Right now I’m a mourner. I can’t be a teacher, a wife.
It was the same when Emily succumbed to the cancer. Libbie was in her midtwenties then and had been too frightened to view the body in the funeral home. It didn’t matter, though. She knew where Emily’s spirit had gone: to the rivers and ponds, the Thicket’s moss-warmed vines, north of Houston.
In the late sixties, Austin was a magical town, lazy, fragrant with honeysuckle and incense. After classes, she and Emily would catch a bus to Sixth Street and listen to jazz, country, rhythm and blues. They’d talk for hours, Libbie about the pleasure she took in the foreign students she was learning to teach or about the qualities she thought a perfect man should have. For Emily, the only subject was home: Paley, a little town in the woods filled with bluebonnets and mockingbirds. Even when Emily talked about losing her cats to owls, she called the woods sacred and longed to return once she’d earned her medical degrees. Libbie meant to visit her there one summer (rural life, away from ethnic restaurants, movie theaters, and frozen foods in giant supermarket bins was unimaginable to her), but Emily had gotten sick. The Thicket remained a fantasy land — marmalade skies — and, in Libbie’s mind, Emily lived on there, in floods of pollen, cottonwood fuzz, changing yellow light on the grass.
The day of the memorial service (Emily’s family wanted their own private ceremony in Paley), a huge protest against the U.S. bombing in Cambodia had been staged in the streets of Austin, near the university. Libbie had ignored the angry chants and sat in the sunshine outside the church, dreaming of her friend.
Now, standing here in Crespi’s funeral home, Libbie understood that, like Emily, her parents were merely spirits to her now. They’d been frail for so many years — and disagreeable, furious in their pain. She preferred to picture them beyond life’s troubles.
She glanced again at Anna Lia. Without its animating spark, a human body was clumsy and heavy, a storage problem, a puzzle. We sneak into the world between our mother’s legs, she thought. And this is the result of our trespass.
“Libbie?”
She turned to see Roberto Capriati standing by the entry’s scarlet curtains. He wore a sport coat the deep sea-green of a sushi roll.
They hugged. Roberto flinched when he saw Anna Lia. His eyes dampened, but he didn’t shake or weep. “I’ve been meaning to call you, to see how you were,” he said. “But I didn’t know what to say, or what to think of all this.”
“I know.”
“I thought you might hold me responsible …”
“No. No. But I wish I knew what brought her to this point.”
“So do I, Libbie. Honestly. All I can tell you is, she wouldn’t let me go. Christ. Couples break up all the time, right? I just needed space.” He pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket, wiped his nose.
“Danny thinks Nicholas Smitts — ”
“No. Smitts is a gyrene,” Roberto said. “Danny’s right about that. But he didn’t do this. I saw them together one night over at Star Pizza — Smitts and Anna Lia — and I swear, Libbie, I recognized the pattern. Same as me. Anna Lia was calling all the shots. Get me this, get me that. Take me to a movie. Take me to a play. You know how she was. She’d worn him to a nubbin, in just a matter of weeks. I don’t know. I’m sure she never thought of bombs, for god’s sakes, before meeting this creep. But I can’t imagine him — or anyone — making her do something she didn’t want to do. We all knew she was impulsive — ”
“You make her sound like a schemer.”
“She was, Libbie. At least with her boyfriends. Maybe you didn’t see it.”
Libbie didn’t like this talk, though of course she had seen Anna Lia’s schemes. She turned to the body for an answer. The hairs on its head wiggled in the stale, recycled air.
“Anyway, the cops have closed their investigation, right? Smitts is off the hook,” Roberto said.
“Whether he deserves to be or not.”
“It’s Danny I’m worried about now.”
“Why?”
“He came by the station Thursday afternoon. Looked like hell — ”
“I know. I saw him here Thursday morning.”
“Libbie, he had a gun.”
Anna Lia could have reached up and pinched her, and she wouldn’t have felt it. “What do you mean?”
“A pistol. Tucked in his pants.”
“I don’t … did he threaten — ?”
“No. But he was wired. And sick. I was so relieved when he left. Have you seen him since Thursday?”
“No, the last couple of nights I’ve been back at my place.” Hugh had warned her. She’d been so unfair to him. “He may have been with Carla when she finalized the funeral arrangements.”
“If he comes around again, watch yourself, Libbie. This thing has knocked him wide open.” He bowed his head above the coffin.
Libbie caught a trace of White Shoulders from the creases in Anna Lia’s dress. Water dripped inside the air conditioner.
Mr. Crespi peered around the doorway’s dusty curtains. “I trust you’re having a pleasant visit?” he asked.
Libbie nodded.
“If there’s anything I can do …”
“We’re fine,” Roberto said.
In our comfy satin box. Our tasteful brown dress.
How many cars, on how many roads, hid a gun? How many walls concealed the makings of bombs? Hell, this was Texas. Whiskey and ammo held pride of place here, in family lockboxes next to the wedding photos and the deed to the house.
Danny still didn’t buy the cops’ Movie of the Week about the pipe bomb; didn’t believe Anna Lia capable of harming anyone, even a weasel like the Love Stud. But now Houston seemed to him a maze of secret desires.
The pistol lay on his passenger seat under a Burger King bag. Danny’s temples throbbed. He remembered his father saying, the morning of their hunt, “Friend of mine told me how this goes. It’s not just your shoulder that supports the stock, but your cheek, son — that’s it, hold it up against your face, like that — now there’s going to be some ree-coil …”
He sped through a blinking yellow light, cut through an Exxon station to avoid another intersection. Where was he going in such a hurry, risking a pullover and discovery of the weapon? The country, he supposed. Where else do you head for target practice? Was he really going to do this thing? Godalmighty, what the hell was he thinking? Libbie and Carla always calmed him down. He hadn’t spoken to them since the funeral home. Maybe he should find them now.
Last night he’d wanted to talk to Marie, to apologize for his forwardness, but Ricky had been nuzzling her there in the restaurant.
His life was a busted seesaw.
A pair of motorcycle cops sat beneath a billboard — FREE VASECTOMY CONSULTATIONS! CALL TODAY! Danny pumped his brakes.
What frightened him the most was the ease with which he’d bought the gun, how natural it felt to follow a crazy impulse. The pistol on his seat made it simpler to believe what he didn’t want to accept: that it wasn’t impossible for Anna Lia to have indulged a nutty whim.
He tugged on the Burger King bag, covering the gun.
Yes. Libbie and Carla. Find them. Now.
It occurred to him he didn’t know where Libbie lived. He’d never been to her home. Carla, on the other hand, loved to throw parties, and he’d danced many nights at her place. He didn’t remember the number, but he knew the neighborhood, and he’d recognize the house when he saw it.
Sure enough: a two-story box beneath a spooky old oak. The driveway was empty, but he stopped anyway. He rang the bell three times and was about to walk away when the door opened a crack. “Yes?” said an unfamiliar voice.