“I know,” she said. “You want to come over right now and pick up your check.”
“I want to talk to your mother,” I said.
“Some other time,” she said.
Then Nancy Root came on the line.
“Mr. Fonesca, I’ve been trying to call you. Can you come over now?”
I told her I could and she gave me directions to her apartment. When we got there, Ames waited in the car while I pushed a button and was buzzed in through the thick glass doors.
The lobby was large and lifeless. The lights were night dim. I had the feeling that the couches and chairs had seldom been sat in and the artificial flowers had never been touched.
Nancy Root met me at the open door. She was wearing jeans and an oversize white sweater. I took off my cap. She said nothing, stood back and let me pass. In the small entryway was a bank of posters of plays she had been in, Man and Superman, Antigone, You Can’t Take It with You, Othello.
“This way,” she said.
I followed her into a living room with a night view of lights on the bridge to St. Armand’s and Longboat Key. Yolanda sat in a large, white armchair big enough for her to tuck her bare feet under her. She was hugging a pillow. She watched me as if I might be about to grab the family jewels and make a run for it.
Nancy Root nervously rolled up her sleeves. For the next ten minutes the sleeves kept creeping down and she tugged them up again. She pointed to the couch with its back to the window and sat in a chair just like the one Yolanda was in.
I sat.
“I thought you might have a show tonight,” I said.
“Sometimes,” said Nancy Root, “the show does not have to go on. In this case, however, the understudy is an Asolo Conservatory student who is very good, too young for the role, but, then again, I’m a little too old for it. I haven’t offered you a drink.”
“No thanks,” I said.
Yolanda. was glaring at me. I saw the glitter of her tongue ring when she opened her mouth.
“I know who killed Kyle,” Nancy said. “I know all about what Richard did. I’m glad the man is dead. I’m glad there won’t be a trial, delays, testimony, excuses, deals. The only thing wrong with the scenario is that I don’t know why he killed my son. Why would a college teacher purposely run down a fourteen-year-old boy?”
Choices. Tell her the truth, that a man who prided himself on his understanding of morality, of right and wrong, had turned into a vengeance-seeking animal because his Down’s syndrome daughter had been spat upon? That her son had stopped in the street and taunted his pursuer with an upraised finger, defied him because Kyle Root was frightened and angry and fourteen years old and had never thought about death? Tell her to ask Andrew Goines, her son’s friend who could have been the one John Welles had chosen to follow, to kill?
“Was he drunk, high?” Yolanda said. “Was he insane?”
Her face was tight. Her eyes met mine. She was trying to tell me something. I thought I knew what it was.
“I don’t know,” I lied. “He didn’t get a chance to tell me. I think he was going to talk about it but your ex- husband showed up. Welles had a gun…”
I shrugged.
Nancy Root sank back in her chair once again, adjusting the sleeves of her sweater. She folded her hands and put the white knuckles of her thumbs to her lips.
I looked at Yolanda. I couldn’t swear to it but I thought she gave me a barely existent nod of approval.
“Okay,” said Nancy, suddenly standing. “I’ll get your check.”
She hurried out of the room.
“Andy told me,” Yolanda said.
“Told you?”
“Told me about what he and Kyle did,” she said.
I looked toward where Nancy Root had exited.
“She’ll take a few minutes,” Yolanda said. “She’s crying. I know Kyle. Knew him. She just thinks she does. If that dead guy backed him into a corner, Kyle would just tell him to screw himself or give him the finger.”
Something must have shown on my face. Yolanda smiled, but there wasn’t any satisfaction in the smile.
“Got it, right?” she asked.
I didn’t say anything. Nancy came back in, check in hand, eyes red. She handed me the check.
“Yola’s moving back in with me,” she said. “We need each other.”
Yolanda didn’t deny the mutual need, but I didn’t see any sign of it on her part.
“That’s right,” she said.
Nancy Root walked with me out to the elevator, adjusting her sleeves one more time as the bell dinged and the elevator doors opened. I got in.
“Thank you,” she said and as the doors closed, she added, “The hardest part is not knowing.”
It was almost ten. Ames and I drove to the Texas, had a beer and burger and looked at the manuscript of Two Many Words. Part One, Too Many Words, was about fifty pages long, each one with a crude drawing and no words. The drawings were of birds, people, pieces of luggage piled in an airport waiting area, a clock, a pencil, tables, a rabbit that resembled Bugs Bunny. Part Two, To Many Words, was also about fifty pages long, neatly handwritten in black ink, probably the longest single sentence ever written.
I began my search for the sunlight as I came out of the womb, my search for sunlight and God, and found sunlight pretty quickly, and darkness too, but I have the feeling that someday I’ll go back into that womb and find that God had been there waiting for me the whole while and he’ll say, Where the hell have you been, and I’ll say, Looking for you, and he’ll say, What the hell for, to which I will tell him that I wanted to know why I had been plucked timely from the warm darkness and sent out to grow old, feel pain and doubt, love and be loved, laugh and be laughed at, doubt and be doubted, and old God will answer saying I had just answered my own question
And words kept coming, but I stopped reading over Ames’s shoulder. I left him sitting there and knew that he would keep reading to the last word. I wondered if there would be a period after the last word. I meant to ask Ames in the morning.
Back in my office, it took about ten minutes before the phone rang. It was Viviase.
“Alberta Pastor is gone,” he said. “Packed up, got in her car, ran. Her lawyer says he doesn’t know where she went. She’s got no money but whatever she had on her and a Visa credit card. We’ll track her down. Looks like we’ll drop the charges against you and McKinney, except for the illegal weapon. Given the situation, the district attorney is willing to accept a fifty-dollar fine, an apology and the promise that Mr. McKinney’s love affair with firearms will not be hands-on.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I thought about telling you to stay out of trouble,” he said. “But that won’t happen, will it?”
“It finds me,” I said.
“Maybe you welcome it.”
“You sound like Ann,” I said.
“Ann?”
“My therapist,” I said.
We hung up and I did a dangerous thing. I should have washed, gotten into my pajamas and watched a Thin Man movie, but I sat at the desk, looked at the painting of the dark jungle on the wall, had trouble finding the spot of color and thought.
I thought about a dead philosopher and a smiling parentless girl with Down’s syndrome. I thought about a father who had lost his only son and had helped the boy’s killer commit suicide. I thought of a mother whom I had faced and told about what had happened to her dead son. I thought about an old woman whose mind was slowly slipping away and I tried not to wonder what would happen to her. I thought about my dead wife and my dead life. I thought about them till I fell asleep at the desk with my head on my arms.
I wanted nothing but to be left alone, maybe for a day, a week, a month, a year, forever.
