I’ve seen dumpier trailers, but not often.
The previous tenant had been a hoarder. When she died in her trailer last year, Alicia and her mom had to clean the place out, and I helped. The place had been full of arts and crafts junk and half-eaten containers of food. We’d worn masks, and no amount of vacuuming and Lysol had made it tolerable inside.
Just goes to show there’s always somebody desperate enough to settle for anything.
I don’t smell the death smell anymore—what I smell is about a half dozen Plug-Ins, all churning away at once. I guess that’s an improvement.
Benjamin and his family don’t have much furniture. A worn futon backs up against one wall of the living room, and a rickety table leans awkwardly under the kitchen light. A makeshift bookshelf sags with paperbacks and magazines. I wonder if they’re his wife’s—girlfriend’s?—and then my face heats up. I’m the last person who should be making assumptions.
His toddler lies in a playpen, her thumb in her mouth, snoring gently. I almost comment on him leaving her unsupervised—then I remember that he did it to save my judgmental ass from getting beaten even worse.
“I’ll grab some cotton and peroxide. They split your lip.”
I follow him to the table and sit on the edge of a vinyl chair. I will myself to keep still as he approaches, dripping cotton in hand. He’s a heavy breather, and his thick fingers smell like peanut butter. Lucky I’m not allergic. This time.
My shoulder blades tingle as he sits across from me and begins dabbing at the blood on my face. His fingers are rough but his touch is gentle.
“Some people are just driven to destroy what they don’t understand,” he says. He gets up and runs a washcloth under the tap. “Hold this against your lip until the bleeding stops.”
I feel silly having him take care of me; I can clean a cut for myself. It’s not like I haven’t been beat up before.
“Anyway,” he adds, “I’m Benjamin.”
“Yeah,” I blurt out. Crap.
He glances up. “You know?”
“Sorry. My best friend’s mom manages this place.”
“What else do you know?”
I swallow, and it’s all the confirmation he needs.
He sighs.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Please don’t tell? She wasn’t supposed to say anything to me, but that’s the kind of thing that’s hard to keep to yourself.”
Benjamin just grunts and sweeps up the bloody cotton balls.
“Anyway,” I add, “I know you’re not guilty.”
He raises his eyebrows. “You what now?”
I study my fingers. “I can tell things about people.”
He snorts.
I shrug. “Anyway, I’m Jamie.”
“Short for James?”
“No. Short for Jamie.”
“Well, I’m glad to meet you, Jamie.”
I press the rag to my lip for a couple minutes, and then, to break the silence, I ask, “Who did do it?”
He frowns. “Not something I wanna go into, kid.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s funny though. You remind me of her. You look like you could be her kid. I mean, if she’d ever had one.” Another awkward moment passes, and he clears his throat. “So the landlady’s kid . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I saw the two of you sitting together. The way you look at her. She your girlfriend?”
“We’re just friends.”
“Ah.”
“We can be friends, you know. You can just be friends with people you’re—you can be friends with people without dating them.”
“’Course you can.”
I bite my lip, and flinch when I catch the split part. “Anyway, I don’t think she sees me that way.”
“Fair enough.”
“Right.”
“Right.” He gets up from the table and begins washing some dishes while I continue putting pressure on my lip.
My mind wanders, trying to stitch together the bits of my last life that I remember. Being a little girl. Going to college. Dropping out to get married.
And I remember my husband turning mean. I remember going to our best man over and over again for advice—the only man Larry trusted me with. I remember deciding that I had to leave. I remember Larry—
Oh God. Larry did it. Larry was the killer.
Benjamin knocks a glass off the counter. He’s not paying attention to the glass, though. He’s staring at me, and he looks like he’s glanced into hell itself.
Did I say that out loud?
“How do you know about him?”
Oops. Apparently I did. “Uh, lucky guess?”
“Right.” He takes the rag from my hand, ignoring the still-running water. “Well, the bleeding’s pretty much stopped now. It was good to meet you. You’d probably best be getting on home now.”
He doesn’t seem to breathe at all as he talks, and before I fully realize what happens I am escorted out the door.
“You take care, now,” he says, once I’m safely outside.
“Thanks, Benjamin,” I say, but the door closes before the last syllable leaves my mouth.
Making my way home, I feel like I can hear all my past selves in my head, and they’re all furious. That bastard Larry killed me, and he got away with it.
I want to punch something. I want to scream. I want to take my notebook out of my backpack and rip out every sheet of paper and crumple each one up. I want to break some pencils. I want to scream.
I want to cry.
What does it say about me if I was murdered and nobody cared enough to find out who really did it? They just found the handiest fall guy to pin it on and went on with their lives, and Larry Dearborn lived happily ever after.
I run through imaginary confrontations with Larry as I walk up to my trailer. I’ve never been violent—not in any of the lives I can recall—but right now I wish I had the talent for it.
Meetu wants to play when I open up the door—Meetu always wants to play. “Not now,” I say, snapping the leash onto her collar. She understands lots of things, but “Not now” isn’t one of them. Still, she’s happy enough to go out for her walk.
I daydream about running into Connor and Eddie again while I’m out with Meetu. See how they like being threatened. Then I play out the rest of that scenario in my head—Meetu’s fifty-eight pounds of love, but all anybody sees when they look at her is a scary, vicious killer dog. I imagine how people would react to another story about a pit bull attack. I imagine them calling for her to be destroyed.
No, if I do see those guys, I’ll keep a tight grip on Meetu’s leash, even if they’re messing with me, because I don’t want to lose her.
That’s what pisses me off—me and Janie and the other voices in my head. The Connors and the Larrys of the world always get away with the things they do.
There must be some way to make Larry pay. He doesn’t know I exist. Has no idea that I know what he did. That I keep remembering more and more with each step I take.
He’ll never see me coming.
“Watch your back, Larry,” I murmur. “I’m coming for you.”
Meetu thumps my knees with her tail. She doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but she’s game. She’s always game.
• • • •
“I’m telling you, he didn’t do it!”
Alicia snorts. “You know this how? Because he told you?”
We’re sitting on her bed. I avoid her eyes by focusing on her posters. Harley Quinn. Black Widow. Imperator Furiosa.
Alicia is into kick-ass women. I’m into her—something I’m better off keeping to myself.
“Listen,” I say, “I’m pretty good at reading people. I believe him. He’s already done his time, so he has no real reason to lie.”
“His reason is to get people like you to trust him. Jesus, you went into his trailer?”
“I was bleeding.”
“So?”
I pull my legs under me and face her. “Listen, en
ough people think I’m a flake. That both of us are. I’ve always had your back. Will you just go with me on this?”
She chews her lip. After a moment she sighs and says, “I’m not sure what you want me to do.”
“You’ve got a computer. Do a search for this Dearborn guy. See what you can find out about him.”
“What for?”
I smooth a wrinkle on her bedspread. Any answer would be impossible to explain. “I don’t know yet.”
She rolls her eyes, but she pulls her laptop off the nightstand and begins clicking around. For several minutes she makes random frustrated sounds as she repeats the same research I already did at the library. I don’t want to admit to how much I’ve already obsessed about this, so I let her retrace my steps.
Finally she chuckles ruefully. “Good luck.”
“What?”
“Larry Dearborn is the Dearborn in Dearborn Automotive. He owns that huge car lot out on Auburndale Highway. The football stadium at Lakeside High is named after him. He’s loaded.”
I frown. So he’s rich, too. Must be nice to literally get away with murder.
“Let’s go see him,” I say.
She scowls. “And do what?”
“We can pretend one of us is buying a car.”
“Look, if you’re right, then Dearborn’s the dangerous one.”
“He was dangerous forty years ago.”
She shakes her head.
I try a different tack. “You’re always saying you’re bored here, surrounded by people who aren’t going anywhere. You always say you want to do something adventurous, like join the Air Force. Well fine: let’s have an adventure. I’m not saying to confront him or anything. I just want to see my—I just want to see Janie Dearborn’s killer with my own eyes. He won’t know that we know, so there’s no reason to be afraid of him.”
She narrows her eyes. Before she can raise an objection, I spit out, “What would Furiosa do?”
She makes a face. “I’m not twelve, Jamie.”
“Sorry.” I get up from her bed.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll go on my own,” I say. “I’ll take the bus.”
“Don’t,” she says. “I think you’re nuts, but I’ll drive.”
We tell her mom we’re going to the library and breeze out before she can question us. Once on the road, we roll down the windows and turn north on state road seventeen. Alicia’s mom’s car is a beat up Saturn station wagon that’s almost old enough to go to bars. It’s sticky and hot and I almost think I should’ve gone by bus, except then I would have been alone.
The car salesmen close in like hyenas when we park, and immediately lose interest when we step out. I guess without an adult with us, they figure we’re not car shopping.
I lead the way into an over-cooled lobby and cast about until I find a receptionist’s desk.
“Hi,” I say to the lady on the other side. “Is Mr. Dearborn here by any chance?”
She inclines her head. “And you are?”
“We are, uh . . .”
“We go to Lakeside High School,” Alicia blurts out. “And, uh, we’re on the yearbook staff. And since Mr. Dearborn’s been so generous to our school in the past, we were wondering if he maybe wanted to take out a page in this year’s edition.”
I fight the urge to stare at Alicia. We actually are in yearbook, but at Pickens High, not at Lakeside. They’ve been leaning on us to sell advertising, and the last thing I’ve wanted to do is cold call on a bunch of local businesses so they can all treat me like some kind of freak. So here we are instead doing it for an entirely different high school.
I have to give her credit, though—that was some quick thinking.
The receptionist’s expression softens. “Ah, yes. Well, he doesn’t really come in to the showroom anymore, but you’re right, he might want to sponsor a page.” She takes a random salesperson’s card from a holder on the counter, turns it over, and writes something on the back. “You can visit him here. I’m sure he’d be thrilled to have visitors from Lakeside.”
Something about the way she said that feels off to me, but I can’t quite figure it out until twenty minutes later, when Alicia pulls up in front of the address on the card: Landmark Hospice.
“What’s a hospice?” Alicia asks. “Isn’t that like a cheap hotel for backpackers?”
“No, it’s a place where people go to die.”
“Oh.”
We park for several minutes under the shade of an oak tree, until Alicia asks, “Can we go home now?”
I nod dully, staring out the window.
It’s all so unfair. Larry Dearborn killed his wife—killed me—and he’ll never face judgment for it. Never spend a day in prison. He made a ton of money, lived out his life, and got to the end without any consequences. Even if I found some way to prove he did it, nobody would prosecute him. Why bother?
• • • •
The riverbed where the news said my body was discovered is just over a mile away. I take Meetu out after school a couple days later and wander around. Meetu runs back and forth between the creek and me, getting all muddy and messy.
I guess I have this idea that Meetu might dig up some bit of evidence, or I’ll remember something about how I died that would lead me to discover something. Meetu’s not that kind of dog, though, and anyway the police already went over this area when they found the body. What could I hope to uncover all these decades later?
And what would I do with it if I found it?
I don’t actually have any memories of this place. I was probably dead or unconscious before Larry ever brought me here. I do remember more and more about our relationship. How his dark moods got darker and more frequent and how even getting promotions at work only made him happy for a day before he’d brood again. I remember the only place I felt safe being with his buddy Benjamin, and I remember Benjamin convincing me I needed to leave, and helping me pack. I remember taking my suitcases to his house one night, and trying to figure out where to go next.
I remember Larry showing up at Benjamin’s place, enraged, and that’s about all I remember. He must have killed me there, leaving plenty of evidence pointing at Benjamin.
Benjamin.
In all of my fury at Larry killing me and getting to live out his life without ever paying for his crime, I’ve hardly given thought to the man who did pay for it. I’ve been so focused on the unfairness of my death that I haven’t thought about the unfairness of his life. I can’t do anything about Larry, but can I do something for Benjamin?
I call Meetu to me and we start to walk back home. About halfway there, Alicia’s Saturn shows up and pulls off the road on the grassy shoulder.
“I had a feeling you might have gone out this way. You’re obsessed, Jamie. I’m worried about you.”
She helps me get Meetu into the back of the station wagon. There’s one thing to be said about having a piece of crap car—you don’t much care if it gets dirty anymore.
“I think I have an idea for how to clear Benjamin’s record,” I say.
She doesn’t take her eyes off the road. “Oh?”
“Yeah. Can I borrow a dress?”
• • • •
Alicia doesn’t wear dresses much, and her fashion style is not quite what I’m looking for. She is close to my size, though, and she’s willing to help, which counts for a lot.
She opens up her laptop and brings up a picture of Janie Dearborn—of her and Larry in better times. She’s wearing a long denim skirt and a turtleneck and throwing her head back and laughing. I think I can remember that day.
“Freaky,” Alicia murmurs. “She could be your older sister.”
“Do you have anything like what she’s wearing here?”
“Janie seems like the wholesome type. That’s not me.”
“Do you have anything that might be kind of close?”
She frowns, then straightens. “Actually, I might.”
She heads not for her closet, bu
t for the chest at the foot of her bed. She digs inside and tugs out a balled up wad of cloth.
“It’s from my Aunt Hilda,” she says, as if that explains everything.
She unrolls the bundle on her bed. It turns out to be a brown dress, with little pink flowers and ivory accents. It’s nothing like the outfit in the news photo, but I understand why Alicia picked it. It’s equal parts Brady Bunch and Sunday brunch.
“My aunt doesn’t really get me,” she says.
“No kidding.”
“Mom made me wear it last time Aunt Hilda visited and then I dumped it here and haven’t thought about it again.” She holds the dress up to my shoulders and cocks her head appraisingly.
I quirk my lip. “It’s . . . really ugly.”
Alicia giggles. “You asked for a dress. You didn’t say it had to look good.”
I go to her bathroom to try it on. I stare at the mirror, trying to form my own opinion before I ask Alicia for hers. I worried that the dress was going to bulge and gap in the wrong places, but it’s a modest cut, so it pretty much works.
I remember looking like this before. It looks like me in the mirror. Just a different me.
I try to imagine how Connor Haines would react if he ran into me like this. He and Eddie would probably go berserk.
Well, fuck them. They don’t get a vote.
I pull the door open and cross the hall back into Alicia’s room. She paces all the way around me, nodding slowly.
“Now let’s add some makeup,” she says.
When I’ve worn makeup before, I’ve always gone for subtle. Some foundation, a touch of eyeliner. Not trying to look like I have makeup on. After some false starts, Alicia and I manage to get a more blatantly feminine style that I’m satisfied with.
“Stand up,” she says. “Let me see.”
I stand by her dresser, suddenly self-conscious.
She raises her eyebrows. “I still hate that dress, but damn, you—” She bites her lip. “You’re really pretty.”
My neck and face heat at that. I know she doesn’t mean . . . I know she’s just trying to build me up. It’s nice to imagine that she’s serious, though.
The moment is interrupted by her mom coming home. When I see her car pulling into the gravel driveway outside, I want to grab my own clothes and hide in her bathroom until the danger passes. But I steel myself and stay right where I am. I’ve always figured that once you start hiding, it’s hard to stop.
The Long List Anthology Volume 5 Page 26
