Few people had such cards in their possession, and the mechanic had never seen a card with the address of the shop added by hand. The letter L was the clincher. In effect, this was an “access all areas” pass, a request — no, an order — to extend any and all help to the person who possessed it.
“Did you call the number?” he asked.
“I don’t want to talk to him through no service. I want to see him.”
“He’s not here. He’s out of town.”
“Where?”
The mechanic hesitated before answering.
“Maine.”
“I’d be grateful to you if you’d give me the address of where he’s at.”
Arno walked to the cluttered office that stood to the left of the main work area. He flicked through the address book until he came to the entry he needed, then took a piece of paper and transferred the relevant details to it. He folded the paper and gave it to the woman.
“You want me to call him for you, let him know you’re on your way?”
“Thank you, but no.”
“You got a car?”
She shook her head.
“I took the subway out here.”
“You know how you’re going to get up to Maine?”
“Not yet. Bus, I guess.”
Arno put on his jacket and removed a set of keys from his pocket.
“I’ll give you a ride to Port Authority, see you safely onto the bus.”
For the first time, the woman smiled.
“Thank you, I’d appreciate that.”
Arno looked at her. Gently, he touched her face, examining the bruise.
“I got something for that, if it’s hurting you.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
He nodded.
The man who did this to you is in a lot of trouble. The man who did this to you won’t live out the week.
“Let’s go, then. We got time, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and a muffin for the trip.”
Dead man. He’s a dead man.
We were gathered around the font in a small group, the other guests standing in the pews a little distance away. The priest had made his introductions, and now we were approaching the meat of the ceremony.
“Do you reject Satan, and all his empty promises?” asked the priest.
He waited. There was no reply. Rachel coughed discreetly. Angel appeared to have found something interesting to look at down on the floor. Louis remained impassive. He had removed his shades and was focused on a point just above my left shoulder.
“You’re speaking for Sam,” I whispered to Angel. “He doesn’t mean you.”
Realization dawned like morning light on an arid desert.
“Oh, okay then,” said Angel enthusiastically. “Sure. Absolutely. Rejected.”
“Amen,” said Louis.
The priest looked confused.
“That would be a yes,” I told him.
“Right,” he said, as if to reassure himself. “Good.”
Rachel shot daggers at Angel.
“What?” he asked. He raised his hands in a “What did I do?” gesture. Some wax from the candle dripped onto the sleeve of his jacket. A faintly acrid smell arose.
“Awwww,” said Angel. “First time I’ve worn it, too.”
Rachel moved from daggers to swords.
“You open your mouth again, and you’ll be buried in that suit,” she said.
Angel went quiet. All things considered, it was the smartest move.
The woman was seated by a window on the right side of the bus. In one day, she was passing through more states than she had previously visited in her entire life. The bus pulled into South Station in Boston. Now, with thirty minutes to spare, she wandered down to the Amtrak concourse and bought herself a cup of coffee and a Danish. Both were expensive, and she looked with dismay at the little wad of bills in her purse, adorned by a smattering of change, but she was hungry, even after the muffin the man from the garage had so kindly bought for her. She took a seat and watched the people go by, the businessmen in their suits, the harried mothers with their children. She watched the arrivals and departures change, the names clicking rapidly across the big board above her head. The trains on the platform were silver and sleek. A young black woman took a seat beside her and opened a newspaper. Her suit was neatly tailored, and her hair was cut very short. A brown leather attaché case stood at her feet, and she wore a small matching purse upon her shoulder. A diamond engagement ring gleamed upon her left hand.
I have a daughter your age, thought the old woman, but she will never be like you. She will never wear a tailored suit, or read what you read, and no man will ever give her a ring like the one that you wear. She is a lost soul, a troubled soul, but I love her, and she is mine. The man who had her upon me is gone now. He is dead, and he is no loss to the world. They would call what he did to me rape, I suppose, for I surrendered to him out of fear. We were all afraid of him, and of what he could do. We believed that he had killed my older sister, for she went away with him and did not return home alive, and when he came back he took me in her place.
But he died for what he did, and he died badly. They asked us if we wanted them to rebuild his face, if we wanted to keep the casket open for a viewing. We told them to leave him as he was found, and to bury him in a pine box with ropes for handles. They marked his grave with a wooden cross, but on the night he was buried I went to the place where he lay and I took the cross away, and I burned it in the hope that he would be forgotten. But I gave birth to his child, and I loved her even though there was something of him in her. Perhaps she never had a chance, cursed with a father like that. He tainted her, polluting her from the very moment she was born, the seed of her destruction contained within his own. She was always a sad child, an angry child, yet how could she leave us for that other life? How could she find peace in such a city, among men who would use her for money, who would feed her drugs and alcohol to keep her pliant? How could we have let that happen to her?
And the boy — no, the man, for that is what he is now — tried to look out for her, but he gave up on her, and now she is gone. My daughter is gone, and nobody yet cares enough about her to seek her out, nobody except me. But I will make them care. She is mine, and I will bring her back. He will help me, for she is blood to him, and he owes her a blood debt.
He killed her father. Now he will bring her back to this life, and to me.
The guests were scattered through the living room and the kitchen. Some had found their way outside and were sitting beneath the bare trees in our yard, wearing their coats and enjoying the open air as they drank beer and wine and ate hot food from paper plates. Angel and Louis, as always, were slightly apart from the rest, occupying a stone bench that looked out over the marshes. Our Lab retriever, Walter, lay at their feet, Angel’s fingers gently stroking his head. I went over to join them, checking as I went that nobody lacked for food and drink.
“You want to hear a joke?” said Angel. “There’s this duck on a pond, and he’s getting really pissed at this other duck who’s coming on to his girl, so he decides to hire an assassin duck to bump him off.”
Louis breathed out loudly through his nose with a sound like gas leaking under near-unendurable pressure. Angel ignored him.
“So the assassin arrives, and the duck meets him in some reeds. The assassin tells him that it will cost five pieces of bread to kill the target, payable after the deed is done. The duck tells him that’s fine, and the assassin says, ‘So, do you want me to send you the body?’ And the duck says, ‘No, just send me the bill.’”
There was silence.
“Bill,” said Angel again. “You know, it’s —”
“I got a joke,” said Louis.
We both looked at him in surprise.
“You hear the one about the dead irritating guy in the cheap suit?”
We waited.
“That’s it,” said Louis.
“That’s not funny,” said Angel.
“Makes me laugh,” said Louis.
A man touched me on the arm, and I found Walter Cole standing beside me. He was retired now, but he had taught me much of what I knew when I was a cop. Our bad days were far behind us, and he had come to an accommodation with what I was, and with what I was capable of doing. I left Angel and Louis to bicker, and walked back to the house with Walter.
“About that dog,” he said.
“He’s a good dog,” I said. “Not smart, but loyal.”
“I’m not looking to give him a job. You called him Walter.”
“I like the name.”
“You named your dog after me?”
“I thought you’d be flattered. Anyway, nobody needs to know. It’s not as if he looks like you. He has more hair, for a start.”
“Oh, that’s very funny. Even the dog is funnier than you.”
We entered the kitchen, and Walter retrieved a bottle of Sebago ale from the fridge. I didn’t offer him a glass. I knew that he preferred to drink it by the neck when he could, which meant anytime he was out of his wife’s sight. Outside, I saw Rachel talking with Pam. Her sister was smaller than Rachel, and spikier, which was saying something. Whenever I hugged her, I expected to be pierced by spines. Sam was asleep in an upstairs room. Rachel’s mother was keeping an eye on her.
Walter saw me follow Rachel’s progress through the garden.
“How are you two doing?” asked Walter.
“Three of us,” I reminded him. “We’re doing okay, I guess.”
“It’s hard, when there’s a new baby in a house.”
“I know. I remember.”
Walter’s hand rose slightly. He seemed on the verge of touching my shoulder, until his hand slowly fell away.
“I’m sorry,” he said, instead. “It’s not that I forget them. I don’t know what it is exactly. Sometimes it seems like another life, another time. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I said. “I know just what you mean.”
There was a breeze blowing, and it caused the rope swing on the oak tree to move in a slow arc, as though an unseen child were playing upon it. I could see the channels shining in the marshes beyond, intersecting in places as they carved their paths through the reeds, the waters of one intermingling with those of another, each changed irrevocably by the meeting. Lives were like that: when their paths crossed, they emerged altered forever by the encounter, sometimes in small, almost invisible ways, and other times so profoundly that nothing that followed could ever be the same again. The residue of other lives infects us, and we in turn pass it on to those whom we later meet.
“I think she worries,” I said.
“About what?”
“About us. About me. She’s risked so much, and she’s been hurt for it. She doesn’t want to be afraid anymore, but she is. She’s afraid for us, and she’s afraid for Sam.”
“You’ve talked about it?”
“No, not really.”
“Maybe it’s time, before things get worse.”
Right then, I found it hard to imagine how much worse circumstances could get. I hated these unspoken tensions between Rachel and me. I loved her, and I needed her, but I was angry too. The burden of blame slipped too easily onto my shoulders these days. I was tired of carrying it.
“Doing much work?” asked Walter, changing the subject.
“Some,” I said.
“Anything interesting?”
“I don’t think so. You never can tell, but I’ve tried to be selective. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. I’ve been offered more . . . complicated matters, but I’ve turned them down. I won’t bring harm upon them, but —”
I stopped. Walter waited.
“Go on.”
I shook my head. Lee, Walter’s wife, entered the kitchen. She scowled as she saw him drinking from the bottle.
“I turn my back for five minutes, and you abandon all civilized behavior,” she said, but she was smiling as she spoke. “You’ll be drinking out of the toilet bowl next.”
Walter hugged her to him.
“You know,” she said, “they named the dog after you. Maybe that’s why. Anyway, lots of people want to meet you because of it. The dog wants to meet you.”
Walter scowled as she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him toward the garden.
“Are you coming outside?” she asked me.
“In a moment,” I said.
I watched them cross the lawn. Rachel waved to them, and they went to join her. Her eyes met mine, and she gave me a small smile. I raised my hand, then touched it to the glass, my fingers dwarfing her face.
I won’t bring harm upon you and our daughter, not by my choosing, yet still it comes. That’s what I’m afraid of. It has found me before, and it will find me again. I am a danger to you, and to our child, and I think you know that.
We are coming apart.
I love you, but we are coming apart.
The day drew on. People left, and others, who were unable to make the ceremony, took their places. As the light faded, Angel and Louis were no longer speaking, and were more obviously maintaining their distance from all that was taking place around them than before. Both kept their eyes fixed on the road that wound from Route 1 to the coast. Between them lay a cell phone. Arno had called them earlier that day, as soon as he had seen the woman safely onto the Greyhound bus from New York.
“She didn’t leave a name,” he told Louis, his voice crackling slightly over the connection.
“I know who she is,” said Louis. “You did right to call.”
Now there were lights on the road. I joined them where they sat, leaning slightly on the back of the bench. Together we watched the cab cross the bridge over the marsh, the sunlight gleaming on the waters, the car’s progress reflected in their depths. There was a tugging at my stomach, and my head felt as though hands were pressed hard against my temples. I could see Rachel standing unmoving among the guests. She too was watching the approaching car. Louis rose as it turned into the driveway of the house.
“This isn’t about you,” he said. “You got no reason to be concerned.”
And I wondered at what he had brought to my house.
I followed them through the open gate at the end of the yard. Angel stayed back as Louis walked to the cab and opened the door. A woman emerged, a large, multicolored bag clasped in her hands. She was smaller than Louis by perhaps eighteen inches, and probably no more than a decade or so older than he, although her face bore the marks of a difficult life, and she wore her worries like a veil across her features. I imagined that she had been beautiful when she was younger. There was little of that physical beauty left now, but there was an inner strength to her that shone brightly from her eyes. I could see some bruising to her face. It looked very recent.
She stood close to Louis and gazed up at him with something almost like love, then slapped him hard across the left cheek with her right hand.
“She’s gone,” she said. “You were supposed to look out for her, but now she’s gone.”
And she began to cry as he took her in his arms, and his body shook with the force of her sobs.
This is the story of Alice, who fell down a rabbit hole and never came back.
Martha was Louis’s aunt. A man named Deeber, now dead, had fathered a child upon her, a girl. They called her Alice, and they loved her, but she was never a happy child. She rebeled against the company of women, and turned instead to men. They told her that she was beautiful, for she was, but she was young and angry. Something gnawed deep inside her, its hunger exacerbated by the actions of the women who had loved her and cared for her. They had told her that her father was dead, but it was only through others that she learned of the kind of man he was, and the manner in which he had left this world. Nobody knew who was responsible for his death, but there were rumors, hints that the neatly dressed black women in the house with the pretty garden had colluded in his killing along with her cousin, the boy called Louis.
Alice reb
eled against them and all that they represented: love, security, the bonds of family. She was drawn to a bad crowd, and left the safety of her mother’s home. She drank, smoked some dope, became a casual user of harder drugs, and then an addict. She drifted from the places that she knew, and went to live in a tin-roofed shack at the edge of a dark forest, where men came to take turns with her. She was paid in narcotics, although their value was far less than what the johns had paid to sleep with her, and so the bonds around her tightened. Slowly she began to lose herself, the combination of sex and drugs acting like a cancer, eating away at all that she truly was, so that she became at last their creature even as she tried to convince herself that this was only a temporary aberration, a fleeting thing to help her deal with the sense of hurt and betrayal that she felt.
It was early one Sunday morning, and she was lying on a bare cot, naked but for a pair of cheap plastic shoes. She stank of men, and the hunger was upon her. Her head hurt, and the bones in her arms and legs ached. Two other women slept nearby, the entrance to their rooms blocked by blankets hung over ropes. A small window allowed the morning light to seep into her room, sullied by the dirt upon its pane and the cobwebs, freckled with leaves and dead bugs, that hung at its corners. She pulled the blanket aside and saw that the door of the hut was open. Lowe stood in its frame, his giant shoulders almost brushing either side of the doorway. He was shirtless, his feet bare, and sweat glistened upon his shaved head and trickled slowly down between his shoulder blades. His back was pale and hairy. He had a cigarette in his right hand, and was talking to another man, who stood outside. Alice figured it was Wallace, the little “high yellow” man who ran his hookers and his small-time narcotics trade from out of this hut in the woods, with a little illicit whiskey for those of more conservative tastes. A laugh came, and then she saw Wallace as he moved across the large window at the front of the hut, zipping up his fly and rubbing his fingers upon his jeans. His shirt was open and hung loose upon his pigeon chest and his little belly. He was an ugly man, and rarely bathed. Sometimes he asked her to do things for him, and it was all that she could manage not to choke on the taste of him. But she needed him now. She needed what he had, even if it meant adding to her debt, a debt that would never be paid.