“I’m going to take a special course in African-American history, Dad,” Shelly said happily, still a bit too loud. “I met with Professor Hill about an independent study he suggested for the fall. We’ll be covering the black relationship to communism . . .”
She went on to regale me about the political commitment and supposed naïveté of Paul Robeson. It seemed that everything Shelly did was intended to make me happy. Sometimes I wondered if it might be a mercy to tell her that I wasn’t her real father.
She was still talking when Twill entered the dining room. AccomÛ€ng room.panying him was a skinny, teenaged, white waif-child with ash-blond hair and the saddest pale eyes. I had only seen pictures of her as a prepubescent girl but I would have recognized Mardi Bitterman if she were retirement age.
“Mom, Pop,” Twill said brightly. “Sis, Bulldog,” he said to his siblings. “This is Mardi, a friend of mine from school.”
“Hi,” the girl said. Her voice was so soft that it was almost inaudible.
“Late for dinner,” Katrina chided. “Now sit, both of you.”
I could tell by her expression that Katrina wasn’t happy with an unannounced guest. But she knew from past experience that if she complained Twill would leave—which would turn my mood sour.
Twill sat Mardi next to Shelly, knowing that his sister would immediately take the child under her wing. My daughter engaged the wounded wraith of a girl. After a few minutes they were gabbing, newfound friends. Shelly talking loudly with broad facial gestures, and Mardi whispering, sometimes even partially covering her mouth.
Katrina had lost her Mona Lisa smile with a stranger at her table. I doubt if Dimitri’s mood would have changed if we were in the middle of a nuclear war. The girls seemed to be getting along, and Twill, as usual, was ebullient and lively.
“So what’s happenin’, Pop?”
“Lookin’ for a guy in Brooklyn, and a client came in today to get me to talk to somebody givin’ him grief.” I didn’t mind talking about work in broad swaths. This made my job seem mundane and served to lessen any interest my family might have shown.
“You readin’ anything good?” he asked me.
Twill never read a book unless he absolutely had to.
“Picked up this little book on the history of Western philosophy,” I said.
“Like who?” my son asked.
“What is it, son?”
“What do you mean?” Even at his most disingenuous, Twill was charming.
“What do you want?”
His grin was perfect.
“Well, you know, Pop,” he said and paused. “You know . . . Mardi here is havin’ a problem at home and I told her she could stay here a night or two.”
“Absolutely not,” Katrina commanded from her end.
Twill didn’t look at her. He was no longer smiling, either.
Even if I hadn’t known about thÛ€known abe girl and her father I would have taken the boy’s side.
“You have to learn, Twilliam,” my wife was saying, “that you cannot just waltz in here and make—”
“Kat,” I said.
My wife hates the feline contraction of her name.
“I am not an animal,” she would tell anyone who dared use that appellation.
I told her I would never use the term unless I needed her to pay close attention to what I had to say.
She stopped mid-sentence and glared at me.
“Shall we go to the kitchen?” I suggested.
“WHY DID YOU embarrass me in front of our children?” she asked when we’d reached her bastion.
It was the first time she’d shown anger since coming back home.
“Because I have it on good authority that this girl’s father has been raping her since she was a small child.”
Katrina’s lower jaw fell open. She had been ready to unleash one of her fiery tantrums but my words doused that flame.
“What?”
“You can’t let on to her or Twill that you know anything about it. You know our son. You know what he’s capable of. I need to defuse the situation before it gets out hand. Do you hear me?”
She nodded.
“The girl can stay with you or Shelly. Shell seems to like her, so maybe that would be good. I’ll bunk with Twill. I’ll tell him that you asked me to so that he doesn’t get with the girl, but really I just want to keep my eye on him until I know why he needs her to stay here.”
“Her father?”
I nodded.
“That’s terrible. We should call the police.”
“We will,” I said. “But not until I’m sure that the cops’ll do something.”
I turned toward the door, expecting Katrina to come along with me, but instead she placed a feathery touch upon my wrist. I stopped but could not bring myself to turn and face her. Just as with my contraction of her name, Katrina could do small things that spoke volumes down the corridors of our history.
“Leonid.”
“Yeah?” I said to the door in front of me.
“Look at me.”
I faced her but could not look directly in her eyes.
“You know that I’m trying my best,” she said. “I’m here and I want to be a good wife to you.”
I took in a deep breath and counted one in my mind.
“The past is over,” she said. “I’m here with you now.”
I exhaled and counted.
“Zool went bust,” I said. “I asked a pal of mine to see what happened to him. They say he flew to Argentina an hour before the feds issued a warrant.”
She took it well: no tears or tremors.
“I learned from that, Leonid. I missed my children. I missed my life with you.”
“I’m here, am I not?”
“With one foot out the door and the other one raised to go.”
“What do you want from me, Katrina?”
“I want you to try. I want a life together and to be forgiven for whatever I’ve done wrong.”
I had counted up to ten and started over.
“I don’t know how to do that.” The words came to voice from the empty chamber of my mind.
“Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me what happened to you two years ago that made you so much more distant.”
The shock of her knowledge of me was muted by the walking meditation. Maybe even the discipline helped me to see what was right there in front of me. I could see that no matter what Katrina would do, given a way out, that she had made up her mind to try and make the marriage work while she was there. She wasn’t pretending or lying. My wife wanted, maybe for the first time ever, to make a bridge between her heart and my life. All I had to do was open the way.
I got as far as opening my mouth. An unintelligible sound came out.
“What?” she asked.
That single-syllable question hit my ear like the soft concussion of a far-off explosion. It was little more than a pop, but the seasoned soldier knew that it might very well signify injury or death.
I knew my wife too well to trust that she would never use my words against me. I knew myself too well to pretend to share my life in some guarded, limited way. It was all or nothing for both of us.
That wÛ€ize="3">as one of those rare moments that have true meaning in human discourse. Katrina and I had never been closer; our hearts, even if mine was secret, had never been more honest.
But neither of us could break down the decades of detritus that composed our marriage. I could never trust that Katrina would not one day rouse from this feeling. I had seen love turn to hatred too often not to read the portents and signs.
“I’m gonna have to think about this, baby,” I said. “You know I’m the oldest mutt in the kennel and they comin’ out with new breeds and new tricks every day.”
Katrina’s blue eyes, at that moment, were omniscient as far as Leonid Trotter McGill was concerned. She saw my every thought and hesitation. I lost the count of my breathing and she held me with that gaze.
“I will still be here trying to make it work,” she said.
After a moment more of this special torture, my wife of decades made her way from the room.
Ê€„
43
A sober-minded Katrina apologized to Twill and
Mardi. She told them that she’d had a hard day and was getting too upset over little things.
“You are welcome to stay for a day or so,” she said to the girl.
Shelly was so happy that she kissed her new friend on the cheek.
“Can she stay in my room, Mama?”
“Of course.”
Twill was looking at me but I managed to keep my eyes on Katrina.
Later on, after the dishes were done, I told Twill about Katrina wanting me to bunk with him.
“Why’d you get on her like that, Pops?” was his reply.
“Because when you looked in my eye I saw that there was something wrong,” I said. “I knew that you had a good reason for bringing Mardi here and so I talked your mother into it.”
For a moment Twill’s eyes tightened, but then he broke into a smile.
“You all right, Mr. McGill.”
I don’t think I will ever receive higher praise.
LATER ON I went down to Twill’s room. He was sitting at his desk, dressed only in dark-blue boxers while surfing the Net for arcane bits of information. When I walked in he signed off and stood up. There was a sleeping bag on the floor at the foot of his queen-sized bed.Þ€…
“I got the floor,” he said.
The sleeping bag was state-of-the-art. The top was dull-green nylon stuffed with goose down, and the bottom was a cushion of a slightly darker hue. There was even a two-ply netting for the face, to keep out mosquitoes while allowing the sleeper to breathe comfortably.
I had given up asking Twill where he got things like that or what he used them for. When he was younger I tried reasoning with him. From the age of five he’d countered my efforts with that winning smile, along with his patented perplexed stare. As the years progressed I tried rewards, punishments, even a child psychiatrist. The presents he shared with his siblings. The punishments he bore without tears or anger. It’s anyone’s guess what the therapist thought. She was an honest woman named Powell; after seventeen sessions she called it quits.
Nothing could deter Twill from the trouble he was drawn to. But he had a cockeyed code of honor, too. Even as a child he never stole from or hurt family or friends. After the age of eleven, when he’d gained a measure of mobility, this truce spread out to include our neighbors. Smiles and schemes came to him as naturally as breath. I couldn’t stop him from being what he was. My only job was to keep him alive and free long enough to become a man.
“SO?” I SAID a few minutes after we were both in our beddings and the lights were out.
It was a very comfortable bed. The thread count of Twill’s bright-yellow sheets was at least twelve hundred.
“So what, Dad?”
“What kind of trouble are you in, son?”
“It’s not like that, Pop,” he said softly. “Mardi and me just friends. She needed to get away, and I knew Shell would be good to her. There’s no problem.”
“You’re wrong about that, Twill,” I said. “The problem is that among your peers you are the best, by far. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people out there that are better than you. What I’m saying is that you’ve got to rely on somebody, sometime.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” his voice came from out of the darkness, dripping with innocence.
“Tell me why you feel that you have to protect Mardi.”
“I’m just doin’ her a favor, Pops. That’s all.”
I hadn’t expected him to tell me anything. This charade of a conversation was designed to get him to believe that I was suspicious about the girl so that later on, when I took action, he wouldn’t suspect that I had his primary e-mail address tapped.
THERE WAS FIRE all around me. My clothes were smoldering and I could hardly catch a breath because I was running hardã€s runnin and inhaling smoke. I ran down a long metal corridor until coming to a huge iron door. I took off my burning jacket, wrapped my hands with it, and tried to turn the knob . . . but it wouldn’t give. I slammed into the door with my shoulder but it was locked. I turned to see which other way I could run but Timothy Moore was standing there, blocking the way. He was holding a long-barreled pistol, pointing it at my forehead.
In that moment, time came to a complete stop. I was looking into the killer’s dark eyes for an answer.
Why did you make me sign over the money? Why do you want me dead? I wanted to ask, but the act of bringing the questions to my lips started time moving again, and then he fired.
I sat up in the posh bedding, gasping for air. My heart was beating like a pneumatic hammer. It took more than a minute for me to catch my breath.
I crawled on hands and knees to the foot of the bed. Twill was sound asleep in his portable body bag. He’d unzippered the face net and the front was open down to his waist. I could just make out the peaceful face of his repose.
I MADE MY way to the small dining table off of Katrina’s near-professional kitchen. I brought my jacket with me, but search as I might I couldn’t find the cigarettes. Then I remembered that I had quit again and so went to the cupboard for the bottle of brandy Katrina kept there.
Three shots later I calmed down enough so that my pulse was near normal and my mind was working in a fairly linear fashion. Timothy Moore, no matter how good his story was, didn’t make sense. The dominoes were just too perfect. There was a slim chance that he was on the up-and-up, but I’d have been a fool to play it like that.
I took out my personal cell phone and entered the code “666.” And even though it was 3:17 in the morning, he answered on the first ring.
