Suspicious River Read Online Free Page B

specially cabled into your color television set. If you’d paid for your room with a credit card, you didn’t even have to tell the front desk girl what you wanted to watch. You just turned to the channel and the six dollars would automatically appear on your bill. Not another word about it.
    Mrs. Briggs hadn’t wanted to offer this special service at first, but then the cable company salesman appeared with his soft burgundy briefcase on a slow April afternoon of sleet and mud, and he showed Mrs. Briggs how much money she was likely to make. As it turned out, sixty percent of the guests were happy to have this entertainment option—though the televisions in their rooms were fifteen years old and the colors on the screen were brighter than life, hard to look at directly for very long. Lips turned flame red or hot pink, bleeding fuzzily into the screen, and each voice reverberated tinny through the sound grill, echoing like a loudspeaker in a cavern, turning all musical instruments to banjos.
    The couple from Ohio was watching
Love Rides the Rails
. It would be the same film shown over and over every night after 8 P.M. until October 22 and
Hot Seat
, when the faces would change, but, of course, the plot would stay the same.
    “Mommy, what are they
doing?
” their blond daughter screamed as if for her life when she opened the motel room door while Mom, Dad and Brother hauled their Samsonite from the station wagon up the long flight of concrete stairs behind her. Mrs. Briggs had to be called at home that night, and she’d been dead asleep. Her voice was full of phlegm when she answered the phone, and Millie’s future at the Swan Motel had been in limbo ever since.
     
    The phone rang then, and it was Rick.
    “Hey,” he said.
    I said, “What’s going on?”
    “Nothing, I just thought you might want me to bring you some dinner over there. You forgot to take your sandwich.”
    His voice sounded far away—a bad connection. I could hear another conversation on the line taking place somewhere beyond his voice: a woman’s singsong rising and falling, telling a story, and I remembered a TV show I’d seen once when I was a child—was it
Twilight Zone
?—in which a ham radio in a man’s basement began one night to play a frantic wireless call for help from a soldier during the last bloody battle of a war that had ended forty years before.
    I wanted to listen to the voice in the distance, but Rick spoke up louder as if to block it out. “I could bring pizza, or I could just drop off the sack if you want.”
    “No,” I said. “I’ll get a snack out of the vending machine and eat the sandwich when I get home.”
    “Sure?”
    “Sure.”
    “See you soon.”
    “See you.”
    He hung up while I was still listening for the woman’s singsong again. I heard a man laugh vaguely, and the woman, muffled, seem to say, “Jesus!” before the line was cut.

 
     
     
     
    A PHOTOGRAPH taken of my mother before she died: She wears a sleeveless white dress. A trellis of pink roses, puffy and soft as pneumonia in the late summer haze, twists and struggles behind her. Her hair is dark and down to her shoulders. A slight breeze seems to sift the loose curls lightly. There’s even a glimpse of the sky beyond her—muted blue, a fading Kodak color that looks nothing like real sky.
    My mother has just opened her mouth to say a word, and her mouth is frozen in the shape of a spoon. Silence is all that comes out.
    Over the years I come to believe, like a child, that my mother is saying my name in that aborted breath, her pink mouth matching the roses behind her:
    “Leila.”
    There it is.
    There it is, I want to believe for a long time: my name flashed forever on a glossy square of radium paper. My mother speaking to me from oblivion. But as I get older I imagine instead that what comes out of her open mouth in the moment of this snapshot is a long sweet howl like a hungry cat. Not interrupted. Even by death. A long, round sound like