Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,43

gone, he had them framed. This was exactly the type of item, Albert assumed, June wanted removed before he handed over the keys to Chequessett Realty.

Susan’s death was an accident. Albert was told this, in the moment, so frequently, with such calm assurance, by so many faceless authorities, that it was only when he had roused himself from grief, and then paralysis, that he found to his surprise he could nominally agree.

Mark had not been drunk, or returning late from one of his trips, or any of the many things it would have been easier to blame him for. He was picking up Ludi from the parking lot of the Great Island Walk. She was allowed to take the hike partway alone, now that she was fourteen.

Albert and Susan had gone on this very walk with Ludi many times, although they seldom made it to the end of the three hunchbacked mounds that stretched out to the ocean. Ludi liked to haul herself over to the oceanside a mile in and pick through rocks, even when she was old enough, Albert felt, to be beyond such things. At least she had stopped examining hermit crabs. It was not uncommon for Susan and Ludi to gather a pound of unvariegated shards and give them to Albert to carry up the dirt-cut stairs when they were done.

That summer, relations between Susan and Ludi seemed strained. Albert had chalked it up to Ludi’s adolescence. He noticed it particularly on a trip to Provincetown the weekend before the accident. Instead of raiding jewelry shops with Susan, Ludi stuck close to Albert. He would have thought she’d take interest in the drag queens who had begun to pop up in abundance, but instead she was fascinated by the lesbian couples, especially the biracial ones.

“Why do you think so many of the girl couples are black and white?” she asked Albert when Susan, after many unsuccessful attempts at conversation, darted off to find a bathroom.

It may have been the first serious question Ludi had ever asked him, and he was surprised to find himself with an answer. “I guess after you cross one boundary, it doesn’t matter if you cross another one,” he said.

Had this hurt the girl’s feelings? It was only later that night that Albert remembered Ludi herself was biracial, something he knew, of course, but had failed to associate with the girl. At fourteen, how sensitive would Ludi have been?

Susan returned from the bathroom and linked her arm with Ludi’s. “There are all kinds of families,” she told them. “All kinds of different constellations.”

Albert hadn’t known she was listening. Maybe she was referring to their own childless state. That summer, their lovemaking also bloomed into a kind of mania, Susan frantically assuming new positions, climaxing so loudly he’d shushed her once or twice, afraid she would wake up June or the girl. Was she, at thirty-seven, desperate to have a baby, or had she abandoned the idea, and was trying to make do with what was left?

“You just like to come,” she accused him. It wasn’t untrue. He couldn’t decide a position on children either, and was happy for Susan to lead the way. Then, around the time of the trip to Provincetown, Susan relaxed, a catlike smile spreading across her features. It was in this mood that she approached Albert and Ludi, and it was probably the same mood in which, not long after, she ran out to greet Mark and Ludi as they pulled into the parking space.

In the slight wood surrounding the house on Chequessett Neck Road, around four o’clock every day, a sharp needle of light appeared as the sun set over the bay, sliding to midpoint on one of the larger trees until it was eaten by the dusk. It was this needle that hit Mark directly in the eye and blinded him as he pulled in with the car. Three hours later, Susan was dead, and another twelve hours after that, the coroner told Albert that his wife had been seven weeks pregnant.

Albert was weeping. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought gathering the paltry leavings of his scattered family wouldn’t set him off, but it had been a long time since he’d cried for Susan, or any of them.

There was a picture of Ludi’s graduation. The sight of the girl—now tall, almost obscenely comely, with ripe lips and languid, sleepy eyes—made Albert draw back with physical distaste. Since Susan’s death, he hadn’t seen her. Ludi looked both