by Amelia Gray
He still had the laundromat’s scent on his skin, an odor that was supposedly the chemical essence of mountain air. His empty home smelled like coffee and furniture polish and paper. In the entry, the grandfather clock gave a few easy ticks and stopped again. The flaps of a cardboard box at the base of the stairs rustled in the opening door’s breeze, and David remembered the urine-soaked clothes inside. He emptied the mess out on the porch and tossed the soiled box down the basement’s dark stairs.
Upstairs, he removed his clothes and stood naked under the bathroom’s warm light. He scooped the last of Franny’s eye cream from its jar, which was so small that only the tip of his smallest finger fit inside. He spread the thimbleful of cream on his chest, where it warmed pleasantly. Inside a hinged pot he found a sparkling paste she might have used on her eyes or lips. It was an ivory color, and when he spread it on his mouth it tasted like mineral oil and pencil shavings. Wrapped around the base of the hinged pot was a thin piece of paper that reeled out like an old ticker tape when he loosened its sticky tab. It read:
I WILL CROSS-STITCH AN IMAGE OF YOUR FUTURE HOME BURNING. I WILL HANG THIS IMAGE OVER YOUR BED WHILE YOU SLEEP.
Released from its anchor, the paper sprang free and curled into the sink. One end was still attached to the fragile hinged jar, and he picked it off with his fingernail, flattening the thin page on the counter and considering it. His mother would buy cross-stitch patterns but never begin work on them, even at the women’s home, where she had a seemingly endless span of time for artistic and other projects.
David considered the possibility that the threat had been included with the product from the manufacturer as a way to distract women from the amount of money they were spending on mineral oil and pencil shavings. Wiping the stinging product from his lips with the back of his hand, he wrapped the threat around the sink’s faucet.
He got into bed but felt a low-level awareness of the threat curled up in the bathroom. He pulled a stack of magazines from the bedside table into bed with him, making a line between his body and the bathroom. The magazines and Franny’s copper-colored coat insulated him, and he tucked his legs toward his chest. He imagined the words and images in the magazines rising up like a wall.
When he switched off the bedroom light, his eyes adjusted to the green glow of his electric shaver in the bathroom and he remembered how Franny’s body shone when she came out of the bathroom to join him in bed at night, her skin a reflected emerald shade that inspired in him a vision of her rising from some stagnant pond and approaching him, robe flowing, eyes empty. Replaying the vision in a loop, he fell asleep and had no dreams.
26.
DETECTIVE CHICO rang the front bell and waited. “There’s a grounding wire on your door,” he said pleasantly when David opened up. Chico tapped the wire with his boot. “Was this your doing?”
A woman stood next to Chico. She was bundled up. “This is Dr. Walls,” said Chico. “She is a mental health professional.”
The woman held out her gloved hand.
“Hello,” David said, shaking it.
“Don’t worry, sir,” said Dr. Walls, squinting at him, removing her winter gloves though she was still outside. She extended her bare hand, and David shook it again. “I’m not here to commit you.”
“We came by to have another talk about how you’re doing,” said Chico.
David wondered at the condition of Chico’s teeth.
“Dr. Walls would like to know you. There’s no harm in inviting us in.”
“It’s cold out here,” Dr. Walls said, holding one bare hand with the other. She had the kind of pale skin that turned translucent in the winter.
David tracked the progression of her sluggish blood. He opened the door wider. “I could offer you some tea,” he said.
“You could offer and we could accept,” said Dr. Walls.
David led the way to the kitchen. The card with the first threat was still facedown on the kitchen counter, and he opened the silverware drawer and slid it underneath the butter knives. He removed a spoon and closed the drawer.
“Sugar?” he asked.
“Yes please,” said Dr. Walls, who had picked up a newspaper from the kitchen table and was holding it close to her face. She unstuck a ballpoint pen that had been taped to the window frame over the table.
“You’ve got your sugar spoon all ready to go,” Chico said.
David felt he could trust Chico about as much as he could trust any police detective who had made multiple trips to his home. David put the spoon in his robe pocket, set the pot of water on the range, and took the box of tea out from the pantry along with the bag of sugar.
“How have you been feeling?” Chico asked.
Placing the sugar on the counter, David slipped some tea bags into his robe pocket, opened the cabinet, and took down three cups and three saucers. He arranged each cup on a saucer and picked up the bag of sugar. “I’m fine. I went on a walk,” he said, unrolling the bag. Inside, a scrap of paper peeked above the sugar line like a prize in a cereal box. David held the bag close to his chest and dropped his free hand into his pocket.
“Very good,” said Chico. “I was worried you would be cooped up all season.”
“Laying eggs,” Dr. Walls said, rubbing her eyes.
David clutched the sugar spoon in his pocket. “My wife’s car is gone.”
“Yes,” Chico said. “The bank confiscated the vehicle due to nonpayment.” He tapped his shirt pocket and reached inside. “I can give you the number of the appropriate department to contact with your grievances.”
“It doesn’t matter,” David said. “I mean, if that settled the debt, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t like that car.”
Dr. Walls made a mark on the newspaper. “The light in here,” she said.
The water on the stove pimpled with the pending boil. The spoon was cutting a ridge into David’s palm and he loosened his grip and brought it out of his pocket. “Thank you for letting me know about the car,” he said. He used the spoon to dig into the sugar mound, uncovering more of the paper. There was a word on it, a sentence. He turned his body, placing himself between Chico and the bag.
“We’ve been talking to a few coworkers of your wife,” Chico said. “Nobody said anything against you, but they all did have the same issue.”
“An issue.” David dug around the piece of paper, trying to make unnoticeable motions, careful not to rip the page.
“They all mentioned the fact that you’re never around. A few of them joked that they didn’t think you really existed. Only one of them claimed to have even met you.”
“They came over and cut my hair three weeks ago.”
Chico looked at Dr. Walls, who set aside the newspaper and produced a pad of sticky notes. She wrote something on one. The water came to a full boil while David was reaching his hand into the sugar bag to grasp the corner of the paper. He kept his back square between the bag and the detective.
“Who cut your hair?” Chico asked.
The page in the sugar was not a card or a strip, but a full piece of notebook paper. When he had unearthed enough of it, David closed the top edge of the page in his fist and pulled it out whole. The action spilled sugar on the counter, his robe, the floor, the range. The sugar blackened and burned under the pot of boiling water. In one motion, he stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket and leaned down to blow on the smoke rising from the burning sugar. “It was a whole group of them,” he said. He felt the grains of sugar coating his hand and wiped it on his chest. “They seemed like nice girls. Maybe they were students. They were all young.”
“The girls cut your hair.”
David poured water into the cups and spooned sugar into one. Steam blushed the spoon’s edge. “One cut my toenails. I told them all not to bother, but they said they were here to do it as a favor to my wife.” The threat felt warm in his pocket.
“Could I get their names?” Chico asked.
“I don’t know their names,” David said. He rea
soned that if he had left the threat in the sugar, it might have dissolved and vanished. It was too important to be ruled by the normal properties of paper. Taking hold of it had been important.
Dr. Walls was beside him. “David, your hair is past your ears.”
“It was longer,” David said, handing her a cup. He touched the fuzzed nape of his neck. “You wouldn’t believe.”
“Where do you keep the tea?” she asked.
David patted the front of his robe, produced one of the bags, and dropped it into her cup. He had the sense that this woman was here to trick him. He didn’t trust the things she said or the way she watched him. He crossed his arms, covering his pockets so that she couldn’t reach in. The woman went back to sit at the table in the seat where guests sat, the one without a place mat. She was trying to be polite. David slipped the other tea bags into the other cups.
“I’m sorry we’re asking so many questions,” Chico said, accepting his tea. “I’m sure you want to get to the bottom of this as much as we do.”
“Important items have special properties,” David said.
“You have been so helpful,” said Dr. Walls.
“I believe I’ve maintained a tradition of cooperation with members of local law enforcement and public works operatives,” he said. “I believe that civilians ought not fear the guiding hand of the state.” He lifted the cup to his lips.
“What was that page you pulled out of the bag of sugar?” Chico asked.
David effused a small amount of bile into his tea.
“Good God,” said Dr. Walls.
“What is your name?” David asked the woman. He wiped his face with his sleeve. “What is your full name?”
The woman’s teacup rattled on its saucer, though she was touching neither cup nor saucer. He saw her leg jiggling the table from underneath. “Marie Walls,” the woman said.
“Marie,” he said. “I’m sorry about all this.”
“It’s all right, David.”
“I haven’t been the same since my wife left.”
“David,” she said.
“I hate to state the obvious,” said Chico, “but you vomited into that cup after I asked you a question.”
“David,” Marie said. Her face elongated before him. Her eyebrows went first, pinching a delicate fold into her forehead. Her eyelids snapped up to follow and she tipped her head back slightly to accommodate the movement. She observed him from behind her cheekbones.
David was holding the paper protectively in his pocket. “It was nothing,” he said. “It was a piece of the bag that fell into the sugar. I felt ashamed to serve the sugar to guests with a piece of the bag loose inside.” He attempted a religious convert kind of gaze with the detective, but Chico’s eye contact was stronger. It was clear that in a past life the detective had been a phone booth beside an empty highway. David felt the page wilting in his warm hand. The sugar stuck to his palm.
From the corner of his eye he could see that Marie was nodding. “Such a good host,” she said.
“A good host,” Chico said. He was making the kind of eye contact employed by officers of the law. He had once been a mechanical crane that hauled beams to the top of a skyscraper.
David tipped his ruined tea out in the sink, took the paper out of his pocket, and laid it on the table. Chico stood beside him and read it aloud:
I WILL STRIP THE BARK FROM A TREE AND MAKE YOU NEW CLOTHES. YOU WILL WEAR THESE CLOTHES AS YOU WANDER THE FOREST FOR FOURTEEN YEARS. YOUR FATHER WILL DIE WATCHING THE SKY AND YOUR MOTHER WILL FORGET YOUR NAME.
Chico stopped reading, but David could tell he was looking over it again, memorizing it. The man had no visible reaction beyond his jaw moving slightly down and to the left behind his closed mouth. It was enough for David to know that he should not have trusted either of his visitors.
“I don’t know what to make of it,” David said.
“There are more like this?”
“No,” David said. “I found it there before. I was afraid to move it.”
“I should take it with me,” Chico said, pulling on his gloves and holding one out for the threat.
“What’s happening?” Marie asked, bracing herself to stand.
“Official police business,” Chico said.
David held the threat close to his chest. “There’s no police business. I can’t let you have this.”
Chico made no initial response, but his jaw moved again within his closed mouth. He was tonguing the surface of his molars. He seemed exceptionally calm. “This could be considered evidence,” he said.
“There’s no reason why it would be. My wife was probably playing a prank on me, and she forgot about it.” David worried that he was talking too fast. Correcting the error would be simple enough but would require talking more to the man, who was probing the grooves in his teeth as if they contained an illuminating secret. “I usually don’t take sugar in my tea,” David said, slower, moderated, trying his best to sound reasonable by employing a reasonable voice, “so there was no reason for me to look here. I don’t usually take sugar.”
“This could be an important piece of evidence,” said Chico.
Marie had abandoned her teacup and stood by Chico’s side. “Goodness,” she said, replacing her thin glasses with thicker ones and reading the page. “Classic transferred umbilical addiction. ICD-10 F20. The coupled individual fears the opposing parental unit and conspires to destroy him or her.”
“There’s no reason why you wouldn’t allow us to take this,” Chico said.
“Or it’s a ruse,” Marie said.
“You’ve been nothing but helpful so far,” Chico added. “Your attitude has helped to ease my mind regarding your status in this case.”
David folded the paper in thirds. “Ease your mind.”
“You’re a person of interest, after all. That’s normal procedure. You’re only helping yourself by cooperating. But really, right now you’re getting your fingerprints all over what could be a key piece of evidence.”
“This could be something my wife wrote as a joke,” David said. “Probably years ago.”
“David,” Marie said. Her face was the color and shape of an oblong shell, a shaved almond, a cuttlefish bone on which a parakeet might smooth its beak.
David leaned forward and gently pressed his cheek against hers. It was satisfying, though she felt nothing like an almond. “I understand your concern, but I’m beginning to grow worried for the physical object,” he said, cheek to cheek with Marie. “I believe it is within my legal right to keep it.”
“I think you should come talk to me sometime,” she said, whispering, into his ear.
Chico exhaled through his nose hard enough that David felt the blast on his face. He took a step back. “It is currently within your legal right,” Chico said. “I don’t enjoy the fact that you’re making that decision, though.”
David held the wilted paper aloft. “This object has sentimental value.”
“Understood,” Chico said. “We’re going to compromise.”
“Compromise is the evidence of a civil class,” Marie said.
Chico produced a pocket camera. “May I?”
David looked first at the camera and then at Marie. He held the threat in his palms, protecting it, while Chico took his picture. Chico put his camera away and handed David a ziplock sandwich bag from his pocket.
“Keep it in there,” he said. “Do you have a stapler?”
David produced one from the junk drawer and Chico stapled the seal with three quick shots.
“We’ll head to the salon again. I’m sure we’ll find the ones that came by your home.”
They both shook David’s hand on the way out, and Marie stepped over the pile of frozen clothes on the porch. On their way to the car, Chico touched her arm once above the elbow. “It may not be wise for David to have a private session just yet,” he said.
“It would be a safe space for him.”
He opened her car door, stepped around the b
ack, and got into the driver’s seat. “Maybe soon.” As they backed out of the driveway, Chico leveraged his arm against her seat while Marie watched the garage in front of her shrink back into the forest. The garage looked like a second house. She could see one pair of old wooden French doors propped slightly ajar by a substantial wasp’s nest that grew between the doors and held them in place.
Inside, David examined the threat. Specks of sugar had fallen to the bottom of the sandwich bag. He thought about the absolute fact that a great number of details had gone unnoticed. He reheated the pot of water, filled his empty cup with sugar. The cup was full to its brim with sugar, and he had to put it in the sink when he poured the hot water in. The sugar sank under the liquid and clouded it, and David stirred it with a small spoon and blew across the surface before sipping the murky, sweet mixture, his lips pursed, his tongue lashing forward. He was a hummingbird. He held the cup at the center of his body, over his heart, wincing as the cup’s contents splashed over the lip and onto his fingers.
27.
THE YEARS had made Franny literal. It got to the point that when she found something funny, she would say so without laughing. David didn’t mind it. He appreciated a literal woman.
Some winter, years before, they had watched a man struggle up the icy hill in front of their home. He plunged silver picks into the ice like an Alpine climber. The man slipped and howled as he fell, digging his pick into his own hand. He slid down the ice in a bloodied mass. Franny smiled, watching. “That was funny,” she said. She always asked to see comedies when they went to the movies. He would turn toward her during the funniest parts to find her bobbing her head in agreement. It was as if the characters were explaining the concept of humor to her and she was indicating that she understood. She moved her lips at the movie theater without making a sound.
The only time she would really laugh was when David tried to compare her job to the one he had just been forced to leave. The first time he tried, they were finishing a bottle of wine, standing at the kitchen counter.
