by Jan Burke
Two walnut nightstands, apparently part of the same set as the dressing table, stood at either side of a white, wrought-iron bedstead. The one nearest him was bare of anything but an alarm clock. The one on the other side, nearest Kaylie, held a skewed pile of women’s magazines. On top of the magazines was a familiar-looking volume. Their high school yearbook.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, looking out the window. She hadn’t turned toward him, and now, looking at her profile, he saw not Kaylie Darren but Kaylie Lindstrom, the girl he had known in high school. She wore no make-up, no earrings, no perfume. This room was more her room than any other, and the fact that she had shared the bed she sat on with a man as cold and empty as that other nightstand seemed grossly unfair to Jim Lawrence.
She turned toward him, looked at him and smiled a quick little smile and said, “Am I in your way? Did you need to look around in here?”
He couldn’t make himself ask her what he needed to ask her, at least not yet. So instead he said, “Why don’t you use the air conditioner?”
“It’s broken,” she said with resignation.
“Let me take a look at it,” he said, striding toward the window.
“It’s broken,” she said again.
“Broken things can be fixed,” he said firmly. He bent down to take a look at it, pushing the switches and buttons on the side panel. Nothing.
“Can they?” she was saying. “Surely not all of them. That thing has been broken for years.”
He turned back to her, inexplicably irritated by her lack of faith.
“Did Professor Joseph Darren ever even try to fix this thing?”
Her eyes widened a little, and she smiled again. “No, he just went out and paid someone to put in this ceiling fan. He thought the air conditioner was too noisy anyway.”
“That ceiling fan doesn’t do much to cool it off in here,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his Swiss Army Knife.
“No, it doesn’t. But it was cool enough for Joseph,” she replied, watching him open the knife to a screwdriver implement and start to remove the panel.
I’ll just bet it was cool enough for him. The professor apparently had ice in his veins. But was it cool enough for you, Kaylie? His thoughts were brought up short when he pulled the panel away. The problem with the air conditioner wasn’t difficult to find. The power cord had been disconnected from the on/off switch terminals. Deliberately.
That son of a bitch.
“Jim?”
He was too angry to reply. He followed the cord back toward the bed.
“What are you doing?”
He looked at her, hearing the alarm in her voice. He must have frightened her somehow. He realized he was scowling and headed right toward her. Did Joseph Darren stalk toward her like this in anger, hurt her? He took a breath.
“I’m just going to unplug it. Your-” He stopped himself. He needed to get a grip. He had just been about to tell her of Joseph Darren’s deception, and here she was, not a widow for one full night yet. “-your air conditioner is going to be easy to fix. I’ll need for you to get up for a moment and let me move the bed away from the wall. The outlet is behind the bedstead.”
She was looking up at him again, in that way she had looked at him several times this evening. What are you looking for, Kaylie? Tell me. Her lips parted, almost as if she had heard him, and she clutched at the sheets beneath her.
He waited.
“Jim-” she said, but then looked down, away from his eyes. She stood up and walked away from the bed.
“Kaylie?”
She shook her head, still not looking at him.
He shrugged and reached for the bedstead, and heaved it away from the wall. He bent to unplug the air conditioner, and stopped short. There were footprints on the wall behind the bed.
Two footprints, to be exact. From the soles of a woman’s athletic shoes. A little garden dirt, perhaps. Two feet, toes pointing up, slightly apart.
He looked at Kaylie, then back at the footprints. He bent down. While the wooden floor under her side of the bed was dusty, something had slid along the floor under his side. He looked more closely, and saw white paint chips missing off one slightly bent rung of the bedstead. The paint chips were on the floor, in the area between and beneath the footprints. He gripped the top of the bedstead, thinking of the single wineglass, picturing her beneath the bed, bracing her feet against the wall, straightening her legs as she pulled…the way the direction of the rope marks on the neck would match up with a suicide-by-hanging. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, it was all still there before him. He slowly straightened.
“He came home one day about twenty years ago and announced that he was going to get a vasectomy,” he heard Kaylie say behind him. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He bent down again and unplugged the air conditioner cord, then walked back to the window.
“He had decided that I wasn’t going to have any children. He had his child. Lillian. Did you know that child hated me? Not so much anymore, but it was awful when she was growing up. I don’t think she would have hated me so much if Joseph hadn’t told her that I was the reason he didn’t marry her mother. He lied. To me and to Lillian and to God knows how many other women. He lied all the time.”
“Yes, I know he did,” Jim said wearily, and knelt to begin replacing the wiring Joseph Darren had undone.
“Today he told Lillian that she should get rid of the baby.”
The screwdriver stopped for a moment, then went on.
He finished replacing the panel and got to his feet, looking out the window at the smoke, which had turned the moon blood red.
Without looking back at her, he knew she hadn’t moved. She stood there, silent now.
“Kaylie, I’m an officer of the law.” For the first time, his chest felt tight as he said that.
“Yes,” he heard her say.
He walked over to the outlet, plugged the air conditioner in, listened as it hummed to life, giving off a dusty smell of disuse.
“You fixed it!”
He looked over at her, at the way her face was lit up in approval and admiration.
“Yes,” he said, and moved the bed back against the wall.
He walked back to the air conditioner, adjusted its settings. He closed his eyes and bent his face to it, letting the cool air blow against him; felt it flattening his eyelashes and buffeting his hot skin.
“Kaylie.”
“Yes?”
“Go turn the clothes dryer off.”
She hesitated, but then he heard her leave the room, heard her going out into the garage. He looked out the window and saw the headlights of other cars coming toward the house. He stood up straight, lifting his fingers to his badge, feeling the now-chilled metal beneath them.
Fifteen years as a deputy sheriff, only to come to this.
Why tonight, he wondered.
The Mouse
At one time or another, everyone has carried a dead mouse around in his or her pocket.
I didn’t know that when I was in the fifth grade, or even in the seventh grade. I didn’t know it until fairly recently, when I confessed one of the greater shames of my childhood to Peggy, a friend at work.
Peggy and I are friends who work together; we don’t socialize outside of work very often. I don’t know why she was the one I confessed to, except that maybe sometimes when you’re around someone for eight hours a day and you’re comfortable with them, you start to tell them things about yourself, find yourself blurting out stuff that might end up making it impossible for them to be comfortable with you again. That was how big that mouse was by then.
I told Peggy that I’m not sure now whose fault it was that the mouse died. Maybe it was my fault, and not remembering is just a way of fleeing some of the guilt I felt when it died. I was ten years old, and so much was going wrong when I was ten, the death of the mouse seemed almost like a sign from God. Looking back, perhaps it was.<
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I was in fifth grade, and my mother had cancer. It was a word then, not something I really understood, just knew adults were very afraid of that word. I also knew that my mother was in the hospital a lot and I heard words murmured here and there about breasts being removed, and she was sad and tired and holding on to me more. I knew that my long hair had been cut for the first time in my life, cut because other people had convinced her that cutting it was something that needed to be done, something to make her life easier. But I think my hair was just something else she lost that year. Those were the things I knew, even in fifth grade.
The mouse was a classroom pet. It was brown and white and Mrs. Hobbs had allowed us to have it. It would sleep most of the time, but now and then it would run in its exercise wheel. Doreen Summers, who was my best friend, had brought it to school. Mrs. Hobbs said that if Doreen and I shared the responsibility of taking care of it, we could keep the mouse at school.
No sweat. Doreen and I were what they used to call “good citizens” in school. We were Girl Scouts in the same troop. We were two good Catholic girls who went to catechism class together. Of course, we also kept each other updated on any new cusswords and phrases we had learned. (Our favorite at the start of fifth grade: “A dirty devil’s behind in hell.” Her brother taught us that one.)
We were each ornery in our own way, and got into our share of trouble, but we knew how to take care of a mouse. We had each had hamsters as pets, and taking care of the mouse was not too much different. Every day, you put in fresh water and some food. Once a week, you cleaned the cage. Doreen couldn’t stand that job, but allergies had long inhibited my sense of smell, so I didn’t mind as much. Still, she didn’t shirk her duties. Doreen would take care of the mouse one week, I would take care of the mouse the next week. With a typical children’s sense of fairness, we decided that if one of us was absent on her mouse-caring day, she would have to make up a day for it at the beginning of the next week.
In October, a new girl came to school. Her name was Lindy and she was pretty and smart. Mrs. Hobbs liked Lindy so much, sometimes she hired Lindy to babysit her children. Only later would I wonder about the judgement of a woman who would leave several young children in the care of a ten-year-old. At the time, it just made Lindy seem all the more superior.
Lindy hated me. I have figured out the part about the dead mouse in everybody’s pocket, but I still haven’t figured out exactly what made Lindy single me out as the object of her hatred. Maybe it was because I looked like a target: unsure of myself with my short haircut; noticing that Doreen wasn’t exactly flat-chested anymore; worrying about what it meant to have my best friend grow breasts and my mother lose hers; wondering why adults shook their heads and looked at me with pitying faces when the cancer word was whispered. Or maybe I sparked some silly set of insecurities in Lindy.
Whatever her reasons, Lindy ridiculed me at every turn.
Gradually, she even wooed Doreen away from me. Soon, taking care of the mouse was the only connection Doreen and I had to one another. She dropped out of Scouts, which Lindy had declared was something for “kids.” Doreen’s mother still made her go to catechism, but we stopped walking over to church together.
I started going home for lunch more often, choosing to lose a few minutes to the walk home over sitting in the school cafeteria, watching Lindy snicker with Doreen as they looked over at me. I took long walks around the schoolyard by myself at recess. For the first time, I dreaded going school. When the flu went around that year, I caught it twice. I was glad to be sick with it. Throwing up was better than school.
One cold Monday morning, Mrs. Hobbs opened the classroom door, and let us in. The students who sat near the corner where the mouse cage was kept immediately complained of a smell. The mouse was dead.
Mrs. Hobbs was furious, angrily demanding that Doreen and I come over to the cage. “The mouse has starved to death,” she shouted, even though we were right next to her. “Which one of you was supposed to be feeding it?”
I looked at the cage in horror. No food. No water. I envisioned the little mouse, trapped, unable to do anything but starve. I started crying.
Doreen said with certainty that it was my turn to feed the mouse, I stammered that I thought it was Doreen’s. I was trying to figure out if that was true, even as I said it. I counted back on my fingers, confused, because each of us had been out for parts of the previous two weeks with the flu. Lindy proclaimed it was my turn. That settled it as far as Mrs. Hobbs was concerned. After all, I had been showing an amazing lack of attention to everything connected to school lately.
“Get rid of it. Get rid of it right now,” she said. “Take the cage out to the trash bin behind the cafeteria.” It was clear to everyone in the classroom who she was giving the assignment to. Doreen went back to her seat.
I picked up the mouse cage with the dead mouse in it and walked out of the classroom. I hadn’t had time to take my coat off yet, so I didn’t have to go back to my desk or do anything else to prolong my time in the hated classroom. My nose was running and I could hardly see for my tears, but I walked out to the big metal trash bin. I set the cage down on the ground near the bin, took out some tissue and blew my nose. I tried to calm myself. I opened the little wire door on the cage and took the mouse out.
His body was cold and stiff, but his fur was still soft and he seemed very small in my own small hand. I dropped the cage into the dumpster, but I didn’t put the mouse in with it.
I stood there, crying, wishing I was the one who was dead. I asked the mouse to forgive me for killing it, and asked God to please forgive me, too. I knew that Mrs. Hobbs had told me do something and that probably I should put the mouse in there and go back to class, to accept whatever happened as my penance for killing the mouse, even if I wasn’t the one who had killed it. It was at least a venial sin, I figured, to not have checked on the mouse on Friday.
The biggest problem for me at that point wasn’t facing Lindy or Doreen or Mrs. Hobbs or the class. It was ignominiously putting the mouse in the Dumpster without a Christian burial. All of my dearly departed hamsters were interred in a shady spot in my backyard. The class mouse, I decided, should rate at least as much consideration.
I wavered for a while, then went into the girls’ bathroom. I carefully pulled off two paper towels and made a makeshift shroud of them. I gently tucked the dead mouse into my coat pocket. I wouldn’t go back to class, I decided. I would just walk home. I washed my swollen, reddened face and scrubbed my hands, and left the bathroom.
The janitor was standing in the hallway outside.
“What are you doing out of class so long?” he asked.
“Our mouse died,” I said, “Mrs. Hobbs asked me to get rid of it.” Not a lie, really, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I hadn’t finished my assignment.
“Better not have plugged up the toilet,” he growled, then seeing my face, gently added, “Sorry about the mouse. They don’t live very long anyway. Go on back to class now, it’ll be okay.”
I couldn’t talk, let alone tell him that I was just about to ditch school for the first time in my life. Under his watchful gaze, I walked back to the classroom. I decided I would go home for lunch, and bury the mouse then.
Mrs. Hobbs might have felt bad about yelling, because she didn’t say anything when I came back into the class. She didn’t call on me, or even ask why I was still wearing my coat. Maybe she didn’t even look at me; I couldn’t say for sure, because I was just staring at the top of my desk, not saying anything to anyone, just wishing for two things: that it would be lunch time and that my hair would miraculously grow longer again so that I could hide behind the curtain of it.
But I hadn’t been back in the class for an hour before the kid sitting next to me complained that something smelled bad. I knew what he was smelling, even though I couldn’t smell it myself.
Mrs. Hobbs demanded an explanation. When I started to tell her that I wanted to take the mouse home and give it a
funeral, she looked like she wished corporal punishment would be immediately reinstated. I looked helplessly to Doreen, who had officiated at some of the backyard ceremonies. She was silent. Mrs. Hobbs wasn’t. Apparently, pets in Mrs. Hobbs’ household were not given funerals. She told me to go back out, and this time, do as I was told.
I left the classroom hearing laughter. It seemed to start near where Lindy was sitting.
I didn’t go to the trash bin. I went home.
My mother was sleeping. She had been awake earlier, but I knew that since she had gone to the hospital, she slept whenever she could manage an hour or two away from me and my younger siblings. I took a big spoon out of a kitchen drawer, gathered up a box of toothpicks, a rosary, a St. Francis holy card and some sewing thread. I quietly went out to the backyard cemetery and buried the mouse between the bodies of a hamster and a sparrow I had found not long before. I gave him the traditional gravemarker: a cross made with two toothpicks, on which the crossbeam is held in place by wrapping the thread around the intersection of the toothpicks. I put the rosary around my neck, recited the Prayer of St. Francis, and moved my right hand in benediction over the grave.
I could hear a bell tolling; the telephone. I ran inside. I wanted to catch the phone before it woke my mother. But I was too late; she stood in her robe in the kitchen, looking at me as I stood with dirt caked on me, spoon in hand, rosary around my neck. She had the phone to her ear, but I don’t think she was listening too closely.
She knew.
She knew I had been caught with a dead mouse in my pocket. But her face wasn’t angry like Mrs. Hobbs’s.
“Yes, she’s here,” I heard her say. There was a long pause, then she said, “No. I think I’ll keep her home today.”
She hung up the phone. I thought she might be angry about my ditching school, but she just told me that maybe I should get out of my priest’s clothes and wash up, maybe put on some pajamas instead. I nodded, then hurriedly followed her advice. By the time I was in my pajamas, she was lying down again. I tiptoed into her room, thinking she might have fallen back to sleep, but she was awake. She patted the bed next to her, and I crawled in beside her. She held me as if I were much smaller, close to where she had once had breasts. I had not ever been allowed to see her chest after the surgery, a radical double mastectomy, but I imagined that day that I could hear her heart better.