World of Trouble (28 page)

She remembers afterward, she says. She remembers running back to the garage, and finding that it was sealed. And understanding, even in her dark and addled desperation, understanding what it meant. The whole thing had been a joke, he had known all along she wouldn’t make it down there. Because Atlee Miller had already come and sealed up the hole, as Astronaut knew that he would.

And then there was just the sink. Just the sink and the knife and knowing what she had done and that she had done it for
nothing—for
nothing
—and then cutting herself open like she had cut Nico open. Pressing the knife in as far as she could stand it, until the blood was pouring out of her and she was shrieking, and running, running from the blood, running out into the woods.

That’s the story. That’s the whole story, she says, and she’s trembling on the ground, her face is streaked with grief, but I’m pacing back and forth above her, that’s the whole story, she says, but there must be more, I have to have
more
. There are pieces missing. There has to be a reason, for example, that a slitting of the throat presented itself as the logical method—was that directed by Astronaut or was that an improvisation, the most effective means in the moment? And surely she was directed to bring back something. If she was supposedly earning her place in the bunker by killing Nico, there must have been a token to prove it.

I throw myself down in the mud and drop the weapons and grab her shoulders.

“I have more questions,” I tell Jean. Snarling; shouting.

“No,” she says. “Please.”

“Yes.”

Because I can’t solve the crime unless I know everything and the world can’t end with the crime unsolved, that’s all there is to it, so I tighten my grip on her shoulders and demand that she remember.

“We need to go back to the woods, Jean. Back to the part in the woods.”

“No,” she says. “Please—”

“Yes, Jean. Ms. Wong. You find her outside the building. Is
she surprised to see you?”

“Yes. No. I don’t remember.”

“Please try to remember. Is she surprised?”

She nods. “Yes. Please, stop.”

“Do you have the knife out at this point—”

“I don’t remember.”

“You chase her—”

“I guess.”

“Don’t guess. Did you chase her through the woods? Over that creek?”

“Please … please stop.”

Jean’s terrified eyes meet mine and it’s working, I can see her seeing it again, being there, I’m doing it, I’m going to get the information I need, she’s back there now at the scene with the knife handle wrapped in her palm, Nico’s struggling weight beneath her. And where was I, I was on the way but I wasn’t here yet, it took me too long, I should have been here to save her but I wasn’t and it’s burning, my blood is burning. I need more, I need all of it.

“Did she beg you for her life?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did she, Jean?”

She can’t speak. She nods, nods weeping, thrashes in my grip.

“Was she screaming?”

Nodding and nodding, helpless.

“She begged you to stop? But you didn’t stop?”

“Please—”

“There are more things I need to know.”

“No,” she says, “no, you don’t—right? You don’t, right? You don’t really, right?”

Her voice is altered, high and pleading, like a little kid, like a toddler, pleading to be told that something unpleasant isn’t really so.
I don’t really have to go to the doctor, right? I don’t really have to take a bath
. Jean and I hold our pose for a minute, down in the mud, me clutching her shoulders tightly, and I feel it, suddenly, where we’ve gotten to, here, what’s happening. What the asteroid did to her is done, and what Astronaut did to her is done, and now here I am, her last and worst terror, forcing her to stare into this blackness, wade through it like every detail matters, like it can possibly matter.

I let her go and she rolls her head back away from me, emitting low terrified moans like an animal on the slaughterhouse floor.

“Jean,” I say. “Jean. Jean. Jean.”

I say her name until she stops moaning. I say it softly, softer and softer, until it becomes a whisper, “Jean, Jean, Jean,” a soothing small little whisper, just the word, “Jean.”

I am sunk now into the ground beside her.

“When did your parents give you that bracelet?”

“The—what?”

Her right hand moves to the left wrist and she brushes her fingers over the cheap piece of jewelry.

“You told me when we first talked that it was your parents who gave you the charm bracelet. Was it on your birthday?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “It was my first communion.”

“Is that right?” I smile. I lean backward, balance myself with my fingers laced across my knees. “So you’re how old for that?”

“Seven,” she says. “I was seven. They were so proud of me.”

“Oh, boy, I’ll bet they were.”

We sit there for a while in the mud of the lawn and she gives it all to me, painting the picture: the soaring nave of St. Mary’s in Lansing, Michigan, the dancing lights of the votive candles, the warm harmonies of the choir. She remembers quite a lot of it, considering how young she was, how much has happened to her since. After a while I tell her a couple of my own stories, from when I was a kid: my parents taking us up to the old Dairy Queen on Saturday evenings for shakes; going to the 7-Eleven after school to buy Batman comics; biking with Nico all around White Park, when she first learned to ride and never wanted to get off the darn thing, around and around and around and around.

There’s a memory I love. It’s me and Naomi Eddes, it’s six months ago, give or take. The last Tuesday in March.

“Well, I have to tell you,” she says, looking across the table at me with a tiny tree of broccoli poised at the end of her chopsticks. “I am quite taken with you.”

We’re eating at Mr. Chow’s. Our first and last date. She’s wearing a red dress with black buttons down the front.

“Taken, huh?” I say, playing at bemusement, teasing her for the outmoded turn of phrase, which I actually find poetic and charming, so much so, in fact, that I am falling in love with her, across the smudged table, under the blinking neon sign that says
Chow! Chow!
“And why do you think you’re taken with me?”

“Oh, you know. You’re very tall, so you see everything from weird angles. Also—and I’m serious—your life has a purpose. You know what I mean?”

“I guess,” I say. “I guess I do.”

She’s referring to a topic of conversation from earlier in the evening, about my parents, how my mother was murdered in a supermarket parking lot and my father hanged himself in his office six months later. And how my subsequent career, she suggested jokingly, has been like Batman’s, how I’ve turned my grief into a lifelong sense of mission.

But it makes me uneasy, I tell her, that version of events, that way of seeing.

“I don’t like to think that they died for a reason, because that makes it sound like it’s okay. As if it’s good that it happened, because it ordered my life. It wasn’t good. It was bad.”

“I know,” she says. “I know it was bad.”

She furrows her brow under her bald head and eats her broccoli, and I go on, explain the way I prefer to look at things: how it’s tempting to place things in a pattern, name certain events as the causes of certain subsequent events—but then when you think again you realize that this is just the way that life happened to happen—like constellations, like you blink once and it’s a warrior or a bear, blink again and it’s a scattered handful of stars.

“I changed my mind,” says Naomi, after I’ve been talking this way for a while. “I’m not taken with you anymore.”

But she’s smiling, and I’m smiling, too. She reaches forward and dabs ginger-scallion sauce from the corner of my mustache. She will be dead within forty-eight hours. It will be my friend Detective Culverson who calls me to the crime scene, at Merrimack Life and Fire.

“Can we agree, at least,” she says at Mr. Chow’s, still alive, still brushing sauce off my face with her thumb, “that you have
put
meaning in your life. Can we agree to that?”

“Sure,” I say. She’s so pretty. That red dress with the buttons. I’ve never seen anyone so pretty. “Okay. Yes. We can agree.”

*  *  *

The remainder of Tuesday, October 2, I spend burying my sister in a shallow grave between the flagpoles on the front lawn of the police station. In lieu of a service I sing while I dig, first “Thunder on the Mountain” and then “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” and then a medley of Nico’s favorites, instead of mine: ska songs, Elliott Smith songs, Fugazi songs, “Waiting Room” over and over until I feel like I’ve dug deeply enough into the police-station lawn to lay her body down and say goodbye.

For several hours after that I help Jean. I haul bodies up out of the bunker one by one; I move Astronaut’s Bunsen burners into the general store so she can use them to cook up macaroni and cheese, if she wants; I push and roll loose stones and hunks of concrete back down onto that first step, sealing the stairwell back up as best I can. I don’t know how long she’ll last down there, or how she’ll do, but that’s the best I can do for her, it really is. There is a helicopter parked in some field somewhere in these woods, but I don’t know how to fly one and neither does she, and where would she go?

She’s got guns, in case she needs to use a gun.

And then I roll out, just after midnight on October 3, with that
one particular memory, of me and Naomi at Mr. Chow’s, threaded through my ribs like a red ribbon.

It’s a quiet ride. Not a lot of people out on the road tonight; not a lot of action on the streets. Probably most places in the world are blue towns tonight, everybody deep into their last round of praying or drinking or laughing, doing whatever there is left to do before everything changes or dies. I roll through Rotary and pass by the house with the semicircular blast wall, the redbrick ranch house on Downing Road. I don’t know if it’s the same fella who shot at me with the machine gun, but there is some fella up on the roof, with a John Deere cap and a massive belly, surrounded by his family: a middle-aged woman in her Sunday best, plus two teenage daughters and a little boy. They’re all up there on the roof, at rigid attention in the moonlight, saluting an American flag.

I find my way to State Road 4 going south. I remember the route. I’ve always been good at spatial geography: getting a sense of a place or a system of roads or a perpetrator’s place of residence, registering the small details in my head and keeping them straight.

In a perfect world I wouldn’t sleep tonight, of course, I’d stay up somehow, but my body doesn’t know what day it is, and my eyes are bleary and I’m veering off the road. I find my same rest stop as before and I fold up my coat in the same way and after three hours of sleep I am awoken by the bright distinct howl of a train whistle, which seems impossible. But then I open my eyes and stumble to my feet and stand there watching it pass, way off in the distance, wondering if I’m dreaming. A long freight train rolling slowly across Ohio, smoke pouring from the engine.

I pee in the woods, get back on the bike, and keep on going.

*  *  *

Pink sky at sunrise, autumn morning chill.

I heard Officer Burdell once, in the kitchen at Police House, talking with Officer Katz about her plans for the last day. She said she was going to spend it thinking about “all the things that suck eggs about being alive. Having a body and that. Hemorrhoids and stomachaches and the flu.”

I felt at the time like this was a bad strategy, and I feel that way now. I take one hand off the bars of the Schwinn and send the Night Bird an air salute, back in Furman, Mass. Send one along to Trish McConnell while I’m at it.

Then I put my hands back on the handlebars and make my turn at the fruit stand. Singing again, as loud as I can, each line caught by the wind and carried off over my shoulder, little snatches of melody, bits and pieces from
Desire
.

*  *  *

I hear the dog before I see him, three fine bright barks devolving into a growly canine coughing fit, cough/bark, cough/bark, then just cough, cough, cough as Houdini limps with determination from behind that shed out to see me.

“Here, boy,” I say, and my heart swells just looking at him, loping and shuffling along toward me across the slight roll of the farmland.

The autumn corn is halfway through its harvest, half the stalks still burdened, half tilting, barren. There’s a pumpkin patch I hadn’t noticed before, in a dirt corner just to the right of the front porch, green winding vines and fat orange globes. Two of the women are up on the porch, two of the daughters or daughters-in-law, sitting on hard chairs in their long dresses and bonnets, sewing or knitting, working on blankets for the winter. They rise at my approach and smile nervously and take each other’s hands, and I ask politely if I might speak to Atlee, and they go to fetch him.

Houdini ducks in and out of my footsteps, snorfeling at the dirt, and I bend and scratch the white fur behind his head, and he growls low and contented. Someone’s given the guy a bath. Someone trimmed his fur, too, combed out all the bugs and burrs. He almost looks like he did when I met him, puckish little creature scampering around the filthy home of a drug dealer on Bog Bow Road. We look at each other and I smile, and he smiles too, I think.
You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen? You did, huh?
Or not. Who knows? You never know what a dog is thinking, not really.