Page 93 of Haven't Killed in Years
That box was fun, but I moved on. There werea lotof towels, dishrags, washcloths. Some of them were crunchy. Why on earth had these survived the move? There had clearly been some depression-era thinking in the packing process. The stuff was too old to even be Barbara’s, more like her parents’. Hoarding passed down from generation to generation. When Barbara died, would Dominic move all this shit into his apartment?
There were lots of souvenirs, like those tiny spoons, a million magnets, postcards from friends with the most generic greetings-from-wherever messages. Barbara had lived a nice life, which made it even sadder to think of her in the room two doors away, her days filled with the Game Show Network and deciding whether to stay in bed or sit in that chair. She couldn’t be that old, but the illness had robbed her of years, leaving her with the existence of a lonely elderly woman.
I stumbled upon a box of Dominic’s old art projects. They werecute, of course, but I didn’t think he was very creative. Lots of dogs. Everything was a dog or a blob where the teacher had labeled it“Dog”—Dominic, Age 5.
Finally I came across some pictures. There was a smaller box inside one of the bigger boxes stuffed with those paper envelopes that pictures used to come in when you had to get them developed. I flipped through a bunch—people I didn’t know, fluorescent fashion, feathered hair, the occasional kid I thought must be little Dominic, a man who was maybe his father, then more men who were pretending to be his father. Barbara had been a total babe.
There were a bunch of loose pictures at the bottom, not part of any particular roll. I grabbed a stack of them. More of the same, too many pictures of buildings and landmarks from trips, multiples of the same group posing with slightly different looks since the luxury of deleting until you got the perfect picture hadn’t existed back then.
I was ready to move on to another box but reached for one more little stack. There were pieces of faded tape in some of the corners, and the chunk of photos stuck together as I tried to separate them. They had clearly been in an album at some point, removed and relegated to this box within a box.
The clumped pictures all featured a lady I didn’t know, which wasn’t much different from my entire experience thus far, but I didn’t recognize her from any of the other pictures. She wasn’t a stone-cold stunner like Barbara, but she had a perfect smile and I could see why someone would keep a nice little collection of her photos. Maybe she had been Barbara’s secret lover. This box of pictures—all the boxes, really—had turned out to be a disappointment, pretty boring, and the thought of Barbara and this woman having a secret love affair brought me back to life.
I just needed one picture to confirm my suspicions. A picture of them together. My hands moved faster, sliding each picture from thestack onto the bed to reveal the next one. It took seven pictures,1-2-3-4-5-6-7, before the mystery woman wasn’t alone. She sat in a folding chair in some backyard. Her symmetrical smile, a crop top, and a pair of jean shorts. Behind her, picking at the food table, was Oswald Shields, sideburns and all.
- - - - -
I took the stickypicture and ran out into the hallway. I burst into Barbara’s bedroom like I had every right to be there. She didn’t wake up on my arrival. She slept propped up on a row of pillows, a thin tube running under her nose providing oxygen.
I went to her bedside and reached for her shoulder.
“Excuse me,” I said, probably not whispering as much as I liked to think I was.
I shook her shoulder a bit and she stirred. I pulled my hand back and she went still again.
“Excuse me!” I basically yelled in her face.
Her eyes shot open and she saw me. She scurried back in her bed, trying to sit up, but too weak to move fast. She started struggling to breathe and I was reminded way too late that what I was doing was terrifying. I’d been so freaked-out by the picture of Oswald Shields in my hand that I had screamed awake a very sick stranger in her own bedroom.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” I insisted, backing away from her, lowering my voice. I reached for a lamp behind me and turned it on so she could really see me, see that I was a nonthreatening young lady.
“Where’s Marissa?” she wheezed.
“She had to go. Everything’s okay.” I crept back toward her, making sure each step was approved. “I need you to tell me something.” I raised the picture in front of me.
“Who are you?” she asked.
I didn’t have time for that. I needed to know how Dominic knew Oswald Shields. I suddenly had much greater concerns than him being dead. What did it mean? It was such a random connection. Was it enough to prove it had been Dominic all along? Pretending that his interest in Abel was innocent and born out of career ambitions? His reaction to discovering my identity had all been a ruse? I had let him seep right into my life, exactly what he’d wanted. He’d wanted to convince me he wasn’t involved, make me worry about him, and then, when I discovered it was him, it would break me.
“How do you know this man?” I asked, bringing the picture closer to her.
She wanted more answers from me, but I was still being kind of scary and she acquiesced, focusing on the picture. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know who that is.”
I flipped the picture back to look again. Maybe I had hallucinated Oswald Shields out of boredom and concern over Dominic, but he was definitely there.
“Why do you have this picture, then?” I shoved it back at her.
“I don’t know,” she repeated.
“Who’s the woman?”
“That’s Eva, my ex-husband Mitchell’s first wife.” Barbara started coughing and sucked for breath until it passed.
I looked at the picture again as if Eva would mean something to me.
“Why would you have this? Why would you have a picture of your ex-husband’s ex-wife?” I pressed, not understanding and knowing there was a zero percent chance it was a coincidence.
She grabbed a tissue to wipe away the tears that generated during her coughing fit. “It must have been the kid’s. When Mitchell and I split, he left tons of stuff in my house.” She started coughing again; stringing so many words together was tough.
