T. Boyle - Talk Talk

The house hadn't changed at all, at least as far as he could see-maybe some of the trees were taller, the weeds thicker along the edges of the lawn. He was standing there at the door of the car, caught in a shaft of sun that was like a spotlight, a box of Godiva chocolates in one hand, the flowers in the other, and the stuffed toy he'd bought for Sukie wedged under one arm, giving the place a quick scan as Natalia, running the brush through her hair one final time, made him wait. His father had always spent an inordinate amount of time and money on the place, putting on the addition with its brick fireplace, pouring a new concrete walk, repainting the exterior every three or four years and the trim every two, as if that could forestall the declining property values, and though he'd been twelve years dead now, the effort still showed. Decay had settled in, that was inevitable. And his mother certainly wasn't about to worry over it-as long as the roof didn't fall in on her she'd be happy to sit there in front of the TV with her bloated friends and a vodka and Collins mix and watch the water stains creep down around the fireplace where his father had screwed up the flashing despite the best of intentions.

“All right,” Natalia was saying, and there she was, her shoulders squared and breasts outthrust, looking commanding and beautiful and throwing back her head so that her hair rose up in a fan of light and settled in perfect array on the perfect white skin of her bare shoulders. And the bones there. The exquisite bones. The scapulae, the muscles, the ligaments that flashed and moved under her skin. He had a moment of revelation that took him out of himself and he saw her as a sculptor might, some genius of line and form with a block of marble and a hammer ready to hand. “Well?” She was giving him a crucial look, a look that asked, “Am I beautiful? Am I ready? Do you want me?”

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, yeah, you look great,” and she held out her arm for him and they turned to glide up the walk, the most natural thing in the world, everything in its place, and then he saw the arc described by the screen door as his mother leaned into it-his mother, with the nose he looked at in the mirror every morning and her hair gone silver and cut in a liquid fall at her jawbone so she looked like some stranger out of a silent movie-and the other figure there at her side, so small and delicate, with the unappeasable eyes and the blanched unforgiving face of the hanging judge.

TO EXPECT TRUTH, justice, the closure official victims were forever demanding on the little screen as the captioning played out dispassionately beneath their grim tight faces, to expect anything other than chaos and frustration, was delusory and she was foremost among the deluded. Life frustrates. Eternally frustrates. How could it be any different? That was what Dana was thinking as she stood in the rain on a stranger's lawn and watched Bridger poised at the top of the front steps, knocking at yet another door. When Frank Calabrese's fist had come down on the bartop with the pure uncontainable force of vengeance in all its shining potentiality, she was sure they'd come to the final turning at the final corner. He knew the thief. He named the thief. He knew where he lived. And ten minutes later they were at Peck Wilson's house-the house he'd grown up in, where his mother lived still-and she and Bridger had got out of the car in the rain, every individual blade of grass standing up stark and violently green, the twigs of the trees curled into claws and her heart about to explode, and then the knock at the door and the sky darkening and darkening till it was like night in the afternoon… and now, after all that? Nothing. Nobody home. No silent footsteps, no noiseless drop of the latch or presumptive squeal of the hinges, no face appearing behind the dark screen that was like the scrim of a confessional or the veil of maya. None of that. Nobody home.

She watched Bridger shift his weight from foot to foot. His face was drained of color, his upper lip and the flesh at the base of his nostrils drawn tight. He knocked again, waited, his head cocked and eyes lowered as if to concentrate his hearing. They exchanged looks, another moment elapsed, and then he signed, “I'm going to go around back,” and she felt strange all of a sudden, vulnerable, felt like a criminal herself, and darted a quick glance up and down the street. In the rain, and with nothing moving anywhere except the water in the gutters, she almost missed the figure on the porch next door. A faint rhythmic movement caught her eye and she looked up to see a woman there, a big-armed old woman in wire-frame glasses, tilting back and forth in a cane rocker and staring right at her. For an instant she was frozen-to shout out would be too obvious-and then, urgently, she was clapping her hands together to warn him. He swung round, his face blank. “There's somebody watching,” she signed.

Bridger looked in the wrong direction. He'd come down the steps now and was arrested there in the rain, his hair limp, the shirt she'd given him for his birthday-the retro look, broad vertical bands of gray and black with an outsized collar-hanging off him like a shower curtain. “Where?”

Her face was wet, water dripping from her nose. She felt ridiculous. The rain intensified, sweeping down the street in successive waves. “Over there,” on the porch, she signed, and then retreated for the car.

The interior of the car smelled as if it had been dredged up out of the ocean. There was mud on her shoes-a pair of Mary Janes in teal blue she'd picked up on sale two days ago-and her clothes clung wet to her skin. She felt a chill go through her and she slid into the driver's side and started the car to run the heater as Bridger, reduced by the rain and the layer of condensation frosting the windows, waved cheerily to the old woman and cut straight across the lawn, stepped over the line of low shrubs that divided the properties and stood just under the projecting roof of the porch to snap his jaws and wave his hands while the old woman snapped her jaws in return.

It took forever. Bridger was out there chattering away as if the skies were clear to the roof of the troposphere and the sun beaming down in all its glory, and the old lady, rocking in the shadow of her porch, chattered back. And what could they possibly find to talk about, the hearing? All this chattering. Peck Wilson: was he there or not? That was all that needed to be conveyed. She was frustrated, angry, shivering in her wet clothes as the heater, out of use since January, added its own furtive metallic reek to the mix. For a long while she stared out the window, first at Bridger, then at the house-an old place, two stories, with a mismatched addition and a stepped roof-where the man who'd invaded her life had played and worked and grown into the fullness of his thieving manhood.

She began chanting to herself, a little Poe, which always seemed to calm her-“And neither the angels in Heaven above, / Nor the demons down under the sea, / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee”-and then she felt the car rock and Bridger was sliding into the seat beside her. “Well?” she said.

“Her name's”-he finger-spelled it-“Alice.”

She was confused. “Whose? The old lady's?”

He swept both palms up over his face and into his hairline, then threw his head back and shook out the water like a diver emerging from a pool. “No,” he said, turning to face her. “Wilson's mother. Peck Wilson's mother. Her name's Alice.”

“Yes, but where is she?”

“The old lady-she was really nice, by the way-said she was away for the weekend, up at Saratoga or something. At the racetrack with her friend-not her son, her friend.”