Olive Kitteridge (33 page)

“I know the attorney general himself,” Jim said loudly, rocking back and forth, holding the arms of the rocking chair tight. “We were prosecutors together years ago. You met him at a Christmas party once, Helen. Dick Hartley. You thought he was a moron and you were right. And no, I can't contact him, Jesus. He's sticking his nose in the case. Totally a conflict. And strategically suicide. Jim Burgess can't just go barreling in, good God.” Helen and Bob exchanged glances. After a moment Jim stopped rocking and looked at Bob. “Did he kill a prostitute? What was
that
about?”

Bob held up a hand in a gesture of apology. “Zach's a bit of a mystery, is all I meant. Quiet.”

“The only thing Zach is, is a moron.” Jim looked at Helen. “Honey, I'm sorry.”

“I'm the one who said ‘prostitute,'“ Helen reminded him. “So don't get mad at Bob, who's right, you know, Zach has always been different, and frankly it is the kind of thing that happens in Maine, a quiet guy living with his mother killing prostitutes and burying them in some potato field. And since he didn't do that, I don't know why we have to give up a vacation, I really don't.” Helen crossed her legs, clasped her hands over her knees. “I don't even know why he has to turn himself in. Get him a Maine lawyer and let
him
figure it out.”

“Hellie, you're upset, and I get it,” Jim said patiently. “But Susan's a mess. And I'll get him a Maine lawyer. But Zach has to take himself in because—” Here Jim paused and looked around the room. “Because he did it. That's the first reason. The other first reason is that if he goes in right away and says, ‘Oh, stupid me,' they'll probably be easier on him. But the Burgesses aren't fugitives. That's not who we are. We don't hide.”

“Okay,” said Helen. “All right.”

“I kept telling Susan: They'll charge him, set bail, get him right back home. It's a misdemeanor. But she's got to get him in there. The cops are under pressure with the publicity.” Jim spread his hands as if he were holding a basketball in front of him. “The immediate thing is to
contain
this.”

“I'll go,” Bob said.

“You?” Jim said. “Mr. Scared-to-Fly?”

“I'll take your car. I'll leave early in the morning. You guys go wherever you're going. Where are you going?”

“St. Kitts,” said Helen. “Jim, why don't you let Bob go?”

“Because …” Jim closed his eyes, bowed his head.

“Because I can't do it?” Bob said. “It's true she likes you better, but come on, Jimmy, I'll go. I want to.” Bob had a sudden feeling of drunkenness, as if the earlier whiskey had just kicked in.

Jim kept his eyes closed.

“Jim,” Helen said. “You need this vacation. You're seriously overworked.” The urgency in her voice made Bob's heart ache with a fresh loneliness: Helen's alliance with Jim was strong—and not to be assaulted by the needs of a sister-in-law whom Helen, after all these years, barely knew.

“Fine,” Jim said. He picked his head up, looked at Bob. “You go. Fine.”

“We're one mess of a family, aren't we, Jimmy?” Bob, sitting next to his brother, put his arm over Jim's shoulder.

“Stop it,” said Jim. “Would you stop? Jesus Christ almighty.”

Bob walked back home along the darkened streets. As he got closer to his building, he saw from the sidewalk that the television was on in the apartment below his. He could just make out the form of Adriana sitting alone and staring at the TV. Had she no one who could spend the night with her? He might knock on her door, ask if she was all right. But he pictured himself, the big gray-haired man who lived above her, standing in her doorway, and thought she would not want that. He climbed the stairs to his place, tossed his coat onto the floor, and picked up his phone.

“Susie,” he said. “It's me.”

They were twins.

Jim had his own name right from the start, but Susie and Bob were The Twins. Go find the twins. Tell the twins to come and eat. The twins have chicken pox, the twins can't sleep. But twins have a special connection. They are, fingers crossed, like this. “Kill him,” Susan was saying now, on the telephone. “String him up by his toenails.”

“Susan, take it easy, he's your kid.” Bob had switched on his desk lamp and stood looking over the street.

“I'm talking about the rabbi. And the queer-o woman minister of the Unitarian church. They've come out with a statement. Not only has the
town
been damaged by this, but the whole state. No, excuse me. The whole country.”

Bob rubbed the back of his neck. “So, Susan. Why did Zach do this?”

“Why did he do it? When was the last time you raised a child, Bob? Oh, I know I'm supposed to be sensitive about that, never mention your low sperm or no sperm or whatever it is, and I never have. I've never said a word about why Pam might have left, so she could have children with someone—I can't believe you're making me say all this, when I'm the one in trouble.”

Bob turned away from the window. “Susan, do you have a pill you can take?”

“Like a cyanide tablet?”

“Valium.” Bob felt an inexpressible sadness go through him, and he wandered back toward the bedroom with the phone.

“I never take Valium.”

“Well, it's time to start. Your doctor can phone in a prescription. You'll be able to sleep tonight.”

Susan didn't answer, and Bob knew that his sadness was a longing for Jim. Because the truth (and Jimmy knew it) was that Bob didn't know what to do. “The kid's safe,” Bob said. “No one's going to hurt him. Or you.” Bob sat down on his bed, then stood up again. He really had absolutely no idea what to do. He wouldn't sleep tonight; not even a Valium, and he had plenty, would get him to sleep, he could tell. Not with his nephew in trouble, and that poor woman below him watching TV, and even Preppy Boy in jail. And Jimmy headed off to some island. Bob walked back to the front of the apartment, switched off his desk lamp.

“Let me ask you something,” his sister was saying.

In the darkness, a bus pulled up across the street. An old black woman sat looking out the bus window, her face implacable; a man toward the back nodded his head, maybe listening to earphones. They seemed exquisitely innocent, and far away—

“Do you think this is a movie?” his sister asked. “Like this is some boondocks of a town and the farmers are going down to the courthouse and demand his head on a stick?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Thank God Mommy's gone. She'd die all over again. She would.” Susan was crying.

Bob said, “This will blow over.”

“God's teeth, how can you say that? It's on every news station—”

“Don't watch,” Bob told her.

“Do you think I'm crazy?” she asked.

“A little bit. At the moment.”

“That's helpful. Thank you. Did Jimmy tell you a little boy in the mosque fainted, the pig's head scared him so much? It'd begun to thaw, so it was bloody. I know what you're thinking. What kid stores a pig's head in his mother's freezer without her knowing, and then does something like this? You can't deny you're thinking that, Bob. And it makes me crazy. Which you just called me a moment ago.”

“Susan, you've—”

“You expect certain things with kids, you know. Well, you don't know. But car accidents. The wrong girlfriends. Bad grades, that stuff. You don't expect to have anything to do with friggin' mosques, for crying out loud.”

“I'm driving up there tomorrow, Susan.” He had told her this when he first called. “I'll take him in with you, help contain this. Don't you worry.”

“Oh, I won't worry,” she said. “Good night.”

How they hated each other! Bob cracked open the window, shook out a cigarette, then poured wine into a juice glass and sat down in the metal foldout chair by the window. Across the street, lights were on in different apartments. There was a private show up here: the young girl who could be seen in her bedroom walking around in her underpants and no top. Because of how the room was laid out, he never saw her breasts, just her bare back, but he got a kick out of how free she seemed. So there was that—like a field of bluets in June.

Two windows over was the couple who spent a lot of time in their white kitchen, the man reaching into a cupboard right now—he seemed to be the one who cooked. Bob didn't like to cook. He liked to eat, but as Pam had pointed out, he liked the stuff that kids ate, things without color, like mashed potatoes or macaroni and cheese. People in New York liked food. Food was a very big deal. Food was like art. To be a chef in New York was like being a rock star.

Bob poured more wine, settled himself at the window again. What
ever
, as people said these days.

Be a chef, be a beggar, be divorced a zillion times, no one in this city cared. Smoke yourself to death out the window. Scare your wife and go to jail. It was heaven to live here. Susie never got that. Poor Susie.

Bob was getting drunk.

He heard the door open in the apartment below him, heard footsteps down the stairs. He peered out the window. Adriana stood beneath a streetlamp, holding a leash, her shoulders hunched and shivering, and the tiny dog was just standing there shivering too. “Ah, you poor things,” Bob said quietly. Nobody, it seemed to him in his drunken expansiveness, nobody—anywhere—had a clue.

Six blocks away, Helen lay next to her husband and listened to him snore. Through the window in the black night sky she saw the planes on their way into La Guardia, every three seconds if you counted—as her children had when they were young—like stars that kept coming and coming and coming. Tonight the house seemed full of emptiness, and she thought of how her children used to be asleep in their rooms and how safe it had been, the soft buoyancy of nighttime. She thought of Zachary up in Maine, but she had not seen him for years and could only picture a skinny pale boy, a motherless-seeming child. And she did not want to think of him, or a frozen pig's head, or her grim sister-in-law, because she saw how the incident was an irritant rubbing already against the fine fabric of her family, and she felt right now the small pricks of anxiety that precede insomnia.

She pushed on Jim's shoulder. “You're snoring,” she said.

“Sorry.” He could say that in his sleep. He turned over.

Wide awake, Helen hoped her plants wouldn't die while she and Jim were gone. Ana was not particularly good with plants. It was a feel, and you had it or you didn't. Once, years before Ana, the Burgess family had gone on vacation and the lesbians next door had let the lavender petunias that filled Helen's window boxes die. Helen had tended those plants every day, snipping off the sticky dead heads, watering them, feeding them; they were like sweet geysers gushing forth from the front windows of the house, and people commented on them as they walked by. Helen told the women how much attention was needed for any flowering plant in the summertime and they said yes, they knew. But then, to return from vacation and find them shriveled on the vine! Helen had cried. The women moved soon after, and Helen was glad. She'd never been able to be nice to them, not really, after they had killed her petunias. Two lesbians named Linda and Laura. Fat Linda and Linda's Laura is how they'd been spoken of in the Burgess home.

The Burgesses lived in the last of a row of brownstones. On their left was a tall limestone, the only apartment building on the block. Co-ops now. The Linda-Lauras had lived in the street-level co-op and then sold it to a banker, Deborah-Who-Does (short for Deborah-Who-Knows-Everything, as opposed to the Debra in the building who didn't know everything), and her husband, William, who was so nervous he had introduced himself as “Billiam.” The kids would sometimes call him that, but Helen asked them to be kind because Billiam had, years ago, been in the Vietnam War, and also, his wife, Deborah-Who-Does, was a terrible nuisance and Helen thought it had to be awful living with her. You couldn't step out into the back garden without Deborah-Who-Does stepping out into hers, and in two minutes she'd be mentioning that the pansies you were arranging wouldn't last on that side of the garden, that the lilies would need more light, that the lilac bush Helen planted would die (it had) because there was so little lime in the soil.