Bound (4 page)

She took both it and the newspaper back to the lounge.

Her mother received the
Times
with her working hand, and Yasmin said, “Hmmph.” Catherine decided to take off her coat and hat; as long as Yasmin was going to disapprove anyway, she might as well treat the curmudgeons to a little flash of cleavage and knee, her tame, game striptease. Then she lowered herself to the floor by her mother’s chair, wrapping an arm around her mother’s calf, leaning her cheek to her thigh. It was easier to be affectionate, now, when her mother couldn’t scold her for being sentimental and silly, for a fondness of hugs and kisses and endearments.

Catherine sort of relished the change, to have lost that former mother, the teacher, the talker, the person in charge; that giver of grades, bestower of allowance, withholder of gifts. Noisy and imperious, possessing moral certainty and a confident no-nonsense heart, her mother would bully you into agreement, either bully you or assume that she had when you didn’t disagree. Catherine now savored not having always to listen, to agree, to pretend to agree, to pay attention to what she was pretending or not pretending to agree with. Passivity could be exhausting.

But also, curiously enough, now that she couldn’t know precisely what was going on in her mother’s head, Catherine found herself occasionally interested in knowing.

The television blared as if to make up for the living human diminishment in the room; how would this place seem, minus laugh tracks and commercial jingles, one large grinning orange face after another, and the patriotic orchestral flourishes that announced the news? The serial killer’s comeback and his recent letters to the station were a fascinating unfolding story, a new clue every time the city seemed poised to forget him once more. The broadcaster’s attempt at showing concern would have been comical, had Catherine been watching at home, safe in her husband’s ironic attitude. But here, at Green Acres, surrounded by the dying and their keepers, she could not feel confident disdain.

“Local authorities have no doubt of the authenticity of these souvenirs,” the blond woman was saying in that iconic newscaster voice, so sincerely fascinated, every fourth or fifth syllable dipping down. The serial killer’s most recent overture had been a package left in a park, in it a PJ doll with a bag tied round her head, hands and feet bound with panty hose. Also a driver’s license belonging to one of his victims. “Police were a
lert
ed to the package
weeks
ago,” she declared, this token woman on the team. But it was an ordinary pedestrian, much later, who finally found it. Catherine’s husband was always pointing out that both the killer and the cops were total bumblers.

“This monster has apparently returned to his favorite hunting grounds,” said the woman. She straightened her blank papers on her phony desk, swiveling her earnest glance toward her co-anchor, the token black man on the team.

“Scary stuff, Kelsey,” said he.

Favorite hunting grounds
? Last spring, when the killer began his teasing communications after such a long absence, the press had seized upon his so-called “reign of terror.” They meant the years 1974 until 1979. “My adolescence,” Catherine had said to Oliver then. “Age thirteen to eighteen. I’m sure my mother thinks of it as a reign of terror.”

“Adolescent girls are nightmares,” he had agreed, shuddering at the thought. The younger of his two daughters had briefly lived with him and Catherine, during her own reign of terror.

Without warning, Dr. Yasmin Keene abruptly laughed—a startling bark, something you might mistake for a cry for help, or someone suddenly choking. A few of the caregivers glanced over, but Yasmin’s fearsome expression precluded commentary, her walking stick in her gnarly grip like a weapon. Catherine remembered her from many afternoons at the old house, Yasmin and her mother sitting at the kitchen table drinking wine, ranting about their colleagues in, first, the English department, and then, later, in the women’s studies department, which they’d founded. Founded out of passionate rage, their righteous indignation fueling a cause, a partnership,
sisterhood
, and, as a probable side effect, a friendship.

The wineglasses were always in danger of tipping over.

It had been Yasmin who wanted to watch the evening’s news, not her mother. Dr. Harding wouldn’t want to visit the lurid territory of local gossip. Catherine’s high-minded mother preferred ideas. Now she gripped her beloved
Times
tighter, in its pages no mention whatsoever of this sick Kansas clown.

Yasmin would have to do the talking for both of them, as her interest in the killer was personal.

“He took one of my classes,” she said to the group. The caregivers turned once more in her direction.

“What did she say?” demanded the feeblest of the curmudgeons. “What did you say?”

“It’s true,” Catherine added, seeing in the staff’s collective bemused expression the usual tolerance of delusional thinking, those wacky stories that the tellers could not be convinced weren’t true—enemies in the basement, taunts coming from the air ducts, furniture mistaken for kin, food for poison, fiction for fact, and vice versa. The kind Haitian, Catherine’s favorite, aimed the remote at the screen to silence a screaming car salesman.

“Her with the stick, what’d she say?” asked the curmudgeon of his comrades.

Yasmin spoke more loudly. “One of his missives, after the seventh incident, was a parody of a folk song from a textbook I assigned for a few semesters.” She leaned back and lowered her chin into her neck as if expecting gasps and questions. None came.
Missives, incident, parody, textbook, semesters
: this was not the vocabulary of serial killing. Beside her, Catherine’s mother stiffened in her seat, her desire to aid the tale a vibration in Catherine’s ribs.

“It was this crazy old folk song,” Catherine announced reluctantly, “and he imitated it when he told the newspaper about how he stalked this poor woman, and he left a copy at the library, the building right beside Dr. Keene’s office, in the Xerox machine. So he had to be one of her students, you see? The police went through her class lists. She had to have taught the BTK.” Catherine ransacked her mind for any other titillating morsel; the thing was, this particular “victim” had gotten away. The letter was a lament about having missed her. It wasn’t much, really, in the grand scale of things. Yasmin was scowling at her.

“Excuse me?” said the Haitian politely to Dr. Keene, “but what is your teaching specialty?” She gave the word five syllables.

Women’s studies, Catherine almost said. This would be the moment to fashion as an anecdote for her husband’s amusement. Ha! Women’s studies, indeed.

“Folk culture,” Yasmin reported.

“Ah,” said the Haitian, smiling brightly.

“Unmute,” ordered one of the curmudgeons in the Barcaloungers, the one on Yasmin’s other side.

It was the sports announcer’s turn to ply his trade.

Catherine’s letter from Houston was puckered, with a coffee ring on it. She worked open the seal and began reading. The language made no immediate sense to her.
Decedent
, it said.
Pursuant to wishes
. If anyone were watching, she would have been horrified to reveal her struggle in comprehending, her panic at her obvious lack of intelligence, her poor heart racing as she labored to wrest logic out of yet another page of information that would not avail itself to her. She could bring home what confounded her to have her older husband rescue her. As her mother had predicted, he would be her parent, protector, translator. He wouldn’t be scornful of her uncertain, flustered response. But by instinct, she had leaned away from her mother’s knee, not wanting her interference. She needed only be patient, read the language over and over again. Her mother valued quickness, and Catherine wasn’t quick.

In the amplified and overheated atmosphere of Green Acres, she applied a methodical attention, slowly taking in what would otherwise simply overwhelm her, send her to the grown-ups to relieve the burden. Here, Catherine could take her time. She had another half hour to kill, after all; there were still the meteorologist’s bantering antics to anticipate.

After several readings, there in her pretty dress at her mother’s feet on the lounge linoleum floor, Catherine eventually discerned that she was the named legal guardian of a minor child.

CHAPTER 4

T
HE FIRST THING
Oliver Desplaines did was turn the letter over to his lawyer. “You have a lawyer?” his wife said.

“Of course I have a lawyer.”

“You don’t have to get testy. Why would I know that?”

“You might ask why you
wouldn’t
know it.”

“No need?” she posited, turning her perplexity into a grinning bit of fun. What Catherine knew and did not know continued to surprise Oliver; women, with the possible exception of his mother-in-law, appeared to undergo some other educational preparation than men—a charming, idiosyncratic, mushy curriculum that privileged people-pleasing over practicality. In the extreme case of his wife, he suspected she’d rejected an interest in the workings of the world in order to thwart her mother, an act of vixenish rebellion, one he’d mostly found quite charming. Mostly, but not wholly.

The document in question had languished at the nursing home after languishing at the post office; his wife might never have received it. Much of her life seemed haphazard that way, unplanned, her calendar of days only sporadically penciled in. She couldn’t have located countries or continents on a globe, yet it was she who remembered the birthdays of managers and the names of their offspring; it was she who came smiling and waving through the doors of their businesses every now and again to remind them that they were a sort of family, Oliver the distant dad with the wallet and spreadsheets and the authority to punish, Catherine the cheerful slightly zaftig mom to whom you could go in tears.

“Roe and Roe and Roe,” he told her, naming the law firm.

“As in ‘merrily, merrily, merrily’?”

“Verily. Will you do this?” he asked, holding up the razor. They were dressing for an evening of holiday partying, wandering in and out of the bathroom and bedroom, their reflections in half a dozen different mirrors. They looked, he thought, as if they’d fallen off a wedding cake, the too-skinny, too-tall man in the tux, the lovely voluptuous lady in the ivory dress.

“I adore it when you ask me to take a weapon to your neck,” said Catherine. Because long ago he’d been called vain for requesting this same service of a previous wife, he was always visited by her irritating words when he requested the favor of this wife.
You’re so vain
, she sang in his head. He wasn’t
vain
, he argued back to YaYa, wife number one; he was
handsome
, and he attended to his grooming, that was all. Catherine, like his other two wives, was less fastidious—wine stain on her sleeve, lipstick on her teeth—but she was also much younger. She could get away with laxness. Not forever, not for much longer, but for now.

He watched her in the three-way bathroom mirrors as she scraped away his errant hairs, her tongue between her lips and her eyes intent, so serious in making sure he was smooth. He smiled at her, felt a frisson of fondness when she finished by giving him a little nip on the ear with her teeth. “Good to go,” she said.

When his Sweetheart asked Oliver if he felt guilty about lying to his wife, Oliver provided a simple answer that was also a lie: “Yes,” he said, and tried to seem contrite, torn. But he didn’t feel guilt concerning love. In his life it was the sacred experience; he refused to turn away when it arrived. He had not invited it, after all; like any truly holy happenstance, it could not be found by conscious seeking. He might have felt guilty, doing that. But love had come regardless, in the form of the Sweetheart. She was one of his employees, a young woman who reminded him of Catherine twenty years earlier, a little awkward with herself, as if she’d woken one morning in a beautiful body that was not her own. She inhabited it in a slightly astonished mood, startling easily, sometimes glancing down at her own wrists or ankles and turning them, as if mesmerized by their perfection.

They
were
perfect, after all. And so was every other part of her, yet all this time it seemed she’d never quite noticed that fact, or never been told by someone to whom she was beloved. She had not been properly loved, Oliver decided. There was nothing more powerful than to be in the position of offering proper adoration to someone. He was still, after a month, meandering around in his own mind and heart about how they’d arrived at the amazing situation of having one another. It had happened before, and yet he never could be prepared for being struck by love. It fell upon him like an accident, like a car crash or knife cut, out of nowhere, without permission or intention. It was like luck, and he would not turn away from such a thing. He was stubborn, that way.

Loyal, he told himself. Loyal to love.

“Ready?” he asked the reflections in the mirror, dabbing at his wife’s upper lip, where she routinely rolled an extra bit of color.

“Ready,” she replied.

Coincidentally, the lawyer’s party, Roe and Roe and Roe’s holiday bash, happened to be taking place this evening just across the street from the charity auction the Desplaines were attending. Oliver appreciated the convenience of mixing business with pleasure. A young man stepped out of a ballroom at the downtown Hyatt, his necktie loosened and askew, as if he’d had second thoughts about suicide. He was redolent of gin and now standing too close. He had been stuck with a crooked name badge,
Hello My Name Is
JOSHUA
, the words ornamented with hand-drawn mistletoe. Some chubby secretary had spent the morning making those, Oliver guessed.

Catherine offered her hand. She refused to heed Oliver’s warnings about germs and random intimacies. She would embrace and kiss anybody who felt the urge. She liked to monitor him at public functions as he maneuvered around greetings, avoiding being touched. Later she would congratulate him on his evasions, letting him know that he wasn’t fooling her. In this instance with
JOSHUA
, he suddenly patted his pants pockets, as if checking for the car keys or valet parking receipt. Catherine ducked her head, smiling.

Oliver thought of his hands in the Sweetheart’s hair, his heedless unwashed enthusiasm for touching her, that virtual stranger, that potential harborer of contaminants.

“You’re the godparents!” the drunk Roe and Roe and Roe minion told them, as if in congratulations. It was a week before Christmas, after all—season of office parties, candy platters, forgotten grudges, goodwill toward men, plus eggnog. This charge he made had the quality of gift, generosity, salutation.
From me to you, with all good wishes, a girl! God Bless!
In some other season it might have been presented differently, the general mood easily otherwise; in spring it might seem a sorrow or a tax, in July patriotic fanfare in the street or sky, near Halloween a disguised arrival, witch or ghost, costume concealing a secret body, inside of which ticked a tricky heart. A frightening youngster who thrust out a demanding empty bag: Gimme.

“Feliz Navidad!” the hotel’s sound system insisted, over and over. The tune was so catchy that it no longer required the words, they were there regardless. Oliver had been unwillingly whistling this and songs like it for weeks, snippets snared together in his head like fizzling flies in a web. A person could feel possessed. And as for the whistling, he knew it was a habit he had to suppress—it announced two things that he did not wish known about him. One was his happiness at being newly in love, and the other was his pitch-perfect ability as a whistler, a trait that dated him.

“You ran all this by one of the Roes?” he asked.

“
I’m
a Roe,” Joshua said. “Not one of the Roe and Roe and Roe, but grandson and son and nephew.” He spun suddenly to show them another markered name tag, slapped on his back:
Hello My Name Is
JUNIOR
. “Anyhoo,” he said, “You’re the godparents, basically.” He looked back longingly at a crescendo in the raucous jollity of the ballroom behind him. “Although ‘godparent’ is hardly legally binding. I spoke with Houston. It’s pretty cut-and-dry, really. You can refuse, of course. And by the way, any decent attorney would have made sure there was a mutual agreement in advance, but whatever. And of course there’s always foster care, duh, if you decline. She’ll be an adult, sooner or later, and get a nifty little chunk of change, not to mention the trust, from which you all will be generously remunerated. It’s kind of a sweet deal, if you think about it. Depending—is she a good kid, or a bad one?” He raised his eyebrows inquiringly, a little blearily: Had he spelled it out?

“What about the father?”

“No father.”

“No father?”

“No father.”

The subject of the legal document was a fifteen-year-old girl; her mother, who had died six weeks ago, had been his wife’s friend from high school. There was no father listed anywhere, Junior now explained with wearied irony, not on a birth certificate, not on the documents at the school, not in the mother’s insurance or work or homeowner’s paperwork. No. Father. “Immaculate conception,” guessed Joshua Roe.

“Highly doubtful,” said Catherine. “I mean, I knew her mom. Immaculate would hardly be the way.”

Snowflakes had begun falling outside in festive complicity, covering the ugly, muting the unpleasant. Downtown Wichita had the aspect of snow globe, insular object of rapt sentimentality, a hush of love and hope, forgiveness and averted judgment. Sentences were being commuted, sins absolved, lips loosening, optimistic music as sound track. Oliver glanced out dreamily toward the convention center across the street, where the Sweetheart was setting up hors d’oeuvres.

Catherine began explaining why the circumstance seemed so peculiar. “We don’t really know this woman … I mean, it’s been years. And we didn’t agree. It’s like wow, out of the blue she’s given us her daughter!”

Joshua nodded, taking her in now under his bloodshot, tired eyes, holding out the well-traveled and -researched package. “Well, actually? It’s not actually
godparents
, plural, but god
parent
, singular, you, Mrs. Desplaines. The deceased listed you. Catherine Anne Harding,” he added, as if she needed reminding. From being inside his jacket pocket, the packet now appeared to be damp. Oliver had asked him to verify its contents. It had traveled from Texas to Kansas, been forwarded, then forgotten, finally found, then driven to Oliver’s office, next couriered across town tucked away in a larger, less soiled envelope, now returned, like an elaborate relic, certified real.

“Happy holidays,” said Joshua Roe Jr., giving Catherine a hug, extending his hand once again to be shaken but then lifting it to his temple instead, offering Oliver a kind of awkward salute.

“You like to menace people,” his wife told him as they headed to the elevator, laughing.

“I don’t.” But maybe he did. He was old enough to be Joshua’s father, he was old enough to be Catherine’s father. He scrolled briefly through a mental file of the people he’d spent the day with—was he old enough to be everyone’s father? In general he enjoyed having them look to him as they would any elder, teacher or preacher or boss, waiting for orders and/or approval. He was very tall, his head heavy, his hair still thick. His gaze was necessarily down.

The Sweetheart. He could be her father, too. Earlier they had met at her grandparents’ house. The grandparents were in Florida; the Sweetheart house-sat, an annual arrangement from December through March. Strictly speaking, Oliver was of her grandparents’ generation, give or take. And had his Sweetheart grown up in Wichita, she would have graduated a few years behind the younger of his daughters. They might have been featured in the same yearbook. But her alma mater was in Portland; her grandparents’ aesthetic was suburban, traditional, dismissible; they could have been Oliver’s grandparents, the identical conventional furnishings and odors. He and the Sweetheart made love in the guest room, unaccustomed headboard knocking against the wallpapered wall. They drank Folgers afterward, sitting at the kitchen nook gazing over the salt and pepper shaker collection on the windowsill—ceramic pigs, anthropomorphized appliances, curtsying bumblebees—to the array of empty homemade bird feeders and dutifully covered lawn furniture outside.

I’m falling in love with you
, he’d texted her. For her, he’d learned the technology.

I already fell
, she’d texted him back, alert and swift on the keypad. What Oliver had yet to discover was the nature of her love. They had shared their histories, he had heard of the others in her past, but he could not discern the precise dimensions of her proclaimed love for him, the scale it represented in the grand scheme, the place he occupied in her assemblage. If her love were a pie graph … If she had to rank-order … If one love was the indisputable winner … She had declared it so easily, so early. While he was still falling under love’s revered spell, into its cloistered chamber, she had already, she said, arrived. She looked at him as if he were the sun. She undressed as if her exquisite body embarrassed her. After sex she clung to him and wept, whereas at Wheatlands, which she managed, she had the reputation of a wisecracker, an even-keeled, efficient, unsentimental straight-shooting no-nonsense boss.

He kissed the part in her hair because she had a hard time meeting his eyes.

They drove away in their separate cars. They would meet here tomorrow. Oliver had held her at the door and experienced a strange light-headedness, as if she had somehow lifted him, relieved him of his body at a moment when he’d briefly left it. And then he was suddenly heavy again, with things to do. Unlike his wife, he had a day planner filled with appointments.