“Why do you say that?”
“A hunch.”
“Can’t you be more specific?”
“Look at that last picture of her. It was taken right before they left Missouri. That’s a very tortured person. And the only description I found of her car accident makes me just as suspect.”
“I read the same article.”
“Think about it.” He put up a hand and started counting off the details on his fingers. “She admitted she was going too fast. She lost control of the car on a dead-flat interstate, although the weather was good—“
“How do you know that?”
“I checked the weather bureau’s records. Lost control of the car just when she happened to come up on one of those seven-foot-round reinforced concrete pillars that hold up an overpass? No, it’s too fishy.”
“You think she tried to do it because of the loss of her child?”
“Yes, and other reasons. A happy young woman marries her high school boyfriend, goes to a good college, graduates into safety and affluence. Has a baby fast and sets up house in the suburbs. Her husband lands a good job at the bank. It’s all a little dull, but very pleasant too in its way.
“One day this fairy-tale princess, so pretty and so safe, hops into the station wagon with her new baby and toodles down to the store to buy her man’s favorite bread. Sounds like Little Red Riding Hood going to Grandma’s house.” Goff stood up and, turning his back to me, touched the face of one of the fish mounted on the wall. “Then within what? – thirty seconds? – her entire life became incomprehensible. Like an unknown foreign language. Every word she once knew and relied on suddenly had a completely different definition. Imagine waking up one morning and discovering every word you knew yesterday has a new meaning. ‘Child’ doesn’t mean child anymore, it means terror, loss, dread. You speak yesterday’s words and phrases the way you always did, but no one understands today. Not even you, finally. ‘Where is my baby?’ now means ‘Death’s here’ or ‘God died today.’
“Most of us had trouble with foreign languages in school. What happens when in one second our own becomes Russian or Farsi? And after that second, it never ever goes back to the way we knew it before.
“Anwen Meier had had a gentle, protected life. She had no preparation for what hit, not that anyone ever does. Her baby was stolen, her husband broke down, neither of them could ever get over the loss… I can understand damned well why she’d try to kill herself.”
“From Missouri they went back to New Jersey?”
“Right. Bought an old chicken farm in the town of Somerset. That’s near New Brunswick, where Rutgers University is. They run a dog kennel out of their farm. Raise French bulldogs. Ugly little things. Ever see one? They look like potatoes. Potatoes with bug eyes.”
I sat there hungry for more, yet already overfilled at the same time. Who were these people with their beauty and tragedy? What were they doing three times in the bottom drawers and hidden corners of Lily Aaron’s life?
“Mr. Fischer? Are you okay?”
“Yes, I was just thinking about what you said.”
“I thought so. I want to tell you something I tell every client at this point in an investigation. It’s only a piece of advice but I feel compelled to tell it to you. How we proceed afterward is your decision.
“I’ve been doing this work twenty-two years. People ask me to look into things… whatever their reasons. Although it may sound contradictory, I’m not a curious man. The work interests me because it’s logical and clear-cut: gather facts, present them, let a client decide what to do with the information. Sometimes I feel like a librarian—you tell me what subject, I’ll go back into the stacks and pull out all the things we have on it.
“But now I give my little talk, free of charge.
“What I want to tell you is—stop now. I can guarantee the further you pursue this, the more it’ll upset you no matter how important you think it is. Chances are, you’re upset already. Most people are. It gets worse. People are curious, so they hire me. But once I give them a first bunch of stuff it begins to chew them up. Cheating wives, dishonest parents… there’s many good reasons to hire an investigator. But finish it now, I’m telling you. Unless it’s absolutely imperative, or doing it’ll save someone’s life, stop now. Pay me, walk out the door, and forget it. That may sound strange coming from me, but I tell ya, I’ve seen so much pain in this job… I don’t get a charge out of seeing people dissolve. I lose some customers, but there’s never any lack of them in this business.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I know I am. In fact I’m so right, I’ll bet I know exactly what you’re thinking this minute. You’re thinking: He’s right and I will stop—after I ask him to look into only one more thing. But that’s the killer. The ‘one more thing’ usually ends up breaking your soul. What a client usually has now is their first whiff of smoke. It makes them suspicious, if not downright paranoid. ‘What do you mean, you saw my wife leaving Bill’s Bar? She doesn’t drink!’ Things like that. So please listen to me, take your suspicion and try to work through it. Go back to your life as it was and leave this alone—”
I don’t know where it came from, but I was instantly furious with this man. Where did he get off condescending to me, saying in so many words he knew what was best and I should go home like a good little fella…
“Thank you for the advice, Mr. Goff. But I’ll make my own decisions. If I do choose to pursue this, and it’s too difficult for you to handle—”
“One more piece of ‘advice,’ Mr. Fischer. Don’t be an asshole when someone who knows what they’re talking about gives you a worthwhile tip. Number one—I know how to ‘handle’ this. I’m only telling you I’ve seen a thousand people walk right off the gangplank with information they asked me to gather. Number two—I don’t care what it does to you. I don’t care if it makes you happy or sad or shocked. I’m the librarian, remember. I only bring the books. You read them and most of the time they do change your life. Guaranteed. I’m only saying: be careful with these books because too often—”
“I get your point.”
Pursing his lips, he crooked his head a few inches to the side. “Maybe you do.”
I have a very good memory. Often too good. People talk so much that sooner or later something’s not true. They have good reasons: they want to impress, or be loved or funny. You are not expected to remember their exaggerations, the small lies, the big ones added to the recipe of a terrific story that needed that tasty distortion to make it sound perfect in the telling. But I do remember. Naturally with Lily I was more aware than ever. Two days before my meeting with Goff, she said something in passing that stopped me then, but made me go forward now.
I’d bought a new shirt and showed it to her. Seeing it was made by a company named Winsted, she gave a small start.
“Winsted! How strange. That’s the name of the town where Rick died.”
The first time she told the story of Rick Aaron, she said he’d died in Windsor, Connecticut. Now it was Winsted.
I casually asked again, “Where?”
She pointed to the shirt label and looked at me. “Winsted. Why?”
“I used to know a guy from Wallingford. Is that near?”
“Pretty near. Did he go to Choate?”
“Choate. Right!”
If she hadn’t known about Wallingford or Connecticut geography, it wouldn’t have struck me so hard. If she hadn’t said her husband died here one time, and there the next. But she did, so I did too.
“Yes, you’re right, there is one more thing. I’d like you to find out everything you can about a man named Rick Aaron. He went to Kenyon College and died in either Windsor or Winsted, Connecticut.”
My detective wrote this down on a pad. “Windsor or ‘Winsted?”
“I’m not sure. Check both.”
He called back three days later. No Rick or Ric or Rich or Ricky or Richard Aaron ever attended Kenyon College. No one by that name had
ever died in Windsor, Windsor Locks, Windham, Winchester, or Winsted, Connecticut.
So I told my own lie. After a long telephone conversation with my brother, I told Lily he was coming to New York. I wanted to take a break and fly there to be with him. Maybe we’d go see my parents too. That’d be a nice surprise for them, eh?
She said it sure would. When are you going? Day after tomorrow. So soon? Then I guess we’d better make up for the time we’re going to lose. She slid into my arms, looking, smelling, feeling lovelier than ever. I realized, though, after she grunted the second or third time that it wasn’t her lust for me but that I was hugging her too tightly. Holding on for dear life, squeezing as hard as I could in hopes I’d find a real Lily in there somewhere behind or beneath skin and bones. A real Lily with a real child and true history of her own. How can you trust someone’s love when you can’t trust them? I remembered Mary’s story about the people who thought they owned a dog but it turned out to be a giant rat. Her other story too, the one about the naked woman tied to the bed while her husband lay on the floor in his Batman suit. Dogs that are rats, love so complicated one needs bondage and Batman to make it work. Perhaps without knowing it, Mary was telling me at the beginning of my relationship with the Aarons the same thing as the detective: Stop now. Stop before you realize what you’ve brought home, before you start making the ridiculous or terrible changes necessary to fit this situation into your life.
“I particularly like the comment one critic made about Beethoven: ‘We feel he knew what can be known.’ Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone said that about us?”
“Fuck you, Herb!” Reaching forward, I snapped off the car radio with a vicious flick. Fall in love and everyone everywhere, everything, every other word’s suddenly “love.” Lose someone and the same applies. Since leaving California, I’d been hearing nothing but references to full knowledge, insight, clarity, understanding. Even an introduction to a Beethoven symphony on the radio reminded me of my feared task. On the plane, a terminally obnoxious woman behind me with a voice like a musical handsaw spoke for five loud hours about a woman named Cullen James whose autobiography had changed this woman’s life. According to the acolyte, Cullen had somehow left her body and traveled to another land where (as usual) she went through all sorts of hair-raising adventures. But by golly she persevered, learned THE TRUTH, and returned home a Whole Person. I’d seen this book in stores but one glance at the summary on the dust jacket made me put it down fast. Beethoven is one thing. It seems possible that via their gifts, geniuses might be able to find their way through life’s maze. However, deranged housewives, aging movie stars, or Retro 1960s gurus who announce unashamedly they hear God or ten-thousand-year-old warriors telling them the secrets of the universe… give me pause. I know if God contacted me, I’d at least be a bit humble. The way these nuttos describe it, they’re all on a first-name basis with Him. Besides, little daily truths are hard enough to bear. Told THE TRUTH by one who knows would, if we survived, surely scorch us inside and out like a blown fuse. It did me.
Driving down the New Jersey Turnpike toward Somerset, I tried to imagine the worst-case scenarios so that I’d be at least partially prepared for whatever guillotine blade was about to drop across my life. I had called the Meiers from L.A. and made an appointment, ostensibly to look at their dogs. I talked to Gregory, who had a pleasant but nondescript voice. In the background was the sweet static of yipping puppies.
I got off at the New Brunswick exit and followed his directions to their farm. What was I expecting? Probably something small and lovely, like a spread in House & Garden or Casa Vogue. You know—one black Bauhaus chair to a room, exquisitely rustic beams and brass hinges, a swimming pool in back. Or nothing. A house for two broken people who were limping through the rest of their lives, having given up on the idea of anything beyond breathing and a sufficient roof overhead.
What greeted me was far worse.
As I drove down a long and remote country road, the flat, single-story houses leading to the Meiers’ address all ran together in my mind’s eye. The kinds of places and surrounding human geography one would expect out in the middle of a semi-nowhere. Rusted mailboxes, cars up on blocks in the yard, women staring suspiciously at you as they hung droopy-looking laundry on gray lines.
Whoa! I did an exaggerated double take when I saw the house. I also said, “What the hellll!” because it was so strange-looking and so utterly, utterly out of place there. The colors struck me first—blood-red, black, and anthracite-blue stone. Then you saw, realized, the dazzling every-which-way angles at which they were set. Metal piping slithered up and along the sides of the structure like stripes of silvery toothpaste. What was this thing? Who would build such an interesting provocation in the middle of that undeserving countryside?
As I closed in on it, my next thought was it’s a downed UFO! They always fall in distant cornfields where only indifferent cows or farmers look on. I’d recently read a columnist in the L.A. Times who’d specifically addressed that question. If there are creatures from other planets snooping around Earth, how come they never land in New York or Moscow, where both the leaders and the action are? Why are they always sited outside places like North Platte, Nebraska? After a gander at this steel-and-stone whatever thirty yards ahead, I thought maybe I’m about to have a close encounter.
Better to wave the flag of one’s stupidity than try hiding it. What I was seeing was one of the early versions of the now renowned Brendan House.
Anwen Meier studied architecture in college and spent summers working in the offices of Harry Radcliffe, the famous architect. Although she didn’t continue her studies after graduation, the subject remained a hobby. She was content to marry Gregory and set up house. After the child was kidnapped, her husband broke down, and she had her car “accident,” she decided the only thing in the world that would save them would be to start life over again doing only the things that truly mattered to them. Her father had died and left her a small inheritance. Along with that they sold everything they could, including the stocks and bonds Gregory had been buying since he was fifteen years old. In the end they had a little under seventy thousand dollars. Anwen wisely decided to split it in half—thirty-five thousand would go to the continued search for their son, the rest toward their new life in New Jersey.
She loved architecture, Gregory loved dogs. In their early thirties they did what most people feel they can do only after they retire—live the life they want. Dessert at the end of the meal. In the case of the Meiers, it was not dessert. It was the only nourishment either of them could digest. They would buy something simple and sturdy way out in farm country where land was cheap. Over the years she would make it theirs. He would raise his beloved French bulldogs. If they were clever and hardworking they would make it. Neither used the word “luck” anymore. Luck is the poor man’s God. Both stopped believing in Him the day their child disappeared.
It gives me such pain to write this.
I pulled up in front of their remarkable home three thousand days after they lost the boy. I needed to look some more and collect my thoughts before ringing their bell. What would I say? Could I pull off looking them over, asking certain questions that had nothing to do with dogs, and still get away without their becoming suspicious? Do you people know a Lily Aaron? Do you know why she would know you? Have you ever been to Los Angeles or Cleveland or Gambier, Ohio? How about a man named Rick Aaron? Although I have a strong hunch he doesn’t exist—
“Hi! Are you Mr. Datlow?”
Unaccustomed to my made-up name, I still turned so quickly in the seat it must have looked odd. I’d been staring blindly at the road while thinking and hadn’t heard her come up from behind, although the driveway was gravel and her boots made loud crunches when she walked, as I heard later following her back to the house.
Whether it was the years of suffering, a hard and active life lived outside much of the time, or simply premature aging, Anwen’s face was beauty ruined. Deep sunken
eyes and too thin all over; her cheekbones were as prominent as ledges. Still there was so much loveliness left in the face that you wished her head was a balloon you could pump more air in. Fill it up and shape it back out to what it must have once been.
“We’ve been waiting for you. Gregory’s back in the barn. Come on, we’ll go find him. Or would you rather have a cup of tea first?”
“Some tea would be great.” I thought it better to talk to her alone first, rather than take them both on at once.
“Fine, let’s go in the house. Do you mind if I ask how you heard about us? Did you see the ad in Dog World?”
I got out of the car and stood near. She was taller than I’d first thought. Five eight or nine, some of it from the boots she wore, most her natural height.
“Yes, I saw the ad, but I also heard about you from Raymond Gill.”
“Gill? I’m afraid I don’t know the name.”
Neither did I, having made it up a second before. “He’s a well-known breeder in the West.”
She smiled, and oh man, the beauty she once was was very plain to see.
“People know of us out there? That’s reassuring. Greg will be so glad to hear it.”
I followed her across the driveway to a thick wooden door which had a great number of different patterns running across it like an intricate parquet floor.
“That’s quite a door. It’s quite a house!”
She turned and smiled again. “Yes, you either love it or hate it. No one’s ever wishy-washy when it comes to our house. What do you think?”
“Too early to tell. First I thought it was a spacecraft from another planet, but now I’m getting used to it. Is it kooky inside too?”
“Not as much. But it ain’t down-to-earth either! Come in, see for yourself.”
We were in the living room when she mentioned the boy for the first time. Until then, her voice and persona had been that of a friendly tour guide. She was clearly used to showing either bewildered or astonished people around her house and had thus created an appropriate self for the role. The room was crowned by a giant cathedral ceiling, parts of which—like patchwork panels—were stained-glass windows through which different colors of light streamed down and carpeted the floor.
After Silence Page 10
