Acts of Love (10 page)

“Don't you have any cereal?” Julia asked.

She realized that she had slept later than they had the last two mornings and had no idea what they had been doing for breakfast. Worse, she had never thought to ask. More proof that she was thoroughly unsuited for this.

“Cereal? Look, guys, I'm a neurotic single woman, okay? The kind overfed editors love to write disparaging articles about. I consider coffee one of the four major food groups.”

“Food pyramid,” Julia said.

“What?”

“It's a food pyramid. They've expanded the food groups to a food pyramid.”

Sandy sighed. “Why don't we go to the mall for breakfast? How do corn dogs and Cokes sound?”

The girls nodded apprehensively, and Sandy, before the nodding stopped and she would be confronted once more with their curious, expectant faces, ran to put some clothes on.

 

T
HEY SAT
at a small orange Formica table that wobbled on its black metal legs in the food court at the far end of the Hardison New Town Mall, eating oversized corn dogs while an elderly woman in a hair net emptied the garbage can next to them. None of them had been in the mall at this hour on a weekday before—not when it had first opened last year and its novelty attracted families to come at all hours to have their children's portraits painted in lurid, hazy hues beneath the large dome of the plaza; not during vacations, when Ann would refuse the girls' entreaties because she herself got dizzy from the lights and the confluence of smells, sugar cooking, kabobs, and twice had had to run to the bathroom to be sick. They were unused to the emptiness, the out-of-work men and women meandering past open shop doors, the women who, lists in hand, scurried determinedly about, taking advantage of the empty registers, crossing off the shirts, the underwear from their lists as the sales were rung up, and others who came greedy only for diversion from their deserted houses. At the table next to theirs, two young women in jeans and quilted satin jackets sat with a toddler sleeping in the stroller between them, a girl with pink ribbons attached to every available inch of her pudgy body, her feet curled up like snails. Their heads were bent over their plastic cups of coffee and they took turns shifting their eyes to Sandy, Julia, and Ali.

“I'm telling you, those are the girls in the picture. Didn't you see the paper? Tommy goes to school with the younger one.”

“He did it right in front of the children, that's what gets me. Right in front of them.”

“My mother-in-law says the family's always been a little, you know, off. Hers, the wife's, I mean. Like goes to like, that's what I say.”

“Rich knows someone who worked with him, says he always had a bad temper, wouldn't have anything to do with the rest of them. Thought he was better than them. Well.”

Julia stopped eating her corn dog. She rested it carefully in its cardboard boat amid the puddles of mustard and rose slowly from her seat. Before Sandy quite realized what was happening, Julia walked over to the two women, looked at them coolly, and reached with calm deliberation for the handle of the stroller. She swung it around, then gave it one firm push, and it rolled a course through the tables while the baby made frightened gurgling sounds. Sandy, running, caught it just before it hit the DeLite Frozen Yogurt stand.

“Jesus H. Christ,” the baby's mother cried, grabbing the stroller from Sandy's hands as she wheeled it back to them. “She could have killed her! What's wrong with you, anyway?” she hissed at Julia. She reached down and picked up her baby, cooing and petting her and straightening one of the pink ribbons.

“I'm sorry,” Sandy said.

“You're sick, the lot of you.”

Sandy returned to the table, where Julia and Ali were standing, cleaning up their trash. She grabbed Julia's arm. “How could you do that?” she demanded. Julia remained silent, though her face was washed in scarlet. Her brows moved once, knitting together and separating. “Let's go,” Sandy said.

They started down the fake terra-cotta center aisle of the mall, past wrought-iron benches spray-painted white and plastic palms, barely noticing the shop windows. Their pace slowed as they got farther from the food court, and Sandy's breath began gradually to steady. She looked over at Julia for further signs of disturbance or remorse, but Julia hurried ahead, her legs moving rapidly to mask the tremor in her knees. Still, Sandy attempted to salvage the day, hoarding any semblance of normalcy she could find or fake. “Do you want to go in here?” she asked in front of a window covered with rock 'n' roll posters, long-haired boys in leather and studs, stars no doubt, but whose names she did not know.

“Naw.” Ali hardly looked.

“What about this place?” she asked about a card-and-gift shop with large white bears and fluffy cats of white nylon nestled in the window. She remembered her own stuffed-animal collection, the six-foot-long snake that Estelle was afraid to touch and would move only with the vacuum-cleaner nozzle. “They look like they might have some fun stuff.”

“Yuck.”

“Yuck? I'm a has-been? Hopelessly uncool at thirty-five?” Her voice had the desperate brightness of a lonely girl at a party who'd had too much to drink.

They walked on, knowing, all three of them, that this was a failure, but caught in it, tangled in it, unable to extricate themselves from it.

“Can we go home now?” Ali asked after passing up four more stores.

“You don't want to buy anything at all for your room?”

“No.”

“Julia?”

Julia shook her head.

“Okay, sure. I agree. Yuck. Absolute yuck. A blatant example of American materialism at its most shallow. Let's go.”

They cut through Sears' main floor, crowded with sales signs for microwaves, popcorn makers, and ice cream machines, and exited out into the parking lot. The three of them separated a number of feet once they got outside, relieved to let the cool air wash between them.

Julia watched Sandy from behind, the curve of her calves in her black leggings, the tangled rivulets of her hair, studied the way she walked, pitched forward, the way she bowed to open the car door and threw her bag in before following it, studied each movement, looking for the secret of female attraction, so that she could capture it and formaldehyde it and pin it down the way she had with the insects that so upset her mother when she was younger, to examine later, in the privacy of her own clinical mind. It was one of her recent obsessions. She climbed into the back seat and watched the back of Sandy's head.

 

J
ULIA STRAIGHTENED
as they approached Sycamore Street, staring out the smudged car window at familiar houses, familiar corners, places they used to play in their previous life, already so many random details from a half-forgotten dream. Sandy steered slowly up the short driveway of their house and stopped in front of the closed door of the garage. The girls followed her out of the car, past the piles of leaves Ann had raked the previous week, now flattened and dispersed.

“I'm sorry, you can't go in there.” The three looked up to find a policeman standing in front of the door, his feet shifting farther apart, his voice consciously authoritative.

“What do you mean, I can't go in there? This is my sister's house. These girls' house.”

“I have orders not to let anyone in. There's been a possible crime.”

“I know damn well there's been a crime,” Sandy replied. The policeman was a good ten years younger than she was. His nose was red and runny from his standing in the cold all day. “Sorry. Look, we just need to get their schoolbooks and stuff, okay? We won't touch anything.”

The policeman glanced down apprehensively at the girls, then back to Sandy. “Okay, Miss, you can go in. But I think it would be better if the girls waited out here.”

Sandy nodded reassuringly to Julia and Ali, and entered the house.

 

M
INUSCULE FRAGMENTS OF SUN
sneaked through the curtains and landed in tenuous geometric clusters over the foyer, like shattered crystal. She took a deep breath. Swallowed. Her business was upstairs, a matter of books, toys—objects. Simple. She took a step forward. Paused. Perhaps this was how thieves felt, stealing in while the owners were away on vacation taking pictures of themselves on some sunny beach, their possessions left unprotected, deserted, the house, in its lonesomeness, reverberating with the faint sense-memory of pulse and breath, waiting.

She blinked, proceeded. But before she reached the stairs, she was stopped by the thick white chalk outline of Ann's body, legs sprawled, head on the first step, three deep-red stains on the carpet like stigmata. She trembled and reached for the railing to steady herself, then pulled herself around it and up the stairs, until she felt her legs regain just enough solidity to carry her first into Ali's room and then Julia's, her mind frigid, vacuous, as she grabbed books and loose-leafs, throwing them into the satchel she had brought, while cold beads of sweat clustered in her hairline and dripped slowly down her forehead.

She forced herself to keep her eyes level, to scrupulously avoid what lay in wait at the bottom of the stairs as she ran down, stumbling once over her own numbed feet. She saw instead the yellow roses that Neal Frederickson had brought to Ann, sitting on the side table, their petals strewn about in dry, neglected curls.

 

J
ULIA SAW THE POLICEMAN'S HEAD TURN
as he opened the door a crack, unable to resist the seductive voyeurism of witnessing another's pain. He leaned in an inch farther.

She hushed Ali, motioned for her to stay put, and darted from the car round to the side of the house, stepping into the oblong plot of hardened earth that in summer blazed with four different varieties of lily. There was an inch-wide sliver between the curtains in the window, and she perched on tiptoes, pressing her face against the cold glass.

She could see, in fractions, the tip of the couch, the rounded corner of the newel post, and a jag of the white chalk outline on the floor. It looked like the west coast of Africa to her.

 

S
ANDY TORCHED OUT OF THE DRIVEWAY
while the girls busied themselves with the bag she had placed between them on the back seat, scavenging for souvenirs of home.

“You forgot my history book,” Julia said flatly.

“Sorry.”

“What am I supposed to tell Mr. Wheeler when I go back to school tomorrow?”

“I don't care what you tell Mr. Wheeler,” Sandy snapped. “Tell him the cat ate it. Tell him the computer ate it. Tell him whatever eats things these days ate it.” She stopped at a red light at the corner where Sycamore ran into Haggerty Road and turned partially around. “I'm sorry. I'll go back tomorrow and get it.”

“Good,” Julia retorted curtly.

Sandy squeezed the steering wheel tighter and tighter, until her knuckles rose white and mountainous. She stared mutely at the car ahead of them. The bumper sticker read “Transform or Die.”

“I'm doing the best I can,” she said quietly to herself, to the girls.

Julia said nothing, only clenched her fists until her jagged nails scored deep red half-moons into her palms.

 

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON
, after dropping Ali off with a neighbor, Sandy and Julia drove into town and parked behind the Grand Union, a few blocks from the police station. They walked quickly down Main Street, past the arched entrance of the old stone library, which had been a gift of the Baylor family a hundred years ago (there were Baylors in Hardison still, weathered, pleasant people whom Sandy on principle distrusted), past the hardware store with a red wheelbarrow out front, and a number of empty windows with For Rent signs pasted up with phone numbers, victims of the mall. They kept their heads bent, already practiced in the futile art of anonymity.

“Why do we have to go back there? I already told them what happened.”

“I know, kid, but the police have to be thorough. They want to go over it one more time.”

Since the exchange in the car, they had spoken to each other with the exaggerated politeness that often serves as a makeshift bridge in the absence of any inclination to real apology.

“Okay.”

“I know it's tough. I'd give anything for you not to have to go through this. Julia?”

“Yes?”

“You're sure, aren't you? He did it on purpose?”

“Yes.”

“Good. All you have to do is tell the truth. I'll be with you the whole time.”

Sandy pulled open the heavy glass doors of the police station, where she had spent countless hours as a cub reporter, listening to the hoarse voices over the wire, waiting for something to happen, any event greater than the drunk drivers and petty thefts that were the steady diet of the Hardison police force. She knew the smell of the station, the cold marble, the day-old coffee, the waiting. She led Julia to the back office, where Sergeant Jefferson, who had won the plum assignment after a somewhat impolite skirmish with his partner and two superiors, stood waiting for them.