Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything

by Kristin Bair

  Agatha rolls her eyes. “My husband and his …” She can’t finish the sentence.

  The officer nods. “His friend?”

  Bile gathers in the back of Agatha’s throat and the prickles on her knee remind her she hasn’t shaved since the morning of the shed incident. Why shave when your husband is feeling the knees of another woman? “Yes,” Agatha says, “his friend.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  The boy’s mom catches on. She clicks her phone, obviously scrolling through the Moms group on Facebook. “Oh, I know you!” she says. “You’re …”

  The officer steps between them. “No need to determine who’s who,” he says. “Let’s just call this a day. Nothing unlawful is happening here, nothing unlawful is going to happen.”

  The woman snaps a photo of Agatha, then says, “Are you not going to cite this woman for harassing my son?”

  “No, your son is fine.” He turns to Agatha. “Ma’am, please stay out of this tree and be more careful about dislodging pine cones in the future.”

  Agatha nods. “I promise.”

  The woman stomps off, dragging her son behind her. “I’ll see you on the Moms,” she spits back.

  Agatha sighs. “I’m sure you will.”

  “I’m serious about staying out of this tree,” the officer says when the woman is out of earshot.

  “I know. I’ll steer clear of it.” Agatha turns to walk away.

  “By the way,” he calls, “I’ve been reading that book you talked about.”

  Agatha turns to face him. “Seriously? Their Eyes Were Watching God?” She is incredulous. No one ever does what she tells them to do.

  “The very one.”

  “And?”

  “I’m only a third of the way into it, but it’s a pretty good book.”

  “Told you,” she says. “Learn anything yet?”

  “I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

  The officer gets back into his car.

  “Hey,” Agatha says before he closes the door. “How about Janie?”

  He laughs. “I see the comparison.”

  * * *

  Her agent’s next email arrives with hot flames licking its heels. “Agatha, so much silence. You haven’t become the victim of your own murder mystery, have you?”

  Agatha sends back a GIF of a girl being bludgeoned to death on a mountaintop, blood spurting everywhere.

  * * *

  “Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart.” Paul Coelho, The Alchemist

  Agatha stares at the quote on the back of the passenger seat. She sniffs back tears, then catches the Uber driver looking at her in the rearview mirror.

  “You okay?” he says.

  She nods. Lying to an Uber driver is easy.

  She stares at the quote. When was the last time she was able to talk to her heart? She looks down. Her neck is still a little stiff, so really she can only see her boobs. Close enough.

  “Hello, heart,” she whispers.

  What does one say to one’s heart?

  “Heart, are you in there?”

  No response.

  “Hello, heart? Heart?”

  Nothing.

  The Uber driver turns. “Excuse me? Did you say something?”

  Agatha shakes her head. “I have to get out of your car.”

  “What? Now?”

  “Yes. Please stop.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes!” Agatha puts her hand on the door handle.

  “But we’re only halfway to your destination.”

  “Please stop the car.” Agatha pulls the handle.

  The driver swerves out of traffic and pulls to the side of the road.

  Agatha taps her Uber app. “I’ve paid. And I’ll give you a solid recommendation.”

  “Ma’am, it’s not that. Are you sure you’re okay? It’s a busy road. It’s starting to get dark.”

  Agatha steps out of the car. “I’m fine.” She closes the door and leans against the stop sign. Thank god for stop signs.

  It’s dusk. Agatha needs to get to the service station before it closes to pick up her car, but the quote keeps rattling around in her brain like a dime in a clothes dryer: “Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart.”

  Handfuls of cars pass. Some stop at the stop sign. Some roll right through. It’s this kind of cavalier nonsense that makes the world so hard to trust. The authorities say you must stop here. They put up a big red sign so you know. But not everyone listens. Not everyone adheres to the rules.

  Five out of ten cars eschew the stop sign. A man eats people with fava beans. A husband has sex with a dog walker in a shed. The Interloper hunkers down at Apple54. Just how far can the world go?

  Agatha hears a beep, then a familiar voice. “Agatha? Agatha Arch? What are you doing out here? It’s almost dark.”

  Agatha leans down and peers into the car. Of course. It’s the Kumbaya Queen. Who else would the universe send? “Melody?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Are you okay out here? Where are you going?”

  Agatha looks around. Is she okay?

  “I was on my way to get my car, at the station, in an Uber. I had to get out. It’s been too long since I talked to my heart. I got out.”

  There’s so much of that in life. The getting in and getting out.

  Agatha’s words make no sense to an outsider looking in, but Melody doesn’t address any of that. She just says, “Get in, Agatha. I’ll take you to the station.”

  Once again, getting in.

  Agatha looks around. It’s at least another mile to the station. It’s close to pure dark now, and her fears are kicking in. “Okay,” she says.

  At the station, she thanks Melody.

  “What was wrong with your car?” Melody asks.

  “Broken windows.”

  “Rock?”

  “Hammer.”

  Melody squinches up her face. “Huh?”

  Agatha thinks about how much her recent life is about tools that start with H. Hatchet. Hammer. She tries to think of others. Hacksaw. Hackle. “Just an accident,” she says and climbs out of the car. “Thank you for the lift.”

  “Any time. And Agatha?”

  Agatha leans down and looks at Melody.

  “Have you decided about lunch?”

  Agatha slams the door and runs into the station.

  * * *

  Over the next few days, she frets and broods over Melody’s unexpected invitation to lunch because, really, when was the last time someone asked her to anywhere, wrote down the words “how about doing this with me,” other than, of course, Kerry Sheridan and the invitation to her ridiculous autumn-in-New-England garden party? And while Agatha feels a trill of joy somewhere down so deep she almost doesn’t recognize it, it’s smothered by a dense, lardy sack of fear, so gasping for air and not knowing how to respond, she does what any brokenhearted, somewhat maniacal person does when mysteriously invited to a meal in the enemy’s lair: She buys a new pair of spy pants and adds 164 North Circle Street to her spy route. The pants, identical to the first, which she tore climbing the tree and accidentally/on purpose lobbing the pine cone at the boy, are a little bit baggier in the arse and legs because eating since the shed incident seems harder than usual and a few pounds or more have slipped away. Not so much that she needs a smaller size, not yet, but definitely enough to require a belt. And because she anticipates a few more rips and tears on her mission, she orders not one, but ten replacement pairs, five her current size and five one size smaller.

  Though she strives for Bear’s level of stealth—shifting into neutral and drifting to her parking spot outside Melody’s Colonial, turning off her headlights three houses before, pretending to hit the button for her secret invisibility cloak, and so on—she knows she’s failed on the third night when Melody appears at Coop’s window with her iPhone flashlight shining brigh
tly, then leans close and whispers, “Agatha? Agatha Arch? Is that you?”

  “Crap,” Agatha says.

  “Agatha, what are you doing out here?”

  “Is this your house, Melody?”

  “Yes, it is. You know that.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to have disturbed you. I was having trouble with my brakes as I was going home. I had to pull over.”

  “You just happened to pull over on my cul de sac? In front of my house? That seems rather unlikely. My house isn’t anywhere near your house.”

  “No, no. I was heading home on Wayton.” Agatha points back at the main feeder road. “And my brakes felt funny so I pulled off here.” She looks around wild-eyed, feigning bewilderment.

  Melody sighs.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been on this street except to drop off that bag for the Interloper,” Agatha says.

  “That’s odd,” Melody says. “I’m pretty sure I saw your car here last night. And the night before that.”

  “Melody, are you spying on me?” Agatha asks, voice rich with shock.

  Oh, the irony, the performance.

  “No,” Melody says. “I wasn’t spying. I was simply looking to see who was shining a giant beam of light in my living room window.”

  Agatha shoves the spotlight from the passenger seat to the floor. It’s the size of a toolbox. The only indispensable spy tool that doesn’t fit neatly in her pants. “Someone has been shining a beam of light into your house? Are you sure? Who would do such a thing?”

  This masquerade might have worked in Agatha’s favor had she been driving an Escalade. Melody would have been too short to peer into the vehicle to see the evidence. Even standing on tippy-toe she wouldn’t have been able to see a thing. But Mini Coopers are low to the ground, so low even GDOG’s Chihuahua could have peered in.

  “What’s that?” Melody says, shining her light on Agatha’s spotter.

  “Nothing.”

  “Really, Agatha? Nothing?”

  Agatha tosses a sweatshirt over the spotter. She and Dax had bought it years before when they’d driven around New Mexico looking for mountain lions. That’s the kind of young lovers they’d been. Reckless and brave. When they’d finally found a lion feeding on an elk, it looked up at them all bloody and wild-eyed, and they were thrilled. Well, Dax was thrilled. Agatha was terrified but putting on an “I’m thrilled” front. Young love and all. Now that Dax is shacked up with Miss Please-Don’t-Kill-That-Mosquito-Even-Though-Its-Bite-Will-Give-You- Dengue-Fever, he has no use for such a light. “I’ll leave this for you,” he’d told her. And thank goodness he had.

  Agatha starts her car, drifts forward a few inches, and taps her brakes. “Oh, look at that,” she says. “The brakes feel much better now. They must have gotten too hot.”

  “Too hot?” Melody says.

  Agatha nods. “It’s a thing with Mini Coopers. It will be fine.”

  Melody moves her light from the spotter to Agatha’s face. “Are you sure, Agatha?” she says. “I wouldn’t want you to drive an unsafe vehicle. I could drive you home. Or you could spend the night here.”

  Agatha’s eyes pop wide. Spend the night at Melody’s house? Good lord, no. She shoves her foot onto the brake and taps again. The car jitters and jolts. “Oh, no, all seems just fine now. False alarm. Thanks for checking on me but I need to get home to my …” She almost says boys, but the word catches in her throat. Her boys aren’t at home. It’s a “boys with Dax” night. She doesn’t need to get home to them. She doesn’t need to get home to anyone. Aside from Susan Sontag lying in wait under the porch and the woodpecker continuing his assault on Agatha’s sanity, there is no one there. Unable to say another word without sobbing, Agatha hits the gas. Melody’s flashlight shines like a beacon in the rearview mirror.

  * * *

  During the next few days, Melody mentions the Interloper in every post she writes on Facebook and insists on calling her Lucy. Not “the Interloper.” Not “the beggar.” Not even “the young woman at Apple54.” Just Lucy. “That’s her name,” she explains. “Let’s all use her name.”

  Somewhere in the middle of the barrage of Lucy posts, just after Agatha mocks her for this blind support of the Interloper, Melody reissues her invitation, right there on FB, publicly, for all the Moms to see: “Agatha, please come to my house for lunch sometime soon. You know how to find it.” Then she adds a winking emoji, calling attention to their private joke.

  Lunch with Melody Whelan at the Colonial Kumbaya house?

  Um, no, thank you very much.

  * * *

  “You did what?” Shrinky-Dink says. “Why in the world would you climb a tree, spy on your estranged husband with binoculars, and film him with a GoPro?”

  “Stop making it sound so dramatic.”

  “It is dramatic, Agatha. And it’s serious.”

  “Stop. It’s not a big deal.”

  “It is a big deal. You need to donate that GoPro to a local school immediately.”

  “No way,” Agatha says. “I have to see my boys.”

  “You have your boys four out of seven days every week.”

  “I have Dustin and Jason. I don’t have Dax. I don’t have all three of them together. They have been my boys for years, and I believed they’d be my boys forever. How is a woman expected to go from three to two without even a say in the matter? Without even being asked?”

  Shrinky-Dink visibly softens. “I see,” she says. “This isn’t about custody, is it?”

  Agatha sighs. “Not at all. It’s about the fact that my life has changed without me even being involved in the decision to change it.”

  “You do have a say in deciding how things move from here,” Shrinky-Dink says.

  “But I had no say in how we got here. And that fact will never change.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Agatha lies in bed trying to assure herself that the scritchy-scratchy noise over by the stuffed chair is not a wee rodent scrounging for nuggets of food and plotting her demise but just a branch on one of the oaks grazing the window in the breeze. If that’s true, she reasons, perhaps the oak trees need a trim. They’re massive things that drop more leaves in the fall than is humanly possible to collect into bags, therefore a major pain in the ass that requires a hired team, but not until you stand in their cool shadows on a hot day in midsummer do you realize their power and worth. There are many such trees in Wallingford. Old, thick-trunked behemoths that tower over yards, arch across roads, and frequently crash to the ground during nor’easters and similar storms, crushing roofs, dragging down power lines, and leaving sections of Wallingford in the dark for days on end. It’s the charm and tragedy of old wood. As Agatha makes a note in her phone to call TreeLife about a checkup, good old Ava Newton posts a photo of the rangy quadruped that has been loitering in her yard for the past thirty minutes and asks: “Ladies, is this a fox or a coyote?”

  Agatha bolts into an upright position. Good lord, here we go again. No matter how many times these Moms have studied pictures of these two very distinct animals, no matter how many times they’ve hashed out the characteristics of each, they are still incapable of distinguishing one from the other.

  Rachel Runk:

  “Ava, that could be a wolf. They’ve been working their way east again.”

  Ava Newton:

  “A wolf?”

  With that, panic permeates the page.

  Priya Devi:

  “Definitely a coyote. They’re killers. Keep little Chloe and your pets inside until help arrives.”

  Lara Lynch:

  “Fisher cat, for sure. If it sounds like a screaming woman being murdered, that’s it.”

  Agatha posts a photo of Janet Leigh doing her famous shower scream in Psycho.

  Grainne O’Neill:

  “Wolf.”

  Rachel Runk:

  “Right, Grainne? Definitely a wolf.”

  Holly McCarthy:

  “Neighbor’s dog? Too small to be coyote or fox.”

>   Lin Zheng:

  “Groundhog.”

  There’s always one.

  Olivia Charles:

  “Damn coyotes.”

  Emily Patterson:

  “Is it growling?”

  Isabelle Fish:

  “Is it howling? Foxes howl.”

  Agatha posts a link to an article about why coyotes howl.

  Quynh Nguyen:

  “Fox.”

  Anne Pape:

  “Coyote.”

  Agatha posts a photo of a lemon. “Ladies, is this a lemon or a lime?”

  Jane Poston:

  “Oh, Agatha.”

  Rae Stein:

  “I vote fox.”

  Cherry Stenson:

  “Is it rabid? Is it frothing at the mouth?”

  Jane Poston:

  “OMG, Ava, have you seen Cujo?”

  Erin Abel:

  “Ava, call animal control right now. Officer Ed will be there pronto.”

  Agatha leans back into her pillow and lifts her thumbs off her phone. Who in New England doesn’t know what a fox looks like? Haven’t these women ever read Peter Rabbit?

  Reddish. Brownish. Furry. Knee high. With a classic bushy tail.

  But then Agatha thinks about GDOG, whom she’d mistaken as an innocent dog walker. Even with all the sashaying past with pups, she hadn’t pegged her for a husband-stealing hussy. Yet here they were.

  She’s quiet for a moment, hesitant to jump back into the controversy knowing damn well there’s no messing with the Moms once Officer Ed enters the conversation. Their absurdity is funny until it’s not. She’d learned this the hard way years before when one of the Moms posted that she’d spotted a turkey strutting around a busy intersection. Like a lot of New England towns, Wallingford is one of those rural/not rural places in which it’s common to see coyotes, foxes, deer, skunks, groundhogs, raccoons, fisher cats, and, yes, turkeys. How this woman hadn’t known that many Meleagris gallopavo roam the land is beyond comprehension. Unless she’d just moved to town from Laos (hadn’t) or was blind (wasn’t), it would seem impossible for her not to know this fact. But she hadn’t, and when she spotted the dislocated tom cocking about near the hardware store, she’d called Officer Ed in a panic and was stunned to learn that he wouldn’t do anything about it. What exactly she’d wanted him to do was unclear—usually you just watch and admire them, or mock them, or shoo them with a beep of the horn if they’re in the road—but the Moms jumped in enthusiastically, most showing support by explaining the wildlife of Wallingford and assuring her the turkey was not a dangerous outlier. It was all going along well, with women telling stories about how they, too, had seen the turkey, where they’d seen it, estimating how long it had been around, and hypothesizing about why it was on its own. One woman even had an emotional epiphany when she opened up about being attacked by a turkey as a kid. Another shared that a group of turkeys was called a rafter. Moms’ camaraderie at its best.