The Tell (5 page)

They turned back. Wilton had left his front door unlocked. Owen told him that the city might look innocent, but it wasn't. He should watch out for coyotes loping up from the river, sniffing around for cats left mewing on doorsteps. Criminals slid by in silent cars, headlights turned off. Houses were broken into all the time; the smash-and-grab was a Rhode Island specialty, like frozen lemonade and clam cakes. He told Wilton about the crime in his own house. He hoped to scare the man some and make him pull back into himself, to make him slightly less sure that he belonged here.

When Wilton went inside, Owen stood on the street and watched as a light went on in the bedroom where the former owner had slept—and died. When he looked at his own black bedroom window, he knew that behind it was the warmth of his wife waiting for him. In the kitchen, the plates were still on the table, the pots tumbled in the sink with their handles reaching out to be rescued. The room was filled with the mortal scent of extinguished candles.

Upstairs, Owen stood in the dark bedroom and undid his belt. The brass buckle clinked.

“That sound,” Mira said, sleepily. “It's really the most erotic one on earth. Come and fuck me.”

“Christ, Mira. What's up with you tonight?” He got in next to her. A salty smell escaped from the sheets, another gust when she rolled against him, another when she exerted the greatest power in the smallest pressure to move him on top of her. Her skin was an urgent temperature. She liked to be weighed down by him. She made him breathless in how she touched him, her fingers at the base of his spine. His face was at her neck, his erection insistent now. He listened for what she was thinking.

“So you didn't really answer me before,” he said, parting her legs and sliding into her. “About what took you so long over at Wilton's.”

“Was it a long time?” She spoke distractedly, her body suddenly distant. “Wilton didn't really need any help with the water heater, you know. I think he just wanted some company for a while, someone to walk with him through all those empty rooms. He was a little spooked by the place. Who wouldn't be?”

Owen stopped moving and pulled back to see her face. “What did you talk about that whole time?”

“God, who knows? And that shirt, open too far like an ancient swinger,” she said. “No one will know what to do with him here, what to make of him.” She rolled Owen off, her desire ebbed. He was left at sea, treading water, while she'd rowed to shore.

“When does anything like this happen?” she asked. “When does someone like him just appear at your back door? I don't know how to explain it, O, that he's here now when he was just there.” She pointed at the television at the foot of the bed. “I don't watch television for my entire life, and then, in the middle of the night, I see a show that's been off for decades, I laugh at this guy, and all of a sudden he's moved next door, of all the places.”

“You don't have to explain it,” Owen said, irritated. “He has to live somewhere.”

“Yes,” she said, “that's exactly what I mean. And somewhere is here.”

“Because his daughter is here,” Owen said, but he knew she wasn't really listening. She was busy with her own logic. “I thought we were making love, Mira.”

“I'm suddenly really tired. I'm sorry. I feel like an idiot.” She touched his face. “You know, it's like I conjured him up. I made him out of my imagination, a real person.”

Was Wilton who she needed in some way? The wine drummed in Owen's stomach. He was far from sleeping, but in a few moments, he heard Mira take her dive into dreams.

He imagined he heard Wilton shifting and sighing on an air mattress next door, imagined the sound of his heartbeat echoing in the empty house. If Mira believed she had plucked Wilton out of the television screen—conjured him up, but for what?—he believed he had plucked Mira from the distant rooftops six years before. Because he'd needed to, needed her. Through the wire-etched window of his first classroom at Spruance, before they'd ever met, he'd spotted the contour of her house a mile away. With his back to his students, he'd looked every day at the determined roofline and stately chimneys above the trees and telephone wires, and it had been like reading his own EKG. Its rhythm was vibrant, alive with highs and lows and history, but it was also out of sync in places, with an extra beat or a missed one, quiet and then sometimes howling with grief. But he couldn't look away, and every time he saw the same thing.

The year before he'd fled overnight and wordless to Providence, leaving his job, his students, and his friends, he'd come so close to being killed one night in May that he'd tasted the briny end wash over him. The cold had bathed his eyelids. With Mira breathing lightly beside him, he couldn't help replaying the moment the bullet announced its intention, not for him after all, but for Caroline, the woman he'd been having dinner with. His life was held in the gun's slightest shift to the left. He could have moved, he could have shifted to meet it, but he hadn't. He'd saved himself.

Caroline was not his girlfriend, though they had been sleeping together for almost a year. It was a strange, chilly arrangement. She was prickly and quick to defend herself, while he was evasive and sarcastic, and together they made a sticky mixture they couldn't extract themselves from. They went to movies and museums, a Knicks game she hadn't liked because her sweater kept getting caught in the flip-up seat. They ate at El Sombrero, where scorched cacti and a faded piñata crowded the front window. That night, Caroline chillingly bit off the point of a chip with her front teeth. This might be the night to end whatever it was they were doing together; he'd been chewing on the notion for a while. Dissatisfaction had finally begun to mobilize him.

But she spoke first. “We should discuss us,” she said, as though she'd gotten advance warning about the dinner's topic. She was measured, exact. She didn't intend to hurt his feelings; this was nothing personal, she said. “But people who sleep together should at least like each other.”

Owen's tamale was impossible to swallow. He knew he should be relieved, but there was still the gut punch of surprise. He gulped his Corona and saw her very reasonable expression. He said something sarcastic and vaguely hurtful. A voice rose and a chair scraped at the front of the restaurant. She asked if he wanted to try her chicken and held out her full fork to him, but she didn't want him to take the fork itself. She would feed him instead, always holding on to what was hers. Somewhere, a plate fell and shattered on the red tile. Fork still aloft, Caroline swiveled to get a view of the action. Her face grew grim and old. Hair swept behind her ear fell forward. A man wearing a cheap black ski mask, the eyes and mouth holes outlined in red yarn, approached. A gun was attached to his right hand, which rose toward an imaginary horizon, Owen's head pinned like a kite against it. This was a cartoon stickup, a joke as synthetic as the threads rising from the mask in static electricity. Owen had the urge to laugh. Caroline's jaw thrust forward urging him to do something. But what? His heart was under his tongue, his bowels retreating fast. He struggled to get his fingers around his wallet and extract it from his back pocket. He put it in the man's hand. Caroline took her purse off the back of her chair and held it on her lap. Water rushed innocently in the open kitchen behind them. The skin around the gunman's eyes glistened and his lips pushed forward. He gestured with a tick of the gun for Caroline to give her bag up. She said no, and then:
fuck you
.

This finally was the reason they shouldn't be together; she said no when she should have said yes. Later on, Owen realized that moments of terror can have their own solipsistic lucidity. Back then, though, he began to piss down his leg. Caroline gave a look that seemed to say that the entire world was a disappointment, Owen at the top of her list—he, a big man and still a coward—and then she fell off her chair like a furious little girl, her hands obstinate on the tile, her skirt up to her waist revealing black underwear, her legs straight out, one shoe off. She had a startled expression. The sound of a jet roared through Owen's head—but long after the shot had been fired. The timing was off and these were the moments that still stuttered until they slipped away from him out of frustration. It was disastrous, almost seven years later, to still detect the basaltic odor of Caroline's death and he could only press his arm across his face to block it out. He couldn't see her face anymore.

He'd met Mira a year later, and then not on Whittier Street or in her house, but on Ives Street, outside his apartment in Fox Point, on a summer's nighttime glittering sidewalk where she nearly hit him with her bike. They had an unhurried conversation, she still straddling the bike's cracked leather seat, while they watched traffic drift down Wickenden. She'd come to find the boy who'd stolen ten dollars from Brindle. There was something defiant and assured about her, with her old-fashioned, clattery bike, her torn sneakers, her deep red lipstick, her funny, bright, and strange clothes. When they turned in the direction of the bay, Owen snuck a few sideways glances at her. He liked how she kept pushing her glasses up her nose with her index finger. It was bookish and sexy. He liked her long neck and high clavicle, her smokeless smoker's voice. She was on a mission to save the kid by having him own up to what he did, but it was really Owen she'd end up saving. She'd drawn him out of his gloom and made him happier than he imagined he'd ever be. He believed he'd conjured her up to take him to this house, this bed, this body, that his heart already knew from a distance, because he'd have slipped away without her. He wouldn't have survived otherwise. She'd suffered tragedy's long legacy after the death of her parents, and she treated what had happened to him as something cherished and fragile, the bubble that held within it the belief that they were safe when they were loved and loved back.

O
n the third floor of Mira's house—servant quarters when there had once been servants—a series of small rooms ran off the hallway. There was a bed in each with a tamped-down mattress and air that was dusty with old grudges. In one room, Owen looked out at the State House and the dome's Independent Man, a proud, gaudy marker. The hour glazed the edges of industry and blurred the city. It was a view he sometimes took alone, a way to see where he was.

When Mira had shown him this same view on his first-ever tour of the house, he had wondered why it was that people in a new place always gazed outward first, inward second. For his part, he was half afraid to stare at Mira too much, as though he might wear out the slightly scary exhilaration he felt looking at her. She'd pointed out landmarks and ruins and said that when the city was smoothed out like this, she could imagine she was living in any century. She could put herself in the place of someone standing at this window a hundred years before, a great-grandmother, maybe. Owen hadn't asked what she really meant by that, not because he was incurious but because he already sensed he was going to have a hard time sharing her with her history. It was everywhere in the house, and in the accommodating, careful way she moved through and around it. He could not separate her from it.

He'd been the one to suggest she give him a tour that first evening. She'd had on a red sweater that zipped up the front but not to her throat, and her hair was collected with a piece of kitchen string, an attractive, careless touch. She was always barefoot. That she'd lived contentedly alone in the house for more than a decade after her parents had been killed made him question if there was room for someone else in all of it. If silence and echoes and still air didn't make Mira hungry for company, then what would? Why would she ever need him? When they came to the third-floor stairs, she'd tucked her thumbs into the belt loops of her pants and announced there was nothing to see up there. Empty rooms, she said. Peeling wallpaper, an old bathroom with a claw-foot tub. Her tone had intrigued him for what she wasn't saying. He'd backed her up a few steps, and she resisted only a little when he guided her the rest of the way with his hands on her hips. He'd wanted to stand very close to her and still feel the distance above and below and around them, while she was suddenly interested in pushing out the smallest space left between their bodies. Come closer, she'd said. Hold me tighter, take your clothes off. Press your chest to mine. He had put his shirt on the floor to protect her from splinters and she teased him about his manners and his armor of goose bumps. He was shivering for a few reasons, and he asked why they weren't making love on one of the beds, or couches, or even rugs instead, somewhere warm, at least. She laughed and tightened her legs around him; she liked the chill contrast to his hot skin. He dwarfed her in a way they both were awed by. His hands were huge on her. They were cold in the ecstatic drafts blowing up between the floorboards. There was nothing casual about what they were doing; he didn't want to mess this up, to be half-hearted, half-asleep, or afraid. She knew who he was and what he'd suffered, and how he suffered still. She wasn't scared of his past—just the opposite. She wanted to understand it, but she admitted she'd always be, at best, looking in from the outside.