Vinegar Girl Page 15

  Dr. Battista’s plan had been for Kate to start wearing her mother’s wedding ring after the ceremony, and she had brought it with her to the church. But it had not been mentioned during the vows—a sign, perhaps, that Uncle Theron was more flustered by the general tumult than he had let on—and so now she bent and drew her billfold from her tote and took the ring out of the coin compartment. The wedding ring was yellow gold and her engagement ring was white gold, but her father had told her that was perfectly acceptable. She slipped it onto her finger and returned her billfold to her tote.

  They zipped down North Charles, somehow managing to hit every intersection just as the traffic light was turning red. Pyotr never once stopped. They whizzed past cherry trees and Bradford pear trees in full bloom, each with a puddle of pink or white petals on the ground underneath. When they reached the construction mess around the Johns Hopkins campus, Pyotr took a snappy turn off Charles without bothering to signal, nearly mowing down a crowd of young people carrying picnic baskets. It was almost one o’clock now, and the whole world seemed to be heading out for lunch—everyone laughing, calling to friends, strolling aimlessly with no sense of urgency. Pyotr cursed under his breath and cranked his window shut.

  In front of Mrs. Murphy’s house, Pyotr scraped his tires alongside the curb and cut the engine. He opened his door and got out and nearly shut it on Kate’s ankles, because she was in the act of sliding past the stick shift and across the driver’s seat. “Watch it!” she told him. At least he had the grace then to stand back and wait for her to emerge, but he still didn’t speak, and he closed the door with unnecessary firmness once she was out.

  They smushed a layer of pale pink blossoms carpeting the sidewalk. They climbed the three brick steps and came to a stop on the stoop. Pyotr slapped his front pockets. Then he slapped his rear pockets. Then he said, “Hell damn,” and put his finger on the doorbell and held it there.

  It seemed at first that no one would answer. Finally, though, a creaking sound came from inside, and then Mrs. Liu flung the door open and demanded, “Why you ring?”

  She was wearing what appeared to be the same clothes she had worn when Kate first met her, but she was no longer all smiles. Without giving Kate so much as a glance, she scowled fiercely at Pyotr and said, “Mrs. Murphy having her nap.”

  “I don’t want Mrs. Murphy; I want to get into house!” Pyotr shouted.

  “You have key to get into house!”

  “I locked key in car!”

  “Again? You do this again?”

  “Do not quack at me! You are very rude!” And Pyotr shoved his way past her and strode directly to the staircase.

  “Sorry,” Kate told Mrs. Liu. “We didn’t mean to disturb you. Monday I’m getting an extra key made, so this shouldn’t happen again.”

  “He is the one is very rude,” Mrs. Liu said.

  “He’s had a really hard day.”

  “He has many hard days,” Mrs. Liu said. But she stepped back, finally, and let Kate enter the house. Belatedly, she asked, “You got married?”

  “Right.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” Kate said.

  She hoped Mrs. Liu wasn’t feeling sorry for her. Before, she had acted so fond of Pyotr, but now it seemed they disliked each other.

  Pyotr had reached the second flight of stairs before she caught up with him. She bypassed him and started toward the room that was going to be hers, where she planned to deposit her tote. Behind her, Pyotr said, “Where my extra keys are?”

  She paused and turned. He had stopped on the landing, and he was gazing all around him. Since the landing was entirely bare, without a stick of furniture or a picture or so much as a hook on the wall, it seemed an unlikely place to look for his keys, but there he stood, wearing a baffled expression.

  She censored the first response that came to her, which was “How should I know where your extra keys are?” She set her tote on the floor and asked, “Where do you keep them?”

  “In kitchen drawer,” he said.

  “Let’s look in the kitchen drawer, then, why don’t we,” she said. She spoke more slowly and evenly than usual, so that she wouldn’t come across as exasperated.

  She led the way to the kitchen and began opening the cranky white metal drawers beneath the counter: one drawer containing dime-store knives and forks and spoons, one containing an assortment of cooking utensils, one containing dishcloths. She returned to the utensil drawer. That seemed to have the most possibilities, even if it wasn’t where she herself would have kept keys. She rattled through several spatulas, a whisk, a hand-cranked eggbeater…Pyotr stood watching with his arms hanging limp, offering no help.

  “Here you go,” she said finally, and she held up an aluminum shower-curtain ring bearing a house key and a Volkswagen key.

  Pyotr said, “Ah!” and lunged for them, but she took a step back and hid the keys behind her.

  “First you have to call the police,” she said, “and tell them you made a mistake about Bunny. Then you get the keys.”

  “What?” he said. “No. Hand me keys, Katherine. I am husband and I say hand me keys.”

  “I am wife and I say no,” she said.

  She supposed he could have wrested them from her. She fancied she saw the thought cross his face. But in the end he said, “I will only tell police Bunny is maybe not vegetarian. Okay?”

  “Tell them she didn’t take the mice.”

  “I will tell them you think she didn’t take the mice.”

  Kate decided that was the best she could hope for. “Do it, then,” she said.

  He took his cell phone from the right front pocket of his shorts. Then he took his billfold from his back pocket. He pulled out a business card. “Detective assigned to my case, personally,” he said with some pride. He held the card up for her to read. “How you pronounce this name?”

  She peered at it. “McEnroe,” she said.

  “McEnroe.” He clicked his phone on, studied the screen a moment, and then began the laborious process of placing a call.

  Even from where she stood, she could hear the single ring, followed immediately by a male voice making a canned announcement. “He must have turned his phone off,” she told Pyotr. “Leave a message.”

  Pyotr lowered his phone and gaped at her. “He turned it off?” he asked.

  “That’s why his voice mail picked up so fast. Leave a message.”

  “But he said I call him night or day. He said this was his personal number.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. She snatched the phone away from him and pressed it to her ear. “Detective McEnroe, this is Kate Battista,” she said. “I’m calling for Pyotr Shcherbakov; the laboratory break-in case. He told you that my sister, Bunny, could be a possible suspect, but that’s because he was thinking Bunny’s a vegetarian, and she’s not. She eats meat. Also she was home all last evening and I’m sure I would have known if she had gone out during the night, so you can take her off your list. Thanks. Bye.”

  She ended the call and returned the phone to Pyotr. It was anyone’s guess whether she had spoken in time to be recorded.

  Pyotr put the phone in his pocket. He said, “Detective told me, ‘Here’s my card.’ He told me, ‘You should call me any time, if you have any further thoughts.’ And now he does not answer. Is final straw; is last straw. This is worst day of my life.”

  Kate knew it was unreasonable of her, but she couldn’t help feeling insulted.

  She gave up the keys in silence.

  “Thank you,” he said absently. Then he said, “Well, thank you”—the unaccustomed “well” slightly softening his tone. He passed a hand over his face. He looked drawn and weary, and suddenly older than his age.

  “I have not told you this,” he said, “but the three years I have been here have been difficult years. Lonesome years. Perplexing. Everyone acts that to be in America is a gift, but is not one hundred percent a gift. Americans say things that are misleading. They seem s
o friendly; they use first names from beginning. They seem so casual and informal. Then they turn off their phones. I do not understand them!”

  He and Kate were facing each other, no more than a foot apart. She was close enough to see the microscopic blond glints of his whiskers, and the tiny brown specks mixed in with the blue of his eyes.

  “It is the language, maybe?” he asked. “I know the vocabulary, but still I am not capable to work the language the way I want to. There is no special word for ‘you’ when it is you that I am speaking to. In English there is only one ‘you,’ and I have to say the same ‘you’ to you that I would say to a stranger; I cannot express my closeness. I am homesick in this country, but I am thinking I would be homesick in my own country now, also. I have no longer any home to go back to—no relatives, no position, and my friends have lived three years without me. There is no place for me. So I have to pretend I am fine here. I have to pretend everything is…how you say? Hunky-dory.”

  Kate was reminded of her father’s confession weeks earlier, when he was telling her what a long haul it had been. Men were just subject to this belief that they should keep their miseries buried deep inside, it seemed, as if admitting to them would be shameful. She reached out and touched Pyotr’s arm, but he gave no sign he had noticed. “I bet you didn’t even have breakfast,” she told him. It was all she could think of to say. “That’s what it is! You’re starving. I’m going to fix you something.”

  “I don’t want it,” he said.

  In the church she had been thinking that maybe the reason he went ahead with the wedding regardless was that underneath, he…well, liked her, a little. But now he wasn’t even looking at her; he didn’t seem to care that she was standing there so close to him with her hand on his arm. “I just want mice back,” he said.

  Kate dropped her hand.

  “I would like that the thief would be Bunny,” he said. “Then she could tell us where are they.”

  Kate said, “Believe me, Pyotr, it wasn’t Bunny. Bunny’s nothing but a copycat! She just has this little semi-crush or whatever it is on Edward Mintz and so when Edward said he was vegan…”

  She paused. Pyotr was still not looking at her or even hearing her, probably. “Oh,” she said. “It was Edward.”

  Then he did flick his eyes in her direction.

  “Edward knows where the lab is,” she said. “He went to the lab with Bunny, that time she brought Father his lunch. He must have been standing right beside her when she punched in the lock combination.”

  Pyotr had been holding the keys in his left hand, and now he gave them a sudden toss upward, caught them again, and walked out of the kitchen.

  Kate said, “Pyotr?”

  By the time she reached the landing, he was halfway down the first flight of stairs. “Where are you going?” she called over the railing. “Just wait till you’ve finished lunch and then call the detective, why don’t you. What do you think you’re doing? Can I come with you?”

  But all she heard was the slapping sound of his flip-flops descending the stairs.

  She should make him take her with him. She should run after him and fling herself into the car. It was hurt feelings, probably, that stopped her. Ever since the wedding he had been downright abusive, as if now that they were married he thought he could treat her however he liked. He hadn’t even noticed how helpful she had been about his stupid keys, or how she had offered so nicely to fix him something to eat.

  She turned from the stairs and continued down the hall to the living room. She went over to one of the windows and peered at the street below. The VW was already pulling away from the curb.

  —

  In movies, women were always flinging together elegant, impromptu meals from odds and ends in the fridge, but Kate didn’t see how she could do that with what was in Pyotr’s fridge. All it held was a jar of mayonnaise, a few cans of beer, a carton of eggs, and some very pale celery. Also a screwed-up bag from McDonald’s, which she didn’t bother investigating. The fruit bowl on the counter displayed a single speckled banana. “Miracle food,” she could hear Pyotr saying, which seemed at odds with his fondness for McDonald’s and KFC. When she looked through the cupboards above the counter she found rows and rows of empty containers—bottles and jars and jugs meticulously washed and saved. You would think he planned to take up canning.

  Her only option was scrambled eggs, she figured, but then she realized he didn’t even have butter. Could you make scrambled eggs with no butter? She wasn’t going to risk it. Maybe deviled, then. At least he had mayonnaise. She put four eggs in the dented saucepan she found in the drawer beneath the stove, and she covered them with water and set them to boil.

  She hoped he wasn’t doing anything foolish. He should have just called the police. But maybe that was where he was going, down to the station in person, or maybe to the lab to reconnoiter with her father.

  She went back to the living room and looked out the window again, for no earthly reason.

  The living room seemed less empty now that Pyotr had moved his desk in from the study. It was heaped with various belongings that must also have been in the study—junk mail and stacks of books and coiled extension cords, in addition to the computer equipment. She picked up a wall calendar, curious to know if he’d made a note of their wedding, but the page was still turned to February and all the days were blank. She put it back on the desk.

  She returned to the landing for her tote and carried it to her room. The leopard-print slipcover had vanished; the daybed had been stripped to its rust-stained navy-and-white-striped mattress, and there was no sign of sheets or blankets. A naked pillow slumped on the floor next to it. Couldn’t he at least have put fresh linens on—tried to make it more welcoming? Her garment bag hung in the closet and her carton of shower gifts sat on the bureau, but she couldn’t imagine ever feeling she belonged here.

  The air in this room had an atticky smell, and she walked over to the window and struggled to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally she gave up and went back out to the kitchen. She looked to see if the eggs were done, but how was she supposed to tell? At home she had relied on a plastic color-changing gadget dating back to Mrs. Larkin. So she let the eggs cook a few minutes longer while she spooned mayonnaise into a plastic mixing bowl and sprinkled in salt and pepper from the two shakers on the table. Then she resumed her inventory, looking into all the under-counter cabinets, but they were nearly empty. After lunch, she would have to unpack the kitchen items from her box of shower gifts. The thought lifted her spirits somewhat. A project! She knew just where she would store her green mugs.

  She turned off the burner beneath the eggs and carried the pan to the sink and ran cold water over them until they were cool enough to handle. When she started peeling the first one she could tell by the feel of the white that it was cooked enough, but as luck would have it, the shell came off in tiny, sharp, stubborn chips, bringing chunks of white along with them. The egg ended up about half its original size, pockmarked and ugly, and the tips of her fingers were bleeding. She said, “Damn,” and rinsed the egg under the faucet and held it up, considering.

  All right, egg salad, then.

  This turned out to be a wise decision, because the other three eggs looked equally deformed after she had peeled them. She chopped them with a very dull knife and then she chopped some celery, using the counter as her work surface because she couldn’t find a cutting board. Most of the celery had to be stripped off and thrown into the bucket under the sink. Even the innermost stalks were slightly flabby.

  She thought of the salad bowl she’d been given at her shower, and she went back to her room to get it. Packed inside the bowl was her dream catcher. She took it out and held it up and pivoted slowly in the center of the room, debating where to hang it. Ideally, she supposed, it should be suspended from the ceiling directly over her bed, but that seemed like a lot of work and she wasn’t sure that Pyotr owned a hammer and nails. She looked toward the window. It had only a yellowe
d paper shade, but there must have been curtains at some point because an adjustable metal rod was stretched between brackets above it. She put the dream catcher down and dragged the ottoman over from in front of the armchair in the corner. Then she took off her shoes and stood on the ottoman and tied the dream catcher to the curtain rod.

  She wondered if Pyotr had ever seen one of these. He would probably find it peculiar. Well, it was peculiar. He would fold his arms and tilt his head and study it for a long, silent moment. Things always seemed to interest him so. He always seemed to be watching her with such close attention—at least until today. She wasn’t accustomed to attention, but she couldn’t say she found it unpleasant.

  She hopped off the ottoman and dragged it back to the armchair and put her shoes on again.

  Could the police have had him come with them to Edward’s house to make the arrest, possibly?

  It was almost 2:30. The so-called wedding banquet was scheduled for 5:00. This meant there was plenty of time yet, but on the other hand, Aunt Thelma’s house was way out in horse country and Pyotr would need to wash up and change clothes before he went. And Kate was all too familiar with how people in labs could forget to look at the clock.

  Maybe he had to fill something out, a warrant or an affidavit or whatever they called it.

  She unpacked the rest of her shower gifts and found places for them in the kitchen. She emptied her suitcases into her bureau drawers, helter-skelter at first, but then, feeling time hanging heavy, she rearranged everything in orderly stacks. She unpacked the items from her tote—her brush and comb, which she set on her bureau; her toothbrush, which she took to the bathroom. It seemed too intimate, somehow, to fit her toothbrush into the holder alongside Pyotr’s, so she went to the kitchen for a jelly glass and she stood her toothbrush in that and set it on the bathroom windowsill. There was no medicine cabinet, but a narrow wooden shelf above the sink held shaving supplies, a comb, and a tube of toothpaste. Would they be sharing this toothpaste? Should she have brought her own? How, exactly, were they going to divide the household expenses?