We Know

Chapter 15

On the front walk, I felt exposed in the bright light of morning, though I'd circled the block three times to make sure I wasn't being followed. A moment's pause didn't help me regain my composure, but I forced my legs to carry me up onto the porch of the neat white two-story. My thumb rested against the doorbell, barely touching it, refusing to press.

Finally I rang. A three-chime doorbell. I ran my hand through my hair, shifted from foot to foot.

The wound in my cheek from Charlie's bone frag made me self-conscious.

Approaching footsteps. My mom's voice calling back into the house, "I got it, sweetheart."

The big door swung in, and her smile caught on her face. My mom looked good, probably, for her age, but all I could notice at first were the differences, the incontrovertible evidence of the passed years. Her hair was a little coarser, the auburn sheen a shade too rich to be natural. She looked youthful in her ponytail and man's shirt, which was flecked with dried paint and unbuttoned to reveal a tank top. She wore foundation to cover the wrinkles, I assumed, but it muted her freckles, too. I didn't like that. Callie's freckles were my favorite part of her.

Sorrow rippled through her features and left them blank. "Five years," she said. "Your visits are getting almost frequent."

"I think four. Remember that lunch?"

"Right. Lunch." She lowered her head, pressing her crown to the edge of the door. "You get my Christmas card?"

"Yeah. You get mine?"

"I did."

She stepped back. I followed her in, Charlie's key clicking around inside my sneaker. We passed through a tiled foyer with mirrors and dried flowers in vases, and into a spacious kitchen. Porcelain rooster by the Viking stove, blue-checkered tablecloth, butter churn in the corner. I couldn't put the new country-contemporary decor together with Callie.

A short, wiry man sat on a wicker stool at the center island, reading the paper and eating poached eggs. His curly hair was receding, with strands of gray at the temples. It was poofy, needing a cut. He stopped mid-chew, regarded me over the top of the sports section. Halfway down the staircase to the right stood a girl, maybe thirteen years old. She was stooping so she could look down into the kitchen and see who'd arrived. Despite the heat, she wore a hooded zip-up sweatshirt over a baggy thermal shirt-charcoal on black. Maroon and blond streaked her dark brown hair, which fell lifelessly to crowd her face. Her sleeves were pulled down over her hands, and she pinched the banister, ready to retreat.

Callie stopped by the double doors of the Sub-Zero and gestured at me, at the man, back at me.

"This is my son," she said.

The girl's jaw dropped. Two scampering footsteps and she was gone.

The man set down his newspaper, dotted his mouth at the corner with a paper napkin. He came around and shook my hand. "Steve Yates." He looked at Callie, nodded supportively, and excused himself to the next room, leaving his breakfast behind.

She said, "My husband."

"Right. Congratulations. I got that card, too."

"And you didn't want to come?"

"I didn't know it was an invitation."

"We didn't do a big thing." She flared an arm. "Third marriages, you know."

"Six months ago?"

"Yes. Steve and Em moved in over Christmas break. Changing schools in the middle of the year was…" She used the heel of a hand to shove a wisp off her forehead, and then she said, "Why are you here, Nicky? I mean, I've been trying to see you forever now. You're hardly one to just drop by." Her eyes moved to the cut on my cheek.

"Some stuff's come up." I was looking at Steve's breakfast more than at her.

"Like what?"

"I'm not sure."

"You're not sure what's come up, or you're not sure you want to tell me?"

"Both." I looked at her directly. "Whatever Frank was afraid of? It came back."

But she barely responded. Her eyelids fluttered an extra beat when she blinked. That was all. I couldn't read the emotion, hidden as well as her freckles.

"Okay," she said. "Are you gonna talk to me?"

"Until I know what's going on, I don't want to put you-"

"In danger? Nice of you to make that decision for me." She crossed her arms, tight, like she was cold. "So what do you want?"

I said, tentatively, "Frank's pictures. That were in his chest. What'd you do with them?"

She stared at me, her lips trembling. The question had offended her, or my arrival had. I wondered how much I'd changed, if I disappointed her.

Finally she said, "They're in a moving box. In the attic. I put them there when I got the trunk ready for you."

I forced the next question out. "Can I see them?"

"Why not, Nick?" she said irritably. "Why not?"

We had a frozen moment, and then I asked, "Where's the attic?"

"On top of the house." She watched me, deciding whether to be helpful, then added, "Upstairs, end of the hall. The boxes are labeled. Help yourself." She grabbed her husband's plate, still half full, and walked out to bring it to him.

I made my way hesitantly up the stairs. Music blared through the closed door to the left, Alanis Morissette wailing about an ex-boyfriend, with no small measure of bitterness. Scrabble letters glued to the door spelled out EMILY'S ROOM. Feeling like an intruder, I continued down the hall toward the attic hatch. A bathroom, a guest room, and then open double doors to the master. I stood under the hatch, peering into the bedroom where my mother slept. A large four-poster bed with a floral duvet faced a window overlooking a gazebo and a swimming pool. A shoulder holster was slung across a dressing chair by the bathroom door. An easel by the bay window held a half-finished portrait of Emily. The lips were tight and angry, and her posture suggested that she was an unwilling subject. The drawing itself was a bit generic-not Callie's best work. It reeked of obligation all the way around.

A string dangled from the hatch overhead. When I tugged, the hidden ladder unfolded like the leg of some insect. I climbed up, heat hitting me along with the scratchy smell of insulation. A ventilation fan embedded in the roof chopped the morning glare to hypnotic effect.

Four boxes sat by the air-conditioner unit, all Magic Markered FRANK in my mom's hand. Two held old suits and a few dress shirts that I guessed Callie couldn't part with. Books filled the third. I lifted several to admire the familiar spines. Presidential memoirs and military histories, a couple Leon Uris novels. The fourth box was the lightest, its contents shifting around when I lifted it. A few layers of pictures, loose in the bottom. I sorted through them. Black-and-white wedding photos-Frank's parents? Pictures of him as a kid. In one he wore trousers and a little flat cap and pointed a wooden gun at the camera. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that Frank had once been a kid. I scooped up more pictures and flipped through several handfuls.

Down at the bottom, I found the pictures from the war. There was one of Frank and other soldiers at a camp in the jungle. He was stretched out on his back, smirking, his legs crossed, boots unlaced. I studied the other men's faces, but none were familiar. A few photos later, I found him. It was a mess-hall picture, guys in white undershirts hunched over trays of cubed meat and noodles. Frank leaned over his food, fork raised to punctuate a point he was making to the men around him. The others bent toward him. At the table behind him, his head turned to listen, sat Charlie. The wild blond hair was shaved in a flattop, but I recognized the piercing eyes, that wide, unruly mouth. He seemed an outsider, pivoting to get in on Frank's conversation, and something in his body language suggested an underdog's reverence. I couldn't help but wonder if Frank trusted Charlie half as much as Charlie trusted him.

The fan huffing overhead, I sat looking at the photograph until sweat trickled down my ribs. Then I shoved it into a back pocket, stacked the boxes neatly, and climbed down. As I passed through the hall, Emily stepped out of the bathroom, nearly colliding with me.

"Hi," I said. "Sorry."

She looked up at me. Her brown eyes were doleful and sort of pretty. "It sucks here," she said.

"I bet." I extended my hand. "Emily, right? I'm Nick."

She brushed past me into her room. "It's just Em." She scowled at the Scrabble letters on the door. "Your mom glued those there when we moved in. She got my name wrong."

I thought about that portrait in Callie's room, how neither of them likely had the desire or stamina to finish it. "She's probably just trying to help you adjust."

"She's always hovering over me, trying to feed me and stuff."

"She means well," I said.

"Then why haven't you talked to her for, like, nine hundred years?"

"Because of a bunch of shit I got into when I was younger."

She stared at me curiously for a moment, then flopped down on her stomach in front of a Scrabble board and a two-volume dictionary. A few tournament certificates and ribbons were tacked over her desk.

I stayed in the doorway. "You're a Scrabble champ? That's pretty cool."

"Cool. Yeah. I have to beat the boys away with my thesaurus." She glanced back at me over a shoulder. "Look, why don't you just get out of here?"

When I got downstairs, Callie was doing the dishes. I cleared my throat, but she didn't turn around.

"Do you know what company Frank was in?" I asked. "In Vietnam?"

She kept scrubbing. "Frank didn't talk much about the war. You know that."

"Do you have anything that would say where he served?"

"Yeah, Nicky, I keep his obit framed in the powder room." The pan hit the counter with a clank, but then her shoulders lowered and she relented. "I believe it's on his headstone."

"Where… where is that?" I was ashamed not to know.

She caught the hitch in my voice and turned. "The veterans' cemetery. Wilshire and Sepulveda."

Above the breakfast nook hung a wedding picture of Callie and Steve, Emily scowling from the side in a dark blue velvet dress. So much of Callie's life I had missed. What had I been doing the day my mom had gotten remarried?

Like his daughter, Steve had seemed a bit tentative in the house, a touch formal. Six months he'd lived here. It wasn't easy transitioning into a new place, feeling like a guest in your own home. I thought about that shoulder holster on the chair upstairs. It struck me how tall Frank was, or how tall he always seemed. "What's Steve do?"

"He's a cop." She added, defensively, "He's a wonderful man."

"I expect so. You wouldn't marry a man who wasn't."

We looked at each other a moment, awkwardly. She'd rebuilt a life, just as I had. Though I was happy for her, seeing her brought back the ache I'd tried for years not to feel. We were no longer who we'd been when we'd known each other. The old cues, the connections, our stupid inside jokes- they weren't there when I reached for them. I could see in her face that she felt it, too. That hollowness.

She said, "We were so close, Nicky."

"Yeah," I said. "We really were."

As I passed, she took my arm, stopped me. She said, "I'm ready to listen now. I want you to know that."

"Listen to what?"

"Why you really ran away."

I thought about the photomat slip in my pocket and the key in my shoe.

She said, "What?"

I shook my head.

"How about the short version?" She let go of my arm. "Do you owe me anything?" She asked it not passive-aggressively but with genuine curiosity.

My chest cramped; my throat was dry. It was as if my body was rebelling so I wouldn't be able to get the words out. "The night I left, they came and arrested me," I said. "For Frank's murder."

"They did what to you?" She was instantly, protectively furious.

"They booked me into MDC. Have your husband check the records."

"You should have talked to me, Nicky." She looked crushed. "We could've gotten you a lawyer. There would've been no case. No case"

"They'd manufactured one, including my prints on the gun."

"Everyone knew you picked up the gun. They couldn't make anything of that."

"After what happened to Frank, I was willing to believe they could do a lot of things. And I wasn't gonna trust the assholes with badges to handle it on the up-and-up."

We both turned at a movement in the doorway. Steve standing, holding his dirty plate. His stare was the first coplike thing I'd noticed about him.

I nodded at her, then at Steve. "Thanks for letting me look at those pictures."

I walked out, but Steve barely moved, so I had to brush past him. My footsteps knocked the tiles of the foyer, and then I swung the door closed behind me and hurried down the walk and to my truck, hidden around the corner.

I walked among the thousands of headstones, the perfect rows fanning by like plowed furrows seen from a moving car. The photomat slip remained safely in my pocket. A few more hours before I could pick up the roll of mystery film. I told myself that's where my uneasiness was coming from.

The grounds administrator had pointed me to the general area, but it was difficult to keep my bearings among the identical Department of Defense grave markers. Traffic on Wilshire and the 405 was distant enough to recall the ocean, a white-noise accompaniment to the grassy swells and shade offered by venerable trees. It would have been peaceful were it not for all the dead.

I nearly walked past Frank's gravestone. I hadn't expected it to be any different from all the others, but I also somehow had. No wreath, no flowers. Just his name, indented in a plug of marble. My chest tightened, and I realized I was breathing hard. Fumbling out a notepad, I jotted down the information I needed. Company C, 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, United States Army. Vietnam.

Slapping the notepad closed, I turned swiftly to go, almost striking an old man making his fragile way up the row of graves. His cheeks were hollow, his jaw pronounced and skeletal, and he wore an ancient cloth hat weighed down with military pins. He looked into my face, then glanced past me at the headstone and shook his head, his lips bunching. "Them boys caught a lotta shit they didn't deserve," he said.

He winked jauntily and continued up the row. I was staring at the grass, and then it got blurry, and I forced my eyes back up to the date of birth, the date of death, the name stamped in block letters on the cold white marble.