18
There was no photograph of the victim, in fact nothing about the Seattle murder, in the newspaper Mary bought in the hospital gift shop.
She managed to check Angie out of Saint Sebastian without incident, though Angie had to agree to see the gently persistent Dr. Keshna the next week. In the interim, the doctor would phone with the results of Angie’s tests. A young volunteer in a candy-striped uniform brought Angie down to the lobby in a gleaming chrome wheelchair while Mary got the car. Angie didn’t need the wheelchair, but she didn’t object; she had been here before and knew it was standard check-out procedure.
During the drive home, she sat subdued and staring straight ahead, as she had after her previous stays in Detox. There was no way to know how much or often she’d been secretly drinking during the last few years; this might be her first really dry time in months.
While Mary was stopped for a red light, Angie said, “You sweep my apartment clean of bottles?” Her words carried little emotion, the voice of a pull-string doll.
“Got ’em all,” Mary said. She felt the idling car’s vibration running along her buttocks, up her back.
“Bet you didn’t.”
Mary glanced at her. “Five gin bottles, including the one with water in it.”
Angie, still looking older and wearier than Mary could ever remember seeing her, stared over at her and raised her eyebrows in mild surprise. “Well, I guess you did find ’em all.”
Accelerating away from the now-green light, Mary wondered if that was true. Alcoholics were like any other kind of drug addict; though they might be naive in other areas, when it came to their addictions they were incredibly savvy and conniving. Lying to themselves and others was the necessary evil in their lives.
“Still feel okay?” Mary asked, turning a corner.
“Sure.” The same flat tone. Angie screwed up her eyes against the harsh sunlight and gazed intently out at the traffic, as if she’d never before seen a car. “Gets a little tougher each time this happens,” she said. “Or maybe that’s ’cause I’m getting older.” She flipped down the sunvisor.
“Getting older’s better than the alternative,” Mary said, concentrating on her driving.
“That’s what they say. Used to say the earth was flat, too.”
“Don’t talk that way, Angie.”
“Well, why not?”
“For one thing, Fred sure as hell isn’t worth it.”
“Such a wise daughter about other people’s lives. You search my apartment by yourself?”
“Jake helped me.”
“Uh-huh. And I guess he’s home in your bed right now.”
“That’s right, Angie.” Irritation swelled in Mary and became full-blown anger. She stomped down on the accelerator and roared around a bus whose diesel fumes found their way into the car. The lumbering vehicle had a liquor advertisement on its side, a young and gorgeously healthy couple toasting each other by candlelight. “Seems to me you’ve got enough to worry about without concerning yourself with me and Jake.”
Angie said nothing, but she pursed her lips in a way that made them look withered. The mouth of an old, old woman. Mary felt her anger plunge and become pity. She shouldn’t have talked that way to her mother.
She said, “How’d you know Jake and I were back together?”
“Fred told me. He phoned this morning.”
Mary saw her knuckles whiten as she squeezed the steering wheel. Why didn’t Fred mind his own business? Why didn’t they all?
“I’ll drop in on some AA meetings, like I was told,” Angie said. “I won’t drink any booze for a long while, anyways. You know I never do after a hard bender.”
Mary did know. That was a common pattern with alcoholics after a stay at a detox center. It was as if they were immune from their desires for a while. But there were exceptions, and things could become unbearably ugly. Something else might set off Angie again, sending her bouncing from bottle to bottle and bar to bar. Mary didn’t want that to happen. Didn’t even want to think about it.
“I need you to drop by the apartment so’s I can get my mail,” Angie said, “then I gotta go to the bank and cash my pension check. You mind the driving?”
“No.”
“I know you gotta get to work.”
“It’s okay.” Too much snap in her voice. Take it easy, Mary; go with the rhythm and follow the lead, like dancing. Will the new Latin shoes fit when they arrive?
“I know I’m a pain in the ass in my old age,” Angie said, playing the martyr now.
“I said it was okay!”
Silence except for the clattering hum of the motor. At least Angie was making sense, even if she was grating on exposed nerves. Her mind seemed to be working normally. Enough brain cells had somehow survived the years of alcohol.
“Mary, I appreciate what you’re doing.”
“It’s no trouble. I don’t have to be anywhere until a one o’clock closing.” Mary let herself relax into the car’s upholstery. She’d been sitting with her back muscles tense and her shoulders were sore. It was a strain, fighting Angie and the ghosts of childhood and the spirit of a dark future. There was no point to it, no way to win, like jousting with windmills that continued grinding out the same slow diet of agony no matter what.
“Want me to stay with you this morning after we come back from the bank?” Mary asked.
“It’s not necessary,” Angie said. “Fred’s coming over.”
When Mary got back to her apartment to change clothes and go to work, Jake was up. He was wearing only baggy Jockey shorts and a white T-shirt, standing in the breeze from the kitchen air-conditioner and building himself a sandwich. An open can of Busch beer was before him on the counter, a puddle around it.
As Mary sat down at the table, he stopped spreading mayonnaise and looked at her and smiled. “How’s Angie?”
“Good as can be expected.”
“She gonna be okay at home by herself?”
“Fred’ll be there. Probably is already.”
He placed the top piece of bread squarely on his sandwich, as if precise alignment were crucial to taste. “That’s good; she needs somebody right now.”
“Not Fred.”
“Aw, the old fucker’s not such a bad dude.”
“Angie’d agree with you, but that’s because she’s not thinking straight.”
Jake took a big bite of sandwich, chewed rapidly with his mouth open, then washed down the half-masticated bread and pastrami with a swig of beer. Mary waited for him to belch, but he didn’t. Point for Jake. He said, “You gonna eat lunch, babe?”
“I’m not hungry. Stopped for doughnuts on the way to the hospital.” She was lying; she simply didn’t want to eat with Jake. A hamburger to go, consumed at her desk between phone calls, was more appetizing.
Had she really enjoyed sex with this man last night, or was he a stranger come to repair the dishwasher? Sometimes Mary felt that way about Jake, as if there were nothing between them and never had been. He kept a part of himself intensely private, came and went at odd hours, disappeared for days at a time, going out of town, she was sure. He was as much an unknown to her, as much an alien, as someone she’d happened to glance at on the street and then seen again. Of course, sometimes she felt that way about her entire life, as if it were somebody else’s and she’d somehow become trapped in it. Everything was happening of its own momentum or lack of it, and she had no control. At times Mary thought people’s lives progressed like billiard balls across a pool table-once stroked to travel in a certain direction, all the deflections, spins, hard angles, and collisions were unavoidable. And so was the waiting pocket.
The murder victims who’d danced, had they felt that way in their final moments? Or before? Had they sensed their destinies propelling them?
She realized that at this moment she’d genuinely rather die than lie down again with Jake. Dying couldn’t be worse, and probably not so different. Wasn’t sex-orgasm-much like death only not permanent? A pinnacle of
