Prized Possessions

by L. R. Wright

  This thing that’s happened to me—it’s not what I know, she thought.

  Get to know it, she thought.

  Why did I have the locks changed?

  What was there between us?

  Emma, listening for a reply, heard only white sound.

  In the kitchen she poured herself some wine and fixed a plate of crackers and cheese. In the living room she sat in the easy chair, arranged the skirt of her robe to cover her ankles, and called Lorraine.

  “I have to get a job,” she said, “in a few months.”

  “Mmmm,” said Lorraine. “You’re okay for money for now, though? Because I could help, if you need it.”

  “I’ve got sixteen thousand dollars in cash. That’ll do me until the fall. I don’t know what kind of a job I can get, though.” She put some Brie on a piece of melba toast. “I never used my damn degree. I don’t have any damn experience.”

  “Mmmm,” said Lorraine.

  Emma munched on the cheese and cracker. “Charlie screwed around on me. Did you know that?”

  “Emma, come on,” Lorraine sputtered into the phone.

  “Well?” said Emma, smiling. “You knew him. Did you think he was screwing around?” She cut off a chunk of white cheddar and popped it into her mouth.

  “I never liked the guy. Since long before he met you. What do you expect me to say? Sure, I think he was capable of screwing around on you. Whether he actually did or not, how would I know?”

  “Why are you using the past tense? I’m pretty sure he isn’t dead.” Although, she thought, Charlie dead would have been infinitely preferable to Charlie having sneaked away on her. Emma swallowed some wine and selected another piece of cheese—Edam, this time.

  “He might as well be dead, as far as you’re concerned.”

  “What else do you think he was capable of?”

  “Emma, a man who deserts his wife instead of having the guts to say he wants out of his marriage—face it, Emma, the guy is a jerk. A dork. A no-nuts, wise-ass, cretinous, fatheaded jerk. Capable of anything.”

  A few minutes later, Emma replaced the receiver and carried the plate and the glass into the kitchen. Then she went into the bedroom and opened the drawer in Charlie’s night table. The gun was still there, along with the small box of ammunition. Satisfied, Emma closed the drawer.

  She turned off the overhead light and climbed into bed, leaving the lamp on. She lay with her hands behind her head, remembering.

  It was about a month after Emma had found out about Charlie’s adultery that he’d brought it up again.

  “Emma,” he’d said, “I think we should talk.” It was evening, and they were sitting in the living room, watching the television news.

  Immediately Emma felt under siege. Adrenaline surged to the rescue. How idiotic, she thought, that her body should blindly prepare itself for a physical confrontation that wasn’t going to happen, while her beleaguered mind just lay there, defenseless and cringing. She reached for the remote control device and switched off the TV set.

  “You deserve better than this,” said Charlie. He was sitting on the sofa, his long legs stretched out, his hands clasped in his lap.

  “Better than what?”

  “Better than a husband who…plays around.”

  Emma examined this sentence carefully, moving its component parts around in her head: the words, and their potential meanings, and the several ways in which a person might react to what she’d heard.

  “I’m really very sorry, Emma. I really am.”

  “I accept your apology, Charlie. And I appreciate it.”

  “It started—”

  “No,” said Emma sharply. “Really, Charlie, I think it’s best if we don’t go into it.” She gave him a tentative smile. “We should go forward. Not backward.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do. But I don’t want to plunge into the future thoughtlessly, Emma. I want to do things right.”

  Emma’s love for him at that moment was so tender and poignant it brought tears to her eyes.

  He got up and came over to the big stuffed chair and sat on the armrest. He put his arm around her. “This is not the first affair I’ve had, Emma. It just isn’t working, hon. It’ll be better for both of us if we get a divorce.”

  Of course, he was wrong about that, Emma reflected, switching off her bedside lamp. But what a lot of time got wasted, what a lot of pain there was, before he came to see things her way.

  As she prepared herself for sleep, Emma realized that she no longer traveled through her days as if Charlie were watching her.

  32

  “DEAR KATHY, Caroline, and Sandy.” Eddie read the letter again, taking a bite of his ham and cheese sandwich. “You know how terribly sorry we all were to hear about Melanie.”

  One piece of bread had mustard on it, the other one had mayonnaise.

  “We will all miss her dreadfully—although not nearly as much, I know, as you three will.”

  The bread was whole wheat, the cheese was Swiss, and the ham was Black Forest, sliced, not shaved.

  “This must be an extremely difficult time for you.”

  Eddie tried to take small bites, so the sandwich would last longer, but this was hard because he was very hungry. He read the next paragraph slowly, concentrating.

  “I know you’re rethinking your commitment to us, and I don’t blame you. But I hope you’ll allow me to suggest that to go ahead with your plans, even without Melanie, might be as good for you as it would be for us.”

  Eddie, chewing, still couldn’t make sense of that part.

  “You’d be kept extremely busy, of course. And I know you’d enjoy Sechelt a lot, especially in the summer.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that one bit.

  “I’m afraid I have to know one way or the other by the end of the week.”

  Eddie licked mustard from his fingers, then put down the letter to wipe his hand on the paper towel he was using as a napkin. “…the end of the week.” That would be Saturday. Maybe Friday, since this was a business-type letter, even though it was trying to sound so friendly. Today was Tuesday.

  “I’ll look forward to hearing from you.”

  He tore up the letter and the envelope it had come in and flushed the pieces down the toilet. Staking out the house had paid off after all.

  He’d been a little worried to find out that there were actually three apartments in the place, with two more girls living in the top part, and a guy in the bottom part. But they were out all day, every day. Not Melanie’s roommates, though. He was having a hard time making head or tail of their comings and goings—and this was necessary if he was going to end up with a foolproof plan.

  He figured he’d better check out the place where she’d worked, too. So yesterday he’d gone in there, bold as brass, and sat down at the counter and ordered a coffee. He was eyeing the owner of the place and trying to get up his nerve to ask about her, casual like. He had it all worked out and had practiced it at home: “Say, where’s the blond girl who used to work here?” he would say, and if the guy looked at him suspiciously, Eddie planned to add, “She’s a real good waitress,” or something like that. Well, he was working up to this when all of a sudden the door opened and this girl walked in who lived in the house, the one with her hair cut uneven. Eddie damn near choked on his coffee. He huddled into his jacket, holding up the newspaper that lay on the counter, hiding his face behind it, and then trying to hear their conversation. But the guy was whispering, for some damn reason. Eddie peered over the top of the paper to see if they were looking at him, but they weren’t.

  And then he saw the guy hand her a box, a small cardboard box. And Eddie knew that this box had to do with Melanie, and he was absolutely sure that at least one of his notes was in there: he’d delivered the second one here, to the café, in the middle of the night; slipped it through the mail slot in the door.

  She must have told her boss about it, too, he thought all of a sudden; but he changed his mind about that
right away, because it was plain as plain the guy had never seen Eddie in his life before. When he looked at him, Eddie could tell that. For sure. So even if she’d told him what happened, she couldn’t have told him what Eddie looked like, and so he was safe there.

  When the girl left the café, he had put money on the counter and hurried out after her. He made sure to turn in the opposite direction, though, and stand a ways down the street and count slowly to thirty before turning around to follow her; this was in case the guy in the café got suspicious, but Eddie sneaked a glance in there as he passed, and the guy was leaning on the counter with his chin on his hand, reading the paper.

  He followed her all the way home, and once she spotted him, but she didn’t really notice him. Which usually was a thing that made Eddie mad, but not this time.

  Up the street from her house was one with a For Sale sign out in front, and it was empty. So Eddie strolled around, looking at this house, staring in the windows, checking this and that, like he was interested in buying it. He even wrote stuff in his notebook about it, in case somebody was watching him. And all the time, of course, he was keeping an eagle eye on the roommates’ house, trying to think what to do about that box.

  Eventually he had to stop pretending he wanted to buy this house—which was a falling-down piece of shit, anyway, when you looked at it close up—and he just sat down on the lawn with his back against a tree trunk and watched the house and worked on his problem.

  After a long time two of the girls came out of the house together. Which left inside only the one with the box. Eddie waited tensely, hoping she’d leave too.

  And then the mailman came.

  And as soon as he’d moved on down the street, Eddie, without even thinking about it, ran across the road, snatched the mail from the box, and hurried away, around the corner and into a little park, where he looked through the mail as if it were his and stuck two envelopes in his jacket pocket.

  Next he had to go back there and return the rest of it, the bills and advertising junk and whatnot. He was a lot more nervous doing this than he’d been when he took it in the first place. Before, he’d watched himself as if from a distance, amazed and horrified, watched himself dart slick as a bug across the street and up the steps, whip the mail out of the box and whirl around to scurry away. But when he had to put it back, he felt palpably there, all right, big and lumbering and cumbersome and noisy—Jesus, but he was loud clambering up those steps.

  Eddie put his plate in the kitchen sink, got himself a beer, and sat down to have another look at the second letter. This one was addressed to Melanie Franklin: that was her last name—Franklin. It, too, was a typewritten, businesslike-looking letter, and it was from the university. Eddie had whooped out loud when he first read it, because it was from the library, telling her off because she had a book overdue.

  But then he thought about how he’d seen her lying on the pavement and the only thing moving was the pages of her book, and he wondered if that was the book they meant, and for a minute he felt sick and sad.

  But there wasn’t any future in feeling sick and sad.

  Now he tore up that letter, too, and its envelope, and flushed it down the john like the other one.

  He opened his notebook to see all that he’d learned, but when he got to the end of what he’d written there, only one thing really stuck in his mind.

  His job was going to be a lot easier now, once he got in there. A box was a lot easier to find than a little piece of paper.

  But there was some urgency about everything, because of the letter. He was going to have to do it really, really soon. He hadn’t worked it all out perfectly in his mind yet, though. He was still doing the planning part. But he’d have to put some speed on, that was for sure.

  He thought and thought, but his thoughts ran around and around in his head like frantic little rabbits and led him nowhere, nowhere at all.

  Eddie put the notebook on the coffee table, took a drink of beer, and leaned back on the sofa. He wondered if you could get that seeing-yourself-from-a-distance feeling on purpose. He thought it would come in very handy sometimes, when you had stuff you didn’t want to do, you were afraid to do, but you absolutely for sure had to do, like get in there and get that box.

  33

  ALBERG TELEPHONED Emma Wednesday morning to tell her he’d gotten more information from the woman in the leather shop.

  “When she said he paid in cash,” he told her, “she meant traveler’s checks. He’s got another bank account—at least he did have. In Vancouver.”

  Emma was stirring porridge in a small pot. She’d decided to start eating well again; building up her strength. “Had one? You mean he doesn’t have it anymore?”

  “Yeah. He closed it. A month ago. Left no forwarding address. Also, his car’s turned up.”

  Emma stopped stirring. She looked intently at the face of the clock in the stove’s accessory panel. It was 9:17. “Where?”

  “In a parking lot at the Vancouver airport.”

  “But I thought you told me he didn’t take a plane anywhere.”

  “I told you he wasn’t booked out on any flights under his own name.”

  “Right. I remember,” she said dully.

  “Don’t give up yet,” said Alberg. “I’ve got a couple of things I’m working on.”

  “What things?” She gripped the phone between ear and shoulder while she spooned the porridge into a cereal bowl.

  “I’ll tell you about it next time I see you.”

  When she’d hung up, Emma sat down at the kitchen table to eat. On the table in front of her, next to a glass of orange juice, lay her weapon.

  It was a Smith & Wesson .38, with a five-inch barrel. Charlie had had it for years, ever since his father died. He should have gone down to the police station and gotten a permit for it, but he hadn’t bothered. He never fired it—it was just a keepsake. “A 1945 issue,” he’d told her once, and she’d exclaimed politely.

  Emma hadn’t even known he had ammunition for it. And then, looking into its dull gray muzzle that night, she’d heard him say, “It’s loaded.” She hadn’t been able to tell, looking at it, if it was loaded or not. He might have been lying. But then she looked up at his face and saw that he wasn’t.

  She pushed her porridge aside and picked up the revolver, cautiously, feeling the weight of it. Not a very big gun, really. She had several purses that were big enough to carry it; several coats and jackets with pockets big enough to accommodate it. It wasn’t loaded now—she’d checked the cylinder to make sure.

  Although Emma still felt somewhat hesitant while handling it, she’d come to realize that it was really a very straightforward device. There was the cylinder, and when it was released (and it had been easy enough to figure out how to accomplish that), there were the six chambers for the bullets, and here was the hammer—but you didn’t have to worry about doing anything with that after all. Emma had always thought you had to cock a gun before you fired it, pull back on the hammer first, but apparently that wasn’t necessary, at least with this gun.

  She’d practiced loading and unloading it, and she’d practiced firing it while it was unloaded. Next, she was going to find a place somewhere out in the woods where she could fire it loaded.

  The cloth in which it was wrapped smelled of oil. Probably it ought to be cleaned from time to time, this weapon.

  There was some printing on the top of the barrel. “Smith & Wesson Springfield Massachusetts,” she read. “Patented… ” and several dates she couldn’t make out.

  The revolver was less ugly than she had at first thought. It had wooden grips, and a sleek barrel, and it fitted into her hand quite naturally.

  Emma was developing a plan, several aspects of which were still vague in her mind. Whenever she thought about this plan, her body felt as if it was sheathed in electric sparks.

  A cardboard box sat on the table. “Dominion Centrefire Cartridges,” it said on the lid. Emma took off the lid and examined the bullets
inside.

  Every time she visualized herself acting upon her plan, instantly it was as if her skin was made of fire. She could feel it in her eyes, too, and thought that would be enough to do the job all by itself, her eyes filled with sparks and fire.

  But the gun was necessary too. For symmetry.

  She removed a cartridge from the box and slipped it into a chamber and snapped the cylinder into place. She raised the revolver and pointed it at the front of the stove. She didn’t know whether she’d load it or not, when the time came.

  ***

  …her throat had burned, her mouth was dry; she tried to speak, but words wouldn’t come, tried to open her eyes but could not; heard sounds but couldn’t make sense of them; moved her hand—“Emma? Emma?” A worried voice, an anxious voice. She tried again: Eyelids, lift, she told them, and they did. And she saw Charlie, and saw that he was holding her hand. There was one second in which she saw relief on his face, felt loved and cosseted. Then memory spilled into her mind, and tears spilled from her eyes. She had turned away from him then and said into the pillow, despite her shame, “I’ll do it again, if you leave me. I’ll do it again… ”

  ***

  “No more,” said Emma out loud in her kitchen.

  Really, she had been an awful fool.

  But no more.

  34

  “I WANT YOU TO CUT IT,” said Cassandra, who had gone to Vancouver for the day.

  Lenore, standing behind her, gazed intently into the mirror. She lifted Cassandra’s hair and pulled it up and back. “How short?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  Lenore considered. “You got quite a lot of gray. You want some color? Highlights?”

  “No color. No highlights. Only short.”

  “You go short, you’re gonna get more curl. Right now, the weight of it, it pulls at your natural curl, straightening it somewhat. Cut it short, it’s gonna frizz right up.”