Endless Love (50 page)
“No. I’m late. And I’m not sure I really want to know. I hate confessions. They always make me think I’m supposed to match them with a bit of breast-beating of my own. I don’t want to get into it.”
“No. You have to. You want to know.”
“You are
so
wrong. I don’t. At least not today.” She put her hand on my face and rubbed her palm against the grain of my whiskers. “You look strange unshaved. I don’t think it suits you. You’re not growing a beard, are you?”
“No. I just haven’t shaved.”
“Good. I think you should get on the bus, get up to Stoughton, and hope to God that Jade’s not home when you arrive and you’ll have time to shave—and bathe.”
“Ann, I want to—”
“No,” she said, stepping back and preparing to close the door. “Not now. If you want to tell me something, write a letter. I hope that the mere fact that you’ve found my daughter won’t forever discontinue our correspondence. I like you in letters and I love writing to you. Confess to me in a letter. Now go.”
She closed the door and I heard her footsteps going back into her apartment. “I killed Hugh,” I whispered to the door. I thought of shouting it out, but it would be stupid, it would be cruel. And—this thought presented itself in a tone distinct from the others—what did I really know? Maybe Ingrid wanted to talk to Jade about something else. Wouldn’t it have been a waste to try to expose myself before Ingrid exposed me, only to find that I’d really been in no danger at all?
It was eight in the evening when I reached Stoughton. The sky was a low inkwash and behind the swollen clouds lightning flashed, throwing a skittery bleak light that looked as false as a stage effect. It was a simple hitchhike from the bus to our house in North Stoughton, but I walked—past the Main Street Clothiers, past the church on whose lawn Jade and I took our lunch, past the art supplies store where I’d recently put ten dollars down toward a set of drawing pens for Jade, and finally into a Dunkin’ Donuts where I tortured my growling stomach with five donuts and three cups of coffee. Powdered sugar was on my lap and my hands shook. I looked down and my suitcase was gone—no, it was on the other side of the stool. I took it in hand and went to a phonebooth. I didn’t think I should appear home without first speaking to Jade.
The phone rang at least a dozen times before I hung up. I felt a peculiar relief but it was blown aside by a rush of panic. A thought had been murmuring all day behind my will not to think it: Ingrid telling Jade the truth of Hugh’s death might ignite a terror and grief in Jade that would make it so she wouldn’t want to live. I put my last two dollars on the counter and left, already starting to run. It was at least three miles to home and within a minute I was breathing with effort and in pain. Carrying my suitcase was impossible and I tossed it aside, with the idea I’d come back some other time to retrieve it. The world before my eyes bounced up and down and I held onto my senses as if they would otherwise take flight and leave me forever. I was running as fast as I could. I had to rescue Jade, but I must have known that was not the case because already I was lying, telling myself that there was a way I could somehow explain myself to her: the real danger I wanted to rescue her from was the danger of holding Ingrid’s information without me there to counter it.
The house was dark when I finally arrived and the door and windows were locked. I pounded on the front door and punched my finger against the bell a hundred times. Then I went to the back and started again. I went to the back of the yard where I could see the small darkened attic window and I called Jade’s name. I threw pebbles against the window, ran out of pebbles, looked for a stone and couldn’t find one, and finally tossed my shoes. The first shoe sailed past and landed somewhere at the side of the house; the second hit direct with a thud, but didn’t break the glass. I waited and then the light went on. I don’t know how much time passed but finally a shadow moved across the window and then I saw her standing, naked, looking down at me. I called out to her, lifting my hands—they felt so heavy. She struggled to open the window and then realized she’d locked it. She turned the latch and the window slid open.
“Go away. You have to go away.” She stared down at me. The light was behind her but I could see her eyes in the darkness. Her chest was heaving. “I know
everything
,” she said. The window slammed down.
I raced to the back door and beat against it with open hands. My world, the only world I knew, the only one I wanted, was broken into pieces. I had no world. I could do
anything.
I beat against the door, I called her name, I threw my shoulder into the door hoping to break it down. It did not budge, and as I bounced off of it I brought my arm around, reaching over the railing of the soft wooden porch, and without a moment’s hesitation pushed my fist through the kitchen window, through the old glass and the saggy wire screen as well. I withdrew, picked a piece of glass out of my knuckle, and tried to see through the darkness if I was bloody. I couldn’t see but I felt the wetness, oily through the cracks of my fingers.
I climbed onto the porch railing and somehow got myself onto the window sill, an inch ledge of tender wood and peeling paint. My fingers gripped the frame and my stockinged feet did their best to hold on to the ledge; to keep myself from falling back, I leaned my weight against the glass and tried to knee a hole large enough for me to crawl in. I neglected to simply reach in to the hole I’d already made and unlock the window. On the third try the window fell away in two huge jagged sheets. I kicked through the screen and as I did, the light in the kitchen shuddered on. I lowered myself in and was hit in the shins—a terrible crack that knocked the wind out of me. The pain spread in every direction and then I was hit again and again. I held on to the window frame with its miniature Alps of splintered glass, three-quarters of my body in the house and my head sending cries into the night air. I was hit again—this time in the knees—and I let go, falling into the kitchen.
Jade was facing me, holding a broom, her hands baseball style near the straw, wagging the red handle at me. I took a stumbling step toward her and she swung again, missing me completely but causing me to stop.
“Don’t,” I said. I closed my hand and my fingertips ground a shard of glass into my palm.
She was naked except for her underwear. She was panting and shaking at the same time, as if running through a freezing rain. There were lines on one side of her face and her hair was flat—she’d been trying to sleep. She continued to wag the broom handle at me but her eyes didn’t seem to be looking at me. She moved her head from side to side, swallowing hard. She stepped forward and threw the broom onto the floor, moved closer until she was near enough to touch, and there she stood, still and immobile. I reached for her, put my arms around her, pressed her unyielding body close to mine.
“We have to talk,” I said. “I know what Ingrid told you and it’s true. But it’s not all. Jade. Jade?”
Slowly, her hands came up and pressed against my chest, pushing me back. “If you stay here, if you stay in this house, no, you have to go, I don’t want to be near you, because if you stay in this house I’ll kill myself, David. OK?” She breathed deeply and burst into tears. She covered her eyes and her fingers were ice white against her scarlet face. “Go away,” she shouted through her tears. “Go away.”
I turned, unlocked the back door, and left. And in my loss, which was absolute, I think I truly did believe Jade would reach out and stop me, or call out, but as soon as I closed the door behind me she rushed to it and turned the lock. I stood on the porch and looked at the wide open window but I had no heart left to climb through. I waited until the light went out and I listened for her footsteps as they went away, but she glided without a sound. A ghost.
A little time is missing. I was wondering where I would stay. I went to our neighbors, the Goldmans, but their lights were on and I shied away. I didn’t know what I looked like that night: a shoeless man with a bloody fist, unshaved, unslept, panicked. I wandered, trying to collect my thoughts. My shirt was wet; it was raining. I wanted to think of somewhere to stay. When I’m particularly exhausted it feels like a low-voltage electrical charge snakes slowly across the top of my skull. In Rockville I tried to have it diagnosed but it apparently is nothing, what we call nothing. And then I was back home, in the yard, staring at the lightless house. There was no line of demarcation between the black roof and the rainy sky. It was all a mass looming before me. There was no longer any question of breaking back into the house but I needed a place to sleep.
I ended up in the kennels Jade had built for the dogs and their pups. I suppose she’d been waiting for me to help her tear them down. There was hay on the ground and two-by-fours and tarpaper to keep the rain off of me. The pen smelled reassuringly of the dogs, fur and shit and breath and milk and reality. I crawled in feeling very fortunate to have found a place so perfect and so near. I placed my head where I could see the house and tried to prepare myself for the morning when Jade would see me and we could begin the long process of making sense of what we knew. I thought about making love with her in the Hotel McAlpin and decided it would help if I remembered that night in every detail, but as soon as Jade asked me into bed I fell asleep.
I slept through the dawn. The light was on me and Jade woke up, looked through the window, and saw me asleep in the kennel. It must have terrified her, made her feel there was no dealing with me any longer. I don’t know what the sequence of events was. She got dressed—but before or after she made the call? She put on a pair of khaki pants and a blue broadcloth shirt, rolling the cuffs midway to the elbow. Blue espadrilles. Then the call. I don’t think, somehow, she’d call the police naked. She was probably hoping that in the time it took her to dress I would have miraculously awakened, that she would look out and the pen would be empty, the straw mashed down in my form. But I was still there, asleep—no, beginning to stir. I remember opening my eyes before the police came, remember seeing the fresh pale sky, the smell of the straw, touching the cuts on my hand and falling asleep, deeper this time, submerging myself as if I knew I would not sleep in my miserable freedom again for a long, long while. “There’s someone here who—” Jade said to the police. But who is what? Threatening me? Who has killed my father? Who has broken into my house? Who has gone mad? I don’t know how she described me to the Stoughton police. She didn’t tell them I was wanted in Chicago because I’d been at the station for hours before they learned that. She probably just told them to come and remove me and didn’t bother with explanations. And when they arrived, she came with them to the back of the house so I could see her as well as them. One of the cops kicked me in the shoulder and when I woke I knew exactly what had happened. “Get up,” one of them said, in a fierce voice, as if expecting the worst from me. I hesitated for a moment, trying to think if there was anything else I could do, if I could alter the rush of events. The cop kicked at me again and Jade cried out. “You don’t have to do that,” she said, and one of the cops said something to her and I stood up. They grabbed me by both arms as if I were a truly dangerous man and they dug their fingers into me and yanked me this way and that, committing those small meannesses that break your heart. It was just a routine morning arrest and it should have been simple and calm; I don’t know what secret revulsion I touched in them by letting myself be discovered in a dog pen. Oh, I’m sure I looked like a creep, but I was hardly awake and I doubt if I looked dangerous. I think it was because I looked so unprotected and so obviously uninterested in defending myself. They walked me away and I moved my feet to keep from being dragged. I tried to look behind me, to see Jade, but they grabbed me harder and I had that morning’s first surge of terror: These guys really
hate
me, I thought. They pushed me into the back of their squad car. I could look back at the house then but Jade wasn’t in sight. She was still in the back, looking down at the kennels, remembering the dogs and how we had raised them and how they’d almost gotten us to start a family of our own. And she was probably shaking quite a bit and feeling the beginnings of doubt over whether she’d done the right thing. The car sped along. I was in handcuffs but there was no wire fence separating me from the cops in the front seat, like police cars have in cities. I always had heard how much handcuffs hurt so it was no surprise, but I wasn’t prepared for how violently the pain would turn my insides. I was sweating; I thought I might vomit into my lap and I had a huge icy fear of disgracing myself.
Whenever I had thought of the consequences of my leaving Chicago, I rooted my dread to the image of a return to Rockville, of pacing the grassy stretches, of the powder blue Wyon, Illinois, sky, and the blond children with their fingers wrapped around the black Victorian fence peering in at us. It was an image of exile, of fury, and, of course, of unacceptable loss because it meant that once again I would be forcibly separated from Jade. There were times during my life as a fugitive when the fear of capture was so great that it was nearly impossible not to torture myself further by imagining in detail what it would be like to be in Rockville again. But I was generally successful in keeping my mind off it, successful in keeping all the little ghoulish actors gagged and tied in their mental chairs, and it was just as well because what actually happened after I was returned to the authority of the Illinois State Police was far worse than anything I would have imagined—all of that dread would have prepared me for nothing, nothing at all. I was treated worse for violating the conditions of parole than I was for setting fire to a house and nearly burning a family to death. The first time I had broken the law of the world; but now I had broken the
police’s
law, and they treated that sort of transgression with more severity.
After a series of delays, continuances, appeals, and what I suppose is normal bureaucratic foot-dragging, after questionings, tests, after transfers from one lock-up to another prison, and then to yet another prison, the court decided to send me to a medium-sized penal facility in Volkshill, Illinois, a small town about midway between Chicago and Wyon. I was placed in a cell with a man named Tommy Rita, a guy in his forties who was somewhere near the end of an eight- to ten-year sentence for black marketing cigarettes. Tommy looked vibrant, practically suntanned, and did two hours’ calisthenics in our cell each afternoon to keep his small, stocky body in reasonable shape. At night, in whispers, he liked to tell me how getting popped for avoiding the state cigarette tax only proved how stupid the law was. He had, he said, beaten people to a pulp, firebombed a restaurant, committed innumerable burglaries, married a woman in Hegwisch and another in Michigan City, and all they could get him on was a “little shitass cigarette rap.” I never believed Tommy’s list of felonies.