by Jane Haddam
“I’m going over there in less than a minute,” Gregor called back.
Tommy was hopping around from one foot to another, stopping every once in a while to try out old George Tekemanian’s new gadget. Peach pits littered the front steps of the house. Pitted peaches and unpitted ones were piled up on a plate that had been left on the sidewalk—a blue-and-white plate that belong to Lida Arkmanian’s best Royal Doulton set.
Gregor grabbed Father Tibor by the arm and starting leading him down the street in the direction of the Ararat. He was starving, and it was suddenly a very good day, in spite of the situation with Bennis. Maybe the truth was that he had very suddenly decided that everything would be all right, that Bennis would find a way to quit smoking for good, that his life was not going to fall apart. Maybe it was just that he was home, in the only home he had ever really had, in adulthood or out of it.
“Listen,” he told Father Tibor as they walked together down the street. “Let me ted you what I’ve figured out about love.”
Turn the page for an excerpt from
Jane Haddam’s
TRUE BELIEVERS
Now available from
St. Martin’s/Minotaur Paperbacks
It was still full dark when Marty Kelly left home, so dark that there were haloes around all the street lights, as if the lights had metamorphosed into miniature blue moons. For a while, it seemed odd to him that he should be standing out here in the night like this. He’d done enough of this kind of thing in his life, in spite of the fact that he was only twenty-six, but all the other times he’d been anything but stone cold sober.
“Alcoholics,” Bernadette had told him, the first time he’d brought her to this place. “Alcoholics and druggies. This place is full of them.”
At the moment, this place was full of nothing. Marty could see with perfect clarity down the long alley between the trailers, and there wasn’t so much as a light on in one of the living room windows. Even Marty’s own mother seemed to be asleep. Marty shifted from one leg to the other, put his hands in his pockets, tried to think. If Bernadette found out that Geena’s trader was dark, she’d want him to go down and check. It was Friday night. Geena worked on Friday nights, if she was able—and for some reason she still got work, almost as much of it as she’d gotten when Marty was small and her face had looked less like a piece of onionskin that had been crumpled into a ball and thrown into a wastepaper basket. In those days, the men had come in the afternoons as well as at night, and when they did, Geena would shove Marty into the back bedroom and fix the door so he couldn’t get out. If the man was fast, it didn’t matter. If he wasn’t, Marty would find himself sitting on the bedroom floor for hours, hungry, bored, ready to explode. When he had to relieve himself, he would get an empty beer bottle out from under the bed and go in that, praying like crazy that he didn’t have to relieve himself in the other way. When the fights started, he would wedge himself into the small closet and shut the door, hoping like hed that nobody would find out he was there. Every once in a while, the fights got bad enough to make somebody notice. Something would crash through the living room window. Something would spill out into the alley where other people could see. Then the police would come and he would have to hide even more carefully. He would have to practically stop breathing. If the police found him, they would call the child protection people, and that was the very worst thing of all.
“She might be sick,” Bernadette would say, if she were standing out here next to him. “One of those men who visit her might have done something to her. You can’t just leave her alone. You have to go see.”
Marty turned back to look at the truck. Bernadette was sitting upright in the passenger seat, her seatbelt already on, her eyes closed. Her sense of duty was one of the things he loved most about her, mostly because he’d never met anybody else who had it Bernadette believed that wives cleaned house and got dinner for their husbands. Their trader was always spotless, and if she had to work late and couldn’t be there when he got back from the station, she left a covered dish in the refrigerator with instructions for him to heat it in the microwave. Bernadette believed that good people went to church on Sunday, and that they did more for their church than sit at Mass looking holy. She volunteered for two different missions, and helped out at the Episcopalian church across the street when they had need of it She hadn’t even seemed to mind that most of the people at the church across the street were gay. Bernadette was holy, but she wasn’t one of those people who had her nose stock in the air.
Marty had learned to nurse a single beer all Saturday night so that he’d be in shape when the alarm went off at six on Sunday morning. Sometimes, he stopped cold in the middle of installing a carburetor or changing the oil on some car that hadn’t had it changed in the last six years and felt a kind of shock. He was still living where he had always lived, but he might as well have been living on a different planet. He didn’t know anybody else whose trailer looked like his, or who had a savings account, either. It was incredible what happened when you kept your drinking to a six-pack a week and didn’t do drugs at all. In the beginning, he had only gone along because he was in love, and because he couldn’t believe that Bernadette loved him back. In the end, he had had to admit that she was right about everything.
“Used to have a savings account,” he said now. He was looking at his mother’s dark living room window again. It was the first of February and very cold. In any other year, there would have been snow. He turned back to look at Bernadette. She hadn’t moved.
“Listen,” Bernadette had told him, when they were first going out. “It’s not luck. It’s not that you have to get lucky. It’s that you have to have a plan. If you have a plan you can do anything. Don’t you see?”
One of the things Bernadette had done was to make him stop playing the lottery. She had made him take the money he would have spent on lottery tickets and put it in a jar behind the kitchen sink. At the end of a month, she had dumped it all out on the kitchen table and shown him how much there was—and there was nearly three hundred dollars, enough for the utilities two months running, enough for a payment on the truck. Marty thought he would remember it all the rest of his life, the way she had been that night, her red hair caught back in a barrette, her great blue eyes looking bluer than usual in her pale freckled face. She had been so beautiful, she had made him hurt.
“You have to have a plan,” she had told him again. “You have to think things through.”
He’d never been too good at that: thinking things through. He wasn’t good at it now. He had a sudden vision of the first time she had fallen down in front of him, bucking and shaking, her eyes rolling back in her head—but the vision went black in no time at all. He knew what he had done, the first time she had gotten sick and every time thereafter, but he couldn’t remember himself doing it.
He forced himself to look at Geena’s window, yet again. He forced himself to walk down the alley to Geena’s front door. The inner door was open, in spite of the cold, but at least the storm windows were in in the outer door. He’d put them in himself, in November, because Bernadette had reminded him to. The windows were all clean, too, because Bernadette had cleaned them, the way she went down to Geena’s when Geena was sleeping off a drunk to do the dishes or vacuum the floors or get the laundry to the Laundromat so that Geena wouldn’t smell.
“She’s your mother,” Bernadette had said, running her fingers along the edge of a sewing needle she had been trying to thread for the last half hour. “You have to honor your mother, even if she hasn’t been a very good one.”
Sometimes, Marty wondered what it was God thought He was doing. He was supposed to have some very important plan—and there had been times when Marty had claimed to understand it—but the truth was that everything seemed to be a mess. Nothing made sense. Nothing ever went right for more than a minute at a time.
Marty went into Geena’s trailer and turned on the light. He could hear Geena snoring in the back. He could see the
small plastic statue of the Virgin Bernadette had put up on the wall next to the front door, as if that alone would be enough to make Geena want to change. Bernadette had statues of the Virgin everywhere, and rosaries, too. She had a Miraculous Medal with a blue glass background that she wore around her neck, always, no matter what. Even in these last few months, when they had not been going to St. Anselm’s at all, Bernadette had not stopped wearing that medal.
Sometimes, when Geena fell asleep drunk, she fell asleep naked. Marty didn’t know how old she was, but he thought she might be going through menopause. She got hot at night, and even hotter when she was plastered, and then she took off her clothes and left them on the floor. He held his own breath and listened to hers. It was even and untroubled. It didn’t sound as if she were sucking in her own vomit. If she were lying naked, he should cover her—but he didn’t want to see her that way. It made him sick to his stomach, and angry in a way he couldn’t explain.
He listened for a moment more, and then went back outside, closing the inner door behind him, because that would at least let Geena’s trailer warm up. The moon over his head was full and clear. The air around him was very sharp. His hands were cold enough to feel stiff. He walked back to the truck and got in behind the wheel, moving carefully so that he did not startle Bernadette. He found himself wishing that her eyes were open, so that he could look into them, so deeply that he could see the bottom of her soul.
Instead, he got the truck started and the heater turned on, and then headed out down the dirt track toward the town road. It was going to be a long drive into Philadelphia, and there would be traffic even at four o’clock in the morning. If they got there too late, Mass would be starting, and they wouldn’t be able to do what they needed to do. He should have listened to Bernadette in everything, without exception, even in those times when he had been so frightened he hadn’t been able to listen at all.
He had just turned onto the two-lane blacktop when Bernadette shifted in her seat and seemed to shudder. He leaned over and put his right hand over hers, to comfort her in sleep.
It was only when he felt the marble coldness of her skin that he remembered, for the first time in an hour, that Bernadette was dead.