No longer feeling so martyred, I was now mostly curious.
Before I went inside, I examined the bike. It didn’t appear to me to be damaged. I ran my fingers along some scratches, but they had the look and feel of old wounds with smooth, healed edges. I turned toward the brightly lit double doors. If he’d been in an accident and the bike wasn’t hurt, then either it wasn’t a very bad spill or else he’d taken all the impact and the dents on himself. The kid had his priorities, I thought caustically: save his motorcycle first, his own body second.
Or he’d faked an injury just to get me down here.
I saw him immediately, just past the nurses’ station, sprawled in an orange plastic chair, holding an icebag to his left eye. The other eye was fixed on my entrance. He didn’t bother to sit up straight; if anything, he only slouched further down into the bowl of the chair, his long legs sticking out in front of him as impediments to anybody trying to get by him. As I approached, I looked him over: Other than the icebag to the head, he didn’t appear any more the worse for wear than his bike. His blue jeans were still intact, they weren’t even fashionably torn. His white T-shirt looked wrinkled in front, but it wasn’t ripped either. His motorcycle helmet, all in one piece, sat on the yellow plastic chair to his left.
I was almost glad to see him slouch; it made him look more like a real, maybe even average, teenager.
I took the red plastic chair to his right. “What’s under the ice bag, David?”
He removed it long enough for me to see a swelling bump and a bruise that was threatening to take over his entire right temple, including his eye. It did look convincing, and it was damned hard to imagine somebody doing that to himself.
“Your bike has not been damaged,” I said to him. “You look all right except for that shiner. What happened? Did you brake suddenly and fly off the bike onto your right eyeball?”
It was four in the morning by then, and I was shut into a fluorescent-bright, ugly hospital lobby with a manipulative, surly kid, and I was starting to get angry again. Damn fool kid!
“I had to tell them something,” he said in a low voice.
“I beg your pardon?”
He made an impatient face, directed either at the pain he was feeling or at me, possibly both. Slowly, as if it hurt, he pulled himself up in the chair, straightening out the slouch, until his back was straight. “What happened is, I had a fight with my uncle, but I couldn’t very well tell the doctor that, could I? So I told them I had an accident on the bike. I told them I ran into a curb and got tossed off. They bought it, I guess.”
“What about this fight?”
“What about it?”
I counted to ten, and when that wasn’t enough to keep me calm, I added ten more digits. “What uncle? What was the fight about? Is he hurt, too? In other words, what happened, David?”
“You wouldn’t be interested.”
I looked down at my toes in my sandals and counted all ten of them. Once from the little toe on my right foot, all the way over to the little toe on my left foot, and then in reverse.
“Possibly not,” I agreed. “But go ahead and start talking. I’ll tell you if I get bored.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“And you,” I agreed, smiling pleasantly at a passing nurse. “Well?”
“Forget it.”
“I’ll tell you what, David. Let’s start with the premise that I am not good with children.” I laid a heavy emphasis on the last word as I stared at him. He flushed or maybe blushed. “So why don’t you act like an adult instead?”
“Bastard grabbed me and tried to beat the shit out of me.”
“The uncle did? Uncle Bastard?”
“Matt. My uncle Matthew. My father’s next oldest brother.”
“The one you’re supposed to be living with?”
He glanced at me, and I thought I saw a pleased expression flit across his face. Now he knew we’d been following up, checking things out. Just what he wanted us to do from the look of it. He’s leading us, Geof had said from the beginning, and now I thought maybe he was right. So where was this kid taking me now?
“Yeah.”
“Why did he do that, David?”
“Hell, I didn’t know he was home! I just went in the house, I just wanted to pick up a few of my things. They always go to services on Monday nights, so they aren’t supposed to be home. So I go in, and I’m just gathering up my own stuff, and bam! Uncle Matt grabs me from behind and starts whalin’ on me.”
“Did he think you were a burglar?”
“Like stepfather, like stepson, you mean?” He laughed, a brief, bitter explosion of sound that made him wince. “Ow. Damn. When’s that pain pill gonna work? They told me it ought to work really fast.”
“Burglar …?”
“Yeah. Right. Like Uncle Matt thinks I’m Dennis or something, like he’s never seen me from the back before.”
“David, can you make this any easier or at least any briefer? I just want to know why your own uncle would hit you.”
“Beats me.”
“An appealing thought,” I muttered.
“Get in line,” he shot back.
“You’re not going to tell me anything else, are you?”
“Can you pay for this?”
I smiled sweetly at him and cooed, as to a toddler who has asked for something from his mother, “What do you sa-ay?”
“Please!” I could have sworn there was a grin lurking at the edges of his mouth, and at that moment if he had only opened it full throttle, I would have smiled back at him. Instead, he chose to grunt. “Please, if you’ll cover this, I’ll pay you back.”
“Oh, all right, I’ll take care of it.”
I went off to ransom his care. When I came back about fifteen minutes later to tell him they still wanted him to spend the night for observation and to pummel him with all of the other questions I wanted to ask him, his orange plastic chair was empty and the helmet was gone. When I raced out to the parking lot, his bike was gone, too.
The wind that had blown me into town had also disappeared, but the rain that followed it had begun. It fell in big slow warm plops on the parking lot pavement, raising a smell of hot asphalt, and it fell on my bare arms and dripped down my skin, and I knew it was also starting to fall upon the leather interior of my little convertible and on boys riding motorcycles on slick streets, even boys I could have happily killed at the moment.
There was a khaki-colored Jeep sitting in a dark spot under an elm tree up on street level. Before I put the top up on my car, I ran up there to have a word with the driver. Tlie word was damn, a cannon burst of outrage that was followed by a machine gun fusillade of a lot of other words of one syllable.
All he said when I stopped was, “Is your top up, Jenny?”
“Of course not,” I snapped and ran back down to the parking level.
In our separate vehicles, we went back home to bed.
This time, I drove the speed limit, with Geof’s headlights always visible in my rearview mirror. In our garage, he walked over to open my door for me and give me a hand out.
Instead, I handed him something else.
“What’s this?”
“When I returned to my car in the parking lot, I found this”—it was a collapsed ice bag, the one David had used in the hospital—“sitting on my driver’s seat along with this note.” I handed that to Geof as well.
In printed letters, it said, “I’ll pay you back.”
“Good,” Geof said.
I grunted as I got out of my car. “Geof, that note could as easily be a threat as a promise.”
When we arrived at our back door, walking from the garage in a steady rain, we had to wonder if David had already made good on his “promise”: A small, torn corpse of some kind of small animal, maybe another squirrel, lay at our back door.
“I’m sorry about this, Jenny,” my husband said to me.
I didn’t know what to reply, so I merely gave him a quick hug.
We were so tired that we stepped over the little body, but we were not so weary that we didn’t take the time to double bolt the front and back doors.
“Geof?” I said on the stairs going up.
He turned to look back down at me.
“Remember that piece of graffiti? Two into two equals zero?”
He nodded. “I didn’t get that one, did you?”
“Not until just this minute. Sergeant Meredith told us that Ron used two shots to kill Judy and two to kill himself. Two into two equals zero.”
It continued to be a quiet rain, with no thunder or lightning, but it kept me awake, all the same.
Finally, unable to sleep, I padded downstairs and opened Judy’s pink scrapbook and read through it more carefully than I had the first time. There were so many questions I wanted to ask David about it, like, Where’d his mother keep the scrapbook? How’d she manage to hide it all these years? and How did David get his hands on it?
When all those and many other questions began to drive me crazy and to worsen my insomnia, I rummaged in our bookcases until I found Geof’s high school yearbooks, and I thumbed through them, looking for him, Ron, and Judy, watching them mature from fourteen-year-olds to graduates. The girls in their senior class pictures had all gone to the same photographer who had dolled them all up in white fake fur around their shoulders. Just like Judy’s “glamour” photo! There was a tag line for each boy and girl: Geof’s was Wild Thing, Ron’s was Most Likely to Build the World’s Better Mousetrap, and Judy’s was, bluntly, Most Likely.
I reread that one, hardly believing it, it was so cruel, so blatant, so clearly a double entendre, that everybody but the faculty and the parents would understand immediately and which would give the kids a good snicker. I wondered how she had explained it to Ron, how he had managed to misunderstand even that, but most of all, I wondered how she had felt when she saw it for the first time.
Had she burst into tears? Had she gone hot and then cold with humiliation or panic or anger? Was it possible that she might have laughed at it, even felt cocky about it? No, that was not possible to believe.
I hoped that she’d felt a good and healthy fury, I wished she had stormed into the yearbook staff and raised holy hell, I wished she had beaten the shit out of the faculty advisor and then sued the bastards. But I would have bet my house and my husband that what she actually had felt was pain and shame of the most mortifying teenage kind, of which there is no worse in all the world, the kind of humiliation that makes you want to run to the furthest corner of the basement of your parents’ home and curl up in a corner with your head on your knees and your arms crossed over your head and never ever come out when they call you, no matter how loud and how long they yell your name, the kind that makes you want to turn to dust and blow away.
Sitting there on my couch in the middle of the night, all those years later, I felt so sorry for her that I could have wept.
“What are you doing, Jen?”
I looked up from the yearbooks and the scrapbook to see that Geof had come downstairs searching for me. He’d slipped on a brown-and-white-striped terrycloth robe, his feet were bare, and his hair was sticking up all over his head.
“So what if she was a liar?” I said angrily. “So what!”
“Huh?”
He came over to the couch, and I moved all the books so he could sit down beside me. I showed him the yearbook entry that had me so upset on Judy Baker Mayer’s behalt and that got him interested in going through all his memories, too. While he was leafing through the pages, I got up and wandered over to the bookshelves again. But the next time I came across an entry that caught my interest, it made me laugh.
Geof looked up at me. “What’d you find?”
I had an unabridged dictionary spread open on a desk, and I read from it: “‘Mother. A stringy, slimy substance formed by bacteria in vinegar or on the surface of fermenting liquids.’ The second meaning is: dregs. Then we have something called mother water, which is defined as ‘in chemical operations, a liquid residue containing water, salts in solution and impurities, remaining after crystallization.’ But my personal favorite is ‘motherwort, an herb of the mint family, prickly, a bitter taste …’”
Then I saw what came next in the definition, and instead of continuing to laugh, I began to feel chilled in our airconditioned house with our locked doors and windows and its mutilated dead animal getting soaked in the rain on our back stoop. Slowly, I continued reading aloud to Geof. “‘In the Court of the Inquisition, a motherwort was a person who assisted in apprehending and imprisoning the accused.’”
For some reason, I didn’t want to look at him at just that moment.
He let a beat pass, while we listened to the rain fall, and then he asked, “And how do you define father?”
“I’ll look it up.”
When I did, I was able once more to find some amusement and to look Geof in the eyes again. “I’ll be darned. The word father comes right after fathead.”
“We already knew that,” he said and smiled at me. “Aren’t we exhausted by now? Can’t we finally go to bed and stay there?”
* * *
Motherwort. Prickly and bitter, I thought as we went back upstairs to bed together some few minutes later. Yes. But no matter how caustically the dictionary defined mother, at least the rain seemed cozy to me now, like a coverlet over our home, a protective, invisible sheath that no unhappiness could penetrate, and it thrummed a comforting lullaby that soothed both of us to sleep.
16
WHEN THE TELEPHONE WOKE US AGAIN, THE rain had already stopped and the sun was shining. Our bedroom windows were fogged over from the cool air inside hitting the already hot air outside. Great, I thought when I saw those windows: The rain didn’t cool things down, it only steamed them up. The phone rang two more times before I realized my husband wasn’t in bed to get it, so I rolled over to pick it up.
It was only six-thirty, but this time the call was for Geof, which was a fairly normal and regular occurrence at that hour. The Port Frederick police didn’t seem to think he could make it through a morning without an early bulletin about the previous night’s score of good guys versus bad guys. I didn’t think too much about it, even though it was Sergeant Lee Meredith on the line.
“Morning, Jen,” she said, then added in what sounded to me like a rather quiet, thoughtful tone of voice, “May I speak to the lieutenant?”
After calling Geof out of the shower to get the phone, I wandered out of our bedroom and down the hall to search for a certain blouse in another closet, so I didn’t hear his conversation with her.
When he yelled “Jenny!” I was really startled.
I’d been lost in sleepy thoughts about rain and teenagers and suicides and easy girls and eager boys and even, once or twice, about my own concerns. On this morning, I was scheduled to see Ginger Culverson—sweet ol’ Moneybags herself—to pin down exactly how much money she wanted to contribute up front to the new foundation and how we might use that as seed money to attract other donors.
I ran to the door and nearly collided with Geof, who was charging out of our bedroom and down the hall.
“Get dressed,” he said without slowing down. “You’re coming with me. Dennis Clemmons got himself killed last night”
“How?” I yelled down the stairs to his retreating back.
Geof stopped long enough to look back up at me. “He fell out of a sliding glass door on the second floor of the place where he lives.”
“But there’s a landing there and a ramp!”
“Not any more there isn’t,” Geof called back to me as he raced toward the kitchen. “The support beams gave way.”
“Oh, my God …”
I felt the bottom fall out of my stomach at the thought of a man falling from that height … and in a wheelchair. I grabbed the first clothes that came to hand, threw them on, and raced outside to the garage and was still buttoning my blouse with shaky fingers when I jumped into the Jeep beside him. r />
“Why do they need you?” I asked him.
“They don’t, but when Lee saw who it was who got killed in the accident, she decided it was a coincidence I ought to hear about.”
“It was an accident?”
“Appears that way, but the paramedics and the officers who got there first had no reason to think it might have been anything else. Understand, I’m not saying it wasn’t an accident, Jenny. I just don’t know. But if it turns out to be a crime scene, Lee says it’s already been compromised by everybody trampling around in it.”
“And why do you need me to go with you?”
He roared backward out of our garage and then kicked gravel up in a U-turn in our backyard.
“Because you know where David lives.”
“So?”
He shot the Jeep from first into second gear.
“So if this turns out to be something other than an accident, I want to get to him before the cops do.”
“Geof, you are the cops.”
“Yeah, people keep telling me that,” he said grimly as we rocketed toward the highway into Port Frederick. I would have given anything for a cup of coffee; it was at moments like these that I almost regretted being addicted to caffeine.
When David failed to answer his door on the third floor of the boarding house, Geof got us into his rooms without the landlady even asking for a search warrant. It was sufficient for Geof to say to her, “I’m his father, and I’m also a cop. We haven’t heard from him, and we want to make sure he’s all right.” To which the landlady said to me with real concern for David in her eyes, “Honey, you don’t look old enough to be his mother.” When I told her in all seriousness that he was aging me quickly, she smiled with sympathetic understanding and gave us one of her spare keys without another question. As Geof turned it in the lock in David’s door, I murmured to his back, “There’s nothing like the truth in a pinch.”
We walked into a room that was so messy it gave me hope. This, at least, looked like the work of a typical teenage boy.