Threats

by Amelia Gray

  57.

  LONG AFTER the other detectives had come and gone and the cleaning crew stopped in to empty the trash bins, Chico remained in his office, paging through the dream interpretation book. Marie had asked for a few statements of meaning for their next session. He looked up “tree,” “forest,” and “clothing.” In his notebook he wrote “transitional phase,” “searching for understanding of self,” “wasting energy,” and “perception of public self.” He could smell the pages of the old dream book and the rot in the walls around him. It was dark outside. He drew a line through “wasting energy.”

  Staying late that day was more of a moral requirement than an above-and-beyond kind of display. Chico had spent most of the day standing at the window and wondering which finger he could do without if he was forced to make that decision. He didn’t like the look of his left thumb, but it seemed the pinkie finger on his nondominant left hand had the lowest use profile of any. He examined the finger’s nail. It was a fine digit overall, but he could do without it if necessary.

  It seemed unfortunately possible that David was capable of doing harm to his wife. Chico had failed to discern a motive or means, but the possibility was there, which made it an option worth considering. Women seemed to make David particularly nervous. Though he did not seem to display a violent tendency, it was worth noting that a nervous individual was capable of performing surprising acts. And then there was the hereditary potential toward premeditated violence, stemming from the actions of David’s mother, which Chico maintained had not been an act of insanity, despite what a team of well-paid lawyers flew in to suggest. They convinced a jury of the woman’s peers of the insanity defense, which Chico had never suspected would transpire, given the woman’s total lack of insanity, in his opinion. On breaks from the trial he saw her doing her taxes, producing a small calculator from the pocket of her professional slacks.

  In the reception area, the child was cleaning the floor with a miniature push sweeper. The device whirred forward and back. The child was singing a song about friendship, which he had heard on the radio.

  Chico considered what he had learned about the woman Frances. She was tall and quiet, stubborn with coworkers, and distant with her husband. She kept secrets. It seemed equally possible that she was capable of doing harm to herself. A woman with the right personal motivation could walk into the cold and die. Stranger things had happened before and since.

  He walked into the reception area, where the child was emptying the reservoir of the sweeper into a garbage can. “I’ll walk you to the laundromat,” Chico said.

  “I believe I’ll stay here tonight,” the boy said.

  “Come on, someone will see you. CPS is down the hall.”

  “I have a change of clothes. I was looking forward to this all day.” The child moved his chair to reveal the sleeping bag under the desk. “You can’t force me to go with you. I have the paperwork around here somewhere.”

  “Your aunt will be worried.”

  “She knows all about it. She praises me for my dedication to my career.”

  “You should be going home and playing video games and eating popcorn, or whatever kids do.”

  “My aunt makes the point that next to a laundry room, there’s no safer place than a police station.” The child snapped the reservoir shut on the sweeping device and tucked it behind the desk. “Good night, Detective,” he said.

  Chico remembered a story about children who slept in a museum, and the bitter jealousy he had once felt toward those children. He shook his head at the child but put on his coat. “There’s sugar cereal in the break room,” he said.

  The child was already tucking himself in. “I know where the sugar cereal is,” he said from under the desk.

  58.

  MARIE BARELY FLINCHED when she felt a wasp sting the palm of her hand. “Bastard,” she said, waving it away.

  It was unfair to bees that stinging anything caused them to remove a portion of their own abdomen. Marie couldn’t imagine being so angry that she would be willing to give up part of herself like that. The wasps had it easy. They could punish without consequence.

  The wasp stings swelled less each time. The initial pain was the same, but the aftereffects were more manageable. She speculated that her natural allergy to the venom was slowly decreasing. She examined her palm.

  She rubbed her temples with her unstung fingertips as she read from a set of texts. She always got to the garage before sunrise, finding that the act of setting aside proper hours helped her focus her mind and streamline her efforts. That morning, she had watched David carrying plywood boards into the yard. He leaned them against individual windows and stepped back, seeming to estimate their scale against the frames. Marie raised her hand to him, and he returned the gesture in silence. She felt calm watching him, which surely meant that he was also feeling calm, even as he spent the rest of the morning driving nails into the frame of his home.

  She saw David’s action as the good sign that he still needed to feel some security in his world. When the loss of privacy was still felt, the self was still known to exist. She thought that was a good thing to think and had gotten as far as writing “privacy” in her notebook, plus three of its synonyms, when another wasp stung her. “Sweet bastard,” she said.

  59.

  DAVID NAILED THE LAST BOARD in place over the last window. His home was ready for any storm. On the four boards across the front of the house he sprayed I AM STILL HERE, as he had on the rear window, in text large enough to be seen from the street. Those who saw the boarded-up house thought of a number of things.

  A neighbor walked her dog in front of the house. She could see a man descending a stepladder in a robe and slippers, holding nails in his mouth, steadying himself on the ladder. It was the house she had seen on television, which meant this was the man police wanted to question, though she couldn’t remember why.

  The mailman parked his truck outside the house hours later and loaded up his saddlebag to walk the street. He saw the house and was reminded of a trip he had taken to the beach. He was just a child then and with his family. They had planned the trip for months, but when the winds and rain picked up, they had to leave early. He had watched the boys from the ice cream shop layering boards over the windows.

  A child walking home from the bus stop saw the boarded windows and stopped to stare. She had seen plenty of windows in her time but never any covered with long sheets of wood like the kind her father kept in the garage. This was a strange house, she knew, having once seen a woman in its backyard pulling up her robe to step over a fence and getting stuck and dropping the snowballs she was carrying and crying the way the girl never cried anymore, because she was a big girl. The girl thought about how good it felt on an early morning when the first peach-colored lines of the sun said good morning through the curtains and how that meant it was time for milk that her mother mixed a powder into so it turned chocolate-flavored. The girl wondered why anyone would want to miss such an event.

  The man who resembled David walked by, holding papers advertising the sale of nearby homes. David had already gone back inside, but the man saw the boarded-up windows and thought about how they might affect property values. The house looked like a dead face to him with the boards, and the man thought of the time he had nearly drowned.

  A pair of older ladies in matching tracksuits paused on their speed-walking route to observe the house. They were sisters, and each saw the house and remembered simultaneously when their own childhood home had burned to the ground. Neither could remember how the fire had started—they had been too little, it had been in another city, another state perhaps. They had returned months later with their father and had seen how strange the charred white clapboard looked, boards nailed over the window frames. The new wood had been nailed to old wood, and the distinction was clear to everyone.

  The ladies looked at this different boarded-up house in the neighborhood where they had lived together ever since. In silence, they individually
considered the span of their lives. One of the ladies thought about the word “still,” and the other thought about the word “here.”

  60.

  THE DARKENED WINDOWS shifted the home inside further. Even the heavy curtains had let in some light, but the boards allowed total darkness and safety. David thought about how his life would be different if he had boarded up the windows ten years earlier. Perhaps the outside world would have vanished for Franny and himself and they could have lived their days in the confines of the property in his name. He figured that if Franny came back, she would be surprised to see the windows boarded up, but she would eventually understand. The dark outlines of the furniture in the rooms gave the couches and chairs the look of sleeping animals.

  The sounds outside were quieter. David could hear a snow sweeper’s muted progress along the residential road. It seemed as if he had covered his own ears and eyes with a piece of fabric. The silence of the old grandfather clock was a negative energy. David pushed an ottoman over to cover up the fireplace.

  He turned on the kitchen light and pulled the threats out of their drawer, spreading them out on the countertop. He couldn’t remember the order in which he found them and switched the papers around trying to figure it out. The threats were on different types of paper. There was the craft store receipt, the fortune cookie scrap, the computer paper, the thin ticker-tape strip, the index card, the pages torn from a notebook. The words were typed in the same style, as if they came from the same machine. He let his eyes unfocus until the words became symbols.

  He looked for other clues on the paper. It would be meaningful if he could find out for certain that each threat had been created or printed at the same time. If he could determine the order in which they were intended to be read, he might be able to uncover some code in their language.

  David looked carefully at the threats. It was possible that a third party had snuck into the house, created each unique threat, and hid them in each corner while David and Franny were sleeping. It was possible.

  61.

  OBJECTS from the basement had begun to creep into the main house. Before, when the house was full of other people, the mess had been more easily confined. It was as if the others created a gravity and the individual items were an orbiting constellation of junk. In those first years of his son’s re-residence, David’s father would head down to the basement with a cardboard box and come up with papers and ancient bank records, and he would spend the afternoon inhaling paper dust next to the old shredder, carrying bags of shredded paper to the curb. Every time he went into the basement, he would come up with a new bag of the same general garbage, like a fisherman drawing up a crab pot. “Clean home, old heart,” he said.

  It had started with the water heater explosion, which caused an inch of bank receipts to plaster the floor. They dried and flaked eventually, their lower layers turning soft and causing the basement to take on the sweet smell of wet newsprint. After they replaced the broken glasses, Franny had remarked that David would need to go down there with a shovel and clean it up, but he didn’t, and she did not mention it again. They closed off the basement but scrubbed and dusted and generally maintained the rest of the home’s three bedrooms as if they were still all occupied.

  After Franny was gone, a layer of dust and skin particles and hair built up over the wood floor. It mixed with the oils in David’s feet as well as the dirt from his shoes and his visitors’ shoes and gummed together, creating a thin layer of grime that gave the floors a softness. Sticky wafers of grime and hair layered behind doors.

  The dust on the floor began to creep up the walls. It fell over itself to make a patina of grime, first on the baseboards, then up the curling lower portions of wallpaper, then broadening to darken the walls nearly to the ceiling. David took a damp washcloth to a portion of one wall, and the single clean swab made the rest look even worse. The moisture from his cloth dripped and accumulated dust, leaving a slick behind it on the way down like a woman’s made-up face after a long night of crying. One corner of the wallpaper was peeled back on itself like a filigree, and David took the edge of the paper between his fingers. Behind it, he could see part of what looked like a word. He pulled the wallpaper off the wall and saw another page, yellowed with wallpaper glue, pasted there:

  I WILL STAPLE MY ADDRESS TO YOUR WINTER COAT, LITTLE ONE. THEY WILL SEND YOU TO ME NO MATTER WHAT YOU CLAIM.

  He hooked his fingernails under the threat and peeled it off, making glue fall, silent as snow, onto the floor. The wallpaper had been there for at least seven years, since he and Franny had put it up together. David moved a chair in an attempt to cover the spot and added the threat to his collection.

  Empty broth cans had begun to accumulate around the threats still spread across the countertop. Junk mail lay across the kitchen counters and the table. Bills and notices surrounded Franny’s ashes on the coffee table in the sitting room, and the magazines and newspapers were a glossy presence surrounding David every night in bed. He still slept under her coat, but added a layer of dental X-rays under it. It felt as if she was lying lightly on top of him and fish scales filled the divide between his body and hers.

  David’s body cluttered at the same rate as the house. His hair began to grow long again and curl like a boy’s in ringlets above his ears. He washed his clothes at the laundromat, avoiding the machine in the garage. Below the layer of his clean clothes, the crevices of his body began to foster their own microsystem. He began to think of himself as a piece of dense bread.

  In the bed, he found himself valuing his inability to move. He might wake and peel a perfume ad or sports page off his face, leaving a wet smudge that he eventually lost interest in cleaning.

  He borrowed books from the library about sleep disorders and books about coping with loss. When the words didn’t make enough sense, he pulled the pages from the books and lined the mattress with them and kept them under his body at night. He sweat on them, and they offered their insular heat, cells of therapeutic text sinking into his own cells.

  He started the bad habit of keeping cartons of food on the bed, until the ants came. Even after he made the effort to clean the cartons away, the ants remained, lost in the pages and sheets, apparently satisfied with the pieces and crumbs they still found. They greeted the corners of his eyes and lips in the morning.

  David had always felt uncomfortable in his bed, always shifting his body and stretching his legs. Now that the confinement of paper meant he had nowhere to go, his body became resigned to its diminished accommodation and was held still. He was surprised to find it much easier to sleep. Sometimes he would stay in bed for hours after waking, feeling the proportions of paper around him with the edges of his body. He sensed himself molding the paper into a permanent shape. It was a kind of meditation.

  62.

  AILEEN was sitting in the rocking chair on the porch. It was unclear how long she had been there, but he remembered registering the sound of wood rocking in the wood groove hours earlier, when he got out of bed. He had thought it was a memory of sound and only realized she was there around lunchtime, when he saw the back of her head through a crack in one of the boarded windows. He tapped the window, and she turned and waved. He beckoned her inside.

  “Listen,” she said, stomping ice from her boots onto the welcome mat. “Frances put this in my coffee cup in the break room.” He shut the door behind her. She dug into her purse and held a handwritten note out to him like it was a piece of identification:

  I WILL CREATE A SET OF WORK RESPONSIBILITIES THAT ARE INCONVENIENT AND DEMEANING TO YOU. I WILL CONVINCE YOUR BOSS TO RUN WITH IT. WE WILL CALL IT THE BATHROOM SCRUB CHALLENGE.

  “I think it’s about me,” she said, flipping the paper back and reviewing the words. “It’s embarrassing. Frances and I shared cleaning duties, but sometimes when I was with a client I asked her to touch the mirror up a little. Do you think she was angry with me?”

  “I don’t think she could write that.”

  “One of the g
irls saw her writing it. I found it in my coffee cup months ago and asked around, and one of the girls saw Frances do it. That area is employees only. We don’t let anyone else in there. She wrote it.”

  It was very quiet in the house, and David realized that he had grown accustomed to the rocking chair’s constant noise. “May I have it?” he asked.

  She held the page closer to her body, against her stomach. “I feel like she would be angry if I showed it to you,” she said. “Can you imagine? Maybe it’s a bad joke. I would hate it if she wrote this about me. I mean, she wrote it out and everything. One of the girls saw her.”

  “If she wrote it, I can give it to the police.”

  “Maybe you could avoid telling them that it might be about me. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “I’m sure it’s not about you.”

  Aileen turned the paper over, examining each side. She folded it in half and unfolded it. She placed her palm on the words and closed her eyes. It looked as if she was trying to absorb the words into her skin. “I can’t keep it. The police should see it. If you really think it will help.”

  David thought about the threats on the countertop. “I’ll show it to the police.”