Hot Springs (31 page)

Bernice bit a fingernail. “You want unstable? I almost killed someone tonight. But it didn’t happen. Maybe this is the other side
of that. There’s a balance sheet, right? If I have a debit, then there’s a credit due somewhere, don’t you think?” She took the remainder of her tea to the sink and dumped it. “I’m going back out on the porch.”

Landis followed her. It was raining again, the street reflecting the light in streaks and patches. “You went to their church?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah. She begged me. And I was bored. I didn’t have much to do, really. You can only watch so much TV and read so many mysteries.”

“So, what are you thinking?”

“That it’s over. We have to call the police. That this is my fault for having a sleepwalking gene.”

An SUV alive with thumping bass, its windows tinted so it was impossible to see in, roared noisily up the block.

He touched her arm. “We should have planned better,” he said. “I went back to his house,” she said. “Then I pushed him off his roof.”

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m not joking. I pushed him off. He fell through a skylight. He’s OK—a little bruised up, I guess. I was feeling lucky for a while there. I told him I was with you.”

“You did?”

“We’ll call the police, and then they’ll want to know our names, and they’ll want to know where Emily lives, and where she goes to school, and all that stuff. And even if Tessa doesn’t rat us out, what difference will it make? They’ll get to the truth, anyway, one way or another. You need to get out of here now. Go back to that place you rented and see if you can get your deposit back. I won’t mention you. Tessa won’t. Hopefully Emily, when we find her, won’t.” She looked up at him in the yellow porch light. “I’m really sorry,” she said. Then she kissed him quickly on the lips, got her keys out, and walked up the sidewalk, headed north.

“Where are you going?” Landis called after her. “Bernice?” But she was just a shadow, and then he saw her getting into her car. He watched the taillights come on, watched her pull jerkily out into traffic. It was amazing she hadn’t been pulled over yet, the way she drove, and those Colorado plates not even registered to that car.

D
onald Click approached the hole cautiously, for fear that the asphalt under his sneakers might give way, but the earth held for him, and he was able to get right up to the edge. What he was doing was illegal, he understood, but he doubted the bean counters at city hall had figured out a standard fine for unauthorized sinkhole viewing. Traffic had been rerouted starting one block north, and this whole section of Cathedral was dead quiet. He stood with his umbrella held over him, distinctly disappointed. There were great black hunks of road, broken and almost appetizing, like torn bits of overcooked brownie. He could see a lot of mud, and some sort of enormous pipe, but not much else. He’d hoped for more. Himself a basement dweller now, he felt he was coming closer to the secrets of the underworld, and things like pipes and ducts attracted him. There was a connection here, he thought, with the ancients. On
their honeymoon, he’d taken Eve to Arles, shown her the spot on the Alyscamps, that Roman lane of the dead, where Van Gogh and the visiting Gauguin had painted the same day, the two masters taking their easels with them. After, they’d visited the cryptoporticus, a series of underground passages that were all that remained of the forum. She’d hated it, but he’d liked the coolness, the darkness, which was total save for the occasional small area lit from a window cut high above. These nether regions were what endured, what got passed along from generation to generation. Immune to fashion, utilitarian, essential. Sometimes, lying in his bed, he mentally mapped his position with respect to the rest of downtown Baltimore, and it amused him to think he was closer to the steam tunnels and water mains—the arteries and tendons of the city—than to the glassed-in offices of the suit-and-tie crowd.

That long-ago trip, he and his new wife had also visited Italy, staying in the cheapest hotels, playing professor and naughty student nightly, traipsing through museums and churches by day to see frescoes and mosaics, the fingers and preserved blood of saints. He’d been at the beginning of his bad life, slipping casually into the coat of his new identity, corrupter of youth, a man who lusted after his own students. It didn’t bother him. He wanted to tell her everything he knew, to fill her with himself. It was the spring of ’75. The United States had just pulled out of Saigon. They hadn’t told anyone they were getting married, had just quietly gone down to city hall. He lived on Tyson Street back then, in a thin, tall house two hundred years old, painted purple and red. They slept naked together on the small bed, fans arrayed around them, talked about buying a mansion together, about seeing the world, about raising a family.

When Eve died, she’d been reading a self-help book called
You Rock!
He still had it—it had been on her nightstand at Ojo de la
Vaca, the arts colony where she’d won a residency. He’d gone out there, canceling classes, flying into Albuquerque, then driving to the morgue in Bernalillo. Those hot wires so tightly laid inside her head, day after day, fraying a little more and a little more, until finally one melted and sparked. He knew what had happened, more or less. A pill slipped into her hand by another resident. Driving her rental car in the early evening to the parking area—perhaps she’d already been there during the day once or twice—hiking the quarter-mile trail up to where the hot water bubbled out of the ground into three separate pools, each a different temperature. The rock walls and ledges of the largest pool colorfully textured with the wax drippings from years and years of candles. Taking her clothes off and stepping naked and alone into the hottest of the three and settling in and closing her eyes, the Ecstasy having already raised her body temperature dangerously, the water moving the process along. As heatstroke overcame her, she hallucinated, imagined herself not in New Mexico at all, but a guest in the baths of Caracalla, surrounded by high walls of polished travertine, gazed down upon by statues of gods and goddesses, elaborate mosaics of Neptune and dolphins and whales spread out before her, shimmering under the surface of the water. Half an hour turned into an hour, turned into two. The guests of the baths came and went, the sun played through the high windows, sent shadows traveling across the domed ceiling. She slipped farther into the water, let it fill her mouth, her ears, her nose. It grew dark.
I rock
, she told herself, the words seeming to separate themselves from any meaning they might have previously held. Someone called out that the baths were closing. The sound was distant. No one came for her. No one came.

Overhead he heard a helicopter flapping into range of the sinkhole, and he could see its searchlight slicing the mist, hunting some criminal. He imagined a figure running through the streets, ducking
into one of the alleys where the old slave houses used to be, and the carriage houses. In Naples, someone had stolen her camera right off her shoulder. He remembered now how angry he’d been—as if he’d failed in some way to protect her—whereas Eve had simply taken it in stride. In spite of her incompetence in so many things, he’d always suspected she might actually understand the world better than he did. Mean dogs let her approach and pet them. Perpetually lost, she somehow always managed to end up where she was going.

But she’d betrayed him, and that was the simple fact of it. Betrayed him for a musician when what she knew about music—well, she didn’t know anything about music. Perhaps he’d been too difficult, playing her Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins and saying,
OK, what’s the difference
? when it turned out that she had trouble telling a sax from a trumpet. That first year with her out of the house he’d gone over it and over it in his head, trying to pin down the exact moment when things had turned, when she’d gone from being a person with occasional bouts of mania to a mania with occasional moments of personhood.

He wanted to blame it all on her illness, but somehow, he never could. She’d
wanted
to be crazy, had found comfort in it, had found an excuse for all the bad behavior that was bottled up inside her, waiting to get turned loose.

The helicopter circled again, then moved on, the clattering sound of its rotor receding into the distance.

And then the girl had started hating him. He hadn’t deserved it, hadn’t treated her badly, hadn’t even kept her from seeing her mother, at least on the occasions that Eve showed up to do something, go to the movies, eat an ice cream. Bernice blamed him for what happened, sided with her mother—that was natural. But there was something else in her, too, a hostility and suspicion. She knew, as did he, that he was
pretty much a fake. He was not a professor: he was a person who played at being a professor. He’d held one visiting position after another, but none had ever turned into a real job. His paintings had sold reasonably well over the years, but in that respect he had failed to come even close to achieving what he thought he deserved. Perhaps if he’d been a little crazy himself he would have had more success. And so he’d simply decided to ignore the facts and live as if he were who he had intended to be, and that persona had necessitated a degree of arrogance—why not just call it snobbery?—that had removed him not only from his wife and his child, but also from himself.

He took a step back from the edge. His knees ached, as did his back and neck. He could hear easy-listening jazz being piped out into the empty street from the front of the Lord Calvert Hotel.

Turning his head, he was surprised to see Bernice standing a few feet from him, her hands on her hips. “On the highway coming here,” she said, “we passed a big sign that said Report Suspicious Activity. Suppose this counts?”

“Well, hello,” he said.

“A lot of mud down there.” She joined him and peered over and down, then whistled. “You think it means something?”

“I think it’s a hole in the road,” he said. “Of course, you can read it any way you wish.”

“Tonight, I’m thinking it’s suspicious activity.”

He didn’t respond. He remembered her roundabout way of getting to whatever it was she wanted to say.

“Do you really think it?” she asked.

“What?”

“What you told that woman from Colorado? That I’m unstable?”

“I don’t know how to answer that. I’m not a doctor. Have you been to a doctor? Do you even have insurance?”

She kicked a bit of gravel into the hole. “No, I don’t have insurance. I don’t have anything, really. I’ve been living a stupid life, I guess you’d have to say.” Bernice sat down suddenly, leaning her head against his leg. “Dad?” she said.

“What? What is it?”

“Oh, Dad. I lost her. I went out, just to see. I had to. I had to think through all the possibilities, not just for me, but for her. So I went, and then when I came back, Landis told me she was gone, and he didn’t know where.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.” He put his hand on her head, felt the soft hair, remembered suddenly what she’d been like to hold as a baby, how only he could make her calm down some nights when she woke crying, how he’d walk her up and down the hall, humming “Darn that Dream” until she’d gurgle and smile and drift off. There had been nothing intervening between them back then, no complications. Just the cry and the comfort.

“You don’t?”

“Not really. Take a deep breath and try again.”

She barely whispered it. “Emily wandered off. She’s lost.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just did. I was headed for your door, but then I saw you out here.”

“We used to find you in odd places. Once, you were under the sink in the kitchen. Your mother was for locking you into your room, but I didn’t like the idea. She’s probably in the house somewhere, and you just haven’t found her. I’ll come—I’ll help look. I have experience. It’s my house.”

Bernice stood back up. Her eyes were swollen, but she wasn’t crying. “I started all this, and I should never have done it. It’s like a scab
I just picked at and picked at, you know. Remember how I’d do that, how I couldn’t leave anything alone?”

More than ever, she reminded him of Eve. “Once, on a car ride back from Maine, you picked your mosquito bites so badly you bled all over the backseat upholstery. We had to make an emergency stop at a McDonald’s for napkins.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Oh, I got most of it out. Dish detergent and a toothbrush. That was the old Volvo.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“She’ll turn up,” he promised.

“We’re calling the police. I’ve sent Landis away. I’ll never see him again.”

“You’re being overly dramatic.”

“I’m not. It’s serious. Can I tell you something?” she asked.

“Is it something I want to hear?”

“No. It’s not something I want to say, either. It’s something no one knows.”

“Then you’d better not.” He hesitated. “That’s not the kind of relationship we have.”

“I want to tell you. It’s the worst thing. I want to tell you the worst thing I’ve ever done.” She came over and touched his shoulder. “I’ve got no one else to say it to.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“You don’t?”

“No. What difference will it make?”

“I don’t know.”

“Exactly. There’s no reason, then. Whatever it is, you did it. It’s done. Telling me won’t change it.”

She stuck her hands in her pockets and kicked at a pebble, sending
it flying into the hole. He knew she thought he didn’t love her, and he wanted to tell her she was wrong, that he did, but he had no idea how to put such a sentence together.

“You really think she’s in the house someplace?” she asked.

“I do. I know you want to imagine her scooped up by child slave traders and shipped off to Arabia, but the simplest answers are often the right ones.” He didn’t even know if he believed what he was saying, but it seemed important to sound calm for her. He could still do it, could still bring her down from her anxious state. “Go home and see. And then call me and let me know, all right?”