The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  As I made the turn onto Old Settlers Road, I thought of Evan's girlfriend in the chicken coop. Another captive. There was no public sign of her yet, and this pleased me, made me feel a bit triumphant, not because of my role in concealing her, but because it reminded me that not everything that can go wrong does go wrong, as much as my own life, and Evan's and Mavis's, seemed to be steering a hard course in another direction. Vicki, after all, was fine. Henderson had found someone to spend the night with, and much of the morning. The sun was shining, and there, right there on the side of the road, was a flower stand, a homemade wooden table covered with painted tins of lupine and cream-colored roses. For a few minutes on that sun-drenched road, I believed that God might be working her magic. I can't describe it except to say that I experienced an almost physical lifting of the blanket of agony that had been dropped over me three days before. It was a moment of respite, a moment when my mind filled with everything in my life there was to rejoice in.

  Then I laid eyes on the dog.

  The morgue was a back room in the Humane Society's secluded gray-shingled Colonial, and the woman who walked me back there from the reception desk had the excessively respectful demeanor of an undertaker but the clothes of a middle-aged tourist on her way to the beach: a pink zippered jacket made of terry cloth that fell to the top of her thighs, a pair of partly concealed white short shorts, and platform flip-flops, lime green. "Our intern told me you would be coming," she said with great solemnity.

  It was a small bedroom, except that it had an antiseptic hospital smell, and the only furniture was a raised stainless steel table, a truncated gurney. Against the far wall were two sets of windows, the shades pulled down to the sill, flanking a door that led outside. But the inside wall was covered with something like stainless steel, and imbedded in it were three mini-refrigerator doors in a horizontal row, each about three feet by three feet.

  "I'm not sure I can do this," I said.

  "Everyone finds it difficult."

  She led me to the middle door, but did not move to open it. I guess she was waiting for me to give her the go-ahead.

  "Maybe I could tell you a birthmark and you could identify him for me. On his stomach there's a brown splotch in the shape of Florida."

  She was quiet for a moment. "It might be a good thing for you to see him yourself. If it is him. Closure, you know." Bree had used the word too, probably learned from this woman. "A chance to say farewell."

  "Do the trays roll out the way they do in the movies?" She nodded. "Will I see his tail first or his head?"

  "His tail, I believe."

  "I'd like to stand off to the side so that you can pull the tray out a tiny bit and all I'll see is his tail and back legs. Would you mind? And will his eyes be open or closed?"

  She sighed in annoyance, and I wanted to explain my skittishness, my terror, my husband, et cetera, et cetera, but it was more than she needed to know, and I felt a wave of nausea that made me swallow hard and breathe deeply. I must have nodded, even though I did not mean to give her my consent, because she reached for the lever on the door, and I thought, All right, I can do it. What she hadn't told me was that the plastic tray with Henry's body on it—it was Henry, I could see that immediately—was attached to the door by a spring, so that as the door opened, the tray emerged with it, and before I knew it, all of him, lying stiffly on his side, like a stuffed dog that has fallen over, appeared before me. His signature ears still pointed like a German shepherd's, and his Florida birthmark floated on his pink-tinted belly the way it always had. But he was lopsided, like a beach toy poorly, unevenly inflated, and his eyes—Jesus God—his eyes were open, shiny and moist, not as if he were alive, but as if they'd been shellacked. The nausea must have been building since Bree first called, churning up my stomach, so within two or three seconds of jerking my head away from the sight of Henry's eyes, blank and glassy, dead and alive, but mostly dead, I felt every part of me convulse, and I did not have a chance to ask where the bathroom was before I vomited all over my hands, which had sprung to my mouth, and began to cry.

  I signed a form releasing the dog's body to be cremated, and the woman said that under the circumstances, she would not charge me the fee. I thanked her profusely and left wrapped in a fragile calm, aware that it could easily vanish. But it was not until I'd been driving for a while that I acknowledged that part of what was gone with poor Henry was my dream that discovering his whereabouts would lead me to the truth about the end of Will's life, even though everyone thought I was dotty for believing this. Now I had to get on with—with what? With accepting the idea that I would never know what had happened.

  I remember wanting to cry out at the injustice.

  It was a warm summer day, but I remember shivering.

  I remember thinking that I should turn at Harper Creek Road and see if my friends there were home, because I needed company, because I didn't want to dwell on this alone, and on all the injustices, all the other things I would never know: what happened to my father after he disappeared, that old favorite at the top of the list. But I wasn't thinking clearly and missed the turn for their house, missed it and kept going, heading for Cummington. If I stayed on this road, I'd reach the yellow gambrel and my stepdaughters and their mother, and I could not face them in this state. If I went to the motel, Henderson might still be out. I turned into the parking lot of the convenience store at the edge of town to buy a newspaper. Not the Boston paper with the headline BABY-KILLER LAWYER IN LOVE NEST, but the island weekly that lists meetings on the page with the tide reports and the poem for the week. Open discussion, nonsmoking, St. Catherine's, had started fifteen minutes ago. The other side of the harbor. By the time I got there, it would be half over, but there wasn't another meeting anywhere on the island until seven o'clock, and it would be pushing my luck to wait that long. I don't mean I wanted a drink; I mean I wanted to talk.

  But where would I begin?

  With the dog today, the poor dog? Or the windswept breakfast in January when Will told me he loved me and I decided to leave? Or, if they called on me, should I start my story the moment of that Thursday afternoon in bed with Daniel when the phone rang without ringing, and our fucking and Daniel's coming and Will's being dead all happened in the same instant, fission and fusion, the beginning and the end, the mundane, the marvelous, the unimaginable? Or could I just raise my hand and say whatever came to mind? Was it possible for me to talk without a speech, without a plot, an alter ego, without dressing up as Dorothy or Toto or the ghost writer from New York or the widow manqué? Could I just say the truth, not every detail, not the story filtered through someone else's voice, but the core, which must have the same root as coeur, and made me think of cri de coeur. Not my own this time, but Will's, in the bedroom the night I told him I was going to leave. You'll change your mind, he said at first. You'll see. You'll feel better when spring comes.... But I told him I could not wait till spring; I'd made up my mind. I said nothing for what seemed a long time, turned away because the dog had done something to catch my attention, and heard whimpering—then something louder, clearer, unavoidable. Will sobbing. A memory I had buried until this moment.

  I parked my car a block from the church, in front of a white clapboard house with black shutters and blue gingham curtains sashed with pink ribbons in every window. Could it be the handiwork of another woman trying to manufacture a happy house, or could this one be for real?

  Four long unadorned tables had been arranged in a square. People sat around the rectangle and in rows of chairs that fanned out across the room, a meeting hall in a building separate from the church. It was a good-sized group, and I couldn't figure out who was speaking, because I'd walked in and sat near the back during a long burst of laughter. When it quieted down, I heard a woman with a heavy Boston accent, and craned my neck until I could see her at the table. She was pretty and older and blond, the way Joan Rivers might look without the facelifts. "But all kidding aside," she said, "what I've really learned in heah is that
if I turn my life ovah to God"—which rhymed with Maude—"theah's no end to the miracles in the univuhse. I can't tell you how grateful I am you're all heah tonight. So thanks for listening."

  Ten hands shot up, my own among them.

  The woman who had spoken chose someone across the room from me.

  "Thanks for calling on me, Grace. I guess I'm still supposed to say," began a woman I couldn't see, whose voice was so flat it was as if she was trying to repress a lifetime of being mad with the world, "that my name is still Crystal and I'm, uh, still an alcoholic. Right?" She gave off a snorty, self-deprecating laugh that no one joined in. There was, instead, a serious, respectful silence, because everyone had a pretty deep understanding of how difficult it had been for her to say what she had just said, and everyone could hear the self-loathing and the shame in her laugh. Warily, because I was afraid of what I would see, I peered around the head of the man in front of me and tried to figure out which one was Crystal. The woman with her head in her hands? She looked up and started talking, pancake flat, plywood flat, hardly any affect, sounding much duller than the gentleness of her face suggested. She had long brown hair with bangs, a denim jacket, the slightly glamorous look of a country-and-western singer, overlaid with depression. "A lot of you know me, better than I know myself. You know I'm in and out of here like a friggin' yoyo, and you welcome me back every time, no questions asked, no judgments offered." She may have been thirty or thirty-five. "There's not a lot I can tell you that you don't already know, but there's probably a lot you can tell me. I haven't been so good at listening lately. I'm trying to do better. I guess that's it. Oh, yeah, I've got twenty-three days. Thanks." Applause went up as if she had won an Oscar—an AA thing, clapping for people counting their early days sober; a kind of three-dimensional slogan—and when it died down, Grace said, "Keep coming back, Crystal."

  I'd stopped looking at her by that time. I was doing the math and trying to figure out what to say to her when the meeting was over. After Grace said, "Let's take a ten-minute break," and I saw Crystal head for the door, I leaped up and followed her into the vestibule. "Are you leaving?" I asked.

  "Just for a smoke."

  "I'm Sophy, by the way."

  "Crystal."

  By then we were on the brick walkway in the church yard, a dreamy, manicured cloister between the parish house and the church, an outdoor enclosure thick with the scents of jasmine and, now, cigarette smoke. Crystal was taller, rangier than she'd looked sitting down, wore old scuffed cowboy boots, tight jeans, a thick belt with a heavy Native American buckle, not typical island attire, and I thought I might have the wrong Crystal. She held out a rumpled pack of Camels to me, but otherwise was preoccupied. I shook my head. "I think I've been looking for you," I said. "I've been looking for someone named Crystal Sparrow." Her eyes shifted to me when she heard the name, and her soft face hardened in fear; she probably owed people money, or worse. "It's about my husband, Will O'Rourke."

  "He said you guys are divorced."

  "Separated."

  "Guess I got the timing wrong. He's not too happy about it, that's no secret." She was defending herself in case I was about to pounce.

  "So you don't know that he's dead." It wasn't a question, or an accusation, either, although she was so startled, it must have sounded that way. Then I remembered her voice on Will's answering machine. What was it she'd said? She was sorry about the other night?

  "What do you mean?" she said now. "Since when?"

  "No one's quite sure about any of it. The autopsy isn't completed." I was holding back a lot of information, because I was afraid of two things. One, that if I told her Will had died twenty-three or twenty-four days ago and suicide was suspected, she might fear she'd had something to do with it. Two, if she was afraid of that, she would simply turn on the heel of her cowboy boot and take off and do what she always did: pick up a drink. I cared, in a not inconsequential way, that she not do that, but I cared more that she stay with me, tell me what had happened between them, because something must have.

  "How do you even know I know him?" she said, her eyes squinting with suspicion.

  "I had to go through his mail after he died. He sent you a letter that was returned to him, No Forwarding Address."

  "How'd you know to find me here?"

  "I didn't. I just heard your name and thought you might be the same Crystal."

  "So you didn't come here for me?"

  I shook my head. "I came for me. I've been having a hard time since he died."

  After that, I didn't need to coax anything out of her until the end. She just started talking, and I listened.

  13. In Search of Another Note

  IT HAD TO DO with her son, how she met Will.

  Define heartbreak: a nine-year-old kid with Crystal for a mother. That was heavy on my mind as she told me the story, and so were the echoes of other stories.

  It started with a quarrel between Crystal and the boy, Matt, though she didn't say at first what it was about. But he got awful mad, she said, and stormed out of the house, stormed three-quarters of a mile down the dirt road to Fresh Meadow Lane, but she didn't know that until later. She thought he'd gone to the pond or over to his friends the Lawlers', whose house was the only other one at their end of the road, about five hundred feet away through the brambles.

  She didn't own any property, so they had to move, like a lot of islanders in that situation, twice a year. When summer came, they left the house in the woods so that the owners could rent it—a tiny two-bedroom nothing, Crystal said—for fifteen-hundred dollars a week, just because of the pond. You know, Chester Pond? The usual summer shit, she said, and then we've got to live in a tent in my sister's backyard till Labor Day, because she's got every room in her house rented for the summer to college kids who are waiting tables. It's hard on the kid, she said, hard on all of us.

  I started to feel impatient, with how far the story was straying from the end of Will's life, but I needn't have.

  "The next thing I know the day of that humdinger fight Matt and me had"—here she became more animated than I had seen her—"there's this noisy motorcycle roaring down our dirt road, and I look out the kitchen window and it blasts to a stop right next to my car, kicks up a shitload of dust. There's my kid hopping off the back with a fat grin on his face and this guy I'd never seen driving it. 'Course I couldn't see much with the helmet, but they start slapping each other high fives and yukking it up.

  "Then I hear this voice through the kitchen window—he says to Matt, 'You wait there, kiddo,' and he starts toward the kitchen door, and I panic. This island isn't the friendliest place in the world. I don't know who the hell this is; he could be a social worker. I've had a few of them at my door over the years. So I stick the bottle of Jim Beam in the cabinet with the cereal and the peanut butter and tell myself to remember to move it before Matt sees it, because he'll dump it down the drain.

  '"Is anyone home?' That's the first thing I hear, then a knock on the edge of the screen door.

  '"Who is it?' I'm still at the sink, and the door's about eight feet away, and all I can see is half the man's body through the screen.

  '"My name is Will O'Rourke. I wanted you to know your son was hitchhiking on Fresh Meadow Lane. I almost didn't see him coming around the turn. Scared the hell out of me. I stopped as soon as I could and went back to make sure he was all right. And to tell him to hitch farther down the road, on the straightaway.'

  "I was at the screen door, saying thank you. I must have said it three or four times. He interrupts, real serious, 'Could I talk to you for a minute?'

  '"We're talking now.' But that wasn't how he meant it. I'd stuffed a few pieces of gum in my mouth and grabbed a Diet Coke, so I didn't look like the drunk I was—that's what Matt and I'd fought about, the bottle of whiskey. We'd had a tug of war with it; I won. And he ran away.

  '"Would you mind opening the door?'

  "I opened it and stood there, kind of suspicious, chomp-chomp-chomp on the Juicy
Fruit. 'Course he'd taken off his helmet by now, and I could see Matt out of the corner of my eye, circling Will's motorcycle, touching it, stroking it, in hog heaven. Will looked familiar. A salty-looking guy like someone you'd see around the shipyards. I was hoping Matt hadn't told him what we'd fought about. Hoping that's not what he wanted to talk to me about."

  She was silent. The meeting had reconvened, and we were outside by ourselves. A few cigarettes had come and gone, and I was in a state of rapt amazement, as if a home movie of Will had turned up. He hadn't been so alive to me since the moment I'd learned he was dead. "Will said, 'I don't mean to be nosy, but when I asked your boy where he was going, where he wanted a ride to, he started crying. He said you hated him. He said you lived down here. I put him on the bike and gave him a ride. I thought you should know.'

  '"You don't believe that, do you, that I hate my kid?'

  ""Course not. I've got kids of my own. I know how they—'

  '"Thanks. That's real nice of you to bring him back. Appreciate it.' I thought that would be the end of it, but he didn't go away.

  "He said, 'Is there anything I can do to help?'

  "I got real itchy. 'You work for the county, for social services?'

  "'No.'

  "'The state?'

  '"No. Nowhere anymore. I'm retired.'

  '"We're fine, the boy and me.'

  "I could tell he wasn't convinced, but what could he do? I think he said something like 'That's good, glad to hear it.' Then there was about a minute—or it felt like it; it was probably six seconds—when we stood there, both of us wanting to say something. It wasn't a sexual thing, what we couldn't say, it was a truth thing. It was like how much are we going to let on that we know about me, about why my kid is hitchhiking and crying and telling strangers I hate him? Not much.