She began to pull the dishes and silverware toward her, stacking them in a careless pile. When that was done, however, she became still.
“I did what I thought was best,” she said again. “To this day, I wonder if I was right or wrong. I never meant to hurt her. I never wanted that.” She stopped, seeming to reconsider what else she had been going to say.
The kitchen sink dripped in the silence.
“For the life of me,” she went on finally, “I don’t know how it is that we wind up doing bad things at the exact moment we think we’re doing good ones. That’s one thing I’ve never been able to figure out.”
We sat together. It seemed to me, as I absorbed her words, that the house was watching us, as if we were characters in a play.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said eventually.
She grunted, crumpling her napkin and dropping it on top of the plates.
“If you knew someone who had done something bad—I mean something really, really bad…What do you think you would do?”
She pursed her lips, eying me suspiciously. “Like who?”
“Just someone. Like a friend.”
She raised her shoulders. “I don’t know. Was it something they did to me?”
“No.”
“Well, then,” she said, bracing herself against the table and pushing herself up, “I don’t see how it would be any of my business. But I don’t know—I don’t sit around and think about these things the way you do.” She looked around. “Where’s that thing your father got me?”
I retrieved her walker from the living room, watching her as I gathered the dishes until she was safely settled onto the sofa. She turned on the television, raised the volume, and lit a cigarette.
You still think about her, I thought. Lulu. Then, abruptly, I realized that I was looking at a woman who had never stopped thinking about her, a woman for whom the past wasn’t past and never would be. Who was seized on the inside by doubt and regret.
Who was any number of things I suddenly and powerfully recognized.
“I’m sorry,” I told her that night before I went to bed.
“For what?”
“For what you told me. Aunt Lulu.”
“Yeah,” she replied, in a voice that was somehow not her voice—the voice of a younger woman, a woman who was not yet sitting before me and smoking her life away, the woman who had stood in this same place some fifty years earlier and watched her children play on the rug. “Me, too.”
2
I turned the key and pushed on the wooden door, which had begun to stick in its frame. The lights came on. The ice cream case and the grill showed their blank, shining surfaces.
I didn’t think I needed to tell the stranger what I’d done. I’d hardly given the ranger who’d taken my call anything to go on, and anyway, I doubted she’d written any of it down. Even if she had, as far as she knew, I was just a crazy person who could barely manage to string a sentence together.
Still, I felt uneasy. When I opened my book, I found I couldn’t read it and pushed it aside.
I had just unwrapped my sandwich and was gazing down at it, struggling to work up a desire to eat, when the door opened and the state troopers walked in.
There were two of them, a man and a woman. The man was lanky and awkward-looking, the woman petite and focused, her frizzy red hair pulled back in a knot.
I stood as they entered, my mouth dry.
As much as I’d been agonizing, I hadn’t truly expected them. Not here. Not in front of me.
Not at all.
“Ms. Guttshall?” the woman said, taking a step toward me. She was remarkably compact, like one of the women wrestlers they sometimes showed on TV.
I took a deep breath that I hoped they wouldn’t notice. “McElwain,” I said.
She checked some papers on a clipboard. “Ms. McElwain. We were wondering if we could talk with you.”
I rested my palms on the counter, as if to show I had nothing to hide, even though something within me had gone cold. “Sure.”
“You know Mr. Landis? Up the hill?”
She meant Martin.
“Sure,” I said again, attempting to shrug.
“You seen anything unusual going on up there lately?”
I sucked in my lower lip, trying to put on a puzzled look while my mind raced. “Unusual,” I repeated.
“Yeah. Like, anybody going in or out at odd hours, for example. People maybe you don’t know.”
“Well,” I said slowly. “I mean, it’s a hostel.”
“I’m talking about people who don’t look like hostel guests.”
I looked down at the counter, gripping my hands together and studying them for a moment. Then I looked up, my pulse thrumming in my ears.
I had to choose.
And I chose.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“No?” The woman raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure? One of my colleagues was up there the other day, but unfortunately Mr. Landis wasn’t very cooperative. We thought you might be able to help.”
I forced myself to meet her eyes. “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s a criminal offense to lie to the police, ma’am.” She said it without anger, but with firmness. “Did you know Mr. Landis spent three years in the federal penitentiary up at Lewisburg?”
I stiffened, trying not to show the surprise I could tell she wanted me to show. Her partner was watching me keenly, my discomfort apparently rousing him from his boredom.
“No,” I replied.
“He did. Aggravated assault. Heroin deal gone bad.” She paused, as if for effect. “Victim suffered severe spinal injuries. He won’t be able to walk again.”
I crossed my arms. “I didn’t know that,” I told her, keeping my voice even. “And I don’t care to know it now.”
She sighed. “Please, ma’am. Don’t make this hard. Where’s your friend?”
“My friend?”
The man spoke up for the first time, with an authority I hadn’t expected.
“Yes, your friend,” he said, his tone so dispassionate it almost gave me chills. “The Russian guy. Rangers’ve had their eye on him for weeks.”
I glanced from one face to the other. A deep, churning pit seemed to open in my chest.
“I don’t know anyone from Russia,” I said finally.
The woman looked as if she planned to stare me down. “Do you know what ‘aiding and abetting’ means?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I set my face in a mask. “And I’ve never met anyone from Russia.”
“You haven’t?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. In a bizarre way, I was almost tempted to laugh. “I haven’t.”
“You don’t have any idea who I might be talking about?”
I had just opened my mouth to reply when the stranger himself appeared on the other side of the screen door, his expression hopeful but anxious. His lips stretching into a nervous, apologetic smile, he was glancing to the side, checking for unwanted visitors in the wrong places. Horrified, I watched him reach for the doorknob.
“I don’t know any Russian guy,” I repeated loudly, the sound of my voice so harsh and strange that the policewoman took a step back.
Behind the screen door, the stranger’s face changed as he registered my words, emptying in shock. Then he opened the door.
“I believe you are looking for me,” he said.
The two figures in uniform turned around.
“You stay here,” the tall officer barked at me as the woman reached for the stranger’s elbow.
They moved out of sight and I rushed to the door, leaning over the porch railing as they moved up the hill. The stranger’s foot slipped, and he dropped to his knee in the mud. The tall officer grabbed his sleeve and yanked him up, pushing him forward. The hostel door closed behind them.