Through the Heart Read online

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Then I took the ice cream and ginger ale home to my mother, and we ate it in front of the television while watching someone win $800,000 on a cable rerun of Millionaire. And for an hour or so, even with everything wrong, life seemed perfect.

  Timothy

  After the Family Dinner

  I left the family dinner ravenous. I know that’s very Freudian, but it almost always happened that way. After a three-course meal, I would leave and feel absolutely empty. Sometimes I went home like that, but then it always took forever to fall asleep. I understood why they keep watchdogs hungry if they want them to be alert.

  Edward followed me out after the dinner, and as I stepped to the curb to hail a cab, he said, “You hungry?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Starving.”

  “Ray’s?”

  “Sure,” I agreed.

  We took a cab to one of the dozens of Famous Ray’s pizza places—this one near his apartment in the West Village. I remembered the fit my mother had when Edward decided to move to the West Village. In her opinion, the Upper East Side was the only place to live. But Edward was smart. He’d waited to tell her until the purchase had gone through and he’d signed the contracts on the sale of his old place. Of course, he needed me to keep quiet about it, but I was happy to do it, mostly because I knew how angry it would make our mother.

  I escaped the Upper East Side by moving down to Tribeca, but I had the excuse that I wanted to be closer to the financial district. That worked for my mother. The money excuse always did.

  When we got to Ray’s, I ordered two plain slices, and Edward got a slice piled with so much crap on top you could barely tell it was a slice of pizza.

  “So, what’s the latest?” I asked him as we waited by the counter for our slices to heat up.

  “Emily thinks she’s found husband number four,” Edward told me.

  “Good luck to her with getting our mother to say yes to that,” I said.

  Emily would have to get our mother’s permission if she wanted to stay on the payroll. She—or rather her three ex-husbands—had gone through all her money, and now she was on a monthly allowance doled out by Mother.

  “She might not need to. This one is loaded,” Edward said.

  “Really?” I was interested. This didn’t sound like my sister’s type of husband. “Mother might even approve of him then.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” Edward grinned.

  “What’s the catch?”

  “He’s Colombian.”

  I snorted. That was why I could stand to be around Edward. At least he had a sense of humor, even if it was a dark one.

  “Drug money?” I asked.

  “No, I’m not sure where the money is from. Probably graft, bribes, that kind of thing. But maybe drugs too. Who knows.” Edward smiled, seemingly delighted at the prospect.

  I noticed two women sitting at one of the dirty Formica tables at the back of the restaurant, staring at us.

  Edward noticed them a second after I did. His smile got bigger.

  “Edward, don’t,” I said.

  He just winked at me and sauntered over to them.

  “Hello, ladies,” he said.

  They giggled as if that was the funniest thing they ever heard. But I knew those two were about to stop laughing, because I knew what was coming next. I’d seen Edward do it before.

  He said to the women, “If you ever want to fuck, you can call me,” and he flicked two cards onto the table.

  The cards he gave them had a phone number and nothing else. Edward had a special phone for the number on that card, so he always knew that a call to that number was going to be a random woman who he had no serious interest in.

  Just as I predicted, they stopped laughing. Their faces kind of froze, as if they weren’t certain he’d actually said what they thought he said.

  Edward didn’t wait for a response; he simply turned and walked away. But I noticed they didn’t throw the cards away. That phone of his rang a lot.

  When Edward came back, he grinned at me.

  I just shook my head at him. “What else is going on with the family?” I asked.

  “Andrew’s brats got rejected from that school Mother wants them to go to,” he said.

  “But he wrote the school a check for an obscene amount.” Actually, I had been the one to write the check in his name, so I knew, and I knew the obscene amount down to the dollar.

  Edward nodded. “And they said thank you very much for the money and no to the nasty little munchkins.”

  “That should make for a fun dinner next week.”

  “I think he’s waiting until they get them in somewhere else. I say send them to public school. Toughen them up a bit.”

  Our slices came out, and we carried them over to a table.

  “Anything else?” I asked. I figured I might as well get all the information out of him before he hit me up for the favor I knew was coming.

  Edward had just taken a bite of his pizza, and I had to wait for him to finish chewing to get my answer. I didn’t know how he could eat pizza when it was that hot. Whenever I took a bite as fast as he did, I ended up burning the top of my mouth. Maybe all that crap he got on top didn’t get as hot as the cheese.

  “Mother got kicked off another board,” Edward offered after he swallowed.

  I rolled my eyes. “Anything else interesting,” I amended. Our mother was always getting invited on to boards, and then getting kicked off. “The old man?” I asked.

  “Who knows. He plays it close to the vest, you know,” Edward said.

  I knew.

  “Did I dance enough?” Edward asked.

  That was the deal. Edward told me the scoop on the family gossip but always in exchange for something. My brother was not one to give away anything that might be potentially valuable for free.

  “All right, what do you want?”

  “Twenty thousand.”

  “Are you going to tell me what it’s for?”

  Edward just looked at me.

  “All right,” I said. “Stop by the office this week. I’ll tell Marie, and she’ll take care of it.”

  “Why Marie?” he started to ask. Then he remembered. “Oh, that’s right. Because you’ll be partying in Nebraska. You get to dole out the money to the rest of us, so it’s only right that you should have to dance to someone’s fiddle.”

  I shrugged.

  He looked at me for a second. “You don’t care, do you?”

  I took a cautious bite. It was the biting that scorched the top of your mouth—when you had to bite down with your front teeth to cut through the crust. You could eat pizza hotter if you used a knife and fork, but no self-respecting New Yorker ate pizza with a knife and fork.

  I chewed, washed it down with some soda, then said, “No, not really.”

  “That’s your secret, isn’t it? You don’t care about anything or anyone.”

  I couldn’t tell if he said it with disgust or admiration. But the truth was, I didn’t care about that either.

  He went on, and what he said next sounded like a kind of curse. He said, “God help you if you ever do start to care. You won’t be used to it, and you’ll suffer.”

  I just took another bite. That didn’t even deserve an answer.

  Edward took the hint, and we ate our pizza in silence.

  Even with two slices, I was done before him. I stood up. “Got to go, Eddie.”

  He hated when I called him that.

  “You’re a bastard,” he said.

  I smiled. That was another reason why I liked Edward. He told the truth.

  THE INVESTIGATION

  LIE DETECTION

  In a homicide investigation, there are two sources of information: evidence and people. The main difference between the two is that evidence doesn’t lie.

  An investigator working with the second source, people, must be able to discern trustworthy information from information that is suspect.

  A J
une 8, 2007, ScienceDaily article reveals new investigative interviewing strategies. Investigators are generally trained to watch for both visual and verbal cues: ability to hold eye contact or body movement indicating nervousness (such as shifting in one’s seat) as well as stumbling over words or giving contradictory information.

  However, the study “Interviewing to Detect Deception,” funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, shows that investigators who pay attention to visual cues over speech-related cues do worse in being able to distinguish truth from lies. Liars often appear less nervous than people telling the truth. The best way to distinguish a liar is to “raise the cognitive load” by asking interviewees to repeat their stories, tell them in reverse order, or give them in more detail.

  Investigations are further complicated by the fact that lying is not necessarily an admission of guilt. People can lie for many different reasons. They are not always lying to cover up a crime.

  Nora

  Sunday Morning, Deirdre’s Visit

  I was still in my nightgown when my sister arrived. I had just gotten up and was making coffee when I heard the front door. I thought it might be Tammy, except it would have taken a crisis to get her up before noon on a weekend.

  When I went out into the living room, I discovered Deirdre coming in with a diaper bag over one shoulder and one of the twins asleep on the other. She looked tired, as if it were the middle of the night, after a hard day, instead of first thing in the morning.

  “Is there any coffee left?” was the first thing she said to me.

  “I’m only just making it now,” I told her.

  She looked at me and took in the nightgown. “You’re not even dressed yet,” she said accusingly.

  “It’s only seven thirty,” I said.

  That Deirdre was here so early meant she must have been up well before six, since she lived a good hour and a half away. And she would have had to pack the car with all the things the twins needed. It’s always amazed me, not just how much work kids are, but also how much stuff you seem to need to take care of them.

  “And I didn’t know you were coming,” I added.

  It was the mildest way I could think to say it, but my sister still jumped all over it.

  “What do you mean, you didn’t know I was coming? I spoke to Mom this week.”

  “Well, she didn’t tell me,” I said.

  “I guess maybe she doesn’t tell you everything then. You think you’re so close now, but you’re not.”

  It usually ended up like this, but it was a bad sign that it was starting out this way. Deirdre and I had been close when we were growing up. We formed a united front against my mother and provided some protection for each other. But then she left for college, and she met Boyd (her husband), and I met Dan, and we just didn’t see each other much. For a long while it seemed like it was just distance and time that came between us. But it turned into something else when I moved home. For some reason, my sister hated the fact that I was taking care of our mother during her illness. I figured it was probably guilt.

  I said, “Mom might not be up for a bit. She had her fifth chemo session yesterday, you know.”

  “Oh really?” Deirdre acted as if she were completely uninterested. Most of the time I thought it was an act, but sometimes I wondered.

  As usual, she changed the subject and said, “I’ve got to go get May from the car. Here, take Frankie.”

  When I took him, Frankie was as heavy and unwieldy as a sack of potatoes. You would never guess that when awake he turned into a whirling dervish of energy.

  Deirdre returned a minute later with May. While she waited for the coffee to brew, she settled the two sleeping twins into a portable crib she had brought. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee in a travel mug, and before I knew it, was gone, mentioning something about meeting a friend in town for breakfast.

  It was nine hours before my sister returned.

  My mother came downstairs when the twins were just waking up. But when Frankie hit May and May started to scream, she said, “I don’t feel up to this right now. I think I’ll go lie back down for a bit,” and she disappeared upstairs and didn’t come down again. I was relieved. The one thing my sister and I agreed on was that our mother was not good with children, even her own. We knew—we had firsthand experience.

  I was exhausted after two hours with the twins. I had no idea how my sister managed. After eight hours I thought I’d figured it out—at a certain point autopilot takes over, and you do it because you have to, because there’s no one else.

  When Deirdre finally walked in the door, I was in the living room, the twins sprawled out asleep on the sofa. I was sitting on the floor, my back against the sofa, still in my nightgown, trying to find the energy to get up and get some food. I hadn’t properly eaten all day.

  Deirdre came back looking like a different person. She took after our mother, small boned and birdlike, with dark brown hair that she wore in a bob. This morning her hair had been pushed back in a headband—and it looked like she hadn’t even brushed it beforehand. Now it was glossy and perfectly cut and dried. She had arrived wearing gray sweatpants and a T-shirt, and now she had on a red scoop-necked top and jeans. Her nails were polished dark red to match her top. So I knew at least three places she’d been in the last nine hours: the beauty parlor, the nail salon, and the mall.

  I was about to say something to her about her disappearing act, but Deirdre looked at the sleeping kids on the couch, held her finger to her lips, and pointed at the kitchen.

  I nodded and got up from the floor carefully, so as not to wake them, and followed her.

  “So you can’t wait to go to sleep, is that it?” my sister said when we reached the kitchen and closed the door safely behind us. She was looking at my nightgown.

  “No, I never changed from this morning,” I said.

  Deirdre laughed. “That’s why I wear sweatpants and a T-shirt to bed, so if it’s one of those days, no one can tell,” my sister told me, giving me a view into her life that I had suspected but hadn’t known for sure. I decided not to say anything about her disappearing. Deirdre didn’t have an easy time of it. My life wasn’t a walk in the park either, but if you compared it to twins and an alcoholic husband, my sister won.

  “I need to take some coffee so I don’t conk out while I’m driving home,” she said as she crossed to the coffee maker. She put in a filter, then opened the jar where we used to keep the coffee.

  “It’s in the freezer,” I told her.

  “You’re not supposed to put coffee in the freezer.” My sister shook her head at me, as if I should have known better. “You’re supposed to keep it in the fridge. The freezer destroys the oils or something. You work in a coffee store, and you don’t know that?”

  In fact, I knew more than that. I knew that everyone agreed on what was bad for the coffee (air, moisture, heat, and light), but no one seemed to be able to agree on whether the freezer or the fridge was better. But I didn’t say that. I tended not to say what I thought to my sister. Things went more smoothly that way.

  “This is regular coffee, right? If it isn’t, it will be your fault if I fall asleep at the wheel and we all die,” Deirdre said as she dumped three, then four, then five scoops into the filter.

  Not for the first time, I thought that Deirdre and my mother had more in common than just their appearance.

  “So why don’t you stay here tonight?” I suggested. “You didn’t even get to see Mom.”

  Deirdre shot me a look over her shoulder as she carried the glass carafe to the sink to fill it with water. “You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing?”

  My sister had a point; whenever they spent more than an hour together they always ended up getting in a screaming match. It made a kind of sense—they were too much the same. Even while screaming they both had a vein right in the center of their foreheads that branched above the eyes like a wishbone and stood out and throbbed.

  “You didn’t even ask how she
was,” I said.

  “No, I didn’t,” Deirdre said, and ran the water full blast so that I couldn’t easily talk over it. When she shut it off, she said, “I don’t want to talk about it, okay? We always fight when we talk about it. And I don’t want to fight.”

  “Okay. We don’t have to talk about it.”

  Deirdre didn’t say anything else right away. She fiddled with the coffee scoop. The fine grains of coffee that clung to it drifted down to the counter like a mini brown snow flurry. She pushed them together with the side of her palm, and then left them there in a little pile.

  “Do you want some food?” I asked, wondering what made her so quiet. “There are some leftovers in the fridge.”

  “No, thanks. I ate dinner.”

  Another thing she’d done while she was out. I have to admit, it hurt a little. I knew Deirdre was probably just avoiding our mother, but it felt like she was avoiding me too.

  “But you can do something else for me,” Deirdre went on.

  “What’s that?”

  As I watched, she pushed her finger into the pile of grounds she’d made. She swirled her finger as if making a pattern. Then, almost abruptly, she said, “I need to borrow some money.”

  “How much?”

  “Not a fortune or anything. Just enough to cover me for a few months. Rent and groceries and diapers.”

  This wasn’t going to go well, I thought.

  “Well?” Deirdre demanded, when I didn’t answer right away. “Don’t tell me you’re going to give me a hard time about this. It’s not like you’ve got a whole lot of expenses. Seems to me like you’ve got it pretty easy living rent free. Bet Mom pays for the food too, right? What do you even need any money for?”

  We had never talked about the details of my staying here.

  “Actually, Mom doesn’t pay for anything,” I told her.