No Way Home

by Andrew Coburn

  “And where are you from originally, Christine?”

  New York, she told her. Her father had been a litigation lawyer in one of the city’s larger firms. The sherry was making her voice lazy. “That’s how I met my husband. My first husband. He was Dad’s protege, and Dad brought him home to dinner.”

  “From the stuff of that they used to make movies,” Arlene Bowman said. “My father took his life in the comfort of a Cadillac in a closed garage, the motor running.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was a cowardly thing to do. I was at Wellesley at the time, senior year. I married Gerald soon after graduating. I knew he was going places.”

  Christine had a clear image of Gerald Bowman from socials at the country club. His grooming was correct in each particular, his manner whispered privilege and power, his polish was of a boardroom table, and his gestures seemed guided by inside information. She remembered him snapping fingers at a waitress.

  Arlene Bowman was on her feet. “I shouldn’t,” Christine said but relinquished her empty glass.

  Over a second sherry Arlene Bowman said, “Marriage is a funny business. The woman’s a sponge soaking up her husband’s acrimony and her children’s fussing. I’ve tried to avoid that role.”

  “Your view of marriage isn’t exalted, is it?”

  “I’ve never believed a man would bring magic into my life. Money, yes. Status, comfort, a certain degree of affection — but magic, no.”

  “It depends on the man,” Christine replied, loyal to a memory, to a phase of existence when she had cooked everything in wine and bought coffee by the bean.

  “Tell me about him, that first husband of yours.”

  The memory burned as old feelings reasserted themselves. Her tongue loosened. “He died after lovemaking. My arms were still around him. I thought he had gone to sleep. Then I knew. I can’t describe what the weight was like. To this day, when Calvin’s on me, I feel like an open grave.”

  “Good God,” Arlene Bowman said in a low voice.

  “No man since has managed to touch the right chord in me.”

  “Not even James Morgan?”

  Leaning back in her chair, she was amazed, even appalled, at what she was telling this woman, which did not stop her. “He’s come the closest,” she confided.

  “To the chief.” Arlene Bowman spoke with only faint irony in raising her crystal glass, the sherry fluttering. “He’s handsome enough, quite virile, but not really our sort, is he? I wonder why we should have bothered with him.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.” She was fully aware but unprepared to defend him.

  “Then I’ll let it ride.”

  She lifted herself from the chair and gave quick tugs to her summery white dress of scaled silk. Her legs were steady; it was her head that worried her. “I really must go.”

  “I like the dress.”

  “Thank you.”

  They walked together to the foyer, where she paused to apply lipstick, the shade long ago popular. Their eyes met in the mirror. “You’re an attractive woman, Christine. You’d be even more attractive if you lost some weight.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you play tennis?”

  “I’m not in shape for that.”

  “Then let’s get you in shape. Are you free tomorrow morning?”

  She hesitated. “I’m not sure. Why?”

  “Don’t ask,” Arlene Bowman said. “I’ll pick you up at nine.”

  She felt her blood run quick when she stepped out into the burn of the afternoon. Day lilies lit the air, a robin flew off and evaporated in the heat. Stepping into her car, she had a vague suspicion that she had been manipulated, entered into a game yet to be explained, the rules negotiable. She drove away with a wary sense of adventure.

  • • •

  The day before, after landing at Logan, he had rented a car and driven up Route 93 to the town of Andover, the outskirts, where he checked into a motor inn and out of habit used a false name. He spent the greater part of the evening in the bar, where the lonely, the unfaithful, and occasionally the desperate hung out. He sat knee to knee with a woman at a miniscule table that accommodated no more than their drinks and an ashtray. She was naive with men, always sticking her face up to be kissed and deceived. Her mouth hardened into a smile that would last the evening.

  Later, in his room, he numbered the lines in her face and found them all beautiful. She admired his tan and asked where he had got it. “The beaches of the world,” he told her with an importance he usually denied himself.

  She puzzled over his name. “You don’t look Puerto Rican,” she said.

  “I’m gringo,” he told her.

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t wear a ring.”

  “No.”

  “What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Esther,” he said.

  With her hand on his chest, she said, “I’m not usually like this.”

  In the morning, he phoned room service for breakfast, which awaited her when she emerged from the bathroom with a washed-out look, chaste and convalescent. She opened her purse with a veiny hand and discovered a brand-new hundred dollar bill folded lengthwise.

  “What’s this for?”

  “For you,” he said.

  That was when she went hysterical.

  • • •

  Outside her parents’ ordinary little house, her house now, Lydia Lapham waited in her car for Chief Morgan. The street was quiet, tree-shaded, property lines marked by friezes of barbered shrubs whose berries drew birds. Next door a curtain twitched: a neighbor was watching. Taking a deep breath, she yearned for the old coherence in her life, when no one infringed upon her unless she allowed it. Finally the chief’s car pulled up behind hers.

  They met on the sidewalk. She wore no makeup. Her hair was swept back and tied, which left her face explicit. Her heart beat rapidly inside a body that seemed dead. She said, “I wasn’t sure whether I needed permission.”

  “You don’t,” Morgan said, gray eyes resting on her.

  “And I didn’t want to go in alone.”

  They moved toward the house. On the front door was an Off Limits sign, red letters on white pasteboard, posted by one of Lieutenant Bakinowski’s men. Morgan tore it off. Lydia used her key. The door opened, and Morgan said, “Are you sure?”

  She stepped inside, and for a second or so her senses teetered, her mind threatened to tip. She heard from somewhere, perhaps upstairs, an echo of her mother’s warm, plump voice. She threw a look back at Morgan, but he seemed aware only of creakings and hums natural to a vacant house. The little hallway was stuffy.

  “You’d better leave the door open,” she said and stepped past dead flowers pluming a vase. Each step was forced, her eye sweeping one room and then another. Nearly all the furniture, prudently selected, dated to the early years of her parents’ marriage. She had grown up with it: the faded brocade of the living room set and the ornate edges of the wall mirror, the massive mahogany of the china closet that seemed too much of a burden for the dining room, the indestructibility of the kitchen table with its old-fashioned cutlery drawer. Her mother could never understand why such drawers had been done away with, and now neither could she. She returned to the hallway, gave another look at Morgan, and said, “Please, wait here.”

  Upstairs, she passed by her own bedroom and entered theirs, which was stifling. Quickly she raised a window. The sun streaked her parents’ bed, the same one with which they had begun their marriage. On her mother’s writing table were two pages of notepaper, an unfinished letter in her father’s hand. It was to a man in Michigan, an old war buddy with whom her father had maintained a correspondence through the years but had never managed a reunion. She lifted a page to her cheek as if the warmth of her father’s hand might still be on the paper.

  She opened a cedar chest and raised her mother’s wedding gown, like lifting a mist, but
against her face it was dry and scratchy. With reverence she replaced it and approached the closet. When she withdrew her mother’s best Sunday dress, a breeze ruffled it, as if the wraith of the woman were in it.

  In the bathroom, after dashing her face with water, she peered into the glass and felt anonymous and pure. She dried her face in a thick towel, like a child who has been playing hard. Then she returned to the chief.

  “I needed to know if I could stay here by myself. I can.”

  He looked doubtful. In the immediate period after his wife’s death, he had avoided his house, entering it only at odd daytime hours and spending most of his time at the station, where he slept in the cell until Meg O’Brien got on his case. “It may be too soon,” he said.

  “If I don’t do it now, I might never,” she said, revealing darknesses in her face, also a determination.

  He wondered whether she might reassess her feelings about MacGregor, if only to add a voice to the house. He doubted it, sensing in her a strength lacking in him during his greatest grief. He also doubted MacGregor would try to come over. Too much else was pressing on Matt and tightening him up.

  “Besides,” she said in a lighter tone, “my aunt and I are starting to get on each other’s nerves. She’s a dear, but she talks to herself on the toilet.”

  The chief smiled. “Good a place as any.”

  “And Reverend Stottle’s been coming around. I can’t respond to him. He tells me that the same God that invented life invented death. Then in the next breath he says maybe God got life all wrong.”

  “Maybe he’s going through a crisis of his own.”

  “I have no time for him — and no faith in my own reality, let alone God’s.”

  She had a few things in her car that needed to be brought in. The chief helped her. In the kitchen a shaft of sunlight quivered with dust. He raised the window and killed a moth planted on the screen. She lifted a carton of milk from the refrigerator, sniffed it, and poured it into the sink. Crumpling the carton, she looked at him in a way that told him it was time for him to leave. Concern marked his face.

  “This is my home,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”

  He kissed her cheek. “You need only pick up the phone.”

  Alone, she stayed at the sink and once again slapped her face with water to reinforce her anonymity. Then she made herself gaze out at the back lawn and at the dark green of the woodlot. A quick glance at her watch told her it was the same hour of the afternoon that the shot had rung out. In the sunshine two aluminum lawn chairs faced each other, each occupied by a ghost.

  • • •

  Papa Rayball sent his younger son to his room and stared across the table at his elder son. Clement looked everything like his mother, but Papa saw only himself in him. The dark brown hair had thinned a little but not enough to matter. He was still lean like a hoe handle, and his features were blades. “You must be gettin’ a lot of sun,” Papa said.

  Clement stared at the stove. He had a memory of his mother fussing with saucepans, steam lifting the lid off one. The memory hurt him. He said, “I think you’d better tell me more about why I came all the way up here.”

  “It ain’t pretty.”

  “I’ve already figured that out.”

  “Junior’s my burden, you know that. He wasn’t born bright like you. I don’t even know for sure he’s mine.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Papa, don’t start that again.”

  “Can’t help what I’ve always felt in my bones.” Papa lowered his voice. “We can’t talk here. He’ll listen, he’s got ears like a rabbit.”

  They went outside, where the heat felt like a noose around Clement’s neck. It pained him to be back. He had hoped never to return. There was a time he had hoped to send for Junior, but that idea had faded.

  Papa, with paternal pride, said, “You look good, Clement. You look like a real man.”

  They ambled away from the house, went into weeds, and stood under a swamp pine, which disturbed a squirrel whose chattering rose from a low branch to a high one. “Let’s hear about it,” Clement said.

  Papa scuffed the ground, then assumed an air of stiff right-mindedness and began unraveling events in a murderous monotone. He spoke at length, his face alive, incandescent, his heart throbbing. “It don’t matter what Junior done, MacGregor had no right treatin’ him less than human.” A snap came into his voice. “I ain’t condonin’ what Junior done. I’m just explainin’ what worked up to it.”

  “Tell me exactly what he did,” Clement said from a dark, deadpan face, and Papa’s voice went low and flat, dry and intense, each word carrying its own charge. Clement peered up at the pine for the squirrel and thought of that moment of mindlessness when a hunter, or an assassin, squeezes the trigger. When Papa finished, he said, “Who showed him how to work the weapon? It’s not easy.”

  “He figured it out himself.”

  “The weapon was worth thirty-five hundred dollars.”

  “You didn’t pay no thirty-five hundred for it. I bet you didn’t pay nothin’ for it.” The air was growing sultry, with mosquitoes on the attack. Papa swatted one and left blood on his cheek. “I did right heavin’ it, didn’t I?”

  “I’m just telling you what the thing was worth,” Clement said, feigning a small anger to conceal a great one.

  “I got one thing to say,” Papa said with the trace of a scapegrace smile. “The little shit got two for one.”

  For moments Clement did not trust himself to speak. He batted the air behind his head and then spoke out of a formal face. “You never should’ve let it happen.”

  “I never saw it comin’. He’s always talkin’ about doin’ somethin’ and never doin’ nothin’ ‘cept pick his nose, you know that.”

  “This time he fooled you.”

  “Don’t blame me. He was little, you brung him up more than I did.”

  “Don’t give me that crap, Papa. And don’t tell me anything more about him not being yours, OK?”

  Papa’s eyes went small. “You was always my favorite. You gonna blame me for that?”

  “I blame you for a lot of stuff, Papa, maybe Junior least of all.”

  “You talkin’ ‘bout your mother now? That what you try in’ to hit me with?”

  “I’m remembering you didn’t want to pay Drinkwater for a coffin. You wanted me to make one out of scrap wood.”

  “Why put somethin’ bad into somethin’ good — that was my thinkin’. ‘Sides, you know what she was.”

  “Let her rest, Papa.” His face softened. He did not want to argue. Some memories hurt his skull, those of his mother the most. He said, “How’s it stand with Junior?”

  “It ain’t as bad as you think. Only one botherin’ him is Morgan, and he’s only goin’ on guess. You remember Morgan, don’t you? He’s chief now.”

  “I remember him.”

  “I know his game. He’s gonna work on Junior, play it cozy with him. You know how he does it, he tried to work on you ‘bout your mother. Tried to make it seem I done somethin’ to her she done to herself.” Abruptly Papa slapped his leg and looked triumphantly at his hand. “Every skeeter I kill is full of blood. They’re livin’ good here.”

  Monarchs busied themselves on milkweed. Clement remembered catching one and giving it to his mother, who told him to let it go. “What do you expect me to do?”

  Papa rose up on his toes. “You can fix him. You can fix him good.”

  “How am I going to do that?”

  “He’s got a weakness. Women.”

  • • •

  “Remember the time you took me to the hospital, Clement? Time I ate the rotten meat?” Junior spoke from his pillow in the dark of the little room they had shared as children. A scrap of moonlight clung to the screen in the window, through which came the ringing of peepers. “You saved my life.”

  “The doctor did, not me. All I did was take you.”

  “I’d’ve died, you didn’t.”

  “Maybe.” Clement sat on
a stool with his back against the wall. The luminous hands of his Swiss watch told him the time. He had promised to stay in the room until Junior fell asleep, which he feared would be a long time coming. Junior’s voice was full of raw energy.

  “I had a whore.”

  “That’s nice, Junior.”

  “Papa took me. She was black. His was too.” Clement sighed inwardly. “How was it?”

  “Papa rushed me.”

  Clement rose from the stool and stood at the window, where he breathed in the scent of the pines and smells from the swamp. When he detected murmurs from his childhood he felt trapped inside his mind. “Next time,” he said, “go alone.”

  “It was all the way to Boston.”

  “Can’t you drive?”

  “Sure I can, but I ain’t got a license.”

  He looked at his watch again as night air bathed the quiet of his face. An owl hooted high in the pines. Gently he said, “Did you really shoot that woman?”

  There was an immediate creaking of springs as Junior shifted about as if something were being exacted from him. The pitch of his voice rose. “Papa don’t want me to talk about it.”

  Clement did not push. He suspected a sickness welling in his brother’s stomach and, worse, the possibility of a fit. The silence that grew between them seemed feminine. It floated. It held secrets. Clement turned from the window. “Papa’s right,” he said. “You shouldn’t talk about it.”

  Reassured, Junior said, “I still got the picture of you in the jeep. Did you see it on the wall?”

  “I did.”

  “It don’t have the same colors anymore. I have to look hard to tell it’s you.”

  “It’s me,” Clement said and moved toward the door. “I ain’t sleepy yet!”

  “You’re not ever going to fall asleep long as I’m here.”

  “Why do you have to go to that motel? Ain’t this better?”

  “I’ve got a room. It’s paid for.”

  “Papa says you ain’t like us anymore.”

  The darkness had faded a little, and contours were returning to the sparse room. Clement discerned the glitter of his brother’s face, which was probably feverish. “I have my own life now, Junior.”