Telling Lies

by Wendy Hornsby

  Aleda’s face pressed close. “Is Emily okay?”

  “No,” I said. “Who would do that to her?”

  “Any of them.”

  “Tell me.”

  The guard had managed to pry her hands away.

  “Give us a minute,” I begged him.

  “Sorry, lady, but that’s it for now. Wave bye-bye.”

  A second guard held Aleda by the waist. She struggled against him and pleaded with me: “Be careful, Maggot.” I saw tears running down her face. “For Marc.”

  The shutter slid over the cage and locked into place. Fay was beside me, looking defeated.

  “You heard her,” I said. “She wants to talk to me.”

  “I heard her,” Fay sighed. “Please. Wait until tomorrow. Aleda hasn’t had any sleep for seventy-two hours. She hasn’t been well and she’s exhausted. I need her rested for the arraignment tomorrow. You can see her in court at two. Go away now, and I promise, I’ll get you together after the hearing. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “I’ll see you in court.”

  Flint had me by the elbow. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you home.”

  I leaned against him. “You offered me a drink earlier.”

  “Okay. Where do you want to go?”

  “Emily’s. I have to change for midnight mass.”

  Chapter Eight

  It was almost midnight when Flint and I drove up outside La Placita church. The sidewalk in front was like a carnival from hell. The usual neighborhood loonies, always joiners, were out in force. I saw sandwich boards promising everything from salvation to direct communication with our Martian cousins. There were a few mainstream groups represented as well: pro-life pickets marched in a tight circle with placards denouncing Emily’s work in a family health clinic that provided abortions. I’d had too much input during the day to feel properly offended.

  I thought I understood why Emily had made arrangements with Father Hermilio for a private memorial mass for Marc. Marc’s funeral had been such a media fiasco that some of our family hadn’t been able to get inside the church. There had been so many issues vying for attention—Emily’s indictment, the death of young Tom Potts, the heated-up Peace Movement generally—that it seemed Marc had been forgotten about.

  There was a second reason. Emily felt responsible for Marc’s death. He had been fragged by his own men the day the international edition of Time with Emily’s face on the cover hit the stands in Saigon. She had spent her life in atonement.

  We parked in the Olvera Street lot across the street and made our way through the crowd. I carried a brown paper shopping bag, its contents requested by Uncle Max.

  The sanctuary of La Placita church was ablaze with candles. Flowers and pine boughs banked the altar. Above it all, stretched across the ancient domed ceiling, was a hand-painted paper banner: HERMANO Y HERMANA. Brother and sister, it meant. Emily had been infused into Marc’s service; in fact, she had overpowered him again. The irony of the scene struck me. Whatever her intentions, Emily had managed to stage her own media fiasco.

  Flint wedged us down the packed aisle toward the front. I passed many familiar faces, a Who’s Who collection of activists and politicians—a former governor, the mayor, the left flank of the City council—and a goodly number of neighborhood folks. There was also a smattering of men wearing bits of military garb: cunt caps, field jackets, khaki shirts, buttons that proclaimed, VETERANS FOR PEACE. What I sensed among the assembled crowd was an air of expectation, more celebrity-watching than grief. I worried about their motives.

  The church is very old and not very large. Ordinarily the place has a certain historic charm. But I wasn’t seeing it. Everything about La Placita seemed heavy, the three-feet-thick adobe walls, dark oak beams, gaudy religious paintings, the overused air. It all began to press in around me. I tried to get a breath, but the smells repulsed me flowers, burning wax, mold, people who live without plumbing.

  Uncle Max and Lucas Slaughter were sitting together on the front pew whispering. They looked up when Flint and I approached. I gave Max the bag he had asked me to bring, and squeezed in between Lucas and Flint. My parents had declined to come, preferring to stay with Emily. I was thinking I should be with them instead of here among so many strangers.

  When we were settled, Flint nudged my arm. “You okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brought you something.” Out of his coat pocket he pulled Mrs. Lim’s starched napkin, the one I had blown my nose into earlier. He must have picked it up when we went back to Emily’s apartment for me to change into my red suit. He pressed the napkin into my hand. “Just in case.”

  “Thanks.” I was very touched. I folded the napkin and held on to it. “It was nice of you to bring me.”

  He shrugged. “I would have come anyway. This way, I get a front-row seat.”

  “You’re some tough guy, Flint,” I managed before I started to choke up. I kept my eyes on my hands in my lap, to avoid having to speak to anyone. I didn’t look up again until I saw Rod Peebles’s freckled hand on my knee.

  “God bless you, Maggie,” he said, bending over me solicitously. “Sit down, Assemblyman,” Lucas whispered. “They’ve all had time to see you.”

  Rod glared quickly at Lucas and made his way down the front pew, giving everyone a back pat or a double-fisted handshake. Very sincere. The change in the nature of the service seemed to have changed his mind about coming—more politically correct. I didn’t see where he finally sat.

  Father Hermilio entered the chancel in his robes. He offered prayers in both Spanish and English. I wasn’t listening very closely to what he said. Most of it was from the ritual and I could respond by rote.

  “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.” He made the sign of the cross; then he called on Uncle Max to join him. This was a surprise to me, though Max seemed prepared. He opened the bag I had brought and took out the khaki field jacket I had brought home from the hospital among Emily’s clothes. It was Marc’s jacket.

  Max kissed me, hard, on the cheek as he rose. “I love you, Margot,” he whispered.

  “Did Emily ask you to do this?” I asked.

  He nodded. “We’ll be okay, kid.”

  In the chancel, Father Hermilio embraced Max dramatically, then stepped to the side, leaving Max alone facing the congregation.

  With a showy flourish, Max put on the field jacket. He was only a few feet away. I could see DUCHAMPS on the patch over the left pocket. There were Marine insignia on the breast and sergeant’s stripes on the collar. The jacket had been sent home from Vietnam with Marc’s few personal possessions.

  The jacket had old dark stains and new mud. Stiff brown blood starched one side of the collar. I imagined I could smell it, and I nearly gagged.

  Max squared his shoulders, but Marc’s jacket was still too big for him.

  “This is my shroud,” he said in his clear, baritone voice. “The shroud worn by every one of you who ever loved my nephew, Marc Duchamps, who ever cherished my niece, Dr. Emily Duchamps Orozco, who ever lost innocence before its time.

  “Marc was kind and good, and full of the spirit of life. Through him, we dwelt in hope for the future. Yet, twenty-two years ago on this day, our Marc was taken from us. It was unfair; he had not spent half his share of youth. That light he had shared with us was interred with him, forever, in his oblivious grave.

  “Today, in full remembrance of that young life lost, Marc’s twin, our shining Emily, put on this jacket he had worn in that faraway Asian forest. She did this perhaps to feel closer to him, to lighten the shadow his loss cast across the remainder of her life.

  “Wearing this shroud, Emily, also, was stolen from us.

  “We have lost them both, hermano y hermana. Now the shadow on our hearts is double, a cold void in our arms where once we held them, at our table where we broke bread together, in the missing voices in the family chorus, in our plans for companionship in old age. To our sorrow,
Emily and Marc will live only in our memory, forever brash and young. ‘The good Lord pity and pardon and help for the future those God has still left us.’”

  Max got to that point before he was overcome. Father Hermilio bowed his head in prayer, but Lucas Slaughter rose to the chance to put his arms around Max. Lucas began singing “Amazing Grace.” A good portion of the congregation joined him, a capella.

  I, too, was overcome, so many warring emotions flooding in at once. Among them was a rising anger. Here was a funeral, though Emily was not dead. What was the rush? Where was the prayer for her safety?

  The congregation was standing, singing anthems from the old Peace Movement days. Many had joined hands and were leaning against each other, swaying as they sang. It was a scene straight out of 1969, except the faces were older, the clothes were better. They were contentedly bereaved, so many together once again after so many years. I didn’t like what I was feeling toward them.

  I turned to Mike Flint and whispered, “Can we leave?”

  He rose with me and we started down the aisle. Hands groped for me, tried to hold on to me or embrace me. It was frightening. They were for the most part strangers, yet they seemed to want from me some sort of absolution, or maybe intercession with the not-yet-departed, as if I were a conduit to Emily’s grace. I hated the idea of the martyrdom of Emily, Saint Emily. Even worse, Emily wasn’t going to her folk beatification alone: we were sending Marc in with her.

  A man in a wheelchair with a Veterans for Peace button on his lapel pressed a crumpled American flag into my hand. “God bless you,” he said.

  Pregnant women in dark shawls, like the one I had encountered on Emily’s front steps, reached out at me from the pews. They touched my clothes and placed in my hands religious medals or small silver milagros, miracle charms crudely shaped like eyes or women.

  The crowd pressed so close they seemed to suck away all the air.

  “Mike,” I pleaded, gripping his arm with both my hands. “Get me out.”

  From out of the corner of my eye I caught a dark movement that rose from the crowd and came flying toward my head. I was hemmed in so closely I couldn’t have ducked even if there had been time.

  The first blow fell on the back of my neck, fists clenched into a hammer. I got my arms up and took the next hit on my wrist. “She was a murderer!” I felt cold spit hit my face.

  I fell back against the fluid mass of people as Mike released me to lunge into the attacker. When the flurry of arms and legs cleared, when the screaming stopped, the man was face down on the red tile with his hands cuffed behind him, pinned to the floor by Mike’s knee.

  I didn’t recognize the man. He was older than middle-aged, better cared for than the local street loonies. He wore pressed Dockers, soft leather shoes, a clean windbreaker. Washed and ironed garb. Without the handcuffs, he would look like anyone’s nextdoor neighbor. He raised his head and strained to look up at me, his broken glasses hanging from one ear.

  “She was no hero,” he sobbed. “Doesn’t anyone remember? She was a killer.”

  “That’s enough,” Mike said, hauling the man to his feet. “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “Potts.” The man dropped his head and began to sob with tragic anguish. “Emily Duchamps murdered my son.”

  Chapter Nine

  At 5:00 A.M. the desert sky was deep black, the stars hidden by a canopy of haze. I sped through the void between the black sky above and the black road below, trying to keep the speedometer of Uncle Max’s Beemer from slipping past 100 mph. I didn’t try very hard.

  The trucks in the lanes to my right were a blur as I passed, or more likely I was their blur, sailing down the left lane as if it were a chute out of the abyss.

  I had the beginnings of a hangover, house wine on an empty stomach, and my neck ached dully where I had been struck in church. I wanted a hot shower, fresh clothes, a toothbrush, a handful of aspirin. And the truth. I was depending on Jaime Orozco to have it all.

  Jaime, as I remembered him, probably wouldn’t be up and coherent for hours yet. I kept thinking about margins of time, about the hour I spent sitting on Emily’s stoop, possibly the same hour during which she was shot. Had I taken an earlier flight, I might have found Emily on time, I might have made a difference in someone’s decision to put a gun to her head. Everything was timing. I forgot about the highway patrol and let the car go.

  The speed, the cold air streaming in the window, made my head feel a little better as, over and over on Max’s tapedeck, I replayed the message tape Flint had taken from Emily’s answering machine. I was thinking about Aleda, the fresh pain in her voice when she said Marc’s name. Max had said that he half-expected Marc to show up with Emily.

  It was a ridiculous idea, born I’m sure from the mating of anxiety and a bottle of scotch. But it was a notion I grasped for, longed for, as I thought of Emily immobile in her hospital bed, slipping away from me just as Marc had.

  What had pushed me toward the edge was the strange service at La Placita and the even stranger conversation in the Bonaventure bar afterward. Max, I think, had been well-lubricated, though eloquent, when he delivered his eulogy. Later, he had been plain old drunk.

  In the bar, I took him to task for speaking of Emily as if she were dead. He had said, “Don’t let it bother you. We buried Marc before he was ready, too.”

  I asked him to explain himself, but he only grew more incoherent. As Lucas was finally helping him upstairs, Max had turned to me and said, “Marc lives.”

  In a metaphysical sense, sure. Just the same, it was an idea I could not let go. Every time I learned something about Emily on the day she was shot, I tripped over Marc.

  Driving Max’s car, as far as Riverside, I had tried to convince myself that the voice of the mystery caller on the tape was Marc’s. I aged it twenty-two years, made allowances for substandard fiber optic transmission, adjusted the pitch to account for stress. I gave him a cold.

  Then somewhere after the 60 interchange, I decided it couldn’t be Marc at all. By the time I passed Banning, I had waffled back and forth so often, I couldn’t even recognize my own voice. The only thing I was sure of was that I felt no shame over the method I had used to liberate the tape from Flint’s pocket. He’s a cop; he should be more careful. He shouldn’t get drunk with distraught women.

  As I neared the Indio off-ramp, I saw the first red sliver of sunrise over the Cottonwood Mountains. The moment of desert dawn came in a hurry. When the sun broke the ridge, soft rose light washed across the black desert floor like spillwaters pouring down from the mountains.

  During the long drive through the night, I had felt a strong sense of isolation, as if I were passing alone through a vast and desolate wilderness. But in the first light, the illusion vanished. Desert-pink condos, new strip malls with turquoise trim, and the rolling green lawns of freshly planted golf courses emerged in relief as the night receded.

  The arrival of another day reminded me I had missed a night’s sleep. I felt tired, but there was too much I had to do to waste time in bed. At least, I thought, remembering the goofy look on Flint’s face when I left him, wasting time sleeping.

  I exited the freeway at Washington Street and was stuck immediately in a bottleneck of construction traffic. On both sides of the wide street the skeletons of new, half-framed condos cast long shadows across what was left of the open, white desert sand.

  Trapped behind an earthmover, I found the last few miles to Jaime Orozco’s house excruciatingly slow going. Like everything I had been looking for, he was so close yet so unobtainable.

  I hadn’t seen Jaime since his divorce from Emily, probably eight or nine years ago. I couldn’t remember exactly. They had planned to be a one-family medical mission to the Third World, a team, he the orthodontist/dentist, she the specialist in communicable diseases. But somewhere between the amoebic dysentery they brought home from Honduras and the malaria they contracted in Bangladesh, the plan had soured. And so had the marriage. It was too bad, t
oo, because I always liked Jaime. I can only describe him as loose. He was good for Emily.

  My hope was that during long, intimate nights in Honduras, or during delirious ramblings in Bangladesh, or maybe some-where in between, Emily had said something to Jaime that would help me now.

  As the sky grew brighter, it became easier to recognize the few remaining landmarks. After getting lost only twice, I man-aged to find Jaime’s place along what was now the road to Lake Cahuilla.

  Last time I visited Jaime, there hadn’t been a paved road, or a lake, either. His acreage had become trapped in the contagion of resort development that crept steadily, inexorably, across the sand and into the date palm groves. I wondered how close Jaime would let the new stucco walls encroach before he fled. He loved mankind in concept, but not necessarily as neighbors.

  Jaime’s weathered adobe and tile house was set well back from the road, still surrounded by a buffer of grapefruit, tangerine, and palm trees. I pulled into the long gravel drive, looking for signs of life in either the house or the attached dental office. I didn’t relish waking him. Especially waking him with the news I had to bear.

  When I came through the trees I saw that the rear office lights were on. A round little woman in a white pantsuit stood on the porch steps watching a collie relieve himself on the trunk of a palm tree.

  I parked beside a pickup truck and got out. The crisp air was tinged with sweet tangerine blossoms and pungent sage. I took a deep breath and stretched my stiff muscles.

  “Forgot your lights,” the woman called.

  I reached back into the car and snapped them off. The collie sauntered over, sniffed my hand, nudged my crotch. I must have passed muster, because he stayed close beside me, licking at my hand and trying to get his nose between my legs, all the way across the gravel drive.

  The woman came down the porch steps to meet me. “You have an emergency? Otherwise you need an appointment.”

  “I only want to speak with Dr. Orozco,” I said. “I’m his sister-in-law.”