Stacking in Rivertown (16 page)

I have a copy of the
Times
sent to the farm every day. I feel a need to keep my eyes peeled. And I’m beginning to worry about Ben. If the round-bodied Detective Bates figured me out, Ben might have figured it, too. And he has contacts in the police.

One morning when I get up, I’m having more trouble than usual with my back. It turns out that Joan’s too sick to make the Chicago deliveries. Since we’d hit a lull in weeding, John suggests that I do the route. He makes me a map with directions. I worry. Maps obviously aren’t my strong point or I wouldn’t have ended up near Joliet in the first place.

After we have the van so full the front wheels are almost off the ground, Joan surprises me by suggesting that Tut go along with me. I’m about to say no when I see his face light up. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile since I’ve been here.

So I throw my backpack into the van and Tut scrambles into the passenger seat. As the van weaves and lumbers its way to Chicago, Tut drops that same CD into his boombox again, and the two of us listen to it.

I didn’t like it the first time I heard it, but now, as I begin to take in the words, I feel drawn down, like I’m in the river again and sinking below where the current is strong and cold, where the ache runs hard. But there’s more in the music than that. I have a sense of a woman’s face, of her eyes watching me, knowing Beth and Clarisse, seeing Terri.

“Who is this singing?” I ask Tut.

“Miriam Dubois,” he says.

Before we hit Chicago, I pull in at a rest stop and change into Becker.

“This is our little secret,” I say to Tut as I sit in my seat.

He smiles at me and giggles. Much to my surprise, I find myself smiling back. He looks in my eyes for the first time. And gazing at him, I feel some kind of lightness inside of me. I wonder how it would be to live a life without Ben in my head and Violet bleeding onto the floor. I wonder what it would feel like to be happy.

So we go about our business, unloading through the day, finishing up about dinnertime. I’m not in the mood to head home yet, so we stop at a mall in a suburb just south of Chicago, looking to pick up dinner.

We take our time, nosing out the stores. As we’re hiking down a long expanse of marble glaring into our brains, surrounded on all sides by loads and loads of stuff, I hear Tut say real loud, “Is that your sister?”

I turn and look, seeing my Clarisse Broder face a hundred times repeated in the display windows of a bookstore. A sign yells in my face: “Available Now!”

I slouch. I pull around the brim of my hat. I punch my sunglasses tight against my face.

“Shut up, Tut,” I say as people look at us. I shuffle over and study the picture. It’s different than the one they had in the papers. I have no idea where Jeremy found this one. Tut and I mosey inside, where I pick up a copy. It’s the new printing.

They added lots of pictures from Jeremy’s sister’s archives. There’s us in front of a Christmas tree. There’s Jeremy’s mother and me trying to avoid touching each other. There’s me staring at the turkey like it’s a scary petrified meat.

When did she manage to take all these pictures? The sneak.

I also see a batch of Betty and Dave’s earlier photos, including the one of Mama and me. I think I might start crying.

The last two pictures near the end take the cake. The first is a view down to the water from the Brooklyn Bridge. The other is of a pile of flowers left at the place where I jumped.

God, they’re milking this. I want to call my agent and tell her she should be ashamed of herself.

On the back of the book jacket it says, tragic suicide. It says, dark novel, cult phenomenon. It doesn’t say, undercurrent. It doesn’t say, the dangers got her. There’s so much it doesn’t say that it makes me sick.

I buy a copy, contributing to Jeremy’s investment strategies in futures. Searching for Tut, I find him plopped on the floor with a Dr. Seuss book spread on his knees, happy as a bee.

I think preschool. I think college tuition.

I buy him the book.

We get back to the farm late that night. Tut wants to sleep with me, so I let him curl up at my side. But I lie awake, worried again. Even here in Utopia, my past has a way of sneaking up on me. I decide that I’m going to have to leave soon, before my ugly little world reaches in and snatches Utopia away.

Every night after we brought Violet up from the basement, she curled against me just like Tut. I got to looking forward to her slipping in next to me. She helped the ache.

And later, when we were making love, when she was rubbing my back or tending welts or bruises on me, or when I held her in my arms, the ache became finer, weaker. But it never went away.

The last few months of that time are coming clearer to me now. I think of Violet moody. I think of her watching Ben with hate undisguised. I remember how the ache grew in me as Violet got pushy about getting out, as she worked me like she tried with Ben, withholding her love at times. That was a misery to me, so that I pushed Ben into whipping me just to get her affection.

And I remember orgasm after orgasm of nothing but despair. Violet made her plans. She drew me along by the power of my misery and love.

I remember kissing her good-bye that night as clear as though it happened just now. She had helped me dress in the black strapless gown, adjusting my slip and hose.

I can smell her breath, taste on my lips that which made her Violet and no other. I see her eyes, still roving and wet, still sly, and her skin smooth, flush, a world made round.

That was just a few hours before the Dumpster, before the blanket drawn back, before the sky wept Violet clean through, melting her off like salt, washing her down through the sewers.

The next week, I begin to go down. I want whiskey. My eyes start itching for smack. At the end of the week, they send me on the Chicago route again because Tom, their son, is flying in from Berkeley. Joan’s too busy cooking up some heart-clogging farm dinner and John is balancing the books. Tut’s not able to go with me this time since his social worker is visiting that afternoon.

Before I hit O’Hare, I find a record store where I look up Miriam Dubois, intending to buy Tut another CD of hers. When I finally find her, I check the picture. I stop.

She could be Violet’s sister. In fact, the similarities are so strong she could almost be a twin, though she has lighter skin and hair. She holds her eyes different. Her lips are softened, as though waiting, and her chin less adamant. I gaze at her, unable to look away. I think of her music. How the ache runs through.

So I buy a CD for Tut and three for me. I’m thinking I’ll get to know her, as though it might make those other pictures fade, the ones in Detective Bates’ briefcase.

Later, as I’m waiting at the terminal, dressed as Becca, paranoid as hell, I see a tall man with a ponytail in a business suit. I freak and stare at his shoes. Thank God they’re not gym shoes.

But it throws me backward, and I hate Ben so hard, I think I’m going to bust open. He didn’t do anything to help Violet. He just let her die like a stuck pig.

“Hi.”

I jump and reach for my gun.

“You must be Becca.” A young guy looking a lot like Joan in the eyes and chin is looking me up and down. “Dad gave me a general description,” his eyes rest on my breasts, “but he left out some important points.” Now his eyes drift downward. “I think I should have come home sooner.”

So within a few days, who shows up in my room at night but Tommy-boy.

I’m becoming such a part of the family, I think, as Tom undoes my shorts, as he lifts my shirt over my head.

I show him new positions and advise him on pleasuring a woman. I tie his hands to the bedposts and tease him for hours.

The young are so fun to teach.

After he departs for the night, I put on the CDs of Miriam Dubois, or M.D., as I’ve started referring to her in my mind. I gaze at her pictures, amazed at how she’s so like Violet. I let her music draw me under. I know I’m getting goofy, but I think I fall in love with her like I’m a teenager. I dream of her eyes looking at me. If I still believed in hexing, I’d have made a doll to draw her to me. I keep telling myself it’s just because of Violet, and how she died, and how much I miss her.

That’s when things start to really go down. The
Times
arrives one day with you-know-who on the front page once more. Or should I say, two different incarnations of you-know-who.

There’s the mug shot of Beth the shoplifter next to the cover picture of Clarisse Broder. The headline?
ARE THESE THE SAME WOMAN
?
SECRET PAST REVEALED
.

The
Times
has been getting a little slack lately, dipping into yellow journalism to boost sales.

And as I’m reading the story, I get a creepy feeling my favorite detective is baiting me. I’m sure he leaked this out, trying to scare the rabbit from its hole, which I’m determined is not going to happen. That is, until I read the last paragraph about Mrs. Broder’s alleged death.

Alleged?

After all, it goes on to say, no body was ever recovered.

I think of Ben reading this article, and I try not to panic. No one can possibly know where I am. My trail is cold, except, I have to concede, for my little excursion into criminal behavior at Dave and Betty’s. And then there was that incident at the hotel with all the puke.

I grind my teeth. I’m going to have to call that little shit of a detective again and get him off my case, maybe have him retract this alleged crap.

Later, I convince John to let me run the Chicago deliveries again, so they can spend more time with their horny son. It’s good I’m leaving anyway, since Susan is due to show up that evening. Utopia’s getting a little crowded for my taste these days.

I have a hard time about not letting Tut come with me, but I worry that Ben’s on my trail. To distract him, I hand over the CD I bought for him the last trip. This makes him so excited, he forgets about me.

Once I’m in Chicago, I buy a phone card, ringing up New Yor k.

“Bates here.”

“Hi,” I say.

“Beth,” he says. “I’ve been expecting your call. Or are you going by Becky now?”

“You little shit,” I say. “Are you trying to get me screwed up? Do you have any idea what Ben will do to me if he finds me? I thought the police were supposed to be nice to their witnesses.”

“All I want is your cooperation,” he says.

“Maybe you should look the word up so you know what it means.”

“I need to see you and ask you questions.”

“Nothing doing. Ask me your questions now. I’m listening.”

“Beth, I’ll find you if I have to put your face on wanted posters and milk cartons.”

“God, why don’t you go after someone like Ben this hard?”

“I’m working on that one,” he says.

That scares the shit out of me. “You should talk to some of the kids he gets and sticks in that basement of his. They’d give you an earful.”

“Why don’t you tell me what he did to you in the basement, Beth?” His voice is soft. It’s got something in it so much like sorrow, I think I might go crazy.

“Don’t ask me that, Bates. You want to put me in the loony bin? I never think about that anymore. You can’t. It’ll make you do something bad.”

“Like jump off a bridge?”

I’m crying now. I can’t stop it. I slide down to a crouch in the phone booth.

“You can do this for Violet,” he says. “She was your friend.”

“You don’t know shit,” I say, but I’m still crying.

“Calm down, Beth. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I wish to hell he’d never gotten his hands on any of you.” He stops, waiting for me to quiet down. “So tell me what you remember. I need more of a description. Where did it happen?”

“That’s the thing,” I say. “I only now started remembering it a little. I really thought I had a fucking appendectomy for five years. And near as I can tell, it happened at Ben’s, which is strange. Ben always stops that kind of thing. He doesn’t like to waste all his training.”

“You were in the room?”

“Yes .”

“So the guy kills Violet and starts on you, but you get away?”

“No. That’s the weird thing. I couldn’t move. I must have been strapped down some way, and maybe gagged. I can’t remember that part.”

“Why didn’t he kill you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember being stabbed. All I remember is him bending over Violet. Her hands are cuffed back, and her neck is . . . ” I begin to gag.

He waits as I compose myself. “You said he was at a reception earlier that evening?”

“Yes. I saw Ben talking to him. I don’t remember his face other than that I thought he was handsome, about Ben’s size. He had a nice ass. And long brown hair in a ponytail. Oh, and he wore black gym shoes even though he was in a tux.”

He’s quiet. “Do you think you’d recognize the guy again?”

“Maybe.”

“Can I send you some pictures?”

“No. I’m not telling you where I am. Your police force has too many connections with Ben.”

“Beth, why do you think he let you go for five years? Ben never does that. He doesn’t just let go of his . . . players? Isn’t that what he calls you?”