The Tell Read online

  Dedication

  For my parents and my sisters

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgments

  P.S.

  About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Praise

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  For weeks he’d waited for the wild lilacs arching over the carriage house to bloom. Then, back from teaching and a plodding swim at the Y that afternoon, Owen had spotted the first fat plume with its buds rising like a thousand fists. The driveway’s pea gravel had protested underfoot as he broke off a sprig. He’d put the lilacs, delicate and strong-perfumed, in a pitcher on the sill over the sink for his wife, Mira, and saw now, as he looked up from his hands circling under running water, how their hue matched the lowering sky, the drooping sun. In the tinted early evening, Providence was washed with improbable color, lulled by a phony urban calm, the arterial whoosh of the highway and the digestive rumbling of the train moving out of the station down the hill toward Boston. Behind him at the table, Mira read in the paper about the city’s boasts and failings, its crimes and peculiarities. His wife’s head would be at that absorbed angle as though every story was interesting and in some way personal, but he understood that this sense of knowing her completely was wrong.

  “Listen to this,” she said, and read to him a story about a man who’d beaten his neighbor’s dog to death with a shovel because the animal had bitten a five-year-old girl on the face. “All it took was three whacks.” Mira banged the table in an echo of finality.

  “A Rottweiler,” she added.

  Owen was so struck by her presence at that moment—the way she bent over the paper; how she spoke, emphatic and raspy; her engagement that kept her in the middle of things, sometimes incautiously—and by this prized evening routine of theirs that a palpitation rose from his chest in a cough. Some essential air flew out of him and left him breathless.

  “You okay, O?” Mira peered at him over the top of her green almond-shaped glasses.

  O: his name in her mouth. He slapped his ribs and nodded. But his pulse had been strangely rampant too during his laps in the sweet pool water earlier, and it had fluttered with a familiar beat of expectation. It was fortune reminding him of its moody balance, of chance’s visit, and of how this house very recently had been atilt with apprehension. Five weeks earlier, they’d been broken into for the first time. They were asleep upstairs and then awake to hear the snap of the ancient lock on the kitchen door, the rummaging and banging around, the uninvited whispers that were gone in a minute as though a bat had flown through. Owen had rushed, terrified, to the window, saw nothing, but heard the sounds of escape down Whittier Street. Mira’s bag and laptop had been taken, and shoeprints were left on the rug to discover in the light.

  Owen leaned into the sink and gulped water, leady and lethal, from the tap. Then some movement of white, gone before he could fully detect or confirm it, drew his eye past the unfurling pleasure of the lilacs to the empty house next door. Its windows were violet mirrors. In the year since the place had been on the market, Owen had sometimes used the house to animate wisps of his imagination the way people used empty battlefields. Where they saw the fuming charge across the hard-packed earth, the clash, the fallen in the grass, the victorious mob shaded by incoming clouds, he pictured his future children on the oak stairs, bodies passing in front of doorways, and the motion of family life he hoped to have here in this house, someday, with Mira.

  He’d been inside only once, after the ancient owner had croaked in her bed and the place had been efficiently emptied by her officious out-of-state children. The apocalyptic vacancy of the rooms, the fissured ceilings, the washcloth on the floor of the tub, the isopropyl chill in the air, had awed him. There was something about all those aristocratic details of leaded glass, inlaid floors, and lights hanging like distended organs that made him think of an old man, useless now in a threadbare suit and expensive shoes whom no one wanted to talk to anymore. He couldn’t imagine who would want to take on the colossus—smaller and less elaborate than the one he and Mira lived in, but still daunting and ridiculous enough—who would want to coddle it and tend to its bounty of needs, its pickiness. Mira always reported to him when people came to look at the property. She imagined the narrow inhales of prospective buyers who would be unnerved to find their own reflections caught too often in beveled glass or their voices skittering into corners. They might have thought they were the right kind of people for a house like this—bold, quirky, dreamy, rich—but when it came down to it, they couldn’t imagine themselves or their children, chairs, and collections living there. They had to admit that they liked clean lines and straight vistas better. Mira had lived in her house for her entire thirty-four years, even during her time at the art school that was just down the hill, which meant she sometimes overlooked the architecture’s Victorian haughtiness and how it could make people wonder about their own ambition. Wonder about themselves. Last week she’d told him that there’d been a guy in a tan Windbreaker taking pictures of the house as he walked the perimeter with a clipboard and a tape measure, occasionally blinking up at the high peaks of the roof lost in the vaporous sun of a Rhode Island spring.

  Owen saw now that what had been a flash a moment before was really a man moving by the low iron fence that separated the properties. He lost him for a second in the vines and rhododendrons, and then the white shirt winked through the lilac’s heart-shaped leaves of rich green. It was hard these days to know who was harmless, who was an intruder, a buyer or a thief.

  “Someone’s next door,” Owen said.

  Mira pushed back from the table and slipped between him and the window. Her shoulders drew up. The crime in their house had changed the way she kept watch; this was no longer the neighborhood of her past, the one she knew perfectly and benignly. It was a shock and disappointment for her to find that her goodwill in the world and longevity in the house had not made her invulnerable or earned her protection against the brutal side of city life. The crime had disturbed her and stolen her conviction, left her nights spiky, her days antsy. She took the break-in personally. Owen, eager to obliterate his own particular fear—the proximity of violence—had installed a heavy new lock on the door, security in the form of a glinty dead bolt. This man, though, with his lack of furtiveness, his leisurely step and crisp white shirt, didn’t look as if he were anything to worry about.

  “What’s with the pacing?” Mira asked.

  “Maybe he’s measuring something. A lap pool, a dog run.”

  “A batting cage,” she suggested. “A bomb shelter. Maybe he wants to park an RV there. He wants to buy the place. Tell him to go away, O. I like it empty.”

  “You tell him. Tell him the neighbors are assholes.”

  “Tell him how unfriendly they are.” She leaned back against him. “Tell him they won’t take in his mail or water his plants or feed his cats. Tell him they’ll never even bother to learn his name.”

  “Tell him how the old lady died in her bedroom and wasn’t found for five days,” Owen said.

  At six-foot-six, he was more than a foot taller than Mira and had to bend to get his hands around her swooping waist, his pinkies grazing her inviting
hipbones. She had spent the day at Brindle, the striving art school she owned and ran on the other side of the Point Street Bridge, and her dark, chaotic curls held the smell of clay and poster paints. This was her perfume—industrious, ambitious, alluring, the scent of best intentions. He adored her in a way that made his legs go watery.

  “Tell him it was a horror show,” he whispered, and took another deep inhale of her scent mixed with the sweet lilacs. “The corpse with open eyes, the rotting body, the damp bed.”

  As though this detail of death that Owen had spoken out loud, this notion of the old lady alone and undiscovered, was the one that finally caught his attention, the man in the yard turned to look at them. His face was a coin coppered in the last angle of the sun.

  Mira pulled in her breath. “Oh,” she said. “O.”

  “You know him?” Owen asked. He could be one of a number of former boyfriends, an old classmate, a friend of her dead parents. Rhode Island was a speck of land, and sometimes it seemed that Mira knew everyone on it—while he knew no one.

  “For a second, I thought I did.” She rubbed her eyes behind her glasses and rose on her bare feet for a better look. “But now I’m not sure. I can’t really see.”

  “He definitely sees us,” Owen said, and raised his hand.

  The gesture was ambiguous and Owen wasn’t sure what had compelled him to make it in the first place, but it was all the man needed to lift his own hand in return and move to the scrolled gate as though he’d been summoned. Instead of opening it, he swooped one long, thin denim-clad leg over and then the other. He was wearing soft leather shoes without socks—not at all the style of the sloppy, sneakered natives. In a moment, he was at the back door they’d left open for the scent of spring, sighing in relief as though he’d just crossed a roaring highway.

  He dragged his forearm across his high forehead. “Thank God. There are actual people here. I was beginning to wonder where everyone was.”

  “Actual enough, anyway,” Owen said, moving toward him. The setup was amusing and the man definitely out of place and harmless, but he still tasted the sourness of suspicion. “Can we help you in some way?”

  Between narrow, almost maroon lips, the visitor’s teeth flashed like a ticker tape of good news. Owen had a feeling that he knew the guy in some distant way, that he’d sat next to him on an airplane or they’d waited in the same doctor’s office or on a bench at the DMV. His face was half memorable in the way handsome, strong-jawed men sometimes were—they looked not so much like themselves but like others.

  “I hope you can help me. I’ve just bought the house next door. Here’s the question: Do either of you know how to get the hot water going?” His eyes roamed the kitchen’s shabby elegance and distant, shadowed ceiling. What was there but a round milk-glass fixture and years of unreachable cobwebs? “I’m not the most competent when it comes to domestic matters. Switches and buttons, that kind of thing. But we all have our failings, and mine’s not the worst, I’m guessing.” A contrite, suggestive smile snaked across his face. “Dials I can probably handle, though who knows?” His laugh was an expensive bauble.

  Too many words, Owen decided. Too much padding around it all, too theatrical, too chattering. What was the guy really trying to say? And who talked like that? Mira was about to say something but pulled back. The dip just below her throat pulsed with questions. She was likely trying to figure out how she’d managed to miss the entire real estate transaction happening right next door when, in the past, nothing had ever escaped her.

  “But look at this. My timing’s perfect, as usual.” The man nodded to the steaming pot on the stove, the sparkling lettuce in the colander, the doomed garlic on the cutting board. When he shook his head, his hair followed stylishly like a little poodle. “You were about to have dinner. I’m sorry for just appearing like this. Should I come back later—or would you prefer never to see me again?”

  The question was pure flirtation. You could stop the future cold and unadventurously, it suggested, or take a chance on what might happen next. Which kind of person were you? The man, in his midsixties, Owen decided, spoke with a kind of put-on accent of breeding and affluence, half high-up East Coast, half something fake British, and as though he meant everything and nothing at the same time. A vaguely ridiculous person, Owen thought, a man too much about himself. The standard blue eyes were watery, the blade of nose off-balance, not the result of a fistfight—he was too wispy for something like that—but from aging imperfectly and maybe dissolutely, and there was the first slackness of skin on his neck. His wiry body had an almost dissipated look to it, the former muscles gone stringy as if his personal trainer had recently defected. He looked like he’d once been strong. But it was the pose, the boneless posture and thin wrists, that were most familiar to Owen, though he still couldn’t say how or why, and the way the man’s shirt hung open to reveal a smooth expanse of tan clavicle and a few gray chest hairs.

  “No, it’s absolutely fine. Really, this is okay.” Mira had been holding her breath so long that the words came out in an enthusiastic and uncharacteristic rush.

  “That’s good, then. Because I can do without a lot,” the man said, and leaned forward as if this were a coy game they had played before. “But not a hot shower. A man’s necessity, don’t you think?”

  “A woman’s, too,” she said.

  He didn’t take his eyes off her. “You’re absolutely right.”

  Heat flamed the tops of Mira’s ears and she bounced on her feet. “Look, I just can’t believe this. I have to say something, okay? Why should I pretend to be cool about it?” She threw Owen a look that suggested he should join in with her, that this holding-back act of theirs was over, but he had no idea what she was talking about. “How amazing is this? I watch you every night.” She ran her hands down the front of her corduroy pants. Her toes curled to hide under the flared bottoms. “On television, I mean.”

  Their visitor gave a shrug of humility. “You’re probably the only one.”

  “I doubt that.” Mira’s laugh was airy and eager.

  Owen was still lost, and he didn’t understand what Mira’s jittery excitement was all about until the man ran a deliberate finger around his jaw and chin. That was the gesture that gave him away. Owen stepped back for a wider view, one that might also take in the years and compress them into a single second.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re from that show, years ago, that sitcom,” he said. He sounded too fervent, but he couldn’t help himself. He didn’t feel like himself. “Ancient Times—am I right?”

  “Right, and yes, years ago.” A lift in the man’s smile suggested he was pleased to be remembered. “That damned television.”

  “You’re Bruno Macon,” Owen said, the name landing on his tongue. How strange it was to know him then—in a way.

  “Isn’t that a terrible name? I never liked it. Sounds like some kind of burned-pork product. Actually, I’m Wilton Deere—Bruno was the character I played.”

  The correction prickled Owen; he liked to think he was no member of television’s addled class, though he had been an avid member at one time. But Wilton Deere—was that any more of an authentic name? He marveled at how the presence of celebrity, even a one-time, one-show kind, could fluster him like this when usually he was checked and hard to read behind his reserve. He kept his enthusiasms close, his restraint closer. But here was that thrill of seeing someone who’d been on television in real, fleshy life. It was the enthrallment of proximity, the assumed glow, and it was intimacy, even if false, a put-on, like the man himself.

  “But it’s an interesting idea,” Wilton said. “Which of us is actually the real person? But that doesn’t happen so much anymore.” He gave Owen an unhurried gaze that seemed to take in his thready chinos, faded blue T-shirt—a gift from the Spruance Middle School PTA—his averted dark eyes, his thick-veined arms, his loose hands, a flop of hair just starting to gray at forty. The sweat of scrutiny appeared above Owen’s lip. “Most of the people who are old
enough to remember my show are the same people who are old enough to forget. That’s the irony of history. Those who’ve lived it have forgotten how it went.” Wilton wagged his head, levered himself off the doorway and opened his hands, as if to say you couldn’t do anything about the way some people were.

  The notion wasn’t untrue, but it had a rehearsed feeling to it, Owen decided. The man was actorish in a way he found embarrassing, with the too-expressive face, the stagey intonation. And all that feeling, that hammy honesty. The blowsy clothes, the feminine ankles. He wondered if the man was gay.

  “History doesn’t matter—not when there’re always reruns,” Mira said. Sleepless in the middle of the night since the break-in and watching the TV newly installed in the bedroom, she spoke like a recent convert. Her face flashed with authority. “One, two, three o’clock in the morning. Seven days a week, if you want.”

  “Insomnia?” Wilton asked. “Insomniacs and the Japanese. My fan base these days.”

  “I couldn’t figure it out at first,” Mira said, taking a step back and weaving her fingers through her curls. “You were completely familiar, so familiar that I couldn’t really see you, I couldn’t make sense of your face. Were you someone I knew? I wasn’t exactly expecting you to show up at the back door.” She recounted their meeting as if it were already their delightful history. “And then.”

  “And then,” Wilton said. “Here I am.”

  Owen caught Wilton glance at himself in the mirror by the basement door and disapproving lines etched around the man’s mouth. He was a less robust version of the star he once was years before, but he puffed up his chest and Mira rounded her shoulders to catch his attention. And who wouldn’t look at her the way Wilton did just then, returned from his own troubling reflection, at how her pants sat so swingy on her hips that you couldn’t help but calculate the rousing rise of her bones, the braless statement of her full breasts, the way she moved like she was on a boat commanding the waves and whales? No, the man wasn’t gay; he looked carnivorous, a drop of moisture at the corner of his mouth. Mira’s eyes were a remarkable, colorlessly pure element and expertly focused. She never wasted her attention and she could be fierce with her loyalties, fierce with her stubbornness. Wilton blinked and blinked as if she were a very bright signal.