She rounds the corner where the flume used to be (just some girders and a couple of brown plastic logs turned upside down now), hugging the winding road that follows the coastline on the right. The ocean is invisible except for an occasional whitecap, and in the rearview mirror Katie can barely make out the outline of the mansion on the beach. She winds up the hill, past the Shore Dinner Hall on the left, and then down the hill, past the takeout window where her family used to get clam cakes and chowder after church every Sunday in the summer. The same takeout where she and Nick would go when the weather turned and the crowds gathered: dozens of people milling around them, but they were the only two there, leaning into each other and listening to the cries of the greedy seagulls circling above. Now, on the other side of the road and across from the takeout, all the picnic tables are gone and the long dock has boards and big signs nailed across the front: KEEP OUT, DANGER.
She curves around again, passes the Palladium Hall on the left, where both she and Dana had their high-school graduation banquets, and then there is only parking lot on both sides of the car; she leaves the ocean behind her, still unseen.
Close to the exit, right before the road dead-ends into Palmer Avenue, is the plunging hill that her father would race over when they left the amusement park after a long day—a lifetime ago. He’d slam the gas pedal, and they’d cruise over it like they were still on the Cyclone, and lose their stomachs for the last time of the day. Dana would throw her hands up in the air every time, and Katie would hug herself, already nauseous from so much spinning and falling. But she loved what came right after, and it made getting a little sick worth it: her mother grumbling (For God’s sake, Jimmy, haven’t we been on the verge of vomiting enough today?) and looking into the backseat to trade a disgusted look with Katie. Katie, who would wait for that look, the perfect way to end the day. For once she and her mother teamed up, while Dana rolled her eyes at their father, who only smiled and shook his head, unrepentant. Years later, a whole lifetime later, Katie would see this same look on Nick’s face as he zoomed over the hill, laughing at her, his warm hand on her leg.
Katie floors the pedal at the last second, feels her stomach bounce as she flies over the hill. Back when she was a teenager and Jill and Amy were off together, meeting boys or trading secrets that didn’t include her, she’d get into her secondhand Buick Skylark and sail over this hill—picturing her mother’s face, feeling that secret thrill again of being in total concert with her.
She reaches Palmer Avenue, gives one last glance back at the park in the rearview mirror. She’ll have to call her parents when she gets home, fill them in on the trial, ask them if they’ll come by to let Jack out during the days. But she won’t tell them about this trip through the park, because her father has told her about the rumors more than once over the phone; she doesn’t need to hear again how the park will be closed up completely soon, how the owners will sell it to developers. Tearing everything down to build condos, or auctioning it all off into private lots. And don’t even think about protests or petitions, sweetie, her father told her. You don’t want to mess with these guys. I’ve heard they’re linked to the mob.
Her breath fogs the windshield as she stares up at her house: total darkness inside. Katie wonders how Jack is making out in there, how he’s finding his way around the unfamiliar rooms and corners.
Her eyes travel over the door, the windows, the small red maple that bends toward the side of the house where the gutter empties onto the lawn.—Feels like home already, doesn’t it? Nick had said one night, soon after they moved in. Just sitting in the car like this, staring up at their new house.—Ours, Katie.
Katie pops open the car door, listens to Jack barking inside—hoarse, like he’s been stuck on autopilot all day. She stares at the bay window on her way up the walk, looks for signs of the little dog in the blackness inside.
Katie crunches up her front stairs, still thick with salt, and kicks her shoes into the cement below the door; Jack’s barking grows urgent until she inserts the key and it stops altogether.
“Jack?” She snaps on the lamp by the door.
A pile of damp and chewed up envelopes is on the floor in front of her. Jack cowers into the curve of the blue sofa, ears flattened. His toys are spread out from the living room to the kitchen, a line that begins with a squeaking newspaper and ends with a purple stuffed elephant wearing a maniacal ear-to-ear smile.
“All these toys, and you decide to play with the mail?” she asks him. His nose dips down an inch. “That’s a good boy.”
Jack shoots forward, flings himself at Katie, who is already kneeling down and ready for him. She hugs him up into her arms, deposits kisses into the thick white fur around his neck. Jack waits impatiently for his turn to love her, body squirming; he gives a soft yelp of pain, and Katie unlocks her hold, accepts his frantic kisses.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “and I’m sorry I forgot to leave a light on, too.” Jack twists inside her arms, tongue dancing out. Katie stares at him, at the happiness in his black eyes as he wiggles, determined to get his face even closer to hers.
“Dumb dog,” she says, swallowing hard. She carries him into the kitchen, pursing her lips against more sloppy kisses.
By the refrigerator, Jack’s food and water bowls are turned over, a small puddle of cakey dog kibble between them. Katie pats him, puts him down. He stands next to her, body touching up against her leg, suddenly solemn. They’re both eyeing the clump silently when the phone rings.
“Hi, you’ve reached the Burrellis’ residence, please leave a message for Nick or Katie at the beep.”
“Hey—hey, girl, it’s me,” Sandy says in an unnaturally bright voice. “I forgot to tell you, Jack just loves to munch on mail, so you might want to leave a box or something under the slot. Okay, call me if you want to talk tonight. Thinking about you,” she singsongs before hanging up.
Jack looks up at Katie, and she shrugs at him. “It’s the thought,” she says. “C’mon, let’s go pee.”
Back inside, she pours Jack a fresh bowl of food, checks the blinking answering machine—a good sign tonight, only four messages besides Sandy’s. Richard asking in a concerned voice if she’s okay, and her father yelling into the phone about the dangers of salt and car rust. The third rambling message is from Dana—she can’t meet Katie tomorrow, she’s so sorry, because she knows they’ll show the photographs in court and how hard that will be, but Michael needs an emergency root canal, it’s so unexpected, he can’t drive, and has Katie considered letting someone else be there for her?
The last call is from Arthur and Sarah Cohen’s son, Ben, who says in that leisurely way of his that he is just checking in with her, everything is fine with him, he is just wondering how Katie is doing today.
“There is no rush to get back to me. You call me if and when you have the time, dear,” he says in his slow, ultracasual voice. “If and when, dear, if and when.”
She hits the delete button before the beep—there’s no way she’s ready to do battle with guilty feelings tonight, and besides, she has every intention of bringing some order to all those canisters of film, of continuing the process of screening his parents’ footage and making sense of it all. She still has to finish sketching the storyboards, to figure out if she will use the clips of the concentration camps she purchased from the National Archives, and if and how she will introduce the Library of Congress photographs—how all of it will eventually come together to tell the story that needs to be told. Ben will have to wait a little longer to hear from her, something he is certainly used to by now. Still, Katie does feel a small pang—Arthur and Sarah’s son is already in his sixties and not the healthiest man since his wife died two years ago. It is all this takeout food that Margaret did not allow, he told her the last time he called, around the end of September. I am a horrible cook, dear, and I’m afraid I have discovered the pleasures of the Burger King.
The last time Katie shot footage of Arthur and Sarah, over a year ago, she
met their son Ben for the first time. Since then Katie and Ben have talked on the phone every couple of months—long, meandering conversations that she always dreads, because she’s waiting each time for Ben to ask her how the documentary is coming along; he has never asked, not once, and the unspoken question stays between them until Katie comes up with a reason to hang up first. Ben never says a word about this, either. He is nothing like his outspoken father, and Katie still remembers how surprised she was when she met him—his tall, slight frame and the hesitant way he ducked around her and the equipment; even when he moved forward, Ben somehow gave the impression of retreating. Though he did surprise her later, when she tried to explain to his parents why it was so important that they change back into the clothes they had worn for the previous interviews.
“So it doesn’t distract the viewers,” Katie told them, eyeing Arthur’s silk tie and suit jacket. Sarah was all elbows, reaching back to hook her pearl necklace.
“We are talking about life and death here, and people are worried about the color of my pants? And my shirt?” Arthur said, eyes darting between Katie and Ben. “This makes sense to anyone?”
Katie looked to Ben for help, but he was already turning away to hide the mischievous, delighted smile on his face; he looked so much like Sarah at that moment, the younger Sarah whom Katie always pictured on the screen inside her head as the Cohens told their stories, that Katie turned to her for help. But Sarah was looking around her living room like she suddenly didn’t understand what they were all doing there, surrounded by the bright lights. And then Arthur had burst out with a long bout of coughing, and finally, with a strained look on her face, Sarah revived and moved into action, passing Arthur a handkerchief. Arthur nodded his thanks, swiped it across his lips.
Three days later and they were gone, and Ben was calling her for the first time to tell her the news, to thank her for her interest in his parents, for her kindness. Your film is their gift, he said, and then there was a long sweep of silence.
The beanbag chair on Nick’s side of the basement has a fine layer of dust on top of it. Katie kicks at it, picks it up and shakes it out, which turns out to be a mistake: Jack is beside her in an instant, teeth sunken into the red plastic. Katie drags the chair across the room with one hand, Jack attached to the other end.
“Quit it, Jack.”
He snaps his head back and forth, tries to wrestle it away from her.
“Here, I was going to wait on this,” she says, pulling a rawhide out of her pocket. Jack releases the chair, nose up and sniffing. He trots over to her, and she kicks the beanbag chair the last few feet, in front of the pull-down screen.
“Okay, let’s see what we have here,” she says, settling into the chair. She picks up her sketch pad and rests it against her knees. Jack saunters over and plops down on her feet with his rawhide.
Arthur’s voice fills the basement before the film catches up. “When I first saw her there, in the general’s kitchen,” he says, and then there they are, on their brown couch, looking at each other, “my heart, it lifted right up inside my chest.”
Arthur beams at his wife, and she bumps her shoulder into his, a surprisingly youthful gesture Katie had forgotten.
“It was the first time in over a month,” Sarah says, “and all that time I did not get word that he was alive. All I knew was that he was not digging the ditches like before.”
“But I was very much alive, no?” Arthur asks in his teasing voice, and Sarah smiles again at him. “God was keeping his eye on both of us, I am sure,” he tells his wife.
Are you sure God was watching? Katie asks him. That He could even see you?
He turns to Katie. “Yes, of course. Always,” he says with confidence, and Sarah nods along.
But it must have been so difficult to believe with everything around you.
Arthur taps his knee thoughtfully. “Is this not the nature of faith? Not just this believing in what you cannot see, but even more difficult, as you say, to see everything in the world with your eyes, and then trust what is in your heart instead?”
Yes, I guess so. And . . . and how long did the two of you work in the same house? she asks both of them. At the general’s house?
Arthur turns to Sarah, and she does that thing wives do with their husbands—she says to Arthur, Go ahead, you tell her just with her eyes.
“Almost until the end—” he says, then interrupts himself to cough into his handkerchief. Sarah peers at him, but he waves her off. He tucks the handkerchief back into his front pocket. “You see, Sarah’s father taught her how to bake, and I,” he says, puffing out his bony chest, “I could do anything.”
Sarah shakes her head at him. “Arthur.”
“What, I’m lying?”
Sarah turns to the camera. “The woman who supervised us, the kitchen workers, Adele, she told me that the general liked Arthur. His sense of humor.”
Arthur feigns indignation at his wife. “So now it is only humor that keeps a young man alive?” He looks into the camera, taps his head with an arthritic finger. “Ingenuity. I was quick in the brain, a smart man who knew how to keep things running in any situation.”
Sarah pulls the tapping hand into both of hers. “Funny and smart. Now, tell me, how can you ask for something more?”
“You see?” Arthur says, all cocky self-assurance.
Katie asks them about the nature of their contact, how often they came together in the general’s house.
“Do you mean face-to-face?” Sarah asks.
Yes.
“Oh, only once or twice in those first few months,” she answers. “And we did not dare speak to each other. But we found ways.”
How?
Sarah shifts forward as if she will tell a secret on Arthur, and Katie thinks of their son in a flash, because there on Sarah’s face is the same mischievous smile she remembered seeing on Ben’s face when Arthur complained about the change of clothes. Now it’s Arthur’s turn to watch Sarah closely.
“It was winter, and Arthur arrived at the house every morning before me,” Sarah says, “to light the fires. I would come later, through the same door at the back of the kitchen. Every morning, drawn in the dirt beside the steps, would be my message from him.”
Arthur is nodding, face intent on Sarah.
Wasn’t that dangerous?
“Not the kind of message you think,” Sarah says, and then she stops, looks at Arthur. “Once, I think . . . I think it was . . . no. Wait.” Her eyes drift to the left of the camera, and she pulls herself forward, to the edge of the sofa, her fingers working over the pearls. Her wrinkled face twitches with confusion.
Arthur coaxes her to sit back, and she relents, sagging against him briefly.
“I was not foolish,” Arthur says. “I made sure only my Sarah would understand. Maybe a sun scratched into the dirt, small, so no one would notice,” he says. “And if they did, what harm?”
“Yes,” Sarah says, reviving, her hands clapping together once. “Yes, I remember that. Arthur’s way to ask how I slept. And I would leave at night and draw a small curve into the dirt, a smile to say, ‘Yes, yes, Arthur, I am warm enough at night and I can sleep.’”
Arthur beams and nods along, then pulls his handkerchief out of his pocket. He holds it over his mouth, clears his throat.
“The next morning,” Arthur says, “I started my day with her answer. And then, fast so no one could see, I would ask her something else. An oval for bread, maybe: ‘Do you have enough to eat, Sarah?’”
But how could you both understand things like that? Ovals and smiles? Katie listens to her bewildered voice coming from the sound box and feels it again, the frustration welling.
“You learn because you must, yes?” Arthur asks. “An understanding grows quickly.”
Sarah is nodding. “Yes, but you start with what is important, what you already know about each other,” she says. “What you have learned before war, before hunger and all this craziness.”
Katie’s voic
e is insistent: But it must have been hard on both of you anyway, the coded messages and the few seconds here and there, without any physical contact?
Arthur turns from Sarah to the camera, bushy eyebrows knit together. “You need to touch someone to know how they feel? How you feel?” He swipes the air with a spotted hand. “It is only one of many ways to show how much you love,” he says with finality. “Only one.”
4
The celebration took place in a banquet room at Cappelli’s restaurant, a crowded space filled with huge, too-green artificial plants, plastic brick walls, and loud Italian music that violined out over their heads. Katie sat at the small horseshoe-shaped bar alone, staring into the gilt-framed mirror right above the bottles of liquor. In it she watched Nick winding around the white-clothed tables, a beer in one hand, a slight, private smile on his face. This party was for him, a time to celebrate his winning the contract at the Warwick Center, but as Katie tracked his movements, she sensed the restless contradictions inside him. It was something about his smile—introspective but also a little arrogant—coupled with the way he carried himself around the room: an uncertain, speculative stride, trailing his fingers over chair tops, tables, and at one point the rim of an ashtray. As if there were answers about himself, this new success that had nothing to do with commonplace lisps or stutters, to be gleaned from the Braille sweep of his fingertips. From time to time, a group of Katie’s relatives tried to catch Nick’s eye, to offer their congratulations once again, but Nick kept on his thoughtful path, the smile intensifying, his hand moving cautiously over surfaces. From somewhere in the room, then, possibly a clue; Candice’s laughter reached Katie’s ears despite the loud music and rumble of conversations around her. Nick’s smile deepened, his walk slowed, the tips of his fingers lingering on a gleaming metal lid at the corner of the banquet table.
Lies of the Heart Page 16
