I Bring Sorrow_And Other Stories of Transgression

by Patricia Abbott

  “I know right where he is.”

  “My belief is we will, in fact, be regarded as liberators.”

  Sharky Black got rinsed at the Dearborn Dialysis Center. “Takes till three. Follow him home or wait in his car—nineties Cutlass. Blue.” Sandy told him.

  “How’s it you know where he’s doing dialysis and the make of his car, but not where he lives?”

  “Had that car forever. And I know a guy who knows a guy.”

  Lou sighed. “I’ll have to follow him home, see where he lives, and get him next time. I’m not movin’ too fast nowadays. Look, there’s no guarantee there’s anything left. Eleven years is a long time.”

  “Local fences claim none of the big stuff ever turned up.” Sandy knew his fences—that’d always been his thing.

  Lou borrowed Marcie’s car for an alleged doctor’s appointment and found the facility.

  It was a good ten minutes before Sharky exited, got the car started, and pulled out of the lot. Lou followed him home Wednesday and was waiting for him on Friday.

  “Bet you’re weren’t expecting me,” Lou said, sitting in what was clearly Sharky’s favorite chair, his mini oxygen tank in his lap, a gun in his hand.

  “Geez, Lou, you scared me. Isn’t that kind of dangerous?” he said, nodding at the gun. “With your tank and all.”

  Lou didn’t answer.

  “When you get out?” Sharky sank onto the sofa, tossing his car keys on the table.

  “Few years back. Guess you know why I’m here.”

  Sharky nodded. “Too late, Lou. Sold the stuff.”

  “Sandy says he checked with every fence in the state. None of it ever turned up.”

  “Didn’t fence it exactly.”

  “What then?”

  “Heard about the emphysema, Lou,” Sharky said, looking at the tank again. “Not much they can do for it, is there?”

  Lou shook his head.

  “And no way Sandy can get himself new feet. Good chair’s about it.”

  “He can live better with some dough. So can I.”

  “I thought about that. But when it came down to it, the money can help me best. Can’t buy you new lungs or Sandy new feet. So I bought myself a new kidney. Just got the call—some kid who died in a car crash. Surgery’s tomorrow. You can kill me, Lou, but you still won’t get the dough and you’ll probably go back to Jackson. Do you see my point? That money moved me up to the top of the list, bought me a few more years. Maybe more.”

  “Or maybe less.” Lou pulled the trigger and watched Sharky slip onto the floor. If he’d known where kidneys were, he’d have plugged the bastard there.

  He’d always figured on a backdoor parole, and fuck if it wasn’t pretty much the same as the backroom one he had now. He turned the air back on and walked out.

  “We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary.”

  We Are All Special Cases

  Polly was lying on the bed, book in hand, when she heard Saul’s footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs. He’d paused on the floor below again, probably fumbling for his key. They’d forgotten the European practice in numbering floors, and each time he came back to the flat, he stopped at the wrong door. If they’d remembered this detail last autumn—realizing they were on the fourth floor and not the third—they’d never have rented this place. Then she wouldn’t have sprained her ankle on the final step, an irregular one, worn down from too many tourists with heavy suitcases. In theory, she loved Paris; in actuality, it was a strain.

  “There’s such a thing as being too fond of familiarity,” her husband, Saul, had said when she raised a few doubts about the trip. “You’re far too young to find change so difficult. Doing new things is like a statin for the brain.” He was always full of observations like this, usually involving some inadequacy on her part.

  Was fifty-five years young in anyone’s book? But it wasn’t really about age. It was primarily about her fear of flying. Since she’d completed extensive therapy over this issue, she never mentioned it, just loaded up on Xanax.

  “Do you realize when we went to Brazil, you came down with a stomach virus? And in Kyoto, you lost your voice.”

  “Coincidences?” she said weakly.

  “I don’t think we’ve once left the States without some sort of mishap.”

  Was this true? Had she always been this awful at being in a foreign place? What about their honeymoon in Dublin? Food poisoning, she remembered. They’d put her on a drip at the hospital there. Fearing air bubbles would enter her bloodstream; she never took her eyes off the IV.

  “That can’t happen nowadays,” the nurse had assured her. But she’d read too many novels to believe her.

  This trip, Polly sprained her ankle the first day. Immediately looking to Saul for sympathy, she saw a flash of anger in his eyes, a stiffening of his back. He practically had to carry her down the steps to get to the pharmacy, and he did it wordlessly

  “Stay off it for a few days,” the Parisian pharmacist suggested in perfect British English. “You’re in Paris for a fortnight, right? You have time.”

  Once, years ago, she’d sprained a second ankle by putting too much weight on it. That was in Montreal. She was particularly clumsy on cobblestones.

  Thoughts of the past flew out of her head as Saul finally got his floors straight and the door opened. She heard him putting the wine in the fridge.

  “Should I leave the cheese out?”

  The flat was so small he didn’t need to raise his voice. “I got some great Emmental. We’ll have ourselves quite the feast tonight. Wait till I tell you about the Picasso Museum. It’s practically around the corner. Maybe you can get to it in a day or two.”

  “Hope so,” she said, putting her finger in the book. She paused, debating saying it. “Saul, it’s still there.”

  He stuck his head in the doorway and sighed. “So back to that again?”

  “Am I supposed to ignore it?”

  “No, but you’re letting it—if there even is an it—take over.”

  She knew he’d like to point out other examples in her long history of preoccupations, but he left the room instead. Flouncing back down, she opened the book and began to read. She hadn’t expected to like this book, but, set in Paris, it was the perfect choice. The streets in the book seemed as real as what she saw out the window. Sometimes life seemed safer a book’s length away. And safer yet when she was reading in her own bed at home. This bed was more like a futon. It seemed stuffed with grains of sand.

  “I prefer it,” Saul had said the first night. “Better for my back.”

  “Why not sleep on the floor if that’s the case?”

  She sat up, watching him prepare to settle in for a nap. “Could you just take a look? Please.”

  She watched from the bed as Saul, sighing and slump-shouldered, walked over to the window and threw it open. The noise from the sidewalk café below drifted up. Someone was playing a radio. Saul closed the window with a bang. “Ugh. I came to get away from American music. Good thing it isn’t hot and we can close it. Bet that noise goes on until three.”

  Up on her elbows, she could see bright light flowing through the glass. “Do you see it? Is it still there?”

  “Yes, yes, I see it. But it’s definitely a costume, Pol. Not half as large as it looked last night either. The light behind the curtain probably magnified it somehow.”

  The wings had seemed gigantic last night, taking up half the window. She was awestruck. Saul—not so much. He always wanted to see things as benign, normal. He’d never have spotted Raymond Burr murdering his wife. A bank of lit windows, in fact, would have no draw for him. He’d lower his shade and ignore them.

  “Look at it through the camera, Saul. You can see it better with the telephoto lens.”

  Her voice was too shrill, but why did
he insist on diminishing the wings? Making them seem smaller, less magical? These wings were all she had of Paris, after all.

  He followed her instructions, snapping a few pictures even. He’d tried this last night, but the light was stronger now. He looked at what he’d shot and shrugged. “Probably a dancer lives there. Swan Lake? Isn’t there an opera about birds too?”“No one could dance wearing wings that big.” She was positive, having taken dance classes for six years.

  “Okay, so then it’s a costume for a play.” He put the camera down and came into the bedroom. “A masquerade. Trick or treat.” He looked at her. “The doctor didn’t send you to bed, you know. Just said stay off your feet. You could sit in a chair, at least.”

  “It was only a pharmacist. And it’s months to Halloween.”

  It was now, in fact, May—the month they’d thought best for their twenty-five year anniversary celebration even though they got married in July. Paris seemed the perfect destination. It wasn’t as foreign as most of the places Saul wanted to go. Just last year he’d suggested New Guinea.

  “Do the French even celebrate Halloween?” He sat down on the bed, examining her ankle. “Swelling’s gone down. Hurt still?” He pressed on it lightly.

  “Not unless I try to walk.”

  “Maybe you should try to walk around more. I think most doctors don’t believe in keeping off it after the first day or so. It stiffens up.”

  “It feels better when I don’t put weight on it.” Was she getting lazy? She couldn’t remember the last time she felt like walking anywhere.

  “How can you stand it, coming to Paris and hardly leaving this place? If it were me…” He paused and looked back at the window. “Maybe it’s for a costume ball?”

  Conciliatory, so she’d be too. “I guess I could hobble across the street for a crepe.”

  He smiled. “I’ll open the wine.”

  She’d first noticed the wings after limping out onto the tiny balcony for some air last night. In one direction lay a noisy creperie; in the other, a pricey shoe store. But across the narrow street was a window much like theirs—except for the wings, seemingly suspended in space. Angel, swan, it wasn’t clear.

  “These flats are small,” he said when she called him to look. “Maybe that’s the only place to store whatever it is. Be gone by tomorrow.”

  But it wasn’t. She’d looked at the wings so often today the impression had been seared onto her retinas. Television programs were all in French so what else was there to do? Read her book. Look at the wings.

  When they got back from dinner—and Saul was right, it did feel good to get out despite the flights of steps—the apartment across the way was dark. And although she tried, she couldn’t tell if the wings were still there. It felt like they were, but she thought that if she mentioned this to Saul, he’d scoff. Felt like it. An odd thing to say. How could you feel like something was there? Shadows, perhaps, a heaviness.

  She couldn’t sleep. Her ankle throbbed. She didn’t want to drink more wine—he blamed last night’s hysteria on it. She’d slept too much today, drifting in and out of sleep while Saul visited the Picasso, Musee D’Orsay, the Rodin Museum. He’d brought back postcards for her.

  “Of course, you can look at practically everything online once we get home. Not that it’s the same thing.” He said this as if she’d suggested it.

  Tucking the book under her arm, she crept into the living room, turning on the lamp on the desk.

  It took a minute to see it, and she would have expected to scream but didn’t. The wings had migrated over the course of the evening. They had, in fact, traveled across the street to the inside of their window—not ten feet away from her now. Had Saul left the window open? No, the noise from downstairs would have been too loud to ignore even this late. The window had been opened by something else. She’d like to shut it now but stood frozen.

  Now that the wings were close, she could see they were much larger than she’d even imagined. They were about her height but much wider. The wingspan must be ten feet. It wasn’t a costume or anything like it. Whatever it was, and she didn’t have the answer to that, it was quivering: alive. Although quiver was the wrong word because it implied some sort of hesitation or fear. It was undulating, heaving like a beating heart, perhaps.

  When she looked across the street, the window was wide open, the curtains streaming outward. What had made it seek her out? Had it watched her as closely as she watched it? Had her all-day vigil encouraged it? Had they made some sort of connection?

  Slowly, she drew closer to the wings, looking into its insect-like eyes on each side of its head. A moth, she thought, and a giant one. Its coloring was not the white it appeared to be from across the street, but something closer to a lavender-gray. It twitched, fluttered, surged. She put out her hand.

  “Polly, are you up again?” It was Saul from the bedroom, his voice sodden with sleep. “If you got more exercise…”

  “Just looking at the wings,” she said, deciding not to tell him of the immigration. She could hear his sigh, and she sighed too.

  Suddenly, there was a fluttery movement and she was enveloped within the wings. Like a delicate embrace. Inside, the wings were not quite solid. She could see through them, out into the night, back into the bedroom. She’d never felt so safe.

  “You’d better come into bed and get some sleep,” Saul said, sounding sleepier yet. “You don’t want to miss any more of Paris.”

  “I won’t,” she said with confidence.

  Polly, securely cocooned, flew out the window and into the night.

  The Cape

  “You make me a cappa? Si?”

  The man standing at the counter had entered the shop quietly, and the proprietor, Joseph Valente, whipped around, wondering if the bell usually triggered by the opening door had malfunctioned. Then he saw the gray-gloved hand holding it still. Joseph had learned enough Italian to know cappa meant cape. For the gentleman’s wife, no doubt, for this was certainly a gentleman.

  He looked familiar, but the tailor couldn’t place him. He spoke with a thick accent, an accent Joseph’s Neapolitan wife, Valentina’s family shared. But no relative of his wife dressed like this, so elegant in his single-breasted dove-gray waistcoat with a prominent watch chain, a wing-collared shirt, and a silky black bow tie. He wore a homburg on his rather large head. Never had a man dressed like this entered Joseph’s shop. And today was a scorching hot day. Joseph was suffering dressed only in a cotton shirt and summer trousers. But the man seemed unaffected by it.

  Although Joseph Valente had made a cape or two for women, he’d never made one for a man, and especially not for a man who, from the cut of his clothes, was used to the finest tailoring available in a city offering the top couture outside of Europe. Mulberry Street would be slumming for his kind. All of these thoughts passed through Joseph’s mind with lightening speed as the businessman in him answered.

  “An opera cape, sir?”

  Joseph’s mind flew to his pattern books for men’s clothing. Did he have a book with men’s capes? Perhaps he could alter a cape meant for a woman—change the cut and collar a bit. A job like this one could bring in money. He’d have to be very sharp indeed to impress this man. But why was he here in the first place? How was it possible his shop had made itself known to this man?

  In Italian, the man told him the cape would be for outdoors. Moving his fingers in demonstration, the man wiped his brow with a large white handkerchief. “Andare.”

  “You want a cape to walk outside?”

  “Si. Fur cappa. Per inverno in da zoo. No vorrei prendersi un raffreddore.” Catch a cold, Joseph translated silently. He doesn’t want to catch a cold when he walks in the zoo. How odd. Was he a zoo administrator? Or perhaps a wealthy patron of the uptown institution?

  The customer waved his fingers, like the pope or a king might, looking at Joseph as if the reas
on for such concern was obvious. Joseph smiled and nodded as if it were. Perhaps the man was suffering from consumption, although he looked too well fed to have a disease that left most of its victims looking, well, consumptive.

  The man walked to the door and stepped outside, pulling a tiny case from his breast pocket and putting a lozenge in his mouth. The humidity from Tina’s laundry business in the back of the shop took some getting used to. After years of proximity, he could still smell the noxious laundry powder and bleach. But the scent of a hot iron on a dampened cotton shirt held its own delights, which was what he smelled this morning. The Irish girl who assisted his wife was singing Let Me Call You Sweetheart in a lilting soprano voice. Joseph usually found her habit a pleasant diversion from his work. Today’s customer, however, seemed unimpressed, even annoyed, as he re-entered the shop. He made a face demanding action.

  “Theresa, we have a customer,” Joseph called out. He didn’t like to hurt her feelings, but the customer came first.

  The singing ended abruptly and something clattered to the floor. The two men looked at each other, sizing each other up in some indefinable way, and then Joseph reached for his drawing pad and began sketching. After a few minutes, he turned the pad around and slid it across the counter.

  “Something like this, perhaps?” He could have drawn a better cape if he hadn’t been shaking with anxiety. Or if he’d ever seen a man in a fur cape just once in his lifetime. His fingertip added a bit of shading to highlight how the cape would catch the breeze.

  The man looked at it carefully and nodded with a small smile. “And da fur? Che categoria?”

  Joseph was flattered such an elegant man would ask for his opinion on this important question. Perhaps it was a test? And one he might fail. Closing his eyes, he sped through a virtual furrier’s display catalog. Better to suggest the easiest pelts to obtain, the most familiar. He had done some stoles in mink.

  “Mink, I think. And dark red lining would be elegant.”