“Now these grandkids of yours, they’re a good-looking bunch.” Tim meant it. The Gianises were always a handsome family.
Lidia was frowning. “Is that who they are?” she asked.
“Beautiful,” Tim said. “All of them.”
“My daughter is a movie star.”
“I know.” She was referring to Helen, who was still maybe the most gorgeous woman Tim had ever met face-to-face. She was said to be a handful, personally, and never got further than a brief role in one of the soaps. According to the local gossip, she was on husband four or five by now, a strumpet by the straitened standards of St. D’s.
“Yes, I think they’re all nice people. I have a son, did you know that?”
“Two, I believe.” He tapped the picture of the twins, a recent one, Paul with his lumpy nose and Cass beside him, just a tad bigger.
“Identical twins,” she said. “No one can tell them apart.”
He agreed.
“My sons come here all the time. One of them is a big deal, too. Is he an actor?” she asked Tim. “People just love him. They tell me so all the time. Everyone here knows who he is.”
Tim said he knew Paul, too, then asked about Cass, hoping for any information. Cass seemed to be some kind of shapeshifter, materializing, then disappearing.
“Oh yes. They are such good boys, both of them.”
“I thought the other one, Cass, didn’t he have some trouble?”
Lidia pondered a second and shook her head. “I had a stroke and my memory’s not so good.” She raised her hand again and stared at the bracelet, which, by whatever logic was left to her, once more brought her attention to Tim. “Who are you? Do I know you?”
“Tim Brodie, sweetheart. I thought maybe we could play a little game, you and me. See here?”
He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and removed an inkless fingerprint pad and several pieces of eight and a half-by-eleven copier paper. He showed her how it worked, putting her whole hand on the pad and the way the impressions magically appeared on the page. She was childishly amused by the process, and they continued for several minutes. Lidia offered no objection when he bore down on her fingers to roll the print onto the sheet.
Being with Lidia couldn’t help putting him in mind of Maria’s last days, when she was mostly gone and couldn’t speak. All in all, his wife was the kindest person he had ever known-love seldom left her and she had filled their house with love like light. But in dying she became ornery and sharp-tongued, and frequently raised her voice to him, telling him that whatever he did was not right. It was a grief impossible to bear at the time, the raw unfairness that she had to die and leave as final memories ones of her being somebody else.
Nothing was fair, when you got down to it. People tried to be fair and made up rules about what was fair, but those laws didn’t have much to do with what really happened, if you were willing to notice. Here he was, no more than eight years younger than Lidia, playing with her like a child. He was still mostly himself, and she was just a little fraction of the proud, regal soul he’d observed from a distance. You couldn’t help but pay attention to Lidia in those days. The power of life swelled through her-it was like the swirling red lines on an old barber pole, no start or end, but you had to stare.
“Are you my husband?” Lidia asked as he was putting the papers and the pad back into his coat.
“No, Lidia. Just a friend.”
“I don’t see my husband much. I think he may still be mad, you know.” Mickey had been dead twenty years. As Tim recalled the story, Mickey had been terrified of the initial open-heart surgery in 1959, when it was a recent innovation, but he came through like a champ. A little less than thirty years later, the pig valve had to be replaced, an act of routine maintenance, but Mickey stroked out on the operating table.
“And what would Mickey be angry about?”
“He never really said, but I knew he was always mad about Zeus.”
“What about Zeus exactly?”
The question stopped her cold.
“Some silliness,” she said. “I don’t really recall. You must forgive me. I had a stroke and my memory’s not so good.”
Tim nearly laughed out loud. She was all but gone but she remained crafty.
“But why would Mickey be mad about Zeus?”
“Mickey?” she asked.
Tim considered his options.
“Lidia, did Zeus ever know he was the father of Paul and Cass?”
“Oh no,” she answered, and clapped a hand straight to her chest. Some thoughts seemed to tumble through her head, then slide away like the rush over a waterfall. She looked again at her wrist. It was her right hand she kept gazing at, Tim realized.
“That’s a beautiful bracelet,” Tim said. “Mind if I see it?”
He took her hand. Doing the prints, he had noticed the Easton College class ring her boys had given her. It was quite loose now on her finger. The top of the ring, with the crest and the stone and the raised numerals of the year, hung down toward her palm. But forty pounds ago, it would have fit well and was substantial enough to have left that bruise on Dita’s left cheek.
Yet what he’d missed before was the scar. Beneath the bracelet, reaching from the back of her wrist upward a good six inches, there was a line of shiny, whitish flesh. The scar looked like a river running through a topical map, wiggling a bit within neat margins. It was the scar, he suddenly realized, not the bracelet, that preoccupied her.
“Where did you get that mark on you, sweetheart?” he asked.
Lidia slowly raised her arm to study it.
“Oh, that,” she said. “I cut myself.”
“How? You recall?”
She contemplated, then repeated her mantra about her stroke. But she never lowered her arm.
“And who sewed it up for you?” From the even look of the scar, and the faint little puckers on either side made by the sutures, it appeared that a surgeon had closed that wound. When Zeus brought Tim on to the investigation of Dita’s killing, the investigators, in the midst of their infighting, still hadn’t checked the ERs for cut cases the night of the murder. Tim spread the canvass to every hospital for thirty miles. Naturally they discovered several bad lacerations treated that Sunday night and the next morning, but none of those patients proved to be of any interest.
Tim touched the scar gently.
“Sure looks like you had a doctor for that.”
“I think it was that girl,” Lidia said, the limb still aloft. Tim took her hand and lowered it, before her arm started to hurt.
“Which girl is that, sweetie?”
“You know her.” She smiled at Tim, as if he were playing a game. “So smart. Such a nice girl. She became a doctor.”
Tim tried to recall when Sofia Michalis got back to town after med school. Then he remembered Georgia’s complaints about the attention Paul had paid Sofia at the picnic.
“It turned out OK for her,” Tim said. “Was that who did your stitches there? Sofia?”
Lidia tried to hold the thought, but shook her head.
“I don’t know anyone by that name,” Lidia said. She apologized again about her stroke.
“Sofia is the woman Paul married.”
“Oh yes. Paul is a big deal. Everyone loves him.”
“Any chance, Lidia, you got that cut at Zeus’s house?”
She looked again and this time touched the patch of smooth skin.
“Did I?” she asked. The idea seemed to make sense to her. From the dark contraction of her irises, he could see her struggling. “My memory is not very good.”
“Did that happen before or after you hit Dita?” he asked her.
In response to the question, a slim fragment of mental agility again returned to her, just long enough to set something off, some kind of alarm perhaps. She reared back, then began rotating her head and her thin floss of gray hair.
“Did you hit Dita?” he asked her.
“Who is that?” she asked.
“Zeus’s daughter. The girl Cass was seeing. Did you end up hitting her, Lidia?”