How Will I Know You? Page 2

  “She didn’t run away,” Alison had said. “I get why her mother wants to think that, though.” She nodded toward the screen, which showed Susanne Enright, her face contorted in tears, issuing an appeal to anyone who knew anything about what could have happened to Joy. “Let’s face it—she’s a floater.” A cop’s kid, Alison used the cop’s term for a body that rose on its own gases or surfaced in a thaw. And as with a cop, Tom knew, something allowed her to separate the lingo she used from the person she was applying it to.

  He’d thought Joy was a floater, too. But three weeks later, here were the news people, telling him that his wishful thinking might have been right: the police now believed that after being murdered, the girl had been in the woods the whole time, despite the fact that the ground had been searched. Instead of hidden under the surface, she’d been right in plain sight, or what should have been plain sight. It happened: sometimes what people were looking for was right in front of them, and they missed it because they were paying attention to something else. In this case, it could have been because the original reports put her under the water, and most people—even the searchers—assumed she was there.

  “No.” Alison was watching through her glasses now, her hand pressed to her heart as she spoke directly to the TV. “She wasn’t murdered; she drowned.”

  He’d always loved this, too, about his wife: her knack for feeling what it was like to be inside other people. Sometimes she couldn’t shake what took hold of her when she observed or heard about someone suffering, even if she didn’t know the person and even if it was far away in the world.

  Tom knew that as she listened to the news report, she did not want to have to imagine her student enduring an assault before dying. In the old days, she would have told him this; she would have wanted to talk about it. But with each miscarriage she’d begun saying less and less, and though he’d done his best to put off realizing it as long as he could, he’d understood for a while now (even before what she did to him at the end of October) that if something didn’t change—and soon—they might never find their way out of the trouble they were in.

  He decided not to correct her about the manner of Joy’s death. What was the point? Watching the familiar footage of Susanne Enright begging the public for information about her missing daughter, he recalled the day he’d gone to the family’s house, at Susanne’s request, two days after Joy had last been seen. Susanne appeared not to have slept at all, and her speech came out slow and uncertain, as if she were trying to find the right words in a language she’d only just learned. How would she absorb the shocks she was suffering now? The first had been the discovery of the body two days ago—a blow in itself, of course, because it was obvious that she’d been trying her best to believe that her daughter was still alive. Now that she knew Joy was not only dead, but murdered, how would she react?

  Beyond that, who could have done it? Who would have strangled a teenager in a random encounter, after she stalked away from her friends in a fit of fury? No one could have anticipated her behavior that day, or where she’d end up at the moment she encountered whoever killed her.

  No, it was more likely that someone had been following her, watching. Waiting for the right moment to pounce and grab. Maybe he (it was always a he) hadn’t meant for her to die. Maybe he just wanted to scare her for some reason. But why?

  The anchorwoman reported that Interim Chief Douglas Armstrong had begun a preliminary investigation, and it showed him speaking at a news conference from the six o’clock broadcast. Even though Doug had been in the position for five months, Tom found himself still doing double takes when he saw his father-in-law on TV; the dark cloth of his uniform showed up his blue eyes brighter than in real life, even on the small screen. “Police are looking for a black man seen in the vicinity of Elbow Pond the day Joy Enright disappeared,” the anchorwoman said, her face and voice containing that solemnly ominous tone they all used when they wanted to make it seem they felt personally affected by the stories they read from their scripts. “The man is not being sought as a suspect at this time but as a person of interest.”

  A black man seen in the vicinity of Elbow Pond. The words rose to jab Tom under the ribs, and he shoved the covers aside.

  “What?” Alison murmured.

  “Nothing. You should get some sleep.”

  “How can I do that?” She gestured at the TV.

  “Just try.” He came back toward the bed and tried to speak in as calm a tone as possible, with all the movement inside his chest.

  His impulse was to call Doug right away, but he remembered the first rule he’d been taught in the rescue-dive class: Stop, think, and breathe. Everything he hadn’t done the night the call came in and he was sent down to find the girl. Acting on instinct could lead to freezing, or “passive panic,” if a diver fixated on a single, ineffective plan while overlooking the obvious better ones. He stood in the kitchen, gripping the counter, and after a few minutes, he realized his training had paid off. Instead of picking up the phone, he went out to the truck, where he’d left his notebook in the glove box. Then he headed to wake up his father-in-law, whom he knew would be happy to see him—for once—when he saw what Tom had to offer.

  Monday, December 7

  I know I shouldn’t care, especially given where I’m sitting, but it matters to me. They keep calling it a journal, smirking as if I’m some teenage girl mooning over a crush. A commonplace book is what my notebook would have been called in the old days. A commonplace book is what I keep.

  But it has been confiscated. They’ve given me this pad and a cheap, blunt-pointed pen (Liberty Mutual/We’ve Got You Covered) to use while I’m confined here. I am not technically allowed a writing instrument, the guard told me—I might use it as a weapon on him, my lawyer, or myself—but he is kinder than some of the others, and the fact that I’m an art student (which probably means to him that I am gay) seems to make me less of a threat, despite the reason I’m here.

  In my own book, the one they took, I write something every day, even if it’s as mundane as the words Nothing to note. I like the discipline of it, which I know can only help me in my work. Then there are the events I want to remember, and I might spend an hour recording those. Don’t skip the details, Grandee told me when she gave me that first notebook right after my father died, containing my first homemade bookmark. Don’t just write this happened today, or that happened. You think you’ll remember, but trust me, you won’t.

  I also use the book to make notes about things I read and to copy down quotes from the great artists (my favorite being Alberti’s assertion that painting makes the absent present and the dead almost alive). It contains the draft of my Artist’s Statement for Souls on Board. I can’t afford to lose anything in there; I want my own book back.

  The pad they gave me is a poor substitute for the quality Leuchtturm notebooks I choose for myself. But since I have nothing to do but sit in this holding cell with the man introduced to me as Drunk Dave, who is using a coverless paperback copy of The Clan of the Cave Bear as a pillow, I might as well document the events of today. For all I know, these notes will be confiscated, too, but if they’re not, I’ll have them to look back on. Not that I can imagine wanting to anytime soon, but I might as well, in case.

  This morning after my swim, I went up to my attic studio and tuned the radio to Rochester’s classical station. Though we are a hundred miles northeast of the city here, I can usually get it to come in. Someone told me once that hearing a good performance of classical music should make you feel like the top of your head is coming off, and that is how I judge what I listen to. Sometimes I picture the woman who is my mother—Linda Martin—playing the piano at the Eastman School of Music, where my father met her, with the expression of intense absorption I feel in my own face when I’m painting. In front of my easel, I might look up and find that three hours have passed, without my being aware of the world. The space I occupy in that time is reflected in the canvas; my thoughts are shapes and colors,
instead of words. I don’t feel hunger, thirst, or any other biological needs; I don’t, with my brush in hand, inhabit a body. Especially this past summer, in the days after Grandee died, I was so grateful to know I could achieve such a state that I almost wept.

  In the past few months, since Susanne put an end to things for good, I’ve felt desperate to find that internal place again. But the desperation gets in the way of my simply being able to settle in. (“Desperation is the worst perfume,” Grandee used to tell her single friends who were looking for husbands, and though I have heard the phrase many times in my life and recorded it in my commonplace book, only now do I understand from the inside what it means.)

  This morning I had not even had a chance to open my paints when I heard the knock downstairs at the front door, which I mistook at first for the sound of my landlady’s son loading lumber into his truck. When the knock turned into a bang, I went downstairs, pulling a sweatshirt around my GOT ART? tee-shirt, and saw two police officers standing on the stoop. I knew they were officers not because they wore uniforms but because of the smug set of the men’s mouths, which caused my throat to clench. When I opened the door and the younger, Hispanic-looking one spoke my name, I felt the room close in.

  “We have a warrant,” added the older of the two, whom I recognized from his constant appearance on the news since Joy’s disappearance and especially since her body was found over the weekend. Cerulean is the color of the chief’s eyes; I identified it from the artist’s color chart inside my mind. “To search the premises.”

  “For what?” I’d been expecting them to say I was under arrest, not that they were looking for something. Stalking is a crime, isn’t it? (I’d never thought of it as stalking when I sat in Grandee’s car outside Susanne’s house trying to summon the courage to get out, go up to the house, and talk to her, but I knew what her neighbor, who’d “caught” me out there idling, must have thought, and must have reported to the police.)

  “You can read it if you want.” The chief held up the piece of paper like a challenge or a taunt, but I shook my head and told him that it was fine for them to come in, the way Grandee taught me to do if I ever got pulled over or stopped on the street by the police.

  “You’ll be careful, right?” I asked. “A lot of what’s here are my grandmother’s things.”

  Instead of answering, Armstrong told the Hispanic officer (who stood only as high as Armstrong’s shoulder) to go upstairs and search. “Be careful of his grandmother’s things,” Armstrong called after him, giving a scornful snort.

  The chief and I stood in the living room without speaking, listening to the partner as he clomped around upstairs. After a while he came back down carrying my commonplace book, saying that was all he’d turned up. I told him there was nothing in there they wanted, they were just notes to myself. The chief said, “What’s the matter, afraid we’ll read something in your diary you want to keep secret? Like when you got your first period?” He ordered the other officer to put it in a bag, then told us to wait there while he searched the kitchen.

  We heard him yanking cupboards and cabinets in the next room. He said, “Jesus Christ, bring him in here,” and the Hispanic one indicated that I should precede him. Armstrong held up a black ski mask by the eyeholes and said, “What the fuck is this?”

  “That’s not mine,” I said, but when the chief whistled and said, “Bingo,” my response was lost.

  Armstrong slipped the mask into a bag and told his partner to finish the search. “Hey,” the partner said, after unfolding a piece of paper from the junk drawer. When I remembered what was on it, I felt a punch from inside my chest.

  “Who’s this a sketch of?” Armstrong held the sheet up in front of him. Though I know it’s a cliché, the only phrase I can think to describe what was on his face at that moment is sheer delight.

  “Nobody,” I said, recognizing even as I said it how stupid it was to lie. I am good at what I do, and I knew they recognized the face as Joy’s.

  “Holy Christ,” Armstrong said. The sketch seemed to please him even more than the mask. “We got you.”

  They told me I was coming with them. I asked if I was being arrested, and the chief said, “What do you think, douchebag?” before putting on the cuffs and leading me outside. My landlady, Cass, was watching from behind her own door on the other side of the house, and she told me to call her if I needed anything. Armstrong muttered that there was nothing she or anybody else would be able to do for me, but this was likely only for my benefit; I don’t think Cass heard him.

  I waited for them to read me my rights, but they did not. I knew it would be wiser not to talk, but I couldn’t resist asking during the short drive, “Aren’t I supposed to know why you arrested me?” (Looking back, I see that I was still allowing myself the delusion that it was related to stalking, even though stalking was not what I’d done.)

  “That’s only on TV.” The Hispanic officer didn’t turn around in the passenger seat as he answered. “But hey, as long as you’re wondering, let’s see—how ’bout we call it murder? Does that work for you?” He gave an obnoxious laugh in search of the chief’s approval and got a sideways smirk in return.

  The word made my gut go cold, and I clenched my jaw thinking I might puke. The anger I’d felt being led to the car in handcuffs slid straight down to fear. I wanted desperately to say something—to defend myself—but I knew there was no point. Only in that moment did it penetrate, what I had been denying to myself because it was too much to comprehend: the officers’ visit to my apartment, and my presence in this car, was related to Joy’s death.

  And if Susanne didn’t know already that they suspected me, she would find out any minute. Of course she knows by now. I can’t even tbring myself to imagine what she feels.

  At the police station, which before today I’ve only ever seen from the outside, they fingerprinted me and took my picture. (Mug shot, I reminded myself as it was happening, feeling glad for the first time ever that Grandee is not still alive; she said to me more than once that she never wanted to see my face in a mug shot on her TV, and when I asked, Why would I have a mug shot? she saw that she’d insulted me, but instead of apologizing she said, You know what I’m talking about. And, of course, I did.)

  After the processing, a woman sitting at a computer recited questions—my name, my date of birth, where I worked. “I’m an art student,” I told her, and she said, “Well, la-di-da” before asking me which school. She was angry at me, I could tell. I could only imagine how she would have reacted if I’d said I was an artist. What I felt coming from her was my first real clue (it went buzzing through my blood) that I was in more trouble than I’d let myself believe. They took my keys, my wallet, and my pen.

  I asked when I would get these items back; the pen was a gift from Grandee when I graduated from college. The woman at the computer only sneered and gave a signal to the chief that she was finished with her part.

  Armstrong came over to the desk and told me to stand up. “We just need you to clarify some things, okay?” he said, and the counterfeit warmth in his voice grated me more than when he’d called me a douchebag.

  “I think I’ll wait till I have a lawyer.” I tried to make my own tone sound pleasant in return, as if we were two guys just shooting the bull about which team had the better quarterback. I asked if I could make a call, and the chief swore as he turned to tell the woman at the desk to let “the ass-wipe” use the phone.

  In that moment I was glad that instinct is not visible, because my instinct was to call Susanne. And how wrong, how offensive I knew that would be to these people, who saw in the hands I offered up to them for the cuffs not hands that worked so precisely and painstakingly to make art but hands that would strangle a teenager, choke the life out of a child. A girl I spent time with and liked, the daughter of someone I loved. Not past tense: love. Why would they suspect me? Even if they knew about the stalking, how did they get from that to murder?

  But things had shifted out o
f the realm of logic and into a territory I know all too well, though I often pretend not to. The police brought that mask into my house. The joke Susanne and I shared—It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?—isn’t funny now, not that it ever really was.

  More than anything I want to talk to her, tell her myself what’s happening. She knows I am innocent. Doesn’t she? She herself sent me after Joy that day. Make sure she’s okay, okay? The idea that she might see merit in my arrest, might consider even for an instant that I could be responsible, is too much for me to bear. When they handed me the phone, I dialed Violet, in Brooklyn, instead.

  When I told her why I was calling, she was silent for a moment before uttering a long, drawn-out Shit. Then she told me to sit tight and said she would be there with a lawyer in the morning. “You don’t have to do that,” I told her, only then realizing that if she didn’t, I’d have to get the court to appoint someone to defend me. Violet told me not to be an idiot, then asked how they were treating me.

  “Okay.” I could feel through the phone that she didn’t believe me. “Well, you know.”

  “Shit,” she said again. She told me to try to sleep, she would see me tomorrow, she had to make some calls.

  So I came to this cell, a ten-by-twelve room with benches along the walls and a single stained toilet in one of the corners. The guard from the front desk brought me dinner—the same microwave mac and cheese I nuke for myself a couple of nights a week—and, when I asked for it, this pad and the cheap pen, which will go dry long before I run out of things I want to write with it.

  Until We Meet Again

  I’m telling you, he’s not the one,” Susanne whispered to Gil, as he pulled to a stop at the light. As long as she’d known him he always just bombed through a yellow, but he was more careful now. Not taking any chances. “You need to listen to me.”

  “Ssh,” he said, because the news report wasn’t over yet.