“I don’t want you to kiss my ass. I simply want respect—”
Ben grunted. It silenced me. The sound he made was arresting: the noise came from a savage animal inside him. He grumbled and roared and shook his head violently from side to side. He appeared to be having a fit. If I didn’t know it was anger, I might have mistaken it for epilepsy.
He’s really crazy, I thought.
“Shut the fuck up.” He hummed the words through his garrulous growl.
“Okay!” I raised my hand, a traffic cop. “Forget it! Okay! Forget I said it!”
Ben grunted once more, took a deep breath, and mumbled. “I won’t be talked to that way anymore. Understand? Not only do I not want you to approve of me, if I accidentally do something to make you approve of me, I’ll stop doing it. It’s great knowing everyone hates you. I’ve been scared of it my whole life. But I was wrong.” Ben stared at me, almost pleaded this point: “Your hatred makes me strong.”
This left a silence to live through. A ghastly moment of eye contact while he waited for a response. Ben seemed bigger. His nervous face relaxed. He lifted a long finger to his small, bright red lips, and parted them slightly with his nail. He almost sucked on the tip. He was at peace with himself, the calmest I had ever seen him.
My knees buckled. I put out a hand and leaned on the back of the wing chair he had kicked toward me. “I h-have to go,” I stammered.
“I think that’s the best thing for you,” Ben said. He glanced toward the hallway. “She’ll be okay. Kids are strong, you know.”
I tried to move. Let go of the chair. Walk out. I lifted my hand a little, but the world began to spin, a carousel starting up, and I grabbed hold of the brake to stop it. “I’ll pick her up for school tomorrow.”
“No. I want to take her. I want to see their faces. I can’t hide forever. Besides, there haven’t been any TV cameras, right?”
I shook my head.
“Guess the school’s got influence. Amazing. Everything’s like that—not what you know, but who.” He wasn’t talking to me. This was a phrase from some constant internal monologue. When he caught my eye, he dismissed me: “Go home. I’ve been entertaining the kid all weekend. I want to be alone to relax.”
I was sure if I gave up my crutch I would collapse. I really believed I was paralyzed. “Why don’t you go out? Take a walk—”
“No—”
“I’ll sit for Naomi. You could see a movie.”
“No. I don’t want to go out.” He smiled slowly, insidiously. “There’s stuff I want to do here.” He paused to grin. “By myself.”
He’s going to dress up. While she sleeps he’ll live his private love affair, his obsession, his only pleasure.
My queasy legs sobered up, heavy with despair, but now able to support me. I walked away from the chair and moved quickly toward the door.
“You can stay,” he said softly to my back.
“Good night,” I answered breezily, as if I hadn’t heard.
ON EACH INVITATION I HAD WRITTEN RSVP MOLLY Gray, followed by my home and office numbers. The calls came in at work, during lunch hour, hoping to avoid me. On the days I didn’t eat, when my secretary offered to put me on, the mothers declined and then also declined attending the party. The typical excuse was that they would be out of town that weekend, or had a family obligation.
There were four exceptions: Naomi’s closest friends. I spoke to only one mother directly, Janet, the flouncy blonde with a constant look of worry, mother of self-assured Holly. She surprised me with her boldness. I suspected she had volunteered to talk to me on behalf of the other mothers who had accepted.
“Is the whole party going to be at the rink?”
“Yes,” I said. I knew what she was getting at. After all, every offer of a play date at Naomi’s home had been rejected in the past month. “We’ll have cake there. No lunch.”
“So you’re being the host. That’s really nice of you.”
“Thank you for letting Holly come.”
“She wouldn’t miss it for anything. She loves Naomi. You know, if you want to bring Naomi over some weekend, or have me pick her up after school, she could have dinner with us, and you could come by for her later.”
I had to tell her what could happen; Ben now wanted to confront them. “Her father might want to be the one who picks her up.”
Janet paused. “I see.” Another pause. “Is he going to be bringing her and picking her up from school from now on? I thought maybe you were out of town or—”
“No. He wants to do it.”
“It’s not fair to her. Everyone shuns—” She sighed. “You know, because of him.”
“Well they shouldn’t,” I said harshly. “What are they scared of? It’s a little girl’s feelings they’re hurting. They’re not doing anything to him.”
“Well,” she stammered nervously. “What can—I don’t…how can we act as though he’s okay, as though we condone—”
“All Naomi gets out of it is that people don’t like her anymore.”
“Oh no!” Janet was wounded and surprised. How could she be surprised? “That’s terrible! Nobody wants that. Can’t you convince him it’s bad for her? Doesn’t he have any feeling for her?”
With everyone, conversation became an endless looping tape. The finish of one only started it again, around and around, worse than a world falling apart, more like a world with nothing but a center, no pleasant side streets, no meandering diversions.
Nothing I did came out right. Stefan was out of my hair, yet I spent less time over at Ben and Naomi’s. I made them dinner, I kissed her good night, and I left quickly. I was a coward again: scared of him.
After a week of this minimal contact, I coaxed Ben into permitting Naomi to spend a Sunday alone with me. He said he needed the day off from child care, anyway. I wanted to treat her to some fun. The rejections to her birthday party invitations (she kept careful track of them) had hurt her as much as any of the terrible events. After all, it contained all of them, a concentrated dose of everything that was changed and lost.
Things began badly. “What do you want to do?” I asked her.
“I don’t care,” she mumbled. But to each suggestion she said no.
“Let’s take a walk,” I said. Naomi shrugged listlessly. I decided to change my tactics: go shopping, behave as though I were her mother involved with our normal routine and she were merely tagging along.
Removing her happiness as the focus relaxed her. She asked if I would let her help find items on my list in the supermarket. En route, we had a long discussion on the virtues of buying family-size items; we discussed why New York supermarkets don’t carry them, but they do in New Jersey.
“It’s not like the families in New Jersey are bigger, right?” she argued. “I don’t suppose they eat more.”
I told her that by law every New Jersey family had to consist of at least twelve people. She found this very funny, doubling over on the street. She covered her open mouth with her hand and hissed through the fingers.
With her help, we checked off the list rapidly. She skipped off to other aisles and rushed back with each item, eyes intent, manner eager. “Got it,” she said. “What’s next?”
We took the groceries back to her apartment. Ben was still out. I decided we should reorganize the kitchen cabinets. Wendy had been a good housekeeper, but a bit haphazard. I didn’t say that to Naomi, of course. She was fascinated at the notion of arranging things by kind so that they would be easier to locate. “I could do that in my room,” she said. Out loud she detailed a plan. “I might need more shelves,” she commented. Her voice was full of energy.
Wendy often spoke of how proud she felt when Naomi copied her in something. Obviously, I had never known that simple pleasure. I hope I gave it to my mother. Probably I did. I don’t remember, though.
I convinced Naomi to wait on redoing her room. We went to the movies. The film was more grown-up than I had expected. When she got bored I asked if she wanted
to leave. “Can we?” She was surprised.
“Sure,” I told her, baffled why that would be amazing.
We went for ice cream. We strolled through Washington Square Park, diminishing our cones, careful not to lose a single drop of pleasure. We were almost done when Naomi said casually, “I wish you were still picking me up from school.”
“Me too.”
“You want to pick me up?”
“Uh-huh. But your father said he wanted to do it for a while.”
“Oh.” She was down to the final point of cone, only a tiny well of ice cream. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell your father you want—” I stopped myself. That was an extraordinarily bad idea. He might throw a fit at her. He might cut me off again, claiming (correctly) that I was trying to wedge myself between them.
“I’ll ask him,” she said firmly.
“No. I’ll ask him. Don’t you. It’s not right.”
“You know what you should tell Daddy? You should tell him you don’t need to stay at work so late. He thinks you have to stay at work until six.”
“Oh, no, if I take you to school then I get in earlier, so I can leave earlier.”
“He doesn’t know,” she assured me. She was laboring hard to make everything right. Removing blame from him. From me. And her friends?
“I’m glad you asked me. But why do you prefer that I pick you up?”
“Nothing. I just like it better.” She swallowed the last bit of pleasure and skipped ahead. “I want to swing,” she called back, running toward the playground.
She would try to remake the world so that no one was at fault. Where would she store all that blame? On whom would she be willing to put it?
Ben answered the door with a smile. “Good timing. Guess who’s on the phone? It’s Holly,” he said, almost as if he had won a private bet.
Naomi broke from me and raced to the phone.
“I want to go back to taking Naomi to school,” I whispered.
“No. I feel better—I have a right to take her,” he insisted, wagging his long finger with pompous self-righteousness, and not bothering to keep his voice low.
“She asked me.”
“She’s flattering you. That’s something Wendy taught her. It’s why she’s so fucking popular—she lets everybody walk over her so they’ll like her. She’s terrified of not being loved.”
So he had bronzed his new philosophy, his rewrite of our culture. Like every prophet, he would make his disciple a victim of his narcissistic martyrdom: Naomi was to be stripped of her friends; she was to be taught that to be alone is to be independent.
Naomi returned, saying, “Holly’s coming to my party!” She grabbed her father’s thick right hand and dragged him. “Come see what we did in the kitchen!” She towed him off.
Dismayed by my failure I opened the front door, prepared to slink off. “Hey!” Ben came out to find me. “Hey, that’s great what you—what you and Naomi did. It was always such a mess.”
“Yeah,” Naomi spoke carelessly. “Mommy just shoved stuff in there.”
It was obscene to me: Naomi criticizing her dead mother. “Don’t say that,” I ordered her.
She was shamed by my criticism. Her hand rose to cover her mouth. Ben spoke. “Perfectly true. Wendy never knew where anything was.”
“That’s not true,” I said, and it wasn’t. Wendy’s desk at work, the few times I had visited her, was always clear. People who had dealings with her often spoke of how prompt she was. She always got Naomi to school on time, cared for her meticulously, and yet held down a demanding administrative job. From my experience of recent weeks, I knew how much time that took. Only childless, cold, compulsive women like me have the spare hour or surplus energy to put their groceries away by food group.
“Okay,” Ben said, but there was no real agreement in his tone. “Listen, before you go, I wanted to ask you—I thought Naomi and I should get away from the city for Christmas. Wish we could go somewhere warm—”
“Why can’t we?” Naomi interrupted.
Ben put his arm around her head and nudged: “Remember?”
Her face, already serious from my rebuke, clouded. Most of the time she doesn’t think of Ben’s fate, I realized. She forgets her situation. I felt my eyes swell. Again, I turned to go, to hide my sadness for her.
“Molly.” Ben caught me with his voice.
“Yes…?”
“I was thinking of going to the Catskills. Maybe Nommy could learn how to ski.”
“Don’t want to,” she muttered.
“Probably too late to make reservations,” I said.
“I thought I’d give it a shot. What I want to know is, should I get two rooms and you’ll come with us?”
“Great!” Naomi cheered.
I stared my fury at him. Naomi grabbed my left arm and jumped happily. “Say yes!” she chanted. “Say yes!” Her shame and sadness were erased, like her Etch A Sketch toy: one shake and your drawing is gone. The bright blue eyes beamed at me: her hair fell under my hand, soft and innocent.
“It’ll be okay,” Ben soothed me. “I’ll behave,” he mumbled.
I nodded my compliance. Naomi spun around in celebration. I continued to burn my anger at him, but he behaved as if he had done nothing, won nothing. He scratched his forehead. “I’ll try the Nevele,” he said. “You don’t know anybody who’s got influence there?”
“I don’t even know what it is.”
“Really? I thought you knew everything.” He smirked as if that had been truly witty of him. “It’s a resort.”
“I can’t help you get in. If that’s why—”
“Come on! Cut it out! That’s not why.” He offered his hand. “Thanks for saying yes.”
Naomi was back to leaning against me, peering up with love. “I can show you how I swim across the whole pool by myself.”
I rejected Ben’s hand. “That’s great, honey,” I told Naomi, and kissed the end of her long nose. “I had fun. Thank you for keeping me company today.”
She hugged me hard for an answer. I squeezed back. My congested heart cleared when pressed against her. I glanced up at Ben, to shoot him another look of disdain while Naomi couldn’t see.
Ben was teary. He had taken off his glasses and he wiped away at both eyes. He wasn’t faking. “Thanks, Molly,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” came out of me, quite naturally and quite fast, before I could think better of it.
THE LIEUTENANT CALLED THE APARTMENT, VERY LATE a few days later, only hours after I learned from Ben that he had booked us into the Nevele, a Catskills’ resort, for Christmas. I didn’t recognize the detective’s sluggish voice. He had to introduce himself. I was wary of him. “How can I help you?” I asked in an uncooperative tone.
“Just wondering how things are going with the little girl. You still helping out with her?”
“She’s fine.”
“You notice anything could be useful for the case?”
“Mmmmm,” I mumbled, wanting to be noncommittal. “How is the case going?”
“Well, we’re done, really. It’s solid, I guess. But you can never have too much of a good thing. You still want to see him convicted, right?”
I wondered if somehow the lieutenant knew I was going away with them. Perhaps Ben’s phone was tapped. “My concern is Naomi. That’s all. There are plenty of people concentrating on everything else.”
“I understand. I’m with you. There’s nothing can be done to change your friend’s murder. Just punishment. But the little girl—there’s something to preserve and protect. Anyways, I was just making sure you’re okay. Remember, I’m here if you do nose into anything.”
I roused myself to put feeling in this: “Thanks, Lieutenant.”
“Okay, then—oh, and I’m sorry nothing could be done about him getting the, you know…disposing of the body.”
“What are you talking about!” I had understood from Stoppard that Wendy would be kept in the coroner’
s office until all the medical evidence was gathered. He had promised that he would keep me informed of any change.
“Didn’t Mr. Stoppard tell you? Fliess got a court order for the release of her body. He cremated it last Sunday.”
While I spent the day with Naomi, Ben had sneaked off and had Wendy disintegrated. Destroyed the evidence. Not of how she died, of the fact that she had lived.
I hung up on the lieutenant without a good-bye. He was still talking. The phone rang moments later, but I was too crazy and hopeless to answer. I pulled the bed apart, ripping the sheets in my hands—tearing the fabric helped. The mattress wobbled underneath me, a rocky sea, until it slid off the box spring and dropped me onto the floor. Eventually I exhausted my frustration, sprawled there, crying, I guess. I don’t really remember.
I had wanted to bury her beside her parents. I know a corpse isn’t the person, but Wendy’s life ended without warning, without reality: we were interrupted in the middle of a great lifelong heart-to-heart talk and part of me kept expecting to resume our conversation. I needed to see the vacated life—the empty shell—to know in a primitive way that she was lost forever.
At the office I confronted Stoppard and demanded to know why he hadn’t informed me. He covered his embarrassment with impatience. Told me he couldn’t stop Ben from getting the body and he didn’t wish to upset me about something that was beyond my control. I pointed out that this way of finding out hadn’t exactly kept me calm.
“I don’t know why the fuck”—he named the lieutenant—“is calling you.” That Stoppard used an obscenity was atypical.
“He’s being a smart-ass cop. I don’t like what’s going on. I think it’s inappropriate for him to be giving you information—”
“He didn’t tell me anything that was confidential.”
“All of this can be made to sound very bad. You know, it doesn’t take much to make it seem like you’re deeply involved in some extralegal way. I’m calling him.” He stormed off.
The Murderer Next Door Page 21
