A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  “Oh, sweet love.” Melissa put her arm across his shoulder and squeezed. She kissed his temple. “How’re you doing?” Her voice was soft, her lips an inch from his cheek.

  He shrugged. “I’m in shock. I don’t feel anything at all. It’s weird.” He shrugged again. “I’m supertired, though.”

  “Of course you are. Poor thing.” She pulled his head toward her shoulder, but he resisted. Then he put his hands on his knees as if he was about to stand.

  “Should we go back?” she said.

  “I think I better. But …” His head turned her way, then back toward the parking lot where all the cars had fog dulling their windshields. “We’re just sitting there next to her … I mean she’s just lying there in the bed. Her face isn’t even covered.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t know if you’ll want … If that’s something you—” He shrugged.

  “If you need me, I want to be there.”

  He put his clammy hand on her bare knee. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean I don’t know what Harriet … I mean …” He squeezed her knee and gave it a shake.

  “Anything you want,” she said. And when he didn’t reply, she added, “Is there any other way I can help?”

  “Well, they want us to call a funeral home to come take the body, but neither of us knows anything about funeral homes.”

  Melissa spent forty-five minutes hunched on the edge of a plastic seat in the waiting room, googling local funeral homes and reading Yelp reviews. When she finally texted Spencer her top two recommendations, he texted back that his mother’s body was gone. A funeral home had come for another body, and the nurse said it was a good place. He still had some forms to sign. He would be out in five minutes.

  A white pickup drives along the dirt road between a field and a wooded creek, then crosses a narrow concrete bridge and, with a crunching roar, mounts the eroded driveway to the house. Harriet is behind the wheel, but doesn’t even glance toward Melissa as she passes the porch.

  Melissa places her tea mug under the swing and walks barefoot along the flagstone path to the red-dirt yard between the house and barn. As Harriet lurches to a stop beside Spencer’s cobalt-blue Acura, a cloud of pink dust trailing the pickup rolls over its cab and into the woods. Melissa steps off the flagstones and onto sharp gravel embedded in the red clay. She winces and rocks from side to side. Harriet is standing beside the truck, pulling a computer case off the passenger seat.

  “Hey,” says Melissa.

  Harriet turns around. “Oh, hi.” She slings the computer-case strap over her shoulder and slams the door.

  “Need any help?”

  Melissa is narrow shouldered and sapling slim. Harriet is shaped like a stack of tires, her arms thicker than Melissa’s legs.

  “Sure,” says Harriet. “Thanks.” She unlatches the tailgate, revealing a Styrofoam cooler and two bags of ice. She hands one bag to Melissa, who grips it against her chest. It is sopping with condensation, a solid mass, jagged and very cold.

  Harriet says: “I’m hoping these will keep the food from going bad.” She grips the other bag against her hip, slams the tailgate shut, then reaches over the top and grabs the cooler by its red plastic handle. As she turns toward the house, she looks Melissa in the eye and gives her head a rueful shake. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Melissa gathers that Harriet is expressing incredulity at the bad luck of their having come home last night to find the power out. “Do you know what happened?” Melissa says.

  “Yeah. A semi careened off the road and took down two telephone poles.”

  Melissa rocks and winces as she follows Harriet across the sharp gravel.

  “I saw it on my way into town,” says Harriet. “There are like six repair trucks parked along the road. The guys said the power would be back on this afternoon, but they’re just sitting there, doing nothing. The new telephone poles haven’t even arrived.”

  “Jesus.” Now Melissa is walking easily, sometimes on the flagstones, sometimes on the coarse grass. “Unbelievable.”

  In the kitchen Harriet puts a layer of ice at the bottom of the cooler, then opens the refrigerator, flings in all of the meat, cheese, and milk, and tells Melissa to cover everything with the remainder of the first ice bag. Harriet puts the second bag onto the refrigerator’s top shelf and closes the door.

  “How was your night?” Melissa asks as she covers the cooler.

  “What night?” Harriet crumples the dripping plastic ice bag and puts it into the garbage. “I didn’t get one second of sleep.”

  She drops into a chair and lets her hands dangle between her legs. There are bags beneath her eyes. Her tangled, pale brown hair is dark with grease near the scalp.

  “I’m so sorry,” says Melissa.

  Harriet shrugs. Her hands still dangle.

  “I didn’t sleep much either,” says Melissa. “The coyotes. Did you hear them? All that yipping gave me chills. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “They’re nothing. They never bother humans.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Well, maybe if there’s a whole pack … I mean—you know: maybe then….” Harriet sighs. She nudges the cooler with the toe of her sneaker, making a fibrous screech. “They ate JJ.” She glances at Melissa. “Mom’s cat. He was scratching at the kitchen door after dinner, so she let him out, even though coyotes had been in the valley for days. An hour later we hear this horrible shriek. That was it. We never saw him again. Mom felt terrible.”

  Melissa doesn’t know how to respond to this story.

  “Where’s Spencer?” says Harriet.

  “Sleeping, I think.”

  Harriet shakes her head. She smiles her not-friendly smile. “You better wake him up,” she says. “Tess called while I was in town. They’re going to be here in half an hour. We have a lot of work to do.”

  Tess is the sister between Harriet and Spencer. She teaches computer science at Urbana-Champaign. Her husband, Jack, is a yoga teacher. They’ve been driving all night. Fourteen hours.

  The small, dark clump on the bedroom floor is Melissa’s short black dress. She puts a glass of ice tea down on a box labeled WINTER CLOTHING, picks up her dress, and drapes it across her open suitcase. Then she picks up the glass and sidles along a row of boxes to sit on a narrow stretch of mattress beside Spencer’s hip. Brilliant sun on the diaphanous curtains infiltrates the room with cloudy light.

  Spencer’s head is turned away from her in the manner of a saint struggling with temptation. His muscular chest, with its weathermap swirls of dense black hair, rises and falls. He doesn’t seem to notice when she places her hand at its center. She can feel him breathing and the gentle knocking of his heart. She wonders if he might like to make love—for a brief respite from his grief, perhaps. As her eyes follow the line of his neck muscles from just behind his ear to his collarbone and chest, a sexual urgency rises through her abdomen, and she wonders if that is selfish. Or perverted.

  He winces when she speaks his name. She presses her hand against his chest and gives it a slight shake. “Hey, Spencer,” she says softly. “Wakey wakey. I’ve brought some ice tea.” She holds up the glass, which she has been resting on her right knee, but his eyes are still closed.

  They twitch, then open—and she can actually see his Ambien grogginess dispersed by the memory that his mother is dead.

  His brow wrinkles. He lifts his hand and pinches the bridge of his nose.

  “Oh, sweet man.” She leans over and kisses his forehead. She puts the tea down on a box labeled KITCHEN and tries to slide her hands under his shoulders and give him a hug. He pushes her aside and sits up.

  “What time is it?”

  She doesn’t know because her cell phone is still off. “Around ten. Harriet says that Tess and Jack will be here in half an hour.”

  “Oh, shit.” His hand goes back to the bridge of his nose. He clenches his eyes shut.

  “Maybe sooner,” Melissa says. “Harriet told me that ten minutes ago. Fiftee
n.”

  His hand falls to his lap. He opens his eyes and looks at her.

  “Here.” She hands him the ice tea.

  “Thanks.” He takes a deep swallow, lowers the glass, and wipes a dribble off the corner of his mouth with the back of his wrist. His chestnut eyes seem golden in the diffuse light. “The power still out?”

  “Yeah. But it’s supposed to come on this afternoon.”

  Spencer looks at her with an expression that she sometimes sees just before he tells her he loves her.

  “You OK?” she says.

  His chest heaves. His lips form a crumpled arc. “I don’t know. I feel like shit.”

  “At least you got some sleep.” She puts her hand on the blanket over his thigh and presses lightly. “You look rested.”

  He doesn’t say anything. His brow warps with a sort of bafflement, which she realizes is the awareness of his mother’s death hitting him again.

  “You poor love.” She leans close, kisses his temple and then his cheek. Breathing in the fragrant warmth beside his skin, she moves to kiss him on the lips, but he turns his head away.

  “There’s so much I have to do.” He taps her thigh with the back of his hand. “I have to get up.”

  “Of course.” She leaps from the bed and backs against the labeled boxes. “Sorry.”

  Melissa is walking a wooded track beside an open field, the warm sunlight on her arms and legs alternating with cool shade. A pileated woodpecker cackles invisibly amid the tract of oaks and beeches to her left, and a fine dust, puffed up by her flip-flops, coats the skin between her toes. She breathes deeply as she walks. With every exhalation, a veil of tension drifts off her shoulders.

  House of death, she thinks. Thank God I’m out of that house of death.

  As she walked out the door, Spencer and his two sisters were sitting down at the dining-room table, each carrying a mug of coffee, their expressions sullen and flummoxed. Soon they will have to go to the funeral home, and Melissa will go along—to hold Spencer’s hand, massage his neck, meet his eye with somber but loving gazes.

  “You don’t have to,” he told her just before she left.

  His eyes reddened and filled with tears.

  Hers too.

  “Oh no!” she said. “I want to be there. I don’t want you to be alone.”

  When she hugged him, she felt that she was made entirely out of love.

  But now she is free. Now she feels the strength in her legs, the clarity in her mind. Now she smells the sweetness of dried grass, the sinus-filling odors of earth, moss, rotting logs. Birds burble and peep. Squirrels rustle amidst the woods’ anorexic undergrowth. In the brilliant field crickets clink and cicadas make their long, metallic buzzes.

  Ahead, the track passes beyond the pasture and enters an emerald tunnel under trees, at the end of which she can see a glimmer of sunlit green that becomes increasingly yellow as she walks and then infused with silver blue. She steps out into a meadow of goldenrod and loosestrife, a gleaming lake off to her right, its surface faintly rippled and reflecting a pale blue sky crossed by cirrus wisps. There are no houses along the lake—nothing but oaks, beeches, evergreens, and, along the far shore (about a half mile distant), a feathering of beige reeds.

  She kicks off her flip-flops and steps into the water. The muddy bottom squishes like cold custard between her toes. There is an icy ring around her ankles, at the border between water and air, but her feet beneath the surface are not uncomfortable.

  You should go for a swim, she tells herself. Why not? There’s no one to see. She imagines leaving her clothes in a small pile on the grass and swimming out to where the water is bluest, then floating on her back and watching the clouds drift across the sky. You should do it! It would be so beautiful. It would feel so good!

  She thinks again about the cold around her ankles, about how chilled she always gets when she swims in a lake.

  Do it! she tells herself. Don’t be such a coward!

  She’s tired. So tired. All morning she’s been running on adrenaline, but now, suddenly, her legs are heavy. There’s a dull pain in her head.

  In fact, there isn’t time. She needs to hurry back to the house so that she can dress and be ready to escort Spencer to the funeral home. And anyhow, if she actually was to swim out to the lake middle, she’d spend the whole time trying to convince herself that she doesn’t mind the cold, that she’s having fun, that there’s nothing she’d rather do.

  Her wet feet on her dusty flip-flops make a film of gritty mud.

  The whole way back she regrets her decision. She never does anything just for herself. She’s lived her whole life afraid of what other people might think. Where is her courage? Where is her curiosity? What kind of life is that?

  Spencer’s Acura and Tess and Jack’s copper-colored Element are parked in the barnyard, but Harriet’s white pickup has vanished. The house is silent except for the click of a venetian blind lifting and falling against a window sash. There is one coffee mug on the dining-room table. Two more in the kitchen sink. Spencer’s black pants and white shirt—the clothes he wore to dinner last night—are missing from the chair beside the bed. His black shoes are also gone.

  Melissa flings herself onto the rumpled sheets and buries her face in a pillow. “Goddamn it!” she shouts into the feathery mustiness. “What the fuck am I even doing here!”

  She flips onto her back and looks up at the ceiling light: a crimped square of white glass containing hundreds of insect fragments.

  She wakes without having had any awareness of being asleep, her mouth coated with bitter paste, her head hot, her thoughts like bubbles rising through mud.

  Sitting on the porch swing, staring blankly into varieties of black, yellow, and shimmery green, Melissa feels a presence behind her. She looks around to see a gaunt, enormously tall man watching her silently from behind the screen door. He pushes the door open. “Hi,” he says, then ducks and steps onto the porch. “You Marilyn?”

  “Melissa,” she says.

  “Jack,” he says.

  A few hours earlier, when she was in the bathroom and Spencer was dressing, she heard a low rumble, slamming car doors, hoarse grunts. She looked out the window and saw this very man carrying two black travel bags across the lawn. Even from above she could tell he was huge. He lumbered. He had a storybook giant’s hunched shoulders. But he wasn’t in the kitchen with Harriet and Tess when she and Spencer came downstairs, and he didn’t join the family for a lunch of waterlogged cold cuts and cheese. Nobody said a word about him. And he wasn’t around when Melissa came back from her walk.

  “Pleased to meet you,” she says.

  “Same here.”

  They shake hands. His eyes are smoke blue. His auburn hair is pulled back so tightly from his forehead it looks painted onto his scalp. A lank ponytail dangles halfway down his back. He is at least six six.

  “Do you mind?” he asks as he folds his long limbs and sits crosslegged on the porch floor, leaning against the railing. Melissa, also cross-legged, looks down on him from the swing. She feels as if she is a swami hovering in midair.

  “So?” he says and smiles. He has horse teeth.

  Melissa doesn’t know what to say. She adjusts her position on the swing, uncrossing one leg and letting it dangle.

  Jack tilts his head and gives her a sly squint, as if they have a secret understanding.

  “Felicitations,” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Felicitations.” When she doesn’t respond, he asks, “Didn’t you guys just have a wedding anniversary?”

  “Oh!” Melissa laughs. “Oh, no, no!” She laughs again. “We’re just dating. Last night was the six-month anniversary of our first date.”

  Jack’s brow crinkles. Then he laughs too. “Good! Now I don’t have to feel offended that you didn’t invite me to your wedding!”

  There is a silence during which Melissa wonders if he is expecting some sort of apology.

  Fixed smiles. Askew gazes.<
br />
  “You two make a nice couple,” says Jack.

  When has this guy ever seen us together? Melissa wonders. “Thank you,” she says.

  “So, are you getting married?”

  Melissa pretends to flick something off her knee. “No.” Her voice is quiet. “We’re not at that stage.”

  “Oh. Sorry!”

  “Well … you know …” She sighs, shrugs.

  He lifts one foot and prods the calf of her dangling leg with his big toe. “Just curious.” He smiles.

  Melissa pulls her leg back onto the swing.

  Jack looks off toward the parked cars, then at Melissa. “So, what do you think of these Galeanos?”

  “I don’t really know them yet—except Spencer, of course.”

  Jack grunts. “They’re a trip.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. …” He pouts ironically. “I mean, like this fucking will thing! I mean, really, what’s that all about?”

  “What will?”

  “Didn’t Spence tell you?”

  Melissa shakes her head and flushes, feeling she has just been revealed as a second-rate girlfriend.

  Jack’s sly squint returns, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “What about the will?” she asks.

  “It’s vanished. For twenty years it’s been in this one folder in Millie’s filing cabinet, but now it’s gone, and Harriet’s claiming that Millie has left her the house.”

  “Is that in the will?”

  “Of course not! That’s the whole point!”

  “But if it’s not in the will, how can Harriet say that?”

  “You obviously don’t know Harriet!” Jack laughs. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That’s what I mean about these Galeanos!”

  Melissa frowns and purses her lips. “So, what happened?”