Gretchen

by Shannon Kirk

  Father and daughter do a weird scrunchy face in mirror to each other, the kind of face you’d do to a newborn or a kitten. I’m over on the side like a third wheel eating a bacon-cheese sandwich, thinking about my escape through the maze of halls back to the foyer.

  I can’t even imagine what hysterical scene broke out when Jerry broke his finger.

  “So, um,” I venture, thinking on details I need to get out, “do these halls continue like this through the whole house? With all the puzzles?” I hope my tone doesn’t reveal fright or plotting or judgment. I tried to ask in Mom’s indifference voice.

  Jerry wipes his mouth with his napkin. “Nope,” he says. “Not yet.”

  Gretchen takes over. “That,” she says and coughs, shifting her pupils to the upper left like she’s scouring her brain for the right words. “Old renter. Um, Earl. The guy who lived in your place and disappeared, he was supposed to build a few more halls. I have hundreds more finished puzzles waiting to be hung. But no, just the two halls you walked through so far. You’ll see the living room next, though, with more puzzles!” She drops her excitement into a scowl. “On the other side of the house, there’s regular house rooms, blah, with puzzles, fine, but not the halls like on this side. And then upstairs, same thing, regular house rooms.”

  Gretchen is staring at me for a response. “Oh,” I say. “So the old renter built these halls special for your puzzles?”

  “Yup,” Gretchen says, sucking her third grape juice and staring at me, seemingly waiting for me to give any kind of reaction. Like if I give the wrong reaction, she will metamorphose into a lethal insect and pierce my skin with the point ends of her pincher strands of hair.

  She must be okay with however my face is reacting, because she sets her juice box down, Jerry hands her another, and she continues talking. “Earl, the old renter, was supposed to renovate the kitchen too. But now Daddy says we have to find a new contractor. Which is very hard. Very hard to find good workers. Right, Daddy?” She gives him a knowing look. Maybe a smirk? A minuscule smirk?

  “Sure is,” Jerry says. He’s sucking on his eighth apple juice. His right arm with his Apple Watch lies on the table next to Gretchen’s left arm with her matching Apple Watch, as if this pair is bound by virtual cuffs.

  Again, Gretchen follows my eyes to Jerry’s juice box.

  “Daddy likes the width of the juice boxes, instead of grasping around a round glass. And they’re safer than glass too. So we drink juice boxes.”

  “Oh, okay,” I say. Because what the fuck am I supposed to say? There is definitely sweat on the back of my neck, and the overhead light in this windowless room is so bright, I honestly have to squint. The glare off the glass over the food puzzles creates dizzying prisms and refractions at all levels in this small, small space. The walls are not just closing in, they’re inside my rib cage and compressing my lungs. I wonder if this is how captive octopuses feel in the middle of an aquarium day, when the halogens are on high at the top of the tank and all those faces and tourist cameras are flashing nonstop. My cheeks are ablaze and puffy; my eyes are dry. My throat is tight. Every surface of my skin is hot, and I want to rip off my T-shirt to cool down.

  “I think I’m full,” I say. I’m half done with my sandwich. When Gretchen and Jerry look at what remains, I add, “Sorry, I can’t finish. I don’t think I’m feeling well. I should go home.”

  Gretchen drops the last of her sandwich, holds her face, and shakes. Jerry rubs her back in, again, the gentlest motion. And in a literal switch, she exhales loud, which is either a groan or a hiccup of a cry, I can’t tell. Can people switch that fast?

  When she looks up at me, her eyes are red with a sheen of wet, and her bottom lip trembles.

  “Lucy, I don’t know how to be your friend. You want to go. I get it.”

  “Uh, Gretchen. I was just feeling hot. Gretchen?” Jerry’s smiling at me, indicating I should keep talking. “Gretchen, hello. I didn’t say I didn’t want to be your friend.”

  Her face is warping in red pulses, but now she looks hopeful. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Just, I don’t know, I’m hot. ’Kay?”

  “Okay,” she says, seeking affirmation from Jerry.

  “Lucy, maybe a bigger room with better air would make you feel better? Can we try that before you leave?” Jerry offers.

  “Um,” I say, shaky.

  “You girls head into the living room. I’ll be right there.”

  Gretchen cow-eyes me, waiting for me to agree. So I nod and shrug my shoulders. And again, I’m the doofus who doesn’t leave the horror movie. “Okay, let’s go to the living room.” I fan my hands in front of my face to give myself some air.

  Gretchen stands, turns around, and pushes on the thick frame of a puzzle of watermelons. A hobbit-door-size rectangle in the puzzle-filled wall opens up: a secret door.

  Mom would leave. Mom would be out of here already.

  I inventory the items in my life I’m keeping from Mom, items I never before would have kept to my core: how far I’m willing to go to live here; Gretchen’s window visit; Doc Nathan, the biggest betrayal of all; and now this strange night.

  But Mom’s down there, alone, ignoring me. So here I am. Here I am. Following Gretchen into her living room.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I stoop to follow Gretchen through the smallest door ever, and we enter the living room.

  Bones.

  Bones everywhere.

  And nearly every item is the color of bone, of ivory.

  Among the bones on the walls are a few square blotches of black.

  I don’t think I’ve blinked my eyes the entire time I’ve been in this crazy house, and I’m certainly not blinking now.

  I am surrounded by brightly lit bones on the walls. Bones, high and low, all around, except for about eight blotches of black pictures.

  “Daddy calls this the living room, but more like the dead room, right, Luce? With all these bones.” She’s twirling, as if joyous, like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.

  The dead room is as brightly lit as the damn dining room, so the ambience is cutting and blinding, and not subdued and comforting the way Mom and I keep the lights at a calm amber. It’s a painful bright light like in Best Buy or Staples, and given the subject of bones and the scattered black pictures on the walls, more like a working morgue in the hospital’s basement. The fifteen-foot-high walls are filled with puzzles of bones, and no furniture takes any space against any walls. Instead, an ivory couch sits five feet from one wall. There’s no rug or carpet on the hardwood floors. Opposite the couch is an ivory baby-grand piano. And on the floor between the bone couch and bone piano is a puzzle box. Sure enough, the pattern on the box is of bones, but I’m not focused on the image for specifics, because Gretchen is pulling me to walk the perimeter of the room.

  “Come in, let me show you these puzzles. They’re my favoritey faves!” Apparently she’s done with her outburst of manipulative sad emotions, because she’s exuberant and loud again. Her extreme emotions vacillate as fast as flicking a light switch.

  “I’m going to be a bone doc, Lucy. Ever since Daddy got his compound fracture in his leg in the woods, and I did see his bone sticking out, gross, I’ve been obsessed. A bone doc is called an orthopedician, so I’m going to be an orthopedician. Most all of these puzzles have to do with the human skeletal systems. Cool, right?”

  Gretchen didn’t take one breath in the entire time she took to say this last paragraph.

  “Don’t you mean orthopedist?”

  Gretchen snorts, a slight snarl in her nose. “Lucy, no. Please. It’s an ortho (pause) ped (pause) ician.” After spacing out the word in a slow education, she rolls her eyes as if I’m some ignorant, illiterate mope.

  “Well, sounds like you’re really into bones.” Whatever.

  “Yeah, I am,” she says, and we’re off again, walking the perimeter, her leading me around the room like a docent. “These on this wall are from my skulls collection. And these, h
ere, on this wall, from my limbs collection.” We keep walking, and she’s talking while pointing out puzzles and collection facts. “This wall, and this is the exterior wall, which faces the forest, these are the intricacies of hand and foot bones. Twenty-seven bones in the hand, twenty-six bones in the foot. Hands and feet hog most bones in your whole body. Most all of these aren’t for sale on the market, Luce. But you probably figured that out by now. Most are from photos I find on the internet and Daddy prints in high def in Boston, and then I make the puzzles with my scroll saw in my lab in the basement.” She pauses her slow, instructional stride and looks back at me. “I’m really good at cutting.”

  I’ve stopped walking. “Your scroll saw in the basement?”

  “Oh yeah, that’s how you make jigsaws. I’m very good at making jigsaws,” she says. “And I’ll have to do lots of surgeries when I’m an orthopedician, so I’m getting pretty skilled at the cutting.” Gretchen says all these facts in a light and informative manner, as if all she’s talking about is how someday she wants to be a doctor and her father bought her—all normal-like—a copy of Grey’s Anatomy, instead of a whole home with slit windows and retrofit maze walls to showcase floor-to-ceiling puzzles and, oh, can’t forget, also a lab in the basement with a scroll saw to make puzzles. She talks like we’re talking of normal things.

  She resumes her instructional stroll along the exterior wall, and I follow.

  On this wall, hidden among the floor-to-ceiling puzzles, are those slit windows, and when I look through, I see nothing but black night and the blackest of black pines. My skin starts to itch as I recall all those damn mosquitoes. I stall before one of the black image puzzles intermixed within the bone puzzles. This one has what seems to be an underground spiral, with different people at different levels of the spiral, which narrows to a point. Curling cursive font labels each level, so I squint to try to read.

  “Dante’s Inferno,” Gretchen says. “That’s Dante’s Inferno. The only other puzzles, other than bones, in here are of Dante’s Inferno. The different levels are layers of hell.”

  I abandon reading the font. I know what Dante’s Inferno is; we read Divine Comedy in honors English this year.

  “Did you make these too?”

  “Yeah. The puzzle industry isn’t into death and depressing things, like games, which are often about money and crime. Puzzles are more about fun. I had to make these. This one is an illustration titled Inferno from the 1400s Daddy had printed. I like the vertical alignment and composition of layered souls, stacked in hell, in this rendition.”

  “Oh.”

  Gretchen shrugs, like this is nothing. Nothing at all to have puzzles of bones and Dante’s Inferno, normal to love the composition of souls stacked in hell. No big deal. But she’s especially quiet, and her hands are clasped at her tailbone as she saunters on. Her fingers skittering on themselves. I can’t tell if she truly is so nonchalant about these puzzle topics.

  “So, Gretchen, question,” I say. I feel my voice is finally in order.

  She stops and twists fast, apparently thrilled my tone is more definite and not quivering or light, like since I entered. “Yeah?” she says, leaning in on me.

  “I was wondering. These windows are really narrow. Are they the originals?”

  “You’re so smart, Lucy. I knew that when we met.”

  I wait for the answer.

  She’s shaking her head no. “Nope, those aren’t the originals.” She glances sideways to the hidden hobbit door to the dining room, and now I realize, that’s the only door out of this interior space. Unless there’s another hidden door. I scan quick for obscured hinges. I can’t imagine this home doesn’t violate all kinds of fire codes.

  I’m trying to tamp down the fear rising in me, the sweat on my neck, and the closing of my throat. Gretchen appears to be checking to see if Jerry’s about to enter from the dining room. Leaning in closer, she whispers, “A couple years ago, I had a ‘spell.’” She says spell with quotation marks around the word. “Daddy calls it a spell. They locked me in a special hospital and tied me in a cloth thing so I would be still. My arms were bound.”

  I take a step back.

  A straitjacket?

  “Don’t be scared, Lucy. I’m fine now. Daddy made me better.”

  As if we’re ballroom dancing, she steps back into my personal space, checks again for Jerry, grabs my arms, and whispers into my face as she pulls me down to her level. “The doctors thought my spell was from lingering PTSD from finding my mom and her baby in the woods. Even though I can’t really remember. They have no idea . . . Anyway, when I was in the hospital, I kept thrashing and got super mad because being tied up meant I couldn’t do puzzles. And when Daddy came to visit, he saw what they’d done, and he made them free me. He gave me a puzzle, and I was better.” Gretchen snaps her fingers on saying, “Just like that, in a snap, I was better.”

  I suddenly feel an instinct, maybe a survival instinct—perhaps this is something wild animals do to make sure they don’t become some subservient beta to a megalomaniac alpha. I push my face into hers. “Gretchen, what’s you having a spell and having your arms bound got to do with the windows?” This feels somewhat like when Mom tries to change the topic, but a much more unsettling manipulation.

  Our faces are about an inch apart. Gretchen smirks; I smirk back. Maybe all these years on the road with Mom, living our own twisted reality, has made me immune to life’s insanities. It feels like Gretchen and I are locked in a power struggle, the weirdest kind, one I have no idea how to define or how to win or shape. But I’m plowing ahead like I’m impenetrable steel. Maybe I’m steel because of my life on the run, and that’s why I’m able to fight back. Or maybe I’m a stupid doofus playing with fire and I should be knocking Gretchen on her scrawny ass and escaping through that cell of a dining room and out through those crazy-town halls.

  “Luce, you’re no dummy. I like you. Daddy had someone change the windows so I could have more wall space to hang my puzzles.” She pauses, side-eyes me, and smirks. She drops her voice. “Sort of obvious, though, right, Lucy?”

  This last line is the exact type of tone Mom uses on me, the same rhetorical, grating question style she uses when she wants to assert her intelligence over mine. I bristle and twitch my nose. Why is this conversation making me mad?

  “Oh,” I say and step away from her, pulling my arms free of her grasping. “Whatever. I get it.” I’m not going to give her any inches. Won’t let her force a rise out of me.

  Jerry walks in and flings his arms like a grand host. “How about Gretchen’s puzzles, Lucy? Amazing, right? Bones, bones, bones, and more bones! Gretchen will be a great orthopedician.”

  I nod yes. I think about Mom’s cutting humor, her way of lightening tensions or commenting on the surreality of life. She’d say something snide to lift the ominous air.

  “Most dads buy their kids a copy of Grey’s Anatomy if they want to be a doctor. Guess you’re all in on Gretchen’s future,” I say. I don’t know who I am right now. What am I saying? Am I channeling Mom? I should haul ass out of here. Jerry is blocking the doorway.

  Gretchen bugs her eyes, and so does Jerry, and both howl in laughter.

  “Oh, Lucy, of course I bought her a copy of Grey’s Anatomy! In fact—”

  Gretchen interrupts and, as she has done several times, finishes her father’s thought. “Daddy got me every single edition ever printed. I keep them upstairs in my room because they’re so precious. All the hardcovers with the beautiful covers.”

  “Every single edition in every single language,” Jerry adds.

  Gretchen skips to the center of the room and plops on the floor. Her apple-print dress pools around her legs. She directs me to sit opposite her. I don’t know why, but I do.

  “Now. Here we go. Daddy, drumroll. You need to play tonight,” Gretchen says, directing her father in a tone not unlike a mother reminding her child, it is time now you must go brush your teeth and go to bed.

  Jerry obey
s and sits on the ivory bench to his ivory—bone—piano. He pinches ever so lightly on the tips of his white cotton gloves to pull, easy, shoulders scrunching, as if the action hurts, his gloves from his hands.

  He begins to play.

  In what is really fluttering pings of piano keys, Jerry doles out a “drumroll.” While he does, Gretchen pops the top of the puzzle box. The homemade title on a stick-on address label says in black Sharpie, ONE THOUSAND SKELETONS, 1,000 PCS. She dumps all one thousand pieces on the floor. The image on the box is a literal pile of one thousand skeletons.

  “This is going to go right there,” Gretchen says, pointing to a square of space at the top corner of the wall behind the baby grand.

  “First,” she says, “we must turn them all picture side up. If we had different colors, we’d need to sort by color. But this is a very difficult puzzle, a monochrome, and highly difficult because where there’s variation, the pieces are cut on the color line, corners are split too. And lots of pieces. But we can do this. Anyway, flip up, then find all the edge pieces, then we start. That’s our methodology. I’ll impose a rule on myself, okay. I’m not allowed to place a piece unless I know exactly where it goes, because I’m an expert. You can just, you know, start. After we sort first, though, as I said.”

  “Gretchen, I think I can stay only another half hour. I won’t be able to finish this game with you tonight.”

  Gretchen snaps her head up. “This isn’t a game, Lucy. The Supreme Court ruled that puzzles are not games.” She looks down. “It was a tax case . . .” She trails off. “Whatever.”

  Again, I think I can’t give her an inch, can’t let this last abrupt lesson cause a visible rise in me. I pause, let the silence hang a second. “That’s fine. I just can’t be here long enough tonight to finish.”

  Gretchen considers my response, nods, and drops her head to study the spilled pieces. As she begins to shift pieces around, starting her idea of what to sort, and without looking up at me, she says, “No problem. Do what you can. I won’t be able to stop, so I’ll finish for us.” She fans her fingers over the puzzle pieces and dives in to create different piles. “Daddy,” she says, while keeping her fingers fanning and sorting.