Buffalo Noir

by Ed Park

  Cheryl has scrawled the word in the corner of my latest draft.

  That’s one word for it. When there’s no other option, what else do you have?

  Cheryl would no doubt say “the truth.”

  The truth is that it’s been almost a year since the rest of the world noticed Ed disappeared. What they don’t know is that he took off long before that.

  But no one believes me.

  Why would anyone believe a wife who claims that, one day, her husband went to work on his book in his study. And he, quite simply, never came out?

  Dr. Kirkbride once had the audacity to ask whether I was “aware” that getting “lost in a book,” as she put it, is “just an expression.”

  To some questions there are no answers.

  I’ve told her: I did not kill Ed. I have no idea where he is. I’ve told the police the same thing. I’ve explained to anyone who would listen: I have no idea what Ed was writing. Nor why. I’ve even admitted that every time I write my husband’s name now—every time I try to account for our life and his disappearance—Ed seems to be standing behind me. Looking over my shoulder. His hot breath raising the hairs of my neck.

  Right now I feel him. He wants me to stop.

  Ed has never left me at all.

  * * *

  The day my husband disappeared began much like any other. It was a school day. Ed was already hard at work on his book—he’d taken to sleeping on the couch in his study in order to, as he put it, “expedite his memory.” So it was left to me to wake up our son, push him into the bathroom, then persuade Bobby to brush his teeth, wash his face, and wrestle his cowlick in place—all the while bracing the baby with my tender left tennis elbow. Then, down to the kitchen the three of us went for breakfast, only twenty minutes to spare before the school bus was due to take Bobby to Harris Hill Elementary. With the exception of Ed’s growing remoteness (which at that time struck me as not so very different from the absences of other fathers who left for work before their children woke), our family that morning could have been any other in our neighborhood. The sun streamed in the windows. The smell of lawn pesticides lingered above the dew in the air. The baby drooled on a toy in her playpen. It was peaceful. It was boring. I’m sure I felt restless.

  Now I miss those days the way an amputee misses a limb.

  As usual, Bobby was running late, his book bag was only half packed, and he was wearing two different socks. But he was in a good mood. Ed roared at him from behind his office door as Bobby rocketed down the hallway.

  Naturally, my son found it amusing.

  “He’s p.o.’d,” Bobby grinned as he climbed into his chair.

  It was one of Ed’s pet phrases, one of those I’d always disliked. It made Ed sound peevish, like an old lady fussing over a pile of dog crap steaming on her front lawn. Maybe that’s why when Bobby said it he made me smile—a boy channeling a father who was (in turn) impersonating a crabby octogenarian. In Bobby’s squeaky adolescent pitch, I could hear Ed’s voice. But because it was Bobby, not Ed, I’d laugh.

  I put my hand over my smile (I didn’t want to encourage him), as Bobby went to explain that his friend/nemesis Jimmy (it was hard to keep track) had been making trouble for him on the bus. But as syrup dripped from his chin, and he smacked his lips contentedly, I set my fears aside. There was nothing to worry about. He was high-strung and, like a monkey, tight and lean. Bobby could fend for himself, even if his heart was as impressionable as clay.

  “Talk to your father,” I advised, then flipped a pancake. A moment later, I slid it onto his plate.

  Naturally, I knew Ed wouldn’t answer a knock on his door. He’d stopped answering knocks a month before. Recently, he rarely showed up for dinner. I should have been more concerned. But, at the time, his absence was a relief.

  I no longer had to negotiate his moods.

  * * *

  Bobby could have used Ed’s help. My son was long-limbed and fast, but Jimmy Hammond—a bloated-face boy whose sweat smelled like onions—was fond of roughing kids up. Bully was in his future, everyone knew it. Everyone, that is, but his mother, Regina. A birdlike woman who held her shoulders like wings, she chirped at parties about her son’s wit, while Jimmy’s wiry, absentminded father looked on in disbelief. How Regina gave birth to a brute like Jimmy is one of the mysteries of genetics . . . unless you believed a popular neighborhood rumor that Jimmy’s egg rolled from an illegitimate nest. The current candidate was a strapping pool boy who stopped by Regina’s home every Thursday while her husband was off at work.

  Back then, I defended her. How young I once was.

  “It’s nice to see an independent woman get what she wants,” I said, backing myself against Ed’s crotch, knocking him off balance. He laughed, cuffed me away.

  “Maybe later,” he said.

  As usual, later never came.

  Now I wonder: was that the instant Regina appeared on his radar? Would this story have been completely different if I’d just kept my thoughts, my soft-boiled ass, to myself?

  Of course, I wouldn’t have had to look so hard for the piranha hiding within the school of sharks if Ed hadn’t moved us north of the city to Clarence, to a so-called gateway development zone—an experimental neighborhood built by one of his clients, wedged between the muscular outer suburbs and the svelte inner exurbs, designed to appeal (so the pamphlet read) to “young, upwardly mobile homeowners looking for outer space and inner peace, for self-discovery and future fortune. Mean age: 38. No. of children: 1. No. of cars. 2. No. of homes: 1.5.”

  Ed’s client had built the community on the homestead of an old barley estate. The original farmhouse itself was in good condition, and it stood as the heart of the neighborhood’s newly built vistas where the development brochure still pictures (I’m told) a “community center anchored by an organic garden, kite shop, gallery space, and day spa.” Ed whistled when he showed it to me. The new homes were a marvel, tricked out with solar panels, geothermal floors, whirlpools, saunas, and media rooms. “We’ll be at the center of all that,” he said. “Not bad for a barley farm, right?”

  True, the farmhouse was a steal. Sure, Ed was doing his wealthy client a favor. All that fresh air, meanwhile, was terrific for Bobby. But couldn’t we have foreseen the effect our new-old home would have on us? Shouldn’t we have known that moving into a farmhouse—no matter how quaintly maintained or historically fetching—surrounded by a dozen newly pointed minimansions was simply a bad idea? That our neighbors, high on the chemical outgas of new-home aroma, would begin to resent the mortality that our farmhouse—cast right in their sight line—stood for? All too soon, we’d feel under siege, all those eyes on us, just waiting for the house to be razed.

  It was all supposed to be temporary. “Just one year,” Ed assured me. After that, his client was going to pay us a reasonable markup to move out, knock the farmhouse over, and build the spa in its place. The plans were on course. And then the Clarence Historical Society got wind of the scheme. Suddenly, the farmhouse was the county’s “last emblem of pre-Fordian Agriculture and Animal Matrimonial Heritage.” A legal intervention was filed and we weren’t stuck, so much as waylaid, in a lawsuit against both Ed’s client and Erie County. One year became three. Then Ed started writing. Quit his job. And once our credit tanked, well, then we were stranded. So when Ed’s tune about the farmhouse changed, I wasn’t surprised. His new pitch was persuasive. “We’re the cheapest house in an upscale neighborhood,” he argued. “Moving?” He waved his hands about. “Why would we want to do that? When we sell we’ll make a killing. Move farther out. To the exurbs proper.” We’d be set, he went on. Two middle-class kids would finally make good.

  We wouldn’t just nail the American dream to our doormat, he explained. We’d wipe our muddy shoes on it too.

  “We’ll show them,” he said, pointing outside vaguely. At the time, I thought he meant our neighbors. The Historical Society staff. His former client. My mother.

  Ed said it more firmly the secon
d time: “We’ll show them what’s what.”

  I must have sighed, because he wrapped me up his arms. “Come on, Janey.” He was so warm then. “Let’s just see it through.”

  Ed wasn’t just a lawyer. He was a salesman. All good lawyers are.

  So I held my tongue. Dressed up our old girl of a home the way a retiree distracts from her sagging chin by plastering her cheeks with rouge. But our neighbors’ front lawns were our front lines, and all that staring wore me down. Predawn joggers and postbreakfast strollers. Loose children and lost dogs. Midnight insomniacs and early risers. It wasn’t the looking itself that troubled me. Even I look in other people’s windows. Sometimes intentionally. But our family had made a subtle move from curiosity to entertainment. We were “them.” The hothouse drama at center stage. We didn’t belong. And it became more than evident as our neighbors sat on their porches sipping cocktails and nibbling overpriced cheese that they excused their bad behavior because they believed we were conditional. “Visitors” at best. “Interlopers” at worst. We’d be gone soon, they thought. So they lurked and peeped, scrutinized our dull program of getting to work, reprimanding our children, washing dishes, paying bills. How humdrum. Still they watched. Their hot eyes fixed on the backs of our necks.

  Of all our neighbors, Regina Hammond seemed the most sincere. Which is to say, she craved sincerity the way a goldfish craves ocean—an idea out of her depth. I try to be kind to myself: How could I have known that she had her eye on Ed from the start? That she’d suck off my husband while I nursed in the next room? That by the time I’d fixed my shirt, he’d fixed his fly.

  The moral of the story is simple: the nicest neighbor behind your fence is malevolent once they walk through your gate.

  Don’t let their feet crush your grass. Stir up the brush.

  Duck your head. Turn the hasp.

  Don’t let them see your fear.

  * * *

  On the day Ed disappeared, I was focused exclusively on getting Bobby to the bus on time with a hot meal in his stomach. My movements were economical from long experience. I signed a test, flipped a pancake, made myself a cup of coffee without moving more than two feet in any direction. I even spared a moment to coo to the baby who, sitting hunched like a frog in her playpen, was happily beating a wood spoon on the rail, making the kind of insistent, percussive music only infant ears can love.

  For a mother, I was at peak performance.

  How little I once knew.

  Bobby kept talking. I washed the dishes. The cat, meanwhile, had curled up at my feet. I had hold of a plate, a pan, a carton of milk. I barely listened as Bobby rambled on about his homework—something about polar bears and mortality rates—when I began to wash the boning knife. Why it was out, I’ll never know. At the time, I’m sure I simply thought Ed had taken it out of the drawer by mistake. He knew as much about boning knives as he did about salad forks: it was all the same to him.

  My husband remains a peasant at heart. I always liked that about him.

  I soaped the knife. There was a small stain on the handle that would not come off. As anyone might, I soaped it, rinsed it again. Raising the knife high in the sunlight, I turned it around to get a better look. The light glinted. I saw my face in the blade.

  Then the knife wasn’t in my hands. And Bobby’s cat began to hiss.

  What happened at that moment isn’t so much a blur as a series of disconnected snapshots that remain bound together in my memory by virtue of my own disbelief. How, after all, could the knife have slipped from my hand with such force? Such fortuitous aim? Yet this one hadn’t just slid from my hand, but shot across the room and lodged itself in my son’s left thigh. We stared at each other. Bobby was so surprised, he didn’t cry out. Mouth agape, he simply stared at me, a wad of half-chewed pancake crammed in his left cheek, as the wound went white before the blood rushed back, welled up, began to drip between us on the floor. It was quiet. The cat stared. The baby watched. Outside, the landscapers put aside their edgers. Even the procession of morning traffic suddenly ceased its inevitable parade by our home. It wasn’t until I heard Ed’s Royal typewriter ring upstairs, in fact, that we began to move again, slowly, trying to assume the roles we’d once portrayed like the costumes I suddenly perceived they were. That’s what I learned that day: a husband can become a monster; a son, a victim; a mother, a killer—in just an instant. That’s all it takes for a new label to stick.

  We are never quite who we think we are.

  “Mom?” Bobby said. He was looking down at the knife hilt-deep in his skin, his leg like a ham hock being prepped for dinner. The knife wobbled tenderly as he panted tiny iridescent gasps. Then with a yank—I tried to stop him—he pulled the blade from his thigh.

  Bobby has always been decisive. Just like his father.

  “Stop!”

  How long did it take me to move? Ten seconds? Twelve? Too long to rush to his side—to comfort him—to grab a batter-slick towel and bind his leg in a poor tourniquet that did little to abate the flow.

  “Ed!” I’m sure I screamed. “For Christ’s sake, Ed!”

  There was no answer, and I had no time to coddle my reclusive husband from the half-light of his lair.

  “Let’s go,” I said. Bobby stared at me blankly. “Your dad will meet us at the hospital.”

  What else did I say? I can’t recall. I know I kept a steady rap going to keep us focused as I moved him from the chair toward the car, then ran back for the baby. “Take my hand,” I’m sure I told him as I pulled him upright. “That’s good. Your arm on my waist. Now, all your weight on me.” Finally we were hobbling toward the door. “That’s just fine. You’re doing great. Look how brave you are.”

  He was observing me with a singleness of attention that I hadn’t felt since he was a tiny wrinkled pup curled in the crook of my arm.

  “Mom?”

  We were joined at the hip as we made our way to the car, but we were now also connected in a more profound fashion, as though the knife that had broken his skin had also penetrated other less permeable barriers—the ones between thoughts, between mother and son, between a child and himself.

  “Mom,” he was asking, “what happened there? Why did you hurt me, Mom? Did I do something wrong? Mom, why isn’t Dad coming with us?”

  In her car seat behind him, the baby burped, oblivious to the wreckage of her brother’s leg or the pain in my lungs. I could not breathe. I could not answer even one of Bobby’s questions.

  After that, we never saw Ed again.

  * * *

  Before me, Dr. Kirkbride is rapt. Her hair is blond and looks as crisp as a dried copse of cuttleweed. The urge to touch it is hard to resist.

  It’s not unusual for survivors of emotional violence to develop obstructive, often dangerous behaviors that inhibit, or preclude, emotional and physical intimacy, she says, her voice neutral, as she tilts her head. Such patterns tend to get worse with age. She pauses. Were they a nuisance to your marriage?

  She asks the question so politely, I’m nearly disarmed. I fail to realize, for a moment, that she’s referring to me, not Ed. But I pinch myself—hard—no doubt adding another bruise to my thighs.

  “We had some troubles.”

  It’s the nature of her occupation that mildly gloomy disclosures make her happy. A soothing, birdlike sound warbles in the back of her throat. Then, just as I think it’s time to go—as I begin to gather my paper-thin housecoat and rise from my chair—she shoots off a final question, as though it’s suddenly occurred to her.

  Was Ed a good father?

  She’s smiling. She knows she’s caught me off guard. Just as she intended.

  “Of course. Ed loved his children.”

  My tone isn’t defensive. But my qualifier undermines all my hard work. Every “I’m sure,” “no doubt,” and “of course,” she’s told me, augments uncertainty rather than diminishing it. The more convinced I seem, in short, the more skeptical she becomes. And she doesn’t hide it.

  O
n her wall, beneath her diplomas, Cheryl has hung a print of the Richardson Complex when it first opened: when its sandstone walls were surrounded by endless lawns and gardens and its tall windows weren’t covered with grime.

  When all the patients were bathed in light.

  “What did they call your work back then?” I ask. “A moral treatment plan?”

  Cheryl can’t help looking pleased.

  You know about my grandfather?

  I shrug. During our mandated “library encounter time,” I had skimmed a book about the building’s design, and the first Dr. Kirkbride’s—her grandfather’s—revolutionary patient care “strategy.”

  “Do you think it works?”

  She considers my question carefully. Do you?

  I sigh. She is single-minded. “I did not kill Ed.”

  We stare at each other, like parents fighting when their children aren’t far enough out of earshot. Dr. Kirkbride can project an uncanny silence when she chooses. I can’t even hear her breathe.

  As for me, the stress makes my eczema flare—my elbows start to itch, then the back of my neck. Even the inflamed patch on my left hip.

  She watches me squirm. A look, like sadness, in her eyes. There’s no getting through to her.

  Then our time is up, the session breaks. Out in the hall once again, an orderly at my side, I give in. By the time we negotiate our way down the curved hallway back to the female ward, my fingernails are wet with shredded skin and blood.

  The orderly doesn’t say a word. He just hands me a bandage. Then he’s gone down the hall, the rubber soles of his orthopedic shoes squeaking softly on the old tiles. The sound is intolerable. It is comforting.

  I am torn in so many ways.

  * * *

  Occasionally Regina calls on me. She waits in the visitors’ center, legs neatly crossed at her ankles.

  A year hasn’t changed her. Two years haven’t changed her.

  I want to reach out and slap her face.

  Dr. Kirkbride has encouraged these meetings. She’s advised me to meet with my former neighbor, to reconcile (as she puts it) your memories. If not your stories.