by John Searles
“Each has a mood, the way each person has a personality,” I remembered her saying. “Which would you be, Sylvie?”
“You mean, which would I want for our kitchen?”
“No. Which would best match who you are?”
The sharp and sudden sound of knuckles banging against the car window startled me. I looked up to see a man with a withered face and long yellow teeth that made me think of old piano keys. He made a rolling motion with his fist, wanting me to lower the window. Instead, I made sure my door was locked then glanced back for some sign of Heekin. The most I saw were the faded flags above the door of that bodega.
I figured the man outside the car wanted money, and I nervously waved him away. He stayed put, though. On the other side of the glass, I heard his muffled voice say, “Sylvie?”
My name passing those wrinkled lips should have allowed me to relax, but it only left me more nervous. “Yes?” I offered in a tentative voice.
His mouth began moving again, but the shhhh made it difficult to piece together all that he was saying. At some point, he must have read the confusion on my face, because he stopped talking and made that winding motion with his fist again. At last, I cranked the window down a couple inches. “That’s better,” he told me. “A little anyway. You are Sylvie, right?”
“How do you know my name?”
“That’s what I was trying to explain. I know your uncle. Knew your father too when he was young, before he went off and got famous. Before— Well, I wasn’t exactly the nicest to him back when he was a kid. He probably never mentioned me.”
As he spoke, the stories in Heekin’s book came back to me. “Are you . . . Lloyd?”
He let out a breath, smiling with those piano key teeth. “You got it. I wouldn’t have known it was you out here, except I saw that reporter and remembered him from when he came poking around months back. I was with Howie when you called earlier. Put two and two together. Anyway, bingo. Hello there, Sylvie.”
“Hello,” I said, warmer, though not lowering my window any farther.
“Guess I’ll get to the point. Howie wouldn’t appreciate me doing this, but if you want to see him, I suggest you come with me.”
“Come with you where?”
“Easier if I just show you.”
In the side-view mirror, there were only those flags above the bodega door. I imagined Heekin inside, watching a clerk smear mustard on our sandwiches or roaming the narrow aisles in an effort to excavate something edible among the cigarettes and magazines. “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait until that reporter gets back so he can come too.”
Lloyd looked down the block, making a tapping sound with his tongue against his teeth. “Try seeing your uncle with that guy in tow, and things aren’t going to go so great. Tell you that right now. Howie doesn’t want to talk to reporters. Especially that one.”
“Why doesn’t he want to talk to him?” I asked, even though what I most wanted to know was why he didn’t want to talk to me.
“Better off letting him do the explaining. If that’s what you want, come with me.”
I studied Lloyd outside the car—his thick fingernails, chipped and worn and yellow as his teeth. Hadn’t he been one of the people to laugh at my father? “Why are you here?” I couldn’t help but ask.
Lloyd shifted his feet, kicking one of his work boots against the curb. Having this conversation through the narrow opening of the window frustrated him, I could tell. But he didn’t say anything about it, leaning forward instead, putting a hand on the roof of the Beetle. “Back when your grandparents were alive, I was the maintenance person around this building. I hung on to the job even when it became a different sort of place. Now that Howie’s back, I’m still here. So like I said, I’m making you the offer before your reporter friend shows up again. You want me to take you to your uncle or not?”
Some instinct warned me not to trust him, to roll up that window and wave him away as if he really were a vagrant begging for money. Even as those thoughts filled my mind, however, my hand reached for the door handle and pushed it open.
Outside the car, I saw that Lloyd was smaller than I realized, not much taller than me, in fact, with a loose belly and long, monkeyish arms that dangled at his sides. Rather than say anything more, he simply motioned with one of those arms. We walked back across the street, and I thought he might pull a key from his paint-splattered jeans for one of the doors out front. Instead, he went to the alley around the side. Before stepping into the shadows, I glanced down the block to see if I might catch a glimpse of Heekin exiting the bodega, our lunch in his hands. No sight of him, though. Considering that I’d dragged us there on what amounted to a lie, and he’d already been kind enough to forgive me, I knew it was wrong to wander off. But it seemed too late to turn back.
Inside that alley, void of garbage cans or graffiti or anything more than a single enormous Dumpster with a motorcycle parked behind it, we came to a stop at a flight of iron stairs. The stairs looked no different than a fire escape, I thought, and after a moment I realized it was a fire escape.
“See that door?” Lloyd pointed one story up. “It’s unlocked. Just go on up and head down the hall. Third door on the right.”
I stood there, not moving.
“Don’t wait for me, Sylvie. If I take you to him myself, he’s going to be pissed. So do me a favor: just act like you figured it out on your own. I’ll consider this one small way of making something up to your father.” With that, Lloyd turned and walked out of the alley. Gone as quickly as he came.
If I allowed myself to hesitate, I knew Heekin might return and find me there. I put my foot on the first of those steps and began climbing. At the top, the metal door swung open easily, and I found myself in the dimmest of hallways. What little light there was inside flickered as I walked along. Singin’ in the Rain, Some Like It Hot, Ben-Hur, All About Eve—posters for those films lined the walls. Whenever the lights blinked brighter, I glimpsed old movie stars smiling at me, like ghosts behind glass frames. “Third door on the right,” I whispered again and again, in an attempt to drown out the shhhh in my ear and the tic-tic-tic of my rabbit heart.
When I reached that door, it was open enough for me to see inside a room not much bigger than my bedroom back on Butter Lane. A wooden desk, littered with papers, filled the small space. A reading lamp on top flickered in the same sporadic rhythm as the other lights in the theater. Behind that desk was a narrow cot, the sort my father used to request in our hotel rooms on lecture trips. I looked past the rumpled blankets on top of the cot at the back wall, where milk crates were stacked floor to ceiling—makeshift shelving, I gathered from the clutter they contained.
I stepped into that office or bedroom or whatever it was and waited. From somewhere in the dark of that building, I heard sounds: a clanging pipe maybe, footsteps maybe too. It was difficult to decipher on account of my ear, which distorted things more than usual. I did my best to study the room without touching anything. On the desk lay more work permits like those on the doors downstairs and a calendar with red X’s slashing the days that had passed, blank spaces in the ones yet to come. Inside those milk crates, I saw boxes of cassettes. The handwritten labels made me think of the tapes from my father’s lectures, only these were marked with names and phone numbers. I went over to the cot, where an ashtray filled with cigarette butts sat atop the pillow. On the floor nearby lay a chaos of newspaper clippings:
INFAMOUS MARYLAND COUPLE MURDERED
DEMONOLOGISTS SLAIN BEFORE ALTAR
DEACON AND WIFE VICTIMS OF BIZARRE CHURCH KILLING
“What are you doing here?”
Startled, I turned to see him in the doorway: Howie. When the lights flickered, he appeared to light up for a moment, same as those movie star ghosts in the hallway. He looked thinner than when I’d last seen him, hair clipped close to his scalp, beard gone, his face less ruddy.
“I told you we were on our way,” I said, in a nervous, wavering voice. “When the front
doors were locked, I found the entrance at the top of the—”
“I know what you told me, Sylvie. I asked you not to come. I said we’d see each other down the road.”
Maybe it was the empty promise of that phrase tossed out again: down the road. Maybe it was his resemblance to my father—those wrinkles in his brow, those dark eyes. Maybe it was that the last time I had seen him had been after the court hearing where Rose was appointed my legal guardian. Whatever the reason, tears welled in my eyes.
“Hey,” Howie said, coming closer. “Hey. Hey. Hey.” He wrapped his heavy arms around my body.
“You never came back,” I heard myself saying into the sudden warmth of his sweatshirt. “You told us you were going to Florida. All that talk about tidying up your affairs. All those phone calls. Then nothing.”
“But I did what I said. It took longer than planned, but here I am. This place—”
His words caused my head to whip up. I pulled away, wiping my eyes. “You never once came to see us! Or bothered to write me back! And now I come here and I find—” I didn’t know how to say the things I was thinking, so my gaze just fell to the floor, where all those headlines screamed some version of the same truth: DAUGHTER IS KEY WITNESS IN MURDER OF FAMOUS PARENTS . . . SUSPECT NAMED IN CHURCH KILLINGS . . . DRIFTER ACCUSED OF DOUBLE HOMICIDE AWAITS TRIAL IN MD MURDER CASE. I kicked them away, the words scattering across the floor, that image of my mother and Penny, which appeared in almost every article, multiplying before our eyes like a magic trick.
“I can explain, Sylvie. Please. Just give me a second.”
I waited, saying nothing. A foggy silence billowed into the room, those odd noises from somewhere in the vast belly of the building fading away. Howie pulled a chair over from the desk. I sat on the edge of that bed and he sat across from me, pushing up the sleeves of his sweatshirt. In the tattoos on his forearms, I saw dice and dollar signs and playing cards, an entire casino bursting to life on his hairy skin. “The first thing I want to say—” he began, then stopped. “I mean, the thing I might have said, should have said, on the phone if you hadn’t caught me off guard, is that I did come back to see you girls, just like I promised.”
“You came,” I said, staring at Penny’s face repeating all over the floor, my mother’s face too, and remembering my father’s promise that the photo would be just for their records. “But Rose sent you away.”
“She told you that?”
“No. It’s just, she’s done it to other people.”
“Well, my story might be a bit different from the others.”
“Different how?”
Howie paused a moment. It was an odd feeling, being so close in that small room, speaking with such a sense of exigency—a word I recalled from that English exam years before. In most ways, we were strangers.
“When I got back to Tampa,” Howie began, “I sent cards with cash to you girls any time I managed to hold on to a few bucks. Wasn’t much, but it was my way of doing something to show you were both on my mind. But there was never any word back. I called, left messages. No word then, either.”
I thought of the way Rose was always so possessive of the mail, and the way she used to roll her eyes whenever we got Howie’s messages on the answering machine.
“Eventually, I figured the calls and cards and cash—all of it was useless. I came to the conclusion that before he died, your father poisoned your minds against me. Same as he did your mother’s years before.”
“Judging from that night in Ocala, you gave my mother plenty of reasons not to like you.”
Howie stared down at those casino arms of his. Ace of spades. Queen of diamonds. Snake-eyed dice in a permanent tumble. I watched the muscles beneath his tattoos tighten as he balled his fists before lifting his head again. “I regret so many of my actions, Sylvie. You have no idea. That night is one among many. I didn’t believe the things they did, not one bit, but it wasn’t right to ruin their lecture like that.”
His voice, his expression, every part of him seemed genuinely sorry. “When you didn’t hear back from Rose and me, you gave up . . . just like that?”
“At first. And after the shock of everything that happened, I started drinking more. Doing things I’m not proud to admit. Things got so bad, there were only two ways to go: keep falling down the dark hole until it was over or crawl back out of it. It wasn’t easy. It’s still not. But I started going to meetings. I got sober. Stopped doing a lot of things I never should have in the first place. And now, here I am.”
We both looked around the small, dim room, and I couldn’t help but wonder how this was any better than where he’d been. “My father never even talked about this place,” I said. “I figured it was closed or torn down a long time ago.”
Howie let out a short, exasperated laugh. “That would have been too easy. After your grandfather died, this theater was left to your dad and me. We couldn’t sell it. Nobody wanted it, considering what the neighborhood had become. So the place sat vacant for years, until an offer came to rent it—as a movie theater, of all things, only not the kind that showed the sort of films that used to play here.”
“My father—he never would have gone for that,” I said.
“What choice did he have? We needed to cover the taxes that drained us every spring, taxes your father usually ended up paying. And then I had this idea of taking back the place. Doing something better than renting it out.”
“You mean, making it a regular movie theater again?”
“Afraid not, Sylvie. The days of people getting dressed up to come to this neighborhood and see a film are long gone. I had another idea. Making it a venue for bands. Something I’ll tell you more about. But your father wouldn’t allow it. Despite his grandiose morals, he preferred to let it stay what it had become, rather than give his own brother a chance. When he passed, since there was no will, the property went through probate. In the end, his half went to you and your sister.”
“Rose and me?”
“Yes. This place, crumbling as it is, belongs to the two of you as well. You might not be aware of it, since Rose was made your legal guardian and she has the say for both of you. When I told her what I wanted to do with it, she agreed so long as I send half of whatever money I make. And so long as—” Howie stopped, considering his words.
“So long as what?”
“So long as I stayed out of your lives.”
I thought of that morning at the bus stop when Rose scoffed at Howie’s “pipe dreams” and told me about his refusal to let her come live with him. I wanted to find some way to ask about all that when a noise came from out in the hall—footsteps, I was certain this time. Howie must have heard them too, because we both turned just as Sam Heekin stepped into the doorway.
I had been so caught up in seeing my uncle again that I’d momentarily forgotten about Heekin, and his abrupt appearance surprised me. Howie stood, shoving his sleeves farther up his arms, displaying more tattoos. In a voice so gruff it seemed to come from a wholly different person than the one who had just been speaking to me with such tenderness, he shouted, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“He’s—” I began, but Heekin was already talking, though not doing a very good job of it.
“I d-d-drove here with—”
Howie cut him off. “I made it clear I didn’t want to see you around here again.”
“Hold on,” I said, standing too. “He brought me here. He’s a friend of our family.”
“Friend?” My uncle all but spat the word. “I read his book. Read every one of his articles, too. A lot of what this guy has to say hardly seems like something a friend would write.”
Heekin shut his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them and began speaking again, his voice was calm, his words clear. “I don’t deny my mistakes, and all the things I’ve done that might have seemed unfair to this family. But I’d rather not do any more harm when it comes to Sylvie. That’s why I found my way inside here. I wanted to make sure she was
all right.”
Howie kicked the articles, sending my mother and Penny and Albert Lynch, who I glimpsed among the photos too, spinning around the floor. “Of course she’s all right! She’s with her uncle!”
I could only imagine how skeptical Heekin felt about that comment, since I felt the same. Neither of us let on, though. Instead, Heekin gazed around the room, making a quick study of the place. “I’m okay,” I told him at last. “We’ll just be a little longer.”
“Okay, then. If you need me, I’ll be waiting outside.”
I expected Howie to make another jab, but he just watched Heekin step back into the hall. When we heard the metal door opening and closing, Howie told me he was sorry. “Can’t stand filthy reporters and scumbag detectives poking around my business. And that guy does not give up. There’s something about him I don’t like.”
“My mother was the best judge of character I knew, and she liked him. In the beginning anyway.”
“Yeah, well, your mother was human too. Like the rest of us, she could have been wrong. And I’m telling you, she was wrong about that guy.”
I sat on the cot again, doing my best not to look at those pictures on the floor. Even if what Howie said might have been true, I didn’t like him talking about my mother that way. I stared blankly at those milk crates as he walked to the desk and fished an envelope out of a drawer. “I want to show you something, Sylvie,” Howie said, sitting beside me on the cot, the thin mattress sinking in a way that brought our bodies closer. I felt his arm graze mine as he opened that envelope.
From inside, he pulled a few black-and-white photos, like those in my father’s desk, only with none of the blurry shafts of light or mysterious figures. The first picture was of the theater—not the ramshackle place it was now, but back when the building looked majestic, when that marquee stood upright just as I’d imagined. In the crowd out front, I saw women with dark lipstick, spidery eyelashes, and dresses so glittering they seemed to be made of hundreds of tiny flashbulbs. The men at their sides sported dapper suits and bowler hats. Howie let the picture speak for itself before handing me another of a man and woman dressed more simply. The man twisted the crank on a taffy machine; she held the finished product in the air, stretching it thumb to thumb, laughing. Something about them seemed familiar, and I felt a stirring in my chest.
