Bradstreet Gate: A Novel

by Robin Kirman

  —

  Several days later, Alice received a postcard from Georgia, forwarded from Jane Street by Bernie and postmarked, two weeks before, from Mumbai.

  On the front was a picture of a male silhouette against a steamy, silver riverbank. On the back, Georgia had penned just a few lines: she was leaving India for Africa and was sorry not to have written sooner; she hoped that Alice was recovering swiftly. If you’re getting this, you must be home already, feeling better. In which case there’s something I’d like to speak with you about. Something you started to tell me at the hospital. This seemed to be the main reason she was writing: Storrow, you said, had come by looking for me.

  All that day and then at night, lying awake, Alice thought back upon her meeting with Georgia in the ward. Their conversation had been charged—affectionate at turns, also fraught—she’d evidently made some sort of admission about Storrow—but the precise details eluded her. Her memory of those weeks in the hospital was clouded; she’d been too medicated to think clearly or to censor herself.

  And wasn’t that the point? Why else had Georgia dropped in after four years? An aggressive thing to do: to take advantage of a person so exposed, to go fumbling among private thoughts without adequate permission. Vengeance masked as concern.

  —

  During the next of their biweekly phone sessions, Alice brought the matter up with Dr. Baum. Had she ever, by chance, talked with him about a visit from an old college friend?

  “Is this the friend you wrote about at Harvard?”

  “You know about that?” She was almost certain she’d never mentioned her Crimson article to Baum, but evidently, he’d done some research, taken what seemed a personal interest in the events of her past. Now, rather than answer her question, he was using this opportunity to address a few related questions of his own.

  “We never spoke about your involvement in that story.”

  “Because I wasn’t involved.” She hoped she’d never given him a reason to think otherwise, not in their sessions and not in her private writings in her notebooks, which, after all, he might have read without her knowledge, too.

  “You must have been close with the girl you wrote about, since you knew intimate facts about her and that man. There were certain facts I wondered how you even could have known.”

  Already she regretted asking Baum for help. She was tired of his hectoring, monotonous voice. Why couldn’t they all leave her alone—first Georgia, and now Baum—prying into details that shouldn’t matter anymore? “Certain facts: you’re playing investigator, is that it? I thought your subject is the soul or whatever you chemists like to call it. Desires, fantasies, those are what matters; facts aren’t supposed to.”

  “Do you believe that? Isn’t one lesson of your illness the importance of holding on to reality?”

  “No,” she told him. “Guilt is what matters. And guilt isn’t out there. It only exists here.” She raised her finger to her skull, as if Baum, or anyone, were with her in her bare Cleveland room to see.

  19

  The Patels were living in East Liberty, a suburban neighborhood of Pittsburgh. 32 North Beatty Street. A pleasant house, split-level, newly painted, shining with that earnest immigrant effort toward middle-class American respectability.

  Alice had come across this information almost by accident; Storrow’s whereabouts were what concerned her after she’d received that postcard from Georgia. She’d done a search online, but rather than find any recent references to Storrow’s activities, she’d instead turned up a small piece on the Patels in a local Pittsburgh paper—“Victim’s Family Fights to Keep Case Open.” A photograph accompanied the story, the family posed before their home. Mr. Patel was trim and balding, a technician at a research lab, a man of science like Alice’s own father had been. Mrs. Patel was pretty, with a round, clever face and a graying braid. The girl, Darlene, was harder to make out: tall and hunched, dark hair shielding her eyes.

  The Patels’ address was listed; it was just a two-hour drive from the Kovac home in Cleveland—so Alice discovered, the next week, after she dropped Peter at the bike shop and borrowed his car to make the trip. She arrived at eleven when no one but Mrs. Patel was home; Alice glimpsed her taking out the trash, dressed in a red parka, moving slowly in the snow.

  On the phone, the woman sounded every bit as sad and gentle as Alice had imagined. Her voice was slightly accented; it made Alice want to close her eyes.

  “I’ll be glad to meet you,” she’d said to Alice. “I’m always pleased to hear from Julie’s friends.”

  —

  Mrs. Patel had prepared lunch: yogurt with mint, spiced potatoes. She was dressed in a cream tunic, neat and simple, like the sunny kitchen that she bid Alice enter. They ate together at a table beside the patio: much too cold to sit outside, but they could see the fresh snow on the lawn through the glass. Mrs. Patel took only a few bites, occupied with listening to Alice’s idea, the excuse she’d given for her visit. With the five-year anniversary of Julie’s death approaching, Alice had come to suggest a means of honoring her memory: a fellowship offered in Julie’s name.

  “We might start reaching out to alumni for donations now; take advantage of the reunion this spring. The idea would be to pay extra for the reunion, and that money would go to cover Harvard tuition for one student who best embodies your daughter’s spirit.”

  “Did you know Julie well?” Mrs. Patel asked her.

  “I knew her, but I wish I’d known her better.”

  It was enough; Mrs. Patel was a warm woman, evidently pleased to meet someone with even a slight connection to her daughter. Over the phone, Alice had given a false name: Shawna Lamb, the most innocent-sounding appellation among all her Cleveland former schoolmates. She’d been sure that Mrs. Patel would remember the name Alice Kovac, the aspiring student journalist who’d written so coldly of her daughter’s death, questioning the virtue of a young woman held to be beyond reproach. Such a person wouldn’t be welcome in the Patel home, unless, perhaps, she meant to offer an apology. Well, if she’d come seeking forgiveness, Alice thought, then lying to Julie’s mother was a strange way to begin.

  “My sense of Julie is that she’d have wanted some good to result from her passing.”

  Mrs. Patel agreed. “I’d like to move forward with this. Especially if Julie’s sister could be involved somehow.” She stood then, to replace the dirty lunch dishes with clean teacups and a plate of sliced spice cake. “Darlene is a senior now; she’ll be attending college next year.”

  Ordinarily, this would be a plain enough remark, but given the fate of the woman’s first daughter, and the stillness that descended over Mrs. Patel then, Alice understood that there was a complex motive for her mentioning this now.

  Mrs. Patel went on. “After what happened to Julie, Harvard administrators made clear that they would waive tuition if Darlene ever decided to attend. There wasn’t much else they had to offer; and they wanted to make it up to us in any way they could.”

  “As if there were any way.”

  “No, of course not.” Mrs. Patel looked at once grateful and abashed to hear her say it. “There can be no reparation. Even to suggest there could be…But, my own feelings aside, as much as the idea of it disturbs me, I need to think about what’s best for Darlene. Harvard is an opportunity for her. She’s not the student Julie was. Money aside, her other options won’t compare. We’ve left it for her to choose what she will do, but it’s December, college applications are nearly due, and she hasn’t started any of them. I had her guidance counselor and the school psychologist try speaking with her, but, as I say, Darlene isn’t like her sister. She can be stubborn, and I don’t always know how to reach her.”

  “It can’t be easy, the whole subject, for any of you.”

  Mrs. Patel looked down at the table, brushed away nonexistent crumbs. Neither had touched dessert. “But maybe, if we could come at things another way, if you could interest Darlene in this scholarship of yours, then she would
have to think about the chance that she’s been given, too. She’ll be home from school soon. I hope you don’t mind, but I mentioned you were coming. As long as you’re here, might you wait and have a word?”

  —

  Less than ten minutes later, a girl came through the entrance, clomping in wearing combat boots that looked like they weighed as much as the rest of her. Her hair was long and loose and not very recently washed; her pants were camouflage print, cut low enough to display a brown belly with a ring through the navel. She wasn’t as pretty as Julie had been; hips and chest flatter, face longer.

  “This is Shawna,” Mrs. Patel informed her daughter. “I told you about her. She was a classmate of Julie’s. She was curious to meet you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Be polite, Darlene. Shawna came all this way. Maybe you could show her your room?”

  Darlene dropped her knapsack on the floor and continued down the hall. Mrs. Patel bent, sighing, to pick up the bag, and Alice trailed the girl to her room. Its walls were painted slate gray, bare, but for two tempera paintings of Ganesh, likely chosen for their kitsch value rather than their cultural significance. The bed was neatly made—her mother’s handiwork, no doubt. Darlene plunked down onto the mattress and kicked off one boot. “So, let’s have it. Shawna, is it? Why are you here, really? What’s your deal?”

  “My deal?”

  “I’ve never heard of you, and then you turn up in my house.”

  Alice took her seat at Darlene’s cluttered desk; school work and college informational booklets lay buried under CDs: Green Day, The Ramones, The Offspring, Jimmy Eat World. “What did your mom say?”

  “You’re planning some scholarship for Julie—maybe I’d like to be involved, which I wouldn’t, which she knows, so that’s all bullshit.” Darlene kicked off the second boot and sat against the wall. There was a hole in her sock at the big toe; she stretched the hole further, picked lint out of the space between her toes.

  Seventeen now, Darlene must have been twelve at the time of Julie’s murder: studying herself for hours in the mirror, memorizing every pimple and unwanted hair and looking to her poised and pretty sister with admiration and probably a dose of spite. People couldn’t shut up about Julie, perfect Julie, proud to excel and to satisfy her parents’ wishes for her. A joy as a daughter and, almost certainly, a misery as an older sister.

  “This is about Harvard,” Darlene said at last. “Has to be. That’s all my mom can think about—that I don’t miss my one chance not to be a fuck-up.”

  “You can go to Harvard and still be a fuck-up, trust me.”

  Darlene eyed her skeptically, her chin buried in her knees. “So what, then, you’re trying to act like a bad ass, get me to like you? That’s what she’s hoping: you’ll be like some kind of example?”

  Alice faced the girl, her angry, unbeautiful stare: “I doubt your mom wants me as your example.” Reaching into her purse, she withdrew a vial of pills: Lithium, 600 milligrams, to be taken with lunch. She popped a pill and tossed the rest of the bottle onto Darlene’s bed.

  Darlene fingered the bottle, then sat, head cocked, not sure what to make of the strange woman who’d appeared, unbidden, inside her home. “You don’t seem the type Julie would have hung with.”

  Alice laughed; it was a fact obvious to anyone but a mother desperate to believe. She took the bottle back from Darlene and returned it to her purse. Darlene watched her, unblinking, refraining from asking, again, the question that had begun their meeting: What was Alice doing here then?

  There was a knock on Darlene’s door and Mrs. Patel stepped in, looking sheepish. “Anything I can get for either of you? Soda? A snack?”

  “Actually, I think we’re finished here,” Alice said. “I should probably start heading back.”

  “So soon? Are you sure?” Mrs. Patel looked nervously between Alice and her daughter. Darlene was quiet; her black-painted nails scratched at some tape stuck beside her on the wall.

  —

  The next morning, Mrs. Patel called to ask if Alice was free that afternoon. “I don’t know what you said to Darlene, but it seems she’d like you to stop by again.”

  Alice was only too happy to accept the invitation, to skip out on group therapy and make the drive to revisit that house, and the family it contained. The Patel home suited her: the absence of pictures or childhood drawings on the walls, of holiday cards or vacation souvenirs along the mantel. There was no silly clutter, just a sober neatness.

  Remembering the anarchy her own home had fallen into after her father’s death, she found Mrs. Patel’s efforts to keep domestic order an admirable feat. It might just be an illusion that chaos could be held at bay, still, it might have been the illusion she’d required at age twelve.

  Thanks to such a mother, Alice thought, Darlene would pull through fine; whatever brief rebellious efforts she was making to distinguish herself from her lionized dead sister, in a few years Darlene, too, would be sensible and self-possessed. She would not make the same mistakes that Alice had. She would steer clear of creeps like Torsten; she wouldn’t hold herself above her more sincere and decent classmates, the sort of people toward whom Alice had only shown contempt. How arrogant she’d been, to consider these others naive when, in fact, they were far ahead of her, further along in building balanced, satisfying lives than she’d ever be.

  It was, Alice knew, a little early for regret: she was only twenty-six, a child by most standards, but not on the scale of her father’s life, ending at forty. With all that she’d endured, she did not feel young. What she felt, above all, after her drive and with the medications heavy in her blood, was tired.

  When Mrs. Patel welcomed her, Alice made a strange request, which, equally strangely, Mrs. Patel granted. She asked if, while she was waiting for Darlene to return from school, she might take a rest and lie down in Darlene’s room.

  Inside that cool, gray room, the college catalogs had been collected, stacked, and set out prominently on the desk: Harvard’s featured at the top. It was clear that Mrs. Patel’s true wish was for Darlene to accept the school’s offer, that her youngest might resume the course Julie had begun, and bring her parents some share of that pride they’d been denied and maybe even, if such a feat could be accomplished, by stepping back onto that campus, cleanse those grounds of horror. Darlene could inherit the many hopes her sister had carried with her to the grave; she could also, her mother must imagine, go on to become a more successful and happier person, and all she had to do was decorate a dorm room, register for classes, and set up home a block or so from where her sister had been murdered without explanation by a killer still at large.

  From the kitchen came the sounds of dishes clinking, running water. Alice crawled onto Darlene’s bed, resting her head on the two plump pillows, fluffed up by mom each morning, smelling of fabric softener and the slightly greasy scent of Darlene’s hair. The Great Gatsby lay splayed open on the nightstand. There was a drawer below; Alice slid it open and reached inside. Pens, batteries, junk: if Darlene kept a diary, she wasn’t careless enough to leave it here. The most intriguing find was a series of shots taken inside a photo booth. Darlene and another schoolmate, a girl.

  Alice studied the pictures: Darlene’s friend had half her head shaved; in one shot, she was biting Darlene’s ear.

  The sound of running water stopped: Mrs. Patel was speaking on the phone. The conversation lasted only a moment, and then Alice heard timid steps outside the door. Unhurriedly, she replaced the photos of Darlene. Though Mrs. Patel might have been tempted to walk in, to check on the stranger she’d left among her daughter’s private things, Alice knew she wouldn’t dare to. It was too essential that the woman maintain her trust in her, this guest she’d placed such faith in, hoping Alice might achieve what the guidance counselor and school shrink could not.

  “Shawna? Are you sleeping? Am I disturbing you?”

  When Alice stepped out, Mrs. Patel was standing in the hall, gripping a dishtowel; she look
ed more nervous than when Alice had left her in the kitchen. “I have a request to make, if it’s all right.”

  “Of course.”

  Mrs. Patel twisted the cloth and cleared her throat. “I hope it won’t annoy you what I’ve done, but I went ahead and discussed your idea with a few of Julie’s closest friends. Some of them have kept in touch, over the years. It seemed appropriate to include them.”

  Appropriate and inevitable, thought Alice, that a moment such as this would come. One of Julie’s friends would grow suspicious: Shawna Lamb you said? I don’t recall a Shawna Lamb.

  “People seem to like the idea,” said Mrs. Patel. “And someone already asked if he could speak with you about it.”

  “Oh?”

  “You remember Lucas Parker?”

  Not the face so well, but the voice, quaking with anger outside Charlie’s window: cunty bitch…. What sort of curses would he shout to find her here, inside the Patel home? “Julie’s boyfriend.”

  “So you do know each other then.” Mrs. Patel looked relieved. “The whole family has been very supportive. Lucas especially; he’d like to join us, he said, for our next meeting.”

  “He’s more than welcome.” Alice offered a thin smile; Mrs. Patel folded the dish towel and checked her watch.

  “I’m so sorry Darlene’s keeping you waiting.”

  “Never mind. I’m the one who should apologize,” said Alice. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to talk with her another day.”

  “No. Why? But you drove all this way.”

  “It’s the drive back that concerns me; the roads are icy, and I’m a bit worried about my focus. I should have said something before, but all morning I’ve felt a migraine coming on.” She didn’t put too much art into the story; this episode with the Patels was over, anyway. Even if she’d begun to imagine she might, in fact, like to assist them, might really like to play the sort of charitable role that she’d assumed, there was no chance of that. This was the last time she’d set foot inside this house.