by Gian Sardar
“So you think this is him, too? We’ll go in there, bring her up.”
Aidan glances back down at the words written on the restaurant bill. No tip for a bitch. A pit opens within him. The a. Right there, a stinger-like formation. “No, I don’t think it’s him.”
The forgery case. Within seconds he’s got the samples in his hand. The a’s are almost identical to Rick’s handwriting in the samples. A couple more letter comparisons—the t’s are the same, the bar of the t starting normally on the left, but becoming heavy on the right side, ending in an angry point. The b’s, the huge loop in the o. He’s got his phone in his hand. Answer. But the call goes straight to Abby’s voicemail.
Quickly he makes another call. As it rings, he shoves the rape report at Harris. “I think this was his first. And I think I know who this was.”
Victim returning home to find furniture rearranged, the harassment report said, exactly as it was, but reversed. At last Rebecca Sullivan answers.
“Your brother ever live in Marshall? I didn’t see it in his records.”
“This is a middle of the night question?”
“Rebecca.”
“Okay. Yes. With my cousin. Never paid taxes, never—”
“When?” A bolt of adrenaline.
“I guess it would’ve been six years ago? Lived above his garage, was there for a few years. Can we use the tax thing?”
Right there at the top of the harassment report is the date. Five and a half years ago. And the serial rape cases, all within the time he was there. “He smokes. What does he smoke?”
“Reds. Faster to hell if you ask me.”
Reds. With a perfect view to Lila McCale’s room. With a perfect view to Abby’s room. One last thing—say no. “He ever know someone here named Abby Walters?”
Silence, then finally. “No.”
And in this moment Aidan finds his breath.
But then she continues. “Mrs. Walters, though, he knew her—the teacher? His ‘other mommy,’ that’s what we called her. They related?”
Facts hurl, crashing. He barely hears the rest of Rebecca’s words—he practically lived at their house till Mrs. Walters pissed him off somehow, everyone pisses him off somehow, I told you—as he’s moving out the door, Harris now alongside him. “Get units at Rick Sullivan’s house on Tenth,” Aidan says. “And at Dorothy Walters’s—543 Acacia Street.”
“Who the hell is Rick Sullivan?” Harris asks.
“He’s the one. And he’s been doing it when the moms are home—to punish them. Only feet away and they don’t even know, they can’t protect their daughters. We thought it was a twisted coincidence—it was the goal.”
A swift tumble of dark clouds, rolling at an impossible pace. Leaves of the oak tree twitch just as the chandelier begins to sway—but there’s no sound, and the silence is what’s worse. With silence comes vulnerability. No warning can be sounded. Turn around and someone is already there.
In the quiet she raises her face to the clouds, that great black surge, and the drops begin to fall. Sound returns. At last, the sky has opened up.
Her cheeks are wet and for a moment she rises to a light consciousness, her mind registering the pillowcase as damp. But she’s caught in the Ambien’s grip, tousled in the dream’s wake, so tired that she sees only her chair at the table, pulled out, her place waiting, and just as she takes a seat something stings her arm. A bee, her mind tells her, and though for a moment she jerks toward wakefulness, there is suddenly something so calming, a sleep within a sleep, that she slides the other way.
—
The fleet of black-and-whites fan out, each on a different route to Abby’s house.
Aidan punches through a red light. The reports were on his desk. Hours ago, had he just looked. And never did he fully look into Rick’s background, the case he’d put on hold, so eager to prove himself. All the missteps, each one lengthens blocks and slows time. Signs blur. A startled man on the corner retracts his foot from the street, his face open with surprise. Still Abby’s house is distant, held at bay.
At last he hits her neighborhood.
—
A man is here. Finally the other guest has arrived. Only instead of sitting, he stands, seen through the blurred haze of rain, his head, hands, and feet covered. He looks for something, and as he turns, the dream world seems to meld with Abby’s own, the table replaced by her bed, her desk close by. He stops—the stones are there, the note. Dear Rick. Then the rain becomes a veil, and the veil disintegrates to static. If only she could see clearly—a thought already distant, a filament snapped free. Wind passes through the meadow, she feels it even as he traces her eyebrow with one gloved finger, and in this moment she understands he could actually be real, that this is some intersection of the dream and reality. But what is what? She can’t shake the worlds apart.
Then suddenly there’s a shift and she’s watching herself from the corner of the room, as if perched in the rafters of a theater. Below are threads of light that bend and weave with movement. A crimson ray as the man reaches for the woman, holding her head with one hand as the other holds the knife, blade angled toward her mouth.
—
Aidan pulls up as patrol cars tear onto the street. Haphazard parking, doors open. The windows of Abby’s house are dark. And for a moment he thinks all is well—they’re sleeping. This is a normal night.
But then he sees it: Rick’s Buick. Two doors down.
They’re out, guns drawn, splitting off and surrounding the house, then ready to break through the front door. On three.
—
Abby sees the man with the knife, but understanding is a slow saturation. The dream gets its grip once more and the oak tree’s limbs shoot up and down the walls, growing, stretching, and thickening as great secrets are whispered in voices she knows—and she’s so relaxed that the burst of the door is simply a part of a giant heartbeat, and the chaos in the room a mass of kinetic color.
And then the room fills with a green light as if filtered through a thousand leaves, and she realizes she was wrong before. Because this is who she’s been waiting for. At last he’s here.
—
The first thing Aidan sees is the knife, brought to her neck the second Rick sees them. Her eyes are half-open but flickering and Aidan wonders if she’s coming to, if she will wake only to glimpse the end. A wretched last image. Fear on everyone’s face, and Aidan, who didn’t make it in time.
Too late Aidan realizes Abby’s mom is in the hall. Someone, Harris it must be, is yelling Get her out of here! Cops holding her back, one strap of her nightgown off her shoulder, stretching, about to snap.
—
But Abby can’t wake. Someone’s left a television on and loud voices are yelling, banging. This can’t be real. It’s a dream, a dream that’s flipped on its side, gills sizzling in the bright sun, mouth open, gasping. She wants out. Her worst nightmare, she never realized, is the one from which she cannot wake.
But then she lets go, drifting back into the dream she knows, an odd comfort. Dry grass waves and branches twist into the black sky.
—
Still Abby’s mother is there, struggling and screaming, and that’s when Aidan catches it: Rick watching Abby’s mother, his face filling with something so far beyond hatred, so far beyond that it’s joy. And he’s so lost in this that he never sees Aidan raise his arm. Never sees the eye of the gun.
—
At the table he sits before her and reaches for her hand.
—
There’s the sound of the shot, and the knife hits the bed.
44
Then
THE DAYS ARE SCOTCH MUDDLED. The house has Eva in its heartbeat. It’s been only two weeks, but he knows he can’t go on like this. He won’t go on, not for long. The anger’s begun to drip into singeing sadness. William created this. Claire
, so desperate for his attention, so punctured by his betrayal, had been reduced to this deception. A baby she’d invented, a lie that undid everything. Ketty, decades of loyalty to his family brought to action by his behavior. Even Edith would be forever affected by his choices. The entire situation brought on by him. Everything. His father had been right, he was selfish. A spoiled boy who thought he could have it all. But when he thinks of never having pursued Eva, of her never being in his life, the emptiness he feels spreads to his entirety. She, he realizes, was the one true choice he made. The problem was years and years ago, when he first took his step on a trail of gilded tinder, never understanding what one truth could do. The destruction is his own.
It’s late. The lamps are off, forgotten. He sits at his desk and swills his drink. Claire knocks on the door to the study, then pushes it open when he doesn’t respond. He sees her absorb the darkness.
“I have to leave,” she says, sitting across from him. “I can’t sleep. I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again if I stay here.”
William says nothing. He wants her gone. Her eyes are skittish, reminding him constantly of why. She says she’s going. And he will let her. He points to the scotch in an offering. When she shakes her head he asks, “You’d leave, for good? What about your family?”
“I’m a guest to my father. A strange girl who visits now and then. My mother’s happy to at last have him to herself. And my sister would miss me, I’m sure, but her inheritance would increase.” She pauses. “It would be better if I disappeared. If it was a tragedy and not a divorce. Even if people learn about my father—it would be understandable. They’d assume it was my disappearance that undid him.”
“It’s drastic.”
“It’s not. It’s simple. It makes things go away.” After a moment, she continues. “You’d claim to miss me. That’s all I ask. That you claim to have loved me and my family, because people will follow your lead. Even if you remarry, that wouldn’t change.”
“I couldn’t remarry.”
“You could. You’d declare me dead.”
“No. Claire, I couldn’t.”
She says nothing, and in the quick averting of her eyes, he sees she understands. I could never love anyone like I loved her.
45
Now
EVERY MINUTE IS broken apart and spread out. Crammed with doctors, police, well-meaning friends—and Robert, who tries time and again to join her. Not now. Please, she finally had to say to him, and in the silence that followed, she heard the squeaking pivot of his desk chair and pictured him turning away from his computer, from his scripts, from all he has control over, facing an empty room. He relented, and she knows that his acceptance of this is an indication that he’s aware of what’s changed. But near death trumps betrayal. Conversations can wait—she’s earned a bit of silence.
The hotel they check into—she and Aidan in one room, her mom in the other, grateful beyond words, the bearer of constant coffee or snacks for Aidan—is drab, with a door that sticks and needs to be yanked. Sunlight brightens a steady layer of dust, and the only way she can sleep is in his arms. The irony, she realizes, is that the nightmares have stopped. A promise made good? An immense relief, but one like the dull edge of a knife—there’s something to be happy about, but it still hurts. Claire’s name, however, remains a mystery.
Over and again she’s told she’s lucky. Lucky. A silver-tipped word, slippery. So very lucky, Aunt Emilia said, hot dish on the hotel-room credenza, her voice a whisper, as if someone keen to challenges could be listening. Spared is her other favorite. Yes, she was spared. But still her ears ring from the blast. Still she feels the wet that sprayed her face. Spared. People should keep their words to themselves. But a heartbeat later she hates herself for her anger.
Life and its patterns and paths and giant loops leave her dizzy. The world and all its faces. Every movement and every action and every reaction. It’s too much. Time will help, Aidan tells her, but all she can think of is where she is now, her trip extended, the unknown return like a lull between words, the empty half page that precedes a new chapter. And she needs it, this space of nothing. Trying to decide anything right now is impossible. The only thing she wants to do is sit by the window and watch the water in the swimming pool, the way it catches the light, so different as the day goes on.
Days pass and the hotel parking lot fills and empties with different cars, red brake lights a mere pause before turning onto the highway, people finally going home or venturing out further. Abby watches them come and go from the window. She’s feeling better, she tells Aidan, and he sees it in her hesitant merge with life. One day he pulled up to find her in a lounge chair by the pool, fully dressed but feeling the sun, and the next day she’d walked to the store down the street by herself, the empty grocery bag in the trash like a token of improvement.
But she won’t go to her house, her soon-to-be old house. Dorothy has put it on the market, with plans to live with her longtime boyfriend until it sells. Strange, Abby told Aidan, what softens a person. Aidan hadn’t thought it strange at all. When you almost lose everything, you sometimes find the most.
—
Rick Sullivan. A copy of Sarah Breining’s key made when he painted their house, almost a year ago. Was he holding on to it? Trying to resist? The only answers are now filtered through his sister, their childhood bright in the public’s eye, tissues wadded in Rebecca’s hand, mascara streaming in the heat of television spotlights. Ever since we were kids, Rick had said, she’s telling lies. Sky’s always on its way down. The truth, Aidan knows, sits off to the corner of their words. Crazy is not created in a vacuum, Dorothy said the other night. I think I remember his sister used to mess with him, turned their mother against him. She’d said this as she held pictures of the victims in her hand. Yes, I think I remember that.
Guilt, Aidan knows, can rewrite history.
—
He goes to collect the rest of her things, forgotten items she’d listed for him, a razor in the shower, a note on her desk, a pair of navy blue flip-flops on the back patio, everything written on a piece of hotel stationery. For a while he stares at the list, realizing it’s the first time he’s seen her handwriting, until he feels the noon sun, thick and urging, and goes inside, impressed with the job the cleaners did. The only giveaways are the broken yellow tape at her bedroom door like leftover streamers from a party and the missing bedding.
On her desk is a black stone that holds down the requested note. His name, the first thing he sees. The dream: AIDAN. Beautiful old butter-yellow car, shadows of tree branches on the hood, a tree-lined street. A squirrel ran in front of him. He waved, he smiled, but he looked sad. Really sad.
He remembers the dream. The car he’d loved so much he’d tried to find the name, the make, anything to match reality to what had been in his mind. He remembers telling his friends—could Abby have heard? He’d never brought up the sadness. It was felt so intensely, but he’d not known how to describe it. And yet she’d known. Strangely unsurprising.
Back at the hotel, he finds her on the bed, watching some daytime drama. She sits up when she sees him, eager. “I felt like they were betraying me,” she says, explaining. “My flip-flops, how dare they stay in a place like that.”
She laughs, just a little, and the sound—so wanted, so missed—at once changes everything. A hand wiping clean a surface. She’s here, he can see her now.
Sitting beside her, he shows her the note she had him get, the dream. “You heard me talk about this?”
“No. I mean I did, but I’d had that dream before. That we’d both dreamt it, I thought it might’ve meant something.” She smiles, and looks in the bag. Then stops. In her palm is the black ring box.
“It wasn’t on the list,” he says. “I know. But you can’t leave something like that where people are in and out.”
“This is the ring. This is the box where I found the note.”
>
“Can I?” he asks.
She hands it to him and watches him take it in. “You were there,” she says.
He smiles. “I made it just in time.”
This affirmation has been repeated a few times, as if the concept still settles within her. He leans forward, a kiss. “Does it fit?” he finally asks.
It fits, but the wrong hand. “It’s easy to size.” She leaves it on, studying it under the light of a brass wall sconce. “It looks different now. Softer, in this light. It still makes no sense, this ring. The cabin.” She turns to him. “Let’s visit Eleanor. Something happened to my grandmother. My family. This is my story, I want to know.”
—
The nursing home is a couple of hours away. White, slow clouds drift across the sky, the highway a dark band rolled upon the plains. Now and then they pass through small towns, painted business names faded on brick, half barrels filled with marigolds and geraniums. American flags and bait shops. Each town seems to have someone on a bench, watching the road.
Abby’s got her seat reclined and is gazing out the window, though now and then she lifts her hand to the light to study the ring. You might as well keep it, Dorothy told her earlier. I feel like it’s always been yours.
“You know what?” Abby suddenly asks as they pass a row of storefronts. “There’s not a parking meter to be found.”
“I think that’s a good thing.”
She nods. “I just saw a sign for chocolate zucchini cake.”
“I know that’s a good thing.”
The home where Eleanor Hadley lives, Forest Glen Estates, is surprisingly nice, in a little town not too far outside Minneapolis. Aidan figures that families from the Cities must bring their parents here, pleased with the tranquil setting, the outdoor activities, the fact that it’s away from big, confusing metropolises with mazes of streets and jumbled sidewalks. As they walk through the hall they pass gold names on doors—Michael, Ed, Ray—and he wonders how many of these men fought in wars. Trudged through waters off France, hid breathless and broken in someone’s barn, German tanks rattling the rafters. And now here they are, bent over in wheelchairs or sitting on a floral couch, staring out a window, perhaps seeing the past, perhaps just seeing a parking lot.