by Karen Brown
I told William I didn’t feel well, and we borrowed Geoff’s car and went home, leaving Del and Geoff to finish out the night with Anne and Randy. Maybe it was Joseph Del had lured upstairs while Lucie, who was drunk, chatted with Shenoa. Del was indiscriminate—everything to her was a game. On the drive home, when William asked me what was wrong, I didn’t know how to respond, and after a while he let his own silence match mine, and the car was filled with everything we wouldn’t say. Every so often he would look over at me, sadness in his gaze, and I felt almost cruel for suspecting him of anything but loving me.
18
A day later, the newspaper reported the discovery of a woman’s remains in an abandoned trailer in Cortland County, and while the cause of death couldn’t yet be determined, or a formal identification made, she was thought to be the missing Mary Rae Swindal. The trailer was an old Silver Streak Clipper—rusted metal abandoned in an area that hadn’t been searched in the early days of her disappearance. It sat at the edge of some woods in a snow-covered field marked with deer tracks, an area remote enough to be beyond, even, the realm of hunters.
I knew it was her—the narrow room, the field, it all made sense. After another few days she was identified, and the questions swirled about how she’d gotten there. Had she simply been lost, wandering, and stumbled upon the trailer? Or had she been abducted? There was simply no way to know until investigators did their work. At no time was it released to the public that she’d been nude, that her clothes had been piled neatly beside her—the jeans and the sweater, the down coat I’d seen her wearing under the elm.
Now the Milton girls were finally able to mourn. A service was scheduled three days before Christmas, and though William and I didn’t plan to go, Del came up to my apartment to announce she’d be attending.
“If you change your mind, you can ride with me,” she said.
“We aren’t going,” I said.
I wasn’t sure why Del wanted us there. William had said it was sad and tragic and he was sorry for the family’s loss, but he wasn’t going to sit in a church and watch everyone cry. “I knew her so long ago,” he said.
I’d never asked how Anne had grown so close to the Milton girls and their boyfriends. Had she met them in town? Did she know their parents? I suspected there was one girl she had befriended who brought the rest—and I guessed this girl was Mary Rae—but when I broached this with William, he said that the gatherings at Anne’s were new, prompted by Mary Rae’s disappearance and Anne’s imminent death. “I never saw Mary Rae there,” he said. He gave me a level look, as if he wanted me to take him seriously. “I hadn’t seen her in years.”
The next morning just after sunrise, I awoke to William moving around the apartment. We were on break from classes, spending a lot of time at home, and his early activity seemed curious. Through the fogged glass the day promised to be gray and cold. William stood in the center of the room, distracted. He’d been having trouble sleeping. His eyes were ringed with shadow. He had Geoff’s car keys in his hand, and I could tell that at some point in the middle of the night he’d slipped from the bed and left me and gone elsewhere.
“Where have you been?” I asked him.
“Get up,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
“Let me dress,” I said.
“No, just put on your coat and get your camera,” he said, as if the idea of presentable clothing was unnecessary where we were going.
He left the apartment, and I followed him out the front door onto the porch wearing the sweatpants I’d slept in, my coat over a cotton T-shirt. The air stung my face, my lungs.
“It’s too cold,” I said. William seemed not to hear me.
We got into Geoff’s car, which was parked in the gravel drive alongside the house. The interior was warm, as if William had just driven it home.
“Where did you go?” I asked him.
He drove expertly, one hand on the wheel, the other fiddling with the Leica in his lap. He didn’t answer me, just focused on the road beyond the windshield. There weren’t any other cars—it was too early for anyone to be out, save the people who’d been out all night. These were dark shapes in doorways, smoking last cigarettes.
I’d assumed we were going to a site he either wanted to photograph or thought I would like as a scene for my work. Occasionally, we went on outings in Geoff’s car to scout places. William found roofless barns for me, structures with weathered gray boards and lichen-covered stone foundations. Sometimes, we would be run off the property by landowners or frightened off by the report of a hunter’s gun. We were always trespassing, but neither of us cared. We wanted the shots we wanted. Abandoned places often surprised me with a subject, so those were the sites I liked best.
This time, heading out on the cold morning in my pajamas, I felt unnerved. In profile, William’s brows were set in a low scowl, his lips cracked and dry.
He was being evasive. I was suddenly awake, alert. “Where are we going?” I said again. “I might like some coffee.”
He flipped on the turn signal and pulled into a gas station, stopping at the door leading into the convenience store.
“Make it snappy,” he said, a phrase that Del often used.
“I’m not even dressed,” I said.
“Dressed enough to get a cup of coffee.”
Inside the overheated store it smelled of the hot dogs that had been turning on their spit all night. My shoes stuck to the linoleum. I poured my coffee and took it to the cashier. William hit the car horn, impatient. It bothered me, his repeating Del’s little phrase. Del spent a lot of time with the Milton girls at Anne’s. Maybe William spent time there, too. The cashier, her graying hair held back with a childish barrette, eyed the car beyond the door.
“Are you all right?” she asked me.
“He’s in a hurry,” I said.
He’s an artist, I wanted to add, but realized how ridiculous that might sound.
I got back into the car and we drove out of the city, along Cayuga Lake, and farther still, until the trees thickened along the roadside, and the pale sun that had risen during the drive barely made it through the snarl of bare branches overhead.
“Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?” I said.
William’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “You’re acting like I’m abducting you.”
“You aren’t answering my questions,” I said.
“I thought you liked surprises.” William pulled onto the shoulder suddenly, almost randomly.
“Here we are,” he said.
I got out of the car. William began to walk into the woods along a path that seemed to have been trampled earlier. We usually followed old roads—those grown through with saplings, but this seemed more a path. Every so often William would stop as if he’d lost his bearings, and we had to backtrack and head a different way. The snow clung to my pajama bottoms. There was no point in complaining about the cold or turning back. I couldn’t have said which way we’d come. It was as if we’d found ourselves dropped into the middle of a wilderness—a pair of explorers on a reality TV show.
Once, I asked him if he knew where he was going, but his frustrated glare prevented me from asking again. Finally, after thirty minutes of scrambling and climbing, we reached what seemed to be a sort of summit—a clearing in the middle of taller pines where a small stone house sat, its walls covered in lichen.
“Is it gingerbread?” I asked.
William was smiling, more in relief at having found the place than at my attempt at humor.
“Hungry?” he said. He pulled me in and kissed me—a slow, deep kiss. His chapped lips scraped mine, but just as I leaned against him for his warmth, he pulled away. I wondered at his behavior.
Footprints led to the house. William tugged me along beside him. The door wasn’t barred or locked. It had an old-fashioned iron latch that William lifted, and the door swung with a rusty groan. From the doorway, his pleasure in the way the light came into the room was evident. The p
lace was just that, one room with a fireplace, a sink, a few cabinets, a rusted refrigerator against a wall, a small couch, a table with four chairs. The dust muted the color of everything, all of the furnishings in various forms of dissolution. Mice had eaten into the couch cushions. Trails of feces and matted animal hair carpeted the wood floor. The old wool braid rug had unwound itself. In the corners of the room twigs and grass formed burrows and nests. An intricate coating of mold swaddled the plates arranged on the table. You could see that at one time food had covered the china surfaces. The whole scene suggested that a family had gotten up from a meal and left; their belongings, the accoutrements of their lives forsaken.
An open doorway beyond the living and dining area revealed a bedroom and a small stairway. The roof had partly given way above the bed, and the bedclothes had been shredded by animals. I felt as if the house was a crime scene that hadn’t yet been cordoned off, and I expected a figure to emerge resembling Mr. Parmenter, with his bloodied hair. But no one appeared. I could hear William’s camera, its mechanical whirring. I went outside. The weak sun flitted off the snow. Birds darted, frantic shapes winging from the canopy. I smelled the pine and took a breath to clear my lungs of the smell of the house.
William came out. “What do you think?” he said.
Del would have said it was a nice place to leave a body.
“Kids probably come here to have sex,” I said.
He looked back at the little cottage, then he came up close to me in the snow and wrapped his arms around me and kissed me again, and though I would rather not have had sex in the cottage, I could tell he had brought me here just for that.
“Isn’t this place amazing? Did you see the table still set? The metal toy cars? I think I had a set of those when I was little.”
The house, the parents and children each with their own place, the mildewed calendar on the wall, the decaying stuffed animals, the doll with its mangy hair and moldering pink dress—these things were poignant reminders of what a family could be, of something he might have. I was touched but uneasy.
“I wonder what happened?” I said.
William took my hand and brought it to his lips.
“Marry me,” he said.
The sun was up now, and the house seemed more benign in its slant of light. “What?” I said, foolishly.
“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s get married.”
I thought of Del and Rory and their commune marriage ceremony that may or may not have happened, of Del’s love of sex in the outdoors, and in abandoned cars, and my envy at her ability to live her life in extremes. I remembered my story about the Eve of St. Agnes, how I’d awakened to him in my apartment, and how that had seemed, at the time, almost fated. Was marriage—a husband—the next step? Would my mother offer to plan a wedding at the house like she had for my sisters? And then I remembered the night at Anne’s, Del and someone else in the hallway outside the little upstairs room.
I wanted to make him happy. I wanted to have him for my own. I let him draw me back into the cottage, and down onto the old rug, where we consummated our childish yearning for something beyond ourselves. If there were ghosts to watch us, I did not see them. I stared up past his shoulder at the way the sunlight came through a hole in the roof, and I stared at it until the brightness blinded me to everything else around me. Like the barn, I thought, watching the spot on the ceiling.
She lies on the narrow bed. The sun filters through the curtains onto her bare legs, leaving strips of light, and when the curtains flutter the shadow moves like light on the surface of water. The field is alive with bees, chicory, the low drone of dragonflies. Summer. Like those afternoons we’d spend in the field by the old house, stamping down the long grass to make rooms, and corridors leading to rooms. She moves, suddenly, swinging her legs to stand—not dead, her long hair flying out around her shoulders, and the narrow trailer door is flung open, a shadow stretches across the floor from the doorway and footfalls come up the metal steps. The room is a swirl of movement, of arms and legs, two bodies falling together on the bed. Heat. A pan drops from the shelf above, the quilt slips, the bodies send up dust. I see his back, the white T-shirt, the jeans, her hands sliding the shirt up to reveal the pale skin, the ridges of the spine, the mole on the shoulder blade, shaped like a heart.
19
William and I drove home, gripping each other’s hands, and went to the courthouse downtown and applied for the license. I’d decided we were a perfect match—each of us devoted to our art and each understanding what a life as an artist meant—hours of every day spent working, and then a late dinner, and talk about unrelated things, the secret of our projects kept close. I vowed that as his wife I wouldn’t pry—that I’d accept his need to remain quiet about his work. When he was ready he would share his new images with me.
The next afternoon, about the time that Mary Rae’s body was lowered into the frozen ground in the Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow’s cemetery, we were married by a registered leader of a church I’d never heard of before. He was also an accountant with an office in his house on Cascadilla Street, within walking distance of my apartment. The man was short, round, with wire-framed glasses and wisps of long hair. Ben Franklin, William whispered, his mouth by my ear. We were nearly giddy. The officiant had a few children we saw scatter as we were led down a dim hall to the office. The house smelled of the meal cooking for dinner—a roast seasoned with sage and rosemary, and the strong scent of pine from the Christmas tree I spotted in a room we passed. I superimposed, fleetingly, the abandoned cottage in the woods on this happy scene.
The accountant’s wife, tiny, with dark, bobbed hair, was our witness. On the shelves in the office were heavy books with moldering spines, the gilt of their titles indecipherable, and I was reminded of my grandfather’s books that lined the shelves of the old house, and of Sister’s missal hidden away in my bedroom there, and then, in a crushing way, of all the childhood dreams of dashing, potential suitors I was giving up, as if in marrying William I was entering an entirely different type of abbey. I had a moment of indecision in which it seemed I’d agreed to marriage to prevent Del from taking him away—as if the rings, and the vows, and the “till death do us parts” really meant something. At the same time I believed this was all a game, and that once tired of it, I could simply undo what I’d done with another trip to the courthouse and more paperwork. I regretted agreeing with William not to tell Del what I was doing, not inviting her to be present. She would have tried to talk me out of it; I suspected William knew this as well. In my confusion, I began to cry.
The notary’s eyes widened in alarm, but the wife stepped alongside me and looped her arm in mine and gave it a squeeze. When I looked down at her, she smiled up at me warmly, her eyes filled with her own tears. She might have been fearful we would call it all off and they would lose the honorarium we were expected to provide, but at the time I felt she understood my sadness and my loss as something universal to all brides. The man said the few words required by law, and I verbally agreed, and William did the same, our voices sounding strange and foreign in the little office. William slid the rings we purchased that morning, plain gold bands, onto our respective fingers, and kissed me gently on the lips, embarrassed maybe, in front of these strangers. My signature on the required documents looked like my second-grade cursive, and I fought the urge to cross through it and try again.
* * *
DEL CAME UP to the apartment the next morning. She never came by in the morning. It was as if she knew about the ceremony and wanted to verify it for herself. She still had on the black dress and black tights she’d worn to the funeral. William had gone out—kissing me on the mouth before he left, a quick press of his lips.
“That’s a married person’s kiss,” I said, and he laughed but offered nothing more.
“I’m late,” he said. “If I kiss you I won’t make the meeting.”
Del came in after he’d gone and sat in the duck-carved chair. “Oh, so sad,” she sa
id. “Anne was there. She looked so frail and weak.”
“You didn’t have to go,” I said. “It’s not like you knew her.”
Would Del see anything out of place in the apartment, some evidence of the marriage? Laundry lay piled on the bed, and I pulled out one of William’s shirts to fold. I felt strung tight with my news, unsure how to share it.
“Her mother asked about William,” Del said. “She asked how he was doing. I don’t think she likes him much.”
“You talked to the mother?”
“We went to the house after—to Mary Rae’s mother’s house. Just us, Alice and everyone.”
“Why wouldn’t she like him?” I said. “Because they broke up years ago?”
Del seemed thoughtful. “I don’t know,” she said. “Where is he?”
I buttoned William’s shirt up the front and folded it like a shirt in a department store display. “He had to go out. A meeting or something.”
Del squinted at me. “Well, we were supposed to go back to Anne’s, but then she canceled. Said she was too tired.”
“Do the police know how she died?” I asked Del. “How she got there to the trailer?”
“Officer Paul was there at the funeral,” she said. “He’s not so bad when he’s not in his uniform.” She raised her eyebrows at me, and I laughed.
Del pushed herself out of the chair. “We’re going back to Mary Rae’s mother’s house today,” she said. “She wants us to have Mary Rae’s clothes. To go through and see if we want anything.”
“That’s weird,” I said.
“No more weird than how you’re folding that shirt,” Del said. “You should come with us.”
Maybe she’d seen my wedding ring right away and had simply refrained from mentioning it. She walked over to the kitchen area and pulled open the refrigerator. “Remember when we used to buy boxes of Cracker Jack and dump them out because we only wanted the ring prize?”
