Threats

by Amelia Gray

  “It’s in there somewhere. Think about the objects you were looking at, the way you were dressed. The paramedics said they found you in your robe and slippers. A flannel pajama set. Think about the food you ate that morning. The coroner’s office said they found berries in her. Were there berries in the house? Picture yourself opening the refrigerator and looking inside.”

  He did as he was told but could see only a more recent picture, of a heel of bread and a carton of orange juice, two bottles of beer. The food featured thriving mold spores. “I don’t know,” he said. “Orange juice.” He heard a wasp and cupped his hand over his left ear.

  “Typical distressed transference,” Marie said. “ISV-2034. Your brain has wrapped a comfortable piece of fabric around where long-term memories are stored. I can help you remember. I’d like to try a process with you called hypnotic induction.”

  “You want to put me in a trance?”

  “I think it can allow us to go back to the place before the event. It can help you feel more connected with your wife. Have you ever experienced the power of induction? We can learn so much from so little.”

  The lid on the paint can popped off when he shook it, and he bent down with some effort to pick it up. “I don’t have time at the moment. Perhaps another day.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll throw in a few gratis sessions of bad-habit elimination or pain alleviation. We could get you over that thing with the doors.”

  “Another time. Thank you for your kind offer. Have you seen the plywood?”

  “No rush. During the season, I get some research done. I think the word ‘you’ has been linked with more devastating sentences than any other in the English language. But it’s possible that ‘love’ is worse. I’m feeling it out. It requires some reading.” She tapped a stack of anthologies and novels.

  David saw a phone book in the stack. “Fine, that’s fine,” he said. “I’ve been unknowingly funding research. Do patients come in here? I’ve never seen anyone.”

  “I’m still getting the word out. It takes a while to build a common base. Meanwhile, I expect my findings to be published by the end of the year. That should help draw people in, I think.”

  “Plywood?”

  She pointed toward a stack leaned up against a far wall. “Mind the wasps,” she said.

  The wood looked sodden from across the room, but the boards were dry and fused together on closer inspection. He pried the top one from the stack. He coughed and hefted the dusty board up, spreading his arms, leaning back against the surprising weight.

  “I’ll be going now,” he said, maneuvering sideways, arms spread against the wood grain, the board pressed against his body. It smelled like turpentine and rot. “Good luck with your research. Thank you for being in my garage. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “I’ll be here,” she said. The door closed between them. David saw a piece of paper wedged under the door. He leaned the plywood panel against the building and dislodged the page. It had been wrapped around wasp corpses, which fell to the ground, separated from and followed by their fluttering wings. The paper read:

  IN THAT HALF SECOND WHEN YOU REACHED FOR THE DOOR, I CAME UP BESIDE YOU, DRILLED A HOLE IN YOUR HEEL, AND ATTACHED A TUBE THROUGH WHICH I AM CURRENTLY COLLECTING YOUR BONE MARROW. IT IS GOING INTO A BAG. I AM GOING TO SELL IT.

  David twisted around to examine his heel. He looked back toward the house and into the ash trees behind the yard. He balled up the note and kept it in his fist as he walked toward the house.

  The house was quiet. David added the balled-up note to the collection in the silverware drawer. He went through the house, touching each piece of exposed metal he could find. He touched doorknobs, window sashes, picture frames, electronic equipment peripherals, door hinges, wall-plate screws, light fixtures, and vents. He put his palms on the water heater. He touched faucet handles, smoke detector battery connect points, individual razor blades, numbers on clock faces, towel racks, and zipper pulls. He imagined all the metal in the house melted in a cauldron. The mixed alloys would create a speckled bubble, like a stone he once found on the beach and kept in his jacket pocket for years, touching it gently with the tips of his fingers, until one day he put on his jacket and reached for the stone and it was gone.

  44.

  THERE WAS A RACCOON in the entry hall. It startled David because it was roughly the size of a healthy baby and was plundering the glass-walled base of the grandfather clock. David thought for a moment that it was a baby, there in the shadows. It was bigger than a breadbox. Its fur was slick. Its paws fumbled and grasped. The raccoon knew it could get into the grandfather clock. It was not bothered that David was standing very close, though it did stop and turn toward the light when he opened the door again. David wondered idly at the percentage chance that it was rabid. It seemed likely. Everything seemed likely. He closed the door and walked toward the kitchen with his back against the wall, giving the raccoon a wide berth should it try to leap for his face. Once the door was closed, the animal turned again to its scrambling task.

  The kitchen was colder than the rest of the house, and David saw that the window over the kitchen table was still empty from where Samson had removed the broken glass and frame. Leaves and dirt were scattered on the table. The raccoon had eaten most of a pear in a bowl before knocking the bowl to the floor, where it split into three ceramic pieces, curved like the cupped palms of hands. David pictured the startled raccoon making a run for the entry hall. Everything made sense. The empty space where the window should have been gave the kitchen the feeling of being outdoors, as if the kitchen had sprung organically from the ground. Woven branches created natural furniture and older trees formed a refrigerator. All of it was cold, the way it was meant to be cold at that time of year in that part of the world. It felt natural. Still, it wasn’t safe to have an empty place where a pane of glass had once gone completely unnoticed. The house could fill with raccoons. If Franny returned, she would assume the place had been abandoned.

  When David returned to the entryway, he saw that the raccoon had successfully opened the grandfather clock and was rooting around its base. The clock’s pendulum brushed against the animal’s body and the gold chains draped over it like ornaments on a woman’s coat. The clock’s glass walls extended almost to the floor, as if the raccoon had put himself on display in a museum.

  45.

  NEXT MESSAGE. From, phone number three three zero, seven two three, eight nine two three. Received, January thirteenth at nine-thirty-two a.m.

  Hello, sweet dear. They’re letting me call. I’m sorry to bother you. There is an issue with the bill that you must come by to address. I haven’t seen your darling face in so long, darling. My life, my angel on earth. My lovely. Do you miss me? I miss you. I remember when you were a younger man. It’s good to remember. Where are you? I’ve been here all along.

  Message erased. Next message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.

  Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.

  Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star.

  First saved message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.

  Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.

  Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star.

  First saved message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.

  Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.

  Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star. To ind
icate your choice, press the number of the option you wish to select. Whenever you need more information about the options, press zero for help. You can interrupt these instructions at any time by pressing a key to make your selection.

  46.

  AILEEN did think of the salon as her child. The salon was needy, like her grown children out of state, old enough to know better, calling at all hours, always finding new ways to break down.

  After a long day at work, rush hour in the small town was the worst. It was chaos compressed into the smallest space possible. Getting caught in traffic meant sitting through three long lights and a busy train crossing. Aileen sat at the first light with her chin hooked over the steering wheel, squinting forward.

  It had been one of the longer days in a line of long days. One of the girls had accidentally sprayed keratin treatment solution into the eyes of one of the salon’s best clients, who ran for the shampooing station, hollering and scrubbing at her face, grasping blindly, trying to operate the sink controls. Aileen calmed the woman down and then had to take the afternoon interviewing for a new aesthetician. The candidates gawked and showed too much tooth. She asked one woman what she would do if confronted with the morning’s product accident and the woman jutted her chin forward and said she had no clue.

  Aileen resisted turning the rearview mirror toward herself. She knew the outside light was highlighting her face in a way that would define the age spots and give her wrinkles a deeper shadow. She could see the furrow deepening between her eyes, even under the carefully applied layers of pro-mineral foundations and powders. Her new year’s resolution had been to be brave and give up the syringes of filler, so accessible in a drawer in the treatment room. They were full of toxins, of course, but that never upset her—she hated that furrow in a way that made toxins seem wholly appropriate, ideal even, a chemical weapon for an enemy combatant. It was a war, she reasoned, while convincing herself to take the injection. Afterward, she would observe her smoothed face and feel ashamed, cowed, cowardly, ineffective, rationalizing. In bed at night, she imagined the toxins seeping into her heart.

  She was stuck at the longest light in town, longer for rush hour, allowing northbound traffic to escape the city square. A city bus inched along within the line, and Aileen examined its passengers as they advanced one by one. There was a lineup of heads facing away, a young girl slumping, an older man reaching for the bell cord. Behind the man, Aileen saw Frances.

  It was such a natural feeling, so clearly Frances, that Aileen’s first thought was that Frances didn’t ride the bus. Yet there she was, smiling, touching her hair as if she was aware that she was being watched by a friend, a favorable eye, one that had missed her. It took a moment for Aileen to place Frances within the timeline of events. As she did, Aileen’s hand lifted to the car’s windshield. She pounded on the glass, startling pedestrians in her line of sight as she called out, fist against the windshield, calling toward Frances on the bus, who looked like a photograph now, hand frozen in her hair, obscuring her face, a prop of a woman in a moving vehicle, a mean joke but a good one, Aileen near tears with laughter or near laughter with tears, the two states of emotion so close that they shared a border.

  Aileen reached for her door, tugged the handle, found herself locked in, and banged on her driver-side window with an open palm. The bus was moving then, pulling away. She fumbled with the lock until it released, and she tried to step out of her vehicle but was restrained by the seat belt, so many things holding her back. She screamed at the seat belt and the bus, threw the emergency brake and unbuckled, and was finally out of the car, waving her arms at the driver, leaping over the curb into the grass bordering it, trying to get his attention, though he had already progressed through the intersection and was merging into the turn lane and was gone.

  Drivers behind Aileen had given up honking and began to maneuver around her car, rolling down their windows to yell at her on the sidewalk. She could hear their noises as they drove away. A man approached her and said some words, but she did not move from the curb. She watched the corner where the bus carrying Frances had vanished, and then she sat down on the sidewalk and twisted her knuckles into the concrete. Her skin curled back and bled like all skin bleeds.

  47.

  THAT WINTER featured the kind of cold people forget about during the rest of the year. Franny would haul the wood and David would make a fire and both of them would promise themselves that they would always remember the feeling.

  David remembered another such winter, when they lost power and burned old greeting cards in a bowl for light. Franny had kept the cards in a shoebox but spoke often of throwing them out to eliminate clutter. There were yearly birthday greetings from her parents, seeming store-bought and inauthentic despite unique signatures. They burned nicely. Franny found letters on fine stationery from a great-aunt long gone. The aunt would conserve postage by fitting a year’s worth of news into one letter, writing on all sides of all accessible space, a postscript on the back of the envelope. David and Franny read each piece of correspondence aloud before burning it. The ink made the flames glow green and blue.

  They swore that night that they would better appreciate the warmer months for the way they forgot their bodies. David remembered that during an illness he swore that he would remember the swollen and aching feeling in his chest and legs and throat, that he would appreciate the days when he could breathe without coughing or walk without stumbling. Then those months of wellness and heat came again, and he did forget, as they eventually forgot that winter when it was gone.

  48.

  ONE AFTERNOON, years before, all the juice glasses in the cupboard shattered simultaneously. The sound it made was of a single powerful firework followed by a garbage boat advancing slowly through ice. David had been out front, painting their mailbox, and he assumed it was children rolling a large stone or a small car onto the thawing pond at the end of the road. It was one of the early sunny afternoons during that first year David and Franny had the house to themselves.

  Franny was the first to see. She had been in the living room, packing books for storage, taking her time to open each and looking for envelopes full of money. She wouldn’t put it past David’s mother, though the woman had never mentioned such a possibility during her brief meetings with her daughter-in-law and in fact hadn’t been in the house in years.

  When the glass broke, Franny dropped a book pertaining to the travels of the saints. The force had blown open the kitchen cabinets, and she could see that each level was layered with shards. She took a step into the kitchen and onto a thin layer of glass. It was clear that moving her bare foot would drive the glass farther in, and so she existed on the glass in a way that was simultaneously precarious and painless. She called for David.

  The thick tumblers at the base of the cabinet were crumbled into sparkling chunks. Glass dust lined the counters and floor, varying from tooth- to palm-size. The room was silent, as if the shards held a power to absorb sound. Franny opened her mouth and closed it without speaking to David, who was standing in the doorway of the far side of the kitchen. He ran around the side of the house and in through the front door. She was too far away to reach and so he laid his heavy coat on the floor, stepped carefully on it, and guided Franny down to sit. He put his arms around her and dragged her out of the kitchen. Then he brought his old dental examination light up from the basement and spent the evening tweezing glass from his wife’s feet, dabbing the cuts with isopropyl alcohol, depositing the glass onto a plant saucer he had found on the front porch. She cried a little at first and then got over it and read to him from his old saints book while he worked on her.

  There had been no movement of the earth, no discernible change in pressure. An unknown explosion, and then broken glass. A few wineglasses belonging to Franny’s parents came away with hairline fractures, suggesting that the blast must have had a low epicenter.

  Franny was convinced that someone had entered the house while David was painting the mailbox. She held
his shoulder and told him that there had been an intruder, that the intruder had obviously entered through the front door and walked by Franny in the living room without her knowledge, a theory that made her feel as if the intruder had made actual physical contact with her, held her against a wall. She imagined the intruder was a small but powerful man who wore ski pants. The intruder would have stolen the ski pants from another home or perhaps a store, putting them on under his jeans and walking out, maybe even waving to the cashier, cavalier, his stocky legs insulated with stolen goods. Franny said that it was time to buy a security system. David considered the possibility of wiring the doors in the house and adding an electric current that could be broken and restored on a whim, by a machine. She talked about security cameras and motion detectors while he thought about the impartial entity observing them making love or eating breakfast.

  She felt nervous about intruders even when they learned that the destruction had been caused by the water heater in the basement exploding, the percussive force directly below the kitchen having the same effect of balancing their glassware on a timpani and striking the instrument with a mallet. While David pulled glass from her feet, she spoke of intruders and security, and the exploded heater quietly flooded the basement ankle-deep with hot water. The man who came to replace the heater suggested that they hire a cleaning crew before more papers were ruined and walls damaged, but the expense was too great and David removed some of the water with a bucket before allowing the rest to more or less drain out the door in the den, where the foundation dipped low enough to allow some liquid exodus. The basement had too many problems to fix. The flood was another in a long line.