The Open Curtain (18 page)

L
ater she could not remember how things became serious. There had been Christmas together and then she had seen him a few more times, and then he had fought with his mother and had shown up distraught, kissing her for the first time. And then suddenly he was living in her house without either of them really having talked it over. Both of them were chaste still and sleeping in separate rooms, but clearly on the way somewhere neither her aunt nor his mother nor the Church would approve of. By that time, trying to puzzle out how it had all happened, it seemed too late to turn back.

Besides, she was not sure she wanted to turn back. Left from her days in the hospital was the residual sense of connection to him, though in the first few weeks of living with him she realized she knew him hardly at all. There was an oddness to him, strange ticks, a tendency to lie about things that couldn’t possibly matter, even at times a certain transient coldness she quickly began to classify as his
moods.
There were whole days she never saw him, days he spent completely out of the house or locked in the room he’d claimed, her sister’s old room. Days too when she found him in the utility room staring at the clippings of the murders.

“Do you want me to take those down?” she asked, but he shook his head.

Other days, he was charming, sweet. He would make dinner with her, sit on the couch with her, take her tentatively in his arms and embrace her, but it never went further than a few awkward kisses. She wondered if there was something wrong with him, sexually. But he seemed normal enough in other ways. Maybe he was simply chaste. As a Mormon, she tried to convince herself, that was something she could admire and respect. Perhaps he was just saving himself for marriage.

They were mostly cordial to one another, polite even, even if at times he was a little abrupt. A few days after he moved in, she gave him a key to the front door, working it off a ring kept in her father’s dresser drawer. He began to come and go at will, sometimes waking her when he came stumbling past the couch at three or four in the morning smelling of smoke or dirt, never explaining. After the first few times of not questioning him about it, she felt her chance to speak had passed. Instead she tried to train herself to wake up right after Letterman, go up to her own bed before he came in. It was easier sleeping in her own bed once someone else was living in the house.

“Do you miss your mother?” she asked him, a few weeks after he had moved in, both of them sitting on the couch.

“No,” he said simply.

She waited for him to explain, but he didn’t. They sat watching TV. “I miss mine,” she finally said.

He turned the channel. “I might miss mine if she were dead,” he said.

She didn’t know what to say. She felt vaguely hurt but tried to push it out of her mind.

“What about your father?” she asked, and watched a strange, frightened look come over his face.

On TV: a small man and a tall man. The tall man was lumbering into things, slowly and ponderously. The small man kept darting through the tall man’s legs and punching him in the stomach. There was a laugh track going.
Does he qualify as a midget or a dwarf?
she wondered. The small man was wearing a padded suit and a mask, so she couldn’t say for certain.

She was doing homework for one of the two classes she was taking, her papers spread out across the desk, when he came in, dragging his backpack along the floor, abandoning it next to the couch.

“Good day at school?” she asked.

But he didn’t seem to hear. Shrugging off his coat, he went into the kitchen.

“Rudd?”

She could hear him moving about, the refrigerator door opening and closing. She got up and went into the kitchen herself.

“Can’t you hear me?” she asked.

“What,” he said flatly, without turning around.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said.

She put up her hands and went out, confused. She sat down again with her homework, tried to go through it. She watched him come out again, pick up his backpack, shuffle down the hall.

She listened for the sound of his door opening and closing, heard nothing. She finished her homework and then sat at the table, staring at her pen, turning it slowly about in her hands. Finally she got up and went down the hall herself.

His door was closed. She knocked but had no answer. So she opened it, looked in. She uttered his name, inflecting the syllable upward, before realizing the room was empty.

Closing the door, she continued down the hall.

He was there, in the utility room, in front of the washer and dryer, staring at the clippings.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

He turned his head toward her, slowly, face slack, eyes dim. “Lael,” he said. “What happened to Lael?”

“No,” the detective said. “I’m sorry. No such person. No Lael Korth and no Lael anyone else for that matter.”

“In Springville,” Rudd said. “In the middle of town. I’ve been to his house.”

The detective turned to her. “Does the name mean anything to you?” he asked.

Lyndi shook her head. The detective looked back to him and shrugged.

“But—” said Rudd.

“There’s a Lyle Korth, roughly your age, lives in Springville. Mother by the name of Anne Korth. We contacted him. Says he doesn’t know you, doesn’t think he’s ever met you. That’s the best we can do.”

“But his name is Lael,” Rudd insisted.

“Then why didn’t you mention it before?” asked the detective. “Where is this coming from?”

It went on like that, Rudd insisting there was a Lael Korth and that it was Lael Korth who had been with him the night of the murders—that was the real last thing he remembered, he said now: Lael’s face beside his own, darkness coming on. Threading his fingers over his belly, the detective leaned back in his chair. He had been on a scooter with Lael, Rudd said, and then suddenly not on the scooter at all and instead both of them pushing their way up the slope, in the canyon somewhere, his breath coming hard, and something in his …

“What?” asked the detective.

“Nothing,” said Rudd. “There was nothing. I’m starting to make things up.”

“In his hand, you mean? What was he holding?”

“I was wrong,” said Rudd. “That part I was wrong about.”

“And his name?” said the detective. “Were you wrong about his name as well?”

Rudd shook his head. The detective got up to shake Rudd’s hand and said thank you, he’d look into it, Rudd was right to come to him, but information like this, what was he to do?

In the car, Lyndi didn’t know what to think. Rudd was beside her, looking ill and still going on about Lael, claiming now that Lael was in fact his half-brother, that they had that connection, that nobody had ever understood him except for Lael.

“Perhaps your mother would know where he is,” she said.

No, he claimed, that was just it. Lael was his father’s child, from a second wife, a secret wife—he had only learned of it himself by accident. There was no point in going to his mother.

“Surely,” she said, “there’s someone or something else you could—”

No, no, no, he said, his voice impatient. Lael had his own life in Springville but he hadn’t been part of it, just as Rudd had had his own life in Provo and Lael hadn’t been part of that either. If the situation were reversed, Lael wouldn’t know who to ask either.
Rudd who?
people would probably say to him; there’s no such person.

“Your name’s not Rudd?” she asked.

“Of course it is,” he said. “Rudd Elling Theurer. But if you called my mother now and asked to speak to her son she’d say ‘Son? I have no son.’”

“Because you’re living with me.”

“She might do it even if I were still living at home,” he said.

They drove a while and then she said, just to make conversation, “I didn’t know your middle name was Elling.”

“I don’t have a middle name,” he said, his face white with surprise. “And it’s certainly not Elling.”

“But you said—”

“I said nothing of the kind,” he said. “Rudd Theurer, plain and simple.”

She dropped him off at the house. He climbed out and tottered toward the door. He had said it, she thought.
Elling.
She had heard it plain as day. What
point was there saying it if it weren’t true? And, if it were true, what point trying to hide it? It was just a name. Do I hate him or love him? she asked herself. Do I know him well enough to do one or the other? No, she thought. And then, He needs someone to take care of him.

She backed out of the driveway and down the street, down past the church and the Baileys’ brick house, then more houses and the Roberts’ field and the second church, the one set back from the road, and Rock Canyon Elementary with the roadrunner on the marquee. There were kids playing on the playground. PTA MEET thurs ˥, the marquee said, the “7” actually an upside-down “L.” She reached the end of the street, turned left past the Missionary Training Center and the temple, on down Ninth East, past Allen’s Grocery,
Closed Sundays
blinking on their sign, down past the university to Center street, and then past that too, the road curving toward the cemetery. Then left, out to the state highway, toward Springville.

The small house was on Third, a few blocks east of Main. It stood on a corner, red brick with peeling white trim, small and square. Built, she guessed, sometime in the forties. The door itself was odd, a grayish green more like primer than finish paint, flecked with yellow from a paint that either had been over it and was nearly scraped away or underneath it and was now wearing through.

She rang the doorbell. The plastic, cracked from exposure, scratched against the pad of her thumb.

Inside, a chime struck flatly like a battery somewhere was worn down. Some sort of song, impossible to say what it was.

She waited, was hooking her hair over her ears when the door opened.

A boy in his teens, blond and large, his skin pale, eyes green.

“You want my mother, I’m guessing,” he said, and gestured back into the house.

“No,” she said. “I’m looking for Lael.”

“Lyle?” he said. “That’s me.”

“But you go by Lael.”

“No,” he said. “I go by Mark. That’s my middle name.”

“You’ve never gone by Lael?”

“What’s this about?” he asked. “It wasn’t you who called, was it? I mean, it was a man who called, but is that what this is about too?”

“Kind of,” she said. “It has to do with my boyfriend.”

She was surprised to hear herself use the word,
boyfriend.
True, he kissed her sometimes but it was distracted, passionless, infrequent, indifferent.

“—Lael,” he was saying. “That’s crazy.”

She nodded. “Do you know Rudd Theurer?” she asked.

“Rod who? I already told the man no,” he said. “Look, maybe if you have a picture, I’ve seen him or something.”

“Never mind,” she said, and walked back to her car.

The boy stayed on the porch while she got in, arms folded over his chest. There was something wrong, she thought as she drove back toward town.
A screw loose,
her father used to say of himself, joking, tapping one side of his own head, but with Rudd it seemed larger than that, not just a screw but a whole mechanism starting to grind itself up. Who was he? She hardly knew. But worse than that was that he himself did not seem to know either.
I
should send him back to his mother,
she thought. But he hated his mother; it couldn’t be any good for him to go back; she had to think of what was best for him as well as for her. No, she could not make him go back there, but he would have to leave her house. Surely there was a relative he could stay with, everyone has a relative. And then she thought,
No, I don’t have one, not a sane one anyway, why should he?
But still, she was confused, she needed some distance. Mother or not, Rudd would have to go.

But when she got home she found him lying on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, only his face showing. He was asleep, face untroubled as cream.
No,
she told herself,
it can wait until tomorrow.

She sat on the floor with her back against the couch. Whatever was wrong with him it was still good to have someone else in the house. She didn’t mind taking care of him. Sending him back to his mother might kill him.

She had the TV on and the sound muted. She kept on slouching a little farther until finally she turned off the TV and undid the top button of her jeans, lay down completely, fell asleep there at his feet.

A day later or perhaps two, a Saturday, he had left for somewhere, hadn’t said where, still hardly speaking to her, and she was going out the door herself, her coat on. Instead, she thought twice and went back inside, went to Rudd’s door. She knocked once just to make sure, her gloves rendering damp sounds against the wood, and then opened the door and looked in.

It seemed an ordinary enough room, not far from the room it had been when her sister was still alive—same unmade bed, same walls, her sister’s knickknacks piled on the three shelves to the right of the door. Rudd’s own things, his clothing, stood in neat piles beneath the shelves.