Little Deaths(16)

The car stopped abruptly and she was brought back and jerked forward and had to put her hand on the seat in front to get her balance. The pink freckled neck did not turn.

She saw that they were in an empty lot in a neighborhood she didn’t know. Confused and suddenly panicked, Ruth looked at Devlin, but he was already out of the car and opening her door. To anyone watching, it might have seemed like courtesy, but these doors only opened from the outside. He bent and reached in and she flinched in horror as he fitted his wide palm into her armpit. She tried to move back, to shrug him off: she couldn’t bear that he should feel the dampness of her, that he should smell her on his hand—but he pulled hard and she found herself half out of the car and slipping on the rough ground, and then walking with him, his hand still tucked in that shameful place.

They stumbled on, Ruth’s blouse sticking to her and her ankles aching where the straps of her shoes cut into her heat-swollen flesh. She could feel that her face was flushed: partly heat and partly humiliation at what this walk—this man—was forcing her to reveal.

A fly buzzed around her face and she slapped at it, then another, and another. She waved her hand, fanned herself, tried desperately to hold onto some sliver of poise. So many flies. Could they smell her: that yellow, female stink of her? Her groin, her armpits, even the sweat running in dirty trickles down her neck and back. Staining her.

She was breathing hard through her mouth when she realized that it wasn’t herself that she was smelling and tasting. This was a new smell. A smell like meat that had lain too long in the sun. Something sweetish.

She saw a dark swarm of gathering flies ahead, heard their impatient buzzing as they jostled to get closer to that smell.

Devlin dragged her on and she kept stumbling, but this time it wasn’t the stones or her heels: she was pushing at him, fighting him, biting her lip to keep the tears back, determined not to let him see her cry, no matter what lay under that pulsing black cloud.

He pulled her on and now she really did fight because the smell was stronger, and she could no longer pretend she didn’t know. The truth was in his set lips and his unflinching face and even in the starched set of his shoulders. She twisted and moaned and pleaded with him in whispers to stop, and finally he stopped. He did not take his hand off her arm, and she did not take her eyes off his face. She would not look. He could not make her look.

He tried. He shouted at her to look, and his spit landed on her cheek, but she was past disgust. Then he grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. She turned her head away, but he took hold of her chin and pushed and finally, she had to look.

There was dirt everywhere. Dirt and trash: cans and bottles glinting in the sunshine, garbage bags, some split by rats, a bike missing a wheel. And in the middle of this stinking pile, soft pink cotton. A pattern of flowers. A glimpse of something mottled like purple and white marble. And a fall of blond hair. She stretched out a hand but Devlin was suddenly there, pulling her back. Forbidding her to touch. She opened her mouth, but the flies and the heat and the smell and the sudden awareness that this was the hair she had shampooed and combed and braided for four years made everything go dark for a moment. Devlin caught her, and his touch felt almost gentle. He set her straight, then turned her away and for a second she felt grateful for this unexpected tenderness.

Then she saw the crowd across the street. Saw the line of faces he had turned her toward, the hands shading eyes, the moving mouths. Saw the cameras, felt the heat of their curiosity.

There was a flash and then, as a single raindrop heralds a shower, there were scores of flashes.

And behind it all, his bruising grip on her arm, his voice against her ear, low and hissing.

“Is it her? Is that your daughter?”

She looked down at the crumpled thing at her feet, and then the world turned faster and she fell again into the kind darkness.





5


No matter how she views the events after that first day, the day itself is always a long one in her mind. There were hours of waiting: in the morning, at home, before Cindy. And afterward at the police station, in anonymous rooms with plastic chairs where she was left alone with her grief and with the horror of it all. With no one to answer her worst fears about Frankie. And then hours of questions from them, and still no one would answer her, reassure her. They just kept asking the same questions again and again.

Devlin and another cop took turns. She answered mechanically. What did these questions matter, now? What did any of it matter now?

Finally, they let her go. Frank was in the foyer, pacing, his hand in his hair, waiting for her.

“Ruthie . . . oh God, Ruth.”

She couldn’t look at his soft, leaking face, so she let him fold her in his arms and sank against him, exhausted.

It was after eleven when they reached the apartment. He wanted to come in, to rehash all the questions they’d been asked, the answers they’d given. She sighed and told him she was tired. He frowned and then he just nodded and cleared his throat, and then he drove away.

The door of the apartment opened before she had time to raise her key and her mother was there. Ruth looked at her, at her hard, lined face, at her hollow eyes, felt the memory of a thousand grievances and arguments rise inside her like vomit.

Ruth shut the door carefully and quietly, and then leaned her head back against it and let her shoulders drop, and closed her eyes. Finally she could weep. Even now she remembers the sweet relief of being able to let go in front of a woman who had seen the worst of her all her life. How it felt like cool water after the heat of the day.