See How Small

On the couch, Kate shook as if she had a fever. Her teeth chattered. Margo seemed to know there was nothing to say. She bent over Kate like a bough, her cheek pressed to Kate’s ear. Kate could feel the rise of Margo’s belly against her back.

Some mornings Kate stands in front of the bathroom mirror and takes a measure of her body as if for the first time. Her areolas have grown darker with age and remind her of when she was pregnant with the girls. Faint stretch marks still pearl her hips and breasts. The pale fault line of a C-section scar just above her pubic bone, which divides her into before and after.

The Realtor, a squatty salt-and-pepper-haired woman from the suburbs — Kate’s consciously avoided the city ones friends recommend; she can’t stand the sympathetic stares — comes by the house and, among other things, wants Kate to remove the growing collage of framed photos of the girls from the living room wall. “Everyone wants to imagine their own brood up there,” the Realtor says, smiling in a disapproving, hands-on-hips way that reminds Kate of her mother. Kate still expects the Realtor to know their story — as if life didn’t go on elsewhere, as if people didn’t continue to show up for work, squabble with teenage children, slog through mediocre marriages. For a few seconds they stand in silence in front of the photos. Zadie and Elizabeth in their bikinis at the beach on Galveston Island; Zadie with her first boyfriend, Marcus, at the prom. An empty space next to it where a photo once hung of the girls and Ray, looking sheepish and gangly in his shorts, waving from the deck of his houseboat. Kate removed the photo after she’d found out the detectives had questioned him. He’d grown paler and paler in her mind until he’d become a space on the wall.

“A couple of head-turners,” the Realtor says, looking at the photos of the girls. “Who’d want to compete with that?” The Realtor smiles, fiddles with a wall dimmer switch. The Realtor looks out at the living room, says that Kate might want to remove the bead board paneling, go with a neutral color on the walls instead of the sea green, mentions a range of hours they might have showings, dates to host an open house. The ceiling fan makes a ticka ticka ticka sound.

Kate readjusts one of the larger studio portraits of the girls from the year before. Cheesy, they’d called it. Staged. Both their heads tilted awkwardly to one side as if listening to an invisible radio.

The detectives surprised Ray on his houseboat. This was three weeks after the murders, two weeks after Kate had told him to leave. Ray didn’t have a phone.

This is how Kate imagines it: Ray, shirtless and barefoot, hobbles to the cabin door on his bad ankles, both of which he shattered falling off the ice cream shop roof while repairing the rain gutters three years before. They ache in the mornings and he has to do exercises to keep them from stiffening up. Because of his ankles, Ray has had to give up his one-weekend-a-month Army Reserve stints in San Antonio. He has a ragged look. Needs a haircut, his beard trimmed, which Kate has done for him for years. Before he opens the door, the urge to talk to Kate seizes him. He wants her there to explain, in her controlled, adult way, to the detectives — one of whom clearly thinks Ray’s hiding something by the way he says “discrepancies” — that Ray loved the girls as his own, that he couldn’t have ever harmed them, that he wants to kill the men who did, even though he isn’t capable of violence, except for the one instance after a friend’s wedding reception when he’d drunkenly struck one of the groomsmen after an insult, bloodying his lip.

They take him to the station, put him in a little room with a table and cold plastic chairs. Can you tell us what happened that night? the detectives ask again. When you went by to get the deposit? There are forty-seven minutes he can’t explain. The money was never picked up, the deposit never made. He feels his blood quicken as if he’d risen up out of bed too fast. He’s dizzy. His ankles throb. He can still feel the houseboat rocking unsteadily on the water beneath him. He grabs the table leg for ballast. Oh my sweet Lord, he says, and puts his hands to his face as if they hold water. There are two things he eventually confesses: first, months before, without Kate’s knowledge, he’d raised the value of the fire insurance policies on the ice cream shop. A terrible coincidence, he admits. Terrible. But the building had old wiring, he says; he needed to protect them all from ruin. And two: from time to time — including that night — he’d been fucking Sarah Haven, the insurance agent who sold him the policy.

The Ray in Kate’s head will not stop talking. All his words the shapes of things he would have done.

I will go away, Kate thinks. When the girls finally leave home, I will leave home too.

11

MICHAEL SOMETIMES REIMAGINES his brother Andrew’s last conscious minutes. He conjures up a single, wavering moment among many now inevitable ones that gives Andrew pause. Saves him from bad luck. Instead of coming through the house’s side door, where he’ll be surprised by the owner, Andrew works his way through the gate and around to the back of the house and hears, through an open window, the murmuring of a baseball game on the radio. The veteran announcer’s soothing voice is one Andrew has heard for years. Never impatient or hurried. Even on bad days — a blown save or key dropped ball — there is always some possibility of redemption in it. Andrew, standing there in front of the den window with his duffel bag of tools that says simpatico appliance repair, can see a fish tank in the corner of the den, its bluish light undulating on the ceiling above. Though there aren’t any other lights on in the house and the radio announcer seems to be talking to himself, Andrew thinks: Not today. This one doesn’t feel quite right. And he makes his way back to his car parked down the street, drives on home, his face intact.

But sometimes it seemed to Michael that it wasn’t chance or luck. That there were no decisive moments that could have tipped things one way or another. Sometimes it seemed as if an invisible cord threaded through them all, pulling them along. When he was eleven, his dad showed him a glossy magazine photo of a group of Hindu men on a religious pilgrimage. A dozen hooks pierced the skin of their chests and attached to the hooks were taut colorful ropes being pulled by someone outside the photo. “Whenever you think someone has you by the short hairs, remember this,” his dad had said, tapping the photo and laughing. But as a kid, the photo had fascinated and terrified Michael. The men’s faces knotted in pain that was also a kind of ecstasy. Their bodies leaning forward, as if into a strong wind.

“But where are they going?” he’d asked his dad.

“Up the mountain,” his dad said, leaving it at that.

Later, he’d taken the photo from his dad’s dresser and tried to duplicate the hooks and ropes in the bathroom with some safety pins and kite string. But when his chest started bleeding he’d passed out and hit his head on the toilet seat.

Michael was living in an apartment on the east side when the detectives found him, five years after the murders. First, there were the bad portents: the series of odd phone calls with nothing but buzzing on the line, two strange men asking about him at his daughter’s preschool, then the carefully handwritten note in green ink under his car wiper blade: Are you the do-right man?

He hadn’t been hard to find, he supposed, considering the detectives had talked to his wife, Lucinda, who’d abandoned them two months before. For the first month of their trial separation — as Michael still called it — Lucinda would call in the evening and they’d plod through Alice’s bedtime routine with exaggerated goodwill. He’d bribed Alice with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and sodas so she’d speak to Lucinda. Sometimes there would be long silences on the other end and he suspected Lucinda of falling asleep with her mouth open like she did after too much wine. Then something changed. Lucinda’s calls took on a manic edge — she phoned at all hours, sometimes claiming he’d stolen Alice from her and threatening to get her back. She said he’d better be careful. She said she had him figured out. Michael began to worry about her abducting Alice from school at recess or lunch, and so he sometimes made impromptu visits to the school office around these times — claiming he needed to drop off a jacket or Alice’s left-behind chocolate milk — to quiet his anxiety.

A few times on the phone Lucinda had prompted him with people’s names, places in Austin where they used to live or hang out years before. She even mentioned the murders, saying she’d seen one of the girls’ parents on the news leading up to the fifth anniversary. Something about a memorial fund. “Can you imagine?” Lucinda had said. He asked her why the fuck was she bringing all this up now? Often during these conversations, Alice, as if on cue, would begin calling him from her room: Could he turn the closet light on? Flip her pillow over? Brush her teeth again because she didn’t want a gold tooth like his? On the phone, Lucinda would pivot suddenly, confess that she made a mistake, that she missed the old days. She needed Alice back in her life. She was sorry for accusing him of stealing Alice. Sorry for the way she’d acted. She had a sponsor at AA now, she said. He should go too. Then he’d hear her inhale softly — almost mournfully — on her cigarette and could see her lying in some stranger’s bed (her sponsor’s, probably), the ashtray balanced on her bare belly, the shadowed curve of her breast. He’d say it all would be okay, they’d come through this, if they just learned to trust each other. This was their job now, he said, rebuilding that trust. Part of him actually believed it.

For the past few months, Michael had worked at straddling the gaping hole Lucinda had left in their heads. Sometimes he did this by taking Alice to a kid matinee at the Paramount Theater. Sometimes by picking up Lucinda’s slack at the YMCA Preschool parents’ day or taking on extra hours working at the men’s residence while Alice was there. Sometimes he and Alice would make space ships and submarines from duct tape and discarded boxes they found in the alley behind the apartment. But most of the time Michael spanned Lucinda’s absence by levitating on vodka tonics and her left-behind anxiety pills. They’d watch too much bad TV and laugh too loudly and long at his downstairs Korean neighbor’s jokes, which Alice didn’t understand but laughed at anyway, like the one about a Korean restaurant manager and the missing neighborhood dog.

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