When he got the call from Venezuela telling him about Miguel, he was terrified that he might lose his wife and also secretly happy to have wounded her. But all of the control he felt as they prepared for his son’s arrival slipped away as he watched her take the strange dark boy into her arms and tenderly wash his feet. He realized then that she was capable of taking everything from him.
The three of them formed an awkward family. Mr. Mitchell tried to place the boy in a home but his wife would not let him. She did this to punish him. He had now been an accidental father for two years. He took the boy to baseball games and bought him comic books and drove him to school in the mornings. Sometimes Mr. Mitchell enjoyed these things, other times they made him angry. One day he walked in on Miguel talking to his wife in Spanish and the boy immediately stopped. He realized then that his son was afraid of him. He was sure his wife had done this too. Mr. Mitchell began to resent what had initially drawn him to her, and to offset these feelings he began an affair with their neighbor, Pat.
It did not begin innocently. Mr. Mitchell walked over to Pat one afternoon as she was planting bulbs in her garden and slid his hand into the elastic waistband of her Bermuda shorts. He leaned her up against the fence, underneath a birch tree, right there in the middle of a bright, spring day where everyone could see. He didn’t say anything, but he could tell by her breath and the way she rocked on his hand that she wasn’t afraid.
He hadn’t known that it was in him to do anything like this. He had never been attracted to Pat; he had never had any conversation with her that went beyond the weather or the scheduling of trash. He had been on his way to the library to return some books. Look, there they were, thrown aside on the grass, wrapped in plastic smeared with age and the fingers of readers who were unknown to him. And here was another person he did not know, panting in his ear, streaking his arms with dirt. Someone he had seen bent over in the sunlight, a slight glistening of sweat reflecting in the backs of her knees, and for which he had suddenly felt a hard sense of lonesomeness and longing. A new kind of warmth spread in the palm of his hand and he tried not to think about his wife.
They had hard, raw sex in public places — movie theaters and parks, elevators and playgrounds. After dark, underneath the jungle gym, his knees pressing into the dirt, Mr. Mitchell began to wonder why they hadn’t been caught. Once, sitting on a bench near the reservoir, Pat straddling him in a skirt with no underwear, they had actually waved to an elderly couple passing by. The couple continued on as if they hadn’t seen them. Who knows, maybe they were half-blind, but the experience left the impression that his meetings with Pat were occurring in some kind of alternative reality, a bubble in time that he knew would eventually pop.
Pat told him that Clyde had been impotent for years — a reaction, it seemed, from witnessing his father’s death. The man had been a mechanic, and was working underneath a bulldozer when the lift slipped, crushing him from the chest down. The father and the son had held hands, and the coldness that came as life left seemed to spread through Clyde’s fingers and into his arms, and he stopped using them to reach for his wife. Since the funeral she’d had two lovers. Mr. Mitchell was number three.
There were rumors, later on, that the lift had been tampered with — that Clyde’s father had owed someone money. Pat denied it, but Mr. Mitchell remembered driving by the garage and sensing he’d rather buy his gas somewhere else.
Mr. Mitchell’s desire increased with the risk of discovery, and he’d started arranging meetings with Pat that were closer to home. In his house he fantasized about the dining room table, the dryer in the laundry room, the space on the kitchen counter beside the mixer. He touched these places with his fingertips and trembled, thinking of how he would feel later, watching his wife sip her soup, fold sheets, mix batter for cookies in the same places.
On the day Pat was murdered, before she put the roast in the oven or reminisced about James Dean or thought about the difference between butter and margarine, she was having sex in the vestibule. The coiled rope of Home Sweet Home scratched her behind and dug into Mr. Mitchell’s knees. He had seen Clyde leave for a bowling lesson, and as he waited on the front porch for Pat to open the door, something had made him pick up the welcome mat. When she answered he’d thrown it down in the hall, then her, then himself, the soles of his shoes knocking over the entry table.
Mrs. Mitchell would soon be home with Miguel. Mr. Mitchell brought Pat’s knees to his shoulders and listened for the choking hum of his wife’s Reliant.
The following day when Lieutenant Sales climbed the stairs of Pat and Clyde’s porch he did not notice that there was nothing to wipe his feet on. He was an average-looking man: six feet two inches, 190 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin. He had once been a champion deep-sea diver, until a shark attack (which left him with a hole in his side crossed with the pink, puckered scars of new skin) pulled him from the waters with a sense of righteous authority and induced him to join the force. He lived thirty-five minutes away in a basement apartment with a Siamese cat named Frank.
When Sales was a boy, he’d had a teacher who smelled like roses. Her name was Mrs. Bosco. She showed him how to blow eggs. Forcing the yolk out of the tiny hole always felt a little disgusting, like blowing a heavy wad of snot from his nose, but when he looked up at Mrs. Bosco’s cheeks, flushed red with effort, he knew it would be worth it, and it was — the empty shell in his hand like a held breath, like the moment before something important happens. Whenever he began an investigation he’d get the same sensation, and as he stepped into the doorway of Pat and Clyde’s house he felt it rise in his chest and stay.
He interviewed the police who found the bodies first. They were sheepish about their reasons for going into the backyard, but before long they began loudly discussing drywall and sheetrock and the pros and cons of lanceted windows (all of the men, including Lieutenant Sales, carried weekend and part-time jobs in construction). The policeman who had thrown up in the roses had gone home early. When Sales spoke to him later, he apologized for contaminating the scene.
Lieutenant Sales found the roast on the counter. He found green beans still on the stove. He found a sour cherry pie in the oven. He found the butter and the margarine, softened tubes of yellow, half melted on the dining room table. He found that Pat and Clyde used cloth napkins and tiny separate plates for their dinner rolls. The silverware was polished. The edges of the steak knives turned in.
He found their unpaid bills in a basket by the telephone. He found clean laundry inside the dryer in the basement — towels, sheets, T-shirts, socks, three sets of Fruit of the Loom, and one pair of soft pink satin panties, the elastic starting to give, the bottom frayed and thin. He found an unfinished letter Pat had started writing to a friend who had recently moved to Arizona: What is it like there? How can you stand the heat? He found Clyde’s stamp albums from when he was a boy — tiny spots of brilliant color, etchings of flowers and portraits of kings, painstakingly pasted over the names of countries Lieutenant Sales had never heard of.
He found the bullet that had passed through Pat’s body embedded in the stairs. He found a run in her stocking, starting at the heel and inching its way up the back of her leg. He thought about how Pat had been walking around the day she was going to die, not realizing that there was a hole in her pantyhose. He found a stain, dark and blooming beneath her shoulders, spreading across the oriental rug in the foyer and into the hardwood floors, which he noticed, as he got down on his knees for a closer look, still held the scent of Murphy’s Oil. He found a hairpin caught in the fringe. He found a cluster of dandelion seeds, the tiny white filaments coming apart in his fingers. He found a look on Pat’s face like a child trying to be brave, lips tightened and thin, forehead just beginning to crease, eyes glazed, dark, and unconvinced. Her body was stiff when they moved her.