4— DECEMBER 17, TUESDAY MORNING
Memory is a work of imagination. —Robert Pinsky
Devon laid the two brown paper grocery bags on their sides and brought the Mercury’s trunk down gently, squeezing the latch into place.
She’d said that she was done, that that was the end of it.
He leaned on the trunk and tried to believe her.
On the way back into the apartment, Devon caught sight of the Mrs. Titus’s newspaper, still in its plastic bag outside her door. He grabbed it and jogged up the stairs by twos, shutting the door noiselessly. Adana was humming somewhere out of sight. Probably the bathroom.
She sounded happy.
Her happiness, it made him catch his breath.
What? What made her happy?
He crept into the bedroom. Reflected in the mirror over the bed, Adana stood in front of the bathroom mirror. She was turning her head from side to side, lifting her chin. She smiled and examined her upper lip. She stuck the point of her tongue out between her teeth. She took a step back and adjusted her breasts inside their brassiere, pulling down the vee of her collar. She smiled again, humming still. Devon backed away unseen.
On the floor of the apartment, he unrolled the newspaper and scanned the headlines. The one he was looking for saw him and leapt behind his eyes:
Man and Woman Found Shot in Salt Pines Apartment
He tried to read the words that followed, but they blurred and slid away across the page. He put one hand on top of the article, to hold it down, and then he put out his other hand and quickly did twenty push-ups.
The happiness, it made him catch his breath.
“Baby? Is that you?”
Devon jumped up and ran to the bathroom, grabbing his girlfriend around her waist and lifting her off her feet.
“Oh, you’re killing me,” she said.
* * * *
SISALPINE — A Phoenix couple were discovered dead in the apartment of recently deceased Salt Pines Retirement Homes resident, Marvel Johnson. Camilo M. Johnson, 57, son of the deceased, and his wife, Alice Kennedy Johnson. 53, had arrived on Friday, May 19, to arrange the burial. According to a county police press release, the bodies were discovered early Monday morning by a Pines employee. “At this point, we’re looking at homicide,” says Detective Sergeant Nedra Coughy.
Irwine let the newspaper fall to the ground, putting his foot on it to keep it from blowing away. Bill and Irene Janson’s windchimes tinkled like a drug store door. Above that, the sound of the wind stirring the pine needles. Just listening, just letting everything else drift away, the sounds were like half-heard speech, like women talking quietly in the next room. Like after a funeral.
Whose funeral?
Once upon a time there was a boy and a doorway.
It was the sliding doors to a room they called the parlor. At Christmas, and once or twice in the summer, Molly would open the doors and pull the sheets from the furniture. The first time he saw her doing it, she told him the shrouded objects were polar bears and she was skinning them, wheeeee! He ran away then, but the next time she coaxed him to the harvesting.
The hall was so cold that his breath hung in front of his face.
If Pa were still alive, his breathing too would steam from the box.
He pressed his eye to the open space between the sliding doors.
The box was so deep.
The box was called a coffin. A man came—a man he’d seen before standing in his pa’s small office—with his deep box of tools and the slabs of wood and he’d hammered the box right there in the room they called the parlor. Molly said they’d have to take the window apart to get Pa and his coffin out of the house. There weren’t no way he’s going out the front door. And it serves him; didn’t never come in that way neither.
Only the minister, Minister Wadsworth, only he came to the front door in the wintertimes. The knife man, the insurance man, the iceman, even the Hoover man knew well enough to go round to the kitchen. It’s their sense of calling, Molly explained. Those as practice closer to the ground have more sense. Minister Wadsworth’s lofty, see.
To better see, he put his hands between the two halves of the doorway and pushed.
Donny, Molly had said yesterday before school, no need to going traipsing off this morning. Sit down and wrap your hands around a coffee. I got something to tell you.
He’d never had coffee before and he wasn’t sure he wanted it, but new was new and he might as well swallow as it didn’t look like there was anything else.
Pa died this morning, Donny. Davy and Dan was in the office with him when it happened and Davy said the doctor said it was his heart. Davy said he just kind of stiffed up.
There was a wide end and a narrow end to the coffin on the table. At Christmas dinner, Pa sat with his back to the window. The narrow end.
Davy said he didn’t say nothing. Not a sound. Twas peaceful, the passing, Donny, and Pa’s gone his way to Heaven to be with God and the Angels. Now drink your coffee, baby; I put lots of sugar in to make it sweetums.
Molly was his sister, but she might have been his mother. The tail end of a family of twelve, Ma and Pa were distant from his daily business of mealtimes and bathtimes, school and chores. When Ma died two winters later, the transition of the house and its economy to the next generation was unremarkable. It was when Molly got married, when she left him and moved across town to her own house, that’s when he felt the passing.
Come along, Donny, she’d said. Robert says it’s all right. You can have the room off the kitchen—you’ve seen it, you know which I’m meaning—and I’ll take care of you like I always have done.
But he wouldn’t bend to her. He would keep himself stiff like the wooden stirring spoon she rubbed with a towel. Stiffly alone and unsure of whether he wanted to see his pa’s face inside that box or not.
He wanted to. He did. Because he wasn’t sure he’d remember it later on if he didn’t study it now. He took a step into the parlor. And stopped.
What was it?
Nothing. Not a sound. Not even his own breathing.
He stepped backwards into the hall.
There.
The sound of his sisters and his aunts and their sisters and aunts, talking in the kitchen, muted, silvery. He played with the sound and the lack of it for a while, stepping in and out of the parlor and the hall, trying to go deeper, to make a game of it. But in the end, he drew the double doors together and went away to the women in the warm kitchen; without dragging one of the chairs from against the wall and knocking its back against the table edge, without climbing up to stand on its velvet cushion, without looking down on the hard blue face of the man called Pa.
* * * *
“’At this point, we’re looking at homicide,” says Detective Sergeant Nedra Coughy.’ Did you really say that, Jefa? Como no, and at the next point we’ll be looking at robbery, o qué?”
Nedra shifted the phone from her right hand to her left and lifted a tiny teacup to her lips. She smiled at the little boy sitting across from her. “Hmmm,” she said. “Delicious.”
“Well, it gets worse,” Robles moaned. “Listen: ’Coughy was promoted last year after the Shell Murder Mystery, a triple homicide involving a group of teens outside the gas station. A local police officer, Stan Morrissey, was later arrested and charged as an accessory.’ Now why do they always have to be bringing that up? What has it to do with the present case? Nada, that’s right. Nada. They’re just going under your skin. You with me, Jefa?”
“Uh huh.” Nedra held out her teacup and raised her eyebrows at the little boy. He knew just what she meant and set to work, pouring and measuring and stirring.
“You coming in what time?”
“In a couple of hours. Around ten.”
“I got the male vic’s old man’s obit: Harry Johnson. Had an international company that insured old cars.”
“What do you mean, ‘old’?”
“Antiguos. Muchos big bucks.”
“Follow the money, Joe.”
“Seguro, Jefa.”
“And Joe: Find me a witness.”
“Está bien. Nos vemos despues.”
Nedra pressed the off button and set the phone on the kitchen table above her head. Lifting her left knee up off the floor, she massaged the joint and the muscle above it. Anymore, there was no time or place that wasn’t painful.
“Hey, Timo: Did you look through that catalog of Christmas presents yet?”
Timo had sprung from tea- to potion-making. All available ingredients were in different stages of concoction. He looked up and frowned.
“Christmas presents?”
“Remember, I gave you that book and said you could circle the things you wanted.”
“For Santa?”
Nedra nodded. “Maybe we could look at it together, over there on the couch.”
Timo leapt up to find the catalog and Nedra nursed herself to her good leg and stood, both hands on the table, stretching it out. The kitchen, drab in the shadow of the radiant outdoors, caved in at the corners. Last night she’d dreamt that she was a waitress and the other waitresses were treating her badly because she was new. She’d scraped a lot of food into a filthy plastic bin, she’d washed dishes and cleaned the salt and pepper shakers trying to make herself a slip of helpfulness. Come to think of it, she’d also had a baby. In a basket. Every once in awhile she’d take him out, carry him around on her arm to make sure he was all right, then put him back.
She was exhausted. The more coffee she drank, the more she wanted to close her eyes.
Grabbing a pen, she went to sit with Timo. The little boy’s feet hung over the edge of the couch, brown and square and strong with their nails like the transluscent shells found along the Gulf. She looked at her watch. Another hour before Liliana arrived. Timo pointed at a photo of a wooden building set.
“Do you like that?”
“Yes.”
Nedra handed him the pen and he circled the item laboriously. He also circled a Velcro dartboard, battling robots and real toy washer and dryer. When he got to the end of the catalog, he returned to the beginning and began circling more things. He stopped and looked up at her.
“I don’t really need all these,” he said. “Santa can choose.”
Nedra put her arm around the boy and squeezed him to her. How was he like Cara? Cara was impatient, exacting, put off by anything out of place. She was a perfect world girl with her vivid imaginings of the ideal.
Just like me, Nedra thought. It was all a waste though—a waste of time, a waste of purpose. Because nothing will ever be just right. Only passion.
Timo pushed the catalog aside and stuck his thumb in his mouth. After a moment he pulled it out and let it rest under his chin. “When does Santa come?” he asked.
“Not for a few weeks. Three weeks. Twenty-one days. Let’s count them together: one…two…three…four…”
Timo leaned his his head against her left breast.
“Would you like me to sing you a song?”
Timo nodded, the thumb back in his mouth.
Nedra began to sing, quietly at first, then jostling the boy with the rhythm. “Oh, you better watch out and you better not cry and you better not pout I’m telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town.” She came to the end and laughed, poking Timo in the tummy.
Timo frowned.
“What if I’ve been medium-good and medium-bad?” he wanted to know, his thumb bent and hidden in his fist. “Will I get some of some things and some of nothing?”
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