She is looking over Paul’s shoulder into the living room, her eyes darting, taking it all in, as though she wonders if she might have left him here too, somewhere on a pile of laundry, in the square of weak light under the bay window.
“Let’s go on in.” The tallest officer, with red, pebbled skin at his neck like a buzzard, the one Paul will come to know as Detective Haberman, shepherds them both past the staircase into the living room. Eva stumbles onto their green corduroy couch. The question-and-answer session begins, and Paul wants her to sound…better, smarter…say something that will make Haberman, with his sharp nose and buzzard neck, look satisfied.
Paul’s head throbs—all he can smell is the stomach acid, Eva’s vomit, wafting up off his shirt, like when the cologne spritzers got him at the mall. He can’t focus on her answers, which have given nothing of substance anyway.
“So I’m trying to get this straight,” Haberman says. “You know you left the car unattended at the Portland Heights gas station—”
“But I thought I locked the door,” she interjects.
“You mentioned that. But then, it wasn’t until you got to the parking lot at the fitness center that you first realized the car seat was empty.”
Eva looks down at her knees. Paul squeezes her hand, hard, feels the knuckles pop and buckle to accommodate the pressure—answer them! He needs to get alone with her so that he can know the truth, what and who he should be protecting. Susan Smith, two boys strapped in their car seats, dead at the bottom of a lake while the world searched for a hysterical woman’s version of the kidnapper. How far gone has Eva been? Why hasn’t he noticed?
“Excuse me.” Paul jumps up, jerking his hand free of hers. “I’m, I’m going to change my shirt.”
All eyes snap to him. One of the other two officers, the one pacing by the fireplace, touching their things, picking up their wedding photo, shifts his eyes to Haberman and raises the edge of a bushy brow. Paul stops with his foot on the bottom stair, taller now than the rest of them in the room, his hand on the banister. The dickhead is ogling Eva’s tits in their wedding photo. (What had her dressmaker said about the excessive hardware under her strapless dress? To put zee girls on za balcony!)
“I’ll be right back down.” Paul means for it to come out stronger, but it sounds like he is asking their permission to go change his shirt in his own house.
“Pretty nice zip code for an electrician,” the tit-starer says to the third officer on the phone by the window, loud enough for them all to hear.
I have my own business! Paul wants to shout as he runs up the stairs, boots and heart pounding, his fingers fumbling over the sick-slick buttons of his dark blue SuperNova shirt. He wonders if they need a lawyer. He clamps down on this, a worry he can stomach, the well-being of Paul and Eva Nova, because he cannot think about the blinding, bright-white horror of Wyeth’s fate. It is too hot, too glaring, for him to even consider, statistics, milk cartons, cults, atrocities, pedophiles, man’s inhumanity to man—
Eva! Think of her. Downstairs, they’re working her over like dogs on a shredding rawhide. Their questions, poking around, tearing into everything they have built, the home, the business, the blossoming family. Suddenly Paul feels a shedding, a lightness, a divestment of all the trappings, until what, what is left? Without all of this, the baby, the wife, the house, what is left? He looks at the dormered window in their bedroom—could he fit out the window? What is left? Answer: simple human survival. Self-preservation. Oh, Eva, what have you done?
He is conscious of his footfalls above them as he crosses to the window. Will they follow him up here, to his own bedroom, the sanctum sanctorum, demand his discarded, soiled shirt to be tagged and bagged? Paul shucks it to the floor, grabs another off his dresser. He glances down at his pants—wrinkled khakis he put on in the dark this morning. The knees are damp, stained red from the waterlogged carpet where he was kneeling this morning, scrubbing, the cheap red fibers bleeding. (Why hadn’t he gotten beige, a neutral color, for the office hallway? Because he had a vision, a showroom with modern Tech Lighting monorail pendants, the transition to design.)