I plodded the last dreary quarter mile under lowering skies, in a strange, pearly twilight. My sewed-up skull was banging, and the steady throb of it nauseated me. The closer I got to Dr. Rusted’s house, the less I wanted to get there. It was impossible, after all I’d seen, to imagine I would find anything good. It seemed childish to hope for any small mercy now.
Dr. Rusted and his family had lived in a pretty brick Tudor east of the park, a place with tangles of ivy matting the walls between the mullioned windows. It looked like the sort of place where C. S. Lewis might meet J. R. R. Tolkien to share some scotch and discuss their favorite ancient Germanic poems. It even had a modest tower on one end. Yolanda slept in the round room at the top, and whenever I visited, I’d yell up, “Hey, Rapunzel, how they hangin’?”
I slowed as I stepped into the front yard. Leaves shivered in the aspens to either side of the house. I could not say why the dark and the stillness of the place so troubled my mind. Most of the houses on the street were dark and still.
Across the road a small, tidy, compact man was sweeping nails out of his concrete driveway. He quit what he was doing, though, to stare at me. I had seen him around: a fifty-something who sported square-framed glasses, a conservative haircut, and an air of chilly disapproval. He was packed into a shiny, violently green tracksuit that brought to mind radioactivity, the Jolly Green Giant, and Gumby.
I rapped twice on the door and, when there was no reply, turned the latch and stuck my head in.
“Dr. Rusted? What’s up, Doc? It’s me, Honeysuckle Speck!” I was going to call again, and then I saw a shadow I didn’t like, near the bottom of the stairs, and let myself in.
Dr. Rusted was on his face, halfway to the kitchen. He wore a gray vest, a white oxford shirt, and charcoal slacks with a sharp crease in them. Black socks, no shoes. He lay with one cheek against the dark wooden floor. His face looked bare and bewildered without his gold spectacles. His hands were mittened in bandages, and the oxford shirt was torn and spotted with blood, but he hadn’t died from those wounds. It looked as though a headfirst plunge down the stairs had killed him. His neck was swollen to the touch. I thought it might be broken.
I had walked a long way to carry a message I hadn’t wanted to deliver, and now it turned out there was no one to receive it. I was tired and headachy and sick at heart. After I came out to my parents, my father wrote me a letter saying he’d rather his daughter was raped to death than be a lesbian. My mother simply refused to acknowledge I was gay and would not look at or talk to any of my girlfriends. When she was in a room with Yolanda, she pretended she couldn’t see her.
But Dr. Rusted always liked to have me around, or if he didn’t, he always made the effort to pretend. We drank beer and watched baseball together. Over dinner we’d rag on the same right-wing politicians, get ting each other riled up, competing to see who could insult them the most creatively without actually being obscene, until Yolanda and Mrs. Rusted pleaded with us to talk about anything else. Is it odd to say I liked the way he smelled? It always made me feel cozy and content to catch a whiff of his bay-rum aftershave and the faint odor of the pipe he wasn’t supposed to smoke. He smelled like civilization; like decency.
The phone was dead, no big shock there. I drifted from room to room, wandering the museum of the departed Rusted family. As I roamed, I was seized with the certainty that no one would ever live there again. No one would heave themselves down on that big striped couch to watch the latest UK imports, The Great British Baking Show and Midsomer Murders, the kind of programs Mrs. Rusted had liked best. No one would pick through the cans of tea in the kitchen cupboard, trying to decide between Lady Londonderry and Crème of Earl Grey. I climbed the tower stairs to Yolanda’s room, my throat constricting with grief even before I pushed open the door to look in there for a last time.
Her round room was done in pinks and yellows like a hollowed-out birthday cake. She had left it in her usual state of manic disarray: a heap of unwashed clothes in one corner, a single sneaker in the center of her desk, half the drawers hanging out of her dresser, and a watch with a broken leather strap in the middle of the floor. Her jewelry was scattered across the top of her dresser instead of in the jewelry box, and tights had been hung over the foot of the bed to dry. I picked up a throw and pressed my face to it, inhaling the faint scent of her. When I left the room, I wore the blanket over my shoulders, like a robe. It was August outside, but in Yolanda’s room it felt like late fall.
I descended the stairs and had a peek in the master bedroom. Dr. Rusted’s gold spectacles were still on the end table, and the counterpane bore the rumpled imprint of a big man’s body. His tasseled shoes stuck out slightly from under the bed. A framed photo of all of us—Dr. Rusted, Mrs. Rusted, Yolanda, and myself, on a trip we made to Estes Park—was faceup in the center of the bed. Maybe he’d had a sleepless night, worrying about his wife and daughter, and had dozed off with that picture of us all together cradled to his chest.
He could’ve been hugging any of the thousands of photographs he owned of Yolanda and Mrs. Rusted, but it made me almost feel like bawling that he’d picked one that included me. I never wanted to be liked by anyone so much as I wanted to be liked by Yolanda’s parents. Understand: I wasn’t just in love with her. I was in love with her family, too. It threw me at first, how often they held each other, and kissed, and laughed, and enjoyed one another, and never seemed to find fault. I’d never cared a damn about crosswords until I learned that Dr. Rusted liked them, and then I began doing them every day on my iPad. I helped Mrs. Rusted make ginger cookies just because it made me feel good to be near her and hear her muttering to herself in her lyrical island accent.
I left the throw blanket with the picture and made my way back outside. I stood just in front of the rainbow-colored banner extending from an angled flagpole bolted to one of the brick columns flanking the front steps. Gumby had retreated to the entrance of his garage, and a daughter had appeared. The daughter was maybe fourteen, willowy and bulimia thin, with sunken cheeks and circles under her eyes. She wore a tracksuit, too, black with purple piping, and the word JUICY across her butt. I wondered what kind of father let his fourteen-year-old wear that.
“You know there’s a man dead over here?” I asked.
“There’s dead folks everywhere,” he said.
“This one was murdered,” I said.
The fourteen-year-old girl twitched, tugged nervously at a silver bangle around her wrist.
“What do you mean, he was murdered? Course he was. Probably ten thousand people were murdered yesterday. Everyone who was caught outside, including a quarter of the people on this road.” He spoke calmly, without distress or much apparent interest.