Frank was such a contrast to Danny, kind where Danny had been cruel, bookish and reserved where Danny had been brash and outgoing. But arguing before a judge and jury on behalf of a client whose cause he believed in, another side of him came out, and that was the Frank Tanner she’d fallen for, the Frank Tanner she missed, who, she was now convinced, was little more than an illusion.
Karin rose from the windflowers, her basket over her arm, and caught a brilliant cluster of wakerobins off to her right. Their deep-green leaves and tri-petaled white flowers seemed to reach up to her as she approached. She bent from the waist, feeling her shorts ride up the backs of her thighs, and let her fingers caress love among the wide leaves and stiff popcorn-burst petals. She flexed at the knees, balancing on the balls of her feet, and snipped off half a dozen of the most eager suppliants at the base of their stems.
Behind her a sound. Something brushed through grass. And as she turned, she knew, without needing to turn, that it was Jimmy. Cloth gliding past a knothole, a shirt or skin, too close to the hole to mean anything but that he’d been spying on her again; and the day dimmed, not much but enough for her stomach to tense. She finished up with the wakerobins, then moved nearer the house for one more batch of flowers to complete the bouquet, a carnation cluster of soft yellow dianthus. But her mind was on her neighbor of seven years.
Pot-bellied, wispy-haired little creature acted like the patriarch of the neighborhood. Him and his peroxide wife Nona. Danny’d taken at once to Jimmy Gallagher when he and Karin moved in, the more traditional welcome of a cake or pie being replaced by a six-pack of Rolling Rock, Jimmy at the door in his bermudas and faded green tee-shirt, one arm crooked around Nona’s neck like an ox yoke so that her great breasts swayed their welcome, she staggering on the stoop and braying laughter through that fashion-model face of hers.
What was ferret-eyed old Jimmy doing glued to the fence so often when he had Nona to keep him busy? Karin knew she herself was no great shakes as a looker—decent, but not one to cause heads to turn. But Nona, good lord she had what all the men lusted after and she knew it and loved to flaunt it. Of course, Nona did more than flirt. Karin knew that for a fact. Jimmy hadn’t been the only one in that household Danny had been taken with; Nona had snagged Danny by the belt, dragged him in, and tried him on quite soon after they met and regularly right up until the day he died. His jogging cover, as painfully obvious as it was bogus, never fooled her for an instant, but she didn’t dare call him on it. Not then. Probably not from the first moment she’d met him.
But that was behind her now, all that letting herself be a victim. She was growing stronger, out from under the domination of others. Her plants were hardier and getting more so. Green thumbs in the neighborhood had turned even greener at the ease with which she grew a vast variety of flowers in the clay that passed for soil in Rocklin, but since Danny’s death, she’d added blooms—added them with no problem at all—which were not supposed to germinate, let alone sprout, burgeon, blossom, and thrive, in this planting zone. Her garden grew healthier and so did she, mistress of her own destiny and getting more so each day.
She crossed to the patio, slid the screen door aside, and carried her basket of flowers into the kitchen. There she wrapped them in light-green tissue paper and secured dark-green twist-ties around the base and center of the cluster of stems.
The house was quiet. Frank was still at the office, or more likely—she checked the kitchen clock, 5:15—he was snarled in a stop-and-go slalom down a parking-garage ramp to join the Sacramento commute home. He’d tried to raise the issue of her visits to Danny’s grave a few times but had backed off in the face of her vehemence. Now he simply made sure to arrive home after she’d left for the cemetery, ensconced in his study until she called him to a late supper. Never said a word about it.
Walking down the hall, she undid her halter, caught the strap as it fell, had one hand at the button of her shorts as she passed through the bedroom door. Stripped them off, panties too, tossed her clothing into the brown laundry basket in her closet, stepped under the shower for five minutes. Danny had sometimes surprised her by rumbling back the opaque shower door and sauntering his taut hairy body in to join her, soaping her everywhere, circle upon circle, spiraling in on her pleasure until she shuddered in his arms and impaled herself on him like a monkey toy climbing a dowel. Not Frank. Never Frank.
Out of the shower, she dried herself and dressed, her mind busy with memories of Danny. For a time, right after the trial when Frank first moved in, he’d convinced her to redo the house, have it repainted inside and out, sell or donate their old rundown furniture and put in new, get rid of all reminders of him. But she refused to move, giving the garden as her initial excuse, but knowing even then that there was more to it than that. And as his things started to go—the clothing, the dog-eared paperback of Shogun, the coffee-table book on samurai warriors, the video collection, the back issues of Hustler he kept under the sink in the hall bathroom—she’d grown more reluctant to continue, hating him sometimes for his zeal. At last she’d refused to part with the final two items: Danny’s Chevy-10 pickup (bought second-hand on Florin Road five years before) and the collection of decorative swords hanging on the wall in Danny’s den, Frank’s study. They seemed to have faded out of Frank’s consciousness, but Karin sat there sometimes during the day when sunlight streamed in by the study window and set the burnished metal to glowing like Danny’s spirit touching them into fire—sat there and missed him so much.
She retrieved the flowers, went through the laundry room into the garage, locking the door behind her as the garage door clattered open on its track. She climbed up into the pickup and backed it out the driveway. Millie Ryder was sitting out in her front yard, sipping iced tea and watching a toddler tethered to a tree. She pretended as usual not to notice Karin and Karin returned the favor. She turned left on Midas, then drove a few miles, past the country club where she voted, over three sets of railroad tracks, and left on Taylor Road. She liked reaching this point, because twenty minutes of automatic pilot took her through the nothing town of Loomis and on her way to the graveyard, during which time she could let the feel of the truck, its rhythms, its smells, lull her back to the good times with Danny, him where she now sat, her by his side, both of them looking forward to a weekend in Danny’s cabin at Chiquita Lake, him for pre-dawn bow-and-arrow hunting, her for solitary walks through the still forest and long nights of loving in the cabin’s cozy bed.
She parked the truck in her usual spot, a blacktopped shoulder dappled with shade, and walked the slight incline of the access road. Day after Easter. Fresh flowers were arrayed on numerous plots, no doubt from morning visitors. Made sense, celebrate Christ’s triumph over death one day, use the same flowers to ease the sting of death’s triumph over a loved one the next, perhaps on the off-chance that sympathetic magic might work. She saw the tiny headstone rise to greet her. BETSY LOUISE TRILLIN, it said in small letters, BUDDING ON EARTH TO BLOOM IN HEAVEN, BORN 7/4/76, DIED 7/4/76. A tiny grave. Neglected, Mister Romano had told her, though he didn’t know why. She placed a sprig of baby’s breath upon it and tucked Easter’s faded sprig into her dress pocket, pleased to imagine that its life had gone to comfort little Betsy like a kiss from, if not a mother, then a compassionate stranger.
Danny’s grave lay ahead.
She approached it slowly, feeling the guilt rise in her like sexual tension. Guilt, yes, and fear, though she had nothing to be afraid of from Danny. Not any more. An ornamental knife to the heart had taken care of that.
Uncanny. As she moved closer, it always seemed as if she were fixed in the earth and the headstones, Danny’s in the lead, marched grandly around her.
She stopped, looked up at Mister Romano, a kindly old man though he always seemed to be judging her in some way. She’d given him a dahlia the other week, brought a can of cat food for Tabby once. Have to offer him another flower some time soon, she thought; not today but tomorrow. She raised her bouquet in gr
eeting, took in his nod and smile. He rose, as usual, to leave her alone with her husband.
Under Karin’s fingers, the stone was smooth and cool and white. Flecks of something—was it mica?—gleamed in the waning sun. “Hello, Danny,” she said, “it’s me.” She knelt beside him, arranging her dress about her knees. It was morbid, she knew, but she imagined him naked under the grassy plot, just inches beneath the surface, preserved to perfection in a protective bubble like Snow White—not six feet under in his Sunday best, his flesh slowly . . . no, he wasn’t doing that, not if she didn’t will it. He was there, fully intact, heart whole, yes that above all, no wound at all nor no trace of one, his skin smooth beneath the black curls of his chest hair.
“Yes, you’re right here, aren’t you, Danny, so close to me,” she said, running loving fingers over yesterday’s strewn blooms. “It’s like you’re in a coma, able to hear every word I say, but unable to move.” Withered mountain laurel clustered red and white like garnished radishes at his head. She toyed with their petals, felt the life flow back into them, their limp surrender turning to a renewal of bloom. They would last another day, no more, but that was, she proudly thought, one day more than anyone else could have coaxed out of them. She brushed beneath the laurels and fingered the thick grass blades, closing her eyes and pretending it was Danny’s hair she touched.
“I miss you, honey. You got awful mean to me in the end, but we had some lovely times, didn’t we?” Her left hand came in to join her right, which wandered through the blooms, feeling the grave mound solid and sinewy like tight muscle. “And even when we fought, when you hit me, it was crazy, I still needed you even while I hated what you were doing. It was like you’d always say when you were sobbing in my arms, kissing my bruises and telling me you loved me more than life itself and begging me to forgive you, that you would never do that again—it was like you said, just a sad little toddler in a big man’s body, throwing a huge tantrum at the world and me getting in his way.” A tear fell on her hand. “I’m not proud of doing what I did to you, Danny. Not proud at all. But if I hadn’t done it, that sad little boy would have killed me for sure. You’d be the one out here grieving for me and I’d be lying under the grass, listening to you be torn up inside, hurting so bad. But you know something, Danny? I’m not so sure now I did the right thing. There’s this big gaping hole where my life used to be. I fill it up with flowers—you should see the house now, stuffed with ferns and potted plants so there’s hardly room to walk—but as dearly as I love them, they can’t fill the ache inside me, not like you could, my dear sweet darling.”
She wiped her eyes clear with the sides of her hand. The sunlight was fading to the west, back from where she’d come. The world was dying again, closing the books on yet one more miserable day. She loved it here as night seeped in around the graves. She couldn’t begin to guess why so peaceful a place as this had ever come to stand in folks’ imaginations for something to be feared and avoided.
A light breeze cooled the tears on her cheeks, then the tops of the trees began an easy rustle and sway. She moved her hands among the strewn flowers, picking out dead peonies, iris, and phlox, reviving for one more day asters and hollyhocks and hibiscus whose whites, reds, and blues strove toward the life in her touch. “You always told me we could work it out, in your gentler moments, after we cried together, and I forgave you, and you lifted me in your arms and took me to bed. If only we had one more chance together. I’d beg you to forgive me, Danny. I’d forgive you. We’d start all over, wipe the slate clean, and never hurt one another again.”
Her hand moved up and down over the muscled earth of the plot, as if she were massaging her man’s grassy torso. She unwrapped her flowers, laid them upon his grave, gave them fondlement unto new life as she did so. A good hour Karin sat beside the grave, talking, remembering; and all that while, her hands idly, ceaselessly moved.
***
Membrance of expiring, wisps of hatred hovering still in the dark air about him, ghostly fingers treadling upon his flesh. Beneath his flesh. That, yes, and the teeming of tiny insects, trillions of hairy mite-legs tickling the underside of his skin as they moved, picking out a hidden tattoo—heart, dagger, the woman’s name floridly scripted there in the center—that sheeted his flesh with pain yet kept somehow its heart shape.
Karin.
The name returned, sharp as a slap, blazing screams of color at him. And then, riding on its back, the smell came howling down upon him, funneling like a twister full of stench and suet, coating him, penetrating like liniment to where the insects crawled. It choked the air, made the air seem solid like hard blackness shaped precisely to his nasal passages and on down his throat into the branches of his bronchial tubes. Any change in their shape—and there were myriad attempts at that—met the obsidian resistance of that blackness, cold, dead, and impassive.
His skull pounded. Every beat of his heart he could hear—yet still (but no, not still but again) he had no idea who “he” was—and every beat felt like a seizure, as sharp and incisive as a dagger come in for the kill.
Karin! That name again. And an image of her face, eyes glowing, mouth twisted inside the cracks and bruises that surrounded it. The dagger—his lion-head kriss!—sank into him, deeper, like a dentist’s needle probing for nerves to deaden. Her hand, gripping the staghorn handle, twisted grimly on her thin wrist.
He moved his arm to stop her—first real move—and a howl of pain seized it as though the movement had set off explosives inside and nothing was left but the memory of its detonation, a phantom limb in the eternal recurrence of its last agony. His gut tightened, pulling shearings of blackness down into his lungs, the thrust of a mailed fist deep and wayward inside him.
That hateful face glowed in triumph as the kriss bit and cut into the muscle of his heart. Every throb of pain echoed her name. Karin, Karin, the hateful litany kept on, and yet there were tinges of an emotion beyond hatred, a bleak kindness, a warped adoration.
His last memory, as his lungs failed and he fell into death again was a faulty one, and he knew that, even as it crimped and curled like a burning photograph: Somehow his heart, flush with the heat of hatred, systoled tight about the blade of the kriss like stone about a sword, turned it red- then white-hot, shot heat past the acorn-headed guard into the hilt, made the staghorn split and sizzle and the lion’s head roar, married the weapon to her smoking fist, shot flame up her arm until her flesh burned and melted, her face sheeted over with flame, her hair frizzed up and bloomed like a torch, and she, the murdering bitch who’d have enchained his balls if she could, collapsed with him into death.
TWO
HOUSEWORK
Karin was coming in from the garden with a perfect basket for Danny—daffodils, bluebells, irises, and boldly colored cotton-candy moptops of hyacinth spilling up and over its sides—when the phone rang.
“Tanners,” she said.
“Karin, thank God you’re still there!”
“You sound frantic. What’s wrong?”
“I’m at some Honda place, um,” his voice faded, then returned, “Hondas Forever, off Business-80, corner of Howe and Alta-Arden.”
“You weren’t in an accident?”
“Nope, nothing like that. Five minutes from work the engine starts juddering when I shift, then smooths out as I accelerate. Remember? Same damned thing happened last fall; some kind of carbon buildup on one of the plugs. I told them what it was but they say they’re backlogged and can’t get to it till tomorrow. Listen, Karin, I know—”
Shit.
“—you’re probably on your way out the door, but I really need you to swing by and pick me up. I’m—”
“Can’t you take a cab?” Alarms were going off in her head, tiny soundless ones, more like the memories of dead clocks than the clamor of live ones. She knew it sounded absurd, but Danny was expecting her.
“It’s a good thirty minutes from here to Rocklin in normal traffic. Add twenty for rush hour, double the fare to get the tax
i driver back to the city, and we’re looking at close to a hundred dollars.” How prosaic Frank sounded over the phone, not a bit like the confident young lawyer she had fallen for during her trial the previous summer. “I’ll drive you straight to the cemetery, maybe even break a few speed limits on the way, how’s that?”
Sure, Frank, she thought; even if we somehow pull off the miracle of getting there before nightfall—and there’s no way in hell of that—I’m really going to feel just fine about your waiting in the pickup or, worse, coming with me to Danny’s grave. “No problem,” she said, staring down at the basket, thinking she would salvage the hyacinths at least, put them in water, but then knowing that Frank would look at them that certain way, not saying a thing, but there’d be this thick fog of silence between them, and she knew it was best to dispose of them. “Shouldn’t take me more than ten minutes to change clothes. I guess I’ll have to skip the visit for today, maybe go early tomorrow.” She almost said Danny would understand, but she held it in, hearing, a moment before it came out, how bizarre it would sound. Besides, she knew that Danny would not understand at all, certainly not the Danny he’d become in the end.
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