Читать книгу A Head in Cambodia - Nancy Tingley - Страница 16

7

“I don’t know where Eric is,” my mother said. “You know he’s often late.”

I looked at the kitchen clock. “It’s 7:30. He’s not usually this late. We need to eat. I need to eat. I have more work to do tonight.”

“It’s Sunday night.” She wiped the countertop, hopeful that I wouldn’t insist if I saw that she was busy.

“It’s Sunday night and I was at the museum all day yesterday and again this morning.”

“What were you doing?”

“Preparing my talk for the opening, trying to catch up on all the things that have fallen by the wayside as we install the exhibition. The usual.” I ran my finger over scars on the kitchen table, skirting the placemats that she’d laid out before I arrived.

“Didn’t you ride?” She bundled her hair into a ponytail that she wrapped and then tied into a knot. When my hair was long, I’d done the same.

I am my mother’s double. Our height, our auburn hair, our turquoise eyes, wide brow, and small but mobile mouth. Our differences result from gravity, which hasn’t yet affected me, and the lines that shoot out from the corners of her eyes and have begun to alter her mouth. Though she exercises at a gym a few times a week and has a friend she walks with the other days, she’s become thicker over the years. I thought of her and Polly walking, and wondered what they talked about. Their husbands? Kids? Dissatisfactions? It wasn’t that I thought of her as old and her life narrow, just that she was a world apart from me.

“I did ride early this morning, my only fun activity all weekend.” I stretched out my legs, trying to relax, to quell my impatience.

“Where did you go?” The question was perfunctory; she was stalling so that Eric would appear and we could sit down together. Sean was out of town. “We rode out the Bolinas Ridge, Pine Mountain, the usual. Really, Mom, I need to eat.”

“So do I,” said my father, coming into the kitchen, the sound of a basketball game trailing him. He opened the fridge, his belly sinking over his waistband as he bent to pull a beer from the fridge door.

At least it was beer, not whiskey. I wondered what time he’d started drinking.

“We’re waiting for Eric,” my mother said as she opened the pot on the stove and stirred the chili. Eric loved her chili. I was less enthusiastic.

“Wasn’t he supposed to be here an hour ago, two hours ago?” He popped open the beer and watched her as he took a sip.

“Yes, but he’s late as usual.” She tried to be light about it, though I knew Eric’s tardiness drove her as crazy as it did the rest of us. My mother was the classic codependent, a role perfected throughout her years of marriage to my father. She covered for Eric, adjusting her schedule to fit his, making excuses for him, just as she’d always covered for my father.

He took a step toward the TV. “Did your mother tell you he got stopped for another DUI?” There was disgust in his voice.

“No,” I said, turning to my mother. “But he doesn’t even have a license anymore.”

“That’s right. They held him in jail. They wouldn’t release him until your mother posted bond and he signed a paper saying he’d seek help. Go to rehab.”

“Can they do that?”

“Don’t know if they can, but they did. May just be an attempt to scare him into sobriety. He said he went to AA last week.” He took another sip.

I caught myself counting his sips; it was bad enough counting bottles. “Alcohol isn’t his problem. It’s the drugs.” I turned to my mother, who was probably better informed, “So what’s happening with the rehab?”

“He has to go to court first,” she said.

“I’ve washed my hands of him,” my father said as he headed back toward the crowd roaring from the TV. Someone had made a great play. “Five more minutes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked my mother.

“I thought I’d let him tell you. We don’t know what’s happening. When his court date is. How we’re going to pay for rehab.”

“The court doesn’t take any financial responsibility if they tell him that going to rehab is his punishment? So how will he pay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s eat, Mom,” I said, taking shallow bowls out of the cupboard and sticking them in the warm oven. “It’s pointless to arrange our lives around Eric. And anyway, how would he get here? He shouldn’t drive.”

“Yes,” she said, defeated. “You should have picked him up.”

I took a deep breath. We all felt defeated around Eric. His addictions, his self-annihilation so clear, so brutal. Like a train without brakes careening down a track.

My dad, though, my dad. I felt defeated around him too, but for different reasons. Eric’s violent swings were hard enough to deal with, but I felt more helpless in the face of my father’s quiet self-destruction. He didn’t get belligerent, but morose, sinking into weepy depressions. Not talking to my mother, who tried to draw him out by cooking elaborate meals, pampering him. At least he’d never gotten a DUI. He was more sensible in his addiction. Unlike many drunks, he willingly turned his car keys over when he’d had too much.

“Can you put the cornbread on the table?” my mother said, breaking my reverie.

I cut three large pieces and put them on the plate she handed me.

“Four,” my mother said, “Four pieces.”

But that hopeful action didn’t prove to be enough to draw Eric to us.

“DESSERT?” my mother asked.

My father knocked back the last of his beer. “What do you have?”

“Chocolate cake.”

It was my favorite, rich and chocolaty, the second piece better than the first. Her making it more than compensated for her cooking chili for Eric. If only she’d told me what was for dessert before I’d taken my second helping of chili.

“So what have you been working on?” my father asked.

My mother and I looked at each other. “The Chinese porcelain exhibit,” I said, trying to keep the irritation from my voice. He’d asked the same question the previous week and the week before.

“Oh, right. I heard something on the radio about a stolen head that your museum bought.”

“No, we did not buy a stolen head. One of our trustees bought a head, which might or might not be stolen. We’re trying to authenticate it.” Damn Philen. My father had heard what I’d expected the average person would hear, that the museum was responsible.

“How do you do that, dear?” my mother asked me, trying to deflect the rising confrontation as she watched me watch him pull another beer from the fridge. A beer to have with his chocolate cake.

“Style, wear to the object, research.” I took a deep breath and turned my attention to my mother. If I didn’t watch his drinking, I might not be irritated. “I visited a book dealer here in Berkeley this afternoon. He bought the book collection that belonged to the previous owner. I wanted to see if there were notations in any of the books.”

I took a sip of tea and plunged my fork back into the cake.

“Were there?” She was determined to keep the conversation going.

“No, though there were a number of pages in the books I looked at, a few of which I bought, marked with Post-its, all of which appeared to relate to the head. They were in sections of books about the Baphuon period or in the plates illustrating Baphuon sculptures.” That wasn’t a lie. I just didn’t mention that I had found papers stuffed into one of the books. Tom Sharpen’s barely legible and incoherent notes explaining why he thought the head P.P. had purchased was a fake and what that meant to him.

“Why did he sell it?” my father asked.

I didn’t look up, but I felt his eyes on me. “What?”

“Why did this person sell this head and sell all his books?”

I didn’t want the conversation to take this course.

“He died. His family sold everything.” I brought another bite to my mouth. Maybe if my mouth was full he’d stop asking me questions.

He held the bottle halfway to his mouth. “How did he die?”

The thing about my father was that even when he drank, he could spot a lie or see one’s dissembling a mile away. We’d been terrified of him as kids. My mother put down her fork and watched me, aware that my father had zeroed in on something I’d said.

“He was murdered.”

My mother’s teacup rattled. “Oh, Jenna. You aren’t going to get involved in a murder?” She knew my propensity for getting involved in people’s tiffs, neighborhood disagreements—which, in my defense, I attempted to mediate. Though I seemed to have a knack for taking sides.

“No, I have no interest in his murder.” That wasn’t exactly a lie. I hadn’t had any interest in his murder this morning when I woke up, or when I went to the museum to do some work before coming to the East Bay, or even when I’d parked my car at the book dealer’s house. It was when I’d stuffed those papers in my purse that there might have been a slight shift. Now I had an interest, though I still didn’t have any plans. Not to find the murderer, anyway. Only plans to try to decipher Sharpen’s notes. Only plans to try to figure out if the head was a fake or real.

“How?” My father wasn’t going to give up. He was undoubtedly ruthless with his students.

“Decapitated. At any rate, I found—”

“Decapitated?” She jumped out of her seat and hurriedly cleared the table. I watched as the last few bites of my cake fell into the compost. I felt about ready to explode, but I would have eaten them.

“Yes, but I’m only interested in the head.”

“The head!”

“The stone head. The Baphuon-style head. I was telling you that I looked at his books, and some of them were marked.”

“What did they tell you?” my father asked, still watching me carefully, more carefully than the usual drunk can.

“I’m not sure. He seems to have figured out that the head belonged—or was a copy of the head that belonged—to a Khmer sculpture that’s in the Siem Reap museum. Well, if you knew anything about that sculpture, you would figure that out. Of course, you’d have to have recent books to come to that conclusion, since the sculpture was only excavated a few years ago.”

“And he did.”

“Yes. But what that means, I don’t know.”

“Jenna, promise me that you won’t get involved in this murder.” My mother was wiping the counter again.

“I told you, Mom. I have no interest in getting involved.”

“You say that now, but even you don’t know what you’ll do. You’re so impulsive.” Mother’s words.

“I have too many other things to do, and I’m going out of town soon.”

“To Cambodia,” my father said matter-of-factly.

“Do you think I could take home some of that cake? I should get going soon. Work early tomorrow, more to do tonight.” I got up, folded the placemats, and put them in the drawer, my father’s keen eyes giving me creepies on the back of my neck.

I came out of the house with more than I’d asked for. Half a chocolate cake, a large container of chili, a jar of pear-and-ginger jam, and a down comforter that I didn’t need but that my mother didn’t need either and foisted on me. The food was in a grocery bag, but the comforter was loose and unwieldy as I struggled to dig my car keys out of my purse.

My feet crunched as I reached to insert the key in the door, but the comforter kept me from seeing my feet, or the car for that matter. I stuffed as much as I could under my arm and saw that I was standing on glass. “Shit,” I said. “Not again.”

How many times can a person have her car broken into and not feel that she’s jinxed? A rear window had been smashed, and glass spread like snow across the backseat and onto the pavement. “Shit, shit, shit,” I repeated, setting down the grocery bag on the damp pavement, opening the front door, and tossing the comforter onto the driver’s seat. I looked nervously up and down the street, though I didn’t really expect to see anyone.

I picked up the bag, shook it to dislodge any glass, and put it in the trunk. I took out a piece of foam board that I could attach to the window with duct tape. It was the third time this year, and I was prepared. My old car invited vandalism, a key run from front to back on the driver’s side, break-ins, graffiti written in lipstick on the rear window.

The foam board was awkward, and it was beginning to rain. Luckily the rain hadn’t started while I was in the house. Luckily I hadn’t had anything in the car. Then I remembered. The books. I threw down the foam board and looked in the backseat. They weren’t there, and they weren’t in the trunk either. A hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of books gone. I cursed the thief, who would have no interest in books on Southeast Asian art. I imagined his disappointment when he saw what he had. It wasn’t a consolation.

I considered going to get my father to help me. Four hands would simplify the task of securing the window. But going back to the house would mean my mother would insist that I stay, that I put my car in their garage until I could get the window fixed in the morning. I wedged one side of the foam board down the opening where my window had been and managed to jam it into place, then I taped the upper edge and sides so that it wouldn’t blow away when I drove.

I pushed the comforter onto the passenger seat, pulled off my soaking coat and threw it on top of the comforter, climbed into the driver’s seat, leaned my head back on the headrest, and closed my eyes, groaning as I thought of the work I still needed to do tonight. Once I’d collected myself, I started the car. A car parked a few cars behind me started too, its lights flashing on for an instant, then going out.

Instinctively I locked the car doors, imagining an arm crashing through the foam board and grabbing me by the throat. Or two arms. Or a machete, its curve falling and in one fell swoop breaking my window and severing my head. Then it dawned on me, my disparate thoughts catching up with each other. This wasn’t just a random break-in.

The rain pummeled the window, making it impossible to see. The street was dark, except for my headlights blurring light across the bumper of the car in front of me. I wanted to scream. Instead I reached into my purse, felt the reassuring bulk of Tom Sharpen’s notes. This must be what the thief was after. The books meant nothing, the Post-its in the books meant nothing. The notes were what was significant. Of course, the thief didn’t know there were notes, or so I hoped.

As I pulled away from the curb, I saw the bedroom light go on in my parents’ house. There they were, unaware of the danger. The thief—was he also the murderer?—knew where they lived and undoubtedly knew where I lived. This wasn’t about the notes, or the books, or the Post-its in the books. This was about frightening me off. A threat not just to me, but also to my family.

Damn Philen for bringing us to the attention of the killer. The idiot. Car lights came on behind me again, and that same car slowly pulled from the curb.

I braked and started to open the door. Then I thought of Grey and how he had tried to intimidate me with his size at the art fair. His smell and his ridiculous thinning ponytail. Damn that Grey. It had to be him, didn’t it? He’d practically admitted it. What was it he’d said? That he’d flown to the States to talk with Sharpen about a piece. That he’d been too late. Or some such. But the point was, he’d come to the Bay Area around the time Tom Sharpen died.

I was sure it was him, a man twice my size. I drove on, turning right, then left, losing the car easily in the maze of streets that wound like snakes around the Berkeley hills.