Who Named the Knife Read online

  “Did you know why he was in jail?” I asked, breaking in on her story.

  “He said it was all a misunderstanding about a gun. Do you want something more to eat?”

  For a brief moment, I see Philip’s friend Roberto putting his hand into his back pocket. I hear his little gun tap the underside of the table at the dance bar in Guadalajara. Why had he come on my honeymoon? How did he get to be part of my life? It was a big dance bar and I was wearing a black, full-skirted, backless dress with white polka dots. I felt both newly married and sexy, although that feeling did not last through the summer. “Okay, sure.” I pick up the plastic bag with the money, my car key, my driver’s licence, thinking another coffee would be welcome. I’m really tired. I need a break. It would be comforting to watch the paper cup drop down inside the vending machine and the coffee dribble into the cup. There are moments that bring me close to paralysis, when I start thinking of a particular time that might have gone another way.

  “I remember the night the neighbours were burglarized,” Maryann says as we cross the floor. She often uses legal-sounding language, as if she reads arrest warrants at night to put herself to sleep. “I came home and there was a police car in the driveway and William was out taking a walk. I found out after we got to Hawaii, the first time he pulled the gun on me, that he was the one that had robbed my neighbour.”

  But hadn’t she said in court that she knew he was travelling with a gun when they left Phoenix? I think about asking, but decide against it. I’m too tired to make sense of anything.

  “Anyway,” she says, as I’m sliding a dollar into the coffee machine, “the trip was going to be a delayed honeymoon. Bill made it sound romantic.”

  “Was it?”

  “I remember getting off the plane and the air hitting us, all the humidity and the smell of flowers and already, within a few minutes, William started to seem different. I don’t know what it was. When we first got there … before everything got totally insane, we took the bus out to Hanauma. I remember that. It was spectacular. The clearness of the water. The lushness of the hills. My memories aren’t all bad about that place.”

  I say yes, but I say it in a distracted kind of way because I’m remembering how it felt to have my face in the salty water of that bay. I’m remembering how my brother taught me to use a snorkel, adamant about the pleasure of seeing things from underneath. I’m fourteen years old and I’ve come out to Hawaii from Kansas, first driving with my parents to California and then getting on a plane for the first time. What I remember about that island is the air: temperature, moisture, smell. And the nights. They were so intense, I can hardly think of them now.

  “We climbed around and explored some of the caves. It was like we were just a normal couple. And we were actually still up there when they cleared the beach that evening. Everyone left and we ended up camping up there. I remember after all the people cleared out, watching a mongoose come out and play on the beach.”

  “It sounds …” I’m thinking, unbelievable, but again the picture, unbidden, forms in my mind. A mongoose, long and thin and sly, peers out from behind a rock, checking for safety, its head moving in suspicious jerks. Maryann is carrying the little Kodak her parents gave her for Christmas. She’s watching William watch the animal, putting the camera in front of her face. She’s thinking this is what honeymoons are supposed to be. Something to keep in an album, something to remember and look back on in life.

  28

  That spring, I would visit the prison three times. I was on the right side of the mirror: that’s how it felt, surrounded by something familiar, something left over from the phone calls my father used to take while we sat at the dinner table. The phone was so close that we listened, my mother and I, wondering what was being said on the other end of the line. After dinner, my father would take a short nap and then go back to the office. On Saturdays, he was at the office. On Sundays, he was at the office after lunch. And there were those summers when I went to the courthouse with files and ran errands and answered the office phone with a list of the law partners’ names.

  Around my father, always, there was a sense that, without his immediate attention, matters of importance would fall apart. Wherever he went, my father’s briefcase was bulging with work that was overdue. Once, I was taken to the office on a Saturday, when there was no one else around. A couple arrived, not especially young. She was wearing a dark coat and a headscarf tied under her chin. He was carrying his hat, as was proper at the time. My father went out to the hall and came back with a baby, very pink and wrapped up. Young as I was, maybe ten or eleven at that time, I was given the baby to give to the woman in the headscarf. She put out her hands and I handed the baby over. She was wearing red lipstick and she thanked me. As if I’d arranged it. As if I’d given that baby away myself.

  So, I went back to the prison, wearing my father’s shoes. On my second visit, I was kept waiting outside for several hours, A man who appeared to be ill or exhausted sat outside in the shelter with me. “My sister’s in there,” he told me, running a hand over his shaved head. “She has six months to live.” Across from us was the high double fence with its barbed wire. “We had a lawsuit. Because of the bad medical care.” I had to listen hard to catch all the sorrow. The wind was blowing dirt and trash. A woman was sent home to get her baby’s birth certificate, which must have a state seal affixed, which cannot be a copy like the one she had brought, although she and the baby come every week. The drive home takes an hour. An hour back.

  After an hour of waiting I wandered across the dirt path to the fence. I could see Maryann sitting outside with the Mormon woman who visits her regularly and I shouted to them that I had not been approved yet to come in. Maryann’s friend, whose name is Sheron, made a frantic go-away motion with her hands just as a loud speaker blared at me to get back across the road. “She’s a good girl,” Sheron said, grabbing my arm, when I finally got into the visiting room. “Never gets in trouble and because of you, the guard gives her a warning.”

  Next came the rush to the vending machines as if they were gods to be pacified. The woman with cancer? “That’s Sherrie. Been here since the Eighties. She’s had mastectomies, chemotherapy, radiation, but they won’t let her out.” We were sitting like friends with our soft drinks between us, Sheron having left as I arrived. Now I heard about the wedding and the parents: how Maryann’s mother cried on the phone and how both mother and father drove up to Phoenix from Yuma. Father brought a friend. The two older men come into the apartment to talk to William while Maryann goes out with her mother to sit in the car. “Are you getting married because you have to?” I remembered my own mother’s words: “And just who is it that you’re marrying?” I remembered her reaction. I was running away. Really escaping. I remembered the way she arranged for a cake, flowers, champagne. In spite of everything.

  In Phoenix, in the tiny apartment, no one will budge. The men talk for an hour and then exit. But in the morning, Maryann’s father calls and says they are still in town. They have not gone home. “I’m going to put Mother on.”

  “Do you have flowers?” she wants to know. “What do you need?”

  Maryann would be married by the bishop in a room off to the side of a church. It would not be the temple wedding of her dreams. She’d wear a wedding dress that William had chosen and after the ceremony he’d call her Mrs. Acker several times to her face.

  “That bothered me. I didn’t like it.”

  The good, steady boyfriend off on a business trip.

  On her wedding night she is back in her apartment. She sits down by the phone. “I remember that so clearly. We’d been drinking since morning. Bill went to bed. I sat out in the living room by the phone. I had this sudden desire to call Doug. But it was too late. That was the minute I knew I had made a mistake.” She looked at me intently. It is a way she has of looking at things. “You know, I was raised that marriage is forever, that you follow your husband. Obedience.”

  I saw myself crossing the bo
rder with Philip, giving my life away. “You ride in the back,” my new husband says and I climb in with my girlish white suitcase. His friend Roberto is waiting for us on the other side of the Rio Grande. It’s a potent moment, sitting there in the back of a car so dear to me that I used to see it in my dreams. There are Coke bottles and beer bottles and pieces of paper floating around. The smell of old cigarettes. The kittenish sound of the engine as Philip and Roberto chatter away in Spanish and I am swallowed by the dustiest of highways.

  Maryann said she was drinking excessively all that day. That’s the word she used, excessively. “William drove out to a friend’s house to borrow a jacket and got lost on the way back. The wedding was at five in the evening. I spent the day running errands and drinking. When I got to the church at 4:30, my parents were already there along with a few guests. Mom was in the church kitchen making a frappé for the reception, saying she only wanted my happiness. She said that if William made me happy, that was enough, but she asked if I wanted to think things through a little longer. Shouldn’t I take more time? Then I remember being in the bathroom with my best friend and her asking me if I was sure about getting married to William. I probably said something like once you get to know him and understand him … and I remember standing in front of the bishop. I didn’t walk down the aisle with Dad. We were all just sitting in the room, then the bishop came in, we stood up and he married us. Then we had the little reception where William would only call me Mrs. Acker.”

  At the reception people mingled as if the sudden marriage had been a foreseeable event, someone taking pictures, everyone talking. And then it was over, bride and groom taking off to Sizzler’s for dinner, the parents driving home to Yuma. Back in the apartment, the groom went to bed and the bride found herself in the dark living room.

  I had told her I got married in Arizona. Mentioned the champagne and the cake and the motel with its cactus lit up by the spotlight at the heart of the night. I was still looking for links, but, sitting there with her, I forgot to imagine what it would be like to have no horizon, no sense of context, not to know where the next town is or how big the Alta Dena Dairy is next door, with all those black and white cows living without injury or joy.

  29

  On the third visit she told me about finding her father. Biological, she called him. A father hears from the child he gave away when she was two months old. She’s calling from prison, where she has spent all her adult life. A counsellor had helped her locate him and she had asked another inmate to write to him because, “what if he wanted nothing to do with me? I didn’t want to just barge in on his life.”

  “And your mother, your birth mother?”

  “I’m not interested. She’s not someone I need to meet.”

  “Because of being adopted?”

  “No, being adopted was fine. I was chosen. I always knew that. It was the best thing to be. It’s just that I know what we have in common. She was wild. She was only sixteen when she had me and she already had a three-year-old. Pretty obviously my good side comes from my adopted parents and I know where the other part comes from. I know about nature and nurture. They teach that in here.”

  “But do you know her name?”

  “The thing is, there’s so much I have to think about and concentrate on and get done. I have to work on my parole.”

  I’m looking around at the huge, bleak room we’re sitting in. It’s enough to drive me crazy, all this grey cement and the row of twinkling vending machines. On one sorry wall, there is a glass case full of baby blankets and small trinkets the prisoners have made. These are for sale, but I have never seen anyone spend so much as a second looking at them. There is, of course, nothing to read. Except the Bible. There is a guard near the door talking on the phone. She is female, but that isn’t saying anything. Maryann turns to smile at someone. “Maria. Born in a little village in Mexico and ends up in this place.”

  I say, “You know while I’m here I thought we could talk about what really happened in Hawaii. We’ve never talked about that.”

  She’s still looking at Maria. No change in the eyes or face. “You heard my testimony.” It isn’t a question. “At first I wouldn’t even admit things to myself. Not even that I was present. Not even to my attorney.” Then she goes back to Maria, saying she came up with her father when she was sixteen. As if she has answered my question. She says the village where Maria was born had no electricity and no running water, but up here she was more or less abducted by a woman who offered her a job telling her not to tell her family, to keep it for a surprise. Maria was driven straight to an old man’s house off in the hills, far from anything she recognized, and the old man told Maria he was a brujo. For five long years he raped her and beat her, although Maryann tells this part without emphasis. When somebody killed the old man, Maria was blamed. Maryann opens her hands and looks at her nails while I remember the test we used as girls to see if we were feminine. Open or closed hands. “She gets angry about how naïve she was, but considering the environment in which she was raised, it’s understandable, don’t you think?”

  I say, “And you went off with William for the same reason.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, you were brought up to believe in male authority. Prophets. Doctrines of faith. If Joseph Smith could establish brand-new rules a hundred years ago, why couldn’t William Acker do it today?”

  Maryann shakes her head. “No. It wasn’t that. I truly believed he had a network that would hurt me or my family.” She shakes her head again. “I did what he said. It wasn’t belief, it was fear. And I was right. When I finally came to my senses and told him to go to hell, that’s when he made his first statement about Hawaii in L.A. and started his revenge.”

  “But, Maryann, in the beginning. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “I was in love. I was eighteen. I was horny.”

  “But in Hawaii when he started being different?”

  “I still loved him. I was crazy for him. It doesn’t make any sense. Even in Phoenix I should have known better. There were signs. One time he saw some man in a car stop and talk to me as I was walking down the street going to the store. Never happened!” She looks down and notices her food, touching it gingerly. “Then in Hawaii … one night he went out and I stayed in the apartment and sometime in the middle of the night I felt him grabbing me, yelling about who the man was that just left the apartment.” Maryann’s face is not easy to read. “He was drunk, but he swore he hadn’t been drinking. He swore he saw a man walk out of our apartment and as they passed on the outside stairs, William asked him what he was doing. The man said he’d been in Maryann’s apartment. I’ve heard about people with chemical reactions to alcohol that go way beyond being drunk. Or maybe he was putting on quite the act. Anyway, I had to do some fast thinking and talking to get him to calm down. And the next day when he saw the bruises on my arm and shoulder from where he’d grabbed me, he didn’t have a clue where they came from.”

  “We were going to talk about the crimes,” I say, looking over at the clock because I have to leave in an hour. I push my chair back and lean forward to show Maryann that I am here as a friend, that my friendship is serious, but I live in Canada and who knows if I’ll ever be back. The metal legs of the chair make a scraping sound on the bare concrete.

  “When William turned himself in, you know, he said he was going to cut me loose,” she says dreamily. “He said I had nothing to worry about; he wasn’t going to let me take the fall. And I was in jail, so instead of co-operating with the detectives, I kept up with the lies he had drilled into my head. To make matters worse, I had a lawyer who had never done defence.” She forces a laugh. “He was actually a prosecutor that got assigned to my case.”

  We aren’t talking about the crimes, we’re talking about William again. “Before the California trial we were offered a deal by the DA. They would have me plead guilty only to robbery if William would plead guilty to the murder. So, I walked out with Willi
am telling me to think about it and when we went into the courtroom a little later, I said, take the deal and he started yelling at me. He called me a bitch and went off in front of the judge, and my attorney requested that our trials be severed. The judge made me waive my rights to a jury trial and about three weeks later I was convicted by that judge under the felony murder rule and within a month William made his first statement about the Hawaii case, blaming me, saying I was the only shooter. I hadn’t spoken or written to him since the fight in court, so he cut a deal to testify against me in Hawaii in exchange for immunity. And he ended up pleading no contest to the murder here. I really never dreamed he would go to such extremes. And when he did, I didn’t believe anything could possibly come of it; they couldn’t use my husband’s testimony against me.”