Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Thirty-four

The young officer’s words echoed off the hard walls like a palm slapping smooth skin. “She was buried in the dirt floor of the garage…wrapped in plastic…melted against her skin…estimating she’s been dead longer, maybe a month more than the man.”

“The woman who lived in the cottage?” Dillard’s voice boomed, like a cannon.

“No reports of any other women missing,” the young cop said.

Dillard’s head turned, I think, to look at me. I was looking at nothing, a foot to the right of the young officer leaning against the doorjamb.

Dillard turned back to the young cop. “Any hope for a positive I.D.?”

“There’s quite a bit of destruction from the fire, but the coroner says the dentals are usable, if we can get comparison records.”

I made myself look at the young cop. “Does she have a slightly crooked eyetooth?”

“What?”

“A crooked eyetooth, left side?” My voice sounded so calm that I had the ludicrous suspicion that somebody else was manipulating my mouth, to make the words come out right.

The young cop moved to Dillard’s desk, picked up the phone, and murmured something into it.

After a minute, he set down the receiver and turned to me. “Left front.”

I asked if I could go then.

“No need for you to go to Rambling,” Lieutenant Dillard said.

“No, I couldn’t do that,” my damned calm voice said.

“Absolutely nothing to look at out there,” the young officer with life ahead of him added, lounging against Dillard’s desk like nothing in the world was wrong.

I wanted to knock him down, shock that stupid, lazy look off his face, but I wouldn’t have the strength.

“I’m done here,” I said.

“You’re sure about that crooked eyetooth?” Dillard asked.

“Maris Mays,” I said.

I have no memory of being driven back to the motel, nor of walking up the outside stairs to my room to pack my few things in my duffel. I can only assume that I signed my credit card slip in a normal enough fashion. Perhaps, if asked, I might even have said that everything about my stay had been fine, thank you very much. I don’t remember.

I do remember the snow. The sky, which had been gray all day, had given up and gone black by the time I crossed from Michigan into Indiana and began hurling down great, jagged flakes that rained into the beams of my headlights like ragged white shingles. I was grateful for that, grateful for the cover of the snow and the crawling speed that asked nothing of me except to follow the red taillights of the truck ahead. I shifted from second gear to third gear to second again, easy on the accelerator, easy on the clutch, thinking only with my ears, to keep the whine of the engine steady above the rhythmic pit-pat of my windshield wipers. Mile after mile, the snow blurred away the other cars and trucks, the exits and the trees and the lives that were still going on around me. Except for the red lights ahead, I was alone on that interstate expressway.

Several times my cell phone chirped, but there was nobody in the world who could tell me anything I wanted to hear, so I let it ring, until finally, somewhere around La Porte, perhaps, I thought to shut it off.

I got back to Rivertown sometime very late. Ten or twelve inches of snow had already fallen, and it was still coming down. Locking the Jeep, I looked up at the turret. It looked foreign, a dark oddity against the snow-blurred moon. It was not my place, not in the middle of that night. My place was somewhere else, in a spring and in a summer, long ago.

I started across the vacant spit of land. Snow jammed up, frigid and wet, between my skin and the legs of my jeans. It didn’t matter.

No john-cars prowled Thompson Avenue. The tonks were dark, their neon signs cold. The good-time district had been hushed, made virginal, by the thick covering of snow. I cut onto a side street. I could only start there.

I walked slowly along the sidewalk, my footfalls dropping silent in the thick new snow. By now, my Nikes were soaked. It was proper. Boots would have been wrong for the walk I was taking. That day in August had been hot.

The wood-sided three-flat where my aunt had lived, where I’d been staying that August, was gone. It had been knocked down sometime in the years I’d been away, its lot graveled over for parking, pending development, I supposed, by some fool of an optimistic owner. So far, development hadn’t come.

The florist’s shop had been five blocks over. I used to hurry those blocks, that summer. Now there was no need.

The florist was gone. A cut-rate liquor store had taken over. I strained to see through the pull-down steel fence, through the windows, to where the counter and the refrigerated cabinets had been. It was too dark. The door was a putrid yellowish green in the light of the halogen security bulb. It had been pink that August, that last time I’d pushed it open, wondering why Maris was so late getting off work.

I left, followed our way from the florist’s, turned onto Thompson, toward her apartment. My mind clicked off the fronts as they used to be: a shoe store, the Montgomery Ward catalog outlet, the Salvation Army resale store. The tonks, of course, dozens of them, then like now. Up ahead, the white ten pin light of the bowling alley flickered and went dark.

I stopped in front of her door, on that same piece of sidewalk I’d haunted as a boy. Next to me, the video arcade was dark, emptied for another night of its dealers and delinquents. With a hand shielding my eyes from the falling snow, I squinted down Thompson Avenue, trying to fix the place where she’d stopped, startled, before she’d put on a smile and hurried toward me.

Everything was blurry. I wiped at my wet eyes with the sleeve of my coat. It could have been the snow, running down my face.

“You’re sure?”

She answered into my chest, something about a doctor and the middle of a second trimester. I said I didn’t understand the words. She pushed away from my shirt, wet now from her sudden tears and my sweat in the August heat.

“I suppose we could get married,” I said, instantly ashamed at the tentativeness of my words.

She wiped at her eyes and then cupped wet hands to the sides of my face. She smiled. But it wasn’t Maris’s smile; it belonged to an older woman, someone wiser than me, somebody I took to be condescending. “Dek, you’re so stupid, so naive,” she said, as though, I thought, to a child.

“I’ll get a job, we’ll get a place.“

“I love you, Dek,” she said-and laughed. Her face was wet, her nose was running, but she laughed. At my stupidity, I thought.

“Why are you laughing?” I screamed, furious at her mocking. “I can take care of you.”

A couple, walking by, moved closer to the curb.

Maris looked at me, her reddened eyes wide at my sudden rage. And then she tugged at her door, ran inside, and slammed it behind her.

I never saw her again.