She wanted to laugh again, but the lips that curled up to smile were trembling. The emptiness of all he had said finally expanded the waiting void to the top of her skull. It pressed her mind up against the rigid cranial bones, so that the shapes and textures in the room could only filter through its vacuous light, and it gave them a clarity that was monstrous. The reds, greens, and yellows exploded around her. The sharp points of each Christmas-tree needle, the curve of the sofa arm, the fine print in the wallpaper, were standing disembodied and torn from any meaning or sense that her compressed mind could have given them. Dear God, she was going insane. She clung to the fragment of reason that had voiced the thought. Pressing her fingers against her temples and squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to push back the tremendous weight crushing her brains. There had to be something left to save her. A tiny blue bubble formed by the pressure of the void against the soft brain tissue began to balloon at the remaining tip of her mind. She concentrated as it grew round, translucent, and shimmering: Oh, but, Grandma, you should hear what pretty music the water makes. It inflated in smooth, undulating ripples, lightening her head and lifting her body out of the chair. Of course. What could she have been thinking of to let things get this far? Where was Roberta?
She sped past the textures and shapes that now took form and meaning through the waves of blue light. This table once held a bathing cap, that coatrack a terry-cloth robe. These steps led up to a bathroom where swimming suits could be draped across shower rods. The diamond tiles in the kitchen pointed toward the patio door, whose metal tracks slid open to a flagstone path. And at the end of the path was the pool. She must find Roberta, tell her that although things hadn’t worked out her way, it was still going to be all right.
Roberta wasn’t downstairs, but Laurel found her up in the guest room, eyes fluttering and breath rattling with light sleep. A flood of tenderness came over her. She had put this woman through so much this past week. She had made her carry the load for both of them, and it showed. Roberta rarely took naps during the day. Laurel started to awaken her and share her happiness over the tiny blue sparkles cascading down the walls of the room, but she hesitated. For once in her life she wouldn’t be selfish, she’d let the old woman get her rest. Laurel smiled, kissed the wrinkled forehead, and gently closed the door.
Running into her bedroom, she quickly stripped down and stretched the silver bathing suit over her lean body, feeling it become one with her skin. She glanced at her bare feet and frowned: there was so much snow outside. The doubt threatened to overwhelm her, but going to the back window, she saw that the path was miraculously clear. Slipping on a terry-cloth robe and a pair of thongs, she headed for the patio door.
The cold air might have stopped her as it numbed her exposed body, or the metal tarpaulin rings that resisted her efforts to release their frozen hooks. But she made it because she thought music. Clenching her trembling jaws, she pulled and rolled, pulled and rolled, until the pure aquamarine of the pool’s high walls and floor jumped up to engulf her eyes. The color vibrated the blue bubble, filling her middle with fluid sound as she shed small, icy tears of relief.
She hurried back to the base of the platform because flurries were already trying to speckle the pool’s bottom. Her limbs were stiff so she ran in place and did several deep knee bends. Feeling the blood circulating and warming her, she dropped the robe, kicked off the thongs, and began to climb. One hand over the other, grasping the aluminum rungs, she stopped every ten feet to massage her fingers and flex her knees. On finally reaching the top, she breathed deeply. The platform was covered with snow, so she held on to the side railings and pushed it away with her bare feet. She had to be careful or she would slip and go crashing onto the cement siding. She knew this was dangerous even in the best of weather. The body weight had to be evenly distributed on each foot, the arms and torso held at an angle that provided the vital balance as you moved toward the end of the platform. And it was much more difficult because the cold was numbing her extremities and distorting her sense of weight. Lining her toes up evenly an inch from the platform’s edge, she began to swing her arms over her head in a 180-degree arc. She knew it by heart: it was going to be a straight, thirty-foot dive at the twenty-foot end of the pool, but each time you must judge the point of descent. A slight dark movement at the far corner of her eye didn’t break her concentration: she was used to spectators. Choosing an area where it was still totally blue, she began to talk herself through the part that never came naturally. Legs straight, body forward, toes thrust. She sprang. Chin close to her chest, that familiar grip of terror in her stomach—anything could go wrong up in the air. But once she got down, there would be nothing to fear. Once she got down, she’d be free.
“Laurel, Laurel.”
The old woman hung dangerously out of the upstairs window, the name on the verge of becoming a hysterical chant.
“Oh my God.” Willie was immobilized, his head swinging between the pool and the window.
“We better get to her,” Lester said, and at first Willie couldn’t figure out which woman he meant. “She might fall out of that window.” Lester ran toward the open patio door, his motion snapping Willie back.
“Call the cops,” he yelled to Lester as he headed for the pool. “No, call an ambulance—call somebody.”
He swung himself down the ladder at the far end, the high aquamarine walls looming over him as he ran. Pink and beige stains were slowly spreading from Laurel’s body into the surrounding snow. From the angle of her neck, she couldn’t possibly be alive, but he had the irrational fear that she might be suffocating with her nose pressed so firmly into the bottom of the pool. Without thinking, he turned her over.
Her face was gone. The photo album trembled in her cold hands as she realized there was no mistaking what she now saw: Priscilla McGuire ended at the neck—and without her features, she was only a flattened outline pressed beneath cellophane. The narrow chin, upturned nose, and deep fiery eyes were a beige blur between the shadows cast by the two grown men on each side of her. The entire face, the size of a large thumbprint, had been removed. This had been done on purpose. There was no way this wasn’t done on purpose. Cleaning fluid. Bleach. A drop of hot grease. Over and over, page after page, the smeared hole gaped out into the dim light. The sight of it sickened her as she kept slamming through the album, feeling her empty stomach heave. She had been tricked into this … I knew you would come, and I’m so pleased … into another twisted life. What other kind of woman would have kept something like this? A healthy mind would have never … She came to the last photograph. And scrawled across the empty hole in lilac-colored ink was the word me.
The bile moved up into Willie’s throat and he quickly turned his back to the crowd in the yard. He had been trying to keep his stomach muscles tightened against it for the last half hour, but the sight of Laurel’s covered body being lifted from the pool on a stretcher brought back the image he had blocked from his mind. Running to the unshoveled side of the house, he retched into the snow. Lumps of yellowish-green mucus slid into a set of deep footprints. Ashamed, he tried to cover it up by pushing snow over it with his feet, but his body acting with a will of its own emptied his stomach again. He tried to muffle the sound as if he could be heard above the squawking police radios and the loud murmurs of neighbors brought out by the sirens. They stood in puzzled and horrified clusters around the pool’s edge, a few still trudging up the path he had shoveled what seemed a decade ago. Willie reached for a handful of snow to clean his sour mouth, but the moment it touched his fingers he got flashes of the colored stains that had surrounded Laurel’s body. Dropping it, he brushed off his hands and rummaged in his pocket and found a piece of stale licorice.
Turning, he saw that Lester was still talking to the policemen. He should go back over there and say he was leaving if they didn’t need him anymore, but his legs weren’t steady and his limbs kept vibrating from the weakness inside him and the frigid temperature outside. He jammed his hand
s into his coat pockets and tried to stop shaking. He refused to look at the pool, afraid that his stomach would let go again. He avoided any eye contact with the occasional glances that the neighbors threw his way. He didn’t want to be asked any more questions. So he stared at the snow banked between the hedges and the house, at the double path of footprints now focusing clearly. The strange, triangular-shaped crevices appeared vividly in two determined sets of lines, leading up and then away from the backyard. This was the path she had taken? No, she might have come up that way, but it was certain that she didn’t go back. She had gone out wrapped in white canvas. She had gone out without a … Willie’s insides began to cramp again. God, please let his legs work—he had to get out of here.
“Son, are you all right?”
He hadn’t seen the old man approach, so he almost screamed when his shoulder was touched. The man’s light-brown skin carried an ashen tint from the cold air, but the gray eyes were gentle through the steel-rimmed glasses. There was something reassuring, almost calming, about the slightly stooped back as he leaned over Willie.
“No, I’m not.” Willie’s jaws trembled as he spoke. “I don’t feel too good. I’ve gotta get out of here. I mean, I’m cold and we’ve been out here so long and—” He pressed his lips together and jammed his hands deeper into his pockets.
“Of course.” The voice was smooth, soft. “You’re one of the young men who found her. I saw you talking to the police. You’ve probably been out in this weather for hours, and no one’s given a thought to your comfort. You must excuse us, we’ve all been overwhelmed by this. But wait a moment, please.”
Before Willie could respond, he left and returned as quietly as the first time. “I believe the police have all the information they need from you. If there are any further questions, I told them they could reach you at my house.”
“Hey look, I just wanna go to my own place, ya know?”
“Of course. But I assume that you live some distance from here, and you can’t walk back up this hill the way you are now. And if you’re willing to accept my hospitality, you’ll get a little rest and some warmth while I call you a cab.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for it to sound like that. It’s just that … Oh Christ, I don’t know what I mean anymore.”
“I understand, believe me, I do.” The gray eyes never left Willie’s face. “My name is Daniel Braithwaite, and my home is just one street down. Once we’re there, you can collect yourself and be on your way.”
“Thank you.” Willie was growing uncomfortable under the man’s bland stare. “But I have to wait for my friend.”
“I’ll go see what’s keeping him. Why don’t you meet us by the front steps? Go this way.” He pointed Willie toward the side of the hedge. “It’s a bit snowy, but you won’t have to work your way through the crowd.”
Willie plowed through the snow, following the set of triangular footprints toward the front of the house. He knew exactly what they were now, but he refused to think about what they meant. He didn’t want to think again for a year. He let his mind go blank as he sighed and stared at the front of the Tudor.
“Christ!” Lester shook his head as he came around the corner. “The way those cops were going on, you woulda thought we pushed her off that diving board.”
“Maybe somebody did,” Willie said almost to himself.
Lester stared at him and started to speak but changed his mind. “She was just nuts, that’s all.” His face was pale in spite of the cold. “But what a way to die.”
They stood there in silence until Braithwaite joined them.
“A pity, a true pity.” He spoke while looking up at the windows. “They had to sedate the grandmother, and the authorities are going to have to locate her husband. This will be a crushing blow for Howard.” His long sigh formed a double tube of condensed air from his nose. “I would hate to be in his shoes when he finds out. Of all people, for it to be his wife.” He sighed again. “His wife.”
“Her name was Laurel.” Willie was staring into space.
“What?” Braithwaite turned to him.
“I said, her name was Laurel.” Willie’s voice got louder. “Laurel.”
Lester looked at him strangely. “You okay, Willie?”
“No, of course he’s not.” Braithwaite touched Willie’s arm. “This whole affair has been a shock to all of us. And standing out in this weather won’t help matters any. Well, come along.”
The noisy hum of activity around the Dumont home was swallowed up as they followed Braithwaite down the gently sloping road that curved to the right, bringing them into the back of the third and final set of houses on Tupelo Drive. They walked in complete silence, each seemingly intent on the crunch of snow underfoot. Willie’s head was tucked into his collar as he guided himself by the impressions of Braithwaite’s round-toed boots, so he didn’t notice that headstones from the cemetery flanking the streets were now quite visible through the low-hanging pine tree branches. Braithwaite’s house was the only one in a widely spaced crescent of four that didn’t have a huge wall of hedges in the back. The split-level ranch house was surrounded on three sides by gnarled willows, their branches trailing the ground like bleached skeletal fingers. They approached the house between low stone benches and the dwarfed bonzai trees of a Japanese garden holding intricate patterns of rocks and boulders that pushed up through the snow-covered dirt.
“It’s difficult to keep up a lawn on this sandy incline, so I decided on this arrangement. It’s really quite pleasant in the summer. I stock those pools with goldfish.”
Willie could easily imagine the old man sitting under his pale-green willows on those stone benches next to the small marble ponds. His whole manner seemed to fit that type of setting.
“We can go in through the side door. I rarely use the front.”
The steps were brushed clean, exposing a grass welcome mat. And over the bell was a brass plaque engraved Dr. Daniel Braithwaite.
“The nameplate is new.” He ran his fingers over the surface. “I used to have one with my wife’s name on it as well, but I’ve been a widower for almost twenty years and I don’t know why I hung on to the old plate. I suppose keeping Anita’s name up there somehow kept her close to me. But there comes a time when we have to accept the reality of things, don’t we?”
“But if you’re a doctor, why didn’t you help?” Willie said. “I remember that you were one of the first ones who got there right after the police. Why didn’t you see if—”
“You’ve mistaken that sign.” Braithwaite opened the door. “I’m a history professor, or at least I used to be.”
“I’m sorry, I thought you were a real doctor.”
Braithwaite laughed soundlessly. “You just might have a point, young man. Maybe I shouldn’t have that up on there. If I accept that I’m no longer married, I should accept the fact that I’m not associated with the university anymore. But I’m still doing research and so I guess that justifies it. Besides, I’ve lived longer as Dr. Braithwaite than I’ve lived as anything else.”
“It looks like I’m gonna spend the whole day apologizing to you. But I didn’t mean anything, Dr. Braithwaite, really. I wasn’t trying to insult you.”
“Yes, I know.” Braithwaite led them into a large, dark room. “It’s strange, but even in academic circles nowadays young people prefer not to be addressed that way. They think it old-fashioned. But when I got my degree from Fisk, it was something to be proud of. There were so few of us at the time, and we wanted it to be known. Why, with the Civil War just being over …” He winked at them and seeing their blank faces, burst into laughter. “My God, I guess you really do think I’m old enough to have been around then.”
“Of course not,” Lester hurried to say, “but maybe World War One or something.”
“Yes.” Braithwaite smiled. “I was alive during that war. But believe it or not, I was just a bit too young to fight.”
He turned on the overhead light and motioned for their coa
ts, but for a moment they forgot him as they stood in stunned amazement. The room had to be over half the size of the house, and at first, they thought it didn’t have any walls. The ten-foot ceiling must have been held up by the stacks of books starting down at the very floor. But the oak shelves were custom-built to fit every available inch of wall space, even lining the door frame and the fireplace. Crammed in above the leather-and-gold bindings and loose, dusty spines were manila folders and newspapers. Three-foot stacks of papers and files surrounded a scarred desk, facing the only unshelved wall; instead there was a heavy purple drapery hanging from ceiling to floor—next to it, a high-powered telescope.
Willie finally spoke. “This is amazing.”
“No, it’s a mess.” Braithwaite motioned them toward the couch in front of the fireplace. “But I wasn’t expecting any visitors today.” He removed an empty soda bottle, soiled paper napkins, and a greasy plastic plate from the coffee table. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be right back.”
The patchwork quilt draped over the sofa’s back smelled of fresh sweat and old dust. The sofa’s arms were slick, and the cushions had been mashed down and bore the imprint of a human body.
“Did you ever?” Lester ran his hands along one wall of books. “This place reads like a Who’s Who in American History—Paine, Franklin, Henry Adams. Willie, look at this. The entire set of the Federal Works Project’s slave narratives. And he’s gotta have every Crisis in existence—his start from 1910. Journal of Negro Education, Journal of Negro History, Black Enterprise—all of them, Willie.” Lester kept going down the line, “Booker T. Washington’s The Negro in Business, Carter G. Woodson’s The Negro Professional and the Community, Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie. I don’t believe this—every one of the Atlanta University Studies and, oh my God—Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro.” He took the volume out. “And it’s a signed first edition. I bet these are all first editions. This room is worth a fortune.”
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