by Karen Brown
I held my hand out. “It’s real,” I said, a little ashamed of the emotion in my voice. “We got married.”
Del shut the refrigerator door and crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re kidding me,” she said. “Right?”
Her eyes were wide, but something about her stance, her expression, made me wary. It was as if she were merely acting surprised, as if she had known about the wedding and was waiting for me to tell her so she could pretend to doubt me.
“You don’t really seem surprised,” I said.
“I don’t?” Del cried. “Seriously? This is a huge surprise to me.”
We stared at each other, and I could see Del holding her surprised expression, waiting for a cue to let it drop.
“What do you think?” I said. “Why don’t you say congratulations?”
“Congratulations!” Del said. “I guess. If that’s what you want.”
“Yes, it’s what I want. I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t.”
“Then wonderful,” Del said. “Perfect timing.”
“What do you mean by that?” I said.
“I mean you timed it so well, right on the day of a funeral.”
“I didn’t know that girl,” I said, but I did know her, and she was part of it all, in some strange way.
Del and I stood in the middle of my bedsit, watching each other.
“So are you going to come with us to her mother’s house?” she said. “Mrs. Bell?”
I smoothed the shirt I’d folded on the bed. “Maybe,” I said.
Randy picked us up an hour later, his red Firebird like a tropical fish at the dirty curb.
Del opened the passenger door and held the seat up so I could climb in back. Alice was there, wedged into the corner, as if afraid of being in close proximity to me. She and Randy had had little time to express their irritation about my presence before Del opened the car door.
“Hi, Alice,” I said.
She didn’t even bother offering her Milton girl version of a smile in return. She appraised me as if I’d worn the wrong outfit or said something offensive.
In the front seat Del was talking to Randy, pattering on about the funeral, and the parts she thought were nice, and then she looked at Alice. “I liked what you said about Mary Rae,” Del said.
“I made most of that up,” Alice said, quietly. “For her mother.”
Del smiled. “I thought so.”
Randy pulled out a fifth of blackberry brandy, and he passed it to the backseat to Alice, who tipped it back to take a long swallow. “What?” she said to me, though I hadn’t said a word. “We need some kind of fortification.” She held the bottle out to me. I accepted it and took a drink, the brandy sweet and burning the back of my throat.
We’d come to a streetlight, and Randy twisted around in the driver’s seat.
“Del said you weren’t a snob,” he said in his low voice.
We drove down Route 13 and into Milton, but we kept driving, Randy, Alice, and I drinking the brandy, and Del taking a rare sip, so that I didn’t feel the need to chastise her. We ended up at a local park, the lot recently plowed of snow, the woods surrounding us marked with hiking trails. I could hear the whine of snowmobiles, and Randy said how much he missed going out, how he had to sell his snowmobile to pay for technical school. “So I could have steady work for the rest of my life,” he said, without any hint of sarcasm.
We sat in the parking lot like teenagers. Alice lit a joint, and the car filled with the smoke. If Randy or Alice noticed the ring I wore, they didn’t mention it, and Del kept quiet about the whole thing, so that it seemed almost as if it had never happened. The sun came out for a moment above the bare trees and lit the inside of the car—the salt on the car windows, the strands of our hair, full of static and stuck to the upholstery—then disappeared again behind the masses of gray clouds.
“We should go,” Alice said. “She’s waiting for us.”
Randy put the car in drive and we headed out of the lot, down a narrow road piled high with snow. Mary Rae’s house was a white Cape with a detached garage. The picture window in front was lit by a lamp, and as we pulled into the driveway a woman rose from a couch and her shadow moved toward the front door. In each of the house’s windows was a candle with an electric bulb flame, a bit of holly wrapped around the brass holder.
“In colonial times they used to put candles in the windows when a family member was away,” I said.
“That’s so sad,” Alice said.
We were drunk and stoned, and climbing out of the car Alice slipped on the ice and fell, with a loud whoop, into a snowbank. By the time we got her up, Mrs. Swindal was at the storm door, her face in its makeup like a mask.
“Are you all right?” she called out.
Randy was stumbling up the path, and Del and I had Alice under both arms, all of us trying not to laugh. Mrs. Swindal held the door open and we stepped into her warm house, into the living-room lamplight, our footsteps muffled by beige carpet.
“Take your shoes off,” Mrs. Swindal said, sounding resigned.
How irresponsible we were being—showing up at this woman’s door smelling of brandy and pot, our boots bringing ice and snow into her clean house. I looked up at her to apologize and saw how much she resembled Mary Rae—her eyes, her hair, the shape of her mouth—all of it surprised me, as if Mary Rae had opened the door herself.
“What is it?” she asked me, concerned. She reached a hand out to touch my arm.
I shrugged off my coat.
Alice was crying now, wiping her eyes with her mittens, and Mrs. Swindal shifted her attention to her and asked us all to give her our coats.
“We’re drunk,” Alice said. “We’re sorry.”
Mrs. Swindal patted Alice’s head and offered us coffee.
We sat in the living room, Alice and I perched awkwardly on the Swindals’ reproduction Louis XIV armchairs, Del and Randy on a deacon’s bench. The house was filled with reproduction antiques—fussy things that seemed easily breakable, the windows hung with sheers and heavy drapes. Mrs. Swindal brought in the coffee and sugar and cream.
“Mary Rae used to decorate the house at Christmas,” she said to us, as if she felt the need to explain the absence of a tree, of windup decorative Santas and ceramic snowman figurines.
She told us to take our time and offered us food—there was so much food, she said, distractedly. Then whenever we were ready we could go up to Mary Rae’s room and have a look at the clothes.
“I’ve already taken what I want,” she said. “Her old Raggedy Ann doll. And her report cards. That sort of thing.”
She eyed Alice and then looked down at her hands. “She’s got shoe boxes of stuff—notes to friends—from high school, you know. I read it all last winter, thinking I could find some clues about where she might be. I gave it all to the detectives, but they brought it back, said it wasn’t any use to them, they already talked to everyone.”
Alice stared at Mrs. Swindal, wondering, maybe, what the woman had read, whether Mary Rae had written about the abortion the Milton girls had mentioned that day at Anne’s, or other things that might have shocked Mrs. Swindal about her daughter, about all of them. But the woman seemed calm. Medicated.
“I’m just going to go lie down,” she said now. “I get so tired lately.” She stood, and told us to let ourselves out after. Then she disappeared through a doorway, and we all eyed one another.
Del stood first. “Well, where’s her room?” she asked Alice.
Alice seemed unsure, her eyes filling with unshed tears, her nose red. “What are we doing?” she hissed. “This isn’t right.”
Randy had kicked his legs out in front of him and closed his eyes. He’d taken off his cowboy boots, and his sock was misshapen where his toes should have been.
“I like her idea of a nap,” he said, softly.
I sensed then that this visit was about something more than picking through Mary Rae’s hand-me-downs. “What is going on, Del?” I said.
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She stood on the stairs, clinging to the banister. “We’re going to figure out what happened to her,” she said. “Alice says she kept journals. They’re hidden somewhere in her room.”
Alice’s face seemed drawn; she looked as exhausted as Mrs. Swindal. “I’m not sure about this,” she said.
“Alice said she was seeing someone,” Del said. “She wouldn’t tell anyone who it was.”
I rose from my chair. “Did you tell Officer Paul?”
Alice shook her head no. “Anne told us not to,” she said.
Del was resolute. “Come on,” she said, and she took Alice by the hand and pulled her up.
The three of us climbed the carpeted stairs, suddenly sober. Randy stayed below, like a lookout. Two doors were at the top of the stairs, and Alice opened the one on the left. Mary Rae’s room was dark. Alice flipped the switch on the wall, and we stepped inside, onto pink carpet, the room decorated with French provincial–style furniture, the bed neat with a flowered quilt. It might have been any high school girl’s room from a movie—she’d never redecorated when she left high school, and had clearly been planning to leave her mother’s house, to move on. I’d read that her cell phone had never been found, that her car had been left in the Viking Lanes lot. How had she spent her evenings bartending in the Viking Lanes, and returned here, to this childish room—Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Caddie Woodlawn, the shelves of girlish collections that Del and I had abhorred—jewelry, candles of all varieties in glass jars, little troll dolls with different colored hair and outfits, their ugly faces and glass eyes staring down at us?
Alice began pulling out bureau drawers, all of them emptied already by Mary Rae’s mother, who’d left the folded clothes in careful piles on the bed. Del felt under the mattress and checked beneath the carpet, as if she might find a loose board to pry up.
“This is a waste,” Alice said. “Everything’s been gone through.”
She opened the closet door, tugged a string, and a light came on.
There on the closet floor was a built-in wooden shelf, a platform for shoes, maybe, and I went to it and pulled the wood up and revealed a hidden niche. Alice rushed over, and from within this hiding place she pulled a journal—black faux leather, the pages gilt. She reached in again, and pulled out more, years of journals, the sort you’d see on the shelves of a bookstore—the covers brightly colored, embossed, decorated with flowers. She held the stack of books out to Del, who took them in her two hands and set them on the bed of clothes.
“Very clever,” Del said, eyeing me.
“Well,” I said. Neither Del nor I kept journals—we’d read Leanne’s and Sarah’s, and didn’t want anyone knowing our business. But I did have things I kept hidden in our bedroom in the old house, and they were beneath a similar built-in shelf. I almost pitied Mary Rae for this invasion of privacy. Even though she was gone, it still felt wrong. “You’ve got a lot of reading to do.”
“We’re supposed to bring them to Anne,” Alice said. She glanced almost longingly at the stack of journals.
“Let’s go,” Del whispered, and I reminded them that they were supposed to be picking out clothes, so they both sifted through and chose a sweater each, and then we went downstairs to awaken Randy on the bench.
Mrs. Swindal never reappeared. She’d probably taken a pill and was out for the night. I said we should pick up our cups, but Del and Alice were nearly out the door, Del grabbing the storm door before it could close all the way, letting the cold rush in.
“Just make it snappy,” she said.
I brought the coffee cups into the kitchen and discovered the Formica counters and the small kitchen table covered with casseroles—foil spread beneath each lid. The smell in the kitchen was of food slowly going bad—shepherd’s pie and lasagna and beef stew spoiling in their containers, leaving circles of condensation beneath them. I set the cups in the sink, and I stood in the kitchen, waiting for Mary Rae. Surely she would be here in her old house, in the room where she once opened cabinets to retrieve a cup or the ingredients for a cake recipe, where certainly she had once sat at the little table with her mother having a quiet dinner. There was a small glass ball hung on the end of the light pull over the sink, and I touched it, and the Silver Streak appeared to me, the fields around it filled with Queen Anne’s lace, and Mary Rae with a man whose back was familiar to me—broad and pale, the mole I saw every morning when he emerged from the shower—my husband’s.
20
On the car ride back from Mrs. Swindal’s, the journals sat on the backseat between Alice and me. From above, the car might have looked like a slash of red against the black asphalt, the white, snow-covered hills, the trees’ crosshatched branches a complicated nest. William would have found the trailer on one of his explorations—another abandoned place to have sex. The trailer might have been their own little place, like a playhouse. Despite what evidence I had that William and Mary Rae had been together in the trailer, it didn’t mean that he was the mysterious man she’d been seeing at the time of her death. He wouldn’t have told anyone about the trailer, for fear of implicating himself. I couldn’t be jealous of a dead girl, but for some reason I was, and I wanted, more than anything, to see what the journals held.
“Anne wants them,” Alice said, when I suggested we take a look, but I knew, from her expression, that she would give anything to go through them herself.
“Let’s go to Del’s place first,” I said. “We can get something to eat, and you can tell Anne it got late, and you’ll bring them by Windy Hill tomorrow.”
Del turned to smile at me from the front. She punched Randy in the shoulder.
“You heard her,” she said.
To keep themselves in Anne’s good standing, they would say it was my idea.
We stopped at the Korean place in Collegetown, the front window steamed up, the interior nearly empty—everyone was away on break. We brought the food back to Del’s. I’d tried to call William, but his phone had gone to voice mail, and I left a message. I assumed our married life would simply be a continuation of what we’d had before, and if he wanted to talk to me he’d call me back.
Del’s apartment was neat and spare. On one wall were shelved books: volumes of classic works in the original Greek and Latin that the professor had collected and her own translations. There were two wing chairs, their upholstery worn. The lamps were old-fashioned, with large silk shades and alabaster bases shaped like pitchers. Assorted pillows—beaded and tapestried, plaid and paisley—decorated the couch. Randy sat at the small bar in the kitchen and ate from the cartons. Del, Alice, and I settled on the carpet under the lamplight with plates of food, the journals spread out on the floor between us.
“Anne will be mad,” Alice said.
“Why does she care?” I said. “Why would she even want them?”
Del had set her plate to the side and was thumbing through a journal with a cover of a seascape. “She must suspect there’s something in here she doesn’t want anyone to see,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
I spun the ring on my finger. It felt odd to be wearing it. “You mean about William,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I said it out loud.
Alice had taken a mouthful of food. “God, no,” she said. “Why do you think that?”
“How many entries will we find in here about Billy?” I asked her.
Alice wiped her mouth. “Rae was obsessed with him. You’ll find a lot, I’m sure. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t mean he was the guy she was seeing?” I said.
“He broke it off with her and that was that.”
Alice’s voice was hoarse from all her crying, like the keening women on the tapes in my Women and Grief course. Alice put her hand over her mouth as if to stifle a gasp. Her hair was an unruly mop of curls she’d fastened up. She wore a Syracuse University sweatshirt, a pair of plaid flannel pajama pants.
“He broke her heart,” she said. “She hated him. She would never have had anyth
ing to do with him.”
Del looked at me a little sadly. The Milton girls weren’t jealous of me at all. In their show of support for Mary Rae they hated William, too. If they had indeed been a coven, they would have summoned spells to bring him grief.
“He’s nice at first,” Alice said, as if this excused my stupidity for getting involved with him. “But he changes, you know?”
Randy came over and stretched out on the couch with a sigh. He looked over at us sitting on the rug, then pulled a throw pillow over his face. “I’m really going to sleep this time,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say to Alice. Del continued to thumb through the journal. The room was cold, as usual. The elm threw its shadowy form on the window, a reminder that Mary Rae might be there beneath it, the snow piling up on her coat’s shoulders. I wished I could invite her inside to set us all straight.
“Maybe you’re the one he was looking for all along,” Alice said, softly. “Maybe he’ll be different.” She pointed to the ring on my finger. “But he tried to get her to marry him, too.”
I was suddenly angry, and I stood. “I can’t believe I even care what’s in these things,” I said.
Del clutched the journal to her chest and pulled her knees up. “Martha, stop,” she said.
“You might not know as much as you think you do about her,” I said. “She might not even have liked you very much.”
Alice paled. She set her plate aside. “How can you say that to me?”
“She hated everything about that horrible town,” I said. “She dreaded ending up like all of you.”
Alice looked confused. “What’s she talking about?” she said to Del.
Del stood with her plate. “Can I get anyone more food?”
“You and your stupid karaoke, and your crush on that Shurfine deli clerk—‘Oh Dougie, Dougie,’” I said.
I hated knowing these things, and I was usually so very good about keeping them to myself, but I felt purged, suddenly, and I didn’t regret having said them for Mary Rae. Not at all.
