The Tell (32 page)

Owen imagined Wilton convalescing in his bed at that moment, considering what to do next, where to go. “Will you sit for a minute? I need to talk to you.”

“Now?” She glanced back at her friend. “We were just about to study.” She lowered her voice. “She thinks you're hitting on her, by the way. Supposedly you're always here looking at her, and once you even threatened to beat up some guy for her?”

“No on both counts.”

“That's what I told her. You're married, for one thing. And Wilton calls you the Peaceful Diplomat. He told me about some fight you broke up at school, how you made the kids shake hands afterward, and now the boys are friends.” She might be leery of her father, but she'd begun to quote him, a thread of attachment growing tauter.

“It wasn't exactly brokering peace in the Middle East,” he said. “I didn't do anything except tell them to cut it out.”

Anya smiled, ran her fingers over the jacket, then pulled out the chair and sat. “Okay. I'm sitting. What's up?”

“I left Mira.” Anya's face drew back in surprise. “I'm living here now. In an apartment at the end of the block.” He decided not to add that he could see her apartment from his own.

Anya picked at his forlorn muffin. “Your leaving doesn't have anything to do with what we did, does it?”

“We didn't do anything.”

“We kissed.”

“We were drunk. It was nothing.”

“Don't be an asshole. If you're married, then a kiss
is
something. Even if you're not married, it's something. It was something to me.” Her mouth pinched tight and she started to get up.

“Look, you're right. I'm sorry, I am an asshole,” he said, and touched her hand. “Sit, please? I left because of Mira's gambling. I left because she wouldn't stop going to the casino and playing the slots, and she's in trouble. I left because she's been lying to me.” Why did he want her to know all this?

“And you're telling me this because?”

“Because I don't have anyone else to talk to.” He hadn't known it was true until he said it; he was without friends. He stood and reached for his coat. His movements were jerky and abrupt; he was fighting with himself. “I don't know why I'm doing this. Just forget it. I have to get out of this place. I'm sorry.”

“God, relax. Take a deep breath. Just hang on for a minute.”

Anya went to speak to her friend, who threw another convicting glare at Owen. When she and Owen left the Bright, Anya took his sleeve and pulled him across the street to her apartment on the second floor. The dark stairwell stank of cat piss. In the living room, sprawled on the careless furniture, her two roommates watched television. One of them was Peter, the man he'd seen Anya with that day outside the Bright. He was wearing the bumblebee hat and a suspicious look. The guy was in love with Anya, and she was offhanded with him. The other roommate, Diana, exuded shatterproof tension. They were all med school classmates. Anya led Owen up another set of stairs that ran behind the dirty kitchen; it was clogged with empty plastic shopping bags and old newspapers. Her room was a small square, deeply angled under the eaves. But it was a girl's fantasy in many ways—he knew this from reading student stories entitled “Where I'll Live”—with satiny pillows, fluffy comforters, framed pictures, scarves, beads, candles half burned, and a hairy white rug. The air smelled of cheap vanilla. Had Wilton seen the room with its listing walls, he would have insisted that she get a different place—preferably one she could stand up in, and one that wasn't a firetrap. In his house, she could have her own floor of rooms.

“This is the only spot where I can actually stand up straight,” she said, posing in the center of the room as her head touched a tasseled pyramid of pink and green silk hanging from the ceiling. Her single bed was against one wall, under an eave and pushed into the corner. When Owen sat at her desk, the back of his head hit the eave's sloping wall with a solid thud. Anya, who lay on her side on the bed because the angle of the ceiling made anything else impossible, laughed as his sinuses bubbled and his eyes shivered. The pain made him strangely more attuned. He noted the dip between her shoulder and hip, a deep, powdery swoop that made him feel the exhilaration of sledding down a steep hill. He thwacked his head again to make her laugh more, and to see and feel more. He felt the weight of his body in the chair, the long length of his legs pointed at her. He smelled her—bookish, salty, and faintly like pine.

“Is Peter your boyfriend?” Owen asked.

Anya smirked. “I wouldn't call it that exactly.”

“What would you call it then—besides none of my business?”

“Unclear. Sometimes we sleep together, but I don't want a boyfriend. They take up too much time.”

“He seems to think otherwise.”

The way she wrinkled her nose made him remember how young she was. The conversation stalled in the bedroom's intimate air. They barely knew each other. Owen forced himself to look away from her laundry slinking over the sides of a basket. He picked up a silver-framed photo by her bed—a man, a woman, four boys, Anya. They appeared enviably ordinary in front of a white garage with a basketball hoop. Anya's mother, the woman who'd had a child with Wilton—that alone was extraordinary enough to consider—was a middle-aged athletic-looking blonde in a polo shirt tucked into baby-yellow bermuda shorts. One arm was around her beefy husband's middle. The sun gave his bald head a paternal glow. Anya's brothers were all bones and huge knees, grinning in braces, long shorts, and chunky sneakers. She stood behind them, her height—Wilton's long body—the one thing that set her apart from the others. If this family had come to the pond when Owen was a kid, he would have made them take him home with them at the end of the summer. They were perfect, lots of white teeth and tanned forearms.

“That's my family,” Anya said, reaching to take the photo back from him. She named her brothers and angled the picture away. Owen knew she was protecting herself in some way from him. “I miss them.”

“I'm sure you do.” In a second, I'll say what I need to say and then I'll leave, he told himself. He wasn't sure where to rest his eyes—they kept moving back to Anya.

“Can I ask you something? Something Wilton told me about you?” she asked. A square of red silk hung over a lamp, and the glow that hit the highs of her face made her look fervent. “He said you were in a restaurant once and the woman you were in love with was shot in a robbery. He said you charged the guy with the gun, but it went off and hit your friend. He said you were holding the woman when she died. Is that all true?”

The only truth was that he'd put his hands under Caroline's head so her hair wouldn't get dirty on the sticky tiles.

“What did you say to—?” Anya asked.

“Caroline.”

“What did you say to Caroline?”

Her name in Anya's mouth made Caroline seem alive, if not right in that room, then in some other city: all had turned out well. Owen felt a flutter of panic that he couldn't remember what he'd said to Caroline. Her eyes had stayed open as her body grew heavy.

“I said, ‘I love you.' I said, ‘You're going to be okay.'” He didn't say either of those things, and anyway Caroline would have known they weren't true; it was there in the way she hadn't looked away from him. Maybe he'd said nothing.

Anya blinked determinedly. “I'm sorry. That's just an awful story. I don't know how you ever get past something like that.”

“Maybe that's not the goal at all.” Owen said.

When someone downstairs left, the house shook. Owen watched a plane thread through the evening sky. Anya's cell phone rang, and while she didn't answer it, she kept an eye on the thing. When it rang again a few minutes later, she showed him it was Wilton and turned her phone off.

She gave Owen a sheepish look. “I don't always pick up.”

Wilton's presence, caught there in the phone on the bed, prodded Owen with urgency. “I want to tell you the truth,” he said.

“About?”

“Look, I didn't love Caroline,” he told her, “and she didn't love me. I don't know why I told you otherwise. I didn't do anything to protect her, and I didn't say any meaningful last words. I didn't tell her she'd be okay. I pissed myself and cowered. That's the real story and the real me, not your father's account.”

“Why would he make it up then?” she asked, angry.

“Because he wants you to believe people are more admirable than they really are. That he is more admirable, that I am, too. That people won't ever let you down or do wrong by you or have bad motives. That even tragedy makes a good story. He knows it's not true, but he wants you to believe people don't do terrible things to each other all the time, that we're not all cowards when it comes to saving others.”

“Who doesn't want to believe that?”

“I'm not sure I believe it anymore.”

“I think you've just forgotten.”

Anya inched closer to the wall to make room for him on the bed. She asked him to lie down with her. The soft mattress closed in around them like a hand. He wasn't aware he was crying until the freckles on her neck blurred and drifted. He needed to shut his eyes and pretend he was floating on his back on the pond. His hair fanned out on the surface. Anya, like water, swayed against the nerve endings on his scalp. The bed dipped and turned. He told her he was imagining swimming at the pond and described the place to her. She said she'd like to see the real thing some day, maybe take a swim there, too. He moved his face to her ribs, and through the cotton of her top, her breast fell against his cheek. The sensation was of a passing sunfish, a change in temperature, a shifting current. He stirred his hand in the water and took a sip of it. Anya touched his forehead, the bridge of his nose, his chin, and he was diving, invited in by a pond dweller. He was under, with the pressure against his eyes and ears, and he heard his heart walloping away. For an instant, he was perfect.

But he couldn't breathe. He was not on the pond; he knew where he was and exactly what he was doing. His craving for Anya twitched in the tips of his fingers, the tip of his penis, his legs and feet. He moved her into the angle where the slope of the ceiling met the bed and pressed against her. He sensed peril waiting at the base of her throat, incaution thrumming like a guide wire on a bridge. He moved his head to find the moon in the window and fell off the bed.

It was a long way down in free fall—minutes seemed to pass—until he heard the crack of bones and wood and then felt the back of his head smack the hairy white carpet. It was like taking a nap amid sheep. When he tried to sit up, his left hipbone jolted, and there was a sickening click of the rearrangement of joints. He lay down again. Anya leaned over the edge of the bed, and the way her hair curtained her face, she seemed far away. What had just happened was either funny or pitiable, and they waited to see which one. When Anya said his name, her mouth still had the gloss of prekiss. He decided that now he might as well believe in the better stories, because where had his gloom ever gotten him? It had suffocated Mira. Maybe everything could be fixed, as Wilton had said. He laughed up at the tasseled silk that hung over him like an exotic sun shade.

“Holy shit,” Anya said, laughing with him. “Are you okay?”

“A single bed. I'd forgotten what those are like.”

“Monastic,” she said. “Meant for one. Just tell me something. Was that an accident or your way out?”

Owen rolled onto his knees. When he finally stood, he put on his coat and kissed Anya's forehead. “I shouldn't be here,” he said. “I know that much.” He would get to Wilton and apologize, and would make sure Anya never knew what had happened. And he would leave her alone.

“I know. It's been a weird day for me, too.” She rolled onto her back and threw an arm across her eyes, the gesture just like her father's. “But I know I don't want to do this again. You need to figure things out.”

She didn't look at Owen as he left her room and then her apartment. He walked through the neighborhood with his hip sending sparks down his leg, and then down to India Point Park by the water. He warmed himself by picturing the tall urban grass that grew between the rocks in the summer and the occasional tall ship that passed by on its way to Newport or Boston, its sails flashing impulsively in the sun. The shoreline rumbled south past the hospital and the gas tanks and the Big Blue Bug. Atomically bright spotlights hovered over repair crews working on the highway. Yards away, two men seemed to be making some kind of deal.

In the apartment, he found that George had visited again while he'd been out. The man had the timing of a jewel thief. The bathroom gleamed antiseptically. The pot Owen had left in the sink had been washed and put away. Even the student papers on the table had been straightened, and the pencils and pens lined up like soldiers, the radio pushed back in the corner, its aerial detelescoped, the handle wiped. In the bedroom, his clothes had been pushed into a corner and the bed had been made with the chenille spread. One part of the edging was torn, his fault, and a chenille ball whisked the floor. It must have irritated George every time he saw it. Owen felt invisible in the apartment, any trace of him wiped away, disinfected, and vacuumed up, which was all okay and how it should be. It was how he felt about himself. He took some aspirin and a sleeping pill well past its discard-after date, and lay down on the bed but did not get in it. He might not get in it ever again. He didn't exist here—he was just an idea of himself. He would sleep, he would dream that everything was going to be just fine. He would wake up and do what he had to do to fix things.