THE BATHROOM TO the right of the police station’s front door had pale green walls that reminded me of a hospital. Tiny floor tiles in the same shade square-danced when I stared at them through my open thighs from my squat on the toilet. The room was clean but cold.
I knew I had sat too long when my right leg went numb.
I flushed.
I knew the roar of the ocean could be maddening.
When I was near John D’Orfini, I felt something odd. I can’t even name it. All I’ll admit to is that when I was in his company, even at the police station in Spring Haven, curled up in the chair across from his desk, I thought, So this is what it feels like to have someone’s attention.
John D’Orfini liked to cook.
“Good food nourishes. I learned this from my mother.” He hesitated, and then, as if the words skipped out between his lips, he said, “I learned nothing from my father.” What does someone reply to this? Instead, we both went silent until I felt the line’s weight in the room. I don’t think it bothered him. He let the words hang over our heads like a sagging clothesline. I ducked as I spoke.
“Nothing?”
John D’Orfini nodded. “My dad played guitar in a backup band. Guess he never grew up, even when my mother stopped following him from city to city. Eventually, she became a social studies teacher in the middle school in town. She could read a map and guess the mileage between that city and this one just by looking. My dad would go on tour and we’d expect him home, only to get a postcard in the mail from someplace in Brazil saying, ‘Tour ended. Staying longer to rest up. Miss my boys.’
By the time my brother was seventeen and I was fifteen, it was just the three of us. He simply stopped coming home. When we read about him performing somewhere in the United States, we’d check a map to see how close he was to New Jersey. He died on the road. Heart attack.”
John D’Orfini hesitated, as if he questioned the wisdom in second chances. “My mother taught me how to braise a pot roast and iron a crease into a pair of khakis.” He laughed and shook his head.
I SEE VINNI better when I close my eyes.
“Mommy, you’ll come find me, won’t you?” she said when she was little and wanted to play hide-and-seek in the apartment.
“Go hide. I’ll close my eyes and count to twenty.”
I was still counting.
John D’Orfini’s stomach growled this deep-in-the-pit-of-the-stomach sound. “You’re hungry.”
“I can cook us something,” he said
My inside voice whispered: Pull over that bus veering off Fourteenth Street, God, and send me roses.
“Come home with me,” he said, with one hand—only one— slipped into his pants pocket.
I picked up my purse, he turned out the office lights, and we walked out of the Spring Haven police station. All but one night cop had already left for the day.
Today was the second time I had been to his home. The first time was in the beginning, when I ranted. Spring Haven is a small town. Finding an address is not difficult. I screamed at him from the street, and he brought me inside until I settled down. There it was again.
John D’Orfini’s home was a single man’s home. Neat, with leather. The location was farther inland, away from the ocean’s noise, but the tiny backyard butted up against the bay. A small, round table with a faded navy umbrella in the middle and two patio chairs bore the erosion from salted air. The firm seat cushions were damp. A woman would have brought them inside each night.
There was a sweet smell—a combination of sage and lemon—that was unusual for a man living alone. When I told him this, he said, “Like furniture polish?” and he laughed.
The streetlights fell on small plots of grass near the curb. John D’Orfini had a narrow side yard that caught the light from the street. He had strung tiny white Christmas lights over and under the railing across his back deck and left them up all year. Between the miniature lightbulbs and the streetlamp, the bay in the back of his house shone a glossy topcoat.
He had a new pair of shoes. I had made a comment about his wingtips earlier—at least a year ago.
“New?” I said, and pointed toward his brown-blood Italian loafers. “Nice.”
“Would you like a glass of wine?” he asked.
I held up my eco-friendly water bottle and shook my head. “Maybe later,” I said.
I slipped off my shoes and settled into a corner on his brown leather love seat. He sat close to me. His dark eyes deepened. “A new piece of evidence was discovered in Brooklyn yesterday.”
I unraveled my legs and sat up. Three years had taught me something: say nothing and wait.
“Hilda’s car showed up in Brooklyn in a private residential garage. The owner of the garage died, and the executor of the estate—a guy from Queens—his nephew, opened the garage and knew it wasn’t his uncle’s. The guy didn’t own a car. He was declared legally blind twelve years ago. Diabetes. The nephew told his buddy, a cop from Brooklyn, and they ran a check on the Jersey license plate. The make and model . . .”
John D’Orfini looked away, as if he didn’t want to tell me any more. I helped him out.
“Matched Hilda and Rudy’s, didn’t it?”
He nodded. “The cop called the Division of Motor Vehicles for the Spring Haven phone number listed for Hilda and Rudy, but, of course, it had been disconnected. That’s when I got the call at the station.”
Hilda had slipped under the radar. The three-year-old theory was that she had taken the Garden State Parkway to the Outerbridge Crossing into Brooklyn. Someone had helped her dispose of the car. If the uncle hadn’t died when he did, the car could have gone undetected for years. From Brooklyn, Hilda and Vinni had vanished. Hilda had followed precisely the plan she and Rudy had devised. Although Rudy’s death had shocked her, it had not derailed her. Hilda wanted Vinni. And so she took her and left Rudy on the beach.
Why would a wife leave her husband’s body on the threshold of death?
To take a child, that’s why. Or was it to get one more chance at living the way she had dreamed?
“Geh. Geh. Geh.”
Why had Rudy told Hilda to go?
“We assume the car’s been in the garage for three years. The battery was dead.”
“How far away is the garage from Mueller’s Bakery?” I asked.
“I know where you’re going with this. The FBI went to Mueller’s this morning. I talked to the investigator.”
“And?”
“And nothing. According to their story, Hilda and Rudy were customers. That’s all. We have nothing to tie them in . . . except your—”
I slammed my hand on the leather space between us. “Hunch? I swear to Jesus, don’t you dare tell me this. Not after all this time.” I stood up and walked over to the screen door. The light on the bay dimmed in a mocking response to my stare. Without turning toward John D’Orfini, I spoke in a rush.
“I saw George in Damson at a concert. Call it serendipity. Call it fate. Call it whatever you want. But he asked me to stay away from Hannah. He said he would ‘protect’ her. Those were his exact words. Why would he say this? Why? Because, goddammit, Hannah and George helped Hilda get away. My God, you know this is true, and yet no one seems to be able to do anything about it.”
I thought for a second and then asked, “Does Steve know?”
“Not yet. I wanted to tell you first, since I knew you were coming down for the weekend. I waited because . . .” He did this little number with his shoulders that was between a shrug and a nod.
I could have crumpled, but I didn’t. Hilda’s car had been found in Brooklyn in a private residence, waiting for someone to die to be discovered.
“I took a trip up to the police station to talk to the cop who discovered the car. The young lieutenant suggested that I visit the funeral home where the nephew had arranged for his uncle’s wake to ‘check the guest book.’”
“And?”
“Hannah and George had signed in at the bottom of the secon
d page. The uncle was a customer for over sixteen years. Every Thursday he came in for one loaf of brown bread with pumpkin seeds.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them.
“One more thing . . .”
I waited. My stomach lurched. Was this the end?
“They found a hair on the seat that matches one from your daughter’s hairbrush.”
He did not touch me or try to move closer.
When a victim is in shock, give them space. Wasn’t that printed in a handbook somewhere?
I balled one hand into a fist and wrapped the other around it like a blanket. Turning my fist round and round, I went crazy with unrelated thoughts. I wanted to be alone by the water, but I didn’t know if I could stand.
“Why don’t you sit outside?” said John D’Orfini.
Streaming, always streaming. This was my mind curse.
Who takes a child? Over and over.
Who. Takes. A. Child.
I pushed myself up from the couch and walked outside, where the moon’s light shimmied on the water. Sobs sprang up through my throat, but I pressed them back, not wanting to let go. John D’Orfini followed me. I lowered my head, but he took his hand and lifted my chin until I looked into his eyes. I suspected he knew something about the dark, but he was more adept talking about a rich cherry-sauce reduction.
“Do you like duck?” he whispered.
Without waiting for my answer, he began a slow, tender dissertation on how a good chef prepared duck. He studied my face as he spoke, caressing me with his sound, holding my gaze, rubbing his finger along my cheek, searching to see if he could keep me settled. Each word rose and fell as if he were reciting a sonnet. Tears ran down my cheeks. He didn’t sing the lyrics. He spoke them.
“I’m going to grill two duck breasts . . . Don’t worry about the fat. . . . Most people don’t know how to get rid of the fat in duck . . . but you need the fat to give it taste.”
John D’Orfini went inside and came back out with a plate piled with slices of uncooked eggplant and zucchini and two drenched-in-orange-marinade duck breasts. I looked up at the stars in the black sky, and I roared, “Where are you, Vinni? Where the hell are you?”
John D’Orfini continued basting the vegetables with olive oil and then laid them out on the grill as if he were putting an infant to bed.
TWENTY-FOUR
AFTER EVELYN FAINTED AT THE CONCERT, I WATCHED HER like a doting mother. She seemed less energetic, and although she resumed painting in preparation for her upcoming show in the late fall, I sensed a brooding soul had invaded the studio.
“I’m a little tired these days. That’s all. Remember, I’ll be eighty in another year.” Her internal light had dimmed. I had read a study about aging and its effects on memory. What surprised me was that whereas short-term memory receded in the brain, long-term memory often gained clarity. The article emphasized how hidden turmoil or past traumas often revisited with unforgiving strength.
Evelyn’s work turned dark. Her devotion to the primary colors faded to a newfound use of charcoal. Black dust crept under her fingernails and stayed. At night, I washed her hands as she closed her eyes. At first, she pulled back.
“Go upstairs and get your rest,” she’d say.
“It won’t take me long,” I said in a soft voice, as I filled a basin with warm water and a packet of lavender powder. “Soak your hands, Evelyn.” And that’s how it began. Hands first. Then feet. She took in the nurturing like a baby sucking its own toes. Soon I was giving her baths, sponging her back, squeezing steamy water over her head, massaging her rounded shoulders, creased from years of standing at the easel. As Evelyn’s body weakened, mine inched its way toward strength. At times, as I shampooed her hair in the tub, she closed her eyes and hummed. I wondered whether the wet on her cheeks was tears, rather than water from the sponge.
Once, she cried out about the baby she lost. “How I would love to have gotten to know her. How have I lived all these years without that baby child? Oh God, I don’t know how I’ve done it.”
When I brought up the subject the next day, she acted surprised.
“Why are we talking about this? That was so long ago. What makes you ask me this now?”
“Nothing,” I said.
I LEFT THE bathroom door open for Bach’s Impassionato to float in from the studio. I lit candles of different shapes and scents— jasmine, gardenia, lavender, calendula, sage, and cherry rose— and placed them throughout the bathroom, careful to avoid the white towels piled on an antique table graced with pear-shaped legs in the corner. Evelyn collected soaps and lotions from every part of the world. I read some of the ingredients aloud to her as she soaked: coffee beans with dandelions, grapefruit seeds with honey, and sea salt with lemon. I became adept at choosing a complimentary soap with a soothing lotion to rub into Evelyn’s feet.
She had the most energy right before lunch. She slept for an hour, but when she awakened, she seemed more tired than she had been before she closed her eyes.
“I received a call this morning from the director of the gallery. She wants to come by to see the pieces I’ll be showing,” she said.
Evelyn’s show was scheduled for the end of October. This was mid-September. I had spent the month of August in a rental in Spring Haven. I sweated out the record highs in a house with one air-conditioning unit in the kitchen. A slight but noticeable breeze drew the lonely down to the boardwalk at 1:00 a.m. I was one of them. When I walked from one end to the other—an hour’s worth of steps—I secretly hoped I’d see John D’Orfini walking toward me from the other end of the boardwalk. I wanted him to tell me something. But there was nothing new. Sometimes, in the afternoon, we met for a drink. Nothing alcoholic. Twice we had dinner together, but I drove my own car to the restaurant and met him there. Neither of us wanted gossip.
Once that month, I had to fly out to Iowa for three days to work on a fashion shoot for Hot Style magazine. They continued to feed me projects, keeping me in the family. Three young sensations—fifteen-year-olds discovered for their wholesome looks in farm country outside Iowa City—were turning the runways upside down. Designers wanted the tall, pale girls to model their creations on the farms where they grew up.
I watched as they smoked in between shoots.
Vinni wasn’t that much younger. I wondered how tall she had grown by now.
“SOMEONE FROM THE New York Times is coming to interview me. I want you to be here when she visits,” said Evelyn.
I turned around in surprise. “This is exciting, don’t you think?” I asked.
She smiled, but that was all. Evelyn’s last solo show had been seven years earlier, but now that news of her exhibit was creating a buzz, invitations to speak had started rolling in.
“I’ve been invited to lecture at the Ninety-Second Street Y in a series this fall,” she told me one afternoon when I stopped by with a sample of fabrics she had asked me to pick up for her, all in varying shades of purple.
Often, I traveled with Evelyn uptown and listened and watched as she stepped up to the podium and spoke about her work. Her long, tiered skirts with elegant shawls distracted the audience from her slower steps. On the evenings of the lectures, I arrived at her studio two hours earlier and helped her get ready.
“Pick something for me to wear tonight. You’re the fashion guru.”
A month before her art show, she slipped and fell on the Persian rug in her bedroom on the same day she was scheduled to be the featured speaker at the Y. It was in the late afternoon, but within moments she had a solution. “You go. Speak for me. You can do it. You know what I was going to talk about. The charcoal paintings—the new series for the show.”
I was stunned.
“Evelyn, I can’t.”
“Of course you can, dear!”
Stanley went in the ambulance with Evelyn. I traveled uptown in a cab. Sweat ran down my ribs. What would I say? I had been painting side by side with Evelyn for the past year. I had attended her salons.
I had listened to her impromptu coaxings in my own work to pay attention to the light in order to traverse the dark.
I wouldn’t tell them, “This is a lady I bathe several times a week, who hums in the tub. She has a tight-fisted muscle in a state of perpetual contraction above the left corner of her right shoulder blade. Throughout the day, she drinks a fusion of black and green tea poured into elegant cups purchased in places like Provence, Lucca, Mendocino, and Quogue. We paint together, and it is very, very good, even though dying used to seem like the only way out after my daughter vanished from the beach.”
I wouldn’t say any of this.
I practiced out loud in the cab. The beginning was easy.
“Evelyn Daly is unable to be with us tonight. She is the most underrated artist of our time. Her place in the art world should be firmly established by now, yet it’s not. What is wrong with us that we need to wait until the artist can barely hear our words before we give her recognition?”
I ended up repeating the phrase What is wrong with us? several times during my lecture. I answered my own questions. A fleeting sense of bravery overcame me as I spoke.
WITH A NEWLY replaced hip, Evelyn was deep into a difficult rehab, and I knew she was in pain. I tried to keep her focused on the exhibit. At the end, Evelyn planned on showing eighty paintings. Five of these were the new charcoals I had been working on for months.
I had finished the large piece that needed eyes. Inside one eye, I drew a sword, a kitchen knife, and scissors inserted into a baby’s abdomen laid out on a white plate. In the other eye, I drew a sandy beach with a girl toddler wrapped and entangled within her own hair like seaweed. I painted a child’s half face a choking blue. When I turned around, Evelyn was staring at the painting, nodding and smiling.
A Matter of Chance Page 15