Now it seems like an improbable scene. And even then, as I was starting to run out of the store, I felt a little ashamed of myself. I knew how Pash felt about intervention. I could hear him lecturing me about breaking cover.
But then I’d already started. I thought it would only draw more attention if I stopped before I’d collected the fruit.
She stood there and watched, those thumbprints under her eyes. Red wine splattered all over her ankles. When I handed the oranges back, she just nodded slightly. Then she turned and climbed into the car.
Who knows if she’d seen me before, when I was waiting outside the store, or at the pharmacy where she picked up her pills. If she had, she didn’t say so. She just took those oranges and drove off in the Plymouth.
BUT ALL THAT HAPPENED LATER, AFTER OPP HAD GONE BACK TO THE mesa. After Warren and the rest of his crew had been declared officially missing in action, their plane having gone down somewhere over the water.
By then, I’d been introduced to the fact that he’d never come back to finish what he started on the back stoop. I’d started to realize that we’d never have that conversation, or any other conversation, and that none of the things I didn’t know about him or the life he led with our mother would ever become any clearer.
Then I finally asked May about where she went to school in Milwaukee.
At first, she stuck to the original story. Then she backtracked a little. She introduced a few complications. During the Depression, she said, they’d moved so often. She’d hated it, all the moving around, and now that she was an adult she liked to think they’d stayed in the one place she’d liked best.
That was Milwaukee, she said. The city where she’d been happiest. But she hadn’t quite finished high school before she went back to Texas.
“With your parents?” I asked.
She looked away.
I waited, that metal taste creeping into my mouth.
“With a friend,” she said.
By then she was pale. She’d set her mouth in a hard line, and it was clear that she wouldn’t keep talking.
STILL, SHE DID HER BEST. SHE TRIED, AT LEAST, TO GIVE ME A NEW SET of facts to hang on to. But by then, of course, I had no reason to believe they were facts.
She was still the same woman who came to the door when I got home, the same girl who threw her arms around me and kissed me, the same girl I liked to play cards with. But after I asked those questions, something between us was different.
Those little lies she’d told at first: they’d come to stay with us like pets who require little in the way of attention. Still, every so often, they made themselves known. Slinking around the corner into a room, or jumping up on the couch and sitting between us.
They bothered me less, I think, than they bothered her. I might have accepted them. I might have moved on with our life, the same way I moved on when my mother left, when I let Warren go with her.
I could have refrained, I think, from asking more questions. But May couldn’t take it. I guess she knew better than I did how uncertain the ground was that she stood on.
Then the lengths of time she stayed away from the bedroom increased, and sometimes she never came back, and finally she packed a bag and went to live with her friend Dorothy.
Or that’s what she said. I never met Dorothy. And after she left, I still lay awake. I still waited for her shadow to cross over the bedroom.
Lying there in the same house, in the same bed, I thought I’d ruined my one chance at happiness by asking too much about what lay underneath it. I stared at the door, imagining it might open, and light might spread over the floor, and when it didn’t, I thought that if you want to get through this life in one piece, you should either know all the facts, or you should know nothing.
Sometimes, I blamed my brother for tempting me to know more than I needed to know to begin with. But by then, he was gone. Another one of the planes knocked down over the ocean, another name on the lengthening list of men who’d been declared missing.
And the thing is, you can’t really blame someone who’s missing. So then I gave up on blaming him for making me want to know more about May, and I’d get to thinking how surprised I’d been to see him when he showed up at our house.
He was taller than me, in a white T-shirt, with a duffel hoisted over his shoulder.
Lying there through the long nights, I’d think how surprising it was to see him as a man. Then I’d think I missed my brother’s childhood. Then I’d think, in some ways, I’d missed my own childhood, too, or at least the childhood I might have had, growing up with my brother.
And now, I’d think, in addition to his childhood, I’d also miss his adulthood. Which meant I’d miss my own adulthood, or the adulthood I might have lived, knowing my brother.
Then it felt as if I’d been fated to miss my whole life. As if, for some time, I’d been moving through a life that wasn’t really my own, and everything I’d recently lost had never really been mine to keep in the first place.
BUT, LIKE I’VE SAID, ALL THAT CAME LATER. THAT NIGHT, WHEN OPP flew the coop and spent the night with that girl, we’d only been in the war a few months. Warren still hadn’t gone missing, and that girl’s lamp didn’t come on in the night. She didn’t come back to smoke a cigarette at the window.
I just stood there for a while, under the lacquered leaves of that tree, wondering what was happening up there in the bedroom.
Whether, after she pulled down the shades, she went to him first. Or whether he went to her. Or whether neither one of them moved, and if for a while the space between them persisted.
Who, in the end, I wondered, made the first move to cross through the distance between them? Those were the questions that came up in my mind, waiting under that tree with the camera.
Those are the rabbit holes you can go down all night if you want to. Then the only way to get any sleep is to remind yourself that not all questions get answered, and all we can rely on are the observable facts. It was 10:50 P.M., for example, on June 14, when they left the Xochimilco Café. She drove a green Plymouth coupe. She lived on the top floor of her building, 1405 Montgomery Street, and at 11:30 P.M., the lights in her apartment were completely extinguished.
WHEN I HEADED BACK TO THE DE SOTO, FRANK LEFT TO GO FIND A pay phone. By the time he came back, it was drizzling. There were beads of water on the brim of his hat.
“Jean,” he said. “Her name is Jean Frances Tatlock.”
I thought about that for a minute. It’s strange, when you’ve watched someone a while without knowing a name. When you finally figure it out, the name never fits.
“How old is she?” I said.
“Twenty-nine,” Frank said. “Working girl. Psychiatrist. And card-carrying Commie. Pash is in the midst of a full-blown conniption.”
Jean Frances Tatlock, I thought. Twenty-nine.
She was eight years older than May. Nine years older than Warren.
Frank craned his neck up at her windows.
“This doesn’t end well,” he said. “She’s most definitely dead by the ending.”
“Everyone’s dead by the ending,” I said, “if the book goes on enough pages.”
“Jesus, bub,” Frank said.
Jean, I said to myself again, rolling the name around in my mouth.
For a minute, once again, I let myself wonder what they were doing. Maybe she was lying with her head on his shoulder. Maybe he’d rolled away. Maybe now they weren’t touching.