The Tell

by Hester Kaplan

  “Get up,” Owen said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Get up,” Owen commanded.

  Wilton ignored his angry bark, rolled onto all fours and crawled into the bathroom, hoisting himself up first on the toilet, then the sink. He examined his purpling cheek and nose in the mirror. He spoke to Owen’s reflection.

  “I could use some ice.” Wilton ran water in the sink and watched it circle down the drain. “Do you know that’s the first time I’ve ever been punched? Lots have wanted to before, but you’re the only one who’s actually done it. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “I told Anya about the accident.”

  “So you said.” Wilton touched the twisted skin under his eye. “Maybe I’ll even have a shiner. That’s dramatic.”

  “Do you know what she said? She said, ‘Of course. He always chooses himself first, and always will.’ And after that? She could barely talk, she was sick with the truth. Remember the day we were in the Bright and she saw us and fled across the street? It was you she didn’t want to see. You saw her expression. How else does a child look at a parent who’s tried to kill her? She doesn’t want anything to do with you. She wishes you’d never moved here, she wishes she’d never written you that goddam postcard.”

  With Wilton still hanging over the sink, Owen went downstairs. He took off his own coat and put the suede one on. It was luxurious and heavy.

  Wilton stood at the top of the stairs looking down at him. “Tell me you didn’t,” he pleaded. “Tell me she didn’t say that. Tell me.”

  Wilton had been that first shadow in the lungs on the X-ray, the first sound of dripping water behind the wall, the first sniff of mold coming from the basement. Wilton had appeared the first time Mira turned on the television, and he was that electric sizzle haunting the air after the set had been turned off. He was Owen’s first prescience of ruin by the lilacs a year ago.

  “She said all of it. Every word.” He hesitated. “Anya wishes you weren’t alive.”

  Wilton spoke, but it didn’t seem to be at Owen anymore. “Then maybe I should just go. I should disappear and pretend I was never even here.”

  “Yes, why not?” Owen said. “Go all the way. Kill yourself and don’t fuck it up this time.”

  Wilton stared at him open-mouthed. He didn’t have anything to say now. Owen felt disturbingly calm as he left the house, as though the riot had passed through his neighborhood, leaving the damage behind. He let himself into his own house through the back door and waited for Mira in the kitchen. The air was stale, and the tangerines in a bowl on the table wore sweaters of mold. Soon he heard Mira’s footsteps crunching on the snow, and her hesitation as she discovered the door was unlocked. She would have seen the light on but wasn’t sure who was inside. In his rush to the door, he scared her and she ran.

  “It’s me,” he called. “It’s just me.”

  “God, you terrified me. Don’t do that.” She stood at the far end of the yard and looked up at the starless night.

  “Come inside.”

  Her hand was at her chest. She was tight with the slow ebbing of fear, and then her face softened into something that looked like relief. “You’re back?” she asked. “Are you here to stay?”

  “I just wanted to see that you made it home.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t? Don’t go, please, Owen. I’ve told you everything. It’s over now. Stay.”

  But he wanted to be in his apartment in Fox Point on Mrs. Tevas’s third floor. He wanted to go back to where he’d begun when he came to Providence, so that maybe he could see what it would be like to start over again.

  12

  On the Friday of vacation week, the elementary school across the street from the Bright was childless and closed up tight, a bank of snow blocking the door. The front mural was scabbed over with ice. Owen could have made coffee in Mrs. Tevas’s son’s Mr. Coffee and cooked himself something in one of the boy’s pans that George Tevas had arranged by size in the cabinet with all handles pointing in the same direction. But the smells of cooking in the apartment made his landlords antsy, and each time they turned up CNN as though to block the odor and the reminder that it was still not their son upstairs. Owen understood that he was not meant to actually live too much up there. When he’d been at work, George had come upstairs to clean. It unnerved Owen, but how could he stop the man?

  He had become a temporary regular in the Bright in the two weeks since he’d left Mira, but it was no friendlier a place to him than it had been. He picked at his muffin, a dry mulchy thing left over from the morning that the woman at the counter had chosen for him. She’d witnessed his bullying of the man in the army jacket weeks before and she wasn’t going to forget it. Enjoy, she’d said, serving him the rock tipped on a plate. Anya’s classmate, who was often in there, was studiously icy. There were other spots he could have gone to sit in his self-exiled state, but being here was some kind of way to stop time while he waited for Anya. Fox Point had welcomed him back in its perfectly indifferent way. He hated and loved the neighborhood for its reminders of his darkest times when he’d found himself shivering in the heat, hungry but unable to eat. The coin-op laundry had puffed endless sweet steam, and the houses were covered with the octopus suckers of satellite dishes. Not much had changed.

  On the corner where he and Mira had first met, a dog without a collar sniffed a snow bank. It was a summer night back then, Mira on her gearless bicycle trying to track down the kid with the sticky fingers. I was ridiculous, she’d later said, and admitted that she’d been showing off for Owen, trying to look tough and determined. Last night, she’d called at 2:00 a.m., the time completely lost to her until he’d pointed it out. In the apartment below him, the television had still been on, keeping its twenty-four-hour vigil of the wars. From the way Mira’s voice echoed, he imagined she was up on the third floor, but he didn’t ask; he didn’t want to know. She said she hadn’t seen anyone in days, not even Wilton, who hadn’t come by and whose house was often dark; she hadn’t been to Brindle or anywhere. She didn’t ask Owen to come back; he sensed that she was waiting him out in her penitence. He hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after the call, suffering his own form of withdrawal from her. He’d been sitting in the Bright for hours, and the day had slowly drained away down the slushy gutters.

  Anya appeared in the noisy doorway and made her way over to her friend. Owen had been waiting every afternoon to see her, and to see how far the lies he’d told Wilton had spread. Had Wilton talked to Anya and begged her forgiveness for a crime she didn’t even know he’d committed? But she looked untouched and beautiful, laughing at something as she unwound the thick wool scarf from around her head. Ruin had fallen all around her, but she didn’t know it. Her father was not on her mind. When she and her friend looked over at Owen, blood rushed to his face. He could only blink dumbly at Anya for how he’d used her once again to get what he wanted. His nerve grew weak at the knees—he didn’t know what he would say to her. She came over and rested her hands on the back of the vacant chair where he’d put his suede jacket.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “Please tell me that Wilton didn’t send you to spy on me.”

  “He didn’t send me.” Owen’s mouth was dry.

  “But isn’t this his coat?” She gave the thing a quick tap.

  “No. He gave this one to me.”

  “But it’s just like his, right?” She looked out to the street. “The other day, when I saw both of you in here, I couldn’t come in. It was too much. I can’t have him following me or waiting for me, just lurking around for a glimpse. It’s too creepy. It’s like my own father’s a stalker.”

  “Have you talked to him recently?”

  “Not in a while, a week and a half, two maybe? He calls, but I’ve had exams. I ignore him.” She looked out at the street. Owen couldn’t tell if she felt guilty about dodging her father. “You think I’m being ridiculous about all this, about him, don’t you. You think I should just be nicer, m
ore forgiving.”

  Owen imagined Wilton convalescing in his bed at that moment, considering what to do next, where to go. “Will you sit for a minute? I need to talk to you.”

  “Now?” She glanced back at her friend. “We were just about to study.” She lowered her voice. “She thinks you’re hitting on her, by the way. Supposedly you’re always here looking at her, and once you even threatened to beat up some guy for her?”

  “No on both counts.”

  “That’s what I told her. You’re married, for one thing. And Wilton calls you the Peaceful Diplomat. He told me about some fight you broke up at school, how you made the kids shake hands afterward, and now the boys are friends.” She might be leery of her father, but she’d begun to quote him, a thread of attachment growing tauter.

  “It wasn’t exactly brokering peace in the Middle East,” he said. “I didn’t do anything except tell them to cut it out.”

  Anya smiled, ran her fingers over the jacket, then pulled out the chair and sat. “Okay. I’m sitting. What’s up?”

  “I left Mira.” Anya’s face drew back in surprise. “I’m living here now. In an apartment at the end of the block.” He decided not to add that he could see her apartment from his own.

  Anya picked at his forlorn muffin. “Your leaving doesn’t have anything to do with what we did, does it?”

  “We didn’t do anything.”

  “We kissed.”

  “We were drunk. It was nothing.”

  “Don’t be an asshole. If you’re married, then a kiss is something. Even if you’re not married, it’s something. It was something to me.” Her mouth pinched tight and she started to get up.

  “Look, you’re right. I’m sorry, I am an asshole,” he said, and touched her hand. “Sit, please? I left because of Mira’s gambling. I left because she wouldn’t stop going to the casino and playing the slots, and she’s in trouble. I left because she’s been lying to me.” Why did he want her to know all this?

  “And you’re telling me this because?”

  “Because I don’t have anyone else to talk to.” He hadn’t known it was true until he said it; he was without friends. He stood and reached for his coat. His movements were jerky and abrupt; he was fighting with himself. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. Just forget it. I have to get out of this place. I’m sorry.”

  “God, relax. Take a deep breath. Just hang on for a minute.”

  Anya went to speak to her friend, who threw another convicting glare at Owen. When she and Owen left the Bright, Anya took his sleeve and pulled him across the street to her apartment on the second floor. The dark stairwell stank of cat piss. In the living room, sprawled on the careless furniture, her two roommates watched television. One of them was Peter, the man he’d seen Anya with that day outside the Bright. He was wearing the bumblebee hat and a suspicious look. The guy was in love with Anya, and she was offhanded with him. The other roommate, Diana, exuded shatterproof tension. They were all med school classmates. Anya led Owen up another set of stairs that ran behind the dirty kitchen; it was clogged with empty plastic shopping bags and old newspapers. Her room was a small square, deeply angled under the eaves. But it was a girl’s fantasy in many ways—he knew this from reading student stories entitled “Where I’ll Live”—with satiny pillows, fluffy comforters, framed pictures, scarves, beads, candles half burned, and a hairy white rug. The air smelled of cheap vanilla. Had Wilton seen the room with its listing walls, he would have insisted that she get a different place—preferably one she could stand up in, and one that wasn’t a firetrap. In his house, she could have her own floor of rooms.

  “This is the only spot where I can actually stand up straight,” she said, posing in the center of the room as her head touched a tasseled pyramid of pink and green silk hanging from the ceiling. Her single bed was against one wall, under an eave and pushed into the corner. When Owen sat at her desk, the back of his head hit the eave’s sloping wall with a solid thud. Anya, who lay on her side on the bed because the angle of the ceiling made anything else impossible, laughed as his sinuses bubbled and his eyes shivered. The pain made him strangely more attuned. He noted the dip between her shoulder and hip, a deep, powdery swoop that made him feel the exhilaration of sledding down a steep hill. He thwacked his head again to make her laugh more, and to see and feel more. He felt the weight of his body in the chair, the long length of his legs pointed at her. He smelled her—bookish, salty, and faintly like pine.

  “Is Peter your boyfriend?” Owen asked.

  Anya smirked. “I wouldn’t call it that exactly.”

  “What would you call it then—besides none of my business?”

  “Unclear. Sometimes we sleep together, but I don’t want a boyfriend. They take up too much time.”

  “He seems to think otherwise.”

  The way she wrinkled her nose made him remember how young she was. The conversation stalled in the bedroom’s intimate air. They barely knew each other. Owen forced himself to look away from her laundry slinking over the sides of a basket. He picked up a silver-framed photo by her bed—a man, a woman, four boys, Anya. They appeared enviably ordinary in front of a white garage with a basketball hoop. Anya’s mother, the woman who’d had a child with Wilton—that alone was extraordinary enough to consider—was a middle-aged athletic-looking blonde in a polo shirt tucked into baby-yellow bermuda shorts. One arm was around her beefy husband’s middle. The sun gave his bald head a paternal glow. Anya’s brothers were all bones and huge knees, grinning in braces, long shorts, and chunky sneakers. She stood behind them, her height—Wilton’s long body—the one thing that set her apart from the others. If this family had come to the pond when Owen was a kid, he would have made them take him home with them at the end of the summer. They were perfect, lots of white teeth and tanned forearms.

  “That’s my family,” Anya said, reaching to take the photo back from him. She named her brothers and angled the picture away. Owen knew she was protecting herself in some way from him. “I miss them.”

  “I’m sure you do.” In a second, I’ll say what I need to say and then I’ll leave, he told himself. He wasn’t sure where to rest his eyes—they kept moving back to Anya.

  “Can I ask you something? Something Wilton told me about you?” she asked. A square of red silk hung over a lamp, and the glow that hit the highs of her face made her look fervent. “He said you were in a restaurant once and the woman you were in love with was shot in a robbery. He said you charged the guy with the gun, but it went off and hit your friend. He said you were holding the woman when she died. Is that all true?”

  The only truth was that he’d put his hands under Caroline’s head so her hair wouldn’t get dirty on the sticky tiles.

  “What did you say to—?” Anya asked.

  “Caroline.”

  “What did you say to Caroline?”

  Her name in Anya’s mouth made Caroline seem alive, if not right in that room, then in some other city: all had turned out well. Owen felt a flutter of panic that he couldn’t remember what he’d said to Caroline. Her eyes had stayed open as her body grew heavy.

  “I said, ‘I love you.’ I said, ‘You’re going to be okay.’” He didn’t say either of those things, and anyway Caroline would have known they weren’t true; it was there in the way she hadn’t looked away from him. Maybe he’d said nothing.

  Anya blinked determinedly. “I’m sorry. That’s just an awful story. I don’t know how you ever get past something like that.”

  “Maybe that’s not the goal at all.” Owen said.

  When someone downstairs left, the house shook. Owen watched a plane thread through the evening sky. Anya’s cell phone rang, and while she didn’t answer it, she kept an eye on the thing. When it rang again a few minutes later, she showed him it was Wilton and turned her phone off.

  She gave Owen a sheepish look. “I don’t always pick up.”

  Wilton’s presence, caught there in the phone on the bed, prodded Owen with urgency. �
�I want to tell you the truth,” he said.

  “About?”

  “Look, I didn’t love Caroline,” he told her, “and she didn’t love me. I don’t know why I told you otherwise. I didn’t do anything to protect her, and I didn’t say any meaningful last words. I didn’t tell her she’d be okay. I pissed myself and cowered. That’s the real story and the real me, not your father’s account.”

  “Why would he make it up then?” she asked, angry.

  “Because he wants you to believe people are more admirable than they really are. That he is more admirable, that I am, too. That people won’t ever let you down or do wrong by you or have bad motives. That even tragedy makes a good story. He knows it’s not true, but he wants you to believe people don’t do terrible things to each other all the time, that we’re not all cowards when it comes to saving others.”

  “Who doesn’t want to believe that?”

  “I’m not sure I believe it anymore.”

  “I think you’ve just forgotten.”

  Anya inched closer to the wall to make room for him on the bed. She asked him to lie down with her. The soft mattress closed in around them like a hand. He wasn’t aware he was crying until the freckles on her neck blurred and drifted. He needed to shut his eyes and pretend he was floating on his back on the pond. His hair fanned out on the surface. Anya, like water, swayed against the nerve endings on his scalp. The bed dipped and turned. He told her he was imagining swimming at the pond and described the place to her. She said she’d like to see the real thing some day, maybe take a swim there, too. He moved his face to her ribs, and through the cotton of her top, her breast fell against his cheek. The sensation was of a passing sunfish, a change in temperature, a shifting current. He stirred his hand in the water and took a sip of it. Anya touched his forehead, the bridge of his nose, his chin, and he was diving, invited in by a pond dweller. He was under, with the pressure against his eyes and ears, and he heard his heart walloping away. For an instant, he was perfect.