Full Circle

by Susan Rogers Cooper

  ‘Something’s up!’ I said as soon as she was gone.

  ‘What?’ asked Alicia.

  ‘My mother never finger waves,’ Megan said.

  ‘And that smile didn’t reach her eyes!’ I said.

  Lotta looked at the door then back at us. ‘You think she knows?’

  I said ‘no’ at the same time that Megan said ‘yes.’

  ‘She may not know know, but she knows something’s up,’ Megan said.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t care. This is the perfect opportunity to find this son of a bitch!’ I said.

  ‘You’re not thinking this is maybe too perfect an opportunity? When was the last time you heard Mom say she was going shopping and might be gone a while? She never says that, even when she’s gone for hours!’ Megan said.

  I stood up. ‘I don’t really care if she knows or not, if this opportunity is too perfect or not. I say we take off. We get Lotta’s uncle’s car and we cruise Codderville.’

  ‘Just Codderville?’ Megan said sarcastically. ‘It’s not a big city, grant you, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover.’

  ‘No, I’m looking for one place in particular.’

  ‘Where, Liz?’ Alicia asked.

  ‘The one place in Codderville no self-respecting girls would ever be caught dead,’ I said.

  And in unison, they all answered: ‘The bowling alley!’

  BLACK CAT RIDGE, TEXAS, 1999

  ‘A cut-and-dried burglary,’ Luna said.

  ‘What?’ I threw up my hands in disgust. Looking around the Lesters’ living room, I said, ‘You call yourself a detective? A three-year-old could tell this place’s been searched!’

  She glanced around at the knife-torn couches and chairs, upended with the bottoms also slashed; the potted plants uprooted and all the dirt poured out on the floor; the paintings ripped off the walls, their canvases slashed; the carpet ripped up at the corners and pulled to the center of the room. This was no ‘cut-and-dried burglary.’

  ‘Every room’s like this,’ I told her.

  ‘You’ve gone through the whole house?’

  I sighed. ‘I had a while to wait for you, you know.’

  ‘Thought maybe you’d prove your point?’ Luna looked at me. I didn’t like the look she was giving me.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I said not to call unless you had something concrete. Maybe you decided to manufacture something you considered concrete.’

  ‘What?’ My hands were on my hips and the look on my face must have matched hers in intensity.

  Luna broke eye contact by taking out a small notebook from her purse. ‘OK, when was the last time you were in here?’ she asked.

  ‘You mean before I started tearing up the place?’ I asked.

  She looked up from the notebook. ‘When was the last time you were in the house before today?’

  ‘Friday morning. I came over to get Bessie’s stuff so she could leave the hospital.’

  ‘Everything was OK then?’

  I nodded. ‘I cleaned out the refrigerator and took out the trash.’

  ‘So sometime between Friday – when?’

  ‘Midmorning – around nine or ten.’

  ‘OK, so sometime between then and now, somebody broke in here and burglarized the place. Can you tell what’s missing?’

  I pointed at the almost brand-new forty-inch Sony TV in the living room. ‘Seems funny to me they’d smash a thousand-dollar TV rather than take it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Maybe they just took smaller stuff like jewelry,’ Luna said. ‘Easier to carry than that huge TV. Smash-and-grab types.’

  ‘Who systematically searched the whole house?’ I whirled around, pointing at the destruction. ‘This isn’t smash-and-grab, Luna! Even if they did take a couple of things to make it look like a burglary! My God, how stupid are you?’

  Boy, had I gone too far! Luna turned and looked at me and I wished I was anywhere but in the Lesters’ living room at that moment. ‘Not stupid enough to make myself a sitting duck for God knows what! Not stupid enough to put Bessie and my own kids in jeopardy by blabbing to the newspapers! And not stupid enough to try to alienate the only people on my side!’

  ‘Are you on my side?’ I asked. ‘How the hell can I tell that? By all the tremendous support?’

  ‘By the fact that you’re not in jail for obstructing justice!’

  Then it hit me. ‘You don’t think Roy did it, do you?’

  Luna sighed. ‘I don’t know.’

  I stood up. ‘I have to go pick up the kids.’

  ‘I’ll drive you.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that—’

  ‘Shut up and get in the car,’ she said. Luna walked toward the back door, heading for the driveway, where her cruiser was parked.

  ‘You know, I’m getting really tired of you telling me to shut up,’ I said to her back, following.

  ‘Get in the car,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Shut up, Pugh.’

  We picked up the kids at Vera’s house and I suggested Luna drop us off at Willis’s office, which was just across the highway in Codderville. She nodded and I gave her directions. As I herded the kids out of the car, she said, ‘E.J., listen.’

  Turning back after the last child was safely on the steps to Willis’s building, I said, ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry I got rough with you,’ she said.

  I shrugged.

  She sighed and said, ‘I’m scared for you and the kids.’

  ‘We’ll be OK.’

  ‘Maybe. If you’re full of shit. Unfortunately, if you’re not – if you’re right – things could go bad.’

  I leaned against the car. ‘Maybe I am full of shit,’ I said, wondering for the first time if that could be true. If Roy really did do everything everybody said he did and if I was just playing wishing games. Wishing my friend hadn’t been a homicidal maniac.

  Luna reached through the car window and squeezed my arm. ‘Call me. Any time of the day or night.’ She took out a card and scribbled her home phone number on the back. Handing it to me, she said, ‘Be careful.’

  I took the card. ‘Yeah. More careful than I have been. You’re right. I’ve been stupid.’

  Luna grinned. ‘Yeah, well, civilians sometimes think life is a made-for-TV movie.’ The grin faded. ‘It’s not.’

  She put the car in gear and pulled away, while I gathered the kids and went into the building.

  E.J., THE PRESENT

  I hid the Volvo behind a large oak tree on a side street by the entrance to our section of Black Cat Ridge. And waited. We don’t have large municipal-size buses like in Austin or other big cities; ours are small bus size, just not yellow. Half the reason for the system is to get service workers – maids, etc. – from Codderville to Black Cat Ridge and back again without the more affluent having to actually drive the help to and from home. The other half of the reason is so our children can sneak off to Codderville without us having to drive them.

  I saw the girls coming – all four of them. They were talking so vehemently that they never noticed the Volvo. Of course, the dark green of the car fairly faded in with the spread of the oak tree and the green lawns. If I stretched my neck out the window, I could see them standing at the corner, waiting for the bus – still all talking a mile a minute. If I hadn’t been terribly suspicious of what they were doing, I might have enjoyed watching my daughters unawares.

  The bus came and I started the Volvo’s engine. As the bus pulled away from the stop, I followed suit.

  ELIZABETH, THE PRESENT

  ‘Mom’s behind us,’ Megan said.

  I sighed. ‘Did we expect anything less?’

  ‘No,’ Megan said.

  ‘Well, I love your mother,’ Lotta said, ‘but we should probably get rid of her.’

  ‘What do we do?’ I asked sarcastically. ‘Ask the driver to lose the tail?’

  ‘No,’ Lotta said, drawing out the word. She obviously hadn’
t missed the sarcasm. ‘I meant when we get the car in Codderville.’

  ‘How do you know we can get it? What if your uncle says no? Or what if he’s gone?’ Alicia asked, literally wringing her hands. I’ve read that in romance novels but I always thought it was something women used to do. I’ve got to say it looked stupid.

  Lotta pulled a key out of her handbag. ‘I have a copy of his key. And he’ll never notice it’s gone. He’s in court all day today and my aunt had to take him in her car because he’s losing his driver’s license because of speeding tickets.’

  We all smiled. ‘Cool,’ I said, and we did a multiple high five. It was on.

  E.J., THE PRESENT

  The bus dropped the girls off on a corner in a mostly middle-class, mostly Hispanic neighborhood. I watched as they walked down the side street – Chicon Lane – to a house five doors down on the left. There was a Virgin Mary in the front yard, her midsection a large vase with plastic flowers blooming capriciously, plastic being the only variety of flower that would survive a full Texas sun exposure. There was a mid-nineties Chevy sitting in the driveway. Dark blue with red and orange flames shooting down the sides, it was low to the ground and at first I wasn’t sure if it was running, since it looked too low to the ground – like all four tires were flat. Then Lotta unlocked the doors and all four girls piled inside. The car started, a loud rumbling sound, and it slowly backed up. As Lotta went down the driveway to the street, the tailpipe hit the pavement and shot off sparks. My first thought was: ‘Stop this now.’ But I needed to know what they were up to, and I figured as long as I was right behind them, how much trouble could they get into? A mother should never think that.

  ELIZABETH, THE PRESENT

  Things weren’t going well. Lotta couldn’t figure the car out and we were going about twenty miles an hour while the car went up and down and up and down. My mother was behind us, probably having a hard time trying to convince herself that she couldn’t be seen by us. Megan and I were both in the front seat and she was down on the floorboard, trying to find a switch or something to turn the up and down thingy off. I mean, this is what low-riders do – go up and down and up and down – but not all the time. There had to be an on/off switch. We were all beginning to get sick when Megan pulled some wires and the car stopped going up and down and, since Lotta had the pedal to the metal trying to get the car to go over twenty, when Megan pulled the wire, we went blasting off so fast the car tilted upward like a cowboy on a horse. It was cool except it made me puke a little bit in my mouth.

  Lotta doesn’t have a license and has only driven Graham’s Valiant and had no idea how to handle what she said was a V8. I thought it was a yucky juice but she said in this instance it had something to do with engines. When the car’s front two wheels lifted from the ground, Lotta had no idea what to do and started steering like crazy, so that when the car’s front wheels came back down, they were pointed in a weird direction and we ended up going on to someone’s lawn, knocking over some religious statues, running through a flowerbed, and almost hitting a cat. We all, including Lotta, started crying when we almost hit the cat, which made her overcompensate with the steering, which made us careen across the street and into another yard where we knocked down five pink flamingos and some laundry hung up in the front yard, which I think is just tacky, and they deserved it. But who am I to judge, ya know?

  Lotta finally got out in the street again, stopped the car, and we just sat there for at least a full minute, not even worrying about Mom, who had tried to hide the Volvo in somebody’s driveway. It wasn’t working.

  ‘OK,’ Lotta said with a big sigh, ‘I think everything’s under control.’ I doubted that but didn’t say anything.

  Megan got up from the floorboard and sat down on the bench seat between Lotta and me. I learned a lot about low-riders by just being in one. Lotta told us that nineties cars didn’t come with bench seats, but that her uncle had the interior customized with tuck and roll, two-tone leather front and back, shag carpeting on the floorboards, and velvet headliner. There was a painting of Jesus on the headliner with the interior light sort of in the position where his navel would have been. It was cool.

  ‘OK,’ she said again, ‘now to get rid of your mother.’

  And then she took off.

  ELIZABETH, APRIL, 2009

  After making all their fearful plans to abscond with their father’s car in the wee hours of the morning – well, eleven o’clock actually, but still – they discovered Dad was going to Austin to be with their mom at her convention and Grandma Vera was coming to stay.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Megan said, grabbing her sister’s shoulders and jumping up and down. ‘This is fabulous!’

  Jumping up and down in unison with Megan, Elizabeth said, ‘I know! I know! She goes to bed at eight-thirty!’

  ‘She sleeps like the dead!’ Megan said.

  ‘She’ll never know we’re gone!’ Elizabeth said.

  Needless to say, the girls were happy about the change in plans.

  The next night, Graham tried to leave early, but Grandma made him stay and eat supper. Elizabeth’s good hygiene included eating right, and looking at the meal in front of her she knew it was all unhealthy. She also knew her grandmother made the best fried chicken in Texas. Hygiene be damned, she had seconds of the mashed potatoes and cream gravy.

  Pushing herself away from the table, she and Megan did the dishes while Graham, whose turn it actually was, was allowed to leave the house with his friends. Grandma was like that: rather misogynistic, if a woman could be that. Elizabeth decided to look that up.

  After the dishes, they sat in the family room and watched TV with their grandmother until, at eight o’clock, Grandma Vera announced, ‘Well, it’s been a long day. Gets that way when you’re up at five-thirty like I am every morning.’ To Elizabeth’s ears it sounded like she was bragging, but Elizabeth couldn’t figure out why anyone would be proud of that. It seemed silly to her. But, since it worked to her advantage, she just smiled and said, ‘Good night, Grandma. Sleep tight.’

  ‘Don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ Megan finished, which was the refrain Grandma used with them when they were little and spent the night with her.

  Grandma Vera smiled and said, ‘You girls lock up, OK?’

  ‘No problem,’ Megan said.

  They sat in front of the TV until nine, then crept upstairs to make sure Grandma was asleep. Opening the door of Elizabeth’s room, which Grandma was using, resulted in hearing the sounds of Grandma’s snoring, snorting, and heavy breathing, an indication she was well into REM sleep. Her purse was on the dresser and Megan quietly crept in and lifted it, taking it into the hall. Finding the keys, she gingerly crept back in and put the purse back on the dresser.

  It was show time.

  BLACK CAT RIDGE, TEXAS, 1999

  I watched TV with the kids until eight-thirty, then supervised baths and got them to bed by nine-thirty. There was nothing on TV, so I closed up the house, turning off lights, and started to go to bed. At the bottom of the stairs I stopped. I wasn’t tired. I headed for my office under the stairs, turned on my computer, and shut the door behind me. I might need to print something, and as my computer printer was vintage, I was afraid the noise might wake the kids.

  I hadn’t worked in so long I couldn’t remember what was happening with Lady Leslie and her hunk. I skipped back two chapters and began to read to get into the flow of it. At 10:03 by my watch, the electricity went off.

  I sat stock still in the pitch-blackness of my office. There was no storm – why had the lights gone off? OK, it happens, I told myself. Somebody tripped a wire at the main switch place or something. I stood up and opened the door to my office. The kitchen was to my right, just a few steps. In there were flashlights and candles and matches. There was no moon that night and the street light, still shining, was at the end of the block. A light was on in an upstairs bedroom of the house across the street. It wasn’t the block, I decided. Just my house. But the little bit of ambien
t light did little to illuminate my kitchen.

  I closed my eyes to get used to the darkness. When I opened them I could see much better. And hear better, too. And what I could hear sent a shiver down my spine and turned the contents of my stomach into sulfuric acid.

  The window in the dining room was opening. I could hear the scrape of aluminum against aluminum. I heard a voice whisper, ‘Shit, man, you’ll wake ’em up!’

  There was a crude return comment. Then the thump of a foot on the carpeted floor, then another, and another, and another.

  They were in my house. They, the ones who’d killed my friends, tried to run me off the road, vandalized the house next door. The ones who were going to kill my children and me. And I stood frozen in the little hall between the kitchen and the utility room, unable to move my eyelids, much less my body.

  ‘You take care of the ones upstairs while I check out down here,’ one whispered.

  Upstairs, I thought. Oh my God, upstairs! The kids. I moved quietly, stealthily, into the kitchen. I was almost to the counter when I hit the bowl of milk on the floor for the new kittens. It skittered across the room, making a noise not unlike a cherry bomb in a toilet.

  I whirled towards the opening from the kitchen into the dining room. A male form was standing there, his hand pointing at me. I fell to the floor as the bright flash of his gun blinded me and the muffled ‘thump’ of the report reverberated like thunder in the quiet house. I rolled toward the opening and kicked up as high and as hard as I could with my leg. By his guttural response and his bent-over position, I knew I’d connected with the groin, as I’d been hoping for.

  I scrambled to my feet and ran toward the counter where I kept my knives. He grabbed my hair, pulling me backward. I twisted in his grasp, seeing the dim glint of the gun in his hand. With both hands clasped together, I hit his arm with all my might, sending the gun flying behind us, into the dining room.

  ‘You bitch!’ he spat, no longer whispering, his grasp on my hair tightening and twisting. Then, for a moment, I was free, his hand off my hair. Before I could react, it was around my throat. I now knew his choice of my demise: I would be strangled to death.