Seventh Heaven (24 page)

When she tried to figure out what had gone wrong with her parents, she came up with nothing; they didn't even fight. It wasn't like them to humiliate Rickie and make her keep such an awful secret from everyone, even her best friend, Joan Campo. Danny was useless; he refused to talk about their parents at all, and the whole thing literally made Rickie sick. Her mother was cooking so much that the kitchen was always burning hot; you'd start to feel faint the moment you walked through the side door. On Sunday nights, Rickie couldn't see Doug because Phil would drive from the city and take Rickie and Danny out to Tito's Steakhouse on the other side of the Southern State and they'd all order steak and French fries and onion rings and then no one would eat. Rickie had to make conversation the whole time because Danny wouldn't talk, and then when they were dropped off at home, Gloria was waiting to quiz them. Rickie actually began to make lists of everything they had ordered at Tito's and everything her father wore, just so she'd have something to tell her mother. On Friday and Saturday evenings, when Rickie got dressed to go out with Doug, she could hear her mother outside in the backyard, thinning the pachysandra. It was a horrifying sound, like a wild animal rooting around, but Gloria kept at it and she didn't stop tearing out pachysandra by the roots until there was a tall pile next to the back patio.

“God, you're perfect,” Doug Linkhauser would whisper as he kissed Rickie when they parked in the Corvair behind Policeman's Field, and she would just want to crack his head open. Oh, she loved him, she was crazy about him, and why shouldn't she be? Everyone wanted to go out with him—it was just that sometimes she found herself thinking about Ace when she kissed Doug, and then she would pull away from him and feel the color rising in her face.

Nothing was perfect, Rickie Shapiro could see that now. What had her best friend said when Rickie finally broke down and told her about her parents' separation? “God, that's awful, your family's destroyed.” She could have kicked Joan, but she couldn't let on that she was hurt. Everything seemed to be on shaky ground now, silt really, that gave way when you touched it with your toe. Rickie had been taught to respect and follow all the rules, at any cost, even losing her chance with Ace, and now it seemed there was a possibility that she'd been tricked. Parents like hers weren't supposed to split up; a boy as smart and handsome as Danny should have been popular, instead of spending all his time locked in his room; even Joan Campo, who had been her best friend for six years, had deceived her. The rules had always been that you could let a boy kiss you and touch your breasts over your bra, but now Joan had more or less admitted she had gone all the way with Ed Laundy and she was probably going to do it again. When Rickie had seemed shocked, Joan had laughed at her and asked, “What do you think everyone's been doing at Policeman's Field?” and Rickie had been too embarrassed to admit that she'd thought everyone was doing what she was doing, being a good girl, and if she hadn't thought that she would have been with Ace instead of being scrunched up in the backseat of the Corvair on Friday nights, letting Doug Linkhauser put his tongue in her mouth.

Something had happened, like a split in the universe, and you couldn't depend on anything being the way you'd planned. And even though Rickie started off convinced that everything would return to normal and she'd know what was expected of her, she soon started to wonder if it would ever change back. Her mother was finished with the pachysandra and had stopped cooking, and now all she did was smoke cigarettes and watch TV, which Rickie knew she didn't approve of. Gloria went out only in the afternoons when she had her driving lessons, and the driving lessons were the worst of all. Gloria had never needed to drive, Phil had taken her anywhere she needed to go, and now the lessons and the fact that she was pricing Fords made the separation more permanent; when Gloria passed her driver's test there seemed no hope at all that their lives would return to normal.

Actually, everyone in the neighborhood seemed a little haywire, especially the mothers. Marie McCarthy, for example, who had spent every day of her married life taking care of her house and her family, suddenly found herself with a job. She went to Armand's once a month to have her hair tinted and cut, but she always avoided Nora. Sure, she saw Nora out of the corner of her eye, but during her last appointment, when Marie was back at the sink with a rubber cap over her head, she noticed that Nora had the baby in a playpen that was jammed into the utility closet. Armand had noticed too, and as Nora sneaked in to give the baby a cheese Danish, he followed her and told her that he didn't give a damn if her baby-sitter was unreliable and that in fact he needed her at least two weekdays or he'd have to find a new manicurist. After he'd stormed out of the utility closet, Nora stood there in the doorway, nibbling on the Danish and holding her baby. Before Marie could look away, Nora spotted her.

“Hi, Mrs, M.,” she had called, and she came out to sit on the chair next to Marie's. “The world is not made for women with children,” Nora had said darkly.

The baby leaned over and grabbed Marie's silver bangle bracelets, and he scooted out of Nora's grasp and into Marie's lap.

“Hi!” he said to Marie.

“What am I supposed to do?” Nora said. “Put my kids into suspended animation?”

“I could take care of him,” Marie found herself saying.

And that was that. She opened her mouth and Nora was only too glad to fire Rickie and take the baby over to the McCarthys' on Wednesdays and Fridays and, along with Billy, on Saturday mornings. So there Marie was, with two little boys in her house again, only this time she was getting paid, and the truth of it was she enjoyed it much more this time around. She bought an old high-chair at a secondhand store and she taught James how to use a spoon and a fork and how to say bye-bye and one, two, three. She took him to Lynne Wineman's and Ellen Hennessy's and showed him off, and even they had to admit he was darling. “Marie,” James said one afternoon when he woke from his nap, and Marie quickly pronounced him brilliant as well as being sweet as pie.

John McCarthy and Jackie were nervous about having a baby in the house; they thought he was too much for Marie. But Ace didn't seem to mind in the least, and he took an interest in the older boy, taking him out to play ball or to walk the dog; and although it took some time for Marie to win Billy over, she finally did, fixing him noodles with butter and cream, playing mah-jongg and gin at the card table, teaching him to crack open pistachio nuts with his teeth.

Marie didn't notice that when she got together with the other mothers they might admire the baby, but the questions they asked were about Nora. Lynne wanted to know where she shopped for clothes and if she had a boyfriend, but Ellen Hennessy was interested only in how Nora managed to take care of her children and work. Every weekday morning, between getting Stevie to school and Suzanne to Lynne Wineman's and going food shopping, Ellen was taking a typing class. It was a five-week class and, because she was almost done, she'd already begun applying for jobs. There was one job she wanted more than anything, as a receptionist in a nearby orthodontist's office. On the day of her interview she actually took Suzanne and went over to Nora Silk's house to get a manicure. Nora was in her bathrobe when she answered the door, but she smiled right away and led Ellen into the kitchen. The house was a mess, worse than any of the women on the block would have imagined, and Nora set out fingerpaints and paper on the floor for Suzanne and James and then had to clear cereal boxes and clay off the kitchen table before she could get to work on Ellen.

“Boy, I'm just crazy about your husband,” Nora said to Ellen once she had her hands soaking in warm, soapy water.

“Oh?” Ellen said. She looked down and saw that Suzanne had already smeared fingerpaints all over her forehead.

“My ex didn't know how to fix anything the way Joe can,” Nora said. “He couldn't even set an alarm clock.”

“Pale pink,” Ellen said when Nora brought out her bottle of nail polish.

“Try the fuchsia,” Nora said. “Trust me.”

“I'm thinking about getting a job,” Ellen blurted out. “An orthodontist's office on the Turnpike.”

“That's great,” Nora said. “You'll probably get a terrific discount if either of your kids needs braces.”

“You think so?” Ellen said, pleased. She took her hands out of their soaks and watched as Nora cut her cuticles. “I'm just worried about the kids.”

“You'll be doing that after they're grown and gone,” Nora said. “Mind some music?”

Nora went into the living room and put on a stack of 45s, then came back, lit a cigarette, put it in the ashtray, and uncapped the fuchsia polish.

“Don't you worry when you're at work?” Ellen asked.

Nora took some graham crackers out of a Tupperware bowl and handed them to the children without bothering to clean their hands.

“Oh, of course,” she said. “I worry about them all the time.”

When Ellen Hennessy got the job, the first person she called was Nora.

“That's so fabulous,” Nora said. “But I can tell you're thinking about not taking it.”

She let James creep into a kitchen cabinet to play with the pots and pans. Ace was on his lunch hour and he had grabbed a Coke to drink before he climbed back over the fence and returned to school for eighth period.

“What do I tell Joe?” Ellen said.

“It doesn't matter what you tell him,” Nora said. “What matters is where.”

Ace put his empty Coke bottle on the kitchen counter, then came up behind Nora and put his arms around her.

“Tell him in the bedroom,” Nora said.

Ace kissed her neck, then went to the baby and crouched down beside him.

“See ya, buddy,” Ace said to James.

Nora turned and put a finger to her lips to hush him.

Ace got up and made a mocking little bow, then whistled for his dog and went out the side door. In the kitchen across the street, Ellen Hennessy sat down at her table, confused.

“I don't know what you mean,” she said, embarrassed. For a moment she thought she must have been completely crazy to have called Nora and confided in her.

“You know what I mean,” Nora said.

“Nora,” Ellen said.

“Well, you do know what I mean,” Nora insisted. “Give him something more important to think about than whether or not his wife works.”

J
OE
H
ENNESSY HAD TOO MUCH ON HIS MIND
already. All week he'd been working on a case he hated, staked out in the evenings outside the hardware store, which had been burglarized three times already this month. Not a damned thing happened during his stakeout, except for the one evening he went to the diner to get himself a hot turkey sandwich. When he came back he discovered that someone had thrown a brick through the plate-glass window during his absence and made off with six transistor radios. He hated the case even more then, because it was so obviously kids, and kids would probably outgrow it, unless he arrested them, but of course he looked like a fool now down at the station because he'd somehow been had.

And then one evening, twenty minutes before Johnny Knight was due to relieve him, Hennessy got a call on his radio and he knew right away it was going to be bad, even before he was told that there was a possible homicide over on Mimosa. He put on his siren and pulled out onto Harvey's Turnpike just as the deep blue in the sky began to turn black. When he got to 445 Mimosa three other detectives were already there, including Johnny Knight, who met him in the driveway.

“Take my advice,” Johnny said as he offered Hennessy a cigarette and a light. “Turn around and drive the other way now.”

They walked up to the front stoop together, smoking their cigarettes in the dark.

“Bad?” Hennessy said.

“Unbelievable,” Johnny Knight said. “Christ.”

Hennessy knew the family who lived here, at least well enough to greet Roy Niles down at the Dairy Queen he owned whenever Hennessy brought his kids there in the summer. If he remembered correctly, Niles's wife's name was Mary and there were two kids, a girl in junior high and a boy who worked at the Dairy Queen in the summer. As soon as they went into the house they could hear a woman screaming, so Hennessy knew that the wife was still alive.

“We just got a call from the hospital that he was DOA,” Knight said. “The guy. Niles.”

Hennessy's shoes had mud on them and he wiped them on the mat in the front hallway.

“You're here to talk to the kid,” Knight said. “Raymond.”

“How'd he get it?” Hennessy asked.

“A knife,” Johnny Knight said. “Eleven times.”

“Christ,” Hennessy said. “Any suspects?”

“We've already got him in custody. It's the kid. His mother and sister are in the bedroom screaming their heads off. He did it down in the basement. Did you know that Niles had a complete bomb shelter down there? Cans of food to last six months. A ham radio. Water. Everything.”

“Is that where it happened?” Hennessy asked.

Knight shook his head. “In the laundry room. It's a mess.”

The kid was in the kitchen, sitting with his head between his knees. Hennessy greeted the two other detectives and a pathologist who had been sent over from Hempstead.

“He's off his rocker,” one of the detectives. Ted Flynn, told Hennessy. “You want to try talking to him, fine, but we're taking him down to be booked and then over to Pilgrim State.”

Raymond had just turned seventeen, he was a junior in high school, like Rickie Shapiro, but she didn't even know he existed. He was thin and his hair was in a fuzzy crewcut; you could see his scalp. His skin, which was usually pale, was ashen now. He was wearing a brown shirt and tan slacks and white sneakers and he looked as if he might throw up at any minute. Hennessy took one look at the boy and he thought, Why the hell is this one mine? He asked for ten minutes alone with the boy, and when the others had gone into the living room, Hennessy opened the refrigerator and took out two Cokes. He sat down across from Raymond and opened both bottles, holding one toward the boy.