Orient (57 page)

She hated both names. A spear of vomit flared up her windpipe, the sickness of pregnancy, the stomach flutter of resolution. She loved him too.

CHAPTER
31

I
t was only five-thirty, but night had fully enveloped the house. Distant lights glowed from the water, and when Mills peered out the back window, he heard animal movements in the weeds. It could be Adam out there, somewhere in the blackness with gasoline and matches, preparing to prey upon another Orient home. Until Adam Pruitt was captured, each house was a lamb marooned in a field, the meat of wood and pink insulation more threatening to its occupants for being so easy to consume.

Paul had the radio tuned to classic rock at low volume, but the music was interrupted by weather forecasts tracking a storm front toward Long Island, promising a 90 percent chance of ice and snow. He and Mills hadn’t talked about Adam Pruitt, about the rumors that had saved them both from suspicion. The matter of the gas can had been swept aside by the news of Lisa and her boyfriend. Paul did, however, call the Greenport locksmith to have all the house locks changed. “Thank god we have a Muldoon system,” was all Paul said on the matter.

With a dish towel draped on his shoulder, Paul puttered through the back rooms, nudging the remaining boxes with his foot. “Let’s take the family heirlooms down to the cellar,” he said. “And that will be it. We’ve done a good job on these rooms. Or you have. I’m not sure these rooms have been this empty since the nineteenth century.”

“What are you going to do with all this extra space?” Mills asked, straightening a row of novels against the wall. “Decorate? Maybe
turn the big room into a library, and the smaller one could have a flat screen. You can hang some of your landscapes around it.”

“Have you been trying to make room for a television all along?” Paul laughed. “That might be good. And a mudroom in the back. A place to put the coats.” He hesitated, his eyes scanning the torn wallpaper. “We’ve never talked about money. I need to pay you something for all the work you’ve put in.”

“I don’t need any money,” Mills said. “You let me stay here. That’s enough.” The mention of payment suggested that his services were no longer needed, that Paul’s feelings about sharing the house had changed in the last few days. Mills had been sleeping in this house since September. He had claimed his own shelf in the refrigerator, his own Polynesian pillow for lounging on the parlor floor. In his mind, there were household anxieties like Thanksgiving to consider. In his mind, his name was practically on the deed.

Paul caught the jumpiness in his voice.

“Hey,” he said. “You can stay as long as you want. I meant what I said. But I still want to pay you. Even if you do decide to stay, you’re going to need your own money and maybe also a job. How’s a thousand for the work you’ve done?”

“That sounds right,” he replied. He watched as Paul shuffled through the room, his injured knee giving him a graceless limp. “What if those detectives come back? What if they pursue that gas can?”

Paul stopped hobbling and looked at him.

“You didn’t do it. You didn’t do it, so you have nothing to be afraid of. You’re not going to be forced out of this house by a piece of circumstantial evidence. And anyway, it’s my prints on the damn thing. If they want to accuse someone, I’m the one with no alibi.” Paul spoke so confidently that Mills knew he was trying to convince himself. “In a year, this whole matter will be forgotten. They’ll catch who did it and it will be over. It’s like Bug Light. They never caught the arsonists, but soon everyone forgot about it, the village just accepted it as gone, and the longer it was gone, the more its loss
became a part of the scenery. Every so often you just have to wait out the bad patch and keep your eyes on the road ahead.”

Mills tried to imagine Paul last June, a yet-unbroken man with five drinks in him, driving straight into a tree after the last member of his family was buried. Maybe that’s why Paul was so insistent on making Mills welcome here. He didn’t trust himself alone on the roads, returning to an empty house with so little to show for his days but the junk that filled the rooms. Mills had spent enough time in cars to know how the presence of another passenger could keep a lonely driver from plowing into a tree. He often felt that drivers had picked him up simply to prevent the possibility.

Mills lifted a box of photo albums. Paul balanced another box on top of it, one marked
FAMILY
, filled with grainy VHS tapes, old letters, and his video camera. Paul grabbed the shoe box of flares but returned it to the floor. “We might need these in case of emergency,” he said. “If the storm hits as hard as they’re predicting, the power lines could snap and we’ll need the flares to mark them.”

“There’s a gun in that shoe box too,” Mills said.

Paul kicked its corner with his toe. “Dad’s pistol. You didn’t find any bullets, did you? I never found them either. I figured they’d be somewhere in these rooms. Just as well. No bullets, no shooting.” Mills didn’t tell Paul about the single bullet he’d put in with the flares. Suicide prevention by lack of equipment.

Paul turned the backyard light on and guided him down the steps. Mills’s muscles quivered with the heaviness of the load. Paul opened the bulkhead doors, and he sunk into the hole, step by step, a man disappearing into the ground. “Just a second while I get the light,” he called. Mills had never been down in the cellar. When a narrow light explained the cement steps, he slowly descended. Cobwebs netted his forehead, and a highway of corroded pipes ran across the low ceiling. The cellar was moist and smelled of chlorine. The ball of a dead mouse contributed a sugary odor. Makeshift shelves displayed jars of paints and the spines of magazines. Paul’s
landscape paintings leaned against the gray brick, several of them half-completed, with white lighthouses leaking into waves. Mills saw a boxy 1980s television by the floor drain. “You
do
have one,” he said. “We could have saved a lot of time getting to know each other by watching that thing.”

“Just stack those boxes over by the boiler,” Paul said, climbing the steps to haul down the remaining cartons. Mills noticed the antique map of Orient taped across the cellar wall. Now that he knew its geography, he could identify the position of familiar properties: Beth’s house next to Magdalena’s, Adam Pruitt’s by Jeff Trader’s, the diCorcia farm next to Arthur Cleaver’s mansion and the Wilson-Crimp compound. The bird-shaped land flew toward Plum, home to avian diseases, and toward the lone darting stingray of Gardiners Island. Another map, carbon-purple, showcased Paul’s architectural model of Bug Light for its reconstruction in 1990. On a metal desk was scattered the hopeful paperwork of the Seaview: sketched drafts of a seaside hotel, bank statements estimating personal liquid assets, a letter from Arthur Cleaver, solicitor, to Eleanor Ogalvy: “All rights to property will be tendered upon completion of sale . . .” Paul was mortgaging all he had to buy his dream. If Adam hadn’t emerged as the prime suspect, the news of Paul’s prints on the gas can would have rendered that dream meaningless. And if the police should ever return to renew their investigation into Paul, he would lose what he’d worked so hard to find—and five more drinks might bring him into contact with another tree that had grown for a hundred years just to finish the job of killing him.

Paul dropped the boxes, dusting his hands. “You ready to go back up?”

“That drunk-driving accident last summer,” Mills said gently. A giant shadow grew along the brick, which took him a second to recognize as his own. Paul’s eyes receded behind their lenses. “It wasn’t an accident, was it?”

Paul yanked at his lower lip. He inflated his chest to try to keep his breathing even. Paul had never been willing to talk about himself.
He had smoke-screened himself in kindness, taking on the role of father to refuse the far tougher negotiation of friendship. Only the mention of his brother, Patrick, seemed to shake him, but Patrick had been dead for forty years, and Mills had no idea what shook Paul now. They could go on that way, knowing each other without risking anything deeper, but then Mills would always be a guest in this house. A family wasn’t forged out of steel. You dig a hole in a person and then you fill it with yourself.

“It’s okay,” Mills said. “You can tell me.” His voice rose into a question.

“I was drinking,” Paul said, almost pleadingly, clinging to the official report. Drunk driving was favorable to vehicular suicide. “I had too much, and I was exhausted. Please don’t bring this up now.”

Mills thought of the bottle of Vicodin on Paul’s bedroom bureau and the pain that had been embedded in him long before the crash.

“I saw Karen Norgen at Beth’s house today. She said she witnessed the accident. She said she saw you drive into the tree. There wasn’t a swerve.”

Paul turned halfway to the steps but stopped. It was uncomfortably quiet, an epilogue’s dead page space.

“What do you want me to say?” Paul whispered. “That I’ve been unhappy? I think I’ve always been unhappy. That I was lonely? Yes, there’s that too. That I watched my mother die and realized, at least she had me to hold her hand and watch her go? That’s more than I’ll have. I guess it hit me the day of the funeral, like hitting a tree. No, hitting a tree is easier, because it brings you to a halt.” His fingers reached for his mustache, but even that was gone, and instead he wiped at his lip with such sorrow it was as if he were mourning the loss of its protective covering. “Yes, I hit that tree. It wasn’t an accident. And for a long time the worst part was that I walked away from it. I survived it and came back home.”

Mills took a step forward. Paul drew his hand up, either to apologize or to stop him from coming closer.

“You still talk about a family, having kids, the hotel . . .”

“That’s not the point of kids, is it? To make you happy? I’m forty-seven. I’m not going to have children. I’m not going to get married. I never was. Can we please not continue—”

“But there must have been someone once.” After nearly two months, Mills still didn’t know if he should say
a woman
or
a man
. But wasn’t there always a
someone once
for everyone? It seemed to Mills as inevitable as the flu, that each member of the human species would eventually bear the loss of a
someone once
. Mills might have been asking for his own peace of mind. He wanted to believe that he wouldn’t end up as lonely as Paul.

“A long time ago there might have been, a few. One or two I thought I loved.” Paul folded his arms over his chest.
One or two
: gender neutral. Was Paul being vague because he was an expert closet case, or out of some misguided respect for Mills’s orientation? “But it didn’t work out, and the years added up. Look, that accident, that car crash, whatever you want to call it, was a moment of weakness. A deliberate moment of weakness. But I am happier now.” Paul’s eyes begged Mills for affirmation, the way a patient begs a doctor for positive test results. “I’m happier. I made a decision to live close to my parents to care for them, to pay their bills. That might have prevented me from other things, but I don’t regret it. I owed it to them. They couldn’t have other children. I was all they had to depend on.”

Mills wondered if not becoming attached—to anyone at all, really—was another sacrifice Paul had made for his domineering parents. If they had treated Paul less like a slave and more like a son, he might have had a chance at happiness. Paul was an architect even in his hobbies, painting landscapes that never included a single human figure. To draw a person was to reduce the scene to scale, to ruin its eternal beauty by fixing it to a time and place. Dead landscape paintings filled the cellar, infinite and impotent in bloodless yellows and blues, a headache of sky and sea. One little dot and they might have taken on life. Paul had brought Mills to his house in Orient to be that dot, the smudge on the doorknobs, the dirty feet
on the coffee table, the stains on the bedroom rug. Paul needed to come out, not as gay or straight, but as human.

“I suppose it seems like I don’t have very much,” Paul said. Mills could have answered yes. Instead, he put his arms around Paul. He hugged him just like he had Magdalena’s grandfather clock, savagely, full-bodied, almost lifting him off the ground. “Hey, now,” Paul said, but he too was hugging, pressing his weight on him, the stench of their breaths mixing, the scratch of cheek stubble, the dry skin of radiator heat in winter, two men of different ages, not father and son, not lovers, just the tight, grappling hug of two people who had found each other in an underground room. “All right, all right,” Paul said, but he was squeezing harder than Mills was. “It’s time we went upstairs,” he said, as if time were of the essence. As if time were Paul’s main problem.

Mills let go. Paul’s eyes were as glassy as the lenses that covered them. They climbed the steps, shut the bulkhead doors, and traveled in slow, astronautical strides through the empty Benchley back rooms. These could be Mills’s rooms too, and he was so fixated on the possibilities of what these rooms could contain that, as he walked down the hallway toward the front of the house, Mills mistook the red strobes revolving through the windows as a string of Christmas lights, a festive, early twinkle of things to come.

But Paul froze in the hallway, recognizing their source.

“The police are in the driveway,” he said. “I want you to go upstairs.”

Mills listened from
the top of the steps as Detective Gilburn and two officers swept through the front door.

“Where is Mills Chevern?” It was Gilburn’s voice, impatient, no longer casual, no longer benign. “We need to take him in for questioning.”

“On what grounds?” Paul stammered. “Do you have a warrant?”

“We could get one in a minute. We were hoping to make this easy. If he comes in willingly, it won’t be considered an arrest.”

“Arrest?” Mills heard the anxiety in Paul’s voice. “Arrest for what?”

“We need to question him about the burglary and fire of the Muldoon residence.”

Paul again spat the most atrocious word back at the detective. “Burglary?”

Mills heard the rustle of a plastic bag. He stayed in the shadows, not daring to step forward on the landing for fear that they might spot him.