Honey

by Brenda Brooks

  * * *

  I woke at 10:30 a.m. to the smell of burning coffee, the same pot I’d put on at 8 before falling back to sleep. Somebody was knocking at the door and may have been for some time.

  A guy about forty-five in a dark suit and overcoat stood there. His hair, what was left of it, was auburn and his face clean-shaven and rosy from the cold. My first impulse was to decline whatever religious pamphlets he might have to offer, because it had to be way too late for redemption. But then he asked for Honey by name.

  “She’s not here,” I said, too quickly, because I was pretty sure of what was coming. If he wasn’t a neat and tidy person of faith, then he had to be the cop I’d expected to show up ever since I first laid eyes on Honey’s ex tucked up under that comforter.

  “I’m Detective Smith. Just up this way from the Torrent detachment.” He smiled, removed his gloves, offered his hand. “And you’re . . .”

  “Nicole.”

  “Nicole . . . ?”

  “Sorry, I’m Nicole Hewett.” This rushed out like a sort of confession, as if I was sorry to be Nicole Hewett (which, at that moment . . . ), so then I swung back the other way and added, “Honey’s roommate?”

  “Well, Nicole, I won’t keep you long. Just a few moments of your time, if that’s okay. I’m up this way making a few inquiries about a missing person.”

  “Honey’s not here. And I don’t think . . .” I was going to say that I doubted she’d know if a person was missing or not, and assure him that she wasn’t missing herself — only at work. Or some other garbled thing. But then I rolled it back up again and added, “She’ll be back.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’s away on business.”

  “Right. Do you know when she’ll return?”

  “I’m not exactly sure when she’ll be back. A couple of days, or three, maybe?” I hedged.

  “Okay. Sure. In that case I wonder if you might let Ms. Ramone know that I’d like to talk to her. Nothing to worry about. Just a few general questions I’m asking — here and there in the neighborhood.”

  He handed me a card and made a few notes in one of those flip-style notebooks — god knows what notes, because how long does it take to write Honey not home? I stood there with the door ajar, self-conscious in the white Grand Hotel bathrobe that Honey had swiped on vacation, the little embroidered initials over the breast pocket. I got a bit giddy from nervousness then and thought about how if Honey were there she’d be laughing, even under the circumstances, about how she thought the guy was security from the Grand Hotel and had come all the way to Buckthorn to get his bathrobe back.

  “I’ll let you get back to your coffee,” he said and pulled his gloves back on. “Have Ms. Ramone call me, will you, Nicole?” First name basis already. There was something about this guy that came across as steady and comforting, like a really good waiter but with a gun.

  Yet those few seconds standing in the doorway with “the law” had to be the beginning of something bad. You know, something bad hot in pursuit of the original something bad — because it’s not like I hadn’t seen the movie. I had a lead role in it.

  After he left I stood at the window, off to one side, and watched him walk down the sidewalk to his car and drive away. Ridiculous imaginings went through my head while I tried to double back on the obvious truth. Inquiries about a missing person? That could mean anyone at all. People had gone missing from Buckthorn for years. I should have told him there was no need to be alarmed: half of them were in Torrent and the other half were on their way to Torrent or points west, as far away from Buckthorn as they could get. I felt like throwing on my parka and chasing him down: Oh, hey! I just realized what’s up. Nobody’s missing! They’re just en route! Then I sat down on the sofa and stared at the floor where the ghost of Aurbuck rolled up in Honey’s comforter shimmered into reality once again.

  I left a message on Honey’s voicemail and managed to wait thirteen minutes before leaving another. By then it was 11:30, the bank meetings would be in full swing.

  I threw a few things in an overnight bag and set off for Torrent.

  * * *

  Out on the main highway, the wind blew fierce all the way up the county line and across the acres of churned-up fields. Now and then it died away and whirling flakes hung suspended for a few seconds, and then began to fall again and merge with all the other whiteness.

  Maybe it was my worried mind, my grip so hard on the wheel, that kept me on the straight and narrow rather than in the ditch like the scattering of cars I passed along the way. I stopped once for gas even though I ached to charge ahead and not let up until the Chevy’s fender nudged the front desk at The Melrose on 5th, where the bank had booked rooms for its employees.

  I arrived at 3:30, parked in the lot out back, and marched straight through the foyer to the front desk. They rang Honey’s room but no answer. I ordered a late lunch in the hotel restaurant and pushed it around on my plate, watched the traffic go by until about 5, and then strolled around the gift shop and bought a package of Kleenex for my lousy cold. Sometime around 6 I dropped into a booth by the window in the hotel’s Twilight Lounge, tossed back a couple of ibuprofen, and ordered a glass of Shiraz. At 7 I had a double scotch, and another at 8:30. I think I must have nodded off for a few minutes, long enough to wake and find my head resting against the cold window. Out on the street the holiday craziness continued — horns blared on cars whose models blurred beyond my recognition, traffic lights seemed to have taken on a sort of unique timing and pattern no longer familiar to me. Maybe it was the drinks, the medication, but I couldn’t figure out how all these people made sense of the maze and got home safely. It was true that I hadn’t been to the city for months, except to the airport for the flight to Vegas, and I guess the country hick had lost her protective coating. Buckthorn was only 200 miles away, but still I felt as though I’d arrived on a train in the middle of the night after three days of travel and didn’t speak the language.

  When Honey hadn’t shown by 11 I booked a room and left a message with the overnight clerk. I bought a newspaper and cough drops at the hotel gift shop and exchanged pleasantries with the cashier.

  When I told her I’d driven down from Buckthorn she whistled and said, “Well, that’s quite a situation up north of you.” She nodded at the paper under my arm. “‘All the news that’s shit to print,’ isn’t that what they say in the news racket?” As I gazed at the paper, she rang up the purchases and continued. “I just don’t understand anything anymore. All the drugs and booze, the lost jobs, people ripping each other off — and worse. The house three doors down from ours? It blew sky-high six weeks ago: drug lab in the rumpus room. Whatever happened to just falling asleep watching TV? Not that there’s anything worth watching on TV since Mary Tyler Moore went off the air. Now it’s just a bunch of idiots doing things that are real, so-called. And I mean, who the hell wants to know that much about reality . . . ?”

  Up in the hotel room I laid the Gazette on the bed and stared at the article the cashier had referred to as that situation up north of you. I examined every individual word as if each one held a tiny compressed picture that would eventually lead to the gigantic irrefutable one. The whole time I kept thinking about what Honey had said: Fortune Bay was a hideous backwater that no one in their right mind would bother visiting in a million years. “You’d have to be lost,” she said, in the days that followed our own reason for being there, “in order to find yourself standing at the edge of that gruesome fucking swamp.”

  Well, it seemed like the million-year time period had expired. Because the lost and crazy swamp people had returned to Fortune Bay:

  BANKER DISCOVERED IN BAY

  The body of Donald Phillip Aurbuck, manager of the downtown branch of the Commerce in Torrent, recently reported missing, was found in his submerged car on Thursday morning in Fortune Bay. A local couple found the silver MG in a remote but popular ice-fishing ar
ea on the bay and immediately notified the police.

  “Dolores and I come out here a lot,” said Mr. Henry Checkley of Cedarville. “You know, just trying to avoid the discomforts of civilization. Anywho, we thought maybe some jerk had ditched a bunch of auto parts, but then we saw the taillights and the MG emblem on the trunk. And that’s when we knew there was a sharp little car down there under the ice. Sad. ‘What a waste of a good sports car,’ I told Dolores. But I didn’t know about the guy stuffed inside when I made that comment. Or of course I never would have made it.”

  Although bank authorities remain tight-lipped, the Gazette has discovered that Aurbuck had been under investigation for misuse of customer funds and a number of other investment-related irregularities. When asked if the banker’s death might have been suicide, Det. Brian Smith of the Torrent detachment said nothing was certain until the coroner’s report but confirmed that the case is being handled as a homicide. The investigation continues. The murder weapon has not been found.

  What the hell had we done with the gun? I couldn’t for the life of me remember.

  * * *

  It was going on midnight when I decided to abandon the room and wait for her in the lounge. I had already called the desk twice to confirm she hadn’t returned unseen and somehow missed my message. Not a chance. The same clerk had been on duty the full shift. Every time I called Honey, it went to voicemail. I asked her to call me right away, my words full of neutral yet ominous meaning, and hung up. I had just settled in at the same table by the window when a cab pulled up to the main entrance.

  She got out.

  Her hair, what was left of it, struck me first. It reminded me of the year she had a go at the Winona Ryder look after we watched Girl, Interrupted with Inez. But since when did an impulse to get a haircut come over her so suddenly? That’s how I went about mine — just go in, make it happen, no fuss. But that wasn’t Honey. And on top of that I could tell that she’d done the snipping herself, something she was skilled at from the old days when she cut Inez’s locks on the stoop and they played rock tunes and made the whole thing into a lark, rather than the sad necessity it was.

  She wore her banking armor, a gray skirt with a white shirt, and her pea coat over top. I was halfway out of my seat, and my skin, when I saw the guy and sat back down dizzy, like I’d walked into a familiar room and noticed a picture gone askew — the content correct but its scenic lake and forest tilting away.

  He got out of the cab after her: heavy wool coat, laptop satchel under his arm, thirty-five or so, dark hair to the collar, and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. As he leaned in to pay the driver, Honey waited, the cab’s exhaust steaming all around them. That was the first odd thing: she waited. Honey never waited for anything, never mind a guy to hold the door. She would have gone on ahead, looked back, held the door for him, her coworker, and got on with things. But to stand there cooling her heels — real heels, part of the armor — in the twenty below?

  If only hands weren’t so damned expressive, and who knew this better than someone who spent her life hunkered down over a mass of oak and little bits of ivory, trying to wring a pleasing sound out of a bunch of wires and wool? But I understood this to my core because of her. As the cab drove away, they walked through the Melrose Hotel’s main doors and into the foyer, she ahead of him, his hand on the small of her back all the way to the reception counter, then removed briefly to perform some dreary task, and back again. Twenty-seven bones in the human hand and wrist and I saw every one of them as I never would have, regardless of how many scales I’d run, if she hadn’t taught me so many midnight lessons about nuance, intricacy, and bliss.

  And that’s how I knew that in spite of the suit and tie and those heavy eyeglasses: the hand on the small of Honey’s back belonged to a woman, not a man.

  I called her again as they stood waiting for the elevator together. I watched her slip her cell out of her pocket, stare at it (at me), and put it away again.

  * * *

  Four hours of blue-knuckle driving with no heat (it conked an hour into the trip home) and slowed to a walking pace as the highways closed behind me. And up ahead, the maniacal whirl of the snowplow’s blue lights and the snapped necks of the ditched trucks bleeding gas into the snow as their wheels spun in the wind.

  I couldn’t help thinking what my mother would have to say about her prodigy now. And wasn’t that her, sitting behind me in the shadows, her face drawn, her eyes filled with the grave apprehension of everything I’d done, everything my delinquent hands had been up to since our last day together? And what explanation? “Well, Mother, I’ve had quite a time since we last scrabbled together. Seems you were R-I-G-H-T on a few important points.” How I missed her certainty at that moment and ached for the series of measured, aggravating questions she would ask in order to trace a route back to myself. Well, too L-A-T-E now.

  Mile after mile, trillions of icy spears disguised as feathery holiday flakes charged the windshield, blinding me to everything but the white walls coming down — or were they rising up? — on either side of the car. And every now and then a highway exit to another faltering town appeared and offered up vague clues about when I might see something I understood again, if only the payday loan billboards on the outskirts of Buckthorn.

  I stopped at a gas station for a container of windshield fluid (blue as my cheek in the rearview), a carton of milk, and two ham and cheese sandwiches, which lay unopened on the passenger seat the rest of the way home. Just before I pulled back into the storm my cell dinged: a text message from an unknown number with a video attached. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. It was recorded at night, so the quality was shit — but not shit enough: Havenhurst came into view, blurry on the tiny screen, but looming in my mind. The tall lights with the round globes along the entranceway, the empty concrete planters out front of the main doors. Whoever was behind the lens swung the view up to the top of the building, focused on Honey’s lit fifth-floor apartment, then down again and around to the parking lot out back: two shadowy figures were at work in the twilight, laboring to lift the body of a bulky man into a tiny car. Our faces were obscured but the audio worked well enough. If you listened carefully you could hear Honey’s voice say, “This fucking bastard won’t fucking fit.”

  And what a voice. You couldn’t hear that voice and not remember it. Meanwhile, I had lost mine. My mouth dried up. I cracked open the carton of milk. It seemed to have gone sour, or turned to ash. I sat there gripping the wheel at 10 and 2 as if I was still driving, careening around hairpin curves. It began to feel close in the car, too close, so I got out and squinted down the highway as though the Eldorado might appear out of the whirl of wind and snow, glide to a stop beside me and — then what? The window slides down and . . . nobody there — ghost Caddy to nowhere.

  I got back in the car and called Honey four, five, ten times. Nothing. A caravan of truckers came steaming off the highway to fuel up and wait out the storm. Wasn’t this the part where I ought to ditch the Chevy, swing my pack up into the cab of one of those monster diesels, and be gone? Me and Bobby McGee all the way to . . . But that just wasn’t my role. My role was to sit there shaking, hit redial over and over, and feel like one of those anonymous voices so often, maybe too often, at the other end of Honey’s phone: I saw what you did, and I know . . .

  * * *

  When I got home I couldn’t sleep, but I couldn’t endure anymore thoughts either. I washed down a couple of sleeping tablets with half a glass of whiskey and went to bed.

  What torment, the smell of her hair on the pillow. I got up and wandered the suite. Then I crashed on the couch and lay torturing myself with thoughts about what she might be doing at that moment. For years after Honey had left I wondered what she was up to. Where in the world was she? Who were her friends? Was she sick, was she well? But I never wondered as deeply as in that one distilled moment at Havenhurst without her. And I found myself, for the first time, wish
ing for the return of the older, tortured days that were merely sad and unresolved, nothing like the savage territory of human emotion facing me at that moment — a landscape I never would have set out across if she hadn’t kissed me, if she hadn’t taken me to bed and put me through . . . what she might be putting somebody else through in some room (probably an upgrade) at the Melrose. How thoughts such as these could overwhelm all the other perils, I didn’t know.

  I finally fell asleep and didn’t come to until early afternoon the next day. I might have slept longer, might never have woken up at all, for all I cared, if not for the hammering on the door.

  14.

  The property manager introduced himself, a long last name, like a train hitched together with a bunch of vowels, and then got to the point: He wondered where the rent checks might be. He felt that he’d been more than fair with Ms. Ramone, but three months in arrears was the cut-off, and he’d told her as much.

  I didn’t understand this any more than all the other events of the last twenty-four hours, but it was the easiest thing in the world to solve in comparison. I wrote him out four checks at $950 a month and prayed they wouldn’t bounce before I got to the bank. Before he left he said he’d noticed that Ms. Ramone often parked her car in front of the main doors and sometimes even propped the security door open. Both of these behaviors were against the rules because they contravened the safety ordinances and could I pass that information along when I next saw her — “as I have done myself many times,” he added. I agreed, and quickly, because I was eager to get to the bank. But still, he stood there.