Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  “The bullet matched the rest of them in Lallo’s drawer,” he said.

  She braced a hand along his desk. Her legs were like shoelaces. She thought of the first day she had walked into William’s class, the way he had smiled at her. She remembered how all the girls scribbled his name on their notebooks. “Where is he?” Her mouth dried. Her hands shook. She wanted to claw him apart with her hands.

  “Sit down,” the detective told her. She didn’t move. “Sit,” he ordered, pointing to a wood bench, and then she did.

  “We found Lallo’s car parked by the Ben Franklin Bridge near Philly. The keys in it. There was blood on the seat, a match for Lucy’s. And a different blood type, same as the type we found listed on a blood donor card in Lallo’s house.”

  She stared at him, waiting.

  “A couple was on the bridge last night, looking at the water. They saw a man standing on the edge of the bridge. The girl yelled to him to be careful, and then she said they heard a splash. The description they gave matches.”

  “They found him?”

  He shook his head. “It’s the Delaware River. It feeds into the ocean. We’re not going to find anything.”

  Charlotte thought she was crying. She was sure of it because of the way her chest was heaving, the way her air seemed funneled into a tight band. But when she lifted up her hand, her cheeks were dry.

  “What happens now?”

  “Without the body, we still have to keep the case open. Maybe there was an accomplice. Maybe someone else did it, and Lallo was so upset about it that he jumped.”

  Charlotte’s whole body began to shake. “You know someone else didn’t do it.”

  “The Boston police contacted his old school. They’re talking to his mother. They’ll watch her house, her phone records for a while.”

  “His mother?” Charlotte couldn’t picture William having a mother.

  “She’s by herself in a house in Belmont. His father passed away years ago.”

  “What about his things?”

  “What things? You saw the place. There was just about nothing there. And frankly, sometimes it’s easier for family just not to come look.”

  “I want my sister’s things.”

  “You can go get them. The scene’s been processed.” He handed her a card from a local funeral home. She stared at it. Brown and Sons.

  “We’re releasing your sister’s body from the morgue. You’ll want to call them.” He hesitated. “You may want to wait until someone’s cleaned the place. Your sister’s name wasn’t on the lease, so you aren’t responsible for that. But Lallo’s name was. Misspelled, too. His mother will have to call a special cleaning service to take care of it. Sometimes funeral homes can send someone. Sometimes local butchers do it.”

  Charlotte looked at him, stunned. She tried to imagine a cleaning service washing away her sister’s blood, handling her clothes, her books, the things she had loved. None of this would have happened if she had gotten there earlier. Her boss had been kind when she called him. Why hadn’t she thought to tell him the truth when Lucy first called? Why hadn’t she put her sister first? Lucy was murdered, and she had had a hand in it. “No, I’ll do it,” she said.

  “You? Are you sure?” When she nodded, he sighed and put his hands in his pockets. “It’s a nasty business. You want to think twice about this. It’s not your responsibility.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She had heard about Sharon Tate’s father cleaning up Cielo Drive after the Manson murders. She thought of how people used to wash the bodies of their dead, hand-sewing them into shrouds. “I want to do it myself,” she said.

  He shrugged and then reached for a sheet of paper and drew a little map. “Make sure you wear gloves,” he said. “Get the really thick kind. And get lots of bleach.” He handed the paper to her, and she saw the store, the arrows pointing her there. “Thrift-T-Mart. They’ll have what you need,” he told her. “Mops, pails. The works.” Then he handed her his card and told her that if anything occurred to her, any new information, she should call him. “If we find anything out, we’ll call you,” he said. “And if you change your mind about the cleaning, no one will think less of you.”

  When Charlotte left the station, it was hot out again, the sun nearly blinding. She turned the funeral home card over in her hand. She tried to think what to do, but her mind was roiling. Lucy would never want to be buried. Neither of them had ever even been to the cemetery where their parents were. “It won’t be them in the ground,” Lucy had said, but Charlotte knew it was because Lucy was afraid. Charlotte would cremate her sister and keep the ashes until she figured out what to do with them.

  She got into the car and went to the supermarket. Muzak was playing “Grazing in the Grass.” A woman was bopping as she wheeled her cart, tapping her manicured fingernails on the handle. Families were wandering around. A couple was smooching by the ice cream. Charlotte wanted to shake all of them. She shoved items into her cart, everything the detective had told her to buy: Bleach, sponges, rubber gloves, a bucket, and a mop. A box of heavy-duty trash bags. A face mask. She also found a package of T-shirts and underwear, which would get her through a few days, and a pair of black sweatpants. When she got to the checkout, the girl, wearing a brown smock, smiled ruefully. “Spring cleaning, huh?” she said. The cashier’s face was open and friendly when Charlotte handed over her credit card, the one Iris had insisted she have “for emergencies.” She gave Charlotte the once-over. “You painting?” the girl said.

  “No,” Charlotte said.

  The girl looked at her funny, then kept quiet while ringing up Charlotte’s remaining items.

  When she got to the house, the crime tape was gone. The chickens screeched, as if they knew what had happened. What was she supposed to do with them? She hadn’t seen any neighbors for miles around and she couldn’t just let them go free.

  She stood outside and tried to take a step forward, but she couldn’t breathe. The pounding in her head grew louder. The house seemed farther and farther away. She never thought of turning around, getting back in her car, and letting William’s mother take care of all of this.

  She inched her way up the stairs, and the screaming of the chickens seemed to fill her head, and then she pushed open the door and she was inside.

  The house looked ransacked. Every drawer was open, contents scattered everywhere. Muddy boot prints crisscrossed the floor. Lucy’s body was gone, but her blood was still there, pooled and sticky, and when Charlotte looked at it she felt her stomach rising. She walked through the house. All the clothes from the closet were flung on the floor, the drawers were open, the sheets pulled back. Folders were spread across the floor, containing bills, it looked like, receipts, papers. In the kitchen, the cops had even emptied a box of cereal, as if they expected something might be hidden, leaving the whole mess on the table. The ants had already found it.

  She started in the living room. She put on the mask, the protective glasses so that the bleach wouldn’t sting her eyes, and the gloves. Shaking, she mixed bleach in water and began to scrub the floor, pressing down, breathing hard and fast. She would have cleaned a thousand houses like this if it would bring Lucy back. Death was too easy for a fucking scumbag like him, slipping under the water, not having to face what he did. She wanted him in jail, stripped of everything, afraid for his life. She wanted him never paroled. Never forgiven.

  Just as she would never forgive herself.

  Blood had seeped into the wood, into the joints, but she got it out of the surface, taking away the finish, leaving a lighter area that looked like a map. The bleach freckled her jeans white.

  The walls were the hardest, spattered with blood. Some of it was still wet, and that came off easily, but a lot of it was now rusty and hard. She scrubbed with a brush, but the blood didn’t want to come out. She took a kitchen knife to the dried blood and scraped. The trick was not to think about what you were doing, to simply do it.

  By the time she had finished, it wa
s dark, only a few fingers of light ascending on the floor. She had gone through three packages of garbage bags and four pairs of gloves. She still had to go through Lucy’s things. She moved automatically from room to room. This is where her sister had lived. This is where Lucy had been alive. She could be breathing in the same air Lucy had breathed.

  Whatever she touched felt like a burning ember. When she got to the bedroom, she found a contract for William to teach at some school, the name Billy Lalo on it.

  She didn’t start crying again until she saw Lucy’s clothes, thrown on the floor. Lucy used to wear a riot of color. Tiny tube tops and skirts so short she could grip the hems with her fingers, but here were faded, drab T-shirts and jeans. There were William’s clothes, his jackets, his shirts. There, in the corner, was a paisley minidress. She pulled it out and put it to her face. This had been Lucy’s “grown up” dress in Boston, the thing she wore when Iris took them out to a nice place for dinner. She pulled the dress off the hanger and threw it over her arm, and then she noticed her own red silk scarf, hanging on a hook.

  She had spent a whole month’s allowance on this, buying it at Truc in Harvard Square. It had been her lucky scarf, and she had worn it every day, until one day she reached for it and it was gone. Frantic, she had combed her whole room for it, had gone everywhere in school where she might have left it, but it had never turned up.

  But Lucy had taken it, something of Charlotte’s. Hands trembling, she wrapped the scarf around her shoulders.

  She left the room and was heading around to the front again when she noticed something blue poking out under a shelf, as if someone had thrown it there. She pulled out a notebook and opened it and saw her sister’s scrawl. I have to leave. Lucy had written this, maybe in this room. It was another part of her sister that was here. She found a spot on the floor that wasn’t wet and slid down.

  She opened the journal to the first page, dated two weeks before Lucy had vanished, and as soon as she saw the tiny heart Lucy had drawn in the margins, Charlotte felt sick.

  I am the only one up, as usual. It’s just my same crummy room, but tonight it feels like everything is made of silver. One hour ago, William kissed my eyelids and told me we see the world through each other’s eyes. We are the same person. Falling in love is like being cotton candy, pink, light, and sweet. Sometimes when I’m with him, I feel sad, because Iris never had this. I know she didn’t or her mouth couldn’t circle shut like a change purse and she wouldn’t always be worried about the future instead of today. And Charlotte, does she ever even have a date? Everything with her is tangled up with grades, her school, her future, like life is a blank check and she can fill in any number she wants. If I tried to tell either of them about this, they wouldn’t get it at all. Oh, I love them. But I’m talking about Love, with a capital L, how I feel just when I say his name in my head.

  Charlotte turned the page, and there was a scribbled list, like the ones Charlotte herself made all the time. Me in two years:

  I will have a job I love. (A writer!)

  I will be with a person I love. (William!)

  I will be living in a place I love. (A big city!)

  I will love myself (finally).

  All that night, Charlotte read Lucy’s journal, her sister’s life rising from the page, her voice sounding on Charlotte’s tongue as if she herself were saying the words. The journal was jubilant in the beginning, all about how Lucy and William had fallen in love, how they were going to go and make their own brave new world. Lucy had been happy, really happy, at least for a while. He’s my oxygen. I breathe in and he breathes out.

  But then, halfway in, the writing began to change. The funny drawings Lucy made in the margins stopped altogether. Charlotte read about how Lucy began to hide her journal in a small space behind a bookshelf, how the freedom they were supposed to have in Pennsylvania had ended up being so isolating she thought she was losing her mind. She wrote about the empty, dark skies, about her fear of the Manson girls, and then she wrote about William’s teaching her to shoot, making her do it. I’m not in love with him anymore. I don’t know what he wants from me. Charlotte turned a page, chilled, and then a new name popped up.

  Patrick really listens. He’s so kind. I think I love him. Who was Patrick? She turned another page, and Lucy wrote about how she worked at his farm stand, keeping it secret from William. How she had finally told Patrick everything because she knew he’d help her. I slept with him. Sort of. Charlotte suddenly felt dizzy. What did that mean? How did you sort of sleep with someone? He’s so beautiful that it hurts.

  It was still all so confusing. She had thought her sister was living this wild and happy life, and instead she was miserable and alone and scared and in love with some farmer. She had thought Lucy wasn’t really good at anything, and maybe she had even thought her sister wasn’t that smart. She had worried over her, but the writing in the journal was raw and touching.

  Wednesday, May 18. William and I eat the same thing just about every night, but Patrick serves me a dazzle of flavors. Cheese with peppercorns and mustard in it. And homemade rhubarb ice cream. “Cooking for guests is supposed to be a blessing,” he says, and all I can think about is how William never wants people over, not for dinner or any other reason, how he’d probably put me under a veil if he could. The first time I ate a piece of chocolate cake at Patrick’s, I thought, William will know. William says he can tell who eats sugar just by their skin tone or the smell of their breath. “Live a little,” Patrick said, giving me a plate, and I lived a lot because I had seconds, and when I got home, William didn’t notice a thing. But Patrick has a secret, too. I found a photo of this woman in his house. A beautiful young woman in a white dress laughing at the camera, but he wouldn’t tell me about her, and that was okay because God knows there are things I don’t talk about either. So we both have secrets. So we are both the same, and isn’t that what binds people together? Yesterday, Patrick had a motorcycle he borrowed from a friend and I asked if I could have a ride. He said yes. He always says yes to me. I sat behind him, my hands around his waist, the wind whipping against us, the smell of exhaust and oil and the leather of his jacket so strong I leaned forward and put my mouth to it like I’m kissing him through it and all I could think was, Keep going. Don’t stop. Take me into a whole other world with you and we will never look back.

  Charlotte blinked hard, the words swimming on the page. The police hadn’t mentioned Patrick to her. Had William found out, and was that why he had killed her? She took a spare piece of paper from the table beside the couch and wrote down, Patrick. She’d ask the police tomorrow about him. She riffled the pages back to the beginning to see if there was more.

  Monday, June 15. It was so hot and we have no air-conditioning, no fan, nothing but windows, and when we open them, it just lets in the flies and the dust and the mosquitoes. I’m jeweled with itchy bites. I was so miserable that William suggested we go to whatever movie was playing, just so we could sit in the air-conditioning, but it wasn’t enough for me. “Can we go to a lake?” I said, and William grimaced, but I begged him and he finally said all right. We drove, and the lake was big and beautiful, and no one else was there for some reason, but as soon as he got out of the car, William began to act weird. Dragging back. Not even looking at the water. “I’m not going in,” he said. “Then why did we come?” I said, and he said, “For you.” He wouldn’t even get into a bathing suit, wouldn’t even look at the water, how pretty it was, how shining. There I was, stripped down to my bikini, and William was in a T-shirt and shorts and sneakers, sitting on the grass, looking worried. “Why don’t you come in and cool off? Why can’t you wade?” I kept asking him and asking him, and he said, “I don’t want to.”

  “We don’t have secrets,” I said, even though of course we did, including Patrick, and of course this journal is my biggest secret of all. His face softened when he heard me say that, and he moved closer to me. “All right, I’ll tell you,” he said. He said when he was little, just f
our, his dad tried to teach him to swim. He didn’t think William needed lessons. He was sure he could do it himself. His father took him to the penny pool on a day when it wasn’t crowded, and William was all excited, all feeling like he was a big boy or something. Plus, he was so proud to be with his big, strapping dad, so surprised to have time with him because his father usually just ignored him. And then his dad lifted him up and carried him to the deep end, William’s legs keeping time to a song he had in his head. He thought his dad would set him down, that maybe he would get to use one of those big inner tubes the pool had, or water wings. But instead, William’s father threw him into the middle of the deep end, into a shock of cold. William went under, his mouth and nose filling with water, everything tasting like chlorine. Every time he came up, gulping at the air, grabbing for something solid that might help him, he saw his father waving his arms. “Swim!” his father shouted to him. “Move your arms! Kick those legs! What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid?” William tried to shout help, he was drowning, help, he was going under, help, but when he opened his mouth, the water flooded in, and he was going under again, deeper and deeper, his feet brushing the bottom. The world went blue and cool, humming around him, narrowing into a cone. Then hands found him. Hands pulled him up. Daddy. He would be mad, but he had saved him. Hands placed him on the cement around the pool, and he looked up, wanting to see that his father wasn’t angry, but instead there was a stranger’s face peering down into his. A man with inky black hair and eyes like raisins, who was pushing on William’s chest, until a flood of water poured out and the full choking feeling was gone. William coughed and sat up, startled that he was breathing air instead of water. “You’re all right then,” the man said, and he got up and walked over to William’s father, who was shaking his head in disgust, and that strange man punched him in the face. “You don’t deserve to have a son,” he said, and he stalked off. William didn’t know what to do, so he sat there, and then his father, one hand cradling his face, looked at him. “Get up,” his father said. “I’m ashamed of you.” And William stood, and they walked to the car, not talking. His father took him home after that, and when his mother asked, “How did it go?” they both said, “Fine.” William’s father grew a black eye the next day, which he told everyone came from walking into a door. He never tried to teach William to swim again or do anything again. That was it. He lost interest. William’s one chance. From that day forward, William was terrified of both his father and the water. He wouldn’t go near either, especially water. Wouldn’t even sit in a bath or a hot tub. Just looking at water bothered him. “It’s a little bit like dying again,” he said to me. And I knew what he meant: I will do this because I want you to be happy.