Gregg Hurwitz - We Know

"On top of the house." She watched me, deciding whether to be helpful, then added, "Upstairs, end of the hall. The boxes are labeled. Help yourself." She grabbed her husband's plate, still half full, and walked out to bring it to him.

I made my way hesitantly up the stairs. Music blared through the closed door to the left, Alanis Morissette wailing about an ex-boyfriend, with no small measure of bitterness. Scrabble letters glued to the door spelled out EMILY'S ROOM. Feeling like an intruder, I continued down the hall toward the attic hatch. A bathroom, a guest room, and then open double doors to the master. I stood under the hatch, peering into the bedroom where my mother slept. A large four-poster bed with a floral duvet faced a window overlooking a gazebo and a swimming pool. A shoulder holster was slung across a dressing chair by the bathroom door. An easel by the bay window held a half-finished portrait of Emily. The lips were tight and angry, and her posture suggested that she was an unwilling subject. The drawing itself was a bit generic-not Callie's best work. It reeked of obligation all the way around.

A string dangled from the hatch overhead. When I tugged, the hidden ladder unfolded like the leg of some insect. I climbed up, heat hitting me along with the scratchy smell of insulation. A ventilation fan embedded in the roof chopped the morning glare to hypnotic effect.

Four boxes sat by the air-conditioner unit, all Magic Markered FRANK in my mom's hand. Two held old suits and a few dress shirts that I guessed Callie couldn't part with. Books filled the third. I lifted several to admire the familiar spines. Presidential memoirs and military histories, a couple Leon Uris novels. The fourth box was the lightest, its contents shifting around when I lifted it. A few layers of pictures, loose in the bottom. I sorted through them. Black-and-white wedding photos-Frank's parents? Pictures of him as a kid. In one he wore trousers and a little flat cap and pointed a wooden gun at the camera. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that Frank had once been a kid. I scooped up more pictures and flipped through several handfuls.

Down at the bottom, I found the pictures from the war. There was one of Frank and other soldiers at a camp in the jungle. He was stretched out on his back, smirking, his legs crossed, boots unlaced. I studied the other men's faces, but none were familiar. A few photos later, I found him. It was a mess-hall picture, guys in white undershirts hunched over trays of cubed meat and noodles. Frank leaned over his food, fork raised to punctuate a point he was making to the men around him. The others bent toward him. At the table behind him, his head turned to listen, sat Charlie. The wild blond hair was shaved in a flattop, but I recognized the piercing eyes, that wide, unruly mouth. He seemed an outsider, pivoting to get in on Frank's conversation, and something in his body language suggested an underdog's reverence. I couldn't help but wonder if Frank trusted Charlie half as much as Charlie trusted him.

The fan huffing overhead, I sat looking at the photograph until sweat trickled down my ribs. Then I shoved it into a back pocket, stacked the boxes neatly, and climbed down. As I passed through the hall, Emily stepped out of the bathroom, nearly colliding with me.

"Hi," I said. "Sorry."

She looked up at me. Her brown eyes were doleful and sort of pretty. "It sucks here," she said.

"I bet." I extended my hand. "Emily, right? I'm Nick."

She brushed past me into her room. "It's just Em." She scowled at the Scrabble letters on the door. "Your mom glued those there when we moved in. She got my name wrong."

I thought about that portrait in Callie's room, how neither of them likely had the desire or stamina to finish it. "She's probably just trying to help you adjust."

"She's always hovering over me, trying to feed me and stuff."

"She means well," I said.

"Then why haven't you talked to her for, like, nine hundred years?"

"Because of a bunch of shit I got into when I was younger."

She stared at me curiously for a moment, then flopped down on her stomach in front of a Scrabble board and a two-volume dictionary. A few tournament certificates and ribbons were tacked over her desk.

I stayed in the doorway. "You're a Scrabble champ? That's pretty cool."

"Cool. Yeah. I have to beat the boys away with my thesaurus." She glanced back at me over a shoulder. "Look, why don't you just get out of here?"

When I got downstairs, Callie was doing the dishes. I cleared my throat, but she didn't turn around.

"Do you know what company Frank was in?" I asked. "In Vietnam?"

She kept scrubbing. "Frank didn't talk much about the war. You know that."

"Do you have anything that would say where he served?"

"Yeah, Nicky, I keep his obit framed in the powder room." The pan hit the counter with a clank, but then her shoulders lowered and she relented. "I believe it's on his headstone."

"Where… where is that?" I was ashamed not to know.

She caught the hitch in my voice and turned. "The veterans' cemetery. Wilshire and Sepulveda."

Above the breakfast nook hung a wedding picture of Callie and Steve, Emily scowling from the side in a dark blue velvet dress. So much of Callie's life I had missed. What had I been doing the day my mom had gotten remarried?

Like his daughter, Steve had seemed a bit tentative in the house, a touch formal. Six months he'd lived here. It wasn't easy transitioning into a new place, feeling like a guest in your own home. I thought about that shoulder holster on the chair upstairs. It struck me how tall Frank was, or how tall he always seemed. "What's Steve do?"

"He's a cop." She added, defensively, "He's a wonderful man."

"I expect so. You wouldn't marry a man who wasn't."

We looked at each other a moment, awkwardly. She'd rebuilt a life, just as I had. Though I was happy for her, seeing her brought back the ache I'd tried for years not to feel. We were no longer who we'd been when we'd known each other. The old cues, the connections, our stupid inside jokes- they weren't there when I reached for them. I could see in her face that she felt it, too. That hollowness.

She said, "We were so close, Nicky."

"Yeah," I said. "We really were."

As I passed, she took my arm, stopped me. She said, "I'm ready to listen now. I want you to know that."

"Listen to what?"

"Why you really ran away."

I thought about the photomat slip in my pocket and the key in my shoe.

She said, "What?"

I shook my head.

"How about the short version?" She let go of my arm. "Do you owe me anything?" She asked it not passive-aggressively but with genuine curiosity.

My chest cramped; my throat was dry. It was as if my body was rebelling so I wouldn't be able to get the words out. "The night I left, they came and arrested me," I said. "For Frank's murder."

"They did what to you?" She was instantly, protectively furious.

"They booked me into MDC. Have your husband check the records."

"You should have talked to me, Nicky." She looked crushed. "We could've gotten you a lawyer. There would've been no case. No case"

"They'd manufactured one, including my prints on the gun."

"Everyone knew you picked up the gun. They couldn't make anything of that."

"After what happened to Frank, I was willing to believe they could do a lot of things. And I wasn't gonna trust the assholes with badges to handle it on the up-and-up."

We both turned at a movement in the doorway. Steve standing, holding his dirty plate. His stare was the first coplike thing I'd noticed about him.

I nodded at her, then at Steve. "Thanks for letting me look at those pictures."

I walked out, but Steve barely moved, so I had to brush past him. My footsteps knocked the tiles of the foyer, and then I swung the door closed behind me and hurried down the walk and to my truck, hidden around the corner.