Something had happened, like a split in the universe, and you couldn’t depend on anything being the way you’d planned. And even though Rickie started off convinced that everything would return to normal and she’d know what was expected of her, she soon started to wonder if it would ever change back. Her mother was finished with the pachysandra and had stopped cooking, and now all she did was smoke cigarettes and watch TV, which Rickie knew she didn’t approve of. Gloria went out only in the afternoons when she had her driving lessons, and the driving lessons were the worst of all. Gloria had never needed to drive, Phil had taken her anywhere she needed to go, and now the lessons and the fact that she was pricing Fords made the separation more permanent; when Gloria passed her driver’s test there seemed no hope at all that their lives would return to normal.
Actually, everyone in the neighborhood seemed a little haywire, especially the mothers. Marie McCarthy, for example, who had spent every day of her married life taking care of her house and her family, suddenly found herself with a job. She went to Armand’s once a month to have her hair tinted and cut, but she always avoided Nora. Sure, she saw Nora out of the corner of her eye, but during her last appointment, when Marie was back at the sink with a rubber cap over her head, she noticed that Nora had the baby in a playpen that was jammed into the utility closet. Armand had noticed too, and as Nora sneaked in to give the baby a cheese Danish, he followed her and told her that he didn’t give a damn if her baby-sitter was unreliable and that in fact he needed her at least two weekdays or he’d have to find a new manicurist. After he’d stormed out of the utility closet, Nora stood there in the doorway, nibbling on the Danish and holding her baby. Before Marie could look away, Nora spotted her.
“Hi, Mrs, M.,” she had called, and she came out to sit on the chair next to Marie’s. “The world is not made for women with children,” Nora had said darkly.
The baby leaned over and grabbed Marie’s silver bangle bracelets, and he scooted out of Nora’s grasp and into Marie’s lap.
“Hi!” he said to Marie.
“What am I supposed to do?” Nora said. “Put my kids into suspended animation?”
“I could take care of him,” Marie found herself saying.
And that was that. She opened her mouth and Nora was only too glad to fire Rickie and take the baby over to the McCarthys’ on Wednesdays and Fridays and, along with Billy, on Saturday mornings. So there Marie was, with two little boys in her house again, only this time she was getting paid, and the truth of it was she enjoyed it much more this time around. She bought an old high-chair at a secondhand store and she taught James how to use a spoon and a fork and how to say bye-bye and one, two, three. She took him to Lynne Wineman’s and Ellen Hennessy’s and showed him off, and even they had to admit he was darling. “Marie,” James said one afternoon when he woke from his nap, and Marie quickly pronounced him brilliant as well as being sweet as pie.
John McCarthy and Jackie were nervous about having a baby in the house; they thought he was too much for Marie. But Ace didn’t seem to mind in the least, and he took an interest in the older boy, taking him out to play ball or to walk the dog; and although it took some time for Marie to win Billy over, she finally did, fixing him noodles with butter and cream, playing mah-jongg and gin at the card table, teaching him to crack open pistachio nuts with his teeth.
Marie didn’t notice that when she got together with the other mothers they might admire the baby, but the questions they asked were about Nora. Lynne wanted to know where she shopped for clothes and if she had a boyfriend, but Ellen Hennessy was interested only in how Nora managed to take care of her children and work. Every weekday morning, between getting Stevie to school and Suzanne to Lynne Wineman’s and going food shopping, Ellen was taking a typing class. It was a five-week class and, because she was almost done, she’d already begun applying for jobs. There was one job she wanted more than anything, as a receptionist in a nearby orthodontist’s office. On the day of her interview she actually took Suzanne and went over to Nora Silk’s house to get a manicure. Nora was in her bathrobe when she answered the door, but she smiled right away and led Ellen into the kitchen. The house was a mess, worse than any of the women on the block would have imagined, and Nora set out fingerpaints and paper on the floor for Suzanne and James and then had to clear cereal boxes and clay off the kitchen table before she could get to work on Ellen.
“Boy, I’m just crazy about your husband,” Nora said to Ellen once she had her hands soaking in warm, soapy water.
“Oh?” Ellen said. She looked down and saw that Suzanne had already smeared fingerpaints all over her forehead.
“My ex didn’t know how to fix anything the way Joe can,” Nora said. “He couldn’t even set an alarm clock.”
“Pale pink,” Ellen said when Nora brought out her bottle of nail polish.
“Try the fuchsia,” Nora said. “Trust me.”
“I’m thinking about getting a job,” Ellen blurted out. “An orthodontist’s office on the Turnpike.”
“That’s great,” Nora said. “You’ll probably get a terrific discount if either of your kids needs braces.”
“You think so?” Ellen said, pleased. She took her hands out of their soaks and watched as Nora cut her cuticles. “I’m just worried about the kids.”
“You’ll be doing that after they’re grown and gone,” Nora said. “Mind some music?”
Nora went into the living room and put on a stack of 45s, then came back, lit a cigarette, put it in the ashtray, and uncapped the fuchsia polish.
“Don’t you worry when you’re at work?” Ellen asked.
Nora took some graham crackers out of a Tupperware bowl and handed them to the children without bothering to clean their hands.
“Oh, of course,” she said. “I worry about them all the time.”
When Ellen Hennessy got the job, the first person she called was Nora.
“That’s so fabulous,” Nora said. “But I can tell you’re thinking about not taking it.”
She let James creep into a kitchen cabinet to play with the pots and pans. Ace was on his lunch hour and he had grabbed a Coke to drink before he climbed back over the fence and returned to school for eighth period.
“What do I tell Joe?” Ellen said.
“It doesn’t matter what you tell him,” Nora said. “What matters is where.”
Ace put his empty Coke bottle on the kitchen counter, then came up behind Nora and put his arms around her.
“Tell him in the bedroom,” Nora said.
Ace kissed her neck, then went to the baby and crouched down beside him.
“See ya, buddy,” Ace said to James.
Nora turned and put a finger to her lips to hush him.
Ace got up and made a mocking little bow, then whistled for his dog and went out the side door. In the kitchen across the street, Ellen Hennessy sat down at her table, confused.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, embarrassed. For a moment she thought she must have been completely crazy to have called Nora and confided in her.
“You know what I mean,” Nora said.
“Nora,” Ellen said.
“Well, you do know what I mean,” Nora insisted. “Give him something more important to think about than whether or not his wife works.”
JOE HENNESSY HAD TOO MUCH ON HIS MIND already. All week he’d been working on a case he hated, staked out in the evenings outside the hardware store, which had been burglarized three times already this month. Not a damned thing happened during his stakeout, except for the one evening he went to the diner to get himself a hot turkey sandwich. When he came back he discovered that someone had thrown a brick through the plate-glass window during his absence and made off with six transistor radios. He hated the case even more then, because it was so obviously kids, and kids would probably outgrow it, unless he arrested them, but of course he looked like a fool now down at the station because he’d somehow been had.
And then one evening, tw
enty minutes before Johnny Knight was due to relieve him, Hennessy got a call on his radio and he knew right away it was going to be bad, even before he was told that there was a possible homicide over on Mimosa. He put on his siren and pulled out onto Harvey’s Turnpike just as the deep blue in the sky began to turn black. When he got to 445 Mimosa three other detectives were already there, including Johnny Knight, who met him in the driveway.
“Take my advice,” Johnny said as he offered Hennessy a cigarette and a light. “Turn around and drive the other way now.”
They walked up to the front stoop together, smoking their cigarettes in the dark.
“Bad?” Hennessy said.
“Unbelievable,” Johnny Knight said. “Christ.”
Hennessy knew the family who lived here, at least well enough to greet Roy Niles down at the Dairy Queen he owned whenever Hennessy brought his kids there in the summer. If he remembered correctly, Niles’s wife’s name was Mary and there were two kids, a girl in junior high and a boy who worked at the Dairy Queen in the summer. As soon as they went into the house they could hear a woman screaming, so Hennessy knew that the wife was still alive.
“We just got a call from the hospital that he was DOA,” Knight said. “The guy. Niles.”
Hennessy’s shoes had mud on them and he wiped them on the mat in the front hallway.
“You’re here to talk to the kid,” Knight said. “Raymond.”
“How’d he get it?” Hennessy asked.
“A knife,” Johnny Knight said. “Eleven times.”
“Christ,” Hennessy said. “Any suspects?”
“We’ve already got him in custody. It’s the kid. His mother and sister are in the bedroom screaming their heads off. He did it down in the basement. Did you know that Niles had a complete bomb shelter down there? Cans of food to last six months. A ham radio. Water. Everything.”
“Is that where it happened?” Hennessy asked.
Knight shook his head. “In the laundry room. It’s a mess.”
The kid was in the kitchen, sitting with his head between his knees. Hennessy greeted the two other detectives and a pathologist who had been sent over from Hempstead.
“He’s off his rocker,” one of the detectives. Ted Flynn, told Hennessy. “You want to try talking to him, fine, but we’re taking him down to be booked and then over to Pilgrim State.”
Raymond had just turned seventeen, he was a junior in high school, like Rickie Shapiro, but she didn’t even know he existed. He was thin and his hair was in a fuzzy crewcut; you could see his scalp. His skin, which was usually pale, was ashen now. He was wearing a brown shirt and tan slacks and white sneakers and he looked as if he might throw up at any minute. Hennessy took one look at the boy and he thought, Why the hell is this one mine? He asked for ten minutes alone with the boy, and when the others had gone into the living room, Hennessy opened the refrigerator and took out two Cokes. He sat down across from Raymond and opened both bottles, holding one toward the boy.
“Drink this,” Hennessy said. “It’ll settle your stomach.”
The boy looked up at him and swallowed hard. He stared at the Coke as if he were dying of thirst. Hennessy put it on the table. Raymond grabbed it and drank half the Coke straight down, then put the bottle back on the table.
“They think you’re crazy,” Hennessy said. “They think it’s open and shut and you don’t even have a story to tell.”
The boy shuddered and looked down at the floor, but Hennessy could tell he was listening.
“Like maybe it was self-defense. Or maybe just an accident. Or maybe it wasn’t even you, and these idiots just want the easy way out.”
“It was me,” Raymond said.
Hennessy took a sip of his Coke. “You want some cookies?” he asked. Raymond shook his head, but Hennessy got some from a tin on the counter anyway. He felt sick, too, but he forced himself to eat one. “That’s your mother and sister crying in the other room,” he said.
“Leave me alone,” Raymond said. “Just let them take me wherever they’re going to take me.”
“Eleven times,” Hennessy said.
“What do you want!” Raymond said. He was just a skinny, nothing kid no one even noticed.
“I want your story,” Hennessy said. “I want to hear your side.”
His side began down in the laundry room, where his father always took him when he wanted to beat him up. He’d make Raymond wait, a day or maybe two, and then he’d let him have it. Only this time Raymond had decided it wasn’t going to happen; he thought all he’d have to do was wave the knife at his father and he’d let him go, but his father went crazy at the sight of the knife, and then he couldn’t back down. And when he stabbed his father once he couldn’t stop himself, so he figured he was crazy and he wanted to go anywhere where he couldn’t hear his mother crying.
“Finish your Coke,” Hennessy said when the boy was through talking.
“No one would believe me,” the boy said. “My mother always turned on the radio so she couldn’t hear it.”
“I believe you,” Hennessy said.
He left the boy in the kitchen and joined the other detectives.
“His father beat the shit out of him,” Hennessy said.
“Yeah?” Johnny Knight said. “So he stabbed him eleven times?”
“He didn’t plan it,” Hennessy said. “It just happened.”
“Come on,” Ted Flynn said. “You buy that? He just happened to have a knife on him?”
Some people in the neighborhood, especially the boys in Raymond’s gym class who had seen bruises up and down his legs and back when he undressed, bought it, and some people didn’t. And in the end it didn’t matter because there was no proof and no one to stand up for the kid except Hennessy, so they took Raymond to Pilgrim State. The news of what had happened spread fast. That very same night fathers in the neighborhood couldn’t sleep and mothers studied their little boys’ faces for signs of trouble. How was it possible for this to have happened, that’s what people asked themselves, waking and in their dreams. Parents and children were excessively polite to each other, as if they expected someone else to snap and they wanted to make certain it was no one in their own house, certainly not themselves. You could hear a murmur between the hedges, but no one talked about the Niles family out loud. Hennessy spent three days interviewing teachers and relatives before he realized he was getting absolutely nowhere. They canceled appointments with him, they gave one-word answers, and even the guys down at the station didn’t want to hear about it; they were actually avoiding him. When he finally turned in his report, which had nothing, not one incriminating word, against the kid’s father, Johnny Knight invited him to a poker game, and when Hennessy arrived the other detectives hit him on the back and offered him cigarettes, relieved he had given up and more than ready to welcome him back as one of their own.
He won fourteen dollars and he didn’t come home until after midnight. Usually he just fixed himself a sandwich if he got in this late, but when he came into the kitchen he found Ellen had made a late dinner for him. There were lamb chops and carrots cooked with butter and a baked potato with sour cream.
“I just felt like cooking,” Ellen said defensively when Hennessy stared at the dinner.
“All right,” Hennessy said finally. “Great.”
Ellen sat down across from him and watched him eat. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
Hennessy stabbed his baked potato and shook his head.
“Maybe you need to talk about it,” Ellen said.
Hennessy looked at her then. She really meant it. “Thanks,” he said. “I can’t.”
More than anyone, Ellen had been waiting for Hennessy to give up on the Niles case. When he grabbed a beer and went to sit down on the couch, she went into the bedroom and her hands shook as she undressed. She switched off all three lights on the pole lamp, then put on the black satin slip. It had been three months since she had made love with her husband, and her heart had certai
nly not been in it. She went to the bureau and brushed her hair in the dark, then she took the jasmine oil Nora had given her and sprinkled three drops on her pillow.
When Hennessy finished his beer he turned off all the lights in the house. Ever since Donna Durgin had disappeared, Ellen had asked him to lock the doors at night, and by now it was a habit, even though something closed up in his stomach each time he turned a lock. He checked the children and covered them with their blankets, which had fallen onto the floor. He thought about the kid drinking Coke at the kitchen table, he thought about how pale the kid was, and how limp his hands were, and how desperately thirsty he seemed. He thought about the woman he hadn’t helped who’d been fixing hamburgers after she’d been beaten, and the look on Donna Durgin’s face when she saw her children get out of his car every other Sunday. Tomorrow he’d probably find himself staked out in front of the hardware store again, and this time he wouldn’t complain about the job. He’d read the newspaper as he sat behind the wheel, and he’d drink coffee, and if the stupid kid who’d been breaking and entering dared to show up, Hennessy would lean down on the horn to frighten him off.
When he went into his bedroom the scent of jasmine made him dizzy, and for a moment Hennessy felt as if he’d wandered into the wrong house. Ellen had switched on the dim night-table lamp and her back was toward him; one of the straps of the black slip had slid down. He could see a white shoulder. Hennessy undressed and put his clothes in the hamper.
“Why don’t you come over here,” Ellen said as he started for his own bed.