How Will I Know You? Page 3

  “Don’t ssh me.”

  “Shut up!” His own whisper was fierce, whipping at her across the space between them as he reached to turn up the volume. They were on their way to the funeral home, and when he asked her, “Radio?” she said “No,” but he either hadn’t heard her or hadn’t comprehended, and he turned on the news despite the fact that they already knew what the voice would say.

  A local man, Martin Willett, had been arrested for the murder of Joy Enright. Officers had taken him into custody after executing a search warrant at Willett’s home and finding a ski mask, among other items police believed might be related to the crime. Willett had been held overnight in the Chilton jail and was scheduled to be arraigned the next morning.

  The police chief had visited them three days in a row: Yesterday, to tell them about the arrest. The day before that, to tell them that Joy’s death was a murder. Two days earlier, that her body had been found, though they were withholding this fact from reporters until they could determine a cause of death. The first time, Susanne went to the sink and vomited; afterward, there was nothing left to purge. “No, no, no,” Gil had said each time, even going so far as to place his hand on the chief’s chest and push him slowly toward the wall. The first time, the chief flinched. After that, he just let Gil do whatever he wanted.

  When Armstrong named Martin as the man they’d arrested, Gil’s fingers turned to fists. The sight made Susanne double over again, and clutching herself she thought of Martin’s fingers—around a brush, on her body. When they were alone again, Gil placed his hands on her shoulders, and she thought he might shake her—she wished he would—but instead he just leaned in close and whispered, “Look what you did. He killed her. Look what you did.” The whisper made it even worse than it might have been; she wished he had shouted instead. After he left without telling her where he was going, she ran to find her phone, then remembered she’d erased Martin’s number. When she finally found it and dialed, it went to voicemail. She tried three more times, left no messages, thought of contacting Violet but realized she didn’t know her last name. When Gil came home, Susanne was still slumped on the floor in the kitchen, and they both knew he would step over her without speaking.

  Twenty hours later now (twenty hours neither of them could remember), Gil stabbed the car radio off only when the announcer moved on to something else. “Susanne.” Gil hardly ever said her full name, the way Martin always did. For a moment she thought with a clutch of dismay that her husband must know this somehow, then realized it was impossible. “They found a ski mask.”

  “I know,” she murmured, looking out at the gray sky, gray snow, gray street. Impossible to tell him that Martin had gone to the pond that day at her own request. “But there’s some other explanation. It wasn’t him.”

  When he took a turn too fast, she sucked in her breath and began rummaging through her purse. In the past three days she’d taken to carrying a plastic bag around with her because the nausea was constant. The only relief came when she slept, and that had been only a few hours. So far, even when her stomach pitched the worst, nothing had actually come up since the first time. But it made her feel better to be prepared in case.

  “We should go to the arraignment,” Gil said. He rubbed his chin on the collar of his coat, a gesture she’d come to think of as one he turned to for comfort, like a child with a blankie.

  “No. I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “What’s the point?”

  He sucked in his own breath as he stared straight ahead, and she wondered if nausea on its own could be contagious. “We need to see him. We owe it to her.” Neither of them had been able to speak Joy’s name since she’d gone missing, nearly a month ago now.

  “They’re arraigning the wrong person. When they figure that out and arrest the right person, then I’ll go.”

  Gil muttered something in reply that she couldn’t hear. She could tell he’d forgotten the exchange they’d just had when he pulled into the funeral home parking lot, turned the car off, and sat there still looking straight ahead, still with his hands on the wheel. “You okay?” Susanne asked, understanding as they both did that okay was a relative measure now.

  They got out of the car, and though the lot had been shoveled and sanded, Gil came around to take her arm as they began the walk across the ice to the entrance. Susanne couldn’t tell whether her husband was holding her up, or vice versa; most likely it was a system of mutual support. Team Us, only minus the third member. Once they stepped in the door, they’d have to plan Joy’s service.

  Ever since Joy started kindergarten, Susanne had dreaded taking her off to college when the time came, having to leave her behind. Now there was nothing she wouldn’t give to anticipate that pleasure.

  GOOD-BYES ARE NOT FOREVER, said the sign on the funeral-home awning, followed by UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN.

  Usually Gil moved at a faster pace than Susanne could keep up with. It was how he could fit so many jobs in a day, he used to say.

  But now she felt his hesitation in every step they took together, and their progress across the ice was slow. No wonder, Susanne thought—there was no difference between this and walking up to the hangman’s noose.

  Families often like to write the appreciation themselves, the funeral director told them as they discussed the arrangements.

  That’s what it always said in the paper, that people were making arrangements for the ones they’d loved who’d died.

  But what “arrangements” did Joy need now? Cremation or burial, that was it. Though Susanne and Gil had specified cremation for themselves when the time came, they couldn’t bring themselves to order it for their child. At least with a burial, they would always be able to imagine she’d just faded into the earth.

  When Susanne had spoken to him on the phone, the funeral director told her that he wouldn’t recommend a viewing, and she kept herself from asking why. Gripping her husband’s arm as they climbed the sanded steps, she faltered, hoping he would pause and give her the time they both needed before they went in. But if he noticed her stalling he ignored it, and pulled her like a punishment into the perfumed hall.

  What’s the appreciation? Susanne asked, and next to her Gil clarified: Obituary. Hearing him say it made her wince, and she understood why the mortician had used the other word.

  Also—here the man hesitated again (and to Susanne it seemed less like genuine reticence than the practiced rhythm of giving the grieving those details they needed to know)—some people like to bring in objects to be buried, or placed in the crematory, with their loved ones.

  An object? Like what? Susanne was the one who asked again, and again Gil was the one who gave the answer: Like a stuffed animal or something. Right? and the funeral director nodded and said it was, of course, up to them.

  On the way home he said, “So what do you think about an object going into the—in with her?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Nobody would see it, right?”

  “Right. It would just be for us, to know it went with her. Whatever it was.”

  “I guess if we could find something, I wouldn’t mind her having something she liked.” She knew this was ridiculous; Joy could no longer have anything, the same way she couldn’t like or know. She understood that it was only to make themselves feel better that she and Gil entertained the idea. And yet if it did so, even in the tiniest measure, what was the harm?

  They divided up the job of searching for something they might put in the casket. Gil volunteered to look in Joy’s bedroom; Susanne didn’t think she could cross that threshold yet. She said she would walk through the rest of the house, and they’d meet in the living room with any of Joy’s possessions they thought she might “want” as company through eternity.

  In the kitchen, her eyes moved first (as they always did) to a charcoal drawing Joy had done four years earlier in a Saturday-afternoon class at Susanne’s school. For an assignment on diminishing perspective, she’d painted the conveni
ence store at one end of Elbow Pond, in the viewer’s distance, a tapered triangle of water leading to the small, dilapidated building everybody in town called “the shack.” Lucas Hannay, who taught the class, told Susanne he couldn’t believe the drawing had been done by a thirteen-year-old: it was better than anything he’d seen by a master’s student all year.

  But now Susanne couldn’t remember when she’d last seen Joy pick up her pencils. She’d asked a few times, but Joy always shrugged and said “Whatever,” as if that were an answer.

  Susanne left the drawing on the wall; there was no way she would sacrifice it to the ground. She moved into the hallway and began rummaging through the mail basket, picking out the envelope from the College Board. This was not something to put in the casket, but she wondered if it would do to mention—in the appreciation—that Joy had gotten a perfect score on her SATs.

  No. The time for bragging was past. Besides, in the basket right next to the College Board envelope was the citation from the Chilton police, which Susanne had found in Joy’s jacket after they brought her home following her arrest the week before she disappeared.

  No, not disappeared. Before she died, Susanne reminded herself. For almost a month she’d allowed herself to think there was a possibility she would see her daughter again, but after the most recent visits from the police chief, there was no way to sustain that fantasy.

  And not only had she died rather than having run or been taken off somewhere—still to return or be returned to them—she had been murdered. And Martin—Martin!—had been accused of doing it. In the day since Doug Armstrong notified them of his arrest, Susanne barely allowed the fact to penetrate the haze of shock she still felt from the first news that her daughter was dead. The chief had told them without elaborating that the police felt confident in their “good evidence” against the suspect they had in custody. “Locked up,” Armstrong added, as if anticipating their need to be reassured on this point.

  Susanne had never seen the actual jail at the Chilton police station, but she imagined it was not a place she would want anyone she cared about to spend any time in. She and Gil had been to the station with Joy the night she got processed after the nursing home raid. Joy’s name had been kept out of the news because of her age, though because Chilton was such a small town, the arrest was almost general knowledge. Despite Joy’s insistence that it was a mistake—or not a mistake, she corrected herself, but a setup—Susanne and Gil had grounded her and confiscated her cell phone.

  That was another thing Susanne was forced, now, to live with; if Joy had had her cell phone with her that day, would she have been able to call for help? Susanne hadn’t agreed with Gil that taking the phone away was the best way to punish her, but after their daughter disappeared, she did her husband the favor of not reminding him that it had been his idea to deny her that privilege.

  She went to the door of Joy’s bedroom empty-handed. “Anything?” she asked, seeing Gil just standing there in the middle of the room, looking as if he didn’t know where or how to begin. When he shook his head, she took a breath and stepped in to join him. Immediately she felt the simultaneous sensations of comfort and longing (the air in here still smelled faintly of Joy, or did it? Was that possible?), nostalgia and grief. She could tell her husband felt it, too—it was what had stopped him in his search.

  A year ago, Susanne and Joy had painted this room together (only a year! Before the bottom fell out of so many things; that expression recited on the news so often, the bottom falling out, making her think of a wet cardboard box and its contents spilling through the mushy floor that was supposed to hold it all—the economy, her marriage vows, the way her daughter felt about her). When the paint dried, Susanne helped her move the furniture back in, and within an hour Joy had restored the room to the sanctuary she’d always cultivated for herself there, everything neatly in its place, including the under-bed boxes where she stored her art supplies, old toys, keepsakes, and out-of-season clothes.

  On Sunday, when they learned that the autopsy showed Joy had been strangled, the police had searched the bedroom, with Susanne’s and Gil’s permission. When Gil asked why they hadn’t done so sooner, Armstrong said that since she’d been presumed drowned, there was no reason to believe a crime had been committed. They took her computer, where they found the messages leading up to her final meeting with Delaney Stowell at the pond. Gil asked when they could have the computer back, and Armstrong said after the trial, if they caught who did it. They were following up some leads, he told them, and though Gil demanded to know what they were, Armstrong put him off, saying they’d know soon enough. Martin was arrested the next day—yesterday, now.

  “They did a good job,” Susanne said, meaning that the officers had managed to set the room mostly back to rights after their search. The clothes in the drawers were not refolded quite as precisely as Joy herself would have liked, but someone had made an effort. The boxes under the bed looked to be in their usual uniform rows, and though the items on Joy’s desk and bureau had been rearranged (and didn’t it mean something—didn’t it mean she was a good, attentive mother—that Susanne knew Joy kept her pens and pencils separate, her earring tree on the left side instead of the right?), they still looked like the belongings of a meticulous teenage girl.

  “I suppose we could put Brown in with her,” Gil said, nodding toward the rubbed-raw stuffed bear Joy had slept with since her days in the crib, but they both rejected this idea immediately without even having to say so. Not for anything would they give up Brown, even if they’d been able to believe in the idea that Joy could welcome him now.

  “I’ll keep looking,” Susanne told him. “Do you want to pick out something for her to wear?” Again: the phrase she would have used if their daughter were alive, capable of actively doing anything: wearing, choosing, looking nice. Gil took in an audible breath, went to the closet, and began sliding hangers across the rod.

  Susanne opened the top drawer of Joy’s nightstand, rummaged among the various tangled cords and spare earbuds, and then gave out a cry as she felt her chest buckle. “What?” Gil said, turning. He was holding a blouse Susanne had bought for their daughter on her last birthday. “This is pretty, right?”

  “I thought so, too. But she never wore it.” She was barely aware of thinking the words before she said them, knowing she would have to look back down and return to the shock of what she’d just seen. As Gil placed the blouse back on the rod, she reached into the nightstand drawer and drew out the homemade bookmark, bright orange fabric sewn over a cardboard rectangle. She’d seen it before, of course—it belonged to Martin.

  It belonged to Martin. It belonged to Martin. She had seen it in Martin’s house; where, exactly? In which room? She could not remember.

  But in Martin’s house. For a moment, she forgot to breathe.

  Gil was holding up another outfit: the dress Joy had worn for her induction into the National Honor Society. After the ceremony they’d taken her to the Inside Scoop, their family tradition to celebrate every good report card, which meant that they went out for ice cream every semester. “Good,” Susanne murmured. “That’s good.”

  “What?” He could tell she’d been distracted. “Did you find something?”

  She dropped the bookmark back in the drawer and shut it with a bang she had not intended. “I think maybe we should just put a few charcoal pencils in with her,” she said. “You know?”

  “Oh, I like that.” Gil’s face brightened the way it always did when he got excited about something; it was a moment before he remembered the context and looked sick again.

  They laid the dress on her bed—they would take it to the funeral home later—and left the room. “Come on, Salsa,” Gil tried to coax the cat, but Salsa refused and jumped onto the bed, where she proceeded to stretch across the dress. Gil moved to pick her up, then stopped himself. “I guess it doesn’t really matter, right?” he said, and Susanne agreed. When she returned a half hour later to retrieve the bookmark, the cat ha
d managed to lift one of the dress sleeves around her paw, covering that part of herself with the remnant of Joy.

  Gil went into the garage to rearrange the cans of leftover paint and stain they had accumulated over the years. He’d rearranged them only two nights earlier, a few hours after the police chief came to tell them that Joy’s disappearance, which had turned into Joy’s death, had now turned into Joy’s murder.

  In a different circumstance, Susanne might have followed him out—after they closed the door to Joy’s bedroom behind them—and asked, Why are you doing that now? Why are you doing it again? But instead she went into their own bedroom and closed that door, so she could only barely discern the sounds of him performing his pointless task. She laid the bookmark on the bureau and traced her fingers over its soft edges, the jolt of its discovery still ringing in her heart. Martin’s grandmother had given him the first bookmark on his birthday a few days after his father’s fatal airplane crash, when Martin was twelve. That meant he had twelve altogether, the last received earlier this year, just before his grandmother died. He kept them in a mesh spiral box next to his bed—an array of vibrant colors from her various sewing projects—but now Susanne remembered that he also had a similar collection up in the attic, his studio.

  What did it mean that Joy had in her possession one of Martin’s bookmarks? And that Susanne had not known this while her daughter was alive? She could barely articulate the question to herself, let alone imagine an answer. She reached for her cell phone before knowing whom it was she was moving to call.

  Doug Armstrong had instructed them to notify him of anything that might help with the case—new information or new memories, no matter how small. They could never know what might be useful, he said, encouraging them to “reach out.”

  Yet something kept Susanne from dialing his number. Part of it (but only part) had to do with the fact that she hated the phrase “reach out”—reaching out was what babies did toward their mothers, and what Adam did toward God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It didn’t mean calling someone to ask a question, or for help.