Little Deaths(29)

Usually she wrote about the weather, which was very warm or awful wet or dreadful cold. She wrote about her occasional outings into town and the expense of the bus and the lines in the stores. She wrote about her arthritis, which was always no worse, thank the Lord, and as he read he would feel that old creeping sense of boredom and suffocation.

But this letter was different. He took it out of his pocket. Folded inside was a check.

As he reread it, he could see her sitting at the kitchen table in the amber lamplight, the white hair at her temples, the brown age spots on her hands. He could smell the familiar aromas of furniture polish and cooked vegetables.

He heard her thin, hopeful voice in her words.

There’s not a lot, you know we never had much. But we kept up the payments and the policy paid out after your father passed. The money is in the bank, waiting for you. You’ll surely need it one day. When your time comes to settle down.

He saw the unspoken words, the expectation, as clearly as if she had written them down.

He folded the letter, slipped it back in the envelope. He had a sudden desire to lie down and sleep for a long time. Then something made him look up, and he saw Ruth Malone at the window of her apartment. She wore a dress of some pale, clinging material and she stood with her hands and her forehead pressed against the glass, looking down at the sunlit street. At the world going on without her.

He watched her watching the women and children and thought about the neighbors he’d spoken to. The things they’d said about her. Maybe she felt safe, up there, behind the glass. Perhaps she thought that if she couldn’t hear what they were saying, their words couldn’t hurt her.

As he gazed up at her, she stretched sideways so that she rested one shoulder and her hip against the window. Her head was arched back so that her thick sheaf of bright hair hung heavy and full at an angle to her neck.

And then she turned, pivoting on the back of her shoulders, which remained in contact with the windowpane. She rolled over as though she was in bed and this was a lazy Sunday morning and everything was normal. She rolled again and came to a stop with her hands pressed against the glass, looking up at the burning sky. Almost as though she were praying.

And suddenly Ruth Malone didn’t look safe. She looked like a pale shimmering moth fluttering behind the glass. She looked trapped.

He had the strangest desire to touch her and, as he thought this, as he felt shame flush his skin in response, she stared straight at him. Her eyes widened, and for a long moment, neither moved. Then her lips parted. Slowly.

Pete dropped his gaze, let the letter fall to the floor. He started the car, fumbling with the key. He did not look at her again but he could feel her watching him, all the way back to the highway. He felt naked, as though she’d seen through to the core of him, and it made him afraid.

He drove home and lay on his bed and tried not to think about her. But his mind kept returning to her parted lips. The way she had looked at him.

And then he realized that his hand had found his cock and was rubbing it through his underwear, and that he was thinking of that mouth on his. That lipsticked O around his hardness, his hand in that glowing hair. And he pushed the cotton down around his thighs and came with a groan and wiped his hand on his stomach, and he was asleep before the stickiness had dried in the hot night.





8


This, then, was grief. It came to her as heaviness. It came as a stone in her throat, preventing her from swallowing; as a pressure behind her eyes, forcing out tears; as a weight in her stomach. It meant that she could not breathe. That she could not have a single moment of not remembering.

It was with her every moment and it fed on her pain and it would not be satisfied. Sometimes she sat up at night with it, cradling it, placating it, but it would not be soothed. It was black and hungry and huge like a screaming mouth and it became bigger and deeper the more she focused on it until it filled up her mind and there was no room at the edges for thoughts or for words, for food or faces or whether she was thirsty or tired or needed to take a shower: only this vast, expanding blackness.

And inside it: the loneliness, the loss. She had no means of orienting herself. The only thing she knew was that this would never end.

Everything came to her through the gray haze of grief. She saw her hands reaching for a lipstick, or a pencil, and they were alien and clumsy because she could not see them clearly for grief. She swallowed coffee and the nibbled corners of things and they were bitter through the grief-taste that lay thick on her tongue. Voices were muffled, finding their way down through the weight of her grief, and her throat was choked with it. She had learned simply to shake her head when the voices paused or rose into questions. No, she did not want to eat. She did not want to lie down. She did not want to pray. To be touched. All she could do was hold Cindy’s stuffed rabbit in her curled claw hands, her pain wrapped by her curled rocking body. There were no words that could console her. This was her suffering, and her bones and her breath had become grief.

And into this place of grief came Devlin. With his steady voice, which carried no emotion. With his steady gaze, sharp and observant as a bird’s. Always watching.


August 10. Twenty-seven days since the children were taken.

Pete was working on other assignments, but the Malone case was always there, like a nagging headache, always at the back of his mind. He read over the bulletins every morning, spoke to the guys on the crime desk, hung around the station house after work. A couple of times he’d buttonholed Quinn at the diner. It all amounted to the same thing: there was no new evidence.