Fields where they lay, p.18
Fields Where They Lay, page 18
“What did I do?” I asked.
“It’s not you,” she said. “It’s . . . it’s everything. It’s my life. Before I knew you. It’s fucking Christmas.”
“Let’s skip it,” I said. “We’ll go straight to New Year. We’ll go out tonight and buy stupid hats and champagne and those, those things that unroll and go phweee when you blow into them. Make resolutions. Sing that awful song about forgetting your old acquaintances. Just cut Christmas out of the calendar.”
She waited until it was clear that I was finished.
“You would, too,” she said. “Except for Rina.”
I was rubbing my eyes with my free hand. “Well, yeah, Rina, sure, I mean, I’ve got to—listen, please don’t go any—”
“I need time,” she said.
“If this is, I don’t know, the Christmas blues, or if you just need to be alone for a while—”
“Junior . . .”
“Then you can have the apartment. Okay? You like it there. I’ll go back to motels, I’ve kind of missed the motels, to tell you the—”
“Christmas in a motel.” she said.
“Then I’ll stay in one of the storage units. Or the Bel Air Hotel. Hell, I’ll go to the apartment and you can stay at the Bel—”
“Junior.”
“The hell with Christmas. You can rattle around at the Wedgwood, get snubbed in Bel Air, work out whatever it is that’s got you so—so damn sad, and I’ll take care of myself, I won’t even telephone.”
Someone walking by at the top of the stairs with an armload of bags snagged at my attention but by the time I’d looked up, she was gone. “You can have all the space you want. Come on, nobody wants to get on a plane this close to Christmas. And it’s cold back east.”
“Back east,” she said.
“You know,” I said, using my free hand to punch myself on the jaw for sheer stupidity in bringing up the multiple towns where she’d said she’d been born. “Um, Trenton or Mount Airy or wherever it was.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “It’s not fair. I can’t impose all this on you. You never asked for this.”
“I asked for you,” I said.
“But not my baggage.”
I said, “Ronnie—”
“It’s just Christmas,” she said. “God rot ye merry, gentlemen, and all that.”
“We can fix this.”
“Men,” she said. “It’s like all you need is a pair of emotional pliers and suddenly the music will start again and everything will be fixed. The window won’t stick, the toast will pop right up, like it’s supposed to.”
“Okay,” I said. “How should I respond?”
“Just listen to me. Can you do that for a minute, just listen? I’m tired, I’m sad, and I can’t handle Christmas right now. I can’t put all my energy into acting like everything is fine, that all we need to do is find the mistletoe, and a kiss will magically make everything all right, okay?”
“I—”
“I won’t be at the apartment tonight. I promise to think about it another day, and I promise if I decide to leave, that I’ll call you and talk to you and try to—try to let you help me figure it out. Please? That’s the best I can do right now.”
“But where will you be?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Take care of yourself. Get something nice for Rina and Kathy. We’ll talk tomorrow. Or the next day.” She disconnected, and it felt like an especially personal disconnection.
“Well,” I said to the stairs. “Shit.”
I went up one step, back down, and then up again, trying to burn through an agitation so intense I felt as though my teeth were vibrating, a new and terrifically unpleasant blend of loss, centered on Ronnie, and rage about Bonnie’s murder and my plodding attempts to figure out who killed her. Old Vlad was mixed up in there, too, somewhere. I did the up-and-down routine a couple more times, trying to work some of it off. The quadriceps are the body’s biggest muscles, and it’s well-documented that exercising them just floods the system with calming, mood-altering endorphins. I was getting short of breath before I consigned the quads-endorphins-mood-elevating phenomenon to the ever-lengthening list of exhaustively documented nonsense. Someone, I thought, should create an encyclopedia just for this kind of richly proven bullshit. Ants avoid marigolds. Eskimos can’t sing bass. Cauliflower is edible. Optimistic people lose more weight. Anti-wrinkle creams work. Christmas is the happiest time of the year.
The phone was showing me the list of recent calls, and I pressed dial automatically and immediately hung up. Said again, “Shit.” Called Wally instead. “Where is he?”
“Where he was. I told you I’d call you if—”
“What are they doing?”
“Looking all over the place. They brought in enough lights for the Rose Bowl.”
“That’s what they do,” I said. “Have they gone up to the third floor?”
“Couple of guys with big old flashlights.”
“Okay, thanks. Keep an eye on the ones on three, too, okay?”
“You all right?”
“I’m doing great,” I said through my teeth. “What could possibly be wrong?”
“Jeez,” he said and hung up.
I thought, My goddamn lunch lists, and went back up to the second level to ask more questions. Being useful was better than seething with undirected anxiety, so I focused on getting back to work, on doing something productive. I was so focused that I walked straight past the open doors of two stores I hadn’t checked, and I didn’t even register the tall, slender young woman coming toward me with an armload of shopping bags until she side-stepped in front of me and said, “Here you are.” I had to look at her twice before I recognized Francie DuBois.
“So soon we forget,” she said, but she was smiling.
“I, uh, I was a million miles away. What are you doing here?”
One eyebrow went up with an effortlessness that made it look natural. “What am I doing here? Remember Hi? Remember pretending to be happy to see someone?”
“Of course, I’m happy to see you.” I looked down at the phone in my hand and put it into my pocket. It still had Ronnie on the other end, even if she’d hung up. “It’s just that, well, there have been millions of people here the last day and a half, and none of them was you.”
“Until now.”
“Right,” I said. “Right.” It didn’t seem to be enough, so I added, “I’m kind of distracted.”
“And I can see why,” she said. “There are a dozen police cars out there, all blinking away, and still smelling of donuts, and here’s the burglar boy, right out in plain sight.”
“No, it’s—” I went completely blank, and then I saw Bonnie on her back, her hand curving around the tinsel, and I said, “We’ve had a murder. Somebody I liked.”
“Oh,” she said. She hugged all the bags against her body with one arm and reached out with the other to put her free hand on my forearm. “I’m so sorry.”
“I really am happy to see you.” I looked down the length of the second level. One store in four or five was closed and dark. “This is a sad place.”
Her hand was still on my arm. Even through the sleeve of my shirt it felt warmer than it should have. She said, “I know what you mean. All the glitter, all the people spending more than they have.”
“All the desperation,” I said. “Most of the people who do business here are on the verge of bankruptcy. The woman who died—who was killed—said this was her last year. She was failing. She, um, she served me hot punch with wine and spices and oranges.”
“How was it?”
“Not so awful. She was a Dickens fan.” I sounded even to myself like I was rambling. The “Jingle Bell Rock” loop began again, and I knew we were only four songs away from PAH-rum-pum-pum-pum. “And this music.”
“I like Christmas music.” I must have made a face, because she added, “But I promise not to sing along. Oh,” she said, suddenly seeming to remember the bags jammed under her left arm. “Your question? What am I doing here? I was over at Louie’s, and he said these were yours.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Let me.” I got control of the three packages—the book, the bracelet and the netsuke. “We were shopping,” I said. “I mean, thank you, and, and—Louie and I, we were shopping when things went wrong. The woman was killed while we were . . .”
“So I asked him,” she said, leaning in to look at me more closely, “could I bring them to you.”
“Thank you,” I said again.
“It was an excuse,” she said, as though speaking to an unusually slow learner. “He wanted to bring them over himself, but I said . . . are you okay? ’Cause you’ve got something, anxiety, confusion, something, just rolling off you in waves.”
There was a moment of silence between us, blighted by “Here Comes Santa Claus.”
I took a deep breath and was suddenly frozen where I stood, looking straight at that path diverging in the wood that Robert Frost wrote about, and I knew this was the moment when I had to turn either right or left. To one side, Ronnie and all her secrecy and her problems, to the other, Francie, possibly with equivalent problems but shimmering with the mystery of someone new. I saw the fork in the road so clearly it almost blotted out the mall and everyone in it, except Francie, and I chose a direction. “When I met you, I, um, I—last night? When I met you?”
She waited and then said, “I still remember last night. When, as you just reminded me, I met you.”
There was nothing to do but plunge ahead. “You’d been, umm, Christmas shopping. Right?”
The way she was looking at me changed, became evaluative instead of just interested. She pursed her lips, so slightly she might just have been thinking about doing it. “Correct. Christmas, you know, it’s the day after tomorrow.”
“And I asked you who you’d been shopping for, and you said, like, Bluto the barber or something like that.”
“Bluto,” she said, nodding, and I had the impression she’d taken a step back, although she hadn’t moved. “Always at the top of my list. Because of the way he does my sideburns.”
“But you didn’t tell me—”
She shook her head. “I knew this was coming.”
“You didn’t tell me who else you were—”
“This isn’t really about me, is it?” She rubbed at a spot above her left eyebrow that didn’t look any different from any other spot above her left eyebrow, but the gesture had the effect of covering one of her eyes. The one that remained was more than I could handle. “This is about you. What you’re trying to say—”
“Hey there,” someone said, and I turned to see first, Rina, wearing one of my old shirts, a bright red scarf, and a pair of shredded jeans, and second, Tyrone.
Both of them were a trifle bright-eyed with the kind of energy that comes when you’re searching for a four-leaf clover and you find a two-carat diamond: diamonds are exciting, but what you wanted was a four-leaf clover. Rina’s gaze bounced back and forth between Francie DuBois and me. Tyrone was regarding me with hooded eyes, and his expression was not one of unalloyed admiration.
I said, “Oh.” It was obviously an insufficient greeting, so I made it worse. “Why are you guys here?”
“Seeing you,” Rina said. “I was saying just twenty or thirty minutes ago, back home, how it was a shame about you being stuck all alone in this, this infected bubo of a mall—”
Tyrone said, “Bubo. She’s been studying the bubonic plague.” His eyes went back to Francie.
“—at Christmas time,” Rina said as though Tyrone hadn’t spoken. “But you’re not alone at all, are you?” To Francie, she said, “Hi. I’m Rina. I’m his daughter.”
“And I’m Francie,” Francie said. She shot me a glance I couldn’t read. “And this is Tyrone, right?”
This time both kids turned to me, and I felt a cold gust of judgment.
“Don’t look so surprised,” Francie said to Tyrone. “You and I, we have the same color eyes, and Junior mentioned it to me when we met each other. Said he’d never seen eyes your color before, until he saw mine.”
“Well, what do you know?” Tyrone said, a rhetorical question if I ever heard one. Rina was chewing on her lower lip, regarding Francie in a way that could be charitably described as unwelcoming. Tyrone, with the ancient male impulse to smooth over an awkward moment, said, “Same color eyes. Huh.”
“Well,” Francie said, looking at each of us in turn, and then back at me. She gazed at me for what seemed like a long time. “Well, well, well. Nice to meet both of you. And since I can see that Junior here is a little uncomfortable, I’ll take off. Your father, honey,” she said to Rina, “he’s crazy about you. Okay,” she said, coming back to me. “I’ll tell Louie I delivered your packages.”
Rina said, “Louie the Lost?”
“The very Louie.” She wiggled her fingers in my direction and said, “Bye-bye. And Junior? Be careful with how you throw yourself around, okay? Some people, you never know, they might believe you.” And she turned and went back toward the escalators. Her back was very straight.
“That is a woman,” Rina said, “who didn’t know you have a girlfriend.”
“I’ve barely met her.”
“You discussed the color of her eyes, and you’ve barely met her? How is Ronnie, anyway?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “And don’t try to be subtle with me.”
“Wow,” Rina said. “I like Ronnie.”
“Well, goddamn it,” I said, “so do I.”
Rina said, “The color of her eyes?”
“Listen,” I said, feeling my face heat up. “Not so long ago, you thought Tyrone here—”
“I remember, Daddy. I thought he was seeing somebody behind my back.”
“And you were wrong. So just slow down on unloading all that judgment. You of all people—”
“Rina was set up,” Tyrone said.
“Yeah?” I said, and suddenly I was furious. “What’s my excuse? Is that what you were going to ask me, Tyrone?”
“Well,” Tyrone said, “yeah.”
“I’m supposed to explain myself to you, is that it?”
Tyrone said, “Only if you care what we think.”
Rina said, “Tyrone,” and I said, “Okay, okay, you’re right. Give me a minute.” I turned away and walked in a circle a couple of times as they watched me.
“I’m having a bad enough day to earn me a year of summer,” I said when I’d worn out the circle. “Ronnie has left me, at least temporarily, and I’m worried about her. I don’t like the way she sounds, and she won’t talk about it. And a bunch of other things. But about Francie, I met her last night, when she probably saved my life.” I held up a hand. “A guy was shooting at me and she interfered with him, very effectively, so I took her to dinner. We, we talked, and I—I didn’t see the need to mention Ronnie.” Rina started to say something, and I cut her off. “I know, I know, I know. But that’s the whole story. And just to look at it from the other angle for a moment, for all I know, she belongs to a sect in which all the women have multiple husbands and she was trying to recruit me as number twelve or something.”
“You just think that because you weren’t being straight,” Tyrone said. Rina took his hand, lifted it up, and kissed his knuckles.
“Am I lucky?” she said.
“You are,” I said. “You both are.”
“On the nose, Jose,” Tyrone said.
I said, “I think it’s pronounced Hozay.”
“Who cares?” Tyrone said. “He’s not here. So. Let’s go shopping.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m working.”
Looking toward the escalator, Rina said, “She seemed like a nice woman.”
“She seemed like she’d fallen from heaven,” I said. “That’s why I got into trouble.”
PART THREE
KEEPING WATCH BY NIGHT
21
In Case the Knock Was Answered by Hermann Goering
An hour and a half later I had all the lunch information I was going to get from the remaining shops, and I was so hungry I almost forgot I was depressed. I gave the new lists to Amanda at Tito’s, who regarded them with waning enthusiasm, so I reminded her how much we’d both liked Bonnie, which earned me a look that could accurately be described as askance. Then I asked for a burrito with everything and gave her my most persuasive smile, which felt frayed even to me, so I also gave her five hundred of Vlad’s dollars. Then I went to pull out the chair next to Shlomo.
“Terrible thing,” he said. He was about the fourth person to say precisely those words to me that day.
“It is,” I said. “There’s no shortage of terrible things right now.”
He shook his head. He had another bowl of soup in front of him. “Never is.”
“So here’s the deal. I need a miracle.”
“To me you come for a—”
“You told me you had a miracle, a Christmas miracle. I need it, and I need it now.”
Shlomo looked regretfully down at his soup. “This is going to get cold,” he said. “I tell you this, my soup will get cold and I won’t eat it, and when I don’t eat my feet get all icy.”
I said, “So wear socks. Does Santa stay home when his feet get cold?”
His attempt not to smile failed miserably. He put down his spoon, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again to look at me more closely, pushed the soup aside, and began to tell me a story about his father, Morris Stempel.
Morris always said that the first worst thing was that he kept seeing the dead man’s eyes.
The barn in which Morris was kneeling had slatted spaces in the roof where boards had fallen through, but the moon apparently hadn’t risen yet, or even if it had, the clouds and fog were more than thick enough to absorb its light. Not an hour ago, as he, Keystone, and Sabathia were picking their way across a low, misty rise, with no idea of where they were, Sabathia had tripped and gone down with a percussive grunt. For a second, Morris had pulled out his angle-head flashlight, stinking from the wax that waterproofed it, and flicked it on.
