When the men cleared away with their beers and I stepped forward, Duke’s grin softened, became more personal than all-purpose. He leaned through the window to kiss me. “You know you could just come around back. VIP access.”
“I know.” I waved at Sal, a fifty-something guitarist with an unironic black mustache, standing behind him. “But I like to get the whole Duke’s experience.”
Duke pulled two Shiners from the fridge, and we sat at one of the tables, where our carved initials were now lost among hundreds.
“Guess what?” I said.
Duke twisted the tops off our beers, passed mine across. He smiled. “What?”
“Remember that story I told you about—the woman with the double marriage?” One of my legs bounced beneath the table, fine powdery dirt sneaking into my sandal. “I’ve been doing some research. I left a message for police records but I’m too impatient, so I found one of the old detectives and—”
“Hang on.” Duke frowned. “Is this for the blog? I thought you didn’t have to do extra reporting.”
I made a face, took a cold gulp of beer. “Not for the blog. I want to write a real story about this.”
“But—” Duke slapped at a fat mosquito on his tawny forearm. “The guy’s in prison, right?”
“Five more years.”
“So then? It’s over. Why are you reaching out to the detective?”
A curdle, deep in my belly. He didn’t get it.
“Crime is rarely over for the people involved,” I said. “The impact lingers. Anyway, the story’s really not about the murder. I have to know about it, but I’m much more interested in her. Dolores.”
“Why, though?” Duke glanced back at the Airstream, making sure Sal had the line covered. Sal gave him a thumbs-up.
Every crime story begins with the writer’s obsession. And for the last twenty years, you could say my obsession had been double lives.
My parents had loved traditions. Every Christmas my father made us Swiss Miss hot chocolate, the kind that came in packets with mini marshmallows, before we drove around to admire all the houses draped in white lights like wedding gowns. Every summer we went digging at the Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge, our rasping shovels searching for the selenite crystals with hourglass-shaped inclusions found nowhere else in the world except for this salt-encrusted land that was once covered by an inland sea. My parents, in those years, had seemed so predictable and familiar, as if nothing they could do would surprise me.
One time I walked into the kitchen and found them kissing. My mother’s back arched against the counter, her legs slightly spread, one of my father’s in between. He ran a hand up her white T-shirt, palming her breast while she crumpled a fistful of his blue shirt. Their mouths moved over each other, sensual and almost savage. I watched for a few moments, cheeks burning, before scurrying back to my room. I thought about that kiss often, after. How it looked like love, but also looked like pain.
My father had been scheduled to work on my ninth birthday. He was an aircraft mechanic at Vance Air Force Base. I used to stare at his hands, each groove stenciled black with oil. The night before my birthday, he squinted over the Better Homes and Gardens recipe for strawberry shortcake. “Does room-temperature butter mean butter left out until it reaches room temperature?” he asked. “Or warmed up until it reaches room temperature?” My mother laughed at his typical precision with language. “Maybe you can write a Letter to the Editor,” she teased.
Had there been tension between them that night? A sharpness on his breath? That’s the thing when you discover another side to a person you thought you knew. No memory is safe from cynical revisiting. You search for clues with the benefit of hindsight, desperate to believe your intuition hadn’t failed you so catastrophically. But in my memory my mother nudged him with her hip when she needed to see the floury magazine page. My father’s glasses steamed when he opened the oven. And my own soft, broken-in happiness: completely unremarkable.
The next day, after my friends’ mothers had bundled them up in marshmallow parkas and hustled them out into the frosty December evening, I followed my own mother with a trash bag stretched open like a cat’s cradle—the living room a graveyard of wilted streamers, frosting-smeared paper plates, and half-drunk Kool-Aid cups. Jim Croce, my mother’s favorite, played on the radio: “Bad, bad, Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole damn town.” We sang damn more loudly with each chorus and I was wild with laughter, hardly believing my mother was letting me swear in front of her.
That was when my father walked through the front door, his hands dwarfing that morning’s coffee thermos.
“John! You’re home early!” My mother’s palm flashed white as a star as she beckoned him to come join us.
Then a thud and something rolling at my feet—the golden urn that held my granddaddy, ashes spilling in sickening clumps, breaking into talcum-fine powder. What’s left of a man.
For a moment, silence. Then my father, red-eyed and mouth slack and one of those baseball-mitt hands, a strike so fast it couldn’t have been the first. The blow caught my mother in the chest with a dull, bony thwack, and she gasped, an absence of sound more than a sound itself, something that seemed to pull the air from my own lungs. My bladder pinched, warmth between my legs. The three of us staring at each other like strangers at a car wreck, shocked at the devastation. Then suddenly my father gagged and lurched down the hallway to the bathroom.
“Mommy.” The word squeaked out, the first time I’d called her that in years.
She fell to her knees. Gently, she pried the trash bag from my fingers and let it drop. A cup rolled out, Kool-Aid leaking on the gray carpet. She pulled me against her, my ear to the waterfall rush of her heart. “It was an accident,” she whispered. “Nothing happened. Okay?”
I nodded, desperate for her story to overtake mine.
“Cassie, you can’t tell anyone about this.” My mother’s sharp cheekbones flushed as she gripped my shoulders. “No one. Do you understand?”
Of course I didn’t understand. But I nodded again.
“Come on,” she said, looking at the front of my purple Levi’s. “I’ll turn on the shower for you.”
That was the beginning.
After that, I still earned good grades, laughed on the monkey bars, talked about boys and played the Ouija board at slumber parties. I blew out candles pretending every birthday didn’t remind me of the one when I’d lost everything that mattered. But I also gave in to the obsession that started with Dateline. I read crime books and saw myself not only as the potential victim but as the killer’s closest family, forever scarred for not recognizing the signs. I saw myself in the detectives, driven to understand those who shed their human skins to act on their darkest desires. I wanted to carve open the perpetrators’ skulls, hold their brains in my hands and sift through the folds to find where the rot began, how it had spread.
But, of course, I also saw myself in them. In those people who split themselves in two.
Maybe I recognized a piece of myself in Dolores Rivera.
I couldn’t say that to Duke, though. I’d told him only that my father and I didn’t get along. That my mother had bound us together and after her death we’d drifted apart. It happens. Duke had looked sympathetic. He couldn’t imagine a family like that, and he’d brought me into his own with no hesitation. Now it was too late. I couldn’t tell him about the years of bruises and silence without also revealing that I was no better than my parents. Maybe worse.
“I don’t know,” I answered Duke. “I guess I’m interested in how women, in particular, can reconcile these seemingly incompatible parts of themselves and then . . . go on living their lives. She’s an extreme example of that.”
Duke nodded, though he appeared unsettled. “What makes you think she’ll talk to you?”
I flinched.
“No,” he said, reaching for my hand. “I just mean if she didn’t want to talk to the first guy.”