“But, Beth, I need to find Mills Chevern. And I say this because we are friends, whether you take me for one or not. You’re in danger if you think you’re protecting him. You don’t have all of the facts about that kid. You’re risking your life and the life of your child if you continue to shield someone who might be guilty. You think about that. You think about what you’re putting at risk.” He backed off the porch, blending into the night.
She shut the door and turned off the lights, climbing up the stairs and ducking into the nursery, where her painting of Mills remained wet and unfinished. It had already been destroyed the moment the officer had photographed it. They had turned the work against her, using it against the young man who had sat for her and trusted her to render him fairly. Beth stared at the eyes on the canvas, two brown pits that didn’t breathe like he breathed. The painting didn’t record much more than his color and shape. It wasn’t him at all.
He wasn’t himself: that was what Magdalena had said about Jeff on his last visit. Beth remembered standing where Jeff had stood earlier that day in the doorway of the sunroom, how he had warned Magdalena about OHB and his own death, how he had refused when she asked him to sit down, how the old woman’s eyes were so ruined with cataracts that she may not have been able to see him clearly. He had come on a Monday, when Alvara was at the grocery store.
Beth wanted to run out to the garage and wake Mills. She wanted to whisper into his ear: Maybe he wasn’t himself because it wasn’t him. Someone could have impersonated Jeff on that final visit, someone who wanted Magdalena to believe OHB was responsible for his death and that the answer to her own murder could be found in what Jeff Trader knew. But she couldn’t go to the garage—the police might still be watching—so instead she went back to her bedroom and crawled into bed. Gavril held the blanket open for her.
“They will always blame the easiest target,” he whispered sadly. “And the easiest target is who they don’t know.”
She kissed his fingers. There were three of them in bed together, she, Gavril, and what they had made. One night, last summer, they had produced the possibility of a child.
She woke early to her cell phone ringing. It was the gynecologist’s office confirming her appointment for the following morning. She decided she would tell the doctor that she’d been under extreme stress in the last month, but from here on she would try to breathe lighter, move more slowly, and soften the corners of her body into a welcoming host. She went down to the kitchen, and Gavril came to sit with her. Beth was thankful to see no outward change to his studio through the window. She prepared scrambled eggs, two plates for them and one to carry to the garage.
“He has to go,” Gavril said after a few minutes, bringing the fork to his tongue. A housefly landed on his knuckle and he shooed it off. “We can’t be normal with him in there. We said we’re starting over from here. He cannot be part of our future anymore. You have to let him go.”
“I know,” she said. She would drive him to the city tomorrow before her appointment. “In the trunk of my car, if I have to. Over the ferry to Connecticut, if the police are doing searches on the causeway.”
“I’m going for a walk today,” Gavril told her. “I can’t work in the studio with him sitting there. I’ll check if they have the causeway blocked off. If it’s open, you could drive him into Manhattan tonight.” He collected his remaining eggs with the side of his fork and looked up at her. “We start over, right? We don’t think about before?” She nodded. “I will be done with my landscape soon, and then we can decorate the nursery and build a crib. After you finish your painting in there. We’ll need to find you a new room for your work.”
She didn’t tell him that she wouldn’t be finishing the painting, that it was already ruined for her. But this was the first time since they’d moved to Orient that Gavril had put her work before his. She thought of the painting in Luz’s bedroom, YOU ARE HERE, and the beauty of those simple self-orienting words.
Beth scraped eggs onto a plate and put on her coat. She pulled a piece of paper from the pocket, the crumbled note from Luz asking to speak with Magdalena.
“I’m going to stop by to see Luz today,” she told him. Gavril bent down to lace his boots. “Do you want me to tell them you said hello?”
He eyed her warily, tightening the laces. “You should leave them be. I think starting as a family means losing track of them. They are not good for us.”
“Why?”
“Just please. Leave them alone.”
His reaction surprised her, but she didn’t push him to explain. She wanted to breathe lightly, to adjust her body to the second heartbeat. She opened the door and looked back at her husband, crouching over his knees as he tied a double knot. The fly swam around his head, and Gavril snatched for it, reeling back on the chair. “Damn bugs,” he growled. “Nowhere is free of them. Listening things.”
Beth scanned the road for any patrol car with a view into their yard. Finding only a stray sprinkling of snow, swept by the wind that carried the cold of a heavier system, she crossed the grass and unlocked the door.
At first she thought he had escaped, maybe after he had heard the officers casing the house last night. The cot was stripped of its blanket, with only the empty mattress dented on its springs. But she noticed the brown, body-shaped cocoon under the frame, with the tips of two sneakers jutting from the seams. He looked like one of the homeless who took shelter under subway benches. When she dropped him off in Manhattan tomorrow, she’d withdraw a thousand dollars from her bank account for him, almost the last of her savings from the Scientific Frontier. It was enough for him to get back to California, to reclaim Leonard Thorp with no trace of ever having set foot in Orient.
The quilt moved at the sound of her footsteps, jolting up until his blanketed head hit the springs, and he wiped the fabric from his face. He smiled dejectedly, to be waking up here, in a tar house, on the hard terrazzo, exiled from the warmth of Paul Benchley’s home after two months of growing accustomed to its comforts. In a year, would he find a job in Modesto? Would he try again to contact his mother? Would he have a boyfriend or a family of his own? A week ago, she might even have been jealous of his directionlessness, the vacuum of his future, no weight on him but his own body. Mills climbed onto the bed, and she placed the plate of eggs on his knees.
“I had a dream I was saving you from a fire,” he said as he ate. “I kept pulling you up a stairwell, but you wouldn’t move until I solved a math problem, like the kind from high school. If the fire is spreading at twenty feet per minute and we’re running up five flights of stairs per minute, will the fire get to the top before we do?”
She laughed as she sat down next to him. “Did we make it? Who won?”
“I don’t know. I woke up before I could find out.”
She told him about her revelation, that the Jeff Trader who visited Magdalena might not have been Jeff Trader at all. “‘He wasn’t himself,’ she said.” Mills chewed his eggs hungrily, and she poured him a glass of water in a dirty mug from Gavril’s shelf.
“So if it was someone pretending to be Jeff,” Mills said, “it had to be a man.”
“Could have been a woman. Magdalena was blind at ten feet. It could have been anyone wearing work clothes and a jacket, just a smudge in the doorway from where she sat. And Magdalena said Jeff was slurring. It’s not impossible to imitate an old alcoholic. Magdalena didn’t exactly have the best hearing, either.”
“So all this time, the whole idea about Jeff Trader’s journal was worthless?” Mills picked up the photocopied pages and slapped them on the bed.
“Someone still ransacked his place. Maybe for that book. It just means that whoever killed Jeff wanted to plant the idea that it had something to do with OHB. Whoever it was wanted Magdalena to think that’s why he died. Maybe Jeff Trader wasn’t blackmailing anyone. Maybe he was just nosy and liked collecting secrets.” She pressed her palms against her eyes. “I don’t know. He must have known something. Magdalena said h
e’d been acting strangely for the last few months. But if his death wasn’t over blackmail, it turns everything around.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that I’ve got to get out of here.” Mills stared past the sculptures, toward the streams of daylight cutting through the tar mounds. Beth tried to find the beauty in Gavril’s destruction, but the only beauty she saw was that his work was paying for their future. When Dombrovski wrote the check, they would have the money to buy the house from Gail and raise their child here.
She wrapped her arm around Mills’s shoulders. “Gavril’s walking to the causeway to see if the police are doing searches. And when I drive out to the tip I’ll check the ferry. We’ll get you out. If they didn’t find you last night, chances are good you’ll make it out of here tomorrow. They probably think you’re already gone. New York might not be safe for too long, either. Go west as soon as you can. You were right. They do think you had something to do with Adam.” She decided not to tell him about the video of him running away from the scene of the crime.
“Lisa,” he muttered. He finished his eggs, closing his eyes as he swallowed. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m going to miss what I had out here. And you. I guess I won’t see you for a while.” Beth stood up, unwilling to say her good-byes. She would miss him too. People, things, the woman in the mirror—they all moved away, left her hands, entered her world and departed. It all seemed horribly fine. “You said you’re driving to the tip?” he asked.
She took out the note on Luz’s stationery. “I want to ask her about this. I want to know why she went over to Magdalena’s house and what she wanted to talk to her about. What was she trying to stop Magdalena from saying?”
Mills bent forward to read the card. “Luz, buzz, fuzz.” He blinked and stared up at her, his features rearranged. “I once caught her coming out of Paul’s house when no one was home. It was before the fire, on the day that Magdalena died. She said she stopped by to ask Paul if he’d sit for a portrait. Maybe she went inside for something else. Maybe it was your friend who took the gas can.”
Beth curled the card around her finger. “I’m going to ask her. There’s something not right about Luz and Nathan. I can feel it every time they look at me.”
“Don’t,” he said abruptly. “Don’t go looking for more trouble. You should let it alone.”
“I’ll be back in an hour or two. Do you want me to lock the door or leave the keys here?”
“Leave them,” he said. She wondered if Mills had already devised a plan of escape, one that didn’t include her. She looked at him sadly. “I’ll wait for you. Don’t worry,” he said. “I just don’t want to be trapped inside if someone comes to the house. This place is fucking scary, you know that? Orient, I mean. Have you thought about raising your child in the city?”
“Have you met children raised in the city?” Beth walked across the studio, following the tarp edges. “They know everything by age five. They have their periods by age seven. They’re divorced by twelve, and all the spark is gone by eighteen. I refuse to punish this child with early adulthood. I still want it to be naïve enough to like me by the time it learns to talk.” She realized she was still saying it. She stopped at the door. “God, tomorrow I’ll know if it’s a boy or a girl. Then it’s six months hunting for a name so that, one day, my child can ask me, Why did you limit me with a name like David? Cut my options down by calling me Rachel? Names are cages, places for parents to lock their children into for life.” Now she sounded like Luz. “People should be allowed to name themselves.”
“It’s better that someone does it for them. Otherwise they’d just keep renaming themselves, over and over again.” He sat on the bed, bundling himself in the blanket. He was just a smile and eyes, brown irises and a gray tooth.
She dropped the keys on the cart by the door.
“See you soon, Leonard,” she said.
Beth drove east on Main Road. Her lane was empty, but more cars than usual were threading west, fleeing to the city and away from the storm clouds already darkening the Sound. She expected heavy snow to fall at any moment across her windshield. Pulling up to a traffic light, she saw a police sketch of Mills—not her own, but a real one—taped to a telephone pole: WANTED FOR QUESTIONING. “If you have any information on this man’s whereabouts, please call the Southold Township Police Dept. Anonymity is guaranteed.” The sign might as well have read GUILTY.
The absence of any name on the poster suggested that Mike Gilburn had already discovered that “Mills Chevern” was an alias. Beth was convinced that the police sketch artist had used her painting as the source: the drawing had the same direct, low-chinned stare, and the artist had mistaken a bubble of paint for a bump along the bridge of his nose. The result converted the soft, liquid lines of her work into the aggressive pencil of an unsmiling, grim-eyed composite. On the wanted posters, Mills looked dangerous, wanted only in one way: to be taken down.
Beth sped up the dirt incline toward the Wilson-Crimp house. Two cars were in the driveway. The farmhouse wavered on the bluff, its tarp walls trembling in the wind. The half-dug trenches for Luz’s pool were white with frost. Beth climbed the walk. Indoor lights starred through the plastic; she heard a radio in the living room and one side of a conversation. The wind blew an opening in the tarps, and Beth peered through it. She saw Luz ten feet away, in a purple spandex top and yellow sweats, arm stretched over her head, cell phone pinned between her ear and neck.
“Slick, slick,” she said into the receiver. The thin bones of her rib cage protruded through shiny synthetic. “I’m proud of you, Ty. You stick up for yourself, and you listen to your mom. Don’t give her trouble.” Her torso bent toward the valley between her legs, the notches of her spinal column smoothing flat. “Okay, you tell my sister I called. And tell her I sent it in the mail and not to worry. There’s enough for you to get your fish. A big bowl, not a small one. And you got to remember to change its water. All right. I love you. Be good.” She tossed the phone on the sofa behind her and turned up the radio. “Today in history, Nazis looted and burned synagogues and Jewish-owned shops in Germany and Austria on the Night of Broken Glass.”
Luz hummed along to the voice-over, rolling her head and arching her shoulders. Beth watched, slightly mesmerized by her beauty, the tight sinew of her body, the gleam of skin under sweat, the jagged border of her upper teeth, and the elongated cup handles of her closed eyes.
“Today in history, the Soviet Union solidified plans to drop a hydrogen bomb from an airplane over remote Siberia. Today in history, suicide bombers carried out simultaneous attacks on three U.S.-based hotels in Jordan, killing sixty and wounding hundreds. Today in history . . .”
If Beth’s theory was right—that someone had impersonated Jeff Trader on that last visit—the one person who couldn’t have posed as an old white man was Luz. When Beth squinted, Luz became a black shape, the color of her skin the one element unhidden by poor vision or distance. A figure moved across the tarp on the opposite side of the house. It raced and melted into a corner, Caucasian green. The sound of footsteps on brick brought Luz to open her eyes. She scanned the room, stopping on Beth’s silhouette behind the plastic. “Hello?”
“Today in history, astronomer Carl Sagan, actor Lou Ferrigno, and singer Nick Lachey were born.”
“It’s me,” Beth said. She stepped through the open seam in the plastic and into the house. Luz drew her legs together and turned the radio off.
“The radio was just reminding me that people have been blowing themselves up since the beginning of time. We’re not living in a particularly inventive age.” Luz offered a smile, then wiped it dry with a towel.
“How’s Gavril?” she asked. “He told me he’s nearly finished his work for the show. An installation of suburban regress. Isn’t it curious that it’s always the male artists who try to make The Last Painting, The Last Sculpture, the Last Black Fuck-Off-and-Good-bye? Men always want the last word—they want to take the ball and go home. If you look at women artis
ts, even you and me, we’re on the side of life. We’re the ones pushing humanity a little farther against the darkness.” She glanced at Beth’s stomach. “How’s the baby?” She reached out and clapped her hands, inviting Beth to step forward and let her touch it. Beth stood still.
“I thought about you this morning when I was clearing a spider nest from the ceiling in the upstairs bathroom,” Luz continued, oblivious. “For a week there’s been a big spitball hanging in the web, and today there were a dozen little spiders climbing all over it, freshly hatched. They scurried so fast when I tried to squash them. And it struck me, standing on the upside-down trash can, that a spider is a spider when it’s born. It knows exactly what it needs to do. But a human has zero instincts at birth. All of its instincts come later. Think of all the work you’ve got ahead to make that thing inside you into an efficient, functioning being. Please make it a good being. We need more of them.”
Beth pulled the crumpled card out of her pocket and held it in front of Luz. “What is this?”
Luz’s mouth stiffened. She tipped her head to the side. It took effort for her to return Beth’s gaze.
“Oh, that,” she said coolly. “Well, you know my project. I’ve been painting all the old-timers out here. I thought your neighbor would make the perfect subject for my series.” She glanced in the direction of her phone, as if it were communicating with her telepathically. “She wasn’t interested.”
“The note seems more urgent than that. It mentions talking to Magdalena before she could say something. Don’t lie to me.”
Luz rubbed her lips together to quicken her smile. It was the kind of smile of someone stuck, the kind of expression used to blanket desperation, as if nothing terrible could ever strike Luz Wilson as long as she had that smile on her lips.
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