by Karen Ellis
“You’re here!” Mel rushes over with a hug.
Elsa drinks in the love, holding her niece long enough to make the girl squirm away. “Where’s Gramp?”
“With Mom, in the kitchen. She’s slaying him at Scrabble—she’s got no mercy.”
Elsa finds her father and sister bent over the table in the small, sunny kitchen he uses only for morning tea. Roy has delighted in taking all his meals in the dining hall, socializing with the other residents, enjoying his freedom from even the smallest responsibility. Feeling a surge of gladness that he’s had this one easy half-year, she pats his shoulder hello.
He turns his face to see her. “Hi, honey. I think I just lost this game.” Behind him on the windowsill, Lex’s hospital flowers, still mostly fresh in their vase.
“You know you did.” Tara grins. “I’ll run those errands now, Dad, since Elsa’s here. Mellie, you want to come with me?”
“Sure. Auntie Elsa, will you be here when we get back?”
“Probably.”
“Cool. Catch ya later, Rambo.” Mel laughs at the new nickname she’s apparently given her aunt.
Tara shakes her head, chuckling.
Roy forces a grin.
But Elsa’s insides freeze. “Is that what you call me now?”
“Yep.”
“You’re a legend around here,” Tara says. “Enjoy it.”
They gather their purses. Elsa sits quietly with her father until the chatter is subsumed by the closing front door. “Wow, I don’t know if I can live with that.”
“We’re lucky they have a sense of humor. So do you, Elsa. Don’t forget that.”
“Dad, I have to ask you something about Mom and—you know.” The question that’s long bubbled under the surface.
“Okay.”
“Why didn’t you stop her?”
The muscles of his face shift incrementally, creating the appearance of a deep shadow. “I didn’t know how.”
“Why didn’t you take us away from her?”
He looks at his daughter and struggles to explain. “She was my wife, and she wasn’t easy, and the thing was that I”—Loved her, Elsa is sure he’s about to say. But instead—“was afraid of what would happen. I was afraid that if I left her and took you with me, it would make things worse.”
“Worse how?” When obviously her life would have been so much better.
“I don’t know,” he says with a familiar hollow sigh. “I’ve thought about it and I can’t really understand it myself. I was weak, confused. We were a family. I didn’t know what to do.”
You drop everything and save the kid, she wants to shout, but doesn’t. What’s the point? In this case, the kid has grown up and the consequences of all that violence are etched into her skin.
“Elsa.” His hand creeps forward to take hers, dry, cool, and he holds tight as if she’s a balloon and he’s afraid she’ll float away, as if no matter what he does or says, he’s fated to lose her trust. “Something came to me just this morning; I realized that I was wrong; we did leave something behind at the house. So much time’s gone by, years, and I’d put it out of my mind. And then suddenly I remembered. I’m sorry, Elsa, I’m sorry.”
“The King of Denial” is what she and Tara used to call him behind his back, before Deb was killed. They’d laugh about it. They even invented a little Egyptian-esque dance featuring (in their imaginations) their father in imperial robes on the banks of the river Nile, pretending to ignore a bloody sacrificial ritual being enacted in the open.
Elsa asks, “What? Just tell me.”
She watches his Adam’s apple toggle up the reed of his throat and slide down. “Remember I had a concrete platform built before the shed was installed in the backyard? I buried something very, very deep at the far left corner, near the fence.”
She instantly knows what he means.
Her mind flashes to the backyard, five days ago, on Sunday, and she realizes that the shed wasn’t there. The new owners must have had it removed in preparation for their pool. All she recalls is that the yard looked overgrown in some places, empty in others.
A wave of queasiness overtakes her. “The shed’s gone.”
“It can’t be.”
“But it is.” She pulls her hand out of his and stands. As usual, what he’s offering is too little, too late. But she can’t hate him for it, not now. He has never been quite enough, but for years he’s been her only parent, her wobbly island in an incessant storm, and he won’t be here for long. She leans over to press her lips against his soft, withered cheek. “I love you, Dad.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeats.
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” Not adding the obvious: If it isn’t too late.
“Elsa?”
She turns at the door. He looks gaunt, almost translucent, in the bright kitchen sun. “Yes?”
“I love you too.”
39
A summertime chorus of air conditioners hums along with cricket song, masking Elsa’s steps in the deep night quiet as she moves up the driveway and into the backyard. She kicks aside the long dry grasses that have fallen over the footprint of the missing shed, where the concrete slab has been removed. Uncovered, the earth is dark and moist, recently overturned. She removes a paper lunch sack from her canvas bag and sets it on the ground. Lays a brand-new spade on top of the sack. Puts her bag off to the side, where it won’t get dirty from the mess she’s about to make. She gets on her knees and begins to dig.
Roy meant what he’d said about burying it very, very deep. The soil remains loose and easy three feet down, releasing a loamy sweetness rife with memories of Deb digging in this very yard, preparing it for planting. Elsa digs all the way to the property line marked by the fence, and a foot to either side. She digs forward to where the middle of the shed had been. She digs and digs, stirring already loosened earth.
She plunges in her spade, hoping to find it and hoping not to find it; anticipating the contours of her mother’s favorite chef’s knife: the wood handle now baked soft by time, its sharp edge coarsened. Nothing, there’s nothing here, she thinks, and then she feels something hard that isn’t a stick or a stone—something man-made that doesn’t belong buried in a yard.
And suddenly, after all these years, it’s back in her hand: the rounded butt, the dip of the handle guard, the scales and tang and return. Not long after it happened, she’d spent hours studying the anatomy of a knife just like her mother’s, hoping that if she could reconstruct every element of every moment of that afternoon, maybe she could understand it better. But it never made any sense, how or why what had happened to her could happen to someone. To a child. And yet it had.
She lifts the knife to eye level, looks at it in the moonlight. Yes, this is it, her mother’s knife. Memory rushes back: the shocking richness of Deb’s blood, and how much there was of it; Elsa’s horror at what had happened and her urgent wish to reverse it.
40
Your hold, at sixteen, is firm around the handle of the knife. Your mother’s best chef’s knife, the one she favors and polishes and sharpens and puts away. The first one you find at hand when she enters the kitchen that afternoon after punching Tara in the back for refusing to start her homework. Tara, then twelve. Considerably older than when Deb started with you.
You’d thought, you’d believed, that she would never touch Tara.
But the sound of that bone-hard smack from the next room, Tara’s sorrowful wail, the thump of your little sister running up the stairs, the way your mother sighs and shakes her head when she walks into the kitchen to make dinner, as if this is just another day.
It isn’t.
It can’t be.
Everything inside you racing to the surface when you pick up the knife and approach her.
The lush waterfall of blood from Deb’s neck.
The way she looks across the room before falling—at the door opening, at Roy walking in, his jaw slack, eyes wide, sheet music spilling out of his bag as it drops
off his shoulder—and tries for her husband’s sympathy before crashing to the floor.
The way your father hurries to fix everything: clean the mess, hide the knife, invent the story of intruders. How he runs upstairs to comfort Tara and weave the first threads of the lie so that she won’t have to know what her older sister did, how bad things just got: A man broke in, a violent man, but he’s gone now; Elsa was heroic, she scared him off, and now she’s safe. How he returns to the kitchen, where he contains you, shaking and terrified, in his arms. And holds you there for the rest of his life.
41
Pizza delivery!” announces a man’s disembodied, crackly voice through Elsa’s apartment’s intercom.
She presses the Talk button. “I didn’t order any pizza.”
“Elsa, it’s me.”
“Me?” But she can think of only one person who would have the nerve to show up uninvited.
“I’m not hungry,” she lies, wondering if he actually does have pizza, because in fact she’s very hungry and has nothing on hand for dinner.
“You don’t have to eat. Please, buzz me in.”
She pauses, then says, “One minute.”
She takes her mother’s scrubbed-clean chef’s knife out of the dish drainer, dries it with a kitchen towel, and slips it into the drawer where she keeps her few cooking utensils. Something in the back of her mind, a warning, bleats for attention but she ignores it. It’s been a long day, begun in the car to Vermont with Lex Cole, and it might as well end with him over a slice or two of pizza. She’s tired of fighting him, and maybe he’s right, maybe she could use a friend.
She buzzes him in, and he appears at her door holding a flat white box in one hand and a six-pack of beer in the other. “Sure you’re not hungry?” he asks. “Or thirsty?”
“Well,” she says, “I guess I am a little bit of both.”
“I knew it.” He walks past her and sets the pizza and beer down on her table.
“You know what I just realized?” she asks as she opens her cupboard and takes out two plates. “I don’t know very much about you, and here you just show up at my place because you feel like it.” She puts the plates on the table, pushes aside a stack of newspaper and unopened mail, and sits across from him. Twists the caps off two bottles and pours them each a frothy glass.
He raises the top of the pizza box, releasing a fragrant steam that makes her stomach growl. “You know about my parents, about Yelena, you’ve met my brother, you know where I went to school. Actually, you know a fair amount about me.”
“About your past.”
He lifts a cheese-oozing slice onto a plate and hands the plate to her. “Ask me anything you want. I have no secrets from you.” The way he says it, it’s like a dare. And she thinks: You should have secrets, you need them to protect yourself, it isn’t safe not to hold back the most important things.
“Okay.” She drinks deeply of her beer, cold, sharp. “Where do you live?”
“Queens—Ridgewood.” Now a slice for himself.
The pizza is warm, not hot, and when she takes her first bite, her hunger explodes. She chews, swallows, asks, “Single?”
“Boyfriend.”
A reflexive half smile she instantly regrets. “Oh.”
“That bother you?”
“Why would it? I just never really thought about it. What’s his name?”
“Adam.”
“Profession?”
“Coder by day, artist by night.”
“What kind of artist?”
“Painter mostly, and also installations.”
“So, do you live together—you and Adam?”
“No. Not yet. Maybe soon.” He twists open a fresh beer and refills her glass. His, she notices, has barely been touched.
“That’s nice.” And she means it, deeply, so deeply, in fact, that she has to push away a blip of jealousy.
He asks, “What about you?”
“What about me?” Defensively. But this time, he persists.
“Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Theyfriend?”
She laughs, but it’s thin, discomfort having crept in. She says, “Obviously you and your brother talked about me, so you already know.” About the permanence of her singlehood. About her tattoos that aren’t tattoos. The second beer has gone to her head, made her feel cloudy, light. She knows she should stop now. She takes another long swallow.
“He really likes you, Elsa, and he wouldn’t care about the…you know.”
The cutting, that’s what he wants to say. The way you cut yourself to shreds. What surprises her now is that she almost wants to hear him say it; for the first time, she wants to rip away the veil with someone outside her family. Tell him everything, the whole truth. But how could he possibly understand?
“You have a lot going on in your life right now”—he detours out of the heavy silence that followed his remark—“with your dad’s health.”
She nods. Sips her beer. Wonders what would happen if she rolled up her sleeve and showed him, actually showed him, her skin.
“And the case, it wasn’t easy, to say the least. You were great, Elsa. I was really impressed. The way you cared about those girls, really threw yourself into it.”
“So did you.”
“It isn’t the same.” His eyes settle on her, and the map of her skin sizzles awake.
She thinks of her mother’s knife sitting in her drawer.
Gets up.
Retrieves it.
Places it beside the pizza.
He looks at her, vaguely confused. “Want me to cut you a smaller slice?”
She lays her right arm on the table, flips it over, pushes up her sleeve, and shows him the pale, slashed underside of her ruined skin. “See this?”
He nods.
“I have a confession, and after I tell you, you can do whatever you want.”
He reaches over and gently pulls her sleeve back down. “Don’t.”
“It disgusts you,” she says.
“No. I’ve seen it before; Yelena never hid herself when we were at home.”
But Elsa can’t imagine anyone being so open and comfortable in her damaged skin, revealing herself casually. Was Yelena really that brave? Or did she give up caring? Or did she feel truly loved?
“It doesn’t look nearly as bad as you think it does, Elsa.”
Maybe, maybe not, she can’t tell; to her, it looks monstrous. Her arm feels cold, naked, a thing of shame lying on the table between them. But she can’t stop now; she has to finish what she started. She has never come this far before and she senses that if she holds back, she’ll never try again. Roy is about to die. She cannot be alone with this for the rest of her life.
She says, “This is the knife that killed my mother.” Almost speaking the precise truth: I killed her. She feels faint. And relieved. And terrified.
“Elsa.” A flint in his voice, begging her to listen carefully. “Stop right there.”
She gets it: he’s not her friend, he’s a cop, and she’s an idiot …who just came very close to admitting to a murder.
“That was a long time ago,” he says. “It’s over. Let it lie.”
Solid advice, but impossible. Lie where? she wants to ask. Because my insides are as cut up as my outside, and my father is about to go, and I can’t hold this knowledge alone. I can’t. She says, “How?” trusting the small, simple word not to betray her, but it does, oozing anxiety.
He reaches for her arm, for her skin, as if to touch it—and she almost lets him. She wants to be touched and thinks, suddenly, of how safe and welcome her father’s embrace has always been and how soon she’ll no longer have it. She looks at her watch, aware of how late it’s getting, how she could still get up there to join Roy for a cup of tea. This detour, this pizza-dinner-dancing-around-the-edges-of-a-possible-friendship episode, has not only perilously softened her defenses but stolen valuable time.
She pulls down her sleeve. Pushes the knife beneath the mess of newspaper and mail. “Let’s pretend
,” she says, “that I never showed it to you.” The knife, she means, but the way he glances at her arm lets her know how broadly he interprets her request.
“I can’t unknow you, Elsa. I don’t want to.” He picks up the knife—newspaper sliding off, mail scattering. At the sight of the blade held in front of her, sharp, brilliant, she jumps back decades into her mother’s eyes and sees herself wielding it with keen intent: a terrified girl, more powerful than wise. And then her mind leaps across to the kitchen door where her father stands, gape-mouthed, watching, and lands in his eyes, into the quicksand of his helplessness that was always, always stronger than his love.
“It’s heavier than it looks,” Lex says, and she returns to the moment.
“You have no idea.”
He folds the newspaper around the entire length of the knife and makes a neat rectangular package, which he tucks beneath his arm. Stands. Says, “Come on.”
“Lex”—a fester of argument in her tone—“I can take care of that myself.”
“I know you can.” But he doesn’t give it to her. “I can tell you’re anxious to get back up to your dad. I’ll drive; I hardly drank anything. We can make a quick detour to the Hudson River, play a little game of Frisbee—what do you say?” He makes a gesture as if to hurl the newspaper-wrapped knife, to rid her of her every burden.
“And then what?”
“I’ll wait while you visit your father. Or, if you want, I’ll take the train back to the city so you can spend the night.”
“Someone will find it sooner or later, and then what?”
“Then nothing. No one’s looking for this—no one. It’s just a knife. You should see the crap they regularly dredge out of that river.” Warmth tugs at the corners of his eyes, and he’s right. She doesn’t need or want this relic of the worst moment of her past, and there’s no reason to act as if she isn’t grateful for his help. He has worn her down, infiltrated her, made himself her confidant whether she’s prepared for one or not.
She takes her bag from the back of the chair and tosses him her car keys.