No One Tells Everything (17 page)

“He’s just my boss,” Grace tosses out as she walks toward the house.

She pours herself a glass of her dad’s tomato juice, forgoing the splash of vodka that she wants, and takes the phone into the family room, falling into the unyielding leather couch with a squeak. She dials.

“Brian. Hi, it’s Grace.”

She feels tentative and shy. She sips her juice and hopes he has moved past the kiss.

“Grace, hi!” he beams. “Thanks for calling me back.”

She’s a little touched; it’s not like she’s been gone very long.

“Of course,” she says. “How are you?”

“I’m good. How are you? I mean, your dad? Is he okay?”

“He’s okay. Getting better,” she says.

“That’s great. I’m really glad to hear it.”

“So what’s up?”

From the back window Grace can see into the woods, abloom with leaves and buds. She used to think they went on forever, that within them were mysteries to discover, secret spots that no one else had found. The first time she made it through to the other side and came out in a backyard on Donner Street, she was heartsick. There was an end to everything.

“I just wanted to see how you were doing,” he says.

“Really?”

Brian laughs. “Yeah, is that so weird?”

“No, no. That’s nice,” she says. “How is it there?”

“Busy. I’m eagerly awaiting your return. I took for granted how quick you are at plowing through stuff. We’re lagging without you.”

“I’ll be back soon,” she says, taking a big swallow of her breakfast.

She spins her watch around to see the time, but she has forgotten to wind it again.

“Good. Okay,” he says. “I’m off to a meeting. If you need anything, let me know.”

“Okay,” she smiles.

She wanders through the quiet house, its windows cracked to the spring air and sounds of twittering sparrows. As she nears her father’s den, she hears him muttering to himself and stops outside the door.

“Damnit to hell,” he grumbles.

He is sitting on the floor, still in his pajamas, surrounded by a mess of slides and round plastic trays.

“Shit,” he says.

He holds a slide up to the light of the window and with fumbling fingers, tries to fit it into a slot of the tray, only to lose hold of it. Again and again he tries, cursing his clumsiness. And then he pulls a bottle of whiskey from his desk drawer, and, gripping it by its neck, drinks straight from the bottle. One, two, three seconds, down his gullet as if it’s water and he’s just in from the desert.

The image stings. It’s not the baseness of the gesture, but its urgency. She saw it once before when she was a teenager. He had topped off his drink at the bar and there were a couple inches left in the bottle. Thinking he was alone, he brought it to his mouth and emptied it back, wiping his mouth with his arm like she had seen done in an old western. Now he is white-haired and angry, unable to make his fingers work. He screws the cap back on with effort, before shutting the bottle back in the drawer.

“Hi, Dad,” she says.

It takes him a moment to place her, to return from wherever he has been.

“Hi,” he says, looking back to the disarray in front of him.

“What are you working on?”

“Organizing,” he says. “Been meaning to do it for a long time.”

“Do you need help?” she asks, not wanting to but wanting him to say yes.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “No.”

“I’m going out to the mailbox if you need anything mailed.”

“I’m making a Callie tray,” he says. “The highlights. Zero to eight.”

“Oh,” she nods.

The light from the window makes a square on his chest.

“Maybe my highlight tray will be your summer project,” she says.

He looks up at her.

“Or maybe it’ll be more than one tray, since I have so many more years,” she chirps. “A highlight tray set.”

Her father opens and closes his mouth like a fish.

“Maybe you’ll include a picture of me when I was thirteen with Hank Morgenstern. He’ll be smiling in it. And his hand will be on my thigh.”

Her dad grunts and looks past her to the doorway for some kind of escape. She wants a reaction, an admission, a defense, anything. But his face is an illegible map of anxiety, pain, and confusion. He will not let her in.

“Okay,” she says, defeated.

He looks down at the slides, a sea of jigsaw puzzle pieces around him.

“So nothing for the mail then?”

He doesn’t answer.

She leaves him to his mining of the past.

G
race cleans out her mother’s spice rack, tossing doubles (cloves, allspice, thyme) and crusty ten-year-old containers (poultry seasoning, tarragon, marjoram). She walks out to the mailbox, ready to run back if the phone rings. She examines her face in the bathroom mirror and over-plucks her eyebrows. She fears that he will never call again.

###

“I got a letter today from an anonymous person in New Jersey. I’ll read you what it says. ‘Charles Raggatt, you are inhuman and every day I pray that you will receive the death penalty, your just reward.’”

“Why doesn’t your lawyer counteract the stories that get put out? I don’t get it,” Grace says.

“He’s doing what he thinks is best. What my parents think is best for me.”

“I don’t think the D.A. will seek the death penalty.”

“I’m told it’s a real possibility,” Charles says.

“That won’t happen,” she says. “If people understand.”

“Have you ever had the feeling that you were suffocating?” he asks.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning, like I’m being sucked under. I’m caught between wanting to get above it and the urge to just give in.”

“What do you do,” he asks, “when you feel that way?”

“Usually I take the easy way out and drink myself into oblivion. So I don’t have to choose.”

“I used to knock my head into a wall. Or burn myself with matches. I crashed my car once.”

“Your parents never noticed that you did these things?”

“No one’s ever looking that hard,” he says. There’s a loud buzzer in the background and a man yells. “Sorry for the noise. It’s never quiet here. I wish for real quiet. I wish for a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Charles?”

“I wish we could each have one do-over. To use whenever we wanted.”

“You’re not alone,” she says.

“Grace?”

“Yeah?”

“The fact that they are calling this a premeditated murder…it’s just not true.”

“I believe you,” she says. He doesn’t respond. “I believe you. Let me help you.”

“I was thinking last night,” he says, “when I couldn’t sleep, about a book I read first semester for English. Have you heard of The Myth of Sisyphus?”

“I read it in college but that was fifteen years ago.”

“I can’t say I really understood it that well, but there was something that stuck with me and it’s become more important to me here in jail, because every day looks the same. He says in the book that we should imagine Sisyphus happy, that in the absence of hope, we have to struggle to survive.”

“Charles, tell me what happened.”

“Were you ever jealous of your sister?” he asks.

“All the time. We didn’t get along that well. I didn’t like her very much. Sometimes we had fun together but usually we fought. She liked to get me into trouble.”

“Parents like to pretend they don’t play favorites but they do,” he says. “They don’t even hide it that well.”

“I think it’s one of the reasons Callie didn’t think anything bad could happen. She didn’t worry because she knew everyone was looking out for her.”

Charles sighs. His words are muffled.

“What?”

“I never felt like anyone was looking out for me,” he says.

“This is awful to say, but when my sister died, part of me thought: so there.”

“Grace?”

“Yeah?”

“Sometimes you remind me of me. Not that I’d wish that on anybody.”

###

Hunter High School is a large, turn-of-the-century brick building with a vaguely gothic façade. Grace parks in the visitors’ lot in the shade of a beech tree and watches the students spill out of Charles’s old school, laughing groups of shiny kids, boys in varsity jackets, girls in expensive jeans. She tries to imagine him, one step behind, looking for the signs of how to act written in a language he couldn’t learn. Always askew.

Charles’s sister emerges from a side door in a threesome of girls, her head back in unbridled laughter as she ambles across the lawn. She has a glow about her, a trueness. Grace wonders if Caroline wants to talk to Charles or if she has given up on him. Maybe she doesn’t want to know. Grace scrunches down in the seat, out of view.

And then as she is leaned over, staring at the glove compartment, she understands what should have been so obvious. If it were her, and she had checked into a rundown motel by herself, it would have meant she felt bad and wanted to feel worse. It would have meant she had had enough. Charles went to the Econo Lodge in Hickton to kill himself. He checked in with a knife to put an end to the spiraling disaster of his year at Emeryville, in the anonymous decay of that room.

When she sits up, Caroline and her friends are gone and only a sprinkle of students idles in front of the building. Grace rolls down the window to the faint rhythmic chanting of cheerleading practice.

She bites her nails. Her head throbs. She’s not moving fast enough. She’s wasting time here in Ohio.

She drives into town, past the old-fashioned Rexall drug store and the freshly painted white gazebo in the middle of the square where Dixie bands play in the summer and craft shows encamp in fall. A couple of kids toss a Frisbee across the grass. She is definitely in the wrong place.

She heads west, out of the nicer part of town, to an area of strip malls and fast-food restaurants and flimsy apartment complexes offering week-to-week leases. Circles, a bar at the Ramada, isn’t open yet. Further out there’s a Hooters. She doubles back and pulls into Happy House Lounge and Chinese Restaurant, a stand-alone place that looks like it used to be a Howard Johnson. On the sign there is a smiling face with slashes for eyes. She parks.

When she was sixteen, Grace lost her virginity with a boy from the club in a janitor’s closet, after a mixed doubles tennis tournament. It hurt, but she didn’t dwell on it. Sex seemed like not that big a deal. It wasn’t until college that this changed, that she felt the pull of male attention, the narcotic power of the physical, the lure of a new body. Sex was the space for escape and nullification that she’d been looking for all along.

In the restaurant entryway, striped and colored fishes swim lethargically in the cloudy water of a giant aquarium. Late-afternoon light streams through the front window in a dusty swath across the bar. At one end, an older woman in a purple polyester suit drinks a beer and nibbles fried chow mein noodles, shielding the side of her face from the sun. At the other, in the shadow, is a man in a short-sleeved button-down shirt with closely cropped hair and smooth, muscled arms. Grace can’t see his face. She sits one stool away from him and orders a vodka tonic.

Upon closer inspection, when her eyes adjust, the man is quite attractive, with long-lashed hazel eyes, full lips, and amaretto skin. He is drinking a cognac and reading the baseball scores from a folded-over Plain Dealer.

“Hello,” he says.

“Hi,” she says.

“What happened to you?”

Her incident with the tree has left a scab on her cheek, still tender pink around the edges.

“You should see the other guy,” she says.

He reaches toward her face and she rears back a little.

“An eyelash,” he says.

“Sorry,” she says, leaning to let him get it.

“Didn’t mean to freak you out,” he says.

“You didn’t. Cheers.”

She holds up her drink.

“Yeah,” he says, and laughs a little, clinking her glass. “Bottoms up.”

They drink.

“Tom,” he says holding out his hand.

“Grace.”

He takes her hand and gently squeezes.

“So what do you do?” she asks.

“Retired. From the military. I do a little of this, a little of that. You?” He leers a bit when he says this, as if he knows she is about to lie.

“Race car driver,” she says.

“Hah,” he laughs, swirling his drink.

Tom buys a bottle of Hennessey from the bartender and they take off into the evening. Even out here, amidst the swooshing of cars, the call of crickets accompanies the darkness. Grace is unusually woozy. The headlights and taillights of passing cars run together in blurry streams. Tom has offered to get them a room at the Ramada down the street using his military discount, because he claims to live in Lorraine—too far away for them to go back to his place. She doesn’t get into particulars because they don’t much matter to her. Tom has nice hands, strong and long-fingered. As he pulls his giant Oldsmobile out of the parking lot, bouncing slowly off the curb, she thinks she might be sick.

“I was in Vietnam,” he says. “In 1972.”

“Oh,” she says.

This makes him much older than she’d guessed. She wishes they we were already in bed, in the dark.

“Relationships are hard for me,” he says.

Oh God, she thinks, please be quiet. She has the spins when she closes her eyes and she’s starting to lose her nerve.

The room is salmon-colored and smells of sprayed air freshener. The cheap nylon bedspread is worn in spots and one of the curtains has come off its metal rail. Tom sits on the bed in his clothes and hands her the bottle of cognac, which she drinks out of habit, not even wanting it, the last swallow coming back up.

“I don’t feel well,” she says, boozily tripping on the end of the bed.

“Why don’t you come here,” Tom says, holding out his ropey arm toward her.

She goes to him and he pulls her onto the bed. He grabs her hair and kisses her hard on the mouth.

###

The phone rings and rings until finally it stops. Grace rolls over slowly—her brain feels like it is floating loosely in her head. She is naked, except for her socks and her watch, and she is alone. It is three a.m. The bedside light exposes an empty bottle of Hennessey on the floor near her bra and inside-out jeans. Panic gives way to regret, and then to shame. She throws up, first right in the bed, and then again in the bathroom sink. There’s a condom floating in the toilet. The mirror shows someone haggard and green, worn out. She can’t remember much after arriving in the room.