Wendy Hornsby - The Color of Light

“Don’t you dare tickle me,” I said, batting his hand away. “I hated it when you tickled me.”

“Yeah.” His hand relaxed but he didn’t remove it. He didn’t smell the way I remembered, no Brut, no pepperoni-more like shampoo and scotch. “It’s just… God, you used to be such a bag of bones.”

“And now I’m fat?” I shifted sideways until I was out from under him, wedged on my side with my back against the back of the sofa. He relaxed, stretched out facing me.

“Jesus, no,” he said. “It’s just… You have more substance than you used to have. I wasn’t expecting it.”

“Funny thing, buddy,” I said, giving him a nudge. “Last time you flipped me over your shoulder I was seventeen years old. A little girl. I’m all grown up now.”

“That’s the thing of it,” he said, brow furrowed as he searched my face for something. Was he counting lines in my crow’s-feet? “We were golden back then, weren’t we, Maggie? Golden.”

“You were a good boyfriend, Kevie.” I combed my fingers through his mussed hair. It wasn’t as thick as it once was, or as dark; the furrows made by my fingers exposed a lot of pink scalp and silver streaks. “Every Friday night, except during football season, you put on your letterman’s jacket, borrowed a car and drove down to pick me up from school. You were handsome and smart and fun, and I was the envy of everyone in school.”

“Everyone include the nuns?”

“Especially the nuns. You were a nice Catholic boy.” I propped myself up on an elbow and looked down at him. “But that was then.”

“Just for old times’ sake, how about we get rid of all these clothes and have one more bare-assed roll around on this big sofa?”

“Might be interesting,” I said, struggling to sit up; he gave me an assist. “But it’s a real bad idea.”

“Sometimes, though, don’t you wish you could go back?”

“Not for a minute,” I said, straightening my shirt. “I’m in a pretty good place right now, not perfect but pretty good. It took a lot of work to get here. I don’t want to go back.”

“What if you could, though, knowing what you know now?”

“Same answer.” I swung my legs over his hips and pushed against him, trying to get to my feet. Instead of giving me a hand, he disentangled himself from underneath me and scooted around until he was sitting upright next to me. I stood and held out my hand to him. “I’d probably just make a whole new set of mistakes. Besides, when we were kids, if we knew half what we know now, we would have ended up in Neuropsychiatric. No thanks. To tell you the truth, some of the big secrets from back then, I wish they had just stayed secret.”

He looked up from checking that the Beretta affixed to his belt was secure. “What secrets?”

“The truth about my parentage for one,” I said. “And I could have lived the rest of my life without seeing that photo of Mrs. Bartolini.”

“You could be right, but I look around at the way things are now and I wonder if the whole world has gone to shit. I mean, tell me honestly, what do we have to look forward to?”

“Kev?” I took his face between my palms. “Why don’t you do what other guys our age do when they feel this way? Go buy yourself a Maserati.”

He finally smiled. “On a cop’s salary?”

“Then have a messy mid-life fling with a twenty-two-year-old blonde.”

“Already tried that.” His face colored. “Didn’t work out so well.”

“Could that be the reason you and the wife aren’t…?”

“That’s part of it.”

I shook my head. “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin.”

“This guy you’re seeing,” he said as he tucked in the front of his dress shirt and pulled his jacket straight. “It’s serious?”

“It could be,” I said. “Too soon to say. But I don’t want to do anything that might muck it up.”

“Let me know if it doesn’t work out,” he said, checking his watch. Suddenly, he was the cop again. “I have to get back to work.”

“Me, too.” I looked around the room at all the laden bookshelves that needed to be sorted and packed up. “You’ll let me know what you find out about Beto’s mom?”

He grew still, looking down at me with his cop face on. He was at least eight inches taller than me so I had to lean back to look up at him.

“I need to know, Maggie,” he said, the heel of his hand resting on the butt of his gun. “Who did you invite over to see that film? Your friend or a cop?”

“I’m not sure.”

“When Beto asked me to look into his mom’s case again, I warned him that he might not like what I found out, especially if it implicates his dad in some way,” he said, watching me closely. “Mag, what if my investigation turns up something that points to your father?”

“I’d like for you to tell me. As a friend.”

“We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see.”

After Kevin left, the house felt hollow, as a house does when all of its inhabitants have moved away. I didn’t count myself among the missing because I hadn’t lived there for a very long time. If I had left some essence or emanation anywhere, I thought it would be at my own house down south.

I went back to the task of cleaning out Dad’s big old mahogany desk, the undertaking that had been interrupted the day before when I found the films locked away in a bottom drawer.

A man’s desk is a very private zone. Who knows what you might find there, besides a random crime scene photo or films of the owner’s former paramour, and various other things a man’s widow might prefer not to learn about her late spouse? That’s why Mom had left the job for me. And rightly so.

I found that Dad had kept a neat file of his correspondence with Isabelle, my natural mother, after she relinquished custody of me. These weren’t love letters, far from it, at least on his part. But seeing them would have been a painful reminder to Mom of Dad’s infidelity, though my very existence must have been daily proof enough that it had occurred.

Because it might be useful to me as Isabelle’s estate wound its way through the arcane French probate system, I set the file in a box with other things I found in the desk that I wanted to keep: handmade cards from my brother and sister and me, an old address book, a few family photos, Dad’s passport, an old wallet molded to the contour of his rear end by years of use. In the wallet I found an unfilled prescription for blood pressure medication, some expired credit cards, his faculty identification card and about fifty dollars in cash, which I stuffed into my own pocket.

Other than that, most of what I found was old pens, tangled paper clips, university stationery yellowing at the edges, and endless scraps of paper with indecipherable hand-scribbled notes and calculations; Dad, a physicist, doodled in mathematical formulae. I pulled out the top drawer, and as I dumped its odds and ends into a trash bag I could almost hear Dad’s voice in my ear: I think there’s still some good use to be found in that red pen; One day when you need a paper clip, you won’t have one. I felt him so strongly that I actually turned my head to check behind me. Nothing there except dust motes floating in the sunlight streaming through the garden windows.

I was disappointed Dad wasn’t there because I had so many questions to ask him. About Isabelle, certainly, but after seeing his little movie, it was the events of the day that Mrs. Bartolini-Tina-died that I needed to have explained frankly.

There are things that happen when we are children that sit restlessly on our shoulders for the rest of our lives and affect the way we venture about in the world. For me, the first of those events was the loss of my older brother-my half brother-during combat in Vietnam when I was very young. The second of course was the murder of Beto’s mother a few years later. I began to understand at a tender age not only how fragile and precious life is, but also the randomness with which life can be stolen away.