Good Morning, Darkness

by Ruth Francisco

  Half an hour late, Morrison peeked into the room with freshly baked muffins. “Find anything interesting?”

  “How far did you get with this case?” asked Reggie, taking a muffin. It was warm and smelled of cinnamon.

  “The ME estimated the arms were two to six weeks old at the time they were found. We checked with Missing Persons for a Caucasian female in the previous three months. We thought a teenager from Torrance might fit the bill, but the blood types didn’t match. We didn’t take it much further. We’ve been kind of preoccupied.”

  “With the Westlake shoot-out?” Reggie had heard about hostage situation at a bank three weeks before, where several cops and two suspects were shot. The suspects who had survived were now suing the county for racial profiling and excessive force.

  “Yeah.” Morrison’s face assumed an expression that Reggie recognized, that look that said maybe the hassles of the job weren’t worth it.

  Reggie shook his head. “Any idea where the body was initially dumped?”

  “Well, the currents at that time of year flow north. Assuming the arms were out there for three weeks, they could’ve been dumped down in Orange County, by the coast, or drifted in from miles offshore. We got maps of the currents from the Coast Guard, but they didn’t really help much.”

  “Could I have copies of them?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you have any idea why the arms were found so far apart?”

  “Again, two possibilities. Either they were dumped separately, or the parts got caught up in different currents. There were fish bites on both arms, so it’s not inconceivable that fish carried the parts in different directions.”

  “Any attempt to locate the rest of the body?”

  “We asked the Coast Guard to keep an eye out, but that’s the most we could do. We can’t dredge the ocean. We’re not talking about John F. Kennedy Jr., after all.”

  Reggie shrugged. The inevitable and unmentionable truth—that the death of one person could be vastly more important than the death of another. At one time, black bodies were at the bottom of the list. Now it depended on the media. If television reporters took an interest, so did police. The arms had been newsworthy for a day.

  “An unidentified body, no crime scene, no suspects. That pretty much sums it up?” Reggie took a bite of the muffin. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tasted something baked from scratch; it was great.

  “Yup.”

  “How about this ring?”

  “There’s no inscription or initials or date. Looks pretty much like your average engagement ring. Matter of fact, it looks like my wife’s.”

  “Mine too. You didn’t have it appraised or anything?”

  “No. I guess we were kind of waiting for the rest of the body to show up. Without more to go on, it didn’t seem like the ring could help us much.”

  “Could I keep the ring for a day or two? I’d like to take it to a jeweler. See if he might have an idea where it came from.”

  “Sure. Sign it out. I’ll give you copies of anything else you want. This is not really what you’d call a hot case.”

  When Reggie got back to the office, he asked Velma to find out which appraiser the department used. She came back ten minutes later and gave him the address of a guy on Fairfax.

  That pleased him, because he thought he’d have a chance to stop by the Farmers Market and get some Ring of Fire hot sauce from a store called Hot, Hot, Hot. A peace offering for Audrey. She loved spicy sauces. It was starting to hurt his stomach, but he’d never tell her.

  * * *

  Connie wasn’t the kind of girl to fuss about what to wear on a date, but there she was sitting in the middle of her bed in a white camisole and underpants, staring into her open closet, feeling completely defeated. It would help if she was sure what kind of date it was supposed to be. She hadn’t gotten any real sense of what Scott expected. A date between friends, or did he want to start up something again? Should she wear sexy or casual? Makeup or no makeup?

  Even when she made calls on clients, Connie seldom concerned herself about what to wear; she wore what she was selling—workout clothes. In a way, she thought of her muscles as clothes, something she put on to hide her true self. When people saw muscles, they saw discipline, drive, and determination. She knew it was a costume of strength over a pathetic weakness that she called herself.

  Only another athlete could understand how weak she was, could know what it was like to swim the two-hundred meter butterfly in 2:06.58, slower by a hundredth of a second than the winner, her will failing in the final nanoseconds of competition, pulling back in despair, a secret even her coaches never knew, assuming it was fatigue when it was a weakness of another kind entirely. Only another athlete could understand the terrible ennui that had overtaken her in those moments before her hand slapped the side of the pool; it all seemed so pointless. She gave up swimming and took up kayaking, a sport in which, competing with nature, she was propelled across the finish line by a survival instinct. Now that, too, was over, and who was she but a girl with overdeveloped muscles who, as a teenager didn’t have time to date or socialize and never really learned how?

  She scrutinized her shoulders, wondering if she should cover them or show them off. Did guys find muscles sexy? Or did they find them intimidating?

  Finally, she decided on black satin pants and a clingy maroon top. She put on mascara and lipstick, but ended up wiping off her mouth because she couldn’t get the line right.

  She had a fluttering in her stomach that she used to get before a meet; her fingers were trembling. Did she really like Scott that much? He was just a guy, charming, yes, good-looking, yes, but like many others. It made her mad. Here she’d spent almost her entire life, at least since she was eight, training her body to do what she commanded; then, at the prospect of a kind-of date with a sort-of average guy, she completely lost control. She considered calling Scott to cancel. But out of some peculiar logic that came, she supposed, from years of living by workout schedules, she decided since she hadn’t been on a date in several months, she needed the practice.

  Because her house—perched on a ledge between the ocean and Pacific Coast Highway—was insulated from traffic noise, she didn’t hear Scott’s car drive up. When he tapped on the sliding glass doors to the deck, she jumped back in surprise. He was dressed in white slacks, a white V-neck sweater without a shirt, and expensive tan shoes with tassels. She didn’t recognize him at first, grinning at her ear to ear, almost demented-looking. Through the double-paned glass, he mumbled something about the door being locked. When she unlocked the door and slid it open, a large wave crashed on the rocks below, distracting her for a brief moment, like a distant warning shot.

  Scott walked in without kissing her. “Hey, sport. You ready to go?”

  “Almost. Let me put on my shoes.” She hurried into the bedroom and slipped on black patent-leather evening sandals with heels. Did he actually call her sport? Like he was somebody’s uncle in a fifties sitcom? She stood and wobbled across the room hoping for momentum to carry her through.

  Scott paced back and forth, marveling at the view. That pleased her, but at the same time she felt vulnerable, as if she were revealing something intensely private. Yes, the view was great, but it meant so much more to her: the ocean, the waves, the dark storms, the tangerine sunsets, the dolphins and whales. In sharing her view, she revealed her soul, like an artist showing a painting that has taken months to finish. She felt dangerously exposed.

  But Scott didn’t sense any of this. He thought it was merely a spectacular view of the ocean. It seemed to her that a man who could love her would look out at the ocean, then turn and gaze into her eyes, understanding that she and this landscape were one. She reprimanded herself; she expected too much.

  “Do you ever get water on your deck during storms?” Scott asked.

  “Yes,” she said nonchalantly, not for a moment revealing how the storms frightened and exhilarated her. “Where are we going?”
she said to change the subject.

  “It’s a secret. You look great, by the way.” He got that odd grin again. He helped Connie on with her sweater. She grabbed her purse and locked the sliding glass door. Then they went out the side door and up the stairs that climbed the hill to the garage.

  They drove in silence. It was a little cool for the convertible top to be down, and Connie wondered whether Scott wasn’t intentionally postponing conversation, or if it was some kind of macho vanity, showing off for the cars coming in the other direction, a proclamation that he was single, free, cruising the California coast with a babe at his side. She pulled her sweater tightly around her, fists under her armpits, getting mad, but not exactly sure why.

  They cruised down Pacific Coast Highway, the sun setting over the ocean on the right, the Palisades pleated with dark shadows on the left. As the colors bled to gray, a mist rose from the surface of the water. A mile out, the light from a single sailboat running its motor, trying to make the marina before fog set in.

  Scott turned up the California Incline and stopped at a light before pulling onto Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. At the next light, he turned to her and asked, “How would you like to be engaged?”

  “Engaged in what?”

  He laughed. “Engaged to be married.”

  “To you?”

  “Yes. Who else?” He turned right on San Vicente. “I told my mother I would bring my fiancée over for dinner. You’re my fiancée.”

  When she realized he was serious, a wave of anger crashed over her. The date was apparently a ruse. He was using her, asking her—for some reason he had yet to reveal—to impersonate a fiction, to lie to his mother. She, no doubt, was getting him off the hook for something. Yet despite her anger, another part of her was curious, perhaps even flattered. He chose her, after all. “Why me?” she managed to say.

  “Because if I ever were to marry, you’d be the type of girl I’d ask.”

  A bucket of ice water couldn’t have surprised her more, her fury quick-freezing to doubt. Had she misread him? There it was: sincerity, a gentleness in his face, his crooked, abashed smile. He thought that much of her? No, he had to be lying.

  Perhaps if she were a better-looking girl, a more feminine girl, perhaps if she had a job that gave her more of an opportunity to meet men, perhaps if she were not twenty-nine and had yet to have a relationship with even a remote possibility of growing into marriage, perhaps if she didn’t have three siblings, all married with children, perhaps then she would have asked Scott to stop the car and taken a taxi home.

  But she didn’t.

  In a matter of seconds, she swallowed her pride and convinced herself she was game, up for a lark, a good sport, ready to pull a caper. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  * * *

  His mother’s house was a large Mediterranean affair in Bel Air, bubblegum pink with a front lawn the size of a golf course. They rang the doorbell. Scott’s sister Samantha answered it. The look she gave Connie was not particularly kind.

  Scott’s mother sashayed toward them from the living room with a gin and tonic in hand. Connie’s impression was of a woman working hard to hang on to her youth and sex appeal. The impression was anything but appealing. It wasn’t her obvious facelifts or her silicone implants or her thick makeup that made her so appalling, but her aggressive chattiness. Connie saw in her everything she disliked about women, everything she hoped never to be. She scolded herself for being so critical: Mrs. Goodsell had not been born this way; surely she’d been driven to create this Medusa by a life of crushing disappointments, by Madison Avenue marketing campaigns and bogus Hollywood images. Mrs. Goodsell wasn’t shallow; she was the product of a woman’s deepest despair.

  Connie resolved to find a way to like her.

  “I’m so glad to meet one of Scott’s girlfriends.” Mrs. Goodsell sang her words, like a librarian reading to a circle of preschoolers. “He keeps them secret, you know. I’m afraid he’s ashamed of us.” With both hands, Mrs. Goodsell clasped Connie’s extended hand. Her fingers were thin, her skin shiny and unnaturally smooth, like an old woman’s. Her grip was tight.

  “Mother, don’t be rude. Besides, it isn’t true. I’m sorry, Connie.” Scott put his arm around Connie’s shoulders, then said, “Mother, I want you to meet the girl I plan to marry.”

  Connie couldn’t tell if the look Mrs. Goodsell gave her was skeptical or pitying. Whatever it was passed quickly into an effusive warmth that felt as impervious as a pink vinyl raincoat. Connie supposed this must be normal social behavior for a woman of Bel Air.

  Social grace was not one of those things Connie—a farm girl from Wyoming—felt she understood very well. Like Mrs. Goodsell asking her to call her by her first name, Bunny. How could she possibly call her Bunny? But if she called her Mrs. Goodsell, the woman would be sure to take offense. Connie decided to solve the problem by avoiding the need to address her at all.

  “Has he given you the ring yet?” asked Mrs. Goodsell.

  Connie glanced over at Scott not sure how to respond. She suddenly became aware of Samantha standing behind them, listening intently, and it occurred to her there was something more here than this simple question. Scott answered for her. “Of course, Mother. At Geoffrey’s in Malibu. I got down on my knee and everything.”

  “Oooooh . . . Let me see it,” Bunny said enthusiastically, like Connie’s best girlfriend.

  “Sorry, Mom. It’s being repaired. I guess it’d been so long since it was worn, the diamond fell out of its setting. I had to take it to a jeweler. It had to be resized, too. Grandma had big hands, you know. Should be ready in a week or so.”

  “You should’ve told me, Scott. I would have sent you to my jeweler on Rodeo Drive.”

  “Don’t worry, Mother. I found someone good.”

  “Are you sure he’s reputable? I’ve heard of jewelers switching diamonds with fakes.”

  “He’s very reputable, Mother. My boss’s wife recommended him.” Scott knew his mother would respect a woman’s opinion in such circumstances.

  Connie saw Mrs. Goodsell and Samantha exchange looks. It didn’t occur to her until they had finished dinner and were eating desert—a tiramisu from Beverly Hills, ladyfingers soaked in espresso and brandy, slathered with marsala-laced mascarpone and chocolate, all of which melted on her tongue like twilight on a hot sandy beach—that this whole painful charade had something to do with the ring.

  * * *

  Scott knew he’d been unfair, bringing Connie into this vipers’ den, but she handled it well, answering his mother’s annoying questions with ease: “What is it you do, Connie? Where are you from, Connie? What do your parents do? Where did you go to school? Wasn’t it hard to do all that training and have a social life? They cut you from the swim team so you took up kayaking? Wasn’t that hard, dear?”

  Connie handled the questions brilliantly, briefly answering each, then spinning off into a short amusing anecdote. She didn’t even know she was being charming. He couldn’t have asked for a better performance. He was beginning to feel like they really were engaged, and to feel oddly protective of her.

  “Do you need to ask so many questions, Mother? You have a whole lifetime to get to know her.”

  “But she’s so interesting. I can’t imagine how you managed to snag such a gem.”

  Scott was so used to his mother scooping on an insult along with her compliments that he hardly heard it. For some reason, he recalled a fairy tale about two sisters: Whenever the older sister opened her mouth, out popped a toad. It occurred to him that he had been raised in a family of toad-talkers.

  Samantha was being uncharacteristically quiet, eyeing Connie and his mother as if she were plotting something. He decided to ignore her.

  After two glasses of wine, his mother started in on questions about their impending marriage, not, he suspected, because she was curious, but to embarrass him. “So, do you plan to have children? Where are you going to live? What religion are you, Connie? Are you going
to get married in a church?” Bunny smiled, poised with a morsel of food on her fork. Then, after she asked a question, she delicately rested the fork on her tongue while slipping off the food with her teeth.

  Scott wanted to jam that fork down her throat. He’d have loved to see her eyes bug out in surprise as she grabbed her throat, gagging. He grew immensely bored and irritated. His eyes drifted around the dinner table as he imagined how he would kill each of the women. Poison would be the easiest. Get them all at once.

  He felt himself drifting apart from his body, above the conversation: as if watching strangers, not people even, but characters in a movie, cartoons, and as the director, he could move these globs of clay at will. Such a strange sensation he was having, floating above the dinner table. Was it the overhead lights, too bright for dinner? He wasn’t drunk. He’d been careful not to drink much this evening—a beer, that was all. Maybe it was the air, all those women’s smells, pussy, perfumes, and cosmetics polluting the air, transforming oxygen to ether, making him light-headed. Or maybe it was the food, his mother finally deciding to kill him off, to rid herself of any male in her life. He always suspected she hated him underneath all her doting and teasing. Whoever thought that the teasing that went on in families was a display of affection had never been teased. Teasing, he decided, was pure hate.

  Finally, they were able to leave. As Scott said goodnight to his mother, he placed his arms around her shoulders, pulling her in, then kissed her on the left cheek, close to but not on her mouth, recalling for a moment his college graduation, seeing his buddies kiss their mothers on the mouth, how revolting he found it, and how his mother seemed shorter than she once did, and frailer, and it occurred to him that he could snap her like chicken bones if he wanted, and in feeling his power over her and imagining how delicious the crack of her neck would sound, he wondered why more people didn’t murder their mothers.