Real easy, p.11
Real Easy, page 11
“Hey,” Nick says softly, already out of his seat, but she simply opens the book, closes it, wedges it under her arm, and stalks toward him. Her eyes are dry.
“I want to go home,” she says.
* * *
HE USED TO feel an itchy half pleasure when he pulled into the parking lot of his apartment building. It had been newly renovated when he and Samantha put down their deposit and first and last months’ rent. It had been a button factory, part of the early-twentieth-century industrial boom, back when this country still made things. He imagines it: heaps of seashells, four-pointed drills and clamps, multicolored buttons stacked like Necco Wafers, loose disks scattered in constellations, their varied circumferences, matte, gloss. Samantha liked the building’s history. She had made a game of finding pretty buttons, some vintage, at garage sales or Goodwill or antiques fairs. She bought them for Rose, who threaded them on a string and believed Samantha when she said that they had been made in their home, their very apartment. Nick remembers Samantha reading a kids’ book to Rosie, the girl’s cheek against her shoulder: “That is not my button. That button is thin. My button was thick.”
The two-bedroom apartment (ground floor, which made it more affordable) was small but had high ceilings and oversized mullioned windows. “This is good,” Samantha said when they first saw it, “for now.” He didn’t know whether she was saying what she meant or what she thought he was thinking. They split a bottle of champagne on their first night there. It was late, almost early morning, his muscles sore from moving furniture all day, before she brought her mouth to his. She tasted like money. He got her long bones between him and pressed her into the sofa, fingers working against her until she came (had she?). Although he knew she didn’t like it, he thought it would be okay, this time, because it was a special time, to turn her over beneath him. He slid into her from behind. He was anxious after, but she said it was good, and it didn’t occur to him until after she fell asleep and he almost dropped into sleep himself that maybe she had spoken in the same way that she had described the apartment.
“Daddy.” Rose is staring. They are in the hallway outside their door, keys in his hand. He thinks of what he was thinking. A clod of shame sits in his gut. “Go on,” he says, opening the door, “get inside the house.”
“It’s not a house,” Rose says. “It’s an apartment.”
* * *
ALTHOUGH HE DOES not want to, he asks if he can read her family story. She says no. He thinks of the slim book hidden in her pink backpack and hates her teacher, hates that Cat Boy got strawberry wallpaper and his daughter got brown pinstripes.
Rose does not want peanut butter crackers. She does not want milk. She sits at the kitchen table and cuts her sparkly nails into the pine.
“Raisins?” he asks.
She drops her jaw and widens her eyes at him in disgust, then goes back to rocking each nail into the wood.
“Doritos?” he says.
“Do we have Doritos?”
He opens the cupboards. “Um.”
“Samantha would tell me to stop.”
He looks over his shoulder at her. The table is flecked with tiny cuts. He thinks the marks should be curved, because a nail is curved, but they are perfectly straight.
He pulls up a chair to sit beside her and puts a hand over hers. “What’s wrong?” he asks, though he knows what is wrong. He is a coward to pretend he doesn’t know. He thinks of his hand on Samantha’s throat. He pulls away from his daughter.
She says, “I want to talk to my mommy.”
Jesus Christ. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Ro.”
Her face goes still. There has been a mistake in what he has said, though he is not sure what. She’s got this greedy look to her now, not a bad kind, not like she wants something she shouldn’t, but something that she should, something that he has not let her want. She says, clearly trying not to make it a question, “But you can call her.”
“Yeah, I guess. Your mother, though…” She’s a crazy whore won’t fly, so he goes with, “She’s got no kind of sense. What do you want her for, Rose? Best let it be.”
“I need to tell her something.”
“You can tell me.”
“No. Her.”
Sadness blows through him like dust. “Okay,” he says. “Sure.”
So he dials Lauri, who still lives in Tennessee, pregnant with yet another half-sibling Rose will never meet, possibly with the same guy she fucked when Nick was still with her, though he has never asked, has not seen her, nor has Rose, since the night he strapped his howling toddler into the car seat and drove north through a blizzard, across two state lines, back to Illinois. The snow came down thick, his windshield wipers caterpillared white. Rose was unrelenting. She screamed for miles. He hadn’t packed enough diapers, had packed little of anything, just swept a bunch of crap into an empty cardboard box: baby clothes, toys that later he realized were the ones she liked least, half of a baby monitor. He thinks of the Winnie-the-Pooh lamp that had been his as a child, with its light-up balloons, and wonders whether Lauri trashed it or kept it for her new kids.
Samantha, even from the beginning, insisted that Rosie call her mother at least a few times a year. Samantha said, “She needs to know that she has a mother.”
“She has you.”
“That’s different.”
Lauri picks up. “Nick? What the fuck do you want?”
He imagines the conversation as if he were Rosie, listening to his side of it. It’s important. Yeah, I know you know. It’s on the news. Everyone knows. I don’t want to discuss it. Leave it. Will you—I said leave it. Well, this wasn’t my idea. It was Rosie’s. Yeah. She wants to talk to you.
“Then what’re you wasting my time for,” Lauri says. “Give her the phone.”
“Just,” he says, “be careful.”
“You asshole. She’s my daughter. You think I won’t be careful? Just because you took her from me doesn’t make her any less mine.”
“We’ve been over this.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Wait. Wait.” He hands the phone to Rosie, who curls both hands around it, her chest rising, her eyes on him wide, almost scared. No, that’s not it, he thinks as she brings the receiver to her ear. It is awe, he realizes. She looks touchingly grateful. It is as if by calling Lauri he has wrought magic.
“Mom?” she says.
If he hated to hear her say “mommy” before, he hates this more, that swallowed last syllable. Already he wants to yank the phone back and rip Lauri a new one, what is she saying, that bitch, to make Rose’s eyes change as she listens. They go glassy. Her little body hunches. She throws the phone. It hits the floor and yo-yos back on its cord. “Not her,” she says. “I don’t want her.”
“Oh, Rose.” He understands now. His mistake funnels down inside him to a blind point. He doesn’t know where everything inside him is supposed to go. He reaches to pull his daughter into his arms.
She hits him. “Not her! Not you!” She is sobbing. “I want my mommy, I want Samantha!”
Nick’s hands go to his face. He is not sure what his face is doing beneath his hands. He doesn’t think he can ever take his hands away. If he does, his palms will well with phantom buttons. They will spill like large seeds over the floor. He imagines retrieving each button and swallowing them so that they stack inside his throat. He thinks of that boy’s story, of coming home with something new and tender, and finding something dead. He imagines taking that stupid fucking cat and burning it: the smell of it, the stink, all over his house.
SAMANTHA
(RUBY)
It must be days since she has taken her pills. This becomes an obsessive thought. At first, that’s okay, because the worry is almost normal. It helps to think about taking pills or not taking pills. Then a new worry grows inside her. When will the effects show on her face? Fuzz on her upper lip. Her cheeks. What if he wants her less, and gets rid of her? What if he wants her more? She is too afraid to know which scenario to fear most.
When he comes, she says, “May I have a favor?” He has refused everything, but he likes when she asks. He likes when she is polite. Sometimes women convince their captors to let them go. It has happened. She is sure of it. “May I have a mirror?”
He leaves. He returns with one, and a candle, which he lights as if this is a date. She is conned into sudden hope by the simple fact that he has done something for her. Then she looks into the mirror he holds and sees half of his smile behind it and realizes that he did this for him.
Candlelight licks her face. This is her face. She is here. She is nowhere else. There is nowhere else. The black ridge of her jaw. Her awful eyes. One earlobe has a brown line of dried blood. Her earrings are missing. Her pearl earrings, from her parents. Her mother. She must not think of her mother.
He lowers the mirror and her face is gone. There is only his face.
DETECTIVE HOLLY MEYLIN
“What’ve you got?” says Holly.
“The pharmacies?” says Pradko. “Zip.”
“The Walgreens in Central says Lind usually picks up there right on the dot, the same day her script’s filled,” says Backyard, “but she hasn’t been in to get her refill. She hasn’t stopped by any of the other pharmacies in Fremont, either, or any in Glendale or Sunrise Heights.”
“Amador’s at the courthouse,” says Pradko. “He’s getting a warrant on Amy Tillson and the dead girl’s fuck buddy, who, bless his skeevy heart, is a drug dealer.”
“GHB?”
“If we’re lucky.”
It’s early, but the dull gray sky outside the slatted window makes it look later. The office is bigger than it needs to be, with binders of old cases lining the walls. The three detectives sit at the central table, Pradko ripping the rim of his Styrofoam cup and dropping the pieces into its bottom inch of cold coffee. Backyard may or may not have been eating something before Holly turned up; he’s stroking the black wool of his goatee with a plastic fork. Lind’s Honda Civic has been processed for DNA, and he presents the report: no trace evidence was found that didn’t belong to Lind or Campana except a small spot of B positive blood. They ran the blood against the DNA they had grabbed from Nick Sullivan’s water bottle during the interview, and it matched, but the car was his, too, so that wasn’t proof of anything. Circumstantial evidence at best. The blood could have been left there years ago. “Meanwhile, Missing Persons canvassed,” Backyard says. “They distributed flyers, did the K-9 thing, checked the forest preserve and morgues in nearby towns. Nothing. It’s been more than a week, so they’re shifting resources.”
“We got other cases, too,” Pradko reminds her. He has a hectic blush high on his cheeks, which could be from annoyance or his eczema. “How long are we gonna be down on this one? Some of us care about our clearance rates.”
Backyard mimes jerking off.
“Stats matter,” Pradko tells him.
“Wanker,” Backyard says.
“What’s that? That’s not English.”
Backyard points the fork at him. “It’s English English.”
“Sounds Black.”
“The fuck you know.”
The thing about detectives, though Holly does not consider herself part of this phenomenon, is that they love to talk. Backyard and Pradko can disappear into an interview room with a suspect for hours and emerge surprised by the passage of time.
“I pulled phone records on Sullivan,” Holly tells them. “The Lovely Lady, too. The 12:07 a.m. call to his residence from the club’s office matches the one on the answering machine from Samantha Lind, but Sullivan’s records also show an incoming call right after, at 12:15.”
“Ooh.” Pradko perks up. “Whose number?”
“A burner.”
“Fucking prepaids,” Backyard says.
On their long list of things cops would love to outlaw, fifty-dollar gas station cell phones, untraceable to their buyers, are pretty high.
“The drug dealer’s phone of choice,” Pradko says. “Kim Campana’s boyfriend is looking good to me.”
“I don’t know,” Backyard says thoughtfully. “There’s Sullivan.”
“Sullivan’s being a pain in the ass,” Pradko tells Holly.
“A true hemorrhoid,” Backyard agrees.
“He showed up here yesterday when you were out to lunch. He’s a wreck.”
“Guilt?” Backyard says.
“Boots covered in mud.”
Holly says, “Tell me he hasn’t been searching for her by himself.”
“Oh yeah.”
When a family member finds a body, they touch it. They try to save it. They damage evidence even if they don’t mean to. Holly would have done it, if she had been the one to smash the window and pull Daniel’s body from the baked car seat. She would have known (she could not have helped but know, she was trained to know) that there was nothing she could do. She would have done it anyway. She would have forced her breath into his limp body. He would have felt like he had a fever, and she would have remembered the time he had a febrile seizure and had gone rigid, mouth frothing as he gripped her finger. He’s okay, the ER doctor said later, smile easy. This sometimes happened with little children. It was frightening but not serious. Holly was doused with relief. Daniel’s gaze had been filmy and unfocused in the ER, but the next morning when he called from his crib, gripping the rail with pudgy hands, his eyes were glossy, his skin fresh. He wore a onesie that her mother, whom Holly had not seen in years, had sent in the mail. It showed a John Deere tractor, its green and yellow bright.
“I hope you shut that shit down,” Holly tells Pradko.
“Sure did. He was mad.”
“Maybe”—Backyard raises one thick finger—“he wants to look like he’s looking.”
“Your theory is a shitty theory,” Pradko says. “Sullivan was miles from the scene, at home, his daughter in the next room—”
“His alibi is a sleeping eight-year-old.”
“Neighbors say they didn’t see him leave.”
“We haven’t hit all the neighbors yet.”
“You really think he left home that night? With what car? There’s only one registered to him, and that was in the ditch.”
“I triangulated the call,” Holly says.
“That’s right, the call,” Pradko says. “The evidence.” This word is pointedly for Backyard, who says, “There is evidence: the B positive blood in the car that matches Sullivan’s DNA, which he didn’t want to give us. Dude is guilty. Plus, you know and I know: it’s always the boyfriend.”
“Yeah,” Pradko says, “the drug-dealing one.”
“The call came from within about a three-mile radius of the club,” Holly says.
“One day,” Pradko says, widening his whey-blue eyes and panning his palm across the air, “cell phone towers will be everywhere. You will be able to ping calls down to a dime on the sidewalk.”
“What interests me,” Holly says, “is that the call lasted four minutes and thirty-seven seconds.”
Slowly, with a glance at Backyard, Pradko says, “Someone picked up and talked.”
“See?” Backyard says. “Sullivan’s lying.”
“Or the answering machine got it and someone left an unusually long message,” Holly says. “But that tape’s in evidence and only Lind’s voice is on there, for that call from the club’s office.”
“Someone could have erased that second call from the tape,” Pradko says grudgingly.
Backyard smiles and leans back, interlacing his fingers over his tight curls. “Sullivan.”
Holly’s father rescued a one-eyed red-tailed hawk that had been hit by a car near their land. It was summer. Stonecrop rioted in the rock wall. He kept the hawk in the barn and, at first, fed it with a dropper. She had never seen him gentle with anything before. After it healed, the hawk could not be released into the wild. It had imprinted on him. She was young enough then for that to have been the first time she’d heard that word. He said it like she should know it, so she looked it up. There was a list of synonyms in their Merriam-Webster: stamp, mark, emboss, brand. He checked out falconry books from the local library, which had once been a settler’s stone house. She saw him reading at night after dinner as she cleared the Formica table and brought dishes to her mother, who washed them. She saw him in the field with a leather work glove, launching the bird from his fist. He walked away. The bird always wheeled back, its fingered wings spread wide, and followed him home.
Holly thinks of this as she looks at Backyard, who likes to pick his culprit early. A few weeks after the hawk healed, it wasn’t in the barn one Sunday when she and her mother came home from church. “It flew away,” her father said from the porch. “Finally.” The sun painted the white porch bronze. The skin beneath his chin was slack and softer than she’d ever noticed, the set of his mouth sad. She was sure that if she were to find the bird, she would find it with its neck broken.
Like Backyard, Holly can be ruthless in choosing who committed a crime, but she is not so certain now. She wonders, for a moment, if she would have touched Daniel’s body after all, had she been the one who had left him in the car. She wants a cigarette. An unopened pack sits in her coat pocket, hanging on the hook by the door, but she ignores it for now. The Lind case is a better distraction. “Let’s bring Sullivan in.”
The fact that Sullivan has no friends or family to help with his kid is a red flag that Backyard would be happy to plant in his Sullivan Did It territory. She calls and asks Sullivan to come down to the station. She makes sure it’s right around pickup time at the girl’s school.
