“It will be okay,” he said. “Cops are always freaky, but they’ll just ask you things about your mother’s routines and such. It happened when my landlady died.”
I thought about nodding my head, for a moment I even thought I was nodding my head, but my brain seemed to have broken itself in two. I looked at Tanner.
“I’m not crying,” I said.
“No, Helen, you’re not.”
“It’s over,” I said.
Tanner did not know the details of my life. But drunkenly, I had mentioned how I felt my mother was sucking the life out of me day by day, year by year. I wondered if he could possibly know what “it’s over” meant, or if he, despite his anarchist habits, was still moved by the sentimentalist portraits of mothers that were created all over the world.
“Let me help you,” he said. “Is this your sweater?”
He reached over to the hutch and pulled out my sweater, along with my bra, which I had tucked inside. Hurriedly he snatched the bra off the dirty floor.
“Sorry,” he said.
Though Tanner had seen me nude week after week for years now, as I peeled back the top of the hospital gown and let it fall around me on the chair, I felt as if I had never really undressed in front of him. He held out my bra as if it were a dress for me to slip into. Seeing his attempt to dress me, I realized that no matter how hard it was, I would have to wrest control of myself and perform.
I took the bra from him and held it in my lap. I managed a small smile. “Thank you, Tanner,” I said. “I’ll take it from here.”
He held out his left hand, and I put my free hand in his. When I was standing, he very gently leaned over and kissed me on the head.
“I’ll see you Monday morning at ten a.m.?”
This time, I nodded my head.
I was zipping up my jeans when Natalie came in.
“Are you back there?”
“Yes.”
She came around the partition in her Diane von Furstenberg and a cloud of newly applied perfume. Her face was splotchy. Tears had recently moistened her cheeks.
“They came in Room Two Thirty looking for you. I dressed as fast as I could. Can I hug you?” she asked. Always, even now, I radiated that permission had to be granted.
Her warmth made me melt into her, want her in the way I had always wanted a mother. But inside my animal brain, I thought how dangerous this was. The very things that would comfort me could make the necessary coil unwind.
I wanted to claw at her. At her ample breasts and what we recently had read was called a “menopot.” I wanted to take her ridiculous dyed hair and pull it out at the roots. I wanted these things because I could not have what I wanted most-to crawl inside her and disappear.
I let her move her hand through the short bristle of my hair and down the back of my neck. I let her rub me across my bony shoulder blades. And I cried, just a little bit, unable to know whether it was because I should, given the circumstances, or because Natalie’s comfort was painful to me.
“Where’s Jake?” she asked. She pulled herself away from me and held my shoulders in her hands. I looked at her. I was happy to have tears at the corners of my eyes. Would this make me more sympathetic? Could I manage it again when necessary?
I remembered our backstory. “I don’t know. He’s supposed to pick me up. He was going to hook up with a former student who works at Tyler now.”
“So he’ll be here soon? He can go with us.”
“With us?”
“To the police station,” Natalie said.
“What?”
“Your mother was killed, Helen.”
I sat down with force.
“Didn’t the police tell you? I thought you knew.”
I tried not to wince. “By who?”
“I thought they told you, sweetie. I’m sorry. Listen, get your shoes on. They’ll tell you everything they know.”
“Do they have a suspect?”
“I don’t know. I was talking to one of them, and then another guy, in a sport jacket, cut him off.”
“Detective Broumas,” I said. My voice enunciated each syllable in a monotone. I thought of Jake and of our wedding vows: Do you promise to take this man in marriage, as long as you both shall live, in sickness and in health, in murderous extravagance?
“Shoes,” Natalie said, and pushed them toward my chair with her foot.
The door opened, and I heard Jake’s voice in the hallway.
“Is she almost ready in there?” an unfamiliar voice asked.
“We’re coming,” Natalie trilled. “Just one more minute.”
“Her husband’s here.”
“He can come in.”
“The detective is asking him a few questions.”
Natalie and I looked at each other. My shoes were on, and for all intents and purposes I was as ready as I’d ever be.
I grabbed my bag, for a moment confusedly thinking my mother’s braid was still inside. Jake had known. Without him it would still be on the bed, curled like a snake.
“Lipstick?” Natalie said.
“Kiss me,” I said. Without hesitation, she did. I rubbed my lips together, spreading out the gloss.
“Ready?”
“Let’s go.”
“It’s horrible, what’s happened,” Natalie said as we approached the door. “But Jake is here. The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
I could not tell my friend it had nothing to do with the Lord but everything to do with a chain of events that my own hands had set in motion less than twenty-four hours ago. Pushing down on the towels, the blankets wrapped around her broken body, her rose-petal-pink slip wedged between the hutch and the wall, traces of the silver braid clinging to my toilet bowl. All of them, like the phone call to Avery that had alerted Jake, had come from the hands that now held my purse, now reached for the door as it swung open, now shook the meaty palm of Detective Broumas.
I saw Jake sitting on the teacher’s desk in the classroom opposite. He made a move to stand up, but a hand on his shoulder stopped him.
“Your husband is answering a few simple questions for us,” Detective Broumas said. “I’d like you to do the same.”
I focused on his shoulders. Flecks of dandruff were scattered over the midnight-blue wool. His eyes, a deep hazel surrounded by long lashes, reminded me of a therapist I’d gone to five years after my father’s death. “Probe, probe, probe,” I had said to this doctor. “Is that all you ever do?”
A student, late for class, headphones blaring, walked by, turning her head like an automated camera, then passed on.
“We’re ready to leave,” Natalie said.
“Leave?”
“Yes, Detective,” she said. “I would like to accompany her to the station.”
The detective smiled. “Nothing so fancy,” he said. “We’ll just find an empty classroom and make the best of it.”
I was watching Jake. His feet dangled over the edge of the desk. For all his height and maturity, he seemed to me, in that moment, a child. By coming to help me, by climbing through that window, he would be inextricably linked to whatever happened to me. I remembered our story. He had tried to fix my mother’s window, doing me a favor for old times’ sake.
“Shall we go in here?”
“Here?” I said, pointing to the door Natalie and I had just stepped out of.
“That is, if you don’t mind.”
Natalie was asked to wait outside. Detective Broumas called for one of the uniformed officers, and the three of us went into the classroom.
“It was a very confusing morning for the neighborhood,” Detective Broumas said.
Surveying the room and seeing few places to sit, he pointed toward the platform.
“There’s a chair there, I guess. Does that suit you?”
“Sure. There’s another chair behind the partition,” I said.
“Will you get that, Charlie? We can move them over here.”
“Actually,” I said, “Professor Haku would prefer that you didn’t move that one chair. He has it set up so the pose can continue on Monday.”