Buster pulled off one of the slippers and sank his teeth into it. He worked on removing the stuffing of the inner lining and kept his eye on the dead man, who used to shoo-shoo him away from garbage bags, from munching the daffodils that lined the walk, from humping strays behind the garage. Once, after catching the dog relieving himself in the middle of the driveway, Clyde had dragged him by the collar all the way down Bridge Street. Listen to me, pooch, Mr. Mitchell had said after Clyde left, one hand smoothing where the collar had choked and the other hand vigorously scratching the dog's behind. You shit wherever you feel like shitting.
When the dog decided to leave the house, he took the slipper with him. He dragged it over to the hole he'd already started and threw it in. Buster walked back and forth over the spot once it was filled, then lifted his leg to mark it.
* * *
The Mitchells had brought their dog with them when they moved into the neighborhood. Three years later, a son arrived—not a newborn baby decked out in bonnets but a thin, dark boy of indiscriminate age. His name was Miguel, and it was unclear to the people living on Bridge Street whether he was adopted or a child from a previous marriage. He called the Mitchells his mother and father, enrolled in the public school for their district, and quietly became a part of their everyday lives.
In fact, Miguel was the true son of Mr. Mitchell, sired unknowingly on a business trip with a Venezuelan prostitute some seven years before. The mother had been killed in a bus accident along with fifty-three other travelers on a road outside of Caracas, and the local police had contacted Mr. Mitchell from a faded company card she had left pressed in her Bible. After a paternity test, the boy arrived at Logan Airport with a worn-out blanket and duffel bag full of chickens (his pets), which were quickly confiscated by customs officials. Mr. Mitchell drove down Route 128 in his station wagon, amazed and panicked at his sudden parenthood, trying to comfort the sobbing boy and wondering how Miguel had managed to keep the birds silent on the plane.
When they pulled into the driveway, Mrs. Mitchell was waiting with a glass of warm milk sweetened with sugar. She was wearing dungarees. She took the boy in her arms and carried him immediately into the bathroom, where she sat him on the counter and washed his face, his hands, his knees, and his feet. Miguel sipped the milk while Mrs. Mitchell gently ran the washcloth behind his ears. When she was finished she tucked him in to their guest bed and read him a stack of Curious George books in Spanish, which she had ordered from their local bookstore. She showed Miguel a picture of the little monkey in the hospital getting a shot from a nurse, and the boy fell asleep, a finger hooked around the belt loop of her jeans. Mrs. Mitchell sat on the bed beside him quietly until he rolled over and let it go.
Mr. Mitchell had met his wife at a gas station in northern California. He had just completed his business degree, and was driving a rented car up the coast to see the Olympic rain forest. She was in a pickup truck with Oregon plates. They both got out and started pumping. Mr. Mitchell finished first, and on his way back to his car after paying, he watched the muscles in her thick arm flexing as she replaced the hose. She glanced up, caught him looking, and smiled. She was not beautiful, but one of her teeth stuck out charmingly sideways. There was a confidence about her, an air of efficiency that made him believe she was the kind of woman who could solve any problem. He started the car, turned out of the station, and glanced into his rearview mirror. He watched the pickup take the opposite road, and as it drove away he felt such a pull that he turned around and followed it for sixty miles.
At the rest stop, he pretended that he was surprised to see her. Later he discovered that many people followed his wife, and that she was used to this, and that it did not seem strange to her. People she had never met came up and began to speak to her in shopping malls, in elevators, in the waiting rooms of doctors, at traffic lights, at concerts, at coffee shops and bistros. An old man took hold of her arm outside of an amusement park and began whispering about his murdered son. A woman carrying three children placed her blanket right on top of theirs at the beach, stretched out next to Mrs. Mitchell, and began to cry. Even their dog, a stray she fed while camping in Tennessee, came scratching outside their door six weeks later. Mr. Mitchell was jealous and frightened by these strangers, and often used himself as a shield between them and his wife. What do they want from her? he found himself thinking. But he also felt, What will they take from me?
His wife was a quiet woman, in the way that large rocks just beyond the shore are quiet; the waves rush against them and the seaweed hangs on and the birds gather round on top. Mr. Mitchell was amazed that she had married him. He spent the first few years doing what he could to please her and watched for signs that she was leaving.
Sometimes she got depressed and locked herself in the bathroom. It made him furious. When she came out, tender and pink from washing, she would put her arms around him and tell him that he was a good man. Mr. Mitchell was not sure of this, because sometimes he found himself hating her. He wanted her to know what it felt like to be powerless. He began taking risks.
When he got the call from Venezuela telling him about Miguel, he was terrified that he might lose his wife and also secretly happy to have wounded her. But all of the control he felt as they prepared for his son's arrival slipped away as he watched her take the strange dark boy into her arms and tenderly wash his feet. He realized then that she was capable of taking everything from him.
The three of them formed an awkward family. Mr. Mitchell tried to place the boy in a home, but his wife would not let him. He had now been an accidental father for two years. He took the boy to baseball games and bought him comic books and drove him to school in the mornings. Sometimes Mr. Mitchell enjoyed these things; other times they made him angry. One day he walked in on Miguel talking to his wife in Spanish and the boy immediately stopped. He saw that his son was afraid of him, and he was sure that his wife had done this too. Mr. Mitchell began to resent what had initially drawn him to her, and to offset these feelings he began an affair with their neighbor, Pat.
It did not begin innocently. Pat said hello to Mr. Mitchell at the supermarket, then turned and pressed up against him as someone passed in the aisle. Her behind lingered against his hips, her breasts touched his arm. Mr. Mitchell had never had any conversation with Pat that went beyond the weather or the scheduling of trash, but later that week he walked over to her as she was planting bulbs in her garden and slid his hand into the elastic waistband of her Bermuda shorts. He leaned her up against the fence, underneath a birch tree, right there in the middle of a bright, sunny day where everyone could see. Mr. Mitchell didn't say anything, but he could tell by her breath and the way she rocked on his hand that she wasn't afraid.
He did not know it was in him to do something like this. He had been on his way to the library to return some books. Look, there they were, thrown aside on the grass, wrapped in plastic smeared with age and the fingers of readers who were unknown to him. And here was another person he did not know, panting in his ear, streaking his arms with dirt. Someone he had seen bent over in the sunlight, a slight glistening of sweat reflecting in the backs of her knees, and for whom he had suddenly felt a hard sense of lonesomeness and longing. A new kind of warmth spread in the palm of his hand and he tried not to think about his wife.
They had hard, raw sex in public places—movie theaters and parks, elevators and playgrounds. After dark, underneath the jungle gym, his knees pressing into the dirt, Mr. Mitchell began to wonder why they hadn't been caught. Once, sitting on a bench near the reservoir, Pat straddling him in a skirt with no underwear, they had actually waved to an elderly couple passing by. The couple continued on as if they hadn't seen them. The experience left the impression that his meetings with Pat were occurring in some kind of alternative reality, a bubble in time that he knew would eventually pop.
Pat told him that Clyde had been impotent since his father died. The old man had been a mechanic, and was working underneath a bulldozer when the li
ft slipped, crushing him from the chest down. Clyde held his father's hand as he died, and the coldness that came as life left seemed to spread through Clyde's fingers and into his arms, and he stopped using them to reach for his wife. Since the funeral she'd had two lovers. Mr. Mitchell was number three.
There were rumors, later on, that the lift had been tampered with—that Clyde's father had owed someone money. Pat denied it, but Mr. Mitchell remembered driving by the garage and sensing he'd rather buy his gas somewhere else. It seemed like a shady business.
He started arranging meetings with Pat that were closer to home. Mr. Mitchell's desire increased with the risk of discovery, and in his house he began to fantasize about the dining room table, the dryer in the laundry room, the space on the kitchen counter beside the mixer. He touched these places with his fingertips and trembled, thinking of how he would feel later, watching his wife sip her soup, fold sheets, mix batter for cookies in the same places.
On the day Pat was murdered, before she put the roast in the oven or reminisced about James Dean or thought about the difference between butter and margarine, she was having sex in the vestibule. The coiled inscription of home sweet home scratched her behind. Mr. Mitchell had seen Clyde leave for a bowling lesson, and as he waited on the front porch for Pat to open the door, something had made him pick up the welcome mat. Mrs. Mitchell would soon be home with Miguel, and the thought of her so close pricked his ears. When Pat answered he'd thrown the mat down in the hall, then her, then himself, the soles of his shoes knocking over the entry table. Mr. Mitchell brought Pat's knees to his shoulders and listened for the hum of his wife's Reliant.
* * *
The following day when Lieutenant Sales climbed the stairs of Pat and Clyde's porch, he did not notice that there was nothing to wipe his feet on. He was an average-looking man: six foot two, 190 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin. He had once been a champion deep-sea diver, until a shark attack (which left him with a hole in his side crossed with the pink, puckered scars of new skin) dragged him from the waters with a sense of righteous authority and induced him to join the force. He lived thirty-five minutes away in a basement apartment with a Siamese cat named Frank.
When Sales was a boy he'd had a teacher who smelled like roses. Her name was Mrs. Bosco. She showed him how to blow eggs. Forcing the yolk out of the tiny hole always felt a little disgusting, like blowing a heavy wad of snot from his nose, but when he looked up at Mrs. Bosco's cheeks flushed red with effort, he knew it would be worth it, and it was—the empty shell in his hand like a held breath. Whenever he began an investigation, he'd get the same sensation, and as he stepped into the doorway of Pat and Clyde's house, he felt it rise in his chest and stay.
He interviewed the police who found the bodies first. They were sheepish about their reasons for going into the backyard, but before long they began loudly discussing drywall and Sheetrock and the pros and cons of lancet windows (all of the men, including Lieutenant Sales, carried weekend and part-time jobs in construction). The policeman who had thrown up in the bushes went home early. When Sales spoke to him later, he apologized for contaminating the scene.
Lieutenant Sales found the roast on the counter. He found green beans still on the stove. He found a sour cherry pie nearly burned in the oven. He found the butter and the margarine half-melted on the dining room table. He found that Pat and Clyde used cloth napkins and tiny separate plates for their dinner rolls. The silverware was polished. The edges of the steak knives were turned in.
He found their unpaid bills in a basket by the telephone. He found clean laundry inside the dryer in the basement—towels, sheets, T-shirts, socks, three sets of Fruit of the Loom and one pair of soft pink satin panties, the elastic starting to give, the bottom frayed and thin. He found an unfinished letter Pat had started writing to a friend who had recently moved to Arizona: What is it like there? How can you stand the heat? He found Clyde's stamp albums from when he was a boy—tiny spots of brilliant color, etchings of flowers and portraits of kings, painstakingly pasted over the names of countries Lieutenant Sales had never heard of.
He found the bullet that had passed through Pat's body, embedded in the stairs. He found a run in her stocking, starting at the heel and inching its way up the back of her leg. He thought about how Pat had been walking around the day she was going to die not realizing that there was a hole in her panty hose. He found a stain, dark and blooming beneath her shoulders, spreading across the Oriental rug in the foyer and into the hardwood floors, which he noticed, as he got down on his knees for a closer look, still held the scent of Murphy's oil soap. He found a hairpin caught in the carpet fringe. He found a cluster of dandelion seeds, the tiny white filaments coming apart in his fingers. He found a look on Pat's face like a child trying to be brave, lips tightened and thin, forehead just beginning to crease, eyes glazed, dark, and unconvinced. Her body was stiff when they moved her.
There were dog tracks on the back porch. They were the prints of a midsized animal, red and clearly defined as they circled the body in the kitchen, then crisscrossing over themselves and heading out the door, fading down the steps and onto the driveway before disappearing into the yard. Lieutenant Sales sent a man to knock on doors in the neighborhood and find out who let their dogs off the leash. He interviewed Clyde's mother. He went back to the station and checked Pat's and Clyde's records—both clean. When he finally went to sleep that night, the small warmth of his cat tucked next to his shoulder, Lieutenant Sales thought about the feel of satin panties, missing slippers, stolen welcome mats, dandelion seeds from a yard with no dandelions, and the kind of killer who shuts off the oven.
* * *
A month before Pat and Clyde were murdered, Mrs. Mitchell was fixing the toilet. Her husband passed by on his way to the kitchen, paused at the door, shook his head, and told her that she was too good for him. The heavy porcelain top was off, her arms elbow deep in rusty water. The man she had married was standing at the entrance to the bathroom and speaking, but Mrs. Mitchell was concentrating on the particular tone in the pipes she was trying to clear, and so she did not respond.
Mr. Mitchell went into the kitchen and began popping popcorn. The kernels cracked against the insides of the kettle as his words settled into her, and when, with a twist of the coat hanger in her hand beneath the water, she stopped the ringing of the pipes, Mrs. Mitchell sensed in the quiet that came next that her husband had done something wrong. She had known in this same way before he told her about Miguel. A breeze came through the window and made the hair on her wet arms rise. She pulled her hands from the toilet and thought, I fixed it.
When Miguel came into their home, she had taken all the sorrow she felt at his existence and turned it into a fierce motherly love. Mrs. Mitchell thought her husband would be grateful; instead he seemed to hold it against her. He became dodgy and spiteful. He blamed her for what he'd done, for being a woman too hard to live up to. It was the closest she ever came to leaving. But she hadn't expected the boy.
Miguel spent the first three months of his life in America asking to go home. When the fourth month came he began to sleepwalk. He wandered downstairs to the kitchen, emptied the garbage can onto the floor, and curled up inside. In the morning Mrs. Mitchell would find him asleep, shoulders in the barrel, feet in the coffee grounds and leftovers. He told her he was looking for his mother's head. She had been decapitated in the bus accident, and now she stepped from the corners of Miguel's dreams at night and beckoned him with her arms, his lost chickens resting on her shoulders, pecking at the empty neck.
Mrs. Mitchell suggested that they make her a new one. She bought materials for papier-mâché. The strips of newspaper felt like bandages as she helped Miguel dip them in glue and smooth them over the surface of the inflated balloon. They fashioned a nose and lips out of cardboard. Once it was dry, Miguel described his mother's face and they painted the skin brown, added yarn for hair, cut eyelashes out of construction paper. Mrs. Mitchell took a pair of gold earrings
, poked them through where they'd drawn the ears and said, heart sinking, She's beautiful. Miguel nodded. He smiled. He put his mother's head on top of the bookcase in his room and stopped sleeping in the garbage.
Sometimes when Mrs. Mitchell checked on the boy at night, she'd feel the head looking at her. It was unnerving. She imagined her husband making love to the papier-mâché face and discovered a hate so strong and hard it made her afraid of herself. She considered swiping the head and destroying it, but she remembered how skinny and pitiful the boy's legs had looked against her kitchen floor. Then Miguel began to love her, and she suddenly felt capable of anything. She thumbed her nose at the face in the corner. She held her heart open.
Mrs. Mitchell had been raised by her aunts in a house near the river where her mother had drowned. The aunts were hunters; birds mostly, which they would clean and cook and eat. As a girl Mrs. Mitchell would retrieve the shots. Even on a clear day, the birds always seemed wet. Sometimes they were still alive when she found them—wings thrashing, pieces of their chests torn away. She learned to take hold of their necks and break them quickly.
Mrs. Mitchell kept a picture of her mother next to the mirror in her room, and whenever she checked her reflection, her eyes would naturally turn from her own face to that of the woman who gave birth to her. The photo was black-and-white and creased near the edges; she was fifteen, her hair plaited, the end of one braid pressed between her lips. It made Mrs. Mitchell think of stories she'd heard of women who spent their lives spinning—years of passing flax through their mouths to make thread would leave them disfigured, lower lips drooping off their faces; a permanent look of being beaten.
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