And yet Dee’s expert tone and the skill with which she later skated round my soggy offer to get together some time (perhaps on the astral plane, dear) — none of it, nonetheless, undid the basic compulsion at work in my Sunday (and in my Monday, too [I’ve got a lot to Delete])… none of it undid the decision I’d come to, the decision I’ve slept on and now input: my resolution that there’d been a fetus in the first place: there’d been something to miscarry.
Briefly you lived, my baby …
You lived, born of the worst mess of my life, and that mess was born of my father’s: you lived, and from there I scroll back, back … yet really I must Delete.
Really, this should all be, well. The lacerations itch, they ooze, and your mother can’t help but see the sheer silliness in what she’s done today, this weekend: like a talking head up on an interior screen, a perpetual electronic voice declaring: Look at you; Just look at you … (and the men have the same problem, my baby, judging from your stepfather). Your mother can’t help but cave in under the pressure of that head. My baby, I won’t deny you any longer: last night I said you lived in the face of Dee’s power to Delete, and today I’ve input the same, in the face of my own; I’ve said it, I’ve input … but I can’t print out, my baby; I can’t let your stepfather see me like this (not when he’s spending all damn day with that other Mzzzz buzzing around) …
O, what am I talking about? I came to my Apple with something simple to say, plain and simple.
This should all be redone.
*
Kit was thinking of the dead. By now he’d washed his face, splashing away a renewed spasm of moaning and near tears. He’d made more tea and reread the printout, or reread in patches while peeling away the borders and separating the pages. And he’d fought down an impulse to go searching for her again. Bette had faced enough hard cases for one day. She was coming out of this in her own good time, in her own chosen places. Patience, husband. Limit yourself to these few rooms and tools — a half-empty yellow legal pad, a decent black pen. Kit ended up back at the kitchen table, where he’d set the printout under the phone and swept the memo sheets out of the way with one lank robed arm. Thinking of the dead.
Junior was dead. Junior’s victims. Bette’s baby.
Corinna had a sister who’d been shot by a boyfriend. The women’s center across from Sea Level had lost a member to an overdose. A skeleton had turned up at the excavations for the new T station. Then there was Kit’s father, upright beside his cockpit, hard-muscled and sure. Dead.
Leaving the pad and pen untouched, Kit replugged the phone. Uncle Les picked up on the second ring. Les, the other one.
“Listen,” Kit asked as soon as he could, “where’s Mom?”
Silence. More than likely Les had been expecting something about his out-of-the-closet brother.
“Mom,” Kit said. “I, ah, I’d like to talk to my Mom.”
The uncle worked up to his answer, beginning with: “The church.” Eventually Kit understood that his mother was making spaghetti for the Loaves & Fishes dinner at Blue Earth Presbyterian. Thanks to her fundraising, her knack for organization, the church now put on these dinners three nights a week. Lots of folks in need, Les said.
Kit was nodding. It took a long moment to recall that his uncle couldn’t see him, to work up to his own responses. He admitted he’d forgotten. He hadn’t even stopped to think what time it was out West. And for another few minutes Kit commiserated about the day’s bombshell from brother Pete. It came easy — he knew what the man wanted to hear. Les, Pete’s still the same guy he’s always been. Les, he wouldn’t have told you if he didn’t care about you. He needs you.
What the man wanted to hear, though, was the best Kit could manage. There over the waiting yellow page, he had a lot of work waiting, drafting longhand till midnight or beyond. All he could spare for Uncle Les was a brisk wrap-up, but this did mean he didn’t have to say another word about wanting his mother.
Yet even once he was off the phone Kit went on staring, thinking of the dead. If the phone hadn’t rung again, and if it hadn’t been another crank call — a serious jolt even though the caller made no noise, no groan — Kit might never have gotten started on his testimony.
Chapter 10
How about this — an actual newspaper. The pages crackling as he turned them, the ink getting into his fingers. The voices remained the same, too, column after column: declarative voices, conservative, every sentence squaring another to help box in some squirming cell of evidence. An actual mainstream newspaper. Kit had swung out of bed early, fired up about his draft, his finished testimony. In thick boot-socks he’d shuffled down to the freezing stoop to meet the boy with the morning Globe. Beside his unplugged kitchen phone he took time to read, while coffee reopened the nerve-ends in his bruises.
Nobody had anything new on Monsod. Grand Jury subpoenas so far were straight out of Casablanca: Round up the usual suspects. Fire and emergency personnel, prison security, those clowns Ad and Amby. Kit saw his own name on the list again. Attached, the tag “unavailable for comment.” The Jury had called a couple of prison inmates as well. These weren’t the howlers down in solitary, the steel-shivered voices who’d turned Kit round and round. Rather the Jury would cross-examine “convicts assigned to the penitentiary workshop at the time of the disturbance.” And that was some progress, at least. That meant big media realized Monsod’s trouble had started in the workshop. They’d learned something since Thursday night, the garbage Kit had seen on TV. Nonetheless, so far the closest the investigation had come to the root problem — guys, the walls are caving in — was a subpoena for the standards supervisor on the original project. Aw, the guy was a family hire. Responsibility for keeping Monsod up to code had been foisted off on an emeritus professor at Boston College whose last construction experience had come after the hurricane of 1938.
Nothing new. Nothing better. To judge from the Tuesday wrap-up, Kit’s own eight- and ten-week-old research still had him a step ahead of the pack.
My. Are we proud? Are we?
Not particularly. Kit sat reading in his last clean suit. His trenchcoat hung over a chair, belt-tip on the linoleum, the reassembled gun bulky in one pocket. He was returning to the office as soon as he was done with his reading, his thinking. He needed to negotiate something different with Leo, and after that with Louie-Louie, but neither of them would be in before ten. Kit would have time even to turn the gun in to the police in Central Square. They took weapons no questions asked.
No, what Kit read this morning didn’t make him proud. Rather he still felt the way he had since finishing up last night, flarey and quick, bristling with ideas.
The Globe, much as he’d rushed to get it, to read it, also looked like just another paper sampler. On this table, at least. Kit turned the wide, crackling pages across the loose pink tongues of phone-memos, and across Bette’s black-&-white printout. If you saw the letter out of the corner of an eye, and against the staid design of the Globe to boot, Bette’s work appeared all ratty line breaks and hyperactive punctuation. Plus there was Kit’s work, his statement for Asa Popkin. A draft in the blocky mix of script and print he’d been using since he was a teenager, it was the most vivid thing on the table. Blue fountain pen on yellow legal paper.