The Smart One (9 page)

Clare insisted we weren’t dressed well enough to go out for dinner, but at last agreed to a casual Mexican restaurant. The place was noisy and crowded enough to numb my mounting anxiety over the fact that we had spent our childhood living next door to a murderer…and that our parents were currently sleeping in the room right next to his.

“How did Mom and Dad sound?” I asked my sisters. They had called Florida while I was unconscious.

“Pretty wigged out,” Joey said. “But not nearly as hysterical as Renee.”

I could only imagine. Renee would have had a nervous breakdown over us trekking that mud inside. News of a dead body under her house had to push her right over the edge.

The hostess told us we could have a seat by the bar while we waited for our table.

“We’ll wait by the door,” I said. Truth was, I was desperate for a frozen margarita, but I didn’t think it was fair to put Joey in that environment.

“We’ll sit by the bar,” Joey said.

Clare turned to her. “Are you sure?”

“Please. This is Disneyland compared to what I’m used to.
In fact…,” she said as she reached into Clare’s handbag for the car keys, “I’ll drive home.”

Joey knew that Clare and I were both lightweights. And indeed, I started to feel the effects of the alcohol about halfway through my fishbowl-sized drink. By the time Joey brought up the subject of the letter again, I was struggling to keep my IQ above room temperature.

“How sure are you about the handwriting?” she asked me.

“Handwriting?”

“How sure are you that it’s Lydia’s?”

“I don’t know.”

“We need to be sure,” Joey said. “We should compare it to a sample.”

“You want a sample of Lydia’s handwriting?” I asked.

“You have one?”

“No.”

Soon after that we were led to our table. When the waitress arrived with our enormous sizzling platters, I stared at mine, watching the steam rise as I replayed the conversation I’d just had with Joey, trying to fill in the piece my subconscious was nudging me to remember. I picked up a tortilla, filled it with whatever was in front of me, and took a bite.

“Oh!” I cried, a little louder than I’d intended.

“Too spicy?” Clare asked.

“No, I just remembered—Lydia
did
leave papers behind! Kenny told me he kept a shoebox filled with cards from her.”

“Do you think it’s in the house?” Joey asked.

I paused for a moment, and recalled that Kenny had said it was under his bed. “Yes,” I said, and Joey grinned. “Why are you smiling?” I asked.

“Because you have a key.”

Joey stopped Clare’s mammoth SUV in front of the Waxmans’ house. “Place looks dark. Where did you say he kept that shoebox?”

I was in the front seat next to her. “Under his bed.”

“We can’t go in,” Clare said from the back. “There’s a big yellow
X
over the front door.”

“It’s only tape, for God’s sake,” Joey said.

Clare leaned forward to get closer to us. “We’ll get in trouble,” she whispered, as if someone could hear.

“Who’s going to know?” Joey got out and shut the door. Clare and I did the same. I glanced around. There were no police cars, no cars of any kind.

“Don’t you see what it says?” Clare asked, pointing to the taped up front door. “Police line—do not cross, police line-do not cross, police line—”

“I got the picture,” Joey said, “but we’re not going to
cross
. We’re going to go
under
.”

“What do you think, Bev?” Clare asked.

I wasn’t drunk enough to believe that Joey’s Clintonesque differentiation between
cross
and
under
would convince anyone in a position of authority that we didn’t know we were doing something wrong. But I wanted to go inside and get that shoebox filled with letters. I imagined us back at my kitchen table, under the bright overhead light, comparing bona fide samples of Lydia’s handwriting against the mysterious letter.

I needed to know.

“I guess it wouldn’t be such a big deal to go in.” I turned to face Clare. “But why don’t you wait here? Joey and I can get it. We’ll be back in a minute.”

Clare looked relieved, and Joey and I approached the front door. I slipped my key into the lock and pushed the door open without disturbing the yellow tape, which was affixed to the door frame. We got down on our knees and crawled beneath
the
X,
then shut the door behind us. The house was dark except for a gentle glow from the kitchen, which I knew came from a small florescent bulb over the stove. The only sound was the soft electronic
whir
of the refrigerator.

“I need to piss,” Joey said.

“Now?”

“While you guys were busy with your margaritas, I drank three cups of coffee. My bladder is ready to burst.”

I rolled my eyes. “Go ahead. I’ll go upstairs and see if I can find the shoebox.”

“Just don’t turn on any lights,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because if anyone outside sees lights go on, they’ll know someone’s in the house.”

“Then you’d better see if you can find a flashlight in the kitchen,” I said. “It’s going to be pitch-black up there.”

I tiptoed up the stairs. I don’t know why I felt compelled to be quiet, but there was an eerie stillness to the house and I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were breaking the law, and that if we weren’t careful, someone would catch us.

When I got to the top of the steps, I could make out that the bedroom door to Kenny’s room was open. From where I stood, the interior was black velvet dark. I walked toward it with my hands out like a blind person. At the doorway, I got down on my knees so that I could crawl to the bed without worrying about bumping into anything or tripping. I felt along the carpet until I got to what I knew was the tailored bed skirt that hung from the frame. I lifted it and felt around beneath the bed.
Ridiculous,
I thought,
to do this without a flashlight.
Still, I reached my arm all the way under the bed so that my shoulder met the frame and my hand was as close to the other side of the bed as I could get. I rubbed the carpet all the way to the head of the bed. Nothing. I started to work my way
back down toward the bottom of the bed when I thought I heard something creak.

“Joey? Did you get a flashlight?”

Silence.

“Joey?” I repeated.

I heard the sound again and froze. It wasn’t coming from outside the room.

It was coming from the bed.

I listened hard, trying to convince myself no one was in the room with me and that the sound I heard was simply the bedsprings responding to my arm bumping against the bed frame. I replayed the scene from outside. There had been no cars parked out front. If someone was in the bed, they had taken great pains to conceal their presence.

I was on my belly, my ear pressed against the carpet, and my heart pounded so hard I could hear it through the floor. I held my breath and lifted my head. The bed was still. Had that creak been my imagination? I listened and heard something else, something softer. It sounded like steady bursts of air.
Wuh-wuh-wuh
.

It sounded like…breathing.

Okay, I thought, this is the moment in the horror movie where you scream at the screen, “Get the hell out of the room!” But I was literally petrified. The darkness was so complete and my fear so paralyzing that I couldn’t move even an inch. At least not without wetting myself.

The last time I had felt that scared was when I was in ninth grade and heard a piercing howl from my backyard that was at once heartbreaking and terrifying. It didn’t sound like man or beast. It certainly didn’t sound like our schnauzer, Stephanie, whom I had let out just a short while earlier. It was late at night, and I was studying for a math test while the rest of the family slept. I had opened the door to the yard and stood star
ing into the darkness, scared that some strange predator had eaten Stephanie alive. I heard someone pad down the stairs and turned to see my father standing behind me in his bathrobe.

“What’s that noise?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Is Stephanie out there?”

“She was.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll get a flashlight.”

We stood side by side as he ran the beam across the yard until at last we saw the source of the horrible wail. It
was
our Stephanie, lying on her side, clearly in such horrible pain that she emitted a sound we had never heard before.

“Be careful,” my father said, as I rushed across the yard to her. “Wounded animals will bite.”

I was crying by the time I reached her. “What’s the matter, girl?” I said as I kneeled beside her. She lifted her head and wailed. My father pointed the flashlight on her and I saw what it was—the clip of her backyard tether had pierced the part of her hind leg where a bit of flesh served as webbing between anklebone and tendon.

“How could this have happened?” I cried.

She nipped at the air as I got closer, but my dad was calm and slow.

“Easy, Stephanie,” he said, as he knelt. He put his hands on either side of the dog’s head, holding it steady as rubbed behind her ears.

“See you if can ease that clip out,” he said to me.

At the time, I thought it was crazy that I was the one performing the surgery when my father was a doctor. But of course, he didn’t want me to risk being bitten. And so, I held Stephanie’s leg and carefully, slowly extracted the clip. Then my father picked up the dog and carried her inside.

“I guess she didn’t want to be tethered and was tugging
against it when her leg got caught,” my father said as he cleaned and bandaged her wound.

That sounded logical except for one thing. I hadn’t tethered her. I had simply let her run free in our fenced backyard, which I knew I wasn’t supposed to do, as she liked to pee in a spot by the fence that bordered the Waxmans’ yard, and Sam complained that the urine was killing his grass. Months before, my parents had instructed all of us girls not to let the dog run loose in the back, but to make sure she was tethered on the opposite side of the yard. I usually complied, but it was late at night and I figured everyone was asleep and I could get away with it.

All these years later and I still hadn’t solved the mystery of Stephanie’s injury. At least not until now. Lying on the floor in the Waxmans’ house, scared half to death, I finally understood that my next-door neighbor might have been psycho enough to hurt my little dog.

The bed creaked again and before I could pull my hand from under it and run from the room, something grabbed my wrist. I screamed and tried to pull away.

Joey came running up the stairs.

“Help!” I called.

“What’s going on?” she said from the hallway.

I turned my head toward her and could see only the beam of the flashlight, first in my eyes and then as it traveled upward toward the bed.

“What are you doing here?” Joey said.

A voice from the bed spoke. “What are
you
doing here? You scared the shit out of me. Who’s under the bed?” The hand released my wrist.

I scrambled to my feet and stood beside Joey, staring down at Kenny looking like a giant in his childhood bed.

I put my hand to my heart in an effort to quiet the kettle
drum player on methamphetamines who continued to pound away in my chest. Joey shined the flashlight on our faces so Kenny could see who he was talking to.

I tried to speak. “I…we…”

“We didn’t know you were here,” Joey said.

It’s only Kenny
, I told myself as I took a long deep breath to calm down.
You’re safe
. I repeated this mantra several times and my heart rate started to slow.

Kenny sat up and clicked on the small lamp next to his bed. He was bare-chested, possibly naked under the thin blanket that covered his lower half. The percussion instrument that was my heart had just settled into a neat four-four beat when it morphed to a set of congas, and the tempo changed to some kind of Latin rhythm that reverberated southward in a mambo that would have made Ricky Ricardo jealous.

Kenny explained that he didn’t feel like checking into a hotel and figured no one would know if he sneaked in and slept in his own bed. He had parked his car around the corner.

“I was going to ask if I could crash at your house,” he said to me, “but you weren’t home.”

Even in the dark, I knew Kenny could sense that I was blushing. I looked down, and Joey started to talk, explaining that we were looking for the shoebox of cards and letters Lydia had written to him.

“Why do you want that?” he asked.

Joey looked at me to see if I wanted to explain that part.

“You tell him,” I said.

Joey nodded. “There was this tampon box in your mother’s room,” she began.

Back at my house, Kenny and I sat at the kitchen table as he scrutinized the letter. It was late and my sisters had gone home.

“What do you think?” I asked after waiting and watching as he silently studied it.

“That prick,” he said without looking up. He sounded more sad than angry.

“Are you surprised?” I asked, wondering if Kenny had ever guessed that his father cheated on his mother.

He kept his face down and rubbed the stubble on his cheek, clearing his throat in that way guys do when they’re trying not to cry. When he looked up at me, his eyes seemed so tired.

“Do you remember when my mother broke her arm?” he asked.

“She fell carrying a load of laundry or something?”

“That’s what we told people. You want to know what
really
happened?”

I wasn’t sure I did, but Kenny continued. “This woman called the house—one of the girls from the factory. That’s what he called them, ‘the girls.’ Anyway, I answered the phone and it was someone I remembered meeting because she was young
and pretty. Her name was Halina. I asked if she wanted to speak with my dad, and she said, ‘No. I wish to speak with your mama.’ So I gave my mother the phone and she put it to her ear but barely said anything. Then, when she got off, she went to talk to my father. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but after a few minutes he screamed, ‘I won’t have this conversation!’ and stomped upstairs. My mother ran after him, crying ‘For God’s sake, Sam, how
old
is she?’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter how old she is, she’s a liar.’ My mother didn’t believe him, and I had the feeling it wasn’t the first time they’d had a conversation like that, probably not the first time she found out he’d slept with one of ‘the girls.’ The fight escalated until he told her she was an ungrateful bitch and utterly useless and how many women with one kid needed a full-time housekeeper, blah, blah, blah.” Kenny paused to grab a tissue and blow his nose. “My mother got hysterical,” he continued, “and screamed that he didn’t love her and her life was over.” Kenny stopped and looked at me, as if to make sure I was paying attention. “Then I heard it—a dull thud followed by an enormous crash. My mother screamed and I ran up the stairs. She was on the floor—their huge old dresser on her arm. She looked so terrified. I can still see her face. ‘Don’t just stand there,’ my father yelled, as if it were
my
fault. ‘Help me pick this up.’”

I pictured it—poor Renee pinned beneath the heavy wooden dresser, and Kenny pretending he believed it was some freak accident, just to keep the peace. I didn’t know what to say. “I had no idea.”

He shrugged. “So, no, I’m not surprised he had an affair.” Kenny picked up the letter again. “And wouldn’t be surprised if…” He trailed off like he was disappearing into his own thoughts.

“Do you think…does it look like Lydia’s handwriting to you?”

He laid the letter on the table in front of him and straightened it out. “I don’t know,” he said, biting his lip. “I need to see those old cards again.”

“What do you think happened to that shoebox?”

Kenny told me that it probably wound up in the attic with all the other old junk. He said he would have a look tomorrow and I asked if I could come along. “If you want,” he said, and looked so sad I regretted making such a chirpy offer, like it was some kind of happy adventure. I rose and approached him so he would know I understood how hard this was. It was awkward to hug him, since he was sitting, but I bent over and put my arms around him. He hugged me back and we stayed like that for several minutes. I released him and moved to take my seat again, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me onto his lap.

I never really understood the whole sitting-on-the-lap thing. To me, it was about as sexy as getting weighed, and made me nearly as self-conscious, as I regretted that last fajita I ate and tried to position myself against gravity. It did nothing to ease my mind. In fact, the more I tried to get comfortable perched on Kenny’s thighs, the more I realized how undignified I felt. It made me wonder if other women felt as I did. Would Clare and Joey feel infantilized on a man’s lap? Or would they throw their arms around his shoulders and snuggle into his neck? I cursed the roll of the DNA dice that bestowed my sisters the flirting gene and not me. Granted, I had gifts they lacked. But what good was a talent for getting the fifty-point bonus in Scrabble when you were trying to score in a different way entirely?

“You don’t seem comfortable,” Kenny said.

Relieved, I stood. He held onto my hand and rose too. We were face-to-face and he touched my cheek. The gesture made me weak. It was so much more emotional than physical that I couldn’t ignore that there was something beyond pheromones
driving the pulse between my thighs. He moved his face in and I closed my eyes. I wasn’t going to fight it. The rush was too exhilarating, the pull too intense. To hell with the past. I wanted to get naked with Kenny Waxman.

He pressed his lips to mine and our tongues touched. He pulled me closer so that we were body against body. My breathing got fast…and faster still when he put his face on my neck. I heard his cell phone ring on the counter behind me and ignored it. It kept on, though, and he released me. I picked up the phone, glancing at the caller-ID window before passing it to him. It was Joey.

He looked at it, and I hoped he would just put it down, but he answered. “Hi,” he said. I took a step back, my heart starting to shrivel. It was just a single-syllable word, but there was an intimacy to his voice I couldn’t ignore. “I did,” he went on. “I think so. No, tomorrow I’ll look for it.” He pulled the chair from the table and sat down, ready for a lengthy conversation. I stood there for a few moments, waiting. But he didn’t give me any sign that he would wrap up quickly and so I murmured, “Good night,” and left the kitchen.

Earlier, before my sisters left, we had all discussed Kenny’s sleeping arrangements and agreed he shouldn’t be in his taped-off house, and that his original idea to spend the night at my house was a better option. Kenny and I hadn’t worked out what room he would sleep in, but now it became clear that it wouldn’t be mine. How foolish I was to believe that kiss was more about feelings than proximity. If he had been sitting at the table with Joey instead of me, well, never mind. I gathered bedding from the linen closet, left it on the sofa for him, and went upstairs.

The next morning, Clare called looking for Joey. Apparently, our little sister’s PDA had fallen out of her purse in Clare’s front seat the night before.

“She’s probably wondering what happened to it,” Clare said. “I called her house and her cell, but she didn’t answer. Do you know where she is?”

“No idea,” I said, just as Kenny walked into the kitchen. “Do you know where Joey is this morning?” I asked him.

“Joey?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, you remember. Skinny ex-rock star you spoke to on the phone half the night.”

“Wasn’t half the night.”

“Are you being evasive?”

“Me? Evasive?” He opened the pantry and looked inside. “What’s good for breakfast around here?”

“Kenny knows where she is,” I said into the phone, “but he won’t tell me.”

“You think she’s okay?” Clare asked.

I glanced at Kenny, who had pulled out a box of raisin bran and went about opening cabinet doors looking, I presumed, for a bowl. Since he didn’t seem concerned, I figured whatever she was up to didn’t involve hypodermic needles or trips to the South Bronx to hook up with certain suspiciously entrepreneurial friends.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” I said to Clare as I pulled a cereal bowl from the cupboard and handed it to Kenny. “But if you really want to be nosy, why don’t you check her PDA?”

After I got off the phone with Clare, I set about making coffee, trying to understand what, if anything, was going on between Kenny and my younger sister.

“There’s nothing going on between Joey and me,” he said, as he spooned raisin bran into his mouth.

“How do you do that?” I asked. “How do you always know what I’m thinking?”

“I read you like a newspaper,” he said, reaching for the
Times.

“Oh yeah? What am I thinking now?”

“You’re trying to figure out if I’m telling the truth about Joey and me.”

I smiled, happy that he got one thing wrong. Maybe I wasn’t so transparent after all. What Kenny missed was that in some way I got him as much as he got me. I knew he wouldn’t lie. He could be evasive. He could be secretive. But telling the truth was like a compulsion. Lying made him feel caged.

“I promise,” he said emphatically, “nothing is going on between Joey and me.”

I put a cup of coffee in front of him and thought,
not yet
.

The Waxmans’ attic was only accessible through a ladder that pulled down from the ceiling in the hallway, so Kenny held it steady while I went first into the dark, dusty space. He followed behind and pulled the chain on a naked single-bulb fixture that hung from a beam.

Bending over to clear the low ceiling, I looked around, covering my mouth with my hand to protect it from the dust. There wasn’t as much up there as Kenny had expected—just a few file boxes with old tax returns, several bins of the plastic flowers his father used to manufacture, and the empty cartons from what appeared to be recent purchases. So we went down to the basement to have a look around. In contrast to the dry, chalky heat of the attic, the basement was cool and clammy and seemed to be the repository for thirty years’ worth of crap destined for a garage sale. There were at least a dozen shoeboxes on a bookcase by the bottom of the stairs, but they contained things like nails and screws, old silverware, extension cords, gardening gloves, cabinet hardware, knitting needles, and old eyeglasses.

“Don’t your parents throw anything out?” I asked, trying on a pair of white cat’s-eye glasses.

“Not even dead bodies,” he said. “You look glam in those.”

I quickly put the glasses back in the box.

After we finished searching every corner of the room, Kenny surveyed the space, scratching the back of his neck. “They moved everything around,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t seen, like cartons of clothes and books, and my mom’s boxes of photographs and keepsakes.”

We checked the garage, but it was a pretty pristine place, containing Kenny’s old sled and bicycle and Sam’s gardening tools, snow shovels, lawnmower, and not much else.

“I’m out of ideas,” Kenny said.

“You don’t think your mom threw it out?”

“Not unless she looked inside…” He moved a bag of potting soil and looked behind it as I waited for him to continue. He turned to me. “I didn’t just stash letters in there.”

“What did you stash—” I stopped myself. “Drugs?”

He shrugged. “I was a teenager. It was a handy spot.”

“Oh, Kenny. Couldn’t you do any better than that? Joey used to hollow out books, take the switch plate off the wall. I once even found her unscrewing the top of her swim trophy.”

“I wasn’t that creative. Besides, subterfuge doesn’t come naturally to me.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I
really
want those letters.”

“Me too.”

“I guess I’m going to have to ask my mom where that box is,” he said, and walked to the corner of the garage where his bicycle leaned against the wall. “Remember how we used to ride to the park?” He squeezed the tire, which looked soft and airless.

“And the schoolyard. You once fell coming down that ramp.”

“Because I was riding with no hands. I was showing off for you.”

It shouldn’t have meant a thing. And yet, the thought that Kenny had once cared about impressing me had a physical effect on my heart muscle, which contracted as if it had been poked.