The Tell (14 page)

The television was an ancient thing bought by Edward so he could watch the Watergate hearings, and when the set finally began to die, Owen's campaign to get a new one was relentless. Edward suggested a book instead. When he said,
Your mother didn't approve of television
, Owen said he didn't give a shit about what a dead person thought. Edward picked the television up, walked it down the path and through the arbored tunnel, and threw it into the pond. Owen had laughed weepily at first, mostly out of disbelief. He was furious with his own helplessness, though he was already as big as his father and much stronger. The thing stayed in the pond, one sharp corner breaking the water's surface like the bow of a shipwreck, its cord a useless line snaking onto the sand. Sometimes a bird perched on it.

It was March then, still very cold, and Owen trudged to one of the houses on the other side of the pond. He'd been inside one summer, invited by a brother and sister who'd rowed their rafts over to him one day. Their parents had fussed over Owen like he was a strange specimen and fed him Pop-Tarts and hot dogs. When he looked in the windows, he expected to see the bowls of bright food still on the table and, most importantly, the television. He kicked open the side door. His strength was new and still surprising, like his own hard-ons. He took the television and brought it home. That night, Edward baked fish that stank up the place, and Owen insisted on leaving the door open to the cold night air as his own retribution. As they were eating, he looked over Owen's shoulder at the water and extracted another fish bone from his mouth. He laid it on the table, reconstructing the skeleton. The next morning, Edward dragged the old waterlogged television out of the pond and left it in front of the house under a sheet like a corpse. When Edward finally bought a new set, Owen took the stolen one back to the house across the pond and repaired the busted door. Neither of them ever said a word about it, this test of their opposing wills.

Owen led Rey back to the house. Inside, Mira had lit two mysterious pale pink candles. They ate the lentil soup, the bread, the tomatoes, and the chocolate cake Mira had made. Owen opened another bottle of wine. Mira leaned back in her chair, pushing off from the table with her palms, and told Edward about the adult life-drawing course she was going to offer soon, maybe just after the New Year.

“It makes sense,” she explained. “If Brindle is going to survive, I have to start getting a different crowd in there. You know, one that can actually pay, one that doesn't cost me money. One I don't have to also feed and clothe. The place can't survive on goodwill or liberal guilt anymore.” She talked about replacing the leaking windows in the gallery, updating the two bathrooms in the building, hiring another teacher or two.

“Where's all the money going to come from?” Owen asked. It was the first he'd heard about any of these plans. “You're talking about some very serious work. The windows alone—”

“I know, Owen. Lighten up. I'll get it. Listen, I have to make some decisions about the future of the place. Expand or fold.” Mira demonstrated like she was opening and shutting a book. “I can't keep waffling. It's making me crazy. Wilton and I've been talking about how it doesn't make any sense to be in the middle anymore. It's just too hard, too wearing.”

“Were you going to let me in on this?” he asked.

“Life drawing,” Edward said, cutting in between them. “Some artists learned by looking at cadavers. Audubon did. Do they call that death drawing?”

Mira pressed cake crumbs under her thumb. “Men and women, everyone's just crazy to look at naked boobs.”

“Maybe you should try the class, Owen,” Edward suggested. “Expand your horizons. Loosen up a little. Relax.”

“I'm all set for naked boobs, thanks.” Rey's long snout rested on his thigh.

Edward shrugged. “I'd like to meet this Wilton. He sounds interesting.”

“You'd like him,” Mira said. “He's been incredibly generous to us—and to Brindle. He's basically floating the place now.”

There was something about the way she said it that made Owen pull up short. “Has he given you more money?” he asked her. “More than at the fundraiser?”

Mira tapped her fingers against her lower lip. “You know he has, O. I already told you that.”

“No, you didn't.”

“I did, but you forgot.” She spoke slowly to make her point. “With school starting and all your tutoring, you've been distracted and busy. It's okay.”

“No, trust me, I would have remembered.” He supposed it was possible that he hadn't been listening when she'd told him—his mind focused only on the casino business—but he didn't think so. “Maybe you're the one who forgot.”

“There's nothing wrong with money.” Edward smoothed the air again. He'd retreat rather than fight or listen to one. Mira determinedly forked cake into her mouth and swallowed his collusion. She wouldn't look at Owen. “You're not sleeping with this man, are you, Mira?” he asked.

Her laugh was an explosion. Crumbs flew onto the table and her hand covered her mouth. “I can't even believe you asked me that.”

Edward looked at Owen. “Okay. She's not sleeping with him. Then I don't see what the problem is. Everything's fine. Your neighbor sounds generous, that's all.”

“It's a little more complicated than that,” Owen said. “Maybe you should stay out of it.”

“Owen,” Mira cautioned. She ate another piece of cake.

They slipped down in their chairs, a retreat. The season's last cicadas revved up. Edward pulled the candles closer. “Any word from the police?” he asked Owen.

The question was inevitable, even seven years after the shooting. It was always just a matter of when his father would ask. There hadn't been any word from the police or anyone else involved since the first months after Caroline's death. No one had ever been arrested and no one ever would be.

“It's always the same. No word,” Owen said. “Maybe it's time you stop thinking about it.” He stood to shake off the unease his father's question always provoked. “Stop asking, while you're at it.”

“I can't very well control what I do or do not think about,” Edward said, made petulant by the wine and the hour. He held Mira's hand in his and looked at her. “We're much closer to tragedy than we ever think.”

“But sometimes we see it coming and we move away. O dodged it, didn't he?” Mira asked. “Nothing happened to him.”

They'd had this conversation before. She wanted to relieve Edward of this oppressive sense of precariousness and erase for him the notion that Owen could just have easily been the one killed, that his only child wouldn't be there, just inches from him. She did more than Owen ever could to calm his father, whose eyes had begun to well up. He blinked out the tears. Mira stood behind Edward and placed her hands across his chest. She kissed the top of his head.

“It's okay,” she said, looking at Owen. “He's okay, we're all fine, we're all safe.”

Edward sniffled. He was fiercely attached, a man who'd been left with a child without knowing how to care for one. He'd been clueless a lot of the time, but Owen had never doubted his father loved him. Maybe it was that particular brand of love that had made Owen feel so suffocated in a place where there was plenty of everything but never enough air. It was the essential problem of two—one would always leave first. That inevitability had hung over them from the beginning. Mira went over to the radio and dialed through the stations until she found some slow music. She pulled Edward up to dance with her, and they laughed together at how clumsy he was. She told him not to look at his very ugly feet. They made a funny couple, one alert with evasion, the other brittle and tentative and moved by life's fragility, with skinny pale legs and shins scabbed by thorns and branches. After a few songs, Edward disappeared into his bedroom. Mira stood with her hands on her hips.

“Looks like he ditched you,” Owen said.

“Seems like that, doesn't it.”

“Wait for me. I'm coming back,” Edward yelled.

He emerged, cradling something in an old towel that he put on the table. Owen unwound the towel and stared at a handgun, an obsidian black against the faded yellow, small and fearsomely precise.

“What the hell is this?” Mira asked, flipping the towel over it.

Edward disrobed it again. “Well, it's a gun, wouldn't you say?”

“We get that part,” she said. “Why are you showing us a gun?”

“Why do you even have a gun in the first place?” Owen picked it up. The weight was exciting.

“Put it down, O,” Mira said. “I don't even like to see you touching it.”

“I'm giving it to you, to both of you,” Edward told her. “In case you need it. You should be prepared.” He put a handful of bullets on the table.

“Who are you, Charlton Heston?” Owen asked.

“I hope not. He's dead.” Edward fished a chewed-up tennis ball out from under the couch. He opened the screen door, and threw it out. Rey tore after it. “If you get broken into again,” he said, “you'll be glad you have it.”

“Glad? Why, so we can shoot and kill the guy this time?” Mira asked.

“Yes,” Edward added. “What's wrong with that?”

“Everything is wrong with that. We're not going to take it. This is absurd. Please, O, will you put it down?” She turned away. She didn't want to see his hand still wrapped around it.

I've had a gun stuck in my face, Owen thought. I've smelled its mineral sweat, and heard it rip open the air. I've seen what it can do to flesh, but I've never held one before. He hadn't known how much he'd wanted to until that moment and he gripped it harder.

“Don't worry,” Edward said. “It's not loaded.”

“That's what everyone always says,” Mira told him, “and then boom, someone gets his head blown off. If there's a gun in the house, it goes off. We are not taking it home, Edward. We don't want it. We're not gun people. For god's sake, please, Owen. Put it down.”

Owen covered it decorously and pushed it to the far end of the table. He asked his father where he'd gotten it.

“Sit. I want to tell you something. I met a woman in April. Katherine. At the salt marshes. Seeing anyone out there that day would have been pretty surprising—it was freezing—but there she was, taking pictures. You'll see them sometime. She was wearing these funny gloves without fingers so she could adjust the lens. I'd never seen anything like it.” They'd shouted in the wind until their cheeks burned, and then they'd gone for coffee. The next week, she'd made him dinner at her place in Brewster. “She's an interesting woman. She used to teach high school math. I like her. Very much in fact.”

“Wow,” Mira said. “This is great news.”

Owen turned to his father who still stood behind them. “It's been months. And you never said anything until now?”

“We wanted to give it some time before we told anyone—to see how things were going. You'll meet her soon.”

We
. Katherine: the flowers, the tissues, the pink candles, the tightly made bed. His father was in love. “And then what, you two went gun shopping?” Owen asked. Which was more shocking, the gun or the woman? “Is she your girlfriend or your arms dealer?”

Edward laughed as he went to the door and whistled for Rey. The dog crashed through the woods and skidded into the house. He dropped the slobbery tennis ball at Owen's feet. “Katherine had the gun,” Edward explained. “Actually, her son gave it to her for protection after a student attacked her—landed her in the hospital. It was terrible.” He winced as if her past was now also his. “But she said no one was going to bother an old lady in a condo complex on Cape Cod and she didn't want the thing around anymore. I don't think she liked the idea of her grandson finding it in her underwear drawer some day. I told her about your break-in and she wanted you to have it.”

His father was ripe with his news, and later, after he had talked about Katherine with the kind of enthusiasm he usually conferred on piping plovers and riptides, after he'd exhausted himself and gone into his room, Mira and Owen made up the pullout couch and lay down. Owen watched the moon admire its reflection in the pond and slink into the house. It was an evocative night and the air was tempered with his father's belief that anything could happen at any time. Letting his anger at Mira dispel was just a matter of choice. Anger had no life on its own—you had to give it shape with your own breath. And what was his problem really that wasn't about his own fears of losing her? His father's news made him feel hopeful.

“I don't want to fight with you anymore,” he said and rolled on his side to look at her. “Go with Wilton to the casino. Do what makes you happy.”

She faced him. “It's just so much of nothing, Owen.”

“So much of nothing,” he repeated.

“Nothing's going to happen to me,” she said. “You have to believe that, trust me on that one.”

“I do.”

“You'll get rid of the gun?” she asked. “Promise me you will.”