by Delia Ephron
“You’re thinking about Sam, aren’t you?” said Jane. “I haven’t been considerate enough, going on about real estate—big deal that I sold Deidre’s parents their home. I know you’re a wreck about Sam, distracted and upset.”
I agreed, I was agitated about Sam. I pushed my plate away to clear the deck and my brain of any other subject. Jane looked at me tenderly, and I felt a welling of helplessness. “The thing about Sam—”
“What?”
I held up my hand, damming a flood of anxiety. “Sam seems so lifeless,” I said finally.
When I’d left him, he’d been sprawled on his bed, on his back, his arms crossed over his face, blocking everything out, especially me. Pleas of concern, “I’m worried about you,” produced no reaction. “Why are you flunking?” made him rollover and face the wall. I was probably asking the wrong questions, but I didn’t know what the right ones were. I’d informed him that until I saw significant improvement in his attitude and behavior, he had to come directly home from school and do his homework in my presence, although I wasn’t sure that I could be home every afternoon. Were certain words, like “attitude” and “directly,” invented by parents for these unpleasant occasions? I didn’t feel authentic using them. “Sam, what do you have to say about all this?”
“Why did you come home, anyway? You’re never home on Mondays.”
That plaint of his had made me nearly insane, as if the entire episode were my fault.
“Lily, honey, he’s not entirely lifeless,” Jane said pointedly.
“No, with Deidre, actually, he’s not.”
“That’s something. Have you thought about therapy or Prozac?”
“I’ve been through all that with him already. In New York. He refuses. I think he likes being a slug. I think it feels … familiar. I’m not going to cry, I swear.”
“Cry your head off. I have Kleenex.” She hunted through her gigantic sack of a purse.
“Hello.”
“Oh, hello,” I said, as I started to reach for the tissue, which Jane released. It wafted through the air like a parachute and landed on my salad. “Whoops.” I pinched it off. “I have a cold.” I dabbed at my nose. “Jane, do you know Sergeant McKee?”
“Of course.”
“What’s going on?” It was not a casual question. I must be emitting silent beeps of anxiety, or maybe now he was an expert on me in a freaked-out state. At least my mascara wasn’t running.
“Nothing, really.” I tried to laugh. “My son’s driving me crazy.”
“That’s rough. I’m sorry.” His body inclined slightly toward me and I inclined slightly back. I hadn’t noticed before that his eyes were dappled, brown with touches of froggy green.
I heard Jane’s compact click open. She took out lipstick and freshened up.
“How’s your ankle?” McKee asked. “Or should I write a letter to the editor to find out?”
We both laughed. So he wasn’t angry. Or he didn’t want to be on the bad side of a columnist. Which? Both? “I’m all healed.”
“I’m glad. Good luck with your son.” He left, but the smile seemed to linger.
“Nice guy,” said Jane.
“Very.”
When I returned home, Sam’s favorite movie,Alien3, was playing on the VCR. I could see it through the living room window as I approached the front door. I was pleased that he’d at least moved downstairs.
He was sound asleep, sprawled on his back, stretched the full length of the couch. His hideous spout of hair lay over the cushioned arm, proudly displayed, the way a hand with a beautiful ring might be offered for admiration. How innocent to show off something so unappealing. His face was blank, not withholding but serene.
“Sam.” I touched his shoulder.
He opened his eyes and, upon seeing me, smiled. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, honey.”
And then he was fully awake and our connection was broken. His smile vanished. He seized the remote and upped the sound. His eyes dulled into TV land. He plucked a half-eaten bagel stick from the coffee table and collapsed into a semi-stupor.
Maybe I should watch with him. Maybe if I entered his world, I could bring him back into mine. This was an idea born of total exhaustion, but I sat down, facing the set. Sigourney Weaver was lying in a sleek futuristic coffin. Her head was bald, Sam’s minus the spout.
Klingons like to kill people. They want to die.
Klingons like to kill people. I looked over at Sam. He closed his eyes and poked the bagel stick softly against his eyelids. His mouth curled up at the edges and remained there contentedly, then he took another bite. I knew where his mind was—humping his heart out before his mom entered the kitchen and wrecked it all.
Sigourney Weaver was now being lifted out of the coffin and placed in another type of space bed. Her eyes were shut. She was wearing a brief undershirt and bikini underpants, which left an attractive field of skin between her hips and breasts.
“Is she dead?” I asked.
Sam didn’t respond. His head rocked gently from side to side while he nibbled his bagel stick.
She couldn’t be dead, but when people die are their eyes always open or are they sometimes closed? As I considered this, Sigourney Weaver woke up. Had the naked woman’s eyes been open or closed when McKee and I intruded? Closed, I was quite sure. So, like Sigourney Weaver, she was probably sleeping. Or was she dead? Sleeping, definitely. This fantasy of mine was as absurd as Alien3. Ridiculous.
“Did you want me?” Sam’s nasal drone interrupted my thoughts.
“No, nothing, never mind.”
I didn’t want to ask Sam about dead bodies. I didn’t want to discover that he knew all about them or that it was one of Deidre’s areas of arcane knowledge. I would have to ask McKee. That woman’s arm flung out, off the bed, was peculiar. No one slept like that. If she wasn’t dead, perhaps she’d been drugged. I would call McKee tomorrow. I had an obligation, a moral responsibility even. Suppose we had stumbled on something nefarious.
CHAPTER 6
THE BEACH was bleak. Gray clouds shading to black, and a biting wind off the water. It was my idea to meet here. No one would see or overhear us. The tide would take care of our footprints, as surely as it had erased the tire marks behind the Nicholas house.
I could feel the damp through my thin cotton socks and the canvas of my white Keds. It was cold. I hugged myself, rubbing warmth into my arms. Too revved to sit on the driftwood log that had conveniently washed up near the Town Beach parking lot, I started pacing in hillocks of sand, but that took too much energy. He was ten minutes late. Was his lack of promptness a character trait or a rarity? And what did that matter, anyway? What about him was incidental, and what was constant? That was the sort of speculation I indulged in about men I was going to date. I settled for working off my nervousness by rocking on my feet, burying them so I now had the unpleasant sensation of sand in my shoes. I wasn’t even sure why I was nervous, except that I was aware there was something infelicitous about our meeting at the beach. What would he think I wanted?
A FedEx truck pulled in. Then Wilson’s Plumbing. So much for privacy. Neither driver removed himself from his vehicle. As far as I could tell, they were both whiling away the time, watching the Atlantic. The FedEx driver rolled down his window, stuck his hand out and shook liquid off a lid. He must be drinking coffee.
Now a big black four-by-four arrived. A Jimmy, according to the lettering on the side. Not until the driver got out and started toward me did I realize it was McKee. He was not in uniform.
I hadn’t expected him to show up off-duty. When I had spoken to him at the police station and he had suggested this hour in the early afternoon, I imagined he would be on break. Not that it mattered. So what that he arrived as a civilian, wasn’t that the term?
He walked with the casual, relaxed gait of an athlete, even across dry sand, which, for me, required a plowing force. His faded jeans and thin gray sweatshirt hung gracefully and naturally. His true uniform wa
s not policeman’s blues. He was taller than I had thought. And hadn’t he been chunky? This was confusing. The equipment that a cop attaches to his belt—gun, handcuffs, ammunition clip—must have created an illusion of chubbiness. In any event, he was underdressed. Immune to cold, I supposed, like all tough guys. Or he might disdain jackets because he knew he looked sexier this way.
I waved broadly and called at the same time, “How are you?”
“Good.” He glanced up and down the shore. He wore slick sunglasses with reflector lenses.
“Do you always do that?”
“What?”
“Check out the place?”
“Sure, it’s habit. You know cops always sit facing the door.” He spoke rapidly. “I don’t have much time. I’m due somewhere.”
“Oh, sure, of course.” I pointed toward the driftwood log. “Should we sit down?”
He waited for me to get situated. Then he placed himself carefully, allowing enough space for a person, possibly a person-and-a-half, to sit between us. Companionable but aloof.
“Mynten?” I offered him one from my pocket, having planned this moment ahead, to soften him up so he would be more receptive. “The pack you gave me,” I explained. “I carry them in the glove compartment, I’ve nearly finished them. I’ve even tried some other flavors—cherry, honey.” I stopped chattering.
“Thanks. So what’s the problem?” he asked.
“It’s not a problem, well, it is a problem—” I popped a Mynten in my mouth and stashed it in my cheek. “Remember the day at the Nicholas house?”
“Yes.” His voice was noncommittal.
“I know you’ll think this is completely crazy, but—”
He waited.
“Is it possible that woman was dead?”
“No.” He dismissed the question as if I were inquiring about parking regulations.
“I’m serious. I keep remembering her arm. She was lying on her back and her arm was hanging off the bed.” I demonstrated, throwing my arm out, with the inside of my elbow facing skyward, a limb rendition of sunny-side up. My hand drooped from the wrist, the way hers had, fingers softly curled. I checked my arm to be sure the imitation was accurate, then looked to see if this rang a bell with McKee. Who could tell what was going on behind those sunglasses? From the slant of his head and a lack of motion around the mouth, he seemed at least to be paying attention. Then his tongue snaked along his upper lip. I let my arm drop. “I experimented at home,” I said, feeling self-conscious.
“Experimented?” Now his voice sounded amused.
“Yes.” I sat straighter, trying to maintain a serious demeanor. I even sucked in my stomach because I had once observed that good posture gave me confidence. “I got on my bed and lay on my back. When you stretch your arm out horizontally, half hanging off the mattress”—I extended my arm again, in the most precise and specimen-like way—”believe me, you cannot sleep.”
He said nothing, and I had a flash. He didn’t remember. He was so fixated on that Playboy-centerfold body, the arm had escaped him altogether. “You remember, right?”
“Sure.”
“So it doesn’t make sense, right?”
“Well—” he said vaguely.
“And who lies naked in a room like that?”
The second I uttered those words, I wanted to retract them. “Who lies naked?” If I could pose the question, the answer was mortifyingly self-evident: Obviously not me. I saw him start to grin, then stop. “Some people,” he remarked. “It was a nice day.”
“No.” This was something I had given thought to. In spite of my planning and the fact that I was doing most of the talking, it was the first moment the ball was in my court. “It was chilly. I remember zipping my jacket.”
“Look.” He spoke kindly but firmly, as if he had decided to end my foolishness. “When a person dies, the blood pools. She would have had deep color in her buttocks, her back …”
“Not if she had just died.”
“And her eyes would have been open.”
“What if she’d been drugged, and died in her sleep?”
“Sometimes your lids roll up anyway.”
“They do?”
“Yes.”
“That’s creepy.”
He laughed. He’d been resting his elbows on his legs, and most of his contact with me had been occasional sideways glances. But now, as he laughed, he flexed backward, sitting up. He took my measure in a friendly way, and the space between us altered, becoming finite.
“So how many dead bodies do you see in a year?” I asked.
“Four or five in car accidents, about the same in heart attacks, strokes, that sort of thing.”
“And their eyes always flip back open?”
“Not always.”
“See?” I was getting excited.
“My grandmother’s eyes did that, though. I’ll never forget it. She had these amazing eyes—”
I interrupted, anxious. “Don’t you have to leave? I mean, how soon do you have to be somewhere?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He pushed up his sleeve. Spying his bare arm, I was gripped with the urge to run my finger along it, grazing the hairs lightly and ending in the crook of his elbow, which appeared exceptionally tender. Do men have secret vanities, and if so, were McKee’s his beautiful tapered forearms, with their ideal density of body hair, suggesting man not bear? Apparently unaware of my fixation—although he did adjust his sleeves higher—he continued talking. “My grandmother’s eyes were pale blue, the color of ocean sky on a hazy day.”
He also commented, apropos of nothing, that his grandmother was a tiny thing who weighed ninety pounds with a rock in her pocket. I dragged my focus from his arms to his sunglasses. All I saw there was my own reflection, and the clutter of detail visible behind: the ribbon of wire fencing, a metal sign, beach grass waving. My face looked little and lonely.
“My granny could scare the truth out of me. No,” he amended, “no one could scare the truth out of me. I was a world-champion liar, but when she aimed those blue lasers in my direction, I always thought she knew the score.”
“You lied a lot?” I watched my mouth move.
“Sure, about where I’d been and where I was going and what I drank. We’re talking sixteen here. And after. I was bad.” He confessed this with nostalgia. “My mom hadn’t heard from her in a whole day—which in my family is a long time—so she called me. Tom the cop. That’s who they call when they’re worried about anything.”
“I’m always worried.”
“I can tell.”
“What do you mean, you can tell? How can you tell?”
“I don’t know, you’re jittery. With your little notebook, always scribbling, it seems like—”
“What?”
“Your brain’s working double time.”
He had noticed that? He saw things in me I didn’t intend for him to see? How was that possible? I was the designated observer. I was paid to observe. There was something humiliating but also impressive in his exposing me offhandedly and then breezing on with his own story. “I found my granny on her bed. Dressed, wearing an apron. I guess she’d gone up to nap.”
“How could you tell she was dead?” I was determined not to be sidetracked, even by the revelation that my interior life was visible to someone who was practically a passing stranger and that, perversely, I found it seductive.
“I felt her pulse, but I knew.”
“How?”
“There was an awesome quiet.” He gave a majesty to this phrasing, dwelling on “awesome.” We both stared toward the ocean; the metaphor for the depth of this silence lay at our feet. “Anyway,” said McKee, “I closed her eyes, and her lids scrolled right back up again. It was like she was saying, ‘I may be dead, but you’ll still never get anything past me.’” I heard him crunch, demolishing the last of his Mynten. Like a chain-smoker, he took a couple more out of his pocket. I accepted one, and we both unwrapped and popped—partners in a shuffle-and-sli
de routine. “Where’d you get this crazy idea?” he asked.
No way was I going to reply, “Alien3.” I just swished my lozenge from one cheek to the other.
“There was no weapon, nothing was disturbed, she wasn’t disturbed.”
Was he positive about that? Was the world-champion liar deluding himself? I bet he couldn’t describe one thing about that woman that wasn’t between her neck and knees.
“Also, her hair wasn’t messed up,” said Tom. “Like she’d just combed it.”
“Her hair—” I was about to comment when I realized I had nothing to say. I couldn’t remember much about it. Was her hair light brown, maybe blond, curly, or simply wavy, perhaps straight? And how long was it? And what color were her eyes? Oh, right, they were closed, but what about her face? Angular, oval, round? I searched for an end to the sentence I’d started. “—was pretty. Her hair was pretty.”
“It was peaceful in that room,” McKee declared conclusively. “Harmonious.” He rolled the word out with pride.
I would have to disabuse him, but I would do it as to a doctor, the way I might discuss something embarrassing like gas as a medical phenomenon. “Actually, it wasn’t peaceful,” I said. “It was sexually charged.” There I’d said it. No big deal. My mouth felt dry. I swallowed, and the Mynten slipped into my throat.
I started to smile but horror took over. I gagged. I tried to cough, then to swallow again, but found no way in or out. The nugget was permanently, stubbornly lodged. I jumped up and bent over, heaving compulsively. I’m going to die. No thought more original than that, I chided myself—even while choking I clung to irony—as McKee’s arm circled my shoulders. He jabbed me under my ribs, once, twice, and the little Mynten shot into the air, making a graceful arc before plopping soundlessly into the sand.
McKee turned me toward him and into his arms. I sagged against his chest, feeling the warm cotton sweatshirt against my cheek and even recognizing the scent of softener with which his wife had sweetened the wash. “Are you all right?” It was as if he’d added “darling,” I could hear the worry in his tone. “Lie down,” he said. “Just lie in the sand.”
