by Doug Burgess
The sea has set itself against my struggles, slapping me back again and again. Now suddenly it changes its mind, and the surge lifts me up until I am staring right down at the figure in the white shirt. We are side by side, struggling together. “Come on,” I urge him, “Take my hand!”
But there is no acknowledgment. He still has not turned around. “Hey! You! A little help here?”
The current pulls us into each other’s arms, and for a moment we are caught in a pas de deux, his unyielding body pressed against mine. The flesh is rigid as marble, and just as cold. Now, at last, he turns. Black hair gone white at the temples. A face that is not a face but a mass of gray putty gone soft over bones. Dark, empty sockets ringed with blood. The mouth is gaping. Water rushes in, rushes out. Black lips, seaweed snarled among the teeth. Marcus Rhinegold is laughing. “I’m so glad I met you David. I hope we’ll be spending a lot more time together.”
The eye passes over. The sky turns black above our heads. I know what must happen now. This is the spot where the wind touches, and Marcus has come to drag me to the other side.
Chapter Thirteen
Carols playing somewhere, the sound of bells. It must be Christmas morning. They’re ringing the chimes at the First Congregational. Downstairs, Grandma is laying out the plates for breakfast. I can hear the clink of china, the television nattering in the background. Fred pours a bowl of Fruity Pebbles for Santa. Barney comes down the chimney to steal them. “Ho, Ho, Ho, I’m hu-hu-hungry!” The Sarahs will be here soon. Grandma will serve them stollen bread and anise drops, strong black coffee with lots of sugar. There will be a fire with pinecones dipped in Borax that light up in ghostly colored flares like the Northern Lights.
I drift along in that pleasant, warm place that is somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. There’s no hurry; they’ll wait for me. I shift a bit under the covers, exploring the edge of the bed with my big toe, open one eye slowly. The window is framed with frost. It’s still snowing. A garland of lights flashes against the pane in twinkling orbs of yellow, blue, red, green. One bulb has worn thin, brighter than the rest, a brilliant white. It flares and disappears, flares and disappears. A warning. Shoal water near.
I writhe a bit in the bedclothes, which constrict like a python lazily contorting itself around a field mouse. But snakes are dry, everyone knows that. These coils are wet and clinging. I want to cry out, but when I open my mouth the sodden mass rushes down my throat. I’m choking, gasping, drowning in linen. Then darkness, endless and silent, the bottom of the sea where light can never reach. I’m being dragged, chained to a dead man. I have only one last lungful of air. “Grandma!”
“Quiet now, honey.”
A hand, cool and dry, brushes my forehead. It twitches the sheet up over my shoulder and pats it smooth. The storm passes over, and the coils unclench.
“It was Marcus…”
“Don’t worry about that now.”
“He’s dead! You’ve got to tell them…we were wrong. Marcus Rhinegold is dead.”
“They already know. Lie still, baby.”
The room takes shape around us. It is not morning but midday, and brassy winter sunlight streams through the windows. Someone has hung my clothes on the radiator to dry. My shoes are tucked neatly under the rocking chair, and a fresh pair of pajamas lies folded on the seat. Aunt Emma stands next to it, hands on her hips, looking down at me with a quizzical expression. It is absolutely her. Not a mirage, or a memory. Her glasses are perched on the end of her nose, connected with a long chain to her collar. She is wearing the old Eastern Star pin she always wore, a bit tarnished around the edges, and gray flannels. So that’s it, I think, the answer to the mystery. She didn’t die after all.
There is so much I want to ask her. But my mouth is dry. She helps me take a drink of water from a glass on the nightstand. “Is it really Christmas?” I ask.
She chuckles softly. “Not quite yet. Rest now, somebody’ll be in to check on you soon.”
I can hear the rustle of fabric as she moves across the room. In a moment she’ll be gone, and I’ll be no wiser than before. “Please don’t go!” I cry, panicked. “If you go it won’t be real anymore.”
She pauses with her hand on the door handle, but her voice is already distant. “You’ll be all right now. You are a sweet boy, David. I’m proud of you.”
The door clicks shut behind her.
When I open my eyes a second time, the chair has moved to the foot of my bed, and Billy Dyer is in it. His head is tilted back and a thin line of drool trickles down his chin. He looks as though he hasn’t shaved in days. His face is pale and haggard. A uniform coat lies across his knees like a blanket. Oh, God, I think, someone else is gone. Emma is back and someone is gone. The storm has rent a seam between the living and dead. “Billy?” I croak, worried. “What is it? What happened?”
He snorts, opens his eyes. The color rushes back into his cheeks and he grins disarmingly. “Hey! You’re awake!”
“Of course I’m awake. I was awake before. What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing at all. Everything is great, just great.” On an impulse he takes my hand. His own is damp with sweat. “You’re back, so everything is fine!”
“Back?” I ponder this for a moment. But my brain feels like it’s still swimming around in open sea. “Where did I go?”
He shakes his head wonderingly. “We didn’t know if you were going to make it. You were totally blue when they brought you in. The doctors said it could go either way.”
“Was I out for a while?”
Billy’s smile fades a bit. “A little while.”
Aunt Irene appears as if from nowhere, wrapped in a fuzzy orange shawl and sipping something from a styrofoam cup.
“Where’s Emma?” I ask. They both look puzzled, and worried. “She was just here,” I insist. “They must have gotten it wrong. She didn’t die at all, Marcus did. If one did then the other couldn’t have, don’t you see?” I’m speaking perfectly clearly, but Billy stares at me like he doesn’t understand.
“It’ll be okay,” he consoles. “I’m gonna get a doctor in here to have a look at you.”
“Is Renzi here already? What, is he downstairs with Grandma?”
Irene shakes his head. “Your Grandma’s back home, David. Don’t worry. Connie’s sitting with her.”
“Home?” I open my eyes a bit wider. The sunlight isn’t sunlight at all, but the harsh glare of fluorescents. It bounces off the white plastic console, the aluminum rails of my hospital bed. There are tubes snaking in and out of the bedspread; some of them are attached to me. “Wow,” I say wonderingly. “How long has this been going on?”
Billy’s gaze is almost pitying. “They brought you in about six days ago. Severe shock and hypothermia.”
“Have you been here all this time?”
“We took turns. Me, Constance, and Irene. One of us sat with Maggie and another with you. I’ve been coming over between shifts.”
I look at the two of them and feel the prick of traitorous tears. “Thank you.”
“Aww, honey,” Irene says, waving an arm awkwardly. She turns her face away towards the door. “I’m gonna get myself a sandwich from the cafeteria. I’ll bring you back something.” She leaves in confusion.
“Thank you,” I repeat, taking Billy’s hand again and squeezing it.
He looks down at our hands for a moment, then pulls his slowly away.
“Don’t mention it. You’re an important witness. I wanted to make sure I got your testimony as soon as you woke up. And you were talking a lot in your sleep.”
“Did I say anything useful?”
“Nothing we could understand. It was pretty wild, though. Did you have nightmares?”
“Only at first. After that I dreamed of Christmas. It was actually quite pleasant. You must have kept a good vigil.”
Bill
y’s Irish blood tells on his face. He flames with embarrassment. “Oh, hell.”
“What does Debbie think of you spending all your time here?” I meant it lightly, but there’s still seawater sloshing around in my brain and takes a moment to realize Billy is staring at the bedclothes, silent, grim. “Oh, shit,” I breathe. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“S’okay.” His shoulders lift slightly, then droop even lower than before.
“Want to tell me?” I ask gently.
“Nothing to tell. And you’re sick.”
I try to ignore the sharp edge on that word, and press again. “I’m a good listener, Billy. In fact, as long as I’m laid up here with no books or magazines or cable, I’m the best listener there is. Go for it.”
“She left me. Or I left her. Either way, she’s back with her folks in Central Falls.”
This news fights its way through a muzzy cocoon of Vicodin and other medications, so for a moment I’m not sure whether to smile or shake my head. Finally I manage to look grave. “I’m so sorry.” I hope it sounds sincere.
He takes a sip from the coffee in his lap, pushes out his cheeks like a squirrel storing nuts, until the coffee reaches a more temperate heat. I recognize the gesture; he always did it when he was contemplating something distasteful. But right now I don’t know if the distasteful object is me, Debbie Antonelli, or himself. “I know you never liked her. But you need to understand. It was a rough time after you…left. The boys were ragging on me pretty bad. Saying what kind of a man I was if my woman wasn’t even a woman at all…” He chokes, embarrassed.
“Go on.”
“That was when Debbie started coming around. She stood up to them, all those guys. Said I was as much a man as they were, and she knew it. Well, after that I guess I kinda owed her something. She was really sweet. Came over all the time, cheering me up, taking me out, bringing dinner and eating it with me. I was grateful.”
So grateful that when Debbie laid out the big seduction scene you went right along, just to prove you were as much a man as she expected. Oh, my poor Billy, what you don’t know about women! “Of course you were,” I say encouragingly.
“We dated for a while. On and off. I was never all that into her, if you want the truth, but—she was around. It wasn’t going anywhere, though, and by last summer I’d had enough. Then she got pregnant. I don’t know how, she said she was on the pill, but whatever. I guess these things happen.”
“If you make them happen,” I whisper.
“What was that? Did you say something? Anyway, she was gonna have a kid, and her parents are Catholic. Hell, my parents are Catholic. And it wasn’t like you were coming back.”
“Not like you remembered, anyway.”
“No. I mean, yes. But then you did come back. And I thought it was okay, I’d just keep my distance. Then this fucking case…”
A convenient excuse, I think. But didn’t I look forward to those conversations too? Didn’t I call him in the middle of the night, bursting with news of Marcus Rhinegold? Didn’t I know Debbie would be right there next to him?
Of course I did.
“She called me a fag.” He takes a deep breath, lets it out in a long sigh. “Right in front of my folks. My mother. My father. Can you imagine?”
Easily, but I shake my head in sympathy. “Why would she do such a thing?”
“We had them over for dinner. Dad wanted to talk about the Rhinegold case. All the details. You came up. Dad brought you up. I tried changing the subject, but he brought you up again,” Billy says, making me sound like something his father expectorated onto his plate. “Debbie was getting steamed, but Dad didn’t seem to notice.”
William Dyer, Senior, I recall, had never liked Debbie much.
“So you told him,” I press.
“Yeah. Then Debbie just exploded. Like, all over the place. Threw a plate of calamari at the wall and called me every name you can think of. Including that one. Then she stormed out. Maybe she figured I’d call her, come around her parents’ place like some lovesick kid, try to win her back. Well, fuck her.”
There are so many conflicting emotions in my head right now that I’m afraid to open my mouth, lest the wrong one escape. “Billy, I’m so sorry,” I repeat. And I am, I really am.
That shrug again. The quintessential New England gesture, meaning all things and nothing. I put my hand on his to hold him fast. There are so many sparks flying it’s a wonder the oxygen in the room doesn’t ignite. “Billy,” I say slowly, “why are you telling me this?”
“You asked.”
“Sure, but…” These may be the most important words I’ll ever say, and I’m choosing each one. “I’ve looked like this a long time. Even when I was calling myself Rosalie. And you were with me then. So when Debbie called you…that name…was there any part of you that wondered if you might be, y’know…?”
He looks up from his lap. There is a whiteness around his lips that was not there before. “Right,” he says, but not in answer. His eyes are hard. “I gotta get back to work.”
“Billy…”
“I’ll let Irene know. She’ll be here in a minute.”
He tries to slam the door but the padded hinge defeats him, and it closes with a soft apologetic click.
The terrible thing about hospitals is how much time they offer to revisit past sins. I spend the next four unrelieved hours replaying that last conversation in my mind, deaf to Irene’s attempts to interest me in raspberry jello, pictures of her nieces, or All My Children. Finally she gives up and leaves, and I am triumphant in my misery. At nine-thirty the duty nurse turns off the lights. Now it’s just me, and the voice that I’ve been trying to ignore all day.
This is what I should have said. Billy, do you remember our junior prom? That’s when I decided to put on the damned dress. Grandma talked me into it for three solid hours, and once I felt that gauzy fabric falling over my shoulders, I knew it was wrong, but it was too late. She dragged out a makeup case as big as a toolbox and went to work on my face. Rouge, powder, eyeliner, dark red lipstick, each layered over the last like a kabuki mask. Finally she stood me in front of a mirror and breathed, “Oh, honey, how beautiful you are.”
The dress was a sickly shade of peach, too much like skin, that made my reddened arms and scrawny neck look even blotchier. I hated it, her, Little Compton, and everything else. But myself most of all.
You always claim you were my date that night, but you don’t remember. You were with Debbie. She came in on your arm like the prizewinner at a state fair, beaming and waving and blowing kisses to everyone. And I was just standing there, near the fold-up tables with Ritz crackers and Cheez Whiz, waiting to go home. The gym was dark and claustrophobic, with a strobe light mounted on the ceiling. They didn’t even bother to take down the rings or parallel bars. You were practically at my elbow by the time you realized who I was. I knew what you were thinking. We’d been best friends since preschool, but now it was as if I had betrayed you somehow, gone over to the other side and left you behind. I wanted to tell you I was sorry. I wanted to say, “This isn’t me. It’s just some stupid thing they make me wear. You know me.” I would have said that, all of it, but you got there first.
“Wow, you look gorgeous.”
Then I knew I could never go back. The rayon fused to my skin like an exoskeleton. It didn’t matter if I wore that dress or overalls or anything else, even if I went butt-naked down the street. You would never see me any other way than how I looked that night, and neither would anyone else. I felt like the universe had conspired against me in some cosmic joke, split me down the middle and given me a heart and brain that went in one direction and a body that went in another. But you couldn’t see inside, underneath the makeup and cloth and skin. So to this day, Billy, I don’t know who it was you fell in love with: the me you saw, or the me you knew before. Because you never knew, and
I could never tell you, that they were two completely different people.
I’m sorry. I should’ve told you then, but the truth is, I hardly knew myself. Maybe I didn’t know you, either. Maybe we both stared at the other and saw the thing we thought we were supposed to have, rather than what we wanted. But that’s no excuse. Not then, not now.
I should have let you go.
In the morning, a miracle. Billy is here. He’s not smiling, and the stubble under his chin is a bit longer, but he’s here. And he’s got a notebook out. “I need a statement,” he says.
“Modern art has killed aesthetic appreciation of beauty.”
One corner of his mouth twitches. “No fooling around. Let’s start with you finding Marcus in the water.” Billy walks me through that whole terrible afternoon, as if he had not seen it all for himself. When we reach the part where the corpse spun around, I can’t quite repress a shudder. “What happened to him?” I ask. “Have they done an autopsy yet?”
Billy frowns, displeased at being forced to answer questions instead of ask them. “Sure,” he nods, “but the body was in the water for a long time. Looks like something took a few bites out of him.”
“Yeah,” I say flatly, “I saw that.”
“No mystery about how he died, though. Lungs were full of seawater. There’s a knot the size of a golf ball on the back of his head, too, so the coroner figures he might have been hit with a piece of flying wreckage and gone into the sea unconscious. No signs of burning or other contusions on the skin, but the clothes have been practically flayed off. Again, that could just be exposure. Tentative theory: the Calliope exploded and blew him clear.”