Lie Still, page 9
After a time, my breathing grew less ragged. The spinning carousel slowed.
“Emily?” Tentative.
Nothing came out of my mouth, even though I willed myself to speak, and my body to stop trembling. I tried to identify the one emotion that hadn’t been wrenched out of my gut. I felt relief. But not healed. I wanted desperately to feel healed.
“I’ve always suspected something like this.”
I swallowed a hard rock in my throat. “You aren’t mad?”
“Why in God’s name would I ever be mad at you for this? I’d like to kill the guy.”
I didn’t say anything. Mike didn’t make empty threats. The last thing I wanted was for him to go hunting.
“There were signs.” Mike shook his head. “I saw them. Marguerite saw them. She said not to push you. That it would happen. That you were almost ready. Because you loved me … and wanted to change. You wanted us to change.”
Marguerite, our last therapist, our best therapist, a University of Chicago Ph.D., the only professional who told me with unwavering faith in her Supreme Being never to be afraid to try again. She was only in her late twenties, but she knew about losing things. She’d grown old on the streets of Detroit before she was sixteen. She had told us that much. She didn’t say that she’d been raped in that city of decay. But I knew.
“I don’t think I can live without you,” I whispered.
“Why in hell would you ever have to?” He arranged a few pillows on the headboard and patted the space nearby. Familiar territory. I scooted up and leaned my back against his stomach, staring at a pattern of nail holes in the wall, at the three oval shadows in the paint left behind by a set of framed vintage flower prints. Now the orchids were permanently gone, and so was the old lady who hung them.
Words stumbled out of my mouth. I told Mike excruciating, inane details, like the empty Domino’s pizza box sitting on the floor of Pierce’s dorm room. I avoided dragging him along razor-sharp wounds, like how there was another person in the room. Mike didn’t seem to need any more than I was willing to say, murmuring encouragement, never interrupting.
Not until I mentioned the package.
“Someone sent the rape report here?” he barked, rolling away. “You don’t know where it came from? Where the hell is it?”
“In my purse. On the dresser.”
He jerked himself off the bed, and I immediately felt a chill, the moment disintegrating. Zero to sixty, tender to tense, in a split second. Our pattern.
“How the hell can you find anything in here?” Mike was back on the edge of the bed, pulling things out of my purse recklessly: loose coins, lipstick, my wallet, receipts. Dumping it all onto the tangled sheets. No woman can bear this kind of invasion of her purse, especially when it’s a nuclear disaster inside, even when it holds no secrets.
“Mike, calm down. Stop. Please.”
I grabbed the purse from him and opened the zipper compartment. The crumpled sheet was now smoothed, folded in half twice.
“You wadded this up? Were you not going to show it to me?” His voice held disbelief. “Never mind.”
He read quickly down the page, detached, professional, not the lover who had moments ago curved his hand around my breast.
“This cop, if you can call her that, should be shot like a dog. I don’t like this, Emily. Did you ever think this could be from him?”
“No,” I said, truthfully, thinking I didn’t like that expression. Shot like a dog. Any rabid dog was better than the man who raped me.
“Frat-boy rapists like him don’t stop at one.”
No, I thought. They marry shy little wives who homeschool their kids, they go to church every Sunday, rail against homosexuals, and continue their sexual perversions on the side. I closed my eyes and pictured a Christmas card photo with Pierce and an imaginary family: a lovely wife and two sweet-faced children posed with him in front of a simulated forest, everyone wearing forced smiles and coordinating black shirts and worn jeans. Trying too hard.
The pitch of Mike’s voice was rising, the cadence more and more frenetic. “A friend of mine who works sex crimes calls date rape ‘the last frontier of crime.’ Women won’t report. If they do, juries don’t like them because they are traumatized and look guilty because they feel guilty and can only paint a picture of fragments. But the rapist, he isn’t confused at all up there on the stand. He’s not feeling guilty. He’s got the whole picture. He drew the fucking picture.” Mike dropped back onto the bed, resting a hand on my leg. “I shouldn’t even call him a frat-boy rapist. He’s a serial predator. A planner. These guys operate in their social network, careful not to leave marks, assessing targets less likely to tell. You know that he planned to rape you that night? Maybe for weeks.”
Mike was making a noble speech in our bedroom, rushing to fill the space with his experience, with facts, to attach some kind of sense and reason to something that couldn’t be tacked down by either one. He was meaning to make it less, not more. But his ferocity and the cold, antiseptic words flying out of his mouth—target and predator and social network—only broke loose more pieces of that night.
The cloying odor of Pierce’s shampoo. My first, absurd thought when he flipped me over. He’s not going to marry me. The sting as my roommate dabbed alcohol along the path where his fingernail had raked my leg.
It was almost unbearable, the pain and guilt I felt for that naïve, humiliated girl. But Mike was trying so hard. I couldn’t let him know he was making it worse.
“I don’t think that Pierce Martin sent this.” I hadn’t spoken his name out loud in thirteen years. He was like a roach crawling out of a sink drain.
“Where’s the envelope?”
“In the kitchen trash.” He grabbed his boxers off the floor and pulled them on. I swiped at his arm but too late. “Wait. Mike.”
Already, I could hear him tossing the kitchen trashcan, slamming a drawer shut that was in the way, silverware rattling. It didn’t take long, but long enough for me to urge my heart rate slower.
“This it?” He stood in the doorway in old blue boxers, holding a piece of paper, red-faced and half-naked, and it struck me not for the first time how there was never a moment that he looked vulnerable.
I nodded and spoke quickly, hoping to diffuse things. “I keep thinking … this might be Caroline’s work. Mike, where are you going?”
Let me tell you about the box, dammit. About a club of pretty Texas vipers entwined by their ugly secrets.
“To take a shower.” His response was brusque. “Then to work for a while. To butt in.”
When Mike reappeared, he was dressed in his new uniform of crisp khakis and a dark blue polo shirt with CLAIRMONT POLICE DEPT. embroidered over the pocket. He strapped on the gun lying on his bedside table before leaning in to simultaneously brush my forehead with his lips and run a swift hand over my belly, always part of the goodbye now, like rubbing a Buddha for luck. But it was the tiny Buddha inside me who needed all the luck he could get.
He turned at the door and spoke gruffly. “You good?”
This was typical of Mike, to acknowledge as he was walking out the door that we’d just experienced something of a breakthrough.
“I’m fine. Really. Thank you.” This was typical of me, not asking him to please hang around.
I knew the uselessness of telling Mike in this mood that it was too late to go back to work—8:13 p.m., by my clock radio—so I lay back on the bed listening for the front door to click shut, to hear his key locking it from the outside. I wondered what he planned to do with the police report, whether he would search for Pierce Martin and find out the rest. Untie the ribbons of my secrets all by himself.
The brittle ring of the phone interrupted.
I couldn’t think of anyone on earth I felt like talking to. Reluctantly, I picked up the receiver on the bedside table. Something was screwy with our caller ID because of the old telephone lines in the house, but Mike insisted I answer the landline no matter what. He didn’t like when he couldn’t reach me, which he declared was half the time lately. The pregnant me forgot to charge my cell phone, left it in the car console or buried in the chair cushions, turned off the sound.
“Hello.”
Nothing.
“Hello? Who is this?”
I felt a presence on the other end, waiting me out. The thick silence spun me back to a phone call in college, months before I even knew Pierce Martin’s name. The caller had paused his rapid breathing long enough to whisper that he was watching me through the bare window of my basement apartment. The cops who showed up ten minutes later assured me that the caller was some gutless wonder lying in his own bed, jerking off. But, I always wondered, how did he know I had no curtains?
Anger at Mike surged, for leaving me alone and not letting me finish. I sat there in my nightgown, slick with sweat and tears, gripping the phone and willing the intruder in my bedroom to hang up first.
I won.
I woke up, sitting ramrod straight, staring at the face of a frightened, wild-eyed woman.
It took a moment to realize that the woman terrifying me was me.
My eyes were locked on a murky reflection in the mirror leaning against the wall on top of the dresser. The white moon of Mike’s head rose beside me in the glass before his arms pulled me down into a warm embrace. He had slipped back into bed around 1 a.m.
“The dream again?” he asked, half-awake. “The little girl?” And then he promptly started snoring.
“Yes. The dream.” I snuggled tighter into his arms even though my body was steaming, soaked with perspiration.
“The little girl,” I said.
The little girl in my dream stands on top of a steep hill. Her expression is solemn. An ancient stone church looms behind her with dozens of pointy turrets rising like thick, sharpened pencils against the clouds. I can see every detail of her face and every microscopic blade of grass on that hill in high definition, a magic trick of dreamland. After the third miscarriage, Mike had made me bring her up in one of our marriage counseling sessions with a woman whose name wasn’t Marguerite.
Yes, the little girl in the dream looks like me, I told the therapist, who gave off a polite, bored vibe in our sessions, as if I wasn’t interesting enough to be a good anecdote in the unfinished self-help book glowing on her computer screen. If only she knew.
The therapist persisted.
Did I know that the little girl probably represented my vulnerability? My fears?
It wasn’t a deep thought worth 150 bucks for a forty-five-minute hour.
Yes, I’d heard that.
But, of course, I knew something different.
11
The uneasiness began with the moms, like I guess it usually does. A tiny flame of gossip, texted and tweeted and Facebooked, all of it leaked from Mike’s office. The blood on the pillow. The damning Bible verse. No family stepping forward.
It was a churning, collective small-town kind of worrying unfamiliar to me, an ex–New Yorker who knew exactly seven people by name in my last apartment building. In New York City, there were 99,000 calls to 911 a day. People disappeared into the ether all the time. No one bonded about it.
Three PTA officers had hounded Mike’s office yesterday until he agreed to place an extra cop at the elementary school during recess and for end-of-the-day pickup. Their concerns weren’t specifically about Caroline Warwick but about the idea that this could happen here, to someone rich and ensconced behind a fortress wall.
“ ‘Paranoia is knowing all the facts.’ ” I said this nonsensically to Mike, on the third morning that Caroline was missing. “Woody Allen.” I was making myself a breakfast of cut-up bananas with sugar and milk, one of my mom’s old tricks.
“Not helping,” Mike said. “Facts aren’t even part of the equation yet. One of those PTA moms bordered on maniacal. She mentioned the Lindbergh baby. First Baptist wants to hold a vigil. I want to hold off hysteria.” He grimly dumped his coffee in the sink and kissed the top of my head. “What you are eating is disgusting.”
As soon as he closed the door, my smile receded. In seconds, I was punching Maria Valdez into a White Pages search on my laptop, which returned 113 listings for either M. Valdez or Maria Valdez within a sixty-mile radius. I took a guess and focused on the M. Valdez who lived closest, in the nearby town of Boon Hill, which was mostly Hispanic. A random decision on my part, because odds were that Maria Valdez was living in a house under a first name that belonged to a father or husband or boyfriend with one of twenty-five initials other than M. But this was the plan I’d made last night.
Mike had brought up Boon Hill in a recent conversation because he was amazed that it was mostly minority and poor with almost nonexistent crime stats. About four hundred people, mostly low-income Hispanics, some illegal, some not. Primarily good people, working hard. Scrubbing toilets, pounding nails in roofs that reflected 200-degree heat, making sub-par wages. No one seemed to mind, Mike said. The Clairmont elite cast their gaze the other way, to the far, far left, when it came to immigration papers for people who snuggled with their children and made their lives immeasurably better. For people they loved. The Hispanics hunkered down, hoping that they wouldn’t get booted back, that Washington and Texas politicians would remain hopelessly mired. It seemed a very good bet for Boon Hill residents.
Clear directions to Boon Hill did not exist in Google or on the Texas map in the glove compartment, which meant I couldn’t plug in the most accurate coordinates for Hugh. I snapped him off after he directed me to drive straight into a barbwire fence and rolled into British freak mode when I ignored him. Bloody hell! You’ve missed it! Mum, turn around!
“Bugger off, Hugh,” I responded, in my best Cockney.
I bumped along on the two-lane country road, feeling lost even though I was traveling in a perfectly straight line. The leafy trees on either side formed a drooping canopy over the road. Eerily isolating. Maybe this drive wasn’t such a good idea. There hadn’t been a single living thing in the last ten minutes except for the crow with nice aim who dropped a splotchy white present onto my windshield.
For the next five miles, I felt increasingly unsettled. The sun was shining but something was off. Every few minutes or so, I checked my rearview mirror. I had answered two hang-up calls this morning after Mike left for work. I was trying to convince myself that they were a glitch between a telemarketing company’s computer dialing and our house’s frayed wiring.
I woke up this morning with Maria on my mind. I figured Maria would have a pretty good handle on whether it was Caroline Warwick’s habit to send out obscure threats to prospective club members. Maybe Maria herself had delivered this special present to my door as part of her duties. I hoped, prayed, that Caroline was at the root of this, because the alternative—that it was all somehow connected to Pierce Martin—was far scarier. I could handle a depressed rich old lady with an overly obsessive interest in my life. Maybe Caroline had voluntarily booked herself into a comfy psych ward for a couple of weeks. Maybe Gretchen had put her there and just wasn’t saying.
I almost missed the sign. Weeds were growing halfway up the pole: BOON HILL, POP. 212, obviously a few years behind the census. No hill in sight.
When a colorful row of wood houses suddenly appeared on either side of the road, I pulled over with relief. Civilization. I almost ran into a small sign planted in the sloping lawn of a boxy house with peeling sky-blue paint. QUILTS AND ROCKS! SE VENDE! BARATO!!! Maybe not quite civilization. My high school Spanish translated: FOR SALE! CHEAP!!!
My eyes traveled past the litter of rusty tools and a huge pile of limestone rocks to the west side of the home. Wildly colorful, Mexican-inspired quilts fluttered on the clothesline like free-spirit Picassos. This house seemed as good a place as any to knock first.
I slipped out of the car, sidestepped a broken tractor seat and an old-fashioned hand pump, and delicately maneuvered up crumbling concrete steps to a small porch. I peered through the patched screen door, but could only make out the dark shapes of a couch and a chair. Every shade was drawn to shut out the sun. Somewhere in a back room, an industrial floor fan roared like an airplane taking off.
Just as I was about to knock, the chair moved. Or rather, a shadow rose out of the shadows. I found myself eye to eye with a fiftyish Mexican man on the other side of the screen. He wore a guarded expression and a faded red-and-blue-checked work shirt. A silver crucifix hung around his neck. Catholic. One of my people.
“I was about to knock,” I said quickly. I offered him a practiced smile, which he ignored. His gaze traveled from my sweaty face to my belly to the old pink Skechers on my feet. I hadn’t taken much care with my appearance this morning, throwing on maternity jeans with a kangaroo pouch that the website promised would expand with me up to forty more pounds. This seemed possible, even probable, at the rate I was eating iced animal crackers out of the bag. I’d also pulled one of Mike’s faded old T-shirts over my head, emblazoned with the New York Fire Department logo.
Definitely pregnant, possibly lost, certainly harmless. That’s what I read in his face when he stepped out on the porch and let the door slam behind him.
“Do you know Maria Valdez?” I asked. “Por favor. I’m looking for her. Por Maria. Me llama Emily.” I pointed to myself unnecessarily. The man was silent for so long I considered turning around and trudging back to my car.
“I speak English,” he said, finally. “I’m Rafael.”
“Good. Great.” I felt myself blushing. Awkward. “I need a babysitter.” I patted my belly. Lying again.
“There.” He pointed across the road to several small boxy houses.
“Really? The pink house? The yellow?” I couldn’t believe this was going to be so easy.
“Yellow.”
“Gracias, sir.” And then, impulsively: “Cuanto? For a quilt?”
“You want to look?” He asked it almost shyly. A paying customer. There couldn’t be many of us meandering by.
