Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  She held up her wrist, drawing the coat sleeve back. The silver and turquoise gleamed in the moody slant of November’s dimming light.

  “It’s really a man’s watch. Seems old-fashioned to say it. As if watches could be male or female.” The woman dragged her sleeve down again.

  “My dad’s been looking for that exact watch for years,” Belinda said.

  The woman looked from Belinda to her father. “I’m sorry. Maybe you’ll find another one.”

  Belinda walked behind the woman’s back. She mouthed a word that Michael thought might be: “fate,” or perhaps, he thought: “hate.” Or “wait.”

  “Sure I can’t change your mind?” Michael asked.

  The woman held her hand up, a stop sign. “Please leave me alone.”

  Carolyn turned and looked back toward the shop.

  Michael wondered if she might run inside and claim he was harassing her. He had to be sensitive. He took a step back.

  “No,” he said. “I understand. Honestly…”

  Belinda, on the other side of the woman, made a rolling motion with her hands, which Michael interpreted as keep talking, Dad.

  “Just name a price,” he said, worried that the woman might throw out some astronomical figure and then he’d have trouble saving face in front of Belinda.

  “Look,” the woman said. “Fuck off.”

  She stepped into the street.

  Something about Belinda caught his eye.

  His daughter darted to the edge of the curb, a blur of motion reaching for Carolyn’s white coat.

  In the same second that Belinda did this, a truck came out of swift traffic, brakes squealing, and slammed into the woman of white at the dead center of her body.

  Belinda stepped back to the curb. Instinctively, Michael nearly leapt for his daughter, and they both crumpled down to the sidewalk in each other’s arms.

  Carolyn flew like a great white bird to the truck’s windshield, reaching upward.

  The woman of white slid down across the hood and then fell to the street.

  Michael rode with the woman in the ambulance, after making sure that the police would give Belinda a ride home. He felt responsible. He wondered if he’d scared the woman a little, making her want to get out into the street, away from him.

  Michael noticed that the sleeves of her coat had torn, but her arms were pristine. The watch seemed to have survived perfectly well.

  At the hospital, Carolyn opened her eyes. He told her where she was, who he was, and why she couldn’t move.

  The nurses flitted around the gurney, doctors chattered, someone called for a specialist, someone else called for someone named Bobby, and Michael felt a thud in his chest knowing he had a few seconds before anyone might see.

  He thought of Belinda, all those times they’d scoured auctions and shops, looking for a watch he was certain they’d never find.

  And then, found.

  And lost.

  Right here, inches away.

  Carolyn’s eyes opened, watching him.

  He slipped the watch off her wrist and into the pocket of his jacket.

  She’ll forget this. After the anesthesia, it’ll all be a weird dream to her when she recovers.

  Later, he called his wife and told her what happened —accident, hospital, nothing about the watch. His wife snarled at him for abandoning Belinda, for riding with some stranger in an ambulance. “Who does that?” she kept asking, as if he’d been unfaithful.

  He managed to get Belinda on the phone.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine, don’t worry,” she said.

  He was just about to hang up when Belinda asked, “Did you get it?”

  Michael arrived home late. He slept in the den on the couch, the watch cupped in his hands.

  He woke up several hours later in the dark.

  He remembered a dream: the woman of white, her face a bloody mess, rose from the depths of a swimming pool to strangle him.

  He took Belinda to the city hospital the next afternoon.

  “I still don’t see why we’re here,” she said as they sat in the waiting area. “I mean, we don’t actually know her.”

  “I want to make sure she’s okay.”

  “You’re giving it back, aren’t you?” Belinda glared at him, then picked up a magazine and began flipping through pages, breathing heavily, making her disapproval known with little grunts and sighs.

  Carolyn lay asleep in her room in the midst of a labyrinth of tubes, hook-ups and machines.

  Michael set the wristwatch on the dresser by the bed.

  He broke out in a cold sweat in the hallway, just beyond the double doors.

  Belinda looked over at him from her seat at the end of the corridor.

  When he reached her, she stood up.

  “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “Over there,” he pointed.

  Michael sat down and closed his eyes. A headache came on. He pressed his hands over his eyes, leaning forward. A throbbing pain, suddenly, a build up of tension; guilt; the poor woman of white; a memory in the past that meant so much to him; the moments of loss in his life; the damned vision of Belinda in her bathing suit rising from the waters of the YMCA pool with all those boys.

  After a minute or two, Belinda returned and put her arm over his shoulder.

  “Dad, it’s okay. I’m not mad at you or anything,” his daughter whispered.

  A month later, closing in toward the holidays, Michael got a letter from a law firm claiming he’d stolen—from their client, Miss Carolyn Hoskins—an expensive wristwatch.

  The firm priced the watch at fifty thousand dollars.

  “The value may be higher,” the letter stated. “Our client believes the item is priceless.”

  He could only guess what had happened.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Belinda said, after he showed her the letter. “She didn’t even pay six hundred for it.”

  They were both in the warm kitchen, a Saturday leaning toward noon. They shared a grilled cheese on rye and a bowl of tomato soup at the breakfast counter by the window overlooking the patio, which was covered with snow.

  “Besides, you didn’t take it,” Belinda added, after she’d read the letter a second time.

  “Someone else — a nurse, maybe a relative — must have stolen it. After I put it back,” Michael said, pausing to take a sip of orange spice tea, one of Belinda’s winter concoctions. “Of course she thought I did it. She saw me pick it up.”

  “Oh come on,” Belinda said. “Nobody’s going to remember that after they get hit by a truck. Her lawyer probably got your name and address from the cops. She just thinks you did it. What a greedy little piggy she turned out to be.”

  “Not sure what the next move’ll be,” he said, setting the letter down by his plate. “I guess I’ll need to shoot a note back about that damn watch.”

  “Why’d you even take it back in the first place?” Belinda asked.

  “I was wrong to steal it.”

  “If she died, she wouldn’t have cared.”

  “But she didn’t die.”

  “But she might’ve.”

  Michael cocked his head to the side, looking at his daughter’s face.

  “Is this the kind of stuff the debate team argues about?” He waved his spoon in the air as if making a point.

  Belinda ignored the question. She picked up a paper napkin and leaned over, wiping up some of the soup spatter on the front of her father’s shirt. She frowned slightly at the result.

  “Listen, when I die, I don’t care if someone takes my red shoes,” she said. “And I love those shoes. I’d fight for those shoes.”

  “But wouldn’t you care who’d get them?”

  “Not if I’m dead.”

  Michael narrowed his eyelids. “Carolyn is not dead.”

  “She’s seriously injured, Dad. She may slip into a coma or something. Anything could happen. And you’re out your watch.”

  He bit down on hi
s lower lip. He should’ve told her by now why they’d hunted for that watch. It seemed too late. What was the point?

  “It’s not my watch,” he said. “It never was.”

  “It is,” his daughter insisted. “You want it. As long as I’ve known you, we’ve been looking for it. She doesn’t need it. Not if she dies, anyway.”

  “Belinda, I don’t like this kind of talk.”

  “It’s not like you didn’t think about it. If she died, what’d she need a watch for? She wouldn’t care.”

  There was more to his little girl than Michael had ever realized. He wondered if she had misinterpreted all those little chats and negotiations while they sought their treasures — the coins on the beach, the sulfite marbles, the amethyst glass bottles, the onyx elephant, and the watch, the watch, the watch.

  “So, now it’s okay to steal?”

  She shook her head. “No, that’s wrong. If someone’s alive. But I’m talking about if she had died. A watch would be pointless to her. What’s time mean to someone who’s out of time?”

  “But could you live with that?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. If I’d been hunting for that watch since the world began. Like you have.”

  “Stealing from the dead, Belinda?”

  “Listen,” she leaned in, twirling her spoon lightly in the soup bowl. “Remember that red granite lion? The one in the British Museum. And all the other stuff. Did Lord Carnarvon really care that he was raiding tombs?”

  “Well,” Michael hedged a little. “It was a long time after King Tut died. Maybe if you give someone a few thousand years, a little thievery’s forgivable.”

  “In fact, isn’t it true that Lord Carnarvon and Carter and their team of thieves did the mummies good? They made King Tut famous all over again. We all love Egyptian history because of thieves. And don’t even get me started on the Elgin Marbles.”

  “You might want to consider the legal profession,” he told her.

  They joked back and forth about the various museums built on theft from one group or another, the wonderful kingdoms built on extortion and skullduggery, the terrible De Medicis and the fantastic Renaissance (with Belinda reminding him yet again that he would never see the Uffizi), about auctions themselves being a kind of tomb plunder.

  “I bet that watch shows up at auction again,” Belinda said. “Maybe we can get it, after all.”

  “You miss the part where I’m being sued?”

  His daughter shook her head slightly, as if he were being an absolute fool of a dad.

  “It’s not a lawsuit, dad,” Belinda said. “It’s a shakedown. She’s lying there in the hospital. She got some ambulance chaser to send it. Don’t be afraid. What can she prove? Who’ll believe her? Who’s going to even back her story?”

  A week or so later, days away from Christmas, Michael saw the obituary in the paper.

  “Carolyn Hoskins,” he said the name three times.

  “Who?” His wife asked as she went to grab her purse from the coffee table.

  He glanced up. “Oh, that woman. The one who got hit.”

  “The one who’s suing you?” Belinda asked.

  “She died,” Michael said.

  “You’re being sued?” His wife stopped in the middle of the room.

  “Not anymore,” Belinda said.

  His wife glanced at their daughter with a mysterious expression. “I’m always the last to know in this house.”

  “She was in her late thirties,” Michael said. “Unmarried. New to the area. They’ll do the funeral back in Chicago.”

  “Long way from home,” Belinda said. “Does it say what she died from?”

  His father looked over at her. “I’m sure it was the accident.”

  “Poor thing,” Belinda said. “How awful. God. We should send flowers, Dad. We really should.”

  After her mother went upstairs, Belinda settled down beside Michael on the sofa. She tugged the newspaper from his hands.

  “Such a dinosaur, still reading papers,” she said.

  “I like the feel of newsprint.”

  “Like I said, dinosaur.” Belinda folded the paper over and read the obituary silently.

  “It’s sad,” she said.

  She reached over and picked up Michael’s cup of coffee. Lifting it to her lips, she checked to see if he disapproved. Took a sip, made a face, put the coffee back down on the coaster.

  “You must feel a little better, Dad.”

  “Not really.”

  “I mean, because of the lawsuit.”

  He thought a moment. “I guess that’s all in the past.”

  Belinda leaned back, one leg over the other, head on the cushion as she flipped through the rest of the paper.

  “Isn’t it weird, Dad? We spend years looking for this particular watch, right?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s something you really, really want. Ever since I can remember, you talked about the watch.”

  “It was a little crazy, I guess.”

  “So we find out about the auction for some old stuff, and — voila — here’s the exact watch. Right nearby. And then this woman outbids you. Only she gets hit by a truck. And then you take the watch when she’s in the hospital, but you feel bad about it. So you return it the next day. And sometime after that, someone else steals it.”

  Belinda took a deep breath. “It’s almost like she wasn’t meant to have it.”

  “I guess we weren’t meant to have it, either.”

  Belinda laughed. “That’s not what I’m getting at. What I mean is, maybe the watch didn’t want her. Fate.”

  “Well, poor Carolyn. Not a great fate.”

  “Yeah, if only she’d sold you the watch in the first place. She’d probably still be walkin’ around with her white coat on.”

  Michael thought no more about this until Christmas day, when Belinda pulled him aside after all the presents were opened, after stuffing themselves on eggnog and pie, and after his wife took the dog out for a walk in the snow.

  Belinda drew him into her bedroom.

  She patted the edge of the bed. Michael sat down.

  She wore her Christmas red sweater and gray sweat pants. Her feet were bare, toenails painted frosty pink.

  He noticed — for the first time — that no pop star posters remained on the walls.

  Belinda shook her hair out and then drew it behind her ears so it wouldn’t flop in her face. She wore the small diamond earrings they’d given her that morning.

  From behind a pillow, she brought out a wrapped box.

  “More Christmas?” he asked.

  “I didn’t want mom to see it.”

  “A secret?”

  “Kind of.” She shrugged.

  Belinda passed him the box.

  Michael looked down at it. He undid the knot of silver string, tearing the neatly folded paper with its red and green snowflakes.

  “Dad, remember how you once said to me how fate doesn’t just happen — you have to make it?”

  Opening the slats of the cardboard box, he saw a gently curved glimmer of silver.

  Oh, Belinda, he thought, looking at her intensely. Eyes like pond water, faint freckles, barely-perceptible dimple in her chin. He felt as if someone kidnapped his child and put this girl — a replica, a changeling, almost Belinda but not quite — in her place.

  “You stole it,” he whispered as he held the watch in his hands.

  “No guessing,” she said.

  But several other guesses began streaming through his mind as he thought of the events — of fate — of the woman in white so hesitant to step out into busy traffic, Belinda with that rolling motion of her hands standing behind Carolyn Hoskins and mouthing a word — Fate? Hate? Wait? — reaching out to pull the poor woman back at the last second before she went into the path of the truck.

  But had Belinda really tried to save her?

  Michael imagined his daughter stepping forward and pushing the woman of white into traffic.

 
Impossible.

  He looked at his daughter — really studied her face, as if he’d never taken the time to see her. Not as a little girl but as an adult slowly emerging from some outer sheath of innocence as boys in speedos watched her and as a woman in a hospital bed looked up to see her pick up a watch from the dresser.

  Had she returned to the hospital later, after the letter arrived? Had she pushed a pillow on Carolyn’s face, unplugged machines or done any of the dozen things you could do to stop the life of someone who couldn’t move much, who went in and out of consciousness, who lived on a morphine drip?

  No, she wouldn’t. Ridiculous. She’s smart and stubborn and she can make your head spin with those moods of hers, but she’d never murder someone. What kind of father are you to even think it?

  But that memory of Belinda in the pool, the way she stopped near the top of the ladder as she let her hair fall from the bathing cap to her shoulders. He’d seen her glance at the boys — for just a second. As if she knew what she was doing to them.

  Who was she? Who had she become?

  “Belinda,” he whispered, holding the watch in the palm of his hand. He could barely get the words out. “How’d you get it?”

  “I’ll tell you. After you tell me something.”

  “All right,” he said, breathing slowly, trying not to imagine.

  She slid back, up against the headboard, drawing her knees toward her chest.

  “It’s something I’ve never understood — all these years.”

  “And then you’ll tell me how you got this,” he reminded her, the sense of an undertow in the room.

  “Sure. Right after.”

  Belinda rested her chin in her hands, her elbows atop her knees, looking up at him with that sense of wonder she’d never quite lost from childhood.

  “So, Dad,” Belinda said. “What’s this watch really mean to you?”

  The Skin of the World

  1

  “I gotta go, anyway,” my brother Ray said.