The Uninnocent (14 page)

I only packed a few things in my shoulder bag, didn't need even to bother except I'll admit I did it to make an impression on him, not that he could hardly have noticed, given how often he kept going back to his Cutty Sark bottle. I left my Dear John on the kitchen table, took Guy by the hand, and collected my little silent Selby into my arms, and without responding to any of his shouted questions from our front porch—“What the hell you think you're doing? How the hell do you think you're gonna get away with this? Where the hell you think you're going?”—I walked down the darkening rainy street straight to Joanna and Kurt's. You know the next part about my being forced to kill him a couple days later.

It's such an awful tragedy that so many people got drowned in what they call a tsunami over there near Japan I think it was, sometime in the middle of the afternoon. God might in His wisdom have at least had the mercy to create this killer wave in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep and wouldn't have known what was about to happen. Whole little seaside towns dragged into the ocean like that. Imagine a hundred-foot cliff of brine being your last vision on this earth. Now, there's a moment of pure helplessness for you. You showed respect toward your mama and papa-san, you ate the rice and fish they served up from the wok, you labored day in and out, you were a good religious person who meditated long and hard about things like Hiroshima because, just say, one of your distant cousins was melted there when we lit the bomb over their heads, none of them ever individually making it into the news, but having been a part of world history without wanting to be, you did your level best, just like so many of us have done. Then you looked up one day and here was a green wall of salty ocean whose monumental hand was about to grab you under. I related to you that night I left home, you dead ones, as I sat there with my friend Joanna, who, since it was four in the morning, was lightly snoring on the couch next to me. I thought about that scary word,
tsunami
, and how it sounded like Daddy Death's name, if he had one. The station ran the word across the crawler on the bottom of the screen so many times that I began to think it meant something special for me, personally.

It did, of course. It became the word I think of when I think of the year of the many deaths. There were a couple more after Lovell's, since I couldn't stand to leave my boys alone and destitute. I loved precious little Selby and my towhead Guy far too much for that. Their mommy had to do what she considered a necessary thing, but which in the eyes of this spotless world of ours would be considered, I sensed in my fuguing mind, heinous and unforgivable. But what do they know? Though I appreciate how hard the talking heads on the news try to do their best to help us analyze events—nearly all of them disasters of some sort—none of us, them included, I'm afraid, can finally understand. We can watch, we can listen and think about things like when a drunken oil tanker skipper runs his full boat into the rocks and causes thousands offish and birds and other creatures to perish, or when some fanatic explodes his shoes in a jetliner over Ireland, or India, or the warlords in Colombia slit the throats of missionaries who turn out to be government spooks infiltrating their cartel instead of spreading the word of the Lord. But we can't ever really understand just how dark people's hearts truly are, how mysterious. Looking at Lovell lying there in his own personal blood tsunami, gasping his last, I realized he never even knew himself, so how could he possibly begin to know me, not to mention Selby or Guy, Angie or Rodney, Dolores or Eileen, anybody at all. I confess to not scoping the depths of my heart, not really. In my way I have tried, but it's just a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces missing and too many pieces from other puzzles mixed in to ever ultimately get a clear picture. This was, however, the way God set things up from the beginning of time. We're born ignorant, we try to learn a few things but mostly fail, and then we get old, some of us, and forget whatever it was we managed to learn, and then when we die we go into a sphere about which we know exactly nothing. Dark before, dim during, black afterward. Hardly seems like a cycle of life, does it. Whole thing just makes me sleepier and sleepier.

I think I said to him, as he was lying inert on the floor, that I was sorry. I always liked that shirt he was wearing, a black-and-white-striped shirt I bought him years ago for his birthday. Who would have guessed it would wind up being the last shirt he ever put on and buttoned up? There was a time, I remember thinking as I kneeled beside him, just before Nelly came into the room, when we used to do the fun, stupid things young people in love seem obligated to do. When Lovell took me to the movies, back before we had to be husband and wife, it was nothing short of glory to slouch in the seats, our laps littered with buttered popcorn and our shoes stuck on the floor with smashed Milk Duds and spilled Pepsi, and without asking hold each other's hand and every so often trade tongues, as we used to say. The feel of his tight jeans under my palm back and forth on his thigh was like the day of creation itself. How I loved him then, my delicious Lovell. His smooth-shaven face wore a smile, a toothy one just a touch yellower than the faded yellow on my cheerleader uniform (our other color was, of course, red), but a smile still and all. He liked cheddar cheeseburgers with bacon and I ordered mine plain. He poured ketchup on his fries and I dipped mine in mayo. I loved his rabbit-fur hat, and sometimes when it was snowing unexpectedly hard in November and I'd forgotten to bring along a shawl, he put his hat on my head, and it came down almost over my eyes, but I loved it. It felt so warm and smelled so much like the best of Lovell. Again, let me be honest. When Guy was born and I used to nurse him, one time Lovell came into bed with us and suckled my other breast. It wasn't until about three months into Guy's life that Lovell started withdrawing. He probably deserves credit for having given it his best shot that year—nine months of my pregnancy, and those first few with the baby—because, looking back, I think it was all full-throttle agony for the man. False calm before the storms. But, Lovell, I give you credit for having tried.

Still, I knew there wasn't much time left after Nelly and I worked to wipe up the gore that Lovell left on Joanna and Kurt's linoleum. I phoned 911 to report the mishap and then directed Nelly to lock herself and her brothers in their bedroom until the ambulance came. She was so well brought up by Joanna. What a sweet little girl, I thought, as I watched her do as I told her to do. I wished Nelly nothing but joy in her life as I filled the downstairs tub with warm water and, having rummaged around in the sink cabinet, found some nice fragrant lavender bubble bath, the whole contents of which I poured in, and then it was Guy who I fetched in first from the backyard, Guy who gave me a quizzical look when I told him to listen to what Mommy said, to hurry up and take off his clothes and get into the bath, which he did reluctantly but with all good faith, and then slumbering Selby, who didn't give me any fight since he was napping and dreaming what I hoped were pretty dreams, so full of trust and whispered words was he before I gentled him under the rising tide of water that already enveloped his older brother beneath the graying foam. Remarkable how calmly and quietly this was accomplished. I was as proud of them as ever. I don't think I was crying. Peaceful was what I felt. Everything was crystal clear in my humming head. Still, it was all I could do to get myself back to the sofa and turn on the news and wait and hope I wouldn't fall asleep again before it was my story that got told, hoping they'd be fair to me.

T
HERE IS A SAMENESS
to the days here that reminds me of my childhood. I mean to say that one day is not much different than any other, and that's fine with me, which is just as well since if I wanted things to be different I'd only be frustrating myself. Decisions here are not much made by Lorraine. The food is decent and the rooms are clean and the locks work. Lorraine can have visitors, but besides Cecily, who drove all the way from Arizona once to see me, nobody comes around. Which, again, is just as well. I have my memories. I have my meds. I have my health, more or less. I have my clothes. Got my paper and pencil. I have my bed to sleep in at night. My window to daydream by in the day. I got cracks in the plaster walls to trace with my finger making its way along their thin black rivers. I've got a lot, and I'm grateful for all of this. I wish Lovell would be kind enough to drop by one of these Sundays and bring the little ones with him to visit their mother. I'm not holding my breath, though. I think he's still mad at me for leaving home and, besides, I doubt his whore girlfriend Angie wants him coming around to chitchat with old Lorraine. She was always jealous of me, Angie was, that's what I believe. So, yes, I'm kind of alone now, but as I say, grateful. One thing would improve my life infinitely, though, and that is a television. Lorraine used to be so current with world events, so up on what was happening in this great big wild world of ours. It makes me a little sad to think how out of the loop she's become.

(MIS)LAID

W
HAT WE HAVE HERE
is a man who on a lovely September morning (touch of early autumn chill in the sweet New England air, some sugar maple leaves already turning red under a crisp blue sky) mislaid his mind. The man (Catholic heterosexual Caucasian bachelor with cocoa eyes, thinning brown hair combed over, athletic despite his narrow, even frail, frame) believed he knew why this was happening to him, yet his beliefs (not religious beliefs, but having to do with his mind no longer working after some four decades of functioning fine, insofar as he could tell) were evolvingly suspect. Where once he was sociable (neighbors often invited him to dinners, during which he told hilarious if familiar jokes and never failed to help clear dishes) and affectionate (his longtime girlfriend, while married to one of these very neighbors, was as devoted to him as a mother of three children could manage to be), now he was isolated, bitter. Whereas before he was dependable (had been with the same accounting firm for fifteen years, was the star shortstop on their interleague softball team, blessed with an infallible throwing arm and perfect aim), he now became not just unreliable, but entirely unpredictable. Never in his life having missed a day of work, he called in sick (head cold, he claimed) on the last Tuesday of the month, then drew the curtains in his modest house (two-bedroom Cape, dove-gray siding) and began what would by week's end come to be known as (aliased thus by local law enforcement)
the siege
.

During the first hours that slowly amassed into days, the man took no incoming calls (the phone did actually ring a few times on Wednesday) but started telephoning people who didn't understand or care about how or why his mind was suddenly wrong. These (outgoing) calls were repetitious, tedious, diffuse, and minimally articulate grievings punctuated by laughter (in turn sometimes punctuated by weeping). It didn't help that they were made to people whom he had never met and who hung up on him before he had a chance either to explain himself or apologize. Many of those who were treated to a minute (or so) of his ravings thought he must surely be drunk (stinking plastered), not knowing that he didn't drink (indeed was a teetotaler and vegetarian with a weakness for wheatgrass juice). By Thursday midafternoon his firearms quietly surfaced (no one would ever have guessed he owned such a cache of weapons, certainly not his lover, whom he took hostage that same evening when she dropped by, as she always did on Thursdays, to make love with him), and by early Friday morning
the siege
had begun (the frantic husband having notified the local cops of his wife's absence, and the man himself having also placed a call to the accounting firm with his list of demands). Once the standoff was in place (SWAT team and state troopers now on the scene), the news media showed up, satellite pillars towering over their vans looking like an ugly flotilla of squat, land-bound boats with sails furled. Throughout that long weekend, newscasters (whom the neighbors would soon enough invite into their living rooms for coffee and to elaborate their thoughts regarding the unfolding situation) began covering this (now renamed)
hostage crisis
. The man who mislaid his mind would himself watch them interviewed on his television and agree with most of what they had to say (he was always such a considerate neighbor, such a nice quiet man, et cetera), all of which he told his girlfriend (who didn't respond because the duct tape he used to mummify her head rendered her mute). Gentle wind rustled in the turning oaks and birches as a glorious moon (full, brightly persimmon) rose above the rooftops down the street.

Now, the girlfriend's husband (who for many years had hired the man's accounting firm to prepare his taxes) held on to a fervent belief that his wife was not, as the media alleged, her captor's lover, but was the victim of a random kidnapping (wrong place at the wrong time, he told his three children and anyone else who would listen). Because
this madman
(as the husband now referred to him) had no next of kin (inherited the house from his parents, deceased), the negotiator (brought in by the police to talk him out of harming his hostage) asked the woman's husband (who had liked the man, even considered him a friend before he turned into
a fucking psycho
) to think about making a personal appeal in the hopes of bringing this unfortunate misunderstanding (as it were) to a swift and nonviolent end. If handled properly, according to the (thick-shouldered yet somehow curiously dainty) trained professional,
suspect contact
with someone familiar and directly involved with the situation can (on occasion) change the hostile dynamics and help defuse said situation. When the husband (whose face was crimson and own fuse short on the best of days) asked if this meant he was supposed to
fucking beg
this
fucking psycho
to release his wife, the negotiator (flanked by stern men in bullet–proof vests) answered that yes, in essence, if he wanted his wife back (in one piece), a personal plea was the best way to proceed. This would have been on Sunday morning, this request from the authorities, who'd been for two days stymied by the intransigence, not to mention sporadic incoherence, of their perpetrator. Before patching the bereft (sullen, chain-smoking) husband through to the man (whose line was now restricted, thanks to local telephone company cooperation, such that incoming and outgoing calls were confined to contact between the principals), he (the husband) was briefed not to (under any circumstances) use incendiary language
(fucking psycho, madman
) with the armed and dangerous (alleged) offender holed up in the house. The news media, having by this time confirmed that the husband's wife had been seen on multiple occasions entering and exiting the modest gray home of the man who now held her inside (presumably against her will), made some requests of their own of the upset husband (interview solicitations as well as appeals for recent photographs of the woman), which he refused (using peppery language with them, too,
fucking vampires
that they were, et cetera). He (the husband) packed the three children off to stay with their loving grandmother (paternal) until the storm passed. Alone now in his own modest Cape (a very pale blue), the husband had to admit to himself (and to his God) that things weren't looking good, that it seemed increasingly possible (undeniable, in fact) that his
fucking wife
had hung the horns on him with this
fucking madman
and that he was from this moment forward going to look like (be) a
fucking laughingstock
(not just in town but in the eyes of a watchful nation). He took a leave of absence from the bank where he had worked without incident for a decade as assistant branch manager, and retained a lawyer (who agreed to represent him on contingency), and also withdrew behind the drawn curtains of his house. The magnificent autumn weather continued all the while to hold, various flitting warblers (some redstarts perched in a lilac, a yellow-throat in the honeysuckle) filling the air with song.