Before (17 page)

“Some cousin of my father's—she didn't know better, but you know the French, scared of silence, always creating conversation,” Tika says, her throat tight, “said at the funeral reception to my mother, ‘But isn't it fortunate that Jean-Louis could spend those last weeks with his daughters?' And my mother waited until we got on the plane before she went ballistic on me. It was so fucking bad that when we were flying over the sea I went to another part of the plane to sleep, just to get the hell away from her. Hell, Jess, I'm never going to live in fucking Andover again.”

“It wasn't right of her,” Jesse says, stroking her hand on the table. “Doing that after you just lost your father.”

Tika is remembering. “It didn't seem to affect her much at all, his dying. She just seemed more angry at him. I don't know. Maybe she fucking cried at night when nobody was looking.”

“It sounds like that is how she would handle it.”

“One of the last things my dad told me,” Tika says, “was, ‘Your mother has a lot of sadness in her, and when she goes crazy just think of the sadness and let your anger go, if you can.' To tell you the truth, I was glad it came out that Kascha and I saw him, because it would have been hard for me to keep the lie going. I'm not very good at lying. Kascha was living in Italy, but I was seeing Mom every day.”

“Jesus, Tika. I didn't know about this part of it, seeing your father and hiding it—”

“Yeah, well,” Tika says, “like I was thinking at the show. We all have these ghosts, right?”

“At the show?”

“Elijah. The song you wrote with him.”

“Oh.” Jesse shakes his head. “Poor freaking Elijah. He says he wants to be a star so she'll see what she missed.”

“Not a good reason to do it.”

Jesse shrugs, smiles. “Makes him ambitious, anyway.” He kisses her fingers. Elton John is starting into “I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues.” Jesse leaves bills under his glass, and the John song is still in Tika's head when they walk to the T. Fewer people are out now, the fire performers gone. The Coop clock stands at nearly midnight. The night is exquisite, cool, and some of the kids by the subway, dressed in their baggy prison pants, are kicking around a beanbag, trying to keep it in the air. Down below, the air of the subway is warm and as they wait Tika leans back against Jesse's chest and then the train is a red, howling rectangle; it slows and stops, and the doors open with a hiss and they step in and soon they are rolling beneath the Charles River, into the city.

NINE

Ghost-Man hears the Elton John song as he turns, ten paces behind Alison Tiner, into the grocery aisle. She bypasses the wines, for she has a well-stocked wine rack at home, in her pantry. Her bottles there are dusty, so Ghost-Man has not attempted to take them out to memorize them, imagining obvious streaks of his cloth-glove fingers on the glass, or worse, one of the bottles slipping from his hand, shattering on the floor—that would be all he'd fucking need. So he's read what he could of the bottles as they sat, where the natural kitchen light falls over them at an angle:
Wild Vines Blackberry Merlot
and
Sutter Home
and
Robert Mondavi
whites and
Bella Sera Pinot Grigio.
He passes some of these now with his cart, bright vanilla colors, deep reds.

In the water and soda aisle Ghost-Man grasps a six-pack of Poland Spring, tears one of these off, twists off the cap, takes a meth from his pocket and swallows it down with the water. Soon he will feel the almost unbearable soaring, and that thing that the rice has done to his insides will be in retreat. At the end of the aisle, Alison Tiner is considering premade sauces for the chicken. Her man has been coming less frequently of late to visit, and Ghost-Man has seen her shadow pace across the curtain often after their phone calls. This all followed a time when Alison Tiner was gone for a few days (Ghost-Man had been afforded a chance to inspect her apartment closely then); presumably she had decided to stay
on top
of her lover, to spend whole days with him, as a woman will at an early point in a relationship, and then will realize that her boyfriend is being polite but badly needs some time away from her, some space.
How coquettish you have become since, dear Alison,
Ghost-Man thinks.
Now your phone calls are receptive, rather than assertive. How clever of you!

Alison Tiner glides along with her cart, not nodding at all to the many shoppers who pass her, her head cocked at that odd angle. Ghost-Man knows she is planning. Putting together provincial female plans to draw her man back in: food, sex. He wants to tell her that she needs to exercise some intelligence here and not simply mold herself about the desires of her lover!
The world changes according to what you do, Alison! When you decide—when you even breathe! You affect everything!
He imagines Alison Tiner's dirty feet in the air, jerking slightly with the thrusts of her boyfriend, the male ass clenching, her body molding around his penetration.

He follows her past the breads, the bakery, the small in-store bank; she goes to the register, speaking only a few words to the cashier, runs her credit card through, and takes her receipt and groceries. In Ghost-Man's chute next to her Kascha LaFond stares from a magazine rack—shining lips, eyes of anticipation.

Alison Tiner walks from the store, the small bag in the crook of her left arm, her hair slightly askew, tied at the back of her head, her head cocked a little up and to the left, working her hips, utilitarian. Ghost-Man pays for his groceries, watching her disappear into the glossy window, and puts his cardboard package in the paper bag, slipping it beside the chili and soy milk, and then he is on the sidewalk of Kirkland and out of the bright lights of the store and beneath trees he sees Alison Tiner walking, looking into windows, a small grocery, a Laundromat just closing for the night, a darkened insurance office. She slows, attracted by something in the window of a closed travel agency: Ghost-Man is sailing already, euphoric, and his anger seems to be slipping into his shirt, into the stitching of it—it might be a fluid that escapes his body and hides in this cloth construction. In this lightness he can almost forgive Alison Tiner her stupidity. His knees, his stomach, his shoulders, could lift off the ground altogether, carry him to the height of the trees, where he might look down on the woman staring into the travel office with her longing, might even feel sorry for her in her desperation.

She stares at a poster advertising Rio. Ghost-Man stops a few feet from her, looking at a travel poster himself, feels her glance at him, at his bag of groceries, decide he is not dangerous, go on reading. Ghost-Man gazes at a poster of Greece: white homes on an island, a dark blue sea. He sneaks a look over at Brazil, at Alison Tiner imagining herself there with her man. Ghost-Man wants to tell her that he was on his honeymoon there. He thinks of his wedding to Jenna in Maine, a piano playing, a floor of beautiful hardwood, women whispering to their partners as they danced, their dresses flowing. Large windows of the old inn looking out onto the rocky seacoast. Then the lights of Rio beneath their plane, Jenna asleep on his shoulder.
Do you know,
he wants to ask this woman (who with her cock of head seems to offer the sense that she knows everything)
that on the Brazilian statues of Christ they never hide the whip marks? They tell the
truth.
They show the streaks of
blood,
the fucking
agony.
They don't sanitize this shit the way we do. Americans in their fear of death sanitize
everything,
even
the blood of the Messiah.

It is hard to concentrate for a moment. He might rise into the trees, his thighs feel so incredibly light. What a moment! He might tell Alison Tiner the truth about Christ! He might do it. In this next moment, or this next. He holds his bag close, feeling his heart beat against it, listens to Alison Tiner breathe.

TEN

Jiri is with Helena in the garden, towering heads of sunflowers over them, sunlight on cabbage leaves, smells of oregano, scallions, basil. His sister walks out through the break in the wall and Jiri follows, toddling on the path to the Horák hill, imitating Helena's fingers as she picks blackberries there.
See, taste,
she says, and the blackberries fall apart easily, tart in his mouth. There is the thick smell of wild grass and trees, the smell of Bohemia, and when she moves the sunlight seems to whiten her face above him.

But now he is an old man on Trowbridge Street again and the memory book is open on the table. There is sweat at his cheeks, and under his T-shirt. He has written two and a half pages of Czech and English and some German; sometimes just a few words represent whole thoughts—the writing abandoned when he got lost in memory. These sections are frustrating to read over, but rather than correct them he presses on. Near the window a crow is cawing, an ancient assault on the night. Dark leaves brush against the screen.

Jiri blinks. His lover Alena is somewhere in his memory, too, and he remembers that he wanted to say more about her. He can hear the sounds of insects and a car door, perhaps on Irving Street, slamming. The garage roof is below him, and his brow creases at what he is unable to do. He closes his eyes and concentrates, then opens them again to the light. He takes one of Marjorie's fresh sheets. He writes in Marjorie's ovals first:

Who:
Alena

What:
stopping the train

Where:
in the forest outside
Plze

When:
1943

Start with a sound,
he thinks—Marjorie Legnini often emphasizes this—
of kestrels in trees.
It is November, sky gray, very late afternoon. The birds call and slip from tree to tree above him. Jiri lies on the forest floor, his submachine gun beside him, looks down through branches at the railroad, black-and-silver rails. There are more trees on the opposite side of the tracks, and then the trees clear and there is a stretch of wild grass on both sides, bled nearly white by cool autumn, and about two hundred meters away an abandoned warehouse and, distantly, a steel bridge and warped loading dock, and the tracks curling south. The sun above is a flat white coin behind clouds.

On the train that is coming, according to Resistance members working with Czechoslovak Railways, there is a physicist named
Jedli
ka,
formerly of the Prague Technical University, who must be taken alive, along with his wife and as many Jews as they can save;
Jedli
ka
and the other Jews shall arrive in a single cattle car, eighty strong, at the end of a string of twelve freight cars that will be carrying munitions from the
koda
Works (these must be blown, quickly, with plastic explosives) and supplies for the Russian front. There will be extra guards on the train; they will be killed or incapacitated. This, along with getting to and opening the car with the Jews, is Jiri's job. Jiri checks his watch: twenty-three minutes left.