She Took the Tape

The night itself. As much of it as she left in me.

I told you I don't have the last night. That's still true. She took the tape, and I'll get to how she took it, because how she took it is the loudest thing in the whole case. But sitting here following the wires backward the way I'd trace a dead circuit, cold, one lead at a time, some frames have come loose and floated up out of the dark, and I'll lay them on the bench where I can see them, and do the thing I never once managed while I was breathing, which is look at them square.

I was sick a long while at the end. Weeks. It started as a cough and then the cough climbed down into my chest and set up housekeeping, moved the furniture in, put its feet up. Fever that came and went and came back meaner. The days quit having edges. I'd surface and it'd be dark and surface again and it'd be dark again and I couldn't have told you if a night had passed or three. And I couldn't breathe right, there was a wet weight in me like a rag left in the lung, and my heart was going like a fist on a door, and every alarm bell in me was ringing the exact same alarm it had rung a hundred false times before. In that basement. In the pew at the back where I could reach the door. In the cereal aisle at the Smith's with a box of shredded wheat going soft in my hand and my own pulse telling me this is it, John, right here, this is the one.

And you know what a man does when he's spent thirty years being told that particular alarm is a liar? He tells himself it's a liar. You're fine, John, you're always fine, breathe it out, it's just the nerves showing off again. I'd been trained. Trained by every doctor in the valley who ever sent me home with a pat and a pamphlet, trained by my own hard survival, to talk myself back off exactly this ledge. Only this time the ledge was real. The drop was real. And I stood there and did the one trick I knew and talked myself right off it into the open air. And so did everybody else in that house, because I'd trained them too. Oh, he does this. He'll be fine by morning. That's just Dad. I spent thirty years teaching every soul around me that my dying was a thing they had my blessing to ignore.

And then I needed one of them. Just one. Just the once. Needed somebody to look at the gray old man drowning on dry land and believe him. And the one standing closest, the one whose hand was on the light switch, was the single wife in this whole notebook who wanted me gone.

That's not the murder weapon. I know it isn't. But it's the room the murder happened in, and I framed that room myself, board by board, one false alarm at a time, and then I handed her the only key. Remember it.

Here's a frame. There was soup that last night. Paige made it, Sarah's girl, a sweet sad quiet kid I was always kind to, and you'll want to hold onto her, because she matters more to this story than either of us knows yet. And afterward, the fuss they made over that soup. His favorite. She made him his favorite, isn't that a mercy. Only it wasn't my favorite. Never cared for the stuff, never once asked for it. Funny thing to get wrong. Funnier thing to keep on insisting to a room full of mourners. When folks buff one innocent little detail that hard, past all reason, a card man quits watching the detail and starts asking what the buffing is for.

Here's another. A glass in my hand. Her voice close over me in the sick-smelling dark, gentle as anything, drink this, honey, it'll help you settle. She'd been giving me drinks at the end. For the nerves, she said. And then, when I was cooling on a slab, the story she carried to the law was that I'd died of stopping the drink. The shakes. The withdrawal. The DTs, like some gutter drunk gone dry. Now hold on and think with me. I was a man who'd had a nerve pill under his tongue half his life, the little Klonopin, and any doctor in the state will tell you that pill is the very thing they hand a fella to walk him through the shakes. So a benzo man dying of the shakes is a strange fish to fry. And if somebody had, say, quietly quit slipping me my own pill along about then, well. You can come apart off of that too, worse, and it looks near enough the same to a tired coroner working past his lunch. I don't know which it was. I'll keep saying it plain because it's the only tool I've got left: I don't know. But the drink she poured, and the withdrawal she blamed, and the pill she managed the bottle of, all three run to the same box. And the box has her name burned on the lid.

And there's the water. The one I can't get around no matter how I turn it. There was water running that night, a long time. Hours. In the dark. I can near about hear it still, the way it must have sounded from that bed, a hard steady beating-down of water somewhere up in the house while everything else lay dead quiet, and-and-and it just kept on, down and down and down. And she was there in the bed. Close enough to hear it. And she did hear it. And what she'd tell people after was that she figured it for the air conditioner and rolled back over. The air conditioner. For hours. She sleeps till noon, she'll tell you, she'll tell anybody, like that's an alibi and not the whole indictment standing up in court and pointing.

And in the morning I was up in that tub. Colleen's tub, the jetted one, two floors up from my whole downstairs life. The one I never used, not once, not ever, a man who couldn't make himself get in still water. Up there dressed, laid out, the water gone cold around me and still running cold over me, still running. There was shouting first. I've got that much held back from the black, the very last frame before it all goes out: two voices raised in the small hours, sharp, loud enough the neighbors would swear to it later with their eyes cutting away. And then nothing. And then the water. And then this. And then me, up here, watching.

Now. Here is how she took the tape, and it's the part I can prove, if only to this notebook by the light of this one bulb, the part that needs no water in it at all to convict. Before my own kids could stand in a room with my body. Before one single soul with a license and a reason to care had bent over me and asked the plain question how did this man die, she had me embalmed. Fast. Drained and filled and painted and set, inside the week. Now there is exactly one procedure on this whole earth that is built, among its kinder purposes, to wash the answers clean out of a body, to flush the very evidence down a drain and pump the truth full of pink, and she paid cash money to have it done to me before the questions could so much as form on a tongue. My kids fought for a cutting anyway. Good kids, better than I earned, and they made them do it over the embalming, over the ruin of it, and it came back exactly the way she'd built it to come back. Inconclusive. By the time anyone was let to ask the body, the body couldn't answer.

That's the tell. That's the whole woman in a single act. A person who embalms the answer before the question is a person holding an answer she cannot afford to have asked out loud. It's the same move she made her entire life, I see it now, from up here, I've watched her run it over and over till it turns my stomach. The instant the ugly thing is about to be seen, she buries it faster than anybody alive. She embalmed my death by embalming me.

So do I have it? Did I follow the wires all the way home to the one that failed?

Near enough. Nearer than a dead man's got any business getting. I can't hand you the single instant. Held under, or let go under, or shaken apart off a pill she quit giving me, or maybe just a sick old fool who cried wolf one time too many and got taken at his word by the one person on earth betting he was right. I can't give you that instant. She took it, in a tub, in the dark, and then she embalmed it so it could never be handed to a living soul.

But I don't need the instant to close the notebook. Because here's the truest thing thirty years on the bench ever taught me: you do not always get to see the exact moment the part let go. Sometimes it's melted to slag. Sometimes it's gone to powder. Sometimes somebody got to the machine and threw the burnt part in the trash before you ever popped the panel. But you can still hold the whole thing up to the light, the scorched wiring and the smell and the way every last lead runs home to the one bad box, and you can say, with your entire trade standing behind you, this is what killed it. You don't need the last frame when every other frame is aimed at the same door.

And every frame I've got is aimed at that door.

And she is standing in it.

Except.

I've been at this too long to walk past a thing that doesn't sit right, and here's the thing that will not sit right: it was too clean. The timing. The paperwork lined up in a row. The body handled inside the week. The story cut and stitched and ready before the first honest question ever got asked. That is not the work of a wife gone to pieces in a panic. That is planned. Cold, and sequenced, and done by somebody who sat down beforehand and did the math and slept fine after.

And here's the crack that ran the whole length of me and never once got fixed. My first thought, my very first, quick as a reflex, was that there had to be a man behind it. Somebody's hand drawing the hammer back for her. Because some low broken beaten part of me would sooner believe any fool thing on this earth than believe that the woman across my own kitchen table, pouring my coffee, was the coldest and the cleverest thing in the house. Hold onto that thought of mine. Mark it. It's just about the last dumb thing this notebook is going to catch me doing, and it is going to march me all the way to Florida and back before it finally gets knocked out of my head.

And there's the other thing, the one I keep skating past because it's the strangest of the lot, stranger even than the water. How did I get up those stairs? A sick man who couldn't cross the front room without stopping to breathe. A man who feared the water his whole life. A man who never once set foot in that tub. How did I come to be in it, two flights up, dressed, dead, the taps still running? A body doesn't climb. A body doesn't haul itself up two floors to lie down in cold water it was always scared of. A body gets carried.

So no. Not one page left. I was wrong about that too. I thought the wife was the end of the wire and she is only the middle of it, and there are two more things I have got to run down before I hand over the pencil, because I was not the last one in that house to die, and I was not the only one who put hands on me on the way into that water.

Let me tell you about my own funeral first.