After handing me the pot, Jake turned and leaned against the counter. I spooned in the coffee, keeping my mind on the count.
“Are you sure you want to hear about this?”
I nodded my head.
“It’s a whole new world. I do more and more private commissions. It beats the teaching. I like to say I burned out in Bern.”
“So, you’re a whore,” I said.
“Now that’s my Helen.”
I smiled at him weakly. “Thank you.”
“My flip-flop artist,” he said. He took a cursory look around. It had been eight years since he’d stood in my kitchen. In a quick moment during a party, we had had a private toast to Sarah, who had graduated high school that day by the skin of her teeth.
I snapped in the filter and turned on the switch.
I did not look at him but at the counter, at the small golden flecks in the old linoleum. I had never been comfortable asking for help.
He walked over to the kitchen desk, where I paid bills and kept my own records, which was separate from the desk in the living room, where I kept my mother’s, and hung his coat off the back of an old Mexican chair. The coffee gurgled into the pot behind me. I thought of how the roof light of our VW Bug had gone on the night we knew it was over. He was dropping the girls and me at home before going to hang out with a group of teachers. I saw his features briefly, sickly, sadly, and then he closed the door. I stood in front of our small house with Sarah in my arms and Emily holding my hand. “Good-bye, Daddy,” she said. And then I said, “Good-bye,” and so did Sarah. Our words like so many useless cans rattling at the back of the car.
We moved over to the glass-topped dining table, and he pulled out a chair.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“That’s all I thought about on the way out,” he said. I realized how tired he must be. In all the years of flying, he had never adjusted to it. Sarah had told me that when she’d asked him to describe his globe-trotting life, he’d responded with one word: “Lonely.”
I did not sit but stayed standing, my arms crossed against my chest. I had four hours before I was due at Westmore at ten o’clock.
“Before I crawled in that window and saw her in the basement, I thought it would be simple. I somehow thought we’d just say that she had died, and you’d been so distraught you’d called me, and though I’d implored you to call an ambulance, you waited for me to come before you did. Now I’m not sure what to do. Having her down in the basement and nude, and you having left her there, makes it stranger.”
On the tip of my tongue I found the name Manny, but I did not say it. Instead I turned and took down two mugs from the hooks underneath the cabinets. I poured the coffee into them as it continued brewing.
“Couldn’t we say,” I said, “that I found her that way? That she fell?”
As I placed his cup in front of him, he looked at me.
“What do you mean?”
I sat down and wrapped both hands around my mug. “I mean, we say what you said, that I was so upset I waited for you to arrive, but that instead of trying to explain how she ended up down there, we just say that that’s how I found her.”
“Nude with a broken nose in the basement?”
“Exactly.”
I sipped my coffee. He reached his hand across the table and touched my forearm.
“You do realize what you’ve done, right?”
Weakly, I nodded my head.
“You really hated her, didn’t you?”
“And loved.”
“You could have taken off, done something else instead.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Anything but this.”
“She was my mother,” I said.
Jake was silent.
“So what’s wrong with my plan?”
“They’d treat it like a crime,” Jake said. “They’d be much more likely to scrutinize things.”
“So?”
“So,” he said, “they’ll figure it out, Helen. They’ll put it together that you didn’t just find her that way but that you put her there.”
“And then what?”
“There’d be an investigation.”
I drank my coffee and leaned back in my chair.
“Stonemill Farms,” I murmured to myself, saying, as I often did, the name of my own development. It had always sounded like the name of a medieval jail to me.
He was wearing a blue sweater, which he peeled off over his head. Underneath I saw the kind of T-shirt only Jake would wear. Against a beige backdrop and underneath a picture of a stick-figure man lying in a hammock strung between two green trees, there was a short slogan: “Life is good.” If there was a reason for our divorce, it was this in a nutshell. On this point, we had always disagreed. It was also, I guess, our reason for marrying.
“Do you ever draw nudes anymore?” I asked.
“My hands don’t work that way these days. I’m working with sheet metal now.”
“Should we make the phone call?” In my mind I had connected calling the police to finally taking a shower. I didn’t care if what I said on my end of the line made sense anymore.
“Why did you bathe her?” Jake asked.
“I wanted to be alone with her,” I said. The word “alone” rang in my head. Suddenly I looked at Jake and felt he was still thousands of miles away and that this would be true no matter how close he moved.
Through the closed windows leading out back, I could hear the neighbor’s baby scream. It was a child whom I had never seen but whose screams were the unhappiest I’d ever heard. And long. They arced and warbled and started up again. It was as if the mother had given birth to an eight-pound ball of rage.
I finished the dregs of my coffee. “Another?”
He handed me his empty cup, and I took both mugs over to the counter to refill. We had always done that well together-drunk coffee. I would be his model, and he would sit and sketch me, and between the two of us, we could drink three pots of coffee in an afternoon.
“I think you should tell me how it happened. Exactly how.”
I carried the cups back over to the table, setting his down but holding on to mine. “I think I should shower,” I said. “I have to be at the college for a ten a.m. class.”
Jake pushed back his chair and looked up at me.
“What’s wrong with you? You’re not going to Westmore. We have to figure this out and then call somebody.”
“You call,” I said.
“And say what, Helen? That you were tired and it seemed like a good day to murder someone?”
“Don’t use that word,” I said.
I walked out of the room. I thought of Hamish as I climbed the stairs. A day when he would want to kill his mother would never come.