Those Who Knew

by Idra Novey

And why were there still no signs anywhere on a road this long? How was a person to have any sense of where she was?

  Exasperated, Lena pulled over onto the strip of dirt along the interminable rows of leaves and called Olga. I can’t find the school, she said. I was supposed to be there an hour ago. And I’m really hungry.

  So come home and go another day, Olga said. I’ve got two elves here making dinner. Cosmo brought his new friend home with us, who’s very serious. But we’re going to loosen him up, aren’t we, elves?

  Lena heard in Olga’s voice that she was high, very high, and hoped the boy’s mother wouldn’t notice when she came for her child. After they hung up, Lena could not bring herself to start the car just yet. A faint half-moon floated over the field on the left. On both sides rang a silence as crisp as a bell.

  As she occasionally did when alone and flustered, she pulled up Oscar’s email address on her phone, pressed it with her finger to make it appear in a new message box, then canceled the message only to repeat the sequence—fingertip hovering above his address, pressing it again.

  * * *

  Nothing but clouds.

  From the ground, Victor couldn’t make out much else.

  He hadn’t intended to come up Trinity Hill.

  Not that evening. Not this one either.

  He didn’t even like the bars on this hill.

  Half of them packed with children pretending to know things.

  The rest with men like his father drinking themselves into children.

  Nah, that can’t be him, he heard a man say.

  I remember seeing him in the paper all the time, another said.

  Clouds.

  Clouds.

  Clouds.

  Victor turned his heavy head to the turning ground.

  * * *

  It’s just a rumor, Cristina said to her aunt as she drove toward her son’s school. I know the girl introduced Victor at a few marches, but he wasn’t involved with her. When politicians fall out of favor, people spread all sorts of nasty rumors that aren’t true. But I really have to go, she said, I’m outside Edgar’s school.

  Cristina was still another ten minutes away, but she had conveyed what was necessary. She hadn’t let another call go unanswered. That first night with Victor at the Zodiac, she hadn’t grasped what Maria the shrill woman in the lobby had been shouting about. She’d been too distracted by the bull-like way the woman had charged at them from across the lobby. Victor had obviously slept with her at some point, as Cristina assumed he had with the woman who’d inquired about Victor’s connection to Maria P. at a dinner party the week before their wedding. The second woman had seemed just as bull-like and resentful. Cristina had dismissed both of them as jealous, bitter that Victor had chosen to marry her instead. She had felt so triumphant during those months before the wedding, walking into parties with her hand tucked under the arm of the handsome senator most likely to be the next presidential candidate for the TJP. Her father had assured her that Victor wouldn’t be able to run for any public office again. But the worst possible rumors kept on surfacing anyway.

  Crossing the last bridge now before Edgar’s school, she glanced down at the muddy rush of the Maria below. It was the third call this week she had received inquiring about Victor and the pretty girl who’d introduced him at the marches, the one who died on Trinity Hill. If she didn’t keep answering at least some of the calls, Cristina knew she would end up feeding the rumor, engorging it into the monstrosity it was bound to become regardless.

  With dread, she looked down at the large, harsh rocks jutting up through the river. If this narrow bridge gave way and pitched her car into the Maria, she wondered which would end her first, one of those rocks, or the muddy water.

  * * *

  Oscar closed the door to his daughter’s room and crept toward the living room thinking of the tigers they’d seen the previous weekend at the zoo, the irrelevance of their stealth, moving toward nothing but the bars at the opposite end of their single-tree, seven-rock savannah. He always felt far freer in his first seconds creeping toward the sofa than he did when he reached it just to sprawl there, reading headlines on his phone like some animal slumbering with its eyes open.

  Over in the kitchen, he saw that his daughter had smeared avocado on the tray of her booster seat. If he didn’t clean it soon, it was going to harden. But this thought did not compel him from the sofa. His wife would be home in an hour. He could clean the seat then.

  As for the cracker crumbs he could feel underneath him on the sofa, he just went on tapping his screen. A notification popped up that he had a new message on Facebook. He tapped into Messenger, guessing someone from his stay-at-home-dads group was around for a playdate tomorrow after all.

  When he saw the name Lena, he thought it must be a coincidence. Except there was the thumbnail image of her chiseled face, that keen stare in her dark eyes, her alluring mouth. And she had sent an attachment. He scrolled down and saw it was a photo. A boy who looked so much like him that Oscar felt a rushing movement in his mind as if he were in a swing cut from its cable midair. Had he given Lena a childhood photo of himself?

  But he knew he had not. And the boy was wearing a T-shirt with a logo in the language of the island.

  Hi, Oscar, the message began. I tried to reach you at the email address you gave me at Freddy’s show but I must have written it down incorrectly. Or maybe your email has changed since then. With your wife expecting, it didn’t seem like the moment in your life to tell you about Cosmo. He is six now. . . .

  Oscar scrolled down to the photograph, flicked back up to the words, waiting for the frantic movement of his finger to diminish his sense of vertigo. In the rest of the message, Lena emphasized three times that she was not contacting him for financial reasons. She assured him that her family was well-off and supportive, that the only reason she was writing was just to open a line of communication for the future, in case Cosmo at some point expressed a strong desire to find the father who had given him what the kids at school called “his tourist face.”

  Tourist face. Oscar gaped again at the photo. The small stranger with his upturned ski-jump nose and freckles. The same thick, blond hair, which Lena had let grow as long as his own. It flopped over the boy’s small forehead. Oscar hadn’t realized how long he’d sat there staring at the photo until he heard his daughter cry out from her room, her cry as familiar to him as his own voice.

  How could he be both of these men? The father able to pick out his daughter’s cry in a crowd of twenty children, and the one responsible for this little stranger with his face? Parenthood was the one dimension of his life about which he felt no inadequacy or ambivalence. About which he felt imminently capable and proud. Every day, he woke up aching to hold his kid again, to be her father.

  He tried to expand the image of Cosmo with his fingertips but the Messenger box wouldn’t allow him to enlarge it. In her toddler bed, waiting for him to appear, his daughter was wailing, her cries escalating into primal howls. He was just about to get up and go for her when the door slammed open, giving way to the flushed face of his wife. My God, Oscar, what happened? I could hear her screaming from the stairwell. What are you doing, just sitting there on the couch?

  Even then, he could not will himself to put down the phone.

  * * *

  Lena pulled up to the gated entrance and checked to see if anyone she knew was driving by. She didn’t want to be observed picking up her son here, at this hideous development, with its plastic-sided houses and groomed lawns that looked straight out of some northerner horror film. When people complained about wealthy newcomers ruining the area, they always brought up the blemish of this new gated development, how profoundly at odds it was with the farmland and produce stands, with the old barns and silos and everything along the road before this sudden cluster of ugly, soulless homes.

  As she waited for
the guard to open the gate, Lena spotted Cosmo’s blond head in one of the first driveways, riding with his friend in a little motorized red car. Lena had asked Olga to find out more about Edgar’s mother but Olga didn’t like to interact much with the parents in the academy. Lena felt guilty for knowing so little about who this new friend was seated beside her son in such an enormous, beeping, bourgeois monstrosity of a toy.

  She hoped Cosmo would move on to another friend soon who lived somewhere else, then felt immediately ashamed at the thought. What kind of a mother indulged in such a desire at the sight of her son enjoying himself after school with another child? Even if that child’s name was one she still associated with Victor’s uncle and the boyhood picture of him she’d passed every time she entered their home. In one of their all-night sessions in the basement, Victor had told her about a night he found his father on the floor in front of the picture, weeping. Uncertain what other response beyond her body Victor would welcome, Lena had drawn closer and kissed him, had said nothing when he roughly placed her beneath him on the floor, though the floor was painful under her tailbone, and cold.

  Stepping out of her car, she forced a smile at Edgar’s mother stepping out of the house onto the porch. She’d been intrigued when Olga told her Edgar apparently didn’t live with a father either. Lena had imagined a possible friendship. But not with a mother who would choose to live in such a heinous development.

  No, she couldn’t possibly have any connection with a mother like this.

  * * *

  Cristina swatted at the mosquitoes as she made her way down the driveway to meet Cosmo’s mother. At dusk, she didn’t linger outside if she could avoid it. She wished someone had warned her about the mosquitoes in the interior. With no breeze from the ocean, the mosquitoes feasted from long before sunset until well after dark. She found it primitive, having to factor in the mouths of insects for so many hours every evening. She required the gardener to mow their lawn weekly and apply insecticide, and at least they had less of a problem than most people in the valley.

  When she’d picked up Edgar at his friend’s the other night, she’d been shocked at how overgrown and weedy the mother had permitted the property to become, the number of mosquitoes clouding the yard. Cristina had made up an excuse to hustle Edgar straight to the car. She’d been surprised at what an oddly isolated old house Cosmo’s mother had chosen, off a dirt road and with cracked tiles on the roof. The babysitter, Olga, had been odd as well, coming to the door with her sweater misbuttoned and her gray hair cut close to the scalp like a man’s. She had looked old enough to be Cosmo’s grandmother, but spoke with as much slang as someone in college, or younger.

  Olga had seemed intelligent, however, and joyful. Edgar had come skipping out of the house, the most relaxed she’d seen him since she’d kicked Victor out. The sight of her son hooking his arm around a boy with such a freckled, stereotypical northerner face had unnerved her, though Cristina knew she was in a poor position to judge a child based on any assumptions about his father. She was in no position at all, in fact. She was desolate with loneliness, had been restless all day, hoping she’d find a way to hit it off with this mother, maybe invite them over together the next weekend.

  Although she hoped the mother wouldn’t insist on reciprocating, or not until the weather cooled a bit and the mosquitoes thinned.

  As Lena emerged from her car, the boys came beeping down the street again, and Cristina mimed a wheel between her hands as she made her way down the driveway, willing her mouth into a broad smile.

  They’ve had such a good time in that car, Cristina called to Lena and waited for her to agree. But Lena just stared back at her from the curb with what looked like alarm, a notable tension in her mouth. Cristina had a feeling they had met before but couldn’t recall where. In the car, Cosmo had told her that his mother worked for the Ministry of Education, but Cristina couldn’t imagine a person in a very high position living in such a dilapidated house. And Lena had arrived in the sort of baggy, flowered tunic sold at street fairs, the fabric cheap-looking, unflattering.

  I’ve kept watch for any cars, Cristina assured her, and with the gate, they’re really quite safe riding down the street here.

  You’re Victor’s wife, Lena said.

  Cristina felt the sting of a mosquito on her cheek but didn’t lift her hand. Ex, she said, and watched Lena step backward. Cosmo called from the street, asking his mother to watch how fast they could go. The boys made a U-turn and just missed the curb, but Lena looked toward them for only a moment before whipping back around, her eyes agitated, almost frantic.

  Did Victor take a job out here? she asked. Does he come to their school?

  Never. Cristina shook her head and explained that Victor was working for a shipping company in the port. We make arrangements for all the visits there, she added, at his brother’s.

  Good old Freddy, right? Lena crossed her arms and Cristina teetered back a step as Lena continued, insisting she knew how often Victor wielded his brother’s goodwill to his own benefit.

  Please. They’re coming back. Cristina gestured to where the boys were already swerving toward the driveway, laughing and beeping in the irritating car her parents had bought. She felt obligated to keep every gift they gave her, after all she’d asked from them to help her flee here to the interior and start again. She had exhausted herself filling out a thousand extra forms in order to register Edgar at the school under her mother’s last name to avoid gossip among the parents. She thought she had cleared a path for him here, for both of them.

  For Edgar’s sake, she said, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t share any . . . any thoughts about Victor with anyone at school.

  Any thoughts about Victor, Lena repeated with a wry laugh, flicking at a mosquito in front of her face. You mean about Maria P., those thoughts? Maybe you don’t remember. We met at the Zodiac.

  Cristina tilted forward, felt a sharp pebble under her shoe.

  Yes, I do recall, she said in her most officious tone, but I can assure you that I don’t have any more information now than when you asked me then. I’m aware of the rumors, she said, lowering her voice on the “u” as if speaking of some unsightly mildew. But we all know politicians are subject to hearsay. I grew up around some of the most influential figures in the TJP, and I promise you, there is no one who is spared.

  The longer Cristina continued in this tone, the more possible it became to fully inhabit the stiff posture she’d long assumed in photographs beside her father. She went on to declare her foremost responsibility for Edgar, to speak as little as possible about the past for his sake, and hoped that Lena, as a mother herself, would understand how—

  Of course, I understand! Lena interrupted, her voice slipping into an impatient, clipped intonation that gave her away, Cristina recognized, as having likely gone to one of the conservative academies north of the port. The academies where the wealthiest supporters of Cato sent their children. Surprised at this, she looked over Lena’s cheap bohemian tunic and leggings again with new eyes.

  Perhaps you know, Cristina said, how impossible it can be to start over on this island.

  * * *

  Olga took her time crossing the gravel outside the town hall. She took her time opening the heavy wooden door. All she planned to do was ask a few questions. She’d left the house with the intention of going to the grocery store. With Cosmo off to Edgar’s after school, she’d needed another reason to get out of the house. Partway to the store, the sight of the town hall coming up on the left had beckoned to her like a bakery. She was just going to ask out of curiosity, just to find out exactly how complicated it might be to add a name to the council ballot.

  Already she was savoring the pleasure of recounting this spontaneous stop to Lena and Sara, enjoying their surprise that she had pulled in here and taken this idea a little bit further. After Sara brought up the idea on the front porch, Olga had not been abl
e to resist considering what her name might look like on a ballot line—what a consolation it would be to witness that little green box next to the O of her name. She’d given up her Sublime, had accepted that the amnesty laws weren’t going to be repealed in her lifetime, or not before all the monsters who worked for Cato had died without a single one of them going on trial.

  Two cement steps led up to the door of the town hall and Olga winced as she hauled her bad hip up the first step and then the other. The front corridor was narrow, empty except for a giant photocopier with a dusty OUT OF ORDER sign taped to its lid. Above the copier hung a row of equally dusty horseshoes. Olga had expected to feel intimidated, but who could be intimidated by a hallway with nothing but a broken printer and a bunch of horseshoes?

  Simon had recently written a scandalous report on mayors all over the island who’d been active in the formation of Truth and Justice who now brazenly doled out jobs to unqualified family members and wrote off their vacations as business trips. The mayor of their district in the valley hadn’t been named in the piece, but from the state of the copier and the absolute quiet, it didn’t look like the mayor or any municipal employees were spending much time in the building.

  At the thought of all the unqualified relatives who might be on the district payroll sitting at home watching movies, Olga picked up her pace toward the only open door in the corridor. The council positions were unpaid and supposed to be filled by concerned citizens of the district, which she was.

  She peeked her head into the open doorway and found a young man with a goatee inside, sitting behind an old wooden desk. He was packing handfuls of potato chips into his mouth without moving his eyes from his computer screen. He looked like he could be a nephew of the mayor. Or maybe an aimless grandson. With each handful of chips delivered into his open mouth, a cascade of crumbs fell and clung to his goatee. Hobbling closer to his desk, Olga felt a twist of nostalgia for the Sublime, for all the curious behavior she’d gotten to observe there, sleepy-faced young men like this one stumbling in for weed, as unaware of the chips in their facial hair as they were of the potential addictive pleasure of Kundera, or the sensual existentialism of Duras.