Suspicious River (29 page)

A
T THE
G
OLDEN
D
RAGON
, Reverend Roberts waved to two old women he knew who were sitting in a red plastic booth adjacent to our own. The women smiled widely at him, nodding their twin white heads at me—suspiciously, I thought.

“Hello Reverend,” our waitress said as she handed menus to us. She was a blonde, nearly six feet tall, the only waitress at the only Chinese restaurant for eighty miles. She had a southern accent, and people in Suspicious River joked that the Golden Dragon had been named for her.

“Oh, I know what I’ll have,” Reverend Roberts said, handing the menu back to her. “We’re in a hurry this afternoon, Amanda. I’ll just have a bowl of hot and sour soup. Leila, how about you? My treat.” He said that, and my name, loud enough for the women behind us to hear.

“I’ll have the same,” I said, handing my menu to her, too. It was plastic red, like the booth we sat in, and there was a dragon engraved in gold on the front. The dragon looked like an evil dog with a long, spiked tail.

“Now, Leila,” he said when we were alone again, in a tone that pretended to be worried and hushed, still loud enough for the women in the next booth to hear, “how have you been doing since your father’s death?”

I touched my fork. It was cold. Then I put my hands in my lap and turned the palms up empty, shook my head. “I’m O.K.,” I said, “except for the house.”

“Oh yes of course, that must be very painful, and a lot of responsibility for you and your husband. Do you plan to sell the house?”

The women behind us were sliding out of their booth, putting their coats on over their shoulders. I heard them drop some coins into the plastic check tray. One of them looked hard at me when she turned, pushing her hands through the sleeves of her coat. Her eyes were nearly pink they were so clear and clean, and her whole face was dusted with powder, thick as flour. There was even powder on her lips, and I thought she looked thirsty, dried. Like the snow that day, her face was blinding.

“Good-bye, Reverend,” the woman said.

“Yes, good-bye ladies.” He smiled and waved to them.

The other one didn’t look at us, but she said “Good-bye” into the dark leaves of a vinyl rubber tree near the door.

When they were gone, Reverend Roberts sighed. When I said “I don’t know,” he didn’t seem to remember what we’d been talking about.

“You don’t know what?” He looked at me, blank.

“I don’t know what we’ll do about the house. But what’s wrong is—” I touched my lips with my fingertips before I said it. “I think, I mean, I imagine, my mother is in it. Dead. And I think I see my uncle.” I felt myself blush—a saucepan of lukewarm blood splashed across my face and neck. But, I thought, if I couldn’t tell him, the man who spoke for a living about holy ghosts, rising from the dead, who could I tell?

“That’s ridiculous,” Reverend Roberts said, and the waitress came then, slipping bowls of soup in front of each of us. He looked up at her and said, “Thank you, dear.”

I looked into my soup. Steam crinolined out of the bowl—a bowl of weather, smoothing and breaking in foggy ribbons as I breathed.

Reverend Roberts blew on his own soup and stirred it around and around with his spoon, then he looked up and said, “Leila, you need professional help. I’ve thought it for a long time. Ever since you were a little girl. There’s always been something very wrong, and I certainly can’t help you. I’ll give you the name of a counselor when we get back to the church, O.K.?”

He inhaled the soup off his spoon with his lips barely parted, but he looked angry afterward, as if it had been too hot.

I nodded. I blew on my own spoon of soup. It was thick, and there were green onions floating on the top, mushrooms and thin strips of gray meat just under the surface. I realized, suddenly, how hungry I was, but when I sipped and tasted the soup, I couldn’t swallow. I had to spit it back into my spoon fast. Then I dropped my spoon into the bowl.

Reverend Roberts looked up at me, startled. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asked.

I put my hand over my mouth. I couldn’t breathe.

“Leila, what’s the matter with you?” He still held his own spoon at a hover above his bowl.

I started to cry, and I pushed the bowl away from me. I said, sobbing, “There’s blood in it,” and I held my hands hard against my mouth. “I tasted blood in it.” I hadn’t meant to cry.

He put his spoon back into his own bowl then, and he looked afraid, but he said sternly, “There’s no blood in the soup, Leila.”

I sipped from my water glass, but I could still taste it, rusty on my teeth. I was afraid I’d gag. I could taste the salt of it on my tongue.

The waitress came over slowly, looking worried. “Is everything O.K.?” she asked.

Reverend Roberts looked up at her and said, “Amanda, this will sound ridiculous, but there’s no blood in the soup, is there?” He nodded toward me when he asked it, patient, conveying a message about me to her in his expression.

The waitress put her hand between her breasts then and said, quiet, watching me, “Well, yes. I’m afraid there is. Cook makes the soup with duck’s blood. I’d be happy to bring you something else.”

“O
KAY
,” he said, “I’ll go in the house with you if it’s that important, but after that we have to go to the church, as I’ve said, so this will look like a professional engagement. Those old ladies at the Golden Dragon could very well be telling the whole damn town about God knows what by now. Leila, it’s essential that we appear perfectly comfortable being seen together.” He wiped the damp corners of his mouth with two fingers. We were driving back down the dirt road along the river again.

Still, the sun was shining on the snow, a billion mirror slivers of it shattered in the banks at the side of the road, but there was one cloud in the middle of the blue sky—low, purple, thick as Brillo. Magnificent. A lodestone. Other clouds raced from the edges to meet it in the middle, planning a blizzard.

When we pulled up at the house, I saw that my father’s shovel, which had been propped up against the fender of his car, had fallen into the driveway again. It glinted when we pulled up in Reverend Roberts’s car. A shovelful of purple cloud—soon it would be full of snow again. We stepped out of the car, and I followed Reverend Roberts toward the back door.

From outside, the house looked dark and empty, but I could see something moving behind the black glass of the bedroom window as we passed. “Look,” I said, touching Reverend Roberts’s arm. It felt surprisingly bony under his thick coat.

I pointed to the bedroom window, but he looked at my face. My skin felt tight and dry across my cheekbones in the cold, like laundry on a line, freezing and moist at the same time, or the way an animal’s hide dries out lifeless with life. I could feel tears itch at the comers of my eyes, and my nose had started to run. Finally he looked up at the bedroom window and said, “Blow your nose for god’s sake. It’s just our reflection,” and he started to walk in a hurry ahead of me toward the back door.

I dug the house key out of the deep pocket of my winter coat—that pocket, like a linty cave of winter, a black tunnel to winter—but the key slipped and fell onto a thin layer of ice that had begun to melt, once, but had frozen over again before it did, gone dead cold again when the sun had moved and the shadow of the house had fallen across the back steps once more. That ice was smoother and thicker now for having melted. More determined than ever to be ice. Slicker. More dangerous. I picked the key up with my fingernails, and Reverend Roberts crossed his arms and exhaled. A shred of white chiffon trailed past my ear in his breath, briefly, then disappeared.

“The house looks perfectly normal,” he said when he stepped into it, scanning the kitchen, which wore a veil of blue winter haze. The air smelled silvery. The two ordinary appliances with their blank faces. The stainless steel sink with only a coffee cup and a white plastic spoon like a stiff tongue in it. After I’d moved out, my father had only eaten off paper plates.

“I know,” I said, apologizing, blowing my nose into a paper towel. I pressed it to my eyes, too. I said, “Here,” and walked toward my parents’ bedroom.

The door was open. I said, “This is where I saw her,” and I pointed to the bed. Reverend Roberts looked over my shoulder while I leaned against the door and stared. Again, I tasted a bird’s blood on the root of my tongue. And, after my eyes had adjusted to the dark, there my mother was.

Light, watery bubbles of blood on her lips and the sound of air escaping from a slashed tire.

Or a teapot starting to boil.

Or wheels spinning on ice until it hissed.

“Jesus,” Reverend Roberts said, backing away from the bedroom. His teeth were set hard against his teeth, and he breathed fast through them. “There’s nothing in there, Leila.”

I followed him down the hallway to the living room with my arms open. “I know,” I said, “I know,” but my body could have flown into an explosion of feathers, a white funnel of spine and hair.
Hysterical
, I thought, I was going to
become
it. I swallowed and swallowed, covering my eyes with my hands and then my mouth, to keep the hysterical feathers in.

“Don’t get hysterical,” Reverend Roberts said and gripped my arms with his fingers hard, pushing them into my body, my body into itself, as if to keep it all, all of me, in one solid piece.

“It’s where I found her,” I said. Panting, I leaned into him. “I found her there.” I stopped and looked at Reverend Roberts, choking it down again—fluff, tuft, molt in my dry throat. My lungs were naked and beating—two featherless squabs behind my ribs. “My uncle wrote me a letter,” I said, “from Indianapolis,” fumbling in my coat pocket to take it out for him.

But Reverend Roberts said, “Who cares, Leila? There’s no one in there now, and you’re acting like a lunatic. You need to get your husband to help you with this, not me. We absolutely have to go.” He shook me, loosening the grip I had around his shoulders, but I leaned further into him. I wanted to put my head on his chest. I could smell old sweat like an animal’s abandoned nest beneath his black suit coat. I remembered the taste of his come. Chemical and sweet as candied aspirin.

“I have to go, Leila. My car cannot be seen in your driveway for more than ten minutes. I told you that.” But as he spoke, I slipped my arms into his coat, which was unbuttoned, and I stood on tiptoes to kiss his neck. Desperate, the kiss sounded like a gasp.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, backing me toward the couch, where my father’s
TV Guide
was still folded open, upside down, like a bird with glossy, paper wings, spread.

Reverend Roberts was angry as he fumbled with my pants. He couldn’t undo them fast, so I pulled them down for him and stepped out. He was grinding his teeth, and he threw his coat on the floor behind him and pushed my sweater up to my neck.

But the couch was too narrow, so he pulled me to the floor and tried to push himself into me, hard, but couldn’t. “You’re dry,” he said, disgusted, then licked his fingers and rubbed the spit between my legs, pushing again until he was inside me, working at it, his hands on either side of my face, holding himself high above me. He wouldn’t look down, kept his head upright and his face forward, a serious and winded expression on it as he stared ahead, starting to sweat, breathing hard. A man afraid of bridges riding an old bike over one.

I couldn’t help but hear them.
Bonnie
. My mother laughed. Then it was muffled. They were suffocating something in the bedroom.

You’re killing me. You’re killing me. Leila!

Reverend Roberts stopped and pulled himself out, got on his knees between my legs and started to yank his pants up, frantic.

Leila?

He reached down and pulled the sweater back over my breasts, but the rest of my body was naked and spread under him on the old carpet like a beige feast, and when I opened my eyes I saw Rick’s mother standing in dim kitchen light in the doorway.

Looking young again.

Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and there was a white wool scarf around her neck.

In that light, hovering above us, Mrs. Schmidt looked beautiful and powerful. A lady aviator from the fifties. A ballerina, not yet past her prime, ready to dance Swan Lake in a snow jacket and boots in the middle of a dark blue blizzard.

Leila!

And then she saw us.

I closed my eyes and listened to her boots bleat across the linoleum with their rubber soles, the screen door slamming delicately behind her.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw Reverend Roberts scanning my father’s living room—panicked, a caged cat. I’d seen one, once, in a live trap in the neighbor’s back yard. They’d caught it, accidentally, instead of the groundhog who’d eaten away the foundation of their house. The cat must have been in the trap a long time. It’s eyes were yellow, and there were strings of foam at its mouth, seeming to rope its throat.

I’d noticed that cat from the kitchen window while I was doing dishes. I’d pulled my father’s raincoat on and run out into the early evening mud to rescue it—though my father muttered in the doorway behind me as I went, “You’d better just leave it alone, Leila. That’s the neighbors’ business, that trap.”