Выбрать главу

“It’s okay, Stanley, you don’t have to pretend. I know you didn’t recognize me at first. And maybe still don’t. I know you don’t remember.”

“The truth is, I didn’t want to remember. Me, I mean. Not you.”

“Why? You didn’t do anything wrong. You almost did. But you didn’t.”

“Maybe that’s why. I didn’t want to remember what I lost that night. And what I found. I wanted to forget that too.”

She gave a hard little laugh and stepped back. “I wish I believed it. What do you think you found and wanted to forget, Stanley? Not true love, that’s for sure.”

“No. Something else.” He’s about to tell her to forget it, whatever it was, it can’t be described. Not by him, anyhow. But instead he hears himself say, “My heart got stung. I could feel it beating, and for the first time in years, maybe in my whole life, I knew I was alive.”

“And it scared you.”

“It’s like, if you know you’re alive, you know you’re going to die.”

“So you decided to forget that you were alive.”

“Yes.”

“Which is like dying before your time.”

“Yes. It is.”

He remembers her standing beside the bed, half turned toward the door, ready to leave his room. He walked across to her and put his arms around her and kissed her gently on the lips. She kept her mouth closed, her lips tight, and after a few seconds shook free of his embrace.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

She said, “Don’t be. You didn’t do anything.”

He said, “That’s why I’m sorry.”

“Goodbye, Stanley.”

He turned back to the darkened window and watched her reflection cross the room to the door, open it, and leave. The door closed slowly behind her.

She says, “Well, it’s been good to see you again. You haven’t changed, Stanley.”

He says, “Yes, I have.”

She says, “Goodbye, Stanley,” and makes her way back through the crowded ballroom toward the exit.

SEARCHING FOR VERONICA

This is what she told me. It came almost from nowhere. I happened to be sitting next to her at the bar in Gustav’s, a German-style pub and grill in the Portland International Airport between Gates 7 and 9 on Concourse C. I was waiting out the night for a storm-delayed Minneapolis flight. I think she was already there when I came in, but maybe not. I remember the bar was otherwise empty. The local TV news and weather was on without the sound.

We hadn’t even exchanged names when she started her story. I might have smiled and said hello or something bland to jumpstart a conversation and show her I wasn’t going to hit on her, the way you do if you’re a male traveler and you start talking to a woman in a bar. She was a worn-down fifty, a basically good-looking woman with a friendly smile and a lot of mileage who I figured was a waitress whose shift at one of the airport restaurants had just ended. Not a traveler. Turned out I was right and it was Wendy’s. Anyhow, this is what she told me.

As if we’re old friends she said, “Whenever the TV news runs a story about finding the body of some unidentified woman in the bushes by the river I wonder if the woman is my friend Veronica. And if I’m downtown I glance into alleys as I pass, hoping to see her alive. You probably think that’s weird.”

I said no. But I did think it was weird. Not the content of what she told me, but the fact that she was telling it to a stranger. That and the way she told it.

She said to me, “Sometimes the next day I even take the bus to the city morgue and try to identify the body, since I can still picture Veronica’s tattoos and piercings all these years later.”

I asked her who was Veronica.

She said, “It was the summer I turned thirty, a couple months after Carl walked out on us. Helene was seven going on eight.”

I said, “Helene is your daughter, then?”

She said, “Yeah. I was struggling just to survive and take care of her, so I swallowed hard and gave the back bedroom in our apartment, the room we’d been using for the cats, to this girl, to Veronica. She’d stayed over after my birthday party and was trying to cut loose of her idiot biker boyfriend and get off of drugs. The cats and their litter box we moved to the screened porch overlooking the back alley.”

She said, “I think Veronica and her boyfriend were into meth pretty heavy. Not just using, manufacturing in some trailer outside town, and selling, at least her boyfriend was. Rudy was his name, I can recall that even today, what, almost twenty years later, because when she talked that was what she talked about, Rudy Rudy Rudy. She drove me nuts with her fixation on this guy, who to me was just some piece-of-shit biker who liked to get high and boost his manhood by whacking his girlfriend on the head every few days to make her cry and say, ‘Stop, stop, please, Rudy, stop!’ You know the type.”

I knew the type, I told her, but the woman kept talking as if I hadn’t said anything. It was not exactly like she was alone, but more like I wasn’t a real person sitting next to her at Gustav’s bar. It was as if she was telling her story to a camera on a reality TV show and had already told a version of it many times. I didn’t care, I was just killing time and trying not to let my flight delay get me down, and she had a friendly face and a nice whiskey-and-cigarette voice.

She said to me, “I had an okay job at a travel agency then. Portland was into connecting with the Orient and all these fast-tracked techno-yuppies were booking weekends in Tokyo and Hong Kong and writing it off their taxes, so even though I’d been slam-dumped by Carl, who’d ridden off into the Hawaiian sunset with his dental hygienist, I was doing fine, no food stamps, no handouts necessary, except I had to work nine to five six days a week and needed somebody to take care of Helene after she got home from school. Which is where Veronica comes in.”

I didn’t say anything and looked off at the TV, checking the weather. The midwestern storms were moving east. She took a sip of her drink and plunged ahead. Her timing was pretty good, I noticed.

She said, “Veronica was a tall girl, taller than me anyhow, with a bunch of piercings on her face and elsewhere that I could guess but didn’t want to know about and homemade tats pretty much everywhere you looked and so skinny you could see her spine through her T-shirt like she had an eating disorder, anorexia or bulimia, one of those, only it was probably from the meth and whatever other chemicals she was putting into her body then, because later I found out she definitely had a healthy appetite. I wasn’t that much older than Veronica — she was nineteen or early twenties, I think, so okay, a decade — but right away I felt motherly toward her. Maybe because of Helene, who I was afraid would turn out like Veronica if she didn’t have me as a mother.

“She showed up following the shadow of Rudy, who came to the party with the three biker brothers from downstairs who came because you couldn’t throw even a small party in that building without those guys sniffing at the door, six-pack in hand. None of my female friends, especially the single ones, objected because the brothers were young and very good looking and lifted weights and you could hook up with one of them if you wanted. We did that sort of thing back then. We were still young. We called them Huey, Dewey and Louie. I can’t remember their real names now. They had jobs and were basically harmless although not too bright and were always holding good weed. But they sometimes brought along a wacko friend or two like Rudy who were into chemicals or crack or both and on the edge of freaking which made everybody nervous. The next day one of the brothers would come upstairs and apologize, which I didn’t mind at all, especially after Carl left.