Blame: A Novel

by Huneven, Michelle

  Brice stood to hug her. At almost fifty, he was thicker, redder in face, as if his grouse-hunting, golf-mad, Scotch-swilling ancestors now insisted on their share of his appearance. His hair was dark bronze, with a faint green tint from all his swimming. Some news, he said.

  I know, she said. And Joey, Lucia was wonderful . . .

  Joey’s green eyes brightened. She took such clear joy in being the messenger, it seemed heartless to temper her.

  I’m glad Brice knows—a lie, but Patsy didn’t want to scold—but I was wondering if you wouldn’t tell anyone else until I’ve had a chance to tell my family. And get used to the idea.

  A flicker of shame crossed Joey’s face. Which meant she’d already told who knows how many people.

  I’d like to keep it close, Patsy said, till I get a grip.

  She wouldn’t mention the detective.

  It does kind of set you up for a major life review, said Brice. What kind of difference will it make? Any idea?

  Oh god, who knows? said Patsy. I feel like a creaky old computer processing an enormous problem. With luck, most of it’ll be done unconsciously.

  Brice went to the counter to order. Patsy gave Joey’s thin forearm a fond squeeze. I’m still a little dazed, she said. I can’t wrap my mind around the whole thing. But I’ll never forget what you did, Joey.

  I didn’t do anything, said Joey.

  You came to me as soon as you could, and you were so excited. So happy for me. That’s what I’ll never forget.

  They watched Brice at the coffee counter, lounging and supervising, making the young male barista smile, blush, and laugh.

  Can’t help himself, said Joey.

  Never could, Patsy said.

  Brice could still charm strangers, but he had worn out family and friends. He’d blown or discarded the jobs they’d found for him, he’d stored his things in their garages and attics for decades. In fact, Cal and Patsy had moved some of Brice’s boxes and furniture from the Tudor to the Ponderosa. He’d also borrowed money, of course, a lot of it, large sums and small, repaid very little, and had become famous for his sulks and furies at the slightest hint of censure. Neither Cal nor Audrey would lend him another cent; Patsy slipped him a hundred or two when his life got grim, which it did cyclically. But then, she’d signed on for life.

  Now, tell me, Patsy said, giving Joey’s thin arm another friendly shake. What’s with your little house?

  The tenants threw some wild party after the eviction, plugged the sinks and tub and let the taps run. Tons of water damage.

  What are you going to do?

  At first I was just going to sell, but now I’m thinking I’ll get a loan, fix it up, and move back. I miss Altadena. And he—Joey stuck a thumb at Brice, now approaching with coffees—has ideas.

  I’m sure he does, Patsy said, and hoped Joey could afford them. Brice had insisted she spend forty thousand dollars on antique oak flooring for her kitchen; when she refused, he didn’t speak to her for months.

  Patsy said, You might have to reel him in at times. Or you’ll end up with a fantastic top-of-the-line refrigerator and no walls.

  I won’t have much money, anyway. It’ll be a total scrounge project.

  Brice came up then, handing lattes around.

  Last Christmas he’d been arrested for vagrancy. He’d been sleeping in his Volvo station wagon and using the facilities at Lacey Park in San Marino for so long, neighbors claimed that he was living there. He charmed his court-assigned social worker into recommending him for a little-known county grant intended for depressed writers—never mind that Brice’s first foray into prose was the application essay. He received food stamps, a small housing allowance, and two hundred dollars cash a month. The social worker suggested a room in the Estelle, the single-room occupancy hotel across from the Lyster. But Brice found a tiny rustic cabin in Millard Canyon, on federal land, the very place that Einstein allegedly rented for thinking time.

  And how’s our gal Cal? Brice asked, settling into the purple wing chair.

  He’s good, fine, no worries now that he takes that little aspirin, said Patsy. I wish he’d get his hips replaced. He’s becoming such a cantankerous stay-at-home bear. Why didn’t anybody warn me how much older he’d get than me?

  You’re just kidding, right? cried Joey, who, like many chronically single people, idolized certain marriages. I saw him yesterday, and he was adorable.

  He was just thrilled to see your pretty face, said Patsy.

  And what did he say about your news? Joey asked.

  Not much, Patsy said. You know Cal. He’s a lawyer. He asked questions—Who is this Lucia? Why has this come out now?

  I should talk to him, said Joey. I could answer all his questions.

  Patsy reached over and caressed Joey’s streaked bob. You’re very sweet, she said. I’m glad you’ll be back on our side of town.

  A tinny tune junked up the air. Brice dug out a slim silver lozenge of a phone, leaned away to talk, then stood. Back in three, he whispered.

  Joey said, I can’t believe Cal wasn’t happy for you.

  I caught him off guard, said Patsy. And we’ve got a lot going on at the house. March is there, as you know.

  That’s why I made Brice call today. I didn’t want to chance her answering.

  I didn’t realize things were that bad between you.

  They’re not. It’s the baby worship. Ava’s spit bubble is just so much more important than anything I could ever say.

  •

  The tiniest flowers were scattered on Patsy’s desk: yellow clover blossoms, purple rosemary blooms, crumbs of lavender spikes, miniature bouquets of lantana, all of them bruised, as if released from warm, clenched fists.

  Also waiting for her was a voice mail from Ricky Barrett. Patsy MacLemoore! Of course I remember you, he said.

  He didn’t say she was the one Hallen prof he’d taken a class from and arrested. He left his cell phone number and said, Call me whenever you get in.

  She closed her office door, dialed, and told him everything.

  All right, he said. Let’s see here. You know the date of the event?

  May fifth, 1981. A Tuesday.

  Good. A pause for scribbling. Now, he said, what about this widow? Are you going to talk to her or do you want me to? I might make more headway.

  You, then. Please.

  You talked to Parnham about this yet?

  Not till I’m sure it’s legit. I’d hate to stir things up for nothing. Besides, it’s not going to make much difference to him.

  It’ll make some. I have to say, the facts sound pretty compelling. Do you have any reason to think these women aren’t telling the truth?

  No. But I’m a historian. I always feel better with multiple sources.

  How well I know, said Ricky Barrett. If I remember nothing else about your class, I got the source thing. That, and you pretty much killed the Christian deal for me. Jesus was born and he died after eating dinner. And that’s all, folks.

  Oh dear, said Patsy. I had no idea anyone was actually listening to me.

  I can only speak for myself, Ricky said.

  •

  She dodged dinner, claiming work. Didn’t your dad tell you I’m up to my ears right now? she said to March. She graded all evening and was in bed—still grading, only a dozen papers left—when Cal came home from his meeting. He went into his bathroom, brushed his teeth, and emerged in yellow pajamas.

  I can feel you thrilling with energy, he said, sliding in beside her.

  I’m not the least bit sleepy.

  I hope this all pans out for you.

  Mmmm. She made a show of reading, lifting a paper closer to her face.

  But you know, Cal said. Even if you weren’t driving that day, what happened got you to where you needed to be.

  Meaning what?

  However unjust it may have been, prison got you sober, which probably saved your life.

  Prison didn’t get me sober.

  You know what I
mean.

  I don’t, actually. You honestly think it’s okay that I went to prison for two years for something I didn’t do, because I got sober there?

  Hopefully, my meaning is a little more nuanced.

  I hope so. Because I’m hardly in the mood for AA platitudes. If you’d ever been to prison, Cal, you’d never dismiss it so glibly.

  I’m not dismissing anything. He took her hand and lightly banged his thigh with it. Two things, he said. First, if you’d kept drinking, you might have wound up incapacitated, dead, or in even deeper trouble, with a longer prison sentence. Second . . .

  She had little patience with Cal’s old lawyering tic of numbering his points. She tried to remove her hand. He held on.

  . . . regardless of what happened back then, the life you’ve lived is the life you have. And I happen to think it’s been a damn fine life and I’m a lucky man to have been a partner to it.

  For someone who doesn’t believe Joey Hawthorne, she said, you’ve sure been thinking a lot about it.

  Some. More banging of her hand against his thigh. And it’s not that I don’t believe Joey. I’d just like some rock-solid corroboration.

  I know, Cal, she said, now firmly withdrawing her hand from his. Me too. So let’s not discuss it till there’s something more to say.

  I don’t want you toyed with, sweetie, he said. Or disappointed.

  He patted her leg, then closed his eyes. Within seconds—seconds!—he was snoring softly.

  Patsy took her papers and climbed out of bed. Back in her office, she worked on the sofa until she fell asleep.

  27

  In the morning she was the first one up, a coup, and made coffee undisturbed. She took her cup into the chilly garden, huddled in the first sunlight. She needed to talk to someone who could help her think more clearly. An impartial ear. A paid ear would do, if only if she had one.

  After Silver, Patsy had managed without any therapy for two years, until her internist referred her to the woman she came to think of as her bland therapist. No matter what subject arose, the bland therapist asked the same question—Does that remind you of anything that happened when you were growing up?—as if all post-homicidal guilt, academic jockeying, marital rough spots, and perimenopausal mood swings could be traced to four people under the age of thirty living together in Stockdale, California, forty-odd years ago.

  Patsy curled over her coffee cup.

  The bland therapist would want to know: Does this exoneration remind you of anything that happened in your family of origin?

  How ’bout nothing? How ’bout not one damn thing?

  Except for how she’d felt to blame for the family’s disorder, the mother’s misery, the rampaging father. If you darn kids would only give me a little peace, her mother would say. If you darn kids could think of someone other than yourselves for a change. Before you darn kids came along, he wasn’t like this.

  Of course, Silver had also had a pet question, one she used infrequently but with exquisite precision. With almost jaunty curiosity she’d say, So tell me, Patsy, why do you think you did that?

  Why do you think you took on guilt so readily?

  Because the circumstances seemed so obvious—she’d been in her driveway, drunk, in situ with the dead and wounded.

  Because guilt was like the check on a table. Somebody had to pick it up.

  A quick turn of her head—was that a raindrop?—and Patsy glimpsed her own anger, a boiling turquoise sea.

  Enough, she thought, and went back inside.

  •

  Oh, but Patsy dear, that’s amazing news. And no, Cal didn’t tell me. But then your guilt or innocence wouldn’t make much difference to him. Your past never bothered him one way or the other.

  For eight years Audrey had been living with a girlhood friend in a grand old apartment overlooking the Pont Neuf. She worked with the nuns in a children’s hospital and went to art exhibitions with a near-religious discipline.

  My past didn’t bother Cal, said Patsy, because he likes people who are down-and-out. He got me fresh from prison, and you’re the one who said he bailed Peggy out of jail the first time he met her.

  Cal does like to rescue people, Audrey said. And as I recall, you needed some rescuing back then. If I spoke sharply, you’d jump! Poor thing. Still—Audrey’s tone grew firm—you mustn’t let Cal get you down just when this big weight has lifted. You must feel so relieved!

  I’ll feel better after the detective looks into it. Things might not be as cut-and-dried as we think.

  They never are. But this could mean a significant shift in your life, Patsy.

  I know. Though it’ll probably take a while before it all sinks in.

  Of course, said Audrey. Years, I would think.

  •

  March had invited her brothers for brunch, so Patsy took her box of finals and term papers and went to her office at Hallen. She had a key to the building. Nobody was around the department, and the heat was off.

  She made herself a cup of hot tea in the lounge and put her feet up on the desk. To her left, out the window, a lone tall woman was jogging around the brick-red clay track followed by a short-legged black dog.

  Patsy had come close to leaving Hallen last year. Her friend Margaret, with much search committee wrangling, got her a good offer at Pitzer. Wes, now Hallen’s dean of humanities, countered with an endowed chair, much more money, and a very light teaching load: three courses a year. Pitzer matched the offer but could do nothing about the commute. Wes didn’t have to make the case for loyalty—Cal reminded her how few private colleges, so vulnerable to board and alumni opinion, would have rehired a known felon.

  Her friendship with Margaret had yet to regain its former footing.

  This fall, there was Cambridge, and researching her new book comparing Modernism in England and America and tracing how, after World War I, the death of God seeped through literature.

  Or maybe she’d write a different kind of book, a memoir perhaps, along the lines of Lewis’s second effort.

  Patsy scanned her shelves for his book’s red spine. Hello, Stranger was exactly as Lewis had described it, part recovery memoir, part biography of his beloved sponsor. The reviews were plentiful and glorious; she’d thought for months of sending him a congratulatory fan note, imagining that it would spark an epistolary friendship. In the end, she’d felt constrained by her promise to contact him only if she’d changed her mind.

  Not that he’d been sitting around waiting for her. The jacket flap of the book said Lewis Fletcher divides his time between Rito, California, and Paris, France. In an interview she’d found on the Internet, he’d said, It sounds so romantic, I know, but it’s a tiny garret studio walk-up.

  No mention of living in Paris with a wife, or a wife and child, a wife and cats.

  For his sake, Patsy hoped that book sales had upgraded the garret and even changed his luck with women. If they had, she didn’t want to know. She preferred to remember his jostling nudge and long-legged pace, the abruptness of his laugh. How urgently they’d talked.

  She twisted her hair into a bun on top of her head, but it uncoiled and fell down her back. Two years later, and she still had regrets. They might have at least kissed, and she would have that much more to remember, to sustain her.

  She turned back to the thin stack of unmarked papers on her lap and allowed herself a long, deep sigh.

  She may not have had a decent night’s sleep since Joey’s news, but she had never before graded so many papers so quickly. In an hour, she’d finished the last of them. She entered the grades in her computer, set the papers and finals in a box where her students would find them, and left.

  Her spring break could now officially begin. She had planned to read the novels and source material for her Modernism seminar and Cambridge lectures. D. H. Lawrence. Woolf. Faulkner and Fitzgerald. But she could hardly swing right into all that after such a manic bout of grading. And extraordinary news.

  •

  At the P
onderosa, the driveway was clear, the boys had gone. Ava ran up to her as she walked in. Mamie bucked me off. She reared and bucked and reared, and I fell on my vagina.

  Ow! said Patsy. She’s an evil creature, Mamie. Did you have to go to the hospital?

  No, said Ava. Maybe later.

  Where’s your granddad?

  In his office. He’s sleeping and sitting up at the same time. Ava grabbed onto Patsy’s waist and, facing her, stepped onto Patsy’s feet. Take big steps, she ordered.

  Patsy, thus encumbered, walked down the hall toward Cal’s office. Beckett slithered up alongside them, but Ava nudged him away with her foot—not a kick, so Patsy didn’t scold. She tapped on Cal’s door.

  Hi, sweetie, he said, blinking awake. Who do you have there?

  A wild bucking bronco rider.

  Cal reached for Ava, who screamed, leaped off Patsy’s feet, then ran away.

  Patsy came inside and pulled the door closed. I was wondering, Cal, she said, if we could go away for a couple of nights so I can have something of a spring break.

  Go away?

  Just Palm Springs or Santa Barbara, your choice.

  What about—Cal waved his hand toward the kitchen. We can’t take off while they’re here.

  Why not? They’re going to Disneyland and SeaWorld. They’ll hardly notice.

  Maybe you should ask one of your friends, said Cal. I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving the kids.

  They’d understand—didn’t you tell them my news?

  Cal looked at her blankly, cocked his head. News?

  About the accident, Cal.

  Oh, no, no, no. I thought I’d let you tell them yourself.

  •

  Cal wouldn’t change his mind, and nobody she called could accommodate such a last-minute plan. Between sorting out her house and a job interview, Joey couldn’t get away, and Brice was helping her. Sarah had gone to Napa with Henry and the girls. Margaret never returned her call. Patsy didn’t feel like going by herself, so she read outside in the morning sun on her deck and took Diotima for long rides. The mountain lilac was in bloom, and she brought back stems of the cool violet flowers to Ava. On the trail, her mind drifted to the past, to the corridors of her childhood home, and to pretty, shabby Pomelo Street, where her yard had been full of crabgrass and plants that bloomed yearly through no help from her: purple sprays of agapanthus, notched-leaf acanthus, and the bush with clumps of red berries the birds loved. Pyracantha. She remembered the shed in the backyard, full of old Yuban cans with rusted screws, the cans nailed in a careful grid to the back of a workbench, the handiwork of the former owner, an old man whose wife had died. He’d shown her the property and wasn’t anywhere as old as Cal was now—late sixties, at most—but he’d seemed ancient to her twenty-five years ago.