Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything

by Kristin Bair

  “She left me for a colleague at work,” he tells her about his ex-wife. “It was such a cliché, it took me an entire year to even believe she was really gone.”

  Agatha starts to share details of Edward’s indiscretions, but then stops. “My shrink made me promise not to roll around in a swamp of pain and heartache during my first post-marriage fling,” she says.

  “Mine, too,” says Edward. “He actually says, ‘Sidestep the swamp, Eddie. Reach for the stars.’ I have no idea why he calls me Eddie. No one calls me Eddie.”

  “Is this a fling then?” Agatha says.

  “Oh, I hope so,” Edward says. “I sure hope so.” Minutes later, when he “accidentally on purpose” brushes his hand on Agatha’s thigh, her loins burst into flames, and she yelps so loudly he jumps a foot off the couch.

  “What? What?” he says. “Are you hurt?”

  “No, no!” she yells super loud. “Just hungry!” She doesn’t know why she is yelling. Yes, rain is slamming against the windows but not so hard she has to holler to be heard.

  “Hungry?” he says, sweetly concerned. “Do you want more soup?”

  “Soup?” she yells. “Oh, god, no, I don’t want soup. I’ve had more than enough Darth Vaders and Obi-Wans. No, no, I want you. I’m hungry for you.” Her voice is screechy and rough. And still super loud.

  When Edward sets his hand on her knee in response and squeezes, desire roars through her like a wildfire. She can’t take the lack of touch one moment longer. It has been so long. Weeks. Months.

  She whips around on the couch so she and Edward are face to face. She grabs his shoulders while the rain smashes against the window. Then she bolts in for their first kiss. This god of noodle soup and Sudafed is as ready as she is, and his lips, all lubed up with Vaseline and Vicks VapoRub, are soft and smooshy and minty and, at least for the night, hers, all hers. His mouth is a blend of noodle soup and wine and berry-flavored cough drops. His tongue? Salty and chicken-y and sultry. She groans and moans and bubbles. She squirms closer and closer, suddenly remembering how delicious mouths are … how many things hands can do on a body. Hands on arms. Hands on shoulders. Hands on hips and stomach. Oh, hands on stomach. And then SWEET JESUS!

  HANDS ON BOOBS!

  “Hands on boobs!” Agatha yells. “Hands on boobs!” And Edward laughs so hard he can barely keep his hands on her boobs, proving he is the exact right person for her to hook up with on this day at this time in her life.

  He squeezes and rubs, pushing her boobs this way and that, all the while throat-whispering, “Beautiful. So soft. Oh, my god, so soft,” which fans that crazy wildfire in her loins into house-high flames. She doesn’t know if his voice is normally this gravelly or if the cold is causing it, but it is sexy as hell.

  “Talk to me!” she yells. She can’t stop yelling. It is all so glorious.

  “Gorgeous,” he whispers. “Lovely. Sweet.”

  The more he whispers, the more she yells. And when he starts to unzip her hideous blue grocery-store-on-a-Friday-night sweatshirt, the zipping sound rips through her like a lightning bolt. “Faster!” she yells.

  When her sweatshirt is finally hanging from one hand, Edward shoves her bra aside and presses his mouth to her nipples. She dies right then. D-I-E-S. But just for a few seconds, because then his tongue, hot and fast like a serpent’s tongue (yes! a serpent’s tongue!), whips her back to life, and she yells, “Oh my god, NIPPLES! Hands on nipples! Mouth on nipples! More, more, more!” She falls backward onto the couch and thanks the gods for her decision to trudge to the grocery store to answer her craving for canned noodle soup. Then she thanks them for Edward’s business trip and his god-awful cold.

  Just as she is about to thank the gods for Elsa and Anna and Darth and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Edward shushes her and folds her up in his arms. With that invitation, she leaps onto his lap like a flying squirrel, legs splayed. Who knew she could even perform such feats of gymnastic prowess? Once in place, grinding ever so lightly—then not so lightly—on his lovely mound of manliness (yes! lovely mound of manliness!), she grips him between her legs and squeezes. She grunts, and he grunts back. She tugs his shirt over his head and discovers wee tufts of hair scattered across his chest. Gah! “Hair on chest!” she hollers.

  Then Edward stands and scoops her up. “Which way to your bedroom?” he asks, pausing on their way to press her to the door and suck on her neck and ears, during which time she caterwauls herself silly.

  Of course, she’s totally forgotten she is wearing her spy pants, fully stocked with all the supplies she carries on a regular basis. Midway up the stairs, her headlamp falls out of a pocket and clunks down the steps. Edward pauses and glances at the bottom of the stairs where the headlamp has settled. “What’s that?”

  She jumps out of his arms, grabs the lamp, and pulls it onto her head. “Ah, my handy-dandy headlamp,” she says, scrambling to make it seem normal. When she clicks it on, the beam of light shines on Edward’s swollen nose. He squints. “The better to guide our path,” she yelps. She grabs his hand and leads the way.

  Once on the bed, her Leatherman pokes into his thigh. “Ow! Ow! Ow! What is that?”

  “My Leatherman Super Tool 300 EOD,” she yells. She may be the first human ever to yell Leatherman during foreplay.

  He grins, wiping his nose. “Should I ask?”

  “Nope,” she says, and she frantically unpacks the rest of her supplies. The reel of fishing line comes undone and gets wrapped around both of them, and as they try to get her pants off, it nearly cuts off the circulation to her big toe. She pulls a pair of scissors from another pocket and cuts herself free. Once she is, Edward flops her onto the bed and peels away all remaining pieces of clothing. Then they

  kiss

  kiss

  kiss

  and

  kiss

  Then it is her turn. With great glee, she unsnaps his britches and begins the interminably long unzip. When his pants are loose, she tugs them down to his ankles and pulls them off. With her headlamp on, she can see tiny haystacks on his shorts. So darn cute. She reaches in, finds a strong stiff sword (yes, strong stiff sword!), and yells, “Penis in hand! Penis in hand! Oh my god! Penis in hand!”

  It’s been so long since she held one, she can hardly control her excitement. She rubs it. Shines it. Polishes it. Turns it this way and that. She honors the hell out of it.

  Once all parts and pieces are free, she throws her headlamp to the floor, and she and Edward roll into action.

  “Olé!” Agatha yells. “Olé!”

  * * *

  Hours later, as they lay there, sweaty and sticky and happy, Edward coughs, then whispers, “I reached for the stars, my dear Agatha Arch. I really did. I reached for the stars.” And saying without saying (as they are both determined not to stick even a toe into their respective swamps of agony), he thanks his gods for her, for her decision to search out a can of noodle soup, for Sudafed, for her patience with his drippy nose, and for her crazy caterwauling wildfire self.

  “Oh, Eddie, it was beautiful,” she says, feeling all starry and shiny and twinkly from the tips of her toes to the top of her head. They nuzzle into each other and pull her new sheets and blankets into a warm nest.

  As Bear Grylls often says, “Time spent preparing a good camp is never wasted.”

  * * *

  Later, when Edward is snoring, Agatha rolls over, grabs her phone from her single bedside table, and texts Melody. “Glorious night. Alive and kicking.”

  Just before falling off to sleep, her phone flashes. Text from Melody. “Just drove past your house to snap a photo of Edward the Man’s license plate. Just in case. A happy glow is pulsing from your bedroom window. See you tomorrow!”

  Agatha snuggles into Edward and falls asleep.

  * * *

  The morning after their most glorious oh-my-god-hands-on-boobs night, Agatha gets a text from Edward. It features a math problem: soup can + a red heart = us.

  For the rest of the day, she pran
ces instead of walks and sings “La la la la la la la la la!”

  She also starts sniffling and getting that no-no-no-no-no scratchy throat that tells you you’ve caught your lover’s cold and you’re going to feel like shit pretty damn quick. But does she care?

  Hell no!

  Cold be damned.

  Olé!

  She jumps into her car and, for the first time in forever, speeds down the street. Truly speeds. The lights on the police car flip on almost immediately.

  Officer Henry pulls her over and steps up. “You!” he says.

  “You!” she says.

  “What’s going on? You don’t speed.”

  Agatha laughs. “I was practicing.”

  “For what? The Indy 500?”

  “Life.”

  He nods. “Hey, I finished the book.”

  Agatha grins. “You read the whole thing?”

  “The whole thing. And I loved it.”

  “I’m surprised,” she says, “and impressed.”

  “Hang on a second,” he says. He walks back to the squad car, and when he returns, she expects a ticket. Instead he hands her a copy of her latest book. “Will you sign this for me? It’s next on my reading list.”

  “You have a reading list?”

  “I do now. Will you sign it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you writing again?”

  “Not yet, but soon. But I’m almost ready to start.”

  “What’s your next project?”

  “A thriller.”

  * * *

  “Thriller in process!” Agatha texts to her agent. “It’s a’coming!”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  On the morning after Susan Sontag makes her final appearance of the year, heading into her winter den to succumb to a delicious state of torpor, something Agatha won’t mind at all, the High Priestess posts a photo of the intersection at Apple54.

  Jane Poston:

  “Hey, ladies, I haven’t seen the Interloper in a couple of days. Apple54 feels strangely empty. Anyone else spot her?”

  Agatha sits up, studies HP’s fuzzy-ass photo of the intersection, so blurry Agatha isn’t even sure it is the Apple54 intersection, and waits, first, for the Moms to weigh in and, second, for the text from Melody with a panicked “What? Lucy isn’t there? What are we going to do?” In the minutes between those things, she clicks on Ava Newton’s call for prayers, offers a bagful of Jason’s discarded stuffed animals to Anne Pape, who is collecting for a charity, recommends Shrinky-Dink to a Mom who desperately needs a good listener, and offers a Bed Bath and Beyond coupon to Lila Due who needs a new rice cooker before ten cousins descend on her house for an anniversary dinner.

  Before the text from Melody, a handful of Moms confirm that they have not seen the Interloper either.

  phyliss-with-one-l-and-two-esses:

  “so strange that you mention it, jane, as i was just saying to my wife, ‘the woman at apple54 hasn’t been around the last few days.’”

  Rachel Runk:

  “I haven’t seen her either.”

  Meredith Wilson:

  “I noticed her can wasn’t in the grass yesterday afternoon but I didn’t think much of it.”

  Kelly Prescott:

  “Agatha, have you checked your basement? Maybe she’s hiding there waiting to pounce.”

  Agatha Arch:

  “Ha ha, KP.”

  A moment after Kelly Prescott’s well-timed jab, Melody’s text comes through. “Agatha, Lucy is missing! Have you seen her?”

  Agatha is honest. “No, not in 2 days. Meet me in the parking lot in 15.”

  Melody shoots her a thumbs up.

  Agatha puts on her spy pants, glances in the mirror, then changes into a pair of yoga pants that she fits into for the first time in years. As she hops down the stairs to the yard, she glances under the porch where Susan Sontag is likely sleeping, curled up next to Jerry Garcia for a long winter’s nap.

  “Research says that only female skunks bunk together in winter dens,” Agatha tells Shrinky-Dink in her next session, “but I’m pretty damn sure Jerry Garcia is in there with her.”

  * * *

  The air is crisp, the kind of crisp that will no longer succumb to warmth, no longer turn over to a few days of second summer. Agatha and Melody stand in the swatch of grass in which the Interloper has stood for the past few months, but as Jane Poston said, there is no sign of her. Her can. The coat she used to hang on the light post. The hand-scrawled sign about being unemployed and going through hard times. Even her essence. All gone.

  “She’s gone for good, isn’t she?” Melody says.

  “Looks like it,” Agatha says. “Feels like it.”

  “I’m going to miss her.”

  Agatha rolls her eyes. “Not me,” she says, “I’m going to sleep a little better now.”

  “Stop it, Agatha. That young woman was a good egg and you know it.”

  Agatha shakes her head because even after everything they’ve been through, no one, not her or Melody, not Willow Bean or Dax, not Jane Poston or David Watkins or any other Mom or Dad in the group knows for sure if the Interloper is a good egg or a bad egg. And now, no one ever will.

  Agatha half expects Melody to ask her to hike into the Krug one more time to check, just in case, but instead Melody turns to the Krug and waves. “Goodbye, Lucy,” she says. “Good luck.”

  Agatha does the same. “Goodbye, Interloper.”

  * * *

  The waving goodbye on this first frosty day leaves Agatha unexpectedly teary, unexpectedly lonely, and even though it is ten o’clock, an hour in which all children, including Dustin and Jason, are in classrooms, learning things, disputing things, examining and exploring things, she drives to GDOG’s house, the place where her boys most recently slept, most recently peed and pooped and ate breakfast. The place where just hours before, they’d fallen down, wrestled, snuck in a video game, and built two LEGO dinosaurs. The place where Jason had cried big tears, brushed mud from his sneakers, and stuffed a Captain Underpants book into his backpack.

  Agatha thinks about home. Her home and their new part-time home at GDOG’s house. Homes, plural. This place, these places, where the boys pull the heads off the neighbor’s Barbie dolls and eat potato chips until their fingers are slippery with grease and stomp around like monsters and scare the shit out of each other by hiding behind doors and jumping out and yelling “Boo!” and not folding the laundry put on their beds and farting and burping and saying “I love you” in their funny, sheepish way and calling Agatha when they miss her and/or calling Dax when they miss him and letting their hair get too long and brushing their teeth superfast so they can get back to Star Wars as quickly as possible and sitting close together without meaning to but meaning to and fighting over the faded yellow Batman T-shirt and fighting over the last chocolate chip cookie and fighting over the TV clicker and fighting over who is going to go down the stairs first and defending each other when the neighbor kids threaten to steal their bikes and laughing like hyenas when SpongeBob loses his pants and throwing a baseball in the living room no matter how many times they are told not to and shattering a lamp with the baseball then hiding the glass bits in a box in the garage until someone says, “Where’s the lamp?” and complaining about having to eat beets and complaining about having to drink milk that isn’t chocolate and complaining about not having any candy in the house and so much more.

  It used to be just one home in which these vital things happen. Now there are two.

  Agatha parks under the pine tree and drops her head onto the steering wheel. Moments later when she hears footsteps approaching the car, she expects Officer Henry but instead sees Willow Bean. Unbelievably beautiful Willow Bean and her thumpa-thumping grapefruit hips.

  “Hi,” Agatha whispers when Willow reaches the car, not even trying to wipe the tears that are streaming down her cheeks. “I’m just sitting here, trying to be close to my boys.”

  “I know. I saw. I brough
t you these.” GDOG hands Agatha the often-fought-over yellow Batman T-shirt and the much-loved Green Hornet T-shirt. “They wore them yesterday. I picked them up off the floor.”

  Even without bringing the shirts to her nose, Agatha can smell the boys. More tears roll down her face.

  Respectfully, Willow Bean turns away and starts walking back to the house.

  “Thank you,” Agatha calls, her voice rough. Willow doesn’t turn, just waves. Agatha buries her face in the shirts and sobs.

  * * *

  On this day of waving goodbye and crying in Coop outside Willow Bean’s house, no one knows that in a year’s time, catastrophic typhoons in Japan will hit so hard even the cherry trees will get confused and bloom in the fall. An autumnal bloom just months after the usual spring bloom. It is beautiful, of course. Pale pink. Fragrant. Intoxicating. It is always beautiful. But an off-season bloom means something. Everything means something.

  * * *

  “Come on,” Melody says, tugging on Agatha’s arm. “Get your yoga clothes on.”

  “Why? I’m tired. I want to sleep and dream about sex with Edward.”

  “Get dressed,” Melody says. “You can dream about sex later. I have a surprise.”

  Agatha sits up. “Fine. Wait here. I’ll be down in ten.”

  * * *

  An hour later they pull into a driveway leading to a beautiful gray barn.

  “What’s this?”

  “You’ll see. Grab your mat.”