The Beggar's Pawn

by John L'Heureux

  “Leave now or I’ll call the police,” David said.

  Maggie put her hands over her face.

  “Tell them, Iris!” Reginald said. “Ask them for money!”

  “I’m sorry,” Iris said.

  “How can you betray me like this? Ask them! Tell them!”

  “I’m sorry.” She began to cry.

  Speechless now, Reginald put his hands on Iris’s shoulders and shook her. It was an automatic gesture. He did not seem to know what he was doing.

  “Stop!” David shouted. “Stop that! I’ll give you the money.”

  Reginald shook her again, then he released her and patted her shoulders.

  “I’ll give you the damned money,” David said.

  Reginald stared at them and at the swimming pool beyond them and then, for just a moment, he came to himself. He looked around as if he were awakening from a nightmare.

  “I wouldn’t touch your money now,” he said. “You can give it to Iris. She’s all you care about anyway.”

  He wiped the tears from his face, pulled himself together, and left them. As he went through the kitchen he tipped over the cookie jar and heard it shatter on the floor. He did not look back. He was done with them. He slammed the door behind him.

  28.

  Maggie and David tried to hold themselves together until Iris left, difficult as that was. “I wouldn’t touch your money now,” Reginald had said. And he stormed through the kitchen and out the front door.

  Iris stood there in tears until Maggie folded her in her arms and let her cry herself out. That took a long time. David sat back in his lounge chair and concentrated on not having a stroke. When he was at last able to speak, he said, “It’s all right, sweetheart, everything will be all right.”

  He got up then with some difficulty—he was dizzy and he kept tilting to the left—and went inside and wrote Reginald a check for a thousand dollars. He put it in an envelope and brought it outside. Maggie was stretched out on the lounge chair now with Iris in her arms.

  “Give this to your father, Iris, and tell him it’s not a loan. It’s a gift.” He put his hand on her head, a kind of paternal blessing, and said, “We’ll always love you. You know that, don’t you.”

  “You should go now,” Maggie said. “Your father will be worried. And your mother.”

  Iris left and David poured each of them a stiff shot of brandy. He poured a second one for himself. They remained silent. This was not the time for a discussion.

  * * *

  —

  REGINALD HAD SAID he was done with them but he knew he was not. He wanted more than money; he wanted vengeance for this latest humiliation. To be reduced to begging! And in front of his own daughter! It was too much. And Iris herself had betrayed him. She was old enough and, God knows, smart enough to understand exactly what she was doing. Telling them she was sorry. Apologizing for her father’s tears, for his begging. Well, they would pay for this. And pay.

  Helen was not at the door to greet him. She was seated on the couch, a woman of leisure, reading. For her intellectual improvement, he had no doubt. And then he realized—but it couldn’t be possible—that she was reading the manuscript of his novel. His vision clouded for a moment and the room went red and then black, and then he came back to himself. She was reading his book. Something inside him twisted against his heart and he thought, This is death. This is what it means to die. He felt rage rise in his throat. He swallowed, hard, and said, “Well?”

  Helen only looked at him. She was very sad.

  “Well?” he said again, frightened now.

  “I thought better of you,” she said. “I thought you were a good man.”

  “I should kill you,” he said. “I should obliterate you from the face of the earth.” His heart was pumping wildly and he felt he was about to do something he would regret forever, so he turned to leave her.

  At that moment Iris came through the door. Reginald whirled on her as if he were being attacked and said, “You!”

  Iris handed him the envelope and, looking down, said, “They said it’s a gift. It’s not a loan.”

  He took the envelope and tore it in half. He threw the two halves in Helen’s direction and watched while they fluttered to the carpet. He turned then and slammed out of the house.

  They were all traitors. All of them.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS LONG PAST midnight when Reginald returned from his walk to East Palo Alto. He had met up with his longtime supplier and they had done some crystal meth. He had been able to push back the feelings of betrayal for several hours and he was calm now and thinking clearly. He knew how to get back at all of them, economically, with one sharp blow.

  Helen was asleep, the bottle of Ambien still open on the bathroom sink. He took two of the pills and filled a glass with water and went into Iris’s room. She was lying awake, staring into the dark.

  “Daddy,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She pointed to the envelope beside her bed. She had taped the two halves of the check together.

  “It’s all right,” Reginald said. “Everything is going to be all right. Just take these two pills and you’ll get a nice sleep and when you wake up everything will be just the way you’ve always wanted it.”

  She took the two pills.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “Shhh,” he said. “Try to sleep. I’ll sit by you until you drift off.”

  It was not long before she fell into a deep sleep. He waited another half hour, telling himself to be calm, be resolute. This would not be easy.

  He lifted Iris out of her bed and, because it was a chilly night, he wrapped her in her pink blanket. He carried her to the door, which he held open with one foot, and sidled through it and out into the dim moonlight. There was a tiny sliver of moon and only a few stars as he made his way through the dark street. This was a night world he was familiar with. It existed in a half-light at the edge of his consciousness. He could hear the suppressed anger in the houses he passed, he knew the sounds they made telling lies in their sleep, not one of them walking in the way of the Lord. He could pull down a curse on every one of them, liars and hypocrites as they were.

  He cradled Iris’s sleeping body against his chest.

  He turned left at the end of the street and approached the Hollisses’ house. There were no lights on, of course. This had been an ordinary day for them: humiliating a neighbor, crushing another human being, and then writing a check to be rid of any problem of conscience. A thousand dollars. A cheap way out. They loved Iris. They had won her away from him.

  He let himself into their back garden by the side gate. It was supposed to be kept locked as an insurance measure against some neighbor kid getting injured at their pool, but they never remembered to lock it. They would remember now.

  He went to the edge of the pool and paused while he looked for the best place to begin. There were a few steps leading down into the deep end of the pool and he chose these. He dropped the pink blanket by the side of the pool and walked down the steps until the water reached his knees. Gently he lowered Iris, facedown, into the water. She stirred, but he was ready for her. With one hand beneath her chest and the other on the back of her head, he pushed her face beneath the water and held her there. A stream of bubbles disturbed the water and suddenly she was fully alive, struggling wildly against his hands, but he was too strong for her and, though she thrashed the water and at one point managed to cry out, he held her beneath the surface until at last she stopped struggling and went quiet. He continued to hold her underwater while he recited the Our Father. It was a good death, a quiet death.

  He was exhausted. He got out of the water and stretched out beside the pool. Iris’s body sank, which surprised him, until he realized it would be some little time before she would float—she would be found floating—safe at last from their love. And from h
is.

  He was calm. He had done what he had to do. It remained now only to go home and destroy his novel, erase it from his computer, and wait for the police. He had always made fun of CSI and Law and Order and the way all their criminals just couldn’t wait to confess—it was so phony—but now he found himself ready, eager, to do the same.

  He would explain to them that in the long run it was better for Iris. He had not wanted to do it. He had to. They could not see it, he knew, but in fact he was a good man.

  PART FIVE

  29.

  In the final months of 2010 the lone terrorist—passionate, reckless—had emerged as the new enemy in the battle against reason. Forget Iraq, forget Afghanistan. The FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon focused their intense concentration on an unidentifiable enemy, the committed killer who acted alone. He could be anyone. He could be your neighbor. Just check the daily headlines.

  Iris’s death and her father’s confession of guilt were front-page news in the local papers, but national interest in the case was almost immediately displaced by yet another mass shooting at a high school in Arizona. One drowned little girl had no chance against twelve teenagers gunned down by a classmate they had bullied. The local papers, however, held on. Her own father had drowned her! What were we coming to? How could this happen in a civilized community? Was it drugs or insanity or some sexual kink? Blame the Hollisses, the father said! Reporters were at the Hollisses’ door every day, demanding an interview, lurking behind shrubbery, sneaking in back to photograph the swimming pool where the child had been drowned. Eventually the reporters would go, but meanwhile Maggie and David sealed themselves in their house and waited.

  Maggie, stunned and broken, pulled herself together long enough to phone the children and tell them not to worry: she and David were surviving the awful attention, Iris was a ghastly loss to them, but above all do not come home. The less attention, the better. Claire insisted on coming west to see them, but Maggie held firm. Repeat: do not come home.

  They were like people who had survived some terrible plane crash and were not convinced they were still alive. They were staggered by grief and overwhelmed by guilt. For several days they did not talk about their part in Iris’s death; they did not talk at all. Separately however—each very alone—they tortured themselves with possibilities. How much were they to blame? Had they kidnapped the child emotionally? Seduced her away from her family? With money, as Reginald claimed? Had they been right to refuse him money? Money! Always the damned money! Why hadn’t they just handed over the thousand dollars? They gave that much to the Pet Rescue Fund every year and never gave it a second thought, so why not give it to Reginald instead? If only for Iris’s sake. Why?

  Once they were finally able to talk, they asked each other these questions and answered them and asked them again, always with the shivering fear that they had acted against conscience.

  David lay awake at night arguing with himself and found he lost every argument. Maggie lay awake beside him, waiting, afraid the worst would happen.

  “If you don’t get some rest,” she said one night, “you’re going to have another stroke.”

  “Was it my fault?”

  “Don’t talk nonsense.” She was loyal still. “You did what you thought was the right thing. It was the goddam money we should blame.”

  And on the following night: “It was the right thing. Wasn’t it? To refuse him?”

  “Was it?

  “Wasn’t it? I thought . . .”

  “Who ever knows for certain what the right thing is!”

  “But we talked about it . . . we agreed . . . we both . . .”

  She lay there, silent, sullen, and then she relented. “Reginald is a sick man,” she said.

  And on another night: “So you think I was wrong to refuse him money?”

  “You’re not to blame.” She was lying for his sake. “We’re not to blame.”

  “I wish I could be certain.”

  “You’re going to bring on a stroke, David.”

  “I know. God’s justice . . . if there was a God.”

  She was alarmed by his mention of God and not for the first time. What next? A stroke, at the least.

  * * *

  —

  THE STROKE, when it came, seemed mild at first. No pain, just a dull throbbing in the right carotid artery. Too much worry. Too little exercise. They had been under journalistic house arrest for too long and they were both a little crazy. What they needed was a good walk and fresh air.

  Then David discovered he could not walk at all, could not even get up from his chair. And the left side of his face was rigid. This one, he said to himself, is a full-on stroke. He tried to say this to Maggie, but what came out was an indecipherable growl. Maggie choked back her tears and called 911.

  David was hospitalized at once.

  * * *

  —

  THIS TIME, Maggie told herself, she would not make the mistake of telling the children about the stroke. She stayed by David’s bedside until there was good news—the clot had not burst, the paralysis would pass—and she put off the chaos and injured feelings of another family visit until some date far in the future . . . perhaps when she herself was dead.

  One morning sitting by his bed, nodding in and out of a kind of sleep, she thought about how much trouble money had caused in their lives. David’s resentment of the Sedgwick money, Reginald’s murderous demands for money, her own children’s endless need to borrow money against their inheritance.

  Money. Always money.

  It came to her as a kind of revelation: she should get rid of it. The children wanted it. Let them have it. It was that simple.

  A feeling of great relief came over her, she felt free, she felt clean.

  She saw her lawyer that afternoon and laid out her plans. A third to each of them, minus their early withdrawals, and with one signature the Sedgwick money would be gone. She and David could live on Social Security and his TIAA-CREF pension and that would be that.

  The lawyer was astonished and cautioned her against making decisions in haste, especially when David was ill and couldn’t rightly assist her in disposing of so much money, and did she realize she was talking about stocks worth in excess of three million?

  “It’s my money,” she said, “it’s Sedgwick money, and I intend to get rid of it. Now. For good.”

  “That’s your right,” he said grudgingly.

  “Damned right,” she said. “It’s mine, and now it’s gone.”

  She left all the little details to the lawyer.

  * * *

  —

  DAVID LAY, SLEEPLESS, in his hospital bed reciting Dickinson poems he had memorized as a boy. After great pain a formal feeling comes, the nerves sit ceremonious like tombs. Indeed. Death was on his mind in a way it had never been before. It was tangible. Its taste was bitter. Moreover they had moved him into a room with another patient and he was constantly assaulted by his roommate’s labored breathing. It was a constant reminder that death was only one deep breath away.

  “You awake?” the roommate said.

  “Wide awake,” David said. His speech was muddy and he had to speak slowly to make himself understood.

  “Can I ask you something?” the roommate said. When there was no reply, he went on, “What do you think of dying?”

  “I try not to think of it,” David said.

  “But when you do. I’m dying and I’m afraid. Pancreatic cancer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m fifty-six.” He breathed in and out several times. “But I trust in God.”

  David thought, More fool you, but he said merely, “I hope that’s a consolation.”

  “I trust in God, don’t you? He’ll see me through. What do you suppose there is after?”

  “After?”

  “Do you think there’s a heaven and
a hell?”

  “Schopenhauer called death that long sleep in which individuality is forgotten. I like to think of it that way.”

  “What way?”

  “Aren’t you sleepy yet?”

  “I’m a born-again Christian. I’ve accepted Christ as my personal savior.”

  “And has he accepted you?”

  “Oh, yes. He accepts anybody. He’d accept you.”

  “That’s nice. That’s very generous of him. You know, I think we should try to get some sleep.”

  “Sleep in Christ.” The man rolled over and sighed. “I have my faith.”

  David fell asleep almost at once. He dreamed he was back home lying in the sun. The sunlight struck the pool and dazzled his eyes until he thought he saw something purple floating on the surface. There was a sudden clutch at his heart and he knew what would happen next. It was always the same. He leaned forward and shaded his eyes to see more clearly. It was a body. It was Iris. A scream rose in his throat and he made a choking sound and sat straight up in bed. He had dreamed this dream almost every night since the stroke. He was shaking and covered in sweat.

  He woke to the sound of nothing. The usual noises had suddenly ceased—the rubber heels on the tile floors, the squeak of hospital machinery being moved, the low groans and soft whimpers of the hopeful sick. The sudden silence descended on him like a black cloak, it enveloped him and cut off his breath, and he was filled with the terror of dying.

  “Don’t worry,” his roommate whispered. “You’ll be all right.”

  David began to shiver. To calm himself he took a deep breath, but somehow he could not pull the air into his lungs. He began to sweat and his hands began to tremble. He sat up in bed. This would pass in a minute or two. He pressed his knees together and hugged himself. He needed a breath. Only one deep breath. He gulped and flailed. He was suffocating. He was dying. And then it came to him that this is what they meant by a panic attack.