December Park(6)

It was supposed to be my father’s night off, but his unmarked police car wasn’t parked in the driveway, and I wondered if he’d been called out to work because of the dead girl. Before going inside, I stomped mud from my sneakers against the doorjamb of the Cape Cod I’d lived in all my life.

Inside, I was greeted by a blast of hot air and the welcoming aroma of my grandmother’s pasta fagioli simmering on the stove. There was something eternally comforting about entering a house infused with the aroma of Italian cooking. Kicking off my sneakers in the foyer, I felt my lips and the tips of my fingers tingling as they warmed up.

I went down the hall and poked my head into the den to observe my grandfather, engulfed in the flickering blue light of the television, snoring in his Barcalounger.

In the kitchen, I dumped the groceries onto the table, then shrugged off my jacket and folded it over a chair. My grandmother stood before the stove, conducting an orchestra of steaming, bubbling pots and pans, looking like wallpaper in her floral housedress, her silver hair petrified into that steel-colored dome fashionable among women over sixty-five.

“Where’s Dad?” I said.

“Well,” said my grandmother, “that’s a fine how-do-you-do.”

“Sorry.” I kissed her cheek on my way to the refrigerator. “Smells good.”

“Is your grandfather asleep?”

“He’s watching TV,” I lied.

“Asleep,” she muttered. “So then he’ll be up tossing and turning all night in bed.”

I popped the tab on a can of Pepsi, eliciting a look of disapproval from my grandmother. For whatever reason and with no documentation to back up her hypothesis, she firmly believed all sodas caused cancer. “So where’s Dad?”

“He got a call.”

“Was it about a girl?”

“A girl?”

“Like, for work.”

“He doesn’t tell me anything, that son of mine. And I don’t ask about his work, Lord knows.” She stirred the pasta fagioli with a big wooden spoon. The pot was as big as a cauldron. Beside it, chicken cutlets spat and sizzled in a pan of vegetable oil. “What girl are you talking about?”

“Cops found some girl in the woods behind Counterpoint Lane. Me and the guys saw it on our way back from school.”

“She was lost?”

“She was dead.”

“Oh, Madonn’!” She set her spoon down on an oven mitt. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. Maybe some kind of accident.” But I knew it wasn’t an accident, not the way she’d been naked and sour-looking beneath that sheet. Not the way her head had been smashed in. For the first time, I wondered how long she’d been in those woods before the police found her.

“Was she from around here?” my grandmother asked.

“I don’t know who she is. Or was,” I corrected.

“What a horrible thing.”

“Did Dad say what time he’d be home tonight?”

“I told you, he doesn’t tell me anything, that man. Now go wash up for supper, will you? And wake your grandfather. He fell asleep in front of the television again. I know he did. Don’t lie for him.”

We ate, accompanied by the lament of my grandfather who, for as long as I could remember, found fault with just about everyone and everything on the face of the planet. Recently, it had gotten so bad that my grandmother forbade him to watch the television news or read a newspaper, as the injustices depicted therein were enough to send the old man on a rambling monologue of such creative profanity, it would have inspired an entire regiment of longshoremen to take notes.

In August of 1990, after President Bush dispatched American troops into Saudi Arabia—my older brother, Charles, among them—my grandfather sifted through his own memorabilia from the Second World War. Our family made nervous jokes about his determination, at the age of seventy-eight, to reenlist alongside my brother. Yet my grandfather, as steadfast as he was old, was disillusioned in an altogether different fashion.

The collected relics from his time served in the South Pacific consisted of, among other things, several boxes of medals, an ashtray made of ammunition shells of varying sizes assembled to suggest a miniature B-29 Superfortress, and, perhaps most impressive, a samurai sword appropriated by my grandfather from the dead body of a Japanese soldier killed in New Guinea.

“I shot him dead right out of a tree,” my grandfather had told me on more than one occasion, “and this sword fell with him. In fact, it stuck in the dirt, blade-first, and quivered there like a tuning fork.”

The sword was impressive, shiny and handsome with colorful jewels embedded in the hilt, complete with an intricate foreign insignia of a dragon with the head of a tiger etched into the scabbard.

For a number of years after the war, my grandfather had received a barrage of letters from an attorney in New York—whom my grandfather was quick to deem a “shyster sympathizer”—representing the Takahashi family making request after request for the return of the sword to the family of the dead Japanese soldier. It was a family heirloom, and the Takahashis would gladly pay any asking price for its safe return. I’d seen the letters, typed on fancy law-office stationery with a Manhattan return address, and they were polite and sympathetic toward my grandfather. Yet my grandfather refused to even entertain their offers.