Lie Still

32

I stood it as long as I could. My bladder was a water balloon ready to burst.

Mike had pulled Dickie up, helped him to the front door, and vanished behind it about twenty minutes ago.

The troopers settled back in their shiny Dodge Charger, pretty fancy for Appalachia. The officer on the passenger side tapped cigarette ash out of his window every ten seconds or so, while a Garth Brooks song floated its way back to me.

Pretty nice stereo, too. There was no evidence either officer figured me to be somebody to protect or worry about.

I slid out of the car slowly, momentarily drunk with the smell of fir trees and crisp oxygen. I briefly considered finding a bush to squat behind. A pregnant bladder knows no social boundaries. But I really didn’t want to provide a peep show for Kentucky troopers. One foot had fallen asleep, so I hopped a little on the way to their car. Lloyd, the one in the driver’s seat, readjusted the rearview mirror to watch me approach. His deliberate coolness struck me as bad cinematic drama.

His elbow jutted out of the open window.

“Sir,” I said. It was a word that rarely found itself in my mouth, but the South and his Dudley Doright hat inspired it. “I’m going up there. I need to use the bathroom.” I pointed to my stomach and offered a smile. I felt ridiculous.

His expression said too much information and his lips said “Go ahead,” almost taunting. I waited for him to offer to accompany me. He didn’t.

In his low drawl, the Go ahead sounded like a dare. I banged three times on the arched oak door with my fist and waited a decent thirty seconds. No response. With a twist of the knob, the door swung open into a vestibule crowded with plastic lawn chairs and dried flower arrangements. A black lawn jockey with chipped paint and exaggerated African American features stood by the staircase, holding a lantern.

I wondered how two Southern-born men could send a pregnant woman in here alone. I was slammed with the powerful odor of mildew. A wide, sweeping staircase lined with the requisite family photos curled upward. I pinched my nose and breathed through my mouth.

To my left, a multithousand-dollar dust-and-cobweb-encrusted crystal chandelier dangled over a room that had abandoned the idea of hosting guests for dinner decades ago. Jumbles of clothes cloaked the floor, reminding me of the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese, where kids jumped in and vanished. Hell, in this, I could disappear. I didn’t want to think about what was nesting underneath all of it.

To my right, it was a different story. The room was full of tidy trash. Recycling bins, with plastic cups and greasy take-out cartons tossed like a salad with empty cans, glass jars, and bottles. At least fifty rolls of unused toilet paper were stacked on the hearth. Yellowing old newspapers and stuffed black garbage bags with zip ties lined one wall. Neat. Compulsive.

The fear of throwing things away. Disposophobia, I remembered. A disease immortalized by the legendary Collyer brothers, who’d been found dead in their mess in a Harlem brownstone.

I remembered, too, that the Collyers used booby traps.

Mike’s voice carried down the hall from the back of the house. Calm. Pleasant. A husky chuckle, and a snort back from Richard Deacon. My husband, working his magic.

My bladder hurt like hell. I needed to hurry this up and get back to the car before Mike knew I’d left it. I ventured down the hall, past stacks of encyclopedias, scrapbooks, papers, and enough old novels to start a used bookstore. So Richard Deacon was a reader. I glimpsed titles: Robinson Crusoe, The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina. Dead authors. It made me think of Lucy, who read only novels by people who weren’t alive.

I found a powder room to the right and flicked the switch. Nope. Bulb out. The hall light dimly spotlighted a blue pedestal sink nearly buried beneath an empty beer bottle, a can of Barbasol shaving cream, a flashlight, and a toothbrush with flattened bristles.

I pressed the button on the flashlight. Nothing. My eyes adjusted. At least it smelled better in here. No toilet paper, however, unless I wanted to make a trip back to the sitting room. On the tank of the toilet, Newt Gingrich’s biography and Miracles: A 52-Week Devotional. I shut the door with my foot and squatted in absolute darkness, hopefully in the position I’d plotted out. Ironic that I’d just seen a sign in a truck stop bathroom this morning: LADIES, PLEASE REMAIN SEATED FOR THE ENTIRE PERFORMANCE.

Fat chance of that here or there. I wasn’t touching a thing if I could help it. Something scuttled across the floor above my head, and I rapidly pulled up my maternity jeans. Thirty-three more pounds to go before they would burst apart.

My head spun a little in the dark. I realized I’d been holding my breath and released it in a ragged hiccup. I flushed and twisted the bathroom doorknob, using my sleeve. The door ran smack into Mike. Richard Deacon stood just a few steps behind him.

“What the hell are you doing?” Mike demanded.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“I asked you to wait in the car.”

“You didn’t hear me knock?” Caroline’s ex was much better up close. A decaying Daniel Craig in a fishing shirt from Goodwill. Once, a match for a debutante. “I’m Mike’s wife, Emily.” I slid into a deferential twang. “Thank you so much for letting me use your powder room.”

“No problem at all, ma’am. I’m just embarrassed the place isn’t a little better kept up for a lady. You might be noticin’ my limp. No more climbin’ poles for Kentucky Power. Live on disability. Would you like to come on back to the kitchen with us for a Tab?” Not so Daniel Craig-y. But polite.

Mike glared at me.

“Sure,” I said.

The spotless kitchen was completely unexpected. A gleaming avocado-green refrigerator and matching gas stove. Basic spices-garlic salt, minced onion, black pepper-lined up on the back ledge. An old, still-white Formica counter with a neat row of canned Del Monte green beans, shoepeg corn, and Le Sueur peas. A scrubbed yellow linoleum floor. A small kitchen table that reminded me of my grandmother’s.

“This is where I live most the time. I sleep in the back bedroom. Hardly ever make it upstairs. Them roof rats are havin’ a heyday up there.”

He set an ice-cold can of Tab in front of me before returning to the refrigerator. Instead of opening it, he reached up for a ceramic cookie jar shaped like a black cat, perched on top. He placed the jar gingerly in front of Mike.

“Mike and I were about to get to what’s inside here. I never wanted to turn on my son. He’s my blood. But after gettin’ to know Mike here a little, I feel that God led him up the mountain. Go on, open it.”

Mike carefully pulled off the head of the grinning cat. Inside, I could see what looked like a curled stash of papers.

“Go on, take ’em out. Ma’am, you might not want to look.” I watched Mike hesitate, no doubt wondering whether to touch them. Evidence. He slipped his forefinger and thumb inside and delicately pinched them out. I caught a glimpse of the one on top, right before the papers snapped back into a roll. The drawing of a prostrate body. Crude. Childish. Red. Red. Red.

“It makes me want to throw up, too,” Dickie apologized. “This here’s some of Wyatt’s drawings after Caroline left us. I’ve been wanting to give these to the police ever since I was saved in the Motel 6 swimming pool a couple years ago.” Saved. Baptized. “I’m going to wash my hands of Wyatt now and give him to the Lord.”

“Do you have a large Ziploc bag, Dickie?” Mike was frowning at the pages. “I think it’s better if I examine these drawings somewhere else. I appreciate your cooperation.”

“Sure, sure.” Dickie reached into a drawer. “I feel bad. I thought I’d feel less guilty. I just feel more guilty.” Eyes shiny.

Wet.

Dickie wasn’t quite what I expected. More sympathetic. “I was a… friend of Caroline’s,” I said impulsively. “I’d love to see those pictures on the staircase. We held a small memorial for her the other day and we had no mementoes of her past to display. Do you mind?”

“Sure, ma’am. Let’s take a look. I never understood why Caroline didn’t take those pictures with her. Guess she was in such a damn hurry. Haven’t thought about them in years.”

Dickie led me to the staircase. Mike followed, holding his Ziploc bag of grisly drawings and staring a burning hole into my back. I began to climb the steps slowly, wondering why this had seemed like a good idea. It was impossible to see the details of the photos arrayed on the walls. The dust was so thick it appeared to be squares of brown woven cloth.

“Here.” Dickie tossed me a grimy T-shirt retrieved from the dining room floor. “That should help clear things up.”

I caught it, deciding to be grateful that he threw me a shirt and not his underwear. I dusted off the first picture. A charcoal rendering of a young Caroline and a baby. She held the infant awkwardly, or else the artist was a novice, still inept at sketching human shapes. Arms are notoriously hard to draw.

I moved up a step, took another tentative swipe, sneezed, and uncovered the actual photograph used for the painting in Caroline’s dining room, the one of her astride the horse. Every detail of the painting seemed identical. Had she been photographed at her parents’ place? How far from here was that? I couldn’t remember whether Mike said, just that it was essentially an estate.

Another step. The next three pictures recorded a boy growing up. Surely Wyatt, Caroline and Richard’s son. A boy whose life would make perfect fodder for that dysfunctional modern fiction that Lucy so hated.

At two or three, Wyatt seemed impish, normal, unaware of anything worse than a transient wasp sting, posed in that silly way professionals insist on, leaning forward, two hands under his chin. A baby pinup.

At nine or ten, the blue eyes and blond hair were going dark, the nose sharpening, the smile not quite reaching his eyes. He gripped a wriggling dachshund puppy with about as much affection as his mother held him with, two pictures down. Maybe he’d wanted a less wimpy dog and more normal parents.

The next photo leapt several years ahead. I leaned in to see the writing etched in the corner with black pen. Wyatt, 14. Close to the time he’d been sent to the juvenile detention center. Tall for his age, a cut-off shirt baring lean muscles, jeans riding low, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling out of his mouth. Appalachian cool.

Wyatt was not classically good-looking, but cocky and magnetic and rife with hormones. The kind of guy who scared the shit out of me. He looked as if he knew I was on the other side of the glass and could yank me right into his world. His choice, always, not mine. I reminded myself he was alive somewhere on this side of the glass and approaching middle age, probably with a prescription for Crestor.

I fluffed the shirt at a few more pictures of dead ancestors before turning abruptly and bumping into Mike.

“Careful,” he warned, grasping my arm. In my ear, he whispered, “We’re leaving. Now.”

Richard Deacon was nowhere in sight.

“Where the hell did he go?” Mike muttered under his breath.

A wavery apparition appeared in a square patch of sunlight on the floor below. Mike instantly, firmly, placed one palm on the back of my neck, ever alert, ready to push me out of the way. His other hand, I knew, was on his holster.

Dickie emerged from the hallway.

“You can have this,” he told me, holding a fat photo album. “To show her friends.”

I stepped onto the landing, and Dickie nervously thrust out the album, like maybe I wouldn’t want it. I couldn’t tell what color the album was, for all of the dust and age. Maybe green. Maybe not. My fingers grasped the edges, because it would have been rude not to.

A few gold letters broke through: AM and BUM. Perfect.

“Caroline kept up her picture albums and diaries pretty good. I used to say to her, ‘Nobody could have that much to say about hisself.’ She always told me I had ruint her dreams about being a writer or a movie star. Anyway, I don’t want it back. I’m washin’ myself of her, too.”

A pale brown spider was traveling up and over the corner of the album, on a speedy route to my hand. Mike caught the album in the air as I let it go, flicking the spider to the floor and crushing it with the heel of his boot.

Mike stuck out his hand to Dickie, and this time it was caught in a firm grip.

“When you find our son, you’ll let me know?” Dickie asked, his eyes, the ones Caroline once stared into, still wet with tears.

“You’ll be my first call.”