Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  “Not my best color,” he finally says of his orange jumpsuit.

  She switches the phone to her other ear.

  “Sid. I’m going to say this because God only knows what’s going through your head. Listen to me. I had nothing to do with this. You know that, don’t you?” His eyes squeeze shut several times. His right shoulder jumps at his ear.

  Sidsel rubs her own eyes as if to make Calder’s stop. Annie used to do the same thing.

  “Of course,” she says. But he can’t take back what he said in Mateo’s about how they were going to fix this.

  “You have no idea what I’m going through,” she says.

  This takes Calder by surprise. It seems a selfish thing, considering.

  In his moment of confusion he gazes at the row of inmates beside him. A red-haired guy with a red goatee and green tattooed fingers and thumb that spell I L-O-V-E wiggles his finger in his ear. A man with a clean haircut and gold wedding band on a tanned finger whispers into his phone, his words jumbled and whiney.

  “It’s a mess,” Calder tells Sidsel. “Don’t think I’m not sure as hell aware of that.”

  “I have reporters calling me all the way from France,” Sidsel cuts in. “The National Enquirer is offering me money and the Danish Consulate won’t return my calls. I’ve got to arrange for Magnus to be sent back to Denmark after the autopsy is complete.” She stops and holds her hand over her eyes as if she’s seeing Magnus dead in front of her. “His father’s calling me all hours through the night. He thinks I killed him or had you kill him for me.” Before he can say anything she’s looking at the ceiling, switching gears. “Then there’s the house. I never even liked the house. Magnus insisted on paying some Dutch architect to design it. He took out a big loan and now it’s on me to pay it back.” Calder opens his mouth. “And it’s freezing outside!” she says. “Do you know how cold it is? The water has to be drained from the pool or it’s going to freeze. I don’t know how to drain water from a pool. How long do you think it would take to sell the house?”

  She’s manic. He’s guessing sleep-deprived.

  “And Siemens. You would think Human Resources would see that I need help, but all I get is that he wasn’t there long enough to make him eligible for life insurance benefits.”

  “Do you need money?” Calder asks.

  “No. No.” His words have slowed her down. “I can take some extra from the café.” She glances at her watch. “I have to get back to work. Every day I’m smiling at the tourists, hoping no one reads the local papers.” She mocks her own smile. “I’m just a happy Danish girl selling her Kringles and pudding.”

  “Sid, please,” he says, his knee hopping beneath the table.

  “Av mig God. I can’t do this by myself. I go home to this warehouse, and I think, what if this person comes after me, too? What if Magnus was involved in something bad? My family is begging me to come home. I’m sorry, Calder. I can’t stand the thought of you in here. It’s killing me in little pieces. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t remember the smallest things—my shoes, my watch, my purse. I don’t even know when the last time was that I’ve eaten.”

  Calder grips his knee with his free hand. “Sweetheart.” She’s got everything bound up in his chest now. He needs to touch her. He does in his mind, and her scent seems to waft through the screen. His heart constricts. He coughs it free. “Have you got something to write with?”

  She keeps her eyes on Calder as she feels around her pockets. She looks pale and sickly, as if she’s lost and looking for change to call someone. She pulls a pen and address book from her purse.

  “My bankcard is in the top drawer of my dresser with some other junk,” he says.

  “Calder—”

  He tells her the pin. “Write it down. There’s not a whole lot in the account but you can take it all if you need to. My accountant deposits money automatically every month. And the condo’s paid for.”

  “It isn’t necessary. No. I’ll be fine.”

  “Sid,” he says sharply. “Take what you need. Call a realtor and put your house up for sale. They’ll take care of everything for you. You can stay in my place.” He thinks of her walking through his rooms, turning lights on and off the way his mother did after his father died. The thermostat up, then down. The windows open, then closed. Sheets off, then on, the rooms never feeling quite right.

  “People live on the other side of the wall. Nice people. Friends. Write this number down, too. It’s Annie’s. She knows a lot of people. Just call her. She can help. You shouldn’t be dealing with this alone.”

  “She must be dealing with it, too.” She takes down the number. “In the papers. On the news. Everyone is paying extra attention because of who she is.”

  Of course. He hasn’t even thought of how this will throw a light on Annie. Pressure percolates in his chest, his throat, his eyes. He needs to stay in control. He slaps his hand onto the video screen.

  Sidsel presses her hand against her own screen, and the gesture makes his whole head ache.

  Their visit is almost up. His knees bang one another.

  “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful time,” Sidsel says in an attempt at Groucho Marx.

  Calder feels the burn in his knees. He smiles and says, “But this wasn’t it.”

  Sidsel smiles, too—the softest, warmest, truest smile she’s ever offered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten so upset. I want to be strong. I promise I’ll be strong next time. I just can’t help wishing there was some way we could go back and change this. To make it so it never happened.”

  This is the thought that will stay with him through the night. But just how far back he’d have to go and what exactly he’d have to change is anybody’s guess. It never does come to him in all the hours he’s awake.

  EIGHT

  Annie is startled by the sound of branches snapping behind her. She nearly falls from the truck bed at the sight of a man in the grove. He’s wearing a Channel 4 News jacket, his mouth in a twist as if caught while searching for the right thing to say.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?” Annie says.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I just wanted to ask you a few questions.” She doesn’t like the sound of his voice. Genteel, almost ladylike. He’s young and pudgy in the face. Annie throws a bruised tangelo at his head. It lands with a thud.

  “Hey!” He holds his head.

  “This is private property. You either leave on your own or I’m going to pull the shotgun out of this truck and point your way.”

  There is no shotgun, but there’s also no way for him to know this.

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  He thinks he’s funny. Annie slips off her gloves and throws them into the bed. Her hands have taken on a permanent grasp, claw-like. She tears her coat off as if readying for a fight.

  “I read somewhere that you quit touring,” the fat-faced boy says. “You haven’t been back in the recording studio since Gull on a Steeple. Of course, that can’t have anything to do with what your brother’s done.”

  She jumps from the truck and he takes off running. “It’s none of my business what my brother does!” she screams, and runs after him. He’s getting away. “You better run, you little son of a bitch.” There’s no time for this. The slight break in the rain has allowed her to make some headway on the tangelos.

  She reaches the road with barely a breath to spare as the man jumps into his green sedan and locks the door.

  Annie stands heaving on the side of the road. If she’s not careful she’s going to burst into tears. Swung out on either side of her driveway is an old iron gate that’s hung open for years, its hinges rusted in place. She treks down the road to shove, and then pull the two sides together, wincing at the high-pitched grind of metal on metal. Then, just as she turns back for the grove, the man leans out his window and aims a telephoto lens at her. She’s filthy and braless in an old long-sleeve T-shirt pulled from the back of her drawer. ANARCHY!
is emblazoned across the front. Her hand shields her face as if from an oncoming fist.

  She’ll hire security guards the minute she gets inside. Careful, she says to her own tears, but they are starting to get the better of her.

  She doesn’t manage more than a few steps when another car appears on the road. Dark and masculine and sleek, clearly an unmarked cop car, pulling toward her gate. It stops and two men step out. They don’t ask if she’s Annie Walsh. She knows they already know. They only ask if they can speak to her. They show badges to be clear. Just a few questions if she doesn’t mind.

  “How many’s a few?” she asks. “I don’t have much time.”

  “Less than twenty,” one says.

  She accepts a ride up to her house. Her jacket is still in the back of the truck and she’s cold now, shivering from adrenaline, too. Sitting in the backseat of the cop car makes her feel like a criminal. She can smell her own sweat.

  Each man has dark hair, a square jawline, and white, healthy-looking teeth. They could be brothers, and she asks if this is how they came to be assigned to work as a team. They laugh a little. She washes her hands at the kitchen sink and they take a seat before she offers.

  They’re the first people to set foot inside her home in months. She imagines it through their eyes. A little too tidy. A little too quiet. Bleached. Pale, blond wood everywhere you turn.

  She makes coffee. They don’t say much until it’s ready, until she brings three mugs to the table and slides theirs in front of them.

  The guns on their belts catch her attention. The heavy brushed metal makes her want to tell the truth.

  “He was here that morning but he never said anything to me about Magnus,” she says when they ask. “Not that I remember. I would have remembered a name like that.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Detective Ron says.

  “And so, I’m not sure what else I can help you with then.”

  “You’d be surprised at the kinds of things that help us,” Detective Rick says.

  Annie sips her coffee and looks at one then the other over the rim of her chunky mug.

  “What was he like as a kid?” Detective Ron asks.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.”

  “What were you like as a kid?” she asks.

  “Hell on wheels,” he says, and both men laugh.

  Annie sets her coffee on the table. “He was sweet. Normal as any boy. He liked to fish. Liked nature and music. He liked watching things grow.”

  “We understand he had tics pretty bad back then.”

  So this is what they are after. Confirmation that her brother is a sideshow, a freak. Someone who was bullied and vowed revenge.

  Annie shrugs a shoulder.

  The detectives wait for her to say something else. She knows this technique. Lawyers use it, therapists, too. Wait long enough and they’ll eventually fill the silence with their version of the truth.

  “Was he ever angry?” Detective Rick asks.

  “About what?”

  “Life. Anything. It must have been tough growing up without a father.”

  “If what you’re asking is whether or not he had some bone to pick, or some need to get back at the world, the answer is no. Never. Not even when he had a right to.”

  “He had a right to?”

  “I think we’re done here, boys.”

  “The last time you saw him, until recently I mean, was quite a while ago. Six months, something like that?”

  Annie reaches into her purse on the counter. The detectives put their hands on their guns and jerk forward and then relax when she pulls out a card. “You get the urge to call someone and talk, here’s my lawyer’s number. She’s a real chatterbox.”

  Detective Ron rises and slowly heads for the door. He stops and studies the photographs on the wall, lingering on one of Detour as a puppy, licking Calder’s chin. Detective Rick finishes his coffee at the table and then grins and asks for Annie’s autograph. She signs his notebook, Happy trails—Annie Walsh. Detective Ron wanders into the living room.

  “You live alone?” he asks.

  “Not if you include him.” Detour dozes in front of the fireplace.

  “Smells like a lumberyard in here. Your boyfriend a carpenter?” he asks.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice my hands.”

  “Oh, I noticed,” he replies, still looking around. “Abrasions on the right-hand fingers. Both hands severely chapped. The right one slightly bruised.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she says sharply.

  “And no Christmas tree.”

  “It’s not a crime, is it? Living alone? Not putting up a tree?”

  Detective Rick joins him near the door. “No ma’am,” he says, and both men smile and thank her and finally leave after what feels like hours but has only been twenty minutes and less than twenty questions.

  She’s furious. Not with them but with her brother. She picks up the phone and calls her old security team. The guys who used to work her local shows. They don’t ask a lot of questions. They aren’t impressed by fame. She always liked this about them. They agree to start immediately.

  An hour and a half after she was first interrupted, she is finally back in the grove. Reaching, dipping, turning herself around. The colorful fruit piles in crates at her knees. It feels good to move her body. It feels good to work with her hands, to smell the tangy fruit, the cold air, and soil. She once heard of a famous singer who quit performing at the height of her career so she could move to Italy and learn the language. She never did return, not to music, not to America. There was another, an Oscar-winning actor, who’d stopped reading scripts to become a cobbler’s apprentice. Of course, he did return, and won another Oscar if she’s not mistaken. No matter. Annie could be a farmer, stay a farmer. She could adopt children. She could teach them to play music, and sing only to them.

  This morning Allen, her manager, called first thing to tell her that Calder’s story has become a twenty-second spot on the cable news networks. “Singer-songwriter’s brother accused of murder,” he said. He said it’s true about any publicity being good publicity. Gull on a Steeple is flying up the charts.

  “I’ll be sure to thank my brother,” she said.

  “I’m serious. Yesterday the title song was the second most downloaded track on iTunes.”

  “What was the first?” she asked.

  “That hip-hop guy’s stuff. What’s his name.”

  “DJ Whatshisname,” she said, but Allen was on to the next thing. “How are the new songs coming?”

  “Soon. They’re coming soon,” she said.

  “Annie. The label is losing patience.”

  “We’ve been through this a hundred times. It hasn’t been that long. They’re just greedy.”

  “Maybe so but they pay the bills.”

  “You just said we’re flying up charts.”

  “Promise me you’ll come back.”

  “Allen.”

  “Promise.”

  “Where else would I go?”

  Annie lunges above her head, slips on the ridges beneath her boots, and tumbles backwards smacking her tailbone against the uneven steel. “Goddammit!” Misty rain has already begun coating the trees, her hair, the crates full of tangelos. She could have filled another crate in the time it has taken to deal with all the nonsense.

  She braces the side of the truck and hauls herself up. Pain snatches her breath when she lets go of the side of the truck. Enough rain has already gathered on the cab’s window to spill a wriggling stream down the glass.

  But she’ll only come in from the grove after two large flashlights have sizzled down to meek yellow dots in the dark. Even after tumbling on her ass she still manages to fill another two crates and lug them into the barn with the others. The freezing rain, possibly snow, is set to arrive tomorrow.

  Once inside, she starts a fire, lets Detour out, and then feels the pain flare in her back when she bends down to feed him. She remo
ves her dirty clothes and slides directly into the silky, chocolate-colored robe Owen gave her two Christmases ago. She thinks of the last time he was here, the last time he would have seen her wear it.

  He’d come down with a fever and she’d fallen asleep next to him with the robe on, waiting to see if his forehead would cool. She woke in the night with the damp silk plastered to her skin from his fevered body. His sweat smelled bitter. His mouth hung open, a mix of onions and sour milk. She thought maybe he’d eaten something bad at lunch that day. She leaned forward and touched her lips to his forehead. “I love you,” he mumbled. He was burning up. She put an ice bucket beside the bed and wiped his face with the cold cloth she dipped in and out of it. She held a glass of ice water to his lips and made him drink. After a while the water in the bucket was nearly room temperature. She was drained by then. The idea of getting up and refilling the ice and then sitting over him and changing the cloth on his head filled her with a thick, clumsy fatigue. Her legs weighed into the mattress. Her brain felt heavy inside her skull. She sat with him until she thought she would cry the way a child cried from sleepiness. She wiped his hairline once more, and then she slipped out of bed and crawled naked between the cool sheets in the guest room. Detour joined her, and once he settled on the rug she fell into a sleep so deep and satisfying that the only thing that woke her was Owen in the late morning hour, tapping his razor against the porcelain sink down the hall.

  I need to get to the store, she’d thought as she lay in bed. Chicken soup and grilled cheese.

  The fire is dying now, and Annie doesn’t have the energy to put another log on. She doesn’t have the energy, even, to go to bed.

  The memory of what happened next that day tugs at her. After the supermarket she would come home to an empty house. She knew the moment she pushed open the door. There were gaps in the shelves where his CDs and books had been. His guitar and stand were gone from their place by the window. But the reason she’d noticed these things in the first place was the air. She’d felt this air once before in her life. Like lights going out unexpectedly. Like being thrown into the dark unprepared.