Before She Knew Him Page 14

  He stuck around for most of the morning, eating pretzels until she told him to stop.

  “What are you putting out with these?” he asked. “To drink?”

  “I have apple cider.”

  “Ooh, you should warm it up, put some spices in it. It would make it smell nice in here.”

  Hen thought that was a good idea. She had a hot plate in her studio and sent Lloyd to get a pot and buy some cider spices. She was glad to get rid of him. She knew he’d leave as soon as people started walking through her space, but she wanted a little time alone. She prepped about eight copper plates that she could run through her press that afternoon. She found it so much better to stay busy, hating the act of standing around watching strangers look at her art. Lloyd returned right before noon. He had their yellow Dutch oven, a packet of spices, and even a pint of Maker’s Mark.

  “You think I should spike the cider?” Hen said, laughing.

  “I thought it might be good to have it, just in case.”

  He put the cider on low, and soon her studio was filled with the smell of apples and cloves. Lloyd and she each had a mugful, spiked with bourbon, and she felt a sudden, overwhelming sense of well-being, that things would turn out all right. When the first visitors arrived—a middle-aged couple, the man glum and uninterested, and the woman with a streak of purple in her hair, wearing two handmade brooches on her coat—Lloyd took off.

  It was a busy afternoon. The nice weather brought out a ton of people, and the cider was gone by three in the afternoon, nothing left but a dark slurry on the bottom of the pot. Hen had underpriced her prints and wound up selling about fifteen of them. She was used to doing open studio events, having done them for years in Somerville, but it was a slightly different crowd out in the suburbs. They asked more questions and spent more money. At five o’clock she was exhausted. She called Lloyd and he came to pick her up. He’d spent the afternoon making chili, he said, and watching a little college football. He smelled like he’d had many beers as well, and Hen was glad he was only driving a mile back to the house.

  The weather changed on Sunday, the morning overcast with swollen clouds and the air humid. Hen took the car herself, not wanting to get caught in the rain if she walked. It was a long day. By noon, the sky had opened up, and there was a steady, drenching downpour. Hen, in her basement studio, couldn’t see it, but the few people who dropped by told her how miserable it was outside as they dripped on her floor.

  Because of the rain, and because the Patriots were playing an afternoon game, there were significantly fewer visitors. Other artists dropped by, willing to leave their studios to venture out, and Hen did a quick walk around the basement level, popping in to see Derek, one of the few artists whose name she remembered.

  “Hi, Hen,” he said as she entered.

  “How’s your Open Studios been?” she asked.

  “Today’s quiet. Yesterday was nuts.”

  She looked at his photographs, fairly interesting, all black and white, mostly of buildings—town centers, shopping malls, a cluster of suburban homes—but often photographed at a tilt so that the sky dominated. She wondered if the perspective in the shots had anything to do with his own shortness and almost considered asking him, but stopped herself. It was the type of question she herself hated. What does this art have to do with you? She knew hers was an unpopular opinion in a culture obsessed with individuality, but sometimes the artist and the art were separate entities.

  Instead, she asked, “Sold many?”

  “One, yesterday.”

  Impulsively, Hen told him she wanted to buy her favorite photograph of the bunch, a beautiful, silvery shot of a pile of pumpkins at what looked to be some fall festival. A child crouched near the pumpkins, running a stick along the bare ground. The sky above was interlaced with clouds.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Derek said.

  “I know I don’t have to. I love this shot. It’ll give me inspiration for the next book I’m illustrating.”

  She ran to her studio, got her credit card, and came back and purchased the pre-framed print. As soon as she had it in her hands, she actually loved it. She thought she could hang it above the low bookshelf in the living room.

  At four thirty she began to clean up, pretty sure that there would be no more visitors. She poured herself some bourbon in a water glass and played the soundtrack from The Painted Veil on her CD player. As she was washing her hands in the big industrial sink, she sensed someone enter her studio. She turned, hands wet. Matthew Dolamore was five feet away from her, his hands pushed down into his jeans pockets. His jacket was pocked with rain.

  Hen’s body went cold, and her eyes flitted toward the door. Matthew took a step backward.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” he said.

  “Then why are you here?” Hen was amazed at how calm her words sounded.

  He half shrugged, then said, “I want to talk. And I wanted to see your art.” His eyes now moved around the space, his hands still tucked into his jeans, and Hen realized he was nervous. She took a step forward.

  “I’d prefer that you leave,” she said. “As you’re aware, you have filed a protective order against me, and I don’t want to violate it.”

  “You were spying on me.”

  “For good reason,” Hen said.

  “Look . . .” Matthew said, but stopped speaking.

  “I actually do want you to leave,” Hen said. “Right now.”

  “You don’t want to talk? That’s all I’m here for. I’m not here to hurt you or threaten you.”

  “Or kill me,” Hen said.

  He smiled, and Hen thought he looked like a child caught saying something dirty at the playground. “No, I would never kill you,” he said.

  “But you killed Scott Doyle. And you killed Dustin Miller.”

  Matthew looked back over his shoulder to see if anyone else was near, then said, “Yes. I did.”

  Hen was scared again. It must have shown on her, because Matthew pulled his hands from his pockets and held them up. “I would never in a million years hurt you. I promise.”

  “What do you want from me?” Hen asked.

  Matthew smiled again, almost sheepishly. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “I suppose I want you to know the truth.”

  Richard

  I suspect my brother is not what he seems. Not that I blame him. Anyone who got through our childhood gets to do what he wants.

  We are owed, he and I.

  I’ve had some of the same urges, I will admit, but I’m proud to say that I don’t act on them. The world is safe with me in it, even though I do like to have fun sometimes. Not quite the same fun that I suspect my father used to have. He came home once from one of his business trips and I followed him into the bedroom while he unpacked his suitcase. Mom stayed downstairs. She was cooking a pot roast, his favorite, and she wanted to make sure it didn’t burn. He’d been away for at least a week (it felt like longer to me, but everything feels longer when you’re a little kid), and I watched him pull clothes from his suitcase, dress shirts mainly, plus underwear and socks. He dropped them on the floor for Mom to pick up later, but then he pulled out a pair of ladies’ underwear, beige and lacy, worn thin in places. He held it up for me to see, smiling with his mouth open enough that I could see all his fillings, then laid it carefully down on top of the nubby bedspread, about halfway down. Then he pulled out a bra and laid it about two feet above the underpants so that the thick, pointy cones of the bra stuck up. I was just old enough to imagine what had been underneath that bra, and I remember getting aroused standing there. One of the cups was darker than the other, and I peered inside. Dark blood, more brown than red, smeared the inside of the bra.

  My father watched me, then raised and lowered his eyebrows and said, “She didn’t want to take it off, but I convinced her.”

  “Are they Mommy’s?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure they weren’t.

  My father laughed at that, his head thrown back. “Your
mommy couldn’t fill out that bra, trust me,” he said. “But I brought them back as a gift for her, to let her know I’ve been thinking about her while I was gone. Oh, got something for you, too, little man.”

  That was the real reason I’d followed my father to his bedroom. I’d been hoping for a gift—he almost always brought me something, even if it was just little bottles filled with shampoo and lotion—and he fumbled around in one of the pockets of his suitcase, then pulled out a pack of cards and threw them toward me. “From my good friend Bill,” he said. “Those are some special cards. Don’t let Mommy see that you have them.”

  I pulled the dog-eared cards from the box they came in. On the backs were naked ladies, showing all their parts including their bushy triangles.

  “Just keep those to yourself, okay? You show them to the other boys in school and one of them will decide to steal them from you. Just put them away in your room.”

  I don’t remember the rest of that night, or what my mom did when she found the bloody underwear on her side of the bed. I remember thinking it was a trick, like when my dad pretended to pull his finger off his hand, or when we’d go out to the quarry and he’d pretend he was about to throw me over the edge. But I still have the cards, even more dog-eared now than they were before. The girl on the eight of spades is my favorite—she’s on all fours, looking back over her shoulder, and I think it’s just a shadow, but it looks like she has a dark, fist-sized bruise on her left buttock.

  I have the same dream, again and again. I’m visiting a house somewhere deep in the woods. I’ve wandered upstairs to where I shouldn’t be. There is a long, dark hallway, lined with doors to many bedrooms, most of them rotting and unused. At the end of the hall is a dark figure watching me, waiting to see where I’ll go. The feeling when I see him is always the same. I need to know who he is. But when I move closer to him, he ducks into one of the rooms, and I can’t find him. I am scared of what is in these rooms, but I need to open the doors. I need to find him.

  Three days ago I went to downtown Winslow on a pretty day, knowing they’d be out in force, herds of Winslow College students in their tiny dresses and their field hockey uniforms. I got a Thai steak salad from Winslow Market and snagged a table on the sidewalk. Just as I was finishing my salad—the steak overcooked and rubbery—I spotted her. She was all alone—maybe a little too old to be a student, but still in her twenties. She was in black yoga pants, neon-orange sneakers, and a T-shirt that actually said the future is female on it. She was coming from the café across the street—Latte Da, it was called—and walking purposefully toward the center of town. I dumped my salad, began to follow her up the incline, but turned back as soon as I saw her unlock her Prius, parked on a slant on Main Street. My own car was a couple hundred yards back, and I turned and walked as fast as I could without breaking into a run. When I pulled onto Main Street she was gone, but at the top of the hill I spotted the green Prius turning left on River Street. I followed her, two cars back. She’d gone only about a mile when she pulled into a new apartment complex on the Waltham River, four stories of brick, each apartment with its own deck. I parked in a visitor’s spot and watched her walk across the parking lot, head down, looking at her phone, a large leather purse bumping against her pistoning hip.

  I got on my phone, went to my fake account on Instagram, and punched in #latteda, not really expecting to get a hit, but not entirely surprised when the most recent post, a close-up of some latte foam swirled into a heart, was by a haleyfpetersen. Her pictures, mostly selfies, confirmed it was the blonde I’d just followed back to her apartment. She called herself an activist, writer, and yoga instructor. The hashtags on the picture she’d just posted half a minute ago included #shoplocal, #girlboss, #yogalife, #thefutureisfemale, and #thehappynow.

  The parking spots at the complex were numbered, and I walked over to where her car was parked. Spot 17.

  And like that, I owned her. Her name. Her personal photos. Where she lived and what she drove. I knew that, without a doubt, I could murder her in the next twenty-four hours and never get caught. She’d go from a living girl, pretty enough to have two thousand followers on Instagram, to a dead girl, pretty enough to make the national news.

  I drove home, thinking about the specifics of how I would do it. The thoughts were enough for now. I felt better than I’d felt that morning. But somehow it had been too easy, way too easy, and I thought, as I often did, about upping the game, about actually going through with it.

  Wherever my brother goes, death follows. Has anyone else noticed this? That kid from his class in college, Jay something, some piece of shit with a dark fuzzy mustache who brought a BMW with him freshman year and killed himself in it the following year. It was the first time I suspected. When I asked Matthew about it, he said that Jay deserved to die, but that he had nothing to do with it.

  Likely story.

  On hot summer days Mom would take us to a pond two towns over. We’d paddle around in the roped-off area, the bottom rocky and weedy, while she sat in the lawn chair she’d brought with her, reading magazines and smoking mentholated cigarettes, the minty smell of them floating out over the water.

  Sometimes a man with a hairy chest would come and sit near her. They never talked, but when Mom would go to the restroom—“Stay where you are, Mommy’ll be right back”—he’d follow her there.

  “Is that man your friend?” Matthew once asked from the backseat of the station wagon when we were heading home.

  “What man?”

  “I saw you in the woods together.”

  She was quiet for what seemed like a long time. I took a bite from my Fudgsicle and my teeth went numb. “If you tell your father about him he’ll kill me. Do you understand that?”

  Matthew said that he did.

  In the other dream I have I am driving alone at night, down a dark road, my headlights carving out a cone of white light. Up ahead a man runs. It is the same man from the house with all the rooms. I’m pretty sure of it. And no matter how fast I go, he keeps running away from me, just out of reach of my headlights.

  I told my brother that I’d seen Henrietta Mazur on her front porch. It’s true, but it’s not the only time I’ve seen her. Sometimes I come to Matthew’s house when I’m not invited. I park a few blocks away and walk over. I know that Mira—uppity bitch that she is—doesn’t want to see me, but I like to see her sometimes, or see my brother with her, the way he helps her cook dinner and rubs her feet at the end of the day.

  He’s pretending, I think.

  And now I get to see Henrietta Mazur as well.

  I’ve seen her through the sliding glass doors at the back of her house. Henrietta in the kitchen, bopping along to some music I can’t hear. Once I saw her there in just a short oxford button-up and a pair of black panties. She had to stand on her toes to reach anything, and the shirt would ride up, showing off two perfect ass cheeks, just barely contained by some shiny fabric.

  She’s small, with dark hair that’s cut a little short for my taste, and moves like a dancer. I imagine she’s flexible, that if you got hold of her ankles you could push her legs all the way back to either side of her head. I’ve been to her website and seen her etchings—sick, twisted stuff—and I can only imagine what goes on in her head. Sometimes I picture her with thick black pubic hair like the women on the playing cards, and sometimes I imagine she’s completely shaved. That’s what the girls these days do, right? Keep themselves shaved down there all the time, because they never know when some man will come along and pull those little panties off.

  There was a murder up in New Essex outside of some bar. The singer from the band got his skull caved in. I didn’t think much of it until I saw the name of the band. The C-Beams.

  Wasn’t Matthew telling me about some band he checked out at the bar near his house, said he knew the girlfriend of the lead singer and how he was cheating on her and she had no idea? It rings a bell. I don’t get over to Matthew’s house very often these days even though Mir
a is always away (I sometimes wonder what she gets up to on all those business trips), and sometimes I drink too much and forget what we talk about. I always think that maybe Matthew will insist I sleep on the couch some night, after I’ve had too much, but he never does. Just sends me on my way.

  Brotherly love.

  Haley Petersen advertises a yoga class on her Instagram. She’s teaching it in her own apartment on a Saturday morning, and I almost think I’ll go. The thought of talking with her face-to-face when I already know so much about her gets me very excited. I’ve studied all her Instagram photos (she loves to show off her body any way she can, especially doing yoga poses in lacy underpants) and read all her Twitter posts (she was depressed over the winter; she went to Lisbon in the spring) and reviewed her website (she writes terrible poetry that makes me think she’s been abused).

  Imagine being in her apartment—everything is white if her Instagram is telling the truth—and being able to smell the sweat on her body. What if I was the only one who showed up? The thought is too much, so I go to Craigslist and look at the Women Seeking Men section for Boston MetroWest, nearly writing an email to HuNgRy for BaD DaDDy in Billerica. I’ve seen her posts before (no pictures, of course), but I just can’t bring myself to write her. I don’t know if I trust myself.

  My father found out about my mother and the man at the swimming pond. I know because he made her wear her bathing suit around the house for weeks. She’d wear that suit when she ate her meals on the kitchen floor. Matthew says she used to eat on all fours like a dog, but I don’t remember it that way. Matthew doesn’t remember the time she returned to her old seat at the kitchen table when Dad was out of the room on a long phone call. She didn’t hear him come back into the kitchen, and he smacked her face down onto her dinner plate, shattering it. I saw the whole thing. I never knew Dad could move so fast. Afterward, Mom just sat there, her head tilted forward, blood from her nose spilling all across the porcelain tabletop with the yellow flowers. Matthew doesn’t remember it because he’s phobic about blood, but I remember it well. Mom never tried to stop the bleeding, never put her handkerchief to her face, and I remember thinking that she hoped the blood would just keep coming out of her, that it would never stop.