Alena: A Novel

by Pastan, Rachel

  He didn’t look up.

  “I’m not sure,” I began, and then there was a click, and we could hear a tiny voice through Bernard’s phone saying Yes? I finished my drink. The vodka burned through me with a blue electric sizzling. The world was a dinner plate spinning through space. Bernard said, “Could you come over? Now. Morgan McManus is here. Did you see him on the news?” Chris Passoa’s voice scrambled and squawked through the speaker. Bernard hung up and dropped the phone on the table. He flicked the plastic video card across the polished surface as though it were a bug. The black square spun sideways and skittered onto the carpet.

  McManus smirked. “Is that what you did to Alena? Pushed her over and watched her go down?”

  “Alena could swim like a shark,” Bernard said.

  “Not if you drugged her,” McManus said. “Not if you killed her first.”

  “I loved Alena,” Bernard whispered, and my heart shriveled and toughened like a piece of overcooked meat.

  “You hated her,” McManus said. “You were jealous of her.”

  “She was Artemis,” Bernard said. “I was Orion.”

  “She was brave. You’re a coward.” Plucking his glass from his sculptured hand and setting it on the table, McManus leaned over to retrieve his video card, but he lost his balance. Down he went to the floor with a crash, the plywood chair flying away behind him, his limbs splayed across the rug like a spider. Bernard and I stared down at him, doing nothing. He grunted and slowly began to gather himself back up, like a boxer in the ring, or a newborn foal in a corral. Why I didn’t move to help him I can’t say. Maybe it was the vodka, or the shock, or my shriveled meat heart. Maybe I was afraid of what I would feel if I touched him. Or maybe it was because it was so interesting to watch him, flailing and gyroscoping on the floor, trying to rise.

  By the time Chris Passoa’s car pulled up, McManus was back in his chair, but his false arm had slipped out of position. It sagged from his bicep at an odd angle, the way my brother Mark’s arm had sagged after he fell out of a tree and broke it during a hunting trip when he was thirteen. I had to keep reminding myself that McManus’s arm couldn’t be broken—not like that. Not in a way that would cause him current pain. He had crossed the frontier into a foreign country of injury, had climbed the mountain and slalomed down the black diamond trail of bodily harm. When the bell rang I jumped up and said I’d answer it.

  Chris was dressed casually in faded jeans and a gray sweatshirt, but his expression was rigid, formal, stern, as though it constituted his uniform. “What’s going on here?” he said.

  I took a step closer and laid my hand on his wrist, pretended I didn’t notice his flinch. “Morgan McManus has a video he claims he took the night Alena died,” I said, looking up into his square set face. “He’s drunk. Probably high too. I think when you went to see him it must have opened the whole thing up again. He hates Bernard because he’s never had a show at the Nauk, and now he’s throwing around these crazy accusations. Making threats. It’s as though he’s lost his mind.” I was standing very close to Chris, my fingers pressing lightly into his arm, and as I spoke, I could see him, reluctantly, taking me in, me in my new dress standing barefoot in the airy foyer of Bernard’s house.

  “And what a mind,” he said.

  “You saw his work,” I said. “You’ve seen how he sees the world.” I said, “Didn’t he tell you Alena’s message was nothing in particular? And now this story about summoning him to the beach, about video cameras! If it’s true, why didn’t he tell you yesterday?” Then I led him into the living room.

  “Hello, Bernard,” Chris said. He looked at McManus. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” McManus said.

  All three of them ignored me. It was as though I had become invisible.

  Chris took a seat, crossed his legs. I wondered if he would accept a drink—if he considered himself on duty or off—but Bernard didn’t offer him one. Maybe he didn’t want to find out. “Catch me up,” Chris said.

  “Morgan is trying to blackmail me,” Bernard said. “He claims I killed Alena. He offered to trade me a recording of the killing for a show at the Nauk.” He nodded at the video card on the table.

  Chris Passoa picked the card up, looked at it, weighed it in his hand. “This the tape they ran on Channel Seven?” he asked McManus.

  “They ran part of it,” McManus said.

  “And you’re saying the other part shows Bernard drowning Alena? Two years ago? And you’ve kept it lying around all this time?”

  “No,” McManus said. “I’m not saying that.”

  “What, then?”

  McManus rearranged himself in his chair. A few inches of his shiny leg prosthesis showed between his sock and the hem of his camouflage pants, and his neck bulged, the architecture of the tendons straining against the scarred skin. “Bernard went out in his boat,” he said. “The night Alena died. He launched from the beach where Alena told me to meet her. But Alena wasn’t there. Where was she? She went into the water that night, and he—Bernard—was out on the water. Is that a coincidence? Is that what I’m supposed to believe?”

  “So nothing’s on the video,” Bernard said. “Nothing at all!”

  “You’re on it,” McManus said stubbornly. “You’re getting out of the boat just around the time Alena was dying!” His face was as crimson as his hand.

  “Why on earth would I kill Alena? For what possible reason?”

  “She told me to meet her,” McManus repeated. “She had something she wanted me to document. She said she’d be there, but she wasn’t there.”

  “She died!” Bernard’s voice was like hot oil sizzling in a pan. “She had some kind of accident and died! That’s why she wasn’t there!”

  Chris Passoa had let the conversation, like fishing line, play out this far, but now he flipped the pickup and began to reel it in. “This video,” he said to McManus. “You didn’t mention it to me when we talked yesterday.”

  McManus turned his big head toward Chris, then his torso with its one real arm and its one false arm, hanging crookedly now like a gutter that has come loose after a storm. “I didn’t,” he admitted. “I should have. Truthfully, I didn’t remember exactly what was on it. Two years, after all! But after we talked, I started thinking. And I started remembering more and more. So I went and dug up the video, and things came back.”

  “But you didn’t call me,” Chris pursued. “You didn’t bring the tape to me. You brought it to Channel Seven.”

  McManus smiled wryly, half his face rising, the other half staying where it was. Chris’s own face tightened in response, his disgust visible. “Why are you interrogating me?” McManus said. “Bernard’s the one you should be questioning. Ask him what he was doing on the beach that night.”

  Chris slipped the video card into his pocket. “Is that much true, Bernie?” he asked. “Were you on the beach?”

  “For God’s sake! It was two years ago!”

  “Yes,” Chris said. “So stop a minute and think.”

  A hot silence fell over the room, broken only by the sound of the surf beyond the deck. Alena had died out there in the cold water in her toe rings and her boots. For two years the water had held her in its dark arms, sucked her down to bone, dissolved the essence of her through Cape Cod Bay. I wondered, as I had wondered before, why it mattered exactly how.

  “I may have gone down to the beach,” Bernard said at last. “I may even have gone for a sail. I’ve forgotten. I often sailed at dusk. Maybe I did.”

  “So you weren’t tired of sailing then.”

  Bernard looked at him for a long moment, his eyes dark, the shadows under them darker. “No,” he said. “Not then.”

  “And was Alena with you? Did you see her on the beach?”

  “I didn’t see her,” Bernard said. “I didn’t see anyone.”

  In my mind I could see McManus’s
grainy video—the man dragging the boat out of the water. The man rolling it across the sand. The sail, loosely bunched around the boom, flapping its ghostly hand in the dark. Could you guess from that what had happened in the hour before the tape was made? Impossible. From McManus’s angle, hidden in the tick-infested dunes, you couldn’t even make out the man’s face.

  “She told me to come to the beach,” McManus said. “She told me to bring my camera. Something would happen, she said. Something I shouldn’t miss. What was it?”

  “Nothing!” Bernard cried. “Nothing! Nothing! She could have been anywhere up and down Cape Cod! She didn’t have to be in Nauquasset at all.”

  It was true: Alena could have been anywhere. But I didn’t believe it. None of us did.

  Maybe Maria Hallett had lured her out to sea. Maybe she’d gone swimming with her boots on, racing a ghost. What a picture that would have made: a woman, naked except for her bubble-gum boots, plowing through the surf, swimming down the moonlit path straight out to the horizon! I thought of what Agnes had said Alena had told her: You only get one shot at death, I don’t intend to waste mine. Was she looking down now, rejoicing in the drama she could make happen even in her absence? “Maybe she committed suicide,” I said. “Maybe that was what she wanted you to document!” Despite what Chris thought, it still seemed plausible to me. Who knew how far a determined woman could swim with her boots on?

  The men’s heads swiveled toward me with the suddenness of guns. The room thrummed.

  “She wouldn’t do that,” McManus said. “We were working on a project!”

  I almost laughed! Not, She wasn’t depressed. Not, She was full of life, she wanted to live. We were working on a project!

  “What was the project?” I asked.

  McManus raised his chin and looked down over his canny nose. “It was going to be fantastic,” he said. “A major reenactment. We were going to restage the sinking of the Whydah with an exact replica of the ship, all made by hand! We were going to rig it and train local volunteers to sail it. Everyone in eighteenth-century clothing! Pirate garb for those on board, spatterdashes and buckled shoes for the ones on shore. Bonnets and corsets for the women. And then we were going to capsize it and the participants would go floating into the bay! Not during an actual storm, of course. And then those watching from the shore would try and rescue them. The bodies would lie on the beach for an afternoon, simulating death.”

  Bernard guffawed.

  Chris’s face shut up like an anemone.

  I said, “Alena would have been Maria Hallett, of course.”

  McManus smiled at me, and for a moment, as our gazes caught, we might have been alone in the room. “Of course,” he said. And then a thought came to him, I could see it flicker to life on his face. “Maria Hallett’s hut,” he said. “That bum who sleeps in it.”

  “Old Ben?” Chris said. “What about him?”

  “He was there that night. I heard him moving around the way he does. Maybe he saw something.”

  25.

  MCMANUS COULDN’T WALK WELL on sand, so Chris Passoa suggested we drive his Jeep out to Willet’s Landing, where four-wheel-drive vehicles could cut through to the beach. The night had grown cold. Bernard and I sat in the back as we bumped along the driveway, then headed up the shore road. I reached out and took his hand. It lay limply in mine, like a dead hand, and he turned his head away, watching the dark shapes of the scrub rise and fall in the salty dark. At Willet’s Landing, Chris turned down the track between the dunes, the long grass sighing against the metal body of the Jeep. And then we were through onto the beach, with the waves breaking and the white foam gleaming on the cold sand. I rolled my window down and let the chilly air wash over me. Stars were bright and thick. McManus tapped his rubbery flower against the dashboard. It made a flaccid, squelchy noise. This was the stretch of beach where the boot had been found—a bit of plastic detritus spat out by the sea. Where was the rest of her, the hundred-odd lost and lonely bones? In the front seat, McManus started whistling. Chris Passoa stopped the Jeep. “It’s just over there,” he said.

  I opened my door and stepped out into the soft sand. We were the only people on the beach, but up on the dune you could see the lights of a few houses, though the summer was over. A little way down, a long low building crouched on the crest of the bluff, a prism of darkness against the stars. “That’s the Nauk,” I said in surprise, and suddenly the shape of the shadowed beach around me became familiar. Chris Passoa got out from behind the wheel, and McManus got out too, holding on to the side mirror. Bernard stayed where he was.

  “I’ll go see if he’s there,” the police chief said. “If he is, I’ll bring him.”

  We waited. The surf roared dully, monotonously, as though nothing could ever surprise it. The cold beach was littered with broken shells and egg cases and hard dark stones. A shadow slipped across the sand, and looking up, I saw a large bird—an owl, possibly—gliding by in silence. McManus said, “Whatever you did to her, it must have been here.”

  Bernard said nothing. He had closed his eyes and leaned back in the seat. He might have been asleep.

  “Did you tie her up?” McManus said. “Did you hit her with a rock? Didn’t she scream? Or did you gag her first?”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  McManus looked at me and said, “If you think he’s ever going to sleep with you, you’re kidding yourself.”

  “He’s my boss,” I said.

  “Even Alena couldn’t convert him. Though of course they slept together once or twice when they were in college. She could always tell he was queer, though. She told me she knew before he did. She always saw things clearly, Alena. Her inner eye was as sharp as a scalpel.”

  “Alena’s dead,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? It feels like she’s gone for a swim and will be back any minute. She loved swimming at night, didn’t she, Bernard?”

  Bernard opened his eyes as though his lids were made of lead. “Yes,” he said. “She did.”

  In Wisconsin too we had swum at night: in depthless quarries and silty ponds, in wide shallow rivers and black indifferent lakes. But this was different—the hungry waves grumbling and churning at the edge of the earth, the doorway to the kingdom of krakens and sharks. It was a miracle anyone ever made it out.

  Chris Passoa materialized from the dunes, leading a thin, windblown figure with a wild white cloud of hair and beard. “I didn’t do anything,” the old man said. “Don’t send me back.”

  “Nobody’s sending you anywhere,” Chris said. “We want to talk to you.”

  “No one uses that place,” the painter said. “Just ghosts.”

  “We want your help. We’re hoping you can help us.”

  “I can’t help anyone. All I can do is paint.”

  “Bernard?” Chris said. “Can you please come out here?” Bernard got out of the car and stood, tall and pale in the wind, his jacket blowing. “Do you know this man, Ben?” Chris asked.

  The painter stared at Bernard. We waited.

  “He can’t tell what’s real from what’s not,” Bernard said.

  The old man gestured in the direction of the Nauk. “He runs that place up there,” he said.

  “Have you seen him on this beach before?”

  “Lots of times.”

  “Have you seen him with the woman who used to work there? Alena? You know who that is, don’t you?”

  The old painter turned toward the policeman. The wind was cold, and freezing spray drifted up from the black, hissing waves, but he wore only a vagrant’s threadbare shirt, and his feet were bare. “She’s gone, isn’t she?” he said. “She went into the sea.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She used to swim, lots of nights. Without her clothes on,” the painter said. “I didn’t watch.”

  McManus laug
hed. “Do you think she cared if you watched or not? If you jerked off, crouching in the dunes? Why should she care about that?”

  “McManus,” Chris said.

  “I only see her in dreams now,” the painter said.

  “I’ll bet you see her in your dreams,” McManus said. “The question is did you see her the night she died?”

  The old man blinked. His face was wrinkled and creased like an old tortoise, but his white hair and beard shone in the moonlight like the pure breath of cows on an autumn morning.

  “Ben,” Bernard said. “These men want to know if you saw Alena and me together, here on this beach, two summers ago. The night she disappeared. June, it would have been. Near the solstice. This man thinks I killed her. He thinks I put her body in my boat and sailed away and dumped it in the ocean. They want to know if you saw that.”

  The painter looked out to sea as if he were struggling to remember. The waves rolled in, as they did every night. How many nights had he seen them? How could he be expected to tell one night from the rest? Then he said, “I saw the arrow.”

  “What arrow?” McManus said.

  “A streak in the air.”

  “A streak?”

  “Like a tracer. They would start the tracers first, and then the shooting. Green light everywhere! Flares exploding red and yellow, mortar rounds dazzling, color everywhere, light painting the sky, the jungle going up in flames, orange on black.”

  “What jungle?” Chris Passoa asked, a tic of impatience in his voice. “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s talking about the war, I think,” I said. “Vietnam.”

  “How to paint that?” Ben was growing agitated. “All that horror—how to capture it?”

  “Surely they didn’t have arrows in Vietnam,” Chris said.

  “Streaks in the burning air the color of snakes,” the painter said. “Snakes in the jungle the size of culverts. An arrow streaking like a white snake through the air. A body falling. Bodies floating down the river, surrounded by leaves and old rubber.”