Prayers For Rain Part 107

Bubba was released from the hospital ten days before I was. Vanessa picked him up, and even before they went back to his warehouse, they drove over to the animal shelter and got themselves a dog.

Those last ten days in the hospital were the worst. Summer died and autumn encroached outside my window, and all I could do was lie there and listen to the sounds of seasons trading places in the voices of people ten stories below. And I'd be left to wonder how Karen Nichols would have sounded in the newly minted briskness if she'd held on long enough for the heat to end and a leaf to fall.

I took the stairs to my apartment slowly, one arm around Angie, the other squeezing a racquetball in my hand, working the muscles in my ever-so-gradually healing arm.

The entire left side of my body still felt weak, depleted, as if somehow the blood on that side wasn't as thick, and nights sometimes, it felt cold over there.

"We're home," Angie said when we reached the landing.

"Home?" I said. "You mean my home or our home?"

"Ours," she said.

She opened the door before us, and I stared down my hallway, which fairly reeked of recently applied oil soap. I felt the warmth of Angie's flesh on my good palm. I saw my ratty old La-Z-Boy waiting for me in the living room. And I knew that unless Angie had drunk them, there would be two cold Beck's waiting in the fridge.

Living is not bad, I decided. The good lies in the small details. The furniture you've molded to your shape. A cold beer on a hot day. A perfect strawberry. Her lips.

"Home," I said.

It was midautumn before I could reach both hands above my head and stretch, and one afternoon, I went looking for my torn, frayed, had-it-since-high-school, favorite sweats.h.i.+rt, which I'd tossed with my good hand up onto the top shelf of the bedroom closet, where it hid in the darkness of a shadow thrown by the top of the door frame. I hid it because Angie hated it, said it made me look like a b.u.m, and I was sure she had homicidal designs on it. I've learned with women never to take their threats against your clothing too lightly.

My hand sank into the faded cotton, and I sighed happily as I pulled it out and several objects fell onto my head along with it.

One was a ca.s.sette tape I'd thought I'd lost, a bootleg of Muddy Waters playing live with Mick Jagger and the Red Devils. Another was a book Angie had loaned me, which I'd given up on after fifty pages and stuffed back there in hopes she'd forget it. The third item was a roll of electrical tape I'd tossed up there last summer when I slapped some around a fraying cord and was too lazy to walk it back to my toolbox.

I picked up the ca.s.sette, tossed the book back into the darkness, and reached for the electrical tape.

But I never touched it. Instead, I sat back on the floor and stared at it.

And, finally, I saw the whole board.

37.

"Mr. Kenzie," Wesley said when I found him down by the pond at the back of his father's property, "what a pleasure to see you."

"Did you push her?" I asked.

"What? Who?"

"Naomi," I said.

He jerked his head back, gave me a confused smile. "What are you talking about?"

"She chased a ball out onto this pond," I said. "That was the story, right? But how'd the ball get out there? Did you throw it, Wes?"

He gave me a small, strange smile, pained, I think, lonely. He turned his head and looked out at the pond. His gaze grew distant. He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back slightly, his shoulders tightening, thin body rippling with a slow shudder.

"Naomi threw the ball," he said softly. "I don't know why. I'd walked on ahead." He tilted his head to the right. "Up that way. Lost in thought, I suppose, though I can't remember what I was thinking about." He shrugged. "I walked on, and my sister threw the ball and it got ahead of her. Maybe it took an odd bounce off a rock. Maybe she threw it out onto the ice to see what would happen. It doesn't really matter why. The ball went out on the ice, and she followed it. I heard her footsteps on the ice, all of a sudden, as if someone had, on a whim, flicked on a sound track. One moment I was locked in my f.u.c.ked-up head as usual, the next I could hear a squirrel pawing the frozen gra.s.s twenty yards away. I could hear snow melt. I could hear Naomi's feet on the ice. And I turned my head in time to see the ice break under her. It was so quiet quiet, that sound." He turned back to me, c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. "You'd think not, wouldn't you? But it sounded as if you were crumpling tinfoil in your hand. And she," he smiled, "she had this look on her face of utter joy joy. What a new experience this was going to be! She never made a noise. Didn't cry out. She just dropped. And she was gone."

He shrugged again, then picked a rock up off the ground and threw it high above the pond. I watched it plummet through the hard autumn air and then make a tiny splash in the center of the pond.

"So, no," he said, "I didn't kill my sister, Mr. Kenzie. I simply failed to keep adequate watch on her." He placed his hands back in his pockets and leaned back on his heels, gave me another flash of that pained smile.

"But they blamed you," I said, and looked back across the lawn to the porch where Christopher and Carrie Dawe sat with their afternoon tea and sections of the Sunday paper. "Didn't they, Wesley?"

He pursed his lips, nodded at his shoes. "Oh, sure. Sure."

He turned to his right and we began to walk slowly along the pond in the midafternoon glow of a late October Sunday. His steps seemed uncertain, and then I realized it was more an awkwardness in the roll of his right hip. I looked at his shoes, saw that the sole of the right was two inches thicker than that of the left, and I remembered Christopher Dawe telling us Wesley had been born with one leg shorter than the other.

"Bet it didn't feel good," I said.

"What's that?"

"Being blamed for your baby stepsister's death when you hadn't truly been responsible for it."

He kept his head down, but a wry smile curled up his weak lips. "You have an odd gift for understating the obvious, Mr. Kenzie."

"We all need our talents, Wes."

"When I was thirteen," he said, "I vomited up a pint of blood. A pint. Nothing wrong with me. It was simply 'nerves.' At fifteen, I had a peptic ulcer. When I was eighteen, I was diagnosed with manic depression and low-grade schizophrenia. It embarra.s.sed my father. Humiliated him. He was sure if he just toughened me up-tortured me enough with his mental games and constant put-downs-I'd one day wake up made of firmer stuff." He chuckled softly. "Fathers. Did you have a positive relations.h.i.+p with yours?"

"Not by a long shot, Wesley."

"Forced you to live up to his expectations, maybe? Called you 'useless' so many times you started to believe it?"

"He held me down and burned me with an iron."

Wesley stopped in the trees, looked at me. "You're serious?"

I nodded. "He also hospitalized me twice and reminded me on a weekly basis that I'd never amount to s.h.i.+t. He was as close to evil as I've ever come, Wesley."

"My G.o.d."

"I didn't drive my sister to her death to get back at him, though."

"What?" He threw his head back, chuckled. "Come on now."

"Here's what I think happened." I snapped a twig off the branch in front of me, tapped it against my outer thigh as we walked along the tip of the pond, then started back down the other side. "I think your father blamed you for Naomi's death and you-some poor f.u.c.king basket case back then, I'm guessing-you were this close to cracking up when you stumbled on the medical records, discovered Naomi had been switched for another child. And for the first time in your life, you had a way to play payback with your father."

He nodded. He glanced down at his right hand, at the small nub of flesh that was all that remained of his index finger, and then he dropped the hand by his side. "Guilty as charged. But you've known that for months. I don't see how you-"

"I think ten years ago?" I said. "You were just a sad, f.u.c.ked-up freak with a medicine cabinet full of pills and a scrambled, genius brain. And you came up with this easy ploy to get a good allowance out of Daddy, and for a while that was good enough. But then Pea.r.s.e came along."

He gave me that studious nod of his, half contemplative, half contemptous. "Maybe. And I fell under his-"