by Tara Conklin
“Luna,” Rodrigo was calling to her. “These men would like to talk to you.”
The cops sat at an empty table, the chrome-and-black chairs creaking as they settled their powerful bodies into place. Luna slid in and crossed her arms against her chest. She remembered her visit to the Miami Beach station house six years ago when she first reported Mariana missing. Does your sister have any tattoos? Birthmarks? That cop had been old and white, with long gray hair pulled into a ponytail, and she’d thought how different he was from her idea of a cop. But these two, with their burly necks and thin lips, looked exactly as you’d expect.
Rodrigo, Luna noted, had disappeared into the back. He would be telling them all to go home—the dishwashers, the busboys, the sous-chefs. Who would work the kitchen tonight?
“I’m Detective Castellano,” the short cop began. “This is Detective Henry. We want to talk to you about Joe Skinner.”
“Okay,” Luna said. She waited. This was not what she had been expecting.
“You know him?” Castellano continued.
“He’s my boyfriend.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“A few days ago.” Luna did not volunteer her unreturned calls. Maybe Joe was busy at work, his mysterious and demanding job full of meetings and presentations, clients to woo, proposals to write. Or maybe he regretted asking her to move in. This was how men operated: back and forth, forward and back, a dance of intimacy, and maybe she would never hear from him again, though she didn’t think so. She would bet, she would put good money, on Joe walking in here tonight, his tie already off, and she would nod and smile, pour him a gin, and wait for her shift to end.
“How many days?” Henry’s eyebrows rose. He had been staring at her steadily. Good cop, bad cop, Luna realized. This was really how it happened.
“Three, I think. Yes, three.”
“You haven’t heard from him because he’s dead. Joe Skinner died three days ago.” Castellano was trying to be gentle, but the words came out like hammers.
“What?” Luna’s eyes fixed on the detective’s lips, which were chapped and cracked. “Joe?”
“Subdural hematoma. Brain injury. We think you were there when he died.” This from Detective Henry.
Luna shook her head. A slow reveal was working on her memory, a curtain pulled to show a different view. The whoosh, Joe on the floor, the scattered ice cubes. They had both been so drunk.
“He was breathing,” Luna said. “His chest was going up and down. I lay down with him. He was sleeping.”
“He was dying.”
Again Luna shook her head.
“Did he fall?” Castellano asked.
“Yes. I think so. I didn’t see it, but I heard him.”
“And then what?”
“I went back there, into the kitchen. He was on the floor. He looked at me and then he closed his eyes and started snoring. I got a pillow and a blanket and I lay down with him.”
“And?”
“I put my head on his chest. I started to fall asleep, but the floor was so cold. So I left.”
“You left?” Castellano asked.
Luna nodded dumbly.
“Did you call anyone? Did you think about calling for help?” Now it was Detective Henry.
“No,” Luna whispered. A horrible dawning, a sickening drop in her stomach. She hadn’t called anyone.
“Maybe you were afraid to call? You didn’t want to get the police involved?” Detective Henry leaned forward as he asked this.
“No. That’s not what happened.”
“Was there anyone else there in the apartment with you?”
“No, just us. Me and Joe.”
“Maybe an old boyfriend”—Detective Henry looked down at his notebook—“Donald Linzano?”
“Donny? Of course not.” Luna wondered why—and then she remembered Donny’s arrest for armed robbery, years before she’d known him.
“Or did you let someone else into the apartment? Maybe after Joe fell?”
Luna looked at Detective Henry, his unblinking gaze, and felt a new emotion. Not shock or sadness but fear. She shook her head no.
The detectives looked at each other, and each nodded as though they’d reached an agreement.
“We’d like you to come down to the station with us,” said Castellano. “Just to talk. We need to ask you some more questions. To rule out any foul play.”
“But . . . I need to work. This is my shift.” This seemed the only item to cling to, the only thing that would keep her from drifting away. Her job, the bar, the people who knew her, routines and hours, tips and drinks.
“I’ll talk to your manager.” Detective Henry pushed up from the table, went to Rodrigo, who had reappeared behind the bar. Rodrigo nodded and shrugged his shoulders. What do I care?
Luna folded herself into the backseat of the cop car, and immediately it pulled from the curb and screamed away. She wanted to put her hands to her ears, but it seemed a childish gesture, a sign of weakness, so she kept them clasped in her lap. Within the padded dark blue of the car’s interior, the shock of Joe’s death was settling into her, and inside it took on a new shape. Not death, which was definitive, conclusive, inarguable, the end. This was a question. An uncertainty.
Luna remembered the cop with the ponytail, how he’d squinted as he typed her description of Mariana into a computer. No tattoos, one mole low on her back, long black hair. Ethnicity? Um, Nica. We’re Nicaraguan. So Hispanic, then? Yeah, I guess so. The cop had disappeared for a long time, and Luna wasn’t sure if he was done with her, if she should go or stay, but then he’d returned and said, A young Jane Doe was brought in last night. She might be your sister. Are you prepared to identify the body?
Prepared? Luna repeated. It seemed an odd word for such a request, as though a test or some type of specialist training were needed to perform the act. Luna had undertaken no such preparation.
Yes, she told the police officer.
Downstairs they went, deep into the bowels of the building: water-marked concrete walls, scuffed linoleum floor laid upon an uneven base, harsh overhead lights. Luna followed the cop’s squeaky shoes, his ponytail swinging with the cadence of his step, along a hall, past closed doors, and finally into a white-tiled room. Another man waited for them there, and it was this second man who took her through another door, this one metal and thick, and lifted a sheet laid atop a table.
No, Luna said. This is not Mariana.
Are you sure? the man asked.
Luna looked straight at the face, once a woman’s face, now a mask or something shaped from clay. Rough pink abrasions rose on the left cheek as though painted on with a brush.
Yes, Luna had said. I am sure.
Perhaps Joe’s death was like that, a mistake. A guess. Luna’s belief that no one knew anything for sure, no matter what kind of badge they wore or how much money they had, took hold of her as she watched from the backseat the thick necks of the two cops. This death could not be trusted. It was death in word only, spoken by two men (nothing but ordinary men) who didn’t know her, didn’t know Joe. Foul play? The term itself seemed laughable. Fowl play. Chickens at bat.
More than anything Luna wanted to pick up her phone, wedged now in her back pocket, and call Joe. Hear the deep calm of his voice, the funny little hiccup that came when he really, truly laughed. She would explain this to him: And I missed you, I was worried, I thought I had done something wrong when I didn’t hear from you, and then these cops came in and said you were dead! Dead! I didn’t believe them, and I’m so glad to hear your voice. Come back to the bar. I’ll pour you a gin. It’s okay. Everything will be okay.
* * *
Inside the station house, Luna filled out some forms and agreed to be fingerprinted. The ink felt cool against her skin, and then the detectives led her to a room with a table, a few chairs, a window that looked onto the blemished white wall of another building. Luna sat with her back to the window, Detective Henry next to her, Detective Ca
stellano across the table from them both.
“So,” Henry said. “Tell us about Joe Skinner.”
Luna began to speak. She told them about meeting him, what she’d liked about him, how he’d made her laugh, the drinking. She did not shrink from describing that, not his or her own. Detective Henry scribbled as Luna spoke, the ballpoint moving smoothly against the page. As she described Joe, she smiled, she relaxed, forgetting in an insubstantial way why she was here. She willed herself to focus on this rush of talking about Joe.
“Did you ever fight?” Castellano asked.
“No. Not really. Joe’s not a fighter.”
Detective Castellano tilted back his chair and yawned. Luna heard the bones of his back crack.
“Did Joe ever hit you?” Detective Henry asked.
“No. Never.”
“Did you ever hit him?”
“No. Of course not.”
“What about a recent altercation outside the Lotus Bar?”
Luna didn’t respond for a moment. “I— Yes. I slapped him then. He started a fight with Donny. I mean, he swung at Donny. Donny was bothering us.”
“This is Donny Linzano, your ex-boyfriend?”
“He was never my boyfriend.”
“Could you take off your shirt, please?”
Luna shook her head. “Excuse me?”
“Your shirt.” Detective Henry pointed at Luna and circled his finger in the air. “We’d like to see if there are any signs of a physical altercation between you and Mr. Skinner. Bruises, scrapes. We need you to take off your shirt.”
Both detectives gazed at her with bored, cold eyes.
“Don’t I get— Can I have some privacy?” Luna asked.
“Sure.” They glanced at each other. “We’ll give you a couple minutes,” said Henry, and they left the room.
Luna stood up. In the room’s new silence, she heard the muffled sounds of men talking, a restrained laugh, footfalls, a sudden guttural shout. She walked to the window and gazed out at the wall of the building opposite. Down and to the right, a stretch of windows revealed rows of women sitting at computers with complicated telephone headsets attached to their scalps, making them look insectlike and vaguely dangerous. They all appeared to be talking or listening. They looked straight ahead at their computers.
Luna began to unbutton her shirt. Across the alley the women shifted and tilted, all those heads and talking mouths seeming to form a singular unit rather than disparate, individual parts—like a cornfield or a stadium crowd. Today Luna had worn her black bra, the push-up that tended to generate more tips when she bent over the ice maker or leaned forward to deliver a glass. It wasn’t something to be proud of, but every bartender did it, the men rolling up their sleeves to show their tanned, veiny biceps, the women and their tight tops, short skirts. But now the bra seemed to mark her as manipulative, dishonest, guilty of something: Why else parade yourself like that? Behind all that skin and seduction, what were you trying to hide?
Luna folded her shirt carefully. As she placed it on the table, there was a quick, short knock, and then the detectives reentered the room before she had time to respond. With them was a uniformed woman who stood to the side of the door and looked in Luna’s general direction without looking at Luna.
The female officer stayed where she was as the men approached Luna, their eyes fixed on her torso, her naked middle, the black bra, and her breasts barely concealed within it. Luna shivered and crossed her hands on her stomach.
“Please uncross your arms,” said Detective Henry, not unkindly, and he walked around her, inspected her. Up and down the two men’s eyes traveled.
“Okay. That’s it. Thank you, Miss Hernandez.”
Luna pulled on her shirt. She focused on forcing each pearly white button through its seamed hole. She kept her eyes lowered to the task. More intimate than the act of standing before these men half naked was their witnessing of this, Luna rebuttoning her shirt. The female officer, Luna realized, had silently left the room.
“We apologize for any inconvenience,” said Detective Castellano. “We have a bus token for you.”
Detective Henry deposited a gold token on the table and waited for Luna to pick it up, and then the policemen ushered her out of the room, out of the building, and deposited her on the sidewalk in front of the precinct. Luna stood there for a spell, staring at the gold disk in her palm. It was early evening now, the sky streaked with orange, the day’s heat starting to pull away. She’d been with the detectives for just under an hour, and in that time the news of Joe’s death had become something else; it had become his death. This time there was no mistake, no false identity. In his apartment, on the floor. A brain injury. The horrible thud of Joe’s fall: Why hadn’t she realized? Why hadn’t she called someone?
A grain of doubt and regret, horror and sadness, lodged then deep within her, an oyster’s piece of grit, and it would remain with Luna for the rest of her life. Year after year it would grow layered, polished, and it would with time become something beautiful—a testament to Joe, a cautious tenderness that Luna would apply to her future choices. But in this moment, remembering the office full of talking women and the detectives’ cold eyes, Luna experienced these feelings only as sorrow, as the falling away of Joe’s life and of her own.
The bus token was warm from the heat of her palm, and she threw it onto the sidewalk where it landed with a flat and tinny sound. Luna began to walk.
Chapter 11
An X of yellow police tape ran corner to corner. do not cross do not cross do not cross. The grim sense of purpose that had been building within us all day—on the flight from New York, meeting with the detectives, the hot, breezy taxi ride from downtown Miami to South Beach—now faltered. No one moved to open the door.
“Just rip it down,” Caroline whispered at last, although it was unclear if she was speaking to me or Renee or to herself. Behind us the elevator doors clanked shut. There was a subtle whoosh as the box descended, and its absence made the hallway quieter, the air thicker.
I stood behind my sisters. The floors were pale gray marble, sconces glowing gold on the wall. Above our heads cool air spilled silently from a silver vent. The shimmering heat of the street outside, the blue fuzz of the sky, the Atlantic’s salty tang existed in a different city, a different state.
Joe’s front door shamed us. Behind this door, with its yellow X and rude command, was the apartment where our brother had lived for two years. We had never seen this place before today. Only Noni had ever visited Joe, and this week she’d refused to return.
“I’m never setting foot in that state again,” she’d declared from her bed, as though humidity and alligators had killed her son. I’d been the one to speak with her about the trip, not because I volunteered but because Caroline and Renee had not yet come home to Bexley. Renee held up at some medical conference in Denver. Caroline unable to find an overnight sitter, Nathan traveling for work. She didn’t want to bring the kids, she’d said. It was too much.
Noni had been propped up in bed with pillows, wearing a yellow bathrobe, hair frizzed and crazy around her head. For one hallucinatory moment, she’d looked like a sad, oversize Easter chick.
“You can’t blame all of Florida for Joe,” I told her.
“Well, what then?” Noni had answered. “Tell me, who can I blame?”
“Sometimes there’s no one.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I loved him, too,” I said.
“Ha! Everyone loved him,” Noni had replied. “Everyone. Look where that got him.”
“I’ll do it,” Renee said now. In one swipe she ripped down the tape with a raw tearing sound, and then she balled it up and threw it onto the floor. “Key?” she said, turning to Caroline.
I watched as first Renee, then Caroline disappeared into the apartment. Now that I was here, in the city of Miami, inside Joe’s building that strained like a silver rocket above the wide and busy Collins Avenue, I didn�
�t want to see where Joe had lived. I only wanted to see Joe. I closed my eyes and imagined him: exiting the elevator, fishing for his keys, walking through this door. Again and again and again. Two years of bringing home groceries, girlfriends, DVDs, furniture, magazines, mail. Pizza deliveries, Thai food from the place we’d seen on the corner. Tall Joe, golden Joe, in suit and tie, his oxfords on the marble, gripping the brown leather case he used for work. Joe in running shoes and nylon shorts, the kind he wore in high school for baseball practice. Joe returning late from a work event or a party. Maybe he’d had too much to drink. Maybe he was unsteady on his feet. Joe stumbling, Joe falling.
“Fiona, what are you doing?” Caroline stood in the doorway.
I stayed where I was. I did not move forward.
“Come on,” she said with force. I recognized this voice: it was the one Caroline used on her children. Irritated and firm, capable of shifting swiftly to anger.
Normally I would have bristled at Caroline’s command, but now I was grateful for it. Step inside Joe’s world. Do it. Do it now. You will never have the chance again.
* * *
The smell was pervasive. A closed-in, moldy, sickly kind of smell. Not strictly of organic decay but more general: mess and inattention, grime and dust and forgotten food.
Hazy sun streamed through the floor-to-ceiling glass doors that lined the far wall of the apartment. For a moment I saw nothing but then began to make out individual items: the cardboard boxes against the wall, full garbage bags tied with yellow twists, dirty dishes, cast-off clothing. Sofa cushions on the floor. One green beer bottle balanced precariously atop a Frisbee on the corner of a coffee table. I saw neither of my sisters.
“Renee?” I called. “Where are you?”
“Here,” came a small voice.
Renee was sitting on the floor a few feet in front of me, her back against a long, low, black couch that had melted into the darkness of my vision. Now I saw her. I saw everything.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. I sank down beside Renee. “Joe.”