As she was driving to try on her dress at Denise’s before work the next morning, Mary heard on KMOX news that Rene had been questioned by the police, then released. Two people at the Kansas City dance competition were sure they’d seen him there at the time of the murder, a tall man with dark hair and a deeply cleft chin, avidly watching the dancers.
Though she’d planned on waiting until she’d picked up the dress, Mary stopped at a vending machine and bought a newspaper. She leafed through the front section until she found the story.
The information was the same as the report she’d heard on her car radio, only it confirmed that Vivian Ferris had been sexually molested after death. A newer, more sharply focused photograph of the victim was in this edition; Mary was struck even more by the resemblance to her own image in the mirror. Dark hair, lean features, even something about the tilt of the head. And beyond that, some essence.
Helen had laughed and told her it was her imagination, that she and Vivian Ferris looked nothing alike. She’d argued with Helen about that.
Occasionally Mary would answer her phone and no one would speak, though she was sure someone was on the other end of the connection. Crank phone calls? Or Jake?
Despite, or maybe because of, the day she’d resisted him and forced him from her apartment, Jake still concerned her. Though no longer in her life, she suspected he’d reappear in a way she wouldn’t like. He was a problem looming like a specter in her near future, one of those dilemmas the mind shied away from, like an impending war too terrible to contemplate.
Denise, chunky and energetic, met her at the door, holding the black dress high on a hanger so she could be impressed. She said, “Duh-duh!” A drum roll was conspicuous by its absence.
But Mary was impressed. The skirt draped in graceful folds where Denise had raised the hem above the knee on one side, the filmy shoulder sleeves appeared perfect, and the sequins caught and gave back morning light like black stars winking at midnight.
“So whad’ya think?” Denise asked, grinning and obviously proud of herself.
“I hope I do it justice,” Mary said, reaching out and touching the dress as if it were alive and might snap at her.
“Quit doin’ a number on yourself, Mary, just try it on.” Denise stepped away from the door to let her in. Her own stocky body was clad in baggy slacks and a sweater with a hunting scene on it, knitted men aiming their rifles at a V-formation of knitted ducks. One of the ducks had tumbled from the sky to beneath her left breast. Her taste and talent were reserved for her clients.
As soon as Mary zipped up the dress in the changing room, she knew it was perfect. It fit perfectly, anyway. How it looked might be another matter.
Avoiding stepping on the many pins lying in ambush on the carpet, she slipped into her Latin shoes, now dyed black, and apprehensively stepped outside the privacy curtain.
She stood in front of the full-length mirror and stared at herself, adjusting the diaphanous sleeves. Denise was gazing at her in the mirror, forefinger to lips, as if warning her to be silent in this moment of truth. She cocked her head to the side and moved the finger in a whirling motion, signaling Mary to turn around.
Mary spun as if doing a walk-around dance turn, gazing at her reflection over her shoulder, automatically putting on the flirtatious expression Mel wanted during the maneuver in the competition. She shocked herself; she looked saucy and put together. Damned sexy, in fact.
“I love it on you,” Denise pronounced. “Absolutely!”
Mary still wasn’t sure. She stood in a deliberately awkward posture and studied the dress in the mirror. “Not too much leg showing when I dance?”
“Hell, Mary, you’ll be one of the more conservative ones out there. You oughta see some of the stuff I been making lately. More skin than material showing, I can tell you.”
“It seems to fit all right.” She switched her hips, making the gathered skirt flare. Hey, she liked the way that looked!
“No way anybody can fit it to you better,” Denise said, sounding slightly miffed by Mary’s lack of enthusiasm.
Mary smiled at her via the mirror. “Okay, I think it’s great!”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Mary changed back into her working-woman clothes and wrote the mollified Denise a check. She was spending plenty for the dress, but Denise was worth it, and the price was exactly the amount agreed upon and allotted by Mary. And though the Ohio competition would be expensive, she’d set money aside for it. Frugality was about to reward her, exactly as Angie and the nuns at Saint Elizabeth’s had preached. What else might they have been right about? If they’d known the score about frugality, why not eternity?
She couldn’t stop thinking about the dress as she drove to work, glancing at it now and then in the rearview mirror, where it was draped in a plastic bag on a hanger in the back of the car. The more she thought about it, the more she liked it. And she could wear her simple cocktail dress for the smooth dance competition; that’s what most dancers wore in the Newcomer category.
Tapping her fingers on the steering wheel in cha-cha rhythm, she smiled as she drove. She’d danced experimentally on carpet with the new Latin shoes, and finally she was sure she’d found a pair that fit. And they were great with the dress. She was set now with what she needed to wear in Ohio. An important and worrisome hurdle had been cleared.
She was still pleased as she parked in the lot behind Summers Realty. A chill fall wind gusted in off Kingshighway, scattering dust and scraps of paper before it, but she didn’t feel cold.
As she was locking the car, she realized she’d momentarily forgotten about Rene. About Angie. About Jake. Just the anticipation of dancing had filled her mind with movement and music and left no room for pain.
Three weeks now, she thought, still smiling but feeling a nervous knot forming in her stomach.
Three weeks until Ohio.
She was sure she was ready. She repeated to herself that she was sure.
Rene, as he’d told her, didn’t call her during those three weeks. Mary thought of him every day, and doubt crept into her mind and spread like a malignancy. Would he ever call? Did any man ever really carry through on the important promises?
As the time of the competition drew nearer, she thought less about Rene and more about Ohio, battling her nerves. She began waking up in the early morning hours and not falling back asleep until almost dawn, her mind spinning to music. Other nights she’d lie awake thinking about Rene, until she slept and saw herself or women she resembled, their throats slit and grinning and their pale bodies locked in sexual embrace with a man whose features were blurred. Her nervous state began to show on her face, the strain dragging at her eyelids and the corners of her lips.
After Ohio things might be different. She would have passed through the fire, emerging annealed, and free.
One day the hospital called and informed her that Angie had been placed in intensive care. It wasn’t unusual during chemotherapy, Dr. Brainton told Mary. Something about the white corpuscle count and anemia. Angie could have visitors, but they must only view her through a window, couldn’t even send flowers; the intensive care unit had to be kept sterile.
Mary dutifully went to Saint Sebastian every day and stood for a while outside Angie’s room. She’d waved to her through the window the first few times. Then Angie became too weak or disinterested to wave back. Sometimes she didn’t seem to know anyone was there, and simply lay with her eyes closed or staring up at the ceiling. She was thinner and seemed much older now, and her eyebrows and most of her hair had fallen out. Yet ancient as she’d come to appear, there was something infantile about her, as if she’d aged full circle and returned to the newborn stage of her life cycle. The lack of hair and eyebrows, maybe. Mary had become the strong one and the caretaker. Daughter had become mother, and mother daughter. Time and death having their joke.
Dr. Brainton assured Mary that while Angie’s condition was delicate, she was in no immediate mortal danger. But he didn’t sound sure. Whatever his reputation, a doctor who looked like a bond salesman two years out of college didn’t inspire confidence.
Mary suspected Angie might die soon. Suspected yet didn’t admit it. To accept the impending death of a parent, you had to bend your mind around your own mortality. There was an undeniable progression there, the dark plainly visible at the end of the tunnel. She kept such thoughts to herself and placed them in an isolated part of her mind where she could almost ignore them.
A few days before Ohio, she answered her phone and a man’s voice said, “I just called to wish you luck.”
Not Rene or Jake. When she didn’t reply, the caller said, “This is Jim, Mary.”
At first she didn’t know which Jim, and stood silently shuffling through her memory.
He laughed. “The Jim that danced with you at Casa Loma.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry. My mind’s been whirling lately.”
“I’m not surprised, with the big competition coming up. That’s why I called. I remembered you telling me you were gonna compete in Ohio, and I ran into somebody from Romance who told me you’d really meant it. I figured I’d wish you the best up there.”
“I appreciate it, Jim, honestly.”
“Anybody else from Romance gonna compete?”
She told him the other dancers’ names, and they talked about dancing and nothing else for another ten minutes.
“Call me when you get back,” he said, “let me know how you did. I’m interested, because I’m interested in everything about you.”
She didn’t want to encourage him along those lines; she’d never thought of him in any romantic way. “I’ll call,” she said. “I promise.” Being kind, but not too responsive.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” he said, and hung up.
Mary wondered about the conversation, about how much Jim expected from her. She’d tried to be diplomatic, but what had he assumed from what she’d said?
She gave up trying to get inside his mind. It was impossible to know how some men thought.
She’d had no trouble getting off work for an extended weekend for the competition. Even Mr. Summers stopped by her desk and wished her luck. She felt rather like a celebrity as she drove home from work the evening before she was to fly with Mel and the other Romance Studio contestants on a TWA flight to Columbus.
As she was carefully packing the black Latin dress in a garment bag, her apartment door slammed. Then a familiar footfall.
She knew it was him even before he spoke. Shouldn’t be, couldn’t be, but it was.
“Mary? Where the fuck are you?”
He sounded drunk, at seven o’clock in the evening.
Not good.
She swallowed a lump of fear and tried to zip up the garment bag. But the zipper stuck and she snagged a fingernail on it. She ignored the pain.
She recalled the way Rene had talked about pressure building and building in violent people. Then the inevitable happened.
“Mary?” His footsteps sounded in the hall, heavy and ominous, from a land of giants in a child’s nightmare.
She’d feared something like this. Though they were no longer together, he’d never be able to let her leave without at least trying to destroy the beauty and possibility in her life. She was about to fly, and he had to crush the wings he so resented. Everyone struggled to grow wings, or had given up. It annoyed him that she wouldn’t make that capitulation. It was, somehow, a threat to him.
Then he loomed in the doorway, his face a mask of rage. The liquor on his breath tainted the air. The way Duke had smelled when she was a little girl.
“How did you get in, Jake?”
He smiled. “Had an extra key made a long time ago.” He was drunk, all right. It was in his voice, his eyes. He was probably here straight from Skittles, boozing it up with his warehouse buddies.
“Get out, Jake. Now!”
She might as well not have spoken. “Guess what that fuckin’ supervisor at the warehouse did?” he asked, so furious his spittle tattooed Mary’s arm.
She shrank away from him. She knew it didn’t matter what anyone had done.
Whatever or whoever had wounded Jake, the price was hers to pay.