Vengeance (3 page)

“Ethan,” she said. Her voice was confident, as if she not only knew who I was but knew me personally. “I’m sorry about Aiden. You meant so much to him.”

It might have been her voice itself that dusted off my memory, but as she spoke a glimmer of who she was flickered in my mind. I held her face up to a few photographs I could hazily recall and felt certain enough to utter the name, “Paige?”

“Oh my god. I forget. We’ve never met in person. Yes, I’m Paige,” she said. We spoke in hushed tones to not disturb the main attraction next to us, where two men had come in together to stand before my dad. Paige leaned forward, forearms on knees. Her hands seemed to work some invisible puzzle, but her face was lifted toward mine. “Aiden talked about you practically every day.”

So that was her. Paige Gardner. Aiden’s fiancé. Or was she his wife now, his widow? No, Aiden would have called me.

“It’s nice to finally…” I said, but my own thoughts interrupted me. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know… were you married?”

Her face aged a year as she maintained eye contact like peering into a hurricane of sand.

“We broke off the engagement last year,” she said, even lower than before. “He moved out.”

Why hadn’t Aiden told me? And what was she doing there if they had broken up? Was she so starved for attention that she’d play the grief-stricken widow to steal mourners’ pity for herself?

I realized my expression was revealing those harsh judgments to Paige. So I erased all expression and said, “He loved you, too. I could tell from how he talked about you.”

She winced a tight, painful grin and tucked her chin toward her chest. I watched the crown of her head shake back and forth a few times as if she were denying release to her swelling emotions. Her hands still twisted and turned that unseen puzzle. I noticed she didn’t wear a ring.

She lifted her chin a bit and I could see her eyes were closed. She turned her head toward the back corner of the room behind my right shoulder, away from my father and the people coming and going. “Look, I don’t want to be here,” she said in a strained whisper. Her eyes darted toward my father, as if suggesting an explanation. “Your dad insisted. But I’m here because I loved Aiden. We were working on things, all right? But he was getting in with the wrong people and now this is where we are.”

She stood abruptly, shielded her face as she started to cry. She touched my forearm and said, “Can we talk later?”

Before I replied, she turned, rested her free hand on my father’s forearm, and bent to whisper in his ear before slipping past us both and through the bodies waiting at the doorway. I nodded a farewell toward my father, who didn’t seem to notice me even as I passed between him and the new arrival in front of him.

I didn’t know if I was pursuing Paige or just taking the opportunity to escape that room. But my turn there was finished, anyway. Paige had already ducked into the restroom so I was left once again in the murmuring disquietude of strangers. The crowd seemed to be thinning out. For a second, I thought that it was time for me to leave, too. The past ten minutes had been so unexpected that I had almost neglected the one person I had come to see. Aiden.

I approached the double doors to the viewing room cautiously. The soft yellow glow was inviting, but felt like a trap to someone who knew what to expect within. The contents of the room, a chapel, came into view as I neared the doors. Candles stood sentry in a series of arched alcoves in the walls. I braced myself, knowing the casket would come into view with another step. As I reached the doors, I looked up the aisle between the two rows of dark wooden pews. The open lid of the black casket revealed the profile of a young man inside. From that distance, it could have been nearly anyone. An arrangement of white flowers adorned the lower half of the casket. An easel with a poster-sized photograph of Aiden I had never seen before stood near the casket. The picture had probably been a few square inches originally, resulting in a grainy, out-of-focus blow-up. My own memories of him corrected the ambiguity of the picture. But I worried that this was how he would be remembered. A vague notion of what he once was. Was he already fading from the minds and hearts of those who had known him? How long had it been since many of these mourners had last seen him in person to be able to compare their memories with this flawed likeness?

There must have been a more appropriate picture. I wanted everyone who ever knew him to be left with the most vivid impression of his charm. His effortless, handsome grace. But I also recognized that there were people who had come to the wake who would scarcely entertain a thought about Aiden again. There may have been people there who already could hardly recall the days they spent in their youth with him, who came to freshen their memories or out of some sense of obligation that verged on guilt. I understood that no one else was constructing a shrine to Aiden in their hearts. Everyone else was packing things up and putting them away. They were saying good-bye a final time. And that was probably the right thing for them to do.

As I walked between the rows of vacant pews, I felt like a compass spinning haphazardly. I grew dizzy, faint, and lucid again with every other timorous step. If not for the flickering of the candles and my own motion, I would have thought time had been suspended. I focused my whole being on moving toward the casket, eyes fixed on the reposing figure inside. I dedicated all my senses and strength to staying upright and navigating each footstep. Plodding forward was like walking deeper against a rushing current. Every step was irretrievable.

The body in the casket was exposed more and more to my sight as I drew nearer. From the back of the chapel I had barely been able to see who it was. I could have left and been convinced it was not my brother. In a moment I would be so close that Aiden’s face would be undeniable. All hope that this was a mistake, a hoax, a prank, or a case of mistaken identity would be stripped away. I had reached the base of the platform on which the casket rested. Once on the platform, I would be an arm’s length from his body, looking down upon his face. My brother would be dead.

I turned my eyes down to watch the step as I climbed onto the raised level. I lifted my eyes just enough to see the casket and lay my right hand on the edge of the open portion. My fingers curled and felt the lining inside. With this one hand anchoring me, I moved my eyes along the arm and up the shoulder until I was looking at my older brother’s face.

My eyes swam as they traced the features of the face in front of me. Was my vision blurry? The face I saw did not belong to Aiden. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t my brother. The face had been so disfigured then pressed back into shape as if it were putty with no bones beneath. This could not be my brother. My handsome brother with his dashing smile. This could not be what remained of him. This was a mannequin or a wax likeness. It was not my brother.

But… yes, it was. It was Aiden. The mortician had done what he could to restore his face, but had been unable to achieve its natural glory. Like seeing a grotesque, mangled mass of steel that had once been your pristine Corvette, unable to imagine the collision that could compress it to this heap. Still, you catch glimpses of its original form, hints of what it used to be. Those distinct features are familiar enough that you could pick it out of a parking lot full of doppelgangers.

So how much more could you still recognize your own brother, even maligned this way?

When I admitted it was truly Aiden, I leaned over the casket to breathe my farewell. In moments, the casket would be closed and Aiden would be removed from the world forever. I began to shake. I would never see my brother again. I shook so hard that the casket trembled. All the same, I dared not let go for fear of collapsing.

I tried to subdue the tremors. Past the foot of the casket a group of people were watching me. Afraid I would pull the casket down. Astonished at the sight of me withstanding that onslaught. Beyond them, the doors to the hearse. I stared at Aiden through my tears, shuddering as every word I would never be able to say to him imploded within me. Ten thousand battalions of artillery firing faster than a string of firecrackers. Every future moment worth taking a picture of and sending to my brother, obliterated.

When the seizure passed, I let go, stepped back from the casket, and whispered one last time, “I love you, Aiden.”

I left through the back of the chapel, where still more onlookers had congregated. They parted to let me through and I looked each one of them in the eyes, unabashed by my tears. This is what it is to love and lose someone. It is not black suits and muted ties. It is not politely folded hands and lowered heads. It is fierce. It is violent. It is losing composure without caring about appearances. It is untimely and inconsolable. It is angry and afraid.

Outside, the air was lifeless. I couldn’t sense cold on my skin because my whole body was numb. My legs quivered as I walked to my car.

“Ethan,” Paige said, descending the steps toward me. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” I said. I unlocked the door, but stopped before getting in. “No. No, I’m not all right. Aiden is dead. How the fuck did this happen?”

“I know,” she said. “I know. But there are some things you should hear. Where are you staying? I’ll call you later.”

“Things I should hear?”

“I don’t want to talk about it now.”

She looked over her shoulder as if to check that the men lingering at the top of the mortuary’s steps had not drawn closer.

“Talk about what? I have no clue what you’re telling me.”

She intercepted the car door as I slipped into the driver’s seat. I was anxious to get away from that place and this woman who was starting to strike me as unbalanced.

“Aiden didn’t die in a motorcycle accident,” she said. “He was killed.”

Her words stunned me. I failed to blink or breathe for several seconds. After all I had just endured, now this woman I had never met was feeding me some delusion about how Aiden died? I had no more reason to trust her than any of the strangers on my flight the night before.

I didn’t know how to reply, or if I should. But I heard my own voice say, “I’m at the Red Roof Inn.”

Chapter 3

Before I could start the engine, there was a knock on my window. It was Casey, signaling to roll the window down. I opened the door, instead.

“You’re coming over to your dad’s, aren’t you?” he asked. It sounded more like a suggestion.

I’d already had a healthy dose of the old man. I hadn’t planned on seeing him any more than necessary, which I figured would be the wake and funeral. A sense of obligation nagged at me, though, and I said I would be there.

“You can follow me over,” Casey said, lifting his keys and remotely unlocking his car. It was a white late-model Lexus. He pulled out of the parking lot and I tailed him as far as the first stop sign. But I let him go straight through while I took a left.

I remembered those neighborhoods well enough to find my way. I needed time to let things soak in. Aiden was dead. I’d been coping with that fact for days, but it had hit home at the wake. As I was reeling from the sense of finality, Paige had punched me in the gut with the notion that Aiden been murdered.

Murdered.

Part of me wanted to accelerate through every light and race back to the motel so she could call. I needed to find out what she was thinking. But a better part of me knew I needed to settle down before hearing more. For all I knew, Paige was high or messed up on anti-depressants. Or she was delusional from grief and she should have been on medication. No. I didn’t want to buy into a paranoid, lovelorn fantasy that might somehow make the day even worse.

Instead, I plotted a longer route to my dad’s house by zig-zagging my way to the river. I eased to a stop at a dozen corners, crept around their turns. Left, right, left, right, left, right. I had probably never driven with such intention. It didn’t require focus. Just steady repetition. I didn’t pass a single moving car for ten blocks. By the time I got to the river, I was practically meditating, lulled into a trance by the rhythmic pattern.

A half mile passed before my surroundings encroached into my consciousness. Mercy Hospital grew closer as I drove up the slight rise. Somewhere inside, Aiden had been born not twenty-five years before. McKinley Junior High School, where Aiden had been two years ahead of me, loomed on the hill just beyond. And not thirty seconds later, the stone wall and wrought iron spires of Oak Hill Cemetery paraded past my passenger window. Was his grave already open wide, imbibing the night air amongst the congregation of crosses and slabs?

The close proximity of those milestones of Aiden’s life underscored its brevity. An aftershock of the moment by his casket reverberated through me. I was immediately divested of whatever composure I had donned. Again, I was impatient to find out what Paige had to say. But my dad’s house was around the next corner, so I stayed the course.

I knew which block to find the house on from what George had said in the cemetery. After that, Casey’s Lexus was easy to spot. I pulled in as close to it as I could. My planned strategy of scanning the houses until I figured out where to go became obsolete as Casey emerged from his car.

“You get lost?” he asked.

“Took a little detour.”

“Come on. Everyone’s inside.”

He led me to a single-story shack whose foundation had settled in waves. The two bowed steps to the porch bemoaned our arrival. Casey stepped inside, reaching back to hold the screen door open. The house was small, maybe 600 square feet, but seemed cavernous by being remarkably empty. My dad was in the bathroom, pissing. He had left the door open and the sound splattered against the plaster walls and hardwood floor, bare but for the century of scar tissue gouged into it.

An old cabinet TV hulked against the right wall. There was a newer set sitting on top of it, its black plastic encasement nearly as deep. Neither was turned on. They may not have even worked. Vickie sat on the far end of a sofa along the wall opposite the TVs. She leaned over the end of an oval coffee table to whisper to someone in an armchair in the dark corner past the TVs. There was an opening on the far wall between the two. Directly through that opening was a back door, in what must have been the kitchen. The front room was dimly lit, despite the windows behind the sofa. A glow from the kitchen windows was supplying most of the light.

Casey nodded at Vickie, who darted her eyes toward the hallway opening on our side of the TV wall. This to indicate where my dad was, though it was perfectly obvious. She was unabashed that her man pissed with the door open even when company was present.

There was nowhere else to sit, so Casey and I stood as we waited for the old man. Casey pulled out a beeper and checked messages, leaving me to entertain myself. The TV wall sported a few framed hangings on either side of the hall entrance. I perused them to seem occupied, but was surprised to discover I knew one of the hangings. We had hung the exact same Frederick Remington print in our dining room in the house where we lived for about a year and a half while I was in the seventh and eighth grades. On Seventh Avenue. The house I had gravitated toward and visited the night before. When we were evicted, we left most of the furniture. It had been salvaged in the pre-dawn hours from middle-class rubbish heaps, anyway. Very little we owned held emotional significance or had cost actual money. And we had always owned very little. I never recalled seeing that print again, so I was astonished to find it, identical frame and all, hanging in my dad’s house a decade later.

“Garage sale,” my dad said, emerging and understanding my fascination. “Might be the same one we left.”

I lingered at the print a few more seconds. It had been my favorite and I had studied it countless times. I could have spent an hour confirming the nicks in the frame to determine if it was the print we had once owned or if it were a twin mounted in a similarly factory distressed frame. Then I could explore the significance of reclaiming a treasure that had previously been plucked from someone else’s pile of trash. But that was my grad school mind at work. That sort of thought wouldn’t serve me well where I was.

As my dad and Casey settled on the sofa, Vickie and her friend made to leave.

“I’m going to take Dawn home,” Vickie announced.

“Grab us a beer first,” my dad said before she opened the front door.

Though Vickie had her coat on and a jangle of keys in her grasp, she left Dawn there and marched past us all, into the kitchen. The fridge door inhaled as it opened, gulped as it was firmly shut. Vickie planted the beer bottle on the coffee table with enough force to flatten a tarantula. “They can get their own,” she said. She dragged Dawn in her wake out the door.

Her attitude was a large part of why there was no love lost between the two of us. She was my dad’s first steady girlfriend after my mom. My mother had disappeared when I was about five. She had taken off and no one ever went looking for her. The way my dad told it. He dated for years, bringing some of them home for a weekend. But Vickie was the first one who stuck around. It disgusted me how obedient she was to my dad. To me, she had always been a witch. Like she was taking out on me all the vexation she felt at answering to my father’s commands.

Casey got up to get a drink. Though he waved me off, I followed into the kitchen. As he ducked into the fridge, I looked around. Out the bare glass of the back door window was a shallow yard truncated by a chain link fence, an economical continuation of the iron fence that ran along the thoroughfare. Through the fence Aiden’s grave was surely waiting on a slope among the rolling waves of stone monuments. The morbid geography of the moment almost spun me into nausea.

There was also a mini-excavator parked in the yard, taking up almost all the space between the house and the fence. Both the shape of its scoop and the age of its design resembled a dinosaur.

“You’re doing excavating now?” I asked my dad as I sat in the chair Dawn had been in. He was sitting where Vickie had been. Casey handed me a beer as he passed, but I set it on the floor next to the chair without opening it.

“Residential. Digging up old sidewalks and driveways, mostly. A little trenching for sprinkler systems.”

“Not much work this time of year, I guess.”

“I cover shifts in snow plows when someone calls in. A few days a week, under the table.”

From what I had seen around town, it didn’t look like there had been fresh snow for weeks.

“I hear you’re in college,” Casey said, before the momentum stalled.

“Graduate school,” I said.

As soon as I drew the distinction, I realized it was moot to Casey and my dad. It was the difference between a stuck-up prick saying he's better than you and a stuck-up prick saying he's superior to you. I hadn't said it to belittle anyone, but it was a meaningful distinction to me. I don’t know if my reply killed the topic or if no one was interested in the first place. After all, to these two, I was a traitor for abandoning my roots.

“You didn’t even say hi to Vickie,” my dad said, disregarding the previous topic like road kill.

There was no polite response. He wasn’t going to listen to anything I had to say about her.

“She helped raise you boys, you know,” he pressed.

She’d been around the last few years I lived at home, if that’s what he meant. And I knew her paychecks sometimes went further than his at paying the bills – when they got paid, that is. But she resented every drop of water I used and every gasp of air-conditioned air I breathed.

“Well, you let her kick me out of the house,” I said. I’d bit my tongue for years. I wasn’t going to let him force down my throat the notion that Vickie was some benevolent soul.

“You stole from her!”

“I never stole a fucking thing from either of you!” As if there had ever been anything worth the taking.

“She said you took money out of her purse,” he said.

“And you believed it. You never even listened to me.”

“She had no reason to lie—.”

“I was your son! I was sixteen and you let your bitch girlfriend kick me out on the fucking street!”

“Well, it looks like that’s what it took to finally get you to grow up.”

“Oh, you’re so full of shit!”

“Ethan,” Casey said, trying to calm us both by petting the air with his hands. “Guys. This is old business. Let’s just move on.”

“No. I’m not letting this old shit take credit for one bit of who I am. I am who I am despite you, you sad fuck.”

“Yeah, that’s right. You were always ashamed of where you came from. Ran off the first chance you got,” my dad said. “If Paige hadn’t given me your number, I wouldn’t have even known how to get in touch with you.”

Talking to him was pointless as always. He twisted every word to serve his needs.

“I didn’t come back here to argue with you,” I said, standing.

He let out a “Pffff!” to convey how disinterested he was in me or my leaving. I might have calmed down if not for his reaction. But that gave me no choice but to walk out. I could hear Casey’s steps behind me. I was marching down the sidewalk before he closed the door behind him.

“Hey!” he said. “I know you two have baggage, but you’re his son. We’re all going through a lot.”

“You don’t have to keep the peace between us,” I said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

I hadn’t even brought up what Paige had said about Aiden’s death. But if we couldn’t make it through a few minutes of small talk, maybe it was for the best. Before I got to my car, I turned back to find Casey still waiting on the porch.

“I know Aiden had moved out of Paige’s house,” I said. “And this place doesn’t look big enough for another person. You know where he was living?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Hang on.”

He went inside. I stamped my feet lightly as if the cold that had seeped through my shoes could be extinguished like a flame. Casey returned and handed me a torn corner of a newspaper with an address on it.

“Don’t know if he had a phone,” he said. “But I think he had a roommate.”

“Thanks. I doubt anyone else has thought about his belongings.”

He shrugged off the notion as if to answer that no one had brought it up.

The address was in the grid, just beyond downtown. I headed there instead of going straight to the motel. Steeped in guilt because I didn’t even know where my brother lived when he died, I considered all I had missed out on in Aiden’s life. Five years since I had seen my brother in person and a year since I had heard his voice. I tried to remember what our last words had been in that final phone call. Had we been arguing or joking? God knows a call could go either way.

The address belonged to an antiquated three-story apartment building that originally had six units, each floor with one unit on either side of the central stair well. But the apartments had been divided to make twelve units. The place smelled of the stains on the wallpaper and food burnt on hot plates.

Aiden’s place had been on the second floor. I knocked on the door, waited, and repeated the cycle a few times before giving up. After all the miles and months, a two-inch thick slab of wood still barred me from the life Aiden had been leading. Yes, I could have tried to kick it in. But I also could have dialed the phone on the wall just inside my kitchen. Ten buttons, including the area code. The “1” to call long distance would total eleven. About a button per month, counting back to when I lost track of Aiden’s trajectory. That’s the microscopic tally of effort I failed to exert. True to form, I left the door unscathed. I didn’t have any paper to leave a note, so I would have to try again later.