The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  She saw that her coworkers eyed her cautiously, and knew that many of them wanted to talk. She understood that they were saddened for her, and horrified by what had happened; but there was a certain thrill there, too. Murder, ghastly murder, tainted everyone with its evil glamour, even those at a distance, those whose involvement was only vicarious, the more so the more gruesome it was.

  She had no desire to satisfy their grisly curiosity and avoided the hesitant glances. Fortunately, most of them kept their distance. Her assistant, Bill—black and gay—worked closely with her each day, but she had learned early on that he was a very model of discretion, a fact for which she could be grateful now.

  Only Mrs. Pendergrast from their young adult division ventured beyond her door with personal condolences. “Catherine, you poor, poor thing,” she cooed and leaned over Catherine’s desk so far that Catherine felt she meant to embrace her, and cringed inwardly. “I just can’t tell you how awful I feel for you. If there is anything I can do, anything at all.”

  “As a matter of fact.” Catherine held up a pile of sketches, needing to divert all that dripping sympathy, “These need to go back to art, if you wouldn’t mind dropping them on your way.”

  “It would be a pleasure.” Mrs. Pendergrast’s voice was a shade less cordial. One did want one’s sympathy to be appreciated.

  Later, in the ladies room, Mrs. Pendergrast shared her insights with Mrs. White from accounting. “Such a tragedy,” she said, repairing her lipstick. “Of course, let it be said, I would never, ever leave my Samantha unattended. You just can’t be too careful these days.”

  Mrs. White patted her hair and frowned. “But, that isn’t quite the way it happened, is it?”

  Mrs. Pendergrast ignored the question. “I keep her practically glued to my side every minute when we’re out. People may call me over-cautious if they like, but no one will steal my little girl.”

  After two years of marriage, Mrs. White was still childless, and afraid to question her doctor because she was sure he would share her husband’s opinion that the fault was hers. She could not help thinking, however, that if God ever granted her the little baby girl she prayed for, she would be ever so vigilant as well.

  Of course, she did understand that it had been the husband looking after the Desmond girl, but, really, you just couldn’t leave something like that up to a man. Certainly not a man as easily distracted as her Robert.

  * * * *

  At first, Catherine went every day after work to Forest Lawn Memorial Park, to bring flowers to Becky’s grave. Becky had so loved flowers. “Red and orange and yellow and white and blue....”

  “I don’t think there are any blue flowers, darling.”

  “Purple?”

  “Yes, definitely purple. And pink. You forgot pink.”

  “And pink. And purple and blue....”

  She said nothing to Walter about her visits. She had no desire to share this pilgrimage with him, with anybody.

  She and Becky had used to come here in the past, not as morbid a destination as one might have supposed. There were fountains and gardens, and an uncanny look-alike of Michelangelo’s David.

  The winter rains came. They did not in any way deter her, though by now she went only once or twice a week. The gravesite was on a knoll from which bright green lawns, salt and peppered with gravesites, spilled down to the Golden State Freeway with its endless rush of cars, their sound a murmur at this distance. She stood without umbrella and let the cool droplets fall upon her, in hope that they would wash away her grief, or at least the numbness.

  Both remained. Her soul was condemned to hold on to every memory, until surely it must break from overloading. She knew that she must one day come back to herself. She had to return to the world of the living. She could not continue as she was. If you were condemned to be alive, you ought at least to live.

  At home, she and Walter shared the house, they moved about in the same finite space and yet they remained light years apart. Sometimes she could hear him in his office, crying. Most of the time he watched her warily with red-rimmed eyes and sniffled until she thought she must scream, but how could she, eyes tearless, rail at him for his grief? She wished that she had solace to offer him, but of that her heart was empty.

  He spent more and more time at the restaurant, pleading increasing numbers of diners. She had no doubt that he found it more comfortable away from her, just as she was relieved to see him go. It was not that she hated him, nor that she even consciously blamed him for what had happened. They could hardly share their home day by day, however, without reminding one another of what was missing from it. And you could only say, “it’s all right,” so many times before that began to sound silly.

  He had lost ten pounds and gained ten years. He looked faded, like a shirt too often washed. It wasn’t only Becky those two men had killed, she thought grimly. They were killing Catherine and Walter Desmond day by day, inexorably and she felt helpless to prevent it.

  A casual question one day—“Will your mother be coming for Christmas?”—made her aware of the time she hadn’t noticed passing.

  The question caught her by surprise. “Is it December?”

  “The second.” The gravity of his tone made it sound the most important thing in the world.

  Which meant, she realized, that Thanksgiving had come and gone without her noticing. They had always made such a big deal of it in the past. Becky had been quite set in her preferences. The turkey’s wings were hers, both of them, and woe betide the foolish mortal who thought to claim one. The pie must be pumpkin.

  “Punkin pie, punkin pie, punkin pie.” She used to chant it while her mother cleared the table, brought in the pie, took the ice cream—pumpkin ice cream it must be—from the freezer. “Punkin pie.”

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she told Walter. She got up and began to clear the table, but she did manage to rest a hand, briefly, on his shoulder. She really did wish she could comfort him.

  He sniffled and said nothing.

  When he had gone, she went into the garage and got down a box of Christmas ornaments and carried it into the living room. The first one she unwrapped turned out to be Becky’s favorite, the little Christmas angel they had bought the year she was born. She set that aside and found another one: the papier-mâché camel with one leg missing. Becky had insisted they hang it anyway each year, legs or no legs.

  “Jesus will love him anyway, won’t he, Mommy?”

  There were, it seemed, memories attached to every ornament. She put them back in the box and taped it closed again, and carried it out to its shelf in the garage.

  A car, a fire engine red Bronco, pulled into the driveway just as she came back into the kitchen. It was unfamiliar to her and at first she didn’t recognize the woman who got out and walked briskly to the door. Not until she had rung the bell and Catherine had studied her long and hard through the glass in the front door, stared at the red hair that clearly refused to obey any bidding of brush or comb, did she realize that it was the FBI agent who had interviewed her in the hospital. What was her name, she wondered as she opened the door?

  “Mrs. Desmond.” The visitor stepped inside.

  She remembered then. “Officer Chang.”

  “Agent Chang.” She smiled to show that no offense had been taken. “Just Chang. Or you can call me Roby, if you like, there’s no need to be formal.” When Catherine still looked blankly at her, she added, “Roby. As in Roberta.” She saw the familiar puzzlement and waited for the customary question. Catherine Desmond’s glance took in her decidedly Asian face, heart-shaped, sloe-eyed, and went up to the frizzy hair. At least she put the question a bit differently from most.

  “You must get told a lot, that doesn’t sound Chinese.”

  “Not as much as I hear, ‘funny, you don’t look Jewish’.”

  Catherine laughed briefly. She must have done that often, before, Roby Chang thought, and felt her throat tighten with anger at what had been done to this w
oman. Watching her, she was surprised to discover how beautiful Catherine Desmond was. When she had seen her earlier, in the hospital, her face had been purpled with bruises, her head swathed in bandages. The gold hair, glinting with its own copper highlights, had mostly grown back out, the bruises had faded from a face that just missed classically beautiful and was the better for it. She was taller, too, than Chang had realized. Five nine, she guessed, maybe five ten, and full-figured. She was no fashion model, but rather what the boys described as “a babe.”

  “Daddy’s the Chinese part,” she said aloud, “Momma was a Jewish princess. Still is, to tell the truth, but she would have a fit if she heard me say it. That explains this, too.” She put a hand up to her spiky orange hair. “I’m afraid I’m the classic American mongrel.”

  Who looked not at all like an F.B.I. agent, Catherine thought. It wasn’t just that she was little, nor that her heart shaped face and the frizzy red hair gave her a comic-cute look entirely at odds with any kind of police work. Her costume, too, was something less than authoritative: jeans, a gore-tex jacket, some kind of boots that Catherine couldn’t put a name to.

  “Maybe hybrid is the better word,” she said aloud. Really, she chided herself, how was she to know what an F.B.I. agent should look like? “Come in, please. Can I get you something? Coffee? A drink?”

  “Nothing, thanks, I won’t stay long.” She looked around, avoiding Catherine’s eyes.

  “Have you come with news? Have you found them?” Catherine asked, hope flaring for a moment.

  Chang looked directly at her then and Catherine knew the answer before the agent shook her head. “Nothing, unfortunately. Actually, I was hoping you might have something for me. I thought maybe you had remembered something after all this time, some detail that you forgot earlier.” Her look was so earnest, so pleading, that Catherine hated having to disappoint her.

  “Nothing that I didn’t tell you before.”

  Chang hesitated a moment. “There’s been another one. Several, actually, over the last few months, but a couple of them look awfully similar to your...your case. Yesterday a girl got snatched from a shopping mall. The mother got just a glimpse, but the description she gave us sounded like the same two men.”

  “That poor woman. I wish...I wish I could do something to help her.” Catherine swallowed a lump that rose in her throat and looked away. “There’s something that I’ve...I’ve struggled for hours at a time to understand: how anyone could do what these men do? Can you help me to understand that, Agent Chang?”

  Roby Chang sighed deeply. She had struggled with that same question many times and every answer she came up with ultimately seemed inadequate.

  “I think it’s the innocence of their victims,” she said. “These animals—I won’t call them men, they aren’t that—they see that innocence, what we perceive of as something beautiful and precious, and to them it appears as a stain, as a flaw in their scheme of things, and they feel compelled to remove that stain.” Like all the others, this answer too sounded inadequate when she tried to put it into words.

  “So this comes down to a philosophical question?”

  Chang shrugged helplessly. “It’s difficult for people like us to understand these creatures. There’s more to it than that, of course. Money.”

  “But, they never asked for ransom. They didn’t even...there wasn’t time for that.”

  Crapola, Chang thought silently. She took a deep breath. She wished she didn’t have to say this, but she knew that it had to be said. “Often, they take pictures, films. There is a big market for that sick sort of thing. Kiddie porn, it’s called.”

  Catherine turned away from her and leaned against the window frame, head bent. After a moment, she asked in a breaking voice, “Are you telling me that somewhere there are pictures, movies, floating around that show—that show my Becky being violated?”

  “There may well be. What I don’t get is, why did they...?” For a moment she had gone into agent-mode, thinking aloud. She caught herself and gave Catherine an apologetic look. “I’m sorry.”

  “No. Go on, please. What is it that you don’t get?”

  “Well, I...are you all right with this?”

  “No, but go on anyway. I want to hear.”

  “Well, like I said, there’s movies and pictures, they’re worth a lot of money. And then, after that, usually, they, you know, they pass them on.”

  “For sex, you mean?”

  “Yes.” Chang was clearly embarrassed with the information she was imparting to Catherine’s back. Should she go on? Or try to soft pedal it? Yet her instinct was that this woman truly wanted—needed—to know. “The point is, these children are worth far more to them alive than dead.”

  “Then why...?”

  “If I knew that....” Chang shrugged again.

  Catherine was quiet for so long that Chang wondered if perhaps she should simply leave. When Catherine finally did speak, it was to say, her voice cracking, “I tried to protect her. I tried to shield her from the evil of the world.”

  “Yes, of course you did. Who could dream that such evil would come down upon you?” She had seen this same bewildered grief in other parents who had lost a child to murder. You wanted to protect, and when you failed, when something of this magnitude happened, you felt as if it were you who was at fault. She had seen marriages, families torn apart by such guilt. Even when justice was served, even when memory faded, no one ever really recovered, no parent of a murdered child ever afterward swam blissfully in the river of forgetfulness.

  She pulled her shoulders back and thrust her chin forward. “Mrs. Desmond, I want you to know, I mean to get these monsters. And I will, I promise you. However long it takes, I’m going to see them burn in the chair before I’m finished.”

  Catherine suddenly turned toward her, fists clenched, and said, with a fervor long missing from her voice, “I want to see it. I want to be there to watch them burn, to see them writhe in agony. Promise me that, Roby Chang. Promise me I will be there when they die.”

  Chang blinked, surprised by her vehemence, and heartened too. When she had interviewed her before, in the hospital, Catherine Desmond had been like a zombie, all her feelings locked away somewhere inside. Anger was good, in Chang’s opinion. It was often a first step in recovery.

  “It’s a date. I promise you, you’ll see them die,” she said with a grim smile. She took a card from her wallet and handed it to Catherine. “Meantime, if you think of anything...sometimes memory does funny things, you know, you’re reading a book or walking down a street, and the most trivial thing will trigger something in your mind. If you think of anything, anything at all, call me. Day or night.”

  * * * *

  Catherine had planned to go into the office for the afternoon, but now she changed her mind. Roby Chang’s visit had unnerved her. She called in and made her apologies, was embarrassed by how quickly, how understandingly they were received.

  The free time left her restless, however. She sat at the piano, picked listlessly at a Chopin prelude. Jack McKenzie’s yellow roses, a new bouquet of them, sat in their usual place atop the piano. Walter never failed to glower at them when he saw them, but he kept his objections to himself.

  Her out-of-practice fingers hit a wrong note. She slammed her hand down on the keyboard, creating a discordant cacophony, and got up, banging the lid down on the piano and making the roses tremble nervously.

  She went to the window and glanced out, and saw again the sorry state of the back yard. Despite the cold and a gentle rain, she donned a parka, pulled the hood over her head, and went out to do some gardening.

  A blue jay scolded her as she pulled up dead pansies and primroses with violent yanks. She imagined herself ripping out the hearts of the men who had murdered Becky.

  Later, muddy and exhausted, she took a shower and thought about Walter. She had been cold, unyielding with him, though he too had grief to bear and, worse yet, a burden of guilt as well.

  She had igno
red her mother, too. The sorry truth was, she had been so wrapped up in her own suffering she had given not a thought to the suffering of others. She lashed herself with the recognition of her self-absorption.

  Since her return from the hospital, she had been sleeping in Becky’s room. That night she returned to her own bed, to Walter.

  He welcomed her into his arms, and after several long moments of silent embrace, he tried dutifully to make love to her. It was a failure on both their parts. After what seemed an eternity of writhing and rubbing, he heaved a deep sigh and rolled off of her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  For a reply, she took his hand and gave it a forgiving squeeze. Later, when he began to snore gently in his sleep, she went back to Becky’s room.

  Lying there in the darkness, the futility of their attempt at sex stayed with her. Yet now that she was in another bed, another room, now that she considered it at a safe distance, she realized that nothing sexual had happened between them for a long while, even before. She had not minded, had welcomed the absence, she supposed, and so had been willing to overlook it, had scarcely even been conscious of it. If she had been able to see the future, she might well have considered another child...but who could possibly have foreseen what happened.

  She did not find it flattering to face the truth of what she had done: it hadn’t been only out of consideration for Walter, for their marriage, that she had returned to his bed. Far back in a corner of her mind, she had thought of replacing what had been lost. In a way, she was glad the attempt had been unsuccessful. That wasn’t the right motivation to bring a child into the world. Becky had been precious to her, and another child might well be too, without being a “replacement.” Anyway, if she were going to be truly honest with herself, Walter was no longer the man she would have chosen for a father.

  She got up and went into the bathroom—not the master bath, which was too close to where he slept, but the one across the hall from Becky’s room. The door closed, all the lights on, she shed her robe and took a long, hard look at herself in the mirror.