by Maddy Wells
“My friend, Mercy.”
“Well, come in, but you have to be really quiet.”
We followed her through two rooms—she had to unlock both their doors—until we arrived at a room lit by florescent lights with a table in the middle with a dead body lying on it covered with a paper blanket. I’d only seen dead bodies before in movies. The place stank like the sulfur kids put on at night to dry up their zits. It was all pretty creepy and I felt a little nauseous. I handed Mrs. Kirby the box of pizza. “Janet said you might be hungry.”
“Isn’t that thoughtful,” she said, putting the box on the dead body’s stomach, then changing her mind and putting it on a chair. It was a woman. “I’m almost finished with this one. I’m waiting for the pancake to dry.”
She pushed her goggles back over her eyes and applied nail polish to the fingernails of the dead woman’s hands which looked like they were a thousand years old.
“Frosted shell pink,” Captain Kirby said. “Everyone looks good in frosted shell pink. Especially if they have ridges in their nails from being sick a long time.” She obviously had strong opinions about her mother’s work, but I thought she was definitely wrong about the frosted shell pink. Jane would die—or something—before she would be seen in frosted shell pink.
“My mom does their make-up,” Captain Kirby said, answering the question I wasn’t sure how to ask.
A metal make-up case was open on a stainless stand next to the corpse table. For someone’s mother—and despite the frosted nail polish—Mrs. Kirby had very hip taste in cosmetics: Urban Decay, Mac, Tarte. She finished the woman’s nails—no need to warn her to let them dry for an hour—and started on her hair. She pulled a blue-gray extension out of a drawer in the stainless stand and attached it to the woman’s head—cutting it so it fit in with the woman’s bob. I had stopped feeling nauseous and was thinking that this was like being in a beauty parlor where you didn’t have to make small talk.
“If you’re going to watch so closely put on a mask,” Mrs. Kirby said. She pulled one out her lab coat and handed it to me.
I had never seen a real dead person—two of my grandparents had died but I didn’t go to their funerals because one lived in Akron and the other in Detroit—and I was surprised at how unmoved I felt. I thought I should be crying my eyes out. Maybe it was the total stillness of the body—I mean no one alive is that still even when they’re sleeping—that made me feel the woman wasn’t real. I wanted to touch her forehead to see how it felt, but I knew that would be disrespectful.
“If you’re going to touch, you need gloves.” Mrs. Kirby was obviously a mind-reader. “But I wouldn’t. You have to get used to it like Janet or you’ll have nightmares.”
“Do you know who she is?”
“Mrs. Joseph McGouldrick is her name,” Mrs. Kirby answered me. “She had eleven children and thirty-nine grandchildren.” She finished up with eyebrow pencil and lipstick and blush. The blush was the only weird note. “That’s who she was.”
Captain Kirby came up next to us and looked at her mother’s handiwork. “Gorgeous, Mom. As usual.”
Mrs. Kirby washed up and took off her lab coat and goggles, putting them in a locker. She tossed her hairnet and gloves and mask, gesturing for me to give her mine, in a trash can, then pulled the paper blanket over the woman’s face and turned out the lights. “Let’s go,” she said.
We walked back through the two locked rooms—Mrs. Kirby told me that it was a tradition to keep bodies under double lock because bodies were regularly stolen in the Middle Ages when medical students wanted to study cadavers—I wondered if Mr. Dow knew about that, how we haven’t advanced in that regard since the Middle Ages—and we went outside and climbed into the beat-up VW van. The back seats had been taken out and two living room chairs were in their place. Captain Kirby indicated that I should take one “Please, you’re our guest” while she sat on the floor and her mother sat in the other chair.
“A long day,” Mrs. Kirby said. “I did a boy who’d been in a car accident this afternoon. Very messy.”
Without her protective gear on, Mrs. Kirby looked like a normal woman, probably prettier than most of the mothers I knew, except Jane of course.
“Mom used to do make-up in Los Angeles, for Vanna White,” Captain Kirby said. She waited for me to acknowledge that I knew Vanna White, but I didn’t. “It doesn’t matter. She was just this bitch on a game show.”
“She wasn’t a bitch,” Mrs. Kirby said, seeming alarmed at her daughter’s harsh assessment of Vanna White. “We just didn’t see eye to eye.” She had brought the box of pizza with her and she opened it now. “This looks lovely,” she said.
“Maybe we could go to your house and eat it there,” I said. It seemed so weird to be sitting in someone’s van, pretending it was a house. But that’s what it was it seemed like. The easy chairs. Pictures were taped to the windows which were covered in black privacy shields. Two TV trays were folded up against the back of the driver’s seat.
“Or we could go to your house,” Mrs. Kirby said.
“We’re having a party there. It’s just a bunch of kids. I don’t think you would like it.” I was surprised that Captain Kirby hadn’t told her mother about it.
“Well this is fine with me,” Mrs. Kirby said. “And the pizza is scrumptious. Yum.” It was fake Mom Talk.
“We have to get back to the party, Mom,” Captain Kirby said. “You all right here?”
“I’m fine.”
We said good-night-nice-to-meetcha etcetera and as Captain Kirby slid the side door closed I noticed two sleeping bags rolled up against the passenger seat. I had mistaken them for pillows in the dark. We fetched our bicycles from behind the rhododendrons and rode silently for a couple of minutes.
“Mom wants me to go back to culinary arts summer camp so I can become a chef and all. She traded our housing vouchers to pay for it. This’ll be my second year.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I think that’s very cool of her, don’t you?”
“Very cool,” I said.
“She’s a great mom, like yours.”
I actually didn’t know what to say, and while I was dithering to myself about where to store the fact that Captain Kirby was basically homeless, my phone vibrated. I’m not a big texter. As I said, there are people who live on their phones and then there are the rest of us. So getting a text was a big deal. I thought maybe Jane needed something.
“Wait a minute,” I yelled to Captain Kirby who’d pulled ahead of me. I coasted to the curb and read the text, which was from Tim. He said that it was all over the net that some student from another high school was bragging that he bedded a teacher from the senior prom. He thought I should know.
Captain Kirby had turned her bike around. My hands were shaking as I reread the message. “Do you feel sick?” she asked. “Hey, you okay?”
Why did Tim think I should know? Did he think it was Jane? He didn’t say he thought it was Jane or that anyone had said it was Jane. It couldn’t be Jane. I mentally pictured the teachers who I knew were chaperones at the prom. It had to be Jane. Who else?
“Actually,” I said, “I’m not okay.”
Chapter 13
I sat down on the curb and told Captain Kirby I didn’t feel like going home any more.
She sat down next to me and coaxed Tim’s message out of me.
“Sonofabitch! I knew that Rob was a phony!”
“You don’t know it was Rob! And you don’t know it was Jane.”
“Of course it was Rob and your ma. They were all over each other.”
“He told us he graduated two years ago. So it can’t be him. And Jane would never do something like that.” Something so creepy and weird. I heard actual alarm bells going off in my head, and I put my hands over my ears.
“He’s a liar! I told you,” she said. “Only a professional liar would say two years ago, not last year or this year.”
We pedaled to the twenty-four hour Dunkin Donuts and Capt
ain Kirby ordered a box of Munchkins and two Coffee Coolatas.
“Do you have a couple of bucks?” she asked me, fishing around her giant pants and coming up empty. “I’m out of quarters.”
“Let’s eat them in the parking lot,” I said.
I couldn’t look at nice Mr. Rajeet who owned the Dunkin Donuts. After he saw me carrying my guitar once, he always told me “I can see you are going to be a famous musician,” and I would correct him by saying “not a musician, a famous rock and roll star,” and he would say, “Okay, then, a famous rock and roll star! Even better. Don’t forget to practice today.” He was always telling anyone who would listen about his two sons in college and how he was working so hard so they wouldn’t have to operate a doughnut shop, so they could operate on brains or something instead and have a sparkly and clean and pure future loaded with nice people doing the right thing just like Mr. Rajeet. If Jane had done this, how could I ever talk to Mr. Rajeet again?
“You ought to have a couple of these,” Captain Kirby said, pushing the box of Munchkins at me.
“You haven’t eaten all day.”
“Yes, I have.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“I’m not hungry.”
It was five thirty and delivery trucks were on the road and a couple of cars were lined up at the take-out window just like everything was normal. The Coffee Coolata was sickeningly sweet and I felt like barfing.
“Well, what are you going to do?” Captain Kirby asked.
A tractor trailer pulled to the side of the road in front of us and sat there with its motor idling. The driver probably was going to sleep in the cab. Maybe when he woke up I would ask him to take me with him to Arkansas, which was where his license plate said he was from. Weren’t the Smokey Mountains there? They sounded dark and hidden and I wanted to hide in them with all the other runaway losers and axe murderers.
“I don’t know.” The more I thought about Jane sleeping with a high school student the angrier I got. What kind of a mother does that? What kind of a teacher does that? Why couldn’t Jane ever do what she was supposed to do, like be a mom who chaperoned students not partied with them. Why couldn’t she stay in her damn Two Cool Society mom box? It was icky.
“At least The Griffin is here,” I said. “He’ll know what to do.” Part of me, honest to god, thought that once The Griffin saw what happened because we weren’t all together, he would take us away on the bus with him. It would be like it used to be when Jane was riding around on the bus and I was riding inside Jane. Maybe this was a good thing no matter how bad it sounded when you said it out loud. Maybe when the sun came up, it would turn out to be a giant joke. The boy was joking. Bragging about nothing. L ike boys do. Or maybe it was some other teacher.
I went through the roster in my head again. Mrs. Horvath? Please. Mrs. Thwaite? Give me a break. My mother was the youngest and prettiest teacher at Milltown High. She wasn’t like the others. Part of me had always been proud of that, but now it terrified me.
“You can’t go back to how it used to be,” Captain Kirby said, reading my thoughts. “Believe me, I know.”
“What makes you think I want to go back to anything? You’re crazy.”
“Maybe I’m crazy but I know what I’m talking about.”
“How can you know anything,” I said, angrily. “You flunked third grade.”
“True enough,” Captain Kirby said and she then proceeded to shove Munchkin after Munchkin into her mouth until the box was empty. “You finished with that?” she asked then grabbed my cup and drained the last of the Coffee Coolatta and threw all the trash in the garbage, picking up her bike and waiting for me to do the same.
The sky had become the silver it gets before the sun comes up. I mean, I should at least ask Jane what happened. Maybe it was a giant mistake. I mean Jane wasn’t an idiot. And no one could prove anything happened. Mr. Dow was always saying that the greatest thing about our country was due process and presumed innocence and a trial by a jury of your peers etcetera etcetera. Yeah right. My peers had already chimed in. And oh my god, what would Mr. Dow say when he heard about this? He was the only teacher I liked and I pictured myself slinking into his class with a paper bag over my head so he wouldn’t have to look at the person who made the entire high school dirty and full of dandelions.
I would talk to Jane and find out it was a great big mistake and she would probably punish me—not let me play in the Trap for a month or wash my mouth out with soap or whatever—for being so disloyal by believing it was her. And I wouldn’t blame her.
I got on my bike and followed Captain Kirby out of the parking lot when I heard the chimes for another message on my phone. I stopped and pulled it out of my pocket again and looked at the screen. It was a Facebook message from my half-brother, Isak. I rubbed my eyes because like maybe I was dreaming. Then I looked again. The message was still there.
“I saw on Facebook,” the message said. “Wow! You okay?”
Chapter 14
I guess I expected a crowd of irate villagers with torches out of one of Mr. Dow’s stories of the middle ages to be waiting for me on the lawn. But it was deserted. Pizza boxes were strewn around. Someone had made a pile of them like eight feet tall at the curb and scrawled THE GRIFFIN RULES in spray paint on the street in front of them. Beer cans and plastic cups were everywhere. Jane’s Kia was parked at the curb in its usual spot. But there was an empty spot where The Griffin’s bus was supposed to be.
“Your dad’s gone,” Captain Kirby said.
“Yeah.”
We walked our bikes up the driveway. The Trap was locked, probably by Tim who understood how much the stuff inside cost, and there was a note taped to the garage door. “Will whoever stole my bike, please return it. Thank you, Tim Coles.”
“Do you want me to come in?” Captain Kirby asked.
“Nah. I’m okay. I mean if you want to you can. You could sleep in the guest bedroom. In the bed we made up for Bang.” I faked a smile.
“I should probably check on my mom.”
“Right.”
She leaned Tim’s bike against the garage door and started down the driveway.
“You can take my bike if you want. It’s a pretty long walk.”
“No, I want to walk. I’ll come back this afternoon.”
“You don’t have to.”
“To see if you’re okay and everything.”
I looked up at Jane’s bedroom. The shades were drawn and the awful thought occurred to me that Rob might be in there with her. I mean, Tim didn’t say where it happened. I forced myself to walk across the lawn. The front door was open and when I walked into the house I saw Tim sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop open in front of him.
“There you are! Finally!” he said. “I was going to go looking for you but someone stole my bike. I was worried that maybe you ran away, but then I knew that wasn’t like you.”
“I was on my way to Arkansas,” I said, wondering what he thought was like me.
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
He turned the laptop so I could see the screen. Someone had posted pictures of Jane and Rob (Rob!) dancing at the prom…which wasn’t so unusual, lots of times guys asked chaperones to dance, they feel sophisticated or something because they’re wearing dinner jackets. But a couple of pictures later Rob’s hand was on Jane’s ass.
“He’s a senior at Black Eddy,” Tim said. “He got a girl pregnant there. You should see what she’s saying about all this. She busted him to his mother.”
“He has a girlfriend?”
“And she’s pregnant.”
“I heard you.”
“Yeah, look at this.” He started keying into her page.
“What do I care what some girl I don’t even know has to say about anything,” I said. I felt calm for a second. I mean if I didn’t look then maybe everything that had happened and was going to happen would only be real inside the internet which was like a pawn shop or something for the
real world but then I felt like barfing again. “Where’s Jane?” I asked.
“She came home around three and she banged like hell on the band bus, yelling for The Griffin to come out, and when he did he was just in his underpants. He said something to her that he must have thought would make her laugh because he laughed, but she didn’t and then they started fighting. Wow, can they fight.”
I nodded.
“And then someone in the crowd showed The Griffin something on their iPhone—I guess it was about what happened—and they fought some more. Then The Griffin came into the Trap and told Bang and Raymond to pack it in. ‘I don’t need this bullshit right before a tour,’ he said, and that Goth girl came flying out of the bus half undressed and Bang and Raymond got on, and the bus backed out of the driveway with the Goth girl banging on the grill yelling that she wanted her jacket that she’s paid a hundred bucks for, and Jane laughed and walked up to her and gave her the finger and stormed into the house, and then they were gone and everyone else left.”
“Did The Griffin say anything for me?” I closed my eyes. “Never mind.”
“Do you think this means they won’t buy our song? The Griffin said his manager was going to call me.”
I wanted to be mean and tell him they never intended to buy his song, that they were just toying with him to amuse themselves like they always did whenever they visited. “I don’t know what it means. It’ll blow over. It always does.”
“This happened before?”
“No. Nothing like this. But almost.” My laptop had reverted to my Power Point Presentation on why I should be allowed to drop out of school. When was Jane going to stop getting all the attention and get out of my way so I could stop living her life and start living mine? The Griffin would have understood what I needed. He would have signed and probably given me some get-started money, but because of Jane he left. She was always ruining everything for me, like a kid kicking a smaller kid’s sandcastle on the beach. “I guess I want you to go.”
“Some asshole stole my bike,” he said.
