No One Tells Everything

by Rae Meadows

  “Hi, Dad,” she says.

  It takes him a moment to place her, to return from wherever he has been.

  “Hi,” he says, looking back to the disarray in front of him.

  “What are you working on?”

  “Organizing,” he says. “Been meaning to do it for a long time.”

  “Do you need help?” she asks, not wanting to but wanting him to say yes.

  “No,” he says, shaking his head. “No.”

  “I’m going out to the mailbox if you need anything mailed.”

  “I’m making a Callie tray,” he says. “The highlights. Zero to eight.”

  “Oh,” she nods.

  The light from the window makes a square on his chest.

  “Maybe my highlight tray will be your summer project,” she says.

  He looks up at her.

  “Or maybe it’ll be more than one tray, since I have so many more years,” she chirps. “A highlight tray set.”

  Her father opens and closes his mouth like a fish.

  “Maybe you’ll include a picture of me when I was thirteen with Hank Morgenstern. He’ll be smiling in it. And his hand will be on my thigh.”

  Her dad grunts and looks past her to the doorway for some kind of escape. She wants a reaction, an admission, a defense, anything. But his face is an illegible map of anxiety, pain, and confusion. He will not let her in.

  “Okay,” she says, defeated.

  He looks down at the slides, a sea of jigsaw puzzle pieces around him.

  “So nothing for the mail then?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  She leaves him to his mining of the past.

  CHAPTER 18

  Grace cleans out her mother’s spice rack, tossing doubles (cloves, allspice, thyme) and crusty ten-year-old containers (poultry seasoning, tarragon, marjoram). She walks out to the mailbox, ready to run back if the phone rings. She examines her face in the bathroom mirror and over-plucks her eyebrows. She fears that he will never call again.

  ###

  “I got a letter today from an anonymous person in New Jersey. I’ll read you what it says. ‘Charles Raggatt, you are inhuman and every day I pray that you will receive the death penalty, your just reward.’”

  “Why doesn’t your lawyer counteract the stories that get put out? I don’t get it,” Grace says.

  “He’s doing what he thinks is best. What my parents think is best for me.”

  “I don’t think the D.A. will seek the death penalty.”

  “I’m told it’s a real possibility,” Charles says.

  “That won’t happen,” she says. “If people understand.”

  “Have you ever had the feeling that you were suffocating?” he asks.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning, like I’m being sucked under. I’m caught between wanting to get above it and the urge to just give in.”

  “What do you do,” he asks, “when you feel that way?”

  “Usually I take the easy way out and drink myself into oblivion. So I don’t have to choose.”

  “I used to knock my head into a wall. Or burn myself with matches. I crashed my car once.”

  “Your parents never noticed that you did these things?”

  “No one’s ever looking that hard,” he says. There’s a loud buzzer in the background and a man yells. “Sorry for the noise. It’s never quiet here. I wish for real quiet. I wish for a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Charles?”

  “I wish we could each have one do-over. To use whenever we wanted.”

  “You’re not alone,” she says.

  “Grace?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The fact that they are calling this a premeditated murder…it’s just not true.”

  “I believe you,” she says. He doesn’t respond. “I believe you. Let me help you.”

  “I was thinking last night,” he says, “when I couldn’t sleep, about a book I read first semester for English. Have you heard of The Myth of Sisyphus?”

  “I read it in college but that was fifteen years ago.”

  “I can’t say I really understood it that well, but there was something that stuck with me and it’s become more important to me here in jail, because every day looks the same. He says in the book that we should imagine Sisyphus happy, that in the absence of hope, we have to struggle to survive.”

  “Charles, tell me what happened.”

  “Were you ever jealous of your sister?” he asks.

  “All the time. We didn’t get along that well. I didn’t like her very much. Sometimes we had fun together but usually we fought. She liked to get me into trouble.”

  “Parents like to pretend they don’t play favorites but they do,” he says. “They don’t even hide it that well.”

  “I think it’s one of the reasons Callie didn’t think anything bad could happen. She didn’t worry because she knew everyone was looking out for her.”

  Charles sighs. His words are muffled.

  “What?”

  “I never felt like anyone was looking out for me,” he says.

  “This is awful to say, but when my sister died, part of me thought: so there.”

  “Grace?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sometimes you remind me of me. Not that I’d wish that on anybody.”

  ###

  Hunter High School is a large, turn-of-the-century brick building with a vaguely gothic façade. Grace parks in the visitors’ lot in the shade of a beech tree and watches the students spill out of Charles’s old school, laughing groups of shiny kids, boys in varsity jackets, girls in expensive jeans. She tries to imagine him, one step behind, looking for the signs of how to act written in a language he couldn’t learn. Always askew.

  Charles’s sister emerges from a side door in a threesome of girls, her head back in unbridled laughter as she ambles across the lawn. She has a glow about her, a trueness. Grace wonders if Caroline wants to talk to Charles or if she has given up on him. Maybe she doesn’t want to know. Grace scrunches down in the seat, out of view.

  And then as she is leaned over, staring at the glove compartment, she understands what should have been so obvious. If it were her, and she had checked into a rundown motel by herself, it would have meant she felt bad and wanted to feel worse. It would have meant she had had enough. Charles went to the Econo Lodge in Hickton to kill himself. He checked in with a knife to put an end to the spiraling disaster of his year at Emeryville, in the anonymous decay of that room.

  When she sits up, Caroline and her friends are gone and only a sprinkle of students idles in front of the building. Grace rolls down the window to the faint rhythmic chanting of cheerleading practice.

  She bites her nails. Her head throbs. She’s not moving fast enough. She’s wasting time here in Ohio.

  She drives into town, past the old-fashioned Rexall drug store and the freshly painted white gazebo in the middle of the square where Dixie bands play in the summer and craft shows encamp in fall. A couple of kids toss a Frisbee across the grass. She is definitely in the wrong place.

  She heads west, out of the nicer part of town, to an area of strip malls and fast-food restaurants and flimsy apartment complexes offering week-to-week leases. Circles, a bar at the Ramada, isn’t open yet. Further out there’s a Hooters. She doubles back and pulls into Happy House Lounge and Chinese Restaurant, a stand-alone place that looks like it used to be a Howard Johnson. On the sign there is a smiling face with slashes for eyes. She parks.

  When she was sixteen, Grace lost her virginity with a boy from the club in a janitor’s closet, after a mixed doubles tennis tournament. It hurt, but she didn’t dwell on it. Sex seemed like not that big a deal. It wasn’t until college that this changed, that she felt the pull of male attention, the narcotic power of the physical, the lure of a new body. Sex was the space for escape and nullification that she’d been looking for all along.

  In the restaurant
entryway, striped and colored fishes swim lethargically in the cloudy water of a giant aquarium. Late-afternoon light streams through the front window in a dusty swath across the bar. At one end, an older woman in a purple polyester suit drinks a beer and nibbles fried chow mein noodles, shielding the side of her face from the sun. At the other, in the shadow, is a man in a short-sleeved button-down shirt with closely cropped hair and smooth, muscled arms. Grace can’t see his face. She sits one stool away from him and orders a vodka tonic.

  Upon closer inspection, when her eyes adjust, the man is quite attractive, with long-lashed hazel eyes, full lips, and amaretto skin. He is drinking a cognac and reading the baseball scores from a folded-over Plain Dealer.

  “Hello,” he says.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “What happened to you?”

  Her incident with the tree has left a scab on her cheek, still tender pink around the edges.

  “You should see the other guy,” she says.

  He reaches toward her face and she rears back a little.

  “An eyelash,” he says.

  “Sorry,” she says, leaning to let him get it.

  “Didn’t mean to freak you out,” he says.

  “You didn’t. Cheers.”

  She holds up her drink.

  “Yeah,” he says, and laughs a little, clinking her glass. “Bottoms up.”

  They drink.

  “Tom,” he says holding out his hand.

  “Grace.”

  He takes her hand and gently squeezes.

  “So what do you do?” she asks.

  “Retired. From the military. I do a little of this, a little of that. You?” He leers a bit when he says this, as if he knows she is about to lie.

  “Race car driver,” she says.

  “Hah,” he laughs, swirling his drink.

  Tom buys a bottle of Hennessey from the bartender and they take off into the evening. Even out here, amidst the swooshing of cars, the call of crickets accompanies the darkness. Grace is unusually woozy. The headlights and taillights of passing cars run together in blurry streams. Tom has offered to get them a room at the Ramada down the street using his military discount, because he claims to live in Lorraine—too far away for them to go back to his place. She doesn’t get into particulars because they don’t much matter to her. Tom has nice hands, strong and long-fingered. As he pulls his giant Oldsmobile out of the parking lot, bouncing slowly off the curb, she thinks she might be sick.

  “I was in Vietnam,” he says. “In 1972.”

  “Oh,” she says.

  This makes him much older than she’d guessed. She wishes they we were already in bed, in the dark.

  “Relationships are hard for me,” he says.

  Oh God, she thinks, please be quiet. She has the spins when she closes her eyes and she’s starting to lose her nerve.

  The room is salmon-colored and smells of sprayed air freshener. The cheap nylon bedspread is worn in spots and one of the curtains has come off its metal rail. Tom sits on the bed in his clothes and hands her the bottle of cognac, which she drinks out of habit, not even wanting it, the last swallow coming back up.

  “I don’t feel well,” she says, boozily tripping on the end of the bed.

  “Why don’t you come here,” Tom says, holding out his ropey arm toward her.

  She goes to him and he pulls her onto the bed. He grabs her hair and kisses her hard on the mouth.

  ###

  The phone rings and rings until finally it stops. Grace rolls over slowly—her brain feels like it is floating loosely in her head. She is naked, except for her socks and her watch, and she is alone. It is three a.m. The bedside light exposes an empty bottle of Hennessey on the floor near her bra and inside-out jeans. Panic gives way to regret, and then to shame. She throws up, first right in the bed, and then again in the bathroom sink. There’s a condom floating in the toilet. The mirror shows someone haggard and green, worn out. She can’t remember much after arriving in the room.

  She sits on the edge of the bed and gingerly dresses, moving slowly, her hands unsteady. She stands but then sits back down and drops her head between her knees. It’s too much.

  She’s still muddled as she trips along the deserted thoroughfare back to the Happy House, stopping once to dry-heave into the weeds. Her mother’s car waits alone in the parking lot. She collapses behind the wheel.

  When Grace finally turns into Woodland Road, relieved by its stillness, she rolls down the window and takes a deep breath. But then there is a bump under the tire and she lurches the car to a stop. She spills out in the middle of the dark street and the interior light shines on a little mound of fur and blood, claws and teeth. A squirrel. One of its legs jerks, and a dead eye holds her with an accusatory stare.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Charles,” your mom says. “Come now. I know you can do it. Say ball. Ball.”

  She rolls the soccer ball to you and it bounces off your shins before you can grasp it. You’re too focused on the black hexagons blurring together. You are not coordinated.

  “Think how proud Daddy will be,” she says, holding the ball up. “Ball.”

  But you are marveling at the big coils of sod the men are unloading to cover up the dirt in the backyard. Grass comes in rolls! You giggle. Who cares about a black-and-white ball when there are huge spools of grass that men deliver. What they’ve been telling you is wrong. Grass doesn’t grow from seeds after all. It arrives on a truck. Maybe more things they say aren’t true either.

  “Charles? Sweetie. Say it for Mommy.”

  Your mom is young and pretty in her pink gingham dress, but she is anxious and weary and you can feel it in the space between you two. You point at the grass carpeting, hoping to distract her from her singular pursuit because you are getting tired and you want to be alone.

  “Please don’t do this,” she says, lacing and unlacing her fingers. “I know you’re not dumb.”

  Your dad thinks you’re dumb. He wants to trade you in for another son.

  A blue jay lands on the bird feeder and you run on pudgy legs toward it, wanting to hold it in your fat little hands.

  “Yes. Bird,” she says. “Charles, look at me. Bird.”

  You look at her but you won’t say anything. You smile, wanting to see your mom look happy, wanting her to not push you anymore, to let you be as you are.

  “Don’t get too close. Jays are mean birds,” she says.

  The men with the sod have unrolled the last of the grass, covering the mud with soft green. Your mother dreams of the day when the Raggatts will be rich and you will be able to move out of this split-level house. For now she will make the best home for her family, petunias and zinnias along the walkway, meatloaf and green bean casserole in the oven.

  She sighs and quickly covers a scowl with a wide-eyed smile when she sees you watching her. The blue jay has flown away. You lie on the grass and look up at the branches of the new willow tree that was delivered and set into the ground by the men. You could stay here for hours.

  “Okay then,” your mother says. “If that’s the way you’re going to be. Let’s go.”

  She touches her stomach, a growing hard mound, as she gets up from the grass. She tells you that you are going to have a little sister and you will have to teach her things. You can’t wait because then it won’t be only up to you anymore. Later you will wonder what would have happened if Caroline had not come along and they had had to deal with only you, but it might not have made any difference anyway.

  “Charles, let’s go. Get up.”

  But you don’t want to. The clouds keep coming and you don’t want to miss one. Moving, splitting, reconnecting. The thin little branches of the new tree are so fragile and they need you here to make sure they withstand the wind. You shake your head “no” against the ground.

  “Now,” she says, frustrated, through clenched teeth, careful not to alert the yard workers. “Get up this minute.” Her eyes are shiny pools. She grabs your arm and pulls b
ut you go limp, refusing. “Do not do this to me.”

  Her nails dig into your soft arm and a curl of her hair falls loose across her forehead. She is crying now, stifling the sound with a red scrunched face, and although you know you could make it better, you are filling with your own fury, a knot of anger, and you pretend you are a rock and no one can get to you.

  She drags you now, despite the glances she gets from the men loading the shovels onto the truck. Your arm hurts and your head bumps along but you are silent. If you talk, you know you won’t ever be able to go back to how it is inside yourself. When she gets you in the house and slams the sliding glass door, she leaves you lying on the floor, watching the ceiling. You fall asleep right there, lulled by the sound of her angry vacuum crisscrossing the living room.

  ———

  Charles Raggatt pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect at his arraignment on first-degree murder charges in a Nassau County courtroom this morning. Raggatt is charged with drugging, kidnapping, and stabbing to death fellow student Sarah Shafer last April. Police say he was upset because Shafer rejected his sexual advances.

  ———

  CHAPTER 20

  Grace has agreed to have dinner with her parents down the street at the Chenowiths’. She would like to behave tonight, to get through it, to leave on an unfraught note and put this visit behind her. She has had enough of Ohio.

  Her father wears seersucker pants and a white shirt, and her mother is in a kelly green sweater set. Take away a few wrinkles and add hair color, and it could be twenty-five years ago, the annual kickoff cookout at the club, gin and tonics all around. They walk slowly and carefully, she and her mother flanking her dad like police escorts, down the little incline of Woodland Road to the Chenowiths’ gated driveway.

  Marjorie answers the door in a linen ensemble with chunky wooden bracelets. She has not aged as well as Grace’s mother, her middle large and her face heavily creased. Grace remembers when Marjorie used to sunbathe in her backyard, slathered in baby oil, her bathing suit straps tucked under her armpits, Scruples splayed on her stomach.