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.
You seen Fluffy?
You mean that Fluffy with the juicy hind leg? No, I never seen Fluffy.
And Michael opened the back window and he and Alice called and called Fluffy in the alley, and the dog’s name came echoing back to them from the mirthless backs of buildings.
Now, in the living room, he watched his unsteady fingers bundle up Alice against the recent cold snap. He struggled a bit with her coat, but she helped one arm through a torn sleeve liner and out the end. He pulled on her wool hat, wrapped her scarf until only her eyes and the bridge of her nose showed. They were partners. She gave him a stoic look over the scarf and he felt the sudden urge to weep. Then he heard an odd clicking sound. He stood perfectly still in the middle of the living room, listening. Alice began to sing a song about the letter H and he shushed her with a finger to his lips. He thought the sound might be coming from the smoke alarm. He tested it and Alice made a cringing face and covered her ears, and he hugged her and told her he was sorry for scaring her. He remembered from somewhere that tapped phone lines made clicking sounds. Click, and they’d know all about you and how to separate you from your family. They’d add to some mistake you’d made until you couldn’t recognize it anymore. He and Alice stood there taking in the silence of the room. “I’m hot,” Alice said from inside her scarf. Then he realized the clicking sound was the grinding of his own teeth.
He pulled on his coat. They held hands down the stairs. Walked up Holly Street through the bright cold to Metz Park, where they liked to play invasion of the zombie dads and prepare a delicate squirrel and tree moss stew. It was late afternoon.
In the park, everything slowed. Stretched out. Light slanted, burnishing the bare branches of pecan trees. They walked past a warped baseball backstop, a paper-strewn dirt field. A trash barrel near the playscape bulged with charred garbage. The whole place smelled like regret.