Cross Country Murder Song (9 page)

The next time they met she'd had her eyelids done: an eyelid lift. It made her eyes feel sluggish and weepy. She'd once had a bad reaction when younger to a cheap perfume and her stinging, perpetually moist eyes reminded her of the insecurity of that time and those teenage years. She hated it. Worse still, he didn't even notice. It had cost more than her lips and didn't even have half the impact. It was late spring by then and her sister invited her to a barbeque in their back yard. She sat in the same seat where months before he'd first touched her and she'd flinched in fear and excitement and he'd recoiled at her imperfect thumb. She willed him to leave the milling group near the kitchen door and to come over and talk to her, but he laughed too loudly with his friends and made pumping actions with his arm as if he were thinking about lofting a football high over the house. Her sister came and sat with her instead, dropping down on to the bench beside her with a sigh.

What are you doing? she asked, staring quizzically into her face as if trying to take all of her in.

About what? she feigned, trying to duck the question. The daylight was broad, the garden glowed almost featureless in the sunshine, and it felt like it was picking out every detail on her upholstered face.

Your mouth, the mole, her sister paused and came in closer for a look, your eyes . . . She sat back as if to focus and made a face that she recognised as her sister concentrating. It was the face she wore when she studied the newspaper or reread a page of a book until the words became less jumbled and conveyed their meaning to her. She was the puzzle and now her sister was trying to solve her. Her sister leant in close enough to kiss her and she sat back startled.

What is going on with you? she asked. Have you met someone new, is this why you're doing this to yourself?

I'm not doing anything, she said, but she avoided herself in mirrors now and never let her fingers trace her face. She missed her mole, she missed the blemish on her skin, she missed the way it felt against the tip of her smallest finger, and how the slight hair on its surface felt when she'd nudged it with her tongue.

She'd had her first lover in her senior year in school and then three more in college. The night she planned to leave the last one he'd got drunk and drove his car off the road, quickly killing himself as he ploughed into the marshy field below. It had nothing to do with her; he'd died without knowing that she was about to leave him. Ignorance too shrouded her friends and family who all gathered quickly around to cluck and moan, keen to let her mourn for a heart long turned cold. She felt guilty about it, but was quietly relieved that she hadn't had to confront him and then let him go out on that road alone with a bottle jammed between the seats and have to think about her as the car slid from under him and left the road. She had a recurring dream after he'd died that she was collecting body parts, limbs and features from different lovers and piecing them together to make herself a new man. In her dream she had slept with enough men to complete her new lover: the right tongue, the perfect eyes, the careful hands (one night she stood there and admired a beating heart pulsing in her palm before she thrust it into the cavern of his chest). She laid all the parts out on a table and watched the flesh right itself, congeal and become whole; he sat up and held out an arm to greet her and then she'd wake up attempting to fathom his features so that she might catch sight of him on the street and run to him and know he was the one.

Sometimes she'd look at her brother-in-law's face in the afterglow, in the muslin-coloured light, and wonder if it was his features drifting in the shadows all those years ago, but she knew better than that. He wasn't here to rescue her; he was only here to save himself.

Once, after he'd left the motel, she'd showered slowly and surprised herself by crying under the hot jets of water. She had no idea who or what she was crying for, she felt no regret and no guilt that she was conducting an affair with her sister's husband. She did however feel herself fading with every encounter, with every heated embrace squeezing just a little more air from her until her lungs felt permeable, her skin too translucent and thin. She stood in the elevator and thrust out a hand as someone called and asked her to hold the door. The man held her gaze as he entered the lift, thanking her with a nod. They rode down the three floors in silence and he crossed the foyer with her, matching her step for step. The receptionist smiled at her as she passed and the man stepped ahead of her to hold the door open.

They know you here, he said, indicating the receptionist. She was surprised to hear him speak.

I think he was just being polite, she said, wishing her voice was more forthright, more emphatic. He smiled as she said it; he was walking across the parking lot with her now. The highway was feet away behind a tall hedge; she could hear cars swishing past. She'd only been inside a matter of hours, but couldn't quite place where she'd parked her car.

My father used to have affairs, he said, all the time. It just about broke my mother's heart. He looked at her evenly.

I'm guessing your guy has a family, he said, but without rancour or malice.

I don't think it's any of your business, she said and was sorry the instant she said it.

It isn't, he agreed. I don't know what my father got out of it. He was a powerful man: I can't imagine it was self-esteem. What about you, what about your man?

She spotted her car and made towards it. He did nothing to stop her.

My mother, he said, and in spite of herself she slowed down to hear what he had to say. She turned to look at him.

She, my mother, he said, read somewhere that emotion is stored in the liver. Did you ever read that? She nodded, it sounded familiar. He'd stopped and was leaning back on a car that she was sure wasn't his. He didn't look like he'd care if his shifting weight set an alarm off.

There's a theory, he continued, that alcoholics are trying to destroy the liver to dull their feelings, to kill the pain there, you know? She didn't, but she nodded all the same.

My mother took this to heart, the longer my father stayed away, the more she drank. He paused and drummed the fingers of both hands against the bodywork of the car. It was cancer that killed her, he said, but the drink played its part. Softened her up for the disease, if you see what I mean?

She was very still though she felt like she was trembling. She said nothing.

The funny thing is, he continued, my dad died two years later pretty much of a broken heart. When my mother was around he couldn't be at home, but when she was gone he couldn't be anywhere else. He used to wander from room to room in our house as if he might happen upon her somewhere, in one of the bedrooms squaring things away, you know? Some animals do that, search for their dead mates after they've gone. They mourn them. My dad did that, he kept moving from room to room; I'd hear him from the floors below shrieking and calling, his booming voice filling the stairwells and then when he'd exhausted all the rooms, when he'd finally quietened down, he sat in his chair and he drank to take the pain away too. Those were my last memories of him, sitting in that chair, getting steadily smaller and inviting me to sit down and take a drink with him. He was an alright guy, he had his problems too. We all do.

She nodded, but was still mute.

I have to get moving, he said. He smiled and tipped his head and then he was striding purposefully through the parking lot towards the exit gate. She sat in her car momentarily dazed. Then she pulled the mirror down towards her and sat looking into her own eyes. It was no one she knew.

She'd tried liposuction by the autumn and had some work done on the bridge of her nose too. He'd complained about the small scar the tube they'd carried her fat through had made at the base of her stomach and at the top of her thighs. She looked at the loose fat gathering below his chin as he quietly complained and thought very hard about leaning forward and tweaking it as he talked. Instead she lay back on the bed and wondered how long she could make love on an orange bedspread. He'd gone before winter, leaving her in the kitchen of her sister's home as builders worked on an extension on their neighbours' house. She'd wanted it to end, but the ending felt abrupt and sharp and after the door had closed she felt wretched and couldn't stave off the hollow feeling spreading inside of her. It went to her fingertips and she had to shake her hands to get the feeling back. Her sister walked in and told her how she couldn't stand the noise coming from next door any more and then she placed her hand on her wrist and asked her if she'd been crying.

It had been over a year since the affair ended. Her sister had never found out about them, but had often hinted that she thought Kory was having an affair with someone he worked with. She made agreeable and sympathetic noises and thought about him out at a motel on the interstate somewhere looking for flaws in the next naked body. Her sister stared intently at her profile. She used her finger to move the ice around in the tall glass she was drinking from and then took a long pull at it until it was empty.

Are you done having work? her sister asked her.

I don't know if you ever know – she had taken to quoting her surgeon for conversations like this – time waits for no man, she said, and she smiled and enjoyed the feeling of the skin constricting around her eyes. Her face was taut; she imagined drumskins pulled tight as she let her fingers idle around her mouth and throat.

Have we got time for another one? she asked, but her sister shook her head, no. She had to pick her daughter up and so they drove together to the shopping mall, where, she thought, she could probably get a drink while they waited. She found a seat at a bar that looked down into a cross-section of shops, each floor linked by endlessly revolving escalators carrying shoppers from floor to floor. She waved the barman over and ordered another drink and waited for her sister and niece to return.

She recognised her former workmate almost instantly, though she could tell by the body language of the woman approaching her that she wasn't so sure.

Nancy, she said, but the word went up at the end and the question hovered above the bar between them.

She stood to embrace the woman and felt for her thickening back beneath her hands. She pulled back to look into her eyes again and all she saw were the crow's feet and the lines around her mouth and the small sack of fat suspended beneath her chin.

You look so well, she cooed, and they held each other again and as she pressed her head into her friend's shoulder she caught sight of herself in a column of mirrors opposite. Her reflected skin gleamed and as she smiled at herself she thought, happily, of a grinning skull. She turned her head and thought she saw a blemish, but decided it was light and the poor quality of the shopping-mall mirrors. She relaxed and pulled herself away. They stood opposite each other, their hands linked.

Tell me, she said. Have you got time for a drink?

Detective Moon, the policewoman said as he approached. She had her hand on the housekeeper's trembling back. She gave him a note and he moved into the sunshine flooding in through the tall windows at the back of the house to read it. It was simple enough. Mona, it read, here are the keys to the basement and the boxes I keep there. Please open them and let my friends out. Give me a day before you call anyone. Thank you for everything
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And then at the bottom his signature. The policewoman handed the detective the keys that had come with the note, the fob was a small, circular plastic frame holding a picture of a young boy with his arms around a Labrador, it looked as though they were both smiling.