Edge

by Michael Cadnum

I got good at spiking the birdie over the net, striking it with the racket’s sweet spot, and Bea fired it right back, as good as Perry used to be. During these games there were no thoughts, no messages, nothing but the game, no one keeping score, Bea and I lunging and laughing, trying to keep the fluttering white shape in the air. Afterward I would put my arms around Bea while moths scribbled the dark.

  One afternoon as I arrived home from work, an envelope I had been dreading was there in the mailbox.

  A snail had made it all the way up the mailbox post, and stuck. I pried the shell off and could see the gastropod tucked way high up inside his shell. I set the creature on the curb where it probably would survive, tugged open the mailbox, and reached in.

  I ignored the multicolored junk mail, platinum credit cards wanting my mom’s business, charities she supported telling her it was that time again. There was only one envelope that mattered. It was from Laney College, the word TESTING rubber-stamped under the printed address.

  I told myself I wasn’t worried. I went into the bathroom, peed, washed my hands. I stalled further, tugging off my Ben Davis work shirt and putting on a clean gray T-shirt, before I picked up the envelope again.

  I went into my room and sat on the bed before I opened it. When the envelope was torn carefully, one end gingerly ripped off, I slipped the letter all the way out and left it facedown on my lap.

  I think I even prayed, a few muttered words, before I turned the letter over and flattened it against my lap. Even then I kept my eyes out of focus. I wished that I were one of those people who need reading glasses. I could fuss with a pair of spectacles for a few more seconds before the truth was in my eyes.

  He parted his lips, his eyes full of questions.

  “The Graduate Equivalency Exam,” I told him again, aware of how little this might matter to him now.

  He licked his lips. This was beginning to be a tick, something he did without thinking.

  I held the letter up so he could read it and waited while his eyes followed the sentences along. He had always been a fast reader, but now his eyes returned to the letterhead, searching the three short paragraphs. When we brought him magazines someone else did the reading, holding up the pictures for him to see. Reading was probably something he had not done since the shooting.

  He sees the words, I thought, but they don’t make any sense to him. He’s farsighted. Or else his brain can’t translate the symbols anymore, the injury giving him aphasia, like a stroke victim. He frowned slightly, parsing out the sentences, ashamed to admit his disability.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Which one do you think?” Sofia asked.

  “When was the last time he wore this?” I asked, fingering the lapel of a blue striped seersucker, one of those suits you take one look at and think: mistake.

  “Never,” she said. “He bought it for a conference in Greece one summer, but then there was a strike at the Athens airport and the meeting was canceled.”

  My dad’s suits were displayed on the bed, five of them. They were sinister, headless ensembles waiting to turn into men. My dad was not usually comfortable in traditional men’s clothes, preferring to wear khaki field clothes, denims, all-cottons that absorbed sweat and were easy to wash. But he gave lectures and met with supervising committees, explaining why another grant for research on the life cycle of the medfly was a must.

  The house my dad shared with Sofia was one of those buildings with too many windows, a view of cypress trees out one side of the bedroom, the Bay out another side, glass everywhere. Daniel was watching television in a distant room, a sound of explosions and screeching tires as the housekeeper’s voice reached us, asking him, didn’t he want to watch Goofy.

  “What did he say he wanted to wear—gray or off-gray?” I asked. “Or maybe this nice granite gray.”

  “He just said he wanted argyle socks.”

  The legendary argyle socks that had brought him luck years ago must have been long ago worn through to so much string. I doubt Sofia understood the full implication of his request as she found a pair of Byford knee-high wool stockings in his top drawer.

  “I bet he didn’t insist that he had to wear a suit,” I said.

  “I said I’d pick out something handsome,” said Sofia, looking a little lost among jockey shorts and V-neck T-shirts.

  I pulled open the closet door, a storage room big enough to walk into. His field boots were lined up in the half dark, along with other shoes, burgundy loafers, shiny black dress oxfords. I chose a pair of crisp brown pants, what a commanding general would wear going to war. I found a cotton dress shirt, fresh from the cleaner, still in its plastic wrapping.

  “Which shoes?” Sofia asked.

  I had already selected a pair of nearly new loafers. I imagined one of the nurses having to tie shoelaces, my dad having to endure being dressed by someone he hardly knew.

  Was I trespassing? I told myself I wasn’t, but why did I wait there in the hall? I barely nudged the door to his office, letting it swing open.

  Sofia had turned off the distant television and was giving instructions, vanilla pudding only after Daniel ate the green bean casserole for lunch. The beans were from my garden, and Sofia had created a novel and tasty meal that Daniel would chew but would not swallow.

  His study, my mom would have called this room, enjoying the fact that her husband was a scholar. But Dad would have called it his fort, finishing his tuna salad and saying “back to the trenches.” He would spend hours peering through a binocular microscope, examining the jugular lobe of a wasp’s wing.

  But I had never spent more than a minute or two in this newer working place, the one Sofia must have helped him set up. It looked like the office of my childhood, aside from the updated computer and printer. Books and journals were haphazard if you glanced at them, but they were arranged to be within easy reach, the Audubon guides to everything from trees to mammals just beyond the Merck Manual and his brace of dictionaries, English, German, Latin. And there was, as always, the slight smell of mothballs, the camphor that protected some of the hundred-year-old specimens of monarch butterflies.

  I found Sofia holding up scarves, letting them fall one by one to the floor, scarlet, uranium yellow, brilliant silks, gaudy patterns.

  “You didn’t deal with his mail,” I said.

  Sofia gave me one of her pretty looks, eyelashes and incomprehension, but I could tell that she wanted to be alone.

  “There’s a gigantic pile of envelopes you haven’t even opened,” I said.

  “I paid all the bills,” she said, “and I opened anything that looked like a get-well card.”

  “But there’s all his journals, and articles people have sent him, and catalogs, and announcements—” Weeks worth. It was a crisis, all the work that had piled up.

  “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” she asked. She let a long gauzy silk drape over her arms and held it up so the light fell through it, studying the way the room looked strained through silk.

  Jesus, I thought. Doesn’t matter.

  “He can’t remember,” Sofia said.

  She glanced to see the effect the words had on me.

  “He can’t remember the shooting,” she said. “He thought he could help the police, but he can’t.”

  A painting was slightly crooked on the wall, an acrylic, a scarlet mountain. There was art in every room of the house. Sofia’s parents made money manufacturing patio doors.

  “It’s normal to have retroactive amnesia regarding a very bad trauma,” she was saying. “Many people can’t remember the events just before a very grievous injury.” She let the silk scarf fall to the floor.

  I slowly shifted the objects on the dresser from one place to another, jewelry box a little closer to the mirror, bust of Pasteur toward the edge of the dresser, beside the pearl necklace. Dad had won the bust in high school for his ant map, a chart of the paths worker ants took from the insect colony to a cube of moistened sugar. The bronze had a slot in the base if you turned i
t over. You could use it as a piggy bank.

  I found myself able to ask, “Does the detective know?”

  “He suspected as much.”

  “They should postpone the hearing until Dad feels better,” I said.

  “It’s been almost a month,” she said, “since the arrest.”

  “They can use hypnosis,” I heard myself offer. “Put him in a trance and record what he says.”

  Sofia gave me a look of kindness before she shook her head.

  “They can give him more time,” I continued. “Let him get back to being more like his old self.”

  Sofia tucked the underwear and socks back into the drawer and closed it very gently. She nudged the bronze Pasteur back against the mirror.

  TWENTY-NINE

  There was another, more subtle reason for walking away from high school, although I didn’t like to admit it. Mrs. Hean and the crude, ignorant fellow students weren’t altogether to blame.

  Somewhere inside I knew that I could never be like my dad—urbane, knowledgeable, someone who flew all over the world to tell people what he thought. I was playing my dad’s game by staying in school. It was a sport he would always be better at than I was.

  Bea brought one of her books along to the hearing at the hospital, a dog-eared insight-into-the-mind paperback, but she never opened it, sitting with the novel in her lap the way Steven Ray McNorr’s mother sat with her Bible. Bea must have expected that the preliminary hearing would take all day, with many breaks and many sidebars, the judge conferring with attorneys, the sort of long delays Court TV fills with expert commentary.

  I wished I had brought something to read, too, a way to keep my mind off this slow, unreal passage of time. Bea and I sat together but we didn’t talk much, both of us silenced by the procedure around us, a bailiff with a holstered pistol making sure the folding chairs were lined up straight in the brightly lit hospital conference room.

  A court clerk said, “Raise your right hand.”

  The witness had thin white hair, combed straight back, and his hand twitched on the crook of a cane. The hand he held up to swear to tell the truth was gnarled and had a slight tremor, a vibration that never ceased throughout his testimony.

  “Shall I sit here?” the witness asked.

  It was not such a ridiculous question. The judge was not behind a bench, only a table with chrome legs. The judge was dressed in a dark suit. The court recorder sat looking up vaguely, fingers ready at his machine. The witness’s chair looked like an afterthought, a piece of furniture left there by mistake, one of the few wooden chairs in the room.

  “Yes, that’s fine, Mr. Van Kastern,” said Mr. Dingman.

  My father’s eyes were steady, watching the witness. The truth, my father must have been thinking—now we will hear what really happened.

  The witness looked at the chair, put a hand out to the chair’s arm, and let himself down into it in stages, getting his body settled, arranging his pants front free of wrinkles, finding a place for his cane. He put a hand to his bolo tie and gazed up at the assistant district attorney with a desire to please so keen it was nearly a smile.

  Mr. Dingman, the assistant DA, had tight brown curls all over his head, like a scrub pad. He led the witness through the questions with the sympathetic voice a man would use on a child.

  The witness’s name was Wiebrand Van Kastern. “People call me Weebs.”

  He was a retired jeweler who still helped around the shop on Nineteenth Avenue. He had been born in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. He had trained in Geneva as a young man, learning the repair and maintenance of time pieces. “Real watches,” he said. “No batteries.” He was a naturalized U.S. citizen, but he had an accent, American with the spice of other places. He had lived in San Francisco for thirty years.

  “You’re the owner of Golden Gate Jewelers, aren’t you, Mr. Van Kastern?” asked Mr. Dingman.

  “Yes, I’m the owner,” said Mr. Van Kastern, a man who didn’t like to brag. But there was a trace of impatience, too.

  It was the first time I had ever seen my father in a wheelchair. The chair had gray rubber tires, plump, with a knobby tread, like a child’s bicycle. The shirt and pants I had picked out looked good. His shoes gleamed with the unnecessary touch of Kiwi neutral polish I had given them. His hands were on his knees, unmoving, a yellow canister of oxygen in a wheeled rack like a luggage carrier beside him.

  Sofia’s eye makeup was too dark. Mom wore dark glasses and a black scarf. She was burning up the vacation days she had saved for years and was considering a leave of absence. I could tell when she was looking at me by the twin wrinkles, one in each cheek, all she could manage of a smile.

  The witness was telling us what he had seen that Saturday, just past noon. Mr. Van Kastern had been changing the display, setting out Seikos and putting the Pulsars into a drawer, getting ready for a sale.

  Mr. Van Kastern had seen what happened outside in the street. A young man had approached a Mercedes at the stoplight. He saw the young man bend over the driver’s side of the car.

  “Do you see that man in this room today?”

  The witness pointed to the defendant. McNorr wore a jail jumpsuit, but his hands were not cuffed.

  “Let the record show that the witness has identified the defendant,” said Mr. Dingman.

  McNorr was leaning on his elbows, one hand on a sheet of paper, like someone taking an exam, working a problem in his head.

  “What happened then?” Mr. Dingman asked.

  “Then?” asked Mr. Van Kastern.

  The defendant picked at the paper, loosening a staple.

  “I heard a shot,” said the witness before the DA could repeat his question. He said this assertively, his voice rising, as though recounting the event made him experience his surprise again, his rush out onto the sidewalk. “The Mercedes rolled through the red light and collided into some cars parked along the street.”

  “And what else did you see?”

  “Running.”

  “Did you see someone running from the scene?”

  “I saw him,” said the witness, emphasizing the last word, his eyes steady behind his glasses. McNorr pinched the staple, worked it loose, the paper tearing slightly.

  McNorr’s attorney wore the same sandy tweed as before, a man with pink cheeks and smart, quick movements, smiling, putting his hands in his pockets, not wandering all over the room like lawyers on TV, but leaning over the table. His voice was pleasant, his manner polite.

  The witness had not seen a firearm in the hand of the defendant. The witness had not seen a gun go off. The witness had not seen blood, had not seen a wound.

  “No,” he answered each time. No, he had not seen the witness dispose of any weapon. He had not seen a wallet in the defendant’s hand.

  Mr. Van Kastern was able to answer yes to some questions. Yes, he had medical problems, and, yes, he was due for cataract surgery next month. The witness suffered from arthritis that affected his joints, and he had trouble moving quickly. “Have you been diagnosed with hearing problems?” asked the attorney.

  Mr. Van Kastern turned to the judge. The judge told him to answer the question as honestly as he could.

  “I don’t hear as well as I used to,” said Mr. Van Kastern after a long moment.

  “Why did it take you so long to report what you saw to the police?” asked the attorney.

  “I had to think,” said Mr. Van Kastern. Then he looked over at Mr. Dingman, an expression of apology, as though another answer to this question had been rehearsed and forgotten.

  “What was it you thought about?” queried the attorney.

  “I had to think about what I saw,” said Mr. Van Kastern, but there was defeat in his voice.

  Bea put her hand on mine. I knew what Mr. Van Kastern meant. When a terrible event takes place sometimes the mind has to climb back down inside itself and study the episode.

  When the judge said that it was time for a recess, I sat there, not moving, my eyes closed, li
stening to the steps shuffling out, the room emptying, the wheels of my father’s chair squeaking on the floor.

  I put my hand over my father’s hand, before I remembered that he could not feel my touch.

  “We’re just heading back to our room,” said the nurse sweetly, meaning: get out of the way.

  Dad had trouble focusing. His face was blank with fatigue. He found me with his eyes as I knelt down beside him and told him everything would be all right.

  THIRTY

  Detective Unruh searched for the right package of sugar, as though each were unique. “Nothing,” he said, answering Bea’s question. He snapped the packet of sugar back and forth, then tore the one corner. He poured the contents into his coffee. “Nothing happens.”

  “They aren’t going to let the killer go free,” said Bea. She was unable to keep herself from saying what she really thought and for an instant was tight-lipped with chagrin. She believed my dad was as good as dead.

  “Free,” Detective Unruh echoed, relishing the word without joy. “He’ll be out in a day or two. Home watching the soaps with Mom and Dad.” He had that brisk attitude people show when they are wise to the world and you aren’t.

  “What should we order?” asked Bea, picking up a menu.

  “The food here is pretty good,” said the detective. “My favorite is tod pramuk, a calamari dish, great stuff. Here they fry it up tentacles and all; some people don’t like that. I think it’s tasty. It’s got that special crunchiness.” He gave the last words a special lift, like someone making up an ad.

  “I like squid, too,” said Bea. “But I’m not hungry.”

  “You’re hungry for this,” he said. “Deep fried squid for three?” When we didn’t respond he said, “The pork satay is good here, too.”

  “The DA’s just going to forget about the whole thing,” said Bea.

  The detective put on one of his Lecture Faces, about to say something he had planned ahead of time, probably on the drive over after the hearing broke up. “I wanted to take you two out to lunch so I could have a chance to talk to you seriously,” said the detective. “Because I know how disappointed you are in what happened this morning.”