by Meghan Tifft
“There is?” How did he not notice that?
She shakes her head as if to dismiss his obliviousness. “I write it down so I can translate later. I can’t help thinking it’s a message, or a code, or something”—she ratchets her finger back and forth between them—“like maybe he’s a messenger and he doesn’t even know it. Stranger things have happened.”
Dracula stares at her. One of the Russian’s meals comes wafting through the walls. A deep fungal smell.
“Sometimes I get the words wrong. Usually,” she says.
Dracula seems to be lost for words. He tries to close off his nose to the odors. He is aware that his freezer is currently crammed beak to toe with frozen bird carcasses that he thaws and sips inside brown paper bags on his delivery route. He knows he shouldn’t judge.
“You know I get insomnia,” Lucinda says. “Basically I’m just learning Russian. The hard way.”
Dracula doesn’t know what he wants to say. When he thinks about how his girlfriend is learning to speak the language of his old-world neighbors, of his own abandoned liaisons—through the conduit of his boorish neighbor—Dracula feels a hot poker jab him in the gut. Why does this scandalize him so? How long has she been doing this? What words has she learned? She recites a few pleas and admonishments. Stop. Don’t hurt me like this. She now knows more than he does of the language he is pretty sure is still lapping somewhere at the deserted grottoes of his mind.
Lucinda plugs her nose. “God. What awful thing is he cooking in there?”
The Russian has been lately admonishing somebody to eat. “Eat why don’t you!” he says. “Why are you starving yourself like this? You’re killing me!”
“By the way,” Lucinda says, “my mom’s still bugging me about dinner. When will you have a night off?”
“When I make enough money for rent,” Dracula says, grimly. He won’t make enough money for rent.
He’s been picking up extra shifts whenever he can. He drives the overnights between the drop-off stations, a perfect job for him. It’s flu season, and somebody is always looking for a sub. Lucinda is still looking for a job to replace the one she left. She won’t say much about why she quit. She also bought a TV, a cheap one, with money Dracula didn’t know they had. That does not make him feel good. They get just enough reception off the rabbit ears to pick up the syndicated shows he likes. Lucinda hates the TV. But then again, she says, maybe she should watch. She can’t decide if she should begin living like they’re nitwit degenerates and just drift into the slow doldrums of insanity, or if she should be doing something more avidly aggressive about her impending monstrosity. What could they do? she asks over and over again, looking for ideas.
Dracula keeps working overtime.
One night, coming home late, he clipped in just before daybreak and it made him feel alive and invigorated in a way that gave him a glimpse of something liberating, his own slim aperture, opening up. Was this what Lucinda was talking about? He found Lucinda on the couch, doing something different too, awake and looking at the TV with wide serious owl eyes. The TV was uncharacteristically on. “I heard the song again,” she said.
The song? “What song?”
Lucinda pointed at the wall.
“Oh, his? The Russian’s?” Dracula picked up the remote. “I’m going to turn this off.”
When Dracula does, he feels bathed in a new and soupy silence. The sound wasn’t on, and all that thin static cling from the back of the box is gone.
“It’s such a morbid song.”
“Morbid?” says Dracula. That is not how he’d describe that song.
“Well, for a funeral,” she says. She looks away. “For how she died.”
Dracula gives her a puzzled look. “Wait—” Is she talking about the singer who died or somebody whose funeral she went to? “You went to a funeral?”
“It was in the bathtub,” Lucinda finishes her thought.
That did not clarify anything.
“Who died?” Dracula asks, trying to draw straight the kink in the conversation.
Lucinda nibbles at her nails. “The girl I worked with. Vanessa. You never met her.”
He is still standing next to the open front door.
“She said her boyfriend was going to kill her. Harvard. But that was just a figure of speech.”
Dracula feels a swoop of dread. He perches on the table. He stares at the dead TV. “You mean, she was murdered?”
“No,” Lucinda says, watching him closely. “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
Dracula thinks about the bathtub. “She was in the bath?”
Lucinda nods. “She was a singer, and now every time he sings it I’ll hear her voice. Her voice.” After a pinched and desolate silence, she says, “I think it was my fault.”
Dracula props his chin on the tips of his fingers. He realizes that he is not surprised to hear her say this.
“I should not have quit my job,” Lucinda says.
“What does that have to do with it?”
Lucinda pauses. She seems a little affronted by his tone. “I just stopped talking to her,” she mutters, as if she knows this is no answer.
Dracula sits and breathes. He thinks about the dead coworker and what this means. He thinks about how she won’t discuss her reasons for quitting.
Lucinda clamps her hands in prayer between her knees. He looks at her, wishing he wasn’t so stuck all the time on himself. There is still so much he doesn’t know about her.
The Door
Doors always open. That’s what Lucinda’s father used to say. Her other father, not the one she lives with now. Lived with. She keeps forgetting she moved out. It’s all new to her, this situation. Being Dracula’s girlfriend. Living with Dracula. Doing his laundry. Doors always open. She hasn’t thought of that in a long time.
She doesn’t like doing the laundry. It’s in the basement of the building and there’s only two machines and the foundation walls are literally dissolving into pink sand heaps on the floor. There must be some animal down here digging away. The only hiding place is underneath the bicycles, a huge rabble of all broken parts.
It reminds her of her childhood at home. Her first home. The one before the apartment. The one from those years with her father—her first father. She barely remembers her first father but she does remember that he wasn’t the same as her second father.
Sometimes, when she thinks about it, it seems to Lucinda like she’s had three fathers, the second one being both of the last two. Because of the accident. Now she wonders if it wasn’t he who had the rule about the doors—the second one. The one before the accident. She knows she hasn’t heard it said in a long time.
Lucinda pulls Dracula’s jeans from the wash, a damp heavy handful. She has to hang them, from a hanger she hooks to a bare iron pipe, because he can’t abide any sort of machine- instilled shrinkage.
Then she gets out of there fast, holding her breath. Now she’s at the bottom of the stairwell, looking at the door directly across from the laundry room door. That one is always closed and the other one is always open. It’s why she always thinks of her father—whichever one it was—every time she comes down here.
“I’m afraid something bad is going to happen,” she sometimes says to Dracula.
He looks up from his mending. He squeezes her knee. “Something bad is always going to happen,” he says. “You just have to live with it.”
Lucinda has come to like living in Dracula’s apartment. She prefers being outside to being inside. What she likes best, what gives it the uncanny feel of sanctuary, is the inside feeling of the outdoor space. The inner courtyard—that’s what she loves. It makes her think she does want to stay here. Maybe she won’t bother with another apartment. It’s like being in a diorama without its lid—sitting inside an airy museum exhibit and enjoying a companionable coexistence with others who won’t bother her. The hedge sculptures, she means. There are figures all over this little open-air cubicle. They help her. She focuses on the p
lay out here. It’s like some oblique preparation for the moment she steps into statuary onstage, and then ceases to be herself. Every day she comes out and sits, feeling enclosed and ventilated at the same time, the sky dropping away above her and the walls closing in around her and the hedges cozying up like eternal little friends. Right now a centaur and a mermaid are keeping her company. They are at the center of a small meditation path looking out with their backs to each other. Though mermaids are deceitful and lascivious creatures Lucinda feels certain that this one is still young and unspoiled, leaning out for open armfuls of love. She is fresh and green. Lucinda has seen the manager meticulously trimming her forked tail.
Lucinda often comes out here to the courtyard to wake up. It takes her a long time. Sometimes, she wakes to a version of herself she doesn’t exactly recognize. She has to sit until she’s familiar again.
Right now, she is taking her time to get her bearings. Lately she’s been arriving at work before she’s even aware of herself and then it takes a cold glass of water to really plant her in the ground. She often looks into the register drawer minutes after just having done it and then finds the bill on her person somewhere and recalls that she already took it. She doesn’t understand why she is taking money from her boss. Why does the register continue to harbor hundred-dollar bills at random and why does she continue to retrieve them? As long as they keep this up they seem to be knitting together the fabric of some inaccessible deal. She doesn’t know what the deal is. Maybe this is the deal. Maybe the deal is what they are doing already.
Whatever is happening, Lucinda hasn’t told Dracula yet about the hundred-dollar bills. She has been quietly hoarding them away, because she can’t add them to their funds without causing cataclysmic ripples. Five bills in all now, and she continues to wonder whether her boss is ever going to try to redeem them. “You’re too skinny,” he told her one day, out of the blue. It’s like he wants to fatten her like a pig. She can’t tell when or if the cash-in will come or what she will do in response. She can’t tell if she will keep the money or give it back. At first she was saving it for another apartment but now she doesn’t want to leave this one. She wants to stay in the rejuvenating stillness of this open box. She wants the centaur and the mermaid to go on guarding each other in eternal commemoration of their mutual solitude. It doesn’t matter that they don’t go together at all. They are both here.
Sometimes, looking down from their window, Lucinda says to Dracula, “Do you ever feel like we’re leaning on a door that’s about to open? That’s how I feel. Like we’re about to fall into some hidden pit.” She feels stupid saying it but Dracula looks at her with intense scrutiny, the kind that makes her spine stiffen pleasantly.
“Yes,” he says, “yes.” It seems they momentarily get each other, in a way they don’t have to discuss.
Her father used to say it too.
“You’re going to disappear,” he said.
Dracula is coming to meet her now at the end of her shifts, whenever they end after dark, but he doesn’t ever come inside. She can’t tell if Richard senses him out there, deepening and harrowing the night air. She almost wonders sometimes if he does and is afraid. Lately he paces behind the counter like a rat in a laboratory simulation—pushing back and forth through the swinging door and darting looks at the glass windows and bumping between the sink and the mirror. When she sees him under the lamp at his desk, his hand is methodically rubbing his head, as if to soothe away the pain. He hardly talks to her and when he does it’s in uneasy expulsions out of the side of his mouth. He is finalizing the divorce with his wife, after six years of separation. It is not pretty, he says to Lucinda. She is reaming me. This makes Lucinda grim with suspicion—the fact that he is wasting petty cash on her in the midst of some intimate gouging. Maybe it’s what Vanessa says and he feels compelled to pay her to keep quiet about his earlier come-on, if that’s even what it was. Maybe he is tossing reckless sandbags at a flood he knows will bring him to total disaster.
When he comes out of the back room, he’s always rubbing at his eyes, almost as if he has been sleeping back there.
“Oh my God,” he says, smearing his face. He never looks at her anymore.
“The divorce?” says Lucinda, politely. She doesn’t really want to know.
Richard’s breath rattles in his throat. “I don’t know. I didn’t know this was going to happen.”
Lucinda is not sure what to make of this. Does he mean the divorce itself? The bitter enmity, the loss of spirit, the bleeding out of all feeling and fund? Or does he mean something else that happened because of the divorce? She gets the sense he wants to tell somebody.
“Didn’t know what?” she says, patting lightly at the register keys, hoping he might not answer.
The boss stands in silence. “Oh,” he says, behind his hands. Hollowly, he draws a ragged breath. “Oh, my daughter,” he says.
For a second, it sounds just like he is saying it directly to her, calling her his daughter, his voice a wobbling plea or appeal.
Lucinda is speechless. She feels her throat slab up like meat. For a second, she imagines that he actually is her father.
The hands slide off his face and he stares out the open door. He likes to prop it wide on winter nights to snag passersby who might not otherwise be tempted by a smoothie, and he places a space heater right beside it, blowing out waves of heat. “I didn’t even find out from my wife. I found out from my wife’s legal aide. Acting in her capacity.”
Lucinda is trying to put two and two together. Does this mean he is finding out something about his daughter? Does this mean his wife is a lawyer?
“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” she says, even as she remembers. Vanessa said she knew her. Lucinda has her arms crossed over her Hawaiian shirt. It gets cold in here at night with the door open. The heater is a tremendous waste of energy. It sends Dracula into paroxysms of dank despair.
Her boss sniffs and shakes his head. “She used to run away. This time she’s really missing.”
“Oh—” Lucinda swallows her next word. “That’s—” She tries to sound sorry. She is sorry.
Lucinda’s boss looks at her. He seems keenly aware of her in some deep way she isn’t even aware of herself, and almost as if he pities her for it. She can feel a sprinkling of ice on her spine. “I can’t—I have to stop,” he says.
“Stop what?” she says quickly back, feeling an earnest need to have him tell her.
But his look seems to weasel further into her and makes her feel suddenly like they’ve been doing more than she realizes.
“I’m quitting,” she says. Her mind is bucking in her head. “Right now, I’ll quit.”
It’s impossible, she thinks. They’ve not been doing anything. “Okay?” she says, scurrying to get her apron off and clock out.
Her boss blinks at the air. He doesn’t say anything.
“I’ll just go right now.”
Lucinda now has to write her new address down if she wants to get her last paycheck. She’s been meaning to do this and she does so with a trembling hand, on a scrap of receipt paper that she puts under the register tray. “It’s here,” she says, wobbling out the words. In the drawer. “My new address,” she tries to clarify. Now her boss has it. He can send the money to the apartment where she lives with Dracula. “You can mail me my last paycheck.”
On her way out after hanging her apron she sees her boss reading it, scrutinizing it mutely as if it might mean something.
“What is this?”
“It’s—where I live.” She thinks he might not have heard her.
Richard pinches the bridge of his nose, as if this is the last thing he wants to hear. “Do you know something about this?”
Lucinda clutches her throat. “About what?”
“You’ve been here all this time,” Richard says, flapping the paper.
“I—well, since I—” moved in, she wants to say. But she can’t say exactly when that was.
“Is this
who you call Dracula? This guy you’re living with?”
Lucinda darts a disturbed hand to her mouth. Vanessa has been talking about her then. Again.
Richard has a look like he’s blaming somebody for something. Whether it’s her or Vanessa she can’t tell.
Barely able to scrape up a murmur in the looming silence, she still feels she has to say something, some last words to finalize this goodbye, so he knows she isn’t coming back. He hasn’t moved from his place behind the counter. He is a shabby dilapidated sculpture, a wrecked and desperate version of himself, and she quickly, with a sliver of uninvited feeling, memorizes the angle of repose. It almost dignifies him. “I’m—” Should she say she’s sorry? She doesn’t know what she’s being blamed for.
Richard looks at her. He opens his mouth to speak, as if some thought or fragment of lost speech is thorning through the thistle of his mind. “You don’t know about this,” he says. It’s like he’s verifying something he’s already sure of.
“I don’t—” She’s halfway out the door. “I’m—” she says, not finishing. “About your daughter.” She has no idea what she means.
Out on the street, she thinks about what he said. After she’s been walking she begins to feel drastically on edge about giving him the address. There was something about that address. She has never claimed it in any official capacity before tonight, and his reaction upsided her. It’s still twenty-eight minutes prior to the end of her shift and she walks briskly, wondering if she’ll meet Dracula on the way, coming to meet her from home. She doesn’t, and she finds herself in front of the portcullis, using her key, the one she duplicated from Dracula. The apartment manager is inside looking at her as if he doesn’t know who she is. Often he has looked at her sitting in the courtyard, poised out there while he is at his work or is escorting last night’s date over his doormat, and he doesn’t seem to see her at all. She’s a twig lost in a verdant copse of green. The women he accompanies to and from his apartment all bear a certain kind of fruit, and the unseeing look he gives Lucinda is familiar. Men like him don’t see people like her. When he is out here trimming his hedges, he is already off in a world of his own, whatever place he goes to when he wants to make his boxwood monuments. She doesn’t hold it against him. Years and years she has been ignored like this. Women are just the opposite. They tell her she should model.
