Because his wife was out of town, he didn’t have to hide his other cell phone. The Sweetheart’s messages made it shiver and burr on the table. But it had been doing less and less of that, the last few months. He was losing her. The feeling set off in him a panic that afflicted him with the same intensity as his earlier pleasure had—his heart running at a catastrophic rate, his nighttime riveted wakefulness during which he did not fantasize about meeting but, rather, missing the Sweetheart.
The day was bright and warm; already the air was full of lawn mower engines and children shouting, car radios through open windows. To avoid the silent secret phone he left it on the table when he took the dogs to the park and turned them loose to run. They collected affection out in the world, cheerful and confident, optimistic, pleased with themselves. They hadn’t liked it when Catherine drove away with the other dog, the unfortunately named Bitch. Maybe it was Oliver’s imagination, but he felt that their loyalty had turned subtly his way from his wife since the girl and her dog had moved into the house. Once, Catherine had been their favorite human, but not anymore. Once, they’d been the recipients of her indulgent affection, and that wasn’t the case anymore, either.
“Boys against girls,” the girl had said. She didn’t say much, so you listened when she spoke. She was going to turn from an unattractive teenager into an unattractive woman, large-boned, unsmiling, unflustered, skeptical—a prison guard, a Mother Superior, a landlady. Oliver liked these qualities in men, but in women he preferred a bit of nervous laughter, a tentative element of inquiry, hesitation, and the capacity to blush or jump in alarm. The gestures of low self-esteem, that charming hardship, that sexy chink.
The Sweetheart, when she had been in the habit of tucking her head against his chest so that he couldn’t see her carnal pleasure.
“She’s so much like her mom it’s weird,” Catherine confessed concerning the girl. “I forgot how much I really liked Misty. The way she could keep her cool.”
“She’s cool, all right,” Oliver agreed acidly.
“You can’t be jealous,” Catherine said. But not like a joke. Not as if she were teasing. She said it as if it were an ultimatum. He was disallowed. When he cast a glance in Cattie’s direction, he found her already looking his way in anticipation, the unblinking gaze. Unlike most teenage girls, Cattie didn’t seem to think of herself as the star of the show so much as an audience member. Or maybe reviewer. She seemed to be taking notes. When she turned sixteen, in August, she was going to wash dishes at Wheatlands. The Sweetheart would be her boss. Oliver had some nervousness about this plan. And also some faint hope that their affair would reignite. That this quasi-stepdaughter Cattie would provide a reason for him to see the Sweetheart more often. The Sweetheart, and those irritating Italian sourdough boys she’d hired.
But meanwhile it was a beautiful day, and nothing actually literally hurt, a sensation Oliver took a moment to appreciate. His heart was being broken, he understood, and his pride injured. Also he remembered that it was his birthday. And even as he thought it, he made himself reject the thought. No corporeal pain, he insisted to himself. All day this happened, a rotation: an absence of physical complaint, heartsickness, and dread that he then pushed away in favor of feeling fine. His wife phoned at four to apologize for the western Kansas weather: tornadoes. She and Cattie were stopping for the night in Great Bend and would see him tomorrow.
She paused, and Oliver said, “I’ll go visit your mother,” before she could request it of him. “I hate my birthday anyway,” he added.
He no longer felt sour about seeing Grace Harding, yet knew it was more useful to pretend that he did. Let his capital grow, in his wife’s estimation; he might need to tap into its reserve some rainy day. Whenever Catherine was busy with Cattie, Oliver performed the daily trek to Green Acres. He’d struck up a bantering relationship with the two remaining curmudgeons and often brought Wheatlands pastries for the staff. He purchased a small refrigerator for Grace’s room so that she could have a cold apple whenever she felt like it. And he knew how to pick out apples, so he provided those, as well.
That evening he brought wine, not red, which would have been his preference, but white, because that’s what his mother-in-law had always served. He did not mention that it was his birthday when they toasted coffee mugs. Everyone was arranging themselves in front of the television. The serial killer was being interviewed, in jail, on a national program. When he asked Grace if she wished to watch, she lifted her left, functioning shoulder: a shrug. She’d gotten hooked, as everyone had, by the local soap opera; this was its season finale.
Oliver was given the recently dead curmudgeon’s Barcalounger. He made a point of draping an antimacassar over the headrest, that deeply stained place where another man’s head had for so long rested.
At first, he could not quit studying the killer’s looks—fierce, defensive, and aggrieved in the way of many midwesterners, eyes beady, expression challenged, men who appeared to have been born facing an oncoming high wind that was going to cause them no end of trouble, this one younger than Oliver by at least a decade but seeming somehow older, like the curmudgeons, wearing that hideous orange jumpsuit and the handcuffs.
He would be sentenced in a week. He could not be executed, as his killings had all taken place during a time when Kansas—briefly lax, temporarily liberal—had been opposed to the death penalty.
Nobody seemed opposed anymore.
The information was not new, the images were the same: the first family in its ordinary house made up of conventional members, Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister. But then the small chilling details. The man’s voice narrating his work. When, for example, he’d begun to strangle the mother for the third time (inexperienced, a beginner at violent murder, an amateur—as Oliver had guessed all along), she said to him, “May God have mercy on your soul.”
“Fantasies,” the man said, “are what got me in trouble.” By day he raised his family—a boy, a girl, a wife, that similar common dollhouse clan—and kept what he called “Factor X” at bay. He was obsessed randomly—out driving around, he’d suddenly be drawn to someone, a woman leaving her home or walking down the street. And then would come the stalking, the “haunting” of her neighborhood and life. From working in home security, he knew how to disable it. From studying criminology, he knew the habits of his ilk. His seventh victim he had killed and then gone to a pay phone to report the fact to the police, his voice on a tape.
He was a father of small children when he killed the mother of three small children. He wanted to be invisible, he wanted to be famous. Or infamous. “How many people do I have to kill before I get the recognition I deserve?” he’d queried of the news media.
“Our town was too small,” the police chief lamented. “He would never get the celebrity he could have gotten in a bigger place.”
“Yeah,” said one of the curmudgeons. “He should of moved to California.”
“New York,” said the other. “Then he’d of been somebody.”
“Jesus loves the little children,” chanted the woman in the corner, her book as usual on her lap.
At a commercial break, Oliver turned to Grace. “This is like watching classic tragedy, isn’t it? He’s a type of tragic hero. Some crude and extreme version of Everyman, foiled by his own hubris. That damned Achilles’ heel.”
She looked at Oliver with startlingly uncomprehending eyes. They’d watched many programs together lately and been in complete agreement, which had surprised and delighted them both. He’d brought a DVD of La Dolce Vita, and they’d watched transfixed—transported, Oliver realized—entranced by the little white kitten, the blond beauty in the fountain, poor perplexed Marcel Mastroianni, a man out of his depths. “Marcello!” the radiantly wet angel called to him. “Hurry up! Come in here!” Oliver had been suddenly reminded of YaYa, an unexpected searing in his chest, his first wife’s impulsive passion burning through his usual hardened opinion of her. In the beginning, when they were beginners, she’d have
traipsed and danced and laughed and splashed into and through the early hours, too, and he would have found it charming, loving her as he did, helplessly. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of YaYa charitably. She was his long-standing and venerated enemy. Like Grace Harding. That afternoon of La Dolce Vita, her eyes had also shone.
But sometimes the old animosity between him and his mother-in-law popped up. He backpedaled. “I mean, the killer’s desire to have it both ways, to be the upstanding citizen as well as the fiend. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde. You know? The rational mind versus the feverish heart?”
Her mouth hung open, as it did when she wasn’t vigilant, when she was taken aback or thinking. A ragged gap of confusion. In this incredulity, in her utter incomprehension in the face of what seemed universally obvious to Oliver, he understood the distance between them: she did not believe in an uncontrollable temptation. What the BTK named “Factor X” was nonsense, in the mind of Grace Harding, an excuse that excused exactly nothing. How dare Oliver elevate the maniac to Everyman, to tragic hero? No, she declined to subscribe to a heart of darkness.
Why would he wish to convince her otherwise, he wondered? The interview resumed, and all Oliver could hear was the language of anybody in the throes of something urgent and insatiable, something that struck every now and then to sabotage, nag, and insist upon until it was fulfilled. And then to begin again, a cycle of …
The air-conditioning kicked on outside the nursing home’s lounge window; the TV’s volume was at its highest level. This wasn’t the kind of entertainment Grace liked to admit enjoying, but she’d been agreeable enough when Oliver suggested they join the others. She would never acknowledge pride at having a visitor, a still-handsome man whose interest was solely in her, a man different from the others who occasionally appeared, the sheepish sons or grandsons in ball caps, men who shouted into the ears of their grannies, looking to leave as soon as possible, checking their watches, covering all the small talk and phony bonhomie bases. Her colleague Yasmin had been another exotic to pass through the doors of this establishment, and only because Professor Grace Harding was confined within. In no other circumstance had Oliver ever felt that his mother-in-law was grateful to him—grateful without qualifications. But he felt it now, and did not wish to ruin its glow.
On television, the killer’s downfall was being chronicled, the final days and hours of his double life. And what had doomed this hapless villain? His own vanity. He’d asked the newspaper editors if a computer floppy disk could be traced to its user. He’d trusted them when they replied that it couldn’t. Did all villains depend on the confidence that nobody else was as duplicitous as they? For instance, had Oliver himself ever really believed that his wives would be capable of having a secret love, a second life? That it would be he who was the betrayed? From the floppy disk the police had identified the computer and the user; from the church where the computer was housed, the authorities had found the man. A deacon, a codes enforcer, an upstanding citizen. To prove without a shadow of a doubt his guilt, they’d obtained DNA from his daughter. He’d left traces at the crime scenes—semen, naturally. The technology had developed over the decades since then. His daughter’s DNA was a match. He was indisputably the man.
Brought down mostly by his hubris, but without any further doubt by his daughter. Oliver felt another shiver of troubling recognition. There was Miriam, out there armed to the teeth, ready to unleash what she knew and ruin his life. Having once been the sweetheart herself, Catherine would know the intensity of Oliver’s passion for the current Sweetheart. She wouldn’t forgive it. Or, rather, she wouldn’t allow herself to be second to it.
Oliver looked at his mother-in-law, who wasn’t watching the television but was watching him. She couldn’t speak, but she could know. She, too, might have some information to share with Catherine. Of the man onscreen in the orange jumpsuit, Oliver said, “He’s an egomaniac. A narcissist. A psychopath. A sociopath.” He lined up as many catchphrases as he could pull from the air, anything at all to separate himself from his earlier statement. Not Everyman, no no no. A maniac. He could not afford to express kinship with this madman, not if he wished to hang on to his life.
Because the Sweetheart would not be there for him to begin again with. She hadn’t been particularly thrilled when he notified her of Catherine’s upcoming absence, the road trip to Colorado. The Sweetheart would leave him. This time, it wouldn’t be he who chose. The time had come for him to be the one left behind.
“It’s my birthday,” Oliver said, changing the subject, lifting his coffee mug for a mock toast. Only then did he realize that he wasn’t turning seventy but seventy-one. His math had been wrong. He was already older than he believed or wished.
In Colorado Catherine had found the place where Misty’s car went off the road. There were rocks on the blacktop, an orange sign nearby warning of the possibility, falling rock as a persistent state, a chunk hanging suspended between cliff and pavement. They parked and stood on the shoulder. The mountains in the distance were beautiful, symmetrical. Had she seen them before? They looked familiar to Catherine. But maybe that was the familiarity of a clichéd standard: the pointed Rocky Mountain, with shoulders, capped with snow, as declared on advertisements for beer or automobiles, on truck sides and billboards and television. On cans and calendars and shirts.
“I had a dream about this place,” Cattie said. “It looked just like this, and I was the pilot of an airplane.”
At their feet and down the roadside incline a lush green patchwork of treetops waving in the evening wind, limber trees in summer, leaves making the noise of water, no sign of catastrophe. Bitch stood on the very edge, her black-and-white fur ruffling in the breeze.
“We came here the summer of the bicentennial,” Catherine told the girl. “I was your age. Misty hadn’t ever left the state of Kansas before.”
“She was poor,” Cattie said, crossing her arms. As if the comment had been a criticism. Catherine knew how that went, defending your mother one minute, complaining about her the next.
“We carved our names and the date everywhere. I bet I could find some of those.” From the other direction, a pair of motorcycles whined by, their riders lifting their hands in unison. “And we drank river water,” Catherine remembered. “We were trying to get giardia. We thought it sounded like a good diet. We were always inventing new diets.”
The question here on the thin open place on the edge of the cliff was: had Misty killed herself? Had the woman decided she’d come to the end?
In the unnerving, extraordinary way the girl had of knowing what Catherine was thinking, Cattie now said, “She wouldn’t have taken Max with her if she was planning to die.”
Catherine hadn’t realized she was still slightly unsure. Dick Little and State Farm had declared the death accidental; most of the ensuing evidence suggested that Misty wouldn’t do such a thing as betray the only love she knew, abandon her girl. Yet now Catherine felt a physical relief at Cattie’s assessment, a membrane of doubt borne off on the next gust of air. She’d shown Cattie the homemade asterisk on her shoulder, the one that Misty had carved there, describing the identical one that she had put on Misty’s skin. Cattie had never been treated to that information, had never noticed a scar on her mother’s shoulder. This, as always, had led Catherine to a whole associative trove of memories. The time they’d broken into a thrift store and stolen wigs. This man they’d followed in Misty’s car. This dog they had rescued from an abuser. This apparent pact they’d made, so long ago, before either of them had believed in the necessity of a will or trust or future, before they were people who thought about growing old, about actually having something, or somebody, to bestow in case of emergency, in the event of accident, in the preposterous possibility of death.
Now the girl opened her cell phone and accessed her saved messages. She held the device to Catherine’s ear. Despite the wind and the awkward angle at which Cattie rested the speaker in Catherine’s hair, she could hear her old friend’s vo
ice, speaking to her from far away, a rambling message for her daughter about the dangers of being out in the night alone and needing to come home.
The summer was especially brutal in Arizona. Drought, heat, fires—fires begun by lightning strikes, fires set by arsonists, fires begun in witless innocence that resulted in extravagant mayhem. By the end of the summer, there would be a serial killer on the loose, some incendiary force just about to burst into flame. The Baseline Killer, he would be named, another in the lineage of infamy and notoriety. His first victims, not to mention his rapt audience, were still ignorant of his existence, of the conditions that were already conspiring to bring him to life and action. The city would be besieged and transfixed for years. It would happen again and again and again.
But for now the dog paced the confines of her backyard, its desert cacti on the other side, sand and rock and tennis balls, which she declined to chase, on her side. “Playing” was not something she understood. She panted, she waited, she slept with one eye open, all the scorching July day. This was the hottest yet in her time here in Phoenix. Left inside the house, she would do damage attempting to get out of it. In her old life, she’d had access to both, and spent her time pacing between, in and out, alert to the instant when the people returned, her own existence incomplete, on hold, without them.
Her new owner would be home soon, apologetic, loving. Anxious and guilty, too, fearful each day that she’d find the dog gone. For hours they would sit together in the cool house, the woman talking and talking, on the phone and to the dog, as well, the soothing and logical rhythm of routine. Affection, gratitude, ritual. Company. These were the components of reassurance.
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