The Tell (18 page)

“Are you okay?” Wilton took a step forward. “Are you sick? Say something. Is it your heart? Are you having a heart attack? Should I call 911?”

Owen struggled to find his breath as fear retreated and left sickening sweat in its place. Here was Wilton, the man who always appeared in doorways. “What the hell are you doing out here, creeping around like that?” he croaked.

“Was I creeping? I saw the open door, I was checking to see if everything was okay. I was being neighborly.” He smoothed his hair into compliance and leaned against a table. Wilton wore a not too clean white robe over his clothes. A gold insignia of a hotel was stitched on the breast pocket, an emblem of more luxurious days.

“But you can't see the back door from your place. You were watching me,” Owen said. He took a deep breath, and thought: that fucking gun. This was not his life. He wondered if he were going crazy.

“Well, yes. But not intentionally. I've been awake all night. I've been watching everything. I've been thinking.” Wilton circled his toe in the dust. “What if Anya decides that last night was it, that she doesn't want anything more to do with me? Do you see why I couldn't sleep?” He took something from his robe pocket and displayed it on his palm. “I found this in the driveway.”

Wilton could not have written this any better, Owen decided; here was the romantic, sentimental lore of Anya's silver hair clip. “You found it.”

Wilton's eyebrows lifted. He knew what he was being suspected of. “Yes, I found it. Anya's magnificent, isn't she? A beautiful woman—when she was just a little girl I missed all those years with her, Owen. I can't get them back. Do you know what that's like, to lose an entire part of your life?”

“Actually, I do,” Owen said.

But Wilton was single-mindedly about himself, winding up, his voice rising, his hands moving. The sun twitched in the yellow leaves. “What do I say to her?” he asked. “How do I talk to her? How do I get her to love me again? You have to help me figure this out. What do I do?”

“Tell her the truth,” Owen said. “Tell her what happened. That's what she wants to know. Tell her what you did.”

Wilton's slammed his hand on the table. “No. That will never happen. I already told you that. Do you understand? What would be the purpose? It would be the end. She would never see me again.” Wilton's voice softened. “You and Anya seem to have some connection, all those looks you were giving each other.”

“There were no looks.”

“I think Anya trusts you,” Wilton said. “Will you help me, please?”

“I don't want Mira to go the casino again. Don't ask her to go with you anymore.”

“I thought we were talking about Anya.”

“I need Mira to stop. Now.”

Wilton stared at his feet. “What does she say about this?”

“It doesn't matter what she says. This is what I'm saying.”

“I don't want to get in the middle of you two.” He shook his head. “That's never a good idea.”

“You're already in the middle.” Anger ached in Owen's chest. He didn't speak easily. “I'm worried she has a problem.”

“Like a gambling problem?” Wilton's laugh was round and brutal. “My god, Owen, of course she doesn't. That's ludicrous. Besides, it doesn't happen just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I can see how worried you are, but you don't have to be. You've concocted this whole thing. Would I let something happen to her?”

“Mira's changed.” He hated to reveal his fears about Mira to Wilton, but who else knew her so well?

“Actually, she's very consistent. She has her routine. She has a glass of bubbly water, a few pretzels, then maybe she plays the slots for all of ten minutes. Then she finds me and we leave. It's a distraction, that's all. Harmless.”

“A distraction from what?” Owen asked.

“Come on. She's your wife. You know the pressure she's under.”

“Do you give her money?”

“Do you mean to play with? Never. Do I pay for the drinks? And the gas? Yes—and why not? The casino and I have an arrangement these days, a small financial one—for my appearances. Nuts, I know, that they'd want an ancient face like mine. But it's all about demographics, and the place is filled with the right kind. These people know exactly what they're doing.” He gazed at the rafters, a pose of infuriating evasion and calm. “You're upset about nothing.”

“And you still give Brindle money.”

“I give lots of money away, you know that. And yes, Brindle is one of those places. And why shouldn't I?”

“Do you understand how this backs Mira into a corner? How can she ever say no to you?”

“Easily. Mira doesn't let anyone tell her what to do. Look, I love both of you. You've made everything possible for me.”

“This isn't an acceptance speech. I don't want Mira to go there again. Do you get it?” Owen said. “Do not ask her again. You want your daughter in your life? Then stay out of mine.”

Wilton pulled his dingy bathrobe tight around himself and left. Owen taped cardboard over the shattered windowpane and, back in the house, got into bed next to Mira. She was asleep, unaware of how he was shaking.

T
he kids rumbled in from the cold. In these first moments of the morning, many were still hopeful that the day might deliver something extraordinary. They might do better, understand more, feel differently, or be freed from the classroom forever. Theirs was the last age of magical thinking, and this is what he loved about them. This is why he'd become a teacher, though he'd gradually understood it wasn't enough. Other kids knew from the minute they opened their eyes that the day was already lost. Owen noted, as he did every morning, who wasn't dressed warmly enough, who was wearing yesterday's clothes, last year's too-tight sneakers. Whose pants had the shine of brand-new, whose nails were dirty, who had the vacant, restless look of the hungry, whose neck was scrubbed, whose hair was filthy. Who hadn't gotten enough sleep, who was lost, who was adored.

In the paper that morning, a city official had called the city's public schools “a sorry state of affairs.” Had the man actually seen the exploded urinal in the boys' bathroom, or the flaking ceiling paint in the cafeteria that sometimes fell onto the food, or the gym with half its lights blown out? Had he seen the bombed-out shells of some of the teachers? Had he felt the moral strain of meting out endless discipline and getting nothing done because of it? Every day there were substitute teachers in the building who Owen knew he would never see again and seasoned teachers who sat like driftwood washed up at the front of the room. By midmorning in his class, he could watch the optimism of one kid teeter, then another, and another.

Kevin, doubting eyebrows and skin the color of aged gold leaf, was the first to tip that day. The arms of his gray sweatshirt rode high to reveal wayward wrists as though he were trying to escape his own clothes. That the boy hated school was the least of it. When Owen had called his mother three weeks into the start of the year, he hadn't even finished his diligent sentence before she said, “I can't make him do anything either.” The boy was distressed and distressing, full of rage if provoked. He was busy reforming a paper clip into its original set of U-turns, his head so low he didn't know Owen was looking at him.

“Mister,” Danielle said. “What's the matter with you?”

He'd been staring at Kevin, his mood dreamish but not dreamy at all. Owen turned over the book he'd been holding and read to the class from the back of it. “‘
Go Slow, Children Crossing
, by M. Andrew Peterson. A mall is planned for the lot across the street from Barlow Middle School where generations of students have hosted their annual winter festival. Will they stand in the way of growth and new jobs in order to preserve tradition? The students must confront what progress and change mean to them.'”

Boring, someone yelled. He agreed. He took his father's new book,
The Reflecting Pond
, from his bag. He yanked at his tie, felt his stomach rumble.

“‘The particular turn off Route 6 was rarely used except by blueberry pickers,'” he read. “‘In season, and at certain times of the late afternoon you could smell the berries from the highway. When my son was young, we picked buckets of the fruit, which we ate by the fistful.'”

The kids were silent, but their silence was not always easy to decipher. It was likely some had never seen a blueberry, didn't know they grew on bushes, so how was any of this meaningful to them? For a few moments, he was lost in a way he hadn't been since his very earliest days of teaching. Was this the end for him, then—had he come full circle to cluelessness? Teaching was an act of faith—had he lost that now, too?

Just then the fire alarm kicked on, like his personal warning to get it together, the clang so familiar to the kids that it lacked any urgency. One day it was going to be the real thing, and they'd all still trudge out of the building like zombies. They pushed back their chairs, obedient now that the alarm meant liberation, and he led them into the thick flow down the stairs and outside. Teachers and students and the people from the front office and cafeteria workers rubbing their hands in see-through plastic gloves gathered on the west side of the school next to the parking lot. Mrs. Tevas gave him a nod and whispered something to the principal.

Everyone turned to look at the stoic, unflappable building. No flames, no smoke. There never was anything. Across the street, a woman waited in her open front door and watched the shivering mass of her daytime neighbors. Mrs. Bogan, a math teacher, pawed through the crowd of kids demanding, “Where's your jacket? Where's your coat?” Owen went to the back of the pack where Kevin, always apart from the others, was gouging a hole in the hard-packed dirt with his sneaker.

“What are you digging for?” Owen asked.

“Huh?” The boy's lips were purple in the cold.

“What are you hoping to find down there?”

Kevin was wary of attention and too ready to be punished. He covered the hole with his foot. He would wait for Owen to move on before he resumed digging, and in the meantime, he'd move as close to disappearing as he could. The boy's teeth were chattering, but he wouldn't accept Owen's coat or connection; there was one student every year who made Owen feel deeply inept like this. The kids bounced around trying to keep warm. Girls pushed boys and they all pressed up against one another, laughing and moaning like nervous cattle. The fire trucks arrived and the men clanked into the building with their wide, slapping boots. No one was in a hurry. This was leisurely inferno theater. Owen watched as Spruance burned with imaginary fire and flames stuck their tongues out. It wouldn't be a terrible way for the school to go. On the faces of the teachers and students, he saw that this was the moment of real magical thinking—a dignified end to a troubled school.

It was when he'd gone upstairs to the bedroom the evening before that he'd stepped on the single earring, nestled under the rug, close to the bed, rounded under the red weave and a pile of Mira's discarded clothes. It was an inch of gold sunburst with a fine-size diamond in its center. Heavy, pretentious, matronly, nothing Mira would ever wear and nothing he'd ever seen before. He waited for the earring to tell him what was going on with Mira. But wasn't this how a wife was supposed to discover that her husband had a lover? The forgotten earring, the wrong-colored pubic hair on the sheets, the satin bow ripped off the bra. But for the husband who suspects his wife has a lover in the form of a casino? Where was evidence of that? He slipped the earring into his pocket.

So this is how you begin to know who your wife is. To start, you look for something particular of hers, a book that might have found its way into the drawer of her bedside table where her diaphragm hibernates in its bubblegum pink case. Between the pages of
The Portrait of a Lady
, which she's been reading forever, might be an ATM slip showing a withdrawal from their account or a note she'd written to herself, errands on the back on an envelope. A bank statement, a canceled check, a tally of what she'd won and lost. He was doing what too many of the sincerest websites instructed the suspicious and the worried to do. He'd gorged himself sick on their checklists at home and in the library at school, Mrs. Tevas sighing conspicuously as she shelved unread books. How do you know your mate has a problem? The addict won't tell you the truth, so you look for her lies to take shape, to have mass and color and sound. You try to figure out what was going on in her head when she left her mother's gold watch on your crowded bureau amid the wrinkled neckties, coins, notes, a scattering of pens and dusty antacids. It's not something she's done before, and what was she even doing there to begin with? What was she looking for? You extract a key from the pocket of her jeans left on the floor for days, but because you have no idea what it opens or closes, you reach again into her strangely warm pockets and pull out a balled-up silver wrapper that you open up, fold back to its rightful shape and sniff; a stick of peppermint gum.