I Am No One You Know (27 page)

Kyle was taken by surprise, Mrs. Jackson had suddenly turned so belligerent. “I—I’m sorry. I only wanted—”

“Well, we don’t want your sympathy. We don’t need your god-damn sympathy, Mister. You can just go back to New Jersey or wherever the hell you came from, intruding in my daughter’s life.”

Mrs. Jackson’s eyes were moist and dilated and accusing. Her skin looked as if it would be scalding to the touch. Kyle was certain she wasn’t drunk, he couldn’t smell it on her breath, but possibly she was drugged. High on crystal meth, that was notorious in this part of Pennsylvania, run-down old cities like Easton.

Kyle protested, “But, Mrs. Jackson, you and your family would want to know, wouldn’t you? I mean, what had happened to…” He paused awkwardly, uncertain how to continue. Why should they want to know? Would he have wanted to know, in their place?

In a voice heavy with sarcasm Mrs. Jackson said, “Oh, sure. You tell me, Officer. You got all the answers.”

She heaved herself to her feet. A signal it was time for her unwanted visitor to depart.

Kyle had dared to take out his wallet. He was deeply humiliated but determined to maintain his composure. “Mrs. Jackson, maybe I can help? With the funeral expenses, I mean.”

Hotly the little woman said, “We don’t want anybody’s charity! We’re doing just fine by ourselves.”

“Just a—token of my sympathy.”

Mrs. Jackson averted her eyes haughtily from Kyle’s fumbling fingers,
fanning her face with a
TV Guide.
He removed bills from his wallet, fifty-dollar bills, a one-hundred-dollar, folded them discreetly over, and placed them on an edge of the table.

Still, the indignant Mrs. Jackson didn’t thank him. Nor did she trouble herself to see him to the door.

W
HERE WAS HE?
A neighborhood of dingy wood-frame bungalows, rowhouses. Northern outskirts of Easton, Pennsylvania. Mid-afternoon: too early to begin drinking. Kyle was driving along potholed streets uncertain where he was headed. He’d have to cross the river again to pick up the big interstate south…At a 7-Eleven he bought a six-pack of strong dark ale and parked in a weedy cul-de-sac between a cemetery and a ramp of the highway, drinking. The ale was icy-cold and made his forehead ache, not disagreeably. It was a bright blustery October day, a sky of high scudding clouds against a glassy blue. At the city’s skyline, haze of the hue of chewing tobacco spittle. Certainly Kyle knew where he was: but where he was mattered less than something else, something crucial that had been decided, but he couldn’t recall what that was, that had been decided, just yet. Except he knew it was crucial. Except so much that seemed crucial in his younger years had turned out to be not so, or not much so. A girl of about fourteen pedaled by on a bicycle, ponytail flying behind her head. She wore tight-fitting jeans, a backpack. She’d taken no notice of him as if he, and the car in which he was sitting, were invisible. With his eyes he followed her. Followed her as swiftly she pedaled out of sight. Such longing, such love suffused his heart! He watched the girl disappear, stroking a sinewy throbbing artery just below his jaw-line.

C
RISSIE?
H
ELLO.
”

The call came out of the void. That nasal voice so like her own. She could not have expected it, who had not thought of him in years. Instinctive now, unthinking, in the way in which we maintain our balance if we begin to slip on ice, was her response to well-intentioned queries about her family: she had none.

Her mother had died of breast cancer when she, Crista, was six years old, and her father and nine-year-old brother had died in an automobile accident in Olcott, New York, her hometown, only a few weeks after her mother’s death.

Such explanations, when she felt obliged to make them, she made, quietly. The dignity of her manner—even as a child Crista had cultivated dignity, out of repugnance for its opposite—forestalled pity. More important for Crista, it forestalled further questions.

How terrible for you…

Well, I was very young. I was taken in by an aunt. I didn’t lack for love.

All of this was both true and not-true. Certainly Crista had lacked
for love, but she wasn’t one to have expected love. Her original family had not been loving. Her father, maybe. At times. When not drinking. Her mother, Crista could not remember clearly.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

Now the call. “Crissie? It’s Henry.”

As if he’d needed to identify himself.

For there was his voice, nasal, reedy, disagreeable to her ears, the unmistakable accent of western New York State she’d long tried to obliterate from her own speech. At once she’d recognized that voice. And there was “Crissie”: no one had called her “Crissie” in the life after Olcott, New York. Meaning no one had called her that childhood name in more than twenty years.

Rapidly she calculated, even as she held the receiver to her ear trying to make sense of his imploring urgent words: it was June 2002 now, the deaths had occurred in June 1981. This meant, Henry was thirty years old. Thirty!

She tried to envision him: a spindly-limbed nine-year-old with eyes dark and luminous as their father’s, and their mother’s fair, carroty-brown hair. Henry, an adult. In a way, it was not possible. Her brain clamped down, against it.

Crista herself was twenty-seven. This seemed to her fully possible, probable. In fact, she felt older. Never would she become one of those tiresome individuals who profess, and perhaps actually feel, disbelief at their age. As a child of six she’d become an adult, and she had liked it. To be an adult—even as a child—is to exercise judgment, control. It’s to successfully resist self-pity and to forestall pity, the most despicable of human responses, in others.

No one, not even a lover, in a succession of lovers, had been encouraged to call her “Crissie.”

Yet there was the name, repeated. Punctuating her brother’s conversation. Forcing her to acknowledge, yes she was the sister he could think of only as “Crissie,” for indeed it would have been unnatural for him to have called her “Crista,” as it would have been unnatural, impossible, for either of them as children to have called their parents by their first names.

Young parents they’d been. Married young, and having their babies young. Very young to have died: in their early thirties.

Crista was “Crista Ward.” Her aunt had adopted her. Henry remained “Henry Eley,” the old surname. She would wonder how he’d looked her up but supposed their aunt had informed him, where Crista had moved. She resented it, but would never speak of it to their aunt who had only meant well.

Henry was asking, “Can we see each other? I think it’s time.”

Crista’s response was instinctive, unthinking. “Why?”

An unexpected response, and unanswerable. Henry was silent for a moment. If their conversation was a Ping-Pong game, Henry had failed to return his opponent’s fiercely placed ball, he’d failed even to see it flying at him.

Henry said, not so much arguing as presenting his case, and the logic of his case, “Because I’m here, in the northeast, Crissie. And it’s been so long. Mostly I live in the Bay Area. San Francisco. I was thinking I’d like to rent a car, and drive to see you, and the two of us could drive up to Olcott together, to the lake. We could do that.”

Crista could not believe the words she was hearing.

“You haven’t been back, have you?” Henry paused, as if hearing Crista’s murmured reply, though in fact she said nothing, nor even framed words of reply. “I haven’t, either. Of course.”

Crista said, “I’m going to hang up now.”

“Wouldn’t you want to? Revisit Olcott? After so long? June nineteenth, 1981.”

Crista hung up.

No. Never.

Though she understood that, through her life, she’d been awaiting such a call. From her lost brother Henry, or from someone. (In that twilight consciousness between sleep and waking, surely it was her parents she awaited. Their voices, their hands on her. Where their young attractive faces had been, Crista’s memory could provide only blurs, like faces seen through wavy glass, or underwater. In the worst of the dreams, Crista opened her eyes wide and was blind. The wider she opened her eyes, the more helplessly blind.)

Possibly some of the belligerence in her character originated in this: she’d been awaiting a call, an explanation. She was owed this. A revelation. It was like waiting for a phone to ring—the phone would not ring. Except if you left, the phone would ring, and you would miss your opportunity, if only to repudiate the call and the caller and to replace the receiver. Thank you. No.

Now the phone had rung. The call had come. But it was her brother who knew no more than she, why what had happened to them had happened. Her brother who could not know more than she knew. (For how could he? She refused to believe this might be possible, though he was three years older.) Her brother who could not tell her what she wanted to hear.
Your father did not kill your mother. Another person killed her on the beach. Your father died because he couldn’t bear the loneliness. His death was an accident.

Yet that call, that revelation, had never come. She was ready, long she’d been ready to hear it. But it had not come. Another call had come in its place, unwanted.

Aloud she vowed, “No. Never.”

Y
ET: THREE DAYS
later, there was Crista Ward waiting on the front stoop of her apartment building for her brother Henry Eley whom she had not seen in twenty-one years. He’d called back, and Crista must have weakened and changed her mind. Somehow, this had happened.

It wasn’t like Crista, such a reversal. Still, it had happened.

She was dressed casually yet elegantly. Pale linen trousers, a silk blouse, and a fine-knit cotton sweater. These were designer sports clothes of understated quality, not conspicuous. She wore her hair that was a faded red-brown, prematurely threaded with silver, trimmed very short and curled against her head tight as a cap, needlessly clamped in place with a rod-like silver barrette behind her left ear. This was Crista Ward’s distinctive look: calculated, stylish, nothing left to chance.

She was bringing a single overnight bag. For they had to stay overnight, the drive was too far otherwise. Crista supposed they would find a motel at Olcott Beach. She seemed to remember motels in that area, a middle-income resort area. Along the pebbly southern shore of Lake Ontario, numerous small motels. They’d made no definite
plans beforehand, at least Crista didn’t know of any plans her brother Henry might have made. They would revisit the old cottage on the lake—from a distance, probably, since strangers would be living in it now—and they would walk along the beach. They would talk together, become reacquainted. Why? Crista wondered. It was just as well, Crista had no lover at the present time. She could not have explained to him, why.

My lost brother. I must love him.

Olcott Beach retained in her memory an aura of festivity, excitement. There was a boardwalk overlooking the lake, there were amusement rides: Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, bumper cars. High-pitched tinkly music. Food smells, hot and greasy. She and Henry had been taken on the rides by—who? The adult figures were blurred. One was meant to be Mommy, the other had to be Daddy. When she tried to see, she could not. Vividly she recalled the taste of pink cotton candy, though. Root beer, chocolate Tastee-Freez in cones. She never ate sweets now, disliked the taste of sugar. Rather swallow a mouthful of ground glass than a mouthful of sugar.

Henry had planned to arrive by 11
A.M.
He was driving north to Albany from New York City where he’d been staying for several days. Yet it was 11:20
A.M.
when at last he drove up to the curb. By which time Crista was feeling fierce, indignant. Her first words to the man she took to be her brother were: “You’re late. I’ve been waiting out here, and you’re late.” Why she’d chosen to wait outside, instead of in her apartment on the sixth floor, she had no idea.

The bearded man, grayer-haired than she’d envisioned, and thinner-faced, stared at her for a long moment as if disbelieving. Then he smiled, a smile that struck her as both boyish and aggressive, and said, “Crissie?
You?
Climb in.”

She did. She would think afterward she’d had her choice of telling him she wasn’t going with him after all, she’d changed her mind, but instead, face smarting as if she’d been slapped, she climbed into the car. Cheap compact rental car, she’d bumped her head on the door-frame. She could have wept.
This isn’t Henry. I don’t know this man.
She fumbled to take the hand extended to her. For a moment she was fearful of crying. Her heart beat in fury, refusing to cry. The bearded man was marveling, “Well. Crissie. Look at you.” His eyes may have glistened
with tears. His teeth shone with smiling. He was trying to embrace her, while Crista held herself stiff, not pointedly resisting yet not acquiescing, holding her breath against the sudden smell of him, unkempt hair, straggly beard, T-shirt and denim vest that needed laundering, if she’d retreated somewhere inside herself, that familiar place, a light becoming smaller, ever smaller, close to extinction.

Look at you.
It was an adult voice yet immediately recognizable. The voice of Crista’s lost brother, she had not seen since she was six years old.

A
FTER
the deaths,
the children were taken in by relatives. Crista went to live with her mother’s older sister whom she knew as Aunt Ellen and Henry went to live with his father’s parents. There may have been a wish expressed by the children—Crista seemed to remember this, for she’d loved her brother very much—that they might live together. But neither Aunt Ellen nor Grandma and Grandpa Eley wanted both children. There was the expense. There was the responsibility. There was the belief that, so long as the children were raised apart, they would cease to remember
the deaths
more readily.

The deaths:
this was what it was called. The cataclysmic event of June 19, 1981 when Rick Eley killed his wife Lorraine with a claw hammer, smashing her skull as she ran screaming from him on the beach at Olcott, and when Rick Eley subsequently killed himself by driving his car into a highway abutment later that night.

Logical to think then, as Crista grew to do, that
the deaths
had occurred at the same time. Not one death on the beach down beyond the Eleys’ cottage on Lake Ontario, and, about forty minutes later, and fifteen miles away, the other.

The deaths. The deaths.
Not
murder, suicide
but
the deaths.

In time, in Crista’s reasoning, her brother would be absorbed into
the deaths,
too. Exactly when this happened, how old, or young, Crista was, she wouldn’t afterward recall. For Aunt Ellen never spoke of Henry, it was as if he’d vanished. If vanished, died. Telling her account of her childhood to others, which was always brief, seemingly impersonal, Crista would say that her mother had died of breast cancer (for so many women, mothers of school friends and acquaintances, seemed to die of or be stricken by cancer, this was a logical explanation), and
that her father and nine-year-old brother Henry had died in an automobile accident only a few weeks afterward.

How terrible for you…

Well. I was very young.

Sometimes, not often but sometimes, Crista felt a pang of guilt for having killed Henry off. In the car crash with their father south of Lockport that same night. And why had she done it? She hadn’t wanted to talk about him. She hadn’t wanted to think about him. She hadn’t wanted strangers to her life to inquire too closely into her life. She dreaded the inevitable prying query.
You and your brother must be very close, you must see each other often?

Crista’s mother’s older sister Ellen Ward had been a public schoolteacher in Utica, New York. Unmarried, which was convenient. Her father’s parents, devastated by what their son had allegedly done to his wife and to himself, moved from the small city of Lockport where they’d been living and resettled in Cincinnati. The driving distance between the households was less than six hundred miles but would seem to have been six thousand miles. Never were the children taken to see each other, and they were not encouraged to write or to speak on the phone. The adults became estranged from one another, as well. What had Aunt Ellen to do with the Eleys?
She
had not married into that family.

Strange how, at first Crista cried herself to sleep every night, she’d missed her Mommy and her Daddy and her brother Henry so badly, but then suddenly, overnight it seemed, she was forgetting. Since Aunt Ellen refused to speak of
the deaths
it was natural to begin to forget. Where there are no words, there memory cannot take root. By the first heavy snowfall in November, the child was well into forgetting. By the turn of the year, numbness had taken hold. Numbness like the falling snow. Numbness like sinking into sleep, in snow. Numbness that crept into her mittened hands, and into her booted feet. Wool mittens, wool socks, and waterproof rubber boots were not sufficient to keep out this numbness. For it was a delicious numbness, too.