Every Dead Thing

“Bird,” he said, and he almost smiled, “sometimes I’m torn between keeping you in touch with what’s happening and not telling you anything.” He grimaced, then sighed as if to indicate that this was something that just wasn’t worth arguing about. “Stay out of trouble, Bird, and tell your friends the same.” He walked away, to be swallowed up by the evening crowds.

I knocked on Rachel’s door, but there was no reply. I knocked a second time, harder, and I heard some noises from inside the room. She answered the door with a towel wrapped around her body and her hair hidden by a second, smaller towel. Her face was red from the heat of the shower and her skin glowed.

“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot that you’d be showering.”

She smiled and waved me in.

“Take a seat. I’ll get dressed and let you buy me dinner.” She took a pair of gray pants and a white cotton shirt from the bed, picked some matching white underwear from her case, and stepped back into the bathroom. She didn’t close the door fully behind her so that we could talk while she dressed.

“Should I ask what that exchange was about?” she said.

I walked to her balcony window and looked out on the street below.

“What Woolrich said about Louis is true. It’s not as simple as that, maybe, but he has killed people in the past. Now, I’m not so sure. I don’t ask, and I’m not in a position to pass judgment on him. But I trust both Angel and Louis. I asked them to come because I know what they’re good at.”

She came out of the bathroom buttoning her shirt, her damp hair hanging. She dried her hair with a travel dryer, then applied a little makeup. I had seen Susan do the same things a thousand times, but there was a strange intimacy in watching Rachel perform them in front of me. I felt something stir inside me, a tiny yet significant shift in my feelings toward her. She sat on the edge of the bed and slipped her bare feet into a pair of black slingbacks, her finger moving inside each one to ease the progress of her heel. As she leaned foward, moisture glistened on the small of her back. She caught me looking at her and smiled cautiously, as if afraid of misinterpreting what she had seen. “Shall we go?” she said.

I held the door open for her as we left, her shirt brushing my hand with a sound like water sizzling on hot metal.

We ate in Mr. B’s on Royal Street, the big mahogany room cool and dark. I had steak, tender and luscious, while Rachel ate blackened redfish, the spices causing her to gasp at the first bite. We talked of little things, of plays and films, of music and reading. It emerged that we had both attended the same performance of The Magic Flute at the Met in ’91, both of us alone. I watched her as she sipped her wine, the reflected light playing on her face and dancing in the darkness of her pupils like moonlight seen from a lakeshore.

“So, you often follow strange men to distant lands?”

She smiled. “I bet you’ve been waiting to use that line all your life.”

“Maybe I use it all the time.”

“Oh puh-lease. Next thing you’ll be wielding a club and asking the waiter to step outside.”

“Okay, guilty as charged. It’s been a while.”

I felt myself redden and caught something playful but uncertain in her glance-a kind of sadness, a fear of hurting and being hurt. Inside me, something twisted and stretched its claws, and I felt a little tear in my heart.

“I’m sorry. I know almost nothing about you,” I said quietly.

She reached out gently and brushed along the length of my left hand, from the wrist to the end of the little finger. She followed the curves of my fingers, delicately tracing the lines and whorls of my fingerprints, her touch soft as a leaf. At last, she let her hand rest on the table, the tips of her fingers resting on top of my own, and began to speak.

She was born in Chilson, near the foothills of the Adirondacks. Her father was a lawyer, her mother taught kindergarten. She liked basketball and running, and her prom date got the mumps two days before the prom, so her best friend’s brother went with her instead and tried to feel her breast during “Only the Lonely.” She had one brother of her own, Curtis, ten years her elder. For five of his twenty-eight years, Curtis had been a cop. He was two weeks short of his twenty-ninth birthday when he died. “He was a detective with the State Police, newly promoted. He wasn’t even on duty the day he was killed.” She spoke without hesitation, not too slowly, not too quickly, as if she had gone over the story a thousand times, examining it for flaws, tracing its beginning, its resolution, cutting all extraneous detail from it until she was left with the gleaming core of her brother’s murder, the hollow heart of his absence.