What's Become of Her

by Deb Caletti

  They are lying in bed, legs curved with legs, when he says it.

  “You’re spending more time here than you are there.”

  She’s not sure how to take this. She can’t read his face the way they are positioned. She pops her head up, chin on his chest. He looks like a monster from that angle.

  “Should I get my purse?”

  “No! I mean, aren’t you tired of having to go back and forth? Just to water some plant or find a certain shirt?”

  “That ficus is a lost cause.”

  “Move in with me,” he says.

  —

  The house sells before a sign even goes up. Maggie’s old friend, Jenny Sedgewick, had already expressed an interest in buying it, so it’s as easy as making a phone call. Isabelle squinches her eyes shut, makes the decision, and before she knows it, it’s done.

  You what? Jane says, when Isabelle tells her. Eddie Groove says, Jesus, Isabelle, what’d you do that for? In line at the Front Street Market, Remy grasps Isabelle’s arm. Sweetie! I heard about you selling your mother’s house. That was stupid.

  They’re acting like she lit all her money on fire or married a convict. It’s silly. And she can tell that Jane and Eddie don’t like Henry anyway, though she can’t understand why. When he comes to pick her up, they meet his effusive charm with frostiness and distrust. She attributes this to protectiveness, and to the territorial outsider/insider tribal impasse common on the island. They love her and care about her; she gets it. But she won’t participate in these worn ways of thinking, and she’s not a child anymore. She does not want to be burdened with the past, living in her mother’s house while running her mother’s business.

  This is big, Iz. I mean, selling the house? What about having options? Jane says. How well do you even know this guy? Eddie says. You could have rented it. I make a bundle on rentals, Remy says. But you can’t unring a bell.

  For God’s sake! You’d think this was a fatal choice, by the way they cluck like alarmed chickens. But Isabelle is glad to be rid of a house full of such mixed emotions. It’s a bold but necessary decision.

  It helps to have all the chaos of moving, the boxes going to the new place, the junk ready to be picked up by Old Shit Hauling, the last-minute runs to Red Apple for more packing tape. All of the motion quiets (but does not silence) the self-doubt that descended as soon as she signed the final papers, and the guilt, guilt, guilt, the curling shame, of boxing up the last of her mother’s things, vacuuming out the old rooms, and cleaning the crumbs from the back of the cupboards before Jenny Sedgewick’s son, Thomas, moves in.

  Isabelle tries to calm herself with logic. What, she’s supposed to hunker down in the dark corners of history? She and Henry are in love, and love is a risk. She can’t keep holding on to this stuff forever. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid, and she should be grateful the opportunity arose to be free of it. Besides, Thomas has a college-aged daughter who will come to visit and stay in Isabelle’s old room. The house will have new life. Thomas has already come over to mow the lawn and ditch the rusty lawn chairs. He’s brought a few tomato plants, which he’s set on the back deck. They have promising little starbursts of yellow flowers. She is leaving the place in excellent hands.

  How could you? Maggie says again and again. How could you, how could you? Bad daughter, bad daughter, bad daughter.

  Most of Isabelle’s stuff—her and Evan’s old furniture, boxes of college papers and photos, once-hopeful holiday decorations, books and more books, outdated-but-once-expensive electronics she can’t bear to dump—is now in a storage garage at Island Air. Also there: cartons of her mother’s clothes and kitchen items Isabelle remembers from her childhood—serving platters and a cookie jar and silverware, a mixer that her mother likely hadn’t used since Isabelle was small. There’s an entire box of records and a pair of nightstands and an elaborate floor lamp that belonged to someone’s grandmother. (Her own? Her dad’s? Her mom’s? No idea.)

  And more. There is much more now crammed into that storage space, which Isabelle tells herself is sort of like Maggie’s own home, once removed. At first Isabelle vowed to keep only things that she actually remembered or could look at with love and fondness, but this proved impossible. Every item had complications. Each pair of shoes or salad tongs vibrated with bad feelings, or some memory, or just the mere fact that Maggie herself had kept it so long. How do people do it? Isabelle envies anyone who can separate a certain blue coat from the person who wore it. She understands the basics here—when a loved one is gone, these objects are all that’s left, and tossing the object is like throwing away the person. Yes, she also understands that she needs to get to that Hallmark-card place that says a person is always there in your memory, but there is no Hallmark card that talks about the way a brush entwined with a mother’s hair can haunt you.

  —

  She doesn’t pack away everything, of course. Some things are going with her to Henry’s. They’ve rented a U-Haul at Eugene’s Gas and Garage. Now, in the back, there’s a rocker that’s been on Maggie’s covered porch forever, one Isabelle always loved, and there’s a painting a friend made for Maggie, depicting the exact view of the sound from her property. There are a few boxes of Isabelle’s clothes and personal effects. Henry and Isabelle have also decided to take the better mattress from her mother’s house to replace the hard one the musician left. There’s a box of quilts and blankets, too, ones that Isabelle remembers from childhood illnesses and cold winters, and, finally, there’s Maggie’s desk. Isabelle can remember both her mother and her own younger self working there—laboring with crunched and serious penmanship over school reports on earthquakes and Chile and the three branches of government.

  The door of the U-Haul rolls down with a slam. Isabelle hides her last keys under her mother’s faded welcome mat. She tries not to look in the windows, at the empty and accusing rooms. Her stomach hurts. She might cry. She climbs up into the cavernous cab of the truck and sits next to Henry. She lies to herself, saying she can come back whenever she wants to.

  Henry drives. His face looks tired. Isabelle guesses this is from all the endings and beginnings his life has brought, or maybe that’s the source of her own fatigue. Probably, no one is in the best mood, after the heavy boxes, and the drawers sliding out of the desk as they inched it up the truck ramp, and after the days of packing and cleaning.

  If a couple can get through moving without some tension, they are either medicated or fictional, so Isabelle isn’t too bothered by the joint snappishness that occurs when, back at Remy’s, they navigate the wobbly mattress out of the truck and across the front lawn. She’s glad when everything is out of the U-Haul, though. It means the whole ordeal is almost over. They’ve unloaded quickly so that Henry can return the rental before Eugene’s closes, so except for the mattress now inside, the rest of the stuff is in the driveway. Maggie’s desk sits there as if waiting for the job applicant to arrive, and boxes are strewn around, and that painting with the view of Isabelle’s old life leans against a tree trunk, looking somewhat baffled.

  Henry kisses her cheek. “I’ll be right back, and then we’ll carry that desk and open a bottle of wine.”

  “I’m cooking tonight, after all this help.”

  “Well, I had my own motivations for that help. It’ll be great to remember what all of this is for. And we’ll just order in, are you kidding?”

  He grabs her ass. She grabs his. They’re a little giddy with exhaustion. After the headaches and tensions of moving, they can now remember that they like each other. She tugs the tail of his shirt in a goodbye.

  He opens the truck door. He’s just about to step up into the cab when the police car cruises down Possession Loop toward Remy’s house. The light on top of the car spins, but the siren is off. Henry stops cold. He watches the vehicle as if it’s a thug about to jump him.

  “What’d you do, rob a bank?” Isabelle jokes, but Henry is frozen in place. It’s weird. It’s like that tag game they used to play when they we
re kids. His hand is still on the truck door handle. The car slows in front of Remy’s house and then comes to a stop.

  It’s Tiny Policeman, of course. Officer Ricky Beaker. The whole department is made up of Tiny, a couple of deputies, office staff, and the occasional committed Parrish High intern who’s watched too many crime dramas on TV. Parrish doesn’t need anything more. There hasn’t been a significant crime here for years, not since Vince MacKenzie offed what’s-her-name’s husband and stuffed him in the trunk of his Triumph. It was some sordid love triangle, and Tiny P. was in his glory back then. Lately, though, all Tiny has to strut about are loud parties or some shoplifting tourist or trying without luck to catch Kale Kramer doing something actually illegal. Tiny’s body is small, but his dreams are big. Henry parked the truck in a loading zone, she guesses.

  She guesses wrong.

  Ricky Beaker steps from his car. He hitches up his little pants. He has his hand on his gun. Wow, imagine if Henry had parked in a handicapped spot. There might be an actual shootout.

  “Can I help you with something?” Henry says.

  “I thought I’d come by and say hello, Mr. North. Since we hadn’t yet met. Check in, so to speak. You moving again?”

  Isabelle steps toward them. She—local, longtime islander, knower of the ropes—will sort this out.

  But then she stops. She stops because an odd shimmer is starting. Officer Beaker knows Henry’s name, knows he’s recently moved once before, and the tone of his voice is strange. Stranger than a wrongly parked truck deserves. Something is happening. She has no idea what is going on, but something is happening, and it’s bad. Henry and Officer Beaker have locked eyes, and this, this whatever that’s playing out in front of her, has nothing to do with her at all; she doesn’t even exist in this scene. An understanding—no, not an understanding, more like a small, eerie dawning—creeps in, and she shuts her mouth fast, not just because she’s forgotten what she was going to say, but because some horrible feeling is arriving in her stomach.

  “I’m not moving. A friend is moving in.”

  Ricky Beaker raises an eyebrow. He’s so intent on Henry, he doesn’t even glance Isabelle’s way. The little man actually looks tough. The days of donut eating and shooing away teenagers lingering on street corners have been stacking up, boredom upon boredom, waiting for a moment like this. “Well, we got a call.”

  “A call.” Henry looks disgusted.

  “A tip. An anonymous tip.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Then we had a chat with our friends in Boston.”

  “This is harassment,” Henry says.

  “No harassment. Call it a friendly stop to say hello. To say, you know, we see you.”

  “If there are any more stops by to say hello, you’ll be hearing from my attorney.”

  The last few months of her life and their result, this imagined and longed-for future, are maybe over. A part of Isabelle realizes this. It’s the part that is squeezing her so that she can’t breathe. Henry doesn’t look right. Not at all. His jaw is clenched and his face has turned red. She didn’t even know he could look like this, this furious. Curves of sweat are starting under his arms.

  “Henry?” Isabelle says. Or, at least, she may have said that. Some sound escapes her throat, anyway. She’s having one of those experiences where she feels out of her own body. She’s watching this woman on the lawn, the poor thing—her mouth is hanging open in what is clearly shock and disbelief. Isabelle has felt this watery distance before. When she was nine, as her mother dragged her by her ponytail down the hall of their house, she looked at the girl with her shorts sliding low and the shirt scrunched high from the motion, and thought about the rug burn the girl was sure to get. And she felt this same odd separation the time she drove away from their apartment after she saw the emails Evan sent that woman. Then, her disembodied hands on the wheel and the surreal swirl in her head caused her to miss a merging car, and she ended up in a small crash against a guardrail.

  “Isabelle Austen? Is that you? I haven’t seen you around since your mom’s funeral. What are you doing here?”

  Tiny Policeman is talking to that woman on the lawn, but she only stares at him. She can’t seem to talk.

  “You’re not the friend, are you?”

  “I’m…” the woman on the lawn says.

  “Jesus Christ! Your mother would be furious! You better make sure you’re not number three.”

  “I swear to God…” Henry says. He clenches his teeth hard. His hands are fists at his sides.

  “Number three?” Isabelle is momentarily convinced she’s dreaming. You can have dreams like this. They upset you into the next day because they seem so real.

  “She doesn’t know?” Officer Beaker actually chuckles. “Well, aren’t you two going to have an interesting evening.”

  “This is against the law,” Henry snarls.

  “Against the law?” Officer Beaker makes an incredulous face, a dramatic and theatrical face, one pronounced enough to be seen by the audience in the back row. He shakes his head. He walks back to his car, inconsequential chatter blaring from the radio on his hip. He gets into the cruiser, settles into the seat. He sits right there for a while, writing something down. He makes it clear he’s not going anywhere until he chooses to. He taps his pen against the pad, as if he’s composing a poem and is stuck on a line.

  “Henry?” Isabelle says.

  Isabelle’s old life is all around her in pieces. Her new life is through the door of that house. But dread has cemented her feet, and horror settles so heavy in her stomach, she thinks she’s about to be sick. And it feels quite clear, quite clear indeed, that the wobbly mattress they just muscled inside will not do a damn thing to fix what keeps Henry up at night.

  Chapter 12

  As he sits at his desk at the New Caledonia Corvus Research Facility and Sanctuary on Mount Khogi, Weary is trying to keep it together.

  Ever since he made that call to the Parrish Island Police Department and spoke to the detective with the little clown voice, there has been nothing online. No Visa charges, nothing on ShutR, nothing nowhere in all the places he looks, except big fat echoes of zero, which his imagination is happy to fill with endless and varied disasters.

  It’s all been one looming, terrifying, cavernous zilch.

  He can’t work. He can’t concentrate. He can barely eat; he’s become a danger on the road, and he keeps walking into rooms and forgetting why he’s there. He found his car keys in the refrigerator, and left the coffeepot on to burn. Think! he begs. Focus! he cajoles. Get it together! Use your God-given strengths! Not happening. It’s impossible.

  The silence is making him nuts.

  After those glory days, too! Information, pouring down like the rain in the Mount Khogi jungle. It had been so easy to find her. Isabelle plus Parrish Island, and, bam, there she was. Island Air appeared first, and then it all made sense. That’s how Henry must have met her. That first day. The story always makes sense. Weary opened the Island Air website, and her photo was right there on the About Us page. Isabelle Austen, the same glowing young woman on the boat.

  Isabelle Austen. A treasure trove! Old swim meet results from the local high school. Yearbook photo. A LinkedIn résumé including her experience working at a small publisher in Seattle. Wouldn’t Henry love that? Egomaniac would assume she’d have an in to get those maudlin, knockoff Poe poems published.

  And more, so much more! Isabelle Austen receives a scholarship from the Rotary Club! She graduates from the University of Washington with a degree in English! She lives in an apartment for a long while in the U-district (small, drab). She marries! She divorces! (That was quick.) The ex’s name is Evan Donaldson, works for GenCrest Pharmaceuticals, looks like a glory-days-are-over jock turned sales guy. His Facebook page shows him raising lots of beer mugs with the boys like he’s still nineteen. Jerk. She deserves better.

  For days, Weary is satiated. He gazes at the photo in Seattle Magazine: Roger Thurston, foun
der of Evergreen Publishing, and Isabelle Austen, editor, celebrate the release of Mark Elliott’s Trout Summers. He surveys Isabelle’s last address in the Seattle neighborhood of Queen Anne, where she lived with Evan Donaldson. It’s a building with a brick façade; a similar apartment currently for sale shows bright windows and a small kitchen and an inner courtyard with garden space. Next door: a park, and on the other side, a Mexican restaurant called El Toreador. Weary reads the menu. He walks along the street via Google Maps, turns down unfocused corners by clicking wide arrows. He checks out her old workplace, Evergreen Publishing. (Nice views. Right in front of a bus stop, though.) He reads Isabelle’s well-written five-star Amazon review for The Princess Bride.

  And then he speeds forward in time, moves with Isabelle to Parrish Island. Change of address: 52 Possession Loop. The house is small and charming, with graying shingles. It overlooks the sound. It’s hard to see any more than that, as it’s protected on all sides by large trees. But look there—52 Possession Loop, owned by the now dead mother, Margaret Austen.

  He puts together the picture, comprehends the personal storyline of poor Isabelle. A brief marriage to that dweeb, a divorce, returning home after the mother dies to run the business that—according to the Our History page—had been handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. Weary spends time on Margaret, too. He scours the Web for information about the tiny airline, peruses the photos of the pilots on the site, reads about the planes, scrutinizes the annual profits, smaller than you’d think. There is Maggie’s hundred-dollar contribution to the Democratic Party, and her bitchy quote about Fourth of July fireworks in the San Juan Islander. On the more personal end, he discovers that Margaret was divorced from Edward Young Austen, who passed away (the family requests no flowers) shortly after. There’s little to be found about Isabelle’s father, except a brief line in the Puget Sound Business Journal about a new job at Chambers Insurance, St. Petersburg branch.