Alena: A Novel (27 page)

Bernard got up. I followed him into the foyer, where he flipped switches to turn on lights and opened the door to the black windy night. A few brown leaves swept into the hall. Morgan McManus stood on the stoop in camouflage pants and a T-shirt. His arm prosthesis was shaped like a real arm as far down as the wrist, but instead of a hand a sort of red rubbery flower, spiky and bright like a cactus blossom, bloomed uselessly. “Hello,” he said to Bernard. Then his eyes found me. He took his time looking. I was wearing a new dress I’d bought at an end-of-summer sale in town—emerald green, sleeveless, with a pattern of whorls and spirals in midnight blue—and I could feel his gaze traveling from my face to my chest to my hips and on down to the silver polish on the nails of my bare toes. I stood up a little straighter. If he wanted to look, let him go ahead and look.

“I could sue you for invasion of privacy!” Bernard said. “Not to mention trespassing.”

McManus smiled. “How could I be trespassing when I was invited? Alena asked me to come. I was a guest.”

“Whose guest?” Bernard said. “Alena wasn’t there.”

“No. But you were.”

“I was there,” Bernard said. “Alone. Alone with my boat. If you don’t believe me, watch your own video!”

“That was on the way back,” McManus said. “Not going out.”

The light was attracting a swarm of night insects. A brown moth fluttered into the house, and a large June bug, out of season, collided with the doorframe and fell, buzzing frantically, to the ground. “What do you want?” Bernard said.

“Can I come in? You could offer me a drink. I wouldn’t say no to a drink.”

It looked as though he had been drinking already. His face was flushed and he swayed slightly on the stoop, though I suppose that might have been the false leg.

We sat in the formal living room, with its Félix Gonzáles-Torres candies and its pale sofas and its row of Cindy Sherman film stills over the fireplace. Bernard poured something clear into small glasses and handed them to us. He said, “What kind of person sneaks around with a night-vision camera taking secret pictures in the dark?”

McManus took his glass with his real hand, nestled it in among the spiky rubberized petals of his false hand, lifted it to his mouth, and sipped. “An artist,” he said.

“A snoop,” Bernard said. “A spy.”

McManus held out the glass in his flower for a refill. “Alena wanted me to see something. What was it?”

“You tell me,” Bernard said. “What’s on your tape?”

“What do you think is on it?”

They stared at each other, waiting and assessing. These two men who had loved Alena.

McManus said, “She died, in the bay, with her boots on, and you were out at the same time in your boat.”

Bernard said, “If you have something to say, say it.” Slowly, deliberately, he raised his glass to his lips. Like a mirror, McManus raised his. The pure spectacle of McManus’s gesture struck me—the red rubbery petals or sepals, comical and obscene, contrasting with the delicate faceted glass. The way McManus maneuvered the artificial arm, which was permanently bent at the elbow, in a motion not quite mechanical and not quite human. Bernard was drinking, but what McManus was doing was something else.

“I’m saying you killed her,” McManus said.

The room seemed to sag and droop like a clock in a Dalí painting. The lines in the Sol LeWitt quivered dizzyingly, and the faces in the Cindy Sherman photographs looked shocked.

“If that were true,” Bernard said, “you’d have it on your video.”

“You’re afraid I do have it,” McManus said. “You should be afraid.”

“You’re crazy,” Bernard said.

“You don’t know what I have. You can’t guess. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you an offer.” He watched Bernard wait. Then, after time had oozed and jerked along a while more, he said, “I can give the tape to the police, or I can give it to you.”

Bernard laughed. “Why would you give it to me?”

He reached into his pocket with his flesh hand and pulled out a video card. He laid it, flat and black as a shard of night, on the table. “I want a show,” McManus said. “Alena promised me a show, and I want that promise kept.” We all stared at the dull piece of matchbook-sized plastic as though, if we looked hard enough, we could read its secrets, translate its digital code. Then, with a jerk, Bernard pulled his phone out of his own pocket and started pushing buttons.

“Who are you calling?” McManus said.

“If you want to accuse me of something, you can do it in front of the police.”

“Bernard,” I said, “you’re not calling Chris.”

He didn’t look up.

“I’m not sure,” I began, and then there was a click, and we could hear a tiny voice through Bernard’s phone saying
Yes?
I finished my drink. The vodka burned through me with a blue electric sizzling. The world was a dinner plate spinning through space. Bernard said, “Could you come over? Now. Morgan McManus is here. Did you see him on the news?” Chris Passoa’s voice scrambled and squawked through the speaker. Bernard hung up and dropped the phone on the table. He flicked the plastic video card across the polished surface as though it were a bug. The black square spun sideways and skittered onto the carpet.

McManus smirked. “Is that what you did to Alena? Pushed her over and watched her go down?”

“Alena could swim like a shark,” Bernard said.

“Not if you drugged her,” McManus said. “Not if you killed her first.”

“I loved Alena,” Bernard whispered, and my heart shriveled and toughened like a piece of overcooked meat.

“You hated her,” McManus said. “You were jealous of her.”

“She was Artemis,” Bernard said. “I was Orion.”

“She was brave. You’re a coward.” Plucking his glass from his sculptured hand and setting it on the table, McManus leaned over to retrieve his video card, but he lost his balance. Down he went to the floor with a crash, the plywood chair flying away behind him, his limbs splayed across the rug like a spider. Bernard and I stared down at him, doing nothing. He grunted and slowly began to gather himself back up, like a boxer in the ring, or a newborn foal in a corral. Why I didn’t move to help him I can’t say. Maybe it was the vodka, or the shock, or my shriveled meat heart. Maybe I was afraid of what I would feel if I touched him. Or maybe it was because it was so interesting to watch him, flailing and gyroscoping on the floor, trying to rise.

By the time Chris Passoa’s car pulled up, McManus was back in his chair, but his false arm had slipped out of position. It sagged from his bicep at an odd angle, the way my brother Mark’s arm had sagged after he fell out of a tree and broke it during a hunting trip when he was thirteen. I had to keep reminding myself that McManus’s arm couldn’t be broken—not like that. Not in a way that would cause him current pain. He had crossed the frontier into a foreign country of injury, had climbed the mountain and slalomed down the black diamond trail of bodily harm. When the bell rang I jumped up and said I’d answer it.

Chris was dressed casually in faded jeans and a gray sweatshirt, but his expression was rigid, formal, stern, as though it constituted his uniform. “What’s going on here?” he said.

I took a step closer and laid my hand on his wrist, pretended I didn’t notice his flinch. “Morgan McManus has a video he claims he took the night Alena died,” I said, looking up into his square set face. “He’s drunk. Probably high too. I think when you went to see him it must have opened the whole thing up again. He hates Bernard because he’s never had a show at the Nauk, and now he’s throwing around these crazy accusations. Making threats. It’s as though he’s lost his mind.” I was standing very close to Chris, my fingers pressing lightly into his arm, and as I spoke, I could see him, reluctantly, taking me in, me in my new dress standing barefoot in the airy foyer of Bernard’s house.

“And what a mind,” he said.

“You saw his work,” I said. “You’ve seen how he sees the world.” I said, “Didn’t he tell you Alena’s message was nothing in particular? And now this story about summoning him to the beach, about video cameras! If it’s true, why didn’t he tell you yesterday?” Then I led him into the living room.

“Hello, Bernard,” Chris said. He looked at McManus. “Hello.”

“Hello,” McManus said.

All three of them ignored me. It was as though I had become invisible.

Chris took a seat, crossed his legs. I wondered if he would accept a drink—if he considered himself on duty or off—but Bernard didn’t offer him one. Maybe he didn’t want to find out. “Catch me up,” Chris said.

“Morgan is trying to blackmail me,” Bernard said. “He claims I killed Alena. He offered to trade me a recording of the killing for a show at the Nauk.” He nodded at the video card on the table.

Chris Passoa picked the card up, looked at it, weighed it in his hand. “This the tape they ran on Channel Seven?” he asked McManus.

“They ran part of it,” McManus said.

“And you’re saying the other part shows Bernard drowning Alena? Two years ago? And you’ve kept it lying around all this time?”

“No,” McManus said. “I’m not saying that.”

“What, then?”

McManus rearranged himself in his chair. A few inches of his shiny leg prosthesis showed between his sock and the hem of his camouflage pants, and his neck bulged, the architecture of the tendons straining against the scarred skin. “Bernard went out in his boat,” he said. “The night Alena died. He launched from the beach where Alena told me to meet her. But Alena wasn’t there. Where was she? She went into the water that night, and he—Bernard—was out on the water. Is that a coincidence? Is that what I’m supposed to believe?”

“So nothing’s on the video,” Bernard said. “Nothing at all!”

“You’re on it,” McManus said stubbornly. “You’re getting out of the boat just around the time Alena was dying!” His face was as crimson as his hand.

“Why on earth would I kill Alena? For what possible reason?”

“She told me to meet her,” McManus repeated. “She had something she wanted me to document. She said she’d be there, but she wasn’t there.”

“She died!” Bernard’s voice was like hot oil sizzling in a pan. “She had some kind of accident and
died
! That’s why she wasn’t there!”

Chris Passoa had let the conversation, like fishing line, play out this far, but now he flipped the pickup and began to reel it in. “This video,” he said to McManus. “You didn’t mention it to me when we talked yesterday.”

McManus turned his big head toward Chris, then his torso with its one real arm and its one false arm, hanging crookedly now like a gutter that has come loose after a storm. “I didn’t,” he admitted. “I should have. Truthfully, I didn’t remember exactly what was on it. Two years, after all! But after we talked, I started thinking. And I started remembering more and more. So I went and dug up the video, and things came back.”

“But you didn’t call me,” Chris pursued. “You didn’t bring the tape to me. You brought it to Channel Seven.”

McManus smiled wryly, half his face rising, the other half staying where it was. Chris’s own face tightened in response, his disgust visible. “Why are you interrogating me?” McManus said. “Bernard’s the one you should be questioning. Ask him what he was doing on the beach that night.”

Chris slipped the video card into his pocket. “Is that much true, Bernie?” he asked. “Were you on the beach?”

“For God’s sake! It was two years ago!”

“Yes,” Chris said. “So stop a minute and think.”

A hot silence fell over the room, broken only by the sound of the surf beyond the deck. Alena had died out there in the cold water in her toe rings and her boots. For two years the water had held her in its dark arms, sucked her down to bone, dissolved the essence of her through Cape Cod Bay. I wondered, as I had wondered before, why it mattered exactly how.

“I may have gone down to the beach,” Bernard said at last. “I may even have gone for a sail. I’ve forgotten. I often sailed at dusk. Maybe I did.”

“So you weren’t tired of sailing then.”

Bernard looked at him for a long moment, his eyes dark, the shadows under them darker. “No,” he said. “Not then.”

“And was Alena with you? Did you see her on the beach?”

“I didn’t see her,” Bernard said. “I didn’t see anyone.”

In my mind I could see McManus’s grainy video—the man dragging the boat out of the water. The man rolling it across the sand. The sail, loosely bunched around the boom, flapping its ghostly hand in the dark. Could you guess from that what had happened in the hour before the tape was made? Impossible. From McManus’s angle, hidden in the tick-infested dunes, you couldn’t even make out the man’s face.

“She told me to come to the beach,” McManus said. “She told me to bring my camera. Something would happen, she said. Something I shouldn’t miss. What was it?”

“Nothing!” Bernard cried. “Nothing! Nothing! She could have been anywhere up and down Cape Cod! She didn’t have to be in Nauquasset at all.”

It was true: Alena could have been anywhere. But I didn’t believe it. None of us did.

Maybe Maria Hallett had lured her out to sea. Maybe she’d gone swimming with her boots on, racing a ghost. What a picture that would have made: a woman, naked except for her bubble-gum boots, plowing through the surf, swimming down the moonlit path straight out to the horizon! I thought of what Agnes had said Alena had told her:
You only get one shot at death, I don’t intend to waste mine
. Was she looking down now, rejoicing in the drama she could make happen even in her absence? “Maybe she committed suicide,” I said. “Maybe that was what she wanted you to
document
!” Despite what Chris thought, it still seemed plausible to me. Who knew how far a determined woman could swim with her boots on?

The men’s heads swiveled toward me with the suddenness of guns. The room thrummed.

“She wouldn’t do that,” McManus said. “We were working on a project!”

I almost laughed! Not, She wasn’t depressed. Not, She was full of life, she wanted to live.
We were working on a project!

“What was the project?” I asked.

McManus raised his chin and looked down over his canny nose. “It was going to be fantastic,” he said. “A major reenactment. We were going to restage the sinking of the
Whydah
with an exact replica of the ship, all made by hand! We were going to rig it and train local volunteers to sail it. Everyone in eighteenth-century clothing! Pirate garb for those on board, spatterdashes and buckled shoes for the ones on shore. Bonnets and corsets for the women. And then we were going to capsize it and the participants would go floating into the bay! Not during an actual storm, of course. And then those watching from the shore would try and rescue them. The bodies would lie on the beach for an afternoon, simulating death.”