After Her (15 page)

“Here,” he said. “Put your hand around it.”

He put his own hand over mine, moving it back and forth. He was breathing hard, but different from how he did when he was playing basketball. His free hand remained on one nipple. Then he made a groaning noise and my hand got wet. Teddy lay splayed on the beanbag, not moving. I breathed in an unfamiliar smell. My hand felt sticky and I didn't know where to wipe it off. He probably wouldn't like it if I got it on his shirt.

 

Chapter Eighteen

T
he first time Patty's JV team played a home game—and based on our father's assurances that he'd be there—she had announced to her whole team that he was coming. He never made it.

The next game, I could see her flashing quick glances into the bleachers, looking for his face and not finding it. Every time she played after that, she'd say she knew he was probably too busy so he wouldn't get to this game either, but in the end she always looked for him.

There was a day, not long before the killings began, when Patty and I were out on our bikes in the neighborhood, and we came upon the unmistakable electric-blue Alfa parked outside a house a few blocks away. Our father's friend Sal lived there—a buddy from his days in North Beach, who managed our favorite restaurant, Marin Joe's, where our father took us on our birthdays, or just because it seemed like a good day for a bowl of minestrone. There'd been a time when we had stopped by with our father for these visits at Sal's house, when the two of them would talk about old times while our father trimmed Sal's hair. He still did this now and then, even though there was not so much of it left for our father to cut.

Seeing his car that day, Patty had gotten excited. “Dad's probably coming by to see us after the haircut,” she said. “I bet he'll take us out for tiramisu.”

I was less sure, but I kept my doubts to myself as we pedaled home. Patty had changed her clothes when we got there and set herself up out front to wait for him, holding her basketball in case he was up for a game of Horse at the hoop in the Marcellos' driveway. It was close to dinnertime before she gave up and came in. Our mother, seeing this, said nothing.

As for Patty, maybe it was her growing awareness of how good she was at the game of basketball that did it—good enough that she was consistently the high scorer, and coaches from other schools had come to watch her play—but something began changing in her that year, not all at once but slowly, as the disappointments accumulated. She never gave up adoring our father, but he ceased to be, for her, the larger-than-life hero I continued to make him into. For Patty, he was more like a deeply lovable spaniel who keeps peeing on the rug and chewing on the upholstery, no matter how many times you tell him not to.

W
E HAD A FAVORITE SPOT
on the mountain—that old rusted-out truck body where we'd gone, time and again over the years, to hide out and eat peanut butter crackers, read our books, and make up stories.

Our father was the one who'd introduced us to the place. He had come home from work one time with a package—something important, he told us. Though he was never the hiking type, he had taken us up the trail with a certain sense of urgency as well as adventure, doling out a couple of sticks of beef jerky when I (not my sister) began to flag.

Who knows how our father discovered that truck in the first place. It occurred to me, much later—thinking back on that day—that perhaps it had been a woman who first introduced him to the spot. The image had come to me of him and Margaret Ann, lying on what was left of the seat, drinking from a wine bottle and kissing.

Clearly the truck was our father's intended destination with us that day. He had brushed it off, laid his leather jacket on the hood, and lifted the two of us up onto it. He took out the package—wrapped not in fancy paper like a birthday gift, but brown paper of the sort used for packaging meat or nails—and slowly undid the string.

Inside was a gun. Not the kind that shot bullets, he told us, though real in its way. This was a BB gun. And in a small plastic bag next to it, a couple hundred BBs.

“Don't tell your mother about this,” he said. “She'd say you were too young. She'd have a point there too.”

He said he was going to teach us how to shoot. It was better to learn properly than to try and figure this out on your own and do some damage while you were at it.

We spent the afternoon firing BBs at the truck body. Our father stood behind us the whole time, on his knees so his eyes were at our eye level, his arms around us, holding ours steady as we raised the gun to shoot and squeezed the trigger. Our mother wouldn't have found this acceptable, but the way he had it set up, there was definitely no way either my sister or I could have hurt ourselves or each other.

I knew no other girl our age in our town—no other person, period—whose father would have taught her how to do this. The fact that he trusted us made us trustworthy.

“Before you shoot,” he said, “you need to be aware of your own heartbeat, know the rhythm, to steady your hand. You need to listen to your breathing. Before you squeeze the trigger, hold your breath.”

Looking back on this now, it occurs to me that our father probably knew at this point that he wouldn't be living in the house with us much longer. Even though our mother had yet to banish him, he knew he was headed someplace else, as very likely we did too. Maybe he felt a need, before he left, to give us something. This.

“Your sister will hold on to the gun for the two of you,” our father told Patty. “She'll decide when you're old enough to take it out on your own. Not yet. Just know it's there.”

He told us other things too: Never keep a gun loaded. Never pick it up if you're mad or upset. This was not something to show our friends or to talk about with anybody else.

“You couldn't kill a person with a BB gun,” he said. “But you could put their eye out if you wanted to, or had to. At close range, with a steady aim.

“It's been my experience,” he said, almost as if he was talking to himself, “that girls are much better shots than boys. Maybe girls listen better. Maybe they want to please their dad.”

This part was true, for sure. There was nothing we wanted more than that. Even Patty, though she looked at our father more critically than I did, never stopped wanting to please him.

He let me carry the gun back down the mountain—empty of BBs—and when we said good-bye, he watched while I tucked the gun under my jacket, the BBs in my pocket. I kept it in the back of our closet, a place our mother never went. We did not speak of it again.

Over the years after that, we returned often to the truck, though never again for target practice with our father—a man who, with the exception of making spiders, specialized in doing most wonderful things with us exactly once. One summer we left a blanket and pillows inside the cab of the truck, along with a stash of hard candy and a few much-studied
Betty and Veronica
comics, a pack of cards, and my well-worn copy of Jennifer Pollack's sexual fantasies book,
My Secret Garden.
We could spend a whole afternoon inside the truck, playing cards and reading.

It always made me think of our father, being there—not just because the cab of the truck, where we had made our hideout, was riddled with BB holes we'd made that day. (And sometimes, in wildflower season, we stuck flowers in those, for decoration.)

One time and one time only, while we were in our truck, we spotted a couple in the field just beyond where it sat, making love. We crouched low and looked out at them, hands over our mouths to keep our laughter from being audible, feeling like spies. What offered up our view of this pair were the bullet holes we'd made, ourselves, with the gun our father gave us, just before he moved out.

S
UNDAY MORNING, EARLY—
P
ATTY WAS JUST
getting dressed for her dog-walking duties, while I lay in my bunk, writing in my notebook (something I hardly ever did anymore since I started hanging out with Alison)—we heard the helicopters on the mountain again. When we went outside, Helen's paper was still on the ground, where we could read the headline. “Hiker Reported Missing. S.S. Strikes Again.”

Later that afternoon they found the body of Annette Kostritsky—a sixteen-year-old girl who had evidently returned to the county only that weekend, after her junior year abroad, and hadn't taken in news of the killings.

They found her body on the Bolinas Trail, along with the body of the child who'd accompanied her that day—a nine-year-old girl with Down syndrome she'd babysat for since she was in junior high named Bunny Simpson.

It was late November now—five months since the first murder. The two girls' deaths brought the total of victims to ten. A person couldn't go anywhere in Marin County at this point without feeling it—a persistent state of anxiety, like the humming of high-voltage power lines or a Santa Ana wind.

Over at Alison's house after school the next day, a group of us were sprawled out on the bed with a bowl of microwave popcorn. The conversation had been focused for a solid hour on menstrual cramps—a topic I dreaded because I never had anything to offer, and, strangely, considering how good I'd gotten at making up stories about the Sunset Strangler murders, I could never make anything up about this. I almost felt relieved when someone turned on Alison's pink portable television set, and there filling the screen was my father's face.

But the mood among the reporters asking him questions had shifted dramatically since the last press conference. A group of citizens calling themselves “Take Back the Mountain” were expressing their outrage at the failure of the investigation to locate the killer. Up at the podium, my father said he was asking the governor for emergency funds to double the number of officers patrolling the mountain. In the weeks since Patty and I had seen him last, he seemed to have aged: his cheeks had sunk in, and I could see a gap between his neck and the shirt collar encircling it, as though he no longer had the flesh or muscle to fill the space. My father—a man who always spoke of the importance of erect posture—hunched over the microphone. Seeing him now, it would have been difficult to imagine that people used to mistake him for Dean Martin.

“Even with all the publicity about the murders,” he said, “there are still some people who insist on venturing out onto our trails, and we don't have enough manpower to protect them all. The problem is, we've got too many miles of territory to cover. It's just not possible to be everywhere, or to shut everything down.”

Listening to him speak, I almost shivered. There was a quality to his voice that I'd never heard before. Almost a pleading sound. Not an admission of defeat, but close.

He had one small lead to report. Though there continued to be no actual witnesses to the crimes themselves, a woman had come forward with a description of an individual she'd spotted near the location of the most recent homicide, seen getting into a red Toyota Corona. He had not looked like a hiker, she said, and he had this look in his eyes. “Like he was hungry for something,” was the best she could do to explain it. A police artist was working with her now to create a portrait of this possible suspect.

They ran it in the paper the next day. You couldn't go down the block without seeing that picture tacked to telephone poles. At school someone had taped it on the door to the girls' locker room with the words
See any resemblance to Mr. Eddy?
—referring to our school's principal. A girl in my English class said the picture looked like her mother's boyfriend, whom she had never liked. Someone else thought it was the man who appeared in the Mattress Warehouse commercial. One girl thought it must be this guy she babysat for one time who, driving her home, had put his hand on her thigh.

That evening our father came by before we'd gone to bed, for once.

Though he stopped by often now, late at night, to have a drink and a cigarette with our mother, almost a month had passed since he'd come for an actual visit with Patty and me, and longer since the three of us had shared tiramisu in our booth at Marin Joe's. Knowing what was going on, we hadn't expected to see him, and even my sister didn't ask anymore, as she used to, whether I thought he'd come over soon.

As always, when I caught sight of him, I felt as if a high-watt beam had suddenly been pointed in such a way that I was suddenly bathed in a pool of warm and glowing light. Better than anything were the times when our father came over, and he was stopping by just to see us.

He wore his leather jacket and his black boots. Although he was considerably thinner than he used to be, and tired looking, he was still handsome.

“My girls,” he said, lighting a Lucky. “Sight for sore eyes, you two.”

“They made me center on my new team,” Patty told him. Tall as she was now, she jumped in his arms when he reached the walkway to our house, same as she always did, though I actually wondered for a moment whether he'd have the strength to hold her.

As critically as Patty spoke about our father these days, when he was there in the room, twirling us around the way he was doing now, neither of us could do anything but wish this moment would last forever.

Patty had her head on his shoulder now, and she was mussing up his hair. Even more than wanting this for myself, I wanted this for her, my gangly, bucktoothed little sister, who had been playing her heart out on the basketball court all season in the hopes that one day he might show up to see her trademark hook shot. Or any shot at all.