Читать книгу Invisible Men - Eric Freeze - Страница 5

A weimaraner first found the girl’s body, bloated on the shoals of the Hocking River. Garvey, the University’s organ professor, got the dog as a companion after his divorce last fall. He was a first-time dog owner who didn’t know much about canines except that they were social animals and liked the outdoors. Maynard was an exercise dog, an animal that would get him out walking or running, even in those sticky Ohio summers where his pores pooled with sweat and it was so humid that it felt like he was breathing through a sock. Maynard usually ran off-leash when Garvey was out on the bike path and Garvey probably would’ve missed the body had Maynard not refused to follow. The last time Maynard had stopped, he was rolling and rubbing himself with a possum carcass and Maynard had stunk for a week, even with multiple washings. Garvey sprinted to the water’s edge, hoping the dog hadn’t found some other dead animal, but instead he was sniffing and pawing a girl’s grayish skin and whining, high-pitched, confused.

Nine months previous, I moved to Athens, the Ohioan center of learning, with my mother. We had just bought an up-down duplex with the money from my father’s insurance policy. Mom took the chance to go back to school to get a graduate degree, something she had always wanted to do when my father was alive. Our renter was Mr. Garvey who was on sabbatical and wouldn’t be back in the apartment until the spring semester. The rent, Mom said, gave us a little income on the side. That, combined with her teaching fellowship, gave us more to live on than we were used to back in Ottawa. Mom joked that we’d become capitalists.

“Do we own it?” I asked Mom.

“The apartment? It’s ours, but he’s renting from us.”

“Why doesn’t he have his own house?”

Mom knifed another box, gave me a set of plastic cups and I put them in the cupboard. “I don’t know honey.”

“For how long?”

“I hope for as long as we’re here.”

“But if it’s ours why can’t we go up there?”

Mom took out a batch of forks wrapped in a rubber band. “In the dishwasher,” she said. “Look, Jen, it’s his space. That’s how we’re able to live here. He pays for it and we take care of it for him. Just leave it alone.”

So the door stayed locked and we moved into the rest of the house box by box, put up pictures and laid out our rugs. It was the same furniture as back home, in our house in Ottawa. I took out a punch bowl, a half-moon chipped in the same spot on the glass.

The girl’s body showed signs of lacerations and bruises. She was tall for a seven-year-old, with hair the color of oatmeal. She had a purple ribbon around her wrist with the ends curled in ringlets like on a birthday gift. When Garvey found the body he was so shocked he didn’t know what to do. He had the feeling that his life was suddenly a movie. There was a camera nearby waiting to see how he would react. Should he put his hand over his mouth? Is this where he should scream? Mostly, he flipped his cell phone open and closed and wondered, do you call 911 if the person is already dead?

Our second month in Ohio, Mom was thrown in jail. It was over a Super Walmart slated for construction in March. Back home, Mom shopped Canadian: retailers like Canadian Tire or Zellers, where the lowest price is the law. She used to argue for hours with my father about this. Once she came home with a hundred-dollar office chair that my Dad found at Walmart for fifty. He was furious. “It’s the principle,” she said.

“Fifty dollars is fifty dollars,” he said.

“Will you lower your voice, please?”

The chair stayed. So when the police cruiser showed up on our street I wasn’t entirely surprised. I still had that awe and respect for police officers that children do; it was the way he coughed and adjusted his belt and made sure that I understood exactly what had happened. Mom, intent on stopping the workers from digging the new Walmart foundation, had stepped in front of one of the big Caterpillar trucks and refused to move. The next day’s paper would show her with her arms flung to the side like a female crucifix. They charged her and a slew of other protestors for civil disobedience, but someone from school posted bail and Mom was home, irate and uncomfortable, by suppertime. My mother’s total time in jail: two hours.

“There’s someone who is going to be coming by the house from now on,” Mom said. “She’s a nice woman and she’s just going to play some games and things with you. Make sure everything is going smoothly at home.”

So that’s how I met Chelsea, my “sitter” who I later found out was a social worker, paid for by the state. Chelsea was a local from Nelsonville who went to Hocking Community College and I was part of her practicum for her social work degree. She was young and religious and she smoked Marlboros on our porch whenever Mom wasn’t home, which was a lot.

Garvey would’ve probably had fewer problems after finding the girl had he not been such a private person. He always jogged early in the morning when the bike path was clear of rollerblading college kids and families on bikes. A physical examiner gave a name to Garvey’s behavior: Dämmerschlaf, twilight sleep. He didn’t phone the authorities immediately, but two hours later, after he’d returned home, washed the slick sweat from his body and fallen asleep on his couch. While he lay there in the room above my bed, flies circled the girl’s bloated body. Asleep, he dreamed that he was watching an open air movie with Maynard when a bug bit his neck. He swatted and pulled his hand away and looked at the crushed exoskeleton of an ant in the weak light. He felt another bite, then another until he realized that he was sitting on an anthill. His legs were covered in ants. Then he woke up and called the police.

I can remember thinking, where does our renter’s half of the house start and ours end? Is it the staircase, the landing? When do our walls blend into his? For the first semester, Mr. Garvey was away. I suppose it would have been easier had we had footsteps or jingling keys at the door or a face to connect to the place, to establish boundaries. But the space remained silent.

“I’m sure your Mom has a key,” Chelsea said. We had been talking about Mr. Garvey’s mail, strange letters from France and Japan, letters bearing the willowy lines of university insignias, crests and coats-of-arms from California, the UK, Singapore, places I’d only heard of. He got great periodicals, The Smithsonian and National Geographic, and I’d put them in mom’s wicker basket in the bathroom and read them cover to cover. In time, though, Mom would make me relinquish all of these, haul them upstairs in front of his door and drop them in a cardboard box left over from our move.

I asked, “Why would Mom have a key?”

“You own the place,” Chelsea said. “What if you wanted to break down a wall or repaint it or something? What if,” Chelsea said, shaking her finger for emphasis, “what if someone was squatting in there?”

“Squatting?”

“She would have to have a key.”

But Chelsea lost interest after about a week, leaving me with an image of a homeless man squatting like a frog, cooking a hot dog over a makeshift fire above our living room. As the weather cooled and the forced air heating came on and the barometer swung south, sounds would come from renter’s apartment: small squeaks or taps, like someone rapping their knuckles on a desk. The squatter was there, I was sure of it. Soon he’d make a noise, take a false step, and Mom wouldn’t be able to ignore it. She’d march upstairs and have to throw him out.

The next day, Garvey canceled his music theory course and all of his meetings. He needed time to decompress. He was a suspect. He’d never been a suspect before. It made him feel guilty. At the Burrito Buggy he paid for his lunch with a one-dollar bill by mistake and the kid with the bandana said “it’s more than a buck” in a way that felt accusatory. When Garvey walked his dog and saw two girls hanging upside down from the monkey bars he turned away. He did not see the girls’ shirts fall almost to their heads, didn’t hear their laughter or smell their bubble-gum breath. Suspicion. He started to live in his mind, imagining how a true predator might feel. The worst was the questioning. “Where were you?” or “Why did you come back to the apartment?” There was time Garvey couldn’t account for. He hadn’t known how long he slept. He’d been alone the night before. And then there was the little detail of his divorce. That they had fallen out of love wasn’t enough. Was there another relationship? A perversion? Would they mind if they checked his computer? That he was capable of crime, this little organist who could play scales with his feet, was too vulgar to consider. Now, walking around with his dog, he wondered if he’d taken the wrong approach. Here he was again, alone with his thoughts. He should surround himself with people, share his feelings. Darla said he was too insular, that she felt she could never reach him, that he stroked the keys of his organ more than he touched her. He needed to live outside himself, to find those things that people use to measure the passage of time: sports events, lunch with friends, yoga class, socials. He had his professional contacts, the music journals and recitals, his students. But friends for him were like lapsed contracts. He’d been invited, sure, invited for coffee, for lunch, but there was his tenure review, then his divorce, and now he had the habit of taking his coffee in his office, of eating alone, of walking his dog. Every Monday and Wednesday he used to have lunch at Seven Sauces with other faculty food snobs. He would go again. Yes, tomorrow. If only he could endure their questions.

On one of the rare weekdays when Mom was home, I helped her clean out our gutters. I hadn’t thought much about Garvey or the apartment for a while. It had been raining nonstop for a week and our gutters were clogged so badly that the water ran right over the edge, surrounding our porch like a bead curtain, and turning the front flowerbeds into giant mud puddles. When the sun finally emerged, Mom borrowed our neighbor’s extension ladder. “Hold the ladder and don’t move,” she told me. She had an ice cream bucket for the leaves, and when she climbed the ladder, she always tested her step first, then hoisted herself up carefully like she was a rock climber without a belay. The bucket thwacked against the aluminum ladder and when she got to the top, she reached with her right hand to pick up leaves, but she couldn’t seem to hold herself back from the ladder enough to put them in the bucket. She wouldn’t let her left hand, the one holding the bucket, go.

“I’m coming down.” Mom said. She’d given up putting leaves in the bucket and had just let them fall. At the bottom, we both looked up to the gutters. Mom put one terry-cotton-gloved hand against her forehead and sighed. She had only cleared about a foot and she was shaking.

“Are you afraid of heights?” I asked.

She looked at me. I hadn’t ever thought of my mother as afraid of anything. It seemed like something I should have known: mom’s one weakness, her own Achilles’ heel, afraid of heights, acrophobia. She took off her gloves and threw them on the ground. The cream cotton was grey and sopping. “Your father always used to do this sort of thing,” she said.

I circled the ladder for a while and kicked one of the clumps of leaves. Mom wasn’t coming out. I slid Mom’s gloves onto my hands. They looked like flippers. I tried to remember Dad cleaning the gutters. It would have been a year ago now: autumn in Ottawa. I pictured him at the top of the ladder, expertly flinging leaves into a garbage can below. He wouldn’t use a tiny bucket. He would wear his steel-toed boots, the ones with the green triangles on the side and his work coat—an old barn jacket covered with paint and motor oil stains. Fling fling fling, a little wrist flick like making a basket. I missed this man. I took off Mom’s ridiculously large gloves and climbed onto our roof.

It was my first time.

The gutter leaves were black and slick. I tossed them off the side of our house where they peppered our lawn that was still green, even in November. I took my time, slinging the leaves out and away. Then I got to the north side, the gabled side where the two shuttered windows looked out onto our back yard.

It had been a couple weeks since I’d given up trying to get into the upstairs apartment, bugging my mom and nosing around for the keys. And here I was, standing on my roof in front of one of the gables, opening the shutters to reveal the window, raked with peeling paint. It was unlocked. I could see it clearly, the cupped half of the brass latch free from the upper window. And loose. Without hesitation, I pulled on the window, felt it give, and stepped inside.

The room looked lived-in. More so than our ramshackle apartment with its too-big armchairs and pictures cluttering each wall. I was in a bedroom, like my room downstairs, with the same fluted trim and white walls. The ceiling was lower, but the space felt somehow roomier, with its neat black poster bed and furnishings. My bed and dresser were always hiding under clothes and junk. I stood there for a moment, imagining it as a kind of penthouse or palace where nothing ever went wrong. It wasn’t at all the image that I had listening to the gurgling of pipes or the tapping of tree limbs on glass. There was a cherry end table with claw feet and a gilded frame picture of a woman holding a parasol. The bed was made with thick moiré fabric and it had gold-tasseled throw pillows. And near where I was, almost within arm’s length, was a writing desk with the roll-top pulled back. The oak was darker where ink splotches and mug rings stained the leather inlay. A notepad lay on the table with a pen next to it, with something scribbled on the pad. I could read it from here. It said: “To do” with a colon made of two small circles and underlined two times. What was it that he was going to do? I wondered. Then I took a step out into the room, and heard the un-sucking sound of my shoes. I froze. Right under the window where I had first planted my feet was a perfect replica of my shoe’s tread, outlined in black tar from the roof. To do. Now our renter would have something to write on that list when he got back from California: get locks for my windows, take inventory of everything I own, look around for shoe treads that match the ones in my bedroom. I jumped back to the window and clambered out, slamming the window in my haste.

He was in his room again. It was twelve-fifteen. He hadn’t gone to work. He wore his khaki Dickies and burgundy penny loafers and a blue pinstripe button up. He was ready for lunch but couldn’t get himself to stop looking at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t a narcissist, no, that wasn’t it. It was something about normalcy. Did his face look right? Was it his face? In lieu of work he’d gone to a line-up today, a request by the investigation. There were five other men who stood in a line and turned to the left, turned to the right, put their left foot in, shook it all about. There was something gravely impersonal about the process. He didn’t talk to any of the other men. They were all Caucasian like him with small frames and varying degrees of male pattern balding. He couldn’t imagine why they would have him stand with these men. There was no victim who could identify him, no one who would be convicted or not convicted based on whatever forensic evidence they found. In the mirror Garvey put his arms out as though he were a kid pretending to fly. Then he reached with his one arm, touched his nose. Reached with the other, did the same. He spread his legs, Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man circumscribed by a perfect circle. He said, “I am Garvey Pacini, professor of music. I am a Doctor of Musical Arts. I have perfect pitch. I like Bach and Buxtehude and Dupré. I play the organ at the Episcopal Church. I have 33D shoes. I am recently divorced. I own a dog.” He put his arms back down at his sides. And sighed. It was 12:30. He wouldn’t make it to lunch now and he didn’t want to seem like a flake by showing up twenty minutes late. No, he would stay here, make something in his kitchen. Eggs perhaps. Breakfast food to trick him out of this funk. But first he was going to open the window for some air.

The next day, they began construction on the Super Walmart. Mom’s protests had had some effect; Walmart agreed to foot the bill for widening South State Street to make access easier for adjacent businesses. Part of the Mom’s group’s platform included an argument about aesthetic appeal. Athens and nearby Nelsonville were brick-making towns. Uptown had roads with bricks stamped “Athens.” Half the buildings of campus were made of the same bricks. A Super Walmart in Athens was like putting vinyl double-hung windows in the Sistine Chapel. It was an “ugly anachronism” a “boxy testament to consumerism” and a number of other things Mom called it that sounded haughty and noble and right. So to make the lobbyists happy, Walmart agreed to build their box in brick.

I decided to ask Chelsea about it.

“Your mom should spend less time worrying about Walmart and more time worrying about you,” she said.

I said, “I broke into our renter’s apartment yesterday.”

Chelsea said, “This family is so dysfunctional.”

We were watching TV downstairs, one of those shows where people receive a makeover before they’re reunited with their family. A big woman had her hair trimmed so it was boy-short, with sort of pointy sideburns. She got new black slacks to try and slim down her squarish buttocks, to streamline her body. She looked about the same as when she was in jeans and a t-shirt, but when her husband saw her he spread his arms wide and embraced her on the mouth.

Chelsea lit a cigarette.

“You’re not supposed to smoke in the house,” I said.

“Tell that to your mother if she ever comes home.”

I shrunk into my seat as I watched the smoke curling out from Chelsea’s mouth. She was right, I knew. Once, a couple days ago, we saw my mother on the local news with a group of activists in the rain. She wasn’t the one talking, but we had a good enough view of her holding part of a picket sign. I said, “Mom is on TV!” and I felt proud for a moment. Mom held the sign and the newswoman talked of their vigil and the rain kept pouring so that Mom’s face was slick with it. Then I realized that Mom hadn’t been home all day, that I had seen her on TV before I had seen her here, at home.

A footprint. That’s what his foot stuck to when he opened the window. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Had he not opened his bedroom window since he got back from his sabbatical? He knelt down and touched the fresh tar with his fingers. The tread was small, a child’s, he had no idea what size. The kid could be anywhere from three to ten years old for all he knew about children. To have this child’s footprint in his bedroom was enormously disconcerting. He hadn’t lived in the apartment long, a little over a year now, but he was sure he would’ve noticed it earlier. And the tar was fresh, still sticky, not hard and caked on. In any other frame of mind, at any other time in his life, this footprint, this child’s footprint wouldn’t matter so much. He would write it off as an anomaly or something he may have overlooked when he first rented the place. He brought his hand to his face and rubbed where his cheeks met his lips. He wanted to chew on his fingernails, a habit he had until he was a teenager. Stick his fingers in his mouth and suck. Maynard jumped down from the bed and shook, the tags from his collar clinking as his ears thwacked his neck. And stretched. Yes, Garvey would take him out. He needed to get away from here, from this spot. When Garvey described himself to the police he said, “I don’t even like kids.” It was unsolicited information, not the kind of thing you mention when you state your name and address. He’d only been thinking ahead. He knew he looked suspicious and so he wanted some declaration to exonerate him. “We didn’t say that you did, Mr. Garvey,” the officer said and from then on Garvey felt like they were on the alert. Now a child’s tar footprint was in his bedroom, like a signature, a stamp. And he did like children, really. Even though Darla cited his reluctance to have a family as one of the primary reasons for their divorce. It was more that he was afraid of them. They had a kind of perspicacity that made him uncomfortable. A child could look through you, past the degrees and office talk and inanities and know what you were thinking no matter how you tried to cover it up. Like you were a bedtime story and all they had to do was open the book and turn the page.

The day Garvey came back I told Mom I wanted to move back to Canada.

“But you love it here,” she said. “You have so many friends.”

“You’re never home. I’m still missing Dad and now I feel like I’m missing you too.”

Mom was getting ready for her once-a-week night class and I knew that this would stop her. She put down her backpack with all the straps and sat down beside me at the breakfast table. “That isn’t really fair, honey,” she said. She touched the side my face and tucked my hair behind my ear. “We’ve talked about this. It’s the middle of the semester.”

I shrugged. Mom watched me for a second to see if there was more. I was trying to cry but couldn’t manage it somehow. Then she put the rest of her books in her backpack and picked up her cell phone and checked its charge and told me that Chelsea would be here in a half an hour and that I should phone her if there was a problem and that we would talk about all this tonight, just the two of us, girls night out, and the screen door slammed and she was gone.

It was then that Garvey showed up. I was watching after-school cartoons and I heard the front door open, the one we never used, and steps going up the stairs. I was curious of course. I had constructed a mental image of the man from what I knew about him: his mail, his furniture, his job. I knew he taught at the university so I thought he must be elbow-patchy, wiry, the kind of man who wore bow ties and Hush Puppies. I crept into the hallway and I heard him fiddle with his keys on the landing. The front door was wide open so I went to close it but he was gone inside his apartment by the time I got there. When Chelsea arrived, I told her what happened.

“Did you see him?” she asked.

“Not really.”

“So how do you know?”

I thought Chelsea was trying to make me look stupid; of course it was him. He had a key. He walked through the door as though he were entitled to it. It was the middle of the day.

“I mean, it could be a contractor or a friend of your mother’s. Or even a friend of his. Did you think of that?”

But I could hear new sounds now, the shuffle of feet to the bathroom, a knock as he dropped something to the floor. I could only imagine who he was, what he was doing, separated as we were by this veneer of wood, sheetrock, and paint. I thought, this is where he must be now, sitting at his desk, running a finger through an envelope as he goes through his mail. He has three separate piles: one for bills, one for correspondence, the other for garbage. He finds out that his cousin is getting married, the mousy one with the too-plucked eyebrows. He gets reimbursement checks from the college, letters requesting him to review the enclosed book please. He tears all the credit card applications in half. A whole semester’s worth of mail takes twenty minutes, like fast-forwarding through his life. He runs his hands through his thin hair. He sits on the edge of his bed, kicks his feet up. How tired he is from traveling. I sat in my room just below his, idly doing homework while Chelsea watched sitcoms and raided our fridge.

I didn’t need to see this man. I was there with him.

From the exasperated sound of the officer’s voice on the line, Garvey could tell he had called at a bad time. “I can call back,” he said.

“What do you want, Mr. Garvey?”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to see if you’ve made any headway on the case.”

No, the officer explained, still the same situation. We’ll let you know. Garvey made the call from his office. He hadn’t wanted to but it was during the day and he was having a hard time concentrating on work. His office was mostly spare and neat, the way he liked it. He had one picture, a man sitting at his desk and looking out the window. Often he’d sit and wonder what exactly he could see, maybe another man looking out another window, an eternal line of men preoccupied by something else. It was a helpful self-reflexive exercise for Garvey, like meditation. And sometimes his mind would fill up with such wonderful notes, images in sound, that he could sit and compose and arrange them on the screen and not notice the time passing. But today, blank. He was sure it was the investigation that was doing it, clogging him up. He needed to get out, go check his cubby, stretch his legs. Forget about the investigation. He had acted poorly, he knew, but now it was time to be on his best behavior. He left his office and entered the hall, a big commons area that had tables and an elevator with the department office at the other end. One of the doors to the stairs was partway open. A girl in a spring gingham dress stood by the door frame so that only half her body was visible. The girl looked familiar but as he passed she shut the door and he could hear the slap of her sandals as she bounded down the stairs two at a time.

Sometimes I would follow Garvey almost the whole loop down the bike path and around the public library. Near the library was a copse of trees so if I didn’t feel like walking I could find shelter under their branches. He and his dog were such an odd pairing. Garvey was short with small hands and a face that was almost babyish with very round features. He shuffled when he walked, like he was a teenager trying to push his toes into shoes that were too big for him. The dog ran back and forth with a sway that reminded me of a rocking horse. His tongue was always out, his body all sinew and muscle while Garvey shuffled along. I wanted to know more about who he was. I had only lived in the same house with one other man—my father—and even though we were separated by walls and plaster and contracts I felt like we had the makings of a kind of nuclear family. Here was the mother and daughter, the babysitter, the man, the family dog. I wanted our lives to intersect in more ways, not to be just an imaginary man with his imaginary dog walking into an imaginary apartment filled with imaginary things. No longer the renter of my mind. One day before dinner I came home and met him on our walkway as he was on his way out. I stood stick still and he said “hello” in a kind of strained way but I kept my mouth shut. During dinner I said, “Mr. Garvey seems like a nice man.” Mom was in a rush again, opening and closing cupboards without ever once looking at me. “We should invite him over.”

“That would be weird,” Mom said. She shoved silverware into a side pocket, broke juice boxes from their shrink wrap.

“Why?”

“Oh honey,” she said. She came over to me and pulled my head to her torso. She ran a finger down the part of my hair. “He’s not anybody. Aren’t things fine the way they are?”

She was wrong in so many ways.

She looked like her. The girl. He couldn’t be sure if his memory was accurate but some features were unmistakable: her oatmeal-colored hair, the dimpled nose. And here she was, a kind of back-from-the-dead siren blocking him on the sidewalk. He didn’t know how to circumvent her and get up to the safety of his apartment without talking to her. How did this girl go from being in front of him to the body floating in the Ohio? He knew most acts of abuse were by people known to the victim. Forget the parked car and tinted windows. It was a trusted priest, a relative, a best friend’s parent. He was none of these to this girl but he lived in the same house, used the same electricity, breathed the same air-conditioned air. Her proximity was unnerving and so Garvey said “hi” in curt, rushed tones, the voice of someone who had people to see. He thought about the murder, how easy it would be for him to take this girl and rape her. Her mother was never home. Often it was just the two of them keeping each other company during the day. He could come downstairs to borrow a cup of sugar, matches for his stove. She would want to see his apartment, to see if the floor plan differed at all from the apartment downstairs. This is where I keep my books. This is my roll top desk. This is my poster bed. See how the memory foam conforms to the shape of your body? He would talk to her like an equal, an adult, and take her for long walks along the river where he would complement her on her fine mind, her artistic sensibilities. The act would happen at any one of these moments. She would tell him about her father and how she had to look at photographs to remind herself what he looked like. She kept one of his work ties in her closet and sometimes imagined talking to it. These confessions would be precious to him, candid and true, like childhood promises. He would hold her hand in a paternal way, have her sit on his lap as he talked about Bach. “Take off your shoes. I want to see if you have the feet to play the organ.” Always a reason. She wouldn’t struggle until he came out of his bathroom and lay beside her and then it would be her cries, her childish “I’ll tells” that would lead to the accident, the silencing of her voice, the breaking of her body. It would happen so quickly, each act the cause of the next. There was something so wrongheaded about it. And familiar. This girl, her twin face.

The second time a police car came to our house I half-expected some sort of confrontation, an old western guns-blazing kind of meeting. My mother hadn’t done anything wrong. Besides being gone less frequently, she’d kept out of the limelight, even turned over her responsibilities to a younger graduate student, one without kids, who could devote more time to the aesthetic concerns of urban renewal, keeping all the mom and pop stores in business. Chelsea met the officer out on the walk I think to shield me from whatever embarrassment his visit may entail so I was surprised when both came up to the front door and entered it. It wasn’t until I heard his footsteps receding up the stairs that I realized he wasn’t here for my mother at all. He was after Mr. Garvey.

“I think you’d better call your mother,” Chelsea said.

That night, we made plans. When Mom came home, she hugged me and put her hands on both side of my face and looked into my eyes. No one wanted to fill me in on the details. I knew our renter was gone, evicted by the law in as sudden a fashion as I could imagine. There were headlines on the news. Chelsea told me that I shouldn’t suppress what had happened to me and that Garvey should have his dick cut off. The conviction wasn’t certain yet but enough evidence had accumulated that the qualifiers “alleged” and “suspected” rang hollow. I would have to tell his story my own way.

“We can go back to Canada if you want,” Mom said.

“You have exams coming up.”

Her cell rang and she clicked the headset open and she walked into the other room. She sniffled and rubbed her eyes and then did it again and again. I unzipped my backpack and got out my schoolbooks and turned to my math homework. Word problems. #1. There were 20 pigs. 2 had one eye, 5 had no teeth, and 3 had no tail. How many pigs had no defects? #2. If there are 789 people in one area, how many are in 5 areas? #3. Holly got a 48% a 53% and 100% on her tests. What was her average score?

I knew what the questions wanted me to answer. 20-2-5-3=10. 789 x 5=3,945. (48+53+100) / 3=67. But I thought, what if? What if some of the pigs had more than one defect? Or what if there were different numbers of people in the other areas? And who aces a test and then fails the others so miserably? So many things masquerading as certainty, shielded by the numbers. My father was dead. My mother still paced in the living room. Her voice warbled. She closed the phone, snapped it shut and smoothed her eyes with her fingers.

“Why don’t we go for a walk?” she said.

Garvey had always wanted to compose Jazz but he never could imagine the notes. Composition for him was a hobby, something he did in his spare time: rearrange, play with scales. He was like a boy with a new set of Legos trying to follow the pictures to make a turreted castle. But he was always drawn to the looser form of Jazz, like a bass who had always wanted to sing tenor. There was just so much more you could do.

Garvey was grateful to the sheriff that he didn’t make him wear handcuffs to the car. Looking at him, the sheriff must have known that Garvey wasn’t the kind of man who would bolt. Or who knew Jujitsu or carried weapons. Maybe he’d been to one of his recitals, a Bach aficionado in plainclothes. Did cops listen to music in their cars?

“I’m sure this is a mistake,” Garvey said.

“You don’t have to say anything Mr. Garvey. Probably shouldn’t.”

Sitting in the patrol car, Garvey felt like he was in a taxi. Same sequestered space, same puke-resistant slick vinyl seats. This wasn’t where he was supposed to end up.

The sheriff’s radio squawked and Garvey tried to make out the voices through the static. They were talking about him. Suspect. Custody. Station. Enough to piece together the coming sequence of events. But there was part of him that wanted verbal confirmation from the source.

“Excuse me,” Garvey said from the back seat. “Excuse me. Would you mind if I make a phone call?”

The sheriff put the headset back in the squawk box and rummaged through his pockets for Garvey’s cell phone. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger and turned around.

“It’s going to take that little girl all her life to sort this thing out,” The sheriff said. “Go ahead. Make your phone call.”

Garvey scrolled through his contacts until he got to his divorce lawyer, a man who knew him better than just about anyone. There was a time when Garvey didn’t have a lawyer. If he’d been arrested then, before everything happened, he would have to ask for the Yellow Pages or look up a friend who knew somebody before he’d be able to make the call. He only hoped his lawyer could come up with the words to tell his story carefully, put it all together in a deliberate and thoughtful way. This once Garvey was sure. There was no room to improvise.

This is Garvey the way he wanted to be: a man wrongfully accused, victim of circumstance. I’ve killed the young version of myself, the body who dies as you read her, limp and lifeless in the first paragraph. It’s only near the end that my stories merge, the man captured for the crime I’ve tried to suppress. Don’t feel slighted. It’s me. I live with the story’s absences: the trips to counsellors and psychiatrists, our gradual migration back to Canada. I won’t apologize for what’s there, no matter how unreliable it may be. But there is one absence that I want on the page.

Let me tell you about my father.

He was a man who worked in an office building that looked like a mirrored Rubik’s cube. He wore khaki slacks and button-down shirts with a different tie for every day of the week. I didn’t know what he did, just that it had something to do with computers and communication and that he never talked about it when he came through the door of our townhouse because when he did it! Was! Time! To! Play! He taught me to do puzzles by finding all the corners and the straight-edged pieces first and for my birthday he bought me a size 1 soccer ball with the red logo of some European team on it. He read books to me when I was sleepy and I’d perk up, that last burst of energy to hear him do the voices of each character, nasal, or in falsetto, or a low growl for wolves or dinosaurs, before falling asleep in the soft space between his shoulder and his chest. He sipped his coffee in the morning and when he took off his glasses there were marks on either side of his nose where the silicone nose pads dimpled the skin. Sometimes we listened to music, mostly old CDs from his high-school days, and we danced and I reached up my hands so he would swing me around in an arc until I was dizzy. When I rode on his shoulders I grabbed tufts of his hair and when he took me on bike rides he always asked, where do you want to go? We did activities with construction paper and glue sticks with glitter and multi-colored puff balls and pipe cleaners. We baked cookies and made waffles and popped popcorn and slathered our vegetables with butter. And at night, just before bed, he puckered and I gave him a peck, a quick touching of lips, and I put my arms around his neck and patted his back and told him good night, papa, have a good sleep, and he said yes, you too, bye now, and then I lay in bed with my hands tucked under my pillow, closed my eyes, and dreamed my childhood dreams.