by Kristin Bair
“I am lonely,” she whispers to the tomato plant.
The lone tomato, now plump and red, whispers back, “I know what you mean.” Agatha pokes it with her finger.
A normal person might have taken Shrinky-Dink’s advice to call Melody and offer an apology, but instead Agatha posts a couple of photos from her most recent journey into the Krug on the Moms page: the Interloper walking away in the storm and a post-storm selfie in which Agatha looks like she was on the losing end of a duel. “What are we going to do about this?” she writes. Provocation is an art form for Agatha.
High Priestess Poston:
“I think we should pitch in and get you to Salon Brava.”
A load of ha-ha-has and laugh emojis follow.
Undaunted, she drives to North Circle Street and parks four houses from Melody’s. She hops out of Coop, sneaks through a series of backyards, and hunkers down behind the mammoth rhododendron next to Melody’s back porch.
She gives her drone a big smooch, then sets it into action. It buzzes to the first floor windows: living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, bedroom, bathroom, study. But no Melody. Minutes pass. Agatha’s heart quickens. Second floor. Library, ginormous closet, guest room. No luck. But finally she locates Melody in the master bedroom on the third floor. She’s lying on the bed with a washcloth draped over her forehead, pearls so perfectly in place it looks as if the string is glued to her high-cut blouse. What modern woman lies on a bed with a washcloth on her head and pearls around her neck? The whole scene is so 1950 and so Melody, it makes Agatha’s heart burst with love. But Melody is still, so still. She isn’t drumming her fingers or twitching her foot. She isn’t scrolling on her phone. She is as still as a stick.
Oh, my god, Agatha thinks, Melody is dead!
Her dear friend, her BFF, the very first member of her zephyr, is dead.
“Melody!” she hollers in her head. “Melody! Melody! Melody!”
Hoping to jar her into action, Agatha bumps the drone against the window. Thank god for Blue’s tutelage.
Bump. Bump, bump.
Nothing.
Agatha pulls the drone back a good five feet and slams it into the window so hard she’s sure the glass will shatter. Blue would be proud. Or appalled.
But still nothing. Not even a quiver.
Just then Agatha notices that one, just one, of Melody’s low-heeled, green-as-an-Irish-pasture pumps is lying on the floor, and she knows this is a sure sign Melody has indeed perished right there on her bed.
“Screw this!” Agatha yells, out loud this time. She tucks her drone into a pocket of her pants, plows through the rhododendron, and takes off for the front door. “I’ll save you, Melody!”
As she runs, she tries to remember the lifesaving steps for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Open the airway. Pinch the nostrils shut. Make a seal over the mouth with yours. There aren’t many people in the world on whom she’d put her lips in order to save their life, but Melody is definitely one of them.
Agatha reaches the front door and turns the knob. Thank god Melody never locks her house (welcome, ne’er-do-wells!). She throws open the door and runs through the foyer hollering, “Melody! Melody! Don’t die! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” She tears up two flights of stairs and into the master bedroom. Just as she slams into the bed, Melody opens her eyes. When she sees Agatha, she smiles like a cat that has devoured 4,390,822 canaries.
“Agatha Arch!” she exclaims, sitting up and letting her other pump drop to the floor.
With that simple happy utterance, Agatha’s heart soars. She falls at Melody’s bare feet and hugs them both. “Oh my god, Melody! I was spying on you with my drone because I missed you and I saw you here with that ridiculous washcloth on your head and one shoe off and I thought you were dead.”
“Dead? Because of a washcloth and a shoe?”
“Yes! I was going to give you mouth to mouth. I was going to save you.”
“You were?”
“Yes!”
“What about all those germs?”
“Fuck germs, Melody! You’re my BFF. I’m sorry, so sorry. Sorry for everything.” Agatha rests her head on Melody’s knee and starts to sob.
And sob and sob and sob.
And sob.
And sob
and sob
and sobsobsobsobsobsob
“It’s okay, honey,” Melody says, patting Agatha’s head and dabbing her tears with the washcloth. “It’s okay.” Then she stops and sits back. “Wait a minute. You did all this because you missed me?”
Agatha nods.
“You missed me?”
Agatha nods again. “So much,” she says. Melody is a little blurry through her tears, but her smile is so bright the astronauts on the space station could probably see it.
“Oh, my dear Agatha Arch, that is music to my ears because I’ve missed you.”
Then, although Agatha is not sure if it is real or if she is just imagining it, Melody starts to hum “Kumbaya.”
Agatha closes her eyes, hugs Melody’s knees, and hums along with the tune. Melody Whelan, her friend, her real and true best friend, the principal member of her zephyr, missed her, too.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Interloper gets taken in to the police station on a Tuesday morning. The police storm the intersection, stop traffic with flashing lights and blasting sirens, escort the Interloper into the back seat of a squad car, and whisk her off to the station. It is all very dramatic, filmed and posted on the Moms page for about thirty minutes before Marty Snow takes it down. “Case of mistaken identity,” she posts. “They thought she might have been the thief who broke into three homes last week. She wasn’t. Move on.”
Agatha is not sure who filmed the scene, but they’d been close enough to capture the Interloper’s expression when she whipped back her hair and glared at the camera. She was pissed, which terrifies Agatha. She would have expected a frightened, skittish, “what’s going to happen now” look, but instead, the Interloper looked like she might murder someone right then and there.
Agatha takes a screen shot of that look before the post is removed and sends it to Melody with: “Why am I scared of her? Why am I scared of her? THIS IS WHY I’M SCARED OF HER.”
Within five seconds Melody texts back: “Pretty sure I’ve seen this same murderous look on your face during conversations about Dax and Willow Bean. Pretty sure it’s the look you have on your face right now because I just dared to call her Willow and not the dog walker.”
Ooh.
Ouch.
Grrr.
From anyone else, that text would have incited an all-out war, but because it is from Melody, Agatha pauses for reflection. After breathing deeply and channeling Shrinky-Dink’s advice, she admits to herself that, yes, seeing the word Willow on the screen pisses her off, but even so, she knows that no matter what the circumstance, she never looks like she would murder anyone. To prove it, she switches her camera to selfie mode, rereads Melody’s text, and looks.
SHIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTT!
Murder face! Murder face!
Her eyes? A murderer’s eyes! Dark and sharp and menacing.
Her mouth? Some kind of god-awful murder-y contortion.
Her eyebrows? Most murder-y eyebrows ever seen.
If she were someone else looking at her, she’d be terrified. She’d call the police there and then. She’d shout, “I have no evidence, but I’m pretty damn sure this loonybird is going to slay an enemy. Stop her!”
Agatha looks away from her image, then back again.
SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTT!
She really and truly looks like a murderer.
Does she look like this often? Does she look like this whenever Willow’s name is spoken? Dax’s? Does she look like this in the grocery store? At Shrinky-Dink’s office? Walking down the street? Do her boys see her look like this?
She takes one more shot of herself, flips the camera back into “photograph normal people” mode, a
nd falls onto the bed.
Melody texts, “Agatha? Agatha? Are you there? If you don’t text back, I’m going to call you.” There it is again. The ultimate threat of the new millennium. A phone call.
“Fuuucccckkkk!” Agatha texts back. “Do I look like this often?”
“You looked at you?”
“Yup.”
“You shouldn’t have looked.”
“Just answer me. Do I look like this often?”
This time there is a good thirty-second silence.
“Yes, yes, you do.”
“Don’t call me,” Agatha texts.
She stuffs her phone under her pillow and flops onto her back.
Her phone rings. “The Wind Beneath My Wings.” She ignores it. The song stops, then starts again. She grabs her phone. “What?”
“You don’t look terrifying all the time.”
“No?”
“Absolutely not.”
“How much of the time?”
“Just when something or someone reminds you of what Dax did.”
“You mean what Dax is doing. Present tense.”
“Yes, is doing. Present tense.”
“Things remind me of what Dax is doing all the time. Every second.” She sits up in bed and glances at her image in the mirror.
Fuuuucccccckkkkk. She looks even more murder-y than before. How is that possible?
“Melody, no wonder the Tush didn’t want to do me.”
“That’s absurd.”
“No, it’s not. Here I am running around citing all the things in the world I am afraid of and the biggest thing that other people must be afraid of is me. Crazy fucking me. Right?”
“No, Agatha, no. People understand. Really they do.”
“They might understand I’m in pain, but I don’t think anyone can understand the murder-y look on my face.”
“Are you still looking in the mirror?”
Agatha nods but doesn’t speak.
“Agatha?”
“Yes, I’m still looking.”
“Do me a favor?”
Agatha is pretty sure she is going to ask her to cover her head with a sheet, but that is already her plan.
Instead, Melody says, “Smile.”
“What?”
“Keep looking at yourself in the mirror and smile.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
“Agatha, I’m serious. Look in the mirror and smile.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. I want to show you something. Think of something spectacular. Then smile.”
Agatha thinks about her crumbling marriage, her failed attempts at sex, her stalled writing career, her roller skates, the Tush, the mailman, the UPS guy, the Interloper, and a few other juicy bits and pieces of her miserable existence of a life. She has nothing. “I’ve got nothing, Melody. Not a damn thing.”
“The boys,” Melody says. “Jason and Dustin.”
Immediately, Agatha is shot through with joy and love. She smiles without even trying to smile. She feels it before she sees it, but as soon as she does, she looks up at herself. Murder-y her is gone and in her place is shiny Agatha. Shiny, shiny Agatha who doesn’t look scary at all. Shiny shiny Agatha who wouldn’t make you cross the street to avoid her. Super shiny Agatha who might even make you want to hug her. Happy shiny Agatha.
“Well?”
Agatha laughs, actually laughs. And an even happier reflection appears in the mirror. She sighs. “Yes, it worked. I no longer look murder-y.”
“Now, can you relax a little about Lucy and that image of her you saw today? It was one moment in which she was sad and afraid and angry and lost. It is not who she is, I swear.”
Agatha takes a breath. “Okay,” she says, “I’ll cut her a little slack.”
“Good. Now go look at yourself smiling for a while. You’re beautiful. I’ll see you later.” And she is gone.
* * *
Agatha takes a selfie while saying GDOG’s name out loud. It’s hideous. Frightening.
She takes another selfie while thinking about the boys. It’s beautiful. As beautiful as she gets.
She posts a mash-up on her Infidelity page. A side-by-side comparison. She’s scared to present something so raw, but she has to own the truth.
#realme #nofilter
* * *
“Do you think this is permanent?” Agatha rubs the crease on her cheek. It is as indelible as it was the morning after the shed incident. A narrow sword-like crease that ends in a sharp point.
The esthetician shines her headlamp at the spot. “Hm. That’s an unusual marking.”
“It’s not a marking. It’s a crease. From lying too long cheek-down on my porch.”
The lady lifts her spectacle and eyes Agatha. She looks again at the mark. “You’ve had it your whole life, yes?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. I just got it a few weeks ago.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“It’s not a normal crease.” She’s leans so close her nose brushes Agatha’s cheek.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it has special qualities.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t respond like the rest of your skin.” She presses a finger to Agatha’s cheek and quickly lifts it. “You see? The rest of your facial skin is responsive, like a trampoline, but this crease of skin is resistant to such buoyancy.”
Agatha wonders if all estheticians talk this way. “Meaning?”
“Meaning, you’re marked.”
“Marked?”
“Yes, marked.”
“For how long?”
“For life.”
“For life?”
“Yes.”
“Like Harry Potter?”
“Like Harry Potter.”
* * *
“Why didn’t you tell me about murderer face?”
“Excuse me?” Shrinky-Dink looks confused.
“Murderer face. This.” Agatha thinks about GDOG and Dax in the shed and feels her face contort and twist into a mask of hideousness. She feels like Bruce Banner transforming into the Hulk. Buttons popping. Shirt splitting down the middle. Skin turning green. “This,” she says when she knows she’s in full murderer face, jabbing at her cheeks and chin with both index fingers. “This.”
Shrinky-Dink sighs. “Oh, that.”
“You knew about it, right? You’ve seen it a lot in here.”
“Of course I’ve seen it. You’ve looked like this often since Dax’s indiscretion. But I wouldn’t call it murderer face.”
“And I wouldn’t call what Dax did an indiscretion.”
“Agree.”
“What would you call it? This look of mine.”
“I’d call it, Agatha-is-in-pain face.”
Of course she would.
Agatha folds at the waist and drops her head to her knees. She falls sideways and curls on the couch. “This is the look that scares me on the Interloper, but I often look the same way? What am I supposed to do with that?”
Chapter Thirty-Six
From the porch, Agatha spots GDOG creeping along the fence in the backyard, creeping along like only a sexy person can, hunched at the back, grapefruit arse in the air, sleek legs stretching out in daddy longlegs steps. Her heart squeezes and flops. WTF? What is this woman doing in her yard? “Hey!” she yells. “Hey!”
Willow stands, straightens into her willowy self, into her full “I am beautiful” height, and gives a small wave. “Hi, Agatha,” she says.
Hi, Agatha?
Hi, Agatha?
This woman tosses out this friendly greeting as if slinking along the fence in this particular backyard is an acceptable activity?
WTF?
Agatha walks toward her. “Willow, what exactly are you doing in my yard?” The last time Willow had been in this yard she’d been slipping off that silky muumuu-maxi, screwing Agatha’s husband in the shed, then running naked from Agatha and the hatche
t.
“I’m sorry,” Willow says. “I’m not trying to intrude, but Balderdash was spotted near here.”
“Balderdash? Here? In my yard?”
Thelma, Louise, and Timothy let out a vigorous meh, as if the thought of a dog in their midst is too much to consider.
“Yes, two Moms spotted him around here late last night. Didn’t you see it in the Moms group?”
“No, I’ve been trying not to look at that as often.” Agatha turns in a circle and surveys the yard. “I don’t see him anywhere.”
The two women walk through the yard, a good five feet between them, a safe distance, Agatha thinks, a safe-ish distance. They skirt the fenced area around the shed remains.
“If Balderdash was here last night, he’s gone now,” Agatha says. “It looks like he’s eluded capture once again.”
Right then a low mournful moan spreads across the yard.
“What was that?” GDOG says.
“My soul,” Agatha says. She means it.
The moan comes again, louder. Willow’s eyes pop wide. “The goats?”
“That’s not the goats,” Agatha says.
“Agatha, it sounds like Balderdash.” GDOG starts to run.
“So you know this dog’s moan as well as you know his poop?”
GDOG ignores the question. She looks behind the row of lilac bushes and the Rose of Sharon, then under the porch. “Balderdash?” she calls. “Balderdash?”
The moan comes again.
“Where is that coming from?” GDOG says. “Balderdash?”
Agatha runs to the gate in the electric fence. On the other side, not far from Thelma, she sees Balderdash lying on his side, his furless body pink and bright, a shade reminiscent of the hideous hot-pink shirt Dax had worn to the house the morning she threw the coffee cup, the shirt with the ridiculous patchwork pocket on the breast. Bastard. “Here, Willow, here. He’s inside the fence.”
Willow lopes to the gate, her grapefruit hips chugga-chugging like a drumroll. “Oh, my goodness! Balderdash! How did he get in there?”
