The Detective's Garden (17 page)

Later that night, Clarke swung his bare foot over the side
of the top bunk and onto the first rung of the ladder. It creaked
as sharply and loudly as a crow. Clarke froze, one leg suspended
in the air. His eyes processed the room into patches of relative
darkness. Shapes were semiobscured. The curtains were open
and the night outside was like a black eye.

The wooden crow’s caw woke King. She opened her eyes.
The dark shape of her brother climbed down rung after rung.
He was shirtless, his skin luminescent. His jeans were folded at
the cuff. He bent to pull a wad of shirt off the carpet and his
ribs rose to the sides of his spine.

King rolled to her side and the sheet pulled against the blan
ket with a hiss.

Clarke turned toward his sister. “You awake?” he whispered.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Be quiet, okay?”

“Where are you going?”

“To meet somebody.”

“Who?” said King.

“A girl.”

When she fell back asleep, King dreamed pale and pleas
ant dreams. She walked through their A-frame cabin with the
colors softened into weakly sketched pastels. Her hands were
closed into fists. A full laundry basket—sheets and socks and
shirts and underpants—waited to be folded. On the counter
sat a handful of raisins in a blue handkerchief and a glass of
milk that held, in the condensation, the fading impression of
someone’s hand. The whole place seemed timid with its own
fragility. The front door stood open and air whistled through
as though sucked between teeth. The ground outside was cov
ered with sparkling snow and night hung over the snow like
a hooded figure in a dark robe. A single pair of bloody tracks
marked the snow. Above, the stars opened like tiny trapdoors.
She opened her hand and found a thin white bone on her palm.
King wished she was a stone.

She woke and sat upright in the bunkbed. The room was
still dark. “Clarke?” she said. She wanted to explain what she
could never explain. The sheets twisted in her hands. The lower
bunk was empty. Clarke was still gone. She wanted to ask, How
can a black robe absorb light? What lies beyond the trapdoors?
Who left the shape of a hand on a glass? Why does it fade?
Where does it go?

Clarke and Elsie walked together past an old frame house
that leaned toward them. A doorless entryway. A gap-toothed
chimney. Fire-blackened beams. Soot. The intimate smell of
burned things. They walked an arm span apart. Long dead grass
caught at their pant legs. Burrs gathered in their shoelaces. The
river gargled and spat in the dark.

“Where we going?” Clarke asked.

“Come on,” Elsie said. “This way.” The high moon washed
the color from her cheeks.

Clarke stopped walking. “Tell me,” he said.

“I’m parked over here.”

Elsie’s rusted-out Dodge Charger was parked along a dirt
road a quarter of a mile from her house. Elsie sat on the hood
and the car sank on its shocks and squealed and did not fully
rise again. She faced down the road toward a boat launch and
the river. He sat beside her and wanted to hold her hand.
Down the road near the water, something darker than the
darkness that surrounded it slumped across the dirt. Clarke
could feel the heat that rose off Elsie and filtered out into the
cold air.

“What happened?” she said.

“With what?”

“What do you think went wrong?”

“How long ago do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

The thin metal of the hood popped underneath them. He
looked at her arms crossed over her breasts, her sad eyes. Nei
ther one gave in to the impulse to tell the other that everything
would be okay. In a minute they would get into the car and
press themselves against one another. Now they sat apart, the
space between them the width of a person. The dark horizon
smelled of the burned house they’d walked past. One of them
reached a hand toward the other and a spotlight split the sky
into strange, radiant plumes.

King woke again. Her father and her aunt argued on the
porch. For a few seconds a light rain fell at oblique angles. It
pattered against the roof and against the window and stopped
suddenly. With Clarke absent, King felt fragile and light, as
though her bones were hollow. She held her own arms as though
to restrain them. She looked at the dark window and the thin
lines of water pushed along the glass by wind. Her beech-twig
arms slid upward along the window frame and pushed against
the wood until it cracked open.

Her aunt’s voice was soft like a child’s blanket. “Can they
take this, Dom?”

“They’re military kids,” he said. “They’re hard.”

“Maybe Clarke,” Annie said, “but not King.”

“She’s tough,” he said. “I’ll take care of both of them.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re so full of yourself.”

“I don’t mean to be, Annie.” He put his huge hand on her
shoulder and its weight seemed to lean her toward him. “I’m
sorry,” he said.

Annie’s head bent forward so that her forehead leaned against
his shoulder. “I’ll get in trouble if you leave the kids with me,
Dom. I’ll probably get in trouble anyway.”

“It’s okay, Annie,” he said. “I need them with me, and they
need me.”

He scraped at one of his cheeks with his palm. The rain had
lightly wet the porch and the gray-blue paint shone for a mo
ment before the water evaporated or absorbed into the wood.
A few moths circled the light. The temperature was falling.
Dominick and Annie breathed in tandem. Dominick could
see the shape of their breath like lost parts of themselves made
visible.

“What happened to Sarah?” Annie said.

“You know this, Annie. She was just gone. Like that.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“The feds asking questions?”

“A lot of questions.”

“Sometimes people just disappear,” he said. “She’d said she
was going to leave me. Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”

“The FBI agent, Charlie Basin, said she called the police.
About you hurting the kids.”

“Oh, my God!” Dominick said.

“When she left, why didn’t you try to find her?”

“I had two little kids.”

“I know you did, Dom,” Annie said. “I’m fully aware of it.”

“That’s why, then.”

“But here you are,” Annie said, “dragging them around with
you now.”

Clarke and Elsie pressed against one another with excit
ed desperation. Each body an uncharted country. The other’s
name as awkward as a first attempt to whistle. Their cold hands
groped beneath each other’s clothes and found shockingly warm
flesh. They fumbled with each other’s buttons and touched each
other without the hesitation reserved for sacred things. They
gave off heat the way a fire gives off heat. They panted. They
couldn’t catch their breath. They felt hot and cold and alive.
They were so human.

Her breasts hung over him. He stretched up to take them in
his mouth and saw a great white furrow beside her left breast. A
luminescent slash, puffy and thick-skinned. An awful scar. For
a moment he stopped at the sight of it and she tensed, knowing
why he’d become still. Then, tentatively, he licked it like an
animal cleaning a wound, and she pushed her weight against
him until he felt that he was holding her up.

In the middle, they paused. Their eyes had adjusted to the
moon-blanched landscape. Each of them tasted of salt. Clarke’s
shirt and jeans had come off and Elsie straddled him. They
could see one another well enough for comfort. They could
taste the metallic tang of each other in their mouths. Elsie’s
hand had stopped just under the waistband of Clarke’s under
pants. There was still a lot that hadn’t been explored and a mo
mentary reluctance to go further, as though under the last layer
of clothing they might find the end of the mystery.

She slipped him from his underpants, turned and plunged
down on him all at once. The Dodge Charger pressed around
them, so the elbow of the seat jammed against Clarke’s thigh.
The roof curled like a great tongue over their heads. The
shocks bounced and shrieked. The dashboard held Elsie’s
hands.

In the trailer, King’s eyes opened. Across the room, a great
dark bruise in the night. A stifling human heat. Larger than the
bunkbeds, her father overwhelming the bedroom. Darker than
the dark. His breath like a sip through a straw.

“You awake?” her father said.

“Uh-huh.”

“You want me to turn the light on?”

“No,” she said.

“Where is Clarke, King?”

“I don’t know.”

The great bruise moved from one side of the room to the other.

“Are you okay?” her father said.

“I had bad dreams,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“Was it scary?” King asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you still scared?”

“Uh-huh, I am,” Dominick said. “Can I come in and sit with
you?”

Elsie drove the rusted Charger past blinking neon signs.
Bars and nightclubs. Red ropes around entranceways. A line of
people waiting before a green door. Plate-glass storefronts that
reflected their images back at them, their faces frozen in happy
lines. They drove past fast-food restaurants. The flat-roofed and
recumbent architecture of strip malls. A yellow neon cowboy
hat. A giant fake windmill. The curlicued maze of driveways.
Sometimes when Clarke leaned against Elsie, he could feel a
pulse. His or hers, he didn’t know. Colored lights glared on the
windshield. The car smelled ripe as sex and fruit.

“What kind of things do you like to do?” Elsie asked.

“When?”

“Back at home?”

Clarke didn’t know why it sounded like she was asking a ques
tion. “I don’t know what I like. Sometimes I went bowling.”

“I hate bowling.”

“I don’t feel that strongly about it.”

“Who’d you go with?” Elsie asked. “A girl?”

“Sometimes. Mostly people I didn’t really like from school.”

“Why’d you go, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know why I do most of the things I do.”

“That’s your problem,” Elsie said.

“What’s my problem?”

“You’ve got to know what you want.”

They pulled into the parking lot behind a Dairy Queen. El
sie lowered her head into Clarke’s lap and tugged at the crotch
of his pants with her teeth.

BECAUSE CHARLIE BASIN
could not sleep, he
drove the mostly deserted streets. He made a circuit between
Annie Sawyer’s small Victorian house and the Sunoco gas sta
tion. He sat beside them both, waiting, until he felt compelled
to move. Not a single light shone in Annie’s windows. He liked
that woman, something about her reminded him of Charlene.
How was he supposed to talk to Charlene? Could they, maybe,
just leave each other alone? Did she need him in some way
that he couldn’t see? Pure-white moths swirled around the sin
gle streetlight. At the Sunoco, someone stumbled to the phone
wearing a black sweatshirt with the hood up. The arm of the
black sweatshirt reached out and lifted the black phone and the
steel cord caught the light and hung like a cable on a suspen
sion bridge. Charlie’s hands grabbed the steering wheel. He felt
hot. He leaned forward toward the windshield, then he relaxed.
Too tall, too stooped, too drunk to be a little girl. The black
sweatshirt spoke into the receiver and Charlie wondered about
the pitch of the drunken voice and the shape of the ear that lis
tened on the other end of the line. How much didn’t he know
about his daughter? Had she wandered around in the night?
As he shifted out of park, he eyed his phone in the cup holder
near the gearshift. He drove through mostly empty neighbor
hood streets. A pale dog snuffled at a storm drain. A hydrant
poured water onto the road. What was Charlene doing right
now? Where was Oswell? In the business district, he passed
restaurants and bars with lines of people. Were both his kids
awake? Were they, like him, circling? Did they think of him?
Were they alone? Were they wondering what the use was?