“I’m so happy to see you,” was all she said as we ambled down the hall to the elevator. She was walking slowly but still walking, thank God.
We had a salad bar lunch in the dining room, but Lada didn’t bring up the murders there, either. She flitted from topic to topic: “Here’s something Ann told me. Did you know Vladimir Putin is a very rich man? Ann says he’s worth billions. And still he acts like a baboon thumping his chest!” Seconds later: “Mort’s daughter is a social worker. She was so upset about a case. A couple put a lock on their refrigerator. They made their fourteen-year-old daughter pay for her food using money she earned babysitting.” Lada looked distraught. “They’re worse than the Stalinists. What’s wrong with them?”
I remembered Stokes’s story of his in-laws presenting him and Kelly with their grocery bill.
“I don’t know, Aunt Lada,” I said, patting her arm. “There are some very sick individuals out there.”
After finishing lunch, we went back to Lada’s apartment, and I shampooed her hair in the sink. She always said, “It comes out so much better when you do it, Nora.” But I knew the real reason. She liked being touched. She purred while I massaged conditioner into her scalp. Her silver hair turned soft as corn silk. I set it with curlers made from empty orange juice cans—a recession-proof method as effective and about three hundred times cheaper than a Brazilian Blowout.
While Lada’s hair dried, I made her some tea and then returned to the closet in the entrance hall where I’d hung my coat. The large, cellophane-covered cardboard box sat on the shelf above the coatrack. On every visit, I’d think about what to do with it—a carton full of mementos of Hugh. Things I hadn’t been able to throw away, but couldn’t live with anymore. When I started over in Pequod, I’d left them in Lada’s care.
I looked up at the box, reviewing the seemingly endless hurts Hugh inflicted. Helene’s pregnancy. A painful and public divorce. Moving to Pequod with Helene and reopening the wound. Now I was a suspect in his murder investigation. What was there to debate? I pulled out the stepladder from the back of the closet.
Lada stared at the cellophane-covered box as I set it down on her kitchen table. There was enough tape on it to wrap a mummy, as if I’d been afraid the detritus of my marriage would claw its way out and hunt me down.
“Nora.”
Suddenly present and mentally alert, Lada was looking at me fretfully.
“Tell me about your talk with the police,” she said.
“The police . . . yes.”
I thought I’d escaped this conversation. Damn. It was probably best not to tell her the whole story. Why stress her? I wasn’t under arrest.
“I spoke with them briefly, but I don’t think it helped them very much. Where do you keep your scissors, Aunt Lada?”
“In that drawer by the stove.”
I walked to the cabinet next to the stove and opened the drawer.
“What’s your bra doing here?”
Bunched up between the garlic press and the chicken shears was one of Lada’s military-grade brassieres. I lifted the white nylon bra out with two fingers. Lada gaped at the dangling DD cups, and her expression darkened.
“I’ve been looking for that! Someone put that in there. Someone is playing tricks,” she said angrily.
Someone.
She grabbed the bra out of my hand, shoved it in the pocket of her sweater and sat back down in a huff.
“What if you’d put it in the microwave, Aunt Lada? It has metal in it. You could’ve blown yourself up!”
There was no way around it. I’d have to talk to The Cedars about graduating her to supervised care. It would cost.
Lada muttered words I couldn’t make out before she went silent, as if a storm had passed. She stood up, walked to the refrigerator, took out a jar of kosher pickles and picked up where she left off.
“Do the police think you killed them?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, that’s good.”
She opened the jar, stuck her fingers in and eased out a big, fat pickle.
“Do they have a suspect?”
“They’re working on it. I’m sure they will.”
She snorted and took a big bite. “Don’t count on it,” she said, chewing. “They never even looked into your father’s death.”
“But Daddy wasn’t murdered,” I said gently. “He fell down the stairs in that basement apartment, remember?”
“Eat, bubbala.” Lada offered me the jar. “They’re delicious. Kosher.”
I shook my head. She shrugged.
“I think someone maybe pushed him,” she said.
“What?”
This level of delusion was new and worrying. No one pushed him. I’ll never forget that day. I was working at New York Spy when I got the call from my father’s landlord, who lived upstairs from him. He told me he had seen my dad come in with groceries. Seconds later, he heard the tumble and shout. He rushed down to help, but death was instant. A broken neck. My chin trembled for a second thinking of it.
“They should have investigated,” Lada said.
I wasn’t sure how to respond in a way that wouldn’t agitate Lada further. Should I challenge her? Ignore her? If she could think logically enough to play gin rummy, she couldn’t be that far gone. Maybe it made sense to explore her fantasy first, and then appeal to her powers of reason.
“Who would kill him, Aunt Lada? Who do you think would do that?”
“The men he stole from. The mobsters.”
“But he paid them back. You know that. That’s why he lived in a basement. He was broke. He had nothing.”
“What if they killed him anyway? To pay him back.”
“That didn’t happen.”
“That’s what some people are like, you know. Some people never forgive a betrayal.”
A tall, brown metal dumpster sat at the back of the main building near the health clinic service entrance. Filled with God knows what. Ensure cans. AARP magazines. Empty pill bottles. I set the cardboard box on the ground, opened the top and stared inside at our wedding invitation and wedding photos, and the framed pressed daisy from my bouquet. For a second, I saw Hugh at the reception, laughing as friends lifted my chair into the air and the white satin train of my wedding gown covered their heads. I heard my father’s sad refrain.
Here’s a big tip, kiddo. A tip for living. This world is rough. It’s going to keep throwing things at you.
I should have done this a long time ago. I reached into the box and began hurling the wedding mementos over the high brown wall. Then I tossed in the pictures from our summer vacations to Maine and Nova Scotia, winter escapes to Mustique, art jaunts to Europe for Hugh’s exhibitions. I crumpled a paper napkin from Harry’s Bar in Venice and lobbed it in along with a book of matches from our Valentine’s dinner at Les Halles. I was ruthless, scrapping the tinfoil ring Hugh made me that summer in the Pequod barn. If the police saw me doing this, they’d think I was acting out of anger. But that wasn’t the case. The past was just too painful to hold on to any longer.