Summertime Page 6

  Sasha mutters something and the man leans over me. ‘You have some connection with the decedent?’

  I say: ‘Daughter.’ The word sounds odd, as though I’ve borrowed it from some other language. He disappears and there is a sound like gunshot. The screen door, slamming.

  Sasha sits down next to me, one plump arm lying across my shoulders, his leg pressed next to mine. We sit together on the top step of the porch, lit garishly in red and blue and then white, while police officers, some in uniform, others in suits, shuffle past us silently up or down the steps.

  And then a voice says: ‘Luce?’ and I jump up and there is Jane.

  We stand facing one another. The wooden structure of the porch frames her so she looks like some photograph that someone took three years ago. My memory has made her taller. It has made her body more like a reed and her jaw sharper and her eyes bluer but now she steps right inside the image I’ve been carrying around in my head and the two merge imperceptibly. We stare and then she holds her hands out and I step towards her. She wraps her arms around-me as though I am still a small child.

  ‘You’re too thin,’ she chides me. I’m supposed to pull away from her now but I can’t. I’m crying. I was okay until she used that big sister voice. Her hug tightens. I smell her perfume: it is faint, the aroma of crushed flowers. It smells good. At last I stand back, sniffing, rubbing the tears from my eyes with the inside of my arms.

  ‘Oh, Luce,’ she says softly. She takes my hand and strokes it as though she’s trying to dry it. ‘Luce, you don’t know how much I’ve missed you.’

  There’s no one in New York, not one person, who would ever speak to me so sweetly. I chose that. I chose to go. I think of the glassy blue of Kent’s eyes as he told me he wanted me.

  I experience again how it feels to be loved as Jane puts an arm around me and holds me close. She has never left me in doubt of her love. As a child, at school, she was always there to compensate for Mother’s absences and inadequacies. She advised me on friends, teachers and math. Once, memorably, she saved me from drowning at the local swimming-pool. She stayed with me at the hospital, her face chiselled by anxiety, after the car crash with Robert Joseph in the valley. And it was Jane, after she’d left for med school, who could see at once that Mother’s homestay was too much and urged Daddy to have her readmitted to the clinic. Then later, years later, when Stevie died, Jane sat with me for hours, maybe days, talking and in silence, somehow knowing what to do when everyone else, even Scott, was frightened or intimidated or upset by my grief.

  She pulls back to look at me. ‘If only you’d called us we would have met you at the airport…’

  The gentlest of reproaches and from someone who is entitled to be angry. My departure from San Francisco was as painful as it was incomprehensible for Jane. And now I have hurt her again.

  I flounder. ‘It’s been so long… I didn’t know how you’d feel about me just arriving…’

  ‘Pleased is how we would have felt. We’ve waited three years for you to just arrive.’ Her generosity is simple and unquestioning. Astonishing quantities of water run down my face, over my cheeks, into my mouth, drip from my jaw.

  Sasha steps forward. He does not kiss Jane but shakes hands with her. There is a formality in the condolences he offers and a formality in her acceptance.

  ‘The time must now have come,’ he says, ‘to ask the precise manner of Uncle Eric’s death.’

  Suddenly Jane’s older, more tired. ‘The police think… the circumstances… I wish there was a way of saying this that didn’t sound so awful.’ She takes my hand. ‘The police are working on a theory that Daddy’s death wasn’t accidental.’

  I nod. I’m pretending to understand.

  ‘They think…’ asks Sasha carefully, ‘that he intended to die?’

  Suicide. It’s the first time I’ve even allowed myself to think the word but now I think it I realize I’ve been avoiding it since the moment Jim told me about Daddy’s death, since the moment he said the death was not straightforward. Suicide. An old dog, slinking around the house, which it is possible to ignore. Just. Until, that is, the dog demands to be fed.

  Sasha holds out a hand to steady me.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I say. I hear myself. Weak, small, as though all the air has been squeezed out of me. ‘Suicide. That’s absurd.’

  Jane says: ‘Lucy, it does sort of look like maybe Daddy intended to…’ Her voice fades. I barely listen to her words. I’m thinking that I’ve never heard Jane falter so helplessly. I’ve always admired the way that, when she starts a sentence, you can tell she knows how it’s going to finish. I watch her, waiting, and when she speaks again her voice is strong. ‘But,’ she says carefully, ‘the police are treating Daddy’s death as homicide.’

  Sasha echoes: ‘Homicide…’ and when I glance at him his eyes have sunk a little deeper into his white face and he is chewing on an unlit cigarette. He says: ‘Surely not. Surely not Uncle Eric.’

  I speak again and my voice is stronger now. ‘You mean the police think someone killed him?’

  ‘They’re waiting for a full autopsy report but apparently the initial examination indicates –’

  ‘Killed him! They’re saying someone killed Daddy!’

  ‘Shhhh, Lucy.’

  ‘Is that what all this is for? The tape across the drive and guys with uniforms and clipboards and flashlights? They’re here because they think someone killed Daddy!’

  Jane’s voice is quiet. ‘Luce, I know it’s a shock but you have to remember that it may not have been violent or painful or –’

  ‘But who would kill Daddy, for God’s sake? No one would have any reason –’

  ‘Shhhh. Stop shouting, Luce.’

  ‘Daddy was a university professor, not some kind of thug. Good, decent people like Daddy from happy families like ours don’t get murdered!’

  I am yelling into the darkness, I hear my own voice crossing the porch but within an instant the thick night air seems to absorb my words as though I had not spoken.

  7

  Jane slips into the house, slim and sharp as a threaded needle. Sasha follows her, holding the screen door open for me, but on the threshold, my belly fluttering, I stop to inhale the old house, its special smell. Oil and rugs and wood and coffee. It seems for a moment that something sweet is missing, then I realize that time has played another trick on me this strange night and that I have remembered the house’s smell as it was long ago, when I was small and Mother was well and the house aroma always included a little of her perfume and the scent of lemon furniture polish and soft, sugary cookies.

  ‘They’ve asked us not to go anywhere but the hall and the kitchen,’ Jane is telling us from down the hallway. She puts her head into the den. I hear her say: ‘My sister’s here.’ The reply is indistinct.

  All the lights in the house are on but there are still pools of darkness in the hallway. I start to walk. I walk in and out of the shadows. A man eases past me, apologizing as I crush my body against the wall.

  ‘Please don’t touch anything,’ he murmurs.

  When he has gone I go into the living-room and stare around me. Daddy’s chairs, the arms and back of his favourite worn thin. Photographs. Books. And rocks. Rocks used as paperweights. Round, smooth rocks in a pile by the fire like an exhibit in a gallery. Specimen rocks on the shelves. Rocks of startling formation or the lurid colours nature sometimes throws up, rocks wedging open the door or placed lovingly on the bureau. Rocks as sculpture. Rocks as pictures.

  ‘Has much changed?’ asks Sasha from the doorway.

  I do not turn around. ‘No, nothing’s really changed.’

  I go to the big sliding doors and open them slowly. They growl back at me. Then I cross the deck and lean out over the valley below. It is a plate of darkness stretching on forever. Tiny sets of car lights, two, maybe three, glitter silently, far apart. They move slowly. Occasionally a cluster of lights indicates a house or a farm. I try to see any of the quadrangles
formed by tracks and orchards but there is nothing out there but stillness and silence. I search, from some old habit, for the long, straight stretch of blacktop where the car I was riding in with Robert Joseph turned upside down. I look for the farm I walked to one day with my friend Lindy, the friend who used to swing with me on the porch. We were seven and we set off down the hillside and across the hot, flat valley floor and kept right on walking until we reached the farm. They gave us water and melon and then drove us home in the back of their pick-up. I’d always wanted to ride in the back of a pick-up like the farm kids. We bounced along the dirt road of the orchard watching the big clouds of dust bubble up behind us and pretended we were a storm blowing through. I strain now to see the farm and the dirt road but I see nothing at all, as though there’s really nothing down there or maybe just a great, dark ocean which you can’t cross.

  Sasha is still waiting at the door but inside the room now are the man who edged past me in the hallway and a woman whose hands are covered in latex. The man speaks. ‘Ma’am, we haven’t completed our work in here yet.’

  I look at him. ‘What sort of work?’

  ‘I must ask you to vacate this room until we can give you clearance to enter.’

  I am about to leave when I notice that in one hand the man carries a collection of small plastic bags. They remind me of the bags Daddy used for tiny rocks and rock dust. When NASA sent the geology department moon rocks, Daddy kept them in bags which looked just like this.

  ‘Do you have rocks in there?’ I ask the man.

  ‘These are forensic samples,’ he says. His face is immobile but he shifts his weight from foot to foot, waiting for me to go. The woman stares at me.

  I lead Sasha past the den. It is a small, near-windowless room full of paper and rock. A uniformed woman and two men in suits peer at Daddy’s blinking computer screen. They do not look up.

  Larry is making us coffee in the kitchen. When I walk in his eyebrows shoot up and he smiles at me then embraces me. I can feel how his body has expanded and when he pulls back I can see it. Even his features have thickened so that his nose is less prominent and his tidy beard looks too small for his chin now.

  ‘Lucy, it’s good to see you,’ he says. ‘Despite the circumstances.’

  He sounds as though he means it. His look is knowing, not searching, a look I remember well.

  ‘It irritates me the way he stares at me like he knows more about me than I do,’ I told Scott once. But Scott admires Larry and he shook his head. ‘He’s a shrink not a witch doctor, Luce. He only knows things about you which you know about yourself but refuse to acknowledge.’ Scott was only half being humorous when he said that.

  Larry greets Sasha and Jane passes us coffees. I look around. The kitchen didn’t change in all the years we lived here and it never occurred to me then how shabby it was. I never noticed that the stove is too small for the space allotted it or that the sink is stained and battered or that the doors of some units don’t fit or even close. It never bothered me that part of the work surface was still covered in lino.

  I say: ‘Jane, did you put sugar in this coffee?’

  ‘Just a little.’

  ‘I stopped taking sugar years ago.’

  She smiles. ‘I know. But you looked like you needed something.’ And although I resent the sugar I also enjoy its sweetness, the sweetness of childhood.

  The officer from the living-room appears noiselessly.

  ‘Kirsty’ll be with you in a minute. I have to take your prints,’ he says.

  I realize he is talking to me.

  ‘My fingerprints?’

  ‘I have to. You opened the door to the deck and held the deck railings… did you touch anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  The man has laid out a small attaché case on the table in front of me.

  ‘Please remove your wrist watch and jewellery,’ he says mechanically.

  Larry and Jane and Sasha watch me as I submit my right hand to him. He lifts it by the wrist and my fingers dangle like dead fingers. He takes one, pressing it on to the paper, rolling it harshly. He does this with each finger in turn, and when he has completed my right hand he does the same with my left and when he has completed ten fingers he rolls each hand in ink and then on to the paper, the fingers and then palms, until by the time he finishes we have established a sort of rhythm as though we’re making a painting together.

  ‘Now you,’ he tells Sasha.

  ‘But I haven’t touched anything.’

  ‘I need to take your prints just in case.’

  ‘I prefer not.’

  The man sighs and shifts his weight.

  ‘Maybe,’ he suggests beadily, ‘we already have them some place?’

  Sasha is haughty. ‘Certainly not. But I really prefer my fingerprints not to be lodged forever on some vast computer.’

  ‘These are elimination prints and they’ll be destroyed right after this case has been closed,’ says the man.

  ‘Unless,’ adds Larry, grinning, ‘you’re found guilty of a crime.’

  Sasha looks from Larry to the police officer with contempt. ‘You do not need my fingerprints.’

  Jane says: ‘For heaven’s sake, Alexander.’ I look at her in surprise. Her use of his full name, her irritation, her coolness. She has never taken so little trouble to hide her feelings about our Russian relatives. Mother adored and disdained her family at the same time. Their very Russianness annoyed her, although, perhaps because, she shared it. Jane has inherited all Mother’s disdain without its curious partner, love.

  ‘They took my prints too, Alexander. They took Larry’s. They took Scott’s. They took them from everyone who’s been in the house today.’

  Sasha looks at her stubbornly. ‘Allow me, Jane, to indulge my Russian paranoia.’

  Jane’s voice is taut with irritation now. ‘You sound so Russian that it’s easy to forget you were born here and you’ve lived here all your life. You didn’t suffer under the Soviet system. Paranoia is for people who did.’

  She thinks Sasha is acting Russian. Jane describes any dramatic behaviour as acting Russian. When I lost my temper, burst unnecessarily into tears, shouted or behaved otherwise demonstrably, I could be sure that Jane would say: ‘Quit acting Russian, Lucy.’ Mother, of course, acted Russian to Academy Award level.

  Sasha is wounded now. He and Jane stare at one another. They are wordless but there is a shared childhood behind that stare. Larry is about to intervene when we hear voices. The woman I saw in Daddy’s den is right outside the kitchen. I can’t see the man she is talking to, only his shadow, absurdly elongated by the light. Then he disappears and the woman turns to us, looking from face to face.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  She is about my age and about my height. I see now that she is wearing not a uniform but dark clothes which have the simplicity of a uniform.

  ‘I need to take a set of elimination prints here,’ snaps the officer. ‘But this guy’s refusing to allow me.’

  Sasha shrugs. He looks clownish now, his mouth set in a wide, taut line, red circles appearing on both cheeks. ‘The procedure is unnecessary. I have touched and will touch nothing outside this room.’

  The woman says: ‘Who are you?’

  Larry and Jane introduce me and explain Sasha’s presence and the woman nods. She looks like someone who used to have a trim figure but for some reason – work, children, ill-health – her body is amplified now. Her hair is short and dark but when she puts her hand to her neck I know she is fingering the hair which used to be there. She is a woman who, probably not so long ago, changed. Like me.

  ‘I have not seen my late uncle for perhaps four years,’ Sasha informs her frostily.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘So long as we can contact you if we need to, we’ll leave your prints tonight.’

  The fingerprint man closes his briefcase and melts out of the room. I wash my hands while the woman explains that she would like to interview me and asks Sasha and Jan
e and Larry to sit out on the porch while she does this. I dry my hands on Daddy’s towel and see that, even though I scrubbed them, I have left more inky fingerprints here.

  Jane pauses before she leaves the room. ‘Kirsty,’ she says. ‘Could this interview wait until tomorrow or the next day? Lucy’s not just tired but she’s still very shocked. Her health has never been good and she really shouldn’t get too stressed.’

  These words touch and embarrass me. Touch me because I am unused these days to the loving concern of others. Embarrass me because, although I was sick a lot as a kid, I now thrive on stress.

  The woman turns to me. Her look is scrutinizing.

  ‘What do you think, Lucy?’ she asks.

  I say: ‘Oh, thanks Jane, thanks very much, but you don’t need to worry, I’ll be fine.’

  Sasha follows Larry and Jane out of the room. He gives me a long look but I don’t understand what the look means.

  When we are alone, the woman gestures me to sit down at the table with her.

  ‘Just relax, Lucy.’ It’s true that I’m tense but I wonder how I have betrayed myself. I thought I’d managed to maintain a sort of stillness which might look like calm.

  ‘At this stage I only have a few informal questions.’ She places a notebook in front of her. ‘I need some basic details like name, date of birth, address…’

  I say: ‘Can you tell me what’s going on?’

  The woman looks down at her notebook. ‘After a preliminary nary view of your father’s body, the medical examiner has some concerns. There’s a full autopsy tomorrow but it’s our job to respond, even at this stage, to the ME’s first analysis.’

  ‘And what is that analysis?’

  Her eyes are brown. They meet mine. ‘The decedent was found by a fisherman at 11.30 a.m. floating off the coast at Retribution. At first he was assumed to have drowned but the medical examiner believes that in fact he was dead before his body entered the water.’

  Her voice echoes inside my head. In fact he was dead before his body entered the water. Finally I say: ‘How did he die?’