Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  “You just seem very tired to me,” I said. “Sleepy, even.”

  “Sleepy.”

  “As if you didn’t get enough sleep last night, and now you can barely keep your eyes open.”

  Her face softened, her eyes brightened. “Now that you mention it—”

  “You’re tired, aren’t you?”

  “Exhausted,” she said, “and isn’t it funny how I wasn’t even aware of it myself?”

  “Well, sometimes it’s easier for another person to spot these things.”

  “That must be it.”

  “Especially when it’s another person who knows you very well.”

  “Almost better than I know myself,” she said. “My goodness, here I am, as tired as I’ve ever been. I really ought to be in bed.”

  “You really should.”

  “And here you are,” she said, moving to the staircase. “Home for lunch.”

  “Isn’t it funny how things work out?”

  “Oh, it is,” she said. “It is indeed.”

  “OH MY,” SHE said, a while later.

  “Feel better now?”

  Her answer was a low chuckle.

  “I guess you needed that nap.”

  “And I guess your lunch was worth the drive home. Or did you walk? No, you took the car.”

  “I had the car,” I said, “but my lunch would have been worth it if I walked. Or even if I crawled on my belly like a reptile.”

  That put her in mind of measuring worms, and their curious manner of locomotion, and we both remembered something we’d seen on TV, some penitent Asian monk who made his way to some sacred shrine in a manner which could only have been inspired by a measuring worm. We speculated on what sort of sin could inspire such a performance, and why this had seemed to him to be a reasonable way to expiate it. And then the conversation wandered here and there, in a less systematic fashion than either the monk or the measuring worm might have chosen.

  Among other things, I told her I loved her, and she said she loved me. And she yawned and stretched and said, as each of us has remarked often over the years, how very lucky we were to have found each other.

  I said, “I hope you still feel that way at the day’s end.”

  “I’ll probably still be glowing,” she said, and then my words registered and her face showed concern.

  “There’s a conversation we need to have,” I told her.

  She sat up. “Are you all right? Darling, should I call a doctor?”

  Not a doctor, I thought. Maybe a lawyer.

  What I said was, “No, I’m fine. But there are things I need to tell you, and I don’t know where to begin.”

  AND THAT’S HOW I got started, by confessing that I wasn’t sure where to begin, or how. That may have been as good a way as any. It got the words flowing.

  It’s not important what words I found or what order I put them in. At the onset I would hear the words first in my head, so that I could choose what to say and what to leave unsaid, but it wasn’t long before that little echo-in-advance went silent, and I just went ahead and said what I had to say.

  I talked for a long time, although I couldn’t say how long. I didn’t note the time I got started, and I wasn’t really conscious of time throughout. I was sitting up in bed beside her when I began, and I never changed position. Nor did she, stretched out on her side next to me. I would glance at her from time to time, but mostly my eyes, focused on nothing in particular, were aimed at the foot of the bed.

  Where Cindy Raschmann had been standing when she told me I was forgiven.

  When I did look at Louella, I couldn’t read much of anything in her expression. She appeared attentive throughout, and when I paused so that she could offer a comment or a question, she supplied neither, simply waiting for me to continue.

  I wondered at this. Over the years I’ve a couple of times been called upon to give a talk to one of my groups, and I’ve learned to draw energy from my audience, seeking out with my eyes those visibly receptive listeners whose nods and facial expressions urge me along like a silent amen chorus. I wasn’t getting any of that now, as I sought the understanding and acceptance of the most important audience I’d ever addressed.

  But I can see now that she gave me throughout my performance precisely the response I required. She listened, she paid close attention, she took it all in—and she gave me the space to go on.

  And what did I say? What did I withhold?

  You’d think I’d remember it all word for word, or close to it. But I don’t, and I’m hard put to explain why.

  What matters, I suppose, is that I uttered the words, not that my recollection of them is imperfect.

  I know I talked far more than I’d expected to about my childhood and my family. It was unusual for me to think much about those years, although Alden’s reports on Kristin’s long-lost second cousins did spark memories. Two of my older brothers, one teasing the other about a girl. A sister, curiously incapable of learning how to ride a two-wheel bicycle, then just as curiously mastering the whole business in a couple of hours.

  This and that . . .

  I PAUSED JUST now and scrolled up to read the account I’ve written of the murder I committed, and of the pleasure I took in it and in the sexual performance that followed it. My recital this afternoon was less detailed.

  I suppose that’s only natural. One wants to be honest and forthcoming, but one balks at revealing oneself to be a monster.

  WHEN I STOPPED, when I had finally run out of words, she acknowledged that I was done talking by laying her hand lightly upon mine. The warm touch of her fingers on the back of my hand moved me beyond words.

  “I’m glad you told me,” she said, “and not the Rotary Club.”

  Kiwanis, I thought.

  “I mean Kiwanis,” she said, as if I’d spoken the word aloud. “You came home so that you could tell me.”

  “Yes.”

  “But first you made love to me.”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t say anything, so I answered the question she hadn’t asked.

  “I thought it might be our last time,” I said. “Once you knew the truth—”

  “I’d be horrified? Sickened?”

  “Are you?”

  She took time to think about it. “I knew there was something,” she said. “Each of us had a life before we found each other, and that’s fine, nobody needs to know every last detail about anybody else. I had an uncle who molested me. I never told you that.”

  “No.”

  “I was really little. Like five or six. Can you imagine wanting to have sex with someone that age? A little child?”

  “No.”

  “It happened twice. He said he had something to show me, and that I would like it, and what he did was take down my panties and lick me. For, I don’t know, a few minutes. Then he stopped and pulled my panties back up again and pulled my skirt down and told me I was a wonderful beautiful little girl and I must never say a word to anybody about what we’d just done. And I never did.”

  “Until now.”

  “Until now. And I still haven’t told you the worst part of all. I liked it.”

  “You weren’t frightened?”

  “I probably should have been, but it never occurred to me. I just loved the way it felt. In fact I adored it. What?”

  “What?”

  “The expression on your face.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What I was thinking—”

  “I know what you were thinking. ‘You still do.’ ”

  “Well?”

  She took a deliberate breath. “The second time,” she said, “must have been two or three weeks later. Maybe more. I wonder why he waited so long.”

  “Could have been guilt,” I suggested. “Or fear, or a combination of the two. He’d done something awful, and as long as you kept quiet he’d get away with it, and now he had to make sure it never happened again.”

  “And then he looked at me and found me utterly irresistible?”r />
  “Something like that.”

  “I wonder. Anyway, the two of us were alone, and he asked me if I’d like to have some fun. And of course I knew what he meant. And I sat on the couch next to him, and my skirt went up and my panties came down and this time I didn’t have to wonder what was going on, or decide how I felt about it.”

  “And you still liked it?”

  “Oh, God, I loved it. I don’t think I had an orgasm. Is it possible for a girl that age to have an orgasm?”

  “I’m afraid that’s outside my area of expertise.”

  ‘I think it’s possible, because I think if he’d kept it up a few more minutes I would have had one then and there. But I guess he had one of his own, because he trembled and made this moaning sound, and before I knew it I had my panties on again and he was telling me what he’d told me the first time. How wonderful I was, and how this had to be our little secret.”

  “And there was no third time?”

  “No, and I was waiting for it. I didn’t really think much about it after the first time. It happened and I liked it, but I didn’t even think enough about it to wonder if it would happen again. But after the second time, well, I thought about it a lot. In fact I would be thinking about it and I would touch myself.”

  “And imagine your finger was Uncle Don?”

  “Uncle Howie. His name was Howard Desmond, he was married to my Aunt Pauline. My father had two sisters, both of them younger than himself, and Aunt Pauline was the younger of the two. I don’t know what I was thinking about when I touched myself. It just felt good and I liked making myself feel good.”

  “And Uncle Howie—”

  “Died.”

  “Oh.”

  “He was driving and he lost control of the car. I was too young to go to the funeral. I wonder how old a child has to be to go to a funeral. I suppose it varies from family to family, and it depends how close you were to the deceased.”

  “And you were closer than anybody realized.”

  “I wonder,” she said, “if anybody knew anything. Maybe I wasn’t the first little girl Uncle Howie mistook for an ice cream cone. And you know what else I wonder? It was, I don’t know, just a few years ago, that somebody on TV was talking about unwitnessed single-car accidents, and how they’re a way to commit suicide and get away with it.”

  “If you’re dead, how exactly are you getting away with it?”

  “The stigma. Or insurance, where they wouldn’t pay if they could prove you killed yourself.”

  “That’s what people think,” I said. “That suicide invalidates an insurance claim, but that’s hardly ever the case if a policy’s been in force for a certain amount of time. After a year or two, it won’t get them off the hook.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “But you’re thinking your uncle killed himself.”

  “When he supposedly lost control of the car,” she said, “he ran it into one of the concrete pillars supporting the Lyons Avenue overpass. ‘That’s where your Uncle Howie had his accident.’ I remember hearing that more than once when I was in a car and we were driving past where it happened. And maybe it was an accident, because people do lose control of their cars and drive into things like bridge abutments, but if nobody was there to see him do it, it’s like that tree in the forest.”

  “The one that fell without making a sound.”

  “That’s the one. Once the possibility occurred to me, and this was years and years after the fact—”

  “When you heard something on TV.”

  “Right. Were the grownups in the family wondering about this all along? There’s nobody to ask, they’re all long gone. No way to know if it was really an accident. Or if it was half an accident, if he’d had a few drinks and was driving too fast and has this sudden impulse and swung the steering wheel hard right.”

  “And stomped the accelerator instead of the brake.”

  “ ‘Oh, the hell with it.’ Like that, maybe.”

  “And what you’re really wondering,” I said, “is what if anything you had to do with it.”

  “If he did it on purpose, it could have been anything. Fear of exposure. Fear of what he might do next. Hating himself for what he was. I mean, there’s no way of knowing.”

  “No.”

  “People suffer from depression. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what’s going on in their lives. I don’t feel guilty about it, because I didn’t do anything. I honestly don’t blame myself.”

  “Good, because you shouldn’t.”

  “But I wonder,” she said, “about what would have happened if he’d kept the car on the road. I’ll tell you one thing that did happen. I stopped thinking about what we did. Or what he did, I guess I should say. You know, skirt up, panties down.”

  “Tongue extended.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t think about it. It had to do with Uncle Howie, and he was gone forever, and I would never see him again. And that was sad, so the thing to do was to stop thinking of him. I sort of forgot about it, and I even forgot to touch myself, at least for a while. I, uh, rediscovered that part later.”

  “What a hot little girl you were.”

  “Oh, not really. You want to know something? Nobody ever did that to me again until—”

  “Until what? Until you were married? Until you ran into Martina Navratilova at that bar on Railroad Avenue?”

  “Idiot. Until I went out to buy a pressure cooker and wound up with the man of my dreams.”

  “But you’d been married.”

  “And it wasn’t a bad marriage, and Duane and I had an okay time in bed, but oral sex was never a part of it. He never initiated it and I never thought about it.”

  “You never thought about it.”

  “I honestly didn’t. I was a little kid when it happened, and I walled it off in my mind and forgot about it. I certainly never had the thought Oh now that I’m married I can do what I did with Uncle Howie.” She frowned. “I suppose it must have been traumatic, but it never felt that way.”

  “And you never told anybody.”

  “Well, he said not to, didn’t he? And what about you? You never said anything.”

  “Until now.”

  “You told Alden. It’s funny, when the two of you came home the other night I knew there was something that happened. I thought maybe you’d had one of those talks where you tell him to always wear a condom. You know, fatherly advice. Guy stuff.”

  “Not exactly.”

  And I said that I’d given Alden an edited version of my history, shorter and less detailed. But wasn’t what she’d just heard itself an edited version? I hadn’t supplied every thought that went through my mind, every impulse, every feeling. I’d recounted a great deal of what I’ve recorded in this unending electronic document, but by no means all of it.

  And hasn’t this document itself had the services of an internal but always present editor? Don’t I choose what to put down and what to leave out?

  WE TALKED FOR a long time. At one point she got up and showered, and when she’d finished I took her place in the shower, and we put on clothes and went down to the kitchen and ate sandwiches and drank coffee and talked some more.

  A lot of it was speculation. What might happen, and how likely it was, and how we could respond to one or another scenario. Thoughts arose, and we chased them down and examined them.

  There were times, too, when the conversation would stop. Shared silences.

  “I never knew you owned a gun,” she said.

  “How would you know? It’s tucked away in a locked drawer.”

  “Promise me you’ll never use it.”

  I’d told her I’d thought of it as a last-ditch emergency exit, a way out if there was no other way out. When the men from Bakersfield climbed onto the porch and knocked on the door, I could put the gun to my head and spare myself what otherwise would follow.

  I hadn’t told her another way I’d imagined myself using the gun, stalking from room to
room, sparing us all the pain of exposure, not only myself but her and Alden and Kristin. The inner editor was on the job, and I was grateful for it. It was almost impossible now, sitting over cups of coffee, to imagine I had ever entertained such a thought, and it was one that never needed to be shared.

  “I’ll never use it,” I said. “It can stay where it is, locked away in its drawer, doing no harm to anyone. And to hell with Chekhov.”

  CHEKHOV PUZZLED HER, until I explained the reference. She agreed the revolver could stay locked away forever. It didn’t need to be fired before the final curtain.

  “SO YOUR NAME was originally—” She broke off the sentence, held up a hand. “No, don’t tell me, because I’m going to let myself forget it. It’s not your name. Your name is John James Thompson, and that’s who you are. That’s the name of the man I fell in love with and married and had a baby with, and I’m Louella Thompson, Mrs. John James Thompson, and that’s all we need to know about names. John, I love you more than ever.”

  “And I you.”

  “And I am so glad we had this conversation. I always told myself that you and I could tell each other anything and it would be all right. And it’s more than all right, isn’t it? I feel closer to you than ever.” She looked away for a moment. “Sooner or later,” she said, “we’ll have to tell Kristin.”

  “But not yet.”

  “No, it would be way too much for her to process. At least I think it would. Or she might just roll her eyes. ‘Like I didn’t already know that, Mom.’ ”

  “God, I can hear her saying it. But with a question mark at the end.”

  “Just a trace of Valley Girl.” She drew a breath. “We’ll know when it’s time, and how to tell her what she needs to know.”

  “Yes.”

  “And whatever happens,” she said, “we’ll get through this.”

  I’VE SAT DOWN at the computer a couple of times over the last month, but the need to add words and sentences to this document seems to have subsided.

  I’m sure it’s a result of those two conversations, first with Alden and then with Louella. I spent some months writing down secrets, things I’d thought and imagined and done about which I could never tell anyone. And then, having shared my secrets with the two most important people in my life, I no longer needed to share them with my hard drive.