And Sometimes I Wonder About You

10

I was looking at the closed door, thinking that everything was possible but little of that possibility was likely. Life was like a rat’s maze tended by some insane god that tortured and shepherded us for some reason he (or maybe she) could no longer remember. Hiram Stent’s fate was etched on a pauper’s grave somewhere, probably before he was born. He would always make the wrong choices, always come up a dollar short. He could have been the ambassador to France and still the handyman would have taken his wife and children.

“Are you okay, Mr. McGill?”

I turned to look at my assistant. She wore a dress that was something like the flappers wore back nearly a century ago. It was sewn from flimsy fabric somewhere between cream and light pink, the hem coming down to her calves. There was faded beading here and there. It occurred to me that this ensemble had a hint of sexuality to it. This was, to say the least, unusual.

Not for the first time I thought of my assistant as a soul that didn’t so much haunt as spiritually guide by a sense of the world that was more intuitive than anything else.

“Mr. McGill?”

“Have a seat, M.”

Mardi made an abortive move for the walnut swivel chair behind her desk but then decided to take the visitor’s chair Aura had been sitting in. I turned my head so that I was looking into her eyes. Mardi didn’t like people looking directly at her — a leftover from childhood, I imagined.

She turned sideways in the padded chair and looked over at her desk; no doubt searching for another pencil to put in its place.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“What?”

“Twill.”

“What about him?”

“Something’s goin’ on with him. When Twill disappears I get the feeling that there’s a door somewhere that should be locked but isn’t.”

Mardi smiled because she understood and appreciated my imagistic bent.

She shook her head.

“You’re his best friend, M,” I said. “You can’t tell me that you don’t know what’s happenin’.”

“He had a meeting with somebody on Monday, after you left,” Mardi admitted. “But then I was out Tuesday and Wednesday. He covered for me. I didn’t see him almost all week.”

Listening to her words, I remembered the dictum — Truth is the best lie.

“Who did he meet with?”

“I don’t know. It was out of the office. A woman called, a young woman.”

“You didn’t tell me you were taking time off,” I said, trying to take on the authority of a boss.

“I’m sorry.” Mardi looked at her desk again, willing me to go so she could get away from the inquisition.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

The expression on her face was equal parts surprise, anger, and don’t you know who the fuck you’re talking to?

“Talk to me, M.”

“My father has been writing me from Ossining over the past year,” she said. This truth dispelled her shyness. Now she was returning my stare.

Mardi’s stepfather was Leslie Bitterman. Once he was an office manager by day and daughter molester by night; that was before he became a full-time resident of the maximum security prison.

“You want me to talk to some people?” I offered.

“What?” she said, almost angrily. “No. No. At first just getting the letters really upset me but not after a while.”

“Does he want something?”

Mardi clasped her hands and pressed her lips against her left wrist — a kiss that was not a kiss.

“Mardi.”

“He sent a letter every week for seven months before I even opened one. He said things like nothing ever happened between us, like he was a normal father trying to reach out to me and Marlene. He asked about my job and if I had a boyfriend...”

The motherfucker.

“I just thought it was sick,” she said, “that he was trying to fuck with us even though he’s locked away.”

Mardi had never cursed in my memory.

“Then I answered him,” she said. If any four words ever sucked the air out of a room it was these.

“What did you say?”

“I was angry. I told him that he didn’t even have a right to think about us much less send letters. I told him that he destroyed my life and he was going to do the same to my sister. I told him that he made me into a murderer because I would have surely killed him if you hadn’t gotten in the way. I don’t know everything I said but it was eight handwritten pages long.”

Mardi wrote in a tiny chicken scrawl. And she only used purple ink.

“Did he give you an answer?” I asked.

“No.”

“No? Then why did you go up there?”

Mardi looked at me and I saw that she had become another person; someone related to the young woman I knew and loved, but now she was both stronger and weaker, more vulnerable.

“I kept thinking about the letter I wrote to him,” she said. “The anger inside me was bigger than anything I’d ever felt. It was even more than the fear I used to have when he’d come into my room when I was a child. I realized that that anger was the largest part of my heart and if I ever wanted to be my own person, my own Mardi, I’d have to do something... extreme.”

I wanted to ask but my breath wasn’t acting right.

“I wrote another letter,” she said. “It was very short and I wrote it in pencil because I erased it a dozen times until it was exactly what I wanted to say.”

“And?”

“I wrote, ‘I forgive you’ and signed it ‘M’ because when you call me M I always feel that you’re my father. And so I was your daughter letting go of that old corroded anchor that was pulling me down.”

I don’t know how long the silence was that followed those words. I don’t remember reaching out but at some point I realized that we were holding hands.

“And,” I said. I had to clear my throat. “And did he answer?”

“He sent another letter. It was the same old gibberish. Me growing into a fine woman and how much he’d learned and thank you about a hundred times. I didn’t read it very closely. I just wrote him and said that I was coming to visit; that I was only coming one time and so he should know what he was going to say.”

“Wow.” For some reason I thought about my earlier sparring session with Chin Wa. If he’d had Mardi’s will I’d’ve never won that match. “And so you went last week.”

“It was horrific,” Mardi said. I’d never heard her use that word before. “They took me to what they call an isolation hut and had me meet him in a room with two guards standing on either side of his chair. Before they’d even let me in I had to let a woman guard give me a body search.”

The conversation stopped for a minute while all the experience and feeling coalesced in the young woman’s mind.

“He had aged twenty years,” she said. “His hair was gray and falling out. He had scars from a knifing and over the left side of his face where somebody had thrown acid on him. He’s blind in his left eye and something’s wrong with his right hand. It was curled up like a bird’s claw.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Nobody likes a child molester in prison. Nobody.”

“He was pathetic. They had him in isolation because otherwise he’d be dead. You know, I wondered why he didn’t mention anything about his troubles in the letters and then I understood that he was trying to pretend that nothing ever happened.

“We had forty-five minutes and talked the whole time. I don’t remember anything we said but he asked if I would kiss him good-bye and I said no.”

That was the end of her story. Her posture was saying that she needed to get up and walk away from the tale. But she stayed in the chair because of me and my relationship to her self-enacted deliverance.

I still wanted to know about Twill but couldn’t bring myself to question her further.

“You’re a strong woman, Mardi Bitterman,” I said at last.

“You think I did the right thing?”

“Every moment since the day you were born.”