Prized Possessions

by L. R. Wright

  “Why did he get the wrong idea about me?” she asked Lorraine. “Because I shot my husband in the stomach?”

  Lorraine shook her head and stubbed out her cigarette. “Because you talked in that fake Southern accent and looked pretty and helpless.”

  Emma frowned. “I was pretty. And helpless.”

  Lorraine hooted. “Also,” she went on, linking her hands behind her head, “it was a big part, and he probably thought you were a serious actress.”

  “I wasn’t very good, though.”

  “No, but you could have been serious without being good yet, couldn’t you? So maybe Charlie thought he was marrying an artist.”

  Emma was becoming depressed. “You mean, and then, when he knew better, he was disappointed.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Emma stood up and went to the window. Lorraine lived in a ground-floor apartment in a building on Dunbar Street, not far from the university, where she went to summer school every year to upgrade her teaching certificate. Emma liked Dunbar. It was a busy street, full of little shops and restaurants and gas stations and low-rise apartment buildings and every so often a supermarket. Emma rested her forehead against the glass and looked out at the bright spring evening.

  “I hardly miss him, you know. His things are there; it’s easy to pretend he’s at work, or out doing something, and any minute he’ll be home. Even in bed… ”

  Lorraine laughed softly, from her Swedish lounging chair.

  A young woman came out of the fitness place across the street, wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, a gym bag slung across her shoulders. She unlocked her bicycle, put on her helmet, swung onto the seat, and rode off, merging smoothly with the traffic. Emma marveled at her confidence, the way she acted as if she and her bicycle belonged on the street with all those cars and trucks, and she admired the tautness of the young girl’s calves and thighs, and the speed and purposefulness with which she pedaled out of sight.

  Emma turned from the window. “Maybe I’ll move back to the city.”

  “Think again.” Lorraine reached for her cigarettes and lighter. “This used to be a nice quiet part of town. There’ve been four burglaries and two places set on fire—all in the last six months.” She lit a cigarette and emptied her glass, which had contained Scotch and water. “Besides, you want Charlie to know where to find you, don’t you?”

  Emma sat down on the edge of a love seat and smoothed her dress over her thighs. It was badly creased, because it was linen. Why did people wear linen, anyway? Why was she stupid enough to keep on buying things made of linen, when she knew very well that they would always look as if she’d slept in them?

  “Do you really think he’s likely to come back?” Emma was surprised at how angry she sounded.

  Lorraine shrugged.

  “Do you think one day I’ll pick up the phone,” Emma went on, “and it’ll be him? Or answer the doorbell—he’d have to ring the bell, even if he kept his keys, because I’ve had the locks changed.” At least if he did come back, she thought, he wouldn’t be bringing that damn gun to point at her head again. She had the gun now.

  “I don’t know, Emma. Personally, I don’t know why you’d want him back.”

  Emma looked at her, thinking. Lorraine was tall, lanky, and untidy, with a generous amount of thick brown hair, almond-shaped brown eyes, and in summer a sprinkling of freckles across her cheekbones. Today she was wearing pull-on khaki-colored shorts and a gray T-shirt that said VANCOUVER in electric-blue letters. A couple of her fingers were stained with cigarette smoke. She was barefoot.

  “Do you want him back?”

  “He probably threw his house keys away,” said Emma. “Into the Dumpster, with my picture.”

  “What Dumpster?” Lorraine sounded exasperated now. “What picture?”

  “There’s a man trying to find Charlie for me. A policeman. But he’s only doing it as a favor. Will you talk to him?”

  “What do you mean, he’s doing it as a favor?”

  “I guess I’ll have to pay him. He’s not doing it as his job; that’s what I mean. If a person goes away because he wants to, you can’t get the police to go after him.”

  “Jesus, Emma. What a dork he is, that Charlie.” She looked into Emma’s face. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

  Emma thought there ought to be more to friendship than whatever existed between her and Lorraine. They had met at the university, in an English class, and Lorraine had introduced Emma to Charlie, whom she’d known for most of her life. This had been enough to forge something between them, but it was an odd relationship. Emma thought Lorraine continued it at least partly out of guilt for having gotten her and Charlie together, even though that’s what Emma had wanted.

  “Of course I’m in pain.”

  She needed Lorraine, Emma realized. She was practically the only friend she had.

  My God, she thought, gazing at Lorraine—who had friends and colleagues and parents and brothers and sisters-in-law and two nephews and a niece—how did this happen? How did I get to be so alone?

  ***

  She left Lorraine’s apartment in the early evening and drove to a small apartment house, a fourplex, on West Seventh Avenue. She looked at the name on the letter box for Apartment 1 and saw that it had changed.

  But she had to be absolutely sure.

  Emma rang the bell for the caretaker and made her inquiry.

  “Oh, Helena moved out months ago,” said the caretaker, a large woman with tightly permed gray hair. “In the summer.”

  “Did she leave a forwarding address?”

  “Yeah, sure, but I can’t remember what the hell it was now, at this late date.”

  “But—it was somewhere else in the city, was it?”

  “Hell, no. She went home to her folks. Someplace in Saskatchewan.”

  A nagging weight lifted from Emma’s heart. “Thank you,” she said, with a luminous smile.

  29

  RAY KNUDSON LEANED across the counter of the restaurant he owned with his wife, Frieda. “What an awful thing,” he said, almost in a whisper, so as not to be overheard by the red-haired man in the beige jacket who was reading a newspaper three stools away.

  Kathy nodded.

  “I still can’t believe it,” said Ray, who was tall and bony, with very wide shoulders and no hips. “I feel like it was my fault, you know?” He was wearing an apron with a bib. “I mean, she wouldn’t have been out on the street at that hour, except she was on her way here, you know?” His long brown hair was pulled back sleek and clean and secured with an elastic band.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Ray,” said Kathy.

  “I know it. But it feels like it was.” He reached under the counter for a small cardboard box. “Here’s her stuff.” She took the box from him and headed toward the door. “We really miss her,” he said quietly.

  Kathy looked through the glass door at the post office across the street. People were hurrying in and out—it looked very busy over there. Almost as if it were Christmastime. Kathy counted the months between today and Christmas and wondered if it was enough time in which to get over the death of a friend.

  “Yeah. Me too,” she said, and went out onto the street.

  She walked home, through a neighborhood that during the last three years had become as familiar as the one in which she’d grown up. She liked this. It was good to feel comfortable in a house, a neighborhood, that was unknown to her family. Having one’s own neighborhood, she thought, verified one’s independence.

  She walked down the street, the box nestled casually in the crook of her arm, and gazed upon the establishments she frequented: the dry cleaner, the bakery, the hardware store, the convenience store that sold almost nothing but flowers.

  Then the ache was there again, twisting in the back of her throat—the ache of mourning.

  And she thought that she probably wouldn’t be going to Ray’s café anymore. Probably none of them would.

  For the first time Kathy acknowled
ged that she might not continue to live here—in this neighborhood; in that house. Even if the three of them carried on with the original plan for the summer—and that wasn’t certain; they were all mulling it over—even if they did, who was to say whether they’d be back here in the fall?

  Kathy walked on to the end of the block, and then stopped, and carefully leaned her body against the corner of the gourmet coffee store. Her day-to-day life seemed to consist of nothing but a series of shocks. Of course, she’d never had anybody die on her before. It was probably totally normal that the world went out of joint for a while when a person you cared about died. But if you weren’t prepared for it, you could get pretty shook up. Kathy staggered through each day bewildered and tense, with an arm raised, metaphorically speaking, against the new blows that she knew would fall.

  People walked past her, and some of them she recognized but most of them she didn’t. For the most part, they ignored her, which was soothing.

  Kathy closed her eyes and rested, her bum and her knapsack and the back of her head pressed against the concrete wall of the coffee store. You’d think the news would have swept everywhere by now, into every little nook and cranny of the neighborhood. The police had investigated—they’d treated it like the serious crime it was. Kathy had thought everyone in the whole city must have known what happened. But the woman in the bakery had asked just two days ago where Melanie was, and the harassed young mother down the street had come over last night, looking for Melanie to baby-sit, and mail was still coming for her, and phone calls too. She wasn’t erased; she hadn’t been expunged; traces of Melanie remained, little bits of her continued to trail through Kathy’s days. A little bit of Melanie had gotten woven permanently into Kathy’s life; a little bit of her had become part of Kathy herself. And Kathy liked that. But it hurt too.

  She opened her eyes. A big man with red hair was standing on the sidewalk across the street, staring at her intensely. Now, this was the kind of stuff she meant. I go all weird, she thought, and start falling asleep against buildings, causing people to stop and stare at me. Flustered, she pushed herself away from the wall and adjusted the straps on her knapsack. When she glanced back, the man was gone.

  Kathy trudged around the corner and headed for home. It was a cloudy day, cool and fragrant, the kind of day against which spring blossoms glow most brightly, in the absence of competition from the sun. Kathy walked home through the quiet afternoon, thinking about decisions that had to be made, and as she approached the house she walked more and more slowly.

  She stood on the sidewalk in front of the laurel hedge, holding the box, which was so light she’d barely been aware of it, carrying it all this way. She stood with her weight on one foot, looking down at the cracks in the sidewalk. She was wearing jeans, tucked into hiking boots, and a long, long sweater, wine-colored. She felt as though she was about to set off on a journey.

  She pushed her hair away from her face and looked up and down the block. Some of the ornamental plum trees were still blooming, but most of the petals had fallen to the ground. Across the street, Mrs. Garber’s huge rhododendron bush was smothered in ivory-colored blooms. Kathy had been staring at it admiringly one day, the first spring she’d lived here, and Mrs. Garber had come outside and told her what it was, and that it was more than fifty years old. She was the only person on the block who’d lived in her house ever since it was built; most of the houses in this part of town had been renovated and turned into rental accommodation—the house Kathy lived in, for instance, contained three suites, one on each floor. Kathy was fond of Mrs. Garber. She thought about going over there right now and inviting herself in for a cup of coffee.

  Instead, she turned and went through the gap in the hedge.

  There was a big climbing rose at the front of the house. It grew upon a trellis between the porch and one of the main-floor windows. It was so old that its stem was as thick as the trunk of a small tree. Once a year the owner of the house sent somebody around to cut it back, and the apple tree in the backyard as well. Kathy noticed dozens of rosebuds, as she climbed onto the porch and fitted her key in the lock. It was amazing that the thing went on blooming like mad, year after year, when nobody paid it any attention at all.

  She went into what had been Melanie’s room and put the box from the restaurant on the bed. Then she joined her roommates in the kitchen, which was at the back of the house, next to the large bedroom Sandy and Caroline shared.

  “I think we should go,” she told them. “Just like we planned.”

  “Yeah,” said Sandy wearily. “That’s what we figure too.”

  “I mean, lotsa luck finding anything else to do at this late date,” said Caroline.

  “Good,” said Kathy with relief. “That’s settled, then.” She poured herself some coffee. “I’m going to finish packing up Melanie’s stuff.” They had offered to take her things home to her parents.

  An hour later, Sandy and Caroline left to get some take-out food. Kathy sat, exhausted, on the edge of Melanie’s bed and looked at the room’s bare walls. Large clean rectangles indicated where her movie posters had hung. Surrounded by boxes filled with Melanie’s belongings, she couldn’t find Melanie anywhere. Eventually she got a felt pen from the kitchen and printed Melanie’s name in big red letters on each of the boxes.

  She was putting the cap back on the pen when she heard the mailman climb the steps and make his deliveries.

  Kathy smoothed Melanie’s mattress and left the room, closing the door gently behind her.

  She went into her bedroom, undressed, and put on a robe. Then she remembered the mail and stepped out on the porch to check the box, but it was empty. She glanced at the other two boxes, both stuffed full, and stood there frowning for a moment, puzzled.

  Kathy had a quick bath and put on clean jeans and underwear and the same wine-colored sweater. She was in the kitchen, setting out plates and cutlery, when her roommates returned with dinner. Caroline put the bag on the counter, and Sandy tossed the mail onto the table.

  Kathy stared at it. “Where’d you get this?”

  “Would you believe the mailbox?” said Sandy, leafing through the envelopes. “Shit, another one for Melanie.” She dropped it into a box on the counter.

  “I looked before,” said Kathy. “There wasn’t any.”

  “I guess he hadn’t come yet,” said Caroline, taking a barrel of chicken out of the bag.

  “No, he’d come; I heard him.”

  “Maybe ours got put in one of the other boxes by mistake,” said Caroline, removing a box of french fries, and then another.

  “No,” said Kathy loudly.

  Her roommates turned to her. “What’s the matter?” said Sandy.

  “I heard him. That’s what.” Kathy waved a handful of forks in the air. “I knew there was something weird. I heard him open the boxes, all of them.”

  She remembered it vividly. Here’s the mailman, she’d thought, as she heard the first box being opened…and then she’d chastised herself for having thought “mailman.” Even though she knew that the person who delivered their mail was, in fact, a man, she tried always to use terms that were not gender specific. “Mailperson,” she’d thought, as the second box was opened. Or maybe we should just call them “letter carriers,” like the post office does, she’d thought, listening for the third box… and there it was—the metallic sound of the lid being lifted, and the shuffling sound of mail being thrust inside.

  She told her roommates this.

  Sandy, bewildered, asked, “So what are you saying?”

  “Jesus,” said Caroline, staring at Kathy.

  “Yeah,” Kathy said, nodding. She looked through the mail and dropped it back on the table. “It doesn’t look like it’s been tampered with. I think somebody took it out of the box and looked at it, and then put it back.”

  “But why, for God’s sake?” said Sandy.

  “Maybe they took something. How would we ever know?” said Caroline.

  “We wouldn’
t,” said Kathy.

  30

  ALBERG PUT THE phone down after his seventeenth call of the morning and jotted some notes on a legal-size pad of lined yellow paper. He now knew that Charlie O’Brea was in good health; that he had not (at least under his true name) applied to renew his passport, changed his mailing address, booked an airline flight, or bought a train or a bus ticket; nor had he dipped into any bank accounts, charged anything—since his disappearance—on any of his several credit cards, gotten in touch with any of his friends, landed in the hospital, or been arrested. They still hadn’t found his car.

  Alberg put his mug of coffee on the dining room table, tossed the yellow pad next to it, and sat down. He took off his reading glasses, rubbed his eyes, and put the glasses back on. Charlie O’Brea was a thoroughly exasperating guy.

  With Emma’s help, Alberg had spent several hours going through Charlie’s things. But apart from clothes, there was little in the house that was specifically his. Almost everything in the filing cabinet in the upstairs bedroom, for instance, had to do with the operation of the household. In the desk drawers Alberg found plain white stationery, and office supplies, and a pile of bills that Charlie had paid; but no personal letters, no address book, no old shopping lists or notes to himself or newspaper clippings—none of the fragments people usually strew behind them as they go through their days. Emma had said he’d had his briefcase with him when he left: that was where Alberg would expect him to keep an appointment book, address book, checkbook, business cards; so it wasn’t surprising that these things hadn’t been in the desk.