The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (3 page)

Jaime had come halfway down the steps and stood there arrested, like a piece of garden statuary. Todd came running from the den, as if he sensed whatever drama was unfolding in the foyer of their home beat out
Judge Judy
or
The
People's Court.
He stood in the doorway, elfin, his hair sticking out at the sides. His mouth hung agape, his tongue playing in the space where one of his front teeth had been. He took one look at his father, then he turned and fled.

“Jesus, Dad,” the girl said. She was wearing some witchy, clinging thing that made of her budding curves a shapeless swell and made her entire shape that of a bell. She grinned uncertainly, showing the metal bands around her teeth, taking such obvious delight in her father's suffering that for the moment she was entirely unselfconscious. “You look like the Elephant Man,” she said.

“Jaime,” Gina remonstrated. She had a feeling her daughter's guidance counselor was going to hear about this, and she wanted to mitigate whatever damage had already been done, to keep the situation from escalating any further than it already had. She stanched wounds, bandaged knees, commiserated with Jaime over boys; she was all the children had in this world, the sane center of their lives. And someone had to protect them from their father.

“Go to your room,” he said, his voice cracking. “You go to your fucking room right now. You little slut, you're lucky we even let you out of the house.”

“Mom,” the girl said, her face a shattered window, like someone had pitched a rock through it. “Something's wrong with Dad,” and she retreated, backing up the stairs.

“You come back down here and there'll be something wrong with you,” Henry said. “Things are changing around this house, and they're changing right now. First thing is, you're going to listen to your father, and if you don't, by God, you'll look like this by the time he's through with you. I will not be treated like an asshole in my own home.”

He balled his fists. His face flamed, a sea of broken capillaries. “And you,” he said, turning on his wife.

It took one well-placed blow with the blunt edge of the paperweight they kept on the end table by the front door to quiet him. She dragged him by the wrists into the tiny bathroom under the stairs and left him there, sprawled out next to the toilet. She could already see the child custody people sweeping down, a SWAT team surrounding the house, helicopters buzzing outside their bedroom window. Principal Dryer would call again on Monday, vague threats lurking as always behind his measured, even tone. Maybe this time he really would report them to CPS. This was bad.

But by the time she called the kids down for pancakes and Hamburger Helper, her thoughts had already turned to the sale starting Saturday at Saks.

“Where's Dad?” Jaime asked, picking at her food.

“Don't you worry about your father,” she said. “He's sick, Jaime. I put him to bed, and all we can do is hope he'll feel better when he wakes up.”

“I want a hot dog,” Todd said, thrusting his plate away from him. He got up without asking to be excused and left, and a moment later she heard his bedroom door slam at the top of the stairs.

 

Two days later she noticed the car.

At first she thought she'd imagined it. But twice on Sunday morning and once in the afternoon she saw the beige Pontiac lumbering along like a dinosaur behind her. It kept two or three car lengths back, weaving through traffic, running a red light to follow her when she made an abrupt left without signaling, one headlight winking in the rearview mirror as the sun crept down in the sky and the day stretched on into evening.

It occurred to her, of course, that she should have been scared. She should have been, but strangely, she wasn't. She'd always known it would happen like this. The sudden appearance of the Pontiac confirmed something. It augured cataclysm, the great upheaval she'd been anticipating all her life. It made real the fear and suspicion she'd been living with since she could remember, drawing the blackout curtains her father insisted on hanging everywhere they lived at night, hiding under the bed in the dark and reading comics guiltily by flashlight, hoping she wouldn't be the one who got them all killed. The feeling something exceptional was happening to her now braced her immeasurably. She was jealous of the people who went on the talk shows claiming to have been abducted by aliens in New Mexico. She only wished something like that would happen to her, something to blast away every trace of her ordinary experience and make her life a dream. If the bluish shape massed behind the Pontiac's windscreen was the shape of her destiny, she welcomed it.

It occurred to her, of course, that they might be from CPS, whoever was in the Pontiac, tailing her, waiting for an opportunity to swoop into her life and take her children. But she felt such kinship with that eddying shape, almost a sisterhood, that she dismissed the idea summarily.

The next day, kids in maroon private school uniforms were playing by the bus stop on the corner. One of them was bouncing up and down on a pogo stick, and it made a sawing noise that cut through the afternoon air. You never saw kids playing in the street anymore, and it comforted her, in a vague way.

She watered the rhododendrons under the gunmetal sky, letting the machine take the calls and listening to the messages at her leisure.

“And I think that if this is happening repeatedly, as it seems to be, there may be some cause for alarm,” Principal Dryer said, his altogether too friendly voice carrying through the empty house on Monday afternoon. He cleared his throat. “Habitual truancy often indicates trouble in the home, something the parents may not even be aware of. If you or Mister Marsh could give me a call in my office anytime during the week, I would greatly appreciate it. I'm sure we all want whatever is best for Jaime.”

He hung up.

Deceitful turd, she thought. Cruddy administrators. The lines were being drawn in the sand.

Someone named Reardon called for Hank a few minutes later, and she listened to him speak into the machine, wrote his name down, and erased the message. Hank had disappeared sometime during the night on Friday. Lying awake in their bed, she'd heard the front door ease shut, wondered where he was going, and she had decided that she didn't care. She found herself hoping she'd killed him when she'd brained him with the paperweight. She thought there must have been something good in him once, but she didn't know anymore when he had ceased to be her husband, or even a man.

Her life no longer seemed to be happening to her but to someone else.

She ran a bubble bath before the kids got home, luxuriating in the folds of steam, scraping the dead skin from the balls of her feet. The flakes drifted away on the water, softened to opacity. She wondered what her life would seem like if it were on television, what some anonymous viewer in a faraway living room or den would think. She felt alienated from her own experience, atomized, like the molecules of steam rising from the water in the tub.

 

3

 

“Sushi?” Karyn said. “I'm impressed, Dad. This isn't your style at all.”

She was majoring in graphic design at City College, she didn't wear makeup, and she never seemed to have a boyfriend. But there were men in her life, he was sure there were, and he admired whatever it was that kept her from getting stuck.

She had her mother's eyes and her mother's hair. Only the dimple on her chin was his, and it was his favorite feature, incongruous, stamped there like an afterthought. She had her mother's way about her, the sardonic smile and the jaw that tapered to a point, always disapproving, like someone had pinched it while she was still being formed in the womb. She might have been pretty if she wasn't so serious. But the steely thing in her, the thing that had enabled her to survive her childhood, it had marked her somehow, and Mickey didn't know whether to feel sorry for her or happy that she was that much stronger than he'd ever been.

She winked back at him, and she seemed content to let him be her dad for the evening. They assumed their roles, and as long as she assumed hers and let him play his, they'd have a good time. She even laughed at his jokes, and her mother had stopped doing that before the honeymoon was over.

“We were just kids, you know. We had no business having kids of our own.”

“Stop it, Dad.”

She ordered a California roll. She ordered the salmon and the tuna, and the eel for herself. He watched her trying to pronounce the Japanese from the menu, and he could picture her doing her math homework at the table in the kitchen in their apartment on Post Street all those years ago, her legs still too short to touch the floor while she sat in the chair, her hair already that fine shade of black. She'd been too serious even then, committing her multiplication tables to memory while he'd argued with Sue, nearly coming to blows over the balance in the checkbook.

Japanese music lilted from the speakers in the corners of the room, and an aquarium bubbled by the door. He sipped his tea, scalding his upper lip, and cursed, setting the cup down angrily. He thought for the hundredth time that day that all he wanted was a beer, but as he'd discovered the other night, the Kolonopin the court-appointed psychiatrist had given him didn't mix well with beer. A woman in a kimono brought miso soup, seaweed and tofu afloat in the cloudy broth. She bowed politely at them, demure, self-effacing, made up like a porcelain doll. When she moved away, Mickey realized she'd forgotten to bring spoons.

“Your nose looks better,” Karyn said, and she sipped her soup, which answered that question. She prized out a piece of tofu with her chopsticks. “How's your side?”

“Better. Those fucking kids. I'm still a little sore. I can't take it like I used to. I swear to God, honey. I feel like I got old overnight.”

“Hey, Dad? Do you think they have places like this in Japan? I mean with the costumes and the music and everything?”

“I think they all eat McDonald's over there,” he said.

She got a kick out of that, and he felt better about everything for the moment. When the woman brought the sushi, he watched Karyn stir the wasabi into a tiny dish of soy sauce with her chopsticks, and he thought she looked like some kind of lesser samurai, diligently observing a time-honored ritual. She ate carefully, using her chopsticks. He used his hands. He scarfed tempura, crunching steamed asparagus, feeling the wasabi clear his sinuses.

“So you're in trouble again, huh, Dad?”

“Nothing I can't handle, sweetie. I'm just taking a little vacation. I'm gonna get out of the city for a while.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding, and that was all they said about it.

He walked her back to the car and kissed her on the cheek. He could feel the hardness through her jacket, and she pulled away from him even as she nestled in his arms. Sunlight slanted across the tops of the houses on Twin Peaks, bathing them in pastel light, etching doors and windows in sharp bas-relief. Through layers of cloud, the radio tower pricked glumly at the sky.

“'Bye, sweetie.”

“Yeah. Hey, see you, Dad. You take care of yourself, okay? And thanks for dinner.”

As the sun slanted down and the sky turned from pink to cobalt blue, he sat behind the wheel of the Pontiac and dug the crumpled snapshot from his shorts pocket. He pressed it flat against the steering wheel. He didn't even know the woman's name. She stared up at him with panicked eyes, crow's feet etched into their corners, her smile bright and hysterical, as if the expression of connubial bliss pained her somehow. She was wearing a mohair sweater, and her skin had an eerie luminescence, a metallic sheen acquired from too many deep pore cleansers, facial rinses, and mud masks. Her hair was pulled back in a way that made her forehead seem too wide, and her eyebrows arched sharply, identical and neatly plucked works of art. She wasn't exactly catwalk material, Mickey thought. But she was still a hell of a good-looking woman.

He'd lost control in the park. He knew that. It seemed to happen more often these days. What did it mean when you quit drinking and you were even meaner than before? Like when those kids had jumped him the other night. He didn't remember half of that. They'd circled him up, and the next thing he knew, he was on the verge of beating one of them to death with his bare hands. In the park it was the same. He hadn't wanted to kill anybody, but he'd seen the guy standing there in his expensive suit with his gold-plated Rolex, and it was like the ghost of every CO, every commissioner or DA who'd reprimanded him for the last twenty years had reared up on him suddenly, and before he'd even known what he was doing, the guy was flat on his back, out cold with one punch.

He figured Reardon was probably going to be pissed. Whatever angle he was playing, Mickey had blown it for him. And if he had enough money in the briefcase he'd taken from Marsh to pay off his debts and put himself in the clear, his instincts still told him to take the money and run, hotfoot it for the airport before everything started to catch up with him.

But another voice whispered at him through those luminous brown eyes in the photograph. They were crazy eyes, he realized; something was missing in them, something was fractured. It wasn't lust they stirred in him. More like some deep and inexpressible desire to make good on his life after throwing forty-three years away. What was the point in running away from San Francisco? Here the battle lines had been drawn, and here he would make his stand. Only he didn't know yet what he was fighting—or what he was fighting for. He'd lost Sue years ago, and he didn't know if it was too late even to win Karyn back.

He let it all tick over in his mind as he started the car, meandering out toward the Great Highway as the last of the day's light burned out over Ocean Beach.

 

She was much smaller in person than he'd expected. She couldn't have been more than five feet tall. And Christ, the woman could shop. He tailed her to the malls, the department stores, the high-end places downtown. She took it seriously. Like some people take food or professional sports seriously. She stalked the aisles like a big-game hunter, shrewd eyes goggling out of her childish face. He watched her trying on a diamond tiara at Saks on Saturday, twisting from side to side in front of the mirror in her designer jeans, and he thought of Wonder Woman.