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“What are you doing? Babe? Don’t make me do this! Anna?”
He’s kicking the door and I’m screaming for him to stop and suddenly he’s on top of me and he pulls my hair and slams the side of my head on the floor and I’m clawing for something, anything and with one hand I’ve grabbed the leg of the bedside table and I’ve pulled it so hard the lamp has come crashing down and Luis is swearing, and I can’t reach the lamp and I claw at the drawer of the table, grappling blindly, and then I feel it.
Small, hard, metallic.
June’s gun.
I’ve kicked him hard in the face and he holds his nose, his face scrunched up in pain and I’m on my feet, my arms outstretched, my hands shaking so hard I don’t know how long I can hold it.
Luis drops his arms to his sides. His nose is bleeding. He shakes his head slowly. “No. Don’t.” Then suddenly his hands are on my face and there’s a noise, so fast, so sharp, it rips through the air and, just as quickly, silence. Except for a high-pitched sound, like a whistle. Luis smiles so sweetly and his eyes fill with tears and when he mouths the words,I love you, it’s pure and real and he looks down at the blood on his chest and I scream but I can’t hear myself, just the high-pitched noise, and when he falls I fall with him and hold him tight, and I say it to him, over and over,I’m obsessed with you.
Forty-One
I stand at the window gazing at the trees filled with brilliant white blooms. They’re all over campus, blossoming in unison, tall and dense, wide and round at the bottom and pointy at the top, which has always struck me as poetic, since they’re ornamental pears, and they really are shaped a bit like the fruit they bear.
“Hey.”
I turn around. June has walked in with a plate of cookies. I laugh.
“A selection of your favorites,” she says, setting it down on the desk. We hug even though I saw her this morning. I stay with her in her new place whenever I’ve needed to return for the investigation.
I grab a cookie and sit down at my desk. Which is not really my desk anymore, although no one has filled this office yet.
“It’s so quiet around here,” I say.
“I know, spring break, no students. Don’t you love it?”
“I sure do.” It’s the first time I’ve been back to Locke Weidman since Luis died, so I’m grateful there are very few students around. I don’t think I could handle the stares, although I’m getting a lot better at that.
“How is Roberto?” she asks. I smile. She’s the only who calls him that and I think he secretly loves it.
I smile. “Rob’s wonderful. He’s been taking the kids fishing a lot.”
“They’ll love that,” she says.
I will never forget—and I’ve said this so much lately—the day Luis’s father, Rob, came to get me outside the court house. We had just found out so many things about Luis. That he had been forging my signature for years. That he signed for my inheritance, that he forged a power of attorney to act on my behalf so he could sell my mother’s house once enough years had passed, and he kept the money, too. He never spent it. All this time it’s been sitting in a term deposit account which he had opened, also in my name.
But there was one thing I never knew, which was that when Luis was young he set fire to a man, and killed him. No one knows the circumstances exactly, and he was charged with involuntary manslaughter. Because of his age, he went to juvenile detention for eight months. Somehow, my mother found out and tried to tell me. But everything I believed about that still stands: it may have been the truth, but the only reason she wanted me to know was to hurt me. To push me to end the relationship because she just didn’t like to see me happy. It would have made no difference if she’d told me. I would have believed with all my heart whatever Luis did back then had beeninvoluntary.
But that day on the lawn outside the court house, Rob broke down and sobbed on my shoulder because he’d never told me about it.But we both thought he was good and kind, I said.You didn’t know either, what he was capable of. You thought he’d made a mistake, you didn’t want it to tarnish the rest of his life. I would have done the same for my kids.
But he put a hand over his eyes, and asked if I was going to forbid him from seeing his grandchildren now. “They all I have left,” he said.
“So come and live with us,” I replied. “They adore you. You’re on your own now. Apart from me, you’re the only family they have left. You’re the only familyIhave left.”
And he sobbed again on my shoulder, for a long time, but with relief, and some joy too, I think.
I’ve resigned from Locke Weidman, sold our house, and we’ve moved to Martha’s Vineyard, to a small but charming rented house. The money I got from the sale of our house is not enough to buy something over here and, until earlier this week, I didn’t know if I’d ever get the money in the term deposit account. I’m not sure I want it, anyway. And I certainly won’t be receiving the prize money. The Forrester Foundation has kindly allowed me more time to give them my notebooks, but I’d already decided to refuse the prize. I wanted to wait until the district attorney concluded his investigation to tell them formally, and explain that it was Alex who solved it, with a little help from me, and that the prize should be awarded to him posthumously. Maybe his parents will use it to create a scholarship in his memory, especially now that the medical examiner has officially ruled his death was suicide.
This came about because of his ex-girlfriend, a young woman called Lauren who used to go out with him when they were together at NYU. She’d broken it off but he had refused to accept it. After two years of behavior that bordered on stalking, he had emailed her to say he wanted to show her something, and after that, he promised he would no longer harass her. It was the last thing he was asking of her.
I don’t know the exact details of all this but, suffice to say, she flew over to visit him—without telling her parents, who would have forbidden it. When she arrived at the apartment, the door was not quite closed. He wasn’t there. She walked in, waited, and she left. The consensus was that he had hoped she would understand he had killed himself because of her, and he wanted her to know.
Did I leave the door open? I must have. Because when I saw her picture I knew she was the young woman I’d passed on the stairs that day. Not because of her face—I never looked at her—but because of her ring. A class ring in the colors of NYU, silver and purple.
I don’t know what he wanted to show her and I don’t think he was going to kill himself. But some days I think maybe he was, and other days I think he was not well and he didn’t know what he was doing.
But even without all that, it’s a big letter to write, and my head just wasn’t in it so I waited until the district attorney’s decision, which has been made, as of last Monday. The DA decided on the evidence that there was no need to take the case to the grand jury, so, I’m free. I will write that letter today, make things right, and after I’ve packed the rest of my things from this office, I’m going home to my kids.
