Topping From Below (30 page)
I sit back in the booth. “Now, that would really bore you,” I say.
“I’ll chance it,” M. replies, finishing his plate of stir-fried. “Tell me why you’re so casual with the men in your life.”
I take a drink of water. For years, I didn’t think there was anything unusual about my treatment of men. I was busy with college and work; I didn’t have time to get involved. Only lately, within the last several years, have I begun to question my behavior. When I put the glass down, I say, “There really is nothing much to report. It’s rather banal, actually, the reason, and of no importance to anyone except me.” I take another drink of water. He waits quietly for me to continue.
Shrugging, I say, “If you’re looking for childhood trauma, you won’t find it. Nothing horrible or scarring ever happened to me. It was nothing, really, just a familiar, boring story. I got pregnant in my last year of high school, and the guy dumped me. The experience made me cautious with men.” Playing with my soup spoon, I say, “Period. End of story. It happens to thousands of women all the time. You deal with it and go on.”
M. sits back, looking at me skeptically. “Except that isn’t the end of the story. Expand.”
The soup is still hot, and I blow on it before I eat it. I open a package of saltines, nibble on one and crumble the other in my soup. “This was eighteen years ago,” I say finally, “attitudes were different then. It seemed like a bigger deal. The boy—the father of the baby—basically told me that it was my problem, not his, and not to count on him for anything. I expected that: he was a jerk. What I didn’t expect was the reaction from my friends. I had a lot of friends in high school. We partied all the time. And each of them reacted the same way as the guy had: it was my problem.”
I set down my spoon and look out the window. Billowing white clouds chug across the sky. On the windowpane, a lone fly buzzes in semicircles, the glass an invisible barrier to its progress. I turn back to M., who is still waiting for me to continue.
“Well, it was my problem. I don’t know what I expected from them. Moral support, maybe.” I play with the napkin on my lap, remembering. “You know what my best friend said? Verbatim, ‘What will I tell my mother? When she finds out you’re pregnant, she’ll think I sleep around with boys, too.’” I sigh. “I don’t know; I guess I wanted a little sympathy from my best friend. Of course, in retrospect, I understand I was expecting too much from them, from any of them. They were only seventeen; they had their own problems. But I couldn’t see that at the time. I just knew that I was facing the biggest problem in my life, and no one was there to help me. I needed someone. I felt alone, abandoned.” I smile, trying to make light of something that had, at one time, affected me profoundly. “I know that sounds melodramatic,” I say, “but that’s how I felt at the time. And I couldn’t tell my parents; I didn’t want to disappoint them. I was panicked. Finally, the reality of the situation dawned on me: I was all by myself in this. I would have to handle it. I couldn’t count on anyone else for support.
“Anyway, I got an abortion. That took care of the problem. But afterward, after the abortion, all my friends returned. They wanted to resume where we left off. They wanted me to start partying with them, as if nothing had happened.” I watch the fly on the window, still attempting an escape, then flick it away with my fingers. “But something did happen. I couldn’t go back to the way things were before. I finished high school, but differently than I began it. One by one, I systematically eliminated all my friends. I don’t think they were even aware of what I was doing. When they called, I said I was busy. After a while, they stopped calling. Which was the way I wanted it, or so I thought at the time.”
I shrug again, and add, “Anyway, that started a pattern. When I met new people at college, new friends, I was cautious. Not just with men, but with women also. In my mind, I thought I couldn’t count on anyone but myself. I didn’t want to get close to people. They would just end up disappointing me, hurting me. I had boyfriends, but I kept them at a distance. I was busy at work, work I enjoyed, and I didn’t want a guy to get in the way. Recently, I started to wonder if my life would have been different if I’d never got pregnant, if I would’ve formed closer relationships. By then, however, the pattern was too ingrained. But Ian is different. Franny’s death made me vulnerable, and suddenly he was there. He made me understand I could trust him, and count on him.”
I glance out the window, then back at M. “It was a long time ago,” I say, thinking that if things had gone differently I would’ve had a son or daughter who would now be eighteen, older than I was at the time of the abortion. It seems incomprehensible: a child, my child, a son or daughter, just about to start college. And maybe after that, a grandchild. I twist the napkin in my lap, then spread it out flat. I think about telling M. the rest of the story. But I don’t.
His gaze is penetrating, seeing more than I want him to see. He says, “You’re leaving something out.”
“Yes,” I say, “but I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
M. leans forward and places his hand gently on mine—a touching gesture that surprises me. “All right,” he says. “But someday I want to hear the rest of the story.”
He leans back and says, “There’s something else I want you to tell me. I want the details of Franny’s murder. The—”
“Shouldn’t you be giving those to me?” I say coolly. I slide my hand out from under his.
I see a flicker of annoyance in M.’s dark eyes, a tightening of his precise jaw, which he quickly loosens. He continues, as if I hadn’t interrupted.
“The newspapers left out the details, and the police, as you can imagine, were reluctant to share their information with me.”
A waitress stops at the table and refills my coffee cup. When she leaves, M. says, “Give me this and I’ll tell you of my last contact with your sister. It’s important, Nora. I may be able to help you find Franny’s killer.”
I push my soup bowl away. I don’t know what game he is playing, or why the act of innocence. He knows very well the circumstances of her death.
We are quiet when the waitress clears our empty plates. She asks if we’d like pie for dessert, and when neither of us answers, she walks away, embarrassed by the silence.
M. says, “You have nothing to lose by telling me. If I killed Franny, the information is worthless—I already know how she died. But if I didn’t kill her, I may be able to help you. I need to know how she died.”
I think this over. “And you’ll tell me about your last contact with Franny? Right before she died?”
“Yes.”
I hesitate, not sure what to do. The fact that he wants this information makes me reluctant to give it. “Okay,” I say, deciding not to give him very much. “What they printed in the newspapers was true—they don’t know how she died. The cause of death on the certificate reads ‘undetermined.’”
“And the rest?” M. is leaning forward, listening raptly.
I shrug. “I don’t know the rest. When they found her, she was naked and bound. That’s all the police told me.” I don’t tell him that I know she was bound with duct tape. And that she had cut marks all over her chest and stomach. Not deep lacerations, but superficial marks. Designs. Patterns. Like a work of art that must’ve taken quite awhile to complete. One of the marks was a circle slashed with a line—the universal symbol of no, the mathematical symbol of the empty set, as if the killer were negating her existence. I don’t tell him that she’d been gagged so the neighbors wouldn’t hear her screams. “The autopsy didn’t reveal anything,” I say. “They don’t know what killed her.”
He leans back in the booth. He is silent. So am I.
Finally, and I have difficulty keeping the sarcasm out of my voice, I say, “So how does this information help you find Franny’s killer?”
M. shakes his head. “I don’t know yet,” he says. “But I have an idea.”
I say, “Now it’s your turn. I want to hear of your last contact with my sister.”
He flags down the waitress for more coffee. After she fills his cup, he begins talking. I listen intently; I will have to write this all down when I get home.
FRANNY
Franny administered heparin, an anticoagulant, to a fifty-nine-year-old dialysis patient, Mr. Cole, then crossed over to the nurses’ station to check his lab results. She wanted to keep a close eye on him. He had low blood pressure, extremely low, and last week his graft had clotted off before treatment. She had to send him to the hospital so a doctor could open it up, and they gave him dialysis there, keeping him overnight.
The clinic was fully staffed today, so she was working the floor: passing out medications, interpreting lab results, doing the rounds when the doctor showed up, making sure his orders were carried out. This week had gone fairly well, with no problems other than Mr. Cole. All the patients came in three times a week, for two to four hours of dialysis, and they knew the routine. Most of them now were either reading, sleeping, or watching a program on the ceiling-mounted televisions above their recliners. The room seemed brighter today, the pastel walls more cheerful—probably because it was springtime. The blue sky had taken on a new glow, a wonderfully glossy sheen, as if it had been freshly burnished, and trees were sprouting budding leaves that unfurled, tenderly, in a delicate, fragile hue of green. Outside the shaded windows, Franny could see a blue scrub jay flying from the top of one tree to another. She’d always enjoyed spring, her favorite season, the time of renewal and fresh beginnings, but this year the joy of the season escaped her.
She went back to the employees’ lounge, got a cup of coffee and two candy bars from the vending machine, then sat down. She had a headache and wasn’t feeling well today. Tearing off the candy wrappers, she thought about last night. Michael had bound her again. She didn’t understand why he did this. And she didn’t understand how someone so gentle could be so rough. He’d held her in his arms, tenderly brushing the hair off her face, listening quietly as she begged him not to hurt her, and then, when she was through, he calmly explained that he would bind her whenever he desired, that he would punish her whenever he desired, and he expected her to acquiesce to his wishes. Kissing her softly, he took off her clothes and stroked her body, lovingly, while she had lain on the bed, crying into a pillow. She’d known then, for the first time really, that it would always be like this, that she couldn’t change him and he’d always have a need—for reasons she didn’t yet understand—to see her humbled and cowering before him. And she also knew that she was willing to accept his brutality as the price for his eventual love. Perhaps it was a test, his brutality, something she must endure; and deep in her mind, desultory fragments of long-ago thoughts, the flotsam and jetsam of an earlier time, drifted by: suffering to gain power, using pain to relieve pain, the Sioux logic of one thing just leading to another.
He made her kneel in front of the bed then, her chest and face pressed into the mattress, and tied each hand to a bedpost, cinching the bindings so tight she’d got burn marks on her wrists when she’d later tried to pull away. He whipped her with a cane, which was more painful than either the belt or the paddle or the riding crop. She had red welts on her buttocks, ugly marks, like scores on a piece of meat, long, thin, searing brands of his misdirected affection. Michael had apologized later. He said he didn’t mean to leave such severe welts but had gotten carried away, and he promised he wouldn’t punish her again, at least not physically, until the wounds had healed. But the rest, the nonphysical, was just as bad—worse, even. She couldn’t bring herself to record in her diary what he did to her; she was too embarrassed. Every day she thought about breaking off with him, but she knew she never would. Especially now, since Mrs. Deever had died. Now she needed him more than ever. Franny finished the two candy bars and got up to buy another.
Two weeks ago, Mrs. Deever had come to the clinic looking horrible. She was lethargic, her blood pressure low, and her stomach distended. Franny called the doctor, who told her to send Mrs. Deever to Kaiser Hospital. A week later, in the hospital, she died. Franny had expected this to happen—it didn’t come as a surprise—but it upset her all the same. She became a nurse to save people, people like Billy, and it hurt whenever a patient died. But Mrs. Deever—it was like losing a parent all over again. Those old feelings she’d tried to hide, the loneliness, the abandonment, the insecurity, they all resurfaced, reminding her of her fragile connections to the ones she loved. She was overcome with grief, a grief that extended far deeper than her sorrow for Mrs. Deever. Her first impulse was to keep all her feelings to herself, as she had for so many years, but she knew she’d reached a breaking point. She was slipping away, and if she didn’t ask for help now, she felt she’d slip away forever, beyond anyone’s help. She’d called Nora, but Nora wasn’t home and she never returned her call. And Michael, well, he was sympathetic about Mrs. Deever, but he didn’t really care. She could tell by the way he acted. He didn’t know Mrs. Deever, so she didn’t blame him for not caring about her, but she thought he would’ve been more sensitive to her own feelings. His unresponsiveness, and Nora’s, made her back off. She felt she was standing alone, slowly slipping off into a distant dimension locked inside her mind. Michael was supposed to have saved her from this.
She thought he would’ve loved her by now, but each week he seemed more and more remote. She did everything he asked of her, but she still couldn’t seem to please him. In her heart, she knew their relationship was destructive, but she also knew she’d never leave him. Even if things didn’t get any better between them, she would settle for what they had. She remembered what her life was like before she met Michael, and she could never go back to that. She’d been vulnerable, her limited experiences with men painful, and she’d built up a wall, impenetrable, to protect herself from getting hurt. She’d got used to the loneliness. But Michael had torn down that wall, and if he left her now she’d be even more vulnerable than before. She knew, now, what it was like to love, to belong to someone—and she couldn’t go back to the way her life had been. Michael was all she had left. She would take his punishment, and the unspeakable things he did to her, the acts much worse than his harshest beatings. As long as he would love her, or try to love her, she would do whatever he asked.