The Tell (38 page)

“Why can't they sit there?” Anya asked. “That's not allowed? Why, because they're black?”

“It's much more complicated than that,” he said, but in many ways it wasn't. He believed he was protecting them from contempt and suspicion, but maybe he wasn't. Providence could also be the very wrong place to be, backward and distrusting.

“They should have told you to go fuck yourself.”

Owen lacked the will to fight with her, and they were silent until they'd arrived at Wilton's house. “What did you want to tell me?” he asked.

“I've decided something,” Anya said, looking down at her twisting hands. “I decided that when Mira deserted Wilton at the casino—”

“She didn't desert him.”

“Okay, when she ditched him. Is that better? Okay, when she abandoned him, when she ditched him, he met a woman, and he's been caught up with her this whole time. He's fallen in love and he flew to Prague or Costa Rica and they're in some state of romantic amnesia. He's lost track of the time; he's not used to people caring about where he is. It hasn't occurred to him yet to check in, but it will. And then he'll call. And he'll be fine.”

Her scenario stopped Owen cold. It was a fantasy that she was going to sell to herself and to him, but it was ridiculous, made up out of nothing but regret and a wish.

“It happens all the time,” she insisted. “People disappear for only a few reasons. They get lost, they get killed, or they fall in love. And he hasn't been in love in a long, long, time. This is what he wants, someone to love and to love him back. Stop shaking your head, Owen. Just stop. And don't dare tell me I'm wrong.” She eyed him angrily.

“I just don't think—”

“You don't know him any better than I do. You don't know anything about him.”

“Anya,” he said. “This is not your fault.”

“Did I say it was? This isn't about me,” she said. “My father's fine. He's in love. What's the matter, don't you believe it's possible?”

She extracted the key on a string from under her shirt where it lived against her skin now. She opened the door and slipped behind it.

I
n the thirteen days her father had been missing, Anya had slept in Wilton's house every night; Owen had slept in his Fox Point apartment. Back at the house to meet Mira, he watched Anya from the kitchen window. A kitten on the end of a red leash prowled on its belly in the wet grass of Wilton's yard.

“This is what she does all day. Paces and obsesses over that cat,” Mira said, coming to stand next to him. “It's hard to see, her keeping vigil.”

“That's what we're all doing, isn't it?” he said. “Just waiting?”

He knew Mira was keeping her own kind of watch, one that involved distraction and neglect. Her hair was flattened on one side of her head and she looked tired. The house had a stuffy, anxious smell. It needed airing out, the junk mail and newspapers tossed, the coats and shoes picked up from the hall floor, half-full crusty jars chucked in the garbage. He felt the house picking at him with its needs, an insistent old lady.

“Anya doesn't sleep,” Mira said. “I see the lights go on in the middle of the night when I'm awake. It feels like we're the only two people in the world and we're both watching
Ancient Times
. It's sad.”

Mira was trying to conjure Wilton again, to draw his essence from the television, as she believed she'd done in the beginning. She told him how Anya wouldn't talk to her or even look at her, despite her attempts over the fence. Did she want dinner, company, a walk? Did she have something she wanted to say? Needed something at the store? The only thing Anya wanted, apparently, was for Mira to leave her alone.

“It's a terrible feeling to be hated like this,” Mira said. “Despised. I don't blame her for blaming me. I was the last person to see Wilton. I left him. But still, does she think this is what I wanted?” She gulped down her distress.

She was wearing a very bright white shirt over blue leggings and green sneakers. It was an attempt to be bright, but it tried too hard. The shirt was huge on her, the hem whisking the backs of her thighs. Owen touched the stiff collar and felt her freeze up as his finger brushed her neck. On this Saturday morning, she had asked him to go to Brindle with her to pick through the ruins—a salvaging expedition, he imagined.

“The shirt was my father's. I found an entire drawer full of them still in their packaging. I think he had a shopping disorder. I mean, look at this house. He was a shopaholic.”

“So everything is an addiction these days,” he said coolly, still reeling from how she'd responded to his touch. “Maybe it's not disease, though, maybe it's just pleasure, just single-minded desire. Maybe there's nothing to cure but selfishness.”

“Maybe.” She looked quickly at him and then down at her feet. “I lied to you, and you should always detest a liar, O,” she said. “A liar is not someone you want to be with, believe me.”

“But the lying is over,” he said.

“Is it? You're still not living here and Wilton's still missing. I don't know the truth about anything.”

He followed her into the hall where she began jamming things into her bag. She couldn't find her glasses or her keys and searched under the newspapers, under the table.

“I don't know why you don't hate me and blame me for everything, too,” she said. “I hate me and blame me.”

She was on her knees, her face hidden. She'd been hiding from him since he'd come in. That she would stay on the floor like this, trying to bend herself into something inconsequential and unseen, was too much for him. “Blame me, Mira,” he said. He forced himself to say it again—so she would at least get up. “Blame me. Hate me.”

Slowly, she stood. She found her glasses in her pocket and cleaned them for too long with the front of her shirt. She held them at a distance, looked at him through the lenses. Nothing was clear; she wiped again and fixed on him.

On that night they'd first met on Ives Street years before, when the boy who'd stolen money from Brindle had finally showed up, Mira got in the kid's face and asked, “Why do you think what you did is wrong?” The question was imperturbable and patient, and it didn't take long for the kid to break and fess up. As she examined Owen, he had the sudden, chilling sense that she knew exactly what he'd done and said to Wilton all along. That she'd always known, had learned everything the night Wilton disappeared and was waiting to hear him say it. She was waiting for him to confess and release her. And if he didn't, well, this is how she would punish herself, this was what she deserved.

In the benign Saturday morning sun that made the oak look newly oiled, maybe what he'd done wouldn't appear so terrible. Maybe Mira would see it for just what it was—his way of pulling her back from the edge. A house alarm began to wail across the street. It happened often enough now that there was nothing urgent about it anymore, but the noise was a rope winding through the air, choking them quiet. Owen went out to the driveway. Anya was on her father's porch steps. The cat's leash tightened as it snooped around in the bushes. The alarm went silent, but the sound still throbbed in Owen's ears.

Mira appeared and waved to Anya, though she knew she'd get nothing back. In the car, Mira asked, “Did you sleep with her? Is that what I should blame you for?” She was practicing casualness, settling her bag onto her lap, and snapping in her seat belt. He could feel a furious heat coming off her.

“No.” He sped out of the driveway and onto the street. He loved the moment just before the car crested the hill and the city came into sight, but now it came too quickly. He'd missed the instant of expectation.

“Wilton thought you did,” Mira said. “He talked about it that last night. He said it was his fault because he'd pushed you two together—he'd wanted you to help him with her. And then I saw it too the other day, the way she spoke to you, the way she looked at you and you looked at her.”

“I said no, Mira. Jesus. Did you hear me?”

She stared straight ahead, and when they'd reached the bottom of the hill, she spoke. “Do you remember how, when we first met Wilton, we used to talk about him all the time together? And then suddenly we didn't anymore because it was all secrets?”

“We each had our own private life with him.”

“It doesn't really work, though, does it.” Mira pushed her hair onto the top of her head and let it fall. “He gave us what we wanted—some excitement, some nice wine, a new friend for each of us. A lot of flattery—too much of it, too easy.”

Because we always want more, Owen knew, we bank on it to head off the sadness coming at us, that first glimpse we have of the end. On North Main Street, a banner strung between the trees announced that it was Roger Williams's four-hundredth birthday, and the long scarf of park dedicated to him was busy with celebrants bouncing in the chill. The twang of live music scratched through the air. A cluster of balloons straining on a string dipped low in a sudden gust and hit the side of the car with rubbery thuds. Traffic was stopped by a cop who let a long train of shiny-suited cyclists cross. Some of the riders wore pictures of children on their backs, or names and dates of dead ones. Across the river, the tail end of the cyclists appeared around the base of a building.

When the last cyclist finally passed, they headed over the Point Street Bridge, where the hurricane barrier looked like a bird paralyzed in midflap. Owen pulled into the lot behind Brindle. Four parking spaces belonged to Brindle, and all but one were taken. Anything left fallow for too long in the city was grabbed up, and this was free space. And the Dumpster was for free dumping, but he could see that it was empty. He'd expected to see a massive mound of it spilling onto the ground and recalled the feasting rat sheltered from the snow and the legions of black plastic bags lined up against the outside wall.

“Where'd all the garbage go?” he asked.

“I paid the bill I owed and they came and hauled it away.”

“How? You don't have any money.” He turned to her. “What did you do? Did you play again?”

“Play? No, Owen, I did not
play
. I don't
play
anymore.” His anger had surprised her, but she was ready to fight back. “And screw you for asking me.”

“It's a fair question,” he said.

“No, it isn't,” she snapped. “Not now it isn't. The day Wilton disappeared was the day I stopped forever. My god! What do you think I am?”

She got out of the car and slammed the door. Owen didn't know what she was or what compelled her. He didn't know who she was any more than she knew who he was. You imagined your spouse's virtues when really you should imagine their transgressions. Whether or not she ever played the slots again, she was changed for it—they both were. Just how, he wasn't yet sure. The shift might take years to reveal itself. But maybe the same wasn't what I should be after, he told himself. Inside Brindle, he watched Mira stomp through the gallery

“Where did you get the money?” he asked.

She stopped to look at how leaks under the front windows had feathered the wall below the sill. “You look away for one second and this is what happens,” she said, tracing the damage with a finger. “Time moves very fast when it's going downhill. I've spent so many years here and put so much into this place, put everything into it, in fact. Probably more than I should have.” She was talking to herself. “I don't want to lose it. I'm going to have to start all over, from the beginning, but that's okay, I think.”

“Tell me where you got the money.”

She considered Owen, her expression revealing nothing. “I sold something that belonged to my mother. A bracelet. She never liked it anyway.”

That she'd done what she'd said she never would was a sad relief to Owen. He opened the front door to let some warmer air in and listened to the oceanic roar of the traffic on I-95. To his left, two women approached from Point Street, walking briskly with their arms hooked in this unfamiliar neighborhood. They yelled for him to wait and picked up their pace. He put them in their late fifties, expensively dressed in sharply pleated pants and bright jackets that pinched their waists. Silk scarves were knotted at their necks. They exuded fitness and some giddy quality of liberation from men and children.