Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

  Phelps said, ‘My wife is—’

  ‘I am not,’ she said. ‘I know what I’ve seen, and this man has seen it too.’

  ‘My wife is troubled,’ Phelps said.

  She moved close. ‘You’ve seen it.’

  ‘Cecilia, go upstairs.’ For the first time, Edward Phelps sounded angry.

  His wife only gazed at me gently and touched my wrist with her disfigured hand.

  I yanked away and swung the gun barrel from her to her husband to Lisman. ‘You’re all insane,’ I said.

  She smiled from one side of her mouth. ‘Don’t believe that. Edward will—’

  Her husband said to Lisman, ‘Take his gun.’

  I pulled the trigger and shot a slug into the ceiling. Cecilia Phelps said, ‘Don’t do that!’ Her husband and Lisman froze.

  I chambered another bullet. ‘What happened to Sheneel and Alex Greene?’

  ‘Is that all?’ the scarred woman said. ‘Tell him, Edward.’ Her husband said nothing, so she continued, ‘It’s the salt. Edward says it depends on moisture. If it’s dry-salted, it will last for a hundred years. If it’s wet, it will eat away in two or three months.’

  Edward Phelps stepped toward her and hit her in the face. She stumbled back and balanced herself on the arm of the couch. She stared with rage at her husband, Lisman, me. A vein-like blue line showed through the surface of her glassy skin as if something inside had broken.

  Then she laughed.

  Her laughter was more terrible than tears or howls. She touched her cheek as if afraid that her fingers would penetrate the fire-scarred skin. She said to me, ‘Use just enough fire and you’ll preserve a body for hundreds of years. Like sand turned into glass. It will never grow old.’

  Her husband said to Lisman, ‘Get her out of here.’

  Lisman extended a gentle hand. ‘Come on, Mrs Phelps. I’ll take you upstairs.’

  She reached for him, as if he were offering to pull her from a deep liquid pool, and she went with him.

  For nearly a minute, Phelps and I listened as Lisman coaxed her through the house and upstairs. Then Phelps drank the last of his cocktail, and I said, ‘Tell me about Little Marsh Island.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘Why would I be?’

  ‘Would you put that damn gun down?’

  I held it level.

  He looked from my eyes to the gun and back. ‘We’re building a facility there, that’s all. In Cecilia’s diseased mind, the place has assumed greater significance since Sheneel’s death.’

  ‘It’s just a coincidence that her body was on land that you were looking to develop?’

  ‘I didn’t call it a coincidence. Sheneel was part of our family. When she killed herself, she chose a place that was meaningful to us.’

  ‘I’m tired of people saying she killed herself.’

  ‘I’m tired of people implying it was more.’

  ‘So, why Little Marsh Island? Of all the places your family owns and controls, why there?’

  ‘Why not?’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a pretty spot to die.’

  ‘And she knew you were going to buy it?’

  ‘A friend owned the land before us, and my family has used it for years. My grandfather shared a hunting lodge there. After that fell down, we still hunted for deer and wild pigs.’

  I wanted to pull the trigger. ‘What was your wife saying about salt?’

  His laugh was bitter. ‘She says a great deal that escapes my understanding.’

  ‘That’s why you hit her?’

  He quieted. ‘I hit her because thirty years have passed since her accident, and there are times when only violence can cut through her delusion.’

  ‘It seems to be your preferred response.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s a last choice, but I don’t hesitate to make it when necessary.’

  ‘That’s why you had Lisman bring me here – so you could make a last choice?’

  He shook his head. ‘I had him bring you here so that you could make the choice for me. Now you’ve made it, and we’ll deal with the consequences.’

  I hugged the stock of the .22 to my ribs and leveled the barrel on his chest. ‘You seem to think you’re the only one who can use violence.’

  Again he shook his head. ‘I know that’s not the case. You reminded my son of it this morning.’ He walked across the room and picked up a telephone from a table between two leather easy chairs. ‘I also know, though, that you missed. I’ve seen your training and service records. I know the kind of marksmanship you’re capable of. With your abilities, it’s a shame that the Navy put you into a non-combat job. You certainly had the physical skills for action. Your officers must have suspected character weakness. To commit deadly violence against another man requires a certain integrity of commitment.’ He looked at the phone and touched three buttons – the one high and two lower notes of nine-one-one.

  I tightened my finger on the trigger. I needed to shoot him.

  ‘You missed Stephen by only an inch. But how far away were you standing? You surely—’ He interrupted himself when the police dispatcher answered. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there’s a man outside our house with a gun.’ He listened to the dispatcher’s response, added a few Yes ma’ams and No ma’ams, listened again, and said, ‘He looks like someone who has been bothering our family. His name is Johnny Bellefleur.’

  I could shoot him and end his telephone call mid-sentence. I could be done with him.

  He took the phone from his ear and pressed the mouthpiece against his shirt. He said, ‘You can leave if you want or you can wait for the police.’

  I needed to pull the trigger.

  He turned his back to me, listened to the phone, and said, ‘Yes, ma’am. He’s trying to get inside.’

  Still aiming the gun at him, I picked up the two bullet shells that the .22 had expelled. The slugs would stay until the police pried them out with a chisel and tweezers.

  ‘Please hurry,’ Phelps said to the dispatcher.

  A quarter-ounce more pressure and the trigger would snap and the hammer would fall.

  I lowered the gun. ‘I’ll be back,’ I said.

  Phelps pressed the telephone against his shirt. ‘I’m sure you will.’

  I ran through the rooms and into the front hall, then out into the night. My car stood where I’d left it. The moon hung in the hazy sky. The warm air smelled of jasmine and roses. A woman, barefoot and robed in white, stepped across the dark lawn toward me, her footfalls delicate and slow as if she feared crushing the grass. Cecilia Phelps. She looked up at the moon or maybe at the second floor of the house where lights shined from the bedroom windows. She seemed not to see me at all as I ran to my car. But as I opened the driver’s door, she said, ‘You should have children.’

  I stopped. ‘What?’

  ‘You and your wife,’ she said. ‘Children. Even if they turn out to be little bastards. They’ll complete you.’

  A loud crack sounded from one of the upstairs windows. I felt the sound as a physical jolt, and I looked at the house. A man sat at the window directly over the room closest to my car. He held a rifle, as small as the .22 that I carried – a squirrel-hunting rifle, a gun to teach a child to shoot.

  A pain started in my side, above my left hip.

  I paid no attention to it. I focused on the man. He was big, but his features, backlit from the room behind him, were unclear. I thought he must be Lisman.

  The pain spread and I felt a damp heat in my belly.

  No, the man wasn’t Lisman. But I recognized him. ‘Daniel?’ I said.

  The man held still and said nothing.

  ‘Daniel?’ I said again.

  My legs weakened under my body, and, as my mind made its slow computations and the pain webbed outward from my belly, I realized that I had been shot. The realization sucked air and energy from my lungs and took me down to the black driveway. Cecilia Phelps stood near me, dres
sed in her white bathrobe. She reached to me as if she would help me to my feet. I reached for her too. But she turned away and walked into the big house.

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Lillian

  They didn’t let me see Johnny in the hospital, but I visited him when they released him to jail. They’d charged him with criminal trespass, malicious destruction of property, and unlawful discharge of a firearm, though the State Attorney’s office decided against attempted murder. Everyone seemed to agree: as a vet, Johnny needed help if he could get it, not long-term incarceration. They said he drove to Edward Phelps’s house and yelled insane threats. They said he shot three bullets into the outside wall of the house before Phelps leaned from his wife’s bedroom window and sank a single shot into the left side of his belly. Phelps owned big guns – for hunting, pleasure shooting, and self-defense – and the police were praising him for his restraint in using a small-caliber rifle.

  The doctors at the hospital said that, for a luckless man, Johnny got lucky. The bullet entered his abdomen above his left hip but missed his pancreas and threaded past his intestines. It passed above the hipbone and below the bottom rib. It tore through muscle and ligament. Except for the risk of infection, the doctors could have released him after twenty-four hours. They kept him for seventy-two, an IV dripping antibiotics into his wrist, a shackle locking his ankle to the bed frame, a full-time police guard standing at his door. Then they dressed him in orange coveralls, the jailhouse equivalent of a hospital gown, and transported him in a locked van to the county jail.

  Johnny’s lawyer, with some help from a letter signed by a hospital psychologist, convinced the police to allow Johnny and me to meet in a private conference room, though Johnny’s lawyer warned me to say nothing that Johnny wouldn’t want heard in court because the police might record our conversations. The room had a long wooden table surrounded by ten chairs, four bare walls, no windows, and fluorescent lighting embedded behind clear-plastic ceiling panels. When a uniformed woman let me in, Johnny sat with his hands cuffed, his fingers folded on top of the table as if he might pray.

  ‘No touching,’ the woman said, and closed the door on us.

  Johnny hadn’t shaved since getting shot, and his eyes looked strangely brilliant.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

  He tipped his head, noncommittal.

  ‘Much pain?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Are they giving you your meds?’

  Another noncommittal nod.

  ‘You’ve got to take them.’

  ‘I’m done with all that,’ he said.

  ‘Johnny—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and his eyes moistened.

  I stared at him and felt something breaking in me. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said.

  He leaned across the table and whispered, ‘Daniel shot me.’

  ‘Shh,’ I said. I looked around the room for a microphone. I spotted none, but that meant little.

  ‘I saw him. He shot me from the window.’ His eyes were brilliant, frantic.

  Screw the lawyer. ‘No. Edward Phelps did.’

  ‘Phelps was downstairs. I talked to him and his wife in their media room.’

  ‘You were outside. You shot at the house.’

  Tears filled his eyes.

  I said, ‘I talked to Daniel only an hour or so before you got shot. He was at home. He wasn’t there.’

  ‘He was there.’

  I shook my head. ‘The police found three bullets and three shells outside. Saying that you were inside will make this worse.’

  He leveled his voice. ‘I shot the gun twice inside. Once into a doorframe. Once into the ceiling. Edward Phelps is lying.’

  ‘Why? To make things easier for you?’

  ‘Nothing’s easy for me.’

  I stared at him. ‘I love you, but you—’

  ‘You saw the blood in the sunroom. You saw Percy. You saw the mess.’

  ‘I saw the mess.’

  ‘And the blood.’

  ‘I don’t know whose blood.’

  ‘Peter Lisman’s.’

  ‘I cleaned it up. It’s gone.’

  ‘You saw what Percy did to him. That was skin from his leg. Get it checked out.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘What do you mean, gone?’

  ‘Percy. He ate it.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘He’s a dog. It’s what dogs do.’

  He laughed. It was an unpleasant laugh. He said, ‘You’ve got to believe me.’

  ‘I don’t know what to believe.’

  He stared at me, his eyes moist.

  I said, ‘I’m going to try to get you out of here.’

  He sighed. ‘Good.’

  ‘The lawyer says they’ll set the bail high. I’ll need to put up the house.’

  ‘Do it.’

  ‘You’ll have restrictions. Probably an ankle monitor. You’ll need to agree to take your meds.’

  ‘I’ll tell them whatever they want to hear.’

  I breathed deep. ‘Will you go after the Phelpses?’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Johnny—’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I won’t go after the Phelpses.’

  We sat together awhile, quiet. I wanted to reach across the table and touch his hands, his face, his skin. Would the guard know? I said, ‘With Tom Corfield and me, there’s nothing. Nothing that matters. There never has been.’

  He stared at me.

  I said, ‘You need to believe me.’

  ‘You need me to believe you. We have that problem, don’t we? You believing me, me believing you.’

  Not with a Club the Heart is broken, Nor with a Stone, I thought. I said, ‘Let’s work on it.’

  The judge refused to set bail. Johnny’s lawyer said that, considering the charges, he had no basis for keeping Johnny in jail, and he filed an appeal. A week passed, then two. The lawyer re-filed the appeal. No one would explain the delay.

  Outside, the yellow and white jasmine blossoms turned brown on the vines. The magnolia trees forced enormous white flowers from their branches, and then the flowers turned brown too. How odd the Girl’s life looks – Behind this soft Eclipse. When Tom Corfield asked me to move in with him, I said, No. Not yet, and I wondered why I couldn’t say, Never. As spring pushed into summer, late-afternoon storms broke the heat with sudden dark downpours and brilliant bolts of lightning. I walked Percy in the mornings, read in the backyard in the early afternoons, and visited Johnny when they let me. I slept on his side of the bed at night, though the sensation of closeness that at first came from that had faded.

  One afternoon, when I thought Edward Phelps must be at work, I drove to his house and knocked on the front door. A maid opened and I asked to see Mrs Phelps.

  ‘She’s sleeping,’ the maid said.

  ‘I’ll wait.’

  The maid narrowed her eyes. ‘Sometimes she sleeps through dinner.’

  ‘I’ll still wait.’ Then footsteps approached through the front hallway.

  ‘Who is it, Sharon?’ Cecilia Phelps’s voice.

  The maid tried to close the door. ‘Mr Edward told me—’

  ‘Am I a child?’ Cecilia Phelps asked.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ the maid said.

  Cecilia Phelps opened the door. ‘Oh,’ she said when she saw me. She wore green cotton exercise pants, a matching long-sleeve shirt, and bright white tennis shoes. She had pulled her stringy black hair tight behind her head and knotted it. She had drawn red lipstick on to her burnt, crooked lips. ‘You can’t be here,’ she said. ‘Edward will be upset.’

  ‘Are you a child?’ I asked.

  She seemed to consider the question. ‘Come in.’ As I stepped into the front hall, she said to the maid, ‘Tea, Sharon.’

  ‘I don’t need any,’ I said.

  The maid hesitated.

 
‘Tea,’ Cecilia Phelps said again, and then to me, ‘What can I do for you?’ She spoke with the stiff, formal politeness that you might program into a machine.

  ‘When my husband came here, what happened?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  I heard no irony. ‘What led to the shooting? Who shot him?’

  ‘He came to our house with a gun.’ Her good eye held me calmly, warmly. Her frozen eye was opaque. Sunlight shined through the windows above the front door. A vase of tulips stood on a credenza positioned against one wall in the front hall. Cecilia Phelps looked at me helpfully, expectantly.

  ‘I’m sorry for this,’ I said, and I walked past her into the living room and through the portrait-lined sitting room that Edward Phelps had showed me as he guided me through the house when I first came here. Cecilia Phelps followed me as I stepped into the media room.

  The room looked exactly as I remembered it. The ceiling showed no sign of having been damaged by a gunshot. The doorframe ran flush and intact around the length of the doorway. I looked for evidence of new paint or new wood. Cecilia Phelps watched me looking. The whole room was clean, untouched, unused. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

  She smiled from the side of her mouth. ‘The men in my life exhaust me too.’ She walked back into the sitting room, saying, ‘Come.’

  The maid set a table for tea on the patio facing the backyard pool and the river. The teacups, saucers, and teapot were white with blue abstract designs on them, the starched and pressed cotton napkins white with blue prints of shepherd boys, girls, and lambs. The maid poured tea and set a silver platter of cookies between us.

  Cecilia Phelps nibbled the edge of a cookie on the working side of her mouth and said, ‘I married into this family. I’m not, properly speaking, one of them. From time to time, Edward reminds me of this. He says the difference between a Phelps and everyone else is that, when the fires start, everyone else gets burned.’

  ‘What a nice man.’

  ‘I never cared much for nice men. I suspect you understand the feeling.’

  ‘Johnny is nothing like your husband.’

  ‘Give him time,’ she said. ‘When we first married, Edward treated me as if I were as fragile as spun sugar.’