Doc’s enthusiasm for the project had rendered him incapable of feeling any guilt of any kind. He’d given his former employees severance pay; he’d arranged for some of our writers to freelance with other newspapers. He’d attended to his conscience all he’d felt he’d needed to.
“I want to show you these,” he said, but as he fussed with a box, my attention was drawn to the trash can. Atop the overflow sat a very unexceptional shaving brush resting in a useless, broken mug. The brush had a tortoiseshell handle, and its bristles were of boar’s hair. I knew because it had been my father’s, and I had bought it for him. I’d given it as a birthday gift one year so that he could shave at the office when the news kept him from coming home at night or took him from the house before dawn. The gift had had manipulative intent; I’d meant to cause a pang of regret. I’d meant for him to toss the mug and brush away upon first sight, to take me in his arms, and to apologize for always putting the paper first, always rushing off to follow runaways, houses afire, public drunkenness, devastating storms rapidly approaching. Instead, he’d thought me practical.
“Glass-plate negatives,” Doc said, taking one from the box and holding it up to a stream of light from the front window. “This one’s of an old baseball team. Look at their socks.”
“Yes, look at their socks,” I said, looking down at my shoes. All the revisions to these walls and floors I’d known for decades made me nervous and claustrophobic. One good blast from a sparkler bomb and the whole shoddy operation would shatter into twigs.
I shrugged. “Well, I’m off,” I said. “I have a cake turning to poison in the pickup.” From the bakery down the street I’d bought strawberry angel food with a seven-minute frosting, its peaks whipped from real egg whites, tempting salmonella.
The late-winter months had been so harsh—blizzard after blizzard, the same dirty drifts thick in our yards and streets for weeks—that these early hints of summer had brought everyone out, especially the children. They fled from their houses and schoolrooms with a vengeance, racing their bikes down the middle of streets and covering every inch of pavement with chalk drawings. On the sidewalk in front of the newspaper offices, I opened my umbrella, though there’d only been clouds, no rain. As I walked away, I stepped through the squares of a hopscotch grid.
“You’re not going to be able to stay mad at me about all this,” Doc said from where he leaned in the doorway.
“I’m already not mad at you,” I said. Standing within the end square, I pivoted on the ball of my right foot to turn to him. “But I don’t much care for the direction that beard’s going, to be honest.”
“Just so happens, I’m cutting it off.” He nonetheless stroked his beard possessively. “I told Hailey I’d shave before the wedding.” I cocked my head and raised an eyebrow, as if to say, Wedding? He smiled. “The plan was to tell everybody tonight at dinner. I bought a fifty-dollar bottle of champagne, so you can all congratulate us.”
Again I cocked my head, as if to say, Fifty dollars? He had to have gone out of town for it—there wasn’t a fifty-dollar bottle of champagne to be bought within miles. “How long ago did you propose, anyway?” I said.
“I asked her a few weeks ago. But she only just said ‘yes’ yesterday. Finally.”
“She was smart to take her time,” I said. “You should never rush into a second marriage.”
“Essie, we were kids together, for God’s sake,” he said. “We’ve known each other for thirty years.”
How could that possibly be true? I thought.
“When we tell you tonight,” Doc said, “act surprised.”
“Oh, it’s no act,” I said. “I’m constantly surprised.” I proceeded to my pickup, and once inside, I opened the cake box to tear at the angel food and eat pieces of it with my fingertips.
It was only May, but I heard the electric snapping of a chain of fire-crackers from somewhere nearby, and I was pleased the children were speeding toward the holiday, all their fingers and thumbs still intact. I decided to take a drive along the country roads I’d avoided most of the winter. I would visit the Crippled Eighty and share my cake with Daisy. The last time I’d seen her, way back on that cold January afternoon, I’d promised to look after her. And yet I hadn’t. None of us had.
· 57 ·
Even before no one answered my rapid knocking at Daisy’s door, I suspected no reply. The house had always had the aspects of a ruin—right down to its cement gargoyle broken in the weedy, overgrown rose garden near the front porch—but it seemed somehow that my huffing and puffing would blow the whole house down.
I’ve never been visited by my many ghosts, much to my regret. In my solid, incredulous presence, phantoms flee séances. The planchettes of Ouija boards go deadly still. But in old age, you can nearly convince yourself you’re not alone. You hear, in your bad ear, voices among the sounds of your own blood pumping through your veins. Without your glasses, in the mushing of shapes, you see shadows and movements of figures not there.
I knocked again, and it seemed the knocking roused something inside the house. I pressed my ear against the glass of the door but could only hear the minor tintinnabulation that had lately become frequent. Sometimes my damaged hearing produced a buzz, a steady creak, like a cricket in a wall. I’d become affectionate toward it.
I leaned over the porch railing to see into the window. I saw a rag doll all ripped up, facedown on the floor, its stuffing everywhere but inside of it.
I opened the front door slowly. “Daisy, the door was unlocked,” I called out, stepping inside, setting the cake box on an end table. “You should lock up, darling, even in the country.” I crept right past the kitchen without once glancing inside; had I looked, I would’ve seen enough to warn me away—the low cupboard doors wide open, the floor covered in emptied packages and boxes. I would’ve seen the paw prints frantic in the flour that had spilled from a gnawed-upon sack.
Up from the basement came a low, slow howl that didn’t sound canine at all. I pictured Daisy on her back beneath a bed, every strand of her hair caught in the springs as she starved to death in a mad metaphorical gesture. “Daisy,” I said. “Answer me.” I descended each steep step carefully, one hand on the wall, the other on my umbrella for support. I could feel the umbrella’s tube warping from my scrawny weight. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, even before my eyes adjusted to the dim light let in by the window above the washing machine, I met the stare of a pair of eyes that in my memory burn deep red. And then I saw another pair. Then another. I saw the dogs among the torn boxes and shattered mason jars of Daisy’s canned vegetables—the howling came from a dog curled up in pain along the wall. I would learn later that that he, among a few of the other hounds, had devoured shards of glass among the pickled watermelon and beets.
The dogs stayed still, then stepped forward into a shaft of murky daylight, their hackles up on the backs of their necks like porcupine quills. They growled with clenched jaws, keeping their voices rumbling with threat in their throats. I stepped backward up the stairs.
“I’ll leave you alone, gentlemen,” I said in my best approximation of a harmless, high-pitched, girlish lilt. Because what’s the most frightening thing about being frightened by dogs? Fear itself, of course, and their famous, brutal sense of it. In trying to hold my shaking breath, to disguise it from the dogs, my heart beat faster and my breathing shook more. Be calm, damn it, I advised myself. “I’m all gristle,” I sang. “Not worth the trouble.” The dogs at first matched my wary movement, only inching forward, their heads and necks lowered. Their instincts were off—they were suspicious of my fear. But before I reached the top of the stairs, it was me matching their rhythms and speed—they began to bark with barks hoarse and strangled, and they tumbled over each other’s many legs as they fought in hopes of being the first to snap my brittle-boned ankles between their teeth.
I reached the door soon enough to slam it behind me. As I leaned back, I felt the hard smack of dogs throwing themselves against the doo
r. I heard the weaker of them falling, rolling back down the stairs, only to race back up them again. Their claws on the door seemed to follow my spine. Their barking, which had grown maniacal, drowned out the sounds of more dogs coming down from the upstairs. I caught sight of this new pack soon enough to run, looking for any entryway with a door, of which I discovered there were many. There were doors to hallways, and in the middle of hallways, more doors than were at all necessary when one wasn’t being attacked by rabid mutts.
The dogs knew the house better than I did, and with every slammed door they would quickly reroute. I finally reached the kitchen, leaving my own prints in the flour. As I ran out the back door, throwing it shut behind me, my sleeve caught in the handle of the screen, just as my sleeves have hooked on handles and doorknobs hundreds of times before, in that little gap in the material beneath the button of the cuff. It was only a swift snag, followed by an easy release, but enough to tumble me down the few cement steps to the sidewalk, a very short fall that somehow managed to break both my ankles.
The silence of the dogs disturbed me, seemed strategic, so I ignored the great pain in my step and limped forth at a frantic clip, cringing and leaning on my umbrella, practically skipping forward to keep as much of myself off my feet as possible, weighing the option of simply collapsing in the grass to be attacked. When I heard the echo of the dogs barking in the open air and saw a flock of swallows rustled from a bush near the house, I ran to my pickup, wailing in agony. The dogs reached me just as I opened the passenger-side door, and teeth tore at my long skirt, then sank into my leg. As I crawled inside, I managed to fight them off with my umbrella, sticking the end of it into a one-eyed dog’s one good eye and beating it against the head of another one. I pulled the door forward, clocking the head of a particularly wolfish-looking beast. He yelped and pulled away, and I managed to get the door closed. They continued to bark, throwing their bodies against the truck so hard it rocked on its chassis.
My doctor would later tell me that the fall had probably produced only thin fractures; it was my mad dash on the fractures that had cracked the bones good. But that afternoon, as I lay back, stretched out on the pickup’s seat, convinced I was trapped, the pain of my ankles seemed to pulse through all my extremities. I had no sense of what was broken and what wasn’t. Throughout my old age, I’d feared an undignified end—from time to time, I’d considered moments in my recent past that would’ve made for an appropriate demise. But this end, this final one, if that was what it was, couldn’t have been more fitting if I’d orchestrated it. Attacked by feral dogs, hobbled on the Crippled Eighty.
I managed to pull myself up by the steering wheel to look out across the yard. The dogs had stopped attacking the truck, distracted by the smells of the outdoors, wandering in a manic path toward the field or the barn. They seemed worse off than just wild and abandoned. They were covered in scars, their coats spotted with bald patches. One dog’s tail dragged behind him as if busted. Another dog was bereft of both ears.
From my purse on the floor of the pickup I took my pill box, and from it four aspirin. I swallowed them without water. I looked at myself in my rearview mirror; it was a good thing, I decided, that this hadn’t done me in after all. I wouldn’t want them finding me so unpresentable, my lipstick smeared across my mouth like a drunken harlot’s. I felt around in the turmoil of my hair, my fingertips seeking my dragonfly pin. I’d lost it too.
I tried to calculate how many years I’d worn that pin in my hair. No one had given the pin to me. In my middle age, I’d gone to an obit writers’ conference in St. Louis, held in a respectable hotel. Though the conference had ended, I’d stayed on. I’d been long widowed, and my son had married, and I’d sat alone in the lobby one morning having a breakfast of one soft-boiled egg and a tall wineglass filled to the brim with a Bloody Mary. I’d worn an evening-time cocktail dress, black, with black pumps, my hair freshly teased from an early-morning appointment in the hotel’s salon. I’d wanted to be one of those melancholy, strange, and lovely women you see in hotels and wonder about. But I hadn’t sensed anyone wondering about me, not even the only other woman alone in the lobby, the woman in the leopard-print stole reading a paperback romance and inelegantly eating slices of an apple from a baggie she’d taken from her purse. Where was everyone off to? I’d wondered. Who were they meeting? I had ordered another Bloody Mary, then another, but I hadn’t gotten at all tipsy, though the waiter raised an eyebrow at me when I accidentally knocked over the egg it was taking me forever to eat. After breakfast, in the hotel’s gift shop off the lobby, I’d considered the matronly dragonfly pin that rested on a blue-velvet pillow, its wings weighted by its tacky cluster of glass sapphires. I’d had a premonition right then, seeing it heavy on my head in my old age, snared flightless in the silver coils of my hair. My still-young self invented me right then and there—the formidable hag I’d make someday. I’d pictured myself quirky in men’s trousers, stewed on home-bottled cucumber wine. Maybe I’d smoke those womanly cigars as, my pants cuffed, my feet bare, I wrote an autobiographical novel that exposed all those responsible for my heartbreak. They’d find me dead on my sofa, having finally gotten around to reading Anna Karenina. “She died with that dragonfly pin right where it always was, in her hair above her left ear, the ear she heard the best through,” my obit writer would say.
But back then, I hadn’t imagined myself living so very long—it had seemed to tempt fate to envision myself in my eighties. I just didn’t see myself as having that kind of luck. So I hadn’t bought the dragonfly pin, and not buying it had nagged at me for years. Sometime later I’d called the hotel to see if they’d still had that pin. Not only had they no longer had it, but the gift shop had long since been turned into a cocktail lounge. So when I’d come upon a reasonable facsimile in an antique shop in Iowa, I’d bought it, probably a good twenty years after those Bloody Marys in the hotel lobby.
My dogs noticed I’d survived, and they returned, bringing on a new attack. It turns out they weren’t bored with me after all, those darling pooches. As the truck shimmied from the effects of their resumed fury, I took a tissue to my lips and reapplied my lipstick, dotting my lips with a shade of cinnamon-plum that had been discontinued two years before but that the pharmacist had helped me to stock up on. I scooted behind the steering wheel and started the pickup, wincing from the throbbing not just from my broken ankles but also from the rather noteworthy chomp a lupine-looking bitch had blessed my right leg with. Maybe I’d wake up as a werewolf, freshly immortal but feeble from rabies.
It hurt too much to press either of my feet down on the gas pedal, so I put the tip of my umbrella to it and drove myself through the open gate of the Crippled Eighty, and to the hospital, the dogs chasing alongside much of the way.
Part
ELEVEN
· 58 ·
After being released from the hospital a few days after my mauling, and into my sister’s nursing home for a week, I loved to tell people I was having a stint in rehab. And that was indeed what the doctors called it, rehabilitation, my ankles in braces, a nurse, his handsome face marred by an outdated mustache, attending to my recovery. I was far too weak to not fall in love with the muscular Carlos, who wore a tiny gold key on a chain around his neck.
“It’s silly, I suppose,” he said when I asked him about it as he wheeled me down to the next unit to visit my sis, “but it means a lot to my little girl.” We calculated together: about the same hour I’d been attacked at the Crippled Eighty, he’d been putting on his Sunday best in order to attend a “purity dance” with his seventeen-year-old daughter. With his wife, he’d brushed up on his waltzing in front of their bedroom mirror, then he’d taken Maria, in her prom-night formal, to a hotel ballroom in Omaha. They’d had a dinner of broiled chicken, then a ceremony during which Maria, with a white rose, had vowed chastity until her wedding day. “The day I give her to her husband at the altar,” he said, his voice catching, “I will lose this key. I will give it to the new man i
n her life.”
Normally I’d scoff, cynical of such virginal pageantry, but for that week, Carlos, and all the others looking after me at the Manor, were the people most dear to me in my life. They knew what was best for me, better than I knew myself, and I was frequently intoxicated with affection for these strangers. I’d sit in my chair by the window, feeling warmly even toward the gardener so committed to keeping the courtyard blooming.
Tiff lent me her iPod after loading it with Erik Satie and Camille Saint-Saens, which she’d discovered after searching for “soothing classical music,” and I would listen as I sat with my sister in the afternoons, shutting out the noise of her soap operas, the iPod’s plugs nestled in my ears.
“I keep thinking I should thin out my things,” I told Lydia.
“You have old love letters,” Lydia said, taking a piece of jellied candy from the box in her lap and biting into it with sudden agitation.
“No,” I said, thinking instead of all the years of little snippets of notes still on notepads in drawers, reminding me to do things I never bothered doing. Recipes, in a tin box, for dishes I never cooked. Expired pills in the apothecary. Shoelaces still in the package. Books on the writing of books, for the novel I never began. My family will spend days lifting items from the dust, considering their worth, tossing them away. Lifting, considering, tossing. Toward the end of their task, they’ll sigh at so many of my things, rolling their eyes, wondering how I’d not recognized that I’d never needed to keep any of it.
When first provided with the wheelchair, when I’d been uncertain that I’d live long enough to fully bounce back, I felt sentenced to a horror show. It seemed I’d not made it through life on both feet, and at eighty-three years old, such a discovery can be existentially disappointing. But as soon as I felt a recovery creeping up, I found that the wheel-chair offered a security I was too frightened to leave behind. I began to enjoy the sympathy I had at first rejected. When you don’t really need it, a wheelchair can feel quite powerful.
The Coffins of Little Hope Page 18
