Suicide's Girlfriend (20 page)

“Wake up, I have something to show you.”

Did the suicide actually say such a thing? Candace wondered. Or were those words just something that foamed up in the agitation surrounding his death? Were they some sort of slough that corresponded
precisely to people's sense that the moment would remain in the witnessing girlfriend's brain forever?

Of course, if the words
were
the words of the suicide, they had to have come from the girlfriend.

Did she repeat them only once, to the police? Or had she, in grief and shock—and maybe even fury—said them over and over, to anyone who would listen?

Morosely, Candace looked up at the bird, now perched on its bare curtain rod. “Sewercide,” Candace mumbled. There was some doggerel when Candace was a kid—a person who died with his head in a toilet? The last line a cantering bit about how the coroner came “and pronounced it ‘sewercide'”?

As neither Candace nor the bird had left the studio since their trip to the patio that morning, Candace headed to the bathroom to fetch them a cup of water. The bird protested. She caught up with Candace in the hall and alighted on her shoulder.

After each sip of water, Phoulish Phlame gave a whistle. When the bird wanted no more, Candace set down the cup and worked a careful fingernail through the feathers on the bird's little skull and twig of neck. The bird turned her head this way and that, eyes closed in bliss. A sweet and wonderful thing: to give another being that sort of contentment. In response, Candace made her own noise of satisfaction, and, ever so lightly, drew her chin across the warm top of the bird's head.

She continued to draw her chin across the bird's head as she slid open the door to the patio once again. The heat of the desert afternoon hit her like a blast. One hundred and ten? Surely above one hundred and five? She wriggled into the rubber thongs she kept outside the door for those hours when the bricks were not negotiable in bare feet. Flop, flop, flop. She made her way to the swimming pool tools, and, this time, extracted from the trio the long-handled brush meant for removing the pool's algae. “Phoul,” she murmured, “good girl. Aren't you a good girl?”

The trick with the algae brush was to push smoothly. One
smooth stroke down, move a step; another smooth stroke down. A little like painting a ceiling, or poling yourself down a river. A little like being a monk, maybe? Being a part of a world that required attention only to this task, and that deemed love and strife illusions? That would be a world in which to be
disillusioned
would be a fine thing, indeed.

“Mrs. O'Connor? Candy?”

Candace turned as a large young woman in black stepped out from behind an ailing hedge of mock oranges.

“Oh, it's your bird!” the woman cried exuberantly.

“Stop! Phoul!” Candace called, but too late. With a squawk, the bird lifted off, spun dizzily up and up—

“Where's it going?” The woman smiled, following the flight; then, after a look back at Candace, she cried, “Oh, my god! It's not supposed to do that, is it? I can tell . . . your face!”

Up into the drooping branches of the great eucalyptus trees that bordered the east side of the yard, Candace wailed, “Phoul! Come back!” In response, the bird made kittenish noises of distress.

“I can't believe this is happening!” The woman in black lowered her face to the stack of books in her arms. “No one answered the doorbell so I just walked around. I'm so sorry!”

Candace turned. It was Joyce Burton, Candace realized. The suicide's girlfriend, Joyce Burton, had dyed her pretty silver hair a queer, flat black since the party at which Candace had met her. Perhaps a gesture of mourning? Candace said, “No, listen, this is my fault,” and then, fighting back tears for both Joyce Burton and Phoulish Phlame, “I was so sorry to hear about your boyfriend.”

Joyce Burton nodded. “Thanks.”

Together, they stared up into the gray-green leaves of the eucalyptus. “Here, Phoul. Come on down, Phoul,” Candace called, and tried to cheer herself with a fact:
In its native Australia, the cockatiel feeds on the many varieties of eucalyptus.

“Come on down, Phoul,” Joyce Burton called.

Candace wanted to stop Joyce Burton for fear the woman might
scare the bird again; still, she did not want to appear to correct this suffering soul, and so she asked, “I wonder if you could go into the front of the house, Joyce. Over Carson's desk, there should be a pair of binoculars.”

At a flurry of noise above them, both women looked up. Out from the eucalyptus trees flew Phoulish Phlame—screaming, flopping up and down like something on a string, while six or seven house sparrows proceeded to dive at her.

“Phoul!” Candace cried. “Here, honey!”

Again, the cockatiel disappeared into the trees, but her protests, and those of the sparrows, persisted.

“Oh, man.” Joyce Burton lifted the pile of books in her arms onto her head and held them there. She wore a black suit with a green sheen that made Candace think of the feathers on a turkey vulture. Today, the rings on Joyce Burton's big fingers were a wild assortment. A few looked as if they came from biker shops. A few were the sort of sweet antiques—amethyst, topaz—that people sometimes inherited from a grandmother, while others appeared to have come from the reservations, from street fairs and gum-ball machines. Joyce Burton said, “I got some wine and stuff in my car? Left over from the picnic? You want me to get us a drink while I grab the binoculars?”

“Oh. Not for me, thanks,” Candace said.

Joyce Burton had been inside the house for several minutes when the sparrows drove Phoulish Phlame out into the open once more. The flock continued to dive at the lone bird until, with shriek after shriek, she streamed off over the rooftops, grew darker and darker with distance, then disappeared altogether.

Was that that, then?

Candace squeezed the tops of her arms, tight. Holding myself together, she thought. She continued to watch the empty sky—waiting for a rewinding of the bird's flight, for a dark spot to emerge and grow lighter and lighter. She turned when she heard the studio door slide on its tracks.

Joyce Burton did not step through the door but remained where
she stood, and it took Candace a moment to realize that her visitor was crying.

“It really is my fault, Joyce,” Candace said, tears filling her own eyes. She went to Joyce Burton and put her arms around that large woman in a hug, then added the excuse that she knew she would offer to Carson: “I didn't realize she was on my shoulder when I went outside.”

Joyce Burton smiled wanly, then stepped away to take a drink from the bottle of wine she held in her hand. “It's not your bird that made me cry. It's just . . . I saw Ricky's picture on Carson's desk.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.”

Joyce Burton took another swig from her bottle. “I didn't see any binoculars in there but I left Carson's books on the desk. They were books Ricky borrowed.” Another swig. A squint up at the trees. The pale skin around Joyce Burton's eyes was checked like the porcelain of an old cup. An effect of grief, Candace wondered. And that quiver in Joyce Burton's face—was it a continuing vibration from the explosion of the shotgun shell?

“I like that painting you're doing.” Joyce Burton jerked a thumb in the direction of the studio. “Wow.”

“Oh, thanks. I've worried it may have gotten a little . . . histrionic.”

“No, no. Sturm und Drang, that sort of thing's good in a still life. So did your bird fly out again or anything?”

Candace hated having to tell Joyce Burton that the sparrows had driven off Phoulish Phlame entirely, and so, afterward, she offered up all of the optimistic cockatiel facts she knew:

Joyce Burton leaned forward and smiled. Candace could not help noting that Joyce Burton had taken a seat in one of the pair of rickety
canvas director's chairs in which her dead boyfriend had sat the fall before. Now a significant chair. A significant patio. Every street on which Rick Haynes had traveled: significant. This felt like the beginning of a wonderful chain of thought, but then a fear welled up in her: Suppose Carson took the cockatiel's departure for a sign that Candace was a presence from which it was desirable to escape?

Joyce Burton laughed. “Hey, maybe your bird will hook up with that flock on Twenty-second.” She raised her bottle of wine in a salute. “What if we liberated all the cockatiels in Tucson, Candy? Filled the trees with pretty little birds!”

A moment before, Candace might have been irritated by Joyce Burton's scenario, but, just now, she could only stare at that poor, slightly drunk soul and wonder what it meant to be Joyce Burton, the one to whom Rick Haynes preferred death.

All glass, no frame, but still big and square and awkward: such was the hall mirror that the bird had always favored. Hard labor for Candace to remove the toggle bolts that held the sheet of glass to the wall, to carry it through the kitchen and study and, then, to the makeshift carport beyond. Carson would have advised Candace to ask a neighbor for help in setting the mirror on top of the carport roof. Carson seemed to know many neighbors. Though Candace often chatted with children she met while out walking, the only adult neighbor that she knew was Wendell Yelland from across the street and Wendell Yelland had to be at least eighty. Suppose she asked Mr. Yelland for help and he tried to take on too much of the task, he had a stroke or some awful fall? Or, he was not hurt, but believed that helping Candace once meant that he could come by the house anytime, forever after, to ask a favor or just chat?

The mirror made a terrible screeching noise as Candace pushed it up and over the edge of the carport's flat roof. It would be ruined. When Carson saw it, he would say, “Was that necessary?” Or maybe he
wouldn't. Whatever good or awful thing that you could predict might turn out to be incorrect. In any case, Candace longed to talk to Carson. He would be angry about the loss of the bird, yes, but he would understand that she felt terrible. Even more important, until she talked to Carson, Candace would not be able to get rid of the words that she needed to say to him:
Oh, Carson, I'm so sorry I didn't go with you! It was probably because I was distracted, missing you, that I went outside without seeing she was on my shoulder!

A lie, yes, but a lie that was not without its germ of truth.

Why didn't Carson miss her so much that he had no choice but to call her before he even reached Iowa? If he worried about her so much, why didn't he need to call to see if she had been murdered or fallen into the swimming pool and drowned? Candace would have called Carson before she planned to, of that she felt certain. Though she would have done her best
not
to ask Carson if he thought that all people considered killing themselves whenever one person did.

Everything. That was what Candace believed that she wanted to know about Carson. She did not understand, however, that the everything that she wanted to know, she also wanted to be palatable. Not just palatable:
laudable
. Carson did know this. Off and on, all night, as he drove through New Mexico and, then, Texas, headlights bleaching the scrub, sending long-eared jack rabbits off on a run, Carson thought with both tenderness and ire of how Candace—whom he surely loved as much as any man could love a woman—how Candace wanted for him to make his whole self up out of things that she could bear to know; how this was her way of helping him to become her private saint.