Three Quarters Dead

by Richard Peck

  “Miss Garland’s apartment, please.”

  He reached inside the door for the receiver of an old-time intercom telephone. “I don’t know if anybody’s up there,” he said. “But I’m part-time. And I just came on duty.”

  He was poking a little metal button. Somewhere high above us a bell was ringing in Aunt Lily’s apartment. And echoing in my head.

  And I thought, just for a moment: I’m on my own here. I can still back out. I can make this not happen.

  “I’m her niece,” I said, for some reason. Lie Number Three or so. “She’s my aunt.”

  But then he said, into the intercom phone, “Young lady to see you.”

  I swallowed hard. I could feel my spine all the way down. The doorman jerked his head. “You can go on up.”

  Who? Who had said I could go on up?

  I was crossing the dark-paneled lobby now, under the heavy beams. I was walking on eggs, not looking back for fear he’d change his mind. Forty-nine percent of me wanted to turn back. Run.

  In the elevator I pushed 13, the button just below PH for penthouse. So if it was Aunt Lily up there, or her maid, I needed to have something ready to say—ready and rehearsed—another alibi. Unless—

  The elevator door rolled back, and I stepped out into a shadowy space. It wasn’t very big, with Chinese wallpaper and dim lights behind parchment shades. Only a couple of doors because there were only two apartments on a floor, two huge and echoing apartments. I was turning to the door of Aunt Lily’s when the door to the back apartment opened. The door cracked and then creaked, and someone was there, behind it in dark shadow.

  I only caught a glimpse. It was someone ancient and weird with eerie orange hair. She was wearing dark glasses in this gloom. And an apron. I flinched, made myself look again, and the door was closed.

  I turned then, to the other one. I didn’t knock. I didn’t have to. The door was inching open, and before I could see, a scent drifted out to me. The scent of apple blossom.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Glitter City

  IT WAS BRIGHTER inside. Light fell across the marble floor and washed over me. Not blinding, but I couldn’t see at first. I couldn’t focus.

  I heard a little chortling, chuckling laugh or two, muffled behind hands. The laughter echoed out of some distant place. But they were right there, standing together in the mirrored entrance hall.

  Tanya was.

  Tanya with highlights in her blond hair and her hand on her hip and her eyebrows arched. I’d know her anywhere. It wasn’t a picture of her. Or a holograph or whatever. Or a memory. Or something made out of mist. It was Tanya. The best-looking girl in school because she could make you think so.

  And there beside her, Natalie—perfect Natalie. Actually the prettiest when you came right down to it. Natalie with the violet eyes and the natural darkness beneath them. And the double lashes. And on Tanya’s other side—Makenzie, smiling her slightly sassy smile, with her arms crossed before her. Full of life, all three, and realer than anything that had happened to me for weeks. There they were, dressed for a Saturday at the mall.

  I was hyperventilating, but Tanya cut right through that. She looked me up and down. “Flip-flops? In town? Honestly, Kerry. And what is that tied around your waist, something from American Apparel? And your backpack?”

  “Honestly,” Natalie echoed. “What next? Tank tops?” And Makenzie only smiled because she could probably remember being me.

  Then all I could see was the crystal chandelier on the ceiling of Aunt Lily’s entrance hall. My eyes swam, though I thought I’d cried all my tears.

  Then all of us, all four, were swimming, drifting like seaweed in turquoise waters among the fish and crabs and rams of all the astrological signs, a zodiac sea mirrored like the walls of Aunt Lily’s entrance hall. A mirrored sea, veined in gold, scattered with silver shells, and in every shell a pearl.

  I woke up—came to on the white sofa in Aunt Lily’s living room. It was a room out of a dream anyway, with murals on every wall, of French clowns—diamond shapes on their costumes and ribbons crisscrossing up their legs. And ladies in masks being helped out of gondolas in Venice. The landscape of a dream, and peeling a little with the years. A little out of date.

  Every light was on. I struggled up among the sofa pillows and looked around. All the painted people on the walls were jostling each other like the subway crowds.

  And they were still there, close enough to touch. Makenzie sat curled in a kidney-shaped love seat just her size. She’d always had somewhat rebellious hair—haystacky, and her glasses were propped up there where they always were.

  Natalie sat in a French-looking chair with gold arms. Every little move she made was always worth watching. Her hands tucking her long black hair behind her ears was an event. Always had been. Tanya sat forward in another French chair.

  “Kerry,” she said. “Get a grip. You’re scattered. And don’t faint again. You drooled.”

  “What time is it?” I said.

  That seemed to be good for a laugh. Makenzie chortled behind her hand. Natalie rolled her violet eyes.

  “What does it matter?” Tanya asked.

  It didn’t, I supposed. But I never wear a watch, and I wondered. After all, I’d been out like a light, long enough for them to carry me in here. I’d felt their hands on me, even when I was out like a light. Their hands, making contact.

  “Time doesn’t matter, Kerry,” Tanya said. “Let’s get that straight. Stay right here in the moment with me. Here is what matters. Where’s your phone? Don’t tell us you didn’t bring it.”

  I looked around for my backpack, and my head was splitting open.

  “Makenzie, get it out of her bag.” Tanya snapped her fingers.

  Makenzie sprang off the love seat and went for wherever my backpack was. When she came back with my phone, Tanya took it and flipped it open.

  “How old is this thing?” she said. “Honestly. It looks like that one somebody left at the shrine. And what did you pay for it? Thirty-nine ninety-five?”

  But while she was trash-talking my loser phone, she was punching in a number she knew by heart.

  She’d just texted me this morning, so where was her phone? It seemed an age ago, not that time mattered. “Where’s yours?”

  “Good question,” Tanya said. “I think the contract got canceled. It figures. You were the last call, and now it’s dead as a doornail. I threw it out. I’m good at getting rid of anything I can’t use. But then we couldn’t order in lunch. Aunt Lily canceled her landline because she’s in Paris so much. She can be so uptight about money. You know old people.”

  “And as a matter of fact, we’re starving,” Natalie said. “I personally could never be anorexic. I don’t know how Joanne does it.”

  “There’s nothing in this entire apartment but Bloody Mary mix, cans of Slim-Fast,” Tanya said, “and—”

  “Cocktail olives,” Makenzie said, “which we ate. We have to keep up our strength.”

  So now Tanya was on my phone, ordering.

  “No anchovies on mine,” I said as in a dream. “I hate anchovies.”

  “Anchovies?” Tanya stared. “Kerry, I’m not ordering in pizza from, like, Yonkers. This is New York. I’m ordering actual food. Continental cuisine from Orsay on Lexington. They’ve been sending meals over to Aunt Lily for forever. I can put everything on her bill.”

  Oh, I thought.

  “No snails,” Makenzie was calling out. “No frogs or frog parts. I’m English.”

  My head had been pounding, splitting. Now it rang. All of this was happening. You could see it. You could hear every word. But how?

  “Nothing with clams,” Natalie was calling out. “You know about me and clams.”

  But the room was beginning to tilt and turn, and their voices wavered up from the bottom of a well somewhere. A deep, deep well. The costume people painted on the walls made jerky little moves. The prisms on all the lamps tinkled. All I had to do was close my eyes, and I was back
at the memorial service, a memory that came and went and wasn’t real. Like a black-and-white movie you don’t want to rent.

  IT HAD BEEN held at school because they needed an auditorium that big. A Saturday right at the end of April. The stage was decorated in branching blossoms, sprays of dogwood and pear and quince and Japanese cherry. Everything but apple blossom.

  The whole school came. Hundreds. Cars backed up for blocks. SUVs parked in ditches. It didn’t matter that it was Saturday. Everybody came. Tanya’s dad and Joanne. Her aunt Lily in the big black hat. Natalie’s parents. My parents, together with me between them—me, stoned on some medication the doctor prescribed. Three pills. I needed more. The school chorus sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” How wrong they were.

  They weren’t there. Not their . . . bodies. It wasn’t a funeral. The funerals had been private or graveside or something. Makenzie had been cremated, and her parents had taken her ashes back to England. The Kemps weren’t at the memorial. Probably a community-wide memorial service was too public for them. Too American.

  I never saw their bodies. Never. You don’t see dead bodies in Westchester County, except on TV. What made me so sure they were dead? Who did I think I was? I ought to get over myself. They’d always been above the law, those three. They’d made their own laws. Tanya had.

  The school orchestra played “When You Walk Through a Storm, Hold Your Head Up High.”

  And that was probably a sign. They’d probably just gone for a walk.

  I OPENED MY eyes, and everything was clearer than before. The room was brighter, and the colors stronger, even on the fading walls. Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie popped out of the scene, realer than before. I saw what they must have been up to.

  They’d spent the afternoon making themselves up with Aunt Lily’s cosmetics. I’d been in her bathroom at Christmastime, so I happened to know: She’d cornered the world market on paint, powder, moisturizer, liner, and blush. She had enough pore filler to grout this building. They were ready for their close-ups. They were on stage now, and this apartment was the perfect setting.

  “Yes, that sounds fine,” Tanya was saying. She could sound exactly like a grown woman on the phone. She was as adult as she needed to be. “Dinner for four, and you can surprise us with the dessert. And Miss Garland would like it as soon as possible. Her party is going out later.”

  Natalie drew in her cheeks at that, showing her killer cheekbones. Makenzie grinned. We were going out later? Really?

  “And add the usual tips for yourselves and the deliveryman,” Tanya said, very brisk, snapping my phone shut, not handing it back to me.

  Time narrowed and widened. Then in no time at all the doorman was buzzing up the word that the dinners were here.

  “Kerry, go to the door and bring it all in. Deal with that.”

  And of course I did.

  THE DIAMOND-PANED windows of Aunt Lily’s long dining room looked out on the nighttime glitter city. The curtains were taffeta in faded pastels, swag over swag. Fringe. Tassels. Dust hung in the swing of the swags. The chandelier over the table was filmy with gossamer cobwebs. Nothing had changed in this place for years, decades. Time had stood still.

  We dimmed the chandelier and dined by candlelight. We unfolded the damask dinner napkins and settled around the silvery table in this grown-up room for our grown-up dinner. The four of us, having another adventure, around the table again like on Halloween night. In business again in these pools of candle flame. They’d pulled up the drawbridge, and I was on their side of the moat.

  Was I still being nagged by doubts? Not this minute. You didn’t have doubts for long around Tanya because she was always so certain. Tanya never let doubts in the door.

  We took turns being the maid, bringing in the courses from Aunt Lily’s huge institutional kitchen. We all played maid except for Tanya, who sat at the head of the table in a high-backed chair with arms. What was she like, there on her throne? Like always—the Mistress of Whatever Was Happening. The Queen of Now.

  Makenzie was the soup course, a cool soup with a floating island of cream. She brought it in on one of Aunt Lily’s dented silver trays. Natalie was the main course. Mahimahi, a fish flown in from someplace where A-list fish live—some turquoise sea. The fish was on a bed of something with whipped squash in a shape and a spray of asparagus Hollandaise.

  It was truly adult food, and some of it went over my head. Besides, I kept snatching glances at the others, just to prove they were there, I suppose.

  Makenzie was tucking in with knife in one hand and fork in the other, the English way. Natalie picked delicately through the sauces in case of clams. I’d forget to eat for watching them. I had this history of watching them, trying to be them. Tanya had to tell me to go to the kitchen for the desserts.

  A swinging door led to a long butler’s pantry lined with endless glass-fronted cupboards. Then a vast kitchen opened up—an acre of black-and-white linoleum and tiled walls and hanging on them blue-bladed knives of every size. A truly historic refrigerator up on legs. The lighting was ghastly, from fluorescent tubes.

  And just as I walked into the glaring kitchen, somebody walked out of it.

  I stopped dead. I couldn’t scream, or budge.

  Somebody had been in here, over by that door to a back hall. Someone had been right there. Just a flash, a glint of ceiling light off of glasses. An apron? Then nobody, not even footsteps.

  I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. What was I supposed to do—grab a bread knife off the wall and light out down that hall, wherever it led? No way.

  I found my breath and yanked the desserts out of their insulated bag. My hands were all over the place, but I was in a big rush now. The desserts were true artworks, spun sugar curlicues poking up out of chocolate-encrusted ice cream bonbons. Whatever. I slapped them on a tray and got out of there, heading for the dining table voices. And believe me, I didn’t look back.

  Later, after dinner, when we were loading the dishwasher, I made sure I wasn’t by myself. We bustled around the kitchen before we went to get dressed. And I kept right in the middle of the bustle. But I didn’t tell the others somebody had been there. I just didn’t, for some reason. Now, maybe I wasn’t that sure I’d even seen anything, or anyone. Maybe it wasn’t anybody real. How many kinds of real are there?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Blue Velvet Night

  THERE ARE CLOSETS. Then there are walk-in closets. Then there are dressing rooms. Then there was Aunt Lily’s entire ecosystem for her clothes, makeup, jewelry, her whole history. It was a vast windowless space the size of Costco.

  And it went all the way back to her ancient childhood. She’d grown up in this apartment. There were drawers full of Raggedy Anns and roller skates and Shirley Temple books.

  But most of it was like forever Fashion Week, crammed with discounts and freebies from the last fifty years or so. And mirrors everywhere you looked. There you were in every closet door. Parts of yourself.

  “Check this out,” Tanya said, throwing open a pair of doors. Inside were shoe racks to the ceiling, two hundred pairs of shoes, at least. Then that rack pulled out, and another rack behind it had two hundred more—every open-toed, slingback, platform, ankle-strap, wedgie, spectator style since 1950 or whenever.

  “Look.” Tanya pulled out wide drawers that unrolled themselves. Inside against plush black steps was Aunt Lily’s jewelry, a treasure chest of retro-bling. The whole room flashed with emerald and sapphire and ruby lights. Natalie sighed. Makenzie stared. The earrings hung on earring trees, three hundred miniature chandeliers, at least.

  “This is just the costume stuff,” Tanya remarked. “She keeps the hard rocks in the bank. And the furs in storage. But look here.”

  Behind more doors were shelves full of bags, silk and paper with grosgrain ties in designer colors. They were the freebies you get at fashion shows, mostly Paris and Milan. And the main source of Aunt Lily’s cosmetic supply. The mother lode.

  “Look at all this stuff,
” Tanya said. “It’s like . . . plunder.” She handed me a swag bag from Chanel. Inside, it was all there: the square bottle of Chanel No. 5, a lace fan, a dried-out bottle of Ultra Correction Cream, a compact with the Chanel logo. Crumbly bath salts, an evening bag on a long silk cord. All of it from probably 1964.

  “Aunt Lily is such a squirrel,” Tanya said. “Will she ever need this stuff? Or use half of it up? Even she doesn’t need this much pore filler.” Tanya looked in a mirror at Natalie and Makenzie. “But she won’t put it on eBay either. You don’t just give everything up and . . . walk away, do you?” she said to them. “Do you? You hang on to your life.”

  There was silence then, echoing like a bell that hadn’t rung. Time teetered and stood still again. Then Tanya was throwing open more doors, and racks of dresses slid out—burst forth. “Frocks,” Makenzie called them. Their hangers were on motorized carousels that revolved in the room, making the turning dresses and skirts whisper and caress each other. They sighed to be worn.

  How long did it take to see even a little of all this? Even a fraction? Aunt Lily was the goddess of the goodie bag and the give-away. Forget the scarf and handkerchief drawers. Never mind the glove stretchers and a bin full of squirmy objects labeled: “Playtex girdles.”

  But time didn’t matter, and we had to see everything—check everything out and try on everything but the girdles. We had to go through everything before we could decide what to wear. We had to put together outfits that worked for us out of this landfill of vintage outrageousness. We were going out. We had to look good, and a little older than we were. Because getting dressed together is the best part of going out. “Like who doesn’t know that?” as Tanya always said.

  Hair, of course, was major. Makenzie’s haystack with her glasses embedded in it had to be jelled into semispikes with a subtle swirl of color not from nature. Nothing pink, nothing punk. Just a nod in the direction of pastel punkery to go with Aunt Lily’s waspwaisted lace dress Makenzie wore over leg warmers. It was hard to get Makenzie out of her favorite fringed suede boots. But tonight below lace and leg warmers she wore spike-heeled pumps. Patent leather. She had to pad the toes with tissue paper because her feet were so tiny.