by Zack Parsons
“So young?” I was surprised. I’d taken Holly and Veronica for mid or late twenties. I realized I’d allowed my own desires to color my perception.
“Just girls. Mom and Dad were asleep in bed, and there was this knock at the door.” She made a knocking motion with her hand. “So loud, like gunshots. It was the sheriff. He asked to speak with Holly, and we both knew something was wrong. It was just like how the man in the dark suit came and told her about her mother dying. I was afraid to go with her to the door, so I watched from down the hall. The sheriff seemed so much bigger than her.”
“What happened?”
“That was the last time I saw Holly for three years. The police held her for her own safety for a while, and then I guess after they ruled it an accident, they sent her off to a foster home.”
“Ruled what an accident?”
“The fire. It killed her entire family. Dad, stepmother, all of them. But there was something really weird about it. The firemen thought it was a set fire, but the police said it was an accident. Weirdest of all, Holly Webber was listed in the newspaper as one of the people killed. My mom didn’t believe me when I told her the sheriff took Holly away in his car.”
“How did you find out about Holly being alive?”
“She called me.” Veronica rolled onto her side. The air conditioner buffeted her hair gently. “I was already in the city, working as a secretary for a modeling agency. The guy who ran it kept trying to get me to pose naked. Holly called out of the blue, said she was set up with an apartment and had a spare room, so I left the YWCA and went to stay with her. It was just like old times.”
She smiled at the memory of it.
“Why do you think she was in Cranford that morning?” I asked.
The smile disappeared. Veronica turned onto her other side, facing away from me.
“Let’s talk about it some other time,” she said. “I’m tired.”
“Please.” I laid my hand on her arm, and she shook it off.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“It’s hot in here.” I walked to the door and did not look back at her on the bed. “I’ll get you a bucket of ice.”
There was an ice machine beside the motel’s office. I wiped the soot from the door and filled ice buckets from both rooms. When I returned, Veronica was no longer on the bed. I could hear the sound of the shower. The light was on in the bathroom, and her clothing lay discarded like the skin of a snake. I leaned into the room only long enough to set the ice bucket on the dresser.
I sat on the bed in my room and picked up the telephone and put it in my lap. My swollen left hand was immersed in my own ice bucket. Once it was numb, I would try wrapping it in clean bandages. I dialed the Hawthorne exchange and my home number. The line clicked a few times and then began to ring. Lynn answered.
“It’s me,” I said.
There was a long silence, and then she spoke.
“Where are you?”
“A motel. I’m headed to Malibu.”
“Why?”
“It’s where this is taking me.”
She sighed. That was like a kick in my soft spots. It was the sound of distant glaciers breaking free, setting off on their lonesome way to melt in places they were never meant to be.
“When you disappeared from the hospital, they called the police,” she said. “They spent hours searching high and low. I can deal with the embarrassment, but I’m not a part of your life at all anymore. You’ve entered some dark place.... Is this ... is this about the war?”
“No,” I said. “Yes. I don’t know.”
“And then your doctor calls.” Lynn’s voice was fraught with emotion. “Dr. Rutledge. He heard you were in the hospital, and he wanted to follow up on your treatment. For what, I don’t know. He wouldn’t discuss the matter with me. I’m just your wife, not somebody important. Something is wrong with you.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“I can’t do this anymore.” Her voice pitched up with anger. “You have this whole other life, and I have my life, and they don’t touch anymore. You’re never home, you don’t tell me anything, I just ... I can’t do it anymore.”
“I know,” I said.
“Some police came by tonight. They’re still parked outside on the street.”
“Don’t trust them,” I said. “I have to go. I can’t call you again until this is over with.”
“Sure, disappear again. Will I see you alive?”
“Don’t give up on me, Lynn. Please.”
“I never gave up on you.” Lynn’s voice was quiet. Resigned. “Never. Don’t say that to me. I wrote you letters every week during the war. I even kept all the ones you sent back. I visited you every day in the hospital. I helped you paint that darn shoebox of an office. I watched you buy all the phones you never answer. I’ve always been in the same place. I haven’t moved anywhere. You gave up on me.”
“No,” I pleaded. “One more chance. I’ll make it square. I’ll be the man you married.”
She was silent.
“You’re right,” I said. “About everything. I will come home as soon as I can and this will never happen again. Done. I’ll quit the business.”
“I’m not even sure what business you’re in anymore.” She sighed. “Alright. Okay. I’m a damn fool, Casper, but God help me I do still love you.”
“Thank you.” Relief washed over me. I had not even realized how afraid of losing her I had become.
“Did you even notice they’d cut your ring off your finger at the hospital?”
I lifted my swollen hand from the ice and looked at the pale flesh where my wedding ring had banded my finger. No. I hadn’t noticed.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said. “Hurry home if you want me to be here.”
I emptied my hip flask down my throat and fell asleep with the room spinning. I came awake at the sound of a knock at the door. She was there, a silk pajama top cinched around her waist, no bottoms, just the slender luxuries of her stockings. She was tragic and beautiful and everything I wanted at that moment. There was always a space between me and Annie in the dreams.
“Get away from here,” I said. “You have your own room.”
“I’m all alone over there.” She insinuated herself into my room like smoke.
She got her curves between me and the door and leaned back to close it. Her lips were red and glistening. The lights of a passing truck poured golden across the open V of the pajamas and spilled light and shadow over the tops of her breasts.
“You loved her, didn’t you?” she asked. “Holly. I could see it in your eyes.”
“Someone else,” I said.
“I can be her for you.” She laid her arms over my shoulders, hands dangling behind my back. “Just how you remembered.”
She kissed me. Her lips were a heated brand. A sting. I pushed her to arm’s length.
“A girl might get her feelings hurt,” she said.
“I’m a married man.” The booze was still sloshing around my brain, but it was no excuse.
She laughed and touched my hand.
“Where’s the ring?”
“What’s your game?” I demanded.
Veronica brushed aside my arms and laid her palms against my chest. She was shorter than me and had to turn up her face to look me in the eye. She stepped closer, and I felt the intimate collision of all her softest corners.
“Tell me about her,” she said. “What was her name?”
When I didn’t immediately respond she kissed me hard enough to make a boxer weak in the knees.
“Annie,” I whispered.
I grabbed her wrists and lifted her hands from my chest, but I didn’t push her away.
“What was she like?”
“She wouldn’t be in a stranger’s hotel room at one in the morning dangling bait to get something she wants.”
She jerked her hand from my grasp and slapped me across the face. Cinders danced in her eyes.
“Don’t,” she said. “You can’t look at me like a piece of meat all day and then lecture me like I’m a child.”
“Fine, let’s lay them on the table, sweetheart. I’m a big, bad man who’s been eyeballing your roundabouts since you walked into my office, but you’re the one coming into my room, waking me up in the middle of the night. Taking advantage of a drunk, beat-up old man. You’re the one dressed like the store ran out of clothes.”
She could have screamed or hit me. Maybe I was still hoping she’d take the decision out of my hands. I saw the storm clouds of those sorts of ideas pass over her in an instant. She untied the silk belt holding the pajamas closed. She let the fabric fall from her shoulders. Her shapely body was swathed in black lace, constricted and cradled and overflowing in all the right places to make men forget their mothers. Her retort had won the argument.
We tangled together and unmade the bed.
It was remarkable how little guilt I experienced. The world was different, waking with Veronica beside me. When I came out of the shower, she was still there, dazzlingly naked on the bed, laughing at the way I looked at her. It was always like that with her, feeling a bit like I was laughed at, but that didn’t stop us.
We left late in the morning for Malibu. The sky was clear and bright, and the fires had gone. We passed through a black, charred wasteland. The trees were just smoldering stumps. Even the stones were blackened and the roadway deformed by the heat. With the Tudor’s windows down, the smell lingered. There was a certainty to it that was comforting. Everything that had burned was gone, but something new would grow in its place.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Veronica asked me. The sun limned her face and seemed to exist within her flowing hair.
“Sure,” I said.
“Just like that? Just ‘sure’?”
“It’s a silly question,” I said. She didn’t seem to care for that answer.
“I’ve never seen a ghost,” she said, “but I can believe in them. Something has to happen to all that stuff we add up to. All the memories and the things we did with our lives.”
“If there are ghosts at all, then we’re all ghosts.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“There’s something telling you who to be. When you’re a kid, it’s telling you to grow. When you get older, well, get a slant at yourself, doll. Look at those hands and fingers, at the little hairs on your arms that you can barely see, at those eyes.
“All of that stuff comes from somewhere. That’s adding you up so gradually, you don’t even know it. Every time you eat or drink or do some honest work, jigsaw pieces of you are getting clicked into their place by the ghost. There’s no moment where it stops and there you are, as you always will be. All you can do is look back at who you were.
“We’re all growing and growing, even when we’re old.” I fitted a Bravo into the corner of my mouth. “Until something makes us stop.”
“So then what? What happens when we stop? Where did Holly Webber go?”
“I dunno. If we are just a bunch of instructions, then maybe her ghost went prowling for someone else to make.”
“Like me?” she asked.
She put her arm out the car window and skipped her flattened palm on the rushing air.
“I think it’s more like music on the radio,” she said. “Only there’s no radio to pick it up. It just bounces around in the air, goes through locked doors and walls, and nobody even knows it’s there.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Malibu was clean and new. Maybe that was why it lacked the foundation of a real city. New money had come in and run out the regulars. There were streets and lampposts and even a few shops, but the real world of Malibu was resorts and exclusive retreats for Hollywood celebrities. They dwelled in the shade of transplanted palm trees on estates walled off from the outside world. They dined at private clubs and played golf. They lived in extravagant terraced houses of Lloyd-Wright angles, overlooking fenced beaches and pools of blue water. At night I’d bet those beaches were lit by tiki torches and strings of Christmas lights.
Old Malibu, or what was left of it, was a stretch of wharves and surviving boathouses dripping off the rocks of a less hospitable stretch of coastline. I pulled the Tudor off into a rough parking area and shared space with three salt-eaten trucks and a green sedan of obscure manufacture.
Down in the sea a moored trawler was taking on ice from a truck parked out on the nearest wharf. The crew was simultaneously offloading sea urchins into wheeled bins. They were shouting up and down to one another. Their dialogue of labor reminded me of long-ago colliers at Port Richmond taking on coal.
“Can I go with you?” asked Veronica. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“You should stay in the car,” I said, but her expression made me immediately relent. “All right. This might be strange. Or it might be nothing at all.”
We left the car and approached the wharf. The spray from the ocean quickly saturated the bandages wrapping my broken fingers. Water covered my hat and coat in fine droplets. Stairs were cut into the nearby cliff, a green iron railing bolted into the stone intended as a small gesture of safety. I glimpsed the rugged beach cradled by the headlands. Gray sand and strips of flooded rocks and heaps of bull kelp.
A few locals with cat-whisker fishing poles and buckets of bait were lingering by the boathouse. I heard them bragging about the easy perch to the man on duty. The boathouse man leaned on his elbows out the open window of the shack. He seemed content to hear them out.
“They’re loving this queer summer. Drop your hook in, barely need to bait it,” said a red-bearded fisherman. “Just get yourself a mini-jig.”
“You’ll catch more if you get ‘em whipped up by dropping in some minnows,” said a fisherman draped in an old Army poncho. “The trick is not too many, so they don’t eat their fill. Just right, and they’ll bite on anything, and you’ll pull in a dozen of them before they’re all scared off.”
“Don’t leave none lay,” the boathouse man warned. “I hate to see a fish gone to waste.”
“Gulls’ll eat it,” said the bearded man.
“That ain’t the point,” said the boathouse man. “Woodrow said last week he came out and there was a whole heap of perch up on the wharf. Smelled to high heaven. I hope it wasn’t none of you boys that did that.”
The boathouse man was answered with a chorus of disavowals. A bin of sea urchins clattered up the wharf toward the boathouse, pushed by a pair of swarthy commercial fishermen. The locals went quiet. They greeted the approaching men with suspicious glances.
They caught sight of me and Veronica sidling up, and their suspicion turned ice cold.
“Hey there,” I said, “I’m looking for Ian Bendwool. His address is in here, but I don’t see any regular streets. Any of you know where he lives?”
The fishermen grumbled apologies and filed off down the wharf to start their fishing. We were left facing the grizzled old man in the boathouse.
“I know him,” said the boathouse man. “Green house on the rocks, down below, between the bluffs. You his kid? He owes money on that place. And if he don’t get thrown out for that, he’s gonna get run out for all the cats.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll let him know.”
“Tell him to quit feeding those cats! I’ll go down there with a pellet gun!” the boathouse man shouted after us.
Not exactly a friendly welcome, but it was at least proof my experience on the beach had produced a real lead. Whether new information or something old resurfacing out of my punch-drunk head, I could not be sure. I never pictured myself much of an oracle, so I’d put money on the latter.
The stairs were even more treacherous than they seemed. I raised my collar against the spray and descended them cautiously. Veronica clung to the rail behind me and took the stairs even slower than I managed. The steps finally met a flat, rocky area between two bluffs, and I turned to help Veronica the rest of the way down.
Ian Bendwool�
�s house was nestled in between the bluffs, decayed by the sea salt to a pale green corpse of rotten wood and rain barrels and old fishing nets. The windows that weren’t boarded up or shuttered were smeared with grime.
Something crunched underfoot as I started toward the house. Looking down, I realized that the ground all around was covered in thousands of tiny fish skeletons. Mewling cats emerged from crates and from the slumping gables of the roof. There were at least a dozen of them, and they rubbed against our legs and put their front paws on our knees.
“Don’t pet them,” I said, observing the shivering face of a white tomcat. “They’re lousy with fleas.”
I clapped my hands, and the cats scattered off to their corners and nooks to regard us sullenly as the interlopers we were. I went up the creaking stairs to the porch and rapped my knuckles on the salt-etched door. Veronica watched from the bottom of the stairs. No one answered, so I knocked again, and again, and a fourth time.
“No one is coming,” she said.
“Ian Bendwool!” I shouted. “This is Warren Groves! I need to talk to you!”
“Warren Groves?” wondered Veronica aloud.
“A name he might recognize,” I said. “Old alias of mine.”
The door opened, and I was face-to-face with a scabrous wreck of a man, pale and unkempt, eyes cloudy, hands quivering, with a faded scar around his neck that suggested he’d been in a noose at some point. He was all the more disarming because I recognized myself in his sagging features.
“You wouldn’t be the first man by that name to come here. What do you want?” His eyes shifted to Veronica, and she waved sheepishly. “Who is ... my God. My God. Come in. Warren, Annie, come in.”
Not content with merely inviting us inside, Ian came creeping out onto the porch and took Veronica by the hands. He pulled her, only half-willing, into the dim house, and we were immediately choked by the foul smell of cat urine and rotten food.
“Annie, I thought I’d never see you again.” He hugged her with such force, the ratty shawl fell from his shoulders. “Come in. I’m so embarrassed I haven’t cleaned. Let me get you both some tea.”
