For Love (3 page)

My father, the thief.
The criminal
, she thought as she passed Elizabeth’s big Victorian house and looked over at it. She said the word aloud, and it came out ‘cwiminaw,’
along with a little drool. She wiped her lip, swung her tongue over the smooth new filling. The dentist had said it was a tooth that would ‘bear watching.’ Lottie had told him that
she’d have her dentist at home check it when she saw him.
Home
, she thought. Wherever that was.

She heard the downstairs shower singing when she came inside. The shower singing and Ryan singing too, chanting some bit of rap in which ‘world control’ rhymed with
‘soul.’

She flapped the umbrella and left it puddling in the front hall. She went upstairs to her bathroom, the bathroom she shared with the one remaining roomer in the house, Richard Lester. She shook
her damp hair out and looked at her face. The skin at the corners of her mouth was red, raw, stretched-looking.
What big hands you have
, she’d wanted to say to the dentist. Her numbed
lips drooped on one side.

More than once, Jack had said he loved her mouth. He’d told her he could sit across from her forever and watch her lips shape the words as she spoke. Forever.
Fowevewr
. She
remembered how he’d looked when she’d driven away to come here to her mother’s house, standing in the dappled sun of the driveway with his old dog.

Ryan turned off the shower downstairs, and the pipes through the house thudded implosively. The dinner bell, Lottie thought. Make yourself useful. She put lipstick on her thickened and awkward
mouth. She went downstairs, through the dining room, where her books and papers lay strewn across the table. Lottie was a writer. She had brought her work with her to her mother’s house; but
she hadn’t gotten much done. The messy dining room nagged at her each time she passed through it.

In the kitchen, she pulled several different kinds of lettuce out of the refrigerator and began to fix a huge salad, using some cold leftover chicken, some pecans, some sliced pear. She was
starving, she realized as she tore off pieces of the frilly green. She’d only managed a bite or two at lunch before her tooth crumbled apart.

Ryan came into the kitchen looking scrubbed and fresh, two bloody bits of toilet paper stuck on his face where he’d nicked himself shaving. He started to set the table while they talked
together in the mild and aimless way they’d grown accustomed to this summer. Lottie put the salad on the table, and they sat down. But as soon as she started to chew, she bit her tongue and
the inside of her cheek. Shocked tears rose in her eyes; abruptly she felt precariously near the real thing.

She got up, went to the refrigerator, and uncorked the wine. ‘Would you like some?’ she asked Ryan, waving the bottle. ‘It appears I have to drink my dinner, since I
can’t chew.’

‘I don’t want wine, but I’ll take a beer, if you’ve got it,’ he said.

She opened the refrigerator again and lifted out a brown bottle. She brought one of her mother’s larger glasses to the table for him, one that had a picture of Fred Flintstone on it. He
carefully poured the beer out, explaining his technique for minimizing foam, learned in England. When he’d emptied the bottle, she held her glass up and they clinked their glasses
together.

‘To dental health,’ he said.

‘To fluowidation,’ she answered, exaggerating the Elmer Fudd stuff.

She had two glasses of wine while he ate almost all of the salad she’d intended for both of them. Between bites he told her that he’d called his father that afternoon and put him and
his wife on alert that he’d be coming for his summer visit within a couple of weeks.

‘That sounds fine,’ Lottie said. ‘Whatever you guys work out.’

Then, because it always made him a little uncomfortable to talk about his father with Lottie, he moved quickly on to a movie he’d seen the night before, and began to tell her the entire
plot. At every pause, Lottie said pointedly, ‘I’d like to see it.’

‘You should,’ he’d say, and then, oblivious to nuance, he’d begin to describe the next episode. While this irritated her in one way, she also took such a simple, almost
physical, pleasure in his enthusiasm, in his too loud voice, his laughter, that she didn’t want him to stop. She felt the wine hit her midway through the second glass, but finished it anyway.
The hell with it.

After Ryan left, she poured herself the definitive third glass. She dumped out the remaining salad. She turned on the jazz program and started to sing while she washed the dishes. When she was
done she sat down at the kitchen table. In spite of the rain, or perhaps because of it, she opened the window wider. A mist strained through the screen on to her face and bare arms. She looked
around the room. It was small and old-fashioned, a dingy riot, if there could be such a thing, of fluorescence and plastic and linoleum. They weren’t going to do anything to it, as they
hadn’t to the bathrooms: Cameron’s theory was that people always wanted to redo the kitchen and bathrooms anyway. With the painting of the stairwell done, she realized, they were
finished inside. And when Ryan had finished the windows outside, it would be over – the job, the peculiar summer here. Nearly as soon as this thought crossed her mind, though, she began to
think of the things – the odd, leftover chores – she still had to do. It was almost a kind of consolation, going over this list. Lottie sat at the table and reviewed it several times. A
song ended; another one began. ‘Miss Brown to You’: the moment the clarinet started, she recognized it. She decided, abruptly, that she would begin tonight. Yes, she would clear out the
kitchen cupboards.

She went upstairs to change back into work clothes. But once she was stripped down to underpants, standing in front of the tidy stacks of folded clothes along the freshly painted wall of her
mother’s room – she’d sold the Depression-era bedroom set, the bed and bureau and night tables, the first week here – her eye fell on the gleaming strip of gray satin
halfway down one pile, the nightgown Jack had given her those few months ago.

‘Oh, wallow in it,’ she said aloud. She bent over and slid the nightgown out. She pulled it on, let it shimmer down wetly over her breasts and hips. Then she went back to the
bathroom to see what she could of how she looked in the mirror there. But Lottie was short, and the mirror was high on the wall; she saw her face, encircled by the wildly curling hair, her regular
features, the large dark eyes. She saw her narrow shoulders, the sheen of fabric over her breasts, the glowing dot of each nipple. That was all.

She went downstairs, and while Billie sang, she pulled everything out of the lower cabinets on to the floor, settled herself amid the junk, and started.

And so it’s a little before ten when she hears the siren, its frantic cry choked off abruptly. Much too close, she thinks. She gets up and pads barefoot through the
dining room, the hall, into the dark, almost bare living room. The furniture they’ve saved for the Salvation Army – so little of what was jammed into the house – is shoved against
the windowless side wall of the room. She stands in the emptied bay of front windows and sees that the ambulance is stopped in the long driveway to Elizabeth’s house. Her hand rises to her
mouth. There are people milling in and out of its headlights, there are sharp voices. Lottie’s quick thought is of Elizabeth’s mother, Emily, in her early seventies and overweight.
Through the sound of the rain, she can hear a child crying hysterically. She hunches against the sticky, cold glass. She sees that Cameron’s car is hulked in the driveway, ahead of the
ambulance.

For a moment Lottie considers getting her clothes on, going over. But while she is standing there, drunkenly weighing it, a police car drives up and squeals to a stop by the curb at the foot of
Elizabeth’s driveway. The men get out and move quickly up the lawn. The blue light slices rhythmically through the driving rain. Somehow this gives everything a dimension that frightens
Lottie, excludes her. She looks up and down the street. She can see a few neighbors at their windows, like her, and one little cluster of three or four people on a porch halfway up the block. All
keeping their distance. Then she hears the sudden explosive
whumps!
of the ambulance’s doors slamming. She looks back quickly and sees it coming down the driveway and then turning
sharply, driving away up the hill. Its wail starts again as it rounds the corner, and fades almost immediately behind the noise of the rain.

There’s still a knot of people standing under the porte cochere, but now they begin to move slowly into Elizabeth’s house. One of the men looks like Cameron, but Lottie isn’t
sure of that. She feels a sense of her own helplessness, her uselessness. She thinks of Emily again, and shivers.

She goes upstairs to get a sweater. When she looks out the bedroom windows through the quivering black leaves, it seems that everyone is gone. She comes down again, crosses the hall, and steps
out on to the wet front porch in her bare feet and nightgown. Someone has turned off the swirling light on top of the police car. Cameron’s car still sits two thirds of the way up the drive.
It looks abandoned; the door on the driver’s side hangs open, and the interior light is on. Lottie feels peculiar knowing that disaster has struck so close by, but not having any sense of
what form it has taken or of how her brother may be involved.

And then suddenly she feels called back again, as she has on and off the whole time she’s been in Cambridge, to herself as a girl. Herself – she feels almost dizzy with the sense of
recollection – standing here in her nightgown, looking across the wide empty street at another mysterious drama unfolding at Elizabeth’s house. There comes the image of all the surfaces
plumped and whitened under a sheen of snow, the memory of the way her feet felt then, bare and burning on the icy porch as she uselessly whispered to Cameron to come home – Cameron, who stood
calling outside Elizabeth’s front door. He had sat down, finally, and huddled on Elizabeth’s stoop, an almost invisible dark lump, and Lottie went back inside her house and stood,
frantically watching him with numbed fingers and feet, from the dark of the living room windows. He stayed there for so long that in the end Elizabeth’s father came outside with a topcoat on
over his pajamas, and unfastened, jingling galoshes on his feet, and gently escorted him back down the street to Lottie.

She remembers another time, when Cam fell and broke his ankle climbing out Elizabeth’s window at night. In that case, too, it was Lottie who had to take charge, who had to comfort him and
arrange for help, even though she couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen at the time. Their mother was home, of course, but she was up in bed, blanketed under a thick fog of
booze.

Now a damp wind kisses Lottie’s face, flaps her nightgown around her legs. It seems to her that she’s had this same sense of
watching
for the entire summer. A sense of her own
life stalled, halted, while everyone else’s – Elizabeth’s and Cameron’s, even Ryan’s – rushes forward with a violence and energy she can’t help being
frightened of. Over and over she’s had the impulse to say to someone, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t . . .’ ‘Do you think you ought to . . .?’ It’s made her feel
elderly, elderly and pinched.

Standing on the porch now, she’s vaguely aware of a vindictive pleasure rising in her at the idea of tragedy striking so close to Elizabeth and her brother:
That’s what you
get.
The thought is gone almost before she lets herself feel it, dismissed by a startled pulse of shame that makes her suck her breath in, that widens her eyes in the dark. She shudders and
pulls the sweater tighter around her. With her heart racing, she goes back inside. ‘To work, to work,’ she says out loud. In the kitchen, she lowers herself to the floor again and looks
absently at the ordered piles of junk. She picks up a rolling pin with a long swollen crack in it and sits motionless for some minutes, holding it, before she’s able to make a decision about
it.

At around eleven, she hears the front door opening. She looks up in time to see fat Richard Lester, the one remaining roomer, pass by the open doorway of the dining room. He sees Lottie in the
kitchen, too, but instantly averts his eyes, moving nearly sideways in a crablike haste not to have to take notice of her. Sometimes she calls out to him when he does this, cruelly trying to force
him to acknowledge that they have seen each other, that they do live in the same house; tonight she lets him go. She hears his muffled, modest noises in the bathroom upstairs and then the silence
that means he’s working at his desk or reading in bed. The bright line under his door often glows all night. He’s a graduate student in linguistics. He’s lived in Lottie’s
mother’s house for eight years. In September he’ll move to some other rented room. In Somerville, he’s told Lottie sorrowfully one of the few times they’ve spoken, as though
she were somehow to blame for this fall from grace.

Lottie works for about another hour. There’s some crazy, drunken equation governing her behavior: since she can’t help over there, she can at least be useful here. Every now and
then, though, she’s stopped completely by the image of Cam’s car in the driveway with its door hung open; or of the cold blue lights whirling and whirling in the rain.

At around midnight she closes the windows and goes upstairs to bed. She falls almost instantly into a heavy, boozy sleep, cradled by the sound of the rain. It’s close to two when she hears
Ryan come in and go into the little bedroom on the first floor where she slept as a girl. The pipes hum and bang in the downstairs bathroom as the water goes on and off.

For a while Lottie lies in the musty dark listening to the silence on the street outside. Suddenly she realizes: the rain has stopped. She gets out of bed and raises the shade. Through the heavy
cover of the leaves, she can see that the lights are all off at Elizabeth’s house now, and the door to Cameron’s car has been closed. Everything looks normal, except for the odd
placement of the car – almost all the way up the drive, but not quite. This seems somehow more ominous to her than the ambulance earlier, or the blue lights.