“Are you kidding?” You Got No Choice said.
“Kidding?”
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?” Cahill said.
“Up in Warren,” he said warily, as if Cahill might be having him on. “It’s been all over the papers.”
You Got No Choice saw the answer in Cahill’s expression. “Doc—they got him on some molesting-a-minor thing, or something. I didn’t want to bring up a sore subject. I know he was like a son to you. You get rounded up by the cops, you got no choice—you go where the Man says you go, right? Don’t mean you’re guilty.”
Cahill put his hand out to brace himself on the door frame. His mind was racing, but it moved neither backward nor forward. It raced like a car on a lift, with someone inside gunning the engine.
“Sorry to drop a bomb on you. Articles have been in the paper every day, as far’s I know.”
“It’s impossible,” Cahill said, having recovered enough to speak, though he could hardly hear his own voice.
“Say what?”
“Why wouldn’t he have called me? Why wouldn’t police have come to the barn, why—”
“There you go,” You Got No Choice said. “Fishy, huh? You got a point; it’s odd if they haven’t made no search.”
Cahill almost tripped on the rug in the entryway on his way back into the house. He walked toward the kitchen and the pile of papers, which he wanted to look through immediately, and not at all. “Real life,” as his wife would have said. He sank into a kitchen chair and brushed the newspapers onto the floor, putting his head in his hands. The phone rang, and he got up and walked numbly toward it. Matt? Calling to say what? “This is Joyce,” his daughter said.
“Joyce, my dear, this is not a time I can talk,” he said, but another voice intruded. “And this is Tara,” a younger, more high-pitched voice sing-alonged, and he realized he’d been talking to a recording. He heard chimes, and the first unmistakable notes of the wedding march. His daughter’s voice said, “We’re sending this recording on the happiest day of our lives to announce that at one o’clock July 20, 2005, we were joined together in a commitment ceremony, blessed by Mother Goddess Devi, and we are now officially Joyce”—the squeaky voice broke in—“and Tara.” “Forever!” the voices shouted in unison. Next, he recognized the familiar strident voice of his daughter: “Don’t be put out that you weren’t invited,” she said. “Our ceremony consisted of only Mother Devi, Tara’s brother who lives next door—who did a bee-yoo-tee-ful Sufi dance—and our little girl Fluffy Sunshine, with a collar of bells and white pansies.” Tara broke in: “When you get this message, we’ll be in the air to Hawaii.” “Peace and love to you, and may you recognize the happiness we have experienced today,” his daughter said. Bells clanged merrily; over their ringing, he heard them giggling, voices overlapping: “
He put his head in his hands again, pushing his fingertips against his eyelids until he felt pain.
He went to the barn in the dark, shining the flashlight in front of him. It had rained, and tiny frogs leaped across the dirt road like tiddlywinks. In front of him grew the rhododendrons that Matt had been so delighted to have found in some nursery’s compost heap: two of them, with electric-lavender flowers, grown large beside the door. The ink on Cahill’s Post-it note had run into one black smear. He knocked, though it was obvious that the place was deserted. He had read enough in the paper to make him sick.
An oversized T-shirt was draped over an oak ladder-back chair. Matt had glued the chair’s leg for him some months back, and somehow it had remained in the barn. On the kitchen table were a few shiny copper pennies, and a
He sat in his old chair and surveyed the room. It resonated with silence. This had once been his wife’s dance studio, the place where she practiced—only for the love of it; she’d been too old to seriously dance ballet. This had been her private place, where she watched tapes of Nureyev dancing and no doubt imagined herself being lifted high by his strong hands; where she wore tights and one of Cahill’s old white shirts long beyond the time when she would have appeared coquettish in such attire. But now he had to accept the fact that the barn had been desecrated, inhabited for years by a person he’d misjudged, toward whom his wife would have felt the greatest contempt. A slight smell of sweat hung in the air—at least, the kitchen had that odor. He got up and opened the refrigerator—not expecting a Jeffrey Dahmer banquet but checking nonetheless. A bottle of cheap champagne lay on its side, and a couple of packs of moldy cheese, unsealed. Yellow celery lay in a brownish puddle in the drawer. The opened cans he didn’t peer into. He took out the one can of Coke, pulled back the top, and drank it, hoping it would settle his stomach. It was not exactly reassuring that the police hadn’t come. Hadn’t they made Matt tell them where he lived? He saw an old calendar held with a magnet to the side of the refrigerator: Shirley Temple as a child, sniffing a yellow daisy. Oh, the banality of it. The sad predictability of people’s intense yet ultimately unoriginal desires. “You’re so superior?” his wife used to chide. Well, yes, he was. At least to some. He took another sip and put the can aside. Well: there were no lollipops. No pictures of little girls naked on the computer, because Matt did not own a computer. A back-to-basics child molester.
It might be, Cahill thought, that the space itself was cursed. There was the time, during its reconstruction, when the carpenter—a strong-bodied, red-haired woman named Elsie—had flirted with him, the strap of her sweaty tank top fallen from one shoulder, and he had questioned her with his eyes, and she had answered in the affirmative. He had moved toward her and gently slipped down the other strap, intending only a kiss to such peach-perfect breasts, when, with the timing of a bad movie, Deirdre Rambell had walked into the barn, carrying the sandwiches and drinks his wife had sent out on a tray. It was funny now—or, if not funny, he still took pleasure in having shocked Deirdre, that holier-than-thou woman. There had been no chance in the world that she would ever report what she’d seen to Barbara. He could still hear the glasses rattling on the tray.
He called the police from Matt’s phone—a rotary dial, another of Matt’s Salvation Army finds. That was what Cahill thought Matt had been doing: going here and there, collecting trivia as a way of getting over his wife’s death. The policeman who answered on the eighth ring—eighth!—seemed none too interested in what he was saying until he raised his voice. “That child molester you’ve got up there in Warren,” he said. “You might want to come over to his house and check through it. This is his landlord calling.” Already, he had retreated from the notion of friendship. “I can’t understand why you haven’t been here before now,” he added. The Coke rose up his throat, the acid rush subsiding sickly. He looked at a pencil sketch of trees in an open sketchbook on the counter. A
