When the Killing's Done (53 page)

Staring at the menu, trying to decide whether she’ll have a cup or bowl of the clam chowder with her crab Louie, it takes her a moment to realize that the Korean woman from the variety store downstairs is standing there beside the table. Mrs. Kim. She has a newspaper in her hand, the
Press Citizen
, and she’s holding it out in offering. “You have seen this yet?” she asks.

Alma hasn’t seen it. She was in such a state this morning, what with the tension of having to get to court and worrying whether she could leave the blouse untucked so as to hide the fact that her jacket would no longer button across her midsection, that she’d forgotten all about it. Half the time she runs right over the paper anyway, remembering it only when she pulls into the driveway at night to see it lying there scuffed and torn. Which doesn’t really matter because it’s a rag in any case, blustering and cocksure and half-competent and on the wrong side of just about everything she believes in. Tim used to call it the
Press Critizen
.

“No,” Alma says. “No, why?”

Mrs. Kim, an erect tall woman in her mid-seventies who once startled Alma by remarking, after a casual exchange of greetings,
You Nihon-jin, eh?,
lays the paper on the table and with a smile of complicity gently pushes it to her. “You going to like what they print today. Free copy. You take.”

Before the thank-you is out of her mouth, she fastens on the headline:
Death on Santa Cruz.
And below it:
Questionable Tactics on Part of FPA Lead to Death of City College Sophomore
by Toni Walsh.

Mrs. Kim backs away slowly, giving an abbreviated bow, which Alma, seated, returns as best she can. “No more protestor, eh?” the old woman says, winking. “Bad for business anyway. You business, my business too.”

Alma, heart pounding, smiles up at her. “You can say that again.”

The article isn’t everything she could have hoped for, but clearly, for the first time since all this began, the newspaper of record in Santa Barbara is attempting to distance itself from LaJoy and his gang of crazies. He’s still seen as a crusader and TNC and the Park Service as the enemy, but Toni Walsh—muddied, bloodied and thoroughly provoked—cuts him loose, sounding more like an editorialist than a reporter:

Activist and local businessman David Francis LaJoy, 47, of Montecito, founder and president of the animal rights organization For the Protection of Animals, was arrested late Saturday evening after a bizarre and tragic incident on Santa Cruz Island. Mr. LaJoy led a group of his followers in an alleged attempt to sabotage the Park Service’s campaign to exterminate the island’s feral hogs after the failure of a last-minute injunction to stop the hunt. Members of the party claim that he proceeded recklessly despite the severe weather conditions that struck over the weekend. In attempting a dangerous climb at the direction of Mr. LaJoy in an area of extensive flooding, Kelly Ann Johansson, 19, of Goleta, fell to her death.

Mr. LaJoy was charged with criminal trespass, vandalism and conspiracy. The parents of the deceased, Ronald and Eva Johansson, also of Goleta, contacted by phone, had no comment, but a family friend, who asked to remain anonymous, states that they are planning to file a wrongful death suit against Mr. LaJoy.

She reads the article twice through, feeling better now, much better. When the food comes, she leaves the newspaper spread out before her so she can run her eyes over the headline and the murky file photo of the pier at Prisoners’ Harbor they’ve dug out to accompany it. The chowder is delicious, rich with clams, potatoes, butter, the crab Louis the best she’s ever had. She finds herself wiping the plate clean with chunks of the hot sourdough bread the management prides itself on and she winds up eating too much, or it feels that way anyway. When finally she looks up, it’s well past three, and despite the lift the iced tea gave her, she can barely push herself up from the chair. She’s sleepy, exhausted, but even as the idea of taking off early comes into her head, she dismisses it.

Once she’s outside, she forces herself to pick up the pace, snapping her knees in a martial stride and taking in great lungfuls of sea air, the marina tranquil, the parking lot just a parking lot once again. The breeze is soft and fragrant, wafting up out of the south in a hint of the season to come, and she takes a moment to stand there on the patch of lawn out back and turn her face to it while the custodian emerges from the rear door to shake out his mop and a half a dozen starlings squabble over a spill of French fries on the walk. Then it’s back to work, her mood darkening again when she sees Alicia’s empty chair, and she settles in at her desk thinking that when Alicia comes up for evaluation, she’s going to have to act on her conscience. That’s all there is to it. And she’s sorry if she’s going to hurt anybody’s feelings.

She winds up working till six, trying to make up for wasting the morning in court, though of course she would have been out on the island still if it weren’t for what happened at Willows, so she can’t be too hard on herself. She’s thinking about that, about the scene on the island, about the dead girl, as she locks the door behind her, makes her way down the steps and crosses the deserted lot to her car. Coming up the beach with the men and the dogs, she’d felt powerful, in charge, and at first, seeing the humped and useless form flung down there in the sand beneath the wet poncho, she’d thought it was a pig, one of the dead pigs they’d pulled out of a ravine and were planning to spirit back to the coast and put on display. Her blood sang in her ears. Removing anything from the island, animal, vegetable or mineral, was a crime, and here they were, caught out at it, and it wasn’t enough that they were trespassing and trying to interfere with a project that had already cost taxpayers millions of dollars, but they were trying to possess wildlife as well, steal it, own it, use it, when as anybody knows all wildlife throughout the country, on public or private land, is the property of the government. She was savage, worked up, thrilling with the joy of nailing them, finally nailing them, when a knot flared in the fire and the form beneath the poncho became something else altogether.

Traffic is heavy along the darkened freeway, an undulating river of soft rubicund taillights carrying her along in its flow. She flicks on the radio, listening first to the news, then switching to music, trying not to think of the dead girl, of Tim, of the child growing inside her and what she’s going to tell people when she can hide it no longer. A song she loves comes on, one they hardly ever play on the radio—“I Came So Far for Beauty,” a Leonard Cohen song in the Jennifer Warnes version—and she tries to sing along, but the words tumble past her and after the second chorus she falls silent.

Her first stop is at the grocery in the lower village—after that big lunch she doesn’t need much: a piece of salmon (farmed, color added) and a bag of spinach to pop in the microwave—and then the video rental. It takes her a long while to pick something out, working her way through the current releases, most of which she and Tim saw in the theater when they came out, and then the comedies, which are uniformly puerile and funny by definition only, before finally drifting into the classics section and settling on an Ernst Lubitsch movie she’s seen at least twice or maybe three times but not recently. The idea—the theme of the evening—is to keep it light, a little distraction, that’s all, and then crawl up to bed and let the oblivion wash over her like a dark tide of nothing.

Fine. Super. But when she gets to the front door and inserts her key in the lock, she finds that it’s already open. Which is strange, because she’s not the sort of person who forgets to lock up. Not ever. For a moment, mentally retracing her steps from the time the alarm clock went off and she’d lurched out of bed in a panic till she left the house with a stale bagel smeared haphazardly with cream cheese, she tries to visualize herself at the door and turning the key in the lock, but the image won’t come. All at once, she’s afraid. There’s been a series of break-ins in the neighborhood recently, in one of which a woman on Olive Mill Road—not three blocks from here—was attacked on surprising the thieves while they were rearranging the furniture so as to get at her oriental carpets. Very slowly, silently, like a thief herself, she turns the knob and reaches in a hand to flick on the hallway light.

She’s poised on the doorstep, ready to bolt if need be, but when she gradually pushes the door open—all the way to the wall to be sure there’s no one flattened behind it—she sees nothing but the familiar entry hall, the table there piled with outerwear, umbrellas, unread magazines and the three purses she’s most tired of. “Hello?” she calls. “Anyone here?” And then, heart leaping, she thinks of Tim. He’s the one who can never remember to lock the door behind him—half the time he doesn’t even know where his keys are. “Tim?” she calls, already foreseeing a reunion, Tim come back to surprise her, and wouldn’t it be just like him to pop out of a dark corner and scare the wits out of her? “Tim, is that you?”

It isn’t until she’s inside, until she’s made her way through the kitchen and living room and into the bedroom, that she begins to understand. Tim has been here, but he’s here no longer. His things—everything, his bicycle, his books and video games, even his underwear and his T-shirt collection—are gone. Empty drawers, that’s what he’s left behind. Dust bunnies. An old pair of high-tops with broken laces and soles worn through at the heels.

She has an impulse to pick up the sneakers, to touch them, lift them to her face, but she can’t. Her legs go weak on her and she has to sit down right there where she is, on the corner of the bed. She folds her arms across her breasts and holds tight to her shoulders. She can’t seem to lift her head. After a while, her hair begins to slip loose, the force of gravity teasing it away from her ears strand by strand till her face is in shadow. How long she sits there in that posture, she doesn’t know, hopeless, slumped over, staring at her own two knees locked together in the navy blue twill of the suit she wore to court, the knees he stroked and caressed, the thighs, and where was he? He couldn’t even call? Leave a note? Anything? Anything to acknowledge that they meant something to each other, that they’d slept in the same bed for five years? It was obscene. A joke. And wrong, deeply wrong.

Later, much later, when she finally does push herself up from the bed, she wanders the rooms like a patient on the surgical ward, shuffling her feet, brushing her fingers idly over the tables and chairs, looking for some trace of him. The note is there, has been there all along—she finds it in the kitchen, pinned beneath the whetstone on the cutting board. A single sheet of paper, folded over once. Inside are two keys—his house key and the spare key to the Prius. The note consists of three sentences:

Alma:

I love you, I’ll always love you, but if you want to do this, you’re on your own. You can keep the car because I won’t be needing it—after the Farallones thing I’m thinking of going up north for the summer to work with this bird guy from the U. in Fairbanks. After that, we’ll see.

Tim

The smell of the salmon nauseates her but she forces herself to eat, the kitchen overlit, cheerless, absolutely still. Afterward, she puts on the movie to distract herself, but she can’t follow it. It’s just noise and motion. She hates Tim, that’s what it is—she’s just glad she found out what he’s really like before it’s too late. And she hates the baby inside her too—the embryo, the thing he implanted there, the life, always more life. She goes to bed when the clock tells her to but she can’t sleep. She can’t call her mother. She won’t call Tim.

In the morning, it’s worse. She must have dozed, must have dreamed, but all she can remember is lying flat on her back and staring at the ceiling while daylight came creeping into the room as if ashamed of itself. It’s a workday, Tuesday, but she isn’t going in to work. What she’s going to do—what she has to do—is force herself out of bed so she can evacuate her bladder, go through the morning ritual of vomiting, washing her face and brushing the sourness out of her mouth, then pull on her clothes and drive downtown. To the clinic. She’s twenty weeks pregnant, second trimester, and she hasn’t been to the clinic, hasn’t even driven past it, since Tim forced its existence on her back in November. She doesn’t even know when they open or if anybody there will see her. Or more to the point: if they perform late-term abortions. What she does know is that for an abortion at this stage—or procedure, as they call it—the fetus will have to be removed with instruments, with forceps, and then they’ll use the suction device and finally a curette to scrape the lining of the uterus to make sure all the remaining tissue is removed. Her uterus is stuffed full, that’s the problem, pressing at her abdomen, swelling it, pushing and puffing and shrinking her clothes, and they—whoever they are, somebody, a doctor in surgical scrubs—will empty it, make everything go away. That’s the point of the procedure. That’s the plan.

All she can think of as she swings out into traffic on the freeway is just that—making it all go away. She’s put nothing on her stomach, not even coffee or dry toast. The nausea is there, scratching at the back of her throat as if to claw its way out. Cars bristle around her. The morning is bright, charged with sun, and the rains have greened the vegetation along the roadway, but she hardly notices. She sees the concrete, the steel and chrome of the cars, exhaust rising poisonously as the traffic inevitably stalls and brake lights flash up and down the line. Trucks. Minivans. Trash strewn along the median. And then, just as she’s turning off the freeway, nature reasserts itself in the form of a gull sailing past toward the rippled brightness of the ocean, its wings as inevitable as the sea itself and the first creature that crawled out of it.

But the thing is, she can’t find the place. And where is it—on Haley? Ortega? Or no: Garden. It’s on Garden, isn’t it? Angry, frustrated—not tearful, not yet—she tugs at the wheel, stymied by one-way streets and lights that seem to change randomly as if the whole city were in league against her, bicyclists careening across her field of vision from every direction, pedestrians throwing up a wall of human flesh at one intersection after another. She goes too fast, then too slow. Someone honks behind her. She’s shuffling through her maps, none of which seems to show downtown Santa Barbara, and at the same time trying to prise her cell phone from the side pocket of her purse—she’ll call them, that’s what she’ll do, call and ask directions, but she won’t give anything away, won’t ask for an appointment or to talk to the counselor she and Tim saw last time, just directions, that’s all—when a woman in a tiny silver car shaped like a hair dryer edges out of a driveway right in front of her and she finds herself rolling into her, softly, sweetly, their bumpers meeting as gently as two pool balls kissing in the middle of a green felt table.