The Sun Collective

by Charles Baxter

  Because of her injuries, she’d been under observation in the hospital, in the yellow room she shared with someone named Sahlee, a brilliant, cheerful woman who was reading a long book by someone named Oshofsky, occasionally making comments about it. The doctors had told Christina how lucky she’d been: there’d been little damage to her lungs, kidneys, or spleen, though the pain was its own universe for several days after the accident, and she’d been lucky to have lived. In the universe of pain, the white fluffy clouds and the sun were furnished courtesy of the opioids they’d given her, and only after the sun hid behind a cloud did she know that it was time to press the button for the morphine drip or to take another pill. Which she did, days later, now at home, another one of those pills, in her now-empty apartment after Timothy Brettigan left, taking his beautiful voice with him, the living room empty except for her, sitting in the sofa, watching the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the game shows.

  Well, that was luck. Another stroke of luck was that, for reasons that were still unclear to her, they hadn’t found the Blue Telephone in her bloodstream, maybe because it had been designed by the albino genius in Memphis not to be detected in the standard blood tests. The drug consisted of stealth compounds and molecules never seen before by laboratory science. And they had determined, they told her in the hospital, that accidents will happen, though there would be some residual questioning, particularly by Detective Dennis O’Connor of the Placid Grove Police Department, who had not been there at the accident scene but wanted to talk to her soon or now, just to make absolutely sure that something, somewhere, was not fishy.

  And it seemed they were asking all these questions because, well, another problem: no skid marks.

  She hadn’t met Detective Dennis O’Connor except over the phone, but on the fourth day after she found herself back in the apartment, he rang her bell at ten in the morning, and she let him into the building after he announced himself on the front door intercom. She heard him dragging himself up the stairs: a large, heavy man. After he knocked, she unlocked the bolt, and there he was: overcoat, sport coat, trousers with snow at the cuffs, necktie with food stain, hat. Also, he was African-American.

  “Miss Lobdell?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Detective Dennis O’Connor. May I come in? I just have a couple of questions to ask you.”

  “Yes, sure, of course.”

  He lumbered into her living room, quickly took in its contents—sofa, semiwilted peace lily in a clay flowerpot, newspaper scattered on the floor, TV set, IKEA chair to the side of the coffee table with its green, chipped ashtray still littered with Ludlow’s chewing gum and cigarette butts, and audio equipment in the corner—and asked, “May I sit down?” She noticed that he overenunciated his vowels and consonants, as if he’d gone through life chronically misunderstood. In all this time, he hadn’t taken off the overcoat, a sign that he didn’t plan to stay long.

  “Please.”

  He lowered himself with a huff-and-puff exhalation and shook his head. His thinning hair was turning gray. “Those stairs,” he said. “Don’t they tire you out?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “How’re you feeling? After the accident, I mean?” He pronounced both c’s in accident: “ac-ci-dent,” with a heavy stress on the first syllable. Maybe he had come to law enforcement after teaching elementary school.

  “Oh, I’m a lot better,” she told him. “My ribs don’t hurt so much. I’m recovering. And they gave me some painkillers.” She noticed that she wasn’t thinking very clearly thanks to the drugs and hoped that she wouldn’t say what she didn’t mean, or, for that matter, say what she did mean.

  “That’s good. Pain isn’t much good for anything, is it?” He laughed quickly, “Ha, ha,” humorlessly and without conviction. Eleanor sounded like that when she laughed. He raised his left hand to scratch his ear. His pad and ballpoint pen were in his right hand. “Well, I won’t be here long. I just have a few necessary questions for you, sorry about that. Whenever there’s a death, there are questions? The ac-ci-dent…well, it was certainly, um, regrettable, what with the unfortunate death, you could say, of your boyfriend. Didn’t stand a chance without his lap-and-shoulder belt, blunt force trauma to the head and so on. A real shame.”

  “Yes. Alas, poor Ludlow,” she said. Alas? She had better watch her vocabulary; she was sounding, even to herself, excessively phony. For Ludlow, she could not grieve. Her heart simply had no room for him. Outside, from far down the street, came the distant sound of a jackhammer. Thinking to deflect the direction of the conversation, she said, “Over the phone, you identified yourself as Dennis O’Connor, and, I don’t know, I guess I was expecting somebody Irish. That’s an Irish name.”

  “You don’t say.” He was taking notes on his notebook pad and raised his eyebrow. “First time I ever heard about that.”

  “Oh my God. You must think I’m a racist or something.”

  He let the silence pass. “Speaking of which and by the way, that’s not his name.”

  “What? Ludlow? It certainly is his name. That’s exactly what he called himself.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe that’s what he did, with you.” Detective O’Connor flipped back the pages of his notebook. “But he was using an alias. Real name was Mark Atherton Bagley.”

  “That’s impossible. That’s a ridiculous name.”

  “Well, I can’t help you there. You can take it up with his parents. Don’t argue with me. They’re in town, the Bagleys, incidentally. I guess you must’ve never looked into his billfold or checked his driver’s license, huh? Or met his daughter?” Detective O’Connor leaned down to pick up the newspapers scattered on the floor, folded them into an orderly array, and dropped them onto the coffee table next to the chipped green ashtray. “Sorry. I like a neat house. Drives the wife crazy, how I’m always picking up.” He glanced at Christina. “Like I say, the parents, these Bagleys, are in town from North Dakota to claim the body. Which is also where the daughter lives. They’re pretty broke up, as you might expect. The ex-girlfriend and the daughter are still in Fargo, in case you’re interested. You can probably meet the parents if you want to. I happen to have their cell phone numbers right here. They want to meet you. Have they called you?” He waited for a moment, and when Christina didn’t say anything, he consulted his notepad. “So anyway, I have just a couple more questions, if you don’t mind. This Mr. Bagley, this Ludlow, your boyfriend, he was working for…?”

  “Ludlow? The Sun Collective. He was a community organizer.”

  “And before that?”

  “I don’t know what he did before that. He was a student, I guess. And he was a housesitter.”

  “I see. Do you know where he lived? Prior to when you met him?”

  “Around. He lived here and there. He didn’t own much of anything when I first met him.”

  “Kind of a nomad, huh?” Detective O’Connor was writing something, but his handwriting was illegible, especially from where she was trying to read it, upside down. “And you worked for the Sun Collective, too?”

  “Yes. Volunteer work. And I work for the Thrid Merchants’ National Bank. I mean ‘Third,’ not ‘Thrid.’ That’s where I work.”

  “Thank you. And may I ask you, were you distracted at the time of the accident, do you remember? Drowsy?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all kinda hazy. It’s really hard to picture what happened. I think I must’ve blanked out.” She gave the sentence a sorrowful inflection. “You mentioned his daughter.”

  “Yes. Astrid, her name is.”

  “Oh.” She couldn’t decide what expression to put on her face.

  “I mentioned you being drowsy. Were you sleepy? Because, as you know, we didn’t find any skid marks.”

  “Yes. My cell phone was off. I wasn’t texting or anything.”

  “That’s correct. We’ve confirmed that. Did you lose control of the car?
And how did you lose control? Do you remember?”

  “Well”—she smiled—“I told the officers at the scene about all this, like what I remembered. It was an old car. A Saab.” She waited, and Detective O’Connor waited with her. “With bad steering? I think I was adjusting the radio. And I’m pretty sure I hit a patch of ice.”

  “Ah-huh. Ad-just-ing the radio,” he overenunciated. By now he was giving the impression of being perpetually bemused by what white people said, this white lady in particular. After a moment, something up at ceiling level seemed to interest him. “You were getting along with this Ludlow fellow? No recent arguments?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you remember what was playing on the radio?”

  “Nope. Well, possibly Rod Stewart? ‘Maggie May’?”

  “No wonder you lost control. What’d you change it to?”

  “Can’t remember. Talk radio, I think.”

  “Ah-huh. Any idea how the all that dirt grit and a dime got jammed into the clasp of the passenger-side seat belt?”

  “Oh, it was an old car, lots of junk in it.”

  “Ah. Thing I can’t figure out, is how that grit and a dime got into that clasp so the clasp wouldn’t work and the lap-and-shoulder belt was unusable.”

  “I can’t either,” she said.

  “Well, maybe it’s a mystery,” he said, without conviction. “You weren’t angry with him, this Ludlow?”

  “No,” she said. “I loved him.”

  “Is that right,” he said, the three words not sounding like a question.

  “He was a sweet guy. We had a lot in common.”

  “Such as…?”

  “The Sun Collective. Community organizing. We had great sex,” she lied.

  “I see.” He was writing it all down. “You two were living together. Here. And this organization, the Sun Collective, that you were a part of and et cetera: get people standing up for their rights, help the poor and the homeless, bleeding-heart, save-the-world crusade? Like that?”

  “Yeah, well, okay. That’s one way to describe it. Say: You want coffee or anything? I should’ve asked.”

  “Oh, no thanks. I wouldn’t put you to the trouble. But listen, don’t get me wrong, I understand it, all that positive social action. We certainly need young people with ideals, what with the world on its steady downward path.” His irony was almost impenetrable. With effort he rose and walked over to the corner of the living room where the audio system was, turning his back on Christina to examine the CDs and the vinyl on display. “Phonograph records!” he said, picking up one album sleeve. “I love vinyl. Still got it myself. And here’s Sketches of Spain. What a great musician that guy was. A real badass. Miles Davis and that bunch.” Still with his back turned to her, he said, “How come if you remember that Rod Stewart was playing on the radio, you don’t remember how you hit that tree? That doesn’t quite make sense to me, that you remember the one thing but not the other.”

  While she tried to think of an answer, Detective O’Connor put down the sleeve to the Miles Davis record and picked up something else, although Christina couldn’t see what it was. She hoped it wasn’t one of her Beyoncé CDs. She had Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean and Nas and Solange lying around, too. He might not like that. Several moments ticked by, and in the midst of the room’s guilt-stricken silence, she said, “I’m sorry. That’s the part that I don’t recall. I mean, I think there was ice on the road, and maybe I was still adjusting the station or the volume, you know?”

  He turned, and what she saw on his face was a complicated expression: compassionate disbelief, by a man who understood criminality but didn’t really like it. “Okay,” he said. “Did this Mark Atherton Bagley leave a will? We haven’t found one, and his parents don’t know. Because of the daughter, and so on.”

  “No,” Christina said. “He didn’t own anything, that I know of.” She had made several missteps already, she realized, and she felt herself getting sweaty from nerves. “He was sort of a vagabond.”

  “Oh, this particular vagabond had something, all right,” Detective O’Connor informed her, without elaborating. “So anyway, if you’d like to talk to his parents, who by the way are eager to talk to you, here’s their number.” He wrote it on a page of his pocket-size notebook and ripped out the page before handing it to her. “I’ve also included my phone number there in case you happen to think of or remember anything relevant.”

  “Why haven’t they called me? Ludlow’s parents? The Bagleys?”

  “I don’t know,” Detective O’Connor said. “You should ask them that question, not me. But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that probably since your driving was the cause of their son’s death, they don’t care to make the first move in your direction. It’s kind of typical in cases like this one.”

  “Oh,” she said softly.

  “Have you ever made a soufflé?” he asked, pocketing his notebook and pen before fixing his gaze on her. He was still standing on the other side of the room. “Cheese soufflés are the best, in my opinion. They don’t take too much in the way of ingredients: eggs, which you gotta separate, whites over here, yolks over there, Parmesan cheese, cream of tartar, flour, and a bit of nutmeg. Me, I like me some nutmeg, a dash, but it’s not to every taste. You need an electric mixer, and, um, I don’t see one of those over there in your kitchen. You a member of Costco? They sell mixers cheap. Anyway, you could look up the recipe on the web, but my point is, you put the mixture into the preheated soufflé dish and you put that into the oven, about 375 degrees, of course. Then, after about twenty-five minutes, the soufflé rises, and it’s ready. No big noises in the kitchen, or it won’t rise, so they inform me, though I’ve never had a problem with that.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” She noticed that he was now staring at her, but not as if he found her attractive.

  “Because sometimes a soufflé doesn’t rise, Ms. Lobdell. And this soufflé, the one you made and have presented to me, hasn’t risen, but…well, so I’ve got one question before I go. Did you want this fellow dead? For any reason?”

  “No. How can you say that?”

  “Reason I ask, you don’t seem all that heartbroken.”

  “I don’t? Because I am.”

  “No kidding. You seem, what’s the expression, dry-eyed to me. I haven’t seen a one single tear since I came through your door, and no sort of weeping and carrying on, that business. I’m not charging you with involuntary vehicular manslaughter, but, hey, I almost might.”

  “I did all my crying already,” she said with firm conviction.

  “Did you really? Is that the Kleenex, over there?” Somewhere a clock ticked several more seconds away. Detective O’Connor nodded. “Well, that certainly settles it, doesn’t it?” For the first time she noticed that he was wearing glasses, and behind the lenses his brown eyes were watery. “What we have is an accident, pure and simple, a moment of fatal inattention, and a death.” He exhaled deeply. “No probable crime appears to have been committed. You have my phone number on that sheet of paper. Give me a call if you think of anything that I should know.”

  “Okay,” she said, without getting up. “Stay warm,” she told him, a standard Minnesota winter farewell.

  He did not say anything in response at first, but when he was halfway out the door, he turned and said, “No problem,” before closing the door quietly behind him.

  * * *

  —

  On the other side of the door, Christina turned the lock. She felt a trembling begin in her right hand, which rose through her elbow and her shoulder to her chest, as if an earthquake had migrated out of the ground and moved inside her, so that the spasms, or whatever they were, took possession of her body, shuddering in waves through her. She felt herself shaking and trembling so violently that she had to sit down on the floor’s tan-colored carpet outside the closet entryw
ay. It hurt. She hurt all over. She was responsible for someone’s death. It was a one-way gate: she would never get back to where she had been and would never be free from that. Remorse could be a physical thing. It could bite into you. She clasped her hands around her knees, her legs pulled tightly into her chest. But the involuntary painful movements did not stop, and when she loosened her fingers to lie down on her back, the stucco ceiling’s pattern seemed to flicker between light and dark, and as she watched it, the daylight ceiling turned into the night sky, constellation after constellation of stars, and she felt herself swept up into it like a god, though only for an instant, on fire, burning, and she felt herself becoming a stellar entity, an emissary of light.

  When she came back to herself, her face was wet with tears, and once her sobbing subsided, she rose and made her way to the kitchen sink, where she’d left two saucepans to soak. Picking up a scouring pad, with nothing in her head but the sorrow she felt, she washed them until they were clean, and behind her she felt Ludlow’s restless spirit watching her.

  - 27 -

  Ludlow’s parents were polite and shy. From the minute she first saw them, she guessed that they suspected her of nothing. Having arranged to meet them for breakfast at a neighborhood restaurant, Mookie’s-on-Hennepin, close to their cut-rate hotel, she recognized at once who they were: Ludlow’s father wore a feed-store hat, red flannel shirt, and blue jeans under his overcoat, and his mother wore a shapeless plus-size flower-pattern dress under her blue cotton winter coat and matching blue scarf. Entering the restaurant, they blinked at the fluorescent lights like underground creatures, moles, unaccustomed to city life. They had the uncomfortable demeanor of a middle-aged couple who were not versed in conversation with strangers, didn’t even have iPhones, just flip phones, and were therefore unable to text, were app-less and un-Twittered, pre-postmodern era, agrarian, and they approached her with makeshift half-smiles. They were going to do their best to make a social effort with her, but every word would emerge with a strain.