by Amelia Gray
Her black winter gloves were stuffed in the coat’s pockets. His hand was like a child’s in the glove. He imagined Franny putting the gloves there in her pockets to surprise herself for the next season. He kept the gloves on and counted five more sealed pouches under the bed, each holding pillows or duvet covers or more of Franny’s coats and sweaters. He lowered his face to the bronze coat again and inhaled its scent before spreading it out over the bed. One of his old jackets was at the bottom of the pouch, a blue and ivory ski jacket with a red zipper, something he had worn in college. He put it on.
His shoes felt strange on his feet, and he saw that he had forgotten his socks. The sock drawer was empty save for the velvet box containing a rare coin given to him by his uncle when he was ten years old. David hadn’t opened the drawer in at least a year. He couldn’t think of a more intuitive place to store socks beyond the sock drawer, but Franny made judgment calls that he tended not to understand immediately. Dust lined the drawer. David opened the velvet box and touched the surface of the coin with the tips of his gloved fingers. There was a pattern of stars ringing the relief sculpture, circling a woman with either a clutch of arrows or an antique tooth extractor held to her chest. He put the coin back in its velvet box and put the velvet box back in the drawer.
Franny’s sock drawer was empty as well. She usually kept soft cloth bags of lavender with her socks and undergarments, but they were gone. Her drawer looked as if it had been scrubbed. David wondered if the police had taken the socks, if the firefighters had, the workers, the girls from the salon. He opened other drawers to find the clothes folded neatly.
He found one pair of Franny’s socks wrapped around a pipe in the linen closet. They were distended as a result of their insulation duty. They were kneesocks, cold as the water that flowed through the pipe they had insulated for years, pulled tightly around the exposed pipe and knotted twice each. The knots were difficult to loosen and the act chilled his hands. They smelled like rusting metal. The socks featured orange rust at the points where the fabric stretched the farthest. David sat on the floor and put the socks on, then the shoes. He wiped the gloves on his jeans and stood.
22.
DAVID AND FRANNY went camping together only once, at a campground that allowed cars and firewood and coolers. The cars bellied up to the individual camping spots, protecting the rock-lined fire pits like steely animal flanks. They heard a generator powering a television. Franny observed the activity and light and said that she had always thought of camping as strapping one’s provisions to one’s back and walking into the woods. David had never camped before, but he imagined others walking, feet falling uncertainly on new territory, eyes scanning the ground ahead, stopping occasionally to drink water from a jug and lean back to look at the canopied trees above. At the car campground, Franny and David walked to the edge of a lake. The water shifted to cover and uncover rocks and shells on the beach. They decided that if the lake was a magic trick, the trick was that there were shells despite the fact that they were standing a long day’s worth of driving from any ocean, ten hours of driving, weeks of walking. He put his arm around her, and she sang a quiet song about a man who takes a journey.
Day trips were more their style. There was a high concentration of antique shops in the area, and the two spent most of their time exploring, flanked by retirees. Franny would leave David at the boxes of tin saints’ medals and return to show him photos and postcards she had found in the shop’s recesses.
Despite never experiencing organized religion beyond his mother’s plastic rosaries, he had an abiding reverence for Saint Apollonia, who, around the year 249, suffered the indignity of having every single one of her teeth bashed in by persecutors of Christians. Apollonia was supposed to be burned toothless at the stake but instead launched herself into the fire, an act pardoned by Saint Augustine, who noted the suicidal action of Apollonia’s leap and forgave her and similar martyred individuals, for they acted on God’s command. “Not through human caprice but on the command of God, not erroneously but through obedience,” Augustine wrote. The classical image of Apollonia was of a beautiful girl holding antique extractors in which a tooth was delicately grasped. She was the patron saint of dentistry, and David collected her prayer cards and medals the way he had collected coins as a kid. Adding to a collection always seemed to have a larger point, which could be appreciated even when he was the only one handing over the cash for the rounds of silver and tin stamped with the saint’s calm face, extractors aloft as her symbol of martyrdom.
When he found an Apollonia charm, he would bring it home in a folded brown bag and leave it on the kitchen table. Franny liked to examine them on her own. She would thread a piece of ribbon through the hoop at the top as if it was a necklace for display, holding it up to the light. Then she would place it back inside its paper bag for David to find later. He stored them on a high bookshelf in the living room.
Franny grew up with religion and occasionally observed its traditions. One cold evening, the two of them walked to a church down the hill and received the sign of the cross on their foreheads with ashes. She scrubbed hers off the next morning before work, but David could feel his own mark as if it was still a flame. He left it on for days, until it smudged and buried itself in the individual pores on his forehead, sinking grease in the furrows between his eyes, giving him the brindled pallor of a man carved from stone.
23.
DAVID PREFERRED to brew a pot of coffee and leave it to fill the house with its scent, but such a move required that he find the coffeemaker and the filters and then the coffee itself. The police officer had left the instant grounds out, and David put them away. The coffeemaker was under the counter by the sink, and the filters were behind a line of cans in the pantry. He found the coffee in the freezer, rolled into a fist-size brick and secured with rubber bands. He had trouble gripping the coffee spoon with gloves on, so he removed one glove and pressed his bare hand on the countertop. His bruised body and brain were confused by the darkness outside and the smell of coffee. It had felt as if it was still evening until he started making the coffee, when it began to feel like morning. He didn’t have a clock to check.
Regardless, it made no sense to leave the house, whatever hour it was. He tried to rationalize his way back into bed with the fact that he could rest underneath Franny’s coat, which smelled strongly of a wet rock, though the scent surely had already mixed and diluted on the bed with David’s own scents from the previous days. It seemed important to take a shower, or sleep and wait for the sun. The coffee brewed and dripped, and he thought about drinking it in the shower or pouring it into a pouch so he could have it while lying in bed. The temptations occurred as he blew the steam from his first cup.
In the days when he would get up early and go to work, he took his coffee to enjoy in the shower, a wet warm surrounded by warm wet. Sometimes he sat down on the tiled floor, his back against the shower’s glass door. Drops of water would splash the surface of the coffee. It had been a secret pleasure.
David missed the smell of sanitized dental tools mingling with coffee. He would have his hygienist come in an hour before him each day and prepare the place, laying the clean tools out on metal trays at each station, covering each tray with a sanitized plastic bib. The smell was of new metal and smooth plastic, the opposite of the ground teeth and dry socket rot that would drift through the office throughout the day.
He had enjoyed his peaceful half hour before patients arrived. The front desk assistant would put on the easy-listening station and David walked through his office, sipping coffee from a thermos and observing each room, enjoying its spotless smell. Sometimes he sat in the examination chair and visualized himself as one of his own patients. He reclined the chair fully and saw the patterns within the ceiling tile. He listened in on the receptionist talking to one of the hygienists about college football.
It was hard to admit that those days were over, but it was hard to admit that any days were over, that the days themselve
s didn’t stretch like pulled taffy and sag to the floor.
He wiped a layer of dust from the old coffeemaker. The machine had been a wedding gift and was the type with a removable top portion for easy cleaning. When David was dumping the filter in the trash, he saw a piece of paper taped on the back of the reservoir. The paper was half the size of an index card and featured typewritten words:
YOUR FATE IS SEALED WITH GLUE I HAVE BOILED IN A VAT. I SLOPPED IT ON AN ENVELOPE AND MAILED IT TO YOUR MOTHER’S WOMB.
David pulled the taped card off the coffeemaker and turned it over. The card bore no other marks, besides a lightened patch on the upper edge where the Scotch tape made contact with the paper. The card seemed old enough to have been sold with the appliance, but its condition could also have been attributed to resting on the hot surface. The edges of the card were crisp, without even a rounded darkening suggesting that they had been used to excavate underneath a fingernail.
David thought about calling the police, but then he imagined handing them the piece of paper, explaining that he had found it while making coffee. He decided that such a discovery would be best dealt with privately. Likely the threat had been stuck on by whoever gave them the gift, as a joke or not as a joke, but still beyond David’s concern years after the fact. He could not begin to think about the number of things that were truly beyond his concern, the hundreds of thousands of things.
The house was a void. Its dark hallway beckoned. Curtains in the living room stood like sentry ghosts. Each room featured an obvious kind of silence that suggested invisible occupants holding their collective breath. He folded the tape over on the card and pressed the adhesive to the paper surface. He placed the card facedown on the counter, put his glove back on, and opened the door.
24.
SNOW MELTED through the seams in David’s thin shoes and soaked ice water into Franny’s socks and between his toes. When he walked down the driveway, he saw that Franny’s car was gone from its usual spot in front of the garage. Someone had taken it and left behind an expanse of gravel and murk in the middle of the snow. He walked down the hill and toward the main road. A runner nodded as he passed, wearing what looked like a full wet suit under shorts.
Walking, David thought of himself as a dotted arc on a map of the world, dropping a plumb line toward some sandy beach. He imagined moving south as a tired crow might fly, over woods, stopping to rest on power lines overlooking gas stations. If David were a crow, he would stay away from trees, preferring man-made structures. He would be a friendly kind of crow, brave enough to communicate with other crows. They could hop around a dish of warm water. The snow would melt to a filthy slush around the Mason-Dixon Line and give way to the clean, sun-drenched variety of winter he imagined was general in Florida. He would be a crow on the sand. His warmer downy feathers would molt and float away as he flew.
The streets were empty, save for a few late-night or early-morning runners and the rare sweep of headlights. He saw dead leaves on the trees for what felt like the first time, though of course he had seen dead leaves in the past. He tried to think. The leaves were speckled with wilt. They hung from the trees like leather pelts.
The laundromat was the only occupied place. Its lights cast a men’s-room shade of yellow over the street. David went into the warm room and took a seat by the door. He remembered that very laundromat from his childhood. Once a year, his mother would take down all the curtains and bundle them up and spend the afternoon watching them spin in the industrial-size washing machines. His sister was there for a few trips, quiet in her stroller, reaching for David’s outstretched finger with the arm that wasn’t tucked inside her corduroy coveralls. The laundromat was the same as it had always been. The brand of detergent stocked in the automatic dispenser had changed, but the dispenser itself remained original to the space. The old pinball machine remained, wherein the silver balls had been tasked with escaping a haunted house.
Eight carts had been lined up against a wall of dryers, their wheels locked. The carts were filled with laundry. Another person was working on them, a woman, older than David by a wide margin and wearing enough layers of earth-toned clothing that the edges of her body were unclear. All of the carts seemed to belong to her. There was a small child curled up in one of them, sleeping. The woman took a sweater out of one basket and pulled it on over the two sweaters she already wore. She didn’t look at David, and their silence became an energy. He removed his shoes and socks and padded barefoot to a dryer. He put them in the machine. “Warming up,” he said.
Her face was like a loaf of bread. “Back already,” she said.
“What’s that?”
She walked across the line of spinning dryers, peering into each. Opening one, she dug in, pulled out a pair of socks, and tossed them to David. MARLON was stitched into the fabric of the sock’s cuff. “Welcome home,” she said.
He put the socks on. They were warm. “What’s your name?”
She extracted a T-shirt from under the child’s bare feet in the cart and tossed it into a washing machine. “Shelly.”
“Who’s Marlon?”
Clearing her throat, she folded a sweater and moved it to another basket. She rolled a basket to the side, slipped around it, and leaned toward him, plucking a piece of lint from his blue and ivory ski jacket. “Marlon’s not around,” she said, tucking the lint in her breast pocket and returning to her folding task. The shirts she worked on seemed generally mismatched to one another, like she had cleared a clearance rack at the Catholic ladies’ thrift store down the street. As she folded a long-sleeved shirt, David saw that it was slashed down the breast in a vertical line starting from under the collar and terminating five inches lower.
“It’s cold out,” he said, digging in his pockets for quarters. The skin on the back of his hand rubbed raw on the frozen fabric of his jeans.
Shelly stood close enough that he could tell she was chewing fruit-flavored gum. Pushing the empty quarter tray halfway, she smacked the dryer’s front panel with a practiced palm. The machine began to mumble with activity. She regarded David sidelong and thumped the center of his chest with the heel of her hand.
He coughed. “Nice trick.”
“It’s exclusively a night trick.” She took a pair of pants out of another dryer and pulled them on under her long brown skirt. When she tugged down the skirt’s waist to button the pants, he saw that she was wearing at least two more pairs. The waists of the pants layered in circles like rings in a tree. She readjusted her skirt and focused again on her baskets, consolidating clothes by color, picking out a sweater that featured a wide dark stain around the collar and tossing it into a machine that was already full of water.
“It’s too cold to be out,” she said. “Stay where it’s warm and safe.”
The water tinted pink around the sweater soaking alone in the wash. “You’ll have a hard time wearing that one,” David said.
“Think of a time you’ve felt warm and unsafe,” she said. “Try to think of such a time.” As she spoke, she took a batch of clean clothes from a clicking dryer, draped a warm blanket over the child in the cart, and loaded the rest into an empty cart. She rolled the cart to the high folding table, and she ducked underneath to find a plastic step stool. She held the table and stepped onto the stool, then crouched to the rolling cart and began transferring handfuls of jeans and shirts and sweaters and blouses to the table. Organizing the clothes in a loose pile, she took a pair of slacks from the top. She stretched the slacks between two hands and smoothed them with her palm, then leaned in close and examined the fabric. There was a scorch mark on the fly, which she ignored, focusing on a stray thread that emerged from a pocket.
David watched her fold the clothes. He looked out the window and at the clock on the wall. After a while he opened the dryer that contained his shoes and socks. The canvas on his shoes was hot and wet and smelled like pancakes, but Franny’s rust-ringed socks were dry. He removed Marlon’s socks and tucked them atop the machine.
&nbs
p; Shelly was folding a slashed-up shirt as carefully as the rest, buttoning it to the neck and holding the collar taut.
“Thanks for the free dry,” David said, taking a seat to put his shoes on. “Are you here most nights?”
She lifted her eyes from her work and saw him lacing up his shoes, hunched over himself in the plastic chair, his head tipped toward her, face reddening against the strain as if he was holding his breath or trying not to expel gas, and she laughed at the sight of him. She held the counter to steady herself and laughed. The noise startled him. He stood and tried to back up at the same time, tripping sideways over the chair. It made her laugh harder, the sight of him holding the chair and tripping across his untied shoes and finally staggering half laced out of the laundromat. It would be foolish to be afraid of the woman’s laughter, but David could easily put reason to feeling surprised and unsettled. He admitted to these emotions in the dark and limped home.
25.
IT WAS STILL FULLY NIGHT when David returned to his street. His wet shoes had frozen again, their trailing laces gathering a snowy coating like a naked wick in wax. The warmth in Franny’s old socks had slipped away and the bones in his feet were a stiff, burning cold. He kicked the shoes off the moment he reached his porch steps. He had fashioned a grounding wire for the doorknob earlier that day, and now he safely tapped the frame with his socked foot. He detected an energy, but when he reached for the knob, he felt no shock and opened the door. Behind him, a pair of joggers crested the final hill and held hands as they navigated the icy road together.
