Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  In the nature preserve in the bright warm autumnal sunshine the adults walked together at the edge of a pond. To circle the pond required approximately thirty minutes. There were other visitors to the preserve on this Sunday afternoon, families and couples.

  The girl wandered ahead of the adults, though never far ahead. Her behavior was more that of a younger child than a child of eleven. Her movements were tentative, sometimes she paused as if she were out of breath. Her skin was pale and appeared translucent. Her eyes were deep-socketed, wary. Her pale blond hair shimmered in the sun. It had been cut short, feathery, falling to just below her delicate eggshell ears.

  After her ordeal in April, Marissa had lost much of her beautiful long hair. She’d been hospitalized for several weeks. Slowly she had regained most of the weight she’d lost so abruptly. Still she was anemic, Leah was concerned that there had been lasting damage to Marissa’s kidneys and liver. She suffered from occasional bouts of tachycardia, of varying degrees of severity. At such times, her mother held her tight, tight. At such times the child’s runaway heartbeat and uncontrollable shivering seemed to the mother a demonic third presence, a being maddened by terror.

  Both mother and daughter had difficulty sleeping. But Leah refused prescription drugs for either of them.

  Each was seeing a therapist in Mahopac. And Marissa also saw Leah’s therapist for a joint session with her mother, once a week.

  Leah confided in Zallman, “It’s a matter of time. Of healing. I have faith, Marissa will be all right.”

  Leah never used such terms as normal, recovered.

  Mikal Zallman had been the one to write to Leah Bantry of course. He had felt the desperate need to communicate with her, even if she had not the slightest wish to communicate with him.

  I feel that we have shared a nightmare. We will never understand it. I don’t know what I can offer you other than sympathy, commiseration. During the worst of the nightmare I had almost come to think that I was responsible . . .

  After Marissa was discharged from the hospital, Leah took her away from Skatskill. She could not bear living in that apartment another day, she could not bear all that reminded her of the nightmare. She was surrounded by well-intentioned neighbors, and through the ordeal she had made several friends; she had been offered work in the area. If she’d wished to return to work at the Nyack Clinic, very likely Davitt Stoop would have allowed her to return. He had reconciled with his wife, he was in a forgiving mood. But Leah had no wish to see the man again, ever. She had no wish to drive across the Tappan Zee Bridge again, ever.

  Out of the ordeal had come an unexpected alliance with her sister Avril. While Marissa was in the hospital, Avril had continued to stay in Skatskill; one or the other of the two sisters was always in Marissa’s hospital room. Avril had taken an unpaid leave from her job in Washington, she helped Leah find another job and to relocate in Mahopac, fifty miles north in hilly Putnam County.

  Enough of Westchester County! Leah would never return.

  She was so grateful for Avril’s devotion, she found herself at a loss for words.

  “Leah, come on! It’s what any sister would do.”

  “No. It is not what any sister would do. It’s what my sister would do. God damn I love you, Avril.”

  Leah burst into tears. Avril laughed at her. The sisters laughed together, they’d become ridiculous in their emotions. Volatile and unpredictable as ten-year-olds.

  Leah vowed to Avril, she would never take anyone for granted again. Never anything. Not a single breath! Never again.

  When they’d called her with the news: Marissa is alive.

  That moment. Never would she forget that moment.

  In their family only Avril knew: police had tracked Marissa’s elusive father to Coos Bay, Oregon. There, he had apparently died in 1999 in a boating mishap. The medical examiner had ruled the cause of death “inconclusive.” There had been speculation that he’d been murdered . . .

  Leah hadn’t been prepared for the shock she’d felt, and the loss.

  Now, he would never love her again. He would never love his beautiful daughter again. He would never make things right between them.

  She had never spoken his name aloud to Marissa. She would never speak it aloud. As a younger child Marissa used to ask Where is Daddy? When will Daddy come back? But now, never.

  The death of Marissa’s father in Coos Bay, Oregon, was a mystery, but it was a mystery Leah Bantry would not pursue. She was sick of mystery. She wanted only clarity, truth. She would surround herself with good decent truthful individuals for the remainder of her life.

  Mikal Zallman agreed. No more mysteries!

  You become exhausted, you simply don’t care. You care about surviving. You care about the banalities of life: closure, moving on. Before the nightmare he’d have laughed at such TV talk-show jargon but now, no.

  Of Leah Bantry and Mikal Zallman, an unlikely couple, Zallman was the more verbal, the more edgy. He was from a tribe of talkers, he told Leah. Lawyers, financiers, high-powered salesmen. A rabbi or two. For Zallman, just to wake up in the morning in Yonkers, and not in Skatskill, was a relief. And not in April, during that siege of nightmare. To lift his head from the pillow and not wince with pain as if broken glass were shifting inside his skull. To be able to open a newspaper, switch on TV news, without seeing his own craven likeness. To breathe freely, not-in-police-custody. Not the object of a mad girl’s vengeance.

  Mad girl was the term Zallman and Leah used, jointly. Never would they utter the name Jude Trahern.

  Why had the mad girl abducted Marissa? Why, of all younger children she might have preyed upon, had she chosen Marissa? And why had she killed herself, why in such a gruesome way, self-immolation like a martyr? These questions would never be answered. The cowed girls who’d conspired with her in the abduction had not the slightest clue. Something about an Onigara Indian sacrifice! They could only repeat brainlessly that they hadn’t thought the mad girl was serious. They had only just followed her direction, they had wanted to be her friend.

  To say that the girl had been mad was only a word. But the word would suffice.

  Zallman said in disgust, “To know all isn’t to forgive all. To know all is to be sickened by what you know.” He was thinking of the Holocaust, too: a cataclysm in history that defied all explanation.

  Leah said, wiping at her eyes, “I would not forgive her, under any circumstances. She wasn’t ‘mad,’ she was evil. She took pleasure in hurting others. She almost killed my daughter. I’m glad that she’s dead, she’s removed herself from us. But I don’t want to talk about her, Mikal. Promise me.”

  Zallman was deeply moved. He kissed Leah Bantry then, for the first time. As if to seal an understanding.

  Like Leah, Zallman could not bear to live in the Skatskill area any longer. Couldn’t breathe!

  Without exactly reinstating Zallman, the principal and board of trustees of Skatskill Day had invited him back to teach. Not immediately, but in the fall.

  A substitute was taking his place at the school. It was believed to be most practical for the substitute to finish the spring term.

  Zallman’s presence, so soon after the ugly publicity, would be “distracting to students.” Such young, impressionable students. And their anxious parents.

  Zallman was offered a two-year renewable contract at his old salary. It was not a very tempting contract. His lawyer told him that the school feared a lawsuit, with justification. But Zallman said the hell with it. He’d lost interest in combat.

  And he’d lost interest in computers, overnight.

  Where he’d been fascinated by the technology, now he was bored. He craved something more substantial, of the earth and time. Computers were merely technique, like bodiless brains. He would take a temporary job teaching math in a public school, and he would apply to graduate schools to study history. A Ph.D. program in American studies. At Columbia, Yale, Princeton.

  Zallman didn’t tell Leah what revulsion he
sometimes felt, waking before dawn and unable to return to sleep. Not for computers but for the Zallman who’d so adored them.

  How arrogant he’d been, how self-absorbed! The lone wolf who had so prided himself on aloneness.

  He’d had enough of that now. He yearned for companionship, someone to talk with, make love with. Someone to share certain memories that would otherwise fester in him like poison.

  In late May, after Leah Bantry and her daughter Marissa had moved away from Skatskill—a departure excitedly noted in the local media—Zallman began to write to her. He’d learned that Leah had taken a position at a medical clinic in Mahopoc. He knew the area, to a degree: an hour’s drive away. He wrote single-page, thoughtfully composed letter to her not expecting her to reply, though hoping that she might. I feel so close to you! This ordeal that has so changed our lives. He’d studied her photographs in the papers, the grieving mother’s drawn, exhausted face. He knew that Leah Bantry was a few years older than he, that she was no longer in contact with Marissa’s father. He sent her postcards of works of art: Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Monet’s water lilies, haunted landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and gorgeous autumnal forests of Wolf Kahn. In this way Zallman courted Leah Bantry. He allowed this woman whom he had never met to know that he revered her. He would put no pressure on her to see him, not even to respond to him.

  In time, Leah Bantry did respond.

  They spoke on the phone. They made arrangements to meet. Zallman was nervously talkative, endearingly awkward. He seemed overwhelmed by Leah’s physical presence. Leah was more wary, reticent. She was a beautiful woman who looked her age, she wore no makeup, no jewelry except a watch; her fair blond hair was threaded with silver. She smiled, but she did not speak much. She liked it that this man would do the talking, as men usually did not. Mikal Zallman was a personality of a type Leah knew, but at a distance. Very New York, very intense. Brainy, but naive. She guessed that his family had money, naturally Zallman scorned money. (But he’d been reconciled with his family, Zallman said, at the time of the ordeal. They had been outraged on his behalf and had insisted upon paying his lawyer’s exorbitant fees.) During their conversation, Leah recalled how they’d first met at the Skatskill school, and how Zallman the computer expert had walked away from her. So arrogant! Leah would tease him about that, one day. When they became lovers perhaps.

  Zallman’s hair was thinning at the temples, there was a dented look to his cheeks. His eyes were those of a man older than thirty-one or -two. He’d begun to grow a beard, a goatee, to disguise his appearance, but you could see that it was a temporary experiment, it would not last. Yet Leah thought Mikal Zallman handsome, in his way rather romantic. A narrow hawkish face, brooding eyes. Quick to laugh at himself. She would allow him to adore her, possibly one day she would adore him. She was not prepared to be hurt by him.

  Eventually she would tell him the not-quite-true I never believed you were the one to take Marissa, Mikal. Never!

  The little family, as Zallman wished to think them, ate their picnic lunch, and what a delicious lunch it was, on a wooden table on the bank of a pond, beneath a willow tree so exquisitely proportioned it looked like a work of art in a children’s storybook. He noted that Marissa still had trouble with food, ate slowly and with an air of caution, as if, with each mouthful, she was expecting to encounter broken glass. But she ate most of a sandwich, and half an apple Leah peeled for her, since “skins” made her queasy. And afterward tramping about the pond admiring snowy egrets and great blue herons and wild swans. Everywhere were lushly growing cattails, rushes, flaming sumac. There was a smell of moist damp earth and sunlight on water and in the underbrush red-winged blackbirds were flocking in a festive cacophony. Leah lamented, “But it’s too soon! We’re not ready for winter.” She sounded genuinely hurt, aggrieved.

  Zallman said, “But Leah, snow can be nice, too.”

  Marissa, who was walking ahead of her mother and Mr. Zallman, wanted to think this was so: snow, nice. She could not clearly remember snow. Last winter. Before April, and after April. She knew that she had lived for eleven years and yet her memory was a window-pane covered in cobwebs. Her therapists were kindly soft-spoken women who asked repeatedly about what had happened to her in the cellar of the old house, what the bad girls had done to her, for it was healthy to remember, and to speak of what she remembered, like draining an absess they said, and she should cry, too, and be angry; but it was difficult to have such emotions when she couldn’t remember clearly. What are you feeling, Marissa, she was always being asked, and the answer was I don’t know or Nothing! But that was not the right answer.

  Sometimes in dreams she saw, but never with opened eyes.

  With opened eyes, she felt blind. Sometimes.

  The bad girl had fed her, she remembered. Spoon-fed. She’d been so hungry! So grateful.

  All adults are gone. All our mothers.

  Marissa knew: that was a lie. The bad girl had lied to her.

  Still, the bad girl had fed her. Brushed her hair. Held her when she’d been so cold.

  The sudden explosion, flames! The burning girl, terrible shrieks and screams—Marissa had thought at first it was herself, on fire and screaming. She was crawling upstairs but was too weak and she fainted and someone came noisy and shouting to lift her in his arms and it was three days later Mommy told her when she woke in the hospital, her head so heavy she could not lift it.

  Mommy and Mr. Zallman. She was meant to call him “Uncle Mikal” but she could not.

  Mr. Zallman had been her teacher in Skatskill. But he behaved as if he didn’t remember any of that. Maybe Mr. Zallman had not remembered her, Marissa had not been one of the good students. He had only seemed to care for the good students, the others were invisible to him. He was not “Uncle Mikal” and it would be wrong to call him that.

  At this new school everybody was very nice to her. The teachers knew who she was, and the therapists and doctors. Mommy said they had to know or they could not help her. One day, when she was older, she would move to a place where nobody knew Marissa Bantry. Away out in California.

  Mommy would not wish her to leave. But Mommy would know why she had to leave.

  At this new school, that was so much smaller than Skatskill Day, Marissa had a few friends. They were shy wary thin-faced girls like herself. They were girls who, if you only just glanced at them, you would think they were missing a limb; but then you would see, no they were not. They were whole girls.

  Marissa liked her hair cut short. Her long silky hair the bad girls had brushed and fanned out about her head, it had fallen out in clumps in the hospital. Long hair made her nervous now. Through her fingers at school sometimes lost in a dream she watched girls with hair rippling down their backs like hers used to, she marveled they were oblivious to the danger.

  They had never heard of the Corn Maiden! The words would mean nothing to them.

  Marissa was a reader now. Marissa brought books everywhere with her, to hide inside. These were storybooks with illustrations. She read slowly, sometimes pushing her finger beneath the words. She was fearful of encountering words she didn’t know, words she was supposed to know but did not know. Like a sudden fit of coughing. Like a spoon shoved into your mouth before you were ready. Mommy had said Marissa was safe now from the bad girls and from any bad people, Mommy would take care of her but Marissa knew from reading stories that this could not be so. You had only to turn the page, something would happen.

  Today she had brought along two books from the school library: Watching Birds! and The Family of Butterflies. They were books for readers younger than eleven, Marissa knew. But they would not surprise her.

  Marissa is carrying these books with her, wandering along the edge of the pond a short distance ahead of Mommy and Mr. Zallman. There are dragonflies in the cattails like floating glinting needles. There are tiny white moth-butterflies, and beautiful large orange monarchs with slow-pulsing wings. Behind Marissa, Mommy and Mr. Zallman are talking ear
nestly. Always they are talking, it seems. Maybe they will be married and talk all the time and Marissa will not need to listen to them, she will be invisible.

  A red-winged blackbird swaying on a cattail calls sharply to her.

  In the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will protect you AMEN.

  WALTER MOSLEY

  _________

  Walter Mosley has forged a successful mystery career in the tradition of authors like Chester Himes and Carroll John Daly, but he added the complex issue of race relations and an in-depth look at the lethal heart of a major city that few authors can even come close to. He is the author of twenty books and has been translated into twenty-one languages. His popular mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins and his friend Raymond “Mouse” Alexander began with Devil in a Blue Dress, which was made into the film of the same name starring Denzel Washington and Jennifer Beals. Others in the series were A Red Death, White Butterfly, Black Betty, A Little Yellow Dog, and Bad Boy Brawley Brown; a prequel to the Rawlins mysteries, Gone Fishin, and a series of short stories collected in Six Easy Pieces. His other character, ex-con Socrates Fortlow, lives in Los Angeles, infusing his episodic tales with ethical and political considerations. Excerpts from his collection Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned: The Socrates Fortlow Stories have been published in Esquire, GQ, USA Weekend, Buzz, and Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine. One of these new stories was an O. Henry Award winner for 1996 and is featured in Prize Stories 1996: The O. Henry Awards, edited by William Abraham. In 1996 he was named the first Artist-in-Residence at the Africana Studies Institute, New York University. Since that residency, he has continued to work with the department, creating an innovative lecture series entitled “Black Genius” which brings diverse speakers from art, politics, and academe to discuss practical solutions to contemporary issues. Designed as a “public classroom” these lectures have included speakers ranging from Spike Lee to Angela Davis. In February 1999, a collection of these lectures was published with the title Black Genius, with a Mosley introduction and essay. This past year, Mosley returned to the mystery world with the debut of a new series. Fearless Jones is now available. Set in 1950s Los Angeles and introducing secondhand bookstore owner Paris Minton and his best friend, war veteran Fearless Jones, the novel is already garnering early praise. His most recent novels include a look at men in shades of black and white in The Man in My Basement and the novel 47.