by Karen Brown
Later in the week I went by the class he usually taught, and it was true, someone else was teaching. It was as if William had simply been erased from my life. At night I had dreams of pushing him down the long stairs, of finding his body at the bottom. I’d awaken, sweat-drenched, and tell myself it was simply a dream. Still, I didn’t contact the authorities and report him missing. I thought of Detective Thomson, and I kept quiet.
One afternoon, two weeks after classes began, I took my film to the lab at school to develop the images and print contact sheets. These I poured over with my loupe. I had taken shots that day in the asylum, and in the photographs the day came back to me: the light crisp, the metal bedsteads flipped on end, the old wheelchairs with cane backs eaten through by vermin, There but for the grace of God go I, on a plaque and the paint coming off the walls in long, tender strips, like skin. The more frightening the objects, the more I could not stop looking—examining tables of cold rusted metal, instruments and wires and hoses and basins and tubs, all bathed in that tinted light. I imagined birds coming in and out through the broken windows, the sound of their beating wings amplified in the emptied rooms.
There was one image of a bed with covers kicked back, as if someone had just gotten up, the mattress ticking worn and stained, the blanket thin and gnawed on at the edges. I’d caught none of the dead in the frames. Then I reached the photograph I’d taken of William. He wore his corduroy jacket, his oxford shirt and sweater. I enlarged the negative and made the print, thinking the whole time that he may have surreptitiously taken one of me.
It was late afternoon. No one was around, and in the glow of the darkroom the image emerged clearly, eerily. He’d paused in the doorway, his expression filled with love and so unlike the memory of him I’d been entertaining that I felt disoriented. Who had I confronted in the asylum that day? I felt overwhelmed with guilt.
I debated destroying the print, and then Charles Wu came into the darkroom, and I shoved it into my bag. He gave me a little wave, a tentative smile, and peered over my shoulder at my contact sheets.
“You went to Buffalo State,” he said, surprised.
He took my contact sheets and peered at them. I felt my face flush with irritation. Now I couldn’t deny I’d been there.
“Yes, yes I did,” I said. “It was incredible.”
Charles Wu seemed pleased I’d taken his advice. He’d dyed the white stripe in his hair, and he wore a pair of pressed khakis, as if he’d decided to give in to his parents and accompany them to the country club. Would I need to start a list of all the people who could implicate me in William’s death?
“You didn’t have trouble getting in, did you?” he said. “These are really cool. I might have to go out there myself.”
Charles could be the one to find William’s body. That would be apt after William’s accusations.
“You should definitely go,” I said. “It’s easy to get in.”
Then I found myself telling him all about the loading dock and the hole that allowed access to the underground corridors. I told him about those tunnels and the route to take to arrive at the upper level.
“Did you find the staircase?” He was excited by my story.
“I did,” I said. “It was dark by then, though. I only got a few shots. I’m not sure how they turned out.”
Charles handed my contact sheets back. “Best to go early. That’s what I’ve heard.”
Although I’d never cared to read a newspaper, I’d begun buying the local paper, scanning it for a report about the discovery of a body in an asylum. Now, it seemed possible that any number of urban spelunkers, artists, or paranormal investigators might have visited Buffalo State and uncovered William’s body. If the roll of film he’d pocketed had come free during the fall, and landed below the balustrades in some hidden niche, if William hadn’t properly captured me in a photograph developed by forensic officers, he might become one of the thousands of unclaimed bodies in the United States, remains discovered without any identification and no one stepping forward for them. Maybe there would be a line drawing of his face in the record, a description of his clothes. Perhaps there would be a mention of the discovery of his body in the Buffalo news. In the old Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, soon to be refurbished to house an outpatient hospital, he might become a ghost who haunted the rooms.
“Let me know if you decide to go,” I said.
“I will,” he said. He unloaded his backpack and slid strips of negatives out of their sleeves for the enlarger, as if sensing I was ready to leave. “We should totally have coffee one afternoon this week.”
My face felt odd, as if I weren’t used to conversing, and my muscles were underused. “I’d like that,” I said.
* * *
DEL CONTINUED TO spend time with Alice and the other Milton girls. I would hear her come and go, or hear Alice’s laughter downstairs. Sometimes, Del would invite me to go bowling with them at Viking Lanes, or snowmobiling in the fields around Milton, but I refused. I wasn’t sure what she was telling them all about William, and I wouldn’t know how to act. It was disorienting to have the apartment to myself—a constant reminder of him. We would have broken up eventually—I knew that now. My only question remained his obsession over the images.
I kept my distance from Geoff, too. It was March when he finally knocked and I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t home. I opened the door to his familiar brown eyes, his crazed hair, Suzie thrusting her nose into my palm.
“Have you got some tea?” he said. “I’m parched.”
He tugged Suzie in on her leash and took a seat at the little table. I boiled water for a pot.
“So have you been licking your wounds?” he said, launching into his real reason for coming by.
I stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“It’s obvious old William has flown the coop,” he said, and pulled out his tobacco. “There’s no shame in admitting defeat. He was always a fickle sort.”
I poured the hot water in so the tea could steep and set the teapot in the center of the table. The apartment was still filled with William’s things, and Geoff took this in.
“I guessed you’d notice soon enough,” I said.
He gave me a sympathetic look. “At least you’ve managed to come out of it unscathed,” he said. “Count yourself lucky you aren’t in the same predicament as your sister.”
I was confused by this bit of conversation, but I sensed I should go along with it. Geoff knew something I didn’t, and I wanted to know it, too.
“Well, I am grateful for that,” I said. The table sat by the window, and I could feel the cold panes. Below me was the sidewalk and the place beneath the elm where I’d seen Mary Rae that first night. Geoff poured out our tea, oblivious. “These are gorgeous cups,” he said, eyeing the Limoges.
I drank the tea, scalding my tongue, and waited.
“Have you banned him from your place?” he said. “It might be easier on you if you packed up his things.”
“I was planning to do that,” I said. “I’ve just been so busy with school.”
The truth was, though I’d continued to attend my classes, I was barely paying attention in them and had begun neglecting assignments.
Geoff eyed me over the rim of his cup. “You’re going to be busy helping raise a baby,” he said. “She’s lost the plot, if you ask me, expecting you to be part of the whole thing.”
I shrugged and set my cup in the saucer. My hand shook, and I buried it in my lap. I could hardly believe this story Del had told him.
“You’re a better person than I’d be,” he said. “Don’t think some of us haven’t put two and two together—I mean Will takes off, and Del is knocked up. Everyone is being so hush-hush.”
He sipped the last of his tea and laid a hand on Suzie’s head. I thought of the things we each could infer about the other through the plaster wall that separated our apartments—the pacing of the floorboards, the sounds of lovemaking. The odd pleasure it lent us to know things
that the other might never confess. And then, how difficult it was to know the person we were closest with—how our bodies together never guaranteed anything.
Geoff said Anne was shocked by the turn in events. “But that’s often the way with unplanned things. A bit of a surprise that often ends up being lovely.”
I didn’t dare sip my tea and reveal my trembling hand. I simply nodded at him, and he saw my distress and changed the subject. “It’ll be spring eventually. Slow to arrive, you know. But it always does.”
Though it was March, there were no signs yet of the thaw that signaled spring’s arrival. Geoff didn’t usually have a problem dominating a conversation, and he did that while he drank his tea, switching topics, until he couldn’t resist returning to the highlight of the day.
“Where is the old scoundrel?” he said. “I haven’t seen him around.”
“You should ask Del,” I said.
“She told me to ask you,” Geoff said. He spun his cup in its saucer. “Sounds like neither of you has a clue.”
I gave him a feeble smile. “That would be Del’s problem now, wouldn’t it?”
Geoff stood to go, brushing the excess tobacco from his lap to the floor. In the doorway I told him to wait.
“I found a necklace in your car,” I said. “It was an amethyst pendant.”
Geoff didn’t seem too surprised. “I don’t drive many women around in my car. But if you girls gave someone a ride, maybe they lost it? You might ask Will, too. He’s borrowed the thing a few times in the past.”
“Well, I’ll ask him if I see him,” I said. After Geoff left I stood listening to him cross the hall, open his door, and enter his own apartment.
I went downstairs and knocked on Del’s door. She opened it with her usual flourish.
“There you are!” she said. “Mother says she’s tried to reach you, and you aren’t returning her calls.”
“So?” I said. I walked past her into her apartment.
“She wants us to come home for Easter.”
I watched Del put her hand on her abdomen, though nothing yet showed beneath her oversized sweater. She saw me looking, and then pulled the sweater tightly closed.
“I know it’s surprising,” Del said, matter-of-factly. “But I saw a doctor in Milton, Alice took me, and it’s true. I’m due in September.”
I felt a lurch of guilt. Our mother would be furious. I could hear her accusatory voice now: “How could you have let this happen, Martha?”
“Were you going to tell me?” I said.
“I thought you already knew,” she said. “After what you said in Buffalo.”
I’d made a comment about Jane mistaking the Institute as a place for unwed mothers, but that could hardly serve as evidence that I knew about the pregnancy. “I didn’t know,” I said, icily.
“I was planning on giving the baby up for adoption,” Del said, “but I’ve been thinking, the genetic makeup might really predispose this child, you know, God, to any number of problems, and maybe someone else should take it, someone in the family who has experience and can show some compassion, and give it siblings and a nice bed to sleep in. Or crib. A crib at first, right?”
Del had scrunched her face, and her expression switched from wide-eyed to puzzled, and back.
Like a thrown switch she had gone off again. I suspected she had either stopped her medication or the doctor she’d seen had readjusted it.
“Who do you think will take it? One of your sisters?” I said.
Del sat down on her couch. Dust rose from the cushions into the slant of weak sunlight. “Eventually we’ll have to tell them.”
I noted her use of “we” with a feeling close to despair. I could easily pity her, with her soon-to-be-extending midsection full of something that stirred and pressed and made its presence known against her skin. I couldn’t help thinking of the movies with gestating babies destined to wreak evil and havoc on the world. She caught my expression and frowned. “You have to be a good aunt,” she told me. “Who else will it have?”
“All babies have a father,” I said.
Del pulled her sweater sleeves over her hands. “You’re so amusing.” Outside a car horn sounded in the street, and we both startled. “Does it really matter?”
“That sounds like your new phrase,” I said. “Does it matter?”
I told myself that the father might be Randy.
“Weren’t you using birth control?” I said. My anger must have shown on my face. Del folded her arms across her abdomen as if she were protecting the child.
“They tried to make me use an IUD, but I took the pill, and then I ran out,” she said. “Still, I honestly don’t know how this could have happened.”
She laughed again and looked up at me.
“Is it William’s?” I said.
Del looked even more confused. “No!” she cried. I had the feeling, as I had the day I told her William and I were married, that she was faking her exclamation, that her protest was a lie. Then she said something under her breath that I couldn’t hear, and I worried she was talking to herself.
“What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“‘Sun, Moon, and Talia.’ Remember? By the Italian author. It was in that book of tales Grandfather used to read to us.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I said.
Out the window and across the street, I saw a figure by the curb on the corner, watching the house. He lurked slightly behind a tree, almost leaning on it. Then he pushed himself off and moved away slowly down the sidewalk. A glint of sun caught in his copper hair. His shoulders were broad in his coat. He moved away with a distinct limp, a drag in one leg. I didn’t think I could take a breath. My head filled with ringing. Del was asking me something, and I couldn’t make out what she was saying—my head was so full of sound.
“What did you say?” I turned my back on the window.
“What is it? What’s out there?” Del came to the window, but I moved away and she followed me across the room to the door.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“Will you come with me?” she said. “For Easter?”
In the vestibule, William’s father’s hat hung from the coatrack.
“We should get rid of that,” I said.
I went out onto the porch, but the figure, William, had disappeared. Had I experienced enough grief to summon him? Or was it his love for me that brought him around? I clutched the porch railing, faint and confused. His ghost might be undertaking unfinished business, but what use would the portfolio be to him now? This life and its ordeals were erased. The dead clung to a tether of love, drawn back by a loss that tormented them, and I felt my knees weaken with my own desire, and the impossibility of ever being with him again. Del, beside me on the porch, pressed her hand to her stomach. If Del was pregnant with William’s baby, he might have another reason to be watching the house. I felt a fresh surge of anger. And Mary Rae was back beneath the elm.
I’d waited long enough to uncover William’s connection to her death. I owed her the truth. And I was going to live my life. He’d accused me of seeing Charles Wu—as if something that preposterous had been the reason for his misery. I’d give him something to be miserable about.
30
It was after I saw William across the street that things began to melt. Icicles dripped audibly onto the front porch. They hung from the house’s eaves, deadly threats we ducked under or knocked off with a shovel. It was time to clean house. I left the windows open and let the cold air blow through the place. I thought of the miniature book by Maurice Sendak my mother had read to us as children, Chicken Soup with Rice. It told its nonsensical story month by month, the months personified, and March blowing down the door and lapping up spilled soup. I shoved William’s things—papers, bills, clothes—into boxes and put them in the closet. I used bleach and scrubbed. I went to Geoff’s door and asked to borrow his mop, and then later, his car. I loaded the blankets and sheets in the trunk and drove them
to the Laundromat, maneuvering around the potholes in the streets, the slush spraying onto the windshield. Outside, without William Bell, the world was changing.
At the Laundromat, a boy I’d met when I first came to school recognized me and called my name. He asked me what I was reading, and what courses I was taking this semester, and then asked me more things. I’d forgotten his name but didn’t ask him for it. The big hot dryers rolled and tumbled. Pieces of lint floated past. The boy’s expression was earnest, his eyes lit with genuine interest. My hair was too long, uncombed, my wool sweater’s hem unraveling, my hands smelling of bleach. But could he be attracted to me?
“Help me take my stuff to my car,” I said.
He grabbed armfuls. I opened the trunk and we put the sheets and blankets inside. And then we stood in the slush in the cold, filling the space between us with our fogging breath.
“Come home with me and help me make the bed,” I said.
He scanned the parking area, as if someone might witness all of this occurring, as if he’d stepped into a play and been asked to read a part.
“Are you serious?” he said, quietly, covertly.
“Sure.” I jingled the car keys in my hand.
Climbing into his car, he was eager and quick. He drove that way, too, following close behind, almost hitting me once at a stop sign. At my house I parked at the curb and he carried everything in his arms up the stairs. His footsteps were light, glancing off each step, careening up to the landing where he had to wait for me to unlock the door. He caught his breath behind the pile of laundry.
Inside, the breeze had whipped things into a frenzy. Magazines and papers had blown onto the floor. The curtains were caught up in their rods. All of the old smells seemed resurrected—fireplace ashes, oak polish, the walls’ dampened plaster, not unpleasantly. The apartment felt cold and fiercely alive.
