Little Bird of Heaven (44 page)

Come back to see me Krissie promise?

I’d promised. But I’d never gone back.

No one called me
Krissie
now. No one in my family, even. Not since Sparta.

Only Daddy had loved me in that way, I thought. That way that was
unconditional, unquestioning. Which did not mean that Daddy might not be cruel to me—but Daddy had loved me, so Daddy’s cruelty had been just a part of Daddy’s love. You know your Daddy loves you Puss don’t you and I had known, yes.

Trying to recall, how Zoe Kruller had come into our lives. One afternoon when I’d returned unexpectedly from school, and there Zoe was—in our kitchen! She had entered my mother’s kitchen once my mother was away, like a princess in a fairy tale entering a beggar’s hut and always with surprising consequences. I seemed to have known, even as a girl, that Zoe Kruller had entered other rooms in my mother’s house, like my mother’s bedroom, she had shared with my father.

My mother’s bed, beneath the beautiful oyster-white crocheted quilt that was an “heirloom”—Zoe had entered that bed, too.

There was no mistaking this: Zoe had looked at me with loving eyes, Zoe had looked at me and called me
Krissie!

Zoe had given me an ice-cream cone infested with weevils! I’d had a hard time forgiving Zoe for that, and for my father’s anger at me afterward. But I’d forgiven her of course.

Though thinking how unfair it had been, Daddy had seemed to blame me for the weevils. And if the person who’d sold us the cone had not been Zoe Kruller, Daddy would have been happy to bring me back inside Honeystone’s for a new cone, for no charge.

Back there,
and
back then.
It’s better not to think of it, that numbing wound in the region of the heart.

At the Amsterdam exit beyond Albany, we left the Thruway for a late meal. This, too, Aaron had planned. It was nearly 8:30 P.M., we had not made good time on the Thruway which was still thunderous and perilous at this hour with enormous trucks. In the dimly lighted and inexplicably named Lighthouse Café attached to the cinder block Wile-A-Way Motor Court we sat stiffly self-conscious across from each other in a booth.
An ill-matched couple. Something wrong between them. Not looking at each other—why?
Aaron was leaning on his elbows, on the tabletop, rubbing his fists in his eyes, yawning. He’d driven approximately six hours to
Peekskill, to get to me; now he was driving back to Sparta with virtually no rest in between.

An obsessive and willful personality. A dangerous personality perhaps.

We tried to assess our clients before we took them on. If their personalities were likely to bear up under the strain of a re-opening of their cases, a re-investigation, possibly a retrial; for some of them were long-incarcerated, and had given up hope. Some of them, in prison, had become mentally deranged. The ideal goal was a commutation of sentence, a governor’s unqualified pardon, a prosecutor dropping all charges and a judge ruling a sentence void. But a
retrial
was a double-edged goal.

Returning to Sparta was something of a
retrial.
I would wonder how good an idea this sudden decision had been.

A waitress came to take our orders. Clearly she was attracted to Aaron, they laughed together like old friends, Aaron’s eyes moved over her with easy familiarity but with me, he was quiet. He seemed not to know what to make of me. There was an obduracy in him, an air of self-possession that excluded me. I was hurt, and I was angry. I was chagrined.

There was something sexual here, I could not interpret. As in my office Aaron had disdained to take much notice of the surroundings, the colorful posters on my wall or the card on the windowsill.

Finally, drinking ale, Aaron asked me how I was doing?—but he meant the Thruway drive, not my current life.

I told him that I was fine.

I told him that I was accustomed to driving alone and often in bad weather, I liked driving alone. I told him that I listened to music.

I told Aaron that I’d been listening to Bach harpsichord preludes and fugues, clavier concertos. I told him there’s no one like Bach to calm the mind—“To give hope.”

Aaron said he’d been listening to Axe, Mr. Big, Metallica. He had satellite radio, he said. In the trucks he drove, tow, flat-bed—he’d had satellite radio installed, too.

He spoke in a flat slightly sneering tone. There came that sharp little barking laughter, that grated against my nerves.

Did I know what satellite radio was? I wasn’t sure. I had never heard of Axe, Mr. Big, Metallica. But I could imagine what this music was.

Aaron had removed his sheepskin jacket and jammed it in a corner of the booth. The cuffs of his flannel shirt were unbuttoned, rolled up. I stared at his muscular forearms, what I could glimpse of purplish-spiderweb tattoos. I stared at his hands with their large knuckles, covered in scars. And the thick man’s-nails, edged with grease. A workingman’s hands. Like my father’s. I thought
He knows that I loved him, then.

He could not know how I felt about him now. I wanted to think that I had no discernible feelings for him, now.

Aaron ate quickly, distractedly. He ate like one accustomed to eating alone, paying little mind to food. He drank, ale from the bottle. He would have lighted a cigarette midway in the meal, but smoking was forbidden in the Lighthouse Café.

I had to know: was Jacky DeLucca going to tell us who had killed Zoe? Was this the secret Jacky DeLucca would “reveal,” after nearly twenty years? Yet I could not ask.

For how to utter such words to Aaron Kruller:
kill, Zoe.
It was not possible.

In the Lighthouse Café in our dimly-lit booth, in the background a throb of music, the murmurous voices of other customers, I was made to think of the County Line Tavern to which my father had taken me that evening. I felt now a sensation of vertigo, helplessness. To think that my father had been alive then, and was not alive now; as Aaron Kruller was alive now, seated across from me.

How distracting Aaron’s presence was! His hands that reminded me of my father’s hands, badly I wanted to take hold of those hands. As if a fissure had opened in the earth before me, one of those nightmare incidents that occur from time to time, you read of in the newspaper, in fact such an incident had occurred at the Sparta Gypsum quarry when I’d been a girl: a worker driving a bulldozer had fallen into an abyss in the ground that had not been there a second before.

Buried in tons of gravel. Body not yet located.

Suffocated. Declared dead. Body not yet located.

Aaron reached over, nudged my arm. I had not expected this. His touch was abrupt and unnerving. “Hey. You O.K.?”

Quickly I told him yes. I was fine.

Maybe a little dazed—dazzled—by the drive. The Thruway. Pavement, headlights. Those damned trailer trucks.

“…thinking about the gypsum mine. Out Quarry Road. In your neighborhood. I was wondering if Sparta Gypsum was still operating.”

“Sure. There’s friends of mine work there.”

“And your father’s garage—is that still there? On Quarry Road?”

How naive I sounded! As if Aaron Kruller would need to be told the location of his father’s auto repair.

“No. It isn’t.”

To this, I didn’t know how to reply. Aaron was drinking ale, eating. His jaws were dark-stubbled and his gaze was down-looking, sullen. Or seemed to me sullen. The waitress returned to our booth brightly asking in a fluttery-breathy voice, “What c’n I do for you?”—Aaron lifted the ale bottle to her, to signal he wanted another, but didn’t trouble to speak, nor even to glance at her. The gesture was condescending and dismissive and I felt a thrill of satisfaction, small and mean, petty.

“Do you still have that old bicycle? The one that looked like pipes fitted together.”

“Jesus, no.”

We laughed together. Suddenly, we were laughing. My question had been an utterly foolish question like my question about Quarry Road but it had the effect of making us laugh. My heart was beating rapidly as if, turning, I saw the earth fallen away at my feet, I could not move away, paralyzed in wonderment.

“What’d you think? I’m still a half-ass kid? Riding that damn broken-down bike?”

Now Aaron was looking at me more openly, I wondered what he saw. If I had surprised him, in Peekskill. I was thirty-two years old which seemed to me an appropriate age for me, who had ceased being a girl at fif
teen. I liked my name too, that had a sharp crystalline ring: Krista Diehl. And my public manner which was a matter of poise: holding myself very still as in armor, or a straitjacket, even as others—like Claude Loomis—break down. My hair was so pale it seemed to lack color, a shimmery-silver hair, and I wore it plaited and clamped about my head. A man who’d hoped to be my lover had said that I was a blond Modigliani. I said, But Modigliani’s women have only empty sockets for eyes.

Unlike Aaron, I was determined to be sociable. I asked him about his family: his father, his aunt Viola, his Kruller relatives. My voice was lowered as if we might be in danger of being overheard.

Aaron said in his flat, blunt voice that suggested no emotion other than disdain, his father had died a few years ago.

I told him that I was sorry to hear this.

Aaron shrugged. Aaron drank ale from the bottle.

I asked him about his aunt Viola and Aaron said Viola was O.K.

“Got married, finally. I mean, she’d been married before. This time looks better.”

I told him that I was happy to hear this—“Your aunt was so kind to me, that night.”

Stoned out of my mind that night, stricken with nausea—I could remember little of what happened. Except I knew that Aaron’s aunt had called my mother and managed to convince her that I’d been at a friend’s house and some sort of domestic crisis there had prevented me from calling her. Apparently Lucille had believed this.

My anxious suspicious mother!—placated by the possibility of a crisis in another Sparta household.

Aaron laughed suddenly, as if he’d been reading my mind. With one of his thick begrimed nails he was peeling at a label on his bottle of ale. “Yeah, Viola’s O.K. Maybe you’ll see her.”

Why would I see Aaron’s aunt? I could not imagine.

“Your brother—how’s he? Ben.”

I would not have thought that Aaron Kruller would remember my brother, let alone his name. Or wish to ask after him.

“Ben is a chemical engineer with Pierpont Labs, in Schenectady. He’s married, he has a son.” I didn’t tell Aaron that there was a strangeness between Ben and me of which we could not speak. That this strangeness had begun in that hour when one of us had come to believe that our father was a criminal, a killer; and the other had continued to love him.

“I didn’t think you would know Ben. You weren’t in the same class, were you?”

“Sure. We knew each other.” Aaron paused, drinking. He’d finished his dinner and had pushed the plate just slightly away. A subtle look came into his face, guarded, half-sneering. “Ben knew me.”

Now I remembered the rumors, that Aaron had roughed up my brother.

And that Aaron had lied to protect his father Delray. Lying, Aaron had made the case against my father more plausible.

Not provable, but plausible.

Now, Delray Kruller was dead. Like Eddy Diehl.

There was a brotherhood in death, I thought.

I wanted to ask Aaron about Mira and Bernadette, my friends from high school. My cruel false friends, who’d exuded an air of cheap reckless glamour. I’d heard that Mira Roche had died of a drug overdose but I had heard nothing of Bernadette in years. And there was Duncan Metz.

I asked what had happened to Metz. Aaron said, in his slight-sneering tone, that Metz had “disappeared.”

“‘Disappeared’—how?”

“Executed in some drug deal, probably. His body was never found.”

Executed! The word conveyed an air of finality, vindication.

Thank you for saving my life dear Aaron.

I had never sent any of those letters. I’d torn them into pieces to make sure that my mother never saw them. Yet now I felt a tinge of fear, that somehow Aaron had seen them.

Aaron asked how long I’d been living in Peekskill and I told him: two years. I waited for him to ask if I was married but of course, he did not ask. I told him that my work was fascinating to me, if exhausting and
sometimes disappointing, discouraging. Prosecution Watch, Inc. was a non-profit organization originally founded in 1972 to investigate cases of police and prosecutorial misconduct.

“When people are wrongly arrested. Wrongly interrogated, tried, convicted and sent to prison. Sometimes executed.”

I told Aaron that I’d gone to college at SUNY Binghamton. And graduate school at Cornell where I’d earned an M.A. in criminology. I was a paralegal, a lawyer’s assistant. Most of the lawyers at Prosecution Watch did
pro bono
work, volunteer work, but the paralegals received salaries. I was trying to save money, I told Aaron. I was accumulating experience, I hoped to go to law school in a year or two.

To this, Aaron had no reply. As my brother Ben had no reply.

Aaron hadn’t finished high school, I supposed. I remembered that he’d been expelled in his junior year.

These facts about myself I wanted Aaron to know. For they were facts of my exterior life, like armor.

I told Aaron that when I’d first begun to work as a paralegal, I’d tried to contact the Sparta detectives—Martineau, Brescia—their names I would never forget—who’d investigated his mother’s death. But Martineau had retired, and Brescia never answered my calls. I’d tried to speak to the police chief, who’d taken over after Schnagel retired, but the police chief too never had time for me. Whoever I spoke with, I was put on hold. The last time I called, I’d threatened to get a subpoena, to be allowed to see what the Sparta PD had in their files, and a voice had said
Ma’am I’m going to have to put you on hold.

I laughed. I seemed to have meant for Aaron Kruller to laugh with me. Instead, he looked away. His face stiffened, his eyes became remote.