by Tawni O'Dell
The prosecutor for the state’s attorney’s office grew up in a nice suburb of Philly and didn’t know a bony pile from a hill of gravel.
I attended every day of the trial. I had just had my first of ten knee operations and was on crutches and wearing a complicated metal brace that looked like a compact version of the Jaws of Life, but I refused to miss a single minute.
Every day Muchmore threw a ton of legal terms and legal bull at the jury, and I watched the process, the subtle changes in their expressions and the varying levels of understanding, hostility, curiosity, desire to do what was right and desire to do what was least embarrassing wavering in their eyes. I saw them start to be overwhelmed, saw the window of opportunity for them to decide to believe or not believe, saw them appraising Muchmore not as a litigator but as the son of Gene Muchmore, a well-to-do local businessman who donated the land free and clear near Coal Run that became the J&P cemetery, where the miners are buried who died in Gertie. If it hadn’t been for Gene, no one knows where they might have ended up. The town wasn’t prepared. A community rarely has to bury almost half its population in one day.
I saw them begin to look at Reese not as a criminal but as one of the Raynors. Everyone knew a Raynor. Chimp came from a family of ten and had six of his own. Very few people could say something good about a Raynor, but they were a part of our landscape.
Crystal was not. She was too small and alone to make an impact. Her family had moved here when she was already a teen. She was an only child, her mother from a town in West Virginia, her father from Ohio. He never got his hands dirty. He worked behind a desk for a company near Pittsburgh that sold light fixtures. They weren’t even present for the trial. They both moved away, leaving Crystal for dead in a state hospital where she received worse treatment than Reese did in jail.
No one was there to stand up for her. And her son was already gone from here. Adopted by an out-of-state family, their identity sealed by the court for his own safety, considering the ferocity of his father’s crime against his mother.
I saw the window close. I watched them decide to listen to Muchmore.
The jury agreed with him that Reese meant to hurt Crystal and maybe even meant to kill her once he got started, but he didn’t plan it. The baseball bat he brought home with him that day hadn’t been purchased as a murder weapon but as a gift for his son. The cashier who sold it to him testified that he told her he was buying it for the boy. No one seemed to care that he was only three.
Reese got six years and would’ve been out in three except he beat a fellow prisoner to death in what his new public defender argued was self-defense. He was sentenced to another fifteen.
“Did you stop by for a reason or just to make me worry about you?” Mom asks me.
I search for the source of her voice. She’s standing in front of one of her shelves looking at a framed photograph.
“Actually, I was more worried about you.”
She looks over at me with surprise showing on her face and the beginnings of mild protest in her eyes.
Her face isn’t just pretty; it’s beautiful in a solemn, superbly crafted way that sometimes goes unappreciated by people around here for the same reason they wouldn’t care to own a bust chiseled by a Renaissance sculptor but fill their houses with Precious Moments figurines.
Age hasn’t harmed her dramatically because of her superior architecture. Her features are softer now, sanded by time, but still a pleasure to view. Her blond hair has faded to white, but she still wears it long and loose like a girl when she’s not working.
Yet age has visited. Up close her skin is a delicate meshwork of lines and wrinkles, like she’s made entirely of tissue paper that’s been crumpled, then carefully smoothed out again.
“Worried about me? Why?”
I ease myself up out of the chair and walk over to her.
“Today was Zo’s funeral,” I remind her.
She picks up a photo of Zo off the shelf and stares at it.
I’m struck by how alone she is. Having Jolene and her three grandsons and a lifetime of suitors and friends and a job where she is always surrounded by people has done nothing to reduce her solitariness. It hasn’t affected her in a bad way. It’s not hard and impenetrable like a wall. It’s more of a mist that shrouds her just enough that no one can ever quite find her.
“I know,” she says. “I’m going to miss her. Zo and I saw each other every single day. We talked about everything. She was my alter ego.”
She smiles to herself over some memory she isn’t going to share.
“It’s going to be hard for a while. It’s going to be like having all the mirrors in my house broken and not being able to look at myself to see how I’m doing.”
I put my hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Mom. You were okay until I opened my big mouth. I didn’t mean to make you feel worse.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m fine,” she insists, shaking her head at me. “Zo had a good life. A long life. It was her time. She knew that, and she was okay with it.”
I believe that, too. From the time I came back, I feared she was on her way out, but she didn’t seem afraid at all.
She had always been petite, but her presence was always the largest in a room, so her physical size often went unnoticed. When I saw her again after sixteen years away, I was startled by how small and frail she had become, even though her mental faculties and energy level hadn’t been diminished at all.
During the last couple months, layers and layers of her fell away and she became smaller and smaller, seeming to curl up and retreat on herself the way a perennial flower does in fall in preparation for its winter sleep.
The last embrace I received from her was the week before she died. We had just finished having a cup of coffee and a piece of her spice cake at the kitchen table.
She made me promise to be the first one to go through her papers and put everything in order before handing them over to Randy. She was concerned that if he was the one who tackled the filing cabinet first and saw the bursting, disorganized drawers, he’d consider the task too daunting and never do it.
I promised her. Before I left, she gave me a quick hug that felt like the soft, papery flutter of a butterfly hitting against my chest, and I knew she didn’t have much time left. She had completed the full circle of her life, returning at the end to what she had been at the beginning: a beating pulse inside the insignificance of a human body.
“Have you given any more thought to that house I showed you in town?” Mom asks suddenly, changing the subject again, this time for her own sake.
“What am I going to do with a house?”
“Live in it?”
“Very funny. Did Jolene say something to you? Does she want me to move out?”
“Move out?” Mom laughs. “You never moved in. You sleep on her couch a couple nights a week and come by for dinner when you feel like it.”
“See, she did say something.”
“She didn’t say anything,” she says, her voice turning into a scold. “Jolene is thrilled to have you back, and so are her boys. I’m just saying, for your own sake, I don’t understand why you don’t want to find a place of your own to live in. You have a job. You have a steady paycheck. Everyone’s glad you’re back.”
“What does that mean?” I interrupt her. “Everyone’s glad I’m back?”
“Just what I said. Everyone’s glad to have you back home again. You’re a hero in this town.”
“I was a hero.”
“Once a hero, always a hero.”
“Are you familiar with the term ‘fallen hero’?”
She frowns at me.
“Are you familiar with the term ‘pain in the ass’?”
“You’ve definitely been talking to Jolene.”
“So you’re not staying?”
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine staying. What would I do here?”
“What are you doing now?”
“That’s what I mean.�
��
“You want to go back to Florida?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You want to go somewhere else?”
“I didn’t say that either. Can we drop this?”
She nods and goes back to staring at the photo in her hands.
“Don’t feel bad,” I tell her.
“I feel bad for myself, but I don’t feel bad for her. She got to finish her life.”
I know she’s thinking of my dad and how his was extinguished in the middle.
“You’re thinking about Dad.” I say my thoughts out loud. “You’re thinking you wish I could have known him.”
She looks up for a moment and puts one hand briefly against the side of my neck.
“No, I was thinking I wish he could have known you.”
I leave her staring at the picture of Zo in her polyester summer pantsuit of dandruff-shampoo blue clustered inside the pink silk lining of Liberace’s cape. He has his arms spread out behind her like a vampire or a protective Mother Goose.
Moments later she would march across the Las Vegas hotel lobby, armed with her big white pocketbook and rural determination to develop film for under two dollars.
———
On my way out, I stop by Crystal’s room. Her roommate passed away last week after a long bout with cancer. The bed has remained empty. The nurses told me that Crystal seemed sad, but I’m skeptical. Detecting any emotion in her is next to impossible, although I have no doubt that she still feels things.
She’s awake, staring at the end of another black day.
“Hi, Crystal,” I say softly.
She can’t turn her head. She can’t move anything below her chin. On a good day, she’s been known to swallow, but never enough to move food or liquid down her throat. She’s fed through a tube. She eliminates through a tube. She can only hear through one ear. She doesn’t see at all. One of the blows to the back of her head destroyed the vision center in her brain.
I try to visit her once a week. I’m doing my best to make up for lost time: the time she’s been lying in this bed without me caring and the time I should have spent with her before this happened.
My mom has asked me about my devotion to her, and I made up a story about us being good friends in high school. She didn’t buy it for a second. She knows better than anyone that the great Ivan Z didn’t have close relationships with mousy girls several years his junior. I didn’t even have close relationships with the guys who were supposed to be my best buddies and the girls that I dated. They were just people I hung out with; I never formed serious attachments.
My mom doesn’t pry, though. It’s a fairly remarkable quality in a mother, especially when it’s not done because she’s too self-absorbed to care or because she genuinely lacks interest. She will ask me about anything once. No subject is taboo. But if I tell her I don’t want to talk about it, she won’t press me.
For most of my life, it’s been great, but lately I almost wish she’d nag at me and force me to talk to her, yet when she starts, I always stop her. I’m afraid she’s going to convince me to make a decision I might regret or one I might not. Right now I can’t decide which would be worse.
I sit down on the bed next to Crystal. Her emaciated body makes a small, angular hump beneath the hospital sheet, like a bundle of sticks. I pick up an unresponsive hand. It lies motionless on top of my palm, and I stare at it with the same repulsed compassion I’d give a broken bony bat.
“Who’d you get the flowers from?” I ask as I notice a browning bouquet of carnations and chrysanthemums I don’t remember bringing her. “Don’t tell me I’ve got competition.”
I notice two more dried-up arrangements sitting on her nightstand. I find a card in one. They’re condolence flowers for her dead roommate. I pick up all three vases, pitch the flowers in the garbage can, and go empty the murky water into the bathroom sink. Then I toss the vases in the garbage can, too, enjoying the sound of the glass cracking.
“I don’t have anything for you,” I tell her, walking back to the bed. “This was sort of an unplanned visit. I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”
Her eyes stare blankly ahead, but I see the tip of her tongue move slightly inside her mouth. It’s one of the few movements she makes. It means either nothing or everything.
I grab her plastic water pitcher and pour a small amount of water into a paper cup. I dip a finger in, then run it lightly over her chapped lips. I take a little more water and dab it around her forehead and neck. She always feels too warm to me.
“You’re wearing my favorite nightgown,” I tell her.
It’s good to talk. She can hear. She’s alive, and she can hear. No one knows for sure how much she understands, but the sound of a human voice must bring her some comfort. It lets her know that she’s not alone, that she is connected to something outside herself. I talk to her, I suppose, for the same reason people talk to babies still in the womb.
“I saw a nightgown at the mall I want to get for you,” I go on. “It’s pink like this one, but it’s a nice soft material and it doesn’t have any scratchy lace.”
I reach out and touch the lace around her neck. It’s not stiff and scratchy anymore. It’s been washed so many times.
She’s facing her colored-glass animals displayed on the bookcase I set up next to her bed. She can’t see them, but I describe them to her.
The state hospital she was in before moving here didn’t allow personal effects, so she had nothing when she arrived, while the rest of the residents are usually coming from their homes and bring plenty of their belongings with them.
The sterility of her side of the room bothered me. I never knew her that well, but I remembered she had a shirt covered in fake sparkly gems and a necklace she used to wear all the time: a tiny, tarnished gold cage in the shape of a ball with colored jewel chips trapped inside it.
I was thinking about the necklace one day right after I started working for Jack, while I was standing in a small, dirty kitchen with Chad, one of the other deputies, reading rights to a guy we were arresting for the forty-odd TV sets, VCRs, and CD players he had spent the past couple days trying to sell out of the back of his van in a Burger King parking lot. He had been fairly adept at breaking into people’s homes and stealing the stuff, but once he had it, he didn’t know what to do with it. He explained to us that this had always been one of his worst shortcomings: He never thought ahead.
His kitchen was void of color except for a set of shot glasses clustered on the windowsill above the sink. Each one was a different vivid jewel tone. They were pretty and ugly at the same time and reminded me of Crystal’s necklace and how she wouldn’t take it off even after I convinced her to take off everything else.
The next day I saw a set of prancing glass horses at the Hallmark store at the mall, colored ruby red, emerald green, and cobalt blue. I’ve added dozens more animals over the past months, but the horses are still my favorites.
I pick up the red one. No one on the staff will dust them for fear of breaking one. I yank my shirt out of my jeans and polish it.
“I have my eye on this rooster,” I tell her. “He’s beautiful. About six inches tall. His tail looks like a psychedelic water fountain.”
I pick up the blue horse next.
“He’s out at that new Italian restaurant I told you about. Marcella’s. It has a cigar shop attached to it that also sells gifts and chocolates.”
I pick up the green one.
“We’ll put him here on the top shelf where the sunlight will hit his tail. Every time a nurse or an aide comes in, she’ll tell you how beautiful he looks. I can’t afford him right now, but we have plenty of time to get him.”
I give her a resolute smile. Her injuries are permanent but will not shorten her life.
The horses are done. I decide to leave the rest for my next visit. Most of the glass is from me, except for a collection of fancy bottles from Mom and Zo and a tiny pink ballerina from the family of her former roommate.
She doesn’t have any family of her own except for the parents who moved away.
She was moved here about twelve years ago. Even my mom and Zo don’t know who’s paying for her care. Her benefactor has chosen to remain anonymous and pays the hefty monthly bill with certified checks through a bank in Harrisburg.
I crouch down next to her and kiss her flaccid cheek. It smells and tastes of a light, sweet sweat and a slight bitterness I’m convinced comes from a buildup of different medications that have begun exuding from her pores. There’s nothing unpleasant about her person, but the bed has the damp, unclean odor of an overused dishrag no matter how often the mattress is turned and the bedclothes are changed.
“He’s getting out Tuesday,” I whisper against her good ear.
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing my plans with her about how I should get revenge against Reese. Most of the plans range from fantastic to comical and would be much better suited for the likes of James Bond or Bugs Bunny to carry out than for me. Now that Reese is about to be released, it’s becoming more and more obvious to me that, as much as I hate him and as repulsive as I find him, I’d rather talk about dropping an anvil on his head than actually do it.
I think about hunting with Val. Did I miss shooting that deer because I was slow, a bad shot, or a coward? Or was Val right? Did I fail because I was trying to kill something I really didn’t want to kill? I think I really want to kill Reese, but I guess I won’t know for sure until I look him in the eye.
“I’m going to take care of it,” I tell her. “Then I guess I should probably leave again. There’s not really much of a reason for me to stay after it’s done.”
I wait to see if the tongue flickers. When it doesn’t, I take it to be a sign that she might not agree.
MONDAY
6
I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE KIND OF LIFE CRYSTAL WAS LIVING with Reese while it was happening, and I wouldn’t have cared. She had disappeared from my thoughts years earlier with the same unthinking ease as a pair of old cleats did.
