The Open Curtain (17 page)

She tried again to drive the car, again could not bring herself to do so. A white haze hung before her eyes and even when she cleared the windshield again it was still there, and she was uncertain whether it came from outside or from within, or somehow both. She could hear, through the wind, the voice of her father, slight, almost indiscernible, yet somehow there. Or was it her father? Perhaps it was not him at all but the killer, or maybe just the wind. She raked the windshield wipers along the windshield again, saw nothing. There was nothing out there, she told herself, though she was uncertain as to whether she meant nothing to be afraid of or nothing at all. She put her hand against the windshield, felt the cold. She managed to engage the gear and then, unable to see, disengaged it again. Setting the defroster on, she steeled herself, threw open the car door.

The parking lot was covered with snow, her car the only one visible, everything else snow-bundled and shapeless, utterly silent. She didn’t know whether to be relieved at not seeing the dead or terrified of being alone. The snow fell thicker and thicker. She climbed back into the car, turned on the headlights. A moment more and the windshield cleared and she could see out, her headlights cutting a few dozen feet into the snow, the flakes flurrying all about her. She forced the car into reverse and drove.

At home, a message from the detective involved with her parents’ case. No news, he was sorry to report, but the boy, Rudd, had been deemed
sufficiently stable and noncomatose, I’m sorry, I’m reading off notes here,
and was now ready to be interviewed. Would she perhaps like to come as well? Perhaps he would say something to trigger something for her, a phrase the police might not catch. It would be a help if she came.

When she arrived, they led her to the interrogation room. The detective was inside, Rudd as well. She stood with several other officers behind the mirrored wall, looking in.

“You’re the one who …” said one of the officers, a pudgy man holding a clipboard, as he pointed at her. “Your family was …”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “That’s me.”

The sound out of the speaker was grainy, off-kilter. “And the last thing you remember?” the detective said.

“There isn’t any last thing I remember,” Rudd responded.

“Do you know him?” the officer beside her asked.

“Sort of,” she said.

“Don’t be silly. There has to be a last thing.”

“I can’t explain it. I was there on the slope, crouched, could hear voices but saw no one, and then some other things happened but I can’t quite remember what they were. But I remember them happening. It’s all a haze.”

“A haze?”

“You know what I mean?”

“Sorry, it just sounds like something from TV. Would you be willing to be hypnotized?”

Rudd hunched his shoulders. “Sure,” he said.

His voice was not what she, sitting beside his body in the hospital, had imagined it would be. Maybe it was just the loudspeaker. But his movements, too, were more nervous, jerkier than she had imagined. In the hospital, in her one-sided conversations with him, she had imagined certain gestures and sounds sitting like an armature on the template of his stilled body, but she had been wrong about them.

The detective asked Rudd if he knew Lyndi’s father.

“No.”

They showed Rudd a picture of her father.

“No.”

“Ever see him before?”

“No.”

“Not even the day they were killed?”

“Not even then.”

“What about during the things you remember happening but you don’t remember what they were?”

“I don’t remember, but I don’t think so.”

“You saw who killed them?”

“No.”

“You saw who tried to kill you?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone at all?”

“I saw no one.”

“The voices you heard when you were on the slope: what were they saying?”

“I wasn’t close enough to hear what they were saying.”

“And that’s your last memory?”

“I told you—there isn’t any last thing that I remember.”

It went on a while, circling always back to the same question and Rudd’s odd refusal to acknowledge a final event. They would fetch a hypnotist, the detective said. But an hour later when the man was brought in, he couldn’t get Rudd to go under. They tried a few more times in other ways, then he went away.

“Why were you up in the mountains?” the detective asked Rudd.

Rudd shrugged. “Recreation?” he suggested.

“But your mother says you’re afraid of heights.”

“My mother still thinks I’m five.”

“You’re not afraid of heights?”

“They take a little getting used to.”

She herself, Lyndi thought, had once been afraid of heights. Once, when she was eleven and her father had stopped the car at a lookout going through the mountains on the way to Colorado, she had refused to get out of the car. She had lain flat on the back seat, a blanket over her head, shivering.

“Why do you think he chose you?”

“He who?”

“The killer.”

“I don’t know,” Rudd said, pushing his hair back from his forehead. “How should I know?” There was a certain pained expression to his face. “Probably because I was there.”

They kept talking. There was nothing, nothing, Lyndi thought. Sometimes the police around her would look at her after Rudd had said something, mentioned a name or a place, but each time she shook her head. The detective came out of the interrogation room, spoke to her briefly. She did nothing but shake her head. The detective sighed and went back in. Through the glass she saw Rudd take a handkerchief out of his pocket and begin wiping his neck. It came away bloodstreaked. They were wrapping it up, the detective’s voice slower and more relaxed, Rudd claiming he wished he could have been of help. The policemen were moving off and down the halls, except the pudgy one, who asked her,

“You know the way out?”

“I think so,” she said, and pointed around a corner.

“Go this way,” he said, pointing in a different direction, “and you won’t risk bumping into him.”

“I don’t mind running into him,” she said.

The policeman saluted her with his coffee cup and left. She circled round the corner and down the hall. Behind her she heard a door open,
then the sound of the detective and Rudd’s tentative conversation. She half-turned, waved.

“Lyndi,” said the detective.

She stopped, waited for them to catch up. “What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I was just saying hello.”

She nodded. Rudd was holding his hand out to her. “In the hospital room, right?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“My mother doesn’t like you,” he said. “Don’t take it personally.”

She nodded.

“You look like your father,” he said. “At least like the picture of him they showed me.”

Not knowing what to say, Lyndi said, “Thank you. About my father, I mean.”

“You have a way home?” the detective asked.

“Scooter,” said Rudd.

“It’s snowy,” said the detective. “Probably iced over.”

“I can give him a ride if he’d like,” said Lyndi. “You can pick the scooter up in the morning.”

He looked at her, then shrugged.

On the way through the parking lot, walking slightly behind him, she kept expecting to see before him, through the snow, her dead father, her dead family.
What does it mean?
she asked herself,
that coming behind Rudd now comes not the killer,
as she had thought in that other parking lot might happen,
but myself?

“What are you doing for Christmas?” he asked once she had started the car.

“I don’t know,” she said. “No plans.”

“You don’t have any other family?”

“Not around here.”

He leaned over and smiled. “Maybe I’ll try to visit you,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

“After all, you visited me.”

She smiled. “O.K.,” she said. “Drop by.”

That was the start of it. Her doorbell rang early Christmas morning, waking her from where, again, she had fallen asleep on the couch. She stumbled to the door and opened it and there he was, bundled up so that only his eyes were showing, a present in one hand.

“No tree?” he asked.

“Couldn’t see the point.”

She opened the gift—a metal box of Almond Roca, something her father had loved but that always stuck to her teeth.

“Thank you,” she said. “I wish I had something for you.”

He smiled and ducked his head.

She got him a glass of orange juice, left him watching a parade on TV while she went upstairs, showered, put on jeans and a blouse. When she came downstairs, he described some of the floats she had missed, and they sat together on the couch, watching. After a while she got up and went into the kitchen, came back with two bowls of Corn Chex, a jug of milk.

They sat beside each other, crunching.

“You ever make that party mix?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “My mom used to, though.”

“Not my mom,” he said. “But I had it this one time somewhere.”

She went back into the kitchen, returned with the Chex box. There was a recipe for the mix on the side. Soon they were both in the kitchen, her mother’s largest glass bowl out, mixing what was left of the cereal with butter and salt.

The phone rang and she went into the other room to get it. It was her aunt, first wishing her Merry Christmas and then berating her for not having come to California. “Thank you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Lyndi said.

“And then the neighbor?” her aunt was saying. “You know Mrs. Miller, not a neighbor exactly, but down the street, the colostomy woman?”

It was the latest installment in her aunt’s life of grief and pain. Lyndi nodded and offered noncommittal sounds as the story droned along—Mrs. Miller and her colostomy bag and her swinging, cradle-robbing lifestyle, which seemed to consist, as far as Lyndi could tell, of her aunt having seen Mrs. Miller once give her paperboy a kiss on the cheek. “But, heavens, could you believe it,” said her aunt, she had looked out the window, early this morning and there was Mrs. Miller, “bright as day and twice as ugly”—or as her aunt said it, “hugly”—“on the front steps, wearing hardly more than a bathrobe—”

“Aunt Debby,” said Lyndi. “I have to go.”

Her aunt fell silent. Lyndi stayed listening to the static. “Aunt Debby?” said Lyndi.

“Well,” said her aunt icily. “If that’s the way you’re going to be, I suppose there’s hardly any point in trying to bring you any Christmas cheer.”

“Aunt, it’s not that,” said Lyndi.

“You have to want to heal,” her aunt said. “But if you want to go through life with a gaping hole where your heart should be, far be it from me to—”

“—I have guests over,” said Lyndi. “That’s all.”

Again the line was silent. On TV, Lyndi could see the parade winding down. She heard Rudd still rumbling about in the kitchen.

“Guests?” her aunt said in a tiny voice.

“Guest, really,” she said. “A boy I know.”

“Lyndi, you’re dating and you haven’t told me?”

“No,” said Lyndi. It’s not that exactly. It’s just—”

“Would your mother approve?”

“Approve?”

“How old is this boy?”

“About my age.”

“How much older? Some rapacious college senior, I suppose?”

“A few months younger, actually.”

“You need a chaperone, Lyndi,” said her aunt, finding her strength of voice once again. “You’re clearly too young to be inviting teenage boys over for Christmas, and he’s certainly too young to be accepting invitations from an older woman.”

“We’re not even dating,” she said. “I hardly know him and I’m not looking for a boyfriend and, besides, he’s shy.”

“It hardly matters,” her aunt said. “Every husband I had, I found by not looking. The shy ones are the worst. Now you get off this phone and hustle that boy out of the house this instant.”

She hung up the telephone. She felt exhausted, drained. In the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face, accidentally got some down the front of her blouse. She looked at her face in the mirror: it was her, she was fine, she didn’t look that upset.

In the kitchen, Rudd had taken the Party Mix out of the oven, had put it on the stovetop. He was picking through, eating all the Corn Chex.

They poured the mix back into the bowl and carried it out to the couch, sat watching
It’s a Wonderful Life.
A couple she barely knew came to her door with a plate of fudge, a note on it reading,
Happy Holidays, in your time of grief.
“Thank you,” said Lyndi. “Thank you very much.” The woman was trying to peer around her for a better look at Rudd. She kept it up until Lyndi, thanking her a third time, shut the door in her face.

After a few hours she made him some lunch. They talked about nothing, or nothing much. He was just out of high school, he said; he hadn’t realized she was in college. They were nearly the same age, she said, so what did it matter? Her aunt called back to leave a vague but dire warning that filled up the answering machine tape. This was a
vulnerable time,
her aunt said, among other things, and
the world was full of wolves.

“Your aunt seems a little bit unusual,” Rudd suggested, but not unkindly.

She nodded, laughed. She got out Monopoly and they played through most of the afternoon. When it began to get dark outside, she went out to the garage freezer, looked through it until she found a honey-baked ham. She defrosted it in the microwave, began heating it up in the oven, made some mashed potatoes as well. They were lumpy, and there was not enough salt. “These are good potatoes,” he said, and then told her how they had probably glazed the ham with a blowtorch.

Then dinner was over and he was awkwardly washing the dishes in the sink like dishes were something he had never washed before. She dumped the rest of the ham into the garbage and scraped the last of the mashed potatoes into the garbage as well. He was at the door, zipping his coat up to the neck, zipperhead glinting below his scar.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

“Can I visit you again?”

“I’d like that,” she said.

He gave her a hug so awkward and crushing that it was clear his experience with women was entirely theoretical. And then, suddenly, he was out the door, gone.