Crushed

by Laura McNeal

  What she wanted to do was call Wickham.

  Pathetic, she thought.

  She hit “2” on her phone, then—how had she forgotten this step?—hit “enter” to speed-dial her father, who answered on the fifth or sixth ring. “Hi, Polliwog. Where are you?”

  Audrey swallowed. She tried to steady her voice. “On my way home.”

  “Good. Me too, in about ten minutes—I just have to finish something up here. How about if I stop somewhere and pick up entrees for two?”

  Within the car, the air was thick with the smell of vomit. “I’m not that hungry, Dad.” She wanted to tell him what had happened, but then he would stop sounding so normal and cheery.

  “You’ll change your tune when you lay eyes on what I bring home!” he said. “See you in about an hour?”

  “Sure.” She would tell him later, maybe. She couldn’t do it now.

  “You okay, Audrey?”

  “Yeah.” She stopped again. “It’s just been kind of a long day.” She waited for her voice to even out again. “I’m glad school’s out for a while,” she said at last. “See you at home.”

  When Audrey got to her apartment, she took off her foul-smelling clothes and stood in the shower until the hot water ran out. Her father still wasn’t home. She put on flannel pajamas and her heavy robe, and climbed into bed. She slept for almost twenty hours.

  Shortly before noon on Saturday, Audrey opened her eyes and felt the world she’d escaped again take shape. It was December 20, the first day of vacation. And then Audrey thought, Vacation from what?

  Wickham was still with Lea.

  C.C. was at the cabin.

  Her father was still at work.

  And somewhere out there Theo Driggs was driving around with his friends.

  The apartment was quiet. Outside, the sky was gray. The drone of a heavy truck rose from the street.

  Audrey felt dully hungry. In the kitchen, on the chrome table, her father had propped a note against the saltshaker:

  Hi, Polliwog—You were sleeping, so I didn’t wake you. I figured all that school stuff had taken its toll. I brought home chicken potpies last night—yours is in fridge if you want it. Also, your Christmas present may come today, so don’t be surprised.

  —XXX, Dad

  As she took small bites of the cold potpie, she thought of Clyde Mumsford. How the vase she’d seen him working on that day at school was for his mother, and how his mother was sick. And how he’d chosen to keep her, Audrey, safe instead of the vase. She thought he’d probably made the wrong choice.

  She took her dishes to the sink, but didn’t wash them.

  She stared for a long time out the window, at the traffic passing below, seeing many red cars but not Theo’s Firebird.

  She picked up a book she’d checked out from the library before Wickham had left. It was overdue. Audrey read a page and a half before she again fell asleep.

  About half an hour later, she was awakened by the buzzing of the entry intercom.

  Wickham. She couldn’t help it—she hoped it was Wickham.

  She pushed the intercom button and choked out, “Hello?”

  But the voice answering from the lobby wasn’t Wickham’s.

  It was a woman saying, “Is that you, Audrey?”

  “Oggy?” Audrey said.

  And the woman in the lobby, in a stolid German accent, said, “Who else?”

  Chapter 76

  Awakening

  There, in the dingy lobby, was Oggy in a blue tweed coat with a fur collar. Oggy in a blue-and-white silk scarf. Oggy with a suitcase and two shopping bags. Oggy with a beaming smile. It was Oggy, Oggy, Oggy. Her hair was silver, her eyes small and black. She looked like a child’s illustration of a person you could trust. Audrey threw both arms around Oggy’s neck, breathed in her Echt Kölnisch Wasser, and whispered, “It’s really you.”

  Oggy looked Audrey up and down and said, “This is not mine Audrey I left in summer. You look . . .”

  Audrey knew she was looking for the right word.

  “. . . abgeschlafft.”

  Audrey glanced down at herself. Droopy, she thought it meant. “I’ve been sleeping,” she said. Then she said something that hadn’t been true, but now was. “I was just about to get cleaned up.”

  Audrey took Oggy to the elevator and held open the gate with her foot while they scooted Oggy’s heavy luggage inside. The bags filled nearly the whole floor of the elevator, which made Audrey recall the problem that awaited them upstairs. “Did Dad tell you how small this apartment is?”

  “I am used to small,” Oggy said. “My sister she have one bedroom.”

  While Oggy unpacked her things in Audrey’s bedroom, Audrey washed and brushed her hair. They went together to the market, and within two hours Oggy had cooked warm potato salad, sausages, and red cabbage, and Audrey had told her everything, starting with Theo Driggs and working backward.

  Oggy, shaking her head and wiping her hands on her apron, said, “I think Oggy vas vell too long avay.”

  Audrey nodded. “Yes,” she said, and hugged her again.

  Telling Oggy everything made her feel better, but it wasn’t just that. Having Oggy in the same room with her made her feel like herself again. Everything smelled right again, and looked right, and felt right.

  “Now this nice boy, Clyde,” Oggy said. “Tell me vat he is like.”

  Audrey shrugged. “I don’t know him. He’s quiet and smart and keeps to himself. C.C. thinks he’s handsome, but I never thought that because I always thought he was kind of creepy until . . .”

  “Until you found out he vasn’t,” Oggy said.

  “Yeah.” She thought about it. “I feel so terrible that I got him beaten up when he was really trying to help me, but I was too smitten with Wickham to see it.”

  Oggy, bleaching the cutting board and the sink, was quiet for a time. Then she said, “You should tell that to this boy, Clyde.”

  Audrey mentioned how she’d tried to get him to talk to her at school but he wouldn’t even answer her notes.

  Oggy gave a dismissive shrug. “Mannesstolz. The man’s pride. You let them parade it, then you try again.”

  Oggy made it sound so possible. “By calling him?”

  The older woman shook her head and gave her a friendly frown. “No, mein Schatz. You go to his door.”

  Chapter 77

  Ash

  Wickham Hill sat smoking at the black desk in the upstairs bedroom that had once been his father’s. Wickham’s mother was at work. No one else was in the house. A blunt pencil lay on the desk, but Wickham wasn’t writing. He wasn’t reading. He wasn’t listening to music. He was thinking. The afternoon was nearly gone, the room had grown dim, but he didn’t move to turn on a light. When the ash on his cigarette grew long, he tapped it into a small ashtray made of Waterford crystal, a gift from Lea.

  A piece of English toffee wrapped in clear plastic also lay on the desk. Audrey had made the toffee for Lea’s birthday, but Lea hadn’t eaten any. “I can’t,” she’d said, setting a piece in front of him. “It makes me feel . . . funny.” He’d turned down the toffee, too, and then, for some reason he couldn’t explain, he put the wrapped square in his pocket when he went home.

  He looked at the candy on the desk and thought of Audrey with a strange detachment. It was like poking at skin that had been deadened with anesthesia. He couldn’t feel his former affection for her, or hers for him.

  He supposed this was how his father was. Yesterday a Christmas card had come in the mail. The preprinted signature said it was from Dr. James Edward Yates and his entire staff. Included were two computer-generated checks for three hundred dollars, one in Wickham’s name and the other in his mom’s. There was a handwritten message to Wickham and his mother: My family and I are going to the Caribbean for the holidays. Please don’t call my home or office. Wickham was glad he hadn’t been there when his mother opened the card. She should have been furious, but probably she was just miserable. Wickham himself
had wanted to rip up the check, which he supposed was a Christmas present, but then had thought better of it.

  He put the cigarette to his lips and pulled smoke deep into his lungs for a second or two before expelling it.

  His mother had decided to go back to South Carolina, where at least she knew a few people. Wickham hadn’t figured out how to tell her he was leaving Jemison with Lea Woolcott, who, it turned out, was as eager to leave the town as he was.

  Lea was different. Outside, a calm package, but inside, everything bursting to get out. She was the one who’d said, “Let’s drive the Audi to the Finger Lakes.” The one who’d said, “Let’s find a hotel.” The one who’d said, “You and I see each other’s secrets, and people who see each other’s secrets should face the fact that they’re always going to be together.”

  It had taken him only the briefest second to see that she’d meant marriage.

  “Not now, maybe,” she’d said, looking at him with her arctic blue eyes. “But sooner or later.”

  Spoken in a tone that he simply could not disbelieve.

  “What would be fun,” she said softly, “would be a secret engagement.”

  But he couldn’t support them, he’d said. Not now, and probably not ever.

  And in her soft voice, she’d said, “I have a trust. All I have to do to start the checks coming is enroll in college.” She’d checked with the school counselor, and it wasn’t impossible to go to college early admission. You needed the grades, the credits, the test scores, and a letter from the principal, all of which she had.

  “And I don’t,” he said.

  “So you’ll get a GED,” she said. “Someplace warm, I’m thinking. Someplace far, far away.” Her pale eyes turned frisky. “How do you feel about Hawaii?”

  Wickham said he’d always wanted to dive in Hawaii.

  “There’s a honeymoon for you,” Lea had said softly. “Not that I’m proposing.” A conspiratorial smile. “That would be your assignment, should you choose to accept it.”

  Now he tapped ash into the crystal saucer.

  He would accept it, of course. He would cash his puny three-hundred-dollar check, buy a ring, arrange with a fancy restaurant to hide the ring box in the dessert, listen to her tell all about her secret dreams, do the whole romantic thing.

  With Lea, he could get away from everything, including Dr. Yates.

  He crushed his cigarette out.

  Then he took the blunt pencil and, pressing hard so that the old black paint flaked off, engraved this in the surface of his father’s boyhood desk:

  W.H.

  L.W.

  Beneath that, he wrote Engaged, then added the date and let the pencil drop.

  Wickham Hill stood, took the cellophane-wrapped English toffee with him to the window, and looked out. The lawn was yellow, the trees were bare. You could see right through the lilac hedge. He peeled back the plastic wrapper and regarded the chocolate-covered toffee for a moment or two. Then he set the whole piece into his mouth and felt the sweetness of it spread over his tongue. It was delicious.

  He stood very still then, staring out, wishing it would snow and cover the yellow lawn and the dirty street and the bare hedge with white and white and more white.

  The toffee still lay on his tongue.

  As it melted, he moved it to the side of his mouth, between his cheek and his teeth. He’d always been the kind of child who didn’t bite his lollipops. He wanted them to last, and so they did last. He sucked on the toffee and waited for the sound of Lea’s car.

  Chapter 78

  An Unexpected Visitor

  In the front room of Clyde’s apartment, Clyde’s mother was hooked up to an intravenous machine that dripped morphine. She slept on one side of the hospital bed. Clyde and his father sat nearby, playing cards on an end table.

  It was Sunday afternoon, the woman from the hospice was away, and Clyde and his father were playing casino. His father laid an eight on a two, said, “Tens,” and gave Clyde the evil eye. “Better cover that, señor, or I’m going home with the big casino.”

  Clyde was used to his father’s bluffing tactics. “Yeah, you will,” he said, and was in the process of matching a jack when the doorbell rang. He got up, peered through the peephole— it was a girl—and then opened the door.

  Standing before him was Audrey Reed.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  There was an awkward silence, and she said, “Could I talk to you for a second?”

  This was different from school, and it was different from a note. Clyde glanced past her down the dimly lit hall. “There’re some chairs down there,” he said, though when they got to the communal sitting area, they didn’t sit. They stood staring through the tall windows toward the park. Finally Audrey said, “I just wanted to apologize. For what I said to Theo to get you . . .”

  “Pulverized?” Clyde said.

  She smiled weakly. “Yeah.” A pause. “And I also wanted to thank you for what you did on Friday with Theo.”

  Clyde shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  “It was like a nightmare I wasn’t going to wake up from.” Clyde nodded, and after a short silence Audrey said, “I guess Theo broke the vase, huh?”

  “No,” Clyde said. “He tossed it up in the air, I caught it, and he walked off saying ‘Merry Christmas.’ . . .” Clyde’s voice trailed off.

  Audrey looked down, then back up. “For a while I thought you were one of the bad guys. And I thought Wickham Hill was one of the . . .”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes the label’s kind of hard to read,” Clyde said, and suddenly realized he was not uncomfortable. He wasn’t blushing or croaking out words or anything else.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” Audrey said.

  Clyde shrugged. Then, when there didn’t seem to be anything else to say, he said, “You want to come in?”

  Audrey Reed seemed pleased with the invitation. “Would it be okay? With your mom . . .”

  “She’s sleeping. Then, when the morphine wears off, she’ll wake up and feel okay for a little bit.” He didn’t mention that the pain would come back soon after and she would need more morphine, which would put her out again.

  Chapter 79

  “Happy to Meet You”

  Clyde pushed open the apartment door, which he’d left ajar, and Audrey followed him down a short corridor that opened into the front room. There was a hospital bed there. It seemed huge, but Audrey wondered if it didn’t seem that way because of the smallness of the woman sleeping in it.

  She was olive-skinned, with deeply sunken eyes and short gray-black hair. Audrey could see from her features that before the illness she’d been pretty. A card game in progress lay on a little table nearby.

  “Clyde?” a voice called.

  “In here, Dad.”

  A moment later, the kitchen door swung open and a middle-aged man who looked like a silver-haired Clyde came walking out with two plates containing sandwiches. Seeing Audrey, he looked surprised. He glanced at Clyde, then smiled at Audrey. “I don’t know you,” he said, “but how do you feel about chicken salad?”

  Audrey laughed, then worried that her laugh would wake Clyde’s mother. “I love chicken salad,” she whispered, looking at the plates Clyde’s father was holding. Two plates, two sandwiches. “But I don’t want to take yours,” she said.

  Clyde’s father said there was plenty more where this came from. Then he said, “I’m Lloyd Mumsford. I’m happy to meet you.”

  Audrey smiled. “I’m Audrey Reed.”

  Clyde’s father took this in, said, “Ah,” and then turned to Clyde.

  “See that?” Clyde said, grinning. “That’s a knowing look he’s giving me. That’s because I looked your name up once on one of his programs.”

  Clyde’s father nodded, then said, “Back soon with more grub,” and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Audrey’s eyes moved from the kitchen door to Clyde. “Why did you look me up?” Audrey said.

  “I
dle curiosity. I wanted to know where you lived.”

  “So you could have been the Yellow Man.”

  “I just looked at addresses. Except for Wickham. And I didn’t tell anybody about him except you.”

  Audrey remembered the scooter passing by some time ago. “Did you ride by my house on your Vespa?”

  He grinned, and didn’t seem at all embarrassed. “Maybe.”

  “More than once?” she said.

  “Possibly.” He laughed. “Hey, it’s a nice house.”

  “Was,” Audrey said. “We lost that house.” She was surprised how easy it was to say this to Clyde.

  Clyde was quiet, and his father swung through the door carrying a tray and saying, “Okay, here we go. Chicken-salad sandwiches all around.”

  So Audrey ate a sandwich (it was scrumptious) and finished Clyde’s father’s hand in casino while he went out to the market. She and Clyde played a few more hands—it was fun when she won, but it was even fun when she lost, too—and then Clyde said he was still hungry. “I make a mean banana split,” he said, and Audrey, grinning back at him, said she loved mean banana splits.

  It was while Clyde was in the kitchen that Audrey noticed the blue vase standing alone on a simple table in front of the picture window overlooking the park. There were three pink tulips in the vase, and the composition in front of the white window seemed like something from an Asian painting.

  Audrey walked over and inspected the vase (it really was beautiful), and then stared out at the park, its bare trees and rock outcroppings and iron benches stark against the brown-and-yellow grounds. Audrey thought of Wickham and felt a deep, almost flu-like pain. She heard the sounds Clyde was making in the kitchen, clinking silverware against glass, squirting whipped cream, and she felt that the pain might go away. Oggy was back, and Clyde had forgiven her. That was something.