In my version of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ the witch was named Depravia. Kyra stared at me with huge eyes when I got to the part where Depravia asks Hansel to poke out his finger so she can see how plump he’s getting.
‘Is it too scary?’ I asked.
Ki shook her head emphatically. I glanced at Mattie to make sure. She nodded and waved a hand for me to go on, so I finished the story. Depravia went into the oven and Gretel found her secret stash of winning lottery tickets. The kids bought a Jet Ski and lived happily ever after on the eastern side of Dark Score Lake. By then The Castle Rockers were slaughtering Gershwin and sunset was nigh. I carried Kyra to Scoutie and strapped her in. I remembered the first time I’d helped put the kid into her car-seat, and the inadvertent press of Mattie’s breast.
‘I hope there isn’t a bad dream for you in that story,’ I said. Until I heard it coming out of my own mouth, I hadn’t realized how fundamentally awful that one is.
‘I won’t have bad dreams,’ Kyra said matter-of-factly. ‘The fridgeafator people will keep them away.’ Then, carefully, reminding herself: ‘ Ree-fridge-a-rator.’ She turned to Mattie. ‘Show him the crosspatch, Mommy-bommy.’
‘Cross word. But thanks, I would’ve forgotten.’ She thumbed open the glove compartment and took out a folded sheet of paper. ‘It was on the fridge this morning. I copied it down because Ki said you’d know what it meant. She said you do crossword puzzles. Well, she said crosspatches, but I got the idea.’
Had I told Kyra that I did crosswords? Almost certainly not. Did it surprise me that she knew?
Not at all. I took the sheet of paper, unfolded it, and looked at what was printed there: d
go
w
ninety2
‘Is it a crosspatch puzzle, Mike?’ Kyra asked.
‘I guess so — a very simple one. But if it means something, I don’t know what it is. May I keep this?’
‘Yes,’ Mattie said.
I walked her around to the driver’s side of the Scout, reaching for her hand again as we went.
‘Just give me a little time. I know that’s supposed to be the girl’s line, but — ‘
‘Take the time,’ she said. ‘Just don’t take too much.’
I didn’t want to take any, which was just the problem. The sex would be great, I knew that. But after?
There might be an after, though. I knew it and she did, too. With Mattie, ‘after’ was a real possibility. The idea was a little scary, a little wonderful.
I kissed the corner of her mouth. She laughed and grabbed me by the earlobe. ‘You can do better,’
she said, then looked at Ki, who was sitting in her car-seat and gazing at us interestedly. ‘But I’ll let you off this time.’
‘Kiss Ki!’ Kyra called, holding out her arms, so I went around and kissed Ki. Driving home, wearing my dark glasses to cut the glare of the setting sun, it occurred to me that maybe I could be Kyra Devore’s father. That seemed almost as attractive to me as going to bed with her mother, which was a measure of how deep I was in. And going deeper, maybe.
Deeper still.
Sara Laughs seemed very empty after having Mattie in my arms — a sleeping head without dreams. I checked the letters on the fridge, saw nothing there but the normal scatter, and got a beer.
I went out on the deck to drink it while I watched the last of the sunset. I tried to think about the refrigerator people and crosspatches that had appeared on both refrigerators: ‘go down nineteen’ on Lane Forty-two and ‘go down ninety-two’ on Wasp Hill Road. Different vectors from the land to the lake? Different spots on The Street? Shit, who knew?
I tried to think about John Storrow and how unhappy he was apt to be if he found out there was
— to quote Sara Laughs, who got to the line long before John Mellencamp — another mule kicking in Mattie Devore’s stall. But mostly what I thought about was holding her for the first time, kissing her for the first time. No human instinct is more powerful than the sex-drive when it is fully aroused, and its awakening images are emotional tattoos that never leave us. For me, it was feeling the soft bare skin of her waist just beneath her dress. The slippery feel of the fabric . . .
I turned abruptly and hurried through the house to the north wing, almost running and shedding clothes as I went. I turned the shower on to full cold and stood under it for five minutes, shivering.
When I got out I felt a little more like an actual human being and a little less like a twitching bundle of nerve endings. And as I toweled dry, something else recurred to me. At some point I had thought of Jo’s brother Frank, had thought that if anyone besides myself would be able to feel Jo’s presence in Sara Laughs, it would be him. I hadn’t gotten around to inviting him down yet, and now wasn’t sure I wanted to. I had come to feel oddly possessive, almost jealous, about what was happening here. And yet if Jo had been writing something on the quiet, Frank might know. Of course she hadn’t confided in him about the pregnancy, but —
I looked at my watch. Quarter past nine. In the trailer near the intersection of Wasp Hill Road and Route 68, Kyra was probably already asleep . . . and her mother might already have put her extra key under the pot near the steps. I thought of her in the white dress, the swell of her hips just below my hands and the smell of her perfume, then pushed the images away. I couldn’t spend the whole night taking cold showers. Quarter past nine was still early enough to call Frank Arlen.
He picked up on the second ring, sounding both happy to hear from me and as if he’d gotten three or four cans further into the six-pack than I had so far done. We passed the usual pleasantries back and forth — most of my own almost entirely fictional, I was dismayed to find — and he mentioned that a famous neighbor of mine had kicked the bucket, according to the news. Had I met
him? Yes, I said, remembering how Max Devore had run his wheelchair at me. Yes, I’d met him.
Frank wanted to know what he was like. That was hard to say, I told him. Poor old guy was stuck in a wheelchair and suffering from emphysema.
‘Pretty frail, huh?’ Frank asked sympathetically.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Listen, Frank, I called about Jo. I was out in her studio looking around, and I found my typewriter. Since then I’ve kind of gotten the idea she was writing something. It might have started as a little piece about our house, then widened. The place is named after Sara Tidwell, you know. The blues singer.’
A long pause. Then Frank said, ‘I know.’ His voice sounded heavy, grave.
‘What else do you know, Frank?’
‘That she was scared. I think she found out something that scared her. I think that mostly because
— ‘
That was when the light finally broke. I probably should have known from Mattie’s description, would have known if I hadn’t been so upset. ‘You were down here with her, weren’t you? In July of 1994. You went to the softball game, then you went back up The Street to the house.’
‘How do you know that?’ he almost barked.
‘Someone saw you. A friend of mine.’ I was trying not to sound mad and not succeeding. I was mad, but it was a relieved anger, the kind you feel when your kid comes dragging into the house with a shamefaced grin just as you’re getting ready to call the cops.
‘I almost told you a day or two before we buried her. We were in that pub, do you remember?’
Jack’s Pub, right after Frank had beaten the funeral director down on the price of Jo’s coffin.
Sure I remembered. I even remembered the look in his eyes when I’d told him Jo had been pregnant when she died.
He must have felt the silence spinning out, because he came back sounding anxious. ‘Mike, I hope you didn’t get any — ‘
‘What? Wrong ideas? I thought maybe she was having an affair, how’s that for a wrong idea?
You can call that ignoble if you want, but I had my reasons. There was a lot she wasn’t telling me.
What did she tell you?’
‘Next to nothing.’
‘Did you know she quit all her boards and committees? Quit and never said a word to me?’
‘No.’ I didn’t think he was lying. Why would he, at this late date? ‘Jesus, Mike, if I’d known that