Wagner thought for a while. “Probably some logical explanation.” He smiled. “What do you think? Part of this, you know, is about you—watching the movements of your neighbor and old friend across the street.”
She stared at him. He was turning it around.
“Are you lonely?” he asked. “Do you want to be Carol’s friend again?”
This caused Rachel to retreat, of course. Feeling chastised. For the moment. It was several weeks before she and Lowell Wagner talked about it again. But when they did, they revisited the matter with great curiosity and wonder.
•
Because one hot July Sunday morning that very summer Wally stabbed Carol nearly to death, right there in their house, right in front of their children. And then outside in the backyard he had a shotgun, and it seemed clear that he would have shot himself but Sheriff McArthur and the local police cornered him and disarmed him.
After a few days in jail, he was carted off to the psych ward at Vandalia, and Carol was many weeks in the local hospital in the painful process of recovering. She had very nearly died. The community carried this picture in its collective memory, the horror, Carol naked and unconscious, bleeding in what Rachel recalled as a cascade on the front porch of the house. Carol had made it that far trying to get away before her blood loss caught up with her. Wally, this wonderful, brilliant man, was corralled like a wild dog in the backyard. The police marched him to a car right past the frantically working EMTs on the porch. The Browns’ children, hysterical—God, what a memory to carry—were being held at a distance by the Fosters, the older couple who lived next door to the Browns to the south—who had called the police, fire department, and ambulances from everywhere to make the horribleness stop, yet there it was, horrible.
It was a small town. A guy jogging by, this former professor at the college named Vasco Whirly, had magically appeared just as Carol fell down in front of her house, and he went right to work on her and at the same time raised the alarm and got people to the phone. Help arrived in less than five minutes. A crowd of the curious and amazed lingered through the afternoon, the blood still on the porch—at first deaver a long gleaming river down the front sidewalk, gradually becoming a brown, wine-colored stain—and the police were going in and out of the house, hovering in the yard, talking, pointing. In shock, Rachel held Hattie and watched the activity from the window of her breakfast nook across the street.
In the following days, relatives and neighbors took charge of the things that needed doing. Rachel learned that the kids would be staying in Chicago with Carol’s sister until Carol healed. The neighbors mowed, and offered up prayers, and got the house cleaned up, and so on. As part of that neighborly effort, Rachel got the job of taking Carol the mail every three or four days. Daily, she pulled the mail from the box and packaged it and, every few days, drove the swollen manila envelope up to the hospital. At the hospital, they had the first good talks they’d had since Carol married Wally. Carol was obsessive about getting the mail and told Rachel it was because she expected to hear from Wally—which seemed odd, but, Rachel thought to herself driving home, love is odd.
The events at the Browns were the talk of the town the rest of the summer. People would go by the dark house on their evening drives. At the store, people would conjecture what had gone on. It was more or less agreed that Wally had been psychologically erratic for many years, that pressure at the college and the financial hopelessness of being a full professor and still completely broke most of the time finally caused him to slip a gear. In all the talk there was the assumption that this was a fault, a flaw, a horrible thing waiting to happen, that had been inside Wally all along, like being a Red or having an underground life of pedophilia and peddling pornography. Murder had been in him. Inexplicably, the town seemed happy to let go of the other, quite fond, image everyone had of him. As they saw it, the truth about him was now out.
About a week after the Browns’ bad scene, Rachel found herself unable to resist calling Lowell Wagner. It was a Saturday, and she called him at home.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey, Rachel.”
“Whoa! You recognized my voice.”
“Yes, I do. I guess I’ve been expecting your call.” He was chuckling under his breath, knowing she knew what he meant.
“Got a second?”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Veronica just left for Champaign and I’m washing floors. Grudgingly but with a certain academic thoroughness.” She could hear him working, some kind of mop maybe, probably holding his phone in the other hand.
“Well, I just wanted to find out what you make of it all.”
“Uh-huh.” He sort of laughed, exasperated. “Well, I can’t figure it out. But I admit I did think of you when it happened.”
“Pretty weird, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah. I can’t say much, you know, but…”
“I know you can’t. I just…”
“…but it sounds very unWally to me, this thing, it really does.” He seemed to mop for a minute. “But what about you? How has it affected you?”
“God, don’t turn it around yet!” She laughed.
Lowell grunted, perhaps lifting the bucket. “You know all my moves, Rachel.” She could hear him working. “I went up to the hospital to see Carol, but we didn’t get a chance to talk. The priest, what’s his name?”
“Kelleher.”
“Yeah, Father Kelleher, yeah, he was there, and I kind of waved over his shoulder, just to let her know I was thinking of her.”
She could hear him breathing as he squeezed out the sponge.
“Tell you what worries me, though,” he said. “The kids. What do you know about them?”
“They’re with relatives last I heard, up in Chicago. Carol’s sister jumped right in. How’s Wally?”
“I’m just hoping they get them some help. This could be permanent, life-altering stuff.”
“Hell yeah!” Rachel barked. She watched Hattie go down the drive on her bike, out of the shade, into the summer sunlight.
“Wally. Wally’s in a psych unit they’ve got over in the prison at Vandalia and will probably be moved soon. They’re likely to move him to Marion. I’m supposed to see him next week.”
“But also, don’t forget this thing happened to me, too—I live across the street. Carol’s blood was on the sidewalk all afternoon. I’ve got PTSD. You’re my shrink, too—right?”
“Uh-huh. So now you’re turning it around on yourself, right?”
“But…”
“But come on, you’re surviving okay, Rachel. It was pretty terrible but you can handle it, right?” She could hear him moving a chair, perhaps sitting down to concentrate on the call. “Am I right?”
“Okay. Right.”
“Yeah. And lucky, right?”
“But, so, I mean, do you ever think about Carol and that goingunder-the-house business I told you?”
“I’ve thought plenty about that.”
“Yes?”
“And I can’t make anything add up on it.”
He’d clammed up. No problem, she thought. He knew a few of her secrets, too, and she was glad he observed the rule of confidentiality. And, of course, there was always the possibility he knew as little about all this as she. He wouldn’t have seen either Wally or Carol since the disaster.
“Okay, then,” she said. “Doesn’t hurt to ask. I don’t want to come off as some leering old gossip.” And that was pretty much that.
•
One night not long after that conversation, Rob Donahue, Rachel’s chiropractor lover from Arcola, came over, and Hattie was at her latest inseparable friend Amber’s for an overnight. Rachel and Rob settled in to an evening of dinner, rock ‘n’ roll, a little dope, and a few hours of athletic love. Rob was a great lover, active and interested and fun but always very careful with Rachel’s spine, and his grass was homegrown and sweet. It was only recently, because of this relationship, that she had begun to see her spine as other. Her ears no
longer heard the same, her eyes no longer saw the same, her ovaries alternately gave her identifiable periods each month, and now here was her back, always in need of adjustment and care, all by itself, completely apart from the rest of her. Rob, high on Rachel who was on her knees and face down, moved her this way and that, applying just the right pressure here, the proper twist there, and when she came, as she usually did three times per time with Rob, she could feel her individual parts rolling and pulling and tightening and releasing in a blessed array of individual and not quite coordinated spasms of quick, hot pleasure. Things used to hit all at once, she seemed to recall.
Anyway, after love, they relaxed into a long, sprawling conversation that finally looped around to the Browns. Down in Arcola, he’d heard about it. Rachel laid out the situation as she knew it, and they pondered aloud well into the night, smoking a little more dope and basking in their privacy. They explored the various corridors of detail and fragmented fact for a reason for Wally’s snapping, for the stabbing, and for Carol’s crawlspace sorties. It made for easy speculation but wasn’t very satisfying since neither of them, in fact, knew a damn thing.
Later they found themselves dressed. Then they were an hour getting good batteries for two flashlights which involved a trip to Huck’s, the twenty-four hour convenience store on the highway, and then later middle of the night, they were making their way across the street to Carol’s empty house.
High as eagles on the wing, giggling and shushing each other, Rob and Rachel found themselves removing the plywood cover on the crawlspace, shining their lights under, crawling in, and replacing the crawlspace cover. They had to stay very flat except right at the opening, where they could sit almost straight up. They were both nervous and deaver felt like burglars, but the togetherness and adventurous mischief of it spurred them on. They shined their beams in all directions—the underarea had rooms, it seemed—and following the flitting flashlight beams with their eyes made it all like a dream. You forget the under-area exists, down under your feet and general life—dark, dirt and gravel, the smell of mildew and cat piss, and something else, the echoes and sift of family life that finds its way down through the rugs and floorboards.
Rachel saw in the dirt the well-traveled trail of the previous crawler. It led toward the front of the house, through a break in one of the under-walls, into the pitch dark. The flashlight beams couldn’t reach back there except in tantalizing glimpses. She began to crawl in that direction. Rob was over it. He urged her to stop. He said they better go. He told her she might find something she didn’t want to find. He kept saying he thought he heard something. He warned her that someone might hear them under there, and how would they explain? Better go, he kept saying.
As Rachel crawled through the dirt, she could sense Carol’s presence—she was seeing what Carol saw when she was down here, the dim far-back shadows, the looming cobwebbed floor beams; she was doing what Carol all alone seemed to frequently want and need to do. Rachel knew she was on the trail. She knew Carol well enough to know there was something really worth this odd journey, and she kept crawling. At the broken wall, she shined a light back into the last under-chamber. Webs and mounds of concrete obscured the view. But at last she spotted, against the brick foundation wall, a dark gray Samsonite suitcase. Now Rachel began to feel, even through the fog of Rob’s good grass and her own curiosity, that she was on the brink of violating someone’s most intimate privacy. She was at heart a good friend and civilized neighbor, and this guilt caused her to pause a full minute before she piled herself hellbent over the broken under-wall and crawled like a madwoman in the direction of the suitcase.
It wasn’t latched. The contents of it were disheveled. They were love letters, to Carol, from a man named Nick, currently living in Ohio. The letters had been coming to her for years, hundreds of letters dating back several years before her marriage to Wally; in fact, Rachel was amazed to note that by her calculations the earliest letters reached back well into Carol’s previous marriage, had been sent to her previous address, in Moline. In the dishevelment, Rachel found a picture of Carol, sitting on a park bench with Nick. He had his arm around her. They were lovers. Staring at the picture, Rachel noted that, in some odd way, the woman didn’t seem to be Carol exactly. It was some other version of Carol, an unknown other side of her, devoted to this secret man. On the back of the picture there was handwriting: “Tampa, FL, June.”
Rob’s flashlight beam flitted all around but Rachel was hidden in the shadows. “Did you find anything?” he called in a loud whisper.
“No,” she said.
•
Over the next few days, Rachel was obsessed by the suitcase under the Browns’ house. On a Saturday night, less than a week after the first foray, she went under again—this time alone. Since one needed a flashlight anyway, it was easy to go under at night. She imagined that Carol went under there far more at night than in the day, that the times she had actually observed Carol were only the tip of the iceberg. It was a long crawl, longer than she remembered. Once she reached the suitcase, she leaned up against the brick wall, set up her flashlight on a pile of broken bricks so she could see without holding it, and began reading randomly among the letters. Her heart pounded and her hands shook.
Nick was a Vietnam veteran. He’d taught at the college only a year, and though Rachel worked there, she’d never seen him before. He lived in Athens, Ohio now. The couple had had several rendezvous over the past six years. Nick apparently always supplied the money for these outings. How the occasions were arranged and explained was deaver unclear. The letters were all very short, and they all said much the same thing, that he loved Carol, her love of adventure, her body, her music, her good soul. He said many times that he envied Wally. He said change was inevitable, and he could wait. He said he hoped if ever she was free again, that she would find him, that he’d be waiting. All of the letters were signed the same: All my love, Nick. What a heartbreaking love, what a beautiful, impossible, sad secret to carry.
Rachel’s sneaking curiosity had landed her in a river of human complication. She found that she admired Carol. She was ashamed she had intruded, but now she couldn’t un-intrude. In the process, she’d learned something, a strange clue to how things are and how people behave. Through the cool concrete brick wall of the foundation, Rachel could hear the night outside—birds, wind, somehow also an airy looming presence, the high clear sky of night. After a while she heard a car pass, slowly, and there was an intermittent slap accompanying it. The Sunday News Gazette was arriving. Sated, and anxious because soon it would be dawn, she piled the letters in something close to the way she had found them and took one more look at the secret picture of Nick and Carol. Then she closed the suitcase tight, reached her dimming flashlight, and crawled back to the plywood exit.
•
For several days, she moped around. Her earlier curiosity was now replaced with guilt at having invaded a strand of Carol’s life. She hadn’t felt guilt like this since she was a child. During all this, Rob the chiropractor was calling, and for some reason she kept putting him off. She didn’t think she wanted to see him again. He reminded her of something. Finally she just had to say to him, “Look, stuff’s happening with me right now—I’m not sure what. You’re great, but I’m going to have to take a break. I’m sorry, I really am.”
After that, Rob quit calling.
And the same approach-avoidance thing was happening with regard to Carol. Because Rachel couldn’t face her, she missed a couple of her regular trips to the hospital with the mail. Although she did, each day, collect the mail and package it. She was watching for a letter from Nick. She knew the handwriting, the various guises and letterheads of subterfuge he used. Nothing came. And nothing came from Wally either, of course.
Late the following week, the pressure became too much, and she took the mail to the hospital. That time and each time after, she sat with Carol and talked, at first in a distant but friendly way and later with increased comfort. Carol wo
uld be sitting up, and she might show Rachel her healing wounds, and they would talk about nothing in particular and perhaps would ask about each other’s kids, and sometimes Father Kelleher would come and Rachel would wander down the hall by the nurse’s station and kill time and let them talk. When her visits were over, she would leave Carol, down the long white linoleum hall, down the concrete-block stairwell, across the hotel-like lobby of the little community hospital, out into the sunlight, thinking about Carol’s eyes, how she seemed so open, and how Rachel knew in many ways she was open but in one way at least she was not. It was interesting for Rachel to study those eyes knowing what she knew. But it was painful, too, realizing that there was a whole life beneath the surface, for Carol, for Rachel, maybe for everybody—an underlife that had to be dealt with or that, ignored, built steam and ultimately altered the terrain at the surface.
•
One day after work, the phone rang and startled her. She figured it was Rob, and just hearing his voice promised to plummet her into a state of confusion, but she answered anyway.
“Rachel, it’s me.” Carol, calling from the hospital.
“Hi. Is everything okay?”
“You alone?”
“Yeah. Everything okay?” Rachel heard something in the voice, foreboding.
“I need to talk with you.”
Something in her voice made Rachel resist. “Now? I’m kind of tied up right this minute.”
“I need you to come see me. Can you?”
There was no way out. Rachel said she could. She was shaking as she hung up the phone. How terrible, to be caught doing a terrible thing.
She drove to the hospital determined to face the music. Up the tunnel-like, yellow-bricked stairwell, down the white shining linoleum hall, into the room.
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