Mockingbird Songs (19 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

The apartment entrance was off a walkway. At the end of the walkway there was a flight of wrought-iron steps down to the street. It was one flight, maybe twelve or fifteen feet. By the time Evan returned to the lower step of that flight, he knew something was awry.

A gentleman dances with the one that brung him.

Someone said that to him one time. He couldn’t remember who or when or why, but it had stayed with him. It meant so many things, and all of them were about loyalty.

Later he would ask questions that could never be answered, and there would be so very many of them.

Later he would turn all of it back upon himself, and she would be blameless and perfect, and he would be the worst kind of man for any woman, and there would be nothing right about what he had said or done. He had broken promises. He had lied. He had deserted her. He had made her life a misery. He had used her to fill a vacuum left by Rebecca, and that—in itself—was the greatest lie of all. He had told Lilly that he loved her so many times, and yet he didn’t even know the meaning of the word.

This was his penance. Of course it was. If not, then how could this have happened?

Halfway up the stairs, he set down the bag he was carrying. Why did he set it down? He did not know then, and he could not explain it in hindsight.

He just
knew
.

He would write a song about this moment. It would be called “No Time Left.” He would never perform it. He would never even sing it after the day it was completed.

As he reached the end of the walkway and started down toward the door of the apartment, a quiet feeling of panic started in his lower gut. He had felt this before. Stronger then, walking down to the barn and finding that Rocket had vanished. He remembered it vividly, the sense that something was so terribly, terribly wrong, and one thing could never be wrong by itself … There would be other things wrong, things spiraling out of control, one small catastrophe somehow drawing other greater catastrophes and disasters into its orbit. Eventually it would all be a black hole of despair and panic and horror …

Evan Riggs forced such things out of his mind.

He reached the apartment door. He pushed it, but it did not give. He had neither closed it nor locked it. He turned the handle. Again, the door did not give.

His heart skipped.

Evan raised his hand and knocked. He waited no more than five seconds and knocked again.

“Lilly?” he called out. “Lilly, open the door, for Christ’s sake. This is just dumb.”

Nothing.

He knocked again. Clenched his fist and pounded. Heart matching rhythm, but pressure inside now, like something coming to the boil.

He looked left and right as if to find someone or something that would tell him what he didn’t know.

Was she just being mischievous? Was she meting out a little punishment for his failure to come home, his failure to call, his failure to inform her? For all his little failures.

Was this all that it was? Or was there something else happening? Was there something more serious?

“Lilly? Sweetheart?” he called, louder this time. There was no way she would not have heard him. The apartment was small. Four rooms: bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, a narrow living room where they would sit and talk and watch TV and sometimes he would read lyrics and sing melodies to her and she would say,
That is so beautiful, Evan … That breaks my heart …

And now the pressure he feels is breaking his heart. Surely a heart cannot survive such a thunderous assault … panic swelling up like some dark spread of blood in water, like a black flower of despair that buries its roots deep into the very core of self, the petals filling the chest, the odor rank and fetid and poisonous.

This is not happening.

Evan remembered thinking that. He was behind himself. That’s how it felt. As if he were right there on the walkway watching himself as he beat on the door, having to step aside as other people came out of their apartments, people he knew, people saying,
Is everything okay, Evan? What’s happening, Evan? Jeez, Evan … give it a rest, man
, until they understood that this was real life, that this wasn’t Evan once more drunk and raging, that this wasn’t Evan drunk and fighting with Lilly or Lilly mad with Evan yet again and trying to break down the door to get to him and rail at him for some other foolish stunt he’d pulled …

This was life in its realest form, and it did not look good.

People came to help.

Evan was back inside himself. His shoulder was against the door. Couldn’t have been more than a minute since he’d first knocked, and yet it seemed as if he had been prevaricating for an hour.

What would have happened if he had acted immediately?

What might have he been able to do had he gotten through that door without delay?

In truth, nothing, but rationality and logic parted company as soon as panic and fear showed up for the party.

The door went through on the third attempt.

He
knew
then without doubt.

There were people behind him as he rushed through the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, all the way to the bathroom, where he had lain beside her in the overflowing tub, a tub too small for two, but both of them drunk and laughing and so very much in love, candles lighting the room with a multitude of halos, late nights beside each other, talking of things that they wanted, things they would do together, things they could never do with anyone else … traveling the world and seeing wonders and making friends and gathering into their collective experience those things that only they and they alone would fully understand and appreciate. That was the life they had planned. That was the life that should have happened.

The blood spooled through the water like clouds being born. Scarlet, slow-motion clouds.

She had cut her arms from elbow to wrist, the full length, the full nine yards. Her veins had opened up without resistance, given her an irreversible escape route out of whatever desperate unreality within which she imagined she was living.

What she believed and what actually was could never have been the same thing.

Anything can be changed.

Tomorrow will always be different.

Most things come easier after a good sleep and a long laugh.

Not this time.

Evan dropped to his knees at the side of the tub.

Fifteen minutes, maybe less. He grabbed her arms, and the blood filled the spaces between his fingers as he lifted her from the tub.

Evan could not speak. But he could scream, and the sound came from deep inside him, somewhere primitive and ancient, and he pulled her close and held her so tight, and she looked back at him with that unmistakable deadlight in her eyes.

Standing then, he turned, and there were people crowding the bathroom.

His voice returned. “Get back!” he shouted. “Get out of the way! Goddamn you, get out of the fucking way!”

The huddle parted, and Evan staggered through into the bedroom, the living room, out onto the walkway beyond the front door of the apartment, and Lilly seemed to weigh nothing at all, as if every drop of blood within her had now been emptied out.

He kicked over the brown paper bag on the way down the steps. The bottles of beer he’d bought bounced down the steps. Two of them broke, and beer spilled out into the dirt. He would have opened that beer with Lilly. He would have opened a bottle of cold beer and passed it to her, and she would have smiled the way she always did after they’d fought, after the emotional dust had settled, and he would tell her she was no good for him, and she would tell him how he couldn’t live without her, and then she would laugh and tell him he was more of an asshole than she was a bitch, and then he would pull her close and they would stay like that for some endless time, and he would tell her once again that he was sorry, and he would mean it with every atom of his being, and then everything would go back to battery until the next time.

Now there would be no next time.

Now there would be nothing.

Evan dropped to his knees in the dirt at the bottom of the steps. He cradled her in his arms, and he knew she was dead.

He’d known that from the first moment he’d seen her lying there within a scarlet, slow-motion cloud of her own blood.

To Evan, in that moment, it all seemed to have been borne out of a lie. If he had stayed back in Calvary, this never would have happened. If Rebecca had left with him, this never would have happened.

But it happened, and it happened in a heartbeat.

All done and over with: the passion, the promise of the future, the life they would have created together.

The end of one thing is not always the beginning of something else; sometimes it is just the end.

It was twenty minutes before an ambulance showed up.

The attending medic was named Don Halliday, and he’d seen it all before.

TWENTY-SIX

Henry Quinn woke beside Evie Chandler and wondered what he had done to bring all of this upon himself. He believed he had lost all connection to whatever his life might have been before Reeves.

For a short while he lay there as Evie slept, her father making the sounds of someone trying not to make a sound, and then he left the house, the banging of the screen perhaps an accident. Evie stirred, but she did not wake, and Henry slid out from beside her and put on his jeans and T-shirt.

He did not leave the room but took a chair from near the wall and set it in front of the window. Sunday morning, the sky bright, the breeze uncharacteristically fresh for West Texas, as if the arid wind that so often drew everything from you had now acceded to the notion of giving something back.

Henry thought of Evan. He missed the man, and though unafraid to voice his feelings, he perhaps missed him more than he would have been willing to say. And even if he chose to speak of it, what would he say? That one of the most important people of his life was a killer he’d known for less than three years? It made no sense.

Henry thought of his mother, too; if she and Howard Ulysses were drunk and fighting or drunk and getting along great. Or just drunk.

If he was completely honest, he cared more for what was happening with Evan than he did for what was happening with his mother. They were mother and son, sure, but they had never connected. He was, after all, an accident, and though she had never said or done anything intended to make him feel that way, it was still an inescapable truth that sat between them like an unwanted member of the family. They both were aware of it, but never said a word. That was how they dealt with it.

That morning, the morning he got drunk and fired the handgun, the morning he nigh on killed Sally O’Brien and simultaneously fucked his own immediate life beyond repair, was perhaps the single most complete expression of his own desperate frustration. It begged the question: How much of what happens to us is determined by a single, nonchalant thought? That carefree, throwaway
I wish …
becomes the force majeure, and then everything changes, perhaps rapidly, even more likely in increments and inches, sometimes so slowly you don’t even notice … and then you’re looking back and wondering how the hell you ended up here.

Started with a thought, and that was all that was needed.

Henry glanced back as Evie stirred.

She stretched, opened her eyes, saw him sitting there, and smiled.

“What you doin’?”

Henry smiled back. Sometimes she surprised him with her beauty. “Just thinking.”

“Surgeon General health warning against that,” Evie said. She leaned up, the sheet falling from her and exposing her throat, her breasts, her stomach.

“Dad gone?”

“Yes.”

“Every Sunday he goes out to put flowers on my mom’s grave.”

“Where is she buried?”

“Hundred and something miles away,” Evie said. “Done it for years, no matter the weather, no matter what else is going on.”

“True love, huh?”

Evie frowned. “I don’t know, Henry … Maybe it’s just that he can’t let go. Sometimes I wonder if he does it out of guilt.”

“Guilt … for what?”

Evie shrugged, brushed her bangs from her eyes. “Christ knows, Henry.”

She slid from the bed, sat naked on the edge of the mattress. “We gonna go to Odessa and find Grace Riggs, right?”

Henry nodded. “Go see Harold Mills first and ask him if there’s anything else he wants to tell us.”

“You think he’ll talk?” Evie asked as she tugged a T-shirt over her head and fetched clean underwear from the drawer against the wall.

“Seems like he wanted to last night,” Henry said.

Evie smiled knowingly. “The previous night and the following morning can be a thousand years different, right?”

Henry nodded. “Yep.”

She made eggs. Henry wasn’t so hungry, but he ate a few mouthfuls out of courtesy. He drank three cups of coffee, though, and asked Evie if her father had given any indication that Henry’s presence might be a problem.

“My dad is a
What you see is what you get
guy,” she said. “Maybe the last of a long line. If there’s a problem, he’ll tell you. He’ll tell you nice, but he will definitely tell you. Besides, he likes you.”

“He does? How can you tell?”

“Has he told you to get the fuck out of his house?”

“No.”

“Then he likes you, Henry. Don’t sweat it. Sometimes you are too well-behaved for your own good.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that you’re not in Reeves anymore. You don’t always have to color inside the lines. Most of the time it’s perfectly okay to be nothing but yourself.”

“And the rest of the time?” Henry asked.

“Be someone better.”

Henry laughed. “Where the hell did you come from, Evie Chandler?”

“Fell from heaven, didn’t I?” she said. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Henry drove. Evie knew where the Mills house was, but she suggested they park up the block and walk down. It was a little after nine. If the Millses were heading to church, they would be going soon enough.

Harold Mills was sitting out on the veranda. He was smoking a pipe, perhaps forbidden to do so indoors, and when he saw Evie Chandler and Henry Quinn turn the corner, there was a definite shift in the atmosphere. For a moment it seemed he was going to stand and greet them, but he went right on sitting there, his back against the front wall of the house, his feet outstretched. He was dressed smart—a shirt and tie, his pants pressed, his boots polished.

“Wondered if you’d show,” he said when they were within earshot.

“Harold,” Evie said. “You okay?”

“Could be better,” he replied, “but isn’t that always the case?”

Henry didn’t speak. He waited for Mills to broach the subject that they all knew was coming.

“Sometimes a man opens his mouth when he should just keep the darn thing shut,” Mills said.

“Last night,” Evie replied.

“Last night, last week, last year, it don’t matter when,” Mills went on. “But what a man says is nowhere near as important as what he does. And what he does is sometimes far less important than what he doesn’t do.” Mills drew on the pipe, using the moment to consider what he was going to say next. It very much seemed that way to Henry, that Mills was choosing words carefully, considering what to say, how best to say it.

“If you want to go out and see Grace Riggs in Odessa, I don’t believe anyone will stop you,” he said. “From what I hear, she’s as crazy as a shithouse rat. Can’t imagine she’ll be able to help you better understand much of anything, to be honest, but you never know. Sometimes the crazy ones went crazy because they saw more truth than anyone else.”

“What happened with that family?” Evie asked.

Mills looked momentarily surprised. “You think this is about the family, sweetheart?” He smiled resignedly, shook his head. “This isn’t about a family, my dear. This is about a whole town, maybe a whole county. Sometimes you don’t ask a question for the sole reason that you know how bad the answer’s gonna be.”

“And this all has something to do with Evan’s daughter?”

Harold Mills shrugged. It was not the shrug of a man who did not know, but that of man who did not
want
to know. Everything about him said that forgetting, perhaps even pretending to never have known in the first place, was sometimes so much more preferable than reality. Reality meant responsibility; responsibility meant confronting the fact that there were things that should have been done that were not.

“Where is she?” Evie asked.

“Odessa, like I said,” Mills replied. “Some nuthouse out there. They call it a rest home or some such. You want to find it, you’ll find it. They don’t say so, but it’s part of the Ector County Hospital. Like most things, they dress it up as something it ain’t.”

“Did Carson put her there?” Henry asked. It was the first time he’d spoken, and it was a question that raised a knowing smile on Harold Mills’s face.

Mills paused for some time before he said anything, and the silence became tangibly uncomfortable. When he did finally speak, it was to Evie, almost as if the question had arrived from the ether and Henry was not there at all.

“I’ve said all I’m gonna say, and if you want to go digging holes and looking for stuff, then you knock yourself out.”

He turned then, suddenly, and walked back into the house. The door slammed shut behind him like a gunshot.

Evie looked at Henry. Henry looked back at Evie.

“Fuck,” she said, and that, too, was like the sound of a gun in the still morning air.