Strangers at the Feast (31 page)

“N
-
O,”
said Ginny.

“Oh, heavens!” said Eleanor.

“I am going to play travel agent with Priya,” Laura announced. “She will be my customer and I will arrange for her to go to Disney World.” She led Priya into the living room.

But the children’s absence changed the air; in the brief silence that followed, Denise recognized a familiar sadness. People always wanted adults-only time, but the moment children left a room, they took some of the joy and the lightness. Everyone at the table suddenly looked very old, very dull.

“It’s been good to meet Priya,” she said to Ginny.

“I’m glad she’s getting to know her cousins. Though I think after seeing this house she might find our place in Mamaroneck a bit shabby.”

“Shabby chic,” said Douglas.

“She’ll be grateful you saved her from the third world,” Denise said.

“Well, we’ll see,” Ginny answered. “In twenty years India’s middle class will be 40 percent of its population. By the time Priya’s an adult, India will be a world leader and the United States will have gone the way of the Roman Empire. Frankly, she might be pissed off.”

Here it came, thought Denise, the moment in the conversation when everyone started to say large and important things. Tried to look well informed.

“I have always wanted to visit Pompeii,” said Eleanor. “It is a real window into Roman times.”

“Gin, this country has land wealth,” said Douglas. “And it has
something few other countries have: ambition.
Moral
ambition. Sure, we’re idealists who sometimes get it wrong, but at least we’re idealists.”

“Two words, Douglas, peak oil,” Ginny said.

Denise had heard some teachers talking about that. About the fact that half the world’s oil had already been pumped from the ground.

“Just look at these houses miles from any train station or supermarket,” Ginny continued. “These electric appliances. We spent centuries building a society based on the premise that power was easy to come by. We’ve already spent our wealth.”

Already spent our wealth.
The phrase made Denise momentarily dizzy. She announced she was going to prepare the dessert.

“Pies and pear tart! See, we
should
be thankful for this meal,” Ginny went on, “because in a few years, I doubt you’ll see such abundance.”

“Well, we certainly don’t need this much,” added Eleanor.

“Ginny.” Denise paused by her chair; she’d been lured by the game, wanted to score a few intellectual points. “You’re always going on about the Trail of Tears, that stuff. But some teachers were talking the other day about how the Native Americans actually raped the land.”

“Raped!” cried Eleanor. “What a word!”

“Apparently,” Denise went on, “
they
began the whole environmental crisis.”

Ginny wiped her mouth, set down her napkin. “It’s a matter of time lines. Yes, the Clovis drove most of the megafauna to extinction. About thirteen
thousand
years ago. The Native Americans
we
drove to extinction were living off the land as recently as four hundred years ago. The people who wrote the Bill of Rights? Those bright and shining minds wiped out hundreds of thousands of modern humans. That, Douglas, is your country’s moral ambition.”

Douglas patted his stomach. “
I
feel like a damned megafauna.”

Denise shrugged off her defeat. She’d been raising three children and working full-time; facts and figures would never flow off her tongue. She certainly wasn’t going to get into a frenzy over politics.
As she made her way into the kitchen, she could see Laura, in the living room, assembling the final pieces of the elaborate dollhouse Douglas had just bought her.

“You know,” Douglas was saying to his father, “I still can’t believe the Packers lost.”

“Oh, Doug, enough with the game,” Denise said over her shoulder. “I hope you didn’t put money on it.”

GINNY

Ginny rose to help clear the table while Douglas and her father sat once again analyzing their team’s defeat.

“A lot of those players use steroids,” said Douglas.

Her father had abandoned the issue of her article—the end. And she knew she would not press further. It struck Ginny as a strange yet essential part of her being that she confronted everyone but him.

Denise slid a tart into the oven, and the kitchen began to smell of pears and cinnamon. Ginny started washing dishes, clumsily, and through the vast window, she stared into the eerie blackness. The velvety green lawn, the pristine chinaberrys—the entire yard was now lost in the gloaming, swallowed whole by a dark sky and full moon. In the distance, the soft speck of a single driveway light punctuated the blackness. It amazed her how nightfall narrowed the world to points of light. With the sun’s cover gone, civilization glowed with campfires, oil lamps, candles, and chandeliers. Beacons, hazards. After all those years living in the city, she would have been frightened living amidst so much space and silence. She looked away.

“Just hand those to me and I’ll shove them into the washer,” said Denise.

Ginny had been on her feet for hours, and after all that eating, she felt bloated. She passed along the dripping plates and stifled a yawn behind her dripping rubber glove. Denise caught the yawn, burying hers in her shoulder. Ginny was thankful her family had made no further mention of her oven’s failure, of the long drive back to Stamford.
That seemed the gift of family: they knew your mistakes and held none against you.

“Well, here’s a funny story,” Ginny said, sponging off the plates. “So I happen to know this writer, a novelist named Richard Conway, and he has two novels out. Father-son hunting stuff set in the South. Anyway, his third novel was published about two months ago, to real acclaim, and he’s getting nominated for prizes. This is his breakthrough book. It’s getting so much attention that somebody notices that about two full pages of dialogue were lifted from this play. An off-Broadway play that was put on about two years ago. Richard claims he did not plagiarize. He swears it. He says he will take a lie-detector test, demands to take a lie-detector test. He claims, in fact, that the bulk of the dialogue in the book came from the time he spent in coffee shops in the city just eavesdropping on real people. Well, of all things, it turns out that this coffee shop where he used to just sit and listen is the exact same coffee shop where the two actors from the play used to go to rehearse. The scene took place in a coffee shop, so they’d just go there and run lines. Richard thought it was real dialogue; he wrote it all down and put it in his book.”

“Does he have to pay a fine?” her mother asked.

“No, no fines or anything like that. Even if it was plagiarism, it’s not criminal. The playwright actually forgave him. I mean, why wouldn’t he? It’s a big compliment to his dialogue and now everyone has heard of his obscure off-Broadway play. It’s going up at City Center next spring!”

The rattle of the plates and silverware sliding into the dishwasher filled the kitchen; Ginny sensed they were all drowsy and pretty much talked out. The oven timer beeped and Denise slipped on a quilted red mitt and extracted the pear tart, beautifully browned around the crust.

“Voila!”

As her mother carried the ice cream into the dining room, Ginny followed, balancing a stack of bowls.

“Children! Dessert!”

Ginny set a bowl at every place, and Denise laid the tart in the middle of the table, at which point Brian and Brandon charged into the room.

The television was blaring.

“Laura and Priya!” Denise called. “Please turn off the television and come in here.”

The television went silent and Laura pattered in, dragging her tablecloth and rubbing her eyes.

“Priya, honey,” Ginny called, setting a spoon beside every bowl.

The twins thumped into their chairs and Laura lifted her spoon, stuck it to her nose.

Ginny sat, every chair occupied but her daughter’s, and once more called out: “Priya! Honey?”

“She’s at Disney World,” said Laura and pointed upstairs.

KIJO

Alone in the closet, Kijo waits. The panty hose flatten his nose so that his nostrils, struggling for air, take in sharp, deep inhalations of cedar, shoe polish, the brine of sweat on his shirt. He thumbs his turtleneck loose from his skin, looks again at the face of his digital watch. Forty-five minutes. He gave up waiting by the doors, scared someone would wander upstairs. But how long can it take for Spider to get down that tree? Make it to the van? They parked two blocks back, but still. Spider’s fast.

The idea that Spider took off, that no one is coming for him, feels like a hand shoved down Kijo’s throat. He gags, tries to shake the thought from his mind. He swats nervously at a row of cellophaned gowns. Then it occurs to him that the thick carpeting and stacked sweaters may have silenced the honking. Maybe Spider already got them out of the house. Kijo rushes across the room, pushes aside the window’s heavy curtains, and gasps. A slit-eyed, misshapen face, the beaten face of a boxer, stares back at him. His.

Panic claws at him. He tells himself to stay calm, to think clearly. He leans forward, slowly, his breath steaming the glass. It’s too dark to see anything but the humped shadows of three parked cars, their windows glinting like the eyes of raccoons at night, hungry and alert.

Kijo looks off in the distance for the headlights of the Diamond Diagnostics van. Nothing. But there aren’t police lights either, which means no one’s had a scare. The yard is empty, silent. If he could just get himself down that tree. But it’s a good twenty feet, and what if he
gets stuck, trapped? He’s seen those pictures of black men hanging from branches.

Come on, Spider.

This room, this house, everything begins to seem horrifically small. Not much space to run or hide. Not much air to breathe.

Kijo inches toward the wooden doors, slowly pulls one open, letting in the sound of faint laughter from downstairs, the smell of gravy, and over that something sweet and cinnamon. Shit, they’re nearing dessert and soon enough someone’s coming upstairs. And three cars outside? There must be at least half a dozen people down there. Half a dozen people to corner him, chase him out the window, or… What would he do if he found a man in his house?

Sweat stings his eyes and Kijo yanks off the panty hose. As the air rushes to his lungs, his chest balloons and he lets out a sharp cough that sounds like a sob.

Please, Spider. Come back.

Looking around at the embroidered blankets, the velvet pillows, the gleaming night tables topped with rainbow-glass lamps, Kijo feels the thought arrive like a blow to his head: coming here has ruined everything. He’s going to end up in jail.

He looks up at the domed ceiling, painted with angels, and his mind races with thoughts of what he would still like to do; he mutters the list aloud. He wants to open his grocery, he wants to be called Mr. Jackson, he wants to move Grandma Rose somewhere safe, to take care of her, to make her proud. Someday, he wants to be an old man sitting on a stoop next to Spider, talking about the old times.

When his muttering stops, the silence of the room folds over him. He can see the smallness of himself as though he were standing at a distance, and as the fact of his aloneness seizes him, Kijo’s eyes cloud over with tears.

But a circuitry within him switches on; the urge to escape, to live, takes hold.

Kijo sees that he will have to fight. That’s what he came here for.
He was done running and hiding. He wasn’t a coward. He was here to say, you can push me and shove me and sweep me out of sight, but one day you come home and realize, I’m still here. I’m always watching you.

Pulling the stone knife from his pocket, Kijo sets his bag on his shoulder and stands with his legs apart. He looks again at his watch. He can’t wait any longer.

He takes a deep breath, prepares to hurl himself through the threshold, to race down the stairs, when suddenly there’s a dark-skinned girl standing before him. For a moment he has the urge to knock her down. He raises his hand, but the flash of alarm on her face stops him.

“I’m just lost up here,” he whispers. “I’m not doing no harm.”

Her brown eyes roam his duffel bag, stuffed with cans, and she blinks like her eyes are dry. Kijo can’t imagine what this dark girl is doing in the house, who she belongs to—a maid? gardener?—or who else might be at the bottom of those stairs.

“How many people down there?”

She tightens her mouth, and then it falls open, in shock, as she catches sight of the stone knife. She turns to run and in one swift move Kijo covers her mouth and lifts her into the room. He pins her to the wall. She is small, fragile. Her heart kicks at his palm.

“I’m gonna uncover your mouth but you aren’t gonna scream. You’re gonna answer my question so everyone’s gonna be fine. How many people are down there?”

He envisions ten, even twenty people downstairs. Too many people to all be drawn outside by Spider’s honking. They’ll be waiting for him. The pulse in his head grows enormous. “You got guns in the house?”

He puts the knife to her stomach.

“How many people down there?
Hablas español?
Are they all in the dining room?”

She tightens her mouth again, works it like a fish, over and over.
The tendons in her neck stiffen and her chin looks as though it might unhinge.

“Just tell me what I want to know.”
Don’t make me hurt you,
he thinks.
Don’t make it come to this.
“There a back way out?”

Bitterness coats his tongue and he grabs the girl’s arm, raises the knife to her neck. Her face goes entirely slack; tears slide from her eyes.

How long before someone comes looking for her?

“You better fucking well talk to me.”

Part III

DETECTIVE BILL O’SHEA

In his line of work, observation was key. You observed what people touched—their pockets, a bracelet, a wedding ring, their hearts—and how they touched it. You made note of where they looked before answering questions: eyes up to the right, they were remembering something; eyes up and left, they were bullshitting. A suspect who touched his face a lot was trying to hide the truth. Repeating the question—
You’re asking me where I was when the victim entered the building?
—meant stalling for time. Legs crossed, arms crossed were signs someone was hiding something.