Innocent Blood

that crap.’

‘I don’t. I didn’t. Not until today. I saw Danny, sis. I actually saw him, and I heard his voice, too.’

Smitty came into the kitchen. He was about two inches shorter than Carol, with thinning blond hair that stuck vertically up in the air, bright blue eyes and a permanently surprised face. He was wearing a T-shirt that read PROFANITY IS THE LAST RESORT OF THE INARTICULATE. He hijacked a slice of red pepper from the chopping board and crunched it between his highly irregular teeth.

‘Did I hear seance?’

Frank said, ‘That’s right. I met this guy Nevile Strange when he was looking around The Cedars. He said he could get in touch with people who had passed over, so I asked him if we could talk to Danny. I guess I wanted to hear Danny forgive me. Well, that isn’t strictly true. I wanted Margot to hear Danny forgive me’

‘What’s to forgive?’ Smitty protested. ‘A bomb went off, for chrissakes. Besides, these seances, what a phony!’

‘I don’t think this one was phony.’

‘Oh yeah? My old lady went to a seance after my old man kicked the bucket. This medium told her that my old man was waiting for her in heaven so that they could dance the night away just like they always did. Total baloney, of course, because my old man lost both his feet at Inch’on. Stupid palooka stood too close to a tank.’

Carol flapped her hand at Smitty in irritable dismissal. ‘You really saw Danny?’ she asked Frank.

‘Standing in the back yard. As clear as I can see you now. We all saw him.’

‘You’re serious?’ asked Smitty, crunching another slice of pepper.

‘He said it was all my fault that he was dead and that he wanted to see me in hell.’

Smitty emphatically shook his head. ‘Nah, you don’t want to take any notice of that. You didn’t see nothing. That was a . . . what . . . an optical delusion. That’s what these mediums do. They delude you. Optically. And financially. You didn’t pay this guy, did you?’

They sat in the swing in the back yard in the last warm light of the day, drinking beer and eating pretzels. Carol’s three boys were rolling around on the crabgrass, playing space ninjas.

Carol said, ‘You won’t lose Margot, believe me. But she’s always been kind of private, hasn’t she? She needs some time to work things out inside of her head.’

‘I guess you’re right. But I feel like something’s gone out of our marriage. Something we can never get back.’

‘That’s life, Frank. We’re always losing things we can never get back.’

He looked at Carol and he knew what she was saying. When she was nineteen she had married her high- school sweetheart, Nick Vereno, and she had been so happy that she had blossomed like her family had never seen her before. For seven months, she had almost looked pretty. But then Nick didn’t come home one night, and a week later he told her he had met somebody else. A twenty-eight-year-old exotic dancer with surgically enhanced breasts and a two-year-old kid in tow. Carol’s happiness had been switched off like the lights in an empty house, when you leave it for the very last time.

Smitty swigged Coors and said, ‘You know what you ought to do, Frank? You ought to insist that this Strange guy does it again. Just to prove that what you saw was genuine. I’ll bet you a lobster dinner that he can’t.’

‘Talking of dinner,’ said Frank, ‘can I smell something burning?’

‘God damn it,’ said Carol. ‘I forgot you’re supposed to keep on adding stock.’

She hurried inside. Smitty, unperturbed, carried on swinging on the swing and drinking his beer. ‘Maybe you and Margot could use a break,’ he suggested.

‘A break?’

‘Well, if your relationship had been in really good shape, it seems to me that she wouldn’t have blamed you for what happened to Danny. Maybe you both need to step back and take a look at what’s wrong. There’s marriage, you know, and then there’s something else. Carol was married to Nick and I know that she still carries this eternal flame for him because he was handsome and charming and everything she thought she ever wanted. But what we have together, Carol and me, is such a closeness that you can’t say where one of us ends and the other begins.’

He finished his can and crumpled it up, and tossed it into the trashcan. ‘No disrespect to Margot, but she’s always been kind of serious, you know, whereas you’re always the guy who can’t keep a straight face for more than five minutes.’ He sniffed. ‘Take my advice, Frank. Don’t force it. Give yourself some space. She’s trying to glue herself back together again and you should do the same, with whatever adhesive you can lay your hands on.’

Frank and Smitty drank so many cans of Coors between them that Frank spent the night on the couch. At two thirty-three A.M. one of the family’s golden retrievers came up to him and licked his face, and he woke up shouting ‘eeaurrghh!’ in disgust. The dog wagged his tail and kept running to the door and back again to tell him that he wanted to go for a walk.

He shuffled to the kitchen door and let the dog out into the yard. The moon was so bright that it could have been daylight. He stood there and thought about all the words of advice that had been given to him since Danny died. It was almost as if everybody else in the world had been discussing what he should do next, behind his back. The old man with the long-billed baseball cap; Nevile Strange; Lieutenant Chessman, and Smitty.

Give yourself some space. Cross the road and never come back.

Carol came up behind him and linked arms with him. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

The next morning, after a breakfast of charred bacon and fried eggs with broken yolks, he kissed Carol and shook hands with Smitty and gave five dollars to each of the boys and then he drove home. Margot’s Jeep was already parked in the driveway. He let himself into the house and found Margot standing in the middle of the living room with her arms folded, like a schoolteacher impatiently waiting for an explanation.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Do I look OK?’

He tried to focus on her through his hangover. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said slowly. ‘You tell me.’

‘Well, no, as a matter of fact, I’m not OK. In fact I’m devastated. I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me, Frank. I always thought you were cynical. I thought that was par for the course for comedy writers. But I never realized that you were cruel.’

He couldn’t understand what she meant. Not until he stepped into living room and she waved her arms at the walls all around her. Her eyes were blurry with tears.

Every one of her Impressions In White had been defaced with red aerosol. One of them had been marked with a swastika, another had the word BITCH scrawled across it. A third had a crude vagina sprayed on to it, and yet another said FORGIVE?? The used aerosol can had been dropped on to the white leather couch, leaving splatters and smears.

‘Christ – who did this?’

Margot stared at him in disbelief. ‘Who did this? You’re asking me who did this?’

‘Hey, you don’t think that it was me?’

‘Who else, Frank? Nobody else has a key, nobody else knows the alarm code. Nobody else knows how much my paintings mean to me. Nobody else despises them like you do, and nobody else thinks that I’m a Nazi and a bitch because I blame you for what happened to Danny.’

Frank opened and closed his mouth and simply couldn’t think what to say to her.

‘I want you out of here, Frank. I don’t care where the hell you go. You can come to the funeral but after that I don’t want to see you. Not until we’ve sorted this out.’

‘Margot, I swear to God I didn’t do this! I wasn’t even here last night. I went to Carol’s.’

She stood still for a moment, with one hand on top of her head, as if she were making one of the most important decisions of her life.

‘Margot . . . can you really see me doing something like this? Sure, I got angry with you the other night, but that was frustration more than anything else. I need you, Margot, and you need me. We have to talk all of this out.’