Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [13]
“You just think you can fix this,” he said. “Baby, it’s been fifty years. She’s so dead she’s not even a person anymore, just bones buried somewhere. And he’s probably dead or senile or moved on. Why can’t you just let it go?”
“Because!” I answered. “Because … I don’t know why. Except that I can’t. They lived in this house, in our house, and they did all the things we do, and Julia’s dead and Henry knows the truth. And I want to know the truth too.”
Josh ducked back into the bathroom. I heard him spitting out toothpaste, running the faucet. I turned off my bedside lamp and snuggled under the covers, closing my eyes. I was facing the wall. Maybe he would take the hint.
When he returned to the bedroom, he turned off the light and got into bed next to me. He reached over to hug me, and I felt the slight dampness on his face. He had strong arms. That was something I’d always liked about him, and I could feel his strength now when he put his arms around me. After the brief embrace, he reached over me, to my nightstand. He picked up the picture of Julia, brought it over to his side of the bed, and put it into a drawer in his nightstand. I heard him close the drawer. Then he turned back to me, buried his face in my hair, and took the night’s deep breath. I pressed my back into him, to feel him next to me. The way we curved together, like two cats asleep together.
“Let’s just sleep, okay?” he whispered. “We’ll wake up tomorrow and forget all this.”
Obviously I couldn’t tell Josh anything more, I decided. I left Julia’s picture in his nightstand. I didn’t even try to sneak it out when Josh wasn’t home, just in case he’d somehow know. That was all right, though; I’d looked at the picture enough to have it practically memorized. And now I knew they were Henry and Julia Lewis, I didn’t need the photo anyway. There were other ways to find Henry. Julia I didn’t need to find; I already knew where she was. The newspaper obit had been brief and to the point. Donations, please, to the ASPCA; service at St. George’s; buried in a cemetery not far from here. I kept meaning to go to her grave, but somehow I never found the time.
Henry, though, Henry was harder. He hadn’t owned a house in Portland, that I could tell, for at least a decade. He didn’t have a hunting or fishing or pilot’s license. He didn’t have any court records. He hadn’t gotten sued or tried to sue anyone. Not even a parking ticket! The librarians and court clerks were tired of me; I’d visited the Oregonian twice more; and I’d called the St. Johns Sentinel, as well as some of the other neighborhood papers. I was starting to think he was dead.
I was running almost every night now. I looked at each house I passed, wondering if he lived in any of them. I puffed schoolyard chants under my breath, with his name: Henry and Julia, sitting in a tree … Mr. Henry had a steamboat … Sometimes I chanted aloud, softly. The people I passed by looked at me oddly, but the chants helped me stay focused, helped me keep my pace up. At night I thought I saw her form standing at our kitchen counter, or ducking into the bathroom. Stupid, of course. The house had been renovated since she’d lived in it; the rooms probably weren’t even arranged in the same way as they were back then. My kitchen wasn’t her kitchen; it was and wasn’t the same house.
Sometimes, when I got very tired, I just used their names as a cadence, over and over. Henry and Julia, Henry and Julia, Henry and Julia. They had shared something, some burden. I wanted to be the one to lift it from them, to take it for them.
“I found a Henry Lewis,” Josh said one night at the dinner table. It was dark out, far darker than where we’d lived downtown, where the streetlights fuzzed out the stars. We were eating spaghetti with meatballs, one of the few recipes I could make well. Josh held a forkful of pasta up to his mouth, examined it for a second, and ate it.
“What?” I said. I almost spilled my wine on my T-shirt. “You found Henry? My Henry?”
Josh shook his head. He was