by Amy Gustine
Brian walked back along the squeaky planks, wondering how long until his father called to find out what the lawyer had said.
Jolly for Jocelyn. The nickname originated in infancy or toddlerhood and stuck. Obi didn’t remember why. As a child she wasn’t particularly jolly, but she wasn’t glum either.
After the medical examiner had cleared her body for burial, they flew Jolly home. “We’ll bump you over and put her where you were going to go,” Karen said, referring to Obi’s burial plot as if it were a place setting. “That way Jolly can be between us.” She nodded at this plan to protect their daughter in death as they hadn’t in life.
Karen also made plans to clean out Jolly’s apartment, booking them a hotel in Phoenix, but when Obi insisted on driving instead of flying, she refused to go. “I can’t sit in a car for four days. I have to get this over with.”
Karen preferred to chew her pain hard and swallow it quickly, while Obi let it dissolve on his tongue, the bitter flavor stored permanently, he feared, in every taste bud.
At the hotel, he signed the credit-card receipt, guessing Karen hadn’t even looked at the room rate. Five hundred a night. He handed the signed charge slip to the clerk, fighting the urge to offer more, all the cash in his wallet, everything in their checking account. He might have handed over their 401(k)s if he’d known how. The woman, a brunette in a cheap red suit coat and navy blue pants, directed him with a polished finger down the hall. He carried his bag up four flights, suddenly repelled by the thought of elevators.
In the room, undyed hemp drapes framed the bright sky and the insistent mountain. Obi shut the drapes, dimmed the lights, took the coverlet—quilted squares of expanding triangles in rust and turquoise—off the bed, stuffed it in the closet, and turned on CNN, knowing it would sound the same in Phoenix as it did in Toledo. He felt dizzy because he hadn’t drunk anything yet today, so he opened the warm bottle of water he’d bought in New Mexico, drank it in two long gulps, used the bathroom, washed up, and left for Jolly’s place, unwilling to face going to sleep tonight without this part over.
The method: pills. The reason: no one knew. Not her GP, who, when Jolly shattered her leg falling down a flight of stairs, had prescribed the narcotics she overdosed on. Not the medical examiner, who’d looked for evidence of injuries on her body to suggest an abusive relationship or foul play. Not the police, who claimed to have interviewed all her friends and colleagues. Who had supposedly searched her apartment. They claimed there was no note. Obi didn’t believe them. He would find something. They just didn’t know how to look. During the long, quiet days on the highway, he had imagined a dozen types of code she could have used, from food arrangements in the cupboard to highlighted passages in the messy stacks of romance novels she always had around.
On the way from the hotel to her apartment, Obi’s cell rang. Normally he didn’t answer while driving, but he’d just stopped for a red light and the phone lay at hand on the passenger seat.
“How close are you?” Karen asked.
“I checked into the hotel. I’m on my way there right now.”
“You’re in the car?” Karen knew his rules. Obi’s real name was Ken, but in college, where they met, she’d dubbed him Obi after Obi-Wan Kenobi. “You’re just so damn good.”
He’d tutored her in math, dug her car out of snowdrifts, driven her to class when it rained and, that first summer, turned down a chance to camp at Yellowstone in order to volunteer on Habitat houses. Nowadays, only strangers called him Ken.
He explained to Karen he was at a red light. “I can’t talk long.”
“Okay,” she intoned, as if he’d reported disarming one bomb of several.
“I’ll call you later.”
“Yes,” she agreed in that tone again.
He could see her sitting at the kitchen table with the phone in her hand, anxious for the all-clear. “It’ll be a while.”
“I know.”
“He’s looking for a psychologist sympathetic to rapists,” Brian said. It was past six. He sat at the kitchen table, a two-person, glass-topped rattan outfit against the kitchen’s end wall, his back to the apocalyptic Indian upholstery, to the balcony and to the blank, burning sky. The days here stretched past the breaking point. No wonder these Indians never wove a circle. Everything had to imply not the sun, but its rays.
“I don’t know anybody down there,” his father said. “Do you? Any contacts in that world?”
“Not really.”
“Well, that’s what Chris is for.” The lawyer. “How you doing on money?”
Brian thought he could hear his father’s checkbook opening. It touched him. “No, Dad, I’ve got plenty. I save most of every paycheck.”
“Good.”
A pause allowed Brian time to think of the joke. “Except for what I spend on ads.”
“You don’t have an ad in now, do you?”
“I was joking.”
“Yeah, okay, good.”
“Dad, I’m sorry about this.”
“Cool it on the ads, all right. We’ll take care of it, just…” A brief pause, then his father said, “I have to go. I got a call coming in.”
Brian admired his father’s restraint. He’d never asked why Brian had to get his kicks by paying a girl to clean his apartment naked, though Brian felt sure his father’s own sexual yearnings could be satisfied without money changing hands, unless you counted hundred-dollar-a-plate restaurants. In the twenty years since Brian’s mother died, his father had dated several lovely women before marrying Carol, a divorced pediatrician whose two kids he helped get into Loyola. At Christmas her kids bought gifts for Brian’s father at the local mall which were more creative and apt than what Brian picked up on his flights to Paris and London.
He wondered what his father had told his other family about the arrest. That’s how Brian thought of Carol and her son and daughter, even though they had a good relationship with Carol’s ex and had lived with his own father for only a few years of high school.
It was possible, even likely, Brian’s father hadn’t told them anything. In front of Brian, he’d treated the arrest for rape—technically vaginal penetration with a digit, in this case his finger—with a lawyer’s professional indifference. The details—that Brian’s ad had specified if the girl came to the job interview without a bra, he’d give her thirty dollars; without panties, fifty dollars—he’d taken in dispassionately, explaining that what mattered most was contact—Brian touching the girl’s genitalia—vs. penetration—his finger entering, however briefly or shallowly, her vagina.
“So when you’re talking to Chris, this is what you keep in mind. Contact gets you a year. Penetration, you’re looking at five to fourteen.” Guilt or innocence never came up. Maybe his father took one or the other for granted. Brian couldn’t tell.
It was nearly time for the news, so Brian turned on the TV. If Jocelyn was at the desk, he would assume she wanted nothing to do with him and go take the note off her door, saving himself another irrevocable humiliation.
Jolly’s apartment complex wrapped a large asphalt lot. The three buildings had no red-tiled roof or rounded eave; their Spanish style relied entirely on the stucco, painted a dirty yellow and punctuated by metal balconies whose railings reflected the sun in blinding shards like knife blades.
Who kills themselves in the summer? Someone who lives in Phoenix, Obi realized. If she’d lived at home his daughter would be alive. No one kills themselves during July in Toledo, Ohio. There’s January, February, March, and most of April for that. In July there is sun, and such a shame to waste it. But in the desert, no matter how many Targets and Costcos you build, how many fluorocarbons the air conditioners pump into the atmosphere, the biggest star remains a malevolence.
Star. Jolly had seemed like one, smart and beautiful, blond hair from somewhere in the family they couldn’t identify. Blue eyes from grandparents who hadn’t managed to give them to either him or Karen. Jolly majored in journalism at Ohio State, took a job
in Columbus, then the promotion to Sun City. Being a newscaster wasn’t the same as acting, though Obi had feared it, too, would deliver an unnatural life, your face known by thousands whose names you never heard. So that was something else he had to do: find out whether things were going well at Jolly’s station.
The other cause Obi planned to investigate was the boyfriend they’d never met, a first-generation Lebanese guy Jolly had been on and off with for a year. Obi and Karen considered Middle Eastern men sexist and authoritarian. They worried Jolly would get taken advantage of. Obi had been able to give only the guy’s first name—Sam—to the police, and realized as he did that even that was most likely just a nickname, some truncated, Americanized version of the truth. They tracked him down anyway, through a coworker at Jolly’s station. Sam claimed he hadn’t seen Jolly for over two months. A hundred witnesses and a paper trail put him in Sonoma at a wedding the day she died.
In the parking lot, Obi took a stack of flat boxes out of the trunk along with garbage bags and a roll of packing tape. Karen had instructed him to send Jolly’s clothes and furniture to charity but to bring home anything personal, like letters, diaries, financials, jewelry, and trip mementos. To make sure he didn’t make a mistake, she’d written a list. He could throw out Jolly’s toothpaste and toothbrush, but he should bring back her makeup, her hairbrushes, and her perfume. He didn’t ask why. These were the things that had littered the bathroom counter for years, that her mother always complained she didn’t clean up.
Struggling with the boxes—too awkward to carry horizontally, yet slipping against one another when he tried to grip them in a vertical stack—Obi made his way across the lot and up the three flights of stairs to Jolly’s apartment. The day he moved her in, after the fifth climb up, he’d said, “I’m too old for this schlep. Next time you can hire movers like the rest of us grown-ups.”
Jolly kissed him on the cheek and handed him a lemonade. “You’re doing fine for a chubby schoolteacher.”
At her door Obi propped the boxes against the walkway’s railing and from his pocket fished out the keys the police had mailed. They still bore the tag with the evidence number. Sliding them into the lock, he looked up to see a note taped to the door. Her name on the outside was written in a masculine hand—large and messy, with alternately blocky and jagged lettering. Whoever put it here did so after the police had come and gone or they would have taken it. Obi stared a long moment. Would there be fingerprints? What if he smudged them? No crime, Obi reminded himself. No crime had been committed.
He looked at the boxes, then at the door handle and the dangling keys, trying to fight the feeling coming up from his knees. It entered his stomach, then his chest. As it invaded his throat, Obi sunk to a kneel, hands pressed against the apartment door. Grief took his breath away, then returned it in gulping sobs. Obi let his forehead fall with a clunk against the metal door, its heat a blank brand, and beat his palms against the beige indifference, cries turning to shrieks like a baby seal.
“Excuse me?” a deep voice said.
Obi looked up. A man stood there, not swarthy, but dark enough to be Lebanese. He’d come out of the neighboring apartment. “You!” Obi said, pushing himself to a stand. He tore the note from the door. “Is this yours?”
“Yes,” the man said.
Obi started forward. The man flinched, features puckered as if ready to take a hit. Obi stopped. “What’s your name?”
The man opened his eyes. “Brian.”
Obi unfolded the note and read it. “Why wouldn’t she be your friend?” he snapped.
“What?”
Obi flapped the note at him violently. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing,” Brian said. “I never did anything.”
Obi took Brian in. He wore socks, jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt. “Why are you dressed like that? It’s hot. You aren’t supposed to be dressed like that.” Though Obi himself was dressed like that.
“Air conditioning,” Brian said. He looked suspicious. “Who are you? How do you know Jocelyn?”
The yelp broke from Obi again and he shook the note in the air. “Did you kill her!” he shouted. “Did you kill my Jolly?”
The man’s expression was enough to exonerate him. “Kill her?”
Obi leaned on the wall, pressing hard against the jagged stucco.
Brian whispered, “Somebody…killed her?”
Obi bleated, “I loved her. I loved her,” and covered his face with his hand.
There was a long pause before Brian said, “You must be her father.”
Obi nodded.
“Come into my place. Come in here for just a minute.”
The man’s apartment hummed with cool. Obi felt as if his execution had been stayed.
“Will you sit down?”
Obi looked at the furniture. “Here,” Brian said, fetching one of the rope-backed rattan chairs from the kitchen. Obi sat facing the living room, like part of an audience, and thought of the days when Jolly put on shows for them. Dances, skits, sometimes readings of stories about princesses and rocket ships.
Brian sat on the edge of the coffee table, his folded hands clamped between his big knees. Despite his size, he looked incapable of hurting someone, which disappointed Obi.
“I don’t understand.” He shook his head. “I just watched her newscast and they didn’t say anything.”
Obi ground his fists into his eye sockets. “I’m supposed to clean out the apartment. Her mother is waiting.”
“In the car?”
“Ohio.”
Several seconds passed. Obi was looking at the floor. “I was supposed to find out why. Did they say anything about why?”
“The news?”
“Yes, it was her station, wasn’t it?” Obi looked up with a glazed, desperate hope in his eyes.
“They didn’t say anything, sir.”
“There’s got to be a reason, you idiot!”
“Right, right,” Brian agreed. “Do they know who did it?”
Obi looked at him with disgust. “Jolly did it.”
“Jolly?”
“The police are telling us Jolly killed herself,” Obi said, his voice accusing.
Brian shook his head. “She wouldn’t do that.”
Obi nodded, his tone now beseeching. “That’s what I said. She had no reason to do that. There has to be a reason.” The sun had sunk near the horizon. It shone straight across the room, a hot spot on the far wall above the kitchen table. Its careless light made the tears at the edge of Brian’s lashes glisten.
“So you knew her?” Obi asked.
Brian shrugged. “I moved down from Chicago for my job. We both liked to swim at night, and when she hurt her leg, I helped her get around a little.”
“Are you Lebanese?”
“No, sir. Italian and German, a little Greek. Maybe some Russian. Nobody remembers exactly.”
Obi looked around the place. “Did the police talk to you?”
“The police?”
Obi explained about the investigation, the lack of a note. “They said they talked to everyone who knew her.” His voice had grown suspicious again.
“They probably did look for me. I’m a pilot, though, and I’ve been out of town.” Brian spoke like a job applicant, striving to explain himself without giving the impression he thought his personal views or circumstances worthy of discussion.
“They should have left you a note, or a phone message. Idiots!” Obi shook his head. “I knew they had missed something.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I could help. I don’t know why…” Brian raised his hands in a helpless gesture. “Can I do something? You’re hot. How about a drink?”
Obi shook his head. “I’m supposed to pack up her things and bring them home.”
“Do you want some help?”
Next to Brian on the coffee table were the TV remote, the pad and pen he’d used to write the note, and the first draft. Obi narrowed his eyes. Brian picked up the note and casually c
rumpled it, as if he were just keeping his hands busy.
“Give me that.”
Brian reluctantly extended the paper. “It’s stupid.”
Obi read the note. “Why wouldn’t she be relaxed here?”
“I got in some trouble recently. It was reported in the papers. I thought maybe that’s why I hadn’t seen her around since I’ve been off work. I thought she heard about my trouble and was staying away from me. I didn’t want her to feel like she had to avoid me. I wanted her to know I wasn’t going to bother her.”
“Drugs?”
“No, sir.”
“Stealing?”
“No, sir.”
Obi examined him a moment. “Rape?”
Brian looked down and squeezed his folded hands together until it hurt. “Yes, sir.”
“Well, aren’t you going to tell me you aren’t guilty?” Obi’s tone implied this would be futile.
“I don’t know for sure.”
“You don’t know?” Obi sneered.
Brian shook his head. “I really don’t.”
“We always know when we’re guilty. Were you drunk?”
“No, sir.”
“Were you in the room with the woman? I assume it’s a woman?”
“Yes, sir.”
A long moment of silence passed before Obi asked, “Why did you scratch out that part about being relaxed?”
“I thought she might think it was dumb, or that I was sort of, like, threatening her. Like when you say the opposite of what you mean to make someone uncomfortable. I wanted to be plain. Not misunderstood.”
“Did the girl, that other girl, misunderstand?”
“Maybe. Maybe I misunderstood.”
“You better tell me exactly what happened.” Obi sounded like the police.
“I put an ad on Craigslist.” Brian never planned to do anything the woman didn’t want. “If I did, why would I place an ad? Or meet her here, where I live?”
Obi leaned forward and nodded. “Okay, yes. But what did you want from this girl?”