Текст книги "House of Sand and Fog"

Автор книги: Andre Dubus

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Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

 

T HE SKY WAS BLACK AND TURNED TO BLUE JUST BEFORE A RIBBON OFbright coral opened like a cut on the horizon. At the edge of the parking lot, on the other side of a tall wooden fence, were juniper trees planted in a yard. The grass was thick and short, and there was a sandbox and swing set and jungle gym all made from dark beautiful wood—redwood, or maybe cedar. The house was beige stucco with a sienna tile roof and a low wide deck only a step off the ground, no railing, and four white plastic chairs around an umbrella table. Beside them, a child’s plastic wading pool covered with smiling spouting blue whales, and I watched from the other side of the fence, two stories up, each swallow a hook in the stitched belly of my throat.

At seven, a male nurse brought me orange juice, coffee, and a bowl of soupy Cream of Wheat. But I didn’t touch it and not long after, the back door of the house opened and a tiny brown-haired boy came running off the deck to the sandbox and blurred. I wiped my eyes. He put his hands in the sand, then lifted them over his head and let it sift down onto his hair. His mother set a mug of coffee or tea on the umbrella table, her long red hair catching the sunlight. She wore shorts and a loose T-shirt, and when she stepped off the deck and squatted at the sandbox I could see her thigh muscles. She was laughing, frisking the sand out of her son’s hair, then she turned and went back to her coffee, sat at the umbrella table and started to read. The little boy sat with his back to the fence and the hospital on the other side, his thick hair sticking out in curls behind his ears. I stared at the miniature blue-and-yellow-striped shirt he wore, at his small bare arms and hands, at how big his head looked on his shoulders. Each swallow was thumbs crushing my Adam’s apple all over again, and so I swallowed more than I needed, pictured the toddler in the yard growing into a boy with blue jeans and a red bike, then a teenager with a skateboard or maybe a beat-up car, and I swallowed twice and finally saw him as a man, a tall young man with a wife and child of his own. He’d drive up to that house across the parking lot and visit his mother and father—but the image wouldn’t stay and instead I kept seeing Mrs. Behrani’s son as I last saw him, climbing out of my car into the sunshine, glancing at Lester the way I’d seen high school boys wait for instruction from their coaches.

The boy lifted a truck over his head, dropping it onto something metal I couldn’t see. The mother glanced up at the sound, then went back to her newspaper, and the door behind me opened and the deputy sheriff stuck his head in, saw me sitting at the window in my hospital gown. He looked at me like he was trying to figure out what else I might be doing besides sitting, then he closed the door.

Yesterday, in another hospital, I woke to see Lester standing at the foot of the bed, my throat swollen and so dry it had cracked. His uniform was clean, his dark hair seemed too short, and he’d shaved his mustache, but I wanted him to come closer. I tried to speak but a nurse put her fingers on my wrist and told me to stay quiet. She was old and slender. I looked back at Lester, but it wasn’t him. This man was younger. His black hair was almost shaved and his eyes were not brown, but blue. I tried to sit up but the nurse put her hand on my shoulder, then showed me the button, and I pushed it and the mattress raised me forward and the nurse left the room. The deputy walked around to the side of my bed. There was another man in the chair behind him, older, with sandy hair and a tanned lined face. He had a piece of paper in his hand and he stood, introduced himself and the younger deputy, then opened it and read what I was being charged with: Aggravated Kidnapping, False Imprisonment, Brandishing a Weapon.

The young deputy leaned forward. My nose felt stopped-up, but I could smell his aftershave. “We know you’re not able to talk right now, Mrs. Lazaro. Would you like us to call your lawyer?”

I remembered the screech of tires in my driveway, the front door swinging open. I had expected to see Lester first, but when I saw the colonel, his bald head silhouetted against the sunlight in the yard, I knew he was alone and then I couldn’t move and his hands were around my neck, shaking me, my hair in my face, and I couldn’t breathe and a buzzing darkness was rising up inside my head.

I nodded at the deputy. He handed me a small notepad and pen and I wrote Connie Walsh’s name and number, then: What about Behrani? What’s he being charged with?

The young deputy read my note, then showed it to the older one, who looked right at me, his eyes green and full of something that made me look down at his arms, at the thick tufts of hair on them. “Mr. Behrani’s deceased.”

I was lying down and they were standing there but the room felt so suddenly still and quiet I started to feel too far away to see and hear what would come next. I took the pad from the young deputy: What?I wanted to ask about Lester. Why hadn’t he come back? Then I thought if they were calling me a kidnapper they had to be calling him one first, but I couldn’t be sure so I didn’t write any more. They didn’t answer me anyway. The older one seemed to be in charge. He stepped away from the bed and told me to get the facts from my lawyer. Then the younger one called Connie Walsh’s office and explained where I was and what I was being charged with. I heard the crimes again, and except for Brandishing a Weapon, pulling Lester’s pistol out of my bag at the gas station, I had a hard time matching up Kidnapping and False Imprisonment with me. The older deputy held the door open for the younger one, then they were gone.

There was another bed in my room, but it was empty with no sheets, just a white plastic mattress cover, a TV suspended in the corner of the ceiling, the dark screen watching me: The colonel was dead.On the serving table was a pitcher and a short stack of paper cups. I poured water into one and drank, each swallow a spiny sea urchin in my throat. My window shade was pulled and I could hear the sounds of traffic nearby. I scooted to the side of the bed. I was dressed in a hospital johnny with nothing underneath. I moved to the window but my legs felt shaky. I opened the shade. Ten feet down was a flat tar roof with big air-conditioning or heating units on it. And on the other side was more building and windows. In one of them was the colored flickering of a TV. I couldn’t see the sky but the daylight was overcast. I wondered if it was morning or afternoon. My neck was stiff and I could hardly look down or to the right and left. I remembered seeing the colonel’s yellowed teeth grinding together, the flare of his nostrils, feeling my feet lift off the ground. I got back into bed and lay down, but it suddenly felt like a dangerous place, as if the bed were a thousand feet off the ground and if I turned over too fast or even reached for water, it would tilt and fall to rocks below; if Behrani was dead, I was sure Lester must’ve killed him.

Less than an hour later the deputies came back, told me I’d been classified a flight risk and was being transferred to San Mateo County Hospital. The older one rode in the back of the ambulance with me. He sat across from my gurney chewing gum, looking around at all the medical equipment. Sometimes his eyes would look into mine. The sky was growing dark as they wheeled me here and at the elevator an older woman with too much blush on her cheeks held the doors for us and she smiled down at me and said, “You are going to be just fine, dear. You’ll see.” There was a smear of lipstick on her front teeth, which were perfect and false, but I wanted to believe her.

The older deputy stayed here in my room until the nurse left, then he stood close to the bed and looked down at me like he was waiting for me to finish answering a question he’d never asked. I swallowed and had to close my eyes a minute. When I opened them he was shaking his head like I’d disappointed him. “Les Burdon and I used to be partners before they divided us up into single units. He was sheriff material, but he’s all through now, I hope you know that. They’ve got him in Protective Custody, but that won’t last. They’ll throw him to the hounds.” He stepped back from the bed and moved to the door. “There’ll be a man outside till you’re okayed to leave, then you’re going right to holding in Redwood City. Think about that.”

He left and I looked up at the white rectangles of the ceiling, the fluorescent light. I closed my eyes and swallowed what felt like a dozen thumbtacks, and I wanted that sandy-haired married deputy to feel it too, feel the colonel’s thumbs breaking through his Adam’s apple like it was cardboard; I wanted this old friend of Lester’s to be at the fish camp when Lester put on his uniform and had me drive him to talk to the colonel; I wanted this friend to be in the house waking up to the whole family locked in the bathroom; and I wanted the deputy to be standing in the bedroom his father left him as Lester held his gun to the colonel’s neck in my car. None of these things I asked for. I didn’t ask for any of them.

A nurse and doctor came into the room. The nurse was younger than me. She smiled and introduced the doctor, a short man with silver hair and thick glasses that made his eyes look tiny. He read the clipboard at the foot of the bed, then came closer and put two warm fingers against my throat. My eyes began to fill up and I must’ve made a sound because the nurse took my hand and held it while the doctor looked down my throat with a tiny flashlight, then patted my shoulder and said my soft tissue was healing well and it would be best not to speak a word for at least two full weeks. Then they were gone, their white coats disappearing behind the door, and I didn’t feel mad anymore; maybe I didn’t deserve the deputy’s judgement of me for things I never did, but now I felt even more that I didn’t deserve the warmth the nurse just showed me, holding my hand like I was a victim in all this. Because I knew that wasn’t true. Neither picture of me was true.

My door opened and a round Chicana woman brought in my supper on a tray: a glass of water, a bowl of clear yellow broth, and a dish of vanilla pudding. She smiled at me and I could see a gold cap on one of her front teeth. She left the room and Connie Walsh stepped in. Her dark hair was shorter than when I last saw her, cut close to the sides of her head, which made her pretty face look older and a little harsh. On her feet were brand-new running shoes and I started to smile but my face felt funny, my lips thick and twisted, and I couldn’t look right at her.

She didn’t say anything, just stood there, and I felt her looking at me. She put her hand on my shoulder, pushed my food tray closer to me, and asked if I could sit up. I pressed the button, and once I was up, glanced at her, at her dark eyes that took me in with nothing but concern. I thought of Mrs. Behrani, how she looked at me like that too, and I felt I was with an old friend, one I was going to let down, if I hadn’t already.

Connie Walsh handed me a spoon. “How much do you know?”

I shook my head and pointed to my throat. She apologized and waved her hand in front of her face, opened the briefcase in her lap, then handed me a yellow legal pad and a pen. I pushed my supper tray to the side and wrote: They said Mr. Behrani is dead. Where’s Lester?

She read the note before I’d finished turning it to her and looked at me a second, her lips slightly pursed. I wrote: What happened?

She took the pen and pad and began to write, then stopped and shook her head at what she’d just done. I smiled and she started to smile too.

“Is Mr. Burdon your boyfriend?”

I nodded and I wished I could hear my voice as I answered yes.

“He’s in custody in Redwood City.”

I looked at her and waited.

Her eyes went to my supper. “The boy was killed.”

My whole face felt squeezed, the air pulling back in my throat.

“Evidently he’d gotten ahold of Mr. Burdon’s pistol on a busy street and was pointing it at him.” Connie Walsh’s voice was calm and controlled but she was looking at me like she’d only begun. “He was shot by police officers.”

This boy who this morning was walking so tall and straight down the hall, his black hair still mussed from sleep. I reached for the paper and pen, my fingers hot and thick: I thought Mr. Behrani was dead. The colonel.

Connie Walsh looked at me like she’d been waiting for the conversation to reach this point and now that it had, she wasn’t quite ready for it. She was leaning away from me slightly, her hands on her knees. I nodded for her to talk but even before she started to I couldn’t look directly at her anymore; I focused on her hands, on her knuckles, which were wider than her long thin fingers. Her nails were short, some with tiny scratches on them, and for a second I saw her on her knees after work digging in a garden, but then she was telling me everything, her hands coming together, her fingers intertwined, Mr. and Mrs. Behrani lying dead in my old bedroom, Connie Walsh’s voice talking of detectives reconstructing the scene. “They want to talk to you, Kathy.”

Now I looked at her, but it was like seeing someone through the wrong end of a telescope. She wasn’t talking anymore. She seemed to be waiting for me to try and speak, or write something, but her face was too far away to read, just an oval of flesh that was now asking me to write her everything, to write what the colonel did to me and when, to write how involved I’d been in holding this family against their will. “Write me everything, Kathy. Write me the truth.”

The word was a black bat flittering between us. I looked down at my own hands, at the cleaning calluses on my palms. I saw again Mrs. Behrani standing in her kitchen, pressing her hand to the side of her head. I thought of the pain she must’ve been in, and I hoped it wasn’t the last thing she’d felt. Connie Walsh’s voice was more relaxed now and she was getting up, telling me she was late for an appointment but would be back tomorrow to read the facts. That’s how she referred to what I would write. She touched my hand a second, then was gone.

I drank a spoonful of broth. It seemed to bathe my throat on the way down, but I didn’t drink any more. I imagined the Behranis laid out on a morticians’s table: the colonel, his suffering wife, his loyal son. My stomach drew backwards inside me and I sat up fast, my mouth filling with saliva. Connie Walsh’s notepad and pen fell to the floor and I left them there, moved to the chair by the window and sat. I breathed long and deep through my nose and mouth till I didn’t feel like I was going to throw up. Outside the window the parking lot was dimly lit with only a few streetlamps, and at the far corner cars passed on the road, their headlights and red taillights visible. In the hallway outside my door was the soft squeak of nurses’ shoe soles as they passed by, the metal wheel roll of a food cart or gurney, the talking and laughing of three women at the nurse’s station, a woman’s voice over an intercom calling a doctor to ICU, then more talking, an elevator door sliding open and closed, the flushing of a toilet in a room not far from mine, then someone humming, the flap of a wet mop hitting the floor, the humming a man’s voice, the tune unrecognizable; and I was unrecognizable. I could see my reflection in the window, a small shadowed face, hair flattened in the back. I looked like a sick child. But I felt dirty. My throat was dry and it was harder to swallow than ever, but I didn’t care. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the facts for Connie Walsh but I kept thinking of Lester in Protective Custody, sitting alone in some cell separated from the rest of the prisoners because he’s a cop, the kind they would never understand, a man who would avoid shooting an armed Filipino boy, the kind that had risked his job to try and get me back into my house.

The mopping and humming had moved farther down the hallway, and I could hear the deputy on duty clear his throat, turn the pages of a magazine or newspaper. I got up and turned off the light switch near the door. The nurse’s button glowed white at the head of my bed, and I made my way back to the chair at the window, the vinyl upholstery sticking to the backs of my bare legs, and I remembered Mrs. Behrani bringing tea and kiwi fruit to her son’s room for me, her brown eyes full of compassion as she looked down at my bruised arms, as if her husband doing that had been the only reason I showed up at her doorstep drunk with Lester’s gun.

But it was everything: it was talking to my brother Frank and hearing that same old patronizing tone; it was the Mexican boy flicking his tongue out at me, his eyes on my crotch like it was something he’d already seen a hundred times before; it was wearing stolen clothes; it was the bright sun on the day after I had drunk too much with Lester the night before; it was my dry mouth, and the deep hungover fear I had that Lester had used me up already and was going back to his wife; it was driving through his neighborhood of one-story ranch houses in the heat looking for what I hoped I wouldn’t find—it was all of these things and none of them; it was Lester pulling out of me at the fish camp, coming onto me in what I was sure was a sudden change of heart; it was me letting Lester finish what we’d both started, letting all this happen so I could put off facing my mother and brother with the news that somehow Dad’s house had slipped through my fingers: I’d been willing for Lester to do anything so I could put off that moment of judgment.

I looked out over the empty parking lot, at the shadowed wooden fence and the black trees behind it, and for a while I tried to tell myself it was the colonel who had brought all this down on us. It was him not doing the right thing with my father’s house. It was his greed, and it was his pride. I remembered him on his new roof deck with his wife and daughter and friends, his expensive suit, a flute of champagne in his hand, potted flowers set in the corners of the railing and on the floor, laughing at something one of the fat rich women had said, the way he looked at me as we drove by, his eyes narrowed, all the muscles of his face still with some kind of concentration that scared me.

The door behind me opened and the light from the hall spread across the room. I didn’t turn around but in the window reflection I could see the deputy’s silhouette, his short haircut and baggy short sleeves, his gun belt. He seemed to look from the chair to the bed, then at the chair again before he stepped back into the hallway, the heavy door closing by itself. My throat felt like cracked stone and with each swallow my eyes would tear, but I didn’t let myself get up for water or broth.

I slept in my chair at the window. When I opened my eyes the darkness was fading and I watched the light come from the east, spreading over the stucco house and its yard, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Now the little boy’s mother drank her coffee and read her paper on the deck. She leaned forward as she read, her thick hair gathered over one shoulder. I wondered what her husband was like. Was he kind to her? Did he want a child when his wife got pregnant? Did they make love early in the morning before their son woke up? My throat hurt worse than ever. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out, the toilet still flushing, a new doctor and the deputy were standing at the foot of the bed waiting for me. The doctor was tall. He introduced himself, then had me sit on the bed and he looked down my throat with his penlight, put his fingers on my lymph glands, and told me not to talk for ten to fourteen more days. The deputy’s eyes were full of a light that reminded me of my brother: fascinated by other people’s trouble, happy hewas in the clear. The doctor wrote something on the clipboard, then left, and the deputy handed me my old clothes: my shorts, the girl’s Fisherman’s Wharf T-shirt, her too-small yellow panties. He told me I was being transferred to Redwood City to be booked, then he left the room and I changed at the window, my eyes on the boy and his mother. The underpants were still tight at my hips and as I pulled on my shirt and shorts the boy stood, his hands open at his sides. He climbed out of the sandbox and walked over the grass. He stepped onto the deck in front of his mother, then held his hands out in front of him, his chin pulled in slightly, his belly sticking out. His mother smiled down at him. She wiped the sand off his hands and lifted him onto her lap, his small back against her breasts, his sneakers just barely reaching her knees. The door opened behind me but I didn’t turn around and I could smell the deputy’s spearmint gum as he said he was sorry but he had to follow procedure and he took my wrists and slipped the cool metal of his handcuffs onto them, clicking them closed, my pulse pushing against them. I couldn’t see the boy’s face anymore, and in the hours and days that followed I would think of him, the way an important dream comes back to you throughout the day, a day that begins at six-thirty, my door unlocking electronically, me stepping out onto the second tier and filing downstairs with black women and white women, Chicanas, all of us dressed in the orange khaki pants and tank tops and overshirts of the San Mateo County Jail, over fifty of us.

On the bottom tier we sit at steel tables and eat toast and cold cereal or scrambled eggs and sausage links. Two color TVs are fixed to the wall, tuned to morning news shows, the anchorwomen pretty and successful. In the middle of the room is a control desk with four woman deputies on duty, and on clear days the door to the rec yard is open, though it’s not a yard at all but a flat rooftop with a Universal weight-lifting gym set in the middle of it, a piece of equipment no one uses. One morning a young black girl pulled herself to the top of the chinning bar, sat there, and smoked two cigarettes. At the edge of the yard is a high hurricane fence topped with razor wire, then it’s four stories down to the streets of Redwood City. You can see the old domed courthouse and part of the Hall of Justice building where Lester used to work. But of course Lester is here with me now, somewhere under us in another wing with the men, the carjackers and rapists and murderers.

On the bottom tier after breakfast, most of the women stay at the tables and smoke and talk. There are pay phones on the wall which never go unused, women calling their kids and boyfriends or husbands collect, their eyes miles away as they talk and sometimes yell or cry into the phone. Some even laugh. But I don’t. I don’t smoke either. My throat can’t tolerate it, the smoke going down like grit rubbed into a raw scrape.

There’s a black woman named Jolene who smokes pack after pack of Marlboro Lights. Her voice is as deep as a man’s. She’s short with boyish hips and small breasts, and her knuckles are wide and hard-looking and she never stops talking and even the big women seem smaller around her. My first week, one afternoon before the midday lockdown for lunch cleanup, she tapped me on the shoulder and said loud enough for an audience, “Why youhere, girl?”

I was sitting at a table with two Mexican girls who spent their lunch talking to each other in Spanish. Three or four black women were standing around and behind Jolene waiting for my answer. At first I didn’t understand her question and couldn’t talk anyway. I pointed to my throat and shook my head.

“You can’t talk?”

I nodded.

“You deaf?”

I shook my head again. One of the women behind Jolene smiled and I could see her teeth were bad.

“So you’s mute.”

The one with the bad teeth laughed. A few others smiled. One of the deputies from the control panel called over to everybody to head back to their cells for lockdown. I nodded at Jolene and she was smiling like I’d just shown her something she’d been wanting to know a long time.

“You mean God sit back with the remote and motherfuckin’ muteyour ass?”

Jolene’s girls laughed and I smiled and that afternoon after supper, while we all sat at tables in front of the two TVs on two different channels, waiting for our turn to go to the commisary or laundry exchange, Jolene yelled across the room at me: “Hey, Remote! Mute them motherfuckin’ TVs!”

She laughed louder than the women around her, and from then on if a woman needed me to pass her the salt or hand off to somebody a lighter or cigarette, she’d say in a loud voice, “Send me the salt, Remote.” Or, “Remote, pass this down to Big April.”

After the first two weeks, when I was alone in my cell I tried talking again, naming the objects in front of me, “Floor. Wall. Toilet. Sink,” my throat aching no more than when you have an allergy, my voice maybe lower than it used to be, but I still kept quiet on the bottom tier and in the rec yard and I let them call me by my new name.

These first weeks Connie has come and seen me three times, once with two detectives who took me to a room and had me write how the colonel tried to strangle me before he went on to do the rest. Lawyers and visitors have to go to the mezzanine on the second tier, a room of enclosed booths with thick glass separating us from visitors. Until I could use my voice again, Connie would talk into the phone while I wrote my answers and questions and held them up to the glass. Now that my voice is back I hunch forward and talk softly into the receiver so none of the other inmates with visitors will notice.

Every time, Connie wants to hear the facts. I tell her what I’ve done, wishing I hadn’t said anything because her planned defense of me is that I was defenseless, suicidal, and drugged when Lester was locking the Behranis into their bathroom, that I was sick and physically weak, my judgment impaired, the next day when he forced the colonel and his son to Redwood City. She wants to argue that I am not who they’re charging me as being, though she admits she has a mountain to climb to prove all this because my best witnesses are no longer with us. That’s her expression, “no longer with us,” though that doesn’t seem true to me.

Connie was able to get me some money for magazines at the commisary, but during the lockdown hours after our meals, I sit on my bunk and can’t even look at them. Instead, I keep seeing Mrs. Behrani, her small lined face, her deep brown eyes, the way she looked at me, one woman to another, when she asked if Lester would hurt her son, who I feel hovering in the corners of my cell, a young and polite presence. And I see his father in a way I never saw him, his bald head turned towards me, his face with no expression, like nothing I did to him can touch him now, but his eyes are two dark stars of grief.

Sometimes I sit against the wall on the rec roof with the sun on my face. I can hear the TVs inside, the chatter of the other women, one of them coughing. I look past the chain-link fence at the edge of the roof, the razor wire too bright, and I ache to see Lester, to lie beside him in the hot loft of the fish camp, to kiss his crooked mustache and hold his narrow back. I remember his ex-partner at the hospital saying he’ll be thrown to the hounds, and I can only hope he’s wrong, that the guards will look out for one of their own, though I feel like I’m lying to myself thinking this. I don’t let myself think of his kids, or his wife, and if I think of the house at all it’s only that Ishould’ve died there and nobody else, of how much better it would’ve been if Mr. Behrani never saved me from Lester’s gun, if Mrs. Behrani never saved me from her own pills.

Today Jolene walks over to me, a cigarette smoking between her lips, her eyes squinting like a man’s. “Mezzanine bitch sent me to get you. You got visitors.”

I’m so surprised to hear this I almost ask out loud who. But instead I keep my eyes on Jolene, waiting for her to say more.

“That’s right, Remote, somebody wants to do sign language.”

Only two days before, I saw Connie. She’s still working on getting my hearing date moved up. I told her I didn’t want her to make me look like I wasn’t responsible for what Lester had done.

“But you weren’t, Kathy. We’re not fabricating any of that.” Connie looked at me through the glass, the phone pressed to her ear. I could see small red marks on both sides of her nose from reading glasses or sunglasses. She looked tired, her lips parted, ready to argue against whatever I was about to say. The other visiting cubicles were empty, but I kept my voice to a whisper as I talked into the phone. “I’ll deny it. I’ll say I was sober and never took any pills.”

Connie Walsh shook her head, her lips pressing tightly together. “Then what isour defense, Kathy?”

“I don’t have one. A family is gone.” My throat started to close up and I turned my face away. I put the receiver back on the hook, left the mezzanine, and went back out to the tier where I knew I wouldn’t cry, where I was relieved I didn’t have a voice.

Now I climb the concrete steps to the second tier, thinking it is either Connie or she’s dropped me as her client and it’ll be a new lawyer, one assigned by the state. A blond deputy opens the door for me. Whoever has come is sitting, and I’m not close enough to see who through the glass over the cubicles, one of them taken up by a Chicana girl, her husband or boyfriend on the other side holding the phone to a little girl’s ear. Then, behind the glass a few cubicles down, my brother Frank stands up. He’s wearing a banana-yellow polo shirt, his black hair is moussed back, and there’s a thin gold chain around his neck, a gold watch band on his wrist. He’s gained weight, the curve of his belly pushing his belt buckle a little. He’s squinting into the glass, his hands on his hips, but he doesn’t see me. Then he does and his lips part, his eyes get shiny, and I want to turn and walk back out onto the tier: I hadn’t sent a letter; I hadn’t made one phone call; I guess I was waiting for Labor Day to come and go, for my mother and aunts to drive by the empty house and know Frank had been right, that I was away on a trip and wouldn’t be back for a long time.