Love and Death in the Sunshine State

by Cutter Wood

  As part of the plea agreement, Bill was required to show the exact location of the body, and when the confession concluded, he was driven out to the island in an unmarked Crown Victoria. He led the way to the beach, followed by a group of deputies, a SWAT team, a number of reporters, and the spokesman for the sheriff’s office. Taking small steps, because of the shackles, he led them to a pavilion where he and Sabine had often watched the sunset together, and he pointed to the ground. They dug four inches at a time, running everything through a metal sieve, and late that afternoon, they uncovered a Converse sneaker. A forensic anthropologist arrived the next morning, and during the course of the day Friday, with brushes and fine picks, and with the help of two graduate students, a skeleton was carefully removed from the sand. It was transported to the office of the medical examiner in Sarasota, and based on comparisons with her dental records, it was quickly identified as Sabine Musil-Buehler.

  I watched the video of Bill leading the deputies to the body again and again, and I listened to the confession enough times that I could recite whole sections of it from memory. I knew that the anthropologist, inexplicably, wore the same gardening gloves as my great-aunt. I knew that Bill wore socks beneath his sandals and that as he was being returned to the cruiser, one of the detectives picked a burr from his clothing. I knew the syncopated clacking of the stenographer in the background, and I knew when Bill would reach across the microphone, drowning out all the voices with the jangling of his cuffs. I knew the sigh of the assistant state attorney, who seemed to understand exactly how the questioning should proceed but not why. But more than anything, there was one moment a few minutes into the confession that always made me stop the tape. It was the moment just before the murder. Sabine had begun to put her clothes on. Bill followed her out of the bedroom. She sat on the couch tying her shoes. The entire conversation had taken place in the past tense, and the attorney wanted to know what happened then, how did the murder begin, and suddenly Bill slips into present tense. “I lose control,” he says, and the past ceases to be past.

  On the beach, I met again with the reporter from the island paper. She had her ball cap pulled down, and even though the case was at a conclusion, she spoke in rapid sentences, as if she felt she was still on deadline.

  “Bizarre,” she said, looking out at the water. “That’s how I would describe it. He buried her under the pavilion where they’d always watch the sunset. I’m sure you heard the confession, the way he described why he chose the spot. ‘The least unexpected place,’ he said. If you go down there and look around, that pavilion sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s the only thing that catches your eye. If I’ve killed someone, do I put the body where someone can find it, or where no one ever will? It’s crazy to bury her there.”

  “Then why do you think he did?”

  “I keep asking myself that question. It’s the absolute worst place to dispose of a body. I don’t know. Sometimes I think he wasn’t trying to get rid of her. Sometimes I think he wanted to know exactly where she was.”

  We stood to leave. She took off her hat and ran a hand through her hair.

  “You heard what happened with Detective Gisborne, I’m guessing? He’s retired, you know. He and his wife were supposed to fly to Europe. They’d been planning the vacation I don’t know how long. The morning their flight was supposed to leave, Cumber confesses and leads the deputies out to the beach.”

  “Did they go to Europe?”

  “What do you think?”

  It was a Saturday when I finally made my way to the county jail, and the road was busy with an estate auction. In the clusters of cars, I drove back and forth along that stretch of highway three or four times before I saw a small sign indicating the way to the jail. The road ran straight for a time, then turned abruptly and crossed a set of railroad tracks, where a tattooed man in a flat-brimmed ball cap was walking without haste in the general direction of Tampa. Then it followed an embankment of gypsum, covered in fine yellow grass and wildflowers. Through the moss-draped oaks, a few low buildings like barracks appeared briefly, flashing white in the sunshine, then vanished behind the greenery. At last, a wooden sign directed me to a parking lot, and a long barrel building with chain link over its windows and a door at either end.

  The line was short. Very soon, I was given a number and waved through the metal detector into the room beyond. Two aluminum benches ran the length of the space. At intervals on the walls, a series of metal boxes was mounted, each numbered and containing a screen about the size of a sheet of paper, and a heavy plastic receiver of the kind one used to find in public telephone booths. As I waited, the room began to fill: women mostly, mostly young, some alone, some with children. At exactly nine o’clock, the screens blinked gray, and each person sat up and took the receiver off the hook. I took up my own receiver, and the screen in front of me flickered and showed Bill Cumber.

  “You know,” he said, and I knew that he was speaking of Sabine. “In the long run, I don’t think it would’ve ever worked out.”

  The white farmhouse still sits on Dodge Street in Iowa City. The neighbor still collects towels at the end of each semester, and launders and folds them and stows them in the cab of his truck. He is planning to have a big sale, he says, but he doesn’t know how much to charge. The Realtor is still trying to buy the neighbor’s property. She wants to tear down both houses and put up an apartment building. Everything is still in its place, except that Erin and I no longer live in that house. I couldn’t bring myself to go up the stairs the last time I visited—from the street, I could see a big screen playing football in the living room, and a jersey draped over the railing of the porch—but as I stood there, I remembered one afternoon when a woman had appeared at our front door.

  Erin was at work, and I was at my desk, and for a long time I didn’t hear the gentle knocking in the other room. The door was open, but the woman, tall and stooped, hadn’t wanted to intrude.

  “I used to live here,” she said. “Do you mind if I look around?”

  Out on the street, a man in glasses sat in an idling car while she walked from one room to the next, saying nothing, touching nothing, only angling her head this way and that.

  “It’s just like it was,” she said. “I lived here till I was six, then we moved up to Prairie du Chien.” She put a hand on the wall of the living room. “Even the walls are the same color.”

  She made it back to the doorway. The man in the car was watching us closely, but she seemed unable to cross back over the threshold, as though there were something she wanted to express but she didn’t know what it was.

  I said, “Do you have fond memories?”

  “Oh.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Some good, some bad.”

  The electronic bells begin to toll at the church on Pine Avenue. It is almost dark on the beach. The joggers’ shadows keep pace alongside them, and the wind blows in for no good reason except to bring the smell of salt and fish. The terns have lined up along the water, looking west, and a few boats crash impatiently across the swells, and all at once, the couples stop to wait for sunset. Here and there, a cloud is touched with orange, and along the horizon to the north and south, the pale-blue cumulus stretches out in a line, like cutouts of an endless pilgrimage.

  Bill sits in the pavilion rubbing his eyes with the backs of his wrists. His skin is pale, and his lips are white and cracked. He has a backpack on the bench beside him, and he cradles an open can of beer between his legs. He has his eyes on the sunset, but he hardly sees it. She is there, directly beneath his feet. His mouth moves. He is speaking very softly. Of what? To whom? If someone were to stop him, he couldn’t say.

  He knows he should go home, eat some dinner, take a nap. He knows a million things he ought to do, but he can’t think of any reason to do them. Now would be the time to escape. And now, and now. Instead, he smokes one cigarette after another and spins the strike wheel on his lighter.

  There is a woman. Slightly broad-shouldered, she stands w
ith her feet set apart, like a dancer or a gymnast, or like someone slightly angry. I’ve seen her at rush hour on the platform opposite my own, her hair hanging down across her cheek as she reads a book, turning the pages with a quick rasping sound, not looking up as the train squeals into the station and disgorges its passengers, not looking up until the last minute, when, with a little leap—and jeté—she slips between the closing doors. At midnight, driving down the back roads of Pennsylvania, with the rain coursing out of the sky, I’ve seen her between flicks of the wiper blades, in the dented sedan going the other direction. She’s the woman one glimpses, the woman one sees reflected in mirrors, the flash of hair in sunlight, the outrageous laugh that rings in a crowded restaurant and never stops ringing.

  In my dreams, where the architecture is arranged not in accordance with physical laws but by the edict of feelings, I leave a college class and step into the grove of sequoias I so often imagined as a child, or the pool where I once learned to dive is now in the middle of an expressway full of parked cars. Sabine no longer appears to me, but if the dream lasts long enough, this other woman finds me there. She sits next to me in the back of a van eating unripe mangoes, or she does the dead man’s float while I swim laps. She leads me through a home that seems to dissolve at its edges into jungle; or in a motel in the mountains, she sits by a window writing a letter while I lie in bed watching her hand move slowly across the page. The sinews of that hand run straight to my heart, and I know with a sort of wistful regret that I must throw over whatever life I have been living and stay here in this room and simply be in love with her forever. I rise then and walk to her, and draw the hair back from her face. She begins to turn her head, and as if my vision is unable to bear the weight of my own desires, the colors shift, the shapes crumble, and I am awake again in bed.

  The density of life insists upon coincidence. That my grandfather should die, that I should go home to make my peace with him and instead find Erin, that two lovers in Florida should fall one night into a pointless argument, and that sometime later the man should bury the woman’s body near a motel where I once stayed, these are matters almost purely of chance. And yet by virtue of having occurred in my life around the same time, these disparate events become part of the same story. A fire takes the shape of the person describing it, and the very breath and texture of life lies in the simple work of trying to understand how one day relates to the next. It has not gone unrealized by me that as I fumbled so earnestly with the story of Bill and Sabine, I was also undertaking a not unrelated investigation into my own life. In point of fact, perhaps, nothing has been more at the forefront of my mind as I assembled this account than the day-to-day experience of my own snuffling attempts to be pleasant, attempts that, over the course of time, cohered into a real and actual woman, a set of pots and pans, a houndstooth couch, and a small but bright apartment on a treeless street in New York City.

  I know that the figure who attends my dreams does not exist, never has nor will, and yet there are moments with Erin—she is a thousand miles away, or maybe she has only stepped behind the shower curtain, or we are on the couch, beneath an old orange blanket, her head against my chest, her eyes closed, my own eyes closing, too—moments when I am afraid to draw back the curtain, afraid to wake her, when I must hold her head tightly to me because I feel that no sooner than I see her, she will disappear. In a very real way, this book, which I have written merely in the hopes of understanding what it means to love another human being, has been composed for her, in the moments when she was sleeping.

  The world is replete with beautiful things. Lilacs perfume the garden, tractors plow the field, the pillows have been fluffed, a soft rain falls along the coast; there are newborn calves, ferny creeks, songs of melancholy and of innocence; the eggs are fresh, the cream is cool, a woodpecker hammers in the hickories; the canoe noses in the reeds, looking for a place to moor, and a rocket ship plunges through the vacuum of space; the factories promise silk and steel, the horizon promises the night; there are avenues of corn where a child can walk till dark and not see another human soul, and avenues of wristwatches and purses down which we stroll to the art museum to see the exhibition on Le Corbusier; in winter, there are fires, in summer, winds, and in spring and fall, the geese fly home beside the moon and wake a thousand miles of lovers. We must fly to those we love. Anoint them with oil, adorn them patiently with laurel and bay. That I could have been better. That this yearning might snub oblivion. That I would be judged by the tenderness I now feel and by nothing else. This is the hope. This is the wish imparted by my hand, as it grazes your shoulder, in the moment before we wake.

  Cutter Wood was born in Central Pennsylvania and received his BA from Brown University, where he was awarded prizes for nonfiction and poetry. Wood completed an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa in 2010, during which he was awarded numerous fellowships and had essays published in Harper’s and other magazines. After serving as a visiting scholar in creative nonfiction at UI and the University of Louisville, Wood moved to New York. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

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  © 2018 by Cutter Wood. All rights reserved.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This is the story of a woman’s disappearance in 2008, but it should not be regarded as the complete and unedited truth. Any number of events have been left out; names have been changed; the fullness of the moon has been reconstructed; human beings have been collapsed into composite characters; certain scenes have been shifted and condensed while others, which occurred with a pace more conducive to the story, were allowed to remain relatively intact; and I have relied on my own imperfect powers of apprehension and comprehension, on the narrative norms of our culture, and on the vagaries of memory. Add to this the essentially amorphous nature of language, and the truth—that outrageous and delightful hubbub—can seem very far away. And yet, other than chapters 8 through 15, which include my fictionalized account of events, this book has been based on that truth.

  eISBN 978-1-61620-826-4