While I Was Gone (14 page)

And I? I can hardly say. I moved woodenly through what needed to get done. I wept at odd times. I panicked at odd times, too, so frightened occasionally that I couldn’t catch my breath. Sometimes literally could not believe what had happened, it seemed a long nightmare I would wake from soon. And then I did believe, and I started to cry again, to weep for Dana.

And from the first moment I was able to think clearly about anything except Dana, I realized that my life as Licia Stead was over, and I mourned her too.

LARRY WAS THE ONLY ONE OF US WHO REGULARLY READ THE

papers—the Nezv Krk Times and the Boston Globe each day. And so it was he, drinking coffee between classes in a cafeteria in Harvard Square, who found the piece about Dana’s death the second day, about the “further discoveries” the police had made. The headline of the Globe article was POLICE LINK LIFESTYLE TO CAMBRIDGE MURDER. Before he came home, he stopped and bought the Herald, too, because he knew it would be even worse there. And it was.

“Neighbors reported being regularly disturbed by parties which lasted into the wee hours, by drunken and drugged revelers urinating or vomiting into bushes.”

The quantity of drugs found was vastly exaggerated. Of Dana they wrote, “The tall blond beauty had written in notebooks of her obsession with one of the house residents whom she’d been periodically intimate with, but this hadn’t prevented her from having sexual relations with at least one other resident.”

“I don’t see how they can say this,” Eli said. He ran his hands wildly through his hair.

“How can they say this?” We were sitting in the kitchen, the three of us. Larry had come in as Eli and I were having lunch and slapped the papers down on the table. We’d taken turns reading them, sometimes aloud.

“God, she’s dead, isn’t that enough?” I said.

“It’s so crazy. Even they don’t think any of this is connected to her dying.”

“It’ll fade,” Larry said.

“It’s good copy for a while, and then they’ll find the guy and that’ll be that.”

“But meanwhile it’s like they’re killing her all over again.” I began to cry.

“It’s so much not who she was.”

“It’s not who she was, it’s not who any of us are,” Eli said.

“I can’t believe they can get away with it.” He slammed his fist on the table.

“There must be some laws for our protection. For her protection.”

“But it is who we are. That’s how we are seen. That’s how this society understands us,” Larry said.

“You forget that.

This”—he held the paper up and rattled it—“this is their truth.”

“I can’t think about that,” I said.

“Don’t talk about it.”

“You can’t afford not to,” he said.

So I suppose, over the next week or so—the papers kept it alive as long as they could—that this was some of what we all mourned and adjusted to, also, this recognition of the enormous gap between how we had understood ourselves and how we were being described. Not just a gap, actually. More a contradiction. Because everything we’d seen as making us innocent or good or open or pure—our sexual honesty, our willingness to stretch the limits of our minds chemically, our political activism—exactly these things were what were now being described as tawdry, or disgusting, or criminal.

I must confess that the smallest—in every sense the smallest—part of myself took some private credit for never having actively participated in any of it beyond a toke or two at a party. The very thing that had made me feel frightened and rigid then became now the source of a secret pride. Which brought a quick dose of shame in its wake every time I allowed it.

I WANTED TO SLEEP WITH LARRY AGAIN THAT NIGHT—THE

third night—but he wouldn’t let me.

“It’s a bad idea,” he said.

His voice seemed large in the dark, too loud.

“I’m a horny bastard.

I’ll talk with you, though, if that would help.”

I said it would, and so he got up and we went downstairs together.

I made coffee and we took it to the living room and sat down opposite each other in the sagging couches. It was then that he told me he was attracted to me.

“I have been all along, Lish,” he said. He laughed.

“Lish. Joey. Whoever the hell you are.”

“Have you? Dana thought so. I didn’t.”

“How come you’re so dumb?” His tone was friendly, affectionate.

He was wearing pajamas and big fuzzy slippers.

“I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

“I’ll say.”

“I mean, about you or anyone. I’m still all screwed up about my marriage. I am married, after all.”

“So you say.”

“I am. I’m going back. I guess. It seems I am anyway.” We hadn’t turned the living room lights on, and Larry’s face was hard to make out in the bluish half-light seeping in from the kitchen.

“But what are you going back to?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And I tried to explain it all to him—who I really was, how my marriage had been, what the Ace of Spades had meant to me, all my reasons for leaving. He was interested and sympathe ic.

And then, of course, we came back around to Dana again.

At one point I asked him, “Did you ever love her?” It seemed to me everyone had.

“Were you ever attracted to her?”

“I loved her,” he said.

“I don’t see how you couldn’t love her. But I was never interested in her sexually. She was too lonely for me, too hungry or something.”

We both hoped she’d lost consciousness quickly. We imagined the moment of her coming in to find the thief. We imagined the various things she might have said. Car I help you? Do I knozv you? Not really scared, we thought. Just, Dana. Hi. What’reyou doing here?

She hadn’t struggled at all, the police said. No scratches or bruises, no cuts on her hands, which there would have been if she’d tried to defend herself, tried to grab at the knife. No flesh under her fingernails. It seemed as though she’d simply received the knife thrusts and tried to move away. We puzzled at this. I thought it was a sign of her goodness, her unwillingness to think evil of others, even of someone trying to hurt her. Larry’s vision was more complex, darker. He had thought of Dana as nearly helpless in some ways, compelled not to offend and fundamentally desperate to be loved. And therefore passive, maybe even too passive to protect herself from a murderer.

We talked about how quickly it must have happened, how she’d just wakened, perhaps—her bed had been slept in. That maybe she didn’t have time, really, to react in any way before she started losing blood and moved away to try to save herself.

“God, if I’d just come home a few minutes earlier,” I whispered.

“And then he would have killed you too,” Larry said.

“Oh, no! He wouldn’t have killed two people.”

He snorted.

“Of course you’re right. He absolutely drew the line at one, our boy. He was a man of some principle.” He’d gotten a cigar little earlier from his stash upstairs, and now he was gesturing with it.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

But I was imagining it, Dana coming barefoot down the stairs, just as I opened the front door. Her eyes puffy from sleep.

“Oh, hi!”

she says.

“I thought I heard someone.” And then we both hear a noise in the kitchen, the thief leaving, panicked by our voices. We go in together, together we find the kitty lying empty on the kitchen floor.

And the terrible news is only that we’ve lost seventeen dollars and change.

Larry and I talked about perhaps passing the guy in the Square, the very guy, one of the druggies who’d lived on the common all summer, desperate now for money. Or just a petty thief, a guy who made his living testing doors, popping easy locks, scooping up what he could quickly and getting out. Someone you might sit next to at Joe and Nemo’s or Albiani’s. This is what the police thought now. They were going through their files, picking up everyone known for this kind of crime, checking alibis.

“It seems so amazing to me, so scary,” I said to him as we washed out our cups in the kitchen, “that it could just be so random. That it could have been Sara or me walking in on him and dead now. I’ve never thought of life that way before,” I said, vowing privately never again to lose sight of this.

“I think I always have,” he said.

WHEN I TOLD MY MOTHER AND TED THAT I NEEDED TO STAY

to see things through, I wasn’t sure what I meant. The police were still talking to all of us then, pretty much daily, so that was some of it. And Dana was being autopsied, a horrible part of the incompleteness. I suppose I thought that when that was over, I’d go to her funeral, I’d meet her parents and say how sorry I was. I suppose I thought the house members would all go together, in fact, all of us who had known her so well in her real life, and loved her, and could tell her family how remarkable she’d been. I wanted them to see her as we did, as I did, to know how honest she was, how loving, how her impulse was always to give of herself, to want to comfort others. How her hands and body made a ballet out of the most ordinary gestures. I wanted them to imagine her dancing wildly by herself in our living room one rainy afternoon for the sheer joy of moving, or turning to me as we trekked across the Cambridge Common in the falling snow, tears in her eyes because it was so beautiful, because she was afraid she might not remember this moment forever.

But none of that happened. On Friday, the day Dana’s body was released, two of her sisters drove up from Chicopee to collect her possessions. They’d called the night before, and we’d straightened up bit for them. I’d forced myself, finally, into Dana’s room and made her bed, pulled up the covers she’d thrown back when she went down to meet her killer.

Her sisters were both stout women, one Dana’s height, one much smaller. The larger one was in her late forties, I think, and graying.

The smaller one was older than that, and she in particular made me think of photos you see of Polish peasant women, her woolen coat was a little too tight across the back, and she wore a babushka, as the women in those photographs invariably do. Both of them had the high, rounded cheekbones, the slanted eyes, that had announced Dana’s Slavic heritage too.

They didn’t want to talk. They barely responded when I said how sorry we were, how much we loved Dana. I showed them her room, and they looked around silently at the female chairs, the snakeskin, the life drawings of Dana, naked. The larger one’s lips tightened.

“The police took some things,” I said apologetically.

“Hmm,” the smaller one said.

I trailed them when they went outside to get liquor boxes from their car. I started to help, but the little one—they hadn’t said their names, just “We are Dana’s sisters”—pulled the box from my hands and said, “We can do this. Don’t!”

I felt as if she’d slapped me.

I retreated to the kitchen then, and smoked and drank coffee while they went silently in and out past me, banging the glass storm door behind them.

On the last trip out, the larger sister stopped in the kitchen, resting her box on the table in front of me. I tried not to look, but I saw, nestled in the clothing, two of the little beasts the police had left behind.

“We’ve left some things up there. Some trash,” she said.

Her voice was hard, as oddly ugly as Dana’s had been.

“Fine. I’ll put it out.”

“You’ll see, it’s all in the boxes. It won’t be much trouble for you.”

“Fine,” I said. She started to pick up the box again. Her hands were large also, reddened and chapped.

“Will there be a funeral?” I said.

“A service?”

“It’s just for the family.”

“Oh, we’d want to come. We were her family, too, you know.”

“It’s just for the family. The real family.”

“But we loved her. We…”

But she was shaking her head, her lips a dark, grim line.

“No one, no one but the family,” she said.

“But we so much want to…”

She set the box down.

“Let me tell you. You listen to me.

You stay the hell away from us. My parents are old, how do you think they feel? This about killed them. Their daughter, their baby, dies before them. This is the worst thing, the worst thing for parents. But then, no, you—you, her so-called friends—you have to drag her name through the dirt. How do you think that feels? Eh? They open the paper and it’s Dan’Jablonski this, Dan’Jablonski that. All of you, and your drugs and your dirty ways, talking such filth about her? Who are you to say one thing about her?”

“But we didn’t! We didn’t talk to the papers at all ” “Ahh!” She flapped her large hand at me.

“You’re all .. scum.”

Her eyelids thickened, reddened. Quickly she picked up the box.

“Liars and the worst kind of scum,” she said, and left.

I went to the door after her. I was going to say something, I didn’t know what. To defend us, to speak up for our connection with Dana, for mine anyway. But by the time I got there, she had stopped outside, the big one, at least ten feet from their car. She’d set the box down on the ground, as though she suddenly found it unbearably heavy. She was shuddering helplessly, while the little one reached her stumpy arms up around her, her hands in their white knitted gloves like two little wings opening and closing on her larger sister’s broad back.

AND SO IT WAS OVER. I TALKED TO THE POLICE ONE LAST

time and left them with the various telephone numbers where they would be able to find me. Sara and Eli were looking for other apartments, other houses. Larry was going to stay on until the end of the month, and then he didn’t know. Maybe Marlborough Street for a while.

I left in the late afternoon for an early-evening flight.

Sara was back at work. Larry was at a class, and I was glad not to have to say goodbye again. Only Eli was home. He had offered to go with me to the airport, but I turned him down. My last sight of him was as I left in the cab. A light snow was falling, the start of a big storm. The sky was a sullen, pregnant gray. The front door was open behind Eli, as black as it is in the photo I still have of all of us together. He stood framed by it, his shoulders lifted against the cold, his hands shoved into his front jeans pockets. I pressed my palm to the icy glass as we drove off and saw him lift one hand in answer. I watched him until we reached the corner, but he still hadn’t turned to go inside. The cheese stands alone, I thought, one of those irrelevant phrases from some other part of life that sometimes occur to you at highly charged moments. And then I was haunted by that nursery song off and on all through the time it took me to make my way back to my other life.