Even though Click and Graham had departed, Van had lingered, offering to help with the cleanup. I could hear her and Joan talking in the kitchen, and just from the tenor of their voices, I knew they were talking about me, trying to stay quiet. I stood just outside the arch which opens into the kitchen, listening.
“. . . bad it was,” Joan was saying.
“She took a fall in Tokyo,” Van said. “End of the third set, just went right off the stage. Didn’t even know she’d done it.”
“She’s not made for it.”
“She’s brilliant.”
“She’s a musician, Vanessa. Not a performer, not like you.”
“She’s great onstage.”
There was a rustle, the sound of a cabinet opening and closing. “My husband knew.”
“About the drinking?”
“Not that, not specifically. But he knew what she was in for, knew where you were all headed. He tried to warn her. He wanted her to understand how isolating it would be, how lonely. But mostly, I think, he wanted her to understand that she shouldn’t trust it, not any of it, not anyone.”
“You mean me, too?”
Another cabinet opened, closed. I heard a sigh. “Sending her home proved him wrong about you. But even now he’d say that for everyone else—and he really did mean everyone—it’s about money. How much of it they can make off her, off the band. Those people, they don’t care about art or entertainment. They just want to keep getting richer.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being rich.”
“Depends how you get there, Vanessa. There was this thing, I heard it on the news this morning, about how the albums have shot up the charts.”
“You think it’s someone close to her?” Van asked. “Someone who put the cameras in her house and killed Mikel?”
“She doesn’t want to think that her brother could have done a thing like that.”
“Would you?”
I’d heard more than enough, retreated, back to the living room. Their voices faded, leaving me with my own.
We’d been with the Larkins for just under two weeks when the same Gresham detective, Wagner, came to talk to us again. He came in the afternoon, after school, and he got lucky, because Mikel was actually at the house, along with me. Mrs. Larkin invited him in and offered him a soda, then went to fetch us.
Mikel and I had been sitting together, in the room he shared with the eldest Larkin boy. I’d been trying to do homework, taking comfort in having him close. When Mrs. Larkin stuck her head in to tell us that Detective Wagner was here, Mikel put his magazine down and told her we’d be right there.
“What does he want?” I asked him as soon as she was gone.
“He wants to know what we saw.” He said it all flat, trying to be bored by the horror of it all. “Dad’s going to be on trial and stuff, and he wants to make sure that he really killed Mom.”
“But he already asked. We already told him.”
“He wants to check it.”
“I didn’t really see,” I said, after a moment. “I was going back to the porch.”
“You saw enough.”
“But I didn’t really see it, Mikel.”
“I did.”
“He just ran her over?”
He nodded, slowly, as if leery of the memory, then got off the bed. “We should go down.”
I followed reluctantly, trailing after him down the stairs. The detective scared me, the thought of talking to him again, remembering again, disconcerting. I was still having nightmares, and having to listen to questions that would force me to see things I hadn’t, make me recall things I was trying so hard to forget, filled my feet with lead.
But Mikel, he was tougher, and if he was scared, it didn’t show, and that made it easier when I followed him into the kitchen. Wagner was at the dining table, with a smile this time, and Mrs. Larkin guided us to him, put us in chairs.
“I just want to check some things, all right?” he told us.
“Sure,” Mikel said.
He started by asking where we were when it happened, what we were doing. Wanted to know how long Mom and I had been working on the pumpkin in the driveway, wanted to know how she’d been acting. If she was upset with me, perhaps, or maybe just upset about something else entirely. My answers were sullen, one-word, a string of nos.
“He picked me up on the corner,” Mikel told Wagner.
“Where were you going?”
“Meet some friends.”
“And your father saw you?”
“He stopped the truck. He was mad. He doesn’t like my friends. Told me I had to come home.”
Wagner asked some questions about Mikel’s friends, and my brother confirmed that they sometimes got into trouble. Sometimes they broke things, sometimes they took things, but it wasn’t like it was ever anything someone would miss, it wasn’t ever anything important, Mikel said. Wagner asked him if he was still getting into trouble, and after glancing to Mrs. Larkin, Mikel confirmed that, too. Not embarrassed, almost defiant.
“What about you, Miriam? You staying out of trouble?”
“Trying,” I said.
“That’s good.”
I looked at Mikel, longing to be tough like he was, to be strong and act like I didn’t care. Wagner made more scribbles on his pad, flipped pages, asked a couple more questions. He asked if Tommy ever hit our mother, if he ever hit us.
“He never hits Mim,” Mikel told him, by way of an answer.
Joan was saying my name, and Van was standing at the door, ready to take me home, and I got off the couch, feeling caught by the memories.
Joan gave me a hug and a kiss, and I thanked her for everything.
“I mean everything,” I said.
“You’re worrying me, Miriam,” she said, and then told me to call in the next day or so. She’d be back in school, teaching again, but she said she’d try to keep her evenings free.
The top was up on Van’s convertible, and when she switched on the engine the stereo began blaring Radiohead, and she lunged for the button to turn it off. There wasn’t much of a point to the silence; we didn’t have anything to say to each other.
She drove me home, and I got out of the car, thanked her for the lift.
“I’m having a thing at my house,” Van said. “Tomorrow night. If you want to come.”
“You mean a party?”
“Just for fun. I’m keeping it small.”
“I’ll probably give it a miss,” I said.
“Thought I’d offer.”
“I don’t really hate you, you know that, right?” I said.
“Sure you do,” Van told me. “Just not for the reasons you think.”
There was a new mess to clean up after I’d changed into comfortable clothes, and I went through my bedroom and bathroom, mopping up the spills and finding the top to the bottle of Jack, trying to ignore the smell. I brought it downstairs and poured a small shot before putting it in the pantry with its brothers-in-proof, then checked the phone for messages while I took the drink. The voice-mail lady told me there were two messages, which I took
