Then, in darkness, I walked through the unlit house toward the sound of laughter coming from the kitchen.
4
I lay on my back on the unmade bed in my own room, my hand on my belly, rising just above the pelvic bones like a half moon, hard to the touch.
Through the large window with which my father had replaced the south-facing wall, a gray November morning lay flat against the glass. It was almost noon, and I was late for classes.
The night in August when Benjamin left for Prague and Victor met me in the dark on the porch, I moved back into my own room from Steven’s. The next morning I opened the doors and windows, dragged the furniture into the garden and scrubbed the floors and walls and windows, washed the linen, tore the dead plants out of the planter, took the boxes of my old life into the basement, where we stored the past on shelves my father had built along the wall above the washing machine and dryer.
I filled the windows with yellow hibiscus.
At night I’d lie in bed and read about human anatomy in preparation for my classes in the fall.
Julia called to ask if I’d be taking the car to school, and I replied I would. Weeks ago she might have stormed into my bedroom with questions about the sudden changes in my life, but not today, although I knew she was brimming with them.
I was dressed, had already been out for breakfast with Eva and a doctor’s appointment and to pick up another copy of the anatomy text, because I’d lost my copy someplace at school.
I’d been losing everything in the last few weeks—coats and books and money, my wallet, the keys to the house—distracted and sleepy all day, falling into bed right after dinner as if I had to make up for all the sleep I’d lost since Steven had died.
Julia had taken off for the day and was in the kitchen, cooking dinner for Faith’s birthday that night. Bernard was probably with her, his second week at home recovering from what he called “late-onset chickenpox.”
Soon I’d have to get up, brush my hair, gather my books and stop in the kitchen to talk. Julia had insisted I eat, which required conversation.
It would begin with Bernard asking me whatever had happened to the boyfriend who sent me all those songs, which was the major reason I didn’t want to go to the kitchen—that and Julia’s inquisition.
“We broke up,” I’d say to Bernard.
Then he’d ask why we broke up, and I’d say it didn’t work out, and he’d ask how come not. We could go on like that for quite a long time, since my patience had lengthened and I was no longer in a bad temper with Bernard.
“I am who I am who I am who I am,” Bernard would say.
I’d broken up with Benjamin although the word “broken” doesn’t at all describe the way I felt toward him, which was glued to every moment we had been together. The morning after he left for Prague, I wrote him a short letter and then canceled my post-office box in Foggy Bottom. There was no way that he could find me. He didn’t know my name, or the names of my family, where I lived. He didn’t know my real life—except at the heart of it he knew everything.
Victor was another story. He knew exactly where to find me, but so far I had not heard from him, and although I went to the library at George Washington as usual, I worked in a different room. Nevertheless it would be easy to track me down, at home, at school, on the streets of Bethesda or Georgetown or Foggy Bottom.
There was nothing to do about Victor but hold my breath.
I knew by heart the letter I had sent to Benjamin, which I’d addressed to him at his father’s house 310 A Street SE, Washington, D.C., expecting that it had been forwarded to Prague by late August. Two and a half months had gone by. Perhaps by now he had a Czech girlfriend and I had slipped into a shadow from his past. Or maybe he was somewhere in Prague listening to music in an old church and thinking of me as I was thinking of him.
Dear Benjamin,
This letter is linear and moves along according to the importance of what is getting said, with the most important coming first.
You are the only man I have ever loved, and I love you to distraction and beyond reason.
But I am not Sophia Lupe, not a musician, not part of a conservative Catholic family with a brother who died this year of encephalitis. Those things I made up, and my reason for this deception is the same reason I cannot see you again.
Before I ever met you, I agreed to do something terrible against you, which is why you cannot know my real name or with whom I had this plan.
My post-office box has been canceled and so has my cell-phone service. There is no way for you to get in touch with me.
Beyond sadness.
I got up, dizzy at first, and brushed my hair, moving the boxes from my old natural-history museum, which I’d packed away in the closet the day after Steven died, from the top of the bureau to his bed, where I planned to look at them before I moved, in case I wanted to bring the pallid bat or the caterpillar on blue silk to my new apartment on Capitol Hill. The kitten floating in formaldehyde, who used to be my favorite, had lost her appeal.
The apartment on Eleventh Street, southeast of the Capitol, had a bedroom and a tiny room that could be an office or a nursery. It was on the top floor of a small building near Lincoln Park and not terribly far away from the house on A Street where Benjamin’s father lived.
“If you have to move, why don’t you move near the university?” Julia had asked on Saturday when I found the apartment.
I had looked in Foggy Bottom, but it didn’t interest me. It was too close to the place where Steven had died. On Capitol Hill it was possible that I would meet up with Benjamin’s father on a long walk. Perhaps in time we would get to know each other, and he would tell me about Benjamin, the way parents do, just as a matter of conversation. Besides, Capitol Hill felt like home to me because it was where Benjamin had grown up.
I picked up my satchel of books for school and went into the kitchen.
“Julia made minestrone, and I’ll get you some.”
Bernard started to get up. He still had a sprinkling of pox, crusty on his cheeks, his eyes puffy. He looked quite terrible.
“What are you doing for furniture, Claire?” Julia asked, her back to me, melting chocolate for Faith’s birthday cake in the double boiler. “Borrowing from home?”
“I don’t need much furniture,” I said.
“Take your whole room,” she said. “Take Steven’s room.”
“I’m not going to take your furniture, Julia,” I said quietly, understanding that she was hurt at my leaving and that fighting was her defense.
“Think nothing of it,” she said to me. “I don’t have any interest in my furniture.”
“You can get some from the Salvation Army,” Bernard said. “My friend Joey got a blue couch from the Salvation Army, and I’ve sat on it.”
Julia licked the wooden spoon she was using to stir the chocolate. “You’ll need help,” she said. “I suppose you’ve thought of that already. And money. Do you have enough to pay your rent?”
“I get enough as a teaching assistant, and help I’ll figure out in May.”
It occurred to me watching Julia’s back that she was crying. Bernard must have noticed, too. He got up from the end of the table and sat down on the chair next to me.
“Aunt Julia will help, won’t she, Claire?” he said. “When you need help, she’ll come to your new apartment.”
“Yes, she will,” I said, grateful that Bernard understood my mother’s sadness, which I couldn’t accommodate, not then, perhaps not ever. Sadness has the weight of nothing else I know.
Bernard had pulled his chair back and was looking at me, looking specifically at my stomach, a quizzical expression on his face.
“Can I touch it?” he asked.
“You can touch it, but you won’t be able to feel anything yet,” I said.
He reached over and put his blunt, squarish hand on my belly.
“See?” I said.
“It’s very small now, isn’t it? But I feel it. I th
ink I feel it.”
“Don’t be crazy, Bernard,” Julia said, turning away from the stove, her eyes bright as they always were, her face set. “What’s there is no bigger than a goldfish. Inside Claire’s stomach is Claire, and I hope it’s a strong enough stomach to survive the crime center of Washington on Capitol Hill.”
“There’re lots of police around the Capitol,” I said, smiling in spite of myself, glad to hear the rough edges of my mother’s temperament resurfacing.
“Police! What good is that?” she asked.
“I can be Claire’s bodyguard,” Bernard said. “I don’t like my job at the 7-Eleven. That’s a serious offer.”
“I know that, Bern.”
I grabbed my bag and coat, kissed Julia on the cheek, and headed out the back door to Steven’s car, thinking of the little goldfish doing double flips in my belly.
IX.
THE AFTERNOON OF OCTOBER 22
Dawn and my mother and I are on our way to the Eastern Market to be there when it opens at six. Julia’s arm is laced through mine, our bodies touching in an awkward syncopation, our heads together. We’re chattering back and forth. Such a funny pair we must seem to people on the street. A tall, skinny woman and a small, squat one walking in lockstep. No one would suspect we are related, but I have become my mother’s daughter in ways I never imagined possible.
Last night at sunset, we scattered Steven’s ashes offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, near the town of Lewes, Delaware, where my father had bought the lifeguard chair that we keep in our backyard.
It was Julia’s sentimental idea that we go to the Atlantic Ocean, close enough to shore that bits of his ashes could wash up on the beach.
My father rented a van so we would all fit, the six of us plus Asa and Lisha. We hired a fishing boat that took us about half a mile offshore. On a clear, cold night with a perfectly shaped crescent moon, the water smooth as glass on the surface.
My father wanted a Quaker meeting with champagne, and so we sat in silence on the deck of the fishing boat as the sun went down, weeping and drinking champagne from the treble-clef glasses Julia had made in memory of Steven.
No one could find sufficient words to speak.
“Steven wasn’t there,” Julia said when we got into the van to go home. “That’s why we couldn’t talk about him.”
“You expected Steven?” Milo asked.
“You never know,” Julia said, reaching out to take my father’s hand.
We are on our way to the market to buy food for a dinner that Julia is making today at my parents’ house in Bethesda. She arrived at my apartment with a menu of lamb and couscous and ratatouille and olives and cheese and wines and plum tart, which she is making because it was Steven’s favorite dessert and this dinner is in honor of his life.
Lisha will be coming, and perhaps Benjamin and his father, and our family, including Faith and Bernard and Milo.
We never had a chance to celebrate Steven’s birthday in August. The food I got for lunch that day remained in the fridge for a roller-coaster month while our lives twisted and turned, settling finally to a silent, fixed point the way a car will do after a crash.
When my family arrived for lunch on Steven’s birthday, I was still sitting in the chair with Asa, who had fallen asleep. Outside, I imagined Victor Duarte, leaning against a lamppost or checking the names on the apartment doorbells, waiting for me to appear.
I told my family the story of what had happened just as you have heard it, from the stormy morning of the day that Steven died to the last time I saw Victor. Julia was saying, “I know, I know,” and after so much talking, I’d lost the voice to contradict her. But I was sure she hadn’t known this story, had been too much on the offensive to listen, and she was stunned. Only my father had had a sense that I was in some kind of trouble.
When I finished talking, Faith, sitting on the arm of my chair, reached down and took my wrist.
“What a long, long wait to tell us, Claire,” she said.
By three o’clock in the morning of the next day, the FBI had gone to Victor’s basement apartment on Thirteenth Street, where by luck he still lived, with the intention of asking him some questions related to Steven’s death.
They didn’t need to wait. Before they had a chance to ask their questions, Victor confessed to assassinating Steven with a Beretta nine-millimeter, hiding in a basement room in Phillips Hall and shooting through a window.
Agent Burns told us what had happened later and promised that, if we wished, it would eventually be possible for us to hear the tape of Victor’s confession.
I wrote to Benjamin in August to tell him the truth. We had not been in touch since the afternoon he left for Prague a year ago, and now he was back in Michigan completing his studies. He didn’t write back for several weeks, and when he did, it was a short note only to say he was flying home from Detroit to meet Asa.
I have seen him several times since then. We’ve had dinner at the tiny table in the Reeds’ kitchen while Charles Reed, a quiet, elegant man, held Asa in his lap, bent over our baby cooing bird songs in his ear.
From time to time that evening, I could feel Charles Reed looking at me, taking me into account, and the sense I had from him was curiosity that I hope might carry over to his son.
Benjamin and I are like a couple in the process of a divorce, uncertain of how to negotiate one day to the next. We speak about Asa, and if we speak about ourselves at all, it is through Asa and with little hope.
“I’d like for Asa to know his father,” I will say, an intentionally loaded remark.
“He will know his father,” Benjamin replies. “We’ll make a plan for that, month to month.”
Just last week, on Saturday, Benjamin flew home for the weekend, and we met at a coffee shop on Independence Avenue. A hot fall afternoon, and we sat outside, the wind behind us, blowing my hair across my face.
“I’d like Asa to spend the weekend the next time I come to Washington,” Benjamin said.
“The weekend is too long while I’m nursing,” I replied. “Maybe just an overnight.”
“How long before he can spend the weekend?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Benjamin,” I said, and again, as I had already said over and over, “I am so sorry for what I did.”
He looked at me quietly, assessing.
“He’s got your nose,” he said. “Not an entirely bad nose.”
We hadn’t talked about what happened or how it happened or why I got so easily involved with Victor Duarte. But that afternoon I felt a weakness in the wall of Benjamin’s defenses, and I told him the story of meeting Victor at Café Rouge the first time, when he had the newspaper article with Benjamin’s photograph.
“I don’t understand how you could believe him with no evidence,” Benjamin said.
“I just did,” I said. “I was desperate to believe.”
Benjamin looked off into the traffic on Independence Avenue, where a blue pickup truck was stopped behind a Metro bus, honking and honking, so it was difficult to hear above the noise.
“It’s not an accident that Victor Duarte chose me, is it?” he asked.
I didn’t reply. I had no answer to what he had implied by asking.
He put his head under the hood of Asa’s stroller, rearranged the blanket, running his finger over his baby cheek.
“I’m going to take Asa home to see his grandfather for a while, and I’ll call you when I’m ready to bring him back.”
“But I have to feed him.”
“I saw bottles in a thermos case in the back of his stroller,” he said. “He’ll be fine.”
I hesitated, ready to argue, but resisted, watching him cross Independence Avenue at Second Street, walk up the block with the stroller and in the distance turn right at A Street, where his house was located, two row houses in from the corner. I wanted to follow him, to knock on the front door and insist, but I couldn’t do anything except walk out Independence Avenue to Eleventh Street, run up the steps to the
seventh floor of my apartment building, since the elevator was slow, and sit by the phone, which I did, weeping tears of shame and betrayal and loss, words so ordinary as to be rare and true.
Hours later he called to ask me to meet him on the stoop next to my building, since he didn’t want to come to my apartment. I was waiting there when he came up the street with Asa sleeping in the stroller and sat down on one of the cold steps, leaned back on his elbows and looked at me.
“What were you thinking, Claire?” he asked. “Tell me, what were you thinking when you agreed to all of this?”
I had thought and thought about it. I had planned these conversations with Benjamin, rehearsed them at night trying to fall asleep, hoping to have the opportunity to talk to him, but he had not been willing until now, and now I had lost faith in any defense I might have had for my own actions.
“I was hopeless,” I began, crunching dry leaves in my hand, and then I shook my head. “I don’t know what I was thinking, Benjamin. I wasn’t thinking. I was dead.”
“But you went on and on, plenty of time to change your mind. We wrote all those letters. We spent hours and hours in your made-up story, pretending this and that, lie after lie, while I fell head over heels in love with you.” His face was flushed.
Reaching into the stroller, I rearranged the blanket around Asa, pulled down the sunroof to keep the light out of his eyes. There was nothing to say, I thought, drawing my knees up under my chin.
“I turned into a stranger to myself.”
We are coming to the fruit stand, where we’ll buy plums and bananas and blueberries and honey—my mother gripping my hand now, demanding my attention to a conversation we have already had many times since August 11th.
A Student of Living Things Page 20