Houston Noir Read online

  * * *

  Lisa patted herself dry after her shower. Her hair, her face, her throat. Lingered on her stomach, which grew softer and softer as the years passed. She wasn’t a vain woman, which was lucky, because age had loosened the skin at her throat, creased her forehead, freckled the backs of her hands.

  Victoria was vain, and so was Lance. Vain men were easier to be with. Easier to understand and anticipate and stay ahead of. So were women, for that matter.

  Victoria’s vanity had propelled her to her mother’s house the week before, to borrow a pair of diamond earrings for a fund-raiser that night. She hadn’t wanted to miss the annual Azalea Trail opening party. Black tie, and Victoria was going to wear her strapless dress and the ruby drop earrings. She and Lisa had talked about it. That was one of their favorite things to do together—shop. Plan their clothes, as they called it.

  But then Victoria had to change her outfit, and thus her earrings, at the last moment. “It doesn’t look good,” she’d said, which Lisa didn’t believe for a moment. Because she’d seen the dress—it was flattering—but also because of the catch in Victoria’s voice. Victoria’s voice so rarely caught. The new dress featured an elaborate yet modest neckline.

  The old dress was strapless.

  * * *

  Lisa glided through the day. She’d been squirreling away money for years, which wasn’t as hard as it should’ve been. Now it didn’t pay to be a cardiac surgeon, but when Lisa first married Lance, eighteen years ago, it had. A surgeon rarely touched a heart anymore, unless performing a transplant, and those, too, were rarer and rarer. Now cardiologists tended to the heart, with highly technical, nearly mundane procedures that had robbed cardiac surgeons of both money and fame. Houston had always been so famous for its heart surgeons, and now correcting an arrhythmia was as simple as threading a line through a groin to ablate the errant piece of the wildly beating heart. Denton Cooley had lived in River Oaks, of course. He must be turning over in his grave. Lance had trained with him, long ago.

  It had happened to Lisa last year: an ablation, due to an arrhythmia that would not correct itself. The most painful part of the procedure had been the shot that numbed her groin.

  Lance had been fucking someone else while she was at the hospital. An outpatient procedure. It killed Lance, that handling the heart had become so ordinary.

  But Lance didn’t cheat because he was no longer considered a god who cracked open human chests and held beating hearts in his hand. Who knew why he cheated? Lisa only knew why he didn’t, and the distinction was important to her, if no one else. He didn’t cheat because of her, Lisa. He did it because he was an animal. And for years, Lisa had looked the other way. And she would’ve continued to look the other way had Victoria not shifted at a certain angle that morning, allowing Lisa to glimpse the nasty bruise covering her daughter’s armpit.

  Such a strange place to hit someone. She knew immediately what it was. She’d raised Victoria to be better than this, the victim of such a cliché. It was like something out of the movies. He was beating her on private places, so no one would see.

  And Victoria—she was so strong. Just last week she had forcefully but somehow gracefully made a hostess sit them by the window at Brennan’s. Lisa had followed her daughter through the restaurant, feeling proud. It was difficult to reconcile the two halves—the Victoria who moved through the world with such authority, and the Victoria who allowed herself to be hit. Lisa felt like her brain was splitting in half. Seeing the bruise, she’d cried out, as if in pain.

  She, not Victoria. She’d wanted to kill him.

  Victoria had watched her mother. She’d seemed unsurprised by her reaction.

  * * *

  Lance came home for lunch, which he did sometimes. He liked to surprise her.

  “Busy morning?” he asked while assembling two sandwiches. One for him, one for her. He was thoughtful.

  He was good with his hands. Spread mayonnaise on the bread deftly, in one neat motion. Pulled out Lisa’s chair while holding both plates—wide, white—in his free hand.

  “Remember, we’re going to Lake Austin,” she said. “The spa.” Lance nodded. “For a week. Will be so nice to get away.”

  “You deserve it,” Lance said absently. He ate slowly, methodically. He would leave part of the sandwich on his plate. Lisa would not have married Lance if he hadn’t owned this house, this house she would be sad to leave. Built in the thirties, updated every decade. It was the perfect house, both old and new, charming and convenient. Heart pine floors, sunrooms attached to every bedroom, a porch that went on for miles.

  Nobody deserves anything, she thought.

  * * *

  She went for her regular walk at dusk. Homes in Tanglewood were expensive, expensively kept. She passed the Spanish-style villa with the red-tile roof, the white Tudor, the new three-story brick that looked like a university in miniature. Tasteless, but she saw the appeal. Building something bigger, bolder. More.

  She saw the outlines of her neighbors in their kitchens. Mothers, nannies, maids. Lisa knew no one very well, though she’d lived here for years. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood to host block parties. Even if it had been, she wasn’t the kind of woman to attend them. She and Lance were nominally social, but her husband’s proclivities made things thorny. She was never sure who he’d fucked. Or wanted to.

  She had Victoria. Victoria who had gone to the University of Texas and pledged Tri Delta even without the benefit of a mother—or any family member—who was a legacy. She was a first-generation college student, but no one who met her would ever guess. Victoria didn’t even think of herself that way, because Lisa had never let her. Money had paved the way, to be sure. Lance’s money. But Victoria knew how to move through these crowds, even though this—these gilded houses, these manicured lawns—was not her birthright.

  In a month, it’d be too hot to walk at night. Lisa would have to get up with the chickens. A saying of her mother’s. It was too hot now to walk. She did it anyway. She tripped over a piece of crumbling asphalt and looked up at a window, just in time to see someone—a nanny, a mother—grabbing the outline of a child by his or her arm.

  She shivered, though it wasn’t cold. There was violence everywhere. Dogs barked, disrupting the quiet. Insects buzzed, voices carried, cars flew through streets, ignoring signs telling them not to. Lately, she braced herself when Lance touched her. Or perhaps she’d been bracing herself for years.

  After half an hour of walking, slick with sweat, she’d wound back to her street, to her daughter’s street, and climbed the steps to Victoria’s sprawling ranch. She wasn’t winded.

  Victoria opened the door before Lisa knocked. Handed her a glass of wine. Smiled.

  Lisa entered her daughter’s house. Remembered to smile back.

  * * *

  Sometimes it felt as if she were moving underwater. She went to the bookstore near Rice and bought books with covers featuring faceless women: their heads turned or severed at the eyes. Those were the kind of books she liked: preferably set in the past, about women and their troubles. Dropped into societies and marriages and families that didn’t understand their desires.

  She went to the grocery store and bought two loaves of the ciabatta Lance liked. Stood in the deli line and sent the turkey back, apologetically, when it wasn’t sliced thinly enough. Went to the salon and luxuriated in what would be her last appointment for a long time. When her hairdresser massaged her scalp with a drop of oil, Lisa nearly wept with pleasure.

  Other times—like now, at home, in her white-tiled bathroom, staring at her new bob—she felt thrilled. Titillated. An electric current running from her brain to the tips of her fingers. She now had brown hair, for the first time since she was a child.

  Her plan was simple. She’d heard somewhere that simple plans were the best plans. She hoped it was true.

  Her makeup had been disturbed at the hair salon, by the hair washing and the heat of the dryer. She took a pad soaked with ast
ringent and drew it across her face, starting at her chin, moving upward in quick, deft strokes.

  * * *

  It had always been her nature to be gentle. When Victoria was a little girl, Lisa was good at untangling knots in her daughter’s hair. Her instinct was to move slowly, to solve with patience instead of force.

  A less patient woman would’ve left Lance. He wasn’t flagrant with his affairs, but still there’d been a nurse who’d driven by their house too many times to ignore. And then, abruptly, stopped. A smear of lipstick on the back of one of his collars, hidden from his sight. Late nights at the hospital, even when he wasn’t on call.

  Lisa hated to think about the fight Lance and the nurse—she wore sunglasses, drove a Honda with an empty car seat in the back—must have had. Lance challenging her, invoking . . . Who knew what he invoked? Did he threaten her career? Her marriage? Did he say he loved his wife?

  Lisa dabbed at the delicate skin beneath her eyes. Imagining the sex didn’t bother her. It was the fighting that disturbed her—the intimacy that accompanied conflict.

  Lisa lived in a beautiful home. Liked her life. Loved her daughter, who she was lucky to have living close by. She hadn’t ever thought seriously of leaving Lance. Or demanding that he stop. She knew he wouldn’t.

  But the bruise. And then the photographs. One day, Lisa let herself into her daughter’s house—a ranch, yes, but totally gutted and restored—with the key hidden beneath the stone turtle out back. Found the Polaroids. It undid something in Lisa, holding them in her hand, stacked in a neat square. She guessed that David checked Victoria’s phone. That something physical, in this digital age, felt safer.

  The photographs were lurid. The bruises against the pale skin—Victoria had always had such beautiful skin—reminded Lisa of tie-dye. Multiple variations of the same hue. An irregular pattern that somehow made sense.

  She had put the photographs back into Victoria’s trunk. The same trunk in which she’d hidden her secrets since she was a little girl: notes passed by friends, treasures dug up in the creek that ran through the backyard of their first home. A letter from her father, who was barely in Victoria’s life.

  Lisa startled back into the present: her white-tiled bathroom, with the dormer windows to let in the light. The light was not flattering, but it was useful for applying makeup.

  It was Lance, opening the door in his firm way. He never hesitated. Lisa caught his surprise in the mirror’s reflection; he rarely saw his wife without makeup.

  She felt naked.

  “You’re home early,” she said, resisting the urge to drop her head. Let him look at her. Let him see.

  He shrugged. “Thought I might go hit some balls.”

  “We have the thing at Deb’s tonight.”

  “I know.” He made to go, raising his hand in a sort of half wave, but then he paused. “You look nice like that. You look nice without all of the—” He ran a hand over his face, as if removing a mask, before he left.

  She was moved. But she shouldn’t have been. It was Lance’s instinct, always, to make women feel good about themselves.

  It was only later that she realized he hadn’t noticed her hair, brown for the first time in years.

  * * *

  Victoria met David three years ago, while walking through the neighborhood with her mother. She was twenty-seven. He was a partner in a law firm, recently divorced, Victoria’s senior by a decade. Lisa didn’t like the decade part, but she liked David. He was quiet and seemed kind. The rumor was his wife had left him for her high school boyfriend, breaking David’s heart. Now, of course, Lisa wondered why the woman had left. They had no children. And he adored Victoria.

  When they’d been dating for a few months, Victoria had fainted, and David had taken her to the emergency room, calling Lisa on the way. When Lisa arrived, David was in a quiet fury, demanding that his wife be seen that instant. And she was.

  David was quiet, but he was forceful. Taller and larger and less handsome than Victoria, with a weak chin and sandy-colored hair. Victoria had worked at a marketing firm when she met him. Not her passion, perhaps, but a good enough job. A way to get out of the house, at least. She’d gone to part-time after they married, then quit altogether. You don’t work, she’d said to Lisa, and you’re happy.

  That was true, or true enough. But sometimes Lisa felt the world had passed her by. Especially once Victoria left for college. She had no purpose, had never had a purpose, except for her daughter.

  But then Victoria moved to Tanglewood, and her presence brightened Lisa’s life. They were each other’s purpose.

  The first surge of sickness, when Lisa was sixteen years old—she’d known what it was. Who it was. And everything after that, all her moves—up, up, up—had been for her daughter. She knew people—Gary’s mother, for one—thought she’d gotten pregnant so she could escape Midland. But it’d been the other way around, entirely. She doubted she would have left if not for her child, her child who had made her life possible.

  * * *

  Lisa would’ve lived a lifetime with Lance. He would’ve retired, eventually. He was reluctant to leave work, said he didn’t know what he’d do with his time, but Lisa and he both knew that the office and the hospital provided good cover for his extracurricular activities.

  They still had sex. A few times a month. It was nice enough. She’d told him once, after the nurse had driven by, that if she ever got an STD, she’d kill him. They had been eating dinner on the porch. She didn’t look at him when she said it.

  “Okay,” he’d responded after a moment, and they’d never spoken of it again.

  Lisa’s first plan had been violence. Lance had a gun—Lisa would use it to kill David. She’d stare him in the face and pull the trigger. She knew how to handle one; it was Texas. She’d grown up among men who hunted. She’d be arrested and spend the rest of her life in prison. Or maybe not. Maybe a good lawyer could prove self-defense, on her daughter’s behalf.

  But the risk of leaving Victoria—abandoning her—was too great. Victoria hadn’t needed her mother in such a long time.

  Her daughter had arranged an enviable life for herself. Talked about having children soon. Liked to cook elaborate meals from old French cookbooks. Was developing an interest in wine. Was—Lisa had thought—happy. She loved her mother, but didn’t seem to need her, not as she had when she was a child. But perhaps that was what it meant to be a parent: your child needed you until she did not. That’s what Lisa told herself.

  But then the bruise. And then the photographs. After seeing them, Lisa had left her daughter’s home and vomited into a camellia bush.

  She didn’t know which part she found more alarming: that Victoria was being beaten, or that she hadn’t told her mother.

  * * *

  A few days before they were to leave, Victoria dropped by the house with a book. Lisa was on the patio—she would miss this patio—drinking a glass of wine.

  Victoria rested the book on the table, raised her eyes at the wine. “Cocktail hour somewhere?”

  Lisa nodded.

  “In that case . . .” Victoria went to the kitchen and returned a moment later with her own glass.

  Lisa was so grateful her daughter wasn’t pregnant, she nearly cried.

  “The stuff you drink is shit,” Victoria said. “All tannin.” She wrinkled her nose. “But whatever,” she said, and took another sip.

  Lisa studied her daughter. She had a solid look about her: firm cheekbones and big hazel eyes. Her eyes had always been her best feature. “You look pretty today.”

  Victoria seemed startled. “Is something wrong?”

  Lisa shook her head. Victoria picked up the book, flipped through it idly.

  “Is it good?” Lisa asked, her voice fraught. She was near tears.

  Victoria shrugged. “I hope so.” She knew something was amiss. She did not know what.

  They were going to run away. To a little town in Mexico where Lisa and Gary had vacationed once, years ago. T
hey would come back once the dust had settled. Lisa had been to see her lawyer—a man with an underbite and a thick head of silver hair who’d come highly recommended—four times in the last week.

  They would each—Victoria and Lisa—file for divorce in Mexico. Victoria had a prenup, of course (everyone did these days), but the attorney was certain they could void it, as long as Lisa got the pictures.

  Victoria would sign the papers in Mexico, Lisa knew. In Houston, she had no interest in leaving David, but things would be different once they were elsewhere. Once they weren’t in Tanglewood. Victoria thought, like Lance, that she and her mother were going to Austin, to a spa. Mexico would be a surprise. Victoria loved surprises, had since she was a little girl.

  In Mexico, Lisa would take Victoria’s phone so David couldn’t reach her, and she’d explain their future to her daughter. She could imagine the words, what exactly she would say: You’re fooling yourself. He will never stop. You’re too young to throw away your life like this.

  Platitudes, all of them. And all of them true.

  Lisa knew Victoria would listen, once they were away from all this. It would be easier, for both her and her daughter, to be gone. To absent themselves from the lives they were going to destroy.

  “Mom,” Victoria said, “stop looking at me like that.”

  But she, too, seemed close to tears.

  * * *

  Her love for Victoria was the purest thing she’d ever felt, even now, thirty years later. Or especially now. She’d never loved another person so deeply, so obsessively. With anyone else she’d loved—her mother, a boy before her first husband whom she’d loved an unreasonable amount—there was a desire underpinning it all. There would have been no love without it. She wanted to touch, she wanted to be touched. She wanted to be made to feel a certain way. That want made her feel like an animal.