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The entire left side of my body still felt weak, depleted, as if somehow the blood on that side wasn’t as thick, and nights sometimes, it felt cold over there.
“We’re home,” Angie said when we reached the landing.
“Home?” I said. “You mean my home or our home?”
“Ours,” she said.
She opened the door before us, and I stared down my hallway, which fairly reeked of recently applied oil soap. I felt the warmth of Angie’s flesh on my good palm. I saw my ratty old La-Z-Boy waiting for me in the living room. And I knew that unless Angie had drunk them, there would be two cold Beck’s waiting in the fridge.
Living is not bad, I decided. The good lies in the small details. The furniture you’ve molded to your shape. A cold beer on a hot day. A perfect strawberry. Her lips.
“Home,” I said.
It was midautumn before I could reach both hands above my head and stretch, and one afternoon, I went looking for my torn, frayed, had-it-since-high-school, favorite sweatshirt, which I’d tossed with my good hand up onto the top shelf of the bedroom closet, where it hid in the darkness of a shadow thrown by the top of the door frame. I hid it because Angie hated it, said it made me look like a bum, and I was sure she had homicidal designs on it. I’ve learned with women never to take their threats against your clothing too lightly.
My hand sank into the faded cotton, and I sighed happily as I pulled it out and several objects fell onto my head along with it.
One was a cassette tape I’d thought I’d lost, a bootleg of Muddy Waters playing live with Mick Jagger and the Red Devils. Another was a book Angie had loaned me, which I’d given up on after fifty pages and stuffed back there in hopes she’d forget it. The third item was a roll of electrical tape I’d tossed up there last summer when I slapped some around a fraying cord and was too lazy to walk it back to my toolbox.
I picked up the cassette, tossed the book back into the darkness, and reached for the electrical tape.
But I never touched it. Instead, I sat back on the floor and stared at it.
And, finally, I saw the whole board.
37
“Mr. Kenzie,” Wesley said when I found him down by the pond at the back of his father’s property, “what a pleasure to see you.”
“Did you push her?” I asked.
“What? Who?”
“Naomi,” I said.
He jerked his head back, gave me a confused smile. “What are you talking about?”
“She chased a ball out onto this pond,” I said. “That was the story, right? But how’d the ball get out there? Did you throw it, Wes?”
He gave me a small, strange smile, pained, I think, lonely. He turned his head and looked out at the pond. His gaze grew distant. He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back slightly, his shoulders tightening, thin body rippling with a slow shudder.
“Naomi threw the ball,” he said softly. “I don’t know why. I’d walked on ahead.” He tilted his head to the right. “Up that way. Lost in thought, I suppose, though I can’t remember what I was thinking about.” He shrugged. “I walked on, and my sister threw the ball and it got ahead of her. Maybe it took an odd bounce off a rock. Maybe she threw it out onto the ice to see what would happen. It doesn’t really matter why. The ball went out on the ice, and she followed it. I heard her footsteps on the ice, all of a sudden, as if someone had, on a whim, flicked on a sound track. One moment I was locked in my fucked-up head as usual, the next I could hear a squirrel pawing the frozen grass twenty yards away. I could hear snow melt. I could hear Naomi’s feet on the ice. And I turned my head in time to see the ice break under her. It was so quiet , that sound.” He turned back to me, cocked an eyebrow. “You’d think not, wouldn’t you? But it sounded as if you were crumpling tinfoil in your hand. And she,” he smiled, “she had this look on her face of utter joy . What a new experience this was going to be! She never made a noise. Didn’t cry out. She just dropped. And she was gone.”
He shrugged again, then picked a rock up off the ground and threw it high above the pond. I watched it plummet through the hard autumn air and then make a tiny splash in the center of the pond.
“So, no,” he said, “I didn’t kill my sister, Mr. Kenzie. I simply failed to keep adequate watch on her.” He placed his hands back in his pockets and leaned back on his heels, gave me another flash of that pained smile.
“But they blamed you,” I said, and looked back across the lawn to the porch where Christopher and Carrie Dawe sat with their afternoon tea and sections of the Sunday paper. “Didn’t they, Wesley?”
He pursed his lips, nodded at his shoes. “Oh, sure. Sure.”
He turned to his right and we began to walk slowly along the pond in the midafternoon glow of a late October Sunday. His steps seemed uncertain, and then I realized it was more an awkwardness in the roll of his right hip. I looked at his shoes, saw that the sole of the right was two inches thicker than that of the left, and I remembered Christopher Dawe telling us Wesley had been born with one leg shorter than the other.
“Bet it didn’t feel good,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Being blamed for your baby stepsister’s death when you hadn’t truly been responsible for it.”
He kept his head down, but a wry smile curled up his weak lips. “You have an odd gift for understating the obvious, Mr. Kenzie.”
“We all need our talents, Wes.”
“When I was thirteen,” he said, “I vomited up a pint of blood. A pint. Nothing wrong with me. It was simply ‘nerves.’ At fifteen, I had a peptic ulcer. When I was eighteen, I was diagnosed with manic depression and low-grade schizophrenia. It embarrassed my father. Humiliated him. He was sure if he just toughened me up-tortured me enough with his mental games and constant put-downs-I’d one day wake up made of firmer stuff.” He chuckled softly. “Fathers. Did you have a positive relationship with yours?”
“Not by a long shot, Wesley.”
“Forced you to live up to his expectations, maybe? Called you ‘useless’ so many times you started to believe it?”
“He held me down and burned me with an iron.”
Wesley stopped in the trees, looked at me. “You’re serious?”
I nodded. “He also hospitalized me twice and reminded me on a weekly basis that I’d never amount to shit. He was as close to evil as I’ve ever come, Wesley.”
