Shaking out the Dead

by K M Cholewa

  He placed the box on his lap and looked again into the canvas. The thing was still there, trying to focus itself. A tight spray of lines. This was what he saw first. The corner of an eye? The woman from the street? The tilt in his neck unconsciously adjusted as he became the thing, felt it moving up from inside of him even as it moved out from the canvas. But then, as it came into focus, Paris found himself pulling away. It wasn’t the woman from the street. It was Linda.

  Linda’s absence had been weighing on him. She hadn’t appeared in the diner, not since that night in the janitor’s closet. He had pretended that night that she was Tatum, and hours later, Tatum had called him to her. Paris wondered if it was some strange magic and worked both ways. If he kissed Tatum and thought of Linda, would Tatum disappear?

  Paris jerked himself backward, farther from the canvas. It was a stupid thought. He didn’t even want to kiss Tatum and think of Linda, but now here it was, like someone saying no matter what you do, don’t think of an elephant.

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Paris said aloud, trying to drown the idea in inner noise.

  He tossed both the box and the canvas back into the closet. He didn’t want Linda in the canvas. He didn’t want anybody in it. He gathered up the pile for the Dumpster and shoved it to the middle of the room. He shredded old bank statements by hand and told himself that he would be taking his art supplies to the trash too. His life was not going to be about something that wasn’t happening or wasn’t there. An empty stool. A door not knocked on. A blank canvas. He had plenty of something. He would not obsess about nothing.

  When he finished the shredding, he gathered the debris. He turned his back, though, on the canvas and shoebox of supplies. He went to the Dumpster without them. He would not throw them away nor would he take them with him, he decided. He would leave them to their own fate.

  Paris packed the last boxes into the car and paused before closing his front door for the last time. Only the aluminum kitchen table and chairs that were there when he moved in and the art supplies shoved back into the closet remained. Paris would not miss this place, he thought, because it had been good. Complete. And now they parted at their crossroad. He sighed and closed the door. He climbed the steps to the street.

  Outside, the sky was gaining ground, breaking through the clouds by a force of sheer will. On the sidewalks, people walked with slightly upturned faces, and above the quaint downtown skyline, the mountains reached and stretched, snow-tipped and too old for preferences. Paris drove slowly, under the speed limit, and took a convoluted route through downtown. His eyes scanned the sidewalks. He was looking for Linda, even though he had never seen her in daylight before. In the illogic of spells and magic he told himself that if he saw Linda, the curse he had accidentally placed on himself would be broken.

  Pulling past the Deluxe, Paris slowed the car even more and looked out his window. Then, at the next intersection, he took a hard right and came back around the block. He had never gone into the Deluxe in the daytime, not since turning in his application. But he had to look. Maybe Linda’s disappearance was nothing more than a change in schedule.

  He parked the car and left the noon hour light behind as he slipped into the casino.

  Life under a rock is self-satisfied. Left to their own affairs, the crawlies and the beetles beneath go about their business. They chop wood and carry water in the sludge and muck with satisfaction. There is no low self-esteem. No one is ugly in the land of slime. But if you lift that rock on a sunny morning, to the prying eyes, the scene is a ghoul fest, creepy and unclean. Such was the Deluxe during the day.

  Paris walked through the stale beer and cigarette reek of the casino to the diner. The diner was empty except for Jerry, the Vietnam vet who worked the day shift. He stood behind Paris’s counter, smoking and staring into the distance. Jerry, Paris, Blair, and a daytime bartender named Betty were all the employees left at the Deluxe. The other rats had deserted the sinking ship. These four were the most reliable of the bunch and were each offered a five-hundred-dollar bonus if they stayed on until closing.

  “What’s up?” Jerry asked in his gravelly voice.

  Paris gave the diner the once-over.

  “I lost something,” he said to Jerry, and Jerry didn’t ask what.

  Paris stepped behind the counter and back into the kitchen. He bent over and looked beneath cabinets in order to appear authentic. Then he stepped into the janitor’s closet and stood there for a moment as though feeling Linda’s presence in the past might reveal where she was in the present. He saw her almond eyes looking up into his from on her knees before him. A flush of shame overcame him. But he fought back.

  He had helped her. Given her what she needed, money, and not the silly soup he always wanted to give. It was about time.

  He didn’t hear Jerry come back into the kitchen.

  “Any luck?” he heard him call.

  “Yeah,” Paris said, stepping out from the closet.

  Paris slipped back out through the casino, raising a hand in greeting to Betty as he passed. He returned to Tatum’s car. Everything was fine, he told himself. No Linda. Which means he found nothing. “Nothing” can’t be figured out or solved. “Nothing” isn’t even there.

  29

  

  As they had walked to school, Tatum pointed out to Rachael the dead leaves that managed to hang onto the trees all winter long and now into spring, blocking the new growth. Rachael knew Tatum was happy because today Paris would finish moving into the basement. Two blocks before the school, Tatum stopped, as Rachael had requested during the very first week, and Rachael proceeded alone under a sky whose pockets were loaded with rocks.

  But Rachael did not proceed alone. Not really. Her aunt didn’t know it, but in the side pocket of her backpack was the Vincent she had cut from a photograph she had found in a junk drawer in the kitchen. She liked holding the paper doll in her hand, and she liked to look at it. It gave her a feeling, the tingle thrill of theft.

  The tingle thrill helped remake her. The first day she carried him, Rachael told another girl that her name was really Mallory. Not Rachael. Mallory is what her mother called her before she died.

  This information, the dead mother, ended up serving as a field of gravity. A small group of girls were drawn to her, finding definition and purpose in including her. They found security in their juxtaposition to her, their own mothers’ existences reassured in contrast. Rachael told them her father was an Indian. She showed them a picture.

  And it was so that Rachael awakened from her shock with a mix of truths and lies, enough of each to support the other. Too much of either and the scales would tip, disrupting nature’s developmental edicts. She learned multiplication and grammar. She made friends. The mind performs miracles. Once split against itself, it survives by finding balance.

  When Rachael reached the chain-linked boundary of the schoolyard, she didn’t turn to wave at Tatum, though she knew she was still there. She walked through the gate knowing the watcher would change. Tatum would disappear, but other eyes would turn upon her. She was noticed. Always noticed. By teachers. By girls. By nine-year-old boys. Even those who gave her a wide berth couldn’t help but be distracted, if just for a moment, when her presence registered. It wasn’t just that she was pretty, although that was certainly part of it. It was the vacuum that accompanied her and made her a larger presence. A motherless space. A fatherless space. Nature abhorred it. People wanted it filled.

  Barely in the schoolyard, she was flanked by three small girls.

  “Rachael,” the first hollered.

  “Mallory,” said another to the first, asserting her greater intimacy.

  They circled her and chattered their way across the playground, stopping short of the steps to the school, the turf of the reigning posse of fifth-grade girls. The younger girls stood close enough to the older ones for association, distant enough to demure. One of the fifth grade girls was the older sister to one
of Rachael’s friends, Claudia. They were a family of sisters, five of them, Claudia being the youngest. Claudia spoke fast and frequently. She was always slightly disheveled — messy hair, jacket askew on her shoulders — by her efforts to keep up. She brought worldly news from the future to her friends.

  The information, like Rachael herself, both attracted and repelled, was seductive and dangerous. The latest news had to do with a thing called a period. Yesterday, Claudia had explained that when you’re almost a teenager, if you’re a girl, you start bleeding out your — and she made a gesture close to her body, a pointing downward toward her crotch.

  But the girls didn’t swallow the information whole. It wouldn’t be the first time Claudia’s sister and her friends had passed on misinformation to the younger girls in order to shame them later for believing it. But another of Rachael’s group, who also had an older sister, had investigated on their behalf. It was true, she reported to them. Her sister told her that the fat girls would get it first.

  “That’s what the machines in the bathroom are about,” she said.

  The school bell rang, and the older girls disappeared through the doors. The younger ones held back for a moment before following.

  The news of the bleeding, which seemed to be true, was something Rachael had never heard of before. But it did not shock or frighten her. It was just another given dropped before her with the others, dealt out like cards. For the rest of that day, when she went to the bathroom, each time that she dropped her underpants, she checked them for evidence. Drops of blood, or a river? She didn’t know which to expect. She furtively checked her desk chair when she stood, on watch for a red pool, even though she was not the fattest girl.

  30

  

  Tatum emptied the kitchen drawer once, put it all back in and emptied it again. Nothing. It wasn’t there. Rachael took the picture of Vincent. She must have. There was no other explanation. But why? Tatum went to Rachael’s bedroom and eyed her secret photo albums from the doorway. There was no Keep Out sign. She had never been told not to peek. But Tatum couldn’t quite kid herself into thinking that what she wanted to do wouldn’t be wrong. Invade Rachael’s privacy, and they would live a lie. This, Tatum knew. If she looked and didn’t tell, she would condemn herself to pretending.

  But she wanted to find it. It was the only picture she had of Vincent, and the empty frame had set off a craving. Tatum needed to see it and know that it still existed. Besides, Tatum told herself, what Rachael did with it might reveal critical information that she, as Rachael’s guardian, should know.

  Tatum entered Rachael’s bedroom armed with her excuse. She squatted before the dresser and fingered the old photo albums, the ones whose contents she knew, the ones full of Margaret. The past. Tatum sat back on her heels and looked at the stack of the newer ones, the secret ones.

  Vincent. What could be Rachael’s reason for wanting him? Tatum knew her own reasons. It was the psychic press of incompletion. The interrupted pattern. She would’ve left him as soon as she was sure he didn’t really love her. But he became sure of it first. She then thought of Paris and wished she hadn’t. They were different men.

  But she was the same.

  Her thoughts and the old photo albums made Tatum feel deflated by the past. It made her remember what is. But “remembering what is” is impossible. It is oxymoronic. “Remembering what is” casts a spell that plays with time. It invokes the past back into being.

  Tatum walked away from Rachael’s photo albums, leaving them undisturbed. Her thoughts continued to mold her, though, seemingly from the outside, shaping her to old dimensions, a size uncomfortable and yet right-feeling. Her heart for the day’s agenda was lost, and she returned to the kitchen and its floor littered with the drawer’s contents. She picked up the duct tape, napkin holders, and trivet and tossed them back into the open drawer. She looked at her address book and tried to re-summon her ambition. She lifted it from the drawer and realized a pen was stuck inside, marking a page. The page didn’t interest her, but the pen did. She let it roll from the book into her hand and then held it like a knife ready to stab. She remembered Margaret’s funeral and the grave marker Lee had chosen for her. Wife and Mother.

  Some things are written in stone. The only way to fix some things is to destroy them. She readjusted the pen in her hand and with the other hand rubbed at the flat side of her chest.

  She wouldn’t let it win. Vincent. The past. Anything in the way of what could be. Symbolic gestures have power. This, Geneva had told her. They ground the intentions in the physical world and instruct the subconscious in terms it can understand.

  She had an idea.

  Tatum left her apartment. At the bottom of the basement stairs, she took in the center of the room, Paris’s bed — the present, maybe even the future — carved out from the stored debris. Tatum climbed to the box where the Book of Rachaels sat on the top. She opened it to her own name and the block of space that followed, the insult, a blank salute to her unworthiness, recognized by even her own mother. Tatum would add Margaret to the Book of Rachaels. She would add her mother too. She would fix the book by destroying it.

  Her heart pounded in her chest. She thought of Margaret and her mother and tried to bring into focus the thing to say. But memories of others are inevitably memories of ourselves, reminding our cells of who we used to be, for better and for worse. Hope might be plucky, but history had weight, and it wasn’t afraid to throw it around.

  Memories gathered to watch her, their doubting eyes making her nervous. Hope sat in the middle of the basement space without her. She observed it from her place on the periphery, knee-deep in boxes and history, holding a pen above a page. The longer Tatum failed to bring the thing to say into focus, the more time other voices had to whisper in her ear.

  Hope, the voices said, like happiness, is not dependable. Hope is a rug that can be pulled out from under you at the whim of others with greater claims to it. Hopelessness was the greater refuge. Harder to snatch away. That’s why others abandon the depressed. They resent that they can’t control their feelings, rip away the despair with the ease with which they could topple joy.

  Or so the voices said.

  The voices whispered in her subconscious, but the message reached her conscious mind. What she was doing was taboo. In fact, she realized that technically the Book wasn’t even hers to change. It belonged to Rachael.

  “Goddamnit,” she hollered, tossing the Book back into the box, the holler and the thud drowning out the sound of the door opening above.

  

  Paris had parked in front of the duplex. Eager to leave behind the haunted canvases and empty stools, he grabbed his box of shoes and headed up the walk. Barely into the foyer, though, he heard Tatum holler from the basement. He dropped his box and ran down the stairs. Reaching the bottom, he looked to his left. Tatum stood among the boxes, holding a pen, looking guilty and surprised.

  “Hey,” he said, seeing her unharmed.

  Tatum closed her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Paris said.

  But Tatum just stood there.

  Paris spoke softly. “Excuse me,” he said, “but your invisibility shield is malfunctioning.”

  Tatum smiled, weakly. She opened her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was looking for some old junk. I wasn’t thinking. I’m in your space.”

  Paris motioned at the house above them. “Actually,” he said, “I’m in yours.”

  Tatum climbed over the boxes. When she reached him, Paris asked her, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  But lies weigh less than the truth. That’s how another detects them, by some internal psychic scale. Density and texture reveal them, not a person’s knowledge of the facts. Paris considered whether to press her.

  As though she could sense the coming questions, Tatum reached for his hand to stop their progress. Paris leaned in and kissed her, a dis
honest kiss, one to hide in, one for her to hide in.

  “Tired?” she said when they pulled apart.

  He hadn’t slept since before last night’s shift. He nodded.

  “Sleep,” she said, and she turned to go up the stairs, checking once over her shoulder as she left. At the top, she closed the basement door, but Paris could still feel her anxiety. He was no stranger to it. It held a threat. Reasons to run.

  He went to the edge of his mattress, sat down, and untied the laces of his boots. Tatum wasn’t fine, and he wished she hadn’t lied to him, not because it insulted him or made him feel betrayed, but because he wanted to know her. But then he was no one to talk. He hadn’t exactly shared the last hours of his life with her either. Lucky for him that with lies of omission, there was nothing to weigh. Still, he worried. Lies multiply. They have to to survive. Like cancer, they build an alternative world that ends up killing the host world, taking it down with it.

  Paris remembered the box he had abandoned upstairs, and he retied his boots. He stood and moved toward the steps. But the spot where he had seen Tatum held a gravitational pull. Was she trying to clear out something she didn’t want him to find? Did she sense his past crimes and was being proactive? Paris sighed. Perhaps he could atone for the past, he thought, by not rifling, again, through Tatum’s belongings. He could be a better man.

  And yet, there was an “on the other hand” that attracted him. Don’t we all want our secrets known? Want our diaries read by eyes that fall in love with us for knowing the bone cold truth? In fact, Paris thought, love doesn’t make us respect each other’s secrets, it drives us to unravel them, one by one, at any cost.