Zelly read the article in the paper twice. In the other room the baby was sleeping. While she read Zelly unconsciously pulled at her bottom lip with her teeth. Pat kept telling her to try to stop but she couldn’t; it was just nerves. Cheryl Nassent had been nineteen years old. She was found late last night on the West Side Highway by a passing motorist. Naked, her throat slashed. The police didn’t think she’d died far from there. She was more poignant in life to Zelly than the others had been in death: there was something in the newspaper picture of Cheryl that reminded Zelly of herself, a certain shy bravado behind the there’s-a-camera-pointed-at-me smile.
Cheryl had been out on the town with a bunch of friends. Everybody was high and it was such a night, seventy degrees at ten o’clock, the last week of April. Zelly had wanted to go out last night but her mother wasn’t feeling well so she couldn’t baby-sit, and then Pat had to work late anyway. He did electrical work, wiring. Wyche Electric. He didn’t have a storefront yet, just the van and his tools, but he’d always wanted to start his own business and he could fix anything electrical; he could make wires sing. He’d begun the business back in November, about the same time the baby was born. Zelly was terribly proud of him, making a go of it by himself, thirty-one years old and already making it with his own business. Still, she was getting tired of being so much alone.
Cheryl had gotten separated from the others somehow, going from one bar to another, everybody drunk and laughing all over the street. That was in the middle of the Village, at MacDougal and Bleecker, where all the tourists and the people from the boroughs went. Nobody knew how Cheryl got over to the West Village. Zelly thought that probably the police knew she hadn’t been carried far after she died because of the way the blood settled. Pat thought she was morbid.
The baby stirred in her crib in the other room. Zelly didn’t hear it but she felt it. In a minute the baby would start to cry. Zelly always knew, when the baby was still in her womb and it didn’t move for a while she could make it move by thinking about it. Mary. Six months old now.
Zelly looked up from the paper. Her eyes were crystal blue, and her mouth was wide. She looked about eighteen. She looked every moment as though she were about to smile.
“Found naked at the side of the West Side Highway.” Zelly could remember having stopped to talk to Rosalie Howard once, on the street outside Bel Gusto, where she went to buy cappuccino muffins, which she ate surreptitiously while Mary was napping. Zelly and Rosalie had talked about losing weight, about how hard it was to lose what you gained when you got pregnant. Rosalie had had a very big baby boy, and they’d talked about that, how much bigger the boys are and how much more they eat; Rosalie’s boy was meaty, he looked like a tiny sumo wrestler. And Rosalie had told her about the mothers’ group she wanted to start, just four or five neighborhood mothers and their babies getting together once or twice a week. “You lose touch, you know?” Rosalie’d said. “You start thinking that nobody else has ever had your problems.” And Zelly had nodded a vigorous assent.
After that Zelly and Rosalie had smiled at each other whenever they met, pushing their strollers up and down Washington Street in the afternoon. Zelly always meant to stop and get to know her better. Now she was dead.
Mary was crying. Pat might come home for lunch; he almost never did but he might. And Zelly liked to have the house nice for him. He worked so hard. If she started now she could vacuum the living room and wipe down the kitchen and make a couple of sandwiches before lunchtime. She looked at Cheryl Nassent’s smile and folded the paper and went to tend her baby.
3
John Nassent was pulling himself back together. He didn’t really remember the funeral, and so far he hadn’t gone back to see the grave. Two weeks. Cheryl was buried in Calvary Cemetery, an enormous city of the dead that stretched for half a mile on either side of the Long Island Expressway.
John kept expecting Cheryl to come down the stairs for breakfast in the mornings. His wife was gone, and now Cheryl was gone. John had been married for eight months. Molly hadn’t liked Cheryl. She hadn’t liked the way John and Cheryl could sit silently, for hours, reading or watching television or just looking out at the yard from the back porch; she had not been brought up in silence. John had no defense against her accusations that he and Cheryl seemed to communicate without words and to need nothing but each other’s company. Molly said it made her feel like the other woman.
But John and Cheryl lived deep below the surface, where if no light fell at least there was the assurance that no danger could penetrate either.
John had risen to the surface once, to love Molly, and then his silence had quenched her flame. She could not follow him, and she could not free him. He too had the capacity to burn, and burn ferociously, but so far neither love nor rage had much troubled his depths. When Molly left he had signed everything, paid for the lawyers, wished her well. He had not questioned her and he had not fought for her. But now his sister had been raped and murdered.
John came by his reticence by blood. When Cheryl was killed he could not believe it—literally could not—because it had already happened. When he was nine years old his mother had been found broken across the hood of a white Chevy Impala. She had been raped and then thrown off the roof of the twenty-four-story building where they lived in Fresh Meadows, Queens. Two boys did it, seventeen, eighteen years old. They dragged her up to the roof as she got in the elevator and nobody heard. John’s father kept expecting her to come back from the movies around eleven. At eleven twenty-five the whole south side of the building heard a thud. John’s family lived on the north side, on the seventh floor. They didn’t hear the thud, and they didn’t hear the screaming either. The papers made sure they found out about the screaming.
Cheryl had been six months old. She didn’t remember her mother at all. She didn’t remember the trial. How the two boys had planned the crime, everything but the victim, for months. How they waited at the elevator. How they dragged her up the last flight of steps, where the door to the roof was never locked, how for twenty-five minutes they raped her, how one of them had balked at the last minute at throwing her over the edge and the other one had said, “The bitch is history, man, don’t you want to hear it when she goes?”
John’s father had heard it for the rest of his life. After the murder the family had moved a few miles away, to Bayside. They never spoke about his mother; his father almost never spoke at all. It was as though what he was listening to in his head were more compelling than any momentary reality. And John never knew, all his life he would wonder, was his father listening for the turn of the key in the door or was he listening for screams?
John’s father had died a year ago. Liver cancer. John didn’t know whether to be sad or happy. John knew that as a last tribute to his wife his father wanted a terrible death, but he had made sure his father was denied that. The last thing his father said was, “I won’t have to listen to it anymore,” but he was on morphine then and didn’t know what he was saying. At the funeral neither John nor Cheryl had cried.
One night when John was seventeen a group of his friends went to somebody’s apartment, the parents weren’t home, and it was in the building in Fresh Meadows. On the nineteenth floor. After they’d been there awhile somebody said, hey, it’s a nice night, let’s go up on the roof. We can look at the stars. And John walked up the staircase where the rape and murder couldn’t have happened but it did happen.
It was easy to get up to the roof. Nobody had ever locked the door. That hurt John, that nobody ever bothered to make sure the roof door was locked even after his mother was raped and murdered up there.
Everybody was high, and nobody knew about his mother. John wished he could remember her better. He looked around the roof under the crescent moon; he wondered which corner it had happened in. There were no stars. For some reason he was sure it must have happened in a corner. He drank a lot of beer. The moon got farther and farther away. He and his friends sat leaning against the low brick wall behin
d the door—was it here? If it were daylight would he see the faint stains of blood that eight years of weather had failed to erase? He drank and drank. He had read once when he was a little kid that the vibration of a sound never stops unless something stops it. If you bang on the side of a lamppost that hollow sound it makes will go on and on forever unless you lay your hand against the cold metal and kill the sound. John had always imagined that the sound just moved farther and farther out into space, forever. Were his mother’s screams still echoing somewhere out in infinite space, in the dark, alone? What could he grasp to stop them?
The crescent moon was moving when John decided to take a walk along the edge of the wall. Dirty white cement, about a foot wide. He looked at the moon while he walked. Everybody thought it was hilarious. He spread out his arms and thought about flying. What would it feel like to fly? What had it felt like to fall? He used his arms as rudders against the sticky summer-night air, and he leaned way out over the edge of the wall. Like a bird flying. It was such a long way, there were toy cars and toy trees and a make-believe sidewalk down there. There was even a white car. He thought that if he fell the act of falling would be frozen forever, he would be falling forever, like a sound, above the toy trees and the toy cars and the make-believe sidewalk.
His girlfriend grabbed his ankle. He almost did fall then, he really thought he was going to fall. He never forgave himself the look on her face. He never told Cheryl.
Cheryl had grown up quiet in that quiet house. She was so afraid of worrying her father that she barely let herself make friends; she was always in by nine. Cheryl was plain, the kind of plain that becomes beautiful once you fall in love with it, but nobody had ever fallen in love with it. Cheryl went to school, she came home. She volunteered with child burn victims once a week. She went to the movies alone. She saw Raiders of the Lost Ark eighteen times when it came out. John thought that that’s what she thought she was, or hoped she could be: the professor who took off her glasses and changed her hat and all kinds of wonderful, exciting things would happen to her.
In the last year she’d gotten a low-level job at a travel agency and made some friends, loud people, the harmless kind of wild. She was thinking about joining the Peace Corps. Of taking all her love and dedication and quiet efficiency and capacity for wildness somewhere nobody knew her and just inventing herself there. John was proud of her, but he told her that he didn’t want to think of how much he was going to miss her when she was gone.
He had helped his father change her diapers after his mother died. His father didn’t know how to do it. John knew how; he had watched his mother. Cheryl laughed when he tickled her belly button when the diaper was off. She was never going to take off her glasses now, and no one was ever going to run his fingers through her long, thick, honey-blond hair.
John stood in a narrow place, above a great abyss. His father had fallen. John could fall or he could fight. His mind was very clear as he sat at the kitchen table looking out at the crab-apple trees in the backyard. His father had fallen. He would not fall. But to keep his balance he had to have a goal. He had to have something to grasp. If he didn’t, he would hear Cheryl’s voice until the day he died.
He would find the man who raped and murdered his sister. He would look into his face. He would silence forever the sounds that lingered behind that man’s eyes, because only he had heard them, and only his death would silence them forever.
4
They were going to have company tonight. They had company so seldom, what with Pat’s hours now, and the baby. Gail and Philip, friends of Zelly’s from high school, and Greg and Lizzie; Pat and Greg had once been partners in a moving business, Two Men W/Van.
It was Zelly’s idea to have them over, no reason except the May weather. She felt awfully isolated sometimes, with only the baby and the newspapers for company. And her mother. Zelly had nine brothers and sisters but they were scattered across the country and she’d been out of touch with most of them since the baby. That was her litany. Nothing was the same since the baby. Even her husband. He didn’t touch her as often—but she tried not to think about that. He was so nice otherwise. And of course he was working so hard. That was another part of the litany: he was working so hard for her and the baby. Even in the honeymoon of their love they had not stayed awake till dawn; it didn’t occur to her now to make love in the middle of the night when he came home. She even felt a small conventional guilt about making love at all with the baby in the house, and although she’d never said anything she sensed Pat knew.
But now his neglect of her was like a small, unidentified lump in her breast: she didn’t know if it was going to get better or if it was malignant. Or if there could be a simple surgical procedure and then the lump would be gone.
She and Pat were cutting vegetables in the kitchen. Pat was good that way, he’d help out if you asked him to. Not if you didn’t ask, but she didn’t expect that. Nobody expected that. Zelly was trying a recipe from Gourmet magazine. Her mother had gotten a sample copy in the mail, and Zelly thought the Monterey Jack-jalepeño-cilantro raviolis looked awfully good. And they didn’t seem too hard; most of the time when friends came over she made a pasta dish or chicken but she felt like trying something different.
Mary was playing with some pots on the floor at their feet. “In the park today the mothers were talking about that woman who was killed,” Zelly said as she skinned cucumbers.
“What woman?”
“Up on Stevens campus two months ago. Somebody there knew her. She used to bring her baby to that park, you know? On Tenth Street.”
“You didn’t know her?”
“Not really. I met her once. I didn’t go to that park. I was going to Church Square until two weeks ago. But I didn’t like the mothers there. And last time this two-year-old kept coming up to Mary and trying to hit her.”
“Was it a boy baby or a girl baby that woman had?”
“It was a boy. God, Pat, it was in the Jersey papers for a week.”
“You know I don’t read about things like that.”
“I know. Just the baseball and the book reviews. There’s a killer loose practically in our backyard, in case you’re interested—”
“I’m not. The Yankee game is on tonight, you know.”
“You told me six times. You and Greg are going to ruin my dinner by putting on the baseball, aren’t you?”
“Not during dinner. You’re going to ruin dinner by talking about this murder nonsense, aren’t you?” But he was smiling. Mary did a drumroll on a pot and hit her hand and cried.
“You know it’s the only thing anybody ever talks about these days,” Zelly said as she scooped her up. “When Son of Sam was in New York in the seventies—”
“I know, I know. I was there. All the brown-haired girls wore kerchiefs or cut their hair, and nobody talked about anything else.”
“Well, I can’t tell our guests what to talk about!”
“But that’s all you talk about yourself. Why couldn’t I have married a girl who’s into stamp collecting? Birdcalls? Coins?”
“Or at least the Yankees.” Zelly laughed.
“At least.” And he smacked her ass lightly. She was pleased he’d touched her; she leaned over, about to pat his rear in return. “I just can’t believe,” he went on, “that anybody would expend so much energy on such a silly topic.”
Zelly’s outstretched hand went stiffly to her side. He was just ragging her, like everybody else. Everyone teased her about her fascination with serial killers; they always had; when she saw her brothers and sisters at Thanksgiving or Christmas it amounted to a tribal ritual to tease her about it. Now she prickled defensively.
“Silly?” Mary had stopped crying and was back on the floor trying to stick a stalk of celery through the little metal handle on one of the pots. “Silly? When there’s a pychopathic killer running around the streets—”
“I doubt very much that he’s actually running around the streets at this moment.”
&
nbsp; “At this moment he’s probably driving around. Serial killers spend a lot of time driving around their territory, fantasizing and reliving their crimes.”
Mary was hitting Pat’s pants leg over and over with her celery. “Here’s somebody who spends all her time reliving her crimes,” Pat said, kneeling to pick her up. She laughed delightedly and hit him in the face with the celery. “Maybe tonight after everybody leaves you and I can spend some time fantasizing.”
“You make fun,” Zelly said, “but it fascinates me.” She felt a pang of unhappiness or anticipation. He talked like that—but usually he just talked. She wished she knew if he meant it. She wanted to say something back, something light and sexy. “I can’t stop people from talking,” she said instead.
“Well, I wish you could,” Pat snapped suddenly, harshly, and the baby started to cry in his arms. “We shouldn’t have even invited people over, this is going to ruin the whole—oh, take her. Honey, I’m just tired. I can’t wait till everybody goes home and I have you all to myself.”
“And the baseball all to yourself.” But she was pleased.
“Of course. I love to think about baseball. Maybe later you can give me a reason to think about baseball. Here, I’ll take her. What were you crying about, Mary-girl?
“I’m sorry I snapped at you, honey. I just want to relax tonight. I don’t want to listen to a lot of amateur detectives go on about why the Slasher this and why the Slasher that and a lot of crap about his mother or something.”
“There isn’t always a problem with the mother. They almost never find out why they really do it.”
“No more, okay? And he’s not going to come over tonight and tell your dinner guests why, either.”
“Oh, he isn’t? And after I invited him specially.”
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