An Unfinished Question

 

By

Bryan Harrison

 

She looked away at first, when the car rolled passed the crowds of yelling people. She couldn’t look at them. What were they doing here? They didn’t know her. She was just a face in the paper.  On the television maybe? At first, uncomfortably grimaced at the thrust of a microphone. Then, more recently, feigning composure in some studio set where they’d asked all the same questions. She’d been paid that time; feeling like a whore when she’d left and the grit of the city clung to her as she boarded the bus home. And it stayed with her.  It had taken weeks, it seemed, to wash it away.

 

At one point she asked the driver to slow because, for the moment at least, she’d thought that she had actually wanted to see them. These people who came to curse or hate a man they’d never known and whose death would never directly affect them. But the driver would not. So the faces rolled quickly by, a gathering of feral or fervent masks behind a blanket of dust and tinted windows.

 

Cameras were there too. Flashing the moment of her passage, capturing images insufficient to the truth, but perhaps to be shown to others some time hence, as a withered tale was recounted and maybe some remnant of the emotion that had drawn them here would be relived. Some scrap of this excitement or outrage would come alive again in the retelling.

 

She sat back into the cushion and closed her eyes against the sight of them. Yes, it had been better that the driver had not slowed.  She’d been wrong about the faces. There’d be plenty of time to see them. In the check-out aisles, perhaps in some movie theater where at least she could retreat to the darkness of her back row seat. Or most likely at work, amid the ragged shelves of second hand goods that gathered dust and occasional fingerprints of some casual scrutiny. Behind the eyes of each would be some calloused judgment or misplaced sympathy to be shared. And she would, as always, look away.

 

They arrived at the gate then. The men whose silhouettes cast grim shadows on the road before them, stood aside and let them pass and she heard the gate rattle to block the others whose taunts and prayers waned, leaving her alone with her fears and the smoky leather smell of the car’s cushions. Beyond them a uniformed young man pressed his face at the window and the driver rolled it down.  The officer started to say something to the driver, but then glanced at her and his mouth closed, eyes set in some sudden judgment.

 

She looked away. Here, at least, among these men, these ‘professionals’, she should have some reprieve. But none seemed forthcoming.

 

The uniformed man nodded and retreated indifferently as the car moved forward again, passing under the dark barbed barricade on which the tower rested, its burning eye scouring the thronged horizon in great arcs.

 

She remembered then, another eye. It had winked at her from across a crowded room some enchanted evening ago, at a time in her life when magic and romance were more than nostalgic whispers. Then he had stumbled drunkenly in her direction in an attempt at a tango, even though the song was a waltz and she’d laughed so hard that the very room had seemed to spin and then right itself as he clasped her hand. And then her waist. And as the dance ensued she thought that no man had ever held her so tight and warm. And perhaps she’d even fallen in love that very first night. If not, then it was on the next; over dinner and the smooth apology for his behavior the night before; the frantic and forgiven grope after the dance. But she’d just looked away and recalled the strength of his embrace. The heat of his breath against her neck.

 

The guard was saying something now.

 

“Yes… yes.. I’m sorry,” she stumbled. “I wasn’t paying attention, what were you… ?”

 

“This way M’am,” he repeated, gesturing to the polished walkway that seemed to force its way against the flat green walls into the building. Her mind clung to the normal things as they walked. The calendar. The bulletin board. Then the water fountain was some momentary solace. And then the point where someone had made a scuff, the mark like a black scar on the bone-white gloss of the floor. So this place had some vulnerability after all.

 

“Wait here,” an anonymous face muttered, and then she was sitting. Alone again. Just her and the scarred floor engulfed within a shrunken landscape of antiseptic green walls. The smell of enamel and cigarette smoke. The hushed voices. Muted footfalls around her.

 

She is alone here.

 

Like the night he’d come back to her the first time she’d kicked him out. And the way he’d shrugged his pathetic apology and repeated the same excuses he would use time and time again. And the way she’d opened the door that first time, knowing even then it was the beginning of a series of similar mistakes. His face had worn that grin then. The one that said “you know you can’t live without me” and even when she saw the lie she’d known he was right. But she’d looked away, relieved when the heat came and then the bed and the sweat.

 

“Ms. Evans?”

 

She looked up.

 

“We’ll have to search you M’am”

 

And then the hands are on her and in her purse and on her hair and scour her pockets and she cannot believe this is necessary at this stage of the game. But the insult is soon over. They are always eventually over.

 

Like the time he’d punched the waitress when they’d stopped at that diner in Texas. And the drunken men that had chased them out into the parking lot while he laughed, threw things at them, called them fuckers and shitheads and other words she’d never heard him say before then. The words he had started to use on her while they’d fled. The ones that hit her inside, punching holes in the thin walls of whatever dignity she’d forced between herself and this cheap rendition of the life she’d imagined.

 

But the insult was soon over and he had not known what had come over him. It must have been the beer and the bitch’s mouthy attitude and he couldn’t believe he’d said all that shit and had promised that first time that it would never happen again. But it always happened again.

 

And she looked away from this memory as she was walked into the clanking metal aisle that led to him.

 

If only she had seen him clearly before the other aisle she’d walked down. But wasn’t he always obvious, now that she looked back? Wasn’t he discernable in the frantic last minute plans for the wedding, and the way he’d tried to keep Mother from attending and his drunken breathy “I do” and his almost reluctant fumbling for the ring? His eyes had strayed even then, over the slim and rose-cheeked nieces and cousins, hadn’t they?

 

Would they stray now?

 

Would hers?

 

And without the slightest ceremony he is there, peering at her from beyond the silent metal barricades. She looked away. Down actually, at the worn shoes with which she has trod her weary daily paths since they came for him. Since she learned precisely what manner of monster that she’d married and laughed with. And bedded with. And forgiven and made excuses for. And suffered time and time again...

 

And loved. Yes. Shamefully, yes.

 

Something inside her, something she thought long dead, whimpered at the last thought. Then she was ushered into the room.

 

“You have ten minutes, Ms. Evans.” And the metallic clang behind her is followed by a silence broken only by distant hushed whispers and his labored breathing. She is lost in the weight of this moment and the sight of her shoes and the tears that well up, unbidden and pointless in her eyes.

 

“Cut that shit out,” he gruffed at her. “You ain’t the one… ” he paused. “You’re walkin’ outta here. What the hell you cryin’ for?” he finished.

 

After all these years he still doesn’t know? She sat then, across the cell from him. She suppressed her sobs, obedient as ever she was. Following, as always, in a chaotic dance that started decades ago.

 

The minutes pass in silence. She knows they are watching. Whispering. Wondering what the hell she had come for. Wondering if she is chewing on this same perplexing question.

 

She is.

 

She has been since the first incomprehensible slap on the face had forced her to see what she hadn’t wanted to see; the trap in which she’d been snared and the cell in which he had kept her. Since she had been forced to see herself through his eyes, a miniscule, withered, meaningless woman whose love was only as important as whatever momentary service she provided. A breakfast. An unsuspecting ear. A temporary whore.

 

A punching bag.

 

But she knows why she is here. They can ponder this all they want, those silent eyes beyond the callous metal bars. They are not, never have been, important. There is something she has to know.

 

She remembers the picture of the girls that they had found in the forest. The gruesome images that she had turned away from. The pictures that had stayed with her all these years, even after only that frantic glimpse. The girls’ parents were here. They had their own questions. Their own concerns. Concerns that would be addressed in a short time as his breath slowed and ceased to be. But first she had to know something that she had been longing to ask him since before he’d sucked away whatever beauty and grace she’d had left.

 

She looked up at him. Into him. “Did ..” she started, and her breath caught, wrestled in her throat with her fear and pain. “Did you…” she tried again. He returned her gaze.

 

“Did you… ” ever love me… but she cannot finish. Her breath is lost in sadness and his face a barricade. His eyes glare as cold as the cement on which she sits. He has become this place. Maybe he always was.

 

“What do you think?” he said finally. And looked away.

 

“Time, Ms Evans,” and the metal clangs open like the toll of a bell.

 

He stares at the wall. Maybe he has always stared at the walls. The ones in his mind, that separated him from feeling. From knowing. From loving.

 

“Ms Evans?”

 

She stood then. Knowing he’d misunderstood the question she had tried to ask. She moved toward him suddenly and he looked up with some curious anger at her approach. The guard even stepped into the cell hesitantly, as if to avoid some incident.

 

But she only cupped his face gently in her hands, this man that she had never really known. This monster that she had called her husband. She felt for the last time the coarse stubble that lined his angry pocked skin and the heat and sweat that came off of him. He reeled back, his eyes confused and … something else. Something that she realized no one else would ever see. Some careless child breaking his toys, ranting in the classroom, pushing the weaker children and laughing at their pain, relentlessly challenging the entirety of life itself for an apology for some buried injustice, is hiding still, behind those eyes.

 

She finally understands his fear.

 

“I loved you,” she said softly, bravely, understanding now that this has always been her strength, even when it was the wrong thing to do. And the questions are his now. She has left them with him to deal with in the short time he has left.

 

She walked quickly from the room.

 

Outside the chanting has grown louder as the moment grew near.

 

Beyond that, in the distance, something glitters on the horizon. A thin sparkling line of gold light winks across the expanse of the night. It beckons. Someplace she’d never been before. In the vast distance before this horizon, the dust from a frenzied tango is settling in the darkness. Her unfinished question disappears with it.

 

The police cruiser arrived then and she took those first hesitant steps into her future.

 

And she does not look away.

 

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