Speak Softly, She Can Hear Page 7

  She sat up, disoriented and sweating, to the distant sounds of her parents’ voices from the kitchen. She tiptoed through the apartment to see if they were talking about her. From the dark dining room she could see into the kitchen through the pane of glass in the door. Her father sat with his drink and the evening paper, and her mother stood at the stove. Carole sat down at the dining room table, which was already set for dinner, and strained to hear. What if they knew everything and were just waiting for her to confess? But it was quiet except for the sounds of pots and pans. The door flew open, and her mother called “Dinner” before she saw Carole sitting in the dark. “What on earth?” she said.

  “I was just coming,” Carole said.

  The dining room table had also been left by the previous owner. The son had done his homework on it or something and pressed down too hard with a ballpoint pen so it had marks on the surface, and the people hadn’t wanted to take it with them. Her father sat at one end and her mother at the other, like people in a New Yorker cartoon, and she was in the middle. She was expected to pass the butter and salad by getting up and bringing it to one of them or the other instead of scooting it down or even handing it across like anybody normal would do. Her mother had made the corn and tomato casserole with hot dogs on top baked to explosion and then cheddar cheese dribbled over it. Usually Carole would eat three hot dogs, but tonight the first bite stuck in her throat.

  I killed a woman.

  Her father was talking about his day. He always talked about his day. Rattling off the names of people he’d seen and where he’d had lunch. She used to wish he’d talk about the trials. About the people he represented. She always wanted to know about that, even if it was just corporate law. But he said it was unethical to reveal certain details, so it was just better not to speak of it at all. That was the family philosophy on most things. They were bores. He told Carole and her mother about a house that Carl Morris had bought outside the city. Eighteen rooms on forty acres in Mamaroneck.

  Her name was Rita.

  Her mother envied people who had houses in the country. The only reason they didn’t was because they needed the money for Carole’s education. After Carole graduated from Vassar, they could spend their money how they wanted. Only four years from now. And anyway, those other people had family money, her father said. Inheritance. That’s what kept all those other people afloat. Not hard work like Conrad Mason.

  I slept with that guy from Grand Central and then I slept with him and her both.

  The conversation swirled around her. Did they always compare themselves to other people this way?

  I’m a very big girl. Three hot dogs a night. I broke her neck.

  “Now you take the Macys,” her father was saying. “They lived just the way we do until her father died and then they moved to that duplex.”

  They must not have found her. If they had, the police would break down your door and take me away. Your precious Macys and Morrises would find out. You’d be ruined.

  “Carole?”

  She must be frozen solid by now.

  “Are you all right?”

  From their seats miles to either side of her, both of them were looking at her. Pig in the middle trying so hard to act normal, but not remembering what normal was anymore. “Just a little bit weak,” she said. “Think I’ll excuse myself.”

  There would be no sleeping that night or any other, she would find out. Her mother came in to check on her, and she said she was fine, still a little wrung out, which seemed to satisfy her mother. After her mother left, Carole lay there. Rita’s warm body would have melted the snow at first and then frozen, would be welded solid to the ice sheath around her ice body by now. It would stay like that until April or even May, frozen solid, so the animals would leave it alone and nobody would find it. And then the terror of these thoughts overtook her, and she broke into an icy sweat and had to get up.

  She went to the window to watch the Home for Unwed Mothers. It was a Catholic place, and in the day she’d see nuns in billowing black wool habits strut about. Pregnant girls hung out in front of the building talking to one another and laughing and smoking all the time. The building was very old and low, only five stories and made of darkened brick. When they had moved into this apartment, the real estate agent had sworn up and down the home was going to be demolished because it was old and an eyesore, and when that happened their property value would go up. But it hadn’t happened yet, and Carole wasn’t sorry. She liked looking into the windows at night, seeing the girls in their rooms. She wondered who they were. Who their families were. Where they came from. She used to wonder about the boys who had gotten them pregnant. She used to be in awe. It was sad, of course, but impressive too.

  Only one of the rooms over there was lit. The rest were dark. A girl in pink sponge rollers was leaning out the window, blowing smoke. Carole could see clearly into the room where another girl was sitting on a bed. The girl at the window dropped her cigarette and watched it fall to the street below, then shut the window. Carole went to the kitchen for a No-Cal, and when she came back, two rooms were lit. Good. The bedroom and the bathroom, which was all stark white. She’d seen girls go into the bathroom lots of times and hide things in the toilet tanks. Now the girl in the rollers did that while the other girl stood lookout at the door. Probably it was a liquor bottle.

  They must have heard something because they both stopped to listen, made a dash for the door, and turned out the light. A few seconds later they were back in their room, doubled over laughing. The girl in the rollers threw open the window and leaned out of it again. At the same moment the light went on in the bathroom and a nun in a white gown and long white hair was standing there, her hands on her hips. She flung open one stall door after the other until she came to the one where the girls had stashed the bottle.

  “Hey,” Carole yelled. The girl looked everywhere but up. “Up here,” Carole stage-whispered. She pointed to the bathroom. “She found it,” she called out. “That old nun!”

  The girl ducked back into the room, and the lights went out. A few seconds later the light went on and the old nun was inside the room, flailing around, getting them out of bed. The girls knelt on the floor to pray, got up, put on their bathrobes, and left. As she walked out the door, the girl in the rollers waved behind her back, like Grace Kelly in Rear Window.

  Carole stood watching after the lights went off, intrigued by what had just happened. She turned from the window and paced the darkened apartment. The corridor to the living room to the den and the foyer. Round and round she went, creeping silently through one room after another. She wondered what might be happening. Wondering how they punished pregnant girls.

  All that week, she roamed the apartment at night and slept away the morning. She read the newspapers, searching for items about Vermont. Finding nothing encouraged her, and she would watch Queen for a Day, The Price Is Right, and Search for Tomorrow. When they were over, hours had gone by. Sometimes she would dial Naomi’s apartment, in case she’d come back, but the telephone just rang and rang. She didn’t dare call Stowe because the charge would appear on her parents’ phone bill.

  Her mother came and went each day. Before she ducked out, she told Carole where she’d be, what was in the refrigerator, and when she’d be back. Right after her mother told her these things, Carole couldn’t remember what she had just said. When the telephone rang, Carole was never able to say when her mother would be home.

  On the Friday before school was to start again, Carole heard voices and laughter in the foyer. She clicked off the TV and was trying to figure out who it was when her mother and Aunt Emily burst into the den. “Carole, darling.” Emily gave her two little air kisses. “I was devastated to hear what happened. You poor dear.”

  Emily was their only relative. She lived in Tarrytown with Carole’s uncle Jack. Carole wasn’t supposed to know about Jack’s money, but she did. He bought food that couldn’t be sold in the United States and sold it to foreign countries. Subst
andard meat, corn with bugs in it. It was disgusting.

  As usual, Emily was dressed to the nines. She had on a green hourglass suit and one of those little fox stoles where each fox had the tail of the one in front in its mouth. Emily and Carole’s mother looked alike in a way. Both of them had very white skin and glittery dark eyes. But Carole’s mother was the beauty—more shapely than Emily, with her hair in a soft bun at the back of her neck. Emily was reed thin, her black hair teased and sprayed into a helmet. She wore too much makeup too, fire-engine-red lips and rouged cheeks.

  “I’m better now,” Carole said.

  “Emily just ducked in to pick up the ski clothes. Are they in your room?”

  The panic ricocheted. She hadn’t checked the clothes. The night she came home she’d taken them out of the suitcase and stuffed them away in the closet, where she wouldn’t have to see them. There could be stains. “I was going to wash them. And send them to you.”

  “I rather thought you’d have already—” Emily said. “Oh, never mind.”

  “So where will we find them, dear?” her mother said. She was already heading for Carole’s room.

  Carole ran after them down the corridor, trying to think of a way to stop them, but her mother was already opening the closet and looking in. “Oh,” she said. She picked up the suitcase. Under it, the parka and ski pants were all bunched up. Carole’s mother lifted the pants and parka and shook them out, but it was obviously hopeless.

  “Well, that’s hardly the way to treat clothing that’s been loaned to you,” Emily said. “Or your own clothing, for that matter.”

  Carole watched the clothes pass from her mother’s hands to Emily’s. Emily laid them on the bed, smoothed them, and folded them into neat squares. Then she tucked them into a shopping bag.

  “And you never even saw the mountain.” Emily looked her up and down. “What a shame. It would have done you so much good.”

  That night Carole was still awake at four, drifting through each room, her steps creaking lightly. Across the street, all the lights were out in the Home for Unwed Mothers. Only the stairwell lights were burning.

  If she could just talk to Naomi. She dialed Naomi’s apartment, but still no answer. So she dressed and left the apartment by the back stairs. When she reached street level, she left the big gates in the alley open to the sidewalk so she’d be able to get back into the building without disturbing the elevator man. It was something she’d done since moving here because she couldn’t bear to make him come all the way up to get her. It didn’t seem right. She was only a girl, and he was an old man. That is so public school, Naomi had said when she told her. But she didn’t care.

  She’d never been outside on the street before dawn, so it was a surprise to her, another world. It was quiet and slow. The streetlights changed from green to yellow to red along Lexington even though no cars were there to stop and go. An occasional car passed, but there were no people on the streets, just dim burglar lights in the stores.

  Grand Central was a tomb. The tunnel to the main concourse was dark and hushed. Bales of newspapers were stacked on the floor in front of gated doorways, but none of the stores was open. She prowled the corridors, her footsteps echoing loudly. A couple was asleep on one of the benches, lying head to head. A drunk watched her from another bench. Overhead, the Kodak sign showed a snow-covered mountain and a pair of skiers looking out over the valley below them. The woman was glamorous and thin, without a care in the world. Her mother had pointed to the picture when Eddie had asked where her daughter was going: “Just like that.” Carole had been so embarrassed. She was about as far from that woman as anybody could be, and Eddie knew it. Maybe Naomi looked like that, but not Carole.

  Naomi. She had to talk to her right now.

  It was four-thirty, according to the big clock over the information booth. At the Double Hearth, the kitchen help would be getting ready for early breakfast, and if she said it was an emergency, she was sure somebody would get Naomi to the phone. She found a bank of pay phones and put in a lot of change, asked for information, then dialed the Double Hearth. A woman answered.

  “I need to talk to one of the girls there, please.”

  “Nobody’s up,” the woman said. “Are you crazy?”

  “There’s been an accident,” Carole said.

  “You sure she’s here?” The woman still sounded irritated.

  “I can tell you the exact bunk,” Carole said. “At the end of the dorm, the top one.”

  The woman let the phone dangle. It banged against the wall. In a little while footsteps approached and the phone was picked up.

  “Who is this?” Naomi said.

  “It’s me.”

  “Jesus, Carole. What happened? What accident?”

  “I only said that so she’d get you. I had to talk to you. What’s going on?”

  No answer.

  “Is he still there? Have you seen him? Did anybody find anything?”

  “It’s four in the bloody morning.”

  “I can’t sleep. I go to sleep and then I wake up two hours later and I can’t get back to sleep. I keep dreaming about her. Oh, Christ, Nay, what are we going to do?”

  “We?” The nearby sound of a steel shade rolling up the newsstand was as loud as a shot in the empty station. “Where the hell are you, anyway?” Naomi asked.

  “Grand Central.”

  “Jesus, Carole.”

  “I need a newspaper.”

  “You stupid idiot,” Naomi hissed at her. “Go home and go back to bed. And act normal, for Christ’s sake, if it’s even possible. Don’t you think people will ask questions if you go running around New York at four in the morning? Use your head for once.” There was a long pause. “By the way, we went back there, just to check. It’s fine.”

  “Went back?”

  “Go home.”

  “Is it okay?”

  “It’s so okay we couldn’t even find it.”

  “We? You mean you went there with him?” She didn’t dare say the name.

  “Go home, Carole,” Naomi said, and hung up.

  She set the receiver back into its cradle and went to the newsstand, where she bought a New York Herald Tribune and a Daily Mirror. Then she walked across to the Lexington exit and headed back uptown.

  It was a shade lighter, and the sky glowed with the approach of day. Traffic was heavier now, and fast. She felt disoriented in the dawn, like being late for school, at large when everyone else was where they were supposed to be. She ran toward home, hardly stopping to check the streets before crossing, half wanting to be hit.

  At the apartment, someone had shut the iron gate tight. Probably it was one of the maids coming in early. She peered through to the steel door. That too was flush against the jamb. Somebody knew. She looked around to see if she was being watched. Lights were on in the apartments across the street, and traffic was thick. Her parents would be up any minute. She watched the street, where the traffic now was just a blur ripping uptown. She could step into the street and end everything. A minute from right now. An impact so hard it would knock the life out of her and not even hurt. The thought was a comfort. All her worry lifted, and she was clearheaded. She wouldn’t do it. At least not now. But she would save it as a possibility. It would always be there, an option nobody else ever needed to know existed.

  She walked around the corner to the canopied entrance, rapped on the glass, and waited. Heney came out of the mailroom at the back and squinted across, trying to figure out who she was. Once he recognized her, he hustled up and unlocked the front door.

  “What would you be doing outside at this hour, miss?” he said with his heavy accent.

  “Walking.” She got into the elevator and watched while he drew the outside door across and then the brass gate.

  “Didn’t see you go out,” he said. He kept his eyes on each floor marker as it went by. The elevator stopped at her floor, and Heney jockeyed it around so the elevator floor met the vestibule floor exactly. “The back d
oor’s not for you.”

  “I left it open,” she said. “When I came back, it was locked.”

  “I know,” Heney said, still not looking at her. “I locked it myself.” He was waiting for her to get off the elevator.

  “My parents would kill me,” she said. She stepped off into the little vestibule outside her apartment door and turned to look at him.

  He looked her in the eye. “They’d be right to,” he said and pushed the brass gate across between them.

  When she walked into the apartment, her father was in the dining room with papers spread out across the table, still in his pajamas and bathrobe. He looked up at her over the tops of black-rimmed half glasses. She hated those glasses because he looked so much more scolding in them. “Carole?” he said, rising and meeting her in the foyer. “You were outside?”

  She had the newspapers in her arms. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said, showing him the papers. “I went out to get a paper.” Stick to the true parts, Naomi once instructed her. And this part was true. She had gone out and she’d gotten a paper.

  “We get the paper.”

  “But not these.” She heard the indignation in her voice, as though it was perfectly normal to be outside getting newspapers at four in the morning, and who was he to challenge her. She’d never spoken to him that way, and he was really startled. He stood and took a step toward her. He smelled of bed, slightly stale and musty, his hair sticking up in back. “Just because I never went out for papers before doesn’t make it wrong,” she said, feeling reckless, challenging him in a way she never would have dared before.

  He seemed about to speak and then changed his mind. “It’s dangerous out there at this hour,” he said.

  “Well, I made it.” She turned and went to her room, where she spread the newspapers out on her desk and went through them page by page and item by item. When she was done, she did it again to make sure. There were stories about murders in lots of places, but none about a murder in Vermont. It hadn’t been discovered. It might never be discovered. If nobody had missed Rita yet, maybe they wouldn’t ever.