Lightning People (38 page)

“The woman who took the cell phone picture, do you think I could have her number? I'd like to talk to her.”

Tasser shook his head. “We can't give out that information. It's important witnesses remain anonymous.”

“I'd just like to thank her. It would mean something to me. I'm asking as a favor. Please, detective. I need something . . . ” He wanted to say “something to bring back, the smallest piece of paper to carry out of this precinct,” but Raj didn't have to say any of it. Tasser licked his teeth, his eyes offering what sympathy a hardened detective had left to give, and swatted the file back down in front of him.

“I'll tell you what. I'll call her and give her your information. If she wants to call you, she will. Her decision.” He copied down Raj's cell number on a Post-it and affixed it to his phone. “But Mr. Singh, do me one favor in return.” Raj already knew what he was going to ask. “Tell your father to please stop calling me. It's been every day like this. I can't hear him yell at me anymore.”

 

RAJ WALKED NORTH, following the sidewalks through Tribeca and the West Village. The summer heat drenched his pant legs into roping cuffs. On block after block, pristine, color-coded couples herded loud cabals of pretty, attention-starved children into SUVs and BMWs to escape to their country homes in the Catskills or to the beach fronts of Amagansett, the annual August migration to leave the city to the residents who could least afford it. In a month the weather would turn cooler, the sun would lose its brutal beat, and the days wouldn't flare like matchsticks burning down to the fingers.
It surprised Raj how much he had learned to rely on each new season to extinguish the past and return a sense of purpose to his hours. In Florida, they had one season for his entire childhood, endless summer like an endless hangover, and he thought how much easier he had it than his mother and father because they would not see the colors turn and the clothes change and the daily routine rerouted by weather, all merciful tactics to help Raj think of all that happened as casualties of a previous season.

He had planned to phone Del as soon as he landed. But even in the taxi home from the airport, he had resisted calling her; as he fell asleep, he had resisted sending a text. Walking back to his apartment now, he still resisted, stopping himself as his fingers gripped his phone. A part of him desperately wanted to see Del again, to bring her back to the darkened studio that smelled of gasoline and to feel her body take up space in his arms. But what had stopped Raj in the cab home from the airport stopped him now, ducking out of the sun underneath imbricating café awnings. A year had gone by and they were no longer a couple. No matter whom they had lost or what grief momentarily pushed them together as tightly as a fist, they weren't limitless for each other anymore.

The sky was turning dark too early, and the first pulses of lightning struck deep over midtown. Raj sprinted down his block for the shelter of his doorway. A bike messenger blocked the entrance, holding a wrapped parcel over his dreadlocks as if expecting torrential rain, and when Raj reached for his keys, the messenger leaned over his handlebars and asked, “Singh?”

“Yes.”

“Sign here please.” Raj printed his name on the messenger's clipboard and carried the package up to his studio, which actually smelled of insecticide and bleach. At his desk, he ripped open the brown paper and lifted the mustard box lid. Inside were contact sheets from the lab. He held his breath to beat back the expectation of pain. On the glossy paper, row after row of Madeline Singh appeared, her face staring straight into the lens, smiling, sucking in her cheekbones, puckering her lips for a look of serious desirability, straining her jaw muscles in irritation at her inability to hold a proper pose. Dropping
onto his stool, Raj studied each image, trying to make eye contact with his sister, to stare right back into her and catch something in her pupils, some flash of knowing what was ahead.

He sat there as lightning blazed across the Hudson River chop, trying to select the best photo, the one that described her most succinctly, most explicitly, the one she would have liked. But he couldn't choose. None of them were Madi. Or they all were, each shot capturing a different creature battling insecurities and trying to bring her most striking features to the surface—indications of the beauty that lay deeper if only one would bother to explore.
Do you think we're monsters, that there's something wrong with us?
she had asked the night these shots were taken, only two weeks ago. He couldn't remember his answer.

In near darkness, he spread the contact sheets on the desk, but none of the shots seemed sufficient. Suddenly Raj felt that his camera had just been a machine that floated between him and his sister to prevent them from looking each other in the eye. These were the last photos ever taken of her, and he had failed to get her down.
Useless
, he thought as he pushed the contact sheets aside. Except now, as his eyes scanned the West Side Highway spidered in the glow of headlights, it occurred to him that these were not the last photos of his sister. There was one more taken later, taken last, on the corner where she had died.

 

AN HOUR LATER, Raj's phone rang. It was an unidentified number, which he immediately answered. A woman's voice hesitated over his foreign name. “Detective Tasser told me to call you,” she said. “I don't know what more I can say.”

“You don't have to say anything,” he responded quickly. “I'm the one who needs to talk.” He wrote down her name and address. At least it was something, the work of a good son.

THEY DON'T SPEAK,
the sons of Tyson.

But letters come from Vincent. They are addressed to Christine using her maiden name. On clean white stationery sent to their new house up the hill from Aurelia's home—its walls sticky from coats of fresh paint, its ranchstyle layout smelling of raw cedar—Vincent scribbles,
I hope you're happy. You won't be with him.
And
Don't you see he stole you? And worse, you went willingly.
And
He is hell. Burn there.

These hate-fueled dispatches, arriving every few months after the wedding, are obviously meant to infuriate her. But Christine sits at the kitchen table and opens them slowly, thinking of the tongue that licked them shut. She smoothes the creases and smiles down at the slurs written across the paper. Christine has not entirely let go of the man she once loved who danced with her at Moonlite Gardens through the colored lights in the shape of crescent moons and starfish. She hides these letters in a box of old childhood photographs, tying them together with a ribbon. The last one
—If it's his, there's a monster inside—
arrives three weeks before she gives birth to her only child. After that, the small white envelopes never again appear in the mail slot. But Christine never stops looking for them until the day she finds out that Vincent is dead.

 

KATHERINE GUITEAU, BORN
weighing eight pounds two ounces, the miracle girl in a bloodline known for its broken men. Katherine's sex is the cause of great celebration. Thomas can't believe the luck of a girl. Thomas drives her home and sleeps with her next to him, afraid to keep his hands off of her for a single second.
You will live
, he says.
You're the one true gift that all mirrors wait to hold, and you'll live.
The death rate for Guiteau women is not like its men. Tyson had two sisters, his father one, and their hearts never gave out. Thomas is sure that Katherine's heart won't stop either. He presses his ear to her chest and listens to the beat. He will die
but this baby will live, her eyelids scabbed from the raw air and pinched closed in the exhaustion of growing. Pink balloons bob on the mailbox. Pink announcement cards sit inside waiting for the mailman to spread them around the world.