by James Renner
“I’m in,” said David.
EPISODE THREE
MENTAL CIGARETTES
“But where are we going?” asked Elizabeth. She slouched back in the passenger seat of his first car, a ’79 Monte Carlo, bare feet resting on the dashboard as he drove them through the tangles of Kent’s frat-row side streets. Her red hair was shorter, bobbed just above the white tube top she had bought for the way he looked at her exposed shoulders and the suggestion of breasts underneath.
“Palcho’s,” he said.
“Why?”
“Donuts.”
“David, we’re going to eat Chinese in, like, five minutes,” she scolded. “Are you pregnant?”
It had been seven months since they had first visited Palcho’s together, a formative evening that was already slipping into a gray jumble of forgotten episodes for Elizabeth, but which David still remembered in explicit and lovely detail.
They arrived and David quickly ran around the car to open her door. She stepped out and gave him a look of cold suspicion. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“I’m in love with you,” he said.
“Cheesy,” she replied. “Like, eighties after-school-special cheesy.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “And this is probably worse.”
David dropped to one knee as he pulled the purple-velvet jewelry box with the snap lid out of his pocket. He opened it. The ring inside was white gold, with bits of crushed diamonds set in the top. He’d had it sized for her already.
“Marry me?” He meant it as a statement, but couldn’t help the rising inflection at the end that marked his insecurity.
She smiled. Not the plastered-on smile she gave strangers, but the wide-open childlike smile that pushed out her cheeks like a chipmunk and revealed the little gap between her front teeth. “No,” she said.
He had expected this.
“You don’t want to marry me,” she said, shaking her head. But her smile was still real, still warm. She pulled him up to her and kissed him, hard, on the mouth.
“But I do,” he insisted. “That’s why I’m giving you the ring.”
“It’s really pretty,” she said, pulling it out of its place and slipping it onto her left ring finger. It fit perfectly. And she left it on, placing the box back in her purse.
“It’s the ring my father gave my mom when they got engaged,” he said.
“That’s really sweet,” she said. “But doesn’t that mean it’s cursed? Aren’t they divorced?”
“Maybe we could reverse it.”
Elizabeth kissed him again, snaking her arms around his neck. She leaned in to whisper something important in his ear. “Let’s get some Chinese,” she said.
* * *
Five minutes later, they were seated at a table inside the Evergreen Buffet, a busy Chinese restaurant populated by college students and obese townies from nearby Ravenna. David felt weak and shaky, his fingers slightly numb, like he was on laughing gas, but he came to realize that he was not disappointed. She’d said no, but was wearing the ring. She’d said no, but was smiling as if he’d done something really swell.
Maybe it’s a test, he thought, as they ate in silence. A test to see how much I fight for it. Or maybe I’m not supposed to care. Maybe that’s the trick. Maybe she wants me to get mad. Maybe …
“I was a twin,” she said.
He shook his head. He had forgotten that this revelation had come as she was falling asleep on his chest that first night.
“I was a twin,” she repeated. “And when we were ten, I watched a guy take her. We never saw her again. It destroyed my family.”
David realized that she was about to give him a peek inside her mystery and he was glad she was finally opening up. But there was a cold part of him, too, that wondered if she would remain as alluring to him once he knew the answer.
“There was a park around the corner from our house in Lakewood. It had a playground with monkey bars and this creaky wooden bridge and a hopscotch grid. Elaine was crazy about hopscotch. Anyway, we used to go there all the time by ourselves while my father cooked supper and waited for Mom to get home—she was an accountant in the city. One day we walked to the park and there was this van there, one of those white all-purpose vans contractors use? A guy was standing outside the sliding door on the side, pacing back and forth. Skinny guy. He had weird bushy hair. When he saw us approaching, he started calling out, ‘Daisy! Daisy!’ When we got closer, he waved to us. ‘I can’t find my puppy dog,’ he said. ‘Have you seen a little black Lab?’ Of course, the only thing Elaine loved more than hopscotch was puppies, right? She goes running over to him and he’s already opening that side door, swinging it down its track—I can hear it tumble down the shaky track, rumbling along. It must’ve been an old van. I’m right behind her as she reaches the van. I didn’t think anything was really wrong, I just wanted to be with my sister. For a second he didn’t do anything, just kind of stood there, looking at the both of us. I could tell he was scared. Isn’t that funny? He was scared. And we weren’t. And then we were. He grabbed Elaine’s arm and flung her into the back of the van real quick, in one fast motion, just, boom, you know? And then he grabbed my arm and was pulling me toward the open door. But I had just a second more to take in the situation than Elaine and so I had the chance to brace myself and so he couldn’t throw me in as easily. He got me halfway in, far enough for me to see Elaine kneeling on the metal floor back there, holding her head, which had opened in a long scrape above her left eye. Then I heard the honking. It was loud and constant, honk honk honk honk honk honk! He let go of me and I fell out, onto the gravel parking lot. ‘Get the fuck in,’ he said. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I just sat there, in total shock. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. He pulled the door closed and then ran to the driver’s side and climbed in. All this time, the honking was getting louder. And louder. And then I saw a big Cadillac trailing down the road that ran along the baseball diamonds from the street, kicking up a trail of dust. It was going so fast, I could see it sliding all over the gravel. The guy in the van gunned it and took off through the baseball fields, cutting across to Clifton. When he got to the chicken-wire fence that marked the home-run line, he just kept going, tearing right through. The Caddy finally got all the way back to me and stopped on a dime. And another man got out and I remember thinking, here we go again, but what he said to me was, ‘Are you all right?’ I told him no, I wasn’t all right. And I started crying. ‘Where’s your sister?’ he asked. ‘Where’s Elizabeth?’ I was crying so much I couldn’t even correct him. All I could do was point at the van that was getting away. ‘Shit,’ he shouted. Then he got back in his car and tore off across the field after the van. I never saw her again. Or him. I ran back home. Told my dad what had happened. He left me alone in the kitchen and I climbed under the table with a butter knife, I remember, because I was sure that man was coming back for me. When my dad returned five minutes later, he called the police. They put men on every road leading out of Lakewood, but he was already gone. I don’t remember much about the next few months. A lot of it was spent in my room, reading, trying not to listen to them argue downstairs. When they got going, they said some pretty mean things. Tossing blame, you know? Back and forth like a tennis ball. Sometimes my mother put my name into the mix, too, even though I didn’t have a voice and was only ten goddamn years old, anyway, and it was really her fault for being at work so late. Maybe she needed to blame me to deflect some away from her and the man she shared a bed with. I know she did, because that summer they sent me to live with my mother’s sister. ‘For a month,’ they said. But it turned into forever.”
“God, Liz, I’m so sorry.”
Elizabeth waved her hand at him. “That’s not why I told you,” she said. “I should have told you that there would never be Thanksgiving with the fam. I haven’t seen my mom in thirteen years. Haven’t seen Dad in seven. And I’m never going to introduce you to them.”
He reached over and took her ha
nd. Her nails were chipped and bitten down to the quick. They shook a little.
“I’m not family material,” she said.
She pulled the ring off her finger, looked at it a moment, then tried to hand it back to David. He pushed back her hand gently.
“It’s for you,” he said. “I’m only giving it once. If you won’t marry me, you still have to wear it. You can wear it forever and we can date until we’re seventy. Put it on a chain around your neck if you want.”
Elizabeth pulled the necklace out of the tube top. It was a simple imitation sapphire set in silver, a child’s thing. “I stole this from Elaine’s dresser before my mother cleaned it out. I can’t replace it until it falls apart, I guess.” Instead, she put the ring back on her finger.
“When you change your mind, you can propose to me,” he said.
A tear fell into her chicken and broccoli. She looked up at him and smiled. “Okey dokey,” she said.
* * *
There was one thing that annoyed him. He could take the coldness, the negativity, the migraines she sometimes got that kept her in bed for two days. He could forgive her forgetting his birthday and for always saying ‘effect’ when she really meant ‘affect.’ He could forgive her for leaving her blow dryer on his side of the bedroom vanity and for making him spray that floral stuff in the bathroom. He didn’t mind all this because he never took for granted the way her bottom lip puffed out a bit when she was drunk or the way she twisted his hair in her fingers when he lay in her lap watching television. The only thing that really annoyed him, the only thing he just could not get over, was her love of Christopher Pike, a late-eighties teen-lit horror novelist she’d become obsessed with in her sister’s absence.
Elizabeth, who was up every morning at five-thirty making a pot of coffee so strong she might as well be snorting coke, could not, no matter how hard she tried, ever fall asleep before midnight. It had been this way since Elaine’s abduction and did not abate in the slightest with the unexpected addition of David’s love and security. By that time, anyway, it was habit. The worst part about it was that it kept her awake when everyone around her was asleep; it kept her alone. The only way she found she could endure this quiet time was to read. And the only thing she ever seemed to read was Christopher Pike. Chain Letter 2: The Ancient Evil, the Final Friends trilogy, Remember Me.
“Why don’t you read Poe or Tolkien or Bradbury?” he asked once when he caught her reading Last Act for the sixth time.
“I don’t have the patience for description,” she told him, as if it were something dirty and tabloid. “I don’t want to read about the history of Hobbit tobacco for an hour.”
And so it went. Elizabeth would march through the entire Pike canon in the course of a year and start again with Chain Letter in early January. Well, almost the entire Pike canon. There was one book she’d never been able to track down. Sati. The story of a young woman who claims to be God. It was out of print. Whenever they passed a library book sale or Mac’s Backs in Cleveland Heights, she was compelled to stop in so that they could spend twenty minutes searching for this rare hardcover.
One afternoon, a short time after David’s awkward proposal, he found himself in Ravenna. He was working for a community biweekly newspaper that covered northern Portage County and the editor had sent him to the county seat to report on a nasty civil suit involving a development deal gone awry. It was not glamorous work, not the investigative journalism he’d dreamed of in college, but it was steady and he was grateful for the experience. On that particular afternoon, on his way to the Triangle Diner for a corned beef sandwich, he noticed a sign across the street that read GOODWILL BOOK SALE.
The place smelled of mildew, mothballs, and desperation. Rows of seventies slacks in shades of brown and orange hung on tall racks to his right, paisley blouses to his left. Taking up the center of the room were a dozen card tables topped with boxes and boxes of books. A milk crate full of hardcovers was mostly hidden under a lime-green shawl someone had tossed aside. Under the shawl, lying atop the other books, was Sati.
His fingertips brushed the cover. He felt dizzy inside. He never thought he could be so happy holding a Christopher Pike book. He still believed in signs, then. And what else could this be? All her life, Elizabeth had been dealt the universal equivalent of a series of seventeens when the dealer always came up aces. Her sister. Her mother. Elizabeth had become an acolyte of probability and she wouldn’t allow herself to bet on him in the face of such a losing streak. But this was a bit of luck. How might that change her?
He thumbed open the front page and felt his breath sucked out of his lungs in one long sigh. For Elaine, someone had written.
On the way home, he stopped at a McDonald’s, where he gently ripped the signed page from the book, leaving no evidence of its presence. He crumpled the page into a wad and tossed it into the garbage.
Back in their apartment, David wrote his own dedication. For Elizabeth. Now you can move on. He meant from Pike, but also from Elaine. He wrapped the novel in polka-dot paper and got up at two in the morning so that he could secretly place it next to the coffeemaker before going back to bed.
David awoke at five forty-five to a strange twisting of his hand. He looked, to find a plain gold band on his ring finger. Elizabeth knelt on the floor beside him. Her eyes were smiling but her nose was pinched and wrinkly with emotion.
“One of the last things I remember,” she said softly, measuring her words so they didn’t catch in her throat. “Our eighth birthday party. Peggy got us grown-up gifts. The first time we’d gotten anything but toys, really. She gave me a magic set. With a top hat and little foam bunnies. I believed in magic then. She gave Elaine a book. Sati. Our parents pitched a fit. Said it would corrupt her mind or something. She hid it under her bed. But it disappeared. I think our dad pitched it.” She began to relax. “I wanted to know what she knew.”
“I get it.”
“So marry me,” she whispered.
* * *
He missed the process. The process involved in reporting, in writing; that tactile experience in the preparation of his work. As Tanner napped, David returned to the Edmund Fitzgerald desk for the first time in four years to see if the magic remained.
He sat down on the expensive leather chair and it sighed around him, welcoming him into its grip. So far, so good. He clicked on the desk lamp, one of those classic green-glass types that adds its own ambience to a room. The bulb still worked, then. Next, he slipped open the shallow drawer above his lap. It smelled of pipe tobacco and cherry lozenges, delights of its original owner. Inside were several reporters’ notebooks, narrow and thick pads of paper. His special pens were there, a box of them emptied into the well. Bic blues, inconspicuous tools he felt superstitious about—he’d used Bic blues during his seemingly endless reporting on the Ronil Brune case. To David, Bic blues held all the power of a magic wand that chooses its owner. Also in the desk was a half-empty pack of Marlboros.
David picked up a notepad and three pens. He felt their weight and smiled a little as he set the items on his desk. He took a pen and flicked off the top, sending it across the room and behind the bar. On the front of the notepad he wrote: The Man from Primrose Lane. He set the notepad back down and considered it for a long moment. He liked the sharp and solid look of his handwriting. It pleased him. He had forgotten this.
The Marlboros, he remembered, served a purpose, too.
He opened the desk again and snatched up the packet. He slapped the cigarettes on their end, and that felt good. Smoking was a process, as well. And the process, the ritual, quieted the hum of his mind so he could write. Though he didn’t smoke, these were his cigarettes. They weren’t normal cigarettes; they were mental cigarettes.
Digging into the pack with one impatient finger, he drew out a slightly bent Marlboro and placed it between his lips. He leaned back into the chair and closed his eyes. He tasted the acrid bite of the tobacco-tinged filter on his tongue. He smelled the nicotine and tar
and formaldehyde with his nose. He felt the cigarette’s presence between his teeth. He imagined himself inside some hick bar, taking a long drag and exhaling the smoke in wispy circles. He exhaled and listened to his breath in the silence of the room. His senses were satiated and they thanked him. Nearer the end, when Ronil Brune had tormented him from the grave and the first fingers of depression threatened to drag him into the earth, too, this process had always brought him back. Mental cigarettes, he’d called them. Elizabeth had understood.
This might work, he thought. I might be able to do this. This might be okay.
He felt relief. But a part of him knew it was a lie.
* * *
On the limited occasions when David felt up to venturing into public alone—to catch an R-rated movie or to play poker with a couple chums from college he kept at arm’s length—he left Tanner with the teenage girl down the street, Michelle. She was always available on short notice if he gave her $50 for a couple hours of her time. Tonight Michelle was “watching” Tanner at his house, which likely meant texting her boyfriend with an episode of Grey’s Anatomy blaring in the background as Tanner fiddled with some new contraption in his room.
Though it was the closest library to his house, David hadn’t actually been inside the Akron Public Library since it had been renovated in 2004. He’d done all his research on Brune in Cleveland because the library there was a nice place to walk to during his lunch break and because he loved combing through the old handwritten notes of the Press reporters at the archive over at Cleveland State. The new building in Akron looked more like an IKEA. It certainly didn’t promise adventure like Cleveland Public did.
In a corner on the third floor, David found the microfilm department, a glass-walled alcove with a row of those nifty new computer-scanning readers. He could have done all this online but David was a tactile learner who retained information better if he could work a machine or flip a yellowed page. He needed to hear it, see it, feel it firsthand, or else everything was pushed to the back of his mind with the other junk.
