by Karen Brown
“It is freezing in here,” the boy said.
I shut the windows and the room stilled. His name still eluded me. We were in the Women and Grief class on the third floor of the Andrew White House. He had lost his father recently, he’d admitted in class. He had no idea what to do now that he was here in my apartment and, without any complicity, neither did I.
“This is the bed,” I said. The mattress was thin in the pitiless March light. He grabbed an end of a sheet, and we stretched it out from either side. From the pile of bedsheets we found the one to go on top, our heads bumping, sorting through everything. His hair smelled of shampoo. The room filled with the smell of clean laundry. We made the bed. He was very competent and serious, as if this were really what he had expected. When we were done, he sat down on the edge.
“I want a cigarette,” he said. He looked up at me, apologetically.
“I don’t smoke,” I told him. I sat down on the bed next to him.
“Maybe we should go out and have a pitcher of beer,” he said.
I took his hand and placed it on my leg. We both looked at it, a fine hand with long fingers and bulky knuckles. “There isn’t a set way to go about this,” I told him. “Either you want me more than a cigarette, or you don’t.”
He snorted and ran his free hand through his hair. “Do you do this a lot?” he asked.
His face was fine-boned, his eyebrows drawn together. “No, not really,” I said.
“Didn’t you go to Wellesley?” he asked.
I told him he must have me confused with someone else.
“Didn’t you go to Yale?” I said.
He laughed. “No, I didn’t,” he said.
“Well then,” I said. “We aren’t who we thought we were.”
The spot of sun on the bed was almost warm. “We are just imitations of what we thought,” he said.
“Apparitions,” I said.
His hand on my leg heated it up. Our bodies touched at the shoulder and hip. They sank at varying depths into the too-thin mattress.
“What if we kiss?” I suggested. Anything to stop his musing.
He put both of his hands on my face then and held it like a bowl you might tip and drink from. I felt my body thaw, my heart shift and give, dislodged from its winter hibernation. I would come to learn that most men exhibited at least one endearing gesture, and this was his. His mouth was soft and he closed his eyes. We kissed for a long time on the clean-smelling bed. He whispered my name like a summoning spell. I wouldn’t have said his if I’d known it, anyway. While we kissed I felt an anxious tightening, and I imagined William had slipped into the room and taken a seat in the duck-carved chair. I sat up and looked over, and was disappointed that he wasn’t there. The boy watched me, his bare chest rising and falling under my hand.
“Did you hear something?” he asked me, his eyes glazed with desire and not really seeing. He urged me back into his arms. He had a way of holding me that made me feel breakable, like a soft-feathered bird. I kissed his mouth, his chest. I slid down his body and undid his pants. When he left I made sure to walk him out onto the porch and kiss him so William across the street, and even Mary Rae, standing in her down coat under the elm, could see.
“Look at me, ghosts,” I as much as said.
Mary Rae smirked. William, stonelike, stalked off with his limp.
Inside, Del was waiting for me, too. “A boyfriend?” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “Just a boy.”
“Be careful.” She twisted her hair into a bun and slipped an elastic band from her wrist to secure it. “You don’t want to get knocked up.”
I didn’t want to be angry with her. “Thanks,” I said. I gave her a halfhearted smile.
“Sometimes I don’t understand it, either,” she said. Her eyes were so sad, I was sure even if she was guilty of sleeping with my husband, I should have had some sympathy for her. But neither of us deserved any sympathy at all. Del went into her apartment. Later that I night, I went down to see her, but Alice’s quick laughter came from behind the door, and I felt glad for Del and Alice’s friendship, even if the Milton girls weren’t friends of mine.
* * *
IT OCCURRED TO me that Del had become the steady, responsible one, and somehow I had taken on her old high school promiscuity.
“I’m already ruined,” she’d said then.
I wouldn’t let the boys I brought home interfere with my goal of finding out what happened to Mary Rae. I pored over the journal Del had given me. It covered the year prior to reconnecting with William, and during that time Mary Rae had dated a series of boys—ones she named and described, providing details of their various dates—to the Regal Cinemas at The Shops at Ithaca Mall, to the Antlers restaurant, swimming at Buttermilk Falls. I took Geoff’s car, the air rushing in through the open windows smelling of melting snow and wet earth, and I drove to Milton or the nearby villages and I tracked them down—Jimmy Cahill sorting bulbs at the Agway hardware store, Russell Watkins tending bar at Viking Lanes, Frankie Duncan carting gravel at the Milton Department of Public Works. Each of them seemed to emanate a sorrowful sense of loss.
Jimmy Cahill sat behind the store alone, eating lunch, a book opened in front of him. Something about the way he tucked a pencil behind his ear spoke of his grief. With Russell the ache was in the way he hitched his pants walking across the Viking Lanes parking lot, in the shape of his hands below his rolled-up sleeves.
“You don’t know me,” I’d say. “But I was a friend of Mary Rae’s, and she always used to talk about you.”
Seriously? A mix of disbelief and gratitude.
There was always a reason to draw them close. Each reason presented itself, like a blessing. Sudden rain. A desire for coffee. Russell and I ducked back into the Viking Lanes. We drank and played pool. I leaned over far enough, let my hair fall onto his arm. With Jimmy we walked to the diner down the street, past the funeral parlor, the bed-and-breakfast. I whispered to him, my hand cupped around his ear. As with the boy in the Laundromat, it would just happen. I’d say we could go to my place. I’d feel a satisfied thrill when they agreed—though I couldn’t admit I wanted to flaunt them in front of a ghost.
The day with Jimmy was chilly, and we walked back to my car in the Agway lot. He wore a T-shirt.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked. I reached out and touched his bare arm.
He looked at me in the slow, lazy way of boys who know exactly what you’re doing. He didn’t say anything. By the time we reached my car and climbed inside, we were both dizzy, breathing fast, falling into each other’s arms with one long exhale, our mouths too busy for words, the car windows steaming up.
When I took Jimmy home, Geoff came out of his apartment with Suzie as we stood on the landing, my key in the lock. He didn’t admonish me. I was an abandoned wife, and he pitied me. He shook his head in disapproval and silently descended. Only Suzie glanced back, and then he gave her a tug with the leash, and a harsh word that was surely meant for me. Jimmy wrapped his arms around my waist and I sank back into his shirtfront, into the muscles of his chest, the bones of his rib cage, wondering if Mary Rae felt the way I did when she was with him.
I stopped locking my door. Sometimes I dreamed William’s boots stomped up the stairs, scraping mud on the landing. He would come in and stand by the bed in the gray light. His gaze did its usual sad dance over the body he no longer held, and sometimes he would take a seat in the chair, and at others he’d turn and leave the room. Once in a while I awoke to his retreating footsteps and I chased after him, slipping out of bed and down the stairs, out the front door onto the porch. There I stood shivering, half-dressed, fooled by what was dream and what was real, no longer able to tell the difference.
One morning Geoff stepped onto the porch from the sidewalk and found me. I had no idea where he’d been—if he’d been out all night or had just stepped out for some air.
“What is it?” he asked me. His eyes were alert, watchful, taking in my feet, bare and white on the po
rch.
“It’s nothing,” I said. I went inside, and he followed me. I shut the door and headed toward the stairs. And the boy that had been with me, Frankie, from the DPW that time, came down, groggily, carrying his boots.
“I have work,” he said, and he sat on the bottom step and put his boots on. I watched him, his dipped head, the white place on the back of his neck. He pulled on a jacket. “Maybe I’ll see you later,” he said, as they all had. I told them that they probably wouldn’t. I didn’t want to foster closeness, to become attached.
They all said the same thing when I asked about Mary Rae—when I worked my way around to mentioning her name. Sometimes I wondered if I was inviting a murderer into my bed, but each of them replied the same way.
“I would have married that girl,” they said. “But she was in love with someone else.”
Mary Rae had refused to have sex with any of the boys, and I could only think what a waste it had been for her not to. We’d both been virgins until William, but she’d lost her chance with anyone else.
Before the boys left I always provided the briefest of messages to them from their dead: “Your aunt Lila is so happy her tulips have come up” or “Your grandfather wants you to major in music.”
This boy, Frankie, hesitated, unsure whether to kiss me in front of Geoff. I walked him out onto the porch, and then he pulled out a wool scarf from the sweatshirt pocket and leaned forward and draped it around my neck.
“The old guy,” he said. “I’ve seen him around somewhere.”
The sun wasn’t yet up, and it was chilly. “Really? Where?”
The boy shrugged, but he seemed uneasy. “Mary Rae didn’t like him,” he said. “We saw him talking to a group of girls outside the Viking Lanes snack shop one afternoon. She wanted to avoid him.”
“Did she ever say why?” I tugged on the scarf and wrapped it around my hands.
But Frankie only shook his head, sadly. “No reason to worry about it now, huh?”
Mary Rae refused to appear under the elm when I had one of the boys with me.
Inside, Geoff stood at the foot of the stairs, as if he were waiting for the boy to go. “Another one?” he asked.
I held the scarf over my face and breathed in Frankie’s smell. I told Geoff that when the boys left, they always gave me something. I didn’t say the gift was prompted by an unexplained relief at the message I provided, at having the sex turn out to really mean nothing more. “You’re sweet,” they’d say. I’d have put on his undershirt, and when I began to remove it he’d tell me, No, keep it. Small things. One gave me his Saint Christopher’s medal on a tarnished chain. Another his L.L.Bean windbreaker.
“You’re lucky they didn’t give you anything else,” he said, his voice harsh.
I wasn’t sure why Geoff was angry with me. He never seemed the type. I attributed it to his feeling something for William. “Good old Will,” he would always say. Maybe he felt torn to choose sides, and even my abandonment wasn’t enough to sway him to mine.
31
I could have predicted it. In April, Anne called me and invited me over. “I’d like it to be just the two of us,” she said. “A little tête-à-tête.”
As far as I knew, Anne’s dinner parties had continued without me and William. Del would relay the menu she’d planned, but like our mother and her halfhearted invitations, I was never expected to attend. Anne had gotten word from Geoff, and probably resented my involvement with other men—especially if she’d heard, as I suspected she had through Randy and Del, that they were local boys. So I was leery. Anne always had some ulterior motive. She would want to know where William was. She would quiz me about how we left things, about what was said. I could tell her William’s ghost was keeping a vigil and watching the house. I might say Mary Rae was beneath the elm, warding him off, waiting for me to solve the mystery of her death. When Anne said she’d pick me up, I agreed.
Spring had begun to show itself—the elm’s buds were bright. Crocuses sprang from beneath the spot where Mary Rae stood. Other bulbs—jonquils, daffodils, tulips—came up in surprising places along the perimeter of the house in beds I hadn’t known existed. The yellow grass grew spongy and speckled with robins. William’s Triumph leaned against the back of the house. It had begun to rust, and weeds had grown through its wheels. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it, so I left it there.
I planned to bring William’s portfolio to Anne’s. According to Del, the Milton girls discussed the photographs when Anne wasn’t around, which led me to assume Anne knew nothing about them. I hesitated to be the one to show them to her. But I decided to pretend William had left them behind. I got dressed and slipped Mary Rae’s necklace into my pocket.
Anne arrived at five o’clock to pick me up. It was dark and a surprising spring snow was falling in the lamplight. Her car was an old Mercedes-Benz—a beautiful blue two-seater. As I got into the car Anne said that if the snow got too bad I could spend the night at her house, and just then I wanted nothing more than to be fed and tended to. She drove expertly along the whitening roads, downshifting on hills we might not make it over. I told her I liked her car, and she gave me a little, secret smile. I worried she thought I had designs on it—another item I wanted her to leave me after she died.
“It was my mother’s,” she said. “My father bought it for her in 1960 from the New York showroom. I shouldn’t be driving it in this weather, but it was spring, wasn’t it?”
She had the radio tuned to the local NPR station, and she talked brightly over a BBC news report—holding back her mention of William’s strange disappearance, I guessed, until we got to her house. I settled back into the leather seat. I had William’s portfolio with me in my bag. When we turned up Anne’s drive, the gravel and the snow pinged beneath the little car, and one lamp burned in the house. Usually every floor was illuminated, the light spilling out of every window, and I felt a woozy anxiousness—as if something inside the house, in one of those dark rooms, lay in wait for me.
Anne pulled into the garage alongside a Jeep with thick tires—the car she should have driven out in the snow. The headlight beams hit rakes and galvanized buckets hung on hooks on the wall. She explained that her husband used to tap the maples for syrup and that William had taken over when her husband had left.
“He should have started already,” Anne said, sounding miffed.
The car’s engine cut off, as did the lights, and we were thrown into darkness. We made our tentative way up the path to the front door and Anne stopped in the middle of her snowy lawn.
“Isn’t this a fabulous night,” she exclaimed, taking deep breaths of it.
At the door, she fumbled with her keys until I nearly offered to do it for her. The snow fell and landed on our shoulders, powdery and soft. Finally, the door swung open and we stepped inside. There was a fire in the hearth, but only one lamp illuminated the room.
“Welcome to my world,” Anne said. “Dreary without my usual company, isn’t it?”
We draped our coats over a chair, and Anne led me back into the kitchen, into the smell of something roasting in the oven. She had on a wool cap, and she went into a small mud room and emerged with her usual scarf—a paisley silk that made her eyes seem violet. The dimness was explained by the candle she had lit on the counter. I watched Anne step over to the bar.
“I’m going to have a vodka martini,” she said. “My parents and their friends were avid martini drinkers in their forties. When I turned forty last year I just fell into the tradition.”
I admitted I’d never had one, and she insisted I sample hers. She held her glass toward me by its stem, and I took a cautious sip. I said it was like drinking partially melted snow, and she laughed and poured me one, too.
“It’s a glioblastoma,” she said, eyeing me over the rim of her glass. “The tumor.”
I didn’t know what to reply. I composed what I hoped was an expression of sympathy.
“I plan to come back as a cardinal after I die.”
Anne brightened. “Really?” she said. “I’m an enthusiast.”
I sipped my drink. “You don’t have any taxidermy birds on display,” I said.
Anne gathered her glass and the shaker. “I don’t kill the birds. I watch them,” she said. “Why don’t we take our snow by the fire?”
In the living room, we sat on opposite sides of the velvet couch, and I could smell Lucie’s patchouli in the dense fabric. Most meals at Anne’s were hearty meat dishes, and Anne said she had made a beef Wellington, and it was her first try, so anything might come out of the oven. When would Anne arrive at her reason for inviting me? Del had always said that I was too suspicious, that I never believed in the goodness of others. She was right about that, but I had never yet been proven wrong. I leaned into the velvet cushions, comfortable but cautious about what might come next. I kept watching the stairwell, expecting to see William in his beaver-skin hat, or Mary Rae twirling her pretty necklace.
The drinks seemed to sharpen my senses rather than dull them. Since the day in the asylum I’d felt in a fog—even with the boys, I’d been trapped in a dreamlike existence. Now I could see the points of the stag’s antlers on the wall, the dewy moisture of their eyes, the shine of their pelts, as if they might leap from their spots to charge across the oriental carpet. The fire sparked and hissed with Anne’s addition of a new log. She sat back down and gave me a searching look.
“I just want you to know that I’m here, for a little bit longer at least, if you need anything.” She lifted her martini glass from the table where she’d set it and held it toward me for a toast. “To friendship.”
The first step in luring someone in was to offer support. I’d seen the mediums do this at the Spiritualists by the Sea camp. I held my glass up and she tapped hers against it, making a bell-like sound.
“We all know about Del and the baby,” Anne said. “I’m here for her, too.”
