The Guilty One (5 page)

Maris wondered what the neighborhood had been like when he opened his shop. The houses were large and once must have been nice. Take the one across the street. Blue plastic sheeting was nailed over parts of the roof, and the window sashes were peeling and rotting in some places, but the eaves were ornately trimmed and the porch rail sat on turned spindles. Leaded-glass windows in a diamond pattern framed either side of the front door.

While she was watching, the door opened and a young man flew out, barely pausing to slam the door shut. He had a backpack slung over one arm, a plaid short-sleeved shirt whose tails flapped over his shorts. Black socks, the kind Maris's father had worn, and white converse sneakers. He jogged across the street without bothering to look for traffic and headed for the diner, pushing open the door with a shove of his shoulder.

“I'll have a pancake sandwich?” Only then did Maris realize that it was a woman, not a man. A girl, really, her fine light brown hair cut short with longer bangs falling in her eyes, and white teeth that were a little too large for her face.

The man at the grill started pouring batter from a metal pitcher without acknowledging her. The girl put a bill down on the counter and helped herself to a coffee cup. After filling it she looked at Maris and frowned. Maris opened the laptop self-consciously and pretended to study the screen.

“Hey, do you mind if I sit here with you?” the girl said, and without waiting for an answer, slid out one of the white plastic chairs with her foot.

“I—no, of course not.”

Maris glanced up, giving the girl a closer look. She had a silver bar in her ear that entered near the top and pierced the shell-like middle before emerging near the lobe. A tattoo peeked out from her shirt, but it was impossible to tell what it was—all Maris could make out was a curving barbed tendril. She dug into her backpack and took out a book, dog-eared and marked in half a dozen places with Post-its.

The book was
East of Eden
. Calla had read it junior year. It was still sitting on the shelf in her room back in Linden Creek.

A sound came out of Maris, a blunted wail.

“Hey,” the girl said, looking up in alarm. “Hey.”

Maris waved her hand, dabbing at her eyes with her crumpled napkin. Usually she could cover up these dangerous slips, which generally came when she was in CVS or driving past the library, small moments in unremarkable days. She had perfected a cough and swipe of the eyes that masked the upwelling of agony.

But today was different. Today was an ending and it was supposed to be a beginning, but Maris suddenly knew that there was no new beginning for her, that she could not go to Santa Luisa to her sister's home that smelled of toast and Balenciaga Florabotanica. There was this moment, this girl and her book, sitting much too close, and Maris heaved, the sandwich suddenly roiling in her stomach. “I'm so sorry,” she mumbled. “I think I'm going to be sick.”

“Hey!” The girl shouted, jumping up from her chair. “The lady's sick! Give me the key!”

The woman behind the counter looked up from stocking a display of energy bars. Her mouth tightened and she looked directly at Maris, judging, assessing. She reached under the counter and slammed a large metal serving spoon on the counter. A key hung off the end.

“Come on,” the girl said. “It'll be faster to go around.”

MARIS JOGGED TO
keep up. Down the cracked sidewalk, into an alley that ran between a vacuum repair shop and a shuttered restaurant. The asphalt was crumpled and strewn with litter. The skeleton of a bicycle was chained to the side of a building, its tires long gone.

Around back, a lean-to shed was tacked onto the rear of the building. There was a smell of garbage, obscenely ripe—Maris couldn't hold it in. The sodden mass of food surged up through her throat, gagging her, making her eyes water. She bent double over a narrow patch of weeds along the edge of the building and let it come, wave after wave, trying to stifle the worst of the noise.

“Shit,” the girl said softly. “Shit, well, you might as well get it all out.”

After a while the convulsive heaves stopped. Maris spat, then wiped her mouth on her sleeve. Glancing at the girl, she saw a splatter near the hem of her shorts.

“Oh my God,” Maris said. “I am so sorry.” She thought of the tissues in her purse, then suddenly realized she'd left it in the diner. “My purse, I—”

“Here.”

It was slung over the girl's arm. Maris hadn't even seen her pick it up. A fleeting thought:
Now the girl takes off with it, and I'll have nothing
, but the thought evaporated—after all, the girl had come back here with her, in the stinking alley, to help. Also, Maris knew where she lived.

“My laptop?”

“In here.” The girl patted the purse. “Listen, you want to come clean up at my place? This bathroom's kind of . . . I don't think you'll want to go in there.”

Maris looked at the flat steel door standing slightly ajar. The smell from it was worse than the stench of her own vomit; the word Bathroom was unevenly written in Sharpie, the last few letters squeezed to the edge. But, to accept more help from a stranger . . . and in a bad part of Oakland, where walking into someone's house could mean walking into anything. Wasn't there a good chance that this would lead to something stupid, some con she couldn't see coming?

The girl had a sweet voice, rather high-pitched and vaguely inflected with a midwestern flatness. If you heard only that voice you'd never believe she was capable of malevolence. It was jarring, though, in contrast with her appearance: the bar in her ear, those bangs above the nearly shaved scalp. A scab on her neck.

“I should probably just go.”

The girl made a tut sound. “Seriously? I have to change, anyway.”

That's what did it—after all, Maris had been the one to soil her clothes. To
hurl
on them, Calla would have said. She couldn't walk away now.

“I . . . would very much appreciate that,” she said humbly.

“Let's go this way, don't need that bitch watching. All she does all day is stare out that window.”

“But what about the key?”

The girl yanked the bathroom door open a few inches and tossed the key into the sink, where it clattered against the porcelain.

“Should I try to . . .” Maris gestured at the ground.

“Clean up? You kidding? She'll never know that was you.” The girl gave her a flash of a grin. “You don't look like the type. You know, not to make it to the shitter.”

Maris blushed. Even now, after everything, there were corners of her that refused to be worn down, little bits of her old carapace that still clung when the rest had been sloughed off by grief and horror.
Shitter
: that was a word that she had never spoken and that she hadn't heard in years. A coarse word that had no place even in the percussive, obscenity-laced torrent that issued from the Morgandale kids (
Mrs. Vacanti, I need to go to the
baff
-room
).

She followed the girl around the end of the block, approaching the house from the other direction. The temperature seemed to have risen even in the short time they'd been outside. A thin trickle of sweat rolled down the small of Maris's back. She hadn't dressed for the weather, thinking she'd be at Alana's condo by now. Alana kept the air-conditioning on all summer, ostensibly because of her allergies; the windows were never open. Another reason that Maris dreaded going there. To be sealed up in that place . . .

The girl led her up the stairs to the porch, opened the door. Inside was a dim foyer, carpeted stairs going up, a cheap door on the right that she opened with another key. Maris followed her into a large, sunny room, every corner stuffed with bright-colored furniture and pillows and throws, fabric panels hanging from the ceiling, curtains pulled all the way open. In the center of the room, up against the bay window, was a bed, neatly made and covered with a patchwork quilt. Along the opposite wall were a tiny stove, a huge old refrigerator, a single cabinet that wasn't even fastened to the wall, and a pair of cheap bookcases that held dishes and cups and food in addition to piles of papers and textbooks.

“Bathroom's through there,” the girl said. “You go first, I'll change.”

Maris went through the arched opening. Once, it must have led to a formal dining room, but it had been walled off, a bathroom wedged in the space between. Inside, the tub enclosure was coated with soap scum. There was a dusty layer of grime on everything, worst on the floor, where used Q-tips cluttered the corners along with clots of hair and dust. Maris washed her hands at the sink, then cupped water in her hands and rinsed her mouth, over and over.

She ought to pee now, because who knew when she'd get another chance, but the toilet was filthy. The ring in the bowl was at least a half inch wide. After a moment's deliberation, Maris sat anyway. She couldn't summon the energy to be appalled.

While she sat, she looked around the bathroom, inspecting the few items lining the windowsill and sink. There were no cosmetics.
Poor thing,
Maris thought before she could stop herself. Just because the girl had more of a . . . the word
butch
was what came to mind, but surely that wasn't the proper word, the respectful word—sort of look didn't mean she couldn't do a little more with herself. After all, even boys wore makeup now. On the tub ledge was a cloudy bar of soap embedded with bits of something. Drugstore shampoo—two-in-one, no need for conditioner. Razors, tampons, deodorant. Secret brand—made for a woman, wasn't that how the old ads used to go?

Maris washed her hands a second time and came out into the main room.

“I feel worlds better,” she lied. The truth was she felt neither better nor worse. Since leaving the house this morning, driving out of their neighborhood and through town and onto the highway on-ramp, she'd had the strange sense that her emotions had been sucked out of her by the heat, laid waste along with the parched earth and withered brown hillsides, victims of the relentless drought. The heat scoured and the dust coated what was left. The drought had officially lasted over a year; it dated almost exactly to Calla's death, something she and Jeff had never spoken of, though surely he must have thought about it too.

The moment in the diner, when the girl took the book from her backpack—that had been an aberration, because Maris was mostly beyond feeling these days. Even when she had seen her car window in bits on the ground, even when she was bent over that patch of weeds, it felt as though it was happening to someone else—or more precisely, that it had happened to her in the past and she was reliving it from the distance of time.

The girl was washing her hands at a tiny sink bolted to the wall near the refrigerator. Above it was a drawing of a car next to a building, done in impossibly bright colors: purple shadows and orange bricks. She dried her hands on a towel and twirled. “Good as new,” she said. She'd changed into plaid madras shorts, the sort old men wear for golf.

“You never told me your name,” Maris said.

“Pet. Short for Petra.” The girl smiled. “I'm like half Czech. Try having that name in middle school.”

Maris was about to say that she understood—other than the character on
Frasier,
she'd never met another Maris.

The thing about her name, though. Maris Vacanti. It was distinctive—it was recognizable. She had a trick, one she'd started using shortly before the trial started. What made it possible: she had never formally changed her name. For the first three years she and Jeff were married, she still went by Ms. Parker at school. Later, after Calla was born and Maris cut her hours and eventually quit teaching altogether, she meant to get around to changing it. Their mail came addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Vacanti; bills and magazine subscriptions and Calla's school directory listed her married name. Even her family eventually starting using Vacanti, and still she never submitted the paperwork, and when she renewed her driver's license and did the taxes every year there was some small . . . satisfaction? Was that what she had felt, holding this small part of herself back, seeing the name Parker on the forms?

Had some part of her always known about Jeff, about what was dormant in him even then?

“Maris Parker,” she said firmly, banishing the thought. She held out her hand, and the girl took it, squeezed rather than shook.

“Maris?” The girl said. “Do people ever call you Mary?”

“Sometimes,” Maris said, and then—for no reason at all, it just popped into her head—she said “Actually, my friends call me Mary.”

“Okay. Mary. So, I have to ask, what the fuck are you doing in this neighborhood?”

Maris laughed the fake little laugh that she used to buy herself time. Framing how she wanted to say things—not that she had ever been the type for conversational chatter; she'd always preferred to speak precisely. But these days, there was always the equation, how much to hold back, how much to reveal. “That's a long story. Am I keeping you from something? Work?”

“Nah.” Pet fluttered a hand. “I don't have to be at work until four. I'm just killing time until then. I ought to be studying, but I was going to go to CVS—but, you know, I can do that whenever. Do you need . . . ?”

She let the sentence trail off. Maris looked down: was it that obvious on her, the damage, the aimlessness, her need for escape despite having nowhere to go other than Alana's? Jeff had tried to talk her out of leaving like this. So had Nina, for that matter. At the time Maris had felt defiant. Now she just felt ridiculous.

“I—I could stand to rest in one place for a while. I have some things I need to figure out.”

“Well, you're welcome to stay here. I'll probably just draw.”

Maris looked at the colorful drawings tacked around the room. “These are yours?”