Bound (14 page)

Instead, he drove home, turned up the heat, washed his hands, poured himself a glass of red wine, switched on the local news, lay back on the couch with the two dogs, one fat foxy face on either leg, and phoned his wife.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said honestly. She offered the same words, but he didn’t believe they were heartfelt. That was okay; marriage was like that, two people trading turns at sincerity and gratitude, the other allowed indifference or neglect. Give and take, teeter-totter. “Guess what your mother and I did today?”

“Oh, I dunno. Scrapbooked? Made divinity?” she said. “Had sex?”

He surprised himself by laughing. “Went on a virtual trip to Rome.”

“Do tell.”

He elaborated on the visit. He told Catherine about the pictures of herself in the album, ones he’d not been treated to before.

“My father didn’t like that haircut,” she told him. “He was furious with my mother for taking me and getting it shorn like that. But my mother didn’t know enough Italian to describe what she wanted. The guy just cut it like all the kids’ hair. A low-maintenance pixie. Something easy to pick nits out of.”

“Very fetching.”

“Like Mia Farrow, in
Rosemary’s Baby
.”

“Your mother was quite the looker, back then.”

“What?”

“I said, your mother was hot, in her day. Where are you? What’s all the clatter?”

“Somebody dropped a tray. I’m killing time, waiting for the insurance guy to get off work. Don’t laugh, but he’s called Dick Little.”

“I’ll just be pleased he’s not called Dick Big.”

“Why do you sound so surprised when you say my mother was good-looking?” And why, furthermore, was it the rule that others could not insult the mother that you yourself could insult?

“I think I might get her on the information superhighway after all.”

“We should bet on it.”

“You always bet a blow job, and then you never pay up.”

“That sounds just like me, all right. This is a good bar, you’d like it.” She was speaking loudly, around laughter and conversation. “It’s going for a kind of British pub motif. Except with ice in the g and t’s, thank the lord. Waitresses in knee socks and little kilty things. No television, best of all.”

“That reminds me, your serial killer has sent the paper some insane puzzle, some horrible scrambled word thing and other paraphernalia. Big excitement here in River City. They keep showing only partial clips, just in case some civilian out in the audience might solve it before the cops can.”

“Say again?” she said. He repeated himself. The killer had made a puzzle, letters and numbers as in a Seek-and-Find, Sunday-comic-style exercise. On the one hand, it was hard to take him seriously; on the other, it was impossible not to.

“Your man’s a moron,” said Oliver. “But the fact that he has to keep prodding everybody is getting embarrassing.”

“I thought about him a lot on my drive down today. The way he sort of kept popping up all those years. And the way he just vanished.” Conventional wisdom held that he’d come back because the newspaper had featured a story last January, anniversary of his first crime, still unsolved three decades later. Wrongheaded speculation about his demise had apparently forced him to set the record straight: alive, intact, authentic, at large. Winning the game he was playing with the city. Catherine paused. “It’s hard to imagine my mother on the Internet. Also hard to imagine you and she spending time together in that place. The smell alone …”

“You warned me, and I still forgot the VapoRub. But actually, it was fine.”

“There’s a woman there who does nothing but cry, all day long. And another who reads the same line from the same children’s book. ‘Jesus
loves
the little children. Jesus
loves
the little children.’ Listen long enough, and you think that she’s going to inflect differently, sooner or later, ‘Jesus loves the
little
children.’ This other lady always asks if I’ve heard from her sister. Every time, ‘Have you heard from Moira?’ How could you live like that?”

“I couldn’t.” He’d already told her, years ago, that he’d kill himself first. The question was, would you remember what you wished for, when the time came? If the weeping woman, for example, wanted to kill herself, how would she pull it off now? How would her old self redress the situation of her new self?

“Thank you,” she said. “I know you hate going there, and I appreciate—”

From his end, the dogs suddenly began barking. “Must go, the lads are having a fit.” He didn’t like to be thanked. His second wife, the martyr, had ruined gratitude for him. It was very difficult to make him hear it. They hung up. Catherine consulted the phone to see how many minutes they’d spoken. Only four. She was quite certain that he’d prodded the dogs into their frenzy. If you took them to the deck door and gestured toward the railing, they would assume defensive positions in anticipation of squirrels, cats, possums.

And then she asked herself: Why hadn’t she brought the dogs with her? How had she forgotten to bring them on her sojourn?

The short-skirted waitress who’d earlier brought her a drink now delivered Catherine her dinner. “Sole in Its Coffin,” she said. “We like to say it’s to die for.”

“Thanks.”

Houston was not at all what Catherine had expected, although she couldn’t quite pin down what she
had
expected. Astronauts? Oil rigs? Ten-gallon hats? It was moist, filled with trees, houses that reminded her of ones in Wichita. When she arrived, she’d parked in Misty Mueller’s bungalow driveway and studied the front porch. Yellow brick, cream-colored trim, a flower bed and porch swing. Frogs, crickets, birds: the rhythmic noise of creatures and nature, the atmosphere pleasantly sodden. She’d decided then to cancel her hotel reservation, to stay at Misty’s.

When she returned to the house, after dinner, she sat on the porch swing and creaked it back and forth. Dick Little was late, but she didn’t mind. Pleasant, this place. The sound of traffic, at a distance, and the restless animals in the jungly undergrowth up close. The nighttime city sky, pink and lacking stars. Some sweet balmy odor reminiscent of spring rather than January, which made time seem strangely upended. From down the block came a single light, wobbling. An overweight man on a bicycle appeared, ringing a bell that sounded like an old-fashioned telephone. “I apologize, I apologize!” he was calling. Dick Little was large yet graceful, appearing to embrace and flaunt his size the way one would a parade float, the way Santa might behave, navigating magically up the drive and off the comically small bike in one smooth motion. He approached with outstretched hands, the Venus flytrap shake, helmet tucked between elbow and ribs.

“Come in, come in! Isn’t this a sweet place? I’ve been checking in on it, making sure nothing says ‘Unoccupied, welcome crack hos, come on in, gangbangers.’ ” He was flipping on lights, igniting one room after another. “Someone else has a key,” he called out, “probably from her office, somebody who emptied the fridge before the food could rot. Thank God I didn’t have to do that! AC! AC!” he trilled, disappearing down a hall.

Catherine looked around, wondering anew at what she did not know about Misty Mueller. They’d parted ways almost exactly half her lifetime ago; this was what had happened next.

The place was clean, its air stale and damp, its separate spaces appointed as if adhering to the designs of dollhouses: living room with a fireplace, dining room with a long empty table and candlesticks, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen with all the compulsory appliances. Misty had not grown up with this clarity and order, this protected museum atmosphere. To see it here on display made Catherine’s chest hurt.

Her uncle with his red-eyed ferrets. The Lava soap rough as sandstone in the kitchen sink. Toolbox packed with greasy instruments instead of sideboard filled with silver. A deer carcass hung upside down in the garage, blood drained in the horse tank, offal thrown in the alley.

“Without a dog around, any old thing could walk in,” Dick Little was saying, indicating the small plastic opening in the larger back door. Around its edges a dark oily stain, where the dog had rubbed coming and going. “Couldn’t leave that open.” He’d duct-taped the thing shut.

“I was just thinking that I should have brought my dogs.” Catherine described the corgis, her adventurers and companions.

“I have a bichon frise,” Dick Little said. “He has asthma, just like me!”

He was florid, freckled, grinning, ginger-haired, a man holding on to his health with a tentative grip, socially robust but succumbing to something larger than asthma. His fingers and cheeks trembled, an illness or drug reaction, and it took him a moment to steady his breath. From their phone conversations, Catherine knew she would like him, as she did most fallible or frail people who gallantly tried to hide those things, to laugh rather than whine. Now he produced hand sanitizer from his pocket and offered Catherine a squirt.

“I hadn’t seen Misty in twenty-three years,” Catherine said, not for the first time. “But when we were in eighth grade, we stole a dog once. This jerk of a guy owned it, and we saw him beating it in his yard. Yelling at it. Every day we walked home from junior high past his house, and finally we just decided to take his dog.” To prove him evil, they’d returned a few days later, pretending to look for a lost cat. He’d snarled menacingly at them, sworn that some asshole had stolen his dog, then slammed his front door in their faces. Vindicated, they kept his dog, that servile, flinching animal. It went between their houses, each girl claiming that the other owned it, that it was just visiting. At Misty’s, it lived in the backyard in the mud, in a box; at Catherine’s it stayed in her closet, undiscovered by her mother, who would have objected. Her mother objected to anything that hadn’t been her idea.

“I’m a dog person,” Catherine said.

“Me, too,” agreed Dick Little.

That dirty animal stain ringing the dog flap was the first thing that made Misty seem real to Catherine. Real in the way of sensing her, imagining Misty making a mental note to someday scrub away that mess. Imagining the dog’s head coming in, its tail going out. Familiar, a dog who, in Catherine’s mind, looked like that long-ago rescued creature.

Young Catherine surely must wonder what had become of that dirty dog. An empty kennel had been found in the wrecked car.

“Not to speak ill of the dead?” Dick Little said, “but I was very sad to see that.” He indicated with a wagging finger the pretty half-empty bottle of citron vodka centered on the kitchen table. “We were AA buds. She was going on sixteen years sober.”

“Maybe she threw a party?”

He shook his head knowingly.

“She drank vodka when I knew her,” Catherine admitted. “We liked it with orange juice.” She shuddered to remember the flavor—healthy breakfast beverage made toxic by alcohol.

“You just hate to see sixteen years gone.”

“Yeah.” Catherine put together the information. “She stopped when she got pregnant.”

Dick Little tilted his head, rolling out his lower lip. “You’re right, that’s probably it. And then her girl goes away, and so what’s the point? Higher power: AWOL.”

“But she was keeping everything together,” Catherine said, indicating the home. “I mean, bills were being paid, right? Mortgage, utilities?” Why did she feel a need to defend a virtual stranger, a person who’d been, in fact, indisputably headed toward disaster when last Catherine had seen her?

“Direct deposit,” Dick Little said. “For a while, the cleaning service was still coming once a week.” The vodka on the table, the car off the cliff in Colorado: this was evidence contrary to “keeping things together.”

Before he left, Dick Little turned the thermostat to 75, fiddled with the television remote, flushed a toilet, provided Catherine with young Catherine’s cell phone number (“I leave messages. It’s still receiving calls, but be prepared for the greeting: whew!”), then took his leave. “I’m fascinated to know what is up with that child,” he said, strapping on his helmet. “Gimme a shout?”

“Of course.” Catherine thanked him, closed the door, and stood in the center of Misty’s living room. Eventually she poured herself a glass of that pricey, lemon-infused vodka. Then she sat on the couch and sipped at it. From where she sat she could see a photograph of the girl, her namesake and goddaughter. In her unsmiling face Catherine attempted to make out the father. Could it have been any of those boys she’d once also known? Not for the first time today, she followed the twisty path of her and Misty’s attachment to those boys and men. The path that had diverged, eventually, she going one way, Misty another.

She’d had a meditative day in the car, remembering them.

First had been Lyle Skinner, who for starters had a real beard. Not mere wisps or patches, not the soft facial hair that some high school boys (not to mention some high school teachers) seemed not to have even noticed on their own faces, but a beard that was busy at all hours growing, surging anew every morning scratchy and rough, perfectly shaped to hold his features, lips, nose, chin. Brown red blond: the girls stared at his face in the early dawning light of a night spent with him, each admiring how, when he lifted his chin to most efficiently inhale the last hit of cocaine, his new beard sparkled like bits of glass on the beach.