The Twenty-Year Death

by Ariel S. Winter

  I’d felt guiltier and guiltier as she spoke until she went and ruined it with that last bit about my books. Why’d she have to do that? I wasn’t my books. I wasn’t even the person I was when I wrote those books.

  “I’ll be back,” I said. “You wait right here.”

  She nodded again, and I crossed the lobby to the elevators and hit the call button. The dial over the door began to run counterclockwise. Away from Mary, my own grief came rushing back in, and I felt my knees give way; I had to hold out my hand to lean against the wall. I had grieved before. When my parents died. When a girl I knew, an actress in Hollywood, was killed. That had torn me apart, the violence ripping her away from me. God, the same thing had almost happened to Clotilde back in France when a man had surprised her at home. I couldn’t even bear to think of that; I wouldn’t have survived if... And sure, I grieved when Quinn died. But this was different. The guilt echoed over the grief, the two trading off of one another, and it was all I could do to get on the elevator and hit the right button for our floor. I leaned against the wall inside, and let myself be carried up.

  Upstairs, I stepped out of the elevator, and turned towards our room—Vee would understand if I brought Mary up even if she didn’t like it—but ahead of me in the hall Carlton Browne stepped out of our room, stopping, stepping out of the way while looking back, and then Vee stepped out in a red dress and sunglasses. I dropped back, and managed to catch the elevator door just as it was closing. I stepped inside, hit the button for the lobby, and then jammed the button to close the doors repeatedly until the doors slid shut, and with a gentle jerk, I started down again.

  My heart was pounding. I didn’t know why exactly. I was sweating. And it dawned on me, I was afraid. I was scared to death of this gangster Browne. I didn’t know how much more my nerves could take, between Joe and Browne and Vee and Mary and now the police and even Great Aunt Alice who was no doubt still waiting for me to drop by, maybe now more than ever since Joe was gone.

  The door opened and I hurried to Mary, putting my arm around her before she could even say anything, and leading her back to the elevator. With luck we wouldn’t have to see Browne or Vee at all. But the counter for the elevator I had gotten out of was climbing, while the other counter fell, paused for a moment, and then fell again.

  I pulled Mary closer to me as the doors opened, and Browne and Vee stepped out right in front of us. Vee was hidden behind those sunglasses, which covered most of her bruise, but certainly not all of it; I couldn’t make out her expression. Browne saw me, and his lip curled in a snarl at first, but then he laughed, and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Vee, look, it’s your cousin.” He looked at Mary. “With his very lovely young friend. You making this girl cry, cousin?”

  Vee took his arm before I could say anything. “Carlton, please. You promised.”

  “I’m just saying hi,” he said back at her. He gave Mary another hungry look. “You do okay for yourself, bud.” He looked back at Vee to see how she was taking this, and laughed again, a mean laugh. Then he gave my shoulder a painful squeeze, and walked past us, Vee trailing him. She didn’t even look at me, which was good.

  I ushered Mary into the elevator. I exhaled. I had been holding my breath, it turned out, and I felt lightheaded. The doors closed, we started our ascent, and all of a sudden I felt as though I were going to cry.

  I must have looked it, because Mary put her hand to my face. “I’m so thoughtless, doing all of the crying.”

  I pulled my face away from her, and shook my head with my lips pressed tight, holding in my tears. I would have them bring me up a bottle of whiskey, damn sobriety, my son had just died.

  She drew her hand away, uncertain of herself, and then the elevator door opened. I led her down the hall to Vee’s and my room. We went in, and I guided her to the couch, where I sat her down. “Wait,” I said.

  I went to the door and put out the Do Not Disturb sign, and then I went into the bedroom where the bed was still unmade—had Vee and Carlton only just gotten out of it; I pushed the thought away—I went into the bathroom, ran the tap until the water ran cold, filled the glass and brought it back to her. I handed it down, standing over her while she drank, like a parent tending to a sick child. When she’d finished, she handed it back to me, looking up at me with timid eyes, and I set it on a glass coaster on the coffee table.

  She turned to her clasp bag, which I hadn’t even noticed until then, and then stopped and looked up, and said, “Is it all right if I smoke?”

  “Of course,” I said. “You want a drink too?” I picked up the telephone receiver.

  She shook her head, got out a cigarette packet, pulling the box of matches she had stuffed in the cellophane wrapper and then shaking out a cigarette and placing it between her lips.

  The desk picked up. “Could you send up a bottle of whiskey? Any kind is fine. Thanks.” They’d probably send me the most expensive bottle in the place, all hotels are chiselers, but that was all right with me. If Vee and Browne were all patched up, then the whiskey was on Carlton. I’d like a good whiskey. And just the thought of the alcohol coming on up relaxed me.

  Mary blew out a stream of smoke. “I was so happy last night when you answered the phone at Joe’s and said you’d made it up.”

  I nodded, trying to remember if I had said that.

  “Why had you fought? Joe never wanted to talk about it. It just made him angry, so I tried to not bring it up.”

  “Why are you here instead of with your parents? With some stranger.”

  “You’re not a stranger. You’re Joe’s father.”

  “But I am a stranger. You don’t know me from anyone else. And I could be just as horrible as Joe thought, couldn’t I? Sure I could. You don’t know. So why are you here instead of with your folks?”

  “I told you I couldn’t stand to be with them right now.” Her voice was flat, and she took a jerky drag off her cigarette.

  “But why?”

  “I just—They were on my nerves. I—Oh, do we have to talk about them?”

  “Yeah, well I guess that’s the same reason Joe hated me.”

  “He didn’t hate you.”

  “Sure he did. Did it hurt? Of course it did. But I had to get used to it. I had to like it.”

  “But you made it up last night,” she said, and pulled on her cigarette for punctuation.

  “Right. Of course, we made it up last night,” I said. Well, we had certainly ended it, whatever it was.

  She stared straight ahead, smoking. “He was the most caring boy I ever met.” She shook her head. “He had a temper. He’d get mad real fast, but he never got mad at me. For me, he was more defensive than I was for myself.”

  I listened, and the pit in my stomach grew, every word pulling my throat along after it.

  “He was so faithful. He lived for his mother. She could do no wrong. She was the ideal everyone had to live up to. And for some reason he thought I did. When he talked to me, when he would tell me he loved me, it was almost like he was describing someone else, someone I didn’t know. It was like he was making me up, and I liked who that girl was. I wanted to be that girl.”

  I jiggled my knee, and couldn’t get it to stop. She was conjuring him now, someone I had never known, and it was making me sick.

  “He wrote poetry. He’d probably be angry at me for telling you that. He didn’t want anyone to know. He assured me it was okay, because it wasn’t fiction, he was so afraid of being at all like you. He never drank, too.”

  There was a knock at the door. I went for it, relieved at the interruption. A bellboy stood there with my whiskey, a brand I didn’t recognize. I found a quarter in my pocket and gave him his tip. He was a professional, and made no indication as to what he thought of the amount.

  I brought the bottle of whiskey back to the couch and pulled the glass I had served her water in closer to me. “It’s the only glass,” I said by way of explanation as I twisted off the top, and sloshed out a good dose of al
cohol. I held it out to her, but she just shook her head, blowing out smoke, her cigarette more than halfway gone, so I downed the whole thing in one burning go. It sat heavily in my stomach, but it warmed me up, and I felt easier immediately. I refilled the glass, and sat back, taking more reasonable sips. If Mary hadn’t been there, I probably wouldn’t have bothered pouring it into a glass.

  “Does it stop?” she said.

  “No. But you think about it less. And the edge gets dulled.”

  She shook her head. “I’m so tired.”

  I sighed, and drank.

  She looked at me. “So very tired.” Her face was completely drained of color.

  I drank some more. “You should sleep then,” I said.

  She ground out the stub of her cigarette in the ashtray on the table beside her. “No...”

  I stood up, indicating the couch. “Come, lie down. Sleep. You’ll feel better.”

  “I couldn’t sleep last night I was so worried.” There was a break in her voice, the tears about to come again. “He... We were going to be married.” And a sob escaped her.

  I felt as though I had been stabbed. The searing pain of the night before when Joe stabbed me with the ice pick flashed through my chest even as the pain in my arm was nothing more than a soreness now. I could have killed myself right then. All the guilt I’d ever felt over the years had never been like this. I thought of the policemen’s suspicions this morning—but had they been suspicious? was it just in my mind?—and I wanted to come out and say it. To say that I had killed him. That I should be punished. But of course I didn’t. And I wouldn’t. I was too much of a coward.

  I picked up the bottle, poured myself a glass, and tossed that one back too, pouring the next one while still swallowing. It was helping calm me at least. “Lie down,” I said.

  “No,” Mary said, while lying down anyway.

  I brought her a blanket from the closet, and draped it over her.

  She reached out with a hand and pulled it closer to her chin, rocking once back and forth. “You look so much like him,” she said, looking up at me.

  I smiled. “Thank you.”

  “How am I going to live?”

  I could ask myself the same thing. But I said, “Close your eyes.”

  She did, and she was asleep within moments. I sat and drank and made an active effort to think of nothing but pouring the liquid from one container to another and then into me. It was a lucky break, Carlton seeing me with Mary and thinking she was a girlfriend. I don’t know if Vee knew who Mary really was or not, but I hoped if she was angry, she was at least a little relieved at being in the clear with Browne. That wouldn’t help her face, she would have told me, and I wouldn’t have had anything to say to that, but it was something.

  I thought of Mandy. She was the girlfriend in Hollywood who had gotten killed. We’d been...dating, we’ll call it, for a few months when it happened. We fought all the time we weren’t in bed, although I couldn’t tell you what we fought about. And it had Clotilde out of sorts with me too since I was never too good at keeping anything secret. (Only I’d have to keep this secret, Joe, this one thing.) Then Mandy was murdered by some madman they never even found, and I discovered her body all cut to ribbons, blood everywhere. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen, and I’d dreamt about it a long time after. Was this going to be like that?

  Clunk—he went down—clunk—he went down—clunk.

  Of course it would.

  I poured another drink, and drank it down. My stomach began to feel full, but I was calm, able to think on it and stay calm. Mary slept silently on the couch. She slept with such trust, I wanted to get her up and get her out of there, to tell her to stay far away from me, that I was no good, she didn’t need to know why, but Joe was right, I was a terrible person, and she should keep away.

  It hit me that Joe had been visiting when Mandy was killed. No, wait, that couldn’t be, because I’d really gone on a drinking binge after that, enough so I remembered it. And that was when Clotilde...when she first went to the hospital. So Joe hadn’t been there. But he’d met Mandy. I’d practically handed him off to her like she was a babysitter. And Quinn let me have him at all. I was no good even then. Yeah, he had been right to hate me. Here’s your kid. Why don’t you leave him with your mistress so you don’t have to stop getting drunk? I could have killed him any number of times, I was so irresponsible. But he had been the one to hit me at his high school graduation. Hell, he had stabbed me last night. But...

  Clunk—he went down—clunk—he went down—clunk.

  I needed to do something. The whiskey was good, and it helped, but I needed to do something. I couldn’t just sit there thinking about it, not if I didn’t want to go crazy. Mary slept on. Should I leave her? Where should I go?

  And I don’t know why it came to me. You probably won’t believe it if you try. But I thought, I should write something. I should do some writing. I hadn’t done that in who knows how long. That was what I needed.

  I retrieved the pad, and this time I found a pencil in the back of the desk drawer. It had gotten lodged in a small space between the back of the drawer and its bottom, so it hadn’t rolled around when I opened the drawer the day before. I took the pad and the pencil back to the easy chair I had been sitting on. I balanced the glass of whiskey on the armrest, and I sat staring at the page.

  Clunk—he went down—clunk—he went down—clunk.

  And I started writing, whatever came into my head. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I filled up most of that pad, and I finished the bottle of whiskey. I wrote, but don’t ask me what I wrote, because I don’t know. It probably didn’t make any sense, but I wrote it all down anyway, and I think there was something about Joe in there, and I don’t know what else.

  Mary slept, and I wrote, and Joe was dead.

  My hand started to cramp and I wore out the pencil’s lead and had to find another, which took me a few minutes, but then I found one just under the edge of the couch, where it must have rolled off the telephone stand. But I filled up pages like I hadn’t been able to in years, just pouring it all out, the anger at being washed up, the hate for the people who had done it to me, the fear for Clotilde, and all the goddamn YMCA rooms, and living with a whore, and just all of it, all of the meanness that had settled inside of me since Clotilde went away, hell, maybe before then, maybe from when Quinn and I started fighting. Yeah, I’d always gotten a raw deal, and I was too pathetic to do anything about it, and I hated myself for that. I hated myself and every goddamn one else, every last one of them.

  12.

  It was only when I woke up that I knew I had fallen asleep. Someone was moving in the bedroom, and the sound of drawers opening and slamming shut had seeped into my dream and woken me. My watch said two o’clock. Mary was gone. She had draped over my legs the same blanket that I had draped over her that morning. The pad I had been writing on was still in my lap under the blanket, but the pencil was gone.

  I listened to the hurried sounds in the other room for another minute, working up the energy to get up. I knew it was Vee and I had a pretty good idea of what she was doing and I wasn’t ready to deal with it just yet, to deal with her after last night. My shoulders and back ached from sleeping in a chair for too long, and when I stood up, everything went black for a moment and I thought I’d lose my balance, but the black resolved itself to white patches, and then the room came back into focus.

  I stepped over to the entryway into the bedroom. Vee was stuffing things into a suitcase with bitter violence. “Vee,” I said, my voice coming out in a croak.

  She yelped, and brought her hand to her chest. “Jesus H. Christmas, Shem, you scared the bejeezus out of me. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “What are you doing?”

  She went back to it. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Where are you going?”

  She stormed around the bed to the vanity where she started collecting her makeup and perfume. “Carlton wa
nts me upstairs in his suite. He wants to keep an eye on me, no thanks to you.”

  The makeup was zipped up in a carrying case and brought over to the suitcase on the bed.

  “You better start packing too,” she said. “You’re thrown out.”

  My lingering exhaustion deepened, my shoulders sagging. “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “I’m lucky he hasn’t killed me,” she said, pulling some shirts on hangers out from the armoire. “I just wish he’d send me home. I’m not too keen on sticking around.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?” I said again.

  She looked up at me. “Quit whining! You start whining, I’m going to beat your head in myself, getting me mixed up in a murder, getting me in hot water with Carlton...” She was so angry, she didn’t even know how to finish. She stuffed shoes into the suitcase, forcing them into a corner on top of some clothes. “I don’t know why I even helped you,” she said, and paused in her packing, sneering at the suitcase. “I’d say something about love, if I didn’t know that was just a crock.”

  I felt sick to my stomach, or I had heartburn, or both, and I was suddenly very hot and clammy.

  “Why aren’t you packing!” she yelled. “Start packing. You’ve got to be out of here toot sweet.”

  “I feel sick,” I said. How had I looked with loving calm on this no-good woman only that morning as she slept?

  “What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” She was trying to close the suitcase, leaning on it with all of her weight.

  I retrieved my duffel, my mind dead as I did it. In the mirror on the front of the bathroom door I looked like I had a hangover and had slept in my clothes, which was how I should have looked, and it wasn’t any great surprise, I’d looked that way plenty of times before.

  “Vee,” I started, but she cut me off.

  “Don’t say ‘I love you,’ I just told you love’s a crock, and only foolish little girls believe any different, and I’m not a foolish little girl, so you can just hold any sentiment, it’s not going to buy anything with me.” She crossed her arms over her breasts, and her face grew narrow. “Besides, you love Chloë, and you always have and always will, calling every day to check on her, begging me to take you across the country so you can pay for her precious hospital. You sponger, you bastard, don’t you dare say anything to me.”