by Sally Mandel
“Is that why this is happening?” Amy asked. “Because I’m wrecked out of my mind?”
“Absolutely,” said Bob. Amy watched his mouth closely. It hadn’t moved, and yet she could hear him so clearly.
“But it feels incredibly real.”
“You’re stoned but you’re not crazy,” Bob said.
“If anything, I feel less crazy now than I do when I’m sober.”
“Well, then, that’s a serious problem,” Bob said.
“It’s the emptiness,” Amy said. “I can take anything but that. It’s like being a jack-o’-lantern. Hollow.”
“What about reading? As I recall, that used to fill you up.”
From the time she was eight, Amy had been gobbling up books like snack food. By the time she was ten, she was reading Dickens and Tolkien. She liked being transported to a place where she could settle in and stay for a while. She liked detail, the more the better. She wanted to be able to visualize the color of the characters’ hair, the shape of their hands, even the buttons on their clothes.
“You have to read if you’re going to be a writer,” Bob went on.
“I just can’t seem to get into a book now,” Amy said. “I don’t write any more either. Not even in my journal. All I can ever think about is my boyfriend. He’s changed my life completely.”
“I met him, remember?”
“Right, I forgot,” Amy said. “Out by your yard the other night. What did you think of him?”
“To tell the truth, he gave off a faint scent of misogyny.” Bob circled around a couple of times and lay down at her feet.
“Wow, you don’t hold back, do you?”
“I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, am I? Scratch my shoulder, will you?”
Amy obliged. “Theo came along at just the right time,” she said. “Like an angel.”
“As you well know, he stole electronics from the company where he had a summer job,” Bob said. “And now he makes his money selling drugs. Some angel.”
“Okay, I know all that, but just the same I can’t imagine my life without him. I felt dead. Even feeling bad is better than feeling dead.”
Bob got up with a sigh and padded over to lay his muzzle on Amy’s lap. “You remember how I got this blind eye?” he asked. “You were there. You saved my life.”
“The hit and run?”
“Precisely. I was lying there more dead than alive and you called the taxi. That driver took one look at me and started to take off, but you hung onto the door and bullied him into taking us to the vet. You stayed with me while they set my leg.” His voice was growing dim. Amy had to concentrate hard to hear him. She ran her fingers over his silky ears.
“Look, honey,” he said. Amy bent her head down close. “I used to love chasing cars. Couldn’t get enough. I was a total thrill junkie. I’d hide behind the Robertsons’ azaleas and run out when I saw one coming. Got away with it for years until that day. And, see, this is just what you’re doing. Chasing cars. You’ve gotta find another way or ….”
She couldn’t hear the last part. “What did you say? Or what?”
“… Road hash. You’ll wind up as road hash.” He lifted his head off her thigh, rose and turned to walk down the sidewalk, limping slightly, his nails clicking against the cement.
Amy woke up in a heap beside the front steps. It was just getting light and the birds had set up an awful squawking. No conversations now, just horrible ear-splitting shrieks that made her head throb. She had a sour taste in her mouth, every part of her body stiff and aching, as if she’d been thrashed with a tree limb. Worse than the physical pain, though, was the bleakness that filled her like a sackful of darkness. She wished she were lying off in the woods where nobody would find her for days. She could just stop breathing. That ought to be easy enough. Water began to seep out of the corners of her eyes. Oh, the pain, the pain. She thought about last night, about the dog. Road hash, that was what he had said.
She began to haul herself up the steps and watched the progress of her knees, focusing on her forward movement and trying not to think, just allowing raw impulse to propel her. When she reached the top, she crawled past the dry corpse of a moth and reached for the front doorknob to pull herself to her feet. Tears spilled down to dampen the neckband of her t-shirt.
The phone was all the way at the entrance to the kitchen, miles away. Slowly, slowly she crept towards it. Grabbing the receiver finally, she collapsed with her back to the wall. Theo’ll have something for me, she thought, something to make me feel better. She began to dial, stopped after three numbers and let out a sob. The phone seemed to have a life of its own; somehow it wound up back in its cradle. She dialed again, different numbers this time.
“Hell-LOH-oh,” the voice said, sleepy but characteristically welcoming.
“Gran,” Amy whispered. And then she began to cry in earnest.
“Amy,” Mrs. Adams said. “What’s the matter?”
Amy couldn’t stop crying.
“You have to get a grip on yourself and tell me what’s happened,” Mrs. Adams said. “Are you hurt? Were you in an accident?” Any trace of sleep was utterly gone from her voice.
“I’m a mess, Gran.”
“I can hear that. Take some deep breaths. Do it now.”
Amy did as she was told. It took a few tries, but finally she regained control of her sobs.
“Let me just put on the light,” Mrs. Adams said. “There.”
“Can I come and stay with you for a while?” Amy asked.
“Of course you can.”
“Will you fix it with Mom?”
“Certainly. Why don’t you put her on the phone?”
“No!” Amy almost shouted. “I mean, please don’t make me talk to her. I just … can’t.” She felt herself beginning to cry again.
Mrs. Adams heard the tears threaten. “Amy, darling, do you want me to come and get you?”
Amy thought for a moment. It felt good to address something concrete. A journey. She imagined her grandmother showing up here to collect her, the collision with her mother. “No. I can do it. I’ll get the early train and take a taxi from the station.”
“Do you have enough money for all this?”
“I think so.”
“Are you sure you’re well enough to do this on your own?”
“I’ve done it a hundred times, Gran.”
“Come along then. Let’s get you on that early train.”
The first thing Mrs. Adams did after she hung up the phone was to go into the bathroom and splash cold water on her face. The heat must have come on during the night, even though Mrs. Adams always turned the thermostat down to fifty on the first day of spring. Her nightgown clung to her skin. She was glad William couldn’t see her in it. He would have thought it dowdy. She glanced at the twin beds side by side, his made up neatly, as always, ready for his return. It had been four years and she still caught herself waiting.
At eight o’clock, she phoned her daughter. Stella did not express her jealousy that Amy would turn to Mrs. Adams instead of her. Nor did Stella disclose her own desire to run home to mother right at that moment, given her current emotional state. Not that she ever would.
“I’ll phone you as soon as she gets here,” Mrs. Adams said calmly, and they hung up.
It was nearly noon by the time Amy showed up. Mrs. Adams had been watching for the taxi and went out to pay the driver when it pulled up out front. Amy hauled a suitcase and a backpack out of the trunk and set them on the sidewalk. She was taller than her grandmother by a couple of inches and stood looking down at her with tear-filled eyes. Mrs. Adams hid her shock at the dark blotches under them, the unwashed hair, the sallow complexion.
“I’m sorry, Gran,” Amy said.
Mrs. Adams held out her arms. “The first thing we’re going to do is feed you. You’re skin and bones.”
“Do you think it’s possible to be addicted to a person?” Amy ask
ed. She was sitting in the kitchen across the table from Mrs. Adams, who was plying her with pita bread and hummus. Amy didn’t like baked goods or ice cream, so it took some imagination to fatten her up.
“I don’t see why not,” Mrs. Adams said. In fact, now that she thought about it, perhaps addiction was merely a more accurate term for being in love. “Tell me about this young man.”
“Well, he’s not what you’d call a good person, not that I even care. I’ve always been so high and mighty, like when my friends drink too much and get all sloppy? And here I’m doing sex and drugs with a guy who’s for sure a dealer and maybe worse.”
Mrs. Adams was struck by her own reaction to this confession. There was no struggle to disguise judgment, for she felt none, merely a knot of fear lodged behind her rib cage. How different it had been with Stella.
“I was feeling invisible, you know? And he, he just looked right at me from the first second, the way you do. I probably shouldn’t, I know, but I just … trust him.”
Mrs. Adams regarded her quietly.
“I know,” Amy said. She gave her grandmother a wan smile, pushing her plate away. “I miss him so much I’d just as soon die if I can’t see him again.”
“Did you tell him you were leaving?”
Amy shook her head. “He would have talked me out of it. I would have stayed.” She had changeable eyes, right now greener than they were blue, small oceans of sadness.
“Amy, darling,” Mrs. Adams said, reaching her hand across the table to capture the slender fingers, “you are far too old for your age.”
It must not have taken long for her to fall asleep. Mrs. Adams saw that the girl had simply sprawled out fully dressed with her backpack beside her. There was a little stretch of exposed flesh between the waistband of her jeans and her t-shirt. Mrs. Adams tiptoed over and carefully pulled it down. Amy didn’t stir. Then Mrs. Adams went downstairs and got out her phonebook.
Fritz Jenovyk had been nineteen when Mrs. Adams first met him. William had been away on a business trip, so she was alone when the police called at 2:00 a.m. It turned out that Fritz had stolen Mrs. Adams’ car from the driveway and crashed it into a tree out on the West Hill Road. What she saw when she got to the police station was just a farm boy; he might as well have been balancing on the top of a split-rail fence. It was clear to her that this young man could fall either way. He was sorry and defiant, vulnerable and tough-talking, quick-witted but uneducated. Most of all he was desperate, with the longest eyelashes she had ever seen and large hands with nails bitten down to the quick.
Not only did Mrs. Adams refuse to press charges, but she met privately with him and gave him a loan from her “just in case” fund, the account that nobody knew about. More even than the money, Fritz needed a gesture, some expression of faith. He wound up working his way through college, as things turned out, and repaid Mrs. Adams every penny of the loan.
“Fritz?” Mrs. Adams said into the phone, keeping her voice low. “Are you going to be around over the next week or two? I may need you.”
Amy spent the first two days with her head in the toilet bowl.
“Did I feed you something that didn’t agree with you?” Mrs. Adams held a washcloth to Amy’s head as they sat side by side on the bathroom floor, the cool, hard marble cruel against her sixty-nine-year-old bones.
“It’s the drugs,” Amy said. When she wasn’t vomiting, she was either asleep or crying, sometimes both.
“Should I take you to the hospital?” Mrs. Adams asked her. “Or one of those places that helps get you off the drugs?”
Amy grasped Mrs. Adams’ hand and held on tight. “Please don’t send me away, Gran.”
On the fourth day, just when Amy had begun to get a little color back in her cheeks, the event that Mrs. Adams had been dreading came to pass. He showed up at about four o’clock in the afternoon. Thankfully, Amy was napping upstairs and didn’t hear him knock. The young man stood handsome and smiling in the doorway.
“Hi,” he said, holding out his hand. “You Amy’s grandmother?”
“You must be Theo,” Mrs. Adams said, standing her ground, arms at her sides. With his shiny black hair and clear eyes, he was the epitome of wholesome youth.
“I really need to see her,” he said. “Can I come in?”
“How did you know she was here?” Mrs. Adams asked.
“Oh, she talks about you. She says you’re her best friend.”
“Please wait on the porch,” Mrs. Adams said, closing the screen door against him.
Her legs were wobbling as she went into the kitchen to pick up the telephone. Fritz had to be paged, but thankfully they were able to track him down.
“It’s Lily Adams,” she told him. “He’s here. Can you come?”
Hanging up, she braced against the table, staring down at the tablecloth. It was sprinkled with a pattern of yellow and purple pansies that seemed at this moment absurd.
“Gran?”
She turned to see Amy in the doorway. “What’s going on? I thought I heard talking.”
“I’d like you to go back upstairs,” Mrs. Adams said quietly.
Amy studied her. “Theo’s here, isn’t he?”
“I want you to let me handle this,” Mrs. Adams said. “You’re in no condition.”
“He came for me,” Amy said.
“Yes,” Mrs. Adams said. She looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. The second hand clung stubbornly to each demarcation before finally lurching to the next.
A car pulled up out front. Amy and Mrs. Adams both moved to the window. Striding up the sidewalk was a hulking state trooper in full regalia. Amy clutched Mrs. Adams.
“What’s going on?” she whispered.
But Mrs. Adams disengaged herself and opened the front door. “Fritz, thank you for coming over.” Amy stepped out behind her. “Amy, this is Officer Jenovyk.”
“Amy,” Theo said from the porch, starting for her.
Fritz held out an arm. “Stay where you are, son.”
“Oh, Theo,” Amy said. “Gran, please. Just for a minute?”
“No, darling, I don’t think it’s wise.”
“How about we take a walk to your vehicle,” Fritz said to Theo.
“I need to speak to my girlfriend,” Theo said.
Fritz clamped a hand on Theo’s shoulder. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.
Halfway down the sidewalk, Theo turned back to look at Amy. He had the look of someone who has just collided with a brick wall. Fritz opened the door to the MG and deposited Theo inside. The trooper’s large frame dwarfed the car as he leaned in to speak with Theo. Amy went out onto the porch and sat down on the steps with her face hidden on her arms. Mrs. Adams stood beside her, watching. Finally, Fritz stood up, slapped the trunk of Theo’s car and backed away.
“That’s it,” they heard him say.
Theo started the car. He didn’t look at Amy, just slid slowly off down the quiet street. Amy sat with her head on her knees, shaking convulsively. After Mrs. Adams said good-bye to Fritz she came to sit beside Amy.
“Oh Gran,” Amy said. The hair around her face was damp with tears. “How am I ever supposed to be happy again?”
Mrs. Adams took her in her arms and rocked her gently. She couldn’t get Theo’s face out of her mind, the expression as he gazed at Amy with such intense need. “Yes, you’ll be happy,” she told Amy. “Then you won’t be. Then you will again.”
Amy was silent a moment. “Okay,” she said finally. After a while, her sobs died away, and the two sat quietly, old and young, in the late afternoon.
In Her Bones
Stella: 1955
The new boy didn’t look like anyone Stella had ever seen before. He was only three years older than she was, which made him seventeen, but he carried himself like an adult. It was partly the English accent, she supposed, but he also had a certain poise, a watchful quality like he was taking it all in and carefully making up his mind
. She couldn’t imagine him grabbing hold of the vine over in Lars Woods and swinging himself out over the ravine like Eric or Fred.
“We’ll have a guest at brunch today,” Stella’s mother had told her that Sunday before leaving for the country club. “His mother’s an old friend of mine who lives in England.”
“The pretty one who comes to visit sometimes?” Stella asked.
“Yes, and Simon’s actually been here once or twice himself, but you must have been away at camp. Grace and I grew up together in Egypt.”
“Oh, yeah. The story with the crabs.”
Lily and Grace had spent a summer living in a luxurious tent community near Alexandria. Every evening as the sun went down, the fiddler crabs, hundreds of them, would march over the hard sand along the surf. Lily still remembered the sight with awe.
“There are some people who stay with you always,” she told Stella. “It doesn’t matter how often you see them.”
“What’s her son doing here now?” Stella asked. She was helping her mother fold the laundry that had just come off the line out back. Lily Adams was one of the few people left in town who passed up the dryer, at least during the warm months. Her husband teased her about it. They had plenty of household help, after all, but Lily liked the smell of sunshine and fresh air as she gathered the clean clothes into her arms.
“He’s taking a summer course at the college. It’s been a hard few years for him, so please be cordial.”
This rankled. Of course Stella would be cordial. When was she ever rude? It was so irritating when her mother expected only the worst from her. “Why was it hard?” she asked.
“He lost his brother.”
“Oh,” Stella said. She buried her face in a bath towel. If anything ever happened to anyone she loved—her mother, say—she didn’t think she could face another hour of the day. She felt Lily’s hand on her head.
“Let’s go get dressed, shall we? I intend to dazzle. How about you?”
