Eileen

CHRISTMAS EVE

My mother never packed lunches for me to take to school when I was growing up. I’d sit and stare down at my knees while the other children ate their sandwiches, my stomach empty and rumbling. As soon as I’d get home in the afternoon, I filled my belly with bread and butter, all that I could find to eat in my mother’s messy kitchen. When I was a child, Dunlop dinners around the kitchen table were hardly nourishing. Mealtimes were brief and uncomfortable. My parents only ever fought in front of Joanie and me, as though they’d needed our audience to discuss their private matters. Our mother would whine and our father would groan, throw his fork across the table, eye his Smith & Wesson, which lay next to his plate. If Joanie or I fussed, Mom would whip a rag at the floor to make a popping sound, sudden and loud, like lightning, like a firecracker. I don’t remember what they were always arguing about. I’d just chew my food fast and bring my plate to the sink and run up the stairs. Furthermore, the meals my mother cooked were awful. I didn’t eat good food until my second husband. He explained that steak was not a leathery flap of sinew burned in a frying pan, but a thick, fragrant, lovely thing, the best of which could be eaten with a dull spoon. I gained ten pounds, I think, the first month we were together. Back in X-ville, Dunlop dinners had been, at best, dry chicken, mashed potatoes from a box, canned beans, limp bacon. Christmas was little different. A store-bought sponge cake was all I remember enjoying year to year. The Dunlops were never big eaters.

But the booze always flowed freely over the holidays. Of course it did. Imagine the festivities: Mom getting the cocktail shaker down—“Let’s do this properly!”—to make drinks she called Diplomats and Stormy Weathers. Those old drinks had great names. Maggie Mays, Old Fashioneds. She made hers and Dad had me make his, Blue Blazers and highballs, with the good stuff he’d get every Christmas from his so-called friends on the force. We had a little book with different recipes. I took sips no doubt, chewed up half the bottle of maraschino cherries on my way back and forth to the kitchen, where I mixed Lee Burns, Mamie Taylors, Manhattans. Whiskey Milk Punch was my favorite since it tasted like a milkshake. I remember another one, the Morning Glory, had me cracking eggs like some kind of short order cook. Those are fun memories: records playing, fire roaring, me, offstage and dutiful, slurping the foam off a cocktail in the kitchen and still expecting something good for Christmas — a microscope, a set of paints — and Joanie entertaining in the living room, twisting her limbs in time to Elvis.

Christmas was one of the few times a year my parents had guests over. My aunt Ruth, my only aunt, took little interest in Joanie and me as children — something I’ve never understood or forgiven — and drank only gin martinis. There was gin running through the Dunlop bloodline for generations, I’m sure. Perhaps Aunt Ruth just got down to her destiny sooner than my father did. Those martinis never seemed to do her much good. She was always frowning, skin so waxy, her face so flat it almost looked wet, shiny as a puddle. Bitterly is the best way to describe the manner in which she displayed her affections. For Christmas she’d bring over something like a canned ham or a jar of peanuts, cheap scotch for Dad, maybe some chocolates for my mother. She was childless and bossy and the only one to insist we pray before we ate. My mother, drunk already, would roll her eyes, pinch me under the table, make me laugh. Mom wasn’t so bad, it seemed, at Christmas. My hopes were always high as I got into bed, drunk and full of sponge cake. Inevitably, Christmas mornings Dad would give Joanie and me each a dollar bill, wadded up and stuffed with lint from the pants pocket of his uniform. A few times our mother gave us new socks or pencils. That was all.

My father and I had silently agreed to do away with Christmas when my mother died. Only one year I did give him a gift — something cruel in its uselessness, given his predicament — a tie. Joanie would send a card if she thought of it. She’d have Christmas parties of her own, I knew, but she never invited me. I don’t hold it against her. I wasn’t much fun.

• • •

When I woke up on that fateful Christmas Eve, the last one of my life in X-ville, I had six hundred forty-seven dollars stashed in my jewelry box. That was quite a sum of money at the time. My life’s savings. And I had a gun. Pulling it out from under my pillow, I really felt quite cool. Its strange provenance did not elude me. My father had used it first as a prop of power in the line of duty, and then as a threat to the invisible criminals only he could see. Those phantasms, he claimed, understood he would shoot to kill. One begins to think in terms of grandiose self-conceit when there’s a gun in one’s hand, that is true. I shall use the gun to clear my path to freedom, I thought that morning, aiming at invisible obstacles. I’m embarrassed remembering how easily that thing filled me with confidence and seemed to open up a world of possibility. I thought about showing it to Rebecca that evening. Perhaps I would suggest we go out to the woods and shoot at trees. Or we could go out to the frozen lake and stand and shoot at the moon. Or to the beach, lie on our backs, make angels in the snow, shoot at the stars. Such were my romantic ideas for the evening with my new best friend.

Lying there on my cot, I agonized over what to wear. I imagined Rebecca would be dressed comfortably — no elaborate gown or expensive jewelry, it was her house after all — but beautifully, perhaps in a thick cashmere sweater and fitted trousers, like Jackie Kennedy on a ski vacation. As for Rebecca’s house, I pictured dark rolling Oriental carpets, sumptuous couches with velvet pillows, a bearskin rug. Or maybe it was more modern and austere, dark wood floors, cold glass coffee table, burgundy drapes, fresh-cut roses. I was excited. I dozed, mentally taking stock of the garments in my mother’s wardrobe and piecing together what I would wear that evening. I knew every item of clothing inside out. Nothing fit me right, as I’ve said, so I often wore layers of sweaters or long underwear just to fill things out. Lying there, I had a bad habit of drumming my fists on my stomach and pinching the negligible amount of fat on my thighs. I sincerely believed that if there were less of me, I would have fewer problems. Perhaps it was for this reason that I wore my mother’s clothes — to be vigilant in my mission never to reach even her minor proportions. As I’ve said, her life, the life of a woman, seemed utterly detestable to me. There was nothing I wanted less back then than to be somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife. Of course, I’d already become just that for my father by the tender age of twenty-four.

“Eileen!” my father yelled, stomping up the attic stairs sometime later that morning. “The store’s open already. Come on, get down!” When I opened the door, he was dressed, had his hands on his hips. “Isn’t it Christmas Eve?” he asked.

“No, Dad,” I lied. “You missed Christmas. Christmas was yesterday.”

“Smart ass,” he said. “I’ll spare you my hell if you get down now, quick.”

“All right,” I said. “But who’s driving?”

“You’re driving. Now get in the car and let’s go. I’m coming with you.”

It was rare that my father dared to make an appearance outside the house like a normal person, but he was adamant about it that morning. Perhaps he sensed somehow that I was going to abandon him. More likely he was afraid of shops closing over the holidays and didn’t trust me to buy him enough booze to get him through. He never explained his choice to move from the kitchen chair to the bed upstairs. It might have been a strategic move. Without his gun, he was defenseless against the hoodlums and was better off hiding. My mother’s deathbed was just as good a place as any to die, he may have thought. Not that he had surrendered, that was clear. He seemed just as on guard as ever. “Hurry now!” he yelled, busting open the front door to the bright, sparkling morning. “Before they sell out. It’s Christmas Eve. Wine for wolves. Get out there. You got the keys? Lock up. People are crazy this time of year. Crime spikes. It’s a proven fact, Eileen. Jesus Christ.” I went and got his shoes, threw them up on the porch. He kept talking. “Everybody out, probably leaving their doors wide open. Stupid. Idiots. Don’t they know this town is full of thieves?” He slid into the shoes and shuffled out to the car, wincing in the sunlight like a man crawling out of a cave, arms held feebly above his head, shielding his eyes. On the passenger seat beside me he lifted his feet one by one, had me lean over and tie his shoelaces.

The roads on the drive to the liquor store glittered with fresh snow once again. The streetlamps were wrapped in ribbon and holly, store window displays were festive, pretty. Along the sidewalks people hustled, dressed up in hats and plaid wool coats and boots and mittens. The hems of women’s skirts skimmed the shelves of snow along the sidewalks. People balanced stacks of brightly colored packages in their arms, piling them in the trunks of their cars. There was almost music in the air. Children built snowmen in their front lawns, played in the yard of the public library. I would miss that old library. I couldn’t realize at the time how those books had saved me. I rolled my window down.

“It’s cold,” said my father. I hadn’t ever told him about the exhaust problem.

“The air in here is stale,” I said. In fact it still smelled of vomit in there, but my father couldn’t detect it. The gin reeking through his skin and on his breath obliterated all other smells around him, I assumed.

“Stale? Who cares about stale?” He reached over my lap, brushing my thighs, then stuck an elbow haphazardly between my knees as he rolled the window back up. I just looked ahead calmly. He had no respect for my comfort or privacy. When I was younger and just beginning to develop, he sometimes sat at the kitchen table at night drinking with my mother and called me over to assess my progress, to pinch and measure.

“Not so good, Eileen,” he would say. “You’ve got to try harder.”

“Come on now,” Mom said, laughing. “Don’t be cruel.” And then once she said instead, “She’s too old for you to touch now, Charlie,” and clucked her tongue.

It could have been much worse, of course. Other girls got rubbed and grabbed and violated. I just got poked and ridiculed. Still, it hurt and angered me, and made me lash out later in life when I felt I was being measured and judged. A man I lived with for a time suggested I secretly wished I’d been big breasted, that I felt bad because I’d disappointed my father with my “small rack. Every girl wants daddy’s hands on her tits,” that man had said. What an idiot. He was just a mediocre musician from a wealthy family. I put up with him for a while because I thought maybe he was pointing to some dark truth about myself, and I suppose he was. I was a fool to be with a man like him. I was a fool about men in general. I learned the long way about love, tried every house on the block before I got it right. Now, finally, I live alone.

“Where in hell are you going?” my father hissed, going stiff and sliding down across his seat as I turned a corner. He wasn’t quite right in the head, as I’ve said. He was scared of his own shadow. I think that’s clear by now. “This is not the way. There are bad people here, and goddammit, Eileen, I didn’t bring my gun.”

“We can throw snowballs,” I laughed. The gun was in my purse, of course. My father seemed to prefer to believe he’d just misplaced it. I didn’t care. Nothing could disrupt my good mood. Finally, with Rebecca to celebrate it, I would have a Christmas I could enjoy. My father could strip me nude and pelt me with shards of glass, for all I cared. Nothing was going to get to me that day. Soon I’d be at Rebecca’s house where I’d be treated like a queen.

“Get me out of here,” he whined as he pulled the collar of his coat up over his head. Stopped at a light, he gestured with his thumb over his shoulder. “Hoodlums,” he whispered, eyes cloudy with fear. I just chuckled, coasted through the city streets, past the cemetery, past the police station, then back around, looping through the elementary school parking lot. I guess I was trying to torture him. “Tell me what you see,” he said. “Are they following us? Did they see me? Act natural. Don’t speak. Just drive. And roll down the windows, yeah, that’s a good idea. That way if they shoot at us the glass won’t shatter.”

I rolled down my window gladly. I enjoyed my father’s madness that day. He was a comic figure, slapstick almost. When we got to Lardner’s he spoke in hushed tones to Mr. Lewis behind the counter, ordered up a case of gin and pulled a few bags of potato chips off the shelf. I bought a bottle of wine for my evening at Rebecca’s. Dad didn’t ask questions. On the ride home he lay across the backseat, shaking and sweating. And when I pulled into our driveway he crawled out of the car, swam through the snow to the front porch, begging for me to “come faster, open the door, let me in. It’s not safe out here.” I calmly carried the box of booze up the front walk to the porch, but he was impatient, scrambled through the living room window, chiding me for leaving it unlocked—“Are you crazy?” When he opened the door from the inside, he ripped the top off the box of gin and pulled out two bottles, slung one under each armpit. “I’ve raised a fool,” he said. I watched him scuttle inside, kick off his shoes. “Two days old!” he yelled, and cleared his throat, settling into his easy chair with the newspaper he’d found frozen on the porch. I was too concerned with my own plans to bother to lock his shoes back up in the trunk right away.

Upstairs, I found my mother’s pills and put them in my purse but didn’t take any. I wanted to save them. If I had to spend Christmas Day at home with my father after he got back from Mass, I wanted to spend it in deep twilight sleep. I went back to my cot and returned to my fantasies of my evening at Rebecca’s. I imagined her saying things like, “I’ve never met anybody like you before.” And also, “I’ve never felt this close to someone before. We have so much in common. You’re perfect.” And I pictured hours of rapt conversation, delicious wine, a warm fire, Rebecca saying, “You’re my best friend. I love you,” and kissing my hand the way you’d kiss the hand of an oracle or a priest. I pulled my hand out from under me, red and cramped, and kissed it reverently. “I love you, too,” I said to it, and laughed at my own silliness, pulling the covers over my head. I waited for Rebecca’s phone call. Somehow I slept. I don’t remember those dreams, the last dreams I’d ever have in that house. I wish I could. I hope they were good ones.

I do remember my father’s wailing later that afternoon from the foot of the attic stairs.

“What’s wrong, Dad?” I yelled, bolting out of bed.

“The phone rang,” he said. “Some woman looking for you. Maybe a lady cop, I don’t know.”

“What did you tell her?”

I stomped my foot waiting for his reply.

“Nothing,” he threw up his arms. “I know nothing and said nothing. Mum from me.” I flew down the stairs, found the phone in the kitchen dangling off the hook, receiver thudding against the wooden cabinet.

“Well, hello, Christmas angel,” is how Rebecca answered when I picked it up.

It’s important to keep in mind, given what I’m about to relay, which is everything I remember from that evening, that I had truly never had a real friend before. Growing up I’d only had Joanie, who disliked me, and a girlfriend or two here and there in grade school, usually the other class reject. I remember a girl with braces on her legs in junior high, and an obese girl in high school who barely spoke. There was an Oriental girl whose parents owned the one Chinese restaurant in X-ville, but even she discarded me when she made the cheerleading squad. Those were not real friends. Believing that a friend is someone who loves you, and that love is the willingness to do anything, sacrifice anything for the other’s happiness, left me with an impossible ideal, until Rebecca. I held the phone close to my heart, caught my breath. I could have squealed with delight. If you’ve been in love, you know this kind of exquisite anticipation, this ecstasy. I was on the brink of something, and I could feel it. I suppose I was in love with Rebecca. She awoke in my heart some long-sleeping dragon. I’ve never felt that fire burning like that again. That day was without a doubt the most exciting day of my life.

She told me to come over whenever I felt like it. She said she would be home, “relaxing. We’ll just sit and chat here,” she said. “Nothing fancy. It’ll be fun. There are some records we can play and maybe dance again, if all goes well.” I remember her kind, measured voice, her words all very clearly. I scribbled her address down — it was not a street name I recognized. I hung up the phone, nearly swooning, and stood there for a minute, blinded with glee.

“None of your business,” I mumbled at my father when he tapped on the kitchen table to startle me out of my trance.

“Pass me some chips!” he yelled back. He seemed to have forgotten the story of my night out with Leonard Polk. I assumed the lie had been flushed away in last night’s gin.

I ran upstairs to get ready. My face in the mirror looked less monstrous than usual. If Rebecca wanted to look at it, maybe it wasn’t so bad, I thought. It’s amazing what the mind will do when the heart is throbbing. I selected a gray linen suit from my mother’s closet, something I thought Rebecca would approve of. Nothing flashy. I must have looked like a dowdy grandmother in that suit, but at the time it felt right — subdued, mature, thoughtful. In retrospect I see that it was what a sidekick would wear, a uniform of service, a blank page. I put on a white nylon slip, a fresh pair of the navy panty hose, my snow boots, my mother’s camel coat. I remember these articles of clothing perfectly since they were what I was wearing and all I ended up taking with me of my mother’s wardrobe when I left X-ville, after all. Despite my grand plans, I left with just those clothes on my back and a purse full of money, and the gun, of course. I brushed my hair in the mirror. My greasy lipstick seemed suddenly pretentious, cheap, idiotic. I decided to go without makeup. After all, Rebecca didn’t wear any. And I suppose my desire to be close with Rebecca, to be understood and accepted by her, allayed my fear of being seen without my mask of cosmetics and indifference.

I remember going and getting the map of X-ville from the car and galloping like a clumsy deer back inside through the glistening mounds of snow. I was full of energy. When I looked out across the yard, carefully shutting the front door, church bells chimed through the bare trees, and I thought how beautiful the light sky was at that moment, tinged orange and blue as the sun set. I was happy. I really was, I thought. I quickly figured out my route to Rebecca’s house, which seemed to be on the wrong side of the tracks, as they say — that barely registered as odd at the time — and then I folded up the map and put it in my coat pocket. I still have that map. It’s at home, pinned up on the back of my closet door. Faded and stiff now, I carried it around for years and I’ve cried over it many times. It’s the map of my childhood, my sadness, my Eden, my hell and home. When I look at it now, my heart swells with gratitude, then shrinks with disgust.

Before I left for Rebecca’s, I drank some vermouth to calm myself, pulled on my mother’s black leather gloves and fox fur hat — her only fur — and said good-bye to my father, who was leaning over the sink, peeling a boiled egg.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked benignly, slurring.

“Christmas party,” I answered. I grabbed the wine.

He paused, and looked genuinely perplexed for a moment, then said mockingly, “Just as long as you’ll be home in time for dinner.” He chuckled and plunked the entire egg into his mouth, wiped his hands on his shirt. The last time we’d eaten a real dinner together was years before my mother’s death, perhaps for someone’s birthday — chicken burnt to a crisp in the pan, a soggy pot of macaroni. That one boiled egg and a bag of potato chips was all my father would eat all day. Did I feel bad leaving him that evening? I didn’t. I figured I’d be home that night to bear the brunt of his misery, hear all his complaints, maybe have a drink with him in the morning before he left for church and I took my mother’s last few pills, which I estimated would put me to sleep for the better part of the day. It should have been sad to leave my father alone on Christmas, but if ever my father felt he was at risk for being pitied, he attacked me with an insult aimed precisely at my self-esteem.

“You’re pale as a ghost, Eileen,” he said, reclining back down in his chair. “You could scare small children out of their socks.”

I just laughed at him. In that moment, nothing could hurt me.

I skipped out down the shoveled path and into the black and sparkling wet street. I was on my way to meet my destiny.

• • •

Nothing could have added to the pleasure of my anticipation on that drive through X-ville on my way to Rebecca’s house that evening — not the calm roads or the softly falling snow, not the homes full of happy little families, not the gay blinking lights strung up on every Christmas tree. Besides my car’s stink of exhaust and vomit, the air from outside smelled of roasting ham and cookies, but I had no use for that holiday cheer. I had Rebecca now. Life was wonderful. My little world of exhaust and vomit was somehow wonderful. I watched out the open window as I passed guests arriving at one house, a child carrying a pie in a glass pan, parents bearing gifts of wine wrapped in red cellophane and ribbon. They looked happy, but I wouldn’t envy anyone that Christmas, a holiday best suited to those who thrive on self-pity and resentment. That’s what all that eggnog and wine is for, after all. The wine I’d bought for Rebecca sat beside me on the seat, still in the measly brown paper bag from the liquor store. I should have decorated it somehow, I thought. I really ought to have found some wrapping paper, some ribbon. It suddenly seemed disgraceful, insulting really, to show up with such a rough gift. Rebecca deserved better, didn’t she? I thought to knock on someone’s door or rifle through a garbage can for scraps of candy-striped or holly-patterned prints, but I would never do that. Still, the paper bag was less than ideal.

As though God were listening, when I passed Bayer Street, a long spotlight came on and fell on a nativity scene set up on the snow at the foot of a small hill. I watched an elderly woman swing open the heavy arched door of Saint Mary’s at the top and disappear inside. It was the church my father attended every Sunday. I pulled over to take a closer look at the scene, unsure of what was motivating my curiosity. The nativity was simple, just dolls stuck in the snow in front of a piece of brown wooden fencing not more than two feet high. Mary knelt beside Joseph. They were both clothed in burgundy robes tied with twine. There was something wrapped in gold cloth in Mary’s arms. I got out of the car. I was inspired.

The nativity figures were made of painted wood and were actually quite beautiful, I thought. I’d loved dolls as a child, but when I turned six my mother collected them and threw them away. The figure of Mary had a wide grin on its face. When I approached it and stood on the cleared sidewalk, I saw that the mouth had been defaced. Someone had painted over it with what looked like bright red lipstick. Black marker crisscrossed within the lips turned her smile into a jack-o’-lantern smirk. It made me laugh. From inside the church I could hear them singing hymns, a piano jangling brightly above the soft and warbling voices. A child cried. I walked closer to the scene, marking my footsteps in the snow. The cloth wrapped around something meant to be the Baby Jesus was a thick, mustard-colored synthetic material, and it was affixed to Mary’s extended wooden arms with masking tape. I removed my gloves and fingered the tape. It was gummy from moisture, but the fabric was soft and satiny. The church music stopped. I listened as the pastor began to pray the liturgy. The sound of it filled me with dread, but that didn’t stop me from peeling the masking tape off Mary’s arms and yanking at the golden cloth. Underneath was an empty canister of motor oil. I was pleased. In the car, I wrapped the wine in Jesus’ blanket. It felt appropriate. I consulted the map and drove on.

Certain images come back to me now. For instance, the cemetery covered in snow, an iridescent blue light cast across its surface, the irregular pattern made by the tops of rounded gravestones peeking up out of the icy crust, and the long, shrinking shadows of trees. The sun having just set, the roads grew darker as I drove across town, streetlamps yellow and hazy, some just flickering. The homes got smaller and closer together. They were not the grand brick colonials of my own neighborhood, but the washed-out wooden trailer-size homes of the less well-to-do — the poor, to be blunt. Their homes were more like cabins, really, a shantytown style of cheap housing built on the coast. I passed a corner store whose windows were plastered in outdated ads for cigarettes and hand-drawn signs proclaiming the cost of bread, beer, eggs.

When I got to Rebecca’s street, I found only a few lights on in the sad, narrow houses. That area was nearer to the ocean, windier than my neighborhood, and the houses seemed to be crouched down, huddling close to the ground, hiding. There were chain-link fences around each yard, few cars in the driveways. I counted the house numbers. I couldn’t think why Rebecca would want to live in a neighborhood like that. Surely the prison was paying her well enough to get an apartment someplace nice. She appeared to be a woman of means — her clothes were fashionable and looked expensive. But even if she dressed in rags, it would have been clear that Rebecca was not a poor woman. You can see wealth in people no matter what they’re wearing. It’s in the cut of their chins, a certain gloss to the skin, a drag and pause to their responsiveness. When poor people hear a loud noise, they whip their heads around. Wealthy people finish their sentences, then just glance back. Rebecca was wealthy, and I knew it. That she lived in X-ville at all seemed strange. I’d expected she would have preferred to live somewhere more central, Boston or Cambridge, where there were intelligent and sophisticated young people, and art, things to do. Perhaps she hated the long commute. Anyway, what did I know? Perhaps Rebecca wasn’t a snob, and I was wrong to expect her to want to live so comfortably. Rolling down her block, I told myself the street did indeed have a dark charm to it. And I figured it took courage and a big heart for a rich woman like Rebecca to live amongst people who worked in factories and gas stations and on fishing boats, or not at all. I imagined the neighborhood was the place my father had done his best work, beating up teenagers, busting into houses full of drunken yelling, a room full of crying children, men with long hair, and fleshy, wrinkly women with rotted teeth and tattoos, wearing only underwear.

And then I found Rebecca’s house, a dark brown two-story home with white trim and a decrepit plant frozen at the top of the front steps. It was slightly less pathetic than the other houses on the block, at least. There were lights on in every window, music on inside loud enough that I could hear it from out in the car. I parked, rolled up my window, primped in the rearview mirror, and got out with my wine. Here my memory breaks down like a film in slow motion. I unlatched the gate and stepped into the yard. My black snow boots found a narrow path hastily cleared of snow, still icy. I walked carefully, not wanting to slip and fall and break the wine or look foolish. I was nervous. It had been a long time since I’d gone any place I wanted to be. Up the steps I saw a shadow move behind yellow curtains. I held the screen with my hip and knocked on the painted plywood door, which swung open as soon as I touched it.

“You made it!”

There she was. My Rebecca. She held in her arms a dirty white cat which clawed at her loose hair, then looked at me and hissed. “Never mind her, him,” she said. “It’s upset because its owner has been a little hysterical all day.”

“Hi,” I said, awkwardly. “Merry Christmas.”

“You know I nearly forgot it was Christmas? Come on in,” she said.

Rebecca dropped the cat with a heavy thud on the worn wood floor and it slunk away, hissing some more. She seemed agitated, too, Rebecca did, from the get-go. I felt like I might be intruding. I looked for a place to put down my things. The front hall had narrow, chipping maroon walls. An ugly metal railing led up the carpeted staircase which was particularly dirty, stray strands of the rug hanging off where the cat had pawed it.

“I brought wine,” I said, unfurling the golden fabric from the bottle and turning the label so Rebecca could read it.

“Well, aren’t you a peach,” she said. She had an odd way about her. She seemed tense and fake, but I liked what she was saying. “That was so thoughtful.” She pulled a cigarette from the pocket of her stained, white terrycloth bathrobe, which she wore over her clothes like a housecoat. I found that bizarre. Perhaps I’d arrived too early? “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I didn’t want to get my clothes dirty.” She gestured down at her robe. “Want one?” she asked, lighting her cigarette and handing me the pack. I took one, fumbling with my gloves and the wine and my purse. Rebecca lit it for me, her hand shaking as she gripped the lighter, eyes focused on the trembling flame when I looked up at her. The smell in the air was of cat piss and fresh cigarette smoke and old sweat. It reminded me of my father’s armchair. It was cold in that house, too. I kept my coat on.

“I’m sorry the place is such a mess,” she said. “I’ve barely made a dent in cleaning it, but here,” she motioned toward the kitchen. “Let’s sit down and open that wine.”

We passed by what looked like the living room — a wooden coffee table piled high with junk and unopened mail, a TV playing static, a pile of laundry spilled out across the couch. The walls were bare but for several lighter square spots in the dun-colored wallpaper where it was clear there’d been pictures hanging. The record player had on something ridiculous. Rachmaninoff or even Die Walküre come to mind, but it was more likely Pat Boone, corny love songs. The effect, nevertheless, was strangely morbid, foreboding. A telephone hung by the kitchen doorway, through which I could see one chair at a small enamel table, a sink full of dirty dishes, an opened package of sliced bread fanned across the yellowed linoleum counter. A clock whirred high on the wall over a calendar opened to May of 1962, a photo of a marine saluting, a chiseled chin. A trash can was set by the kitchen table, ready to catch the overflow of peanut shells piled up alongside empty cans of Schlitz. It seemed not unlike my own home. My senses were sharp, but the chaos of the place was buzzing with something I couldn’t immediately identify. Rebecca fidgeted with her hair. She seemed different. She seemed terribly uneasy. I felt I’d walked into a scene from a movie in which someone was going mad, the air heavy with suspense. I tried my best to look natural, smile, to read Rebecca’s stilted cues.

“Here, sit down,” she said, ashing her cigarette on the tile floor. “Let me get rid of this.” She gracefully swept the peanut shells and the beer cans into the trash can, patted the seat of the tin chair with a yellow cushion. “Sit.”

Since I’d walked in the door, Rebecca hadn’t looked me in the eye. I felt around on my face to make sure there wasn’t something unappetizing on it — a sudden blemish or a crust of sleep, a booger hanging from my nose. But there was nothing. I sat down. We were quiet and awkward, shy for a moment, Rebecca assessing the newly cleared table, flicking her cigarette nervously, me folding my gloves, unbuttoning and rebuttoning my coat. Finally I nodded toward the bottle of wine.

“I hope it’s a kind you like,” I began.

“Well, that’s just swell,” said Rebecca, turning confusedly toward the kitchen cupboards. “I probably don’t need much, so you drink up. Now let’s see where the corkscrew is hiding.” She opened a cabinet to reveal shelves of spices and a few cans of food, another of plates and saucers. She pulled out a rattling drawer then slammed it. “There must be one somewhere in all this mess, huh?” She tried another drawer and rifled through spoons and forks. Another drawer was completely empty. “Well, no luck. Hand me the bottle, we’ll do it this way.”

Rebecca’s rings clanked against the glass as she walked to the sink and hovered, hesitated, then grasped the bottle from the bottom and bashed the neck of it against the ledge of the counter. It made a loud cracking sound. “Almost.” She banged it again, and the neck broke off and fell, wine spilling across the dirty tile floor. “That’ll have to do,” she said, throwing a rag onto the red puddle and mopping it with her feet in those tall, leather boots. “I saw that done once without spilling. Maybe he used a hammer. I don’t know.”

“He?” I would have liked to have asked. “Very inventive,” was all I could think to say. I smiled, but inside I was disturbed by the dark unruliness of the house and Rebecca’s disregard for decorum, to put it lightly. She paced back and forth for a moment, licking her fingers. Something was on her mind, but I didn’t dare ask what. At last she looked me in the eyes and frowned.

“I’m a crummy hostess,” she sighed.

“Don’t be silly,” I told her. “You should see where I live.” The ceiling light was a mere bare bulb hanging from a wire. Through the kitchen window I spied a car covered in snow, and another behind it, Rebecca’s two-door, with just a dusting of white. It was all very odd. Was this her boyfriend’s house? I wondered. Had she shacked up with a local? It was possible, I guessed. Was I disappointed? Surely. I’d expected bone china, mahogany, beveled mirrors, damask, soft pillows, velvet, comfort and decadence, things from magazines. This was a poor person’s house. And more so, a poor person in a bad state. We’ve all seen homes like this, dingy and depressed, no life anywhere, no color, like a grainy black and white television screen. I’ve lived in countless such places throughout my adulthood, places I wouldn’t set foot in today. It’s remarkable what people become blind to when they’re in such darkness. The only comfort I found in that house was that all in all it was in even worse shape than mine.

I will say this about houses. Those perfect, neat colonials I’d passed earlier that evening on my way through X-ville are the death masks of normal people. Nobody is really so orderly, so perfect. To have a house like that says more about what’s wrong with you than any decrepit dump. Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four. Of course at twenty-four I was also obsessed with death. I had tried to distract myself from my terror not through housekeeping, like the housewives of X-ville, but through my bizarre eating, compulsive habits, tireless ambivalence, Randy and so forth. I hadn’t realized this until sitting at Rebecca’s kitchen table, watching her crack open a peanut, lick her fingers: I would die one day, but not yet. There I was.

A silly truism comes back to me, “If you loved me, you’d be blind to my flaws.” I’ve tried that line on many men in my life, and the response usually has been, “Then I guess I don’t love you.” Makes me laugh each time I remember it. I gave Rebecca the benefit of the doubt, tried to justify her grunginess the way I justified my own. The grime on her kitchen table meant she couldn’t be bothered to clean. Well, neither could I. And that made sense to me. Surely Rebecca could afford to pay someone to clean for her, and she just hadn’t gotten around to hiring anyone yet. She was new in town, after all. I thought she was wonderful. Her nervousness, her scraggly hair, her chapped lips, these quirks only made her more beautiful. I watched her turn and start opening and closing various cupboards and closets. Her bathrobe fell open around her shoulders like a fur stole. There was nothing that woman couldn’t get away with.

“Aha,” she exclaimed, setting down two cups. They were cheap coffee mugs like you’d find at a diner, chipped and stained brown on the inside. She poured the wine awkwardly from the broken bottle. “You like the music?” she asked, her long finger poking up into the air. She was jumpy. It’s possible she had taken something before I arrived, it occurred to me at the time. So many women took pills back then to keep their figures. It made them nervous, creepy. I don’t suppose Rebecca was above that. When I think back on her upright posture, her long wild hair, her strange monochromatic outfits, she seems incredibly vain.

“Sure,” I said, lifting my eyes as though the music could be seen floating in the air. “I love it.”

Rebecca pushed a bowl full of peanut shells toward me on the table. “You can use that as an ash tray,” she said. “Just be careful with the wine. There might be some broken glass in there.”

“Thanks,” I said, and peered into the dark liquid. It smelled much like the vomit from my car.

“Mmm,” Rebecca purred, tasting it. “This is just wonderful. I hope you haven’t spent too much on it. Cheers.” She approached me at the table and held out her mug. “To Jesus Christ, happy birthday.” We clinked. She laughed, seemed to relax a bit. “How has your Christmas Eve been so far, Miss Eileen?”

“Pretty good,” I answered. “I spent the morning with my father.” I hoped to sound well adjusted.

“Your father?” she said. “I didn’t know you had family here. Does he live in the area?”

“Not too far,” I answered. I could have told her the truth — that I’d been his willing slave until she came along, that he was a crazy drunk, and that I hated him so much I wished him dead sometimes — but the air was already heavy with woe. “He lives within walking distance from my place,” I told her. “That’s been nice since he’s retired. He gets lonely a lot.”

“That’s lovely,” Rebecca said. “That you spend time with him, not that he’s lonely, I mean,” she laughed.

I attempted a self-conscious chuckle, which fell flat. “Do you live here alone?” I asked, happy to switch the focus onto her.

“Oh sure,” she said, to my great relief. “I simply can’t have roommates. I like my own space. And I like to make a lot of noise. I can play my music as loud as I want.”

“Me too,” I lied. “I can’t stand roommates. In college I—”

“People are how they are and they do what they do, don’t they?” Rebecca interrupted me, leaning against the counter. She didn’t seem to be interested in a response. She stared intensely down at her wine, her lips already stained, her face a bit flushed. I really wondered about that bathrobe she wore. It was old and worn and discolored, hardly something a person would wear in the presence of company. Was I not worthy of anything better? “I don’t believe we do things we don’t want to do,” she said oddly, her voice now grave and restrained. “Not unless there’s a gun pointed at our heads. And even then, one has a choice. Still, nobody wants to admit they want to be bad, do bad things. People just love shame. This whole country’s hooked on it if you ask me. Let me ask you, Eileen,” she turned to me. I put down my mug — already nearly empty — and looked up at her, my eyes bright with expectation. “Are the boys in our prison bad people?” she asked.

This was not the question I’d hoped to hear. I tried to mask my disappointment with a thoughtful lift of my eyebrows, as though seriously considering her question about the boys. “I think a lot of them just had bad luck to begin with. Rotten luck, most of all,” I replied.

“I think you’re right.” She put down her mug, dropped her cigarette butt into it. She crossed her arms and looked me bluntly in the eyes. “But tell me, Miss Eileen, have you ever wanted to be truly bad, do something you knew was wrong?”

“Not really,” I lied. I don’t know why I denied this. I sensed Rebecca could see through my dishonesty, so I tensed and hid behind the mug, gulping the last of my wine. I wanted to be understood and respected, you might say, yet I still felt that I might be punished if I expressed my real feelings. I had no idea how trivial my shameful thoughts and feelings really were. “May I use your bathroom, please?” I asked.

Rebecca pointed toward the ceiling. “There’s one upstairs.”

I took my purse with me as I plodded up the dirty, carpeted steps, holding the iron rail for balance. I was soothed by the weight of the gun on my shoulder. I just wanted to hold it in my hands for a moment, to get my bearings. As I climbed, I lamented my cowardice. How could I ever be happy, I asked myself, if I didn’t allow Rebecca to know me deep down inside? It was silly of me, of course, to take this all so seriously. Still, I kicked myself for being so uptight. Rebecca had invited me into her home, allowed me to see her in her natural state, however slovenly and nervous. That was friendship. I didn’t want to disappoint her. But if I had to reveal my true self that evening, if we were to bond in any deep way, I would need more alcohol, I thought.

The bathroom door at the top of the stairs was wide open. It smelled bad inside. It was a pink tiled bathroom, old metal fixtures rusted orange at the seams, a plastic shower curtain rumpled and browned with mold. The knob on the door rattled and wouldn’t stay closed, the bath faucet dripped, and the tub itself was ringed green and stank of mildew. The sink, too, was greenish, and on the ledge sat a red, chewed-up toothbrush, a tube of discount toothpaste rolled up tight and crusted. A tube of lipstick was perched under the greasy mirror. I opened it — bright pink, nearly finished. Flesh-colored stockings hung from the shower curtain rod. A bar of soap bore tiny curled hairs dried to its chalky surface. These must be Rebecca’s pubic hairs, I thought to myself. I took it and rubbed it on my face, splashed away the suds, and felt a little better. I dried my hands on a rag, then took the gun out. The smooth feel of the wood and metal soothed me. I pointed it at my reflection in the mirror. I held it against my face, cool and hard. I could smell my father on the gun, not the acrid madness of gin he exuded then, but the warm, homey smoke of whiskey from when I was a child and didn’t know better than to look up to him. I put it back in my purse and fixed my hair in the mirror.

Before I went back down to the kitchen, I quietly stepped around the banister and peered into the lit-up rooms upstairs. One was a bedroom: green and pink floral bedspread, a cheap desk lamp on a drab dresser, ugly gold earrings on a pale blue saucer, an empty can of beer. A mirror hung on the closet door. I wanted to see Rebecca’s wardrobe inside, but didn’t dare snoop that far. If in fact she was a slob and her elegance and refinement were a sham, maybe there was hope for me after all. Maybe I could be a sham, and appear elegant and refined, too. The next bedroom meant little to me at the time: a small wooden desk, a twin bed stripped to the mattress, a fan on the bedside table next to a small stuffed bear, a map of America on the wall. None of it made much sense, but I reasoned that Rebecca must have rented the house furnished and never cleaned. I looked in the mirror. A drawn and haggard face looked back at me. I looked like an old lady, a corpse, a zombie. I looked slightly less deadly when I tried to smile. It seemed preposterous that this beautiful woman wanted me around. As I walked back down the stairs, I put on a mask like Leonard Polk’s — contented, confident, perfectly at ease.

When I sat back down at the kitchen table, Rebecca was busy looking through the cabinets again. “Aha!” she exclaimed, turning around with a corkscrew. “Too late, I’m sorry. Please, have more wine.” She poured out the last of it. “Thank you for bringing it,” she said again.

“I guess it’s a kind of housewarming party, too, isn’t it? Since you’ve just moved here?” I tried to sound chipper.

“I love that. A housewarming, yes. Thank you,” Rebecca answered. “That’s very appropriate. The house needs some warming. Drafty old place.” She pulled up the collar of her robe and opened her mouth as though to say more, but stopped herself, folded her arms across her chest.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I got to town just a few weeks ago,” she replied, adjusting her robe. “I must say I was expecting the cold, but nothing like this. This is pretty brutal cold you have here. Worse than Cambridge. But the snow is pretty. Don’t you think?”

The conversation went on like that, perfunctorily. The magic was gone. It was as if we’d broken the ice but the frigid waters had made us slow and phony with hypothermia. I’d missed my chance, I reckoned, to be her real friend. Rebecca had opened the door to me and I’d shut it in her face. I was boring. I had nothing to contribute. I tried, pathetically now, to make up for my flatness with self-pity. “I don’t get out much,” I told her. “There isn’t much to do here in winter. Or in any season.”

“Do you ice-skate?” Rebecca asked with false enthusiasm, I sensed.

I shook my head no, smiled, then corrected myself. “But I’d go if you wanted to.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Rebecca. It was terribly uncomfortable. The chair was so stiff, the house was so cold. Still, I sipped my wine, nodding and grinning as best I could. I knew what I was hiding — my disappointment, my foiled fantasies, my longing. What Rebecca was hiding, and why, was utterly mysterious to me. She talked at length about how sunburnt she’d gotten over the summer, how her hands cramped while driving, her favorite painters — all abstract expressionists, as I recall. We agreed to take a trip to Boston together in the spring, to the art museums, but she seemed to have retreated to some far-off place in her mind, leaving just the surface of herself to be with me. Perhaps all I deserved was to look at her from afar, I thought. Who was I to think that a woman like Rebecca — beautiful, independent, professional — could ever really care to get to know me? And what did I have to say for myself, anyway? I was a nobody, a nerd. I should be grateful she’s doing all the talking. “Do you swim? Do you ski? Where did you buy that fur hat?” I got the feeling she was just humoring me, pitying me, even making fun of me and my dull life, trying to put me at ease with her asinine questions.

Finally I said, “I should be going.” There would be other nights, I told myself. Real friendship isn’t forged in one evening, anyway. And better to leave on a note of dullness than of discord. I got up out of my chair and began to pull my gloves back on. That was when Rebecca got up from the stool she was sitting on.

“Eileen,” she said, coming toward me, her voice suddenly low and stern and sober. “Before you go, I need your help with something.” I thought she might ask me to take out the garbage or help her lift a piece of heavy furniture, but she merely said, “Stay. Talk with me a little while longer.”

She looked worried. Maybe she’s sick, I thought, or expecting a visit from a jealous lover. I would stay, of course. I was desperate for more wine. And I was hungry. As though she’d read my mind, Rebecca got up and opened the old refrigerator. She pulled out a hunk of cheese, a bottle of pickled onions, some ham.

“I’ll make us sandwiches,” she said. “I really am a bad hostess, I know.” I watched her wash two plates, pat them dry with the edge of her bathrobe. “We’ll feel better if we eat something.”

“I feel fine,” I said defensively. It just came out of me, and rang out in that cold kitchen as cutting, rude and untrue. I began to excuse myself, babbling a bit, but Rebecca interrupted me.

“You know as well as I do that there’s a bit of tension in the air,” she said. “You feel it and I feel it. It’s there, so why deny it?” She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders, gave a half smile, then turned her back to me and piled up the sliced bread on the counter.

I let out a high neurotic giggle. I couldn’t tell if Rebecca was angry or entertained. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. But she ignored me. Laying aside the awkwardness hanging between us, she turned back to the subject of Moorehead as she worked at the counter. I watched as with unsteady hands she composed our sandwiches. I picked at my chapped lips, fingered the gun inside my purse, listened as she talked. She seemed to relax a bit, her voice now wafting down into its lower registers. With her back turned, she paused now and then, punctuating the air with her knife as she spoke.

“They’ve hired me to develop some sort of blanket curriculum for the boys, a daily plan for the lot of them, as though they’re all the same age and at the same level. As if we could just repeat lessons over and over again. It’s a ridiculous idea on its own. I’m not some nineteenth-century farm schoolteacher. And these boys can learn. Most of them are already literate. Of course there will have to be testing, trial and error on my part, to know what works, and then the big questions — what are the goals, what’s the point? I’m not here to teach them how to repair car engines, after all. They need to learn literature, history, philosophy, the hard sciences. That’s what I think. It’s a job big enough for a dozen people. Robert doesn’t understand that the boys have minds, that they’re even conscious. To him they’re just cattle.”

“Robert?” I asked. “You mean the warden?”

“The warden,” she shook her head. “All he does is punish boys for jerking off.” I had a good idea of what that meant. “You knew that, didn’t you?” Rebecca turned slightly, showing me the seriousness of her profile. “That guy is really something. His ridiculous Christian rhetoric is completely inappropriate. Then I find out that Leonard Polk got stuck in the cave for ‘inappropriate touching.’” She shook her head. “If I were those boys I’d be touching myself all the time. It’s about the only fun that can be had in a place like Moorehead, don’t you think?” She turned to me then, nose crinkled, eyes shining, suddenly full of sprightly and conniving joy.

“Oh, of course,” I said, twisting my hands around in the air to indicate that I was flexible, open-minded, that I had no qualms.

“I swear,” Rebecca went on. “I just don’t understand what the big deal is.” She shook her head. I tried to imagine Rebecca touching herself, what sort of touching she did and how it was different from my sort, as it seemed — given what I knew about her — that she had no shame. I wondered what sort of ecstasy there was to be had without shame to incite it. I couldn’t imagine. I was a bit stunned sitting there then, and was grateful that she kept rattling on. She told me how happy she was to be working at the prison, how relieved she was to have finished her degree. She said she was sure she could have a great effect, and how much she cared for the boys already. “Like they’re my own brothers,” is a phrase I recall clearly. She handed me a plate, plunked a sandwich on it. We sat and ate in silence.

“As you’ve probably figured out by now, Eileen,” she said after a while, “I live a little differently from most people.”

“Oh, not at all,” I insisted. “Your house is really nice.”

“Please, don’t be so polite,” she said. “I don’t mean the house.” She looked at me as she stood, munching an onion. “I mean I have my own ideas. I’m not like those women you work with.” That was obvious. “Or like your teachers at school, or your mother.” She slid her plate back into the sink. “I can tell you have your own ideas, too. Maybe you and I even share some of the same ideas.”

Now I felt she was testing me — was I a follower like “most people,” or was I “different” like her. I could barely eat the sandwich she’d given me. The bread was stale, the ham was gummy. Still, like a good girl, I chewed and nodded.

“I’ve realized some things over the years,” she said, licking her fingers. “I don’t believe in good and bad.” She offered me a cigarette. I took it, grateful for an excuse to put down the sandwich. “Those boys at Moorehead, they don’t belong there. I don’t care what they’ve done. No child deserves that kind of punishment.”

I’d barely drunk two cups of wine, and since it was not in my nature to argue when I wasn’t drunk, what I said next surprised me. Perhaps it was the spirit of my father moving in me, because I really didn’t care much about the issue. “But those boys are all criminals. They need to be punished somehow,” I said. Rebecca was silent. I finished the wine. A few moments passed in which my head grew heavy and spun with regret. It seemed clear that I had offended her. I felt sick to my stomach.

“I should go,” I said. “You must be tired.” By then, I believe, I’d been in that house less than an hour. My skin felt greasy and hot. The air in the room seemed to be spinning with dust and smoke and the smell of rotting food. I put out my cigarette. Rebecca looked deep in thought — I assumed her thoughts revolved around me, my lack of vision or compassion. What a square I was. What a pig. I worried I might vomit. It seemed imperative that I go home immediately. But Rebecca had other ideas.

“May I confide in you?” she asked, her voice suddenly soft, but urgent. She squatted down toward me, leaning one arm on the table.

Nobody had ever confided in me before. I looked at her squarely in the face, held my breath. She really was beautiful. Suddenly clear-eyed and still and vulnerable, like a scared child in the forest. She held my hand absentmindedly, her fingers cool and soft against my rough skin. I tried to relax, to show that I was open, accepting, available. But I felt my death mask creep up again. I nodded with my eyes closed, thinking that would be a somber and reliable gesture of fidelity. If she had tried to kiss me then, I think I would have gone along.

“It’s about Lee Polk,” she said.

I really thought that I would vomit at that moment. I began to stand, reaching for my purse, hoping she’d lose her nerve before she could tell me that they’d kissed, or worse. She gripped my hand again, though, and I sat back down.

How relieved I was when she said not, “I’m in love with him,” but rather, “He spoke to me.” Still there was a kind of perverse look of pride and pleasure on her face. I was reminded of Joanie’s self-satisfaction when she’d told me, so many years ago at that point, “He likes to taste me.” Rebecca squeezed my fingers, swallowed hard. “He told me everything. What happened and what he did and how he ended up in Moorehead. Look at this.” She pulled an old photograph from her robe pocket. It was a photo of the crime scene. Lee Polk’s father lay on the blood-darkened carpet, wrapped partly in a tangled sheet, a disheveled bed beside him.

“That’s the father,” Rebecca went on. “People always think it’s Oedipal. Kill the father, marry the mother. That’s what I’d assumed.”

“Gross,” I said. I looked at the photo again. The man’s eyes were partly open, as though he were surreptitiously glancing downward, shifty. His arms were held over his head, fingers jammed and piled up against the bedside table. I’d seen pictures of dead people before in various books and magazines, mostly important figures lying in mausoleums or photos from wars — soldiers slumped on the battlefield, starved corpses. Then of course there was Jesus dead on the cross everywhere I looked. There had been a few such crime scene photos in the files of other inmates at Moorehead, but none of them had captured the essence of death quite like that photo of Mr. Polk. Not even my own mother’s dead body struck me as powerfully. She’d just faded away, really, a little bit every day until there was nothing left. Life had been ripped out of Mr. Polk, however. The death was there, alive in the photo. I twisted my hand away from Rebecca and got up and flung myself toward the sink, vomiting that terrible sandwich, all that wine.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Rebecca came up behind me and rubbed my back. “Don’t be sorry,” she replied. She handed me a cold, wet and mildewed dishrag. “The picture should make you sick.” I turned on the faucet, rinsed my vomit off the plates. “Don’t bother,” Rebecca said.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. I don’t know how sorry I really was. Getting sick like that had excited me. I can’t think of any other time just looking at something has made me vomit. I wanted to look at the photo again. There was something in it that I couldn’t fully make out. Between the crumpled bedsheets, the thinly striped sleeping shirt, the black stain puddled on the rug, Mr. Polk, face sagging and limp, had something to say. Another kind of life lay behind the blank expression captured in that photo. I wished I could get inside of it, examine the throat where it was gashed, touch the blood, investigate the wound as though a secret were embedded there, but the throat wasn’t visible in the photo. What did those eyes know? What was the last thing Mr. Polk saw? Lee, the knife, the darkness, his wife, his own spirit rising up out of his body? I liked the look of those still, sneaky eyes. Mr. Polk, I knew, held a secret I’d been wanting to understand. He knew death, I suppose. Maybe it was that simple.

“Where did you get that?” I asked Rebecca.

“Lee’s file,” she said. “Scary, huh?”

I sat back down in the chair, sobered, calm. “Not really,” I lied, purposelessly.

“Lee snuck into his parents’ bedroom with a kitchen knife and hacked through his father’s throat. His mother claims she went into shock. She didn’t phone the police right away. She said she woke up and found her husband dead, assumed there’d been a break-in. How do you sleep through something like that, I wonder? Can you imagine? They found the knife in the kitchen sink, and Lee in his bed, holding his teddy bear.”

Rebecca’s expression hardened as she spoke. I looked closely at her face, at the delicate lines around her eyes, her translucent skin, fresh and rosy. In one moment she looked like a mature woman, in the next, a little girl. My eyes seemed to be playing tricks on me, as though I were peering into a fun house mirror, as if it were all a dream. She tapped my hands to get my attention. “But Lee isn’t responsible for this,” Rebecca went on. “That’s what he explained to me yesterday. The whole ordeal. It’s too much for a child to keep to himself.” She turned away as though overcome with emotion, but when she faced me again she was calm, steady, even grinning. “It’s terrible, this photo, yes. It’s disturbing. When I saw it, and then met Lee, I just couldn’t put two and two together. A smart, shy boy like that doing something like this. It didn’t add up. I asked him if he’d really done it, killed his father.” She tapped her finger on the photo, over the dead man’s face. “He said that yes, he had done it. Or really he just nodded. I asked him why, but he just shrugged. He didn’t open up to me right away, you know. I had to ask the right question. At first I was just stabbing in the dark. Did his dad beat his mom? Did his mom have him kill his dad for the insurance payout? What was it? I just had a sense there was something rotten happening in the family. It’s written all over the mother’s face, anyhow. You saw her. I knew something was going on. That’s why I called her and told her to come in. I told her, ‘I think your son would like to speak with you.’ You saw them together. The poor boy could hardly look her in the eye. And so afterward I just asked him point-blank. ‘What did your father do to you? Did he touch you?’ And he spoke. He spilled it all in a matter of minutes. That man, Mr. Polk, was raping him, his own son. Nobody had ever bothered to ask Lee before. Nobody wanted to know.”

At this point Rebecca was wild-eyed with enthusiasm, you’d say, nearly salivating, her hands having moved up my wrists and forearms to hold me by the shoulders. I was riveted by the pink of her mouth and gums, the black grit of wine in the chapped corners of her lips. I’d heard of stories like the one she was telling. I had a vague idea of what it all meant. “It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to get down to the truth,” she went on boastfully. She let go of my shoulders. “And it doesn’t take a prison sentence to set things right. The wardens and shrinks of this world are crazier than most killers, I swear. People will tell you the truth, if you really want to hear it. Think about it, Eileen,” she said, squeezing my hands again. “What would drive someone to kill his own father?” She looked up at me imploringly, her eyes darting back and forth between mine. “What?” she demanded.

I had spent years debating a similar question. “Killing him,” I answered, “would have to be the only way out.”

“The only recourse, yes,” Rebecca nodded.

We stared again at the photo, her head next to mine, so close that our cheeks touched. She leaned over my shoulder, put her arm around me. The wind shook the house, a spray of snow vibrating the drafty kitchen windows. I closed my eyes. This was as close to another person as I’d been in years. I could feel Rebecca’s breath on my hand, hot and quick and steady.

“You have to wonder,” she continued, “why the mother didn’t do something.”

I looked up at her. Her strange, shifting expression, strained in the harsh light, eyebrows raised, eyes wide, mouth open in delight or expectation, I couldn’t tell. She seemed excited, agitated, ecstatic and full of wonder. I twitched. “My mother’s dead,” I said defensively. Rebecca wasn’t irked by the non sequitur. I held my breath.

“Mothers are very difficult,” Rebecca replied. She stood suddenly and gazed down at me as she spoke. “Most women hate one another. It’s only natural, all of us competing, mothers and daughters especially. Not that I hate you, of course. I don’t see you as competition. I see you as my ally, a partner in crime, as they say. You’re special,” she said, softening. I could have cried hearing those words. I blinked hard, though my eyes were dry. She reaffirmed her statement by squeezing my hand again, and squatted back down to meet me at eye level. “That mother,” she went on, “Mrs. Polk, you remember her, don’t you?”

“She was fat,” I said, nodding.

“Quiet,” Rebecca whispered all of a sudden. She got up, put a finger in the air to hush me. The wind rattled, but otherwise the house was silent. The music had stopped without my noticing it. I held my breath. “Lee’s mother,” she went on, punctuating the words by clattering her fingernails on the table, “is the real mystery. There’s no lovely way to say this, Eileen. It broke my heart to hear the boy tell his story. But as you and I know, it’s so important to let the truth out. Lee told me that each evening after dinner, his mother would take him upstairs to give him an enema before bedtime. Then she just sat around watching The Honeymooners or painting her nails or sleeping or whatnot until they were done. Why didn’t she stop him? The answer is quite plainly that she didn’t want to. She must have been benefiting from it all somehow. I just don’t understand how.”

I was disgusted, of course. But I was also skeptical. “It’s really awful,” I said, shaking my head back and forth. “Gross,” I said again. I watched Rebecca ease back from the table, lean against the counter. She crossed her arms and gazed up at the ceiling. I was suddenly cold and lonely with her so far away. I yearned to get up and go to her, snuggle inside her bathrobe, curl up in her arms like a child.

“You really have to imagine it, Eileen,” she went on. “You’re just a kid sitting at the kitchen table.” She took me through the entire nightly routine at the Polk house as she imagined it, describing in depth how an enema works, the size of the child’s anatomy, how the nether regions get torn during the sex act, and then the psychology of the father — how he must have suffered all his life with a desire he couldn’t satisfy. “The father’s motivation is rather obvious,” she said. “He had some wires crossed. For him, doing that with his son, that must have been love. As awful as that sounds, love is like that sometimes. It will make you rape your own son. It’s not something we think we’d ever do, but Mr. Polk must have known no other way.” I thought of my own father, and my mother for that matter, how little affection they gave me but for a pinch and a poke now and then when I was growing up. Perhaps I was lucky after all. It’s very hard to measure out, in hindsight, who had it worse than whom.

“But the mother — Rita is her name — I just don’t understand her motivations.” Rebecca was intent on getting to a point. I really could not have cared less about the Polks — I had Rebecca now. We were partners in crime. She’d said those very words. I would have cut my palm open with the kitchen knife and made a pact in blood then and there to be friends, sisters, forever and ever. But I sat and listened attentively, feigning interest the best way I knew how, nodding and furrowing my brow and batting my lashes and all.

“I don’t get the feeling that the father was threatening her,” Rebecca continued. “She doesn’t come across to me that way.” I knew what she meant, actually. When Mrs. Polk had visited earlier that week, she hadn’t come off as a victim. She held her head high, seemed more angry than sorrowful, had an air of judgment in the way she gazed at us — me, Randy, Rebecca, Leonard. And she didn’t seem like the type of woman who would try very hard to please others. She was fat. She wore ugly clothing. “I believe something crucial must be resolved with that woman,” Rebecca continued, “before Lee can really move on. And like I said, I don’t believe in punishment, but I do believe in retribution. Lee’s father raped him. He did a bad thing, so he got killed. Lee killed his father, so he’s in prison. The mother is guilty of her own crime, and she hasn’t suffered any consequence. And Eileen?” She leaned forward, grabbed me by the calf. “You can’t tell anyone about this, you promise?” I nodded. Rebecca’s hand on my leg was enough for me to promise her the world. I still couldn’t understand her earnestness, her grave intensity about the Polks. What did it matter? Why did she care? When she stuck out her slender pinky finger, I hooked mine around it. We shook. This gesture felt so heartfelt, so pure, and yet so perverse, my eyes filled with tears.

“This isn’t my house, Eileen,” Rebecca said then. “It’s the Polk house. I have Rita Polk tied up downstairs.”

• • •

I should say that as a rather sheltered young person in X-ville, I had little experience of direct conflicts between people. My parents’ dinnertime fights when I was growing up were all for nothing, just gripes covering the surface of whatever deeper grievances they each carried around, I’m sure. Nothing ever came to blows, though in my last years with him my father would occasionally wrap his flat hands around my pencil-thin throat and threaten that he could squeeze the life out of me any time he felt like it. It didn’t hurt. His hands on my neck were, in fact, a kind of balm — it was all the affection I received back then. I recall that when I was twelve, a girl a few towns over went missing and they found her naked body washed up on the rocks at the beach in X-ville. “Don’t take rides from strangers,” and “scream if someone tries to grab you,” our teachers said to warn us, but their alarm never scared me. On the contrary, being kidnapped was something of a secret wish of mine. At least then I’d know that I mattered to someone, that I was of value. Violence made much more sense to me than any strained conversation. If there had been more fighting in my family growing up in X-ville, things might have turned out differently. I might have stayed.

I must sound terribly self-pitying, complaining that my father didn’t love me enough to hit me. But so what? I’m old now. My bones have thinned, my hair has grayed, my breathing has become slow and shallow, my appetite meager. I’ve had more than my fair share of scrapes and bruises, and I have lived long enough that self-pity is no longer a pathetic habit of the psyche, but like a cold wet cloth on my forehead bringing down the fever of fear about my inevitable mortal demise. Poor me, yes, poor me. When I was young I didn’t care at all for my physical well-being. All young people believe they are invincible, that they know well enough not to heed any silly warnings. It was this kind of brave stupidity that led me out of X-ville. If I’d known just how dangerous a place I was escaping to, I may never have left. New York City was no place for a young woman all alone back then, especially a young woman like I was — gullible, helpless, full of rage and guilt and worry. If someone had told me the number of times I’d get groped and grabbed on the subway, how often my heart would be broken, doors slammed in my face, my spirit smashed, I may have stayed home with my father.

Back in X-ville, I’d read tales of violence in the prison files — awful business. Assault, destruction, betrayal, as long as it didn’t concern me, it didn’t bother me. Those stories were like articles in National Geographic. Their details only fostered my own twisted imaginings and fantasies, but never made me scared for my safety. I was naive and I was callous. I didn’t care about the welfare of others. I only cared about getting what I wanted. So when Rebecca’s revelation hit me, I wasn’t as horrified as you’d expect. I was insulted, however. Suddenly it became obvious to me that her friendship was not motivated purely out of admiration and affection, as I’d have preferred to think. Rebecca had forged a rapport, it was clear, as part of a strategy. She assumed I’d be useful to her, and I suppose in the end I was.

“I’m so sorry,” I stammered, trying to hide my disappointment. “I’m really not feeling well.” I could have told her she was crazy, that I wanted nothing to do with her, that she ought to be committed, but I was so hurt, so dismayed by her scheme to seduce me into being some sort of accomplice that I failed to muster any cutting words or phrases. “Good luck,” might have been enough, I suppose. Anyway, I wasn’t going to reveal my brokenheartedness to her — I felt humiliated enough already. I’d been such a fool. Of course Rebecca didn’t really like me. I was pathetic, ugly, weak, weird. Why would someone like her want someone like me as a friend? “I should really get going,” I said, and got up and headed for the door. In the hallway, however, Rebecca grabbed my arm.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t run off so quick. I’m in something of a little pinch.” I could tell from looking at her that she was scared. I thought of breaking free, driving home to tell my father, calling the cops. But with Rebecca looking at me like that, as though I could save her, saying, “Please, I really need you, Eileen. Be a friend,” I began to cave. She pulled a cigarette out for me, lit it with trembling hands. “You’re the only one I trust,” she said. That was all it took to reel me back in. She respected me after all, I chose to believe. She wanted me on her side. Tears filled her eyes and slid down her cheeks. She mopped them up with the cuff of her robe, exhaled, shuddered, looked up at me imploringly.

“OK,” I said. Nobody had ever cried to me before. “I’ll help you.”

“Thank you, Eileen,” she said, smiling through her tears. She blew her nose on her sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a mess.” It pleased me to see her scared and vulnerable like that. She took another slice of bread from the counter, picked at it mindlessly for a moment. “I don’t know how I got into this. But now that we’re in it, we have to finish what we started.”

I sat down, straightened my back against the chair, crossed my legs like a lady, folded my hands in my lap. “We could call the police and just explain what happened,” I said softly. “It was an accident, we could say.” I knew full well this suggestion was ludicrous. I just wanted to reap all the desperation I could out of her. I deserved at least that much in return for my loyalty, I thought.

“And say what?” Rebecca replied. “That I accidentally tied her up? They’d take me to jail,” she cried.

“My father was a cop,” I told her. Rebecca looked down at me, wide-eyed. “Of course I won’t tell him, but I’m saying, if we said Mrs. Polk threatened you…”

“The last thing we need is for the police to get involved. Mr. Polk was a cop, you know. If the police actually cared about justice, I wouldn’t have had to come here in the first place. I can’t go to jail, Eileen. People won’t understand the good I’m trying to do.” She flapped the piece of bread around and threw it into the sink, lit herself a cigarette. She peered into the broken wine bottle. It was empty. “I could use a drink,” she said.

“No drinks,” I said, satisfied that she was desperate enough not to judge me. “We need to keep our wits about us. We have a confession to extract.” I tried to sound industrious. I stubbed my cigarette out and clasped my hands. “We have a job to do.” Rebecca smiled weakly. “Tell me what happened,” I said. “Tell me everything.” It tickled me to see her squirm. Her hands flew to her hair, pulling and twirling as she paced the kitchen floor.

“It started yesterday afternoon. I invited myself into Mrs. Polk’s home,” she said. She steadied her voice so as to seem unruffled, collected, believable, as though rehearsing what she’d tell a judge or jury. “I confronted her about her and her husband’s actions, repeating what Lee told me about the enemas, the sexual abuse, all that.” She jangled her hand as though to gesture upstairs, where the routine rape occurred. I had just barely comprehended the abuse as she’d described it — what body part had gone where, what the enemas were for. What it all meant was as yet unclear. I was naive and I was perverted and I knew what homosexuality was in theory, but I was inexperienced and couldn’t picture sexual intercourse well enough to understand it in this twisted form — the rape of a young boy.

“What exactly did his dad do to him?” I asked. Rebecca stopped pacing and looked at me as though I were an idiot. “Just to be clear,” I added.

“Sodomy,” she said. “Anal penetration. Is that clear enough?”

I nodded, though this seemed implausible. “Go on.” I cleared my throat. “I’m listening.”

“Mrs. Polk denied everything, of course,” Rebecca continued. “She called her husband a saint, said she’d never even heard the word ‘enema’ before I’d said it. ‘Wouldn’t know the first thing it was for.’ But I kept asking, ‘Why didn’t you take Leonard and run away? Why would you allow this to continue? How could you be complicit in such torture?’ And she just wouldn’t answer. I told her to think it over. I left my number. But I knew she wouldn’t call. I couldn’t sleep at all last night. It was just eating me alive how that woman had lied to my face. So I came back this morning. She had nothing new to say, of course. Clammed up even more. Called me crazy. I threatened to report what she’d done. And I fought with her because what I had to say made her angry. I tried telling her I was there on Lee’s behalf, and that I wanted to help her, too. But she wouldn’t listen. She was mad. She attacked me. See?” Rebecca opened her robe and lifted her blouse to show me faint scratch marks across her chest, nothing grave, nothing that would leave a mark. Her torso was so narrow and pure, white skin seeming to glow from the inside, ribs like the ivory keys of a piano, abdomen stiff in its fine musculature. Her brassiere was black satin with delicate lace across her small bust. “I had to detain her,” Rebecca said, shaking her head. “There was no other option. She was threatening to call the police. What would I tell them?”

“You did the right thing,” I said. I steeled my eyes and let my face go slack, hoping to convey to Rebecca that I was fearless, calm and tempered with disdain for the terrible crime against the child, and would work vigilantly to see this thing through to the end, although I had no idea what that would mean. Rebecca’s exasperation eased up a bit. She pulled her hair back.

“I didn’t really hurt her,” she said. “She’s not in any pain. She was yelling for a long time, so I turned the music up. But now she’s quiet. I figured eventually she’d tell the truth, accept her part of the blame, and then we could set things right. But she’s not confessing to anything. She refuses to talk at all. I can’t keep her tied up much longer and have her stay down there in the cold. I’m not a criminal. She deserves far worse, but I’m no villain. Do you know what I mean?”

I cannot say for sure why Rebecca had to drag me into her scheme. Did she really think I could help her? Or was I just there to witness her brilliant project, absolve her of her guilt? I’ve debated with myself time and again the earnestness of her compassion. Just what was her motivation for getting involved in the Polk family drama? Did she honestly think she had the power to atone for someone else’s sins, that she could exact justice with her wit, her superior thinking? People born of privilege are sometimes thus confused. But now she was frightened. Mrs. Polk was perhaps more evil than Rebecca had counted on.

“Leave her down there for a few more hours,” I suggested. “That will punish her. She’ll talk.”

“But she hasn’t said a word,” Rebecca cried. She threw herself against the counter again, crossed her arms. “The damn woman won’t confess. She’s simply incorrigible. She’s as mute as her son was.”

“Get her drunk,” I proposed. “People always say things they don’t mean to when they’re drunk.”

“That’s beside the point.” Rebecca exhaled. “Anyhow the liquor stores are closed by now. What we need is a signed confession. Something she can’t deny later. But she isn’t scared enough to admit to anything. It’s not as though I’m going to beat her up.” She looked at me pointedly. “Have you ever beaten anybody up?” she asked, struggling haltingly to pronounce the words.

“No,” I replied, “though I’ve imagined it.”

“Of course not, of course.” She paced again, kneading a new slice of bread between her fingers into small balls. My stomach churned. “We need to think. Think hard.” A few moments passed. Then the solution came to me, so simple and easy I almost laughed. I turned to my purse where it hung behind me off the back of my chair and carefully pulled the gun out and set it on the table.

“It’s my dad’s,” I said, my face uncontrollably giddy, though I tried to hold my mouth closed. I tried not to smile.

“Oh dear,” Rebecca murmured, eyes wide, robe falling off her shoulders. She let it drag behind her like a queen as she approached the table. “Is that real?” Her eyes were glassy, awestruck.

“It’s real,” I said. She put her hand out to touch it, but I picked it up, held it tight in my right hand. “Better you don’t handle it,” I said. “It might be loaded,” I told her, though I assumed it wasn’t. How could it be? My father wasn’t that crazy, I thought.

“It’s incredible,” said Rebecca. But then she asked, “Why do you have that? Why would you bring it here with you?”

What could I have said? What would she have believed? I told her the truth. “My dad is sick,” I said, tapping my temple with my finger, “and I worry what he might do if I left him alone with the gun.”

Rebecca nodded gravely. “I see. Your father’s keeper. Saving him from himself.”

“Saving others,” I corrected her. I didn’t want Rebecca to see me as a martyr. I wanted to be a hero.

“Quite a gal,” Rebecca said, giving me that shifty-eyed, conspiratorial look I’d seen at O’Hara’s a few nights earlier. “We make a good team,” she said. I could imagine the two of us as some kind of lawless duo: Rebecca with her arrogance and her moral vision, and me with my deadpan glare and my gun. I put it back down on the table. She seemed eager to hold it. “Let’s go downstairs,” she said, lifting her robe from the floor. She wrinkled her nose and tied the belt of the robe tight around her waist. “It’s filthy down there,” she said. But I stalled. If there really was a woman tied up downstairs, my time alone with Rebecca was running out.

“What if Lee was lying?” I asked. “What if he made it all up? He’s had years to think up a good reason to kill his dad, blame his mom. Mrs. Polk could be innocent. Don’t you think?”

“Eileen.” Rebecca looked down at me sternly, folded her hands across her heart. “If you saw this boy’s tears, heard the story in his own words, felt him shake and cry, you wouldn’t doubt him for a second. Look,” she said, sliding the photo of Mr. Polk up next to the gun. “This man deserved far worse than he got. Don’t you see that?”

I looked again at the photo, those secretive, side-cast eyes. The dead body was so strange, so unsettling, I had to believe he got what he deserved. To believe otherwise would have been too much. Back then I believed whatever I could to avoid the terrifying reality of things. Such is youth. “OK,” I nodded. “So you think the gun will work?”

“Memory is a fickle thing,” Rebecca answered. She was calmer then, her anxieties seemingly subdued. “Mrs. Polk is in deep denial. She’s kept her secret so well, probably never told a soul, she may have a hard time even just remembering what the truth actually is. People pity her, you know. People assume she’s just sad and lonesome. Nobody wants to challenge a woman in that state. Nobody even wants to be around someone like her, such a victim. We assume she’s pathetic, just miserable. But no one’s ever asked her the right questions. I’m the first to care.” Rebecca pulled her hair back, braided it skillfully with quick fingers. She was so pretty, even in the harsh kitchen light, even with her eyes red and puffy. “She hadn’t visited Lee once since he’d been at Moorehead,” she said. “Not until I called her, after I read his file.” She seemed to drift off for a moment, thinking and staring at the cellar door. “Eileen,” she said finally, turning and pounding lightly on the table with her fist. “If Mrs. Polk believes her life is at stake, she’ll have no reason to deny anything. She’ll be free to confess. We can set her free this way, whether she thinks she wants that or not. She’ll thank us later. This is a good thing we’re doing. You’ll see. Here.” Rebecca pulled my scarf from around my neck. “We’ll cover your face. It will be scarier for her this way, and she won’t know who you are. She won’t be able to recognize you from Moorehead. If she does, it might confuse things.” She tied my scarf around my head, then pulled it down over my face so that only my eyes were showing. My body tingled from her touch as she swept the hair out of my eyes. She giggled. “You look fine,” she said. “Now hold up the gun. Show me how you’ll hold it.” I did as I was told, holding the gun with both hands, extending my arms out straight, lowering my face. “That’s very good, Eileen.” Rebecca smiled, put her hands on her hips and clucked her tongue. “Quite a gal,” she said again.

I watched her go to the cellar door, slide the chain off the lock, and pull it open to a dark and steep staircase. She reached around the air and tugged on a dirty string. The light went on. She turned, breathy and smiling, and gripped my shoulder. “Come on,” she said. I picked up my purse with my free hand and followed her down the stairs.

• • •

Rita? It’s just me,” Rebecca called out. Her voice was cautious, kind, the voice of a nurse or teacher, I thought. It surprised me. The scarf over my mouth made my face sweaty and tickled my nose, but I could see fine. The stairs were so steep, took so long to descend, it felt as though we were walking into the bottom of an old ship or tomb. The light from the bare bulb swung around, throwing sharp black shadows that stretched and contracted across the plain dirt floor. I walked carefully, step by step, not wanting to fall and embarrass myself. A new calm came over me down there. The basement’s dark, cool dampness arrested my racing anxieties, softened the loud thudding of my heart. I thought of Joanie’s busted-up hardcover Nancy Drew mysteries. The Cellar of Secrets. Of course I’d been grossly miscast in my role as Eileen the conspirator, Eileen the gun-wielding accomplice, but once underground, I was becalmed. That basement was somehow my domain. At the bottom of the stairs, I dug my heels resolutely into the dirt. “Be cool,” Rebecca said to me. But I was cool. The gun in my hand was level and steady. When I turned the corner, I saw Mrs. Polk. There she was on the floor, legs akimbo, with her back against the wall. She had on dirty white bobby socks, a yellowed nightgown with lace at the throat. Her hair was loose and frizzy, face wet with tears. I have that picture set deep in my mind. She looked like a fat, old Cinderella, pale eyes darting back and forth innocently from Rebecca’s face to mine. Rebecca had tied the woman’s wrists together with the belt of her housecoat and strung them up to a pipe in the ceiling. There was little else to get tied to down there — an old rusty reel lawn mower, a broken wooden chair, a pile of wood pieces that looked like dismantled furniture — a dining table or a crib, perhaps.

“Don’t shoot,” the woman cried, uselessly trying to cover her face with her bound hands. “Please,” she begged. “Don’t kill me.” It seemed ridiculous at the time. Of course I wasn’t going to shoot her, I thought. I was glad my face was covered. It kept me from consoling Mrs. Polk with an assuring smirk or smile. Still, I kept the gun raised, pointed in her direction.

“She very well may shoot you,” said Rebecca softly, coaxingly, “unless you tell us the truth.”

“Which truth?” the woman cried. “I don’t know what you want. Please.” She peered up at me, as though I had an answer. I remained quiet. Even down there, pointing the gun at the poor woman, the situation had a curious element of make-believe. I may as well have been playing a party game, seven minutes in heaven, grappling around in the dark, doing things I’d never do in the light of day. I’d never played any of those make-out games, but I imagined that once you came out of the closet, you acted as though nothing had changed. No damage had been done. Everything seemed to go back to normal. Under the surface, however, either your popularity and prestige rose, or if you didn’t perform well, your reputation suffered. The stakes down there in the basement were still only as high as Rebecca’s esteem for me, my own happiness. Yet I had faith that her plan would work: Mrs. Polk would feel so relieved when she admitted what she and her husband had done to their son that she’d actually thank Rebecca for extracting the long-buried truth, saving her from her haunted world of secrets and lies. She could reunite with her son on new terms. She could live again. And Rebecca and I would be best friends forever as a result. Everything would be beautiful.

“Please,” said Mrs. Polk. “What do you want from me?”

“An explanation.” Rebecca puffed her chest out, put her hands on her hips. “We know it wasn’t easy for you, Rita, married to a man who likes little boys. We understand that you’ve been suffering alone in this house with your guilty conscience. It’s obvious you’re having a hard time. Just tell us why you helped your husband do what he did — why you gave Lee the enemas. Why didn’t you tell anybody what was going on? Tell us. Get it off your chest.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mrs. Polk asserted, averting her eyes. “I’d never do anything to hurt Lee. He’s my son. My flesh and blood. I’m his mother for Christ’s sake.”

“Eileen,” Rebecca said. I started at my name. “Do something.”

Holding the gun out, I approached Mrs. Polk. She let out an odd warbling scream, then yelled out again and again for help. A dog started barking somewhere aboveground and the sound echoed around the cellar between the woman’s cries. Rebecca covered her ears with her hands.

“Quiet,” I said. But Mrs. Polk’s screeching was too loud for her to hear me. “Screaming won’t help you,” I yelled, amplifying my voice in a way I’d never had to before. “Shut up!” She stopped screaming and looked at me, sucking in quick short breaths, her mouth sputtering with saliva. I took a step closer, the gun aimed straight at her face. I tried to think of what my father would say and do in my situation. “Don’t think I won’t pull the trigger,” I began. “Who would miss you? You could rot here forever. We could bury you right here,” I stamped my foot on the hard dirt floor, “and nobody would come digging because nobody cares if you live or die.” I can only say that given my home and professional life, I’d had years to learn how to speak in a way that made a person feel she had no option but to obey. In fact, I was uniquely prepared and qualified by experience to wrench the disgusting truth from this woman, I thought. I looked at Rebecca. She seemed to be deeply impressed by my performance. She took a step back, her mouth slightly open, and fluttered her hand as though to tell me to keep going. It was exciting. I adjusted the scarf over my nose and bent down to Mrs. Polk. Her face was wet with tears, red as a roasting pig.

“Death would be a blessing for someone like you,” I continued. “Admit it. You’ve got too much pride to own up to what you did to your son. You’d rather die than confess that you’ve done anything wrong. Pathetic,” I said, kicking at her feet. “Little piggy,” I added. My voice bounced off the walls with a strange quick echo. Mrs. Polk turned away, her face tense with fear, eyes pinched shut but cracking open to glance at the gun every now and then as I spoke. She whimpered. “You want to die?” I rushed toward her suddenly, bringing the gun just an inch from her face. I looked up at Rebecca. She stood in the swirling shadows, wide-eyed and smiling. “Admit it!” I screamed at Mrs. Polk, my voice louder than it had ever been. I felt so buoyed by my convincing display of rage, I actually began to feel enraged. My heart pounded. The basement seemed to go black but for Mrs. Polk’s blubbery body vibrating on the floor. As though I were drunk, I came at her violently again. I squatted down and tried to hit her with the gun across the top of her skull, but I barely grazed her. The butt of my fist just mussed her hair. Still, the gesture had her panting and crying even harder.

Rebecca stepped up. “I can’t protect you unless you confess,” she said. “Eileen has killed before,” she added.

“That’s right,” I said. It was a ridiculous scene, two girls making things up as they went along. If I had to do it again, I would have calmly pressed the barrel of the gun to the woman’s heart and let Rebecca do all the talking. I wouldn’t have lost my temper the way I did. Looking back, it still embarrasses me. But however silly I looked waving it around, the gun was having its effect on Mrs. Polk. Her face had lost its arrogant pout and when she opened her eyes, they were terrified and ready. “Tell us what happened in this house,” I said viciously. I put the gun to her temple.

“Please, don’t hurt me,” she whimpered, shaking.

“I won’t have to hurt you if you talk,” I agreed. But still, she just howled and sobbed. My arm got tired after a few minutes and I lowered the gun. Each time Mrs. Polk opened her eyes, I would raise it again. Finally she lifted her chin, grit her teeth.

“All right,” she said. “You win.”

“Are you ready to talk?” I asked her, my voice raised unnecessarily.

“Oh good,” said Rebecca, clasping her hands. “Thank God.”

I backed away from Mrs. Polk and sat down on the cold dirt floor, pulled my knees up toward my chest inside the warmth of my coat. The steam of my breath made my face wet beneath the scarf. I watched the woman catch her breath, collect herself. The gun had warmed in my hand. “We’re waiting,” I taunted her. She nodded. I wondered how well my father had known the Polks when he was still a cop, if Mr. Polk and he had shared chitchat over coffee, complained about their wives, their children. I don’t remember ever meeting Mr. Polk but if I did, he made no impression on me. I guess that is how those sick people get by. They look like nobodies, but behind closed doors they turn into monsters. Sitting there, I imagined that if Mrs. Polk were to go and confess everything to the police, they’d simply dismiss her as a woman with a sick imagination. The ball and chain concocting some unbelievable story to make her old man look bad. Trashy. That would have been my father’s explanation, I’m sure.

“I’ll be right back,” whispered Rebecca.

Startled, I raised the gun again. “Where are you going?” I asked, watching her cross the cellar floor. Mrs. Polk wheezed and sniffled, looked around, confused.

“To get something to write on,” Rebecca answered, hushed. “You’ll give us a signed confession,” she said louder, to Mrs. Polk. “And we’ll agree, you and I, that we won’t ever go to the police about any of this. We’ll put it in writing,” she said. Turning, she gestured for me to point the gun at Mrs. Polk, which I did. Then she flitted up the steep cellar stairs, closing the door to the kitchen behind her. I could hear her footsteps through the house, fainter as she walked up to the second floor. I propped the gun on my knees, looked at Mrs. Polk.

“I really don’t care what you did,” I told her. “Just confess and she’ll let you go, and you’ll never see us again.” I figured the struggle was over. Mrs. Polk had surrendered. I expected Rebecca to come back and untie her, rub the woman’s back while she scribbled and sobbed, begged God to forgive her. I aimed the gun in her direction, expecting more fearful shrieks. But she just looked at me, frowning.

“I tell you things, and then what?” she asked. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Run away?” She cried some more, quietly, her face slick with snot.

“There’s nowhere to run to,” she said. “I don’t have any money. I don’t have anyplace else to go.”

I shrugged. I thought of my stash of cash in the attic back home. Would I give my money to Mrs. Polk, forfeit my own escape to set her free and keep the authorities out of our hair — Rebecca’s and mine? The thought crossed my mind. Upstairs I heard Rebecca clanking around, floorboards creaking. I yearned for her to return, to heap praise on me, to thank me from the bottom of her heart, tell me I was her hero, an angel, a saint. Then we could take off together. In New York, people were kissing under mistletoe, dancing and pouring champagne and falling in love. And where was I? I was alone in a basement with a woman tied to a pipe. I didn’t want to watch Mrs. Polk cry anymore. I had played my part well, I thought. I stood up, dusted the dirt off my backside and gestured with the gun up at the ceiling. “She just wants to help,” I said. I could go to jail, I realized, if something went wrong. Still, I wasn’t afraid. I put the gun back down.

“She’s right, you know,” Mrs. Polk began. “That lady. Your friend?” Her voice was high and monotonous and clicked with phlegm as she spoke. “My boy wasn’t lying about his father. Mitch, my husband, he had bad habits. You know, strange tastes. I thought some men were just like that. I never got used to it, but you have to understand. I couldn’t just leave. You take an oath when you get married to honor and obey your husband. That’s what I did. Where was I supposed to go?” Her eyes glittered in the weak light. She swallowed, looked up at the ceiling and cleared her throat. Where was Rebecca? “At first I thought Mitch was just checking on him in his sleep, like a good father would,” Mrs. Polk went on. “Like he just wanted to be sure his son was safe and sound in bed. We all do that. But he’d spend a while. Bit by bit, longer each time, I guess. I don’t know how often. Sometimes I’d feel him getting out of bed. Sometimes I’d just feel him when he’d come back, and he’d kiss me or hold me, and you know. We hadn’t really been together since Lee’d been born. I’d lost interest. We’d lost interest. But suddenly Mitch wanted to be with me again. I was flattered. But I started getting these infections down there. Oh God,” she sighed, “in my private parts. The doctors said I had to wash more. I figured it was my fault. And then I wondered if Mitch had brought something home from a trip he took one summer to visit his brother in Toronto, or so he said. The clap? I don’t know what I was thinking. But I kept getting these infections. Then one night I got up in the middle of the night and went and looked and I saw Mitch in Lee’s bed. At first I had no clue what they were doing, and I just went back to bed. It didn’t dawn on me right away, I swear to you. You don’t expect your husband’s going to do a thing like that. It’s a hard thing to believe. But as time went on, I came to accept it. It couldn’t have hurt that much, I said to myself. Couldn’t be that bad, I thought. And Lee never said anything, so I figured it was OK. Maybe I’d been confused all along about men, I thought. Maybe all men do this with their sons. You start thinking that. It could be true. What did I know? And Lee seemed fine. Quiet kid, good kid, decent grades, sweet boy. Barely said a word, played nice with the neighbors, nothing out of order. So I got used to it. And then I figured, if he was clean, it would be better for all of us. Maybe I wouldn’t get those infections. They hurt, you know, when Mitch and I were together. Lee wasn’t a big eater anyway, and I got to know what foods ran through him which ways,” she said, “to make the enemas easier. It sounds funny, I know. I knew what I was doing wasn’t quite right. But Lee was such a sweet kid, brave, you know, he didn’t question it. He always just wanted to make everybody happy. He’d say, ‘I just don’t want anybody to be mad at me.’ Made me all kinds of pretty cards at school for Christmas and Valentine’s. Good boy, back then, I thought. So I put on a happy face. What else could I do? They don’t tell you about these things. They don’t prepare you for problems like that.”

“They?” I asked.

Mrs. Polk didn’t answer. She just bent forward, shook her head back and forth, stunned, it seemed, by her own words. I heard Rebecca’s footsteps through the house again, even-tempoed but slow. Mrs. Polk looked up toward the ceiling, huffed, fighting back more tears. “Who do you tell? I wasn’t going to tell anyone. You do the best you can. You know what happens when you have children? Your husband never looks at you the same. I blamed myself, you know. I ate too much. And Mitch didn’t find me attractive anymore. We hadn’t been together in years before that started, with Lee. Then it just became habit, the way things went. I was alone all day, you know. I was a housewife. I had nobody else, you understand. Mitch didn’t talk to me, just came home, ate his dinner, drank, and I was just a stranger in the room, a nuisance. He could barely stand me. But after he went to bed with Lee, he’d come to me. And it was like a big burden had been lifted. He was relaxed. And it felt good, how he’d hold me. He loved me then. He was tender. I knew he loved me. He would show it. He’d whisper and kiss me and say nice things. It was the way it had been before, when we were young and happy and in love, and it felt good to me. Is that so wrong? To want to feel that way? I even got pregnant once, but I lost it. I didn’t care. I had my husband back. You wouldn’t understand,” she said, looking up at me. “You’re young. You haven’t had your heart broken.”

But I understood her perfectly. Of course I did. Who wouldn’t?

She began to cry again, solemnly this time.

“There, there,” I said, the first time in my life I had ever sincerely tried to comfort anyone. We sat in silence for a moment. Then we heard the door open, footsteps. We both turned to watch Rebecca float down the stairs, carrying a pad of paper and a pen.

“Will you untie me now?” Mrs. Polk looked at me. “I’ve said everything.”

Rebecca looked at me suspiciously. I nodded. “It’s true,” I said, all my rage now gone. Mrs. Polk’s eyes darted nervously from Rebecca’s face to mine, then down at the gun on the floor.

“We’ll untie you once you agree to our terms,” Rebecca said. “And sign a contract. Eileen,” she looked at me incredulously. “What did she say?” I wasn’t going to repeat to Rebecca what Mrs. Polk had said. There was no polite way to phrase it. Rebecca grunted in frustration. “Eileen,” she whined. To Mrs. Polk she said, “You’ll have to write it all down, or else our deal is off.”

“What deal?” Mrs. Polk was now clear-eyed, flushed more with anger than fear.

“The deal is you admit what you’ve done and we don’t kill you.” Rebecca was angry now, too, at Mrs. Polk and at me, it seemed. “Hand me the gun, Eileen,” Rebecca said gruffly. I did as I was told. I didn’t want her to turn against me. She stood back looking down at Mrs. Polk, as I had done earlier. “Tell me what you told her,” she insisted, holding the gun awkwardly, her elbows bent outward, her fingers closed over the barrel. Mrs. Polk looked at me, as though I could save her.

“Be careful,” I told Rebecca. She rolled her eyes.

“Rita,” she said. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Shoot me,” the woman cried. “I don’t care anymore.” I could barely breathe under my wool scarf. I lowered it from my face and wiped my sweaty cheeks with the cuff of my coat.

“I know you,” said Mrs. Polk suddenly, dismayed. “You’re the girl from Moorehead.”

Rebecca turned to me, shocked. “What are you doing, Eileen?” I fumbled to pull the scarf back up.

“She already knew my name,” I said in my defense. “Rebecca.”

What happened next is still unclear, but as far as I could tell, Rebecca took one hand off the gun to pull back the cuffs of her robe, and when she gripped the gun again, her hands shook, she fumbled and the gun fell and fired as it hit the floor. The blast stopped us all from breathing. I crouched down and froze. Rebecca hid her face in her hands and turned away from us. Mrs. Polk was silent, drew her fat legs up to her large chest, exposing her fleshy calves and knees. Outside the dog began to bark again. And then, the blast still echoing in my ears, we three looked at one another.

“Shit,” said Rebecca. She pointed at Mrs. Polk’s right arm, a quickly spreading darkness seeping through her quilted housecoat.

“You shot me?” Mrs. Polk asked, her voice suddenly childlike with disbelief.

“Shit,” Rebecca said again.

Mrs. Polk started to scream again, struggling against her restraints. “I’m bleeding!” she cried. “Call a doctor!” She became hysterical, as anyone would.

“Hush,” said Rebecca, going to Mrs. Polk’s side. “The neighbors will hear you. Don’t make it any worse. Quit fussing,” she said, covering the woman’s mouth with her hand. I had warned Rebecca about the gun. Mrs. Polk would be fine, I assured myself. A superficial flesh wound was all I thought she’d suffered. Her arm was wide and fatty. No great harm had occurred, I thought. But the woman could not be soothed. She panted like a crazed animal and shook her head violently against Rebecca’s hold, trying to scream for help. I picked up the gun, and feeling the strange heat through the grip, I was struck with an idea.

You can think what you want, that I was vicious and conniving, that I was selfish, delusional, so twisted and paranoid that only death and destruction would satisfy me, make me happy. You can say I had a criminal mind, I was pleased only by the suffering of others, what have you. In a moment’s time I figured out how to solve everyone’s problems — mine, Rebecca’s, Mrs. Polk’s, my father’s. I came up with a plan to take Mrs. Polk to my house, shoot her, wait until she died, leave the gun in my father’s hands — he would be passed out drunk — then drive off into the sunrise. Yes, of course I wanted to run off, and all the more if Rebecca would come with me. And yes, I thought killing Mrs. Polk was the only way to save Rebecca and me from the consequences of Rebecca’s scheme. If Mrs. Polk were dead, no one would know that Rebecca and I had been involved, I figured. We’d be free.

But I was also thinking of my father. Nothing I could do would ever inspire him to dry out for good, get straight, be the father I wanted. He couldn’t even see how sick he was. Only a massive shock would wake him up. If he believed he’d killed an innocent woman, that might be enough to shake him. Then he might see the light, accept the truth of his condition. He might have a change of heart. If they asked my father why he shot Mrs. Polk, maybe he’d mutter something about me and Lee, suggesting he thought that Lee was my boyfriend. The police would see he’d really lost his mind. They’d put him in prison maybe, but more likely they’d take him to a hospital, treat him well, nurse him back to health. I’d be long gone, of course, but at least he’d have the presence of mind to miss me, to regret what he’d put me through, to wish he could somehow make amends.

And as for me, I’d put off my escape from X-ville for long enough, my desire to leave always outweighed by my laziness and fear. If I killed Mrs. Polk, I’d be forced out of X-ville once and for all. I’d have to change my name. I’d have to completely disappear. Only fear of imprisonment, restitution, could propel me to leave. I could stay in X-ville and face hell, or I could disappear. I gave myself no choice. Shooting Mrs. Polk was the only option.

But how would we get Mrs. Polk to my house without her screaming the whole ride long? I wondered, turning the gun over in my hands. She bucked and stomped, wailing and gnashing her teeth as Rebecca shushed her and tried to stifle the screams by pressing her hands over the woman’s mouth, but it was like stopping a break in a dam — Mrs. Polk refused to quiet down. Her arm was bleeding, but not profusely. Rebecca looked at me in desperation.

“What do we do?”

I shuffled around in my purse for my mother’s pills. “I have these,” I said, shaking the bottle. “They’re for pain.”

“Tranquilizers?” Rebecca’s face brightened. She grabbed them from my hand. “What else do you have in your purse, Eileen?” she asked. I didn’t catch her sarcasm at first.

“Lipstick,” I answered.

I watched as Rebecca approached Mrs. Polk again, this time cautiously, coolly, as she would a frightened animal. The woman twisted her neck and bucked her head as Rebecca reached out to grab her face, one fist under her jaw, holding the pills in her other hand. She wrestled with the woman’s head like a farmer with a cow, pinched her nose closed. Seeing her move like that made me wonder still, where had Rebecca come from? Perhaps she was a country girl, a farmer’s daughter, a rancher. Truthfully, I cared less and less to make sense of her. I watched as Mrs. Polk clenched her jaw, held her breath, stared up fiercely into Rebecca’s eyes. Finally her lips parted, and Rebecca opened her fist and took the pills in her other hand and worked them into Mrs. Polk’s mouth. I was crouched down at a distance, observing them. I had a strangely comic impulse to pray or sing. I thought of the rites of passage I’d read about in National Geographic, bizarre ceremonies where people are bound and gagged, left in the desert, trapped in cages for days without food or water, administered hallucinogenic drugs so powerful that they forget their childhoods, their names. They return to their villages entirely new people, imbued with the spirit of God, fearless of death, and respected by everyone. Perhaps this experience in the basement, I thought, was akin to that. After it was over I’d be living on a higher plane. No one could ever hurt me, I imagined. I’d be immune.

“You’ll be sorry!” Mrs. Polk cried once the pills went down. “I know you now. I’ll tell everyone what you’ve done.”

“Nobody will believe you,” said Rebecca, her tone not as assured or confident as it should have been.

“Like hell,” said Mrs. Polk, eyeing me. There was no great heartfelt surrender in the basement that night, just the three of us, our faces shiny with sweat or tears in the quaking light. Rebecca and I sat back and waited. The stain of blood on Mrs. Polk’s arm seemed to stop spreading. Her breathing began to slow. “Get out, go away,” she whined. “Get the hell out of here.” Her voice dragged out like a slowing record bit by bit as the pills took effect. Once she was asleep, slumped against the wall, mouth leaking, tears drying into a crust around her eyes, Rebecca and I began to whisper. It took less than ten minutes, I’d say, to convince her that my plan was a good one. “My father’s a drunk,” I said. “If he killed somebody, it’d be on the cops — they should have locked him up years ago. Maybe they’ll find Mrs. Polk and sweep the whole thing under the rug. It doesn’t matter. We’ll be fine.” Rebecca’s face had flattened and stiffened, her knuckles white as she clutched the dirty hem of her robe. “We’ll have to hide out somewhere,” I added, trying to maintain my composure. “I was thinking New York City.”

“How do we get her to your father’s house?” is all Rebecca asked me.

“We’ll have to carry her out to the car.” It seemed easy.

“And you’ll shoot her?”

“My father will,” I said. “But we’ll pull the trigger.”

“We?” Rebecca’s eyebrows lifted. She pushed her hair out of her face.

“I will,” I assented. It didn’t seem so terrible. The woman had nothing to live for anyway. Either she could die quickly and painlessly or stay and rot in that awful house of hers, her dark past weighing on her day after day. “It won’t hurt,” I said. “Look.” I kicked at the woman’s fat feet. “She’s out cold.”

After a few moments of biting her lip and wringing her hands, Rebecca agreed. Together we untied Mrs. Polk’s hands and lifted her off the floor. Remarkable how much a human being can weigh, I remember thinking. I took her from under her shoulders and Rebecca held her feet, and we hoisted her bit by bit up the steps, me going backward and bearing most of the load. It took every reserve of energy I had, and by the time we’d reached the top of the stairs, my knees shook and my arms burned. “Let’s take a break,” I said. But Rebecca insisted we move quickly.

“Let’s get her out of here. Then you go on ahead to your father’s house. Get him ready. I’ll clean up here. We can’t leave any evidence behind.” She grabbed Mrs. Polk’s feet again. The weight of her body was like a tub of water. Her head fell back toward me, her mouth hung open. When I looked down into it, her teeth were brown, her gums nearly white. She was as good as dead already, I thought. Rebecca stopped to cover her with her robe before we carried her out the front door. We moved carefully, but it was impossible not to bump her rear end on the frozen steps. A few times Rebecca slipped and let Mrs. Polk’s legs hit the snow on the path to the sidewalk. It was slapstick, ridiculous, and I remember the jubilance rising from my chest into my throat. Once the woman was in the car, I paused to exhale, looked up at the sky, the stars spangled across the darkness like splattered paint. I thought I might burst into hysterical laughter under the quiet of that night, the beautiful stillness. I could feel the entire universe revolving around me in that moment. Rebecca looked tense. I shut the car door and put my death mask on then, tried to contain my excitement. I can’t tell you what I was thinking. I’m not here to make excuses.

“I’ll see you,” Rebecca said suddenly, turning to dash back into the house.

I called out after her. “I’ll be waiting!” My voice bounded loud across the snow-filled yard. Rebecca turned and put a finger to her lips to hush me. “We can go anywhere we want,” I said, hushed. “Just the two of us. I have money. No one will ever find us.” I gave her my address. “A block from the elementary school. Can you find it?”

She just waved, hopped up the icy stairs, and closed the door behind her.