Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  I can’t muster a response, not even an encouraging nod. His voice begins to trip, dwindling. “We could have this, Lena, you and me.” He holds my hand tightly. But he must feel it—the rigidity in my arms. Finally I just say, “Charlie—don’t. Just—stop.”

  He leans back, shoulders humped. Neither Frank nor Carole look at him. Frank is pouring coffee, his face eloquently disapproving. Carole goes into the kitchen for sugar. I wonder if Charlie thought I wouldn’t be able to say no in front of them. For some reason, I feel like leaning over and slapping him.

  Charlie is already resettling himself in his chair, his eyes blank. Instead of saying more, Charlie opts to eat his cake. He gives it everything he’s got, doesn’t speak or look up, just eats slowly and methodically, finishes in eight forkfuls, then asks for seconds. As if he’s punishing all of us with this deliberate pace. I listen to his fork tick on the plate. I haven’t touched mine. Carole manufactures a few questions for me about Alyce, my apartment; I barely remember how to speak.

  I help stack and carry the dishes in as Charlie sits back. When we enter the kitchen, Carole takes the plates right out of my hands. “I want you to know that I had no idea he was going to do this,” she says. Her voice is smooth and furious. Years ago, when I mentioned Charlie’s nights out to Carole, the ticket stubs and phone numbers he kept stuffed in his pants pockets, she stared at me with a sort of horrified wonder. She crossed her arms and locked her hands inside the crooks of her elbows. “That bastard,” she’d said, in the same marveling tone as Alyce’s.

  Now in the kitchen with Carole, I hug my ribs, lean my head against the wall. “Is that why you invited me? Because it was Charlie’s idea?”

  She shakes her head. “Ach, I don’t know—I guess Charlie suggested tonight. But he was just the catalyst. I’d been wanting to do this again for a long, long time.” She rests her fingers on the crook of my arm. “I’ve missed seeing you, Lena. Truly. I’ve missed you so much.”

  “But you stopped inviting me.”

  “No,” she says. “You stopped coming.”

  The men’s voices drift through the kitchen doorway. Frank’s is gentle—a warm burr of consolation. Charlie’s is lower, darker. He seems to already be recovering from his disappointment. Over the years, Frank has forgiven Charlie for the way he treated me. But Carole is fixed more in her own mind. She moves briskly through the kitchen and waves me away from the dishes. “Leave those for Frank,” she says dryly. “It’s the least he can do after letting Charlie set us up like this.”

  “Carole, please, it’s fine.”

  “No,” she says. “It’s not fine. Not even a little fine.” She nods in the direction of the men’s voices. “Some men don’t have a lick of sense and they don’t know a damn thing. Not how to be married. Not how to be a friend. They should be roped up and bused to some sort of reform school and trained to be decent people before they’re set loose on the population.” She smiles archly, then, and says, “I want to show you something.”

  We go out the kitchen’s rear entry and up the wooden stairs. I catch a flash of their bedroom—ivory comforter, two fat pillows, TV remote—as I follow Carole into another room. This had been one of their daughters’ bedrooms; now there are stacks of books on the bed and bags of colored yarns, knitting needles, knitting magazines piled up against the walls. Carole looks cheerier in here. She shoves aside some books—old detective paperbacks—flops down on the bed, and pats the space beside herself.

  “This is my recovery room. I decided when I turned sixty I was going to try and find out where I’d hidden myself. And I figured Gina’s old bedroom was a decent place to start looking.” She pulls the end of a knitted square in a gray wool from one of the bags. “That was a few years ago, of course. And as you can see, I’m still looking.”

  On a wooden piano stool, nearer the door, there’s a magnifying glass and an oversized picture book with a glossy cover: Butterflies of North America. An old upright piano is shoved against the wall, a bunch of sketch pads piled on top of the piano. “It’s a wonderful place.” I join her on the clearing on the bed. I like the way Carole looks in this room; her voice seems mellower, her neck curves in a relaxed arc from her shoulders as she elbows back on the bed.

  I look toward the stairs; it’s like we’re hiding from the men. I can smell the haze of Frank’s cigar. There’s a faint padding sound: the greyhound drifts up the stairs, her coat like watered silk. She stands near me, not quite close enough to be petted, and fixes me with her blue-gray eye. Then she comes and leans her full weight against my leg and I strum her silky ribs. After a moment, she huffs and sinks down on my feet.

  Carole laughs. “Swany loves you. She doesn’t ever go up to people like that.” She claps her hands on her knees. “Okay, now I want to show you something.” She crouches, reaching under the bed, and slides something out—a cigar box. As soon as she opens it I catch an ancient, resinous whiff of marijuana—the pot long gone. Carole pulls a mitten out of the box.

  It’s small and yellow and there’s a frayed hole in the tip of the thumb. “This belonged to Laura—I think she wore it for all of a month before she lost the other one.” She gives it to me and I turn it over carefully, then give it back. I recall that Laura is now the mother of the sensible girl in the photo on the kitchen windowsill.

  “But somehow, Lena? I always felt that I could tell you whatever I needed to. I always liked the way you manage to . . . just, to listen . . . you know?” Carole says, holding the mitten. I’m startled to see that her eyes have a sheen, her chin dimpled. “This is what it feels like sometimes. Having a baby? Sometimes I think it’s the most stupid damn thing anyone could do. What kind of an idiot takes the—the—” She touches her knuckles to the center of her chest, fingers curled. “Takes this—right here—chops it right out, and then, gone!” She throws both her hands open. “You let that critical thing go—out there, into open air—in fact, you’re supposed to hope it goes. Because if you try to hold on to your child”—crushing her hand closed—“it dies. Just dies. So you excavate yourself and then you throw it out there.”

  “But not all the way?” I ask. “There’s still a connection.”

  “Oh sure.” She smoothes the mitten out over her knee. “A connection. Certainly. But the shocking thing is that there’s a very real separation. And you know when you know it? You know it for the first time when you look at your baby, lying there, sleeping, because where does their sleep take them—right? What are they dreaming about? My God,” she says quietly, one hand on her stomach. “Are they already having these secret dreams when they’re still inside you? You don’t know! Even though it’s your baby. I know everyone talks about how glad they are when the baby finally sleeps, but it wasn’t ever that simple for me. That’s when it first hit me—the separateness. I guess I’ve always been an oddball.” Her voice has gotten cloudy.

  “Well, no, I think I can understand that.”

  She smiles at me ruefully. “Well, and then there I was, a mother, of all the absurd things—maybe twenty-three years old—and my little girl had once again lost one mitten and, for some reason, just as I was about to throw the remaining one away?” She holds the mitten up but closes her eyes. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t throw the other damn mitten away.”

  We sit, shoulder to shoulder. I think of the cribs I’ve seen in Evidence so far, and it’s as if I’m there again, looking between their bars: vaults of light, windows in a darkened room. I frown and squint; it seems that I can see something there. . . .

  Abruptly, Carole folds the mitten in half, tucks it back into the box, and slides it under the bed. Then she straightens up again, looking ahead, our shoulders touching. I feel a sigh sift through her. She says, “My oldest granddaughter has got herself a nice steady boyfriend. I wonder if I’ll be a great-grandma anytime soon.”

  She puts her hand on my wrist—it’s cool and light. For a
moment, I wonder—did my mother ever gaze into a crib at me? She says quietly, “Lena, do you think there’s a—well—that the case needs to stay open?” I can almost feel her examining my face. “Because if you do, you have to say so. You must. Frank will listen to you.”

  I stare at her hand on my wrist, not speaking.

  FRANK MANAGES TO swipe the keys that Charlie’d set on the front hall table. He says that Charlie is too far gone to drive, but Charlie refuses a ride home. He lives seventeen blocks from Frank and Carole. He says if he can’t drive his cruiser, no one else is going to drive him anywhere.

  “C’mon, Charlie,” Frank says, rumbling up his garage door. “Don’t be like that. We can stop at your place on the way to Lena’s. Get over it and accept a little help.”

  “I don’t believe in help, Frank. Help is not in my handbook,” Charlie says, his voice jangly. The nightscape around us glows, the air frigid, shocked still and clear. A bird-shadow flaps overhead. “I want you to take Lena straight home. No detours. I’m going to walk home, by myself, in the cold.”

  “Charlie, don’t be a dickhead,” Frank says in an exhausted voice.

  Charlie makes a sideways lurch and points at me. “Lena, I want you to know, I’m doing this for you, baby. I’m walking. This is to prove my love. To you.”

  We’re standing outside, motionless, our breath hanging furred in the air. Carole is shivering in the open doorway in her sweater, one hand holding the door, the other rubbing her arm. “Charles,” she says, “it’s too cold for you to walk home from here. I won’t have it. It’s dark, you’ve been drinking, who knows what could happen.”

  “Ah, fuck it, Carole,” Charlie says. He totters a few steps backward off the sidewalk and into the neighbor’s snowy yard, as if he will cut across it to get home. It’s about a mile. It occurs to me that he probably will do it, ducking around fronts and backs, children’s swing sets half-buried in snow. When Charlie decides to do something, no matter how stupid, he will not be deterred.

  Charlie wobbles, then puts out his hands like a gymnast. “Hell, I’m sorry, Carole,” he says. I can hear the blur in his voice. “I didn’t mean anything by . . . anything. That was a hell of a nice dinner you made us. I hope I didn’t fuck it up too much for everyone.”

  “Charlie! Get in the damn car,” Frank shouts. “We’re all freezing out here.”

  “We are?” Charlie frowns at me as if he can’t quite recollect who I am. I open and stand inside the front passenger door of Frank’s car. “I see you’re all packed and ready to go, aren’t you, Lenny? Well, I won’t hold you all up any longer. Remember, Len, it’s all you!” Charlie says. He turns and starts cutting across the neighbor’s yard just as I’d thought, lifting his legs out of the snowbanks to plunge them back in again, heading in the general direction of his house. His leaky dress shoes punch through the snow. The thought crosses my mind that if he gets lost, it’d be no problem tracking him. He shouts over one shoulder, “Sorry . . . it’s all fuckety duckety . . .”

  The lights go on in the neighbor’s upstairs window.

  We stand there for a moment, watching Charlie trudge, till he disappears behind two houses. “Frank,” Carole says, her voice tired. “Go after that fool.”

  Frank watches for another second. He waves one hand loosely in Charlie’s direction. “Let him go. It’ll sober him up.”

  “Well, you’re the reason he’s like that in the first place,” Carole says tartly. “A bottle of brandy after all those beers. I’m calling his house in a little while and make sure he gets there.”

  “That’s good, honey. You should do that,” Frank says. He’s smiling as he slides down into his seat. “Come on, Lena, I’m turning on the heater.”

  As we pull away, the inside of Frank’s windshield flares with condensation and we have to keep swiping at it with our sleeves as we wait for the heat to kick in. Frank raps his dashboard once with the side of his fist and there’s a low hum from the fan. “Carole wants to trade this lemon in for a Lexus. Me, I just want to retire to the beach house and forget about the world of cars altogether.”

  “Yeah, but not really,” I say, but I don’t look at him. I slide my hands in under the cuffs of my down jacket: I forgot my gloves at their house. “Right?” I squint at the streetlights streaming through my side mirror. We pass an abandoned gas station, its pumps humped up under the mounds of snow like something from a Neolithic era.

  “Lena, I am seventy long years old. I’ve been doing criminal investigations for nearly fifty years. I’d say that’s plenty, wouldn’t you?” His voice falls in its usual relaxed curves. But I feel my own throat tighten. I don’t like to think about endings.

  “Retirement would be a good thing for me,” he says, his voice instructional. “Carole and I would be able to travel a little, see our grandkids—great-grandkids. Damn, that’s old.”

  I try to focus on what he’s saying. But the fan under the dashboard seems to grow louder and everything beyond the windows is wrapped in a gauze of snow and mist. Instead I close my eyes and flash on Charlie’s long walk home, imagine the tight rows of houses, icicles sharp as teeth. Charlie said there was a small lake behind the house where he grew up; it was too small to be named. But he swam in it through the humid Jersey summers, cutting through its silver surface. I wonder if his walk home tonight through the backyards reminds him of his lake. For a moment, I miss Charlie keenly.

  I manage to say, “I don’t like things to change that much.”

  “Oh. Oh yeah. I know about that. Change is hard, always. I don’t know if you can really get away from it so much, though. It’s probably not such a bad idea, though, in theory. It means that new things can start to happen.”

  “I guess,” I mutter.

  “I won’t always be here. You have to realize that. And you’ll be fine without me.”

  “Shut up, Frank,” I say, trying to laugh but surprised by the angry twang in my voice. I look back out the window.

  We drive a few more blocks in silence, the streets changing from neighborhoods to city, the bare trees shrinking away the harder lines of the city. I see a veil of new snow twinkling in the edges of the sky.

  Frank pulls up to a stoplight at the corner of James and Burnet and we watch the hanging light rock, the wind picking up. There’re no cars out on the roads, but we wait for the light to change. “Lena, come on, girl. I’m not trying to upset you.”

  “Frank,” I blurt. “I don’t think the Cogan case is resolved.”

  He stares at me, blinks. Then he says softly, “I know it’s a terrible thing—really a tragic loss. And we will help each of those parents with testimony against the manu—”

  “No, no.” I’m shaking my head. “I don’t think it was accidental.”

  He tips his head forward, to the steering wheel, then puts the car into park. “Go ahead. Tell me.”

  “Well,” I lean back against the seat and stare at the ceiling of the car. “I’ve been thinking—we don’t know how the parents got those blankets.”

  He looks impatient. “Presumably they bought them, from the store.”

  “But I still haven’t seen anything about that in the statements.”

  Frank groans, then says, “Fine, we can double-check the notes, but believe me, these people have been interviewed within an inch of their lives. What else you got?”

  I shrug and look out the window. “It feels like we’re rushing, trying to wrap everything up.”

  Frank doesn’t laugh, but he does put the car back into drive. “Lena, I think that makes sense, but you have to remember sometimes there’s a difference between when a case is over and when it feels over.”

  I press myself in against my seat. “I know, I know,” I say, almost to myself.

  We go two blocks and slow for another light. The intersection is a huge swath of black ice and, as the l
ight changes, Frank taps the accelerator and the wheels spin, then catch, and the car shoots forward. When Frank tries to brake, we start skidding, the car shimmies, then fishtails, spinning lazily in the wrong direction, and a pair of oncoming headlights appear. We spin, the windows flashing with the lights. “Whoa!” Frank shouts. A gasp catches in my throat; I grab his arm. And then the big Chrysler magically rights itself by the curb, the taillights from the other car barely visible in the rearview mirrors.

  “Whooo!” Frank laughs weakly and pats my hand. “Lee, you okay?”

  I nod and release his arm but don’t say anything, waiting for the pressure on my heart to subside. “Maybe too much drama for one night, huh?” he asks. Frank breathes heavily through his nose and pulls away from the curb. We take the next five blocks at a crawl. Just before we reach my building, he says, “Listen, Lena, I’ve gotta move you on to new cases. Take a couple more days if it’ll make you feel better. You can study the whole case file. But do it quietly—okay? It’s a—a sensitive time around the office.”

  “Sensitive how?”

  He glances at me, inhales, then says, “Margo is trying to get you fired.”

  I laugh once, abruptly, like a cough. “Margo? No. How could Margo—”

  “Margo is sleeping with Rob Cummings.”

  Rob Cummings is Frank’s boss, head of the Evidence Collection unit, a police captain, so he has authority over both the sworn personnel and civilians. He’s in his late fifties, one of the old guard, from the days when the PD had their own lab, before they had to join up with the sheriff’s and county labs and they started the switch to civilian technicians. I recall the times I’d see him in or just exiting our office over the past few months. I think about the drowsy phone conversations that Margo seems to be constantly having, lolling around on her desk, murmuring on her cell down in the break room. And how Margo’s personality has altered recently—how she’s withdrawn from the rest of us, turned moody and sour. Stuff that I thought came from worrying about money. I don’t bother pointing out that Rob Cummings is married. I’ve barely spoken to him myself. He moves through the corridors of the Lab as remote as a chess piece, notable mainly for his attempt to require business attire in the Lab in place of chinos and jeans. Lately, Margo has taken to wearing heels and narrow skirts.