The Tell

by Hester Kaplan

  Owen sensed Wilton’s profound absence, too. It was nothing he could explain either or confess to her, but it was like a sound or smell that you don’t notice until it’s gone. And then you realize the sound wasn’t ever the wind, or the smell of the ocean, but all along it was someone breathing close to you.

  Mira had been desperate to come, and now she was desperate to leave, pulling him away by his hand. Her breath fluttered; she lost her way and had to turn them around. She stopped to look at a child sleeping on a bench, an adult’s coat thrown over him for a blanket. Back in the car, Owen slowed to look at the stand of pine trees across from the main entrance. The temperature had risen into the sixties. The woods were an untouched boundary, striking, fully green in the winter, an instant of antidote, dripping. In this moment of unexpected beauty, Owen saw that Mira’s fear was fully his now—Wilton was nowhere.

  When they turned onto Whittier, the street was jammed to the end with a line of idling cars. Another pulled up behind them, boxing them in. Owen’s hands levitated from the wheel. Mira inched up in her seat. She’d called Wilton’s cell and house phone over and over, knowing that if he were home, he’d answer. He never liked to let a call go, because who knew what it might offer or ask? And it could always be Anya. The notion that Wilton might not pick up because he couldn’t, and that this traffic had somehow to do with him, hit both of them. But they didn’t hear what they expected to hear outside: radio squawks, the orchestration of rescue or resuscitation. They heard kids laughing instead.

  In the bulbous back of a minivan in front of them, two heads and four hands appeared, two little girls waving wildly, sticking their fingers in their ears. Mira waved back, her thumbs in her ears, her fingers fluttering. She wagged her tongue. Owen loved her for this. She made a quacking duck out of her thumb and forefinger. Three balloons lifted into the blue. There was nothing tragic going on here—unless pink balloons were a distress flare—nothing at all to do with Wilton. The world went on no matter where he was.

  Mira got out to see what was happening and came back ten minutes later. “It’s a birthday party. Alice Jessup’s great-grandaughter,” she said deliberately, determined to get the tumble of generations right. “Kids everywhere. The truck that was delivering one of those inflatable bouncy things got stuck in the middle of the street, wedged right between the cars on either side. Snapped off the side mirrors and then couldn’t move. It’s really something, one of the best driving fuck-ups I’ve seen.” His wife, the archivist of abysmal Rhode Island driving stories. “Wilton’s not home.”

  “You looked inside?”

  “No. The key wasn’t there, but I rang. Anyway, you know he’d be outside watching the action if he were home. These little kids would thrill him. You’re going to have to back up if you ever want to get out of this. It could be forever before they get that truck out. They might have to airlift it—or cut it apart with the Jaws of Life.”

  She instructed the cars behind him to back up. She stood at the intersection directing traffic, this resolute woman in red running shoes, this mayor of the street. No one knew this neighborhood better, no one felt they belonged here more than she did. She waved him back like he was any other car, and he drove around the block to park closest to the other end.

  When he walked back up the hill, children and their parents milled around the street examining the wedged truck in front of the house. Many were shedding sweaters and jackets and looking for somewhere to dump them. A small pile grew on the steps up to Alice Jessup’s. The season was prone to freakish spells of warmth and people drank it up. Tinny music played in Alice’s backyard. The truck driver was a stooped kid, miserable and disbelieving, his lower lip hanging slack. His partner sat in the passenger seat of the truck smoking, as if to say none of this was his fault, he was just waiting for quitting time. The driver kept touching the seams where his truck met the parked cars. The side of the truck announced Partee Tyme!

  “Tough squeeze,” Owen said.

  “Yeah. Seems like it.” The boy took off his Friars cap in the universal sign for bafflement and whacked his knee with it. “I hate this fucking neighborhood. These streets, they’re ridiculous, too narrow.”

  “Definitely not designed with trucks in mind.” The kid looked too young to drive anything. Owen took a closer look at him.

  The kid glanced at Owen and then quickly away. But Owen had seen enough of his face to know that he knew him. Not his name at that moment, but some vague sense of where he’d sat in Owen’s first classroom years earlier. And what did the kid remember of him? That he was a mess that year and sometimes stared at nothing for long stretches, that he lost his way when he was talking, that his pain was catching and the kids couldn’t wait to escape from the room. Owen wanted to tell the boy now that there wasn’t much a person couldn’t get past if he wanted to, that this day would pretty soon be shrunk to almost nothing, a speck to keep in a drawer or a pocket. But the kid was speaking into a cell phone now, and he’d turned his back to Owen.

  The inflatable castle had been unloaded and put up in Jessup’s backyard and an occasional child careened against its walls. A blindfolded girl swung a plastic bat at a piñata with murderous intent. The yard was dotted with mounds of melting snow. He couldn’t know if Alice upstairs was aware of what was going on below her, if she heard or sensed anything, or if the kids had been dragged into the medicinal stink of the sickroom to pay homage to the world’s oldest human who probably didn’t even look so human anymore. Maybe ancient Alice was the best entertainment of all, the real magic of a very long life.

  Mira appeared next to him. “Look,” she said, excitedly. “Look at Wilton’s. The packages that were there before are gone. He’s back.”

  They rushed across the street and knocked on his door. The grinding and shrieking of the truck being extracted from the parked cars was deafening. Amused police and a crowd of gawkers and kids watched the tow truck try to drag the Partee Tyme! truck backward. Owen expected to see Wilton’s expression—part seduction, part calculation. Maybe he’d already be back in his filthy bathrobe, his face smooth from a shower and a shave and smelling like the expensive oriental grapefruit soap he’d once given to Owen. “Everyone wants to smell like a fruit salad,” he’d said. Owen’s heart beat apprehensively. He would take the man aside and apologize, he’d say he’d lied about it all. When the door opened, the sound was of mutual surprise—and disappointment.

  “Oh,” Mira exhaled.

  “Oh,” Anya said, looking first at Owen, then at Mira. “I thought you were my father.”

  “And we thought you were him.” Mira peered around Anya into the house. The packages were pushed against the wall. “Why would he be knocking on his own door?”

  “Because I have the key.”

  “So he’s not here.” Mira drew out the words, and Anya took full note of Mira’s inspection of the room as they stepped inside. “I’ve been calling. Why didn’t you answer?”

  “It’s not my house, so why would I? Anyway, I just got here.” Anya turned to Owen. “What’s going on? Where’s Wilton anyway?”

  “We’re looking for him,” Mira answered. She wasn’t going to be shouldered out. “He didn’t come home last night.”

  “Come home from where?” Anya asked Owen, pointedly ignoring Mira.

  Mira looked puzzled by Anya’s obvious iciness, but she persisted with her. “He’ll be really happy you came by to see him. He’s been hoping for this for a long time.”

  “Come home from where?” she asked again.

  “Your father and I went to the casino last night,” Mira said. “He wanted to stay, so he did.”

  “And you left him there?” Anya asked her.

  “Yes, I did, but that’s what he wanted. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

  “Look, the guy’s not a child, not some invalid,” Owen insisted, stepping between the women. “He can find his way home. Hire a cab or go anywhere else he wants. He doesn’t have to tell any of us where he is or what he’
s doing.”

  “I can’t believe you still go to that place,” Anya said, speaking around Owen to Mira. “After everything that’s happened, everything you’ve ruined. That’s really fucked-up. You should get some help.”

  Mira looked from Owen to Anya to Owen, and her mouth disappeared into a bloodless seam. Owen moved his wife to the door, then down the steps, and told her to go home.

  “You told her about me?” she asked. She squinted in the sun. The street was festively busy with people coming to see the wedged-in truck. “Why would you do that, O? You don’t think I’m ashamed enough?” She hesitated. “And when? When did you see her? When did you talk to her?”

  “You’ve been gone a lot,” he said. “And I don’t live here—”

  She started to say something but held back. Her eyes pulled down at the corners as though she were figuring something out and it was becoming more and more clear to her. She turned away from him, but instead of going home, she crossed the street and stood in Alice Jessup’s driveway, watching the party and the careening kids. Owen turned back to Wilton’s where Anya was waiting at the door. He moved her back inside.

  “Don’t do that,” he warned. “She’s my wife.”

  “You don’t act like she is,” she said, but she wouldn’t look at him. Her confidence was a fake, and her attack on Mira had left her shaky.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Look, I just want to talk to my father,” she said. “I want to tell him I’m sorry for how I’ve been acting. I know he’s been trying with me. I’ve been mad at him for so long, I don’t know how else to be. Some of the things you said last night made me feel I could try a little harder, cut him a little slack.”

  Owen looked at the places in the room where he’d done all the damage to the man—and to his daughter. In the dark, his crimes would always glow fluorescent.

  “I don’t know where he is,” he said.

  Anya looked at him blankly, hiding herself from him, and then turned on the television. She lifted an indifferent hand when he said he was going. She was going to wait there for her father.

  He needed some sleep and drove to Fox Point. Taking the stairs to his apartment above Rosalie’s, he stalled at the niche that held a vase of silk roses and waited for the heaviness to drain from his legs. Someone was moving around upstairs. There was a faint scraping across the floor and a rhythmic squeak of something sliding back and forth. Were people screwing so tentatively in the bed under the white chenille? The door was open a few inches to reveal George on his hands and knees, scrubbing behind the toilet. The tub was filling with a cloudy soup of Ajax and water.

  “George, you don’t have to do this. I’ll clean the bathroom. I’ll clean everything,” Owen said. “Please. It’s so early.”

  “I didn’t hear you come back last night.” The back of George’s bristly neck was red. He adjusted his rubber gloves over the sleeves of his Patriots sweatshirt. “I don’t mind.” He dunked his sponge in a bucket and resumed scrubbing the spotless tiles. “It gives me something to do.”

  Owen sat on the edge of the tub. Caustic steam stung his eyes and ate away at the back of his throat.

  “You going to sit there and watch?” George asked.

  “I might.” Owen’s sneakers had left gray slashes on the wet floor and he leaned over to wipe away the dirt with the heel of his hand.

  “I never saw anybody who liked to watch me clean.” George scratched his chin with a rubber finger. “Excuse me.” He motioned for Owen to get off the tub and put the lid of the toilet down, like an usher showing him to his seat. “Here. So you don’t get in my way.”

  “Breathing this stuff will kill you,” Owen said.

  “Something’s got to kill me eventually.” George plunged his hands into the water and took a breath of the bleachy bouquet. He opened the drain and coaxed the blue silt down. “Let me ask you something. It’s none of my business, but I figured if you’re sitting there on the can, I can ask. You going to work this thing out with your wife? I ask because my boy’s going to need his place soon and I wouldn’t want to push you into the street. Rosie wouldn’t either. But we might have to.” He collected his sponges and bucket. “I’m not trying to rush you.”

  “I understand. And that’s great news—he’s coming home.”

  “No date yet, but soon, I think. I just have a feeling about it. Look, you’re not going to get any marriage advice from me. I got nothing for you in that department.”

  Owen smiled. “That’s too bad.”

  “Right. I don’t do that kind of cleaning,” George said.

  He disappeared at the stair’s turn. The man’s touch was everywhere. It was impossible now to ruin this order by sleeping on the bed with the bedspread he’d already torn, so Owen lay on the floor on a pile of clothes. If a normal day had twenty-four hours, this one had a hundred times that many. Later, when it was just turning dark, he opened his eyes to see a bat circling in front of the sparkling night window.

  14

  On Thursday afternoon, Owen tried to swim at the Y. He waited for the moment when he would give in to the water and the water would give in to him, and he’d be weightless and, with any luck, empty-headed, too, for a bit. He locked his focus on the screen of bubbles the swimmer ahead of him kicked up. He’d often imagined that if you could take some measure of the vapor above the pool, you’d discover what was in the minds of all the silent swimmers.

  What wafted from him now was an unsteady, combustible mix. Wilton had been gone since Friday, almost a week. Mira had filed a missing-persons report on Monday morning—last to see him and best to know him—but was that too late? Or too soon? Wilton was an adult, the police had reminded her, and if he wanted not to be found, he was allowed. Owen’s conversations on the phone with Mira—nothing in person since that moment on Wilton’s steps—had all the qualities of a fragile alliance: necessary information, suspicion, self-preservation, a wish for another way.

  Earlier, when Owen had called her during his lunch period, Mira had recounted for him again the questions she’d been asked about Wilton when she’d filed the report: Was Wilton mentally or physically impaired? In need of medical attention? Emotionally unstable? Suspect of foul play or victim of a crime?

  “All of the above? None of the above? I mean, if I knew the answers …,” she said, trailing off.

  They asked each other if they even knew Wilton well enough to say if disappearing was something he’d do. If they’d known him for only a year, could they actually say what was in or out of character or history? Certainly Anya, who now came and went from her father’s house several times a day, didn’t know him any better than they did. As Owen had stood outside the teachers’ lounge and heard the low riot of children surging up from the basement cafeteria, he’d told Mira he didn’t understand why more people simply didn’t walk away from their lives for a time—or for good.

  Fifteen minutes in the pool, and the sound of his breathing and the slavish industry of his limbs had failed to settle him. Everything was a struggle. Wilton was riding on his back and pushing him under, squeezing his lungs with his narrow fingers, grabbing his ankles, filling his goggles. Owen’s arm smacked down hard on the plastic lane divider, sending a current of pain down his spine. He swallowed a mouthful and came up gasping. He was afraid of the water all of a sudden and knew that if he stayed in the pool, it might kill him. He scrambled out. In the shower room, three boys from the swim team threw purloined shampoo bottles and flip-flops at one another. Owen had watched them for years here at this hour, seen them grow from scrawny to less scrawny, and the understanding had always been that Owen would pretend they weren’t there snapping towels, throwing wads of paper on the ceiling, spilling soap on the floor, taking anything left unattended, and in exchange they would pretend he wasn’t there. He closed his eyes under the hot water. His body was taking a daily beating from fumbles and falls; remorse tattooed him.

  Something slammed into his balls and he folded over with white, exp
losive pain. The tile floor swam in front of him. He was going to puke. His chest and stomach were being pulled inside out. He crouched. The shampoo bottle spun at his feet. Across from him, the boys were frozen with their backs against the wall. As if on cue, they dashed for the pool door, but Owen snatched one kid back by his bathing suit. The boy struggled on the slick floor as the waistband of his suit cut into him. His friends, fascinated and glad it wasn’t them who’d been captured, watched from the doorway.

  “You little shit,” Owen hissed. He held the boy by the twisted arm. The kid was made up of twigs and string, easy to toss.

  “It wasn’t me.” The boy looked at Owen’s size inflating above him.

  “You little bastard.”

  Owen wanted to punish the boy for all the times a wad of wet paper had landed on him, for all the boys’ boasting about pissing in the pool, for how they turned grown men silent and complicit. Some men had been just like these boys once—and if they hadn’t been, they’d secretly wanted to be. Past and present could not share a locker room peacefully, and Owen tightened his grip on the kid, hard enough to feel bone, and it felt absurdly satisfying. His balls throbbed. He lifted a hand to slap the boy. But the lifeguard, a skinny teenager, appeared then in the doorway with a band of kids pressing up behind him. He had hoped never to be called into service for more than the occasional whistle-blowing for running or roughhousing, and his look was so beseeching that Owen let go of the culprit who sniffled and pulled up his suit. Owen got dressed quickly and jammed his things into his bag. He wanted nothing more than to get out of there. Mrs. Paul at the front desk yanked her door-knocker-size earrings in disapproval.

  Outside in the March wind, water from his wet hair dripped down his neck and under the collar of his suede coat. All these years working with kids and he’d never lost it with one before now. But once that happened, he knew, you were done. From then on it was all about temptation and holding back—when the swiftest solution to every problem was right there in your hands. Use it once and you’d use it again and again.