“I didn’t want them to see me.”
“Who? See you what?”
“The first thing Dingus did, after telling me he was so sorry about Mom, was tell me to stay away from you.”
Because Dingus didn’t like the Pilot reporting things until he was ready to have them reported. Especially now.
“That’s Dingus,” I said. “Look, Darl, I really am-I don’t know how to say it. About your mom. You know I loved her.”
Darlene turned away, fighting more tears, and took off her cap again, set it on the roof of the Bonneville. She laid her hands on the roof and stood there staring into the car through the driver’s window.
I looked in, too. The eight-track tape player was still bolted to the underside of the dashboard. During our college summers, before I left Starvation to work at the Detroit Times, Darlene had liked me to blast Elton John doing “Bennie and the Jets.” I hated the song, and she knew it, and when the tape got tangled up so badly that it wouldn’t play anymore, she accused me of messing it up on purpose. I told her I hadn’t but wished I had. The fight ended in Dad’s tree house sometime after midnight.
“Why didn’t they go to bingo, Gus?” Darlene said.
“I don’t know. Mom was in one of her crabby moods.”
“Don’t you usually go over for supper?”
“Usually. But I had a game.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s done. You weren’t there.”
“Wait. Weren’t you the one always telling me I had to cut the apron strings? Telling me, Come on, you want to live with your mommy all your life? You can’t pin this on me.”
“No.” She looked around the garage, finally let her eyes settle on mine. “I miss you.”
“You miss me. You’ve been missing me? Or you miss me now?”
“There aren’t many people left in the world who know me. Who really know me.”
I was not about to go into how she had ignored my calls for weeks, how she had stolen out the back of Enright’s the one Saturday night I had spied her there, how I had finally accepted that we were to be nothing more than failed lovers who through the happenstance of necessity would inhabit the same crowded space while barely acknowledging each other.
Now here she was, seemingly opening the door again.
“How did you hear?”
She looked at the floor. “I found her.”
“You mean you were there first?”
“Yes.”
“My God, Darl.”
“I was out on patrol when the call went out from dispatch. Your Mother had called nine-one-one. When I got there, there was just the one light on in the living room.”
“Where was my mother?”
“In the bathroom. With my mother.” Darlene’s lips were trembling now. “There was a lot of blood.” She put a forefinger to her left eyebrow. “She had a gash here.” She drew the finger away, held it half an inch from her thumb. “About like this. Like she was hit with something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
She covered her face with her hands. I moved closer, wanting to embrace her, unsure whether I should. Darlene shook her head, dropped her hands. “I tried to show her a hundred times what to do if she was ever… ever in trouble.”
“How to defend herself.”
“She told me, ‘I know where a man’s privates are.’”
“So she-”
“He must have hit her in the head. Or he hit her and she fell and hit her head. Or both. Detectives are working on it.”
“No knives or guns?”
“Not that we can tell. We took… we took the rug.”
“The rug?”
“It was soaked.”
“Ah. Me Sweet Ho,” I said, and Darlene smiled wanly, beautiful even then.
My mother knitted the rug many years before. A little yellow house sat on a pond ringed by pines over the legend “Home Sweet Home.” Over years of wear, the house blurred into the pond and trees, and some of the letters in the words faded into the fabric. When we were a lot younger, Darlene had liked to needle me about it.
She reached into a back pocket and produced a cell phone. She punched a few buttons and held it up in front of me.
“Listen.”
I moved closer and bowed my head to the phone. There was a beep. A few seconds of silence gave way to a woman’s voice.
“Darlene,” it whispered.
“Jesus,” I said. The voice belonged to Mrs. B.
“Listen,” Darlene said.
“There’s someone here,” Mrs. B whispered. She had to have been hiding. But why hadn’t she called 911? Maybe because her daughter was, after all, a cop.
The call went silent but for the sound of Mrs. B’s breathing. Hearing those shallow breaths must have been torture for Darlene, for they told her that her mother was frightened in the final moments of her life. I heard the creaking hinge of a door. I knew that sound. One of the two doors to Mom’s bathroom. There was a footstep. I pictured Mrs. B ducking her head out, stepping into the hallway, peeking around the corner into the living room.
If she saw someone, she didn’t say.
The door creaked shut.
There was silence again, then the sound of the other door opening. Mrs. B started to cry out but something muffled her voice. There was a brief scuffling, then a thud, then silence.
“My God,” I said.
“Wait.”
A few seconds passed. Then came a single word, in a barely audible whisper, a word I had never heard before. It sounded like “nye-less.” Like the name Silas, but with an “n.” Then, sounding barely able to speak, Mrs. B uttered it again: “Nye-less.”
Darlene ended the call.
I wanted to reach out and hug her, for what had happened to her mother, and for what she must have felt for not having picked up her mother’s call. Would she have made it to the house in time? Would she have been able to get an ambulance there faster?
“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” I said.
“I heard it ring, figured it was Mom, but… I was chasing a raccoon out of Mrs. Morcone’s house. She left the door open again. I thought I’d call Mom when I was done.”
“What was it she said? Nye-less? What is that?”
“I have no idea. I’ve listened to it a thousand times.”
“Can your tech guys make it clearer?”
“They can barely do a reboot.”
“Maybe it’s a name.”
“I thought of that.”
“What about the state cops? They have a lab.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Darlene,” I said. “You haven’t told anyone yet, have you.”
