Mission Flats

43

I lingered over the evidence in the room, burned the details into memory — a smear of blood on the door, body odor, the ache in my fist — as if to convince myself of what had just happened. This blood, this odor, this pain was real and actual. This was the proof. Yet there was no fear, no thrumming nerves or pounding heart, no emotional evidence. Just this sense of unreality and draining mood. Plane-crash survivors seem to know this emotion. They do not celebrate their survival. They wander out of cornfields looking shocked and hung over and vaguely remorseful.

But I had given Braxton my word. So, after a period of staring into space, I rolled onto the bed with the chair clinging to me like a jealous child. My keys were in a coat pocket and at length I was able to extract them and uncuff my hands. It was only quarter past midnight, to my great surprise.

I called Caroline at home to ask about the little girl. Only a day earlier, she’d had no trouble believing I could be Bob Danziger’s killer. Her words were fresh in memory, an audio loop of her voice that I could still hear:

Ben, what do you want me to say?

That you believe me.

I don’t even know you.

It was hard to fault her for being cautious. She was a prosecutor, and I a suspect. Truly she didn’t know me; she’d had no reason to trust me. In her shoes, I might have done the same thing. All of which may not have mattered anyway. It may have been too late for me to simply erase Caroline Kelly from memory. The heart recalls what the head would rather forget. But now where did we stand?

So I called, woke her, and sketched in the incident, omitting the detail of the gun against my scalp.

Caroline was instantly awake. Throughout the tale, she repeated, ‘Braxton what? He what?’

‘Look, can we not make a big deal of it? I’m beat. I’ll file a report tomorrow.’

‘Not make a big deal? Are you insane?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Ben, are you okay? You sound kind of spacey’

‘I’m fine. Something’s going on and I don’t know what it is. You’ll check on the kid?’

‘Ben, I’m coming over.’

‘No, don’t do that.’

‘You’ll let Harold Braxton come but not me?’

‘Caroline, please. I’m tired. I just don’t want to play that whole scene. I don’t want to write a report, I don’t want twenty cops in my room. We’ll talk tomorrow.’

‘I won’t tell anyone. I’ll come, just me.’

As much as I wanted to see Caroline, I did not want to do it right then. I needed a chance to compose my thoughts, to sort things out first. ‘Caroline — Look, you and I have to talk. I mean, really talk. I just don’t have the energy to do it right now.’

‘I just want to see if you’re alright.’

‘I know. But — don’t take this the wrong way — you’re hard work.’

At the other end, the mouthpiece rustled against her chin. ‘That’s not true.’ A pause. ‘I’m just going to come and see if you’re okay, then I’ll leave.’

‘Caroline, I just got through saying-’

‘I know, Ben, but see, I’m not asking you for permission. I’m telling you, I’m coming. You can think I’m a bitch if you want to.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Is there anything you need?’

‘A restraining order.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Caroline, you know, we’re not gonna… you know.’

‘Oh, Jesus, Chief Truman! Don’t worry, I won’t take advantage of you.’

‘That’s what I mean about hard work. Stuff like that.’

‘What? I’m sorry. I was just teasing.’

‘Well I don’t want to be teased, alright? I’ve had a rough few days here, in case you haven’t noticed.’ I caught the note of whining in my voice. ‘Can you just turn it off for one night?’

‘I’m coming.’

It was like telling the cat to stay off the sofa. ‘Alright, fine, come. Bring some booze, as long as you’re making the trip.’

Thirty minutes later, Caroline was at the door with a bottle of Jim Beam.

She poured a glass, thrust it at me, then retreated to a corner chair, where she made a gesture of surrender, hands up, fingers splayed, as if to say I’m keeping my distance.

I stood at the window, at the spot where Braxton had looked out. There was an atavistic simplicity to this view of the city. Under a full moon, the South End stretched for long, low blocks of eighteenth-century brownstones, and the steeple of Holy Cross Cathedral was still the highest structure in sight. Somewhere off to the northwest was Mission Flats. And superimposed over all of it was my own face reflected in the glass.

‘Are you bleeding?’ Caroline asked. She pointed to a streak of blood on the door.

‘That’s not mine. It was some monster Braxton had with him.’

‘What happened?’

‘You’re not going to believe this, but I hit him.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘Don’t be. I think I broke my hand.’

The whiskey scraped a little going down but it warmed my stomach. ‘Did you take care of that thing with the little girl?’

‘It’s all set. They’re bringing her to her grandmother’s now. She wouldn’t talk to anyone at the station. They didn’t know what to do with her.’

‘Good, I’m glad. Thank you for doing that.’

I peered out the window a moment longer.

‘Ben, is something bothering you?’

‘No, I’m fine. They didn’t touch me.’

‘I meant, are you upset about something?’ But she thought better of pursuing me. Leaning forward, she said, ‘Maybe you don’t want to talk about it. I’ll go if you want. I see you’re not hurt.’

‘No, stay. I mean, if you want, you can stay’

Caroline leaned back again, pulled her knees up, and sat curled in the chair. She was wearing jeans and a baseball jacket, and even this simple outfit she invested with stylishness. There was always something about the way this not-quite-beautiful woman wore her clothes that compelled me. I have no doubt that if she were wearing the PROPERTY OF BUFFALO SABRES T-shirt that I had on at the time — a relic as dingy and thin as a moth’s wing — she would have looked elegant in it, too.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

‘I’m just feeling a little lost, that’s all.’

‘Why lost?’ I didn’t respond and she prodded, ‘Say it.’

‘My mother’s dead.’

She tilted her head in a sympathetic way, and I hurried to cut her off before she could offer the usual sticky condolence. ‘I’m just still getting used to the idea. My mother’s really dead.’

Caroline waited for more, but how could I explain it? How could I convey the three-dimensional reality — the skin, the warm breath, the voice — of the person who’d vanished? What would the obscure, lost history of Annie Truman mean to someone who’d never met her?

‘There’s a lake in Versailles,’ I said to the window, ‘called Lake Mattaquisett, very beautiful, very cold in springtime. We have a home movie of my mother floating on a tire tube in that lake. She’s wearing a yellow bathing suit and she’s pregnant with me. We used to pull out the movie projector on rainy days and we’d watch it. In the movie she’s young, maybe thirty or so, a little older than I am now. She’s laughing, happy. I have that image in my memory. I’m not sure why’

‘Because you miss her.’

I nodded.

‘I’m sure she was proud of you, of how you turned out.’

‘I guess.’

‘Ben, I’m a mother too. Trust me, she’d be proud of you.’

‘I think she’d be happy I came back here, to this city. She’d get a kick out of this, too, what we’re doing.’

‘What are we doing?’

‘Flirting. Or not flirting, whatever it is. She’d love this.’

‘Are we flirting, Ben?’

‘I don’t know. Aren’t we?’

She pretended to fiddle with a thread.

‘Do you know your dad goes to your sister’s grave every day?’

‘Yes.’

‘Every day. Still.’

‘It gets better, Ben. It takes time.’

‘That’s just what your father told me.’

I sipped some more, the warmth of the bourbon streaming through me now.

‘Ben… I don’t feel like I owe you an apology for last week. But I hope you understand. I had to be careful. At the time it seemed like Gittens was right about you and Danziger. You had motive, means, opportunity.’

‘Sometimes you have to forget all that Agatha Christie crap, Caroline. You have to look at the person too.’

‘Okay. I guess that’s right.’

‘The other thing is, about when my mother killed herself-’

‘Ben, I don’t want you to tell me anything about that. You’ll put me in a terrible position.’

‘We have to get past it sometime.’

‘Ben, please, don’t. I mean it.’

‘Okay’ I tapped a knuckle against the window. ‘You know, last winter my mother got in a car accident. She wasn’t supposed to be driving at all. We weren’t supposed to let her. I used to unhook the battery cables so the car wouldn’t start. But somehow she got it started. Either I forgot or she figured it out. Maybe someone helped her reconnect the battery, someone who didn’t know what was going on. My mother could be… insistent. Anyway, she got all the way out to I-95. Who knows how. I guess she just kept driving and driving. Maybe she was lost. Or maybe she was trying to drive all the way down here, to Boston, to come home. She was born here, did I ever tell you that? She loved this place.’

My eyes began to seep.

Caroline was silent.

‘Somehow she wound up on the wrong side of the highway. She was going north in the southbound lanes. She must have gone on the wrong ramp or got confused by the signs or something. It must have been terrifying, all those cars coming at her. She drove into a concrete bridge support.’

Caroline made a soft, startled sound.

‘She was okay. Bumps and bruises. She had a black eye. It took forever to heal. The car was totaled. My dad had a fit.

‘That was when she decided. She said, ‘I don’t want to be a vegetable, Ben. I’d be mortified.’ That’s the word she used, mortified. She said she did not want to go through it alone and my father was not someone she could turn to, not for that kind of help. She was-’

‘Ben, please. Don’t do this.’

‘She got a book. That was Anne Truman: She researched the whole thing. The Seconal, she had a doctor friend. I won’t tell you his name. He gave her an anti-nausea drug too, so she could keep it all down.’

‘Ben, I don’t want to hear this. I can’t.’

‘There were ninety pills. We had to empty them all into a glass of water. Ninety red gel-capsules, one by one. They didn’t want to dissolve. We had to keep stirring and stirring.’

‘Ben-’

‘It was supposed to taste bitter. She said you were supposed to chase it with something to dull the taste. Jell-O or applesauce or something. She used bourbon.’

Caroline walked over to the window where I was standing. She stood in front of me, close, and said, ‘Ben, stop. I can’t hear this.’

‘I need you to understand.’

‘I do understand.’

‘Mum said, “Ben, hold my hand.” So I held her hand. And she said, “My Ben, my Ben.” And she went to sleep.’

‘Ben, no more. For your own sake, please. Please. I understand.’

I brushed my eyes. ‘Do you?’

‘I understand,’ she whispered.

We kissed, leaning against the window. It was a different — better — sort of kiss, because this time Caroline gave herself to it completely.