The Good House

by Tananarive Due

  The phone rang only once before someone picked up, but there was no greeting. A silent line.

  “Hello?” Angela said. “Is Myles there? This is—”

  “Oh, just make it stop!” Ma Fisher said crankily. Her voice bellowed, distorted because her mouth must be too close to the mouthpiece. She had aged, but Angela recognized the voice right away from the countless times she had called for Myles in high school.

  “Excuse me?” Angela said.

  “It hurts, Mrs. T’saint. Why won’t you please make it stop? Go on, make it stop, you coward. You know how. Just like you did in ’Cisco. Don’t be scared. Whatcha scared of?”

  Angela’s words died in her throat. In ’Cisco? What the hell did that mean? She didn’t know what to say, nor exactly what she had just heard. It took Angela several seconds to remember that Ma Fisher’s mind had been lost to Alzheimer’s. Angela heard interference and a few muffled words, then Myles’s voice came on. “Hello?”

  “Myles, it’s Angela.”

  “Sorry, Angie. Ma got hold of the phone again. She likes to answer it, even if she doesn’t know who she’s talking to.”

  “But Myles, shedid know. She called me Mrs. T’saint.”

  “Yeah…She saw the Caller I.D. She still seems to be able to read, when she wants to. It’s not real likely she recognized your voice. I never say never, but she’s just…not here.”

  He was right, of course—the old Ma Fisher would have called her Angie, like everyone else in town, not Mrs. T’saint—but Angela was rattled by the exchange with Myles’s mother. After a morning like she’d had so far, rattling her was not difficult.

  “What’s up? We’re all sitting down to breakfast,” Myles said. There was a distance in his voice that felt crushing. She didn’t know whowe was, if he was simply referring to his mother and the nurse or someone else who had a breakfast pass. Angela almost changed her mind about why she’d called. But then she glanced out at the backyard deck, where Naomi was sitting at the table with an untouched glass of orange juice, staring out accusingly toward the woods.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your meal. It’s just…Myles, Onyx is missing.”

  “Who?”

  “Naomi’s dog.” She forced herself not to come to tears while she told him the story, even the part about the cellar. She didn’t want him to feel manipulated, as if she were having some kind of breakdown. But she hoped he would want to help.

  Myles’s voice dipped with concern. “Okay, let me finish up here,” he said, “and I’ll meet you at your place within an hour. Listen, I don’t want to alarm you, and you probably shouldn’t share this with Naomi, but a dog that size out back in your woods—”

  “I know,” Angela said. “I’m trying not to think about that.”

  “Sorry about your crappy day, doll-baby. I’ll be there soon.”

  Once, Gramma Marie had said, Elijah Goode had a carriage house where Toussaint Lane dead-ended, where the clay road lost its will and conceded to the mouth of the dense woods. But the carriage house had been taken down decades ago, and the path seemed to have vanished, too. In Angela’s memory, there had been a clear trail back here, the one she and the other kids in Sacajawea knew would take them to The Spot. Once, someone had hung up an old pair of gym shorts on a cedar limb as a landmark, and when Gramma Marie took them down, a bra had gone up instead.

  All landmarks were long gone now. Corey had led her and Tariq on the path after Tariq’s arrival that summer, and she’d realized then that she might never have found her way without her son’s knowledge. The path wasn’t clearly appointed like a nature hike; it was a narrow trail of red-brown needles carved by footfall over time, winding in a seemingly random snake through ferns and the trunks of narrow hemlocks and pillarlike red cedars that grew in crowded stands back here.

  Together, tentatively, Angela and Myles sought out the path. Sometimes they reached blockages, and Angela was sure the thin trail had vanished—then she saw it reemerge at an odd angle, around a rotted tree stump, or beyond a fallen log carpeted with bright green moss. When she lost her balance and braced herself against a maple, she marveled at the springiness of the soft moss beneath her palm. The tree might be dead, without a single leaf, but it was so trussed in moss that it looked like it was wearing a majestic robe, dressed for company.

  The growth was so dense, the sunlight had all but vanished except for patches of light tricking their way past the thinning fall leaves of the alders and maples. Angela wished she had worn a jacket over her sweatshirt, because the temperature dropped without the sun’s favor. The woods smelled damp, of composting leaves and a fir scent that was so vivid and fresh that it put air fresheners to shame. This wasbeautiful . Angela had her own personal nature refuge back here, and it was a crime how rarely she visited. Even before Corey died, she’d rarely come out here. To her own land.

  Angela and Myles followed the path in silence much of the walk, except to call for Onyx and point out each other’s way when the path tried to lose them. Silence felt right. Angela had expected to hear a symphony of insects and noisy birds, but the forest might as well be a chapel. When she finally heard a small animal stirring in a nest of vines beside the path, she thought Onyx would dash toward them with his pink tongue hanging from his mouth. But he didn’t. Whatever it was camouflaged itself so well that Angela couldn’t see a peek of it.

  Squirrels. Raccoons. Moles. They had their own world out here, hidden from her.

  “Do you think he had sense enough to stay on the path?” Angela asked Myles.

  “I don’t see why not. The deer use it. See?” Myles said, nudging his foot against a pile of round, pale droppings. Leave it to Myles to recognize deer shit, she thought, smiling. He had always been more enamored of Sacajawea, more rooted to the region. She’d forgotten most of what she’d known about outdoor life, and she didn’t remember ever knowing much.

  The walk to The Spot took longer than Angela had remembered, nearly twenty minutes. Thick, knotty tree roots helped her keep her footing as the path steepened, then the sunlight’s influence grew as they reached the clearing, which was stark in its lack of growth of any kind. The Spot was barely larger than a public swimming pool, a circular bed of fallen fir needles and leaves around a fire-pit. She could have sworn it was bigger than this, but she’d thought the same thing the last time she’d been here. In her imagination, The Spot was huge.

  The makeshift grill Tariq had laid over the fire-pit to cook hot dogs with her and Corey was still here, only more rusted, and the logs and large stones ringing the pit were nestled in new trash. Dozens of beer cans. Newspapers. Cigarette butts. A crushed KFC bucket. When Angela saw a faded, discarded red box of Trojan condoms, her jaw tightened with anger.

  “What’s wrong with these nasty kids?” Angela said. “We never left this kind of mess here.”

  “No, it’s a disgrace,” Myles said. “We’ll clean it another time.”

  Angela was so annoyed by the lack of respect the kids had shown for the land that she didn’t notice Myles’s use ofwe until seconds later, and the word warmed her. Maybe all was forgiven. But then again, Myles had his own memories anchored here, and he probably was just as offended as she was. They had been eighteen, seniors, when they had come here looking for privacy the night of their prom, her chiffon dress swishing in the underbrush on the trail. If there had been anyone else here, they’d planned to park Pa Fisher’s truck somewhere secluded down the Four, on one of the old logging roads, but Angela had been relieved The Spot was theirs that night. The truck wouldn’t have been the same.

  Myles had been a virgin when he came with her to the heart of Gramma Marie’s woods, and she’d decided she would give him her virginity, too, that she’d kept it for him despite the four times she’d had sex already. She’d been so young before, a thirteen-year-old kid in awe of a band instructor who had pretended to be her friend, feeling grown because he offered her his beer and his dick. Angela had never told Mama or Gramma Marie about her visits to
Mr. Lowe, but she knew damn well Gramma Marie would have put that SOB in jail even if Mama hadn’t been able to collect herself enough to care. With Myles, Angela had been ready to erase those times; the times that had made her feel sullied and used as soon as a minute passed and she knew better.

  She’d wanted it to feel right. Here, nothing could feel wrong.

  That night, Angela had seen Myles’s dark, firm nakedness poke through the zippered mouth of his jeans, surprising her with how wide and man-sized he was when she thought of him as a skinny boy. Angela remembered the ground beneath the blanket, hard despite the cushion of needles, bothering her shoulder blades until the sweet moment when everything was suddenly perfect. Myles had pushed slowly, nudging inside her, and she’d felt locked tightly to him, possession and possessor. That was the first time she’d understood how profound it was to have a manfill her . She’d lost her breath, digging her nails into Myles’s shoulder blades. Only Tariq had made her feel anything close to it since, in days that felt so ancient by comparison that her experience with Myles at The Spot could have been last week. Or yesterday. Angela’s stomach loosened, fluttering.

  Angela glanced shyly at Myles, certain he must have the same memory in his eyes, but his attention was on his task.“Onnnnnnn-yyyyyyyyx,” Myles called, cupping his mouth as he shouted into the woods. He stuffed two fingers past his lips and produced a whistle that hurt Angela’s ear.

  A fully reborn echo repeated his call to him before fading. The whistle, too, seemed to weave its way through the woods before it fell silent. No Onyx.

  The trail that had brought them here didn’t reappear on the other side of The Spot, at least not that she could see. Angela helped Myles search the areas bordering The Spot, but they didn’t wander far from the clearing. In the light, she noticed pockmarks on his cheeks, acne from high school that had not properly healed, or marks from razor bumps. The small marks gave his face a sterner, more finished quality, evidence that his journey from boyhood to manhood had not been without scars.

  “I’d feel better with a compass,” Myles said.

  “Could we get lost?”

  “For a couple hours? You bet. It’s easy to get disoriented.”

  “Screw that, then,” Angela said. She had heard about aVillage Voice editor named Joe Wood who had never returned from an afternoon hike while he was in Seattle for a minority journalists’ convention a few years back, something that happened to hikers too often for her liking. Angela had never met the man, but the news of his vanishing had chilled her. That could have been her. That could have been anyone. “Let’s head back and check the other side, by Gramma Marie’s garden.”

  “Before we go back, there’s something I need to tell you,” Myles said, grave.

  This was it, then. They were alone for the first time, and he was going to speak his mind. She tried to find words to tell him her side of the story—how she’d felt so mortified after attacking Tariq at the funeral, how she’d gone to The Harbor for those months. How she’d been afraid that if she allowed Myles to befriend her again during that time, she might have been such a madwoman that she would have damaged their friendship for good. Or she might have melted into Myles’s presence, losing herself entirely. Her son had died, for God’s sake. What the hell did he expect? Angela’s thoughts were so crowded, she couldn’t choose one.

  Myles’s eyes blazed in the sunlight as they neared the shaded path. “When we first set out, I saw some remains by a shrub,” he said. The wordremains did not have immediate meaning to her. Myles went on: “Some blood and fur. I noticed a dark patch, so I took a peek. It’s pretty well eaten, but it’s definitely a small animal. Maybe it’s been there a couple days already, and there wasn’t enough for me to say for sure if it was the dog…but the fur was dark, and there’s a chance. A good chance, I’m beginning to think.”

  “Lord Jesus,” Angela said. “On the path right near the house?”

  “Where the path begins. I didn’t see a collar, but you can look for yourself on our way back. I don’t know what you’ll want to say to Naomi.”

  At the mention of Naomi’s name, the woods seemed twice as cold. A newborn headache squeezed Angela’s temples. It would be bad enough if Onyx had run away or been stolen, but how could she tell Naomi there was evidence that some animal might have eaten him? Naomi would be traumatized, and she had to report to her shoot in two days.

  “Shiton me,” Angela said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “This is not happening. Why is this happening?”

  “Things always happen, doll-baby,” Myles said. He slipped his arm across her shoulders, where it rested broad and sure, but now she couldn’t enjoy it.

  Angela didn’t want to examine the remains, but she had to. She’d spent more time with Onyx, so she would be more likely to recognize him.

  As Toussaint Lane and Tariq’s van came into distant view from the trail, Angela asked Myles to show her the carcass. Stooping down, Myles pointed behind the expansive trunk of a red cedar at the edge of the trail, and Angela laid her hand upon the tree’s trunk as she peeked around. She saw four ravens pecking at what looked like a mound of leaves. A closer look told her the leaves were stuck to something underneath. Angela couldn’t see more from where she was standing, so she walked beyond the tree, past Myles, until she was only five feet from the thing. Then, she squatted.

  Three of the ravens flew away, but one remained, tugging at the mound. The last raven pulled out a string of red flesh, snapping it away from the mound with its beak. Angela felt her morning yogurt tease the back of her throat, flavored with stomach acid. The bird was eating the dead animal. She had almost forgotten ravens did that. “Get away!” she said, angry, and the bird flew off.

  The raven had been feeding on something fleshy, covered in old blood. The flesh seemed much too small to be a dog at first, but when she looked more closely, she realized these were onlypartial remains. This portion had been separated, but it had been bigger, maybe twice the size of what was left. There was too much blood to tell what the consistency of the animal’s fur might have been, but a pinhole of sunlight from a gap in the trees above gave her perfect light where she needed it: She saw a small patch of fur, bright and damp. Black fur.

  “Shit on me,” Angela whispered. It wasn’t certain, but it was possible. Turning probable.

  “See what I mean?” Myles said.

  “God, I hope this isn’t Onyx. Please don’t let this be Onyx.”

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “We can’t say anything. Not now. We have to be sure.”

  “Your call,” he said, but she wondered if he was disappointed in her.

  Silent again, she and Myles circled the house to go to the backyard. The path down to the herb garden from the backyard was steep and overgrown, so they had to cling to jutting branches to make it down the rocky, muddy soil without stumbling. Gramma Marie’s words came back to her:Before you grab hold of any branch, see that it’s friendly, she had said, warning her to test any branch’s strength before relying on it, a phrasing that had made Angela think of mean trees plotting to hurt her. Exposed roots grew in descending rows that were perfect as makeshift steps, and Angela clearly remembered making this descent as a teenager.

  But the underbrush had grown since she had been here last, and Angela couldn’t remember her landmarks, or whether the herb garden was right or left of where they stood. This side of the property had a very different feel than the portion leading to The Spot, more a marshy thicket than a forest, although there were still stands of trees. Long ago, an acre or more back here had been cleared. Gramma Marie had kept chickens, goats, and pigs, growing her vegetables on one side and her herbs on the other. Now, left to its own will, the land had grown wild again. A nest of gnats circled Angela’s ankles from a puddle of mud she nearly stepped into.

  “There,” Myles said, nodding to his left. “I think the creek is that way.”

  This path was much less t
raveled, no longer a path at all. A bed of chest-high ferns stood in their way, so they waded through. There were so many spiderwebs strung between the ferns, the sea of green branches seemed to be waving from a marionette’s hand. Angela knocked down spiderwebs as she walked, pulling them from her hair and skin when she felt their sticky tendrils. In October, the black garden spiders reappeared in force, and Angela hoped she wouldn’t run into one of the webs’ caretakers, because they were too big for her comfort.

  “Onyx!”Angela shouted, almost a scream of frustration.

  Myles joined her calls for the dog until they reached the creek, following it until they saw the three fence-posts marking the flat land where Gramma Marie’s herb garden had once stood. It was no more than a small clearing now, overrun with weeds. Gramma Marie would be sad if she could see it, Angela realized. She imagined Gramma Marie in her straw hat, stockings falling down her thick calves as she bent over her garden, hacking and pulling. She’d worn big rubber boots in her garden. My God, yes, Angela could almostsee her. The memory of Gramma Marie was as strong here as her memory of lovemaking with Myles at The Spot had been. Close enough to touch, almost.