year at this time lights were strung on the eaves, around the windows.
Keith, smiling, had tossed strings of purple lights in the oaks. They’d walked on the road in the crunching snow and looked back and seen the trees float under the stars like Pi-cassos dashed out with a child’s sparkler.
This year there were no lights. The tree lay abandoned near the freeze-burned lawn, and it looked like the week after Christmas. The edges of Caren’s lips curved down, but she had to force a smile.
It turned out she didn’t because, when she entered the house, she heard Keith’s footsteps going down the stairs to the basement, then she heard the pop of the TV come on.
She spied a beer bottle cap and the torn carton of a microwave burrito dinner on the counter. The microwave door was ajar.
She scooped the mess and deposited it in the trash. Carefully, she closed the microwave. Touched up with a damp dishcloth. Clean up. Make nice. Hide his empty whiskey bottles in the recycling bin.
Denial and avoidance. Passive aggressive. Words you volleyed in counseling. Like throwing Ping-Pong balls against those hungry lions.
They wore the house like a Victorian straitjacket and always kept at least one room between them. On the inside, all the snaps and buckles were accurate. This was the second big house she had remodeled. She ran her hand along the purple wallpaper she’d chosen for the hallway, just to see if Keith would notice the morbid pattern.
Decor for
Except there was no family, just Keith and Caren. Unless you counted Paulie Kagin. He was family. From Chicago.
Don’t worry, Keith had assured her.
Then it was, don’t worry, I won’t spend the money.
All of a sudden it had turned into killing people. Caren knew in detail what the news reports only hinted at.
She knew it all.
Now she had to do something about it.
First she had to stop taking the pills.
The pills had combed it smooth in the beginning. Let her live with it. Like floating.
Duty didn’t float. It thudded through room after empty room.
A wall of drawers rose in the hallway by the front door and she took an old wooden footlocker from one of them.
It looked like a pirate chest, and it had been dented and scarred when her mother passed it down to her when she was six, in Williston, North Dakota.
Just now it reminded her of Phil Broker, who’d become a sort of pirate.
She carried it into the living room and placed it on the floor, where the tree should go, in front of the broad bay windows. Through the side panel of the window she could see the tree, out in the cold, abandoned on the cobbles. The room was boxed by horrible Prussian blue wallpaper.
Gothic rockets in a turgid sea. She had taken her pills and papered the walls with signals of distress.
She sat down on the shiny hardwood planks, opened the trunk and removed a cardboard box. Inside, stacked with care, were tiny handmade Christmas tree decorations that fit in the palm of her hand.
The pills she had taken for the last six months had magically dried her tears. Now, in the absence of the antidepressants, the vast cloud of accumulated tears condensed in her head and began to drizzle. Hot wet streaks burned down her cheeks.
This is really crazy, Caren. Thoughts wouldn’t balance on her head. They fell off. A jumble of blocks.
With difficulty, she placed them in order. She. And her first husband. Made the decorations. Up north, on their first vacation. The year they were married. In a storm of sawdust, delicate designs had come from Phil’s rough hands like intricate charms. Hers incorporated beads, fabric and feathers.
Arts and crafts class.
Phil, the rustic, turned out diminutive stars, moons, suns, trees and animals on his band saw. She made angels. She selected one of the awkward angels and placed it on a wide plank called a king board. She had learned about king boards from Phil. In colonial times the best lumber went back to England, and it was illegal for a colonist to own a “king board.” The crafty Americans used the wide boards as flooring in their attics where the redcoats didn’t inspect.
Her angel, with its rosy cheeks and misshapen wings, was meant to hang and not to stand, so it toppled over on the king board.
The sound of a roaring crowd carried up the stairwell from the basement. Tapes of old college games. Keith, the Minnesota Gopher quarterback, was throwing touchdowns down in the dark. Keith would never find the time to make a tree decoration. But, unlike Phil, he could plan a Christmas party down to the last detail that the mayor of St. Paul would attend.
Not this year.
A telephone was the only other occupant of this hollow room, and it coiled on the floor like a plastic tapeworm. That phone weighed fourteen years of living. That’s how THE BIG LAW/33
long it had been since she’d left Phil Broker, to marry Keith Angland, who had once been Phil’s partner and then, his boss. She’d deserted Phil because he wasn’t going anywhere and sure-footed Keith was.
She stared at the phone and squeezed an angel in her right hand and made a wish that the phone would ring. That Phil would call. That he would come and give her some help.
He’d come if he really knew. But for now, because she had been vague, he wouldn’t trespass. She’d been vague because she kept hoping Keith would pull it out of the hat at the last minute. Do one of his famous scrambles.
But the federal building story changed all that.
She didn’t trust anyone Keith worked with. There was too much money involved. So it had to be Phil. He’d been off the job for two years. Independent now. And if she’d missed something, he would spot it. So she’d have to take what she had to Phil. And when the time came, let him-as they quaintly put it-drop the dime.
He was up there, alone with his baby, while his damn Amazon child bride was off playing St. Joan in Bosnia.
God. Edgy Phil with a kid. Round with paternity, padded with much laughter. She tried to imagine him smiling. She bet he’d gained weight.
She knew the baby was a girl-Caren flinched as her muscles curved in and stabbed her, in both breasts and in her belly. Her imagination ambushed her with a detailed blueprint of the flawed eggs lined up in her ovaries, racks of them, drawing lots to see who would take the Kamikaze trip down the red rapids this month.
Dammit. Leaving that message was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. Breaking the vows. Going outside her marriage. No, it was just the first step in the hardest thing.
It was going to get much harder.
Something had to be done about Keith.
She shut her eyes and prayed: Please call. Don’t make me do this alone.
7
Going west on U.S. 94, the automatic pilot grabbed the wheel. Tom resisted the first pull, steered straight. The next tug came at the southbound exit for U.S. 494. He beat that one, too. Ten minutes later, as the spire of the state capitol marked the horizon, the impulse snuggled up again. This time, seduction was fast and total; he drove past the downtown St. Paul exits and continued west on 94 until it branched and he took 35E south. The Rabbit knew the way.
Get off on County Road 42, turn west, and then it was eight miles to the Mystic Lake Casino.
Working through the turns, his pulse quickened: Eagan and Prior Lake-the crossroads. Casino to the left.
