Seventh Heaven (25 page)

“Drink this,” Hennessy said. “It'll settle your stomach.”

The boy looked up at him and swallowed hard. He stared at the Coke as if he were dying of thirst. Hennessy put it on the table. Raymond grabbed it and drank half the Coke straight down, then put the bottle back on the table.

“They think you're crazy,” Hennessy said. “They think it's open and shut and you don't even have a story to tell.”

The boy shuddered and looked down at the floor, but Hennessy could tell he was listening.

“Like maybe it was self-defense. Or maybe just an accident. Or maybe it wasn't even you, and these idiots just want the easy way out.”

“It was me,” Raymond said.

Hennessy took a sip of his Coke. “You want some cookies?” he asked. Raymond shook his head, but Hennessy got some from a tin on the counter anyway. He felt sick, too, but he forced himself to eat one. “That's your mother and sister crying in the other room,” he said.

“Leave me alone,” Raymond said. “Just let them take me wherever they're going to take me.”

“Eleven times,” Hennessy said.

“What do you want!” Raymond said. He was just a skinny, nothing kid no one even noticed.

“I want your story,” Hennessy said. “I want to hear your side.”

His side began down in the laundry room, where his father always took him when he wanted to beat him up. He'd make Raymond wait, a day or maybe two, and then he'd let him have it. Only this time Raymond had decided it wasn't going to happen; he thought all he'd have to do was wave the knife at his father and he'd let him go, but his father went crazy at the sight of the knife, and then he couldn't back down. And when he stabbed his father once he couldn't stop himself, so he figured he was crazy and he wanted to go anywhere where he couldn't hear his mother crying.

“Finish your Coke,” Hennessy said when the boy was through talking.

“No one would believe me,” the boy said. “My mother always turned on the radio so she couldn't hear it.”

“I believe you,” Hennessy said.

He left the boy in the kitchen and joined the other detectives.

“His father beat the shit out of him,” Hennessy said.

“Yeah?” Johnny Knight said. “So he stabbed him eleven times?”

“He didn't plan it,” Hennessy said. “It just happened.”

“Come on,” Ted Flynn said. “You buy that? He just happened to have a knife on him?”

Some people in the neighborhood, especially the boys in Raymond's gym class who had seen bruises up and down his legs and back when he undressed, bought it, and some people didn't. And in the end it didn't matter because there was no proof and no one to stand up for the kid except Hennessy, so they took Raymond to Pilgrim State. The news of what had happened spread fast. That very same night fathers in the neighborhood couldn't sleep and mothers studied their little boys' faces for signs of trouble. How was it possible for this to have happened, that's what people asked themselves, waking and in their dreams. Parents and children were excessively polite to each other, as if they expected someone else to snap and they wanted to make certain it was no one in their own house, certainly not themselves. You could hear a murmur between the hedges, but no one talked about the Niles family out loud. Hennessy spent three days interviewing teachers and relatives before he realized he was getting absolutely nowhere. They canceled appointments with him, they gave one-word answers, and even the guys down at the station didn't want to hear about it; they were actually avoiding him. When he finally turned in his report, which had nothing, not one incriminating word, against the kid's father, Johnny Knight invited him to a poker game, and when Hennessy arrived the other detectives hit him on the back and offered him cigarettes, relieved he had given up and more than ready to welcome him back as one of their own.

He won fourteen dollars and he didn't come home until after midnight. Usually he just fixed himself a sandwich if he got in this late, but when he came into the kitchen he found Ellen had made a late dinner for him. There were lamb chops and carrots cooked with butter and a baked potato with sour cream.

“I just felt like cooking,” Ellen said defensively when Hennessy stared at the dinner.

“All right,” Hennessy said finally. “Great.”

Ellen sat down across from him and watched him eat. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

Hennessy stabbed his baked potato and shook his head.

“Maybe you need to talk about it,” Ellen said.

Hennessy looked at her then. She really meant it. “Thanks,” he said. “I can't.”

More than anyone, Ellen had been waiting for Hennessy to give up on the Niles case. When he grabbed a beer and went to sit down on the couch, she went into the bedroom and her hands shook as she undressed. She switched off all three lights on the pole lamp, then put on the black satin slip. It had been three months since she had made love with her husband, and her heart had certainly not been in it. She went to the bureau and brushed her hair in the dark, then she took the jasmine oil Nora had given her and sprinkled three drops on her pillow.

When Hennessy finished his beer he turned off all the lights in the house. Ever since Donna Durgin had disappeared, Ellen had asked him to lock the doors at night, and by now it was a habit, even though something closed up in his stomach each time he turned a lock. He checked the children and covered them with their blankets, which had fallen onto the floor. He thought about the kid drinking Coke at the kitchen table, he thought about how pale the kid was, and how limp his hands were, and how desperately thirsty he seemed. He thought about the woman he hadn't helped who'd been fixing hamburgers after she'd been beaten, and the look on Donna Durgin's face when she saw her children get out of his car every other Sunday. Tomorrow he'd probably find himself staked out in front of the hardware store again, and this time he wouldn't complain about the job. He'd read the newspaper as he sat behind the wheel, and he'd drink coffee, and if the stupid kid who'd been breaking and entering dared to show up, Hennessy would lean down on the horn to frighten him off.

When he went into his bedroom the scent of jasmine made him dizzy, and for a moment Hennessy felt as if he'd wandered into the wrong house. Ellen had switched on the dim night-table lamp and her back was toward him; one of the straps of the black slip had slid down. He could see a white shoulder. Hennessy undressed and put his clothes in the hamper.

“Why don't you come over here,” Ellen said as he started for his own bed.

He sat down beside her on the bed, and because she seemed to be waiting he ran his hands over the satin slip. He was actually afraid to kiss his own wife, because the last time he had wanted to make love she had turned away. But now Ellen put her hands on his face and drew him to her, and after she started to kiss him Hennessy knew she wouldn't turn away. He made love to her as if she weren't his wife, and when she moved down to take him into her mouth, Hennessy thought he might explode. She had never done this before, she wouldn't even listen when he asked for it in the past, begged for it, really, and now she was doing it all on her own. Afterward, when she moved on top of him, Hennessy made love to her as he'd never dared to before, but he knew she didn't want him to stop because her arms were fastened around his neck and she was kissing him.

They fell asleep in the same bed while the moon rose in the sky, and in the morning they woke early, before the children, and they dressed in silence, as if stunned by what had gone on between them after all these years of marriage. Ellen found the black slip tangled in the sheets; she folded it carefully and put it in her top drawer. And when she told him, after breakfast, that she'd decided to take a job, Hennessy was too confused to argue with her. He spooned sugar into his first cup of coffee and stared at her for so long that Ellen leaned up against the sink and laughed, and if the children had not already been awake and calling for their clothes, she would have taken her husband back to bed.

T
HERE WAS A CALCULUS EXAM ON
A
PRIL
F
OOL'S
Day, for those few seniors who were allowed to take advanced math. The exam was more a matter of personal pride than anything else; all twelve students in the calculus class would be getting their acceptances to college in only a few weeks. That's why it was particularly odd when Danny Shapiro didn't show up on the day of the exam. The math teacher, Mr. Bower, waited until ten minutes past the bell, and finally had to distribute the exam booklets. It was a test Danny would have had no trouble with, he would have placed first in his class, but by the time Mr. Bower was handing out the number-two pencils, Danny Shapiro was already on his way to the bus terminal in New York City.

If he had thought it over he probably wouldn't have left, but he didn't stop to think. On Saturday he had smoked some marijuana and was sitting in his room, listening to the radio play in his sister's room while she dressed for a date with her latest moron. Danny had known she wouldn't have the guts to stay with Ace McCarthy and he pitied her for not having the courage to do anything more than what people expected of her. He pitied his mother as well. She had become something of a lunatic on several subjects. If anyone happened to innocently mention Lucy and Desi's impending divorce, she would lambaste Desi, using language Danny hadn't even guessed she knew. She despised cars and car salesmen. She'd insisted that Danny go with her to test drive a new Ford Falcon, and she screamed at the salesman, crying out that he was trying to cheat her, and finally Danny was so mortified that he dragged her to the auto parts department and begged her to stop.

What really got to Danny was not just that his father had left but that he had dumped everything on Danny. After their first Sunday dinner at Tito's, Phil had waited until Rickie was in the ladies' room and had told him in all seriousness that he was now the man of the house. Well, who had asked for that? He hadn't applied for that job, hadn't wanted it, but his father acted as if it were a kingship and Danny was the next in line. Like it or not, he could now change the fuses and wait up to make certain Rickie got home on Friday nights. Danny had actually been excited when he first heard his father was moving to Manhattan. Columbia was Danny's first choice, he had dreamed of getting to the city, and he thought he could save some money if he moved in with his father. He had been stupid enough to help his father carry his boxes out to the car, and while he was watching Phil arrange them in the trunk he approached him about moving in with him after graduation. Right away Phil began to explain why that wasn't a good idea; Danny would miss out on dormitory life, the apartment wasn't big enough, it just wouldn't work out, and then Danny knew that his father wasn't escaping just from his marriage but from all of them.

And so he pitied his mother and sister, because he could see their blind faith, their belief that they were doing what they were supposed to do, and it was getting them nothing. He watched them after supper, washing the white dishes with the band of gold around the edge until they shone, chattering about nothing, absolutely nothing, like birds fluttering their wings and plucking their own feathers, and he grew to despise them. When Raymond Niles stabbed his father and the whole damned neighborhood clammed up about it and acted as if the Nileses were complete strangers, Danny felt something inside him turn off for good. He couldn't bear to be where he was, the neighborhood was suffocating him, and when he saw Rickie wearing Doug Linkhauser's I.D. bracelet he felt like breaking her wrist. When she had walked beside Ace along the parkway, her long red hair trailed behind her like a stream of fire. Now she seemed smaller, contained within crinolines and I.D. chains, and each time she walked through the hallways with Doug Linkhauser's arm around her he seemed to block her out completely.

On the day before he left, Danny had waited for Linkhauser after school in the students' parking lot. He stood by the new Corvair like a maniac, and even Linkhauser could sense his fury.

“Hey, Danny,” Linkhauser said easily.

Danny had left his books in his locker; but he was holding a baseball bat in one hand.

“You're going out with my sister,” Danny had said.

“Well, yeah,” said Linkhauser, confused. Everybody knew that.

“And?” Danny said.

“And,” Linkhauser had repeated stupidly.

“What do you plan to do about it?”

“Oh,” Linkhauser had said and he'd leaned up against his car to think it over. He was planning to go to the state college in Farming-dale and live at home, so of course he'd still be seeing Rickie. “I guess when I finish school I'll ask her to marry me.”

He looked over at Danny and smiled, thinking he'd said the right thing. His father owned a chain of carpet stores and he'd never thought about what he planned to do because he always knew he'd go into the carpet business. Now he felt as though he'd been put to the test and had done rather well. There were worse things than marrying Rickie Shapiro.

“God almighty,” Danny said.

“What?” Doug Linkhauser was alarmed.

“Maybe you'll want to be a race car driver,” Danny said.

Doug Linkhauser stared at him.

“Maybe you'll want to join the foreign service and Rickie won't want to travel to Italy or Syria, did you ever think of that, Linkhauser?”

“I think you're nuts,” Doug Linkhauser had said.

Danny had leaned up against the Corvair. “Yeah, maybe I am.”

And standing there in silence with Doug Linkhauser, staring at the blue sky and the windows in the gym, Danny Shapiro had felt a pain shoot through his left side, up into his shoulder and his arm. He wished he were twelve years old again, and he could meet Ace McCarthy in the field for baseball practice, he wished he could just block out everything he was feeling, but he couldn't, and on his way to school the next morning he walked up to the Chemical Bank by the A&P and withdrew all his savings. He didn't even bother to go home and pack.