What Time Devours (2 page)

She was standing at the window, he supposed, but there was an awkwardness to her posture and a slight smear of something on the glass: sweat? Makeup? She didn’t move at all, and Thomas took a small, reluctant step toward the window, half hoping the figure would turn out to be some store mannequin, dressed and propped there by one of his more enterprising students as an end-of-term gag.

But she was real enough. He took two wary steps toward the window.

The glass reflected black everywhere but where the face was pressed to the window, lit by the kitchen light so it seemed to float like a party balloon. He supposed she was in her late fifties. Her pale skin looked delicate and had the beginnings of translucence. She was expertly made up, her lips a trifle redder than suited her, and her teeth were unnaturally white. But it was the eyes that he couldn’t shake. They were wide, fixed in something that might have been surprise.

Or terror
.

One was a dull, muddy green, the other an uncanny violet.

Thomas put down the coffeepot and picked up the wall-mounted phone, his eyes still on the motionless face pressed up against the window, but he didn’t dial. He would go outside first. He needed to know for sure.

The kitchen had two windows, one facing south—into the backyard—and one facing east, which was where the woman stood. Thomas stepped out into the predawn chill, cinching his bathrobe tighter as he walked barefoot onto the cold path. She wasn’t visible from the front of the house and it was only when he went around the dark yew that grew on the corner and turned down the narrow path between the house and next door’s dense privet hedge that he saw her. She wasn’t standing exactly, which meant that she was rather taller than he had imagined, but was slumped over one of the gold-flecked au-cubas that were planted along the shady foundation. Down here the only light was the startling and flat brilliance of the kitchen window, which had given an unearthly vividness to the woman’s face from inside. Out here the light only brushed a little green and gold over the edges of the aucuba. The woman herself was no more than the silhouette of her head, her body lost in shadow.

Thomas approached her slowly, watching for movement, anything that would shift the nature of the morning’s strangeness into something more mundane. She could still be just some disturbed old woman who had fixated on his house for reasons known only to herself, and who might yet bustle off muttering incomprehensibly.

“Excuse me,” he said, and when she didn’t respond, didn’t move at all, he put his hand on her shoulder.

Then he knew. He felt the cool slickness of fluid on her shaded shoulder and he recoiled.

Too late. His touch made her shift. She rolled as she fell away from him, and the kitchen light showed the terrible concave shape of the back of her head and the blood that soaked her back like a cloak.

CHAPTER 2

Thomas was already two hours late for work but the police were still there. He had recounted every detail of the morning’s grisly discovery but hadn’t had much to offer. No, he had never seen her before, and no, the spot where she was lying was not where he’d found her. She’d fallen when he touched her, and he was sorry for disturbing the crime scene, but he hadn’t been sure she was dead . . .

He told the story twice, once to a uniformed officer who treated him like some half-wit who had willfully compromised his investigation, and once to a female plainclothes detective called Polinski who was merely efficient. He gathered they didn’t know who the dead woman was.

“No purse, no credit cards, no ID,” she said. “Mode of attack suggests a mugging.”

“The mode of attack?” said Thomas, unnerved by his own curiosity, but also trying to suggest he had nothing to do with it. Thomas was a big man, six foot three and broad across the shoulders. People who didn’t know him expected him to be rough, physical. He had noticed a couple of the policemen sizing him up, though he suspected some of them already knew who he was.

“Looks like she was hit from behind with a half brick. We found it under the hedge. The lab has it now.”

Chastened, Thomas said nothing.

They kept him sitting around for another forty-five minutes and then said he could go. When he went back inside to get his things together, he found that his hand was shaking. He checked his face in the mirror. He was pale, dead looking. Suddenly he felt nauseated and ran to the bathroom, but when he got there, nothing happened. He sat for five minutes on the edge of the tub, then drank a long glass of ice water and felt better.

Thomas dressed for work, feeling the silence of the house now that everyone had left and the strangeness of putting on his tie in the middle of the morning. He wanted to call his wife, Kumi, in Japan, just to listen to the sound of her voice until the world felt closer to normal. It wouldn’t matter what she said. It was enough that they were talking again.

The wheezy grandfather clock in the hall chimed eleven. He brushed his teeth again, ran his hand over his stubbly chin, and decided to shave. He wasn’t sure why, but it seemed important to go to school looking composed and professional, looking different from the way he felt.

Perhaps if everyone else assumes it’s an ordinary day,
he thought
, it will be
.

But it wasn’t an ordinary day and not because of the corpse at his window. In the morning’s chaos, he had forgotten that his early classes had been canceled, and the school had been closed for the Williams memorial. Thomas remembered as soon as he pulled into the empty parking lot behind Evanston Township High School.

He cursed, turned the car around and drove over to Hemingway Methodist on Chicago where Ben Williams had volunteered in the soup kitchen. The service was already over and people were drifting out, clustered together, so Thomas sat in the car by the curb, radio off. He recognized a lot of the kids, including a number who had graduated five or six years ago, most of them black. Was it that long since Williams had been here? It didn’t seem so, but then it never did, these days. Thomas was thirty-eight and had been teaching high school for a decade. Ben Williams had been twenty-three; a smart, thoughtful, popular kid and a wide receiver for the Evanston Wildkits. He had only joined the National Guard because it helped pay for college. After his tour he had planned to be a teacher, like Thomas. A week ago he had been killed in Iraq. Thomas didn’t know the details.

Thomas had been his English teacher. He couldn’t remember what they had studied that year.
Julius Caesar
? As soon as the title came to mind he was sure it was right, sure also that Williams had taken the lead in organizing a staging of two or three scenes from the play. The memory came back so powerfully that Thomas couldn’t believe he had forgotten it, or the charismatic kid at its core. Williams had played Mark Antony. Thomas thought they had done the assassination scene and its immediate aftermath, maybe even both sets of funeral orations, but the only thing he could recall clearly was Ben Williams talking to the class as the people of Rome:

 

Thomas was surprised at how well he recalled the lines, but
had forgotten—or half forgotten—the boy who had made
them memorable.

Twenty-three. If he had merely read about this in the paper, if he had never known Williams, the memorial service might have produced a private diatribe about the war, but he felt no outrage, only loss and futility. He started to frame thoughts of Williams’s frustrated potential but pushed them away as clichéd. He wanted a stronger connection to his former pupil but couldn’t grasp enough of him beyond that classroom
Caesar
to make the boy real. He thought of Williams but found that his own thirty-eight years weighed too heavily on him. At twenty-three he had been teaching in Japan, had not even been to graduate school yet. He
had
already met Kumi, had already fallen in love with her, in fact. Twenty-three.

Strange
, he thought,
that so much of who you are was already in place so early
.

He remembered it all, the scent of his apartment in Japan, the feel of the bicycle he had ridden every day, the thrill of visiting Kumi. It was so long ago, but felt so fresh that he smiled as if he were still there in that moment, as if he had not dropped out of graduate school, had not separated from his wife, and had not found a body at his kitchen window. He stared at his hands as they sat at ten and two on the steering wheel: big hands, they were. Strong. But the skin was tougher than it had been, not quite as smooth. He looked back to the church and wondered if losing a former student was at all like outliving your own children.

Amazing
, he thought,
the way you can make everything about you
. . .

“Nature of the beast,” he said aloud.

Life, he supposed.

He sat there, replaying all he could dredge up about Ben Williams, and watched the kids filing out to cars and yellow buses, while Ben Williams’s former classmates hugged, shook hands, and swore to keep in touch.

CHAPTER 3

By evening, the morning’s horror seemed a world away and he was not entirely surprised to find the house deserted when he got there, the only sign of the investigation being a mass of yellow tape designed to keep people away from where the corpse had been, and a squad car down the block. A couple of uniforms were going house to house. He had almost forgotten what had happened, pushed it into some dark part of his mind and tried not to look at it. Now he was back, and it was real again. As he walked up the path to his front door, something of his former nausea returned.

Inside, Thomas had another glass of water, reached for the phone, dialed a sixteen-digit number, and waited.

“Hello, Tom,” said Kumi.

“You don’t say
moshi moshi
anymore,” he said, smiling.

“Not to you,” she said. “You are the only person who calls at this ungodly hour.”

“So how’s Tokyo?” he said, the sound of her voice unwinding him like a hot bath.

“Oh, you know, the usual. The State Department wants to involve me in intellectual property issues with China, about which I know nothing.”

“And they understand that you speak Japanese, which is not the same as Chinese?”

“Yeah, they got a research grant.”

“So why you?”

“Who knows. They think I look friendly.”

“Boy, do they not know you,” said Thomas.

“No one knows me like you do, Tom,” she said, wry as ever. “Or at least there are bits of me that only you see.”

“I should hope so,” said Thomas.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “You have a mind like . . .”

“A graduate student?”

“I guess so,” she said. “Aren’t you getting a bit old for that?”

“Probably,” he said. “But sometimes it feels like I only really knew you in my twenties.”

He thought he heard her sigh. For years they had been separated, furiously so. Now they were at least speaking again, perhaps more than that, though it was hard to be sure. They had never stopped being married, at least technically.

“How are your classes?” he asked.

Kumi had decided that since she was going to be in Japan, she might as well tap into her cultural heritage. She had signed up for three courses, karate, traditional Japanese cooking, and ikebana: flower arranging. That had been the first to go.

“Those women drove me nuts,” she had said. “Everything had to be
just so
. And there was only one way of doing it. They’re sticking two bits of bamboo and a camellia flower on a rock and they act like they’re defusing a tactical nuclear missile. They’d look at mine and say, ‘This is incorrect.’
Incorrect?
It’s flower arranging! I had to get out before I killed someone.”

That had been two weeks ago.

“Not sure how long the karate is going to last,” she said tonight. “They say I’m unfocused, too aggressive.”

Thomas chuckled.

“Laugh it up, English teacher,” she said. “I’ll come by there and kick your ass.”

“When?” he said.

“When I’ve mastered rolling my sushi,” she said. “I’m better at that. The Zen thing makes more sense when you’re making rice and seaweed snacks than when someone is trying to kick you in the head. Go figure.”

“Listen,” he said. “Something happened and I need to talk to you.”

He told her about the dead woman and she asked the right questions until he had no more answers, and there was a silence. Then he told her about Ben Williams’s memorial service.

“I don’t think you ever mentioned him before,” she said.

It wasn’t supposed to be a criticism, but Thomas bristled.

“You weren’t talking to me then, remember?”

“It takes two to . . . I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever the opposite of ‘tango’ is.”

“True,” he admitted.

“I’m sorry I can’t come back to the States right now, Tom.”

“Oh, I know,” said Thomas, pleased that she would even consider it. “I’m not sure which bothered me more, the murder or the memorial service. He died at the same age I was when we met.”

“Yes?”

“Makes you think, doesn’t it,” he said. The hollowness of the phrase stung him into saying more. “I mean, makes you realize how little time you have—or might have—how much you should . . .”

“Seize the day?”

“Something like that, yes.”