Raj uncrossed his legs, uncertain what more he could ask but terrified that he would leave the precinct as empty as he came. He feared returning home to find another message from his father waiting for him, his voice filled with so much reborn belief in his only son.
“Please, there must be something. I could go through the evidence with you . . . ”
“Mr. Singh, I’m sorry to say it, but it was an accident. It was homicide, but it wasn’t premeditated murder. We’ve got no suspects. Without suspects we’ve got nowhere to turn. I know your family is hoping for answers, but when you’re dealing with accidents, it’s near to impossible. Unless someone else comes forward, I’m afraid it was a matter of someone reckless getting away with something bad.”
Raj wondered how many of the case files on his desk were kept as decoration for families whose couldn’t accept open endings. He realized that his presence here wasn’t one step toward discovery, it was a step toward the Singhs coming to terms with inexplicable loss. Tasser closed the file, placed it on top of the stack, and netted his fingers together on his desk.
“The woman who took the cell phone picture, do you think I could have her number? I’d like to talk to her.”
Tasser shook his head. “We can’t give out that information. It’s important witnesses remain anonymous.”
“I’d just like to thank her. It would mean something to me. I’m asking as a favor. Please, detective. I need something . . . ” He wanted to say “something to bring back, the smallest piece of paper to carry out of this precinct,” but Raj didn’t have to say any of it. Tasser licked his teeth, his eyes offering what sympathy a hardened detective had left to give, and swatted the file back down in front of him.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll call her and give her your information. If she wants to call you, she will. Her decision.” He copied down Raj’s cell number on a Post-it and affixed it to his phone. “But Mr. Singh, do me one favor in return.” Raj already knew what he was going to ask. “Tell your father to please stop calling me. It’s been every day like this. I can’t hear him yell at me anymore.”
RAJ WALKED NORTH, following the sidewalks through Tribeca and the West Village. The summer heat drenched his pant legs into roping cuffs. On block after block, pristine, color-coded couples herded loud cabals of pretty, attention-starved children into SUVs and BMWs to escape to their country homes in the Catskills or to the beach fronts of Amagansett, the annual August migration to leave the city to the residents who could least afford it. In a month the weather would turn cooler, the sun would lose its brutal beat, and the days wouldn’t flare like matchsticks burning down to the fingers. It surprised Raj how much he had learned to rely on each new season to extinguish the past and return a sense of purpose to his hours. In Florida, they had one season for his entire childhood, endless summer like an endless hangover, and he thought how much easier he had it than his mother and father because they would not see the colors turn and the clothes change and the daily routine rerouted by weather, all merciful tactics to help Raj think of all that happened as casualties of a previous season.
He had planned to phone Del as soon as he landed. But even in the taxi home from the airport, he had resisted calling her; as he fell asleep, he had resisted sending a text. Walking back to his apartment now, he still resisted, stopping himself as his fingers gripped his phone. A part of him desperately wanted to see Del again, to bring her back to the darkened studio that smelled of gasoline and to feel her body take up space in his arms. But what had stopped Raj in the cab home from the airport stopped him now, ducking out of the sun underneath imbricating café awnings. A year had gone by and they were no longer a couple. No matter whom they had lost or what grief momentarily pushed them together as tightly as a fist, they weren’t limitless for each other anymore.
The sky was turning dark too early, and the first pulses of lightning struck deep over midtown. Raj sprinted down his block for the shelter of his doorway. A bike messenger blocked the entrance, holding a wrapped parcel over his dreadlocks as if expecting torrential rain, and when Raj reached for his keys, the messenger leaned over his handlebars and asked, “Singh?”
“Yes.”
“Sign here please.” Raj printed his name on the messenger’s clipboard and carried the package up to his studio, which actually smelled of insecticide and bleach. At his desk, he ripped open the brown paper and lifted the mustard box lid. Inside were contact sheets from the lab. He held his breath to beat back the expectation of pain. On the glossy paper, row after row of Madeline Singh appeared, her face staring straight into the lens, smiling, sucking in her cheekbones, puckering her lips for a look of serious desirability, straining her jaw muscles in irritation at her inability to hold a proper pose. Dropping onto his stool, Raj studied each image, trying to make eye contact with his sister, to stare right back into her and catch something in her pupils, some flash of knowing what was ahead.
He sat there as lightning blazed across the Hudson River chop, trying to select the best photo, the one that described her most succinctly, most explicitly, the one she would have liked. But he couldn’t choose. None of them were Madi. Or they all were, each shot capturing a different creature battling insecurities and trying to bring her most striking features to the surface—indications of the beauty that lay deeper if only one would bother to explore. Do you think we’re monsters, that there’s something wrong with us? she had asked the night these shots were taken, only two weeks ago. He couldn’t remember his answer.
In near darkness, he spread the contact sheets on the desk, but none of the shots seemed sufficient. Suddenly Raj felt that his camera had just been a machine that floated between him and his sister to prevent them from looking each other in the eye. These were the last photos ever taken of her, and he had failed to get her down. Useless, he thought as he pushed the contact sheets aside. Except now, as his eyes scanned the West Side Highway spidered in the glow of headlights, it occurred to him that these were not the last photos of his sister. There was one more taken later, taken last, on the corner where she had died.
AN HOUR LATER, Raj’s phone rang. It was an unidentified number, which he immediately answered. A woman’s voice hesitated over his foreign name. “Detective Tasser told me to call you,” she said. “I don’t know what more I can say.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” he responded quickly. “I’m the one who needs to talk.” He wrote down her name and address. At least it was something, the work of a good son.
CHAPTER THIRTY - FOUR
THEY DON’T SPEAK, the sons of Tyson.
After the youngest, Thomas, returned home from serving in the war, he found the hay-brick Victorian house in terrible condition and his older brother, Vincent, already engaged. Her name was Christine Garfield, a rake-bodied blonde with a teenager’s infatuation with dances at Cincinnati’s Coney Island Moonlite Gardens, and with a father in the insurance business. Was it the viciousness of world war that turned these two brothers into hostile entities or was it the secret in their blood: a message conducted through the heart that told each one what little time was left. Thomas came back pudgy and a victim of both a premature receding hairline and a urinary disorder that released a small stream unexpectedly into his underwear (the product of seeing his first dead bodies on the battlefield). He returned to Cincinnati after the war to find Vincent tall and handsome with a talent for the latest dance moves and a harem of girlfriends unknown to Christine. The betrayal of one brother against the other was no negligible act, especially in a town where so many Cincinnati sons had returned home in body bags. All Thomas did was edge Christine toward the discovery of her fiancé’s sexual adventures, and, in the weakness of her grief, swoop in to take his brother’s place. One year after Thomas returned home from serving in the war, he married Christine Garfield in St. Mary’s Cathedral in front of an audience absent of his only sibling.
Thomas refuses to hear any mention of Vincent’s name. The brothers avoid all chance meetings an
d arrange their visits to Aurelia with the precision of a calendar. The narcoleptic cook, Verda, loses sleep assuring each that the other is safely out of the vicinity. She promises not to pass on any news—travel plans, fender benders, blood test results—and doesn’t, until the day she falls asleep one afternoon on the horsehair sofa and doesn’t wake when Aurelia comes down to turn off the lights. Neither man attends her funeral.
But letters come from Vincent. They are addressed to Christine using her maiden name. On clean white stationery sent to their new house up the hill from Aurelia’s home—its walls sticky from coats of fresh paint, its ranchstyle layout smelling of raw cedar—Vincent scribbles, I hope you’re happy. You won’t be with him. And Don’t you see he stole you? And worse, you went willingly. And He is hell. Burn there.
These hate-fueled dispatches, arriving every few months after the wedding, are obviously meant to infuriate her. But Christine sits at the kitchen table and opens them slowly, thinking of the tongue that licked them shut. She smoothes the creases and smiles down at the slurs written across the paper. Christine has not entirely let go of the man she once loved who danced with her at Moonlite Gardens through the colored lights in the shape of crescent moons and starfish. She hides these letters in a box of old childhood photographs, tying them together with a ribbon. The last one—If it’s his, there’s a monster inside—arrives three weeks before she gives birth to her only child. After that, the small white envelopes never again appear in the mail slot. But Christine never stops looking for them until the day she finds out that Vincent is dead.
Christine tracks Vincent’s life through local gossip, mostly over lunches at the Clearwater Country Club. She never asks outright, but her friends know she will listen intently to any rumor or chance sighting of her former fiancé. Over soups and salads, between discussions of Republican fundraisers or hospital charity balls, she learns that Vincent married a Presbyterian music teacher and built a small house twenty minutes north of the city. He also works in insurance. He flies small single-engine planes on the weekend at Lunken Airport and is once spotted carrying three loaves of bread and a dead houseplant across Fountain Square during a Sunday thunderstorm. “Don’t worry, Christine,” her friend confides, digging her straw into a glass of iced tea. “He doesn’t look like he used to. You probably wouldn’t even recognize him. Not so handsome anymore, and nowhere near the money Tom makes.” In a distorted deference to their communication by post, Christine sends Vincent birthday and Christmas cards, addressing them secretly in the morning after Thomas leaves for work.
Vincent dies at age thirty-four of heart failure. Thomas says nothing. He doesn’t even close his eyes when his wife tells him the news over dinner. He asks for more broccoli. Christine slips into the back pew at the funeral, out of curiosity, out of whatever lasted, and she watches a thin, olive-skinned woman in a cheap, black dress cry at the casket alongside Aurelia. The woman wears black orthopedic sandals that expose her ankles and fallen arches. Christine can’t move her eyes off those shoes, the idea of trying to be comfortable even while bawling her eyes out seems so excruciatingly vulnerable, but she is careful to leave before the mass ends without being noticed. A year later, when she finds out that Vincent’s wife has died unexpectedly from breast cancer, she has no one to send a sympathy card to. She drives out to Coney Island, where she turns off the car motor and cries. The parking lot is crowded with concertgoers, teenagers in tight shirts and jeans, screaming as they slam car doors. Christine squeezes the steering wheel. She weeps for this woman who died alone, for those breasts she saw a year ago that must have already been ravaged with lumps. Christine’s daughter sits belted in the back seat, little arms shaking with plastic bracelets, crying loudly while throwing a cardboard book against the driver’s side headrest.
That’s Katherine. Even at three, she is not one to stomach other people’s heartaches.
KATHERINE GUITEAU, BORN weighing eight pounds two ounces, the miracle girl in a bloodline known for its broken men. Katherine’s sex is the cause of great celebration. Thomas can’t believe the luck of a girl. Thomas drives her home and sleeps with her next to him, afraid to keep his hands off of her for a single second. You will live, he says. You’re the one true gift that all mirrors wait to hold, and you’ll live. The death rate for Guiteau women is not like its men. Tyson had two sisters, his father one, and their hearts never gave out. Thomas is sure that Katherine’s heart won’t stop either. He presses his ear to her chest and listens to the beat. He will die but this baby will live, her eyelids scabbed from the raw air and pinched closed in the exhaustion of growing. Pink balloons bob on the mailbox. Pink announcement cards sit inside waiting for the mailman to spread them around the world.
When Christine tells Thomas the news of his older brother’s death, he doesn’t even blink. But as he finishes dinner and pours a glass of bourbon at the side bar, his head booms with fear like an orchestra practicing in an empty concert hall. Heart failure. A wrestling match with fate that will come sooner or later and pin him to the ground. Thomas says nothing to Christine, but the next day at the office he makes a series of urgent appointments with any and all specialists listed in the Cincinnati Yellow Pages: cardiologists, general practitioners, blood doctors with their trays of long needles, nutritionists. He spends hours getting his pulse taken, his eyes examined with flashlights, his heart monitored while a nurse counts with her wristwatch. Each time he returns for the test results, the doctor takes him into the office, opens the chart, and breathes hard through the nostrils. And they all say the very same thing. “I can find nothing wrong with your heart. No aberrations. No signs of disease. Basically, Mr. Guiteau, no reason to assume it will in any way malfunction. You’re completely healthy, sir. Get out of here and enjoy the sun.”
Thomas shakes his head and explains his family history. “Help me. Please, you must. I don’t want to die.”
Thomas is also prone to fits of crying with his fingers wrapped around a steering wheel. All day long at his father-in-law’s offices, he talks customers into taking out insurance on the chance nature of unforeseeable acts: a house on fire; a fall down the stairs; a car accident on the corner; an unlocked back window in the middle of the night with the children sleeping upstairs. He is an expert at terrorizing his audience into signing with him, at making them believe that at any moment the worst will happen, instantly reducing life to smoke. “We like to think nothing awful will strike us,” he says, moving around his desk, his eyes trained into the distance like a stoic philosopher. “But what if it does? What if it doesn’t just happen to other people? What protection will you have against the slings and arrows that are around the next corner?” Thomas sells more insurance packages on those abstract questions than he ever does listing the number of break-ins, electrical fires, and car accidents that occur within the city limits each year. When he speaks, he makes the wildest nightmares sound as inevitable as dinner. But here he is, age thirty-one, with his own tragedy just around the calendar, and he can do nothing to avoid it. Driving home, tears kaleidoscoping his eyes, all he can do is keep going forward until his heart decides to stop.
He cries so hard he can’t catch his breath, kicking his feet into the car’s maroon carpeting, using his left turn signal and checking his speed as a police car whizzes by, late for a bigger emergency. He pulls into the driveway, all wood beams and marigolds blooming under the hot streaks of bay windows. Here is the life he has built. Katherine runs across the front lawn, sprinting toward his door in her yellow cords and black barrettes. He pretends to gather papers in the backseat while wiping his face. She races to attack him, her legs winding around his knee and her fingers holding on to his belt loops, already too old and heavy for this ritual ride.
He shuffles up the walkway with his daughter strapped to his leg. He is thirty-one and healthy.
THOMAS DIES AT Christ Hospital four days before a snowy Thanksgiving in 1958. He was admitted a week earlier, complaining of chest pains and numbness in his fingers. W
hen his heart finally bursts, the night nurses on duty say that he made no noise, no twist of the face or groan heard all the way to the station desk. But Thomas knows he is going. He knows this like he knows a train is coming down the tracks. The amount of money that Christine receives from his multiple life insurance policies astounds even a protection expert like her father. She feels guilty when she accepts the reduced widow-clause membership at the country club.
Their marriage was imperfect. There was little worry when Katherine ran into their bedroom in the middle of the night that they would be having sex or even sharing the same bed. They fought, usually about stupid grievances, a tactless comment at a cocktail party or his lending money to the wrong sort. If Christine ever suspected that Thomas betrayed his own brother to marry her, she couldn’t understand where that kind of passion went. She buries him in the same cemetery that holds his father and brother, although a hundred feet away, near a row of leafless oaks. She loved him but not romantically. She misses him nonetheless. Her response is to keep moving. She runs for president of the Neighborhood Watch and secretary for the Woman’s Catholic Association. She attends luncheons, arranges golfing lessons, organizes fund drives, plays marathon bridge, and visits Aurelia, now Clorox white from hair tip to toenail, once a week out of obligation, sitting in the quiet kitchen with all of the lights off. When John F. Kennedy runs for office, Christine switches parties and registers as a Catholic Democrat.
Somewhere a teenager with acne and crooked teeth hides in a bedroom painted yellow, smoking cigarettes that turn her nails the color of the walls. There is no heaven above the speckled canopy of her four poster bed, of this she is sure, but when it’s late and her eyes won’t close, or it’s Sunday and the radio counts songs up the chart, she talks to her father.
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