The Illusionist (15 page)

People had paused in the parking lot on their way out of the bar to watch the crazy scene. “Oh Dean, why'd you do that?” I said. “You'll just make him crazy!”

But Dean wasn't listening to me. He was transfixed. “Look at him! Freaked out of his mind over a little bird!”

I could see it flapping crazily around the interior, bumping into the glass blindly, completely disoriented in its terror. “Oh God!” I cried. “It's gonna die!” I ran toward Brian's car as if to rescue it.

Brian was backing out of the car, arms raised in front of his eyes, and the little speck of yellow came whirring out after him, then flew up into a pine tree.

“How could you, Dean!” I cried. “It's gonna freeze to death.”

Dean ran over, stood at the foot of the tree. “Here, little little little bird. Here . . .”

Brian was brushing himself off and glaring at Dean. “Fuck,” Brian said. “Fuck . . .”

“Here bird . . . Here bird . . .” Dean cooed.

Brian had recovered himself a little now and he walked over to Dean. “Fuckin' asshole,” Brian said, so Dean could hear. But Dean just smirked. Then Brian climbed back into his car and just sat there darkly, panting and humiliated.

People had begun to drift away. After a few more minutes, Dean gave up trying to get the bird down from the tree and we drove home, leaving Brian sitting in his car with the door open, his legs out, and Jimmy standing over him protectively.

*  *  *

At home, Dean ingratiated himself with my mom. We'd cook dinner together for her when she came home from work, to show her how much easier it was to have Dean staying with us, how I was being good because she was letting him stay. Dean would make himself useful, he would clear the table, shovel the newly fallen snow from the walkway in the morning. When her car wouldn't start one day, he tried to get it going, as if he knew how to fix cars. He looked inside the hood and fiddled around, but no luck. He
couldn't find the problem, and Mr. Lyon had to come over from next door and help us. Mr. Lyon said the battery was cold, and he jump-started the engine and had it going in a moment.

After dinner, Dean played hearts with her at the dining table, popping Skittles, his can of Mountain Dew at his elbow, while I lay on the couch watching TV, listening to the hum of their conversation and the sound of their cards slapping on the tabletop.

He showed her how to do magic tricks, though she didn't really want to learn but was just humoring him, like she would a child. “See, what you do, when you're talking to the other person, you touch the card just like this and you say, ‘You could have taken a card from here, looked at it, and replaced it here. . . .' But really, when you're handling the card, you let the card hang over the pile, like that. And you press your thumbnail on the edge, see—just enough to make a tiny cut. . . .” And she would try it and laugh. He was just making her love him too, pulling her in, I thought.

On Sunday, Dean went to church with us. The People's Mission Chapel was in a small red brick building that didn't even look like a church from the outside, and today Reverend Bill, with his round body, his hair flat on his forehead, was giving a sermon on the subject of “Until.” “We must learn to live
until. . . .
” Reverend Bill said.

Dean looked so beautiful standing there between us, his soft, wispy hair damp from his shower, his almond eyes, his full, red lips, his face soft from his night's rest and glowing with health.

“
Until
we lose that ten pounds!” Reverend Bill was saying. “
Until
we pay off that mortgage.
Until
five o'clock comes and we can walk away from that job we hate. . . .” I wondered how many more “untils” Reverend Bill would say. “
Until
the Lord Jesus comes!” he cried at last.

In the pew behind us, someone's stomach rumbled loudly and Dean stole a glance at me and smiled, and suddenly in the middle of the service we were both giggling out of control like third graders.

That night, as I lay in bed, I heard Mommy enter the room. I felt her standing over me in the darkness. As if she were waiting for me to say something. “I like Dean,” she said, finally. “I feel like he's part of the family . . . as if he were my other child.”

I could just make out her form above me. I saw her shake her head, as if she had surprised herself, and now she was mocking her own love.

He had us both in his power now, I thought. The power of not doing. The power of holding himself back, of being mysterious, always keeping you wanting to know more, to hold him until you learned it all.

*  *  *

In the mornings, Dean and I would sleep late. She would leave early for work, and Dean would be asleep on the couch downstairs, and I'd be upstairs in my own bed. There was a world of work out there, people going to their jobs in the daylight, while he and I slept in the close, still air of the house, sleeping, sleeping, because there was nothing else to do. Sometimes I wouldn't get up for hours, until I had a headache from oversleeping and I was almost sick with it and forced to get up.

He had been with us about a week, it was nine o'clock in the morning, I was still in bed, when I heard the doorbell ringing downstairs. It was a harsh, rude sound, penetrating the silence of the house.

I climbed out of bed, pulled on my bathrobe, and stumbled down the stairs. Through the glass pane in the front door, I saw two policemen, a man and a woman, standing on the front steps. I unlocked the door. A blast of cold air hit me in the face.

“I'm Officer Jubey,” the man said. He was skinny, with buck teeth and a big Adam's apple and hardly any chin.

He nodded over his shoulder at the woman cop standing behind him. “Officer Payette. Sparta Police.” The woman cop was short and squat, with bright orange hair, and a little pug nose all red in the cold and her policeman's pants tight on her wide hips.

“We're looking for a Dean Lily,” the man said. “He around here anywhere?”

Instinctively, I blocked the door, protecting Dean. I saw the cop swallow hard, his Adam's apple traveling all the way down his throat, his eyelids fluttering in the cold. I saw the woman cop raise her hand to her hip and rest it on the holster of her gun.

“We got a complaint here about him stealing from a Terry Kluge,” Officer Jubey said.

Dean had come up behind me. He stood on the threshold in his socks, his face sleepy. “Whassup?”

The cop stared at him. Hesitated. “You Dean Lily?”

“Yeah?”

For a moment, he just stared, as if trying to figure out what Dean was. Then, momentarily, he seemed to recover himself. “There's Terry Kluge says you been writing checks on her account?”

The cop said, “She got her checks back from the bank and she says you stole her checkbook and her ID?”

He waited for an answer. “You steal Terry's checks, Dean?” He was calling Dean and Terry by their first names, as if he knew them both.

Dean was still groggy from sleep. “Whah?” Dean said.

The cop took a piece of paper from inside his notebook, unfolded it, and held it out toward Dean. I saw it was a copy of a check, for 123 dollars. There was a signature at the bottom in squiggly black writing, deliberately indecipherable.

“This your writing, Dean?”

Dean fixed his eyes on the paper, he seemed to scrutinize it, slowly, thoroughly. “No,” he said, finally, looking up at the cop, square in the face. “No. That's not mine.”

Officer Jubey said, “Mind if I check your wallet?”

It was cold. I wore only my bathrobe and Dean had no shoes. He stepped back into the house and let the cops pass in front of him into the living room. As they moved by me, I sucked in my
breath, I knew it smelled from the night. I rubbed my fingers under my eyes. I probably had raccoon eyes, the mascara smudged there. Always did in the morning.

Dean reached behind his back, slipped his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, and extended the wallet slowly to the cop.

“Would you empty out the contents on the coffee table there, please?” the cop asked, his voice all nervous. I noticed bits of moisture in the corners of the cop's mouth as if he couldn't swallow properly because of his buck teeth.

Dean removed the bills and cards from his wallet, placed them on the coffee table.

Officer Jubey bent over, riffled through the contents of Dean's wallet. He picked two of his cards up and examined them. “You got Terry's Social Security card here,” he said. “And her Food Mart card. That's criminal impersonation, Dean.”

Dean stared at the cards as if he'd never seen them before. “I do?” he said. Officer Jubey held out the two cards for Dean to see, but Dean didn't touch them.

“Terry's reporting five hundred dollars' worth of checks written on her account,” Officer Jubey said. “The checks all bounced. She says this isn't her signature.”

“She gave me her cards!” Dean cried indignantly. “So I could go shopping for her and pay by check. I didn't steal them.”

“She says you did.”

“That's a lie!” he cried. “She's just mad because—” He stopped himself, not wanting to tell them more.

*  *  *

But they took him away anyway. They clamped the handcuffs over his wrists, dragged him out to the police car. I ran after them in my bathrobe with bare feet crying, “Please! He didn't do anything. I swear he didn't! I swear I've been with him the whole time. . . .”

“You'll have to move aside, miss,” the woman cop said, “Or we'll have to arrest you for obstruction.”

“She's just jealous!” I said. “He didn't do anything!”

But Officer Jubey opened the door to the patrol car, pushed Dean's head down, and backed him inside.

“Don't!” I begged, standing there shivering in my bare feet and bathrobe. “Oh please.” I could feel the tears biting into my cheeks.

But now they were disappearing up the street, the red light on top of the police car flashing and staining the pale air, exhaust throbbing, the stink floating back toward our door.

As soon as the cops took Dean away, I pulled my jeans on under my nightie, then my sweatshirt, and my sneakers without socks, my leather coat—and I ran. I ran along Route 7, the icy rain falling like tiny glass splinters on my skin, washing away the snow, the cars passing by me spraying slush on my body. There were no sidewalks on Route 7, no one ever walked here. I could feel the cars slowing down beside me, keeping pace with me, the drivers leaning across their seats to peer out at me. They were not used to seeing a girl running like this on the highway in the middle of winter with her coat flying out, her nightie on over her jeans. But I ignored them, and I kept on running, oblivious.

Along Route 7. My chest began to hurt, the pain filled my lungs, my throat grew raw from the cold. I could feel the pain in my chest expand. But something carried me along, beyond hurt. O my sweetheart . . . ice water was seeping through the seams in my sneakers, the air slicing my lungs, but I didn't care.

At the park I made a left, then a right down Washington, past the red brick buildings with their false fronts. A few solitary souls out in the morning cold passed me on the sidewalk, their heads down, their bodies sunk into their coats, they didn't even see me. They wanted to get where they were going as fast as they could.

O my sweetheart . . . Down Washington, past the antique stores, left onto Court.

Before me, Courthouse Square, and the courthouse itself, the huge, gray building with columns, the park with the gazebo, the big houses lining the square, their windows dark. Across from the courthouse, the red brick police station with the American flag hanging down over the entrance.

I stormed in through the double doors of the police station. The air was thick, stale. Behind the desk a cop stood, a black man with shiny, blue-black skin like silk. Next to him, a police radio squawked.

“I'm looking for Dean Lily.” I was panting for breath. “Have you seen him? Is he here?”

A second's hesitation. No expression on the cop's face. “Has he been arrested?”

“An hour ago! At my house.”

“Well, if he's been arrested, miss, you can't see him till he's been arraigned.” Slow as he could be, with finality.

“But is he here? Where is he?”

“Can't help you, miss. Have to wait till the arraignment.”

Like a teacher. He was playing by the rules, he had all the power, he wouldn't tell me, just because I was young.

I turned away, paced the room. There were rows of plastic chairs linked by metal bars, all vacant, and wanted posters on the walls, hollow-cheeked youths with stringy hair, beefy men with stubble on their cheeks and circles under their eyes. They looked like they hadn't slept for days.

Then, I sprang loose again. I ran back out into the square, across the park, and behind the courthouse, to the jail. The jail was built of yellow brick, fronting on the parking lot. It was shiny and slick with rain now. The building was four stories high, each window two stories high and covered with thick bars so you couldn't see in.

Sometimes, in the lot, you would see young women standing there yelling up at the windows. “T-y-r-o-ne!” they would yell. “I lo-o-ove y-o-o!” they would scream. Sometimes they had their babies
with them and they'd hold them up in the air like little round balls so the men inside, the fathers, could see their offspring. But there was never any answer from those dark windows. The women, ever faithful, stood there yelling up anyway, they didn't care about the noise they were making, shattering the calm of the square, and the people staring out at them from behind the curtains and the blinds of the grand houses.

Now
I
was standing there just like them and above me there was no sign of life, not a shadow moving behind the windows of the jail. But he was there, I knew it. And just seeing me standing down there would comfort him. O my sweetheart . . . And I yelled, “Dean! Dean—honey. Oh Dean, I love you, honey.” And I realized I didn't dare call him “honey” in person, that I was afraid to tell him I loved him, but I could do it here, screaming at the top of my lungs, my voice echoing in the empty square. And there was nothing he could do because he was trapped up there, and now the truth was out. “I love you, Dean!” I cried.