Tenderness (11 page)

He was not surprised. He had come upon the insurance policies a few weeks before dispatching Harvey and his mother.

She handed him three official-looking certificates, saying, “Harvey and your mother had checking and savings accounts. I invested that money in certificates of deposit. I timed them to mature and be available to you on your release from that awful place. Three certificates—now worth more than three thousand dollars each.”

“Thank you, Aunt Phoebe,” he said. “I want to share this money with you.” Knowing, of course, that she’d refuse the offer.

“Nonsense,” she replied, as expected. “I have more than enough. My job pays me handsomely and I have a fine pension plan for my later years. This money is yours to give you a good start in your new life.” She seemed to hesitate, pursing the thin lips, looking away from Eric, then looking back.

He knew what was coming.

“What do you expect to do in that new life, Eric?”

He was ready for her.

“I’d like to stay here for the next week or two. Until I pass my driver’s test. I took lessons at the
facility. I want to buy a van and do some camping this summer. I checked out colleges at the facility and hope to enroll in one in the fall. Either Boston or Worcester. Or maybe a community college somewhere in the state. I want to make something of myself.”

He smiled, hoping The Charm of the shy smile added sincerity to this little speech he had carefully rehearsed.

“That’s just fine, Eric,” she said. “It’s good to be ambitious. And you can stay with me as long as you wish.”

Relief was obvious in her voice, coming from the knowledge that he would not be a permanent guest.

When Aunt Phoebe drove off to work every day, she ignored the crowds across the street. Eric remained inside the house, killing time, watching boring talk shows on television in which transvestites seemed to be the most popular guests, and game shows where people won speedboats they would never use or went into hysterics about winning a new kitchen set. After a few days, he did not bother watching anymore.

Heat held the house in a suffocating grip. Aunt Phoebe could not stand air-conditioning, or “artificial
air,” as she called it, saying that it aggravated her sinuses. Eric wandered the rooms as if he were the only living thing in a museum. He opened the windows once in a while to allow fresh air, however hot, into the house.

The street was seldom without some kind of activity, although lulls occurred from time to time. In the first few days, television crews showed up, focused camcorders on the house while newscasters stood before cameras talking into space. He would later see them on the local news. Newspaper people also made regular visits, interviewing some of the spectators, scribbling in their notebooks. They occasionally crossed the street and rang the doorbell. Waited. Rang again. Then gave up. Eric never answered the doorbell or the telephone.

Once in a while, a parade of cars streamed by, horns blowing and brakes squealing. School vacations had begun, and kids either rallied to his cause or protested his freedom. Eric resented their intrusions, because they kept interest in him alive and their pictures turned up later in the newspaper or on television, brandishing the stupid signs that canceled each other out. Sometimes, when the street became suddenly deserted, he opened the door and stepped out on the front porch. He’d look with disgust at the debris left behind by the
crowds—candy wrappers, McDonald’s cups and paper bags, soda-pop cans.
The slobs are taking over the world
, he thought contemptuously.

The
Wickburg Telegram
was deposited at the back door every morning by a carrier he never saw. Boredom led him to read the stories at first—
Teen Murderer Refuses to Talk
. After a while he ignored them, because they were mostly rehashes of earlier stories with nothing new added. He sensed that the publicity was coming to an end when he saw the headline
Is Eric Poole in a New Kind of Prison?
Reading the story that speculated on what his life must be like in his aunt’s house—what television shows he watched, what books he might be reading—he realized that the writers were stretching and running out of ideas. Which pleased him.

What the newspeople did not know was that Eric managed to leave the house occasionally. His aunt became a willing conspirator, driving the car while he sat, cramped and crouching on the floor of the backseat, sitting up only when they were out on the highway. They went on shopping excursions in the strip malls along Route 9. Bought camping equipment and clothes. “Isn’t this fun?” Aunt Phoebe asked, picking out an orange shirt that Eric knew he would never wear.

They checked used-car lots for a minivan, Eric
wearing a baseball cap with the visor pulled low over his eyes and dark glasses. After three excursions, he found exactly what he was looking for. A nondescript beige minivan, six years old with low mileage. No air-conditioning and a manual shift, not even a radio, but luxuries were not important to him. His aunt placed a deposit on the van while Eric waited in the car. The transaction would be completed when he received his driver’s license.

His big moment each day came with the delivery of mail, when he looked for a letter from the Registry of Motor Vehicles announcing the day and hour of his driver’s test. He had submitted his application for the test before his release from the facility, having been advised of a two- or three-week waiting period before he’d be notified of his appointment.

He was running out of patience.

Suddenly, he had trouble falling asleep at night, tossing and turning in bed, unable to find a comfortable position. His brain and body clashed in an endless battle, visions crowding his mind, keeping him high-noon awake while his body moved restlessly, as if propelled by the visions.

The visions: soft feminine bodies, long black hair flowing to pale shoulders, glimpses of Laura
Andersun and Betty Ann Tersa and, finally, the Señorita. Her note blazed in his mind:
Call me. I’ll be waiting
, like neon-lit letters.

He sat up in bed, sweating, breathing hard, as if he had just completed one push-up too many. Looked toward the window at a slant of streetlight to establish his reality in the bedroom. He had never had trouble sleeping before. Always dropped off as soon as he closed his eyes, waking up suddenly in the morning after a dreamless sleep.

He left the bed and went to the window, looked out at the backyard drenched with moonlight, giving everything, bushes and trees and the picket fence, a sheen of silver. The image of the Señorita blossomed in his mind. He wondered what kind of perfume she wore, what other scents emanated from her body. Wondered how her flesh would respond to his touch, whether her skin would be warm or cool or moist with perspiration. Her eyes were dark, but she’d always been too far away from him to know whether they were brown or black. He preferred black, to match the sweet flow of hair to her shoulders. He imagined looking deep into those eyes as he moved his hands across her flesh, fingertips tracing the lovely landscape of her body until he reached …

He turned away, did not allow his thoughts to go further, had to escape the agony of desire unfulfilled, unanswered. Danger in these thoughts.

Must not think of the Señorita too often. Not yet. He pictured the old lieutenant out there somewhere, in the shadows, around the corner, watching, waiting.

He saw the girl for the first time the next afternoon, a Saturday, his aunt resting after vacuuming the parlor rug, sipping tea as she watched an old movie on television. Bored and restless, as usual, he prowled the rooms, pausing now and then to glance at the TV set. All the women in the movie wore crazy hats and long skirts and smoked endlessly.

At the window, he looked out at the street, dimly angry at himself for giving in to his curiosity. Not curiosity really but merely a desire for distraction. The crowd had thinned to a few stragglers in the heat of the afternoon. No television vans in sight—in fact, TV crews showed up only intermittently now, for which he was grateful.

A sudden movement drew his attention to the big weeping willow tree on the lawn of the house across the street. A girl stood partially obscured by the long, drooping branches that almost reached to the grass. He caught a glimpse of her face peering through the branches. She suddenly stepped out onto the sidewalk, all yellow and gold. Long blond hair, pale yellow blouse.

Her face evoked a distant memory, just out of reach. Had he seen her before?

He waited for a commercial to interrupt the movie that Aunt Phoebe was watching. Then, hoping the girl would not go away, he asked his aunt if she owned a pair of binoculars.

“I have opera glasses,” she said. “I don’t know why they call them opera glasses. I’ve never been to the opera.”

She produced the small black binoculars from the dining room cupboard, and did not ask any questions.

Eric went upstairs to the spare bedroom at the front of the house. Keeping to the outer edge of the window, he trained the opera glasses on the girl, who still stood in front of the weeping willow. Her blond hair caught the sunlight. Her legs were tanned, the beige shorts barely reached her thighs. She was pretty, full lips, a girl’s face but a woman’s body.

As he studied her through the binoculars, she raised her face in his direction, as if offering herself to him. Once again, she evoked a vague memory. He was certain he had seen her before. But where, when?

He lowered the binoculars. Palms wet. The longing for tenderness startled him with its intensity.
What have I been missing all these years?
He
had always been proud of his control over his mind and body, stifling his desires and needs. Now, he was unsure of himself. The girl across the street did not attract him like the others—he was drawn to dark-eyed, black-haired girls—but her presence evoked his desires, making his nighttime visions of the Señorita and the other girls pale by comparison. He could no longer be satisfied with visions and daydreams.

That night in bed, he tossed and turned again, but this time as if a fever raged in his blood. The old lieutenant’s words echoed in his mind.
You are incapable of feeling, Eric
.

If that was true, then what was this agony that denied him sleep and rest?

Suddenly there was less activity on the street, fewer people showed up and those who did became familiar to him, kids on vacation with nothing better to do or senior citizens who also had time on their hands. Once in a while, a television van drove up and spent a few minutes scanning the street or interviewing spectators. A young guy in his twenties, obviously a reporter with a camera dangling on his chest and pencils in his lapel pocket, spoke to the onlookers. Eric saw him talking to the girl now and then—obviously attracted
to her. The girl did not respond to him and walked away. “Good,” Eric murmured, for no reason at all.

The telephone did not ring anymore. The ringing had jarred him at first, the sound like assaults on his hearing, disruptive after years at the facility in a room without a phone.

The high point of his day continued to be the delivery of mail. The number of letters had dropped off, and the mail consisted mostly of routine bills for his aunt and an occasional letter from a longtime pen pal in Kansas dating back to her high school days. Eric learned to recognize the purple ink and delicate handwriting. He tossed the mail aside with a grimace when the registry letter did not show up.

He was stunned when he picked up the
Wickburg Telegram
one morning and saw a picture of the girl on the front page. A three-column close-up, in color, showing her face peering out of the limp branches of the weeping willow. The paragraph that accompanied the photograph read:

Once
.

The word blazed in Eric’s mind, like a flash of doom. Where had she seen him? And why was she being so mysterious about it? That word corroborated his own feeling that he had seen her before, but her face did not emerge from his memory. He was sure that he had not seen her at the facility, which meant that they must have met at least three years ago. Studying her photo, he squinted as if at a painting in a museum. She was probably sixteen or seventeen years old now and would have been much younger if they had met before he was sentenced. Probably had pigtails, freckles. A kid.

He laid the newspaper aside and stood immobile at the kitchen table. The girl represented a threat to all his plans, a threat to his very existence. The picture in the newspaper linked them together in the minds of the public. She was an unknown quantity, and that meant that she could be any number of things coming out of his past to haunt his future.

Angered, frustrated, he crumpled the newspaper in his hands, wanting to destroy the picture, destroy the girl. Then he sighed, placing the page on the table, smoothing the wrinkles. He had to keep the photograph, study it, absorb it into his system. Maybe that way he would remember when they had once met.

That night, he awoke from a sound sleep, surprised to learn from a glance at the digital alarm clock that it was 4:10. Now what? He had never experienced broken sleep before. What had caused him to vault out of a sound sleep?

Sudden knowledge filled his mind.

He knew where he had seen that girl before.

At the railroad tracks.

Years ago.

He remembered, to his horror, exactly the day and the circumstances.