Trace the Dead Eye

by Steven D. Bennett

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  YESTERDAYS

  She still wasn't talking to me, even after a lifetime.

  After leaving Rollins at the park, I’d spent the night watching Teresa. Jim was nowhere to be seen. And I was getting antsy. I needed to see Tina and tell her all my triumphs. Thus reasoning, I left the girl and went home.

  But upon arrival, I found Tina in no mood for company. She was doing the laundry, grimly separating clothes, tossing them into piles or appliances, putting some on hangers and placing them around the room, others in a basket for the clothesline. Grim, grim, grim. She never was in the best humor during housework. Or before. Or after. Even now, after half the household's normal amount of clothing had gone the way of all flesh.

  "You could always get a job," I said, as she snapped another shirt straight, placing carefully on the basket. “Stop being so sheltered and join the real world; the incessant boredom of office work, the monotonous jabbering of co-workers on the assembly line. You could type for ten bucks an hour, flip burgers for less. Think of the excitement."

  No reply.

  Whenever Tina would complain about housework, I would helpfully list the alternatives. She hadn't worked since getting pregnant with Tyler and never seriously considered returning to the workplace, except when the checks were late.

  "Having no skills might make things more difficult," I went on, reminders from the grave. "Can't act, can't dance. You can wash clothes and microwave a dinner with the best of them. Maybe open your business: Tina’s Laundry and Food Warming.”

  I looked into that face. So young, so beautiful, so grim and distant. "Why," I asked, "do I still love you?"

  She had a list magnetically affixed to the refrigerator. Things to Do. Laundry. Vacuuming. Tyler's Room. Gardening. The latter was the only thing she truly enjoyed, being out in the sun and digging in the dirt. She put that last after all the rest. Delayed gratification. She crossed Laundry off the list.

  Maybe if I helped her, I thought, things would go faster. But the basket was too heavy. She picked it up and I followed her outside.

  "Remember the day we met?" I asked, as she pinned Tyler's pajamas on the line. "I was roaming the bookstore, looking through the business section because I needed a book for some class I ended up not taking. And you were there, too, business being your major, though the book you were reading wasn’t about business at all. Butterfly Gardens, if I remember. I walked by, then again, and by the third time I knew I had just found the most beautiful woman in the world. I pretended to look through other books, but you were all I could see. It was the first time my breath was literally taken away, though not the last. Ever other time I saw you–unless we were arguing–I had that same feeling. You had on that short blue dress that matched your eyes, with those perfect white legs which seemed to go on forever. But it was your hair that framed it all in angelic perfection. Blond curls which spiraled just beyond your shoulders and bounced when you looked up to see what kind of fool was stalking you from every bookshelf. It was just an instant of a gaze when our eyes met, but it was an instant that changed my life. Electricity flowed through my body, making everything seem clear and focused, and I felt like Superman. Stupid, I know, but everything was heightened. I knew I needed to feel every day to be alive, and you were the one person I wanted to spend a lifetime spilling my heart to. But fear held me back.

  “Then a greater fear swept over me: that if we never met the rest of my life would be nothing.

  "When I finally walked over and you looked up, I thought I’d die because of the perfection. And when you spoke to me my heart was like wax, but for the first time life seemed right. We must have talked for hours; about gardening and spade work and dreams you had apart from your job at the bank and dreams I had apart from not being with you. And after some hours we made a date and I left looking like the biggest grinning idiot the world had ever seen.”

  She finished hanging the last of the laundry, wiped her forehead, picked up the empty basket and carried it inside.

  "Those next days and weeks were unreal times, incredible times," I continued, as she dropped the basket on the washer and walked over to the closet to pull out the vacuum. "I was in a constant daze." I sat on the vacuum as Tina plugged it in, and I held on tightly as she began cleaning the living room. "I couldn't get enough of you. I'd call you at least once a day. We'd go out and alternate between our favorite restaurants and hangouts and theaters and dives until we knew each other's tastes inside and out. Then we did it again. And afterwards, going back to your apartment, listening to music, watching movies, listening to old radio dramas, we'd sit on the couch and I would hold you and wonder how life could be so good.

  "You never let me stay the night," I said, as she moved the couch aside to reveal cobwebs. "But you sent me away with the most passionate kisses. A few times I walked straight from the front door of your apartment to jump into the freezing pool in the courtyard, fully dressed, so I could make it through the night, or at least the ride home. I’d drive back to my apartment with the heater full blast, then dry off when I got home and jump in bed and fall into a deep, contented sleep.

  She bumped the vacuum into the wall and I fell off.

  "But something happened,” I said, sitting.

  She turned, tying the cord as she rolled it back to the closet. She put it inside and I followed her as she made her way to Tyler’s bedroom. Toys lay scattered on the floor, on the bed, on the dresser. Tina sighed and knelt down.

  "Something happened," I repeated, sitting cross-legged on my son's bed. “And it didn't start when you got pregnant and had to quit your job at the bank, though that didn’t help. It was before, and during, and after, and now. It was a progression, like a light beginning to dim so slowly that you don't know it's fading until the dark looks bright by comparison. My job started to lose its glamour, because you were alone more and I was out later, trying to make up for the money you weren’t bringing in. Then I started to lose whatever glamour I held in your eyes. I was no longer a private detective out to right the wrongs and save the world, but now just a guy who spent most of his time in his car watching people who weren't his family.

  "The money was still good," I argued. "But you were a new mom with a new baby and a tired husband who wished he could be home more but...money. But money. We both went brain dead; you by having no interaction with anyone but Tyler, me by having no interaction with anyone but my car. Sex became as rare as Red Sox pennants. You became angry and resentful and bitter. You said I was the same."

  Tina was trying to separate similar pieces of toys into piles. She stopped suddenly and reached over and dragged a wastebasket from under Tyler's cluttered desk. She began scooping up handfuls of tiny toy men and cars and bugs and dropping them into the basket until it overflowed. She pushed them down and dropped more in until the floor was clear. She carried the basket quickly to the bigger kitchen trash can, emptied it, carried it back to Tyler's room, set it on the floor and escaped the room with a slam of the door.

  "You became distant, emotionally and physically."

  She was in the front yard now, digging out weeds in the flowerbed near the fence. Her gardening toolbox was next to her along with a six-pack of ranunculus.

  "Like a zombie, going through the motions, looking out with those dead eyes," I said. "But the worst of it all, the very worst thing: I couldn't get you to smile."

  She dug harder, stabbing the ground, grimly chopping into the hard earth.

  "You lost all joy for life. And all hope. Tell me, was it before my affairs, or after? I honestly don’t know. I’d come home to those eyes that used to sparkle, that face that radiated so much life, and I'd try to hold you and you'd squirm away as if touched by a leper. So I'd walk out, leaving the fear behind. But I was too afraid to tell you what I was afraid of. So I ran, to another, and another. Someone I could make smile. Someone who would hold me. Someone I hadn't killed."

  "That's what I was afraid of," I said, as I looked at her face. "That I was the one wh
o had caused you such death. I didn't want to be that person. I couldn't be. Even now I’m afraid to ask. But tell me. Am I the one who killed you?”

  She looked at me and I waited for her to speak, to console, to forgive. She squinted into my eyes and I could see the reflected fear I felt. But she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking through me, to the other side.

  I turned to see as well.

  A car was moving slowly down the street, exhaust rumbling as if detached. It was dull grey, primer-esque, and I could read the chrome letters on the body. Fairlane Galaxie. It slowed even more as it neared the house. Inside the man grimaced a smile, as if the attempt caused him pain.

  It was Jim.

  He stared at Tina as the car moved by.

  Tina stared back, frozen, until the car had moved beyond the invisible boundary of the property. She dropped the weeder on the ground and ran to the house.

  I took a step to follow, then stopped and waited. I needed to be sure. The car had made a slow u-turn and was coming back. There was no mistaking him, not at that speed. Same scraggly beard, same greasy hair.

  Then he did something horrible.

  He looked at me and waved.