I moved to Washington and snagged a job driving a delivery truck for a bakery. And then, two years later, to Oregon, where I worked mornings on a road crew and earned a night-school B.A.
I felt like a hermit crab trying out new shells, looking for a fit. I didn't realize it consciously at first, but I was inching my way toward Los Angeles.
Nine years after that first flight, I finally came home. When the plane touched down at LAX, I was so ashen that the kindly schoolteacher next to me offered his airsickness bag. The first weeks were awful. Some nights I lay awake, wrapped around a pillow, eyes on the door, until sunlight fell through the dusty motel drapes. Other times I prayed they would come just to get it over with. But, slowly, perspective returned. They had to
know that if I hadn't talked all this time, I had nothing to say. Surely they had moved on.
I waited a month to track down Callie. She was living in a big white house in Pasadena. Frank's hefty life-insurance policy had bought her a nice piece of property. Coming up the walk, I almost puked in the tulips. When Callie opened the door, she stood perfectly erect, her face motionless except for the tears streaming down her cheeks. We hugged and sat and talked, and I told her some of where I'd been. I lied, too--those lies of omission that had become part of who I was, blank spaces at the center of me. I said I'd fled because of guilt alone, and given what I'd done, that was plausible enough.
She gave me Frank's steamer trunk, which she'd filled with some of my personal things and held on to all these years. But after six months, we hardly saw each other. I still didn't want to risk telling her the whole truth, so there were buried land mines everywhere. And Callie had a whole other life that I didn't fit into, no matter how hard she tried to let me. I drove by her house a few times, sat in my car, and watched the impassive face of the large white house. And I heard an echo of the big guy's voice, just after he flipped me the envelope filled with traveler's checks. You don't talk about this to anyone. Ever. Or we '11 know. And we 7/ know who you talked to also. We won't be nearly as accommodating next go-round. To you or her I could no
longer bring myself to stroll up that nice suburban walk and ring the doorbell. On my third or fourth trip, as night fell and the lights began clicking on upstairs, a neighbor slowed in passing to cast a suspicious glance at my crappy little Honda. The drawn reflection I saw in my rearview was alarming even to me. I had become that troubling watcher in the night. That dark, idling car at the curb, beyond the curtains. The thought of someone outside my mother's house, scaring her, finally drove me off for good.
I tried to resume my old life. But I quickly learned it wasn't there waiting for me. My friends, too, had moved or moved on. Seeing them brought home just how much I'd lost. How bad the damage was, burned into my character like a convict's brand. One day I'd been a seventeen-year-old with a Nintendo and a decent life forecast. The next I was a grown-up on the run. Secretive, itinerant, alone with my guilt and those dwindling traveler's checks. And then just my guilt.
I drove to Bob's Big Boy one night. I didn't get past the parking lot. The huge picture windows were lit up like a Norman Rockwell. All those kids eating and drinking, talking about movies and lying about getting laid. I was brought up short there outside, like a bum contemplating a lavish window display. I didn't think about everything I didn't have, but everything those kids did. Envy flared, of course, but when it burned away, I said
a silent prayer for them, that their lives would stay blissfully uncomplicated, that for many more years they would be able to take everything for granted.
I had to start over. And I gave it my best shot. Make new friends. Build a different life. Cut my bitterness with gratitude for what I still had. I tried to live up to Callie's hopes for me by not spending my life looking over my shoulder. Now and then, when I'd see a dark sedan or hear a voice of a certain timbre, I'd feel a flicker of the old fear, a snake's tongue moving along my spine. At any moment they could pounce on me and throw me in a cell, charge me with a murder I didn't commit.
But they didn't. I got a job helping people who were homeless. I managed to become a part of society, so if I did get hauled off, I could feel like my life had been worth something.
I had finally found calm, or at least my version of it.
And then I awoke one night to see the end of a black rope coiled on my balcony.
Chapter 14
The silence was what told me I had finished talking. I emerged from the stupor of my thoughts as if rousing from a deep sleep, pressed into the present tense by the couch arm in my lower back, the floor beneath my feet, the sensation of nearly
unbearable vulnerability, as if I'd been skinned and dangled above salt water.
Induma glanced away, her dark eyes darker than usual. Then she slid down the torn-up couch and embraced me, pressing my cheek to her chest. I couldn't move. We stayed like that a few minutes, and then I raised my hand and put it on her forearm.
She set her other hand on top of mine and said, "I will help you."
She stood and straightened out her clothes. With effort she produced a smile for me. The door thumped to the carpet, and she was gone.
I jolted awake at 2:18. Experience had taught me to lie flat and draw deep breaths, to picture the soothing roll of the ocean. Soon the panic lifted and I came back to my body, safe in the darkness.
Clever, the tricks our minds play on us. The mean-spirited reminders they think we require. Given the past twenty-four hours, it was no surprise that the habit had reasserted itself, but still, the thought of it stung. I'd convinced myself it was behind me. The return to the old pattern seemed proof that I'd failed. My deficiencies had been waiting there all along, hibernating just beneath the surface like a bad memory.
It was ungodly hot, my pillow drenched. My air conditioner was awful. It made a lot of noise and didn't put out much, like a sitcom wife. It didn't
help that I kept the windows and sliding glass door closed and locked even on muggy summer nights. I lay on my slashed mattress, restless and miserable.
But comfort doesn't matter. Security matters.
I spoke Frank's name to the darkness as I sometimes did. I knew it was weird--embarrassing, even--but I did it because it was the only thing I had left of him, really. I did it to keep him alive. Now I was doing it out of habit. For years it was the one thing I was sure of. Tonight it didn't feel quite that way.
How were Frank and an old war buddy linked to a rucksack of cash? The bills were new, dated last year, but even so, it didn't mean they weren't merely the latest move in a ploy stretching back to Frank's last months. Frank was a man with secrets, but I'd known him well, better than I'd known anyone except Callie. Whatever his involvement with Charlie, or with whatever had surfaced in the weeks before his murder, he would have acted aboveboard. I tried to convince myself and got mostly there. Mostly.
I was exhausted, yet wide awake. I turned on the TV, my analgesic of choice. Daffy Duck was being stared down by a little mob guy with a big hat. I mouthed the line with him: Okay, duck, no more
stallinsee?
It was no use. I got up, dressed, and double-checked the locks and windows. About ten years
ago, I realized I wasn't checking for my safety. So why? Compulsion, certainly. Partly out of respect for the dead. I knew my way around this apartment in the dark; I'd walked it with my eyes closed.
After Induma had left, I'd cleaned up, bagging my broken possessions and dumping more down the chute than was necessary. I'd hammered the front door into the jamb with two nails, which I now tested with my thumb. They'd prove at least as effective as the dead bolt had been last night. Cracking the dishwasher, I checked the bundles of hundred-dollar bills that I'd laid beneath the bottom tray. I closed the door, setting a paper clip on the right top corner so it would fall if someone looked in there.
I opened the sliding door, passed through the torn-out screen, and straddled the balcony parapet. The three-story drop was menacing, but the telephone pole was within
easy reach, one of the reasons I'd selected the apartment. Liffman's Rules: Always leave yourself a getaway. Timing my lunge, I grabbed the footholds without having to go airborne, then pulled myself across onto the pole. I climbed down and walked to my Ford pickup.
I told myself I wasn't sure where I was going, but of course I knew.
Aside from a different shade of paint, a goose mailbox, and the Realtor sign hammered in the front lawn, Frank's house looked the same. I
parked up the street, walked back, and stood staring at the house from across the way. I thought of a rucksack stuffed with a hundred eighty grand and Frank's tattoo and how he'd hugged me that one time and called us a family. I thought, Please don't be a lie.
I slipped through the side gate and circled the house, peering inside. Some of the furniture was still there, and a few boxes, but whoever had been living there was mostly moved out. The old porch swing remained. I placed a hand on the peeling wood but couldn't bring myself to sit. Then I confronted the back door I'd stumbled through that night to find Frank. I wondered if this was the feeling that killers got when they returned to the scene of the crime to roll in the dirt of their misdeeds.
The door was locked, but the pivot latch on the kitchen's sash window was tired and pulled open readily with an upward jostling of the pane. I stepped inside, easing the window shut behind me.
I walked into the living room and sat in a slipcovered armchair, setting my feet before the spot where I'd held Frank while he died. I stared at the rag rug for a while. I'd driven by the house when I'd first moved back, and one or two other times when I really missed him, when I wanted to breathe the air he'd breathed, walk the streets he'd walked. These walls held my favorite memories. And, of course, some others, too.
I slid off the chair onto my knees and turned back the rug, revealing the bleached stain in the floorboards. It had yellowed over the years. It smelled of dust and rot. I wondered if the last owners had been oblivious to the blood spilled here.
I smoothed the rug back into place and walked silently into the kitchen. The old alarm keypad, still cracked from Callie's fist, was no longer hooked up to anything. Padding up the hall, I saw that my old bedroom had been converted into a sewing room. For a time I stood beneath that high rectangle of window and stared up at the smog-smeared night sky.
Comfort. Security.
Caruthers's words came back to me from yesterday afternoon: A single bad decision can open a world of lamentable consequences.
I asked myself the same questions I'd been mulling over half my life. What if I'd just let the phone ring that night? What if I hadn't climbed into the back of that sedan?
My footsteps seemed amplified in the small house. Same Medeco locks on the back door. I looked into the master bedroom, which was nothing like I remembered it. No sweaters cramming the top shelf of the closet. No scattering of partly read books on the nightstand. No stack of sketch pads on the bureau, cloudy with charcoal. I went back out and faced the front door. The same. The window dressings had changed, and I wondered if the security catches Frank had installed were still there. I pulled back the curtain, and fright hit me so fast and hard that I crouched in paralyzed shock.
A short way up the shadowy street, a car was pulled to the curb in front of my truck. A figure stood at my driver's-side window. He either sensed movement from the house or was looking for it, and the dark oval of his head wobbled slightly as it rotated. He was looking at me.
I jerked my hand back, letting the curtain fall closed, my breath sucking in with a screech. An engine turned over.
And then something unexpected happened. My reaction shifted, away from fear, to a flick-it urge for confrontation, no matter the stakes. Seventeen years ago I'd exited this house on trembling legs, but now I found myself charging the front door, spoiling for a fight. By the time I was off the porch, the car was already around the corner, the whine of its acceleration rising in pitch but fading with distance. When I reached my truck, there was nothing but crickets and the machine-gun strafing of a high-power sprinkler. A spasm of energy spun me in a full circle, but I spotted no one anywhere.
My mouth dry from the scare, I hurried back, closed and locked the door, and left the way I'd come in. At my truck, I pulled a flashlight from the glove box, slid beneath, and examined the undercarriage, as Liffman had taught me. The gas tank also showed no signs of tampering.
When I climbed into the truck and set my hands on the steering wheel, they were still shaking. I squeezed the wheel, doing my best to still them. When I looked up, I noticed a slip of paper tucked under the windshield wiper. Like a valet stub. But I hadn't valeted, not in months.
I climbed out and tugged it from under the rubber blade. A film-processing slip from a photo place on Ventura Boulevard. A single roll. Ready for pickup today at noon. The order number and pickup time were preprinted, the name and phone number spaces left blank. The only human mark was the black circle around Thursday. The film had probably been dropped in an overnight box rather than brought to a counter.
I got into the truck once more and stared through the windshield at nothing. My fear bled into curiosity and back again. A panicky urge overtook me. To drive away from all this. Keep moving until I wound up at a new city, a different apartment, a cannery in Alaska. But no matter how hard I tried to give in to the urge, some part of me wouldn't allow it this time. I had reached some turning point that I hadn't even known I was approaching.
I headed home. After monkeying my way up the telephone pole, I checked the locks, the paper clip, and the two nails through the front door, then sat on my mattress, staring at the damn photomat slip. My bones ached from last night's explosion, and my shirt chafed the raw skin of my chest.
When I closed my eyes, I saw again in the darkness those familiar ideograms, blue ink faded into flesh. TRUST NO ONE.
To find the answers that I needed, I'd have to source Charlie's connection with Frank beyond Okinawa. How had Induma put it? Maybe it's time to look for some new allies. Or new candor with old ones.
I got up and moved the television off Frank's trunk and onto the floor. The lid creaked as I pried it up. I dug around until I came up with what I was looking for. A creased photo of Callie from so many years ago. At the beach, squinting into the sun, one hand pinning back her thick, unruly hair. That face, almost as familiar as my own, though I hadn't seen it for years.
It was time.
Chapter 15
On the front walk, I felt exposed in the bright light of morning, though I'd circled the block three times to make sure I wasn't being followed. A moment's pause didn't help me regain my composure, but I forced my legs to carry me up onto the porch of the neat white two-story. My thumb rested against the doorbell, barely touching it,
refusing to press.
Finally I rang. A three-chime doorbell. I ran my hand through my hair, shifted from foot to foot.
The wound in my cheek from Charlie's bone frag made me self-conscious.
Approaching footsteps. My mom's voice calling back into the house, "I got it, sweetheart."
The big door swung in, and her smile caught on her face. My mom looked good, probably, for her age, but all I could notice at first were the differences, the incontrovertible evidence of the passed years. Her hair was a little coarser, the auburn sheen a shade too rich to be natural. She looked youthful in her ponytail and man's shirt, which was flecked with dried paint and unbuttoned to reveal a tank top. She wore foundation to cover the wrinkles, I assumed, but it muted her freckles, too. I didn't like that. Callie's freckles were my favorite part of her.
Sorrow rippled through her features and left them blank. "Five years," she said. "Your visits are getting almost frequent."
"I think four. Remember that lunch?"
"Right. Lunch." She lowered her head, pressing her crown to the edge of the door. "You get my Christmas card?"
"Yeah. You get mine?"
"I did."
She stepped back. I followed her in, Charlie's key
clicking around inside my sneaker. We passed through a tiled foyer with mirrors and dried flowers in vases, and into a spacious kitchen. Porcelain rooster by the Viking stove, blue-checkered tablecloth, butter churn in the corner. I couldn't put the new country-contemporary decor together with Callie.
A short, wiry man sat on a wicker stool at the center island, reading the paper and eating poached eggs. His curly hair was receding, with strands of gray at the temples. It was poofy, needing a cut. He stopped mid-chew, regarded me over the top of the sports section. Halfway down the staircase to the right stood a girl, maybe thirteen years old. She was stooping so she could look down into the kitchen and see who'd arrived. Despite the heat, she wore a hooded zip-up sweatshirt over a baggy thermal shirt--charcoal on black. Maroon and blond streaked her dark brown hair, which fell lifelessly to crowd her face. Her sleeves were pulled down over her hands, and she pinched the banister, ready to retreat.
Callie stopped by the double doors of the Sub-Zero and gestured at me, at the man, back at me.
"This is my son," she said.
The girl's jaw dropped. Two scampering footsteps and she was gone.
The man set down his newspaper, dotted his mouth at the corner with a paper napkin. He came around and shook my hand. "Steve Yates." He looked at Callie, nodded supportively, and excused himself to the next room, leaving his breakfast
behind.
She said, "My husband."
"Right. Congratulations. I got that card, too."
"And you didn't want to come?"
"I didn't know it was an invitation."
"We didn't do a big thing." She flared an arm. "Third marriages, you know."
"Six months ago?"
We Know (aka Trust no One) (2008) Page 9
