Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Yes,” Beth said. “I’m going to tell Gavril tonight, if he isn’t too drunk. I’ve been waiting to make sure it’s healthy. I know what you think about babies so—”

  Luz lifted the pencil from her eyelid. She watched Beth in the mirror and swiveled around. “Who cares what I think? If this is what you want, that’s all that matters. Gavril loves you. And he’ll be a terrific disciplinarian. I’m just bitter because I spent too many years changing diapers, and I’ve seen smart, ambitious girls lose their entire futures the moment some crying, shitting bundle arrives. Arrives and never leaves. It’s easy for a white man like Nathan to say that the future is the only thing no one’s gotten their hands on. When you’re a half-Chinese, half-black girl growing up in the projects, the future looks about as warped as the safety mirror in the West Ward elevator. But here’s what I’ve learned. No one regrets having children. Maybe, in the end, children end up delivering you.”

  Without asking permission, Luz placed her hand on Beth’s stomach. She palmed the slight bowl through her dress. “I’ve forgotten what it feels like,” Luz said, her eyes starting to run. “To be alive on this planet. I keep catching my reflection and thinking to myself, that’s you, right here, alive. But the next moment I have no clue what that revelation means. It’s like a tool you have no use for, so you keep putting it back in a drawer and finding it later all over again.”

  Luz let go, turned back to the mirror, and applied the pencil to her pink, wet lids.

  “Maybe you and Nathan will have a child one day.” As soon as Beth said it, she worried that she’d overstepped. Luz had been generous in her kindness—not cruel or sympathetic, but generous. Why not walk gently across the soft carpet of generosity, rather than risk having it pulled out from under her?

  “We haven’t been sleeping together much. I think I’d need to look elsewhere if I wanted that. Nathan a father? Can you imagine? But sometimes I think Nathan has the right idea: wait until all the old year-rounders out here sell their houses, and then try to raise a proper community of artists in Orient, the kind that doesn’t exist in Manhattan anymore. Aren’t we always saying that’s what we want? Maybe we’d be better taking over Plum. We could raise two-headed cats and scare off the tourists. We can be a kind of plague.”

  Beth tried to fix the braid, but Luz brought her hands to the back of her head and pulled her hair away. Her eyes were still wet. “I’ll do it. It’ll be easier that way.”

  Luz yanked the strands and tied them up. She opened a cedar box on the table and took out an earring, a diamond-studded L. She worked at fastening the earring, and her eyes smoothed shut, wide U’s emphasized by the black makeup, the kind of heavy lids Beth had inadvertently given Mills in her painting, the kind he said might have belonged to the woman who owned an L pendant at the Seaview. Beth turned from the mirror, reaching for the wall. She felt dizzy. A figure stood in the doorway, staring at what must have looked like drunken steps.

  “Dinner is on,” Alvara said quietly. “Everyone is at the table. They wait for you.”

  On the drive home, Gavril drifted in and out of consciousness, a casualty of the wine at dinner. They drove along Main Road behind Dombrovski’s black-windowed SUV, which would have looked less out of place in Saudi Arabia, until it turned off at the Cleaver estate, and Yakov and all of his power and money diminished into red taillights glowing through the trees. Gavril roused himself long enough to ramble on about Nathan’s stupidity. “I respect Yakov. His work cultivates the world economy. Iron ore from Denmark to Russia. Microchips from Taiwan to Pakistan. Oil from Ukraine to Caucasus. His money follows the lines of the globe. And Nathan, what does he do but act like an idiot. He makes us all seem unserious, like what we do is the work of children.” And from there, loose-jawed, he returned to sleep.

  Who had he been walking with at night on the streets of Orient?

  She shook him awake in the driveway. “Come to bed tonight,” she said. “Are you sober enough to talk?”

  “Yes,” he mumbled. “I’ll just check the studio before Yakov comes tomorrow. You go in.” She unlocked the kitchen door.

  Even if Gavril was drunk, she would tell him tonight about her pregnancy. She’d watch his reaction, the happiness that invaded his face or the concern or regret he tried to hide. At the end of the hallway, under the slot, the day’s mail spilled out like a puddle of postal sewage. She would no longer have to edit out the baby advertisements, the dispatches from the wrong source arriving to betray her. She picked up the mail, two flyers for cribs and an invitation to visit a day care in Southold. She could throw it all out—the garbage bag in the closet with all of those ecstatic, blue-and-pink mailers—before Gavril came in from the studio, and never have to worry about them again.

  Beth opened the closet door and shoved her hand between the winter coats. She felt the bag’s bulk, a month’s worth of mail, and pulled it over the rain boots. It was heavier than she remembered, and when she tugged on the drawstring, the bag fell into the foyer with a clunk that was louder than any paper would make. That’s when she saw it through the plastic, mixed in with the flyers—a canister she didn’t recognize. A red canister with a square handle and a black screw cap. The kind used to carry gasoline and spill it through a house. Beth dropped the bag and stumbled back, smelling the odor of leftover fuel. In fright, she almost slipped on the baby announcements that poured like kindling into the hall.

  At midnight, the officers took pictures of the evidence. They used infrared lasers on the gas can and used plastic gloves to zip it into a vinyl bag. Beth and Gavril waited on the living room couch, both with their foreheads in their hands, not speaking, unwilling to look at each other, two victims in an emergency room assessing their separate injuries.

  Gavril had hurried into the house at the sounds of her screams. “It fell out of the closet!” she said in shock. “Don’t get near it! It could be the murder weapon!” She blocked the hallway as she dialed 911 so that Gavril couldn’t see the clutter of baby mail spilling across the floor. She knew he’d see it eventually, and she knew what he would think. She had briefly considered removing the mail but stopped herself: that would be tampering with evidence.

  In the minutes between the call and the arrival of the police, Beth told Gavril the good news. She tried to deliver the message with excitement, with a burst of strumming hope, but tears clotted her eyes—for Gavril, for herself, for the potential murder weapon lying in the foyer, all mixed up now, all part of one picture that didn’t make sense.

  Gavril stared at her horror-struck. “How the hell did it get in there?” he shouted, stepping into the hall. She tried to stop him, tried to bring him back to her with the news. “Gavril, I’m pregnant, didn’t you hear me? That’s what I wanted to tell you tonight. Remember I wanted to talk to you? Please remember that.”

  Gavril pushed her aside, clinging to the walls as he crept toward the front door.

  “You think that’s what killed that family? And it’s in our closet?”

  “Please don’t go near it,” she cried.

  It was the other evidence lying in the hall that finally got the message of her pregnancy through to him. A month of stashed mail, a secret cache of babies on paper. Gavril returned to the living room holding an advertisement for cribs. “How long have you known?” he asked, his eyes dazed.

  “Just a week or two,” she lied. “I was going to tell you, but I wanted to be sure it was healthy.” The lie went stale in her mouth, a rationalization that sounded like its own form of madness. I wanted to see if the blaze spread from the floor to the curtains before I phoned the fire department. I wanted to make sure my daughter was missing for three days before I filed a report.

  “Make sure it was healthy?” His voice cracked. “You didn’t think it was important to tell me right away?”

  “I didn’t know—” she wheezed. What she didn’t know was what she couldn’t say. She reached for him, but he sidestepped her.

  “This whole time you’ve been pregn
ant? All along while I was in my studio, thinking things were going wrong between us?” he sputtered. “And things were going wrong. Why wouldn’t you tell me? Isn’t that what we moved out here for?”

  “We just found a gas can in our house that might be a murder weapon,” she shouted. “I don’t think when I told you is important right now. We’re going to be parents. It doesn’t matter when—” But of course it mattered. There was no way for her to hide the evidence; the police would be picking through it any minute now, establishing a time line. Their questions would provide his answer: weeks and weeks and weeks of lying, of hiding the truth in the hall. “I was scared, okay? I was scared to have it. I wasn’t sure, but now I am.”

  Gavril’s face was a piece of warped metal, his expression distorted around the dent of his mouth.

  “Gavril, listen to me. We’ll have the child and we’ll forget that I had any doubts. Aren’t you happy about it?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck, his head ducking and turning. “Yes, I’m happy about the baby. It is you that I don’t know about. All you’ve been doing is lying to me, and for how long?”

  “I wasn’t lying,” she screamed. “If you had been here and not locked in your studio, I might have been able to tell you what was going on.”

  He admired the dodge, laughing inaudibly. “So it’s my fault now.”

  “It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s not a fault. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. Because you would have forced me to have it, all right? Even if I decided I didn’t want to be a mother.”

  “Forced you? I shouldn’t have to force you.”

  “You’re not forcing me, because I’ve decided to keep it. That’s what I wanted to tell you tonight.” She grabbed her purse and handed him the printout the doctor had given her. “It’s three months along,” she said pleadingly, watching him study the blurred shape. “It can still be just like we planned.”

  He looked over at her, as if his wife had been swapped with a stranger. Maybe she had.

  “Things are different. We aren’t how we used to be in New York. Neither of us is.”

  “What are you saying?” As bad as things were, no part of her had expected that this would be the end of their marriage, their union that had begun not at the Swiss embassy but at exactly 2:13 P.M. on a microwave clock. She paced between the chairs, around the coffee table, toward the window, and over to the fireplace, a trapped bird looking for a way out. She became a subscriber to the idea that, if she moved around fast enough, the world couldn’t catch up.

  “I don’t know who you’ve become,” he said, so coldly it didn’t sound hysterical. What frightened her about it was that it sounded composed. “Something is wrong with you lately. You haven’t been right in the head.”

  So much had been wrong lately. Maybe if Gavril had been less obsessed with his work, or if she’d never given up painting, or if the Muldoons hadn’t been killed in a fire, or if a gas canister hadn’t been found in her closet, or if Magdalena had never invited her over that afternoon, or if they’d remained in Manhattan—maybe then it would all be different.

  Beth stopped moving. She stood completely still, looking at her husband in his suit and un-knotted tie, at his Hawaiian birthmark and tar-stained fingernails, the defeat in him so palpable he could barely close his mouth. “I’m sorry, Gavril. I truly am. But it was my decision. And I made it on my own.”

  She sat down on the couch. The world could catch her now.

  After thirty minutes of sitting, Mike Gilburn carried the plastic bag of mail into the living room. The detective seemed more awake at night, more efficient and clinical. Perhaps he was simply invigorated to have his hands on some actual evidence.

  “So neither one of you is responsible for hiding the canister in this bag?”

  “I didn’t even know that bag existed,” Gavril said. “I don’t use that closet.”

  “Beth, when was the last time you opened this bag?”

  She struggled to remember. “Yesterday. I remember I put some mail in it yesterday around eleven, just before the funeral, and the canister wasn’t there.”

  “So it was a bag that you used—”

  Gavril didn’t look at her. He trained his eyes on his lap.

  “I used it to sort out mail about babies. I was storing it in the closet. It’s just junk mail. I meant to throw it away.”

  “And it’s been in the closet for how long?” Mike dug his hand deep into the bag, pulling out the oldest flyers. Beth focused her eyes straight ahead.

  “About three weeks or so,” she said. Mike nodded as he examined the dated postal stamp on an advertisement for diapers. “You see, I’m pregnant, but I was irritated that all of this stuff was being delivered to my house. I felt bombarded by stores when I never signed up to be on their mailing lists.”

  Mike lifted his eyebrow, expressing honest surprise.

  “I thought you told me you couldn’t have children. When I visited you last week, you said you two were having trouble conceiving.”

  Gavril rocked back, wrenching at his hair. “Jesus, Beth.” The detective steadied him with a raised hand. She noticed a blue J tattooed on his palm, a vestige of his ex-wife, Jill. She wondered if Mike would transfer his allegiance to Gavril—two husbands who had been deserted by their wives.

  “It was a misunderstanding,” she said. “But I am expecting. I don’t see what that has to do with the canister. Yesterday, I was alone upstairs and I heard someone moving around down here. Someone had broken into the house.”

  Gavril put his fingers to his eyelids. Mike inched forward on the upholstery and dropped the bag on the floor.

  “You heard someone break in and you didn’t call the police?”

  “When I came down to check, no one was here. The front door was open a crack, which I wouldn’t have left unlocked. My purse was moved. It was hanging on the knob of the hall closet. And the chairs”—she pointed to the one that the detective was sitting in—“had been rearranged.”

  “Rearranged?” Mike scratched his beard.

  “Yes. Whoever broke in switched them. They moved the furniture around.”

  “Couldn’t your husband have done that?” He glanced at Gavril.

  “No. I was in garage working. I’m the one who told Beth not to call police, because I thought she was confused. She hasn’t been acting like herself lately. I figured she was mistaken.”

  Beth clenched her jaw.

  “What kind of work do you do in your studio?”

  “Art,” Gavril said, grasping his forearms defensively. Gavril had been waiting since he’d become a citizen for a chance to fire back at anyone who questioned his personal freedoms. Beth had to admit he was keeping himself under control. She knew he’d love to defy the detective, to refuse to concede information about his own house where he could do as he pleased. He was just waiting for Mike to mock his profession so he could prove himself a man.

  “Do you use any gasoline or accelerant in your work?”

  “Yes,” Gavril said hoarsely. “I use a torch. But it is butane. And that gas can is not mine.”

  “Mike,” Beth interrupted. Gavril darted his eyes at her, surprised to hear her use his first name. “We don’t own that canister. The point is, someone broke in. They moved my purse to the closet doorknob. I thought it was just a threat. I didn’t realize they planted that canister in our closet, probably hoping I’d come across it.”

  Mike nodded, as if the scenario she described couldn’t be more normal.

  “Now why would someone be threatening you?” he asked.

  “Because I’ve been the one saying Magdalena and Jeff were murdered, and I was saying it long before the fire killed the Muldoons.” She looked at the detective, hoping he’d remember. “Whoever killed Jeff Trader also stole the jar of keys he kept in his truck. Those keys open the doors to the houses he took care of, including mine. It probably explains how the killer got hold of the keys to the Muldoons’ front door.”

  “It sounds like y
ou’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Mike said somberly. “And yet your husband says you’ve been confused lately.” Mike’s implication stunned her. She thought they were on the same side. He sensed her anger and tried to offset it. “I know we go way back, Beth, but I have to take your stability into account.”

  “I have been confused,” she shouted, “because you haven’t been listening to me. If you think I’m crazy, I’d like to hear what you’ve come up with. Honestly, have you found any leads? Because clearly someone is trying to scare us. Why else would they choose my house to hide the canister? Why don’t you tell me what you think happened?”

  Mike didn’t appear bothered by her outburst. He dug his notebook out of his shirt pocket and flipped through pages until he came upon a clean one.

  “Everyone is impatient for an arrest,” he said calmly. “I understand that. And with that ludicrous creature that washed up onshore today, it’s no wonder everyone’s nerves are frayed. But I can assure you, we’ve been making headway in the investigation. I promise I’ll look into those missing keys. In the meantime, I need to ask who else visited your house since eleven A.M. yesterday.”

  “No one,” she said. “Just my mother. We went to the funeral together.” Beth watched as Mike wrote down Gail’s name. “But I saw her when she arrived. She didn’t have a gas can.”

  “She didn’t get here by car? And she was never left alone downstairs?”

  “Yes, but my mother has nothing to do with the Muldoons.”

  Mike licked his finger and flicked through pages.

  “Actually, your mother’s name has come up more than once in respect to a local who had an ongoing grudge against the Muldoons. And she wasn’t a particular favorite of your neighbor Ms. Kiefer, was she?”

  “My mother is not a murderer,” she hissed. “And she doesn’t live out here anymore. I think it’s safe to say she wouldn’t try to implicate her own daughter by hiding the gas can in my closet.”