Beach Strip (2 page)

I
carried Mother’s empty dinner tray to the commissary, then returned to her room. At this point I would usually say goodbye and return home. But that early August night I told Mother I wanted to stay with her for an hour or so. We could watch television together or just absorb the view out her window facing the lake.

Sitting in her room, you can see the small white lighthouse at the end of the canal on the lake side. There is nothing special about the lighthouse. It is white and slim and functional, with a red metal roof and a light that beams across the lake. Lighthouses don’t need to have a unique design to be romantic or picturesque. They are romantic and picturesque by definition. You say the word “lighthouse,” or picture one in your mind, and something within you relaxes because it feels good. Just the idea, even without the reality, feels good to you. Like hearing a railroad whistle in the distance. Or being married to a strong and gentle man.

On summer evenings, people stroll along the pier to the lighthouse or sit fishing on the walls of the canal. You can watch them from Mother’s room. The pleasure boats and freighters come and go on the canal, passing through the beach strip from the bay to the lake or from the lake into the bay. Birds soar through the sky visible from the window—cormorants black and determined, herons silent and haughty, seagulls gliding and screeching, and Canada geese honking in formation. There are worse views in the world.

We sat watching the lake grow golden in the light of the sunset. It was a muggy evening with no breeze, and many people walked along the pier to the lighthouse, where they stood looking east down the length of the lake or chatted with fishermen before walking back to the beach strip.

When it became too dark to see the people clearly, we turned from the window and I switched on the television. We sat for a while, Mother in silence and me commenting on the silliness of first one comedy show, then another, until Mother wrote on her blackboard,
Why aren’t you going home?

“Gabe’s not home yet,” I said. “He’s on an investigation. Told me he’d be late.” Which was a lie.

Mother erased her first message and wrote,
What’s bothering you?

“Nothing is bothering me,” I said, annoyed. “Tonight I’d rather sit here with you than hang around our empty house, waiting for Gabe.”

She watched me with an expression that said she didn’t believe me, then turned back to the television. We sat quietly until Frieda, one of the night nurses, knocked on the door to say that someone wanted to speak to me on the telephone in the reception area. I don’t have a cell phone. It’s part of my clinging to tradition. I don’t own a computer, either. I use the retirement home’s computer for bookkeeping, but I don’t have one in my house. It’s not that I believe technology is evil. I just believe it encourages evil things.

I followed Frieda to reception and picked up the receiver. It was Gabe.

“Come home and let’s do it,” Gabe said.

“Do what?”

“Get naked in the bushes.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“A glass of wine. Maybe a couple. Been home for over an hour waiting for you.”

“There are people around.”

“Hardly any. Besides, once we’re in the bushes you can’t see anything. It’s dark out. Soon it’ll be pitch black.”

“I’m with Mother.”

“I know.” He sounded relieved. “I know. I love you, Josie.”

“Gabe—”

“Please come home. It’s not just … there’s something else.”

“I know.”

“How can you know? I love you so much, Josie—”

“Gabe—”

“I’ll get the blanket. It’s good wine. Chewy Merlot, the kind you like.”

“Gabe—”

He hung up.

I wanted fresh air. I walked down the hall to a set of French doors that opened onto a small balcony overlooking the lake, where I stood clenching the rail and staring at nothing. Sometimes we make fools of ourselves without intending to, and sometimes we do it with full knowledge of our foolishness. I counted cars passing on Lakeshore Road. I counted the jokes Gabe had told to make me laugh. I counted the places we had made love. When I felt foolish enough, I returned to Mother’s room.

“Gabe wants me to come home,” I told Mother.

She frowned and waved her hand at the door, meaning,
Go, go.

“He’s been drinking.” I settled in the chair.

Mother shrugged.

“I’ll go when this program is over.”

Mother sat watching me, not the television set. I stayed to the end of the silly comedy, and through three commercials, almost half an hour. Then I rose and walked to Mother’s chair. I kissed
her forehead and squeezed her arm. “I may be back tomorrow,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

She looked at me with concern. I have never been able to fool Mother.

I WALKED OUT OF THE RETIREMENT HOME
into the summer evening’s warm, damp darkness, something I have always enjoyed. My sister, Tina, hates humid weather, especially at night. She tells me that anybody who likes warm, humid evenings is longing for a womb, and she’s too old for wombs, including her own.

I crossed the road to the beach trail I had followed from my home and walked south. It is almost a mile along the lakeshore to the canal, where I crossed the lift bridge on the pedestrian walkway, traffic flowing past me, then turned onto the lakeside lane. It’s shorter along the road, but that would take me home sooner. I didn’t want sooner. I wanted later.

Ahead of me, small white lights were moving in patterns both random and logical, like a cloud of insects, and red and blue flashes reflected from trees on Beach Boulevard. The location of the lights was as distant as our house, Gabe’s and mine.

Someone had fallen from their bicycle or their in-line skates onto the boardwalk, I thought. Crazy kids, out too late at night. They move so fast, tearing along in darkness. Perhaps they struck someone walking.

Two larger white lights shone on the lake side of the boardwalk. Their beams moved and broke erratically, making sudden flashes through arbitrary darkness, and I realized they were shining from within the caragana bushes where Gabe and I had made love last summer, and where we had promised to return some warm night.

I began running, past other people attracted to the lights, coming from their homes and their cars, and some from the water’s edge. As I approached, I saw a mass of onlookers standing behind
yellow plastic tape and uniformed police officers, the crowd whispering among themselves, the younger ones adding low laughter to their words. I elbowed my way through them all until I reached the yellow tape, and when I stepped under the tape a uniformed cop approached with his hand raised.

“I live here,” I said. “This is my house. Where is my husband?”

“Josie.” A man in shirt and tie, his large body topped with an almost hairless head, oversized nose, and thick lips, walked toward me.

“Walter,” I said, “where’s Gabe?”

Walter Freeman was the chief of detectives, a man neither Gabe nor I liked very much. Walter held a notebook in one hand, and he placed the other on my shoulder. “Josie,” he said, “go and wait in the house.”

“No.” I pulled away from his touch. I wanted no one touching me, especially Walter. “Where is Gabe?”

“You don’t need to see this,” he said.

“See what? Is it Gabe? I want to see Gabe!” I began shaking with fear. “Please let me see Gabe. Please take me to him …” I would have begged Walter, if that’s what it took. I was already crying. I was already expecting what I would see.

Walter’s voice grew more commanding, like a father dominating a child. “Josie, just go into the house. Now.”

That’s when I forgot about begging. I forgot about everything. “
I
want to see my husband!
” I screamed the words and flailed my arms to push Walter Freeman’s hand away, and ran for the circle of high caragana shrubs. I was beyond fear and sorrow. I wanted to know, I wanted to be with Gabe, Gabe needed me, we needed each other. We didn’t need Walter Freeman, who treated Gabe with disdain, and who once made a pass at me at a charity barbecue.

Two officers were erecting blue plastic sheeting around the bushes, an unnecessary shield because the growth was so thick
that everything within their embrace was already invisible. A uniformed cop stood at the opening in the circle of shrubs facing our house. He was young with a bland face, the kind of cop that enrages me with their good looks and intransigence. He stepped in front of me, staring at me without blinking like some damned stone statue, like a granite robot.

“Is my husband in there, you son of a bitch?” I shrieked, and people behind the yellow tape snickered.

“You can’t go in, ma’am,” the cop replied.

“I’m his wife!” I seized the young cop’s shining black belt. It smelled of fresh shoe polish. Of course it would, because the kid was ambitious, the kid wanted to be promoted, the kid kept his belt shined, the kid was an asshole. “If my husband is in there, I want to see him!”

“Josie,” a voice behind me said. “Josie.”

I knew that voice. I released the young cop and turned to face Mel Holiday, Gabe’s detective partner. “Is it Gabe?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Mel said. “I just arrived.” Then: “I think so. One of the guys out front, in a cruiser, said …” Mel started over again. “He said it’s Gabe.”

“I want to see.” I kept my eyes closed. Maybe it would help to keep the tears in. “I need to see him, Mel.”

I felt Mel turn to look back at Walter Freeman, and heard Walter say, “Quickly.”

Mel pushed away to look at me, hands on my shoulders. “You don’t have to,” he began.

“Yes, I do.” I twisted out of his grip. “Yes, I do.”

The young cop stepped aside at a gesture from Mel, who returned his hand to my shoulder, keeping me from bursting through the opening in the shrubs. I saw the corner of the blanket first, the blanket we had purchased in Ixtapa on our honeymoon, its orange and green pattern lit by the flashlights of two police officers and two medical technicians in white coats. The blanket
covered the area of sand enclosed within the circle of shrubs rising almost ten feet around it. One light lifted to shine on my face, then returned to the scene it had been illuminating: the naked body, the eyes open, the face calm, the head framed in an obscene pool of blood.

I screamed Gabe’s name as though he could hear me. Perhaps if I screamed loud enough, if I raged madly enough, he would rise from the blanket and duck his head like he did, and smile, asking me to be quiet, to speak softly. I could not believe that the man who had saved me, as I had saved him, was dead. But the child in me believed it, the one who always wanted to live on the beach strip, the one who had lain here with Gabe, both of us as naked as he was now but alive in the darkness, making love while voices passed on the sand along the water’s edge and on the lane behind the houses, while traffic raced noisily over the highway bridges and boats moved in silence through the canal.

I saw red, I saw anger, I saw blood beneath Gabe’s body, I saw two men in blue uniforms approach and felt someone seize my arms from behind. I gave up. Actually, my consciousness gave up and abandoned me.

G
lass, glass, glass. Stay away from broken glass. Don’t run with a glass in your hand. Never take glass containers to the beach. Glass in the sand beneath bare feet. I am a child on the beach. No, I am a woman on a sofa.

Glass, glass, glass. My arm ached. I wanted to throw up.

Oh, glass. And a man’s voice: “I think she’s awake.”

Open your eyes, I told myself. I did not want to.

Not glass. Lass. “Lass, lass, lass.” A voice like porridge. Warm, rich, soft. My neighbour Maude Blair was speaking to me. Fifty years out of Glasgow and she still wore her soft highland burr like a tartan, like a brooch in the shape of a thistle. Maude and her husband, Jock, are two of the few friends I have on the beach strip. Not “How are ya?” friends you pass on a walk or in the supermarket. I have many of those. I mean friends who know and care about you. They’re more difficult to find. The beach strip is made up of individuals who prefer to remain that way.

Maude was stroking my head, and when I opened my eyes she smiled at me but spoke to someone else, out of my view. “Aye, she’s fine now,” Maude said. “She’s awake. You’re awake and all right, aren’t you, lass?”

Two medical attendants entered from the kitchen. They looked purposeful, the way professionals do when they’re allowed to demonstrate their training and use their tools. They took my blood pressure, shone lights into my eyes, gave me a pill and some
water, asked if I needed a blanket, and left, satisfied that they had practised on a living person.

I rose from the sofa, helped by Maude Blair. I stumbled into the kitchen and sat slumped in a chair, drained in the manner you have when your body’s supply of tears is exhausted. Nothing ached, but everything pained me.

“Should I be staying with you?” Maude asked. Her hands were touching my head, my shoulders, my arms, as though she wanted to assure herself or me that I wasn’t falling apart physically as much as I appeared to be mentally.

I hugged her to me, burying my face against the printed pattern of her dress, and permitted myself to wail while Maude patted the back of my head gently, saying, “There, there.”

When I sat back, I saw Jock, Maude’s husband, peering around Mel and two uniformed officers, all three making notes on small paper pads.

“We need to question Mrs. Marshall,” Mel said to Maude, then added “privately,” and Maude nodded and stood, looking from me to Jock and back again, dabbing at her eyes with a small lace-trimmed handkerchief. Jock raised a hand to me, then took Maude’s arm and walked toward the back door, into the garden.

Mel followed them, returned to speak to the two uniformed cops, who nodded and left, and sat facing me.

“Who did it?” I asked him.

Someone had brought coffee in paper cups and set several on the kitchen table. Mel placed one in front of me.

“He did. Gabe shot himself.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Josie—”

“My husband did not shoot himself in the head. My husband did not tell me to meet him out there just so I could find him dead. My husband was not that mean or that selfish. I spoke to him, he called me on the telephone, he was fine, he was Gabe …”

“When did he call you?”

“An hour ago. Maybe more.”

“Where were you?”

“With Mother. Just down …” My throat tightened. “You know where she is.” I shook my head. My words emerged between sobs. “Gabe did not kill himself. Where was the gun? Why wasn’t it in his hand? How could he shoot himself without a gun in his hand?”

“The gun was there. He was kneeling when he shot himself. He fell to his left, his arm … when he died, all the muscles relaxed, Josie. That’s what happens. The arm drops, the gun is released. It was there on the blanket. The weapon does not always remain in the hands of a suicide, Josie. I’ve seen it a dozen times. The recoil, the kick of the gun—”

I didn’t want to hear about it. “You’ve seen it a dozen times. Good for you. I’ve seen it once and I hate it. I hate it and I don’t understand it. I don’t believe it, either.”

Mel rose from his chair and walked outside, leaving me listening to sounds I had rarely heard on other evenings: traffic on the twin high bridges, feet shuffling along the boardwalk, muffled noises from factories along the bay. When he returned he said, “There’s an open bottle of wine with him.”

I told him I knew that. I knew all about it. Merlot. Rich, red, chewy Merlot. That’s what we drank.

Walter Freeman entered the kitchen with authority and without knocking. “Josie,” Walter said, “I need a statement.”

“About what?”

“About Gabe calling you tonight.”

“Who told you that?”

“I did,” Mel said. “Somebody has to put the facts down.”

“Then put down the fact that my husband did not commit suicide.” I was crying again. Tears must be inexhaustible.

Walter gestured to Mel, who rose from the chair and walked
outside. Walter took his place at the table, watching me as he set his wire-bound notebook in front of him. He reached for a pen in the pocket of his cheap shirt. Walter always wore cheap clothes. Walter had no class. “Walter Freeman is a man,” Gabe said to me once, “who is confident enough in himself to be an ass and not care about it. You have to admire him for that.” I did not admire Walter for anything.

“You see this?” Walter said. He took a small page of lined paper from inside his notebook. Two pieces of sticky tape extended on either side, like coiled transparent wings. On the note was,
I’m in the bushes. Get naked!
It looked like Gabe’s writing. It
was
Gabe’s writing.

I shook my head.

“It was stuck to the door, the back door,” Walter said. “Look like Gabe’s writing to you?”

I nodded.

Walter inserted the note between the pages of his notebook. “What did Gabe say when he called you tonight?”

“He asked me to come home. You saw the note. He wanted me to go with him into the bushes.”

“Why?”

I looked at Walter, who was staring at me with the same expression he wore, I suspected, while reading a telephone directory. I did not want to speak to Walter, and I wanted him to know it, so I replaced my despair with anger. It made a good substitute. “Why the hell do you think?”

Walter blinked. “We didn’t find his clothes. It appears he left the house naked, wrapped in the blanket. Once you’re inside those bushes at night, nobody can see you.”

“Do you suppose that’s why he wanted to make love there?”

Walter wrote something in his notebook, and as he wrote he said, “Tell me what time your husband called you. At a retirement home, was it?”

“Trafalgar Towers. My mother lives there. I work there twice a week. You already know that. It was around nine.”

Walter’s eyebrows moved up his forehead and stayed there. “It’s past eleven now. You haven’t been here for, what? Half an hour? What took you so long?”

“I walked.”

“Which way? Along the highway?”

“Along the lake to the bridge.”

“Any reason you came down the lake tonight, didn’t walk along the road?”

I shrugged.

“Coming back along the road should have taken you twenty minutes. Half an hour at the most. You took over an hour to get here. Why so long?”

“I was not aware that a wife needs to drop everything and run home just because her husband wants to screw her in the moonlight.”

I watched Walter’s eyebrows descend slowly into place. “What was the state of your marriage?” he asked. He was making notes again.

“The state of our marriage? What the hell kind of question is that?” I looked away, then back again. “The state of our marriage? I don’t know. Michigan? No, Florida. Gabe liked Florida. How’s that for a state of marriage? If Florida is a state of marriage, is Nevada a state of divorce?”

“Josie—”

“Call me Mrs. Marshall. That’s my name. My husband is dead, so I’m the widow Marshall now, but it’s still my name, and you damn well better use it.”

It was a tantrum, but I thought I deserved to throw one and Walter Freeman deserved to catch it. He drew a deep breath and started to speak, but I wasn’t finished. “Did Gabe leave a note? Where’s his note?”

“There is no note.” Walter nodded at his own words as though confirming something. He looked up at me. “Was your marriage happy, Mrs. Marshall?”

“Delirious.”

“Are you certain?”

“I know when I’m happy.”

“Did your husband give you any gifts?”

“Of course he gave me gifts. And I gave him gifts.”

“Expensive ones? Recently?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Were there conflicts in your marriage?”

“Conflicts? Like arguments? Sure there were. We were married.”

“I was thinking of other partners. I was thinking of that kind of conflict.”

I shook my head. “Think about something else.”

“Neither of you was having an affair?”

“No.”

Whenever I lie, I’m convinced something happens to inform the other person that I am not being truthful. I blush, I look away, I stutter, my mouth gets dry, maybe my nose grows longer, I don’t know. Walter Freeman knew I was lying, and he sat looking at me, saying nothing, which made me so uncomfortable that I spoke first. “Who found Gabe’s body?”

Walter pushed both lips forward like a man playing a trumpet, a habit he had when thinking deeply, or as deeply as Walter’s intelligence could take him. “Couple of kids. Down on the beach. They heard the shot and thought it came from your house. One of them called us on his cell phone, and a bunch of them came up here, looking around. They found the opening into the bushes. Stomped all over the place. Screwed up a lot of things, but …” Walter shrugged.

“If I heard a gunshot, I’d run the other way.”

“So would most people over the age of twenty.” He stood up just as Mel entered the room again.

“They’re ready to take Gabe away,” Mel said. “Is there anything I can do, Josie? Somebody I can call?”

I could only shake my head. I could think of nobody I wanted to speak to. Only Gabe. “I want to go with him,” I said. “I want to see him and hug him.”

“I’ll arrange something,” Walter said. “You can follow the coroner’s vehicle in a cruiser. It’ll be out front. The officer will call you.” He walked out of the kitchen through the back door, and Mel took his place in the chair facing me.

“I know it’s hard to accept.” Mel looked back over his shoulder to confirm we were alone, then reached for my hand and held it as he spoke. “It always is. Gabe did it. He had reason to. We both know that. God, I feel terrible. Gabe was …” He dropped my hand and turned away.

“He wanted to make love to me.” I was crying again. Damn it, damn it.

“He carried his gun out there with him, Josie.” Mel turned back to me. “Maybe he planned to do something else.”

“Like what?”

He wiped his eyes and looked at me.

“Bullshit,” I said. “That’s bullshit, Mel. He wouldn’t do that. Gabe loved me.”

“He knew things.”

“He suspected them. Unless you told him. Did you tell him, Mel? Jesus, did you tell him?”

Mel shook his head. “How could I? Why would I?” He knelt to look directly at me. “It’s his weapon, Josie. They’ll retrieve the bullet, and when they match it to his gun, what else can they think?”

I walked to the cupboard next to the refrigerator and opened the top drawer. Then I walked to the pantry and looked behind the sugar. Gabe always followed the same routine with his weapon when he was off duty, removing the ammunition clip and placing it in the drawer near the refrigerator, and keeping the gun itself
in the pantry behind the sugar. All the cops had their own way of dealing with their guns. Gabe told me they joked with each other about it. One put his ammunition clip inside an empty cereal box. Another hid his behind his wife’s box of tampons.

Neither piece of Gabe’s gun was where he would hide it. I leaned against the kitchen counter, staring into the sink.

“It’s his gun, Josie.” Mel was watching me, his head tilted to one side.

“He wouldn’t take it with him,” I said. “Not to meet me. He knows I hate guns.”

Someone called Mel’s name from the door to the garden, and he left me alone for the first time since I arrived home. Gabe disliked carrying a gun, and he disliked police officers who expressed a desire to use their weapon. “If I didn’t have to carry one, I wouldn’t,” he told me once. “Anybody who collects weapons or loves to fire them or says he loves them—I’ve heard guys say that—well, they’re sick.” Gabe was always late for his tests at the firing range, and he always dismantled his gun as soon as he arrived home because he knew I hated the sight of it. He would not have taken it with him to the caragana bushes for that reason. Not to meet me. Not to use it on me. He loved me that much. I knew he did.

When Mel returned, he closed the door behind him. “The coroner wants to move the … to move Gabe,” he said. “The officer in the cruiser out front is ready to take you to the morgue. You’re sure you want to do this?”

I nodded.

“You could ride with me, but …”

Riding with Mel was the last thing I wanted to do. No, seeing Gabe on a slab in the morgue was the last thing I wanted to do. I could avoid one, but not the other. I wanted no one to accompany me to see Gabe. I wanted to speak with no one. I didn’t even want to look at anyone. I buried myself in myself. I didn’t want to do that, either, but I had no choice.