A FAQ I read about writing to prisoners said not to ask about their crimes right away—that prisoners who felt like discussing them would do so of their own free will, but I think we’ve gotten to the point where I should know something more about what happened to land you in there.
I don’t mean to sound cold (I hope I don’t!) but if you want me, you’re going to have to give a little more of you.
xo
Lily
PS Richard Lovelace was in prison when he wrote that poem, but I don’t think he was in there very long. I don’t think Whitman was in prison, ever, but he liked to use the Prisoner as a character in his poems. PPS I wrote the above a day ago and I haven’t mailed it yet, so this is an add-on. Something else happened to me when I went over our old letters. I realized I have not been entirely truthful with you. My father didn’t really invent any plastics. He was an inventor, that much is true, but he was not as successful as I have made him out to be. I thought, when writing to you before, that I could convince myself that things were different, but I cannot. He was a good man. I suppose he was something of a dreamer. I have vague memories of his laboratory in the garage. I’m sorry to have burdened you with untruths, but you have to understand that I’m struggling with this myself. My aunt told me a different version of my father’s story, that he was manufacturing drugs and selling them, but I refuse to believe her. You have to make your own version of events if you want to live a happy life. I just went a little too far.
xo
Lily
I found Patty packing up a file box in the living room. She had stopped wearing black altogether.
“What’s going in there?” I asked.
“Old videos,” she said.
“What’s the point of packing away old videos? Everything is coming out on DVD anyway.”
“CJ videos,” she said.
“Oh.” Did this mean I would no longer find my wife laughing and weeping on the sofa, watching increasingly static-filled images of her brother and his friends?
She looked up. “Don’t tell my mother I’m putting these away, or she’ll want them at her house, which will start a whole other cycle of her watching them, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I found myself unable to speak, unable to summon the required platitudes.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I nodded again.
“I can’t keep doing this forever,” she said. She asked for the packing tape, from the table.
I handed it to her.
“I just want things to get back to how they used to be,” she said.
“Me too. That’s what I want too.”
She wrapped the box with packing tape and I carried it out to the storage shelving in the garage. I thought of my aunt’s meticulous Eileen archives. Everyone’s life is destined to become a bunch of boxes. We live, we leave behind a trace, the trace gets relegated to storage, we are forgotten.
It took me some time to realize what was going on with Patty. The way she had decided, as if on a whim, to suddenly stop mourning CJ, to pack his videos into boxes, was a clear indication that she was moving backward, emotionally. How can you console someone who refuses to admit she’s hurting? She, whose inner life revolved around remembering her brother, had suddenly decided to forget him, to block everything out. Patty had always had that ability on a micro scale. She could pull herself out of any mood for the moment, if the situation demanded it. Now she was doing it with her whole life. She had given up, on some level unknown to her conscious mind, trying to find justice for CJ. That part of her which had nearly destroyed our sacred bond was being repressed even further. It would explode if not tended to. People die. Death is the mother of beauty, a poet said. We’re all on the clock. Awareness of death is the mother of beauty. The death of others is the mother of beauty. My own death is the mother of nothing. My own death is the end of everything. An absurd idea. A joke that tells itself. Patty had excused herself from the burden of feeling. I was concerned for her.
18
Feverish at the Mailboxes Store. I was generally careful to keep my feelings in check, but somehow a flash of superiority at the Mailboxes Store snuck around my defenses and stormed my emotional citadel. There is something undeniably exciting about being in contact with a man who has taken another man’s life. In my shoes you would have felt the same excitement. (My own sense of disgust threatens to censor me here, but if I cannot be honest, this is all a waste.)
The sight of my empty mailbox tempered my sense of superiority, with just enough disappointment to make me think twice about what I had been feeling. I was able to divide my feelings into three component parts and distribute them accordingly:
1. The allure of the killer. I assigned this part to Lily, as it would provide a useful motivating factor. She should be drawn toward whatever dark glamour attached itself to a killer.
2. The sense of superiority. This part—most keenly experienced among the people of the Mailboxes Store—I stitched onto my sense of mission. I was not going to stop until I had brought Raven to his knees, until I had made him feel what he had done, and to accomplish that I needed a somewhat inflated sense of importance.
3. The remainder, the excess, the part that threatened to overtake me, the sense that Raven had somehow become my killer—as if he were a starving child I was sponsoring by sending five dollars a month—I let myself feel as a reward for having done a good job so far, for having made, in a preview of the main event, Raven suffer a little bit already.
Someone said once that writing was like trying to dance with a bear who only wanted to wrestle. I’d gotten Raven to dance a few steps. He and I had become protagonist and antagonist in a world of minor players. What did the husband/wife-cum-brother/sister couple behind the counter at the Mailboxes Store have to do with it? What did my aunt and uncle have to do with it? Minor characters, walk-ons, bit parts, atmosphere. And Patty, what could she contribute now, really, while I was teaching the wrestling bear to dance, lulling him, seducing him, pulling him close, dancing cheek to cheek, until he himself wanted to dance, and then wrestling him to the ground …?
This thinking of course resulted in an emotional hangover. Celebration of projected victories in the face of present setbacks is not recommended. In the midst of this aftermath, I realized I was leaving something out of the equation, something that would bring meaning to Raven’s future suffering. It wasn’t about me, my superiority, Raven’s allure. It was about CJ. And he was disappearing. Patty was trying to put him away. I had met him only a few times. I remembered the polite disdain of a younger brother-in-law. An athletic build. A seemingly telepathic line of communication with his father, used primarily for inside jokes. Then he was gone and Patty, inconsolable Patty …
I left the Mailboxes Store and drove like a madman to the Stockings’ house. I expected only the housekeeper to be there, but when I knocked, Minerva answered.
“Hello, Owen.” She smiled in such a way as to ask what I was doing there. Not unfriendly, just inquisitive.
“Minerva—Minnie, hi. I’m sorry I didn’t call. I just wanted—well, it’s good you’re here, anyway.”
She invited me in, poured me a plastic cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice, the same kind I liked to purchase at the market we both frequented. I sipped from the cup and took a peek up the stairs. If she hadn’t been home, I could have gone straight up to CJ’s room. You can learn a lot about someone from the environment they create for themselves. I wasn’t planning to ransack the place, but only to soak up the atmosphere, to refuel, to remind myself that CJ had once been a living human being.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, improvising, “but I wanted to talk to you about some things.”
“I’m always here for you, Owen.”
She made prayer hands at me and closed her eyes. It was a brief and spontaneous gesture, one I’d seen her make before, the intent of which was to convey blessings upon the recipient while also hi
ghlighting the humility of the one making the gesture. I hoped, for everyone’s sake, that she wasn’t going around town doing this, but one never knew. She did hang a dream catcher from the rearview mirror of her Escalade.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said to me at the market some time ago—about Calvin Junior and the leaf you saw falling …”
This was the only common ground I could think of that didn’t involve other people. My first inclination had been to come to her with concerns about Patty’s wardrobe change, but I quickly realized that (1) it didn’t get me any closer to CJ’s room, and (2) knowing Minerva, Patty would hear all about it before I even got out of the neighborhood.
“Oh yes,” she said. “That was several months ago. He was right, too.”
“Right?”
“The leaf can fall without bringing down the whole tree. That moment was a life saver. Literally.”
How was I going to parlay this into a trip up to CJ’s old room? Up the colonial steps, down the jute rug runner, second door on the left. I knew where it was, had been inside even, to dump and retrieve coats during a party for Calvin Senior’s firm.
“How was it a life saver?”
“You’re young yet, Owen. You don’t want to know.”
“Ironic that CJ is the one saving lives.”
She nodded and dug up a smile. I was glad she’d remembered the leaf thing at all. The fact that she saw it as a life-saving event was even better, because while we sat upon the Early American furniture, I hatched a diabolical chick in my mental henhouse.
“I came here today,” I continued, “without Patty—without even telling Patty I was coming—because I wanted to talk about CJ, just the two of us. I know I never knew him, really, but as the newest member of this family, I feel as though I have gotten to know the CJ you all knew. His light is far from extinguished—it is reflected in all of you. I feel honored, I guess is how I’d put it, to participate, even peripherally, in the stewardship of his memory. When Patty and I have children of our own—”
Her eyes lit up at this, as they always did.
“Not yet. Soon. I want to be able to tell those kids about Uncle CJ, whose life was taken way too early.”
“I hope you’ll be able to do that, Owen.”
“I will.”
“Fate allowing.” She bowed her head prayerfully. “I don’t mean to imply it isn’t going to happen. On the contrary, I could wish for nothing more. But life doesn’t always turn out like you expect, or hope. Fate’s agenda is not always known to us.”
“You can say that again,” I said. I employ this phrase whenever I disagree with someone but want to imply enthusiastic agreement. All I have done is given the speaker permission to repeat their assertion. Despite the fact that I was about to unleash a string of careful untruths, I could not bear at that moment to hear myself talking about fate as if it were a real thing. Fate doesn’t exist in real life. Sure, sometimes we see people setting themselves up for a fall unawares, but is that fate? Coincidence isn’t fate. Character isn’t fate. Fate, real fate, old-school Fate, is for characters in books and movies, not real people.
“I’m not quite sure how to say this,” I continued, “but lately I’ve been feeling the presence—and let me know if this sounds ridiculous—the presence of someone, as if someone is watching over me, too.”
“That’s not ridiculous, Owen.” She looked at me more clearly than she had ever looked at me before, with a yearning in her eyes. I became somewhat aroused by this yearning look of hers. I don’t mean physically aroused, per se, but aroused in such a way that, if you pictured the mind as a 1950s supercomputer, the panel of lights reading “nonspecific sexual thoughts” lit up and began blinking, which it had never done in Minerva’s presence before. The intensity of her gaze, the establishment of a newer, deeper connection between the two of us, our being alone in an empty house—all of these things conspired to set off my arousal mechanism for an instant, as when you see a woman struggling to push a shopping cart into the back of another shopping cart with her hips and you think to yourself “that is what she looks like when she is making love.” No Oedipal web of connections, just a man and an older woman, and the “sex lights” blinking on and off for a millisecond. I wondered if Minerva’s sex lights had lit up, too. I wondered if she’d ever thought of me in a sexual way, and this general wondering remained in my brain for some time. Minerva waited for me to continue—waited for me to validate her experience by repeating it back to her as my experience.
“Lately,” I said, “I’ve been feeling a presence in my life, signals here and there, sort of like your falling leaf, and I have wondered more than once whether it might be CJ. Is that crazy?”
“It’s not crazy at all.” She got up and fetched herself some tissues. She did not return to the seat across from me but remained standing instead. She too, then, had felt the intensity of the moment, and felt safer a bit farther away. She wiped her eyes as she spoke, in that way women do, with the tip of her finger moving horizontally below the eye. (To keep mascara from running? Was she even wearing mascara?) “I’ve actually … you won’t believe this, Owen, but I’ve actually been waiting for this since the wedding. We’ve all—even Cal Senior—we’ve all accepted you into this family. You’ve become a member of our family, and I knew it was only a matter of time before CJ would throw his blessing into the ring.”
“It’s generous of him,” I said. “Especially considering I barely know him. I feel like there’s so much more to know, like there’s a whole room upstairs full of a life I’ve only begun to hear about.”
“I’d be happy to help you get to know CJ better,” she said. “I think it could be good for you and Patty, too, for you to know Patty better, by understanding who she lost.”
I knew then that Minerva would lead me directly to the reliquary.
“What kind of signs have you been experiencing?” she asked. I had not the slightest idea how to answer this question convincingly, but I took my first cue from Minerva’s own leaf-vision—a totally insignificant event, seemingly random and singular, imbued with significance for being random and singular.
“Please don’t tell Patty,” I said, stalling.
She nodded.
“I was sitting in the house a few weeks ago. And I heard a strange crashing sound, like dishes clanking in the dishwasher, followed by two thumps. Now, I couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from, in part because I wear earplugs while I work, but I first assumed that Asulcena had broken something again—she’s unreliable, I think—and so I didn’t leap up right away. Then I realized she wasn’t even there that day, so I thought: oh, no, one of the cats. But the cats were in my office, sunning themselves on my reading chair. I got up to investigate.”
“What was it? Don’t tell me—a car accident?”
“No, nothing like that. I walked into the front room and saw that one of our windows had been broken. Part of it was shattered completely, but the other part had the clean round outline of a baseball. I ran out front …”
“No one out there?”
“Deserted.”
“Figures.”
“I have literally never seen our street so quiet during the day. I look, I listen. No one. I get back in the house, annoyed at having to clean up the mess and call the glass guy and so on. While I was waiting for the glass guy—he came and fixed the window before Patty got home—I realized that maybe I should look for the ball. I had swept up all the glass, but for some reason I hadn’t noticed the ball.”
I should point out that Patty’s stories of CJ’s boyhood often referred to his love for baseball, and that he had more than once put a baseball through a neighbor’s window. There was no reason for Minerva to know I’d heard those stories before.
“Because there was no ball?” she asked.
“Well, let’s just say I didn’t find it. I didn’t look all that carefully, figuring it had rolled under something and would turn up later. I wasn’t happy about the broken window
interrupting my work, so I wasn’t in the most receptive mood. But after the guy had come to fix the window and everything, I went back to my desk, and something that had been bothering me for weeks, a particularly thorny piece of documentation—no need to get technical here—all but solved itself, thanks to the broken window, I thought, and thanks to the ball. I decided I’d keep the ball as a memento of sorts. I went back out to find it, convinced I’d missed it before, and I tell you I turned the front half of the house upside down.”
“There was no ball?”
“There was no ball.” It took all my resolve to look Minerva in the eye and continue. “Just a sneaking suspicion, and I can’t explain this either, that CJ had been involved, had paid me a visit somehow, to help me solve my problem.”
“That sounds just like him,” she said. “Breaking your window to help you out. He works in mischievous ways. Did so even when he was alive. Let me show you something.” She indicated I should follow her upstairs.
I put down my empty cup, realizing only then that I’d been gripping it hard this whole time, and followed. Up the stairs, I first avoided, and then enjoyed, looking at her round and firm behind. My sex light panel did not light up. I noted the comeliness of her parts as a pleasant fact. The moment was not charged, as it had been earlier.
I knew where she was taking me. I knew what she was going to show me. Patty had mentioned it to me in passing once: CJ had a baseball collection, and it was still there, somewhere in his old room. He’d always been proud of his baseballs, signed and unsigned, old and new, and he’d held from an early age that such a collection was superior to a collection of statistical picture-cards that came with chewing gum, cards with no inherent value vis-à-vis the game of baseball. Patty cherished the collection quietly, as one of the things that made CJ CJ, and made his death that much more of a senseless tragedy. The world hadn’t lost just another person, it had lost a CJ, and not only those who knew him, but the whole world (upon which he would have had some impact, had he lived) was the poorer for it.
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