The Uninnocent (13 page)

Being so horrendous, her murder made the morning news. I sat with the children, who didn't understand much of what was going on. “Why is Poppy crying? Where are the Eggos, we want Eggos! Can we change the channel, please, please?” Lovell too watched the newscasters bring the story to life on the set. Here was her image on the screen, the Dolores I'd known and loved almost more, I swear, than I'd loved my own mother. Her winning white-as-coconut-meat smile, her casual long, windblown dark hair so beautifully streaked with silver, her careful cardigan. This was a real loss not just to our family, but the community at large. The newspeople, who of course had never met Dolores, were surprisingly right in their eulogies and kind words. Sitting on the sofa, I glanced every now and then at Lovell, prone as a cadaver in his navy-blue, wide-wale corduroy recliner. Looking at Lovell alive on his chair and looking at Dolores dead and gone on the television was like looking into the opposite ends of another universe where there was no news, there was nothing but mayhem and peace in harmony with each other. I watched him watch her on the television and I watched me watch him watching her in the mirror next to the set, and I was a changed person. Even more changed than I was the night before.

How to explain. His fingers, Lovell's fingers, at the ends of his hairy hands at the ends of his favorite frayed shirt bothered me. I was someone who'd gently kissed those fingers in years past. But they troubled me now because Dolores had died in an awful kind of way, and here was her pathetic son with his twitching fingers, my husband the great God-almighty Lovell, who had already hired a lawyer to handle “public relations” (there were none, as it turned out), act as media spokesman for the family of the deceased. One of the other peckerheads in his scofflaw firm, anxious to grab some Ben Franklins for doing nothing. The police questioned next of kin first, as they always do in these types of cases. Needless to say, everyone's story checked out. Lovell was at work, as a whole gaggle of legal-eagle hicks was prepared to corroborate. I was babysitting Kurt and Joanna's kids that day, as it was their wedding anniversary, and they drove up to the mountains to have a romantic picnic. None of her neighbors was without a verifiable excuse, and even one of them said he witnessed a man leaving her house by the rear entrance at just about the time of the crime. To this day, poor Dolores's case goes unsolved, which I think is ridiculous.

The distance Lovell and I felt was marked not by yelling or harsh words. We just went silent on each other. I don't think Guy and Selby so much as knew anything was amiss between their parents. Sure, Pop didn't seem to come home after work as soon or often as he used to, and there were many mornings when Lovell had left for a supposed early breakfast meeting with a client, or to deposit retainer checks, or some other rigamarole, without seeing the boys. But they honestly didn't seem to mind, and I was, I'll freely admit, proud of them for that. One way or another they weren't ultimately going to grow up with a father around anyhow, and so I did my best to bolster this manly indifference they'd begun to show by showering them with small gifts and perks, stuff like flapjacks with chocolate ice cream for breakfast, toys they wanted, the indulgence of letting them stay up late with me to watch the news about this earthquake in Mexico City or that one in Turkey, or to hear about how the polar ice caps are melting faster than you can boil water in a pan. It was a way of building their wayward father out of their lives, I suppose. I didn't give it much thought at the time. It's not like I had any kind of game plan, so to say. As for Lovell, when he stayed out all night long only to show up unshaven and sheepish the next morning, the sole question I'd have asked him, had I bothered to speak with the man, would have been, “Why so silent, mister? Don't you think I'm aware you're putting Dolores's death to good use in the arms of any number of town sluts? Don't you realize that I'm beyond caring which whores you've taken up lovelling with?”

Only because his best friend landed paralyzed in an irreversible coma as a result of losing control of his motorcycle and crashing into a bridge abutment over at Sandy Platte did Lovell come crawling home, looking to make up with me, give things another chance. I'm not a coldhearted woman. Forgiveness resides in this heart of mine. Besides, I was always fond of Rodney, too. Before I got pregnant, I used to enjoy sitting Saturday afternoons with the two of them in Rodney's garage while they worked on their Harleys. Motorcycle maintenance and the cooler full of beer and the top-forty transistor radio scritch-scratching away. I couldn't begin to guess how many times I saw them take those bikes apart and put them back together. Even after Lovell had to let go of his hog in order to support his fledgling family, Rodney let Lovell take his out for the occasional spin. And now Rodney and his Black Bird, as he'd named it, were ruined beyond salvation. All the more sad since despite the many joyful hours Rodney and Lovell had spent fixing that treasured, sleek bike, the accident was blamed on a mechanical malfunction. The incident was only in the news for a day, which I thought was a shame given what a nice man Rodney had been. If I was a producer in broadcast news I'd have used Rodney's accident to do a report on how many young men in America own motorcycles and crash them, would have turned it into a human-interest news story, something to raise a higher consciousness about public safety. Well, it was not to be. Too many other tragedies vying for notice.

A suicide bomber in Malaysia killed thirteen the same week that the next in my tidal wave of deaths happened, even closer to home. This would have been about a month after Rodney was taken off life support and we buried him. If everything going on hadn't been so tragic, so relentlessly heart-wearying, I can imagine how it might seem weirdly comical for one looking in from the outside, like a bad horror movie directed by some psycho on steroids. But it wasn't funny. Her name was Angie. Angie Farber, a coworker of Lovell's. She was found in her bathtub with a garbage bag knotted hard around her head and a whole ton of sedatives in her system. Some famous author with a weird name I can't remember had done this sometime recently in New York City, and I was wondering if this wasn't where Angie got the idea. It sure seemed like a strange way to check out of Hotel Earth, nothing like the usual shotgun in the mouth or slit wrists. I didn't know Angie as well as Lovell did, but recall her around holidays being the typical life-of-the-party kind of girl. Trips to the drinks table, trips hand in hand with all the guys, Lovell included, as you might have guessed, to the doorway where the plastic mistletoe was thumbtacked overhead, many trips to the bathroom (not to pee, I didn't think), and even a couple of arm-in-arm traipses out into the snow to the parking lot. You get my drift. You have also surmised, to use a nice fat word a pundit pulled out of his bag of word tricks the other evening, that Angie was one of the women into whose bed Lovell took his grief over Dolores, and then again over Rodney. I didn't hate her when she was breathing the same air that you and I breathe, and I don't hate her even now that all the hard work her lonely heart and desperate lungs did in order for Angie to live her life—to make her bed and her coffee in the morning, to celebrate Christmas and Columbus and even Presidents' Day, to make the sweaty beast with two backs with Lovell—is over. To tell the truth, my feelings toward her are few. I'm less sorry for her now that she's taken her own life than I felt before when she was wasting time, going to hell in a handbasket with her dead-end job and ludicrous lover boy. I know this will sound callous of me, but in some ways I think Angie made the right decision.

Her suicide was what precipitated the big blowout with Lovell, but not necessarily for the reason you might be thinking. Because I'm a person who watches the news, and not merely watches it, but watches religiously, I am a person who is, and I can say this with all humility, somewhat informed. In other words, I'm not blind to things. I watch events unfold and I make my own considered decisions as to what forces are behind these events and where matters may wind up going, when all is said and done. It's like being a historian of the future. You make every effort to be objective about the data and then you chart in your mind's eye the possible ways life's drama has happened and is happening and shall happen. Let me cut to the chase.

I accused Lovell (behind closed doors, mind, in a quiet voice, long after the children were put to bed) of being somehow behind all these deaths. Oh boy, did he not like my theory. His reddening face and flailing hands and vehement denials—“Fuck you, bitch,” of course, and all the regular crap men say when they're pushed to the wall—plainly suggested he did not agree. But it all added up too neatly for me not to begin to worry about the safety and health of my two small children and me. Why was it that these were all people connected to him? Why wouldn't he concoct some way of silencing Angie, his adulterous lover with those big, voluptuous lips and hips of hers and no doubt a gal who loved being spanked, Angie to whom he might have made some lame, drunken confession about Rodney, for instance, Rodney, who he was always quietly angry with for having the beautiful Black Bird when he had nothing but a rusted Dodge Dart, a scrawny wife who was in the process of getting fat, two kids who liked toaster waffles better than they ever liked him, and a nothing job that began nowhere and would end somewhere less than nowhere?

“If you're lame enough to think there's one pebble of truth in that bullshit,” Lovell said, in a voice that deepened to a low, threatening growl, “then you better gather up your evidence and head right down to the police station before I get it in my head to kill somebody else I know.”

“Maybe I might just.”

“Might just what.”

“Might just,” I said, fixing him straight in the eye. (His face was so beautiful—why did he have to be so unbelievably handsome, cocky, and muscular, the greatest kisser of all time, not that I ever kissed anybody else, his eyes the color of molasses, and those strong hands of his, those hands that once upon a time knew their way around my body.)

“Listen. Before you go make a fool out of yourself, explain to me why I'd want to go and murder Dolores.”

This one was harder to figure. Dolores had loved me as if she were my birth mother, loved me far more than she ever did her lackadaisical Lovell. How could a son commit such an atrocity toward his own mother, even out of jealousy? I knew this part of my accusation didn't make sense, so I kept my mouth shut, which only gave him an opening to blather on, and despite his mental feebleness he managed to make a point.

“By the way, Lorraine, while we're at it here. How come you're accusing me of doing something bad to people who wasn't murdered?” he asked, his voice now kind of high-pitched puling. “Roddy died driving too fast. Angie got it in her sick head to bring her own life to an end. What's up with you, Lorraine?”

I always hated it when he called me by my name. He never called me by my name when we got along. Only when he was scolding and screaming.

“Sounds like you know something I oughta know.”

As if Lovell ever knew anything. “You might have tried to know a lot of things I know but you never had the guts or the energy,” I told the ignorant son of a gun. “You never bothered to inform yourself about anything other than yourself, get any of the ‘background framework' horsefloo you're always so busy gathering for your crooked firm's crooked clientele, and now you dare stand here and accuse me with no proof, no rhyme, no reason?”

This was the evening when I began screaming in his face about every single wrong, every slight, every sin my husband ever did or committed against me. Though it wasn't fun, it was the closest to an orgasm I'd had in a long time, if you'll pardon me for expressing myself plainly and truthfully. I reminded Lovell about the time he came over to my aging grandparents' for Good Friday supper, high as the moon on scotch, and treated them to an endless sermon about the magnificence of the Harley-Davidson organization, how a hog was quicker than the devil and purer than the Virgin Mary, and slurringly offered to take Nana Eileen for a ride across the wheat flats at a hundred twenty miles an hour (she declined, and I remember thinking this idea of his was more about the small-ness of his peter, because in fact as handsome as he was, he did have a mighty little one, not to mention how long it took him to get up to maximum speed). About another time when he bravely kicked the television off its stand at two in the morning because I'd made the big-deal mistake of falling asleep on the sofa during the election coverage without having finished doing the dishes. The time that for no reason whatever he pulled up all the tomato plants Dolores and I had staked in the backyard, and stepped on the seedling pumpkins and zuchs for good measure, shouting his fool head off that I'd stolen his mother away from him, or some such untreated sewage of a falsehood. That once when he made my child Guy eat his chicken dumpling dinner, like a dog, on the back porch, put his plate down on the floor, having taken his spoon away from him, because the boy had made the mistake of refusing to oblige Lovell's need for Guy to eat with his mouth shut. As if my husband could ever shut his. The time he deigned to come to Easter sunrise service and got it in his head to put a penny in the tray as a way of insulting me and everyone in the pews around us. The time he slapped me across the face because in my protesting his always coming to the dinner table in summer with his shirt off, and him never hearing my complaint that only cavemen pigs would do such a thing, I decided to make the macaroni with my blouse and bra off and, having served everybody, sat down to eat just as jaybird naked from the middle up as he was. When he threw—so typical and what a clichéd cliché—my burnt pot roast out the kitchen window, right through the glass, by the way, in the dead of a January winter blizzard. The time when, the time when. And if you think I'm over the top, don't you dare. This was all Lovell's doing. Every bit of it. Every ounce.