House of Sand and Fog (40 page)

Connie Walsh shook her head, her lips pressing tightly together. “Then what
is
our defense, Kathy?”

“I don’t have one. A family is gone.” My throat started to close up and I turned my face away. I put the receiver back on the hook, left the mezzanine, and went back out to the tier where I knew I wouldn’t cry, where I was relieved I didn’t have a voice.

Now I climb the concrete steps to the second tier, thinking it is either Connie or she’s dropped me as her client and it’ll be a new lawyer, one assigned by the state. A blond deputy opens the door for me. Whoever has come is sitting, and I’m not close enough to see who through the glass over the cubicles, one of them taken up by a Chicana girl, her husband or boyfriend on the other side holding the phone to a little girl’s ear. Then, behind the glass a few cubicles down, my brother Frank stands up. He’s wearing a banana-yellow polo shirt, his black hair is moussed back, and there’s a thin gold chain around his neck, a gold watch band on his wrist. He’s gained weight, the curve of his belly pushing his belt buckle a little. He’s squinting into the glass, his hands on his hips, but he doesn’t see me. Then he does and his lips part, his eyes get shiny, and I want to turn and walk back out onto the tier: I hadn’t sent a letter; I hadn’t made one phone call; I guess I was waiting for Labor Day to come and go, for my mother and aunts to drive by the empty house and know Frank had been right, that I was away on a trip and wouldn’t be back for a long time.

Franky begins to blur. I wipe my eyes, step into the phone stall, and there’s my mother sitting in the chair looking up at me like I’m a vision she’s been both praying and dreading would come. She’s wearing too much makeup, the blush too pink and high on her cheeks, her lipstick too red. She’s wearing her costume pearls and a purple-and-blue flowered dress. And she’s just had her hair done. From where I stand, my breath high in my throat, I can see a round spot of scalp through her thinning hair. There are old-lady tendons in her throat.

Frank picks up the receiver and starts to say something, but then stops and waits for me to raise mine. I stay standing and hold the receiver, light as balsa wood, to my ear.

“Why didn’t you
call
us, Kath?”

I glance down at my mother. She’s looking up at me through the glass, her eyes slightly bloodshot. I swallow and point to my throat and am about to say I couldn’t call at the time but Frank interrupts me.

“You can’t talk?”

I don’t answer but feel myself slide back into the lie like a warm bath. My mother turns and asks him for the phone. “K? Are you all
right?
Your aunts and I drove by the house yesterday and there was that police tape over the doors and windows. Why can’t you talk? Franky flew out this morning. It took us all day to find you. No one would tell us anything, K. Honey, are you all
right?”
My mother was squinting into the glass like I was a ghost that might fade away any second. And that’s how I felt, dead to them, nothing but a voice from the other side; I started to feel strangely at ease, safely out of their reach in every way.

My mother’s lower lip starts to quiver. Her eyes go from mine to my county-jail orange, then back to my face, and I want to stand and show her all of it, the whole costume, every piece of it right down to the orange underwear that’s as big and loose as a man’s. I lean close to the glass and speak into the phone, “I’m all right, Mother.” I have never called her that, only Mom or Ma, but I like the sound of Mother, the dignity it seems to give her, the bereaved.

“K? What
happened?”
She starts to cry. Franky puts his hand on her shoulder and hands her his monogrammed handkerchief. I look up at his face through the glass, but he isn’t looking at me; his eyes are on the countertop, and he seems about to go off into a stare, like he’d just as soon sit this moment out somewhere else, but also there’s hurt in his face, and for a second I wonder about Jeannie and the kids, is everything all right at home? I must have asked this into the phone, and the question props my mother up instantly.

“Of course they’re not all right, they’re worried sick about you. What have you
done,
K? Why are you
here?”
My mother still looks like she’s going to cry, but there’s something hard in her face now. She dabs at her mascara, her lips pressed together, bracing herself for what I am going to tell her. She’s waiting for the facts, but her last question is still a wire of words in my head that won’t stop vibrating, that’s been singing the same thing for years and years:
What have you done?
Why are you
here?

My mother is talking into the phone again, asking me about Dad’s house, about the police tape across the front door, about the widow’s walk Frank had never given permission to build. “Can’t you speak, K? Is there something wrong with your voice? Did Nick have anything to do with this?”

Franky is looking down at me through the glass. He shrugs as if he’s not quite sure he was supposed to have mentioned that but did. I look back at my mother, her eyes waiting, always waiting. Her last question seems as ridiculous and naive as can be.

“Nick left me, Mom.”

“But why?”

“I don’t
know
why, Ma. Why don’t you go find him and ask him?”

My mother’s eyes turn hard now. Her question might’ve sounded different coming from somebody else, more gentle, like the man who left me must’ve been in the dark about my best qualities. But from her it was an interrogation: What did you do this time, Kathy? How could you have let him go?

But now she looks confused, her too-red lips parted, her forehead furrowed. She shakes her head once, the way the hard-of-hearing do. A second ago I’d felt like hitting her over the head with the truth of my story, telling her the charges against me, telling her about the Behranis, holding her face in everything. But she looks so vulnerable right now, so pathetic in her pearls and dress and makeup, trying to make a good impression on my jailers, I can’t say more. I shake my head and point to my throat. “I had an operation. I shouldn’t talk right now. Call this number.”

I write Connie Walsh’s telephone number on the memo pad they leave in each cubicle for us, my shoulder squeezing the phone to my ear, and I hold the pad to the glass. My mother is quiet on the other end, and this should be familiar to me, her silence as I keep the truth from her. Frank is punching the number into the computerized Rolodex on his watch, and I’m looking into my mother’s eyes, as dark as they’ve always been, tiny pink capillaries broken in the whites, but now they don’t look cold or hard, though not warm either. Under her eyes is a small packet of flesh her pancake foundation can’t hide. She raises her chin, her red lips pressing together, and I am the hunter who has caught an old deer in his range only to lower my bow. And this wall of safety glass between us doesn’t feel like a bad thing, more like something natural, inevitable. Her eyes stay on mine longer than I can ever remember. I can look at her for days. Then she blinks, stands quickly, and turns to go as if I’ve already left. I wave at Franky but he is hanging up the receiver and I don’t wait for him to look up.

I walk past the cubicles and out onto the second tier. I can hear the TVs and the chatter and Jolene’s hoarse laugh coming from below. I see her sitting at one of the tables playing cards, blackjack, it looks like, and she’s the dealer. The table is full of her women, all black except for a new blond girl who is sitting quietly between Jolene and Big April, an obese woman whose chins sag to her cleavage. I stop on the stairs and watch Jolene take Big April’s money, a small mound of pieces of notepad paper. The air is heavy with cigarette smoke, and the sunlight from the open rec door makes it look heavier than it is, bluish, a wide band of it hovering over everyone’s heads. I think of Lester, his Toyota station wagon pulling away from the neon light of the El Rancho Motel, disappearing into the fog. There is a loosening warmth between my legs and I want to feel him inside me again, but feel sure now I never will.

Behind and above me the deputy tells me to move along, no loitering on the stairs, and Jolene looks up and laughs. “Get down here, Remote.” And I smile at her and nod like she’s just said something I never understood before, but now finally do.

I descend the stairs, my eyes on the wide flat cloud as I walk down under it, this blue ceiling of smoke we make. And I feel it above me as I move past the women at the phones, past other women at other tables, all of them smoking, blowing out thin angry streams into the air, and I stand at Jolene’s shoulder. She stops dealing and looks up at me, her dark eyes waiting, though she’s never heard me speak, and I nod at her pack of Marlboro Lights. At first she doesn’t seem to understand what I want, but then I smile, and put two fingers to my lips.