Criminals (30 page)

criminals

T
he time came for Jean to meet Michael's friends. Like his housemates, the friends, two women and a man, were his own age, a dozen years younger than Jean who was forty, something she knew was not going to matter to them because they were easygoing about everything, while Jean kept coming back to the fact that she had been a girl of thirteen when somebody was weighing the newborn Michael, the size of a kitten as his mother always told him, on the little scale for preemies.

She sat half awake at Michael's picnic table in the sun, waiting for his friends to arrive. Dozens of tiny birds had swooped into the forsythia and made it blink with bits of gray. They were the minute, restless bushtits she had once watched in her own yard in summer, at a time when she had paid attention to birds and looked them up in guides, a time when she had had interests.

The table occupied a clearing in the yard, under a gnarled cherry tree with a net over it. Mylar balloons printed with owls' eyes flew from strings tied to the net, and higher up, wired onto the gutters of the house, sat two large, real-looking plastic owls. All of this was to protect Michael's cherries. The yard was full of lumber and sawhorses
because he was remodeling and had just finished ripping out the back steps, so going in and out of the house they had to use a ramp.

The three friends came through the gate, threw down their packs, and shook her hand. Before she knew it that part was over and they had opened beers from the cooler and straddled the picnic benches. They cut into Michael's bread and soon they were all, all but Jean, talking lazily in the sun. They were complaining about music. They didn't know all the songs the way they had even a few years ago, when there was a song for each of their occasions, each of their moods.

They seemed little more than children. Yet one of them—Jean could not remember which one—worked in the DA's office with Michael.

The conversation turned to song titles and Jean heard herself enter it. “I used to wonder why there's no song called ‘I'm Pregnant.' A happy song.”

There was a moment and then it caught. “A girl song! Or how about ‘I've Got My Period,'” said one of the women, the one with the shining, light-brown braid. Lisa. She had swung her long leg over the bench and begun tearing wedges of bread off the loaf Michael had made, spreading cream cheese and cherry jam, talking with her mouth full. “Well, that's an important occasion. And for some of us it was a real cause for celebration. When it first came, I mean. And then of course many times afterward,” she added, licking her fingers, “so I guess the song would be ambiguous. Michael, your jam is incredible.”

“It's the cherries,” said Michael. They all gazed up at the protected tree. “Starlings. They'd get 'em all.” Everything you do, Jean thought, all this shoring up of house and yard every weekend, making jam, growing zucchini, for God's sake, all of it is orderly. It's all planned, it's careful, you write it down in those notebooks of yours. What for? Is it important? Why be so careful and ceremonious? Of course it was because he was a lawyer—or did he say “attorney,” the way people his age liked to?—why be a lawyer at all at his age, and in the prosecutor's office, when it didn't suit him—surely when he had children he would not be good at punishing them—why try to do it, or any of the complicated, futile projects he engaged in, if not out of pride
masquerading as modesty and simplicity? And yet he seemed modest, simple, kind.

By a silent agreement they did not have to work at any conventional understanding of each other, they had bypassed that. If they were seriously interested in each other, and it was not clear that they were, it was in some other way.

“But why not ‘I'm Pregnant'?” Jean persisted, realizing as she said it that it sounded like an effort to turn things in her own direction. Neither of the women at the picnic table had yet been pregnant, as far as she knew. Or no children, anyway. No marriages. No deaths.

“Yeah,” said Lisa thoughtfully. “Maybe a reggae. Hmm. There's ‘Having Your Baby.'”

“That's different.”

“What about the poor pregnant teenager?” said Steve. Already Jean didn't care for Steve because of his frequent soft, confident laughter, and her suspicion that he was the other prosecutor. “‘I'm Pregnant' would be like ‘oh God, what am I gonna do now?' It's kids that songs are for now, they don't write them for us.” He ended with the soft laugh.

“Country songs, they do.” Jean looked up because this was said by Michael.

“For you, maybe.” Steve slapped Michael on the plaid flannel of his small, hard shoulder.

Michael had persuaded Jean to spend a weekend with him, then another. They did not sleep together. Why was he pursuing her? The question made her queasy. I am, she said to herself, like a can of something in the back of the refrigerator. Web and mold. But not mold, because I'm not alive. You don't know that, though, she thought, eyeing Michael, so you can't be blamed. Or if you said “dead,” it would be a metaphor.

The sun was high. It was afternoon on Sunday, on his mowed grass with the neatly stacked lumber, netted tree, tomato plants and trellised peas, picnic table, all encircled by the high cedar fence he had built, with a row of hollyhocks growing up against it. In the spaces between forsythia bushes he had planted the tall flowers, soft,
worn-looking blossoms with furred leaves. That was what he liked, that suggestion, in the countrified pink flowers, that nothing in the tiny field inside the fence had to do with what was outside it—the freeway they could hear gusting close by, the courtroom a few miles down it where he went in his gray suits. But Jean didn't want to be in a little field. She was waiting for the friends to go so she could say good-bye to Michael in some acceptable but abbreviated way and get back to her own unmowed, flowerless yard, her house. Her house! Her heart gave a throb of appetite and fear.

“Maybe you should move,” Michael had said. At that time he hardly knew her, her friends pointed out. But he hadn't said, as those friends of hers, friends now half forgotten, had said, “What's in that house for you?”

She couldn't tell them, but she had told Michael.
His soul
. His soul is there. It hasn't gone, not yet. I can't leave. I don't like to be away this long, a whole weekend.

“OK, Jean,” was all Michael would say to her wild look. Pity. She recognized his talent for graceful pity. A person could cry in the rather sharp hollow of his neck and shoulder, certainly; she had done so. But she would not again. Tears were not what they had been on that occasion. Tears had reverted that one time to their old purpose of cleansing and relief. Usually they were more like vomiting, they worked on the muscles, and now the few times they came, mostly in the car, she felt afterward as if she had fallen down the stairs.

“Have you considered seeing somebody?” This he threw out lightly, while he was making the bed. She had been standing at the new window the whole time he was putting the room in order because he was going to give his friends a tour of the house. She had picked up her things, there was no reason not to stand there a little longer and lean her head on the glass.

“Who, a counselor, a grief counselor?” She stopped him with her palms on his chest.

“Oh, right, I'm talking wellness.” In the morning, climbing the hill in silence after he made her get out of bed and put on clothes and walk around the lake with him, they had seen it, the bumper
sticker. “Visualize Wellness.” Jean was out of shape and couldn't get her breath. The three-mile walk, the steep grade were nothing to Michael, a five-mile run barely raised a sweat, but when he walked with her he always stopped to give her a rest. This time he leaned on the car with the bumper sticker and screwed up his face. “I'm visualizing. I think I'm getting it.” He opened his eyes. “I'm not going to say what it is, though. Each person has to see Wellness for him or herself.”

He never came closer than she wanted. Now he was letting her stand at the window in his bedroom. If she wanted to she could stand there all day without moving, just looking out and smelling the wood; he would not interfere. He merely said, “I would not make suggestions to a person unless”—he paused—“I really wanted her to be in OK shape so I could use her and cast her aside without any qualms. Because she's older. And us young guys don't have any conscience yet. That comes when you're forty.”

“Well, maybe it does. And conscience is going to keep us together?”

“Oh, you want to keep together?”

“Oh, Michael.” She did like using his name. It had been the name of her son's best friend. Was still his name. Michael. She could hear it being called down the stairwell in a voice. Out the window in a voice.
Hey! Michael!
“They'll be here and you won't have any lunch ready,” she told him.

“I'm not giving them anything except bread. Bread with accompaniments.” But he had made the bread. There were men like this in Seattle still.

In the mornings his room was filled with dusty sunbeams, and when she lay trying not to wake up all the way she could feel sawdust in the sheets. Though he did not have to, Michael shared the house, like most people on his street, in his part of town just across the freeway from the university. Several houses on his street were starting to receive new roofs and paint and to have their deep porches, which had been converted to front bedrooms, opened back up. He was taking part in all this, happily but with a certain fixedness, as if he had to invent the methods of renovation.

His housemates were away bicycling for the weekend. She had stood beside him to wave them off yesterday morning, with their bikes locked in frames on top of their van, two kids even younger than he, in those shiny black skintight pants everybody wore now to bike in, with small helmets and goggles, and tight mesh sleeveless T-shirts. They had shown her their slim packs of dried food. “Well, have fun,” they said together, and smiled at the couple on the porch being left alone in the house, new lovers, seemingly. They were sincere, wishing Michael well, the one with his coppery beard and the other blond and open-faced. They were so direct, like Michael, that looking into their eyes Jean thought, I must stop lying all the time and just tell the truth, just say . . . nothing. That is the truth. Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing.

Why do I pretend to be nice? she thought, shaking their strong hands. I had friends of my own and they let me be. Why am I standing here with friends of his, as if I were nobody? Because I'm nobody, she replied to herself, nobody and nothing. But she didn't mean it. She was something. Something high up and loosely put together, like a cliff nest of debris and bones and shed, hollow feathers.

Why would he have put his arms around a person like that when the car broke down?

They had met when her car stopped on the freeway. It was late at night, raining, after she finally went to see a movie. Her first in seven months. Coming out into the parking lot in the rain she could not have said what movie had played, but her head was aching with chagrin at all the color, the woman's careless babbling, the foolishness, the man's inconsequentiality, the failure of anyone to account for the emotions being enacted. Children are born because of characters like you, she thought, born and made to live and made to go through whatever happens to them because you—
you—

With a pounding in her head she drove onto the freeway.

The timing belt, Michael said later. The car just sank to a stop. She was a good driver; she had time to realize what was happening, change lanes, steer onto the narrow shoulder against the wall of the on-ramp, all before it came to a stop, like a top spinning its last and
falling on its side. The rain droned on, the windshield wipers had not stopped. Of all the possible passers down the freeway at midnight—the murderer, the guy strung out on drugs who would force her to let him into her house where he would torture her—the man who walked into the red of her taillights with his arms out from his body to show no ill intent was Michael.

He came into her rearview mirror as a shape, outlined in rain by his own headlights.

While she was explaining, she let him get into the car out of the rain, because he was short. I'm taller, she thought, probably stronger. He can't hurt me. Though when she sagged against him she felt the muscles, like small sandbags.

His pleasantness in response to her tight voice explaining that she had never had any car trouble brought on one of the bad episodes. She cried for fifteen minutes. My son is dead! she said repeatedly, shouting almost, in the shut car. He was ten years old! Ten! And he, turned in his seat facing her with his arm on the dashboard, had drawn a black 10 with his finger on the fogged windshield. There was traffic, cars passing so close they shook hers with a
whump
. So this is hysteria, she thought. It was exactly like being drunk, the impossible load of wrath coming up from somewhere, the operatic gestures with hands on slimy face. And I, she whispered coldly, raising her head, when she got herself stopped, I was at the wheel.