’s kitschy Hollywood memorabilia, until she found the girlfriend herself, clad in her own sporty outfit, staring back across the breakfast bar.

  “Hi, Mona,” the girl said, not unkindly. “Sorry about the B and E we pulled on your storage unit.”

  “That’s okay, Tess. I’m actually relieved it was you guys.” It surprised Mona to hear herself forgiving them so quickly, but they looked so stupidly disarming in their Day-Glo jog wear. Plus, she felt disoriented again, as if she had crashed at that intersection, then stumbled over here like some dazed amnesiac. And for a long moment she did seem to have lost her memory, just a woman consuming the present without all its ugly contexts. Are these my friends, she wondered. Could this sweet-looking young woman be my daughter? And who is this sporting fellow with the salt-and-pepper goatee? She felt her ribs for damage, her forehead, her teeth. Then her history came reeling back—the long motherless childhood before these years of privilege, marriage, parenthood, divorce. She looked sadly upon her ex-husband. If only, she thought, he hadn’t called me a “stupid slut” for all the neighbors to hear.

  “Do you need something?” Leonard asked.

  Mona put herself down on the leather couch. “I’m feeling poor.”

  Leonard scoffed. “Poor? Well we both know that isn’t true.”

  “Leonard,” said the girlfriend.

  Mona slumped back into the couch’s deep fleshy clutch. “I mean that I’m feeling a little endangered, I guess.”

  “Endangered,” Leonard repeated.

  “I’ve been at the Lowerys’ house all week, helping them through this nightmare, and there’s this awful man there who’s trying to sabotage me.”

  Tess set a water glass in front of Mona and sat down beside her. “Which man?”

  “Oh God,” said Leonard, “not the handyman again.” He turned to Tess. “Mona’s been warring with this guy for years.”

  “Oh,” said Tess. “You mean Mr. Bello?”

  Mona, as she sipped, turned to the girl. Water fell down her chin onto her blouse.

  “When I was little,” Tess explained, “Sonia Lowery was my babysitter.”

  Mona wiped her mouth. She felt speechless. How, she wondered, had she not known her ex-husband was shacked up with a girl who’d grown up in Tower Hill? “Why in the world,” Mona said, hearing her voice balloon with astonishment, “would Sonia tell you about her parents’ handyman?”

  “I used to beg her to tell me all sorts of things,” Tess answered. “Like ghost stories and stuff. And the creepiest story of all was about a creature from the lake that crawled out of the water at night and put on a suit of human flesh and broke into kids’ rooms to steal their tooth fairy money.” Tess paused, her eyes lifting ponderously toward the ceiling. “Or maybe it was the teeth he wanted. I can’t remember. But the creature’s name was definitely Raymond Bello.” Tess pronounced the name with a disquieting emphasis, as Sonia must once have done. “It was just a story,” she continued, “but imagine being a little kid hearing this tale over and over, and then one time, when Sonia’s mom was supposed to come pick her up at the end of the night, this random man who wasn’t her dad came to the door instead, and she called him Mr. Bello.” Tess snapped out of her recollective trance and came shrugging back into the present. “It’s just so sad. I don’t believe in the death penalty, but I hope they hang that guy.”

  “He got eight years,” Mona said.

  Leonard made a face. “Not exactly capital punishment.”

  There were more details to add, Mona thought, about the time she met the killer herself or about the lawyers’ attempts to make Sonia complicit, about Hartley Nolan’s fancy college degree and Sonia’s penchant for wayward ministers. But these people weren’t part of Tower Hill’s grapevine anymore. They weren’t entitled to it.

  “I heard he’s a terrible alcoholic,” Leonard said.

  Tess popped off the couch. “No, wasn’t it the wife who had the problem?”

  “Maybe that’s it,” Leonard agreed. “Yeah. So, it’s actually ironic then.”

  If Mona had wanted to tell them anything, she’d have told them that the Nolans actually seemed like good people. I once showed them a hou
se they hated, Mona could have said, and they were perfectly nice about it.

  But when she looked up, Leonard was performing a deep knee bend and the girl had propped a leg on the arm of the couch. It was apparently time to run. A siren blared from some unknown distance. The perils of the city loomed close. Dangerous people were everywhere.

  Mona laid her hand on one of the stolen end tables. “Is it too late,” she murmured, “to call the police?”

  //

  And then she was in her car, sliding through a rough neighborhood, graffitied and loitered upon, criminals on every corner. The brakes were on the verge of failing, she was sure. She felt dizzy and endangered. Her car still smelled of turpentine. She lifted her phone to her ear. “Liz,” she said, “did you know about this nonsense with your father?”

  “Which nonsense?”

  “The girl he’s shacked up with. What do you mean ‘which nonsense’? She’s younger than you are!”

  “Tess is harmless,” Liz said. “At least she’s getting him back into shape.”

  Mona thought of the creature Raymond Bello, suited in human flesh, hoarding children’s teeth. She thought of his phlegm on her windshield, a wad of shining alien ectoplasm, and of his claws raking the panels of her car. “It’s disgusting,” said Mona. “Poor Sonia. Do you realize people have tried to make her complicit in all this?”

  “Complicit in all what?” her daughter asked.

  “And the man who hit her. You should’ve met him, Liz. He’s actually quite decent. He’s the type of man I wish you had found—”

  “Oh, Jesus. Seriously? Mom, you sound totally out of it right now. Are you okay? Do you need me to call someone?”

  “The police maybe. But first I’m going to try to evict him myself.”

  “Evict who? I don’t understand. Is Dad trying to move back in?”

  “Did you know this story?” Mona asked. “About the handyman?”

  “Which handyman?”

  “Please stop being coy with me, Liz. You used to play over there with Sonia. Did she ever say anything about stolen teeth?”

  “Mom, seriously, you’re not making any sense right now.”

  “Would you have even told me if there was something to tell?”

  “I do think I’m going to call someone, Mom.”

  “They’re too blind to see the trouble he is. It’s up to me to cast him out.” Mona looked up at the road, surprised to find herself still on it. A red light waited in the distance. She took her foot off the accelerator.

  “Mom . . . ?”

  The traffic light. It was time to stop. Mona pressed the brake. It felt loose. It didn’t feel loose at all.

  CAUGHT IN THE CHEMISTRY

  He was about to speak, Allie could tell. He was about to make one of his suggestions, which she would then ignore. She was already ignoring it, whatever he was about to say. Andrew’s expression said enough—his worried brow, his slowly opening mouth.

  He’d been following her around the house all morning, helping locate her phone and purse, handing her the keys to the Range Rover. He’d listened to Allie announce that she was really going this time, in the car, because what was so hard about driving to the grocery store and back? Then Allie went into the garage and sat in her car. She put the keys in the ignition, adjusted the seat, the mirrors. She could feel her husband eavesdropping from the mudroom, his lean shadow on the open door. She adjusted her seat again, looked for her sunglasses. Where the hell were her sunglasses? So she got out again and went back into the house and sat down on the couch to read a magazine instead.

  Andrew hadn’t been in the mudroom after all. His shadow had been the coat rack. He’d been upstairs getting dressed, but now he was coming back down the steps with his anxious brow, his slowly opening mouth.

  “I can tell you’re struggling with this first anniversary,” he said in the quiet, halting voice he now always used when making suggestions. “Forget about the store. It’s time for you to visit the grave.”

  The Grave, Allie thought, with capital letters. This was how people rendered the memory of her sister. The Grave. The Day. The Spot. A series of vaguely ominous phrases they used—everybody used—to talk around the details of Sonia’s death.

  “You could even visit Victor while you’re down there,” Andrew added.

  “Visit him?” she asked. “Victor didn’t like visitors when Sonia was alive.”

  Her husband pressed forward into a lunge. He’d developed a habit of performing light calisthenics during their conversations. “It might actually make you feel better,” he said. “Both of you.” Everything that came out of Andrew’s mouth lately was an invitation to feel better, to better oneself, to self-help. What about seeing a psychiatrist, he’d ask. How about reading a book about the steps to recovery? What about meditation? Let’s shake things up with a raw diet! You could start running again. Yeah, running is what you need. Don’t you miss running? You should go for a run! But it was only Andrew who took these suggestions, with his charity races and his weekend yoga, his self-improvement manuals cluttering the house.

  “I’m the one who lost a sister, Andrew. Why can’t you support me in a more conventional way? Like other men?”

  He looked startled by this. “What does that mean?”

  She wasn’t certain what it meant. But her husband was standing in the living room in capri pants drinking a kale shake, looking healthy and organized to such an alarming degree that Allie was beginning to view it as an act of aggression. What had happened to the man who’d once hollowed out the center of a Slim Jim with a power drill in order to make a straw with which to sip his beer? “It means,” she said, “that my loss is looking an awful lot like your midlife crisis.”

  This of course wasn’t fair. And perhaps, she thought, Andrew wasn’t entirely wrong. Allie could barely recall the funeral, the burial not at all, sick as she’d been with shock and guilt. Most of what she knew of those events had been relayed to her in secondhand reports—the nice eulogy she’d apparently given, the overwhelming turnout of old friends despite the long drive to Wicklow, the questionable decision by her parents to go with an open casket. The only true memory she possessed was of the moment during the wake, while looking down upon her sister’s body, when she realized someone had stolen the wedding ring off Sonia’s finger.

  It was possible, she began to admit, that her grief was stagnating because she couldn’t envision the concrete signifiers of Sonia’s death—the plot and the headstone, the cemetery that Victor happened to own. And so, later that morning, when Andrew was in the shower, she left a note on the table that read, Sorry. You’re right about this. I’m walking to the train station now. Tell the kids I’ll be back tonight.

  //

  She stood on the Metra platform trying to imagine what it must be like to throw oneself in front of a train. Just a month ago, another person had done himself in one station to the south. He was someone Andrew knew, a friend of a friend whom Allie recalled driving his Ferrari convertible in the Fourth of July parade with a bunch of Cub Scouts hanging off the sides.

  In downtown Chicago, she got a big sugared pretzel in the station, took two bites, and gave it to a homeless man. Then she boarded the Prairie Stater, choosing a car with a group of young Amish men. Always there were Amish on trains, even when Amish country was nowhere close. It had something to do with technology. A refusal of some kind. At some point in these young men’s day they would ride in something horse-drawn. They would churn something. Allie could understand it, the need to refuse. She hadn’t driven a car since Sonia’s death. She’d tried to get over it, but every time she got behind the wheel of her Range Rover she felt herself turning grim with fate, a precursor to some awful roadside mess.

  “Are you Amish?” she asked the young man who sat down beside her.

  “Man-onite, actually,” he said, a lascivious smile cracking through his face. “All man. All night.”

  Allie turned around. In the seat behind, another young man in a h
ooded sweatshirt was filming her with a small camcorder. “We’re punking you,” he explained.

  “Is it working?” she asked. She turned to the boy in the seat beside her, his long bushy sideburn coming unstuck from his jaw. “Do you feel anything? Because I don’t feel a thing.”

  The boys got up and went to the back of the train car to rethink their strategy.

  Allie opened her purse for a mint, discovering a slender paperback that Andrew had left inside titled So You’re Grieving, Now What? But it was the memory of her sister that kept Allie from reading any of Andrew’s manuals. Sonia had been too self-possessed for such bluntly prescriptive help. The younger sister, yet someone to look up to. Exotically beautiful with dark hair and green eyes, but bored by most boys’ attention. Declining invitations to homecoming or prom, but secretly promiscuous on the side. A smart person, but with lousy grades. A woman in possession of a jogging stride Allie had spent a lifetime trying to emulate, but without the least interest in joining the track team, in joining any team. In these ways Sonia had always been casual with herself, careless even, but never with others, and never so reckless with her own life as to engender real concern in family and friends.

  Allie flipped through the book to a page where Andrew had left one of the twins’ holographic bookmarks. Chapter 7: It Wasn’t Your Fault.

  The train lurched into a lower gear as a decaying campus of stone buildings drifted past the windows, an old but regal-looking penitentiary, like a forsaken college. She imagined him—the man who killed her sister—getting out of jail someday and living the rest of his life just fine, maybe even making his incarceration into a point of distinction on his résumé. After my time at the University of Chicago but before my tenure at Grassland, I got into business junking cars. That was about all she knew of him, that he’d gone to a nice college. An older couple on their block had a daughter who’d known him there. A years-ago economics class together, something. Others around Tower Hill knew him more directly. Friendly. Soft-spoken. Sober even.