by LR Wright
“Where to?”
“I’m going to California,” said Enid. “To see Reggie.” Yes indeed, she thought. “Yes,” she told Bernie, pushing her fingertips into her curls, “I’ll go tomorrow, I think. I need some warm sun to shine on me.”
Alberg was sitting in a chair next to Eliot’s hospital bed.
“How come I’m not dead?” said Eliot.
“You bent your hand back, right?” said Alberg. “That moved stuff around in there. You didn’t get a good shot at the vein.”
“Shit.” He looked at his bandaged wrist and turned away. He had lost weight since November 11. And he was very pale. Otherwise, Alberg thought he looked about the same.
“My sister,” said Eliot, not looking at him.
“She’s just fine.”
Eliot drew a long, shuddering breath, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He looked slight and fragile, lying there, thought Alberg. He had lost enough blood to pass out, if not to die. It had soaked his sweatshirt, and his jeans, and the sleeping bag.
“I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to hurt any of them—I just—I just get so fucking mad —” He was holding on to the sheet with both hands, twisting it, and his head was averted from Alberg. “I miss them so much. Rosie. And my mom.”
Alberg put his hand over Eliot’s fists.
“I get so fucking mad,” the boy said again, and turned his head swiftly to look at Alberg. “I thought for a while it was gone, now.” He struggled to speak. “But it isn’t. It isn’t.”
“You can get help for that.”
“Yeah, right,” said Eliot bitterly, and turned away again. He pulled some tissues from a box on the nightstand and wiped his face.
“Your friend Alvin—” Alberg began.
Eliot sighed. “Yeah? What about him?”
“I saw the bruises,” said Alberg. “Do you know how he got them?”
Eliot looked up at him. “How do you think he got them? Somebody beat him up.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who. His father.”
“I called Social Services this morning,” said Alberg. “They’re going to talk to his aunt. Maybe he can go to her. She’s in Salmon Arm.”
The boy lifted his arm, wincing, and looked at the bandage. “Where is he now?”
“They took him back to the detention center.”
“He’s a funny little guy.” Slowly, Eliot shook his head. “I’m never gonna see Rosie again. She won’t ever want to see me again. I killed her mom and dad. I almost killed her.”
“But you didn’t kill her.”
Eliot sat up in bed and clung to the sides of the mattress. “I remember—I remember my dad coming at me, smacking me with his hat. And I don’t remember anything else, until—Jesus. I pulled back. I’d hit her, but I pulled back. And I watched her run down the beach, and she was bleeding. And on the sand there they were, lying there, all over blood.” His face glittered with sweat. “Why didn’t I pull back sooner? Why didn’t I stop? Why did I kill my mom?” He began to sob, and covered his face with his hands.
Alberg sat next to him, waiting. When the sobbing had stopped, and Eliot had fallen back on the pillow, exhausted, Alberg said, “I might be able to help you.”
Eliot absorbed this, and his glance flickered across Alberg’s face. “But why would you?”
Alberg shrugged. “Why not?”
“I killed people for god’s sake.” Tears fell again. “That’s why not.”
“You’re going to have to start talking, though,” said Alberg, standing up. “I can’t help you if you won’t talk. To your lawyer. The social worker. The psychiatrists.” He looked down on Eliot. “Yeah, you killed people,” he said wearily. “And you’ll suffer your whole life for it. That’s why you’re worth helping.” He gave Eliot’s shoulder a squeeze and went in search of Rosie.
“She’s in here.” The nurse tapped on the open door before entering.
Rosie sat in a chair by the window, holding the stuffed koala bear.
“We thought she’d be better off in an adult ward,” said the nurse, who had to keep tucking stray strands of dark hair back under her cap.
There were four beds. Privacy curtains had been pulled around one, and another was obviously unoccupied. The third was rumpled, and on the nightstand next to it sat a vase of carnations and several get well cards. Rosie’s bed was one by the window.
She was wearing a pink bathrobe and pink slippers, and her long light brown hair had been drawn into a ponytail and tied with a pink ribbon. Alberg could see the cut in the side of her neck, unbandaged now, a dark red healing wound three inches long.
“Hi, Rosie.” The child turned, slightly, to look at the nurse, who then bent to kiss Rosie’s cheek. “You know Mr. Alberg, don’t you? He’s the one who got your koala for you.”
Rosie didn’t speak. She looked at Alberg. She had blue eyes, which Alberg hadn’t expected. He had remembered them as hazel, like her mother’s, like Eliot’s. The teddy bear was cradled in her arms.
“Hi, Rosie,” said Alberg. He got down on his haunches. “I hear you’re going back to Nova Scotia. With your aunt and uncle.”
She looked at him sideways, not moving her head, then shifted her gaze again to look out the window.
“Is it pretty there?”
Slowly, Rosie nodded.
The nurse was tidying up, removing dead blooms from the six floral arrangements that were lined up on the wide window ledge, along with several cards.
“Tell me about their house.”
The child held the koala bear a little bit tighter.
“Do they have kids of their own?” said Alberg.
She nodded again.
“Big kids? Or little ones?”
She pursed her lips and pulled the corners of her mouth down. “Big.”
A large woman sailed into the room, wearing a white terrycloth robe over her hospital gown, her feet flapping in white heelless slippers. She threw a magazine down on the bed next to the carnations, swept over to Rosie, and gave her a big hug. “You been good while I been gone?” she asked sternly, and Rosie, with a faint grin, said yes.
“Good,” said the woman. “Hi,” she said to Alberg, and turned her back on him to climb onto her bed, where she started paging energetically through the magazine.
“Hi,” said Alberg, stupidly, from the floor.
“That’s Mary,” said Rosie. “She had her gall bladder out. They gave it to her to keep. In a jar.”
“Ah,” said Alberg. “Really.”
Rosie shifted in her chair. “They’ve got a swing. In the backyard.”
“Hey. That’s good. What else?”
“Apple trees.”
“I’d like to have an apple tree,” said Alberg.
She turned her head to look at him. “Will Eliot come there?”
Alberg felt a great sinking in his chest. “No, sweetie. Eliot has to stay here.”
“Is he crazy?”
“He was, I think, when he did what he did. Don’t you think so?”
She looked out the window again, and Alberg felt himself to be dismissed.
He got awkwardly to his feet.
“Just look at that sunshine,” said Mary. “You want to go for a walk, later, out in that sunshine, Rosie?”
Rosie shrugged.
The nurse said, “I think that’s a good idea.” But Rosie, looking out the window, didn’t respond. “I’ll come back after lunch, and help you get dressed.”
Mary winked at her, and nodded encouragingly.
“Did somebody bring clothes for her?” said Alberg, when he and the nurse were out in the hall.
“We’ve had so many people drop off stuff for Rosie—” She smiled at him, tucking in her hair. “It’s kinda good to be reminded how nice people can be.”
“What’s likely to happen to him?” asked Cassandra.
They were having coffee in the living room, curtains pulled against the darkness outside. She was sitting
on the sofa, and Alberg was in his wingback chair.
“He’ll probably get three years in a youth facility. Unless they transfer him to adult court.” He rubbed his thighs. “They’ve got anger management programs. I hope to Christ they work.”
Cassandra pushed from her mind the bloody sight of Alberg coming out of that house with Eliot in his arms.
Alberg got to his feet. At the window, he pulled the curtain aside and looked out. Then he turned to Cassandra and folded his arms in front of him. “I’m going to try to help the kid. Because I misinterpreted that whole situation.”
She started to protest, but changed her mind. He was grateful for that.
“I also screwed up with Jack Coutts’s crazy wife.”
She was listening gravely, her head bent, and the light glittered in her hair, which had a lot of silver in it now. “And people died,” he said evenly. “People sometimes die, when cops screw up.”
He could tell that she didn’t want to hear this. But she wouldn’t stop listening, and he loved her for that. “I had decided not to tell you about this. But now I’ve changed my mind.”
Alberg sat down again, on the edge of his chair, and clasped his hands between his knees. “It happened twelve years ago,” he said. “I went home—No. Not home. It wasn’t home anymore. I went to the house. To get the rest of my things. I’d brought some boxes, packing cartons. Flattened. A stack of them. I parked on the street. I remember it was a very cold day. But I think it was sunny. Maybe there was a lot of snow. Because it was very quiet on the street. Everything seemed—muffled. Although”—he shrugged—“maybe I’m making that up.”
He concentrated hard, needing to report only the actual. “I’d gotten out of the car, carrying the boxes, and locked it, and yeah, there was a lot of snow, I remember crunching through it when I went around the front of the car. And something next door made me look over there—it was Christmas lights. Yeah. Two months or more after Christmas, and the lights were still up, and still lit. So I looked at this and at the same time I was thinking about the reason I was there, trying to decide what to pack in the boxes, what belonged to me, and not to the two of us. And then I saw that their front door was open.”
He looked at Cassandra. She nodded slightly, encouraging him to go on.
“I almost didn’t go in there,” he said. “I didn’t want to go in there.” He gazed around the room, looking for an anchor, something to secure him in the here and now. “I put the cartons on the roof of the car and walked toward the house, looking at that open door, hoping like hell that somebody would suddenly slam it shut.” He took a deep breath. “But nobody did.
“I went up the walk—the snow was pretty deep, and there were footprints in it—and onto the porch. And I called out. But nobody answered. So I went inside…”
Betty took out her tools. Then she fetched the plastic bottle from the bathroom, the one with her pills in it—there were lots and lots of them in there. She displayed her tools in a straight line on top of her bedspread and stared at them, frowning.
She picked up the tweezers and went into the bathroom, so she could watch herself in the mirror there, and she plucked the hairs from her eyebrows, all of them, every single one, although it hurt badly and caused her eyes to flood with tears. She decided she liked the way she looked with no eyebrows, naked and astonished. She wet a washcloth and put it on the places where her eyebrows had been, soothing the red raw skin there.
Betty returned to the bedroom and threw the tweezers into the wastepaper basket, and studied the rest of her tools. With the sewing scissors she cut off all her hair, cut it again and again, ran her hand over her prickly scalp and everywhere she felt a piece of hair that had escaped she said “Aha!” and cut it off. She looked in the bathroom mirror and admired the shape of her head, which she had never seen before. Then she went back into the bedroom and threw the scissors away.
She hung the eyeglasses from her box of tools over her ears and on top of her nose — they had no glass in them and she saw perfectly through the holes.
She looked at what was left. The big kilt pin. She pinned it to her robe. That left the long hat pin with the pearl knob on the top; the jackknife with the leather handle and the leather pouch to hold it; the pickle fork she’d taken from Maura’s house; the screwdriver with the bright orange handle; the pliers.
Betty sat on her bed and undid her yellow bathrobe. She picked up the hat pin. Delicately, she traced a line on her left thigh. When she took away the hat pin, though, the line disappeared, so she pressed harder. She felt a sharp squeal from her skin but she went on, one letter after another. Blood raced to the faint fragile tears in her skin and the skin squealed more loudly. Impatiently she shook the pain out of her head and plodded on. After a while she took away the pin and looked at her thighs. “B E” was on the left one and “T T Y” was on the right one. Her thighs were hurting a lot, so she went into the bathroom again and wet the washcloth and pressed it onto the letters in her thighs. Betty patiently waited and pressed it down again and again. Finally the weak, thin trickles of blood stopped coming.
She went back to the bedroom, dropped the hat pin into the trash basket, and took hold of the pickle fork. She pushed up the left sleeve of her robe and dragged the fork up her arm, from wrist to elbow. Two pink streaks appeared. When they began to fade, she did it again. Altogether she did it four times, and then four more times on the other arm.
Both arms were screaming at her now, along with her thighs, and the places where her eyebrows had been. She was getting impatient with her body.
There was the jackknife left, and the screwdriver, and the pliers. Betty couldn’t think what to do with the screwdriver or the pliers that wouldn’t incapacitate her. She didn’t want to be incapacitated. She threw them into the garbage.
She took the jackknife and her pills downstairs and filled a glass with water. She looked at the bottle of pills and then at the glass, calculating. She filled a second glass with water and took both glasses and the pills into the living room and set them on the card table. Then she sat down on the sofa and waited.
And eventually Heather came home.
Betty stood quickly, before Heather even got the door closed. “Boo!” she said.
Heather looked at her and screamed.
Betty ran to the child and threw her arms around her and buried Heather’s face in the front of her robe. “How do you like it? It’s me, just me, Heather, just me. I’m going to let my eyebrows and my hair grow again and maybe my hair will grow in yellow like yours, maybe then I’ll have yellow hair again like when I was young, like you, see? See? Come along now, don’t be silly, come along.”
She dragged her over to the sofa and sat down, and pulled Heather onto her lap. Heather’s face was white and the skin was pulling away from her face, and her lips were pulled back, too. She almost looked as if she were snarling.
Betty lifted her right leg and threw it over the bottom half of Heather’s body. She reached for the bottle of pills, which she had uncapped. She told Heather to open her mouth, but the teeth clamped shut. The eyes were twice as big as normal.
The wind started to blow. Betty stopped and cocked her head and listened to his eager rustling around the windows, around the bottoms of the doors, through the open front door. He wanted to get in, for some reason, he was coming in.
Heather screamed again and quickly, deftly, Betty dropped half the pills down her throat. She clutched Heather’s chin with her left hand, holding her mouth closed while Heather struggled and kicked and choked. Then she opened the mouth just a little and poured some water down. Heather choked and coughed and swallowed.
More water. Choking, coughing, swallowing.
Betty did this again and again, while Heather kicked and struggled. Through the fingers of her strong hand Betty felt Heather’s tears, warm and languid, and the liquid from her nose, warm and sticky.
When she took her hand away, Heather’s eyes opened; she struggled, still. It would take some ti
me, Betty knew. But she could wait.
She sat back on the sofa and held Heather in her two arms. Her face stung and her thighs and her arms continued to scream in pain, but stoically she held her daughter and felt herself weeping. She held her and rocked her and wept and waited.
If the jackknife isn’t long enough, she thought, there is a long sharp knife in the kitchen; if the jackknife doesn’t go all the way, the kitchen knife will.
It was very important that her actual heart be touched.
Chapter 28
Monday, December 5
ALBERG LOOKED FROM HIS office window. There wasn’t a brown Silverado in sight. He wondered if Jack had made the trip back to Kamloops in a single day, or if he had stopped someplace Sunday night.
He turned around and leaned against the filing cabinet, studying his office. He would have done it, he thought. He would have given up the Job to keep his wife and kids.
And then what? He hadn’t the faintest idea. And he hadn’t had the faintest idea then, either. He had never progressed beyond the idea of quitting to what he might turn to next.
Isabella rapped on his door. “Can I take an extra half hour for lunch?” She was wearing a gray and white cardigan, hand-knitted, she had told him, in a pattern that featured several Canada geese. Under it, a tangerine-colored skirt and a yellow sweater.
“Sure,” said Alberg.
“Good. Look, I’m going out the back way, okay?”
“Sure,” he said again, and she vanished down the hall.
Alberg sat at his desk, put on his reading glasses, and regarded the crowded in basket that he had almost completely emptied less than a week ago. He sat back and tossed the glasses onto the desk. He didn’t have the heart for this today.
He was relieved when Sokolowski came along.
“There’s a guy out there,” said Sid, “wants to know where Isabella’s gone to.”
“Lunch,” said Alberg. “What guy?”
“I don’t know, a guy sitting on the bench, reading the paper.”
“Not her husband again,” said Alberg. “I hope.”