On the wall by the table hung a gourd banjo. I ran my thumb across the strings, surprised to find they weren’t steel but soft, like a classical guitar’s.
“You really are into this.”
“I guess I am.”
She lifted down the banjo and, sitting, balanced it on her lap. Plucked a string or two, twisted pegs. Then started playing, back of the nail on her second finger striking a melody note then brushing other strings as the thumb popped on and off that short fifth string. “Soldier’s Joy.” Abruptly she stopped, putting the instrument back in place.
“Would you like tea?”
“Love it.”
We went through a double doorway without doors into the kitchen.
“Here’s my real bona fide as a southerner,” she said.
While even the living room had about it an element of improvisation, camping out or making do, the kitchen was fully equipped, pots and provisions set out on shelves, towels on drying racks, dishes stacked in cupboards, knife block on the counter by the stove. We sat at a battered wooden table waiting for water to boil.
“Funny thing is,” Val said, “I wasn’t into this, not at all, not for a long time. As a kid I couldn’t wait to get away.”
“You grow up around here?”
“Kentucky. Not a spit’s worth of difference. When I left for college, I swore that was it, I’d never look back. And I’d absolutely never ever go back. Took the two JCPenney dresses I’d worked as a waitress to buy, and some books I’d kind of forgotten to return to the library, and settled into a dorm room at Tulane. It was 1975. My Texas roommate’s debut had been attended by hundreds of people. She used most of my closet space in addition to her own-I didn’t need it. And those dresses looked as out of place, as anachronistic, as a gardenia in my hair.”
Val poured water into a round teapot.
“I was smart. That was one of two or three ways out of there. Tulane was full of rich East Coast kids who couldn’t get into Ivy League schools and poor southerners on scholarship. I lost the dresses first, the accent not long after. Most any social situation, I discovered, all you had to do was keep quiet and watch those around you. Sugar? Lemon or milk?”
I shook my head.
“By the second year you couldn’t pick me out of the crowd. ’Wearing camo,’ as a friend of mine put it. I finished near the top of my class, went to Baltimore as a junior partner, very junior, in a group practice.”
She set a mug before me, thoughtfully turned so the chip on its lip faced away.
“I don’t usually prattle on like this.”
“Not a problem.”
“Good.” Settling back at the table, she sipped her tea. “I was up there for four years-dancing with the one who brung me, as my father would say. I liked Baltimore, the firm, liked the work. And I was good at it.”
“What changed?”
“Nothing. Something. Me?” She smiled. “I wanted to, anyway. Do we ever, really?”
“Change?”
Nodding.
“If we don’t-if we can’t-nothing else makes much sense, does it?”
She half-stood to pour us more tea. Close by, just past the window, an owl hooted.
“You’re not a cop, are you?”
“Not for a long time. I was.”
She waited, and after a moment I told her the basics.
“Another Cliff Notes life.”
“What?”
“Those pamphlets on great books that students read instead of the books themselves. A lot of us experience our lives that way. Sum up who we are and what we’re about as a few broad strokes, then do our best to cleave to it. All the good stuff, the small things and distinctions that make the rest worthwhile-Sunday mornings sitting over coffee and the paper, taste of bread fresh from the oven, the feel of wind on your skin, sensing the one you love there beside you-all these get pushed aside. Unnoticed, lost.”
“If we let them.”
“If we let them, right. And as much as anything else, that’s why I’m here.”
Dark had become absolute. Far off, frogs called. Their cries bounced across the pond behind the house, amplified by the water as though it were in fact the metal dish that moonlight made it appear. Moths beat at the window beside us, and at the kitchen’s screen door.
“I drew my weapon three times,” I said. God knows why I told her this. “And each time someone died. The second time, it was raining, I remember. His blood was running down the street. I was in the street too, with his head in my lap. And all the time I kept thinking: My kids are home waiting for me.”
“Kids?”
“A boy and a girl. They grew up without me, have their own lives now. Probably for the best… Thing is, there in the street, in some strange way I was closer to that stranger as he died, this man I’d shot, than I’ve ever been to anyone else my whole life.”
For some time she was silent. We both were.
“I don’t know what to say.’’
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“Suddenly everything in my life seems so small.”
“Our lives are small.”
She nodded. “They are, aren’t they?”
I followed her outside, onto the porch.
“Don’t suppose you’re hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Seems I always am. Buy popcorn by the case, eat carrot sticks till I start turning orange myself and have to stop, chew celery till my teeth hurt.”
We stood looking up at the sky.
“What about the third time?” she said.
“That I drew my weapon.”
“Yes.”
“That time, it was my own partner.”
“Oh.”
“There’s a lot more to it,” I said.
“There would be.” She looked off into the trees. “Listen.”
I did, and for this one perfect moment silence enveloped us, absolute silence, silence of a kind most of the world and its people have forgotten. Then the frogs started up again and from miles away the hum of cars and trucks on an interstate reached us.
Chapter Eight
A year or so into playing detective, I pulled the chit on a missing-persons case. Rightfully it should have gone to Banks, who was senior and next up. But Banks was actively pursuing leads, the Lieutenant told me, on a series of abductions and rapes at local private schools. Would I mind.
A patient had disappeared from an extended-care facility. Patricia Pope, nineteen years old. Shed been out with friends celebrating her birthday with slabs of pizza and pitchers of Co’Cola. As they ferried home around eight in the evening, a drunk driver smashed head-on into their car. He’d been drinking since he got off work at five and somehow had entered the new interstate by an exit ramp. The other four in the car were killed. Patricia, riding in the front passenger seat, went through the windshield and onto the hood of the drunk’s F-1 50. She’d received acute care in Baptist Hospital’s ER, from there had been moved up to neuro ICU for several days where a shunt in her head dripped fluid into a graduated cylinder, then onto a general ward, finally to a separate, step-down facility. She made no acknowledgment when spoken to, reacted but slightly to pain. (In ER they pinched nipples and twisted. Upstairs, kinder and gentler, they poked pins about feet, ankles, forearms, torso.) Her hands had begun curling in upon themselves, first in a series of contractures pitching muscle against bone. Eyes rolled left to right continually. She was incontinent, provided nutrients through a tube that had to be reintroduced with each feeding. Caretakers threaded these tubes down her nose, blew in air through a syringe and listened with a stethoscope to be certain the tube was in her stomach.