You didn't have any trouble finding the spot. The path that led to it was clear, trampled flat by the feet of all the cops and reporters who had come out there to investigate, take pictures, sift through the leaves and dirt for clues, or simply gape. A bit of yellow police tape had got caught in a tangle of dry undergrowth, flapping there like some misplaced remnant of a late summer bloom. The steel stake had been removed. Evidence.
"We didn't kill her?" Libbie's hand on your arm, her fingers scrabbling, clawing, clinging to her sleeve. "Did we?" She'd explained about the medal. And John had been questioned, too. The little silver cross was never found.
"Of course not," you told her. "No."
Libbie's thin face a splinter of worry and doubt made more pale by the cold reflection of drab snow and low sky and yours a doubtful moon, aglow with bland resistance: No.
You were just kids. You'd done nothing wrong.
"But Meena, are you sure?"
You shrugged her off: "What are you talking about?"
Libbie circled the site, tromping over it, stomping purposefully upon the ample detectives' footprints with her inconsequential boots: "Well we always did hate Julia." Stopping to peer at you again: "Didn't we?"
And hadn't you taunted her? Didn't you laugh at her? Didn't you scold Julia and kick her and push her out the door, into the night?
So maybe you were guilty, after all. Had you gone after her? That's what Libbie was asking. Had you come upon her hiding in the shadows of the yard beyond the shelter door, shivering, cowering, afraid of breaking every scolded rule and walking home alone? You on one side and Libbie on the other—the two of you squatting beside her, trapping her there on the lawn. Libbie holds her down, you have the rock, and you raise it up high, bring it down hard against the surface of Julia's skull. She is as fragile and flimsy as a blown egg. In silence and surprise, she falls forward, softly crumples to the ground.
But no, that wasn't what happened, it wasn't like that at all. The St. Christopher was proof positive that it was Deep Eddie who had killed Julia Bell. He'd found John's medal in the brush, where Libbie had lost it. He'd picked it up, he'd put it in his pocket, he'd kept it with him, he'd saved it like a souvenir. Then when the time was right, he gave it to Julia, or maybe he used it to tempt her, or maybe he meant it to be a signature of some kind, to let you know that it was him and you were next. Besides, you argued, you and Libbie had been inside the fallout shelter that night. You'd been listening to the radio and dancing in your underpants with Leo and laughing about how stupid Julia was. The newspaper said that there had been no evidence of any violence. No breaks, no fractures, no broken bones, no bullet holes.
This you did know: her hands had been tied, behind her back. Her feet had been tied, too, and trussed. Hands first, she must have been standing. Force her to her knees, then further to her belly, bring her ankles up to meet her wrists, wrap, tie, knot.
She snivels.
"Baby."
She moans.
"Shut up!"
Cries.
"Boo-hoo."
She begs and pleads and snuffles in the dirt, but that only makes it worse.
The searchers hadn't found her body in the woods because when they went to look for it, it wasn't there. Because while they were searching for her, she was still alive. All those days, she'd been kept hidden, gagged and tied. How long, before he killed her? Or did she die of suffocation, a mistake? He comes back to check on her, to look at her, again and again. And then, after the furor has died down, after the searches have ended and no one is trying to find her anymore, then he can let her go.
Julia Bell, she was just a kid after all. Ten years old, and small, even for her age. Deep Eddie picks her up, easily. He swings her back and forth a few times, and then he lets her fly. She dips low, rises high, spins on in a wide and graceful arc before she falls and crashes, rolls and settles against the ground, for good.
You could see that Libbie was crying. It wasn't just the cold wind stinging her eyes. She sank to her knees in the thin snow and clenched her bare hands together. She was praying, murmuring some Latin gobbledygook, some Catholic mumbo-jumbo that she'd picked up in her classes at Mount Mercy—her lips moving, her eyes squeezed shut, tears gleaming, spilling over, tracing stinging lines down along her cheeks to her chin. You wanted to comfort her. You knelt near. You wrapped an arm around Libbie's shoulders, as any friend would do, and you pulled Libbie close. You would protect her. You would save her from her own self-destructive self. You were Libbie's friend. You loved her.
You told her: "It's not your fault."
You said: "We didn't kill anybody."
You whispered: "I love you."
And then you kissed her.
Later, you would deny it. Maybe that was what Gingi Noone said, and maybe that was what Libbie went and told everybody afterward, but you would insist: that was not what happened.
You did not kiss Libbie Grandon. And you didn't murder Julia Bell.
Did you?
July 2006
At nine thousand feet the air is thin and clear and from this new perspective of such height, it seems to Meena as if the darkness that has obscured her vision of the world until now is burning clean away, and everything looks brighter. That fog, that smoke, the haze, the veil, the caul—it is lifting, and now what she can see seems almost too brilliantly, blindingly, painfully clear. The sharp sunlight, a swirl of dust motes, the fine pores and creases in her skin, the icy white glint of the diamond clenched in the gold teeth of her mother's wedding ring on her right hand. Even as she understands that this heightened perception might not be real, she squints against it. Her father would mock her, if she told him; she understands this, too. He would not hesitate to let her know, in no uncertain terms, exactly what he thinks of what she thinks she is experiencing. Delirium, he might call it. Hysteria. Sleep deprivation.
Her heart pounding, her pulse fluttering in her throat.
His voice convincingly deep and decisive as he paces, slapping the newspaper against his leg for emphasis.
Dehydration. A lack of oxygen to the brain.
Leaving the room long enough to give the impression that he's finished, then popping back in again to add:
Hypoglycemia. Altitude sickness. Psychotic break.
Or maybe it's an aneurysm, a slow leakage of blood in her head.
Well all right, she thinks. Maybe so. Could be. Fair enough. But, she smiles, just let him go ahead and explain to her how wrong she is this time, if he can do it. In his own current mute and immobile situation, that is.
Not that it would make any difference to her at this moment anyway, what he thinks or doesn't think. What he says or not. Because the fact is: all of her senses have been sharpened. Everything is real. She is Meena Krejci. She is the grocer's daughter. She has run away from home. It's taken her more than thirty years to do it, but now she's done it, and now she is gone. She has been gone for three days. And her father, Josef, he is dead.
She thinks she might have an even greater understanding now of what Mrs. Grandon thought she was up to when she let herself fall out her bedroom window that day all those years ago, after President Kennedy was shot. This state Meena feels herself to be in right now might be something like what Mrs. Grandon was after then. Just the clear clean experience of it, that's all. The razor's edge of a disaster. Now.
Not suicide though. Definitely not suicide. That wasn't it at all. That was the mistake that everybody made. That was the crucial misinterpretation of what Mrs. Grandon's gesture was for on that bright winter afternoon in 1963. Not self-destruction. Nothing like that. Exactly the opposite, in fact. Re-creation. Faye Grandon would fall out of her second story bedroom window, she would drift into the blue, and be reborn.
Meena recalls the bitterness of John Grandon's scorn for his mother's judgment—not that she would choose to end her own life, if she could, but that she was too stupid to do it with any measure of success. Why not a gun? Or a handful of pills, a bottle of vodk
a, a plastic bag over her head? If she was serious about wanting to jump to her death, why not off the rooftop of the twelve story Roosevelt Hotel, or from the shoulders of a saint down on Bohemie Bridge, why not into the deep eddy, which would be sure to suck her down and hold her there forever?
She wasn't serious, that's why. According to John, it was a failure of intent. It was all just drama, melodrama, it was craziness that was too overwrought and too feminine to be taken seriously. It was something to be laughed at, embarrassed about, ashamed of, even scorned.
But Meena knows that John Grandon had it all wrong. Death was never the point. Life, that was the point. Galloping heart, adrenaline thrum. And now that Meena can see it all so clearly, now that she knows what it really was that Mrs. Grandon was after—that same free fall, a letting go to gravity—well, she wonders, why then can't she have something like it for herself, too? An air-clearing, mind-cleaning, breath-taking sort of tumble through thin air. With the wind of it strong enough to blow away everything else that used to hurt so much but doesn't have to matter anymore. Isn't that what Mrs. Grandon wanted? Meena thinks it is. And now she's finding it to be something that she is after, too.
At Holly's urging she has bought herself a few days in the Aspenglo cabin here at Will Gidding's Paradox Compound, and until next Sunday the place will be hers, all four rooms—bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bath. What more does Meena need? She has paid in cash, with bills snapped off the roll that she took from her father's pocket, and she can't tell whether or not Will Gidding was made suspicious by this or not. She hopes not.
He told her that these woods are full of wildlife. Critters, he called them. Deer and elk and fox. Coyotes, but not wolves. Bobcats and black bears. This last had sounded dangerous, but he was quick to reassure her—"Those kind like to keep to themselves," he said. "They're smart and they don't want to have anything to do with you, not if they can help it, especially if you let them know you don't want to have anything to do with them."
She is thinking: maybe there's some way she can stay here, if not in quaint little Aspenglo itself, at least in this area, in these mountains and this forest, where everything seems clear. Maybe she can come up with some way to work it so she won't have to go back to Linwood after all. Or on to California, either. Is it crazy for her to be considering such a thing? she wonders. What kind of miracle would it take for Meena Krejci to have a life of her own from now on? After all this time. Why can't she just stay gone, leave her father where he is—where he belongs? In his bed, in his room, in his stone house on Otis Road. Just leave the house as it is, too—let it be a museum, a tomb, an archive of the past, perfectly preserved—just up and leave that whole mess of the first half of her life behind, forget all about everything and begin herself over again right here?
She is fifty-five years old.
Is that the first half of her life?
What if it's more? Much more.
Her heart tumbles at the thought, pounding with an urgency that launches Meena to her feet, across the room, and out the door into the woods.
In Linwood, Mimi Hanrahan has fixed herself another drink and carried it outside to the wicker chaise on the front porch of her house in Rompot. She peers at two children chasing fireflies in the yard across the street and thinks of her friend Meena Krejci. So many times she tried to get her to go out, have some fun, live a little, without success. Meena always had too many reasons why not and after a while Mimi threw up her hands and quit. Fuck it. Some things are not meant to change.
And then that turned out to be just exactly what she loves best about Meena now: her reliability. The reassuring sameness of her self. Meena is always Meena, nothing more and nothing less, steady as a stone. The job at The White Elephant started out as a simple act of charity, because Mimi felt sorry for her, but lately she isn't sure what she'd do without Meena there to help her out and fill in. To keep her company. To be her friend.
And anyway, who is Mimi Hanrahan to talk, still living right here herself, in this same old rundown poor white neighborhood of Rompot where she grew up and now, decades later, nothing much has changed? Where kids still chase after fireflies in the twilight, men swagger off to the bars with their friends, and overweight middle-aged women like herself sit out on the porches drinking themselves into a forgetful stupor of contentment.
She shifts her weight in the chaise and the wicker creaks. The kids stop and look up. They peer through the shadows at her. One raises a hand, gives her the finger. The other giggles, then both squeal and skid away. Little fuckers. Mimi should get up and go after them, but she doesn't have the energy for it anymore. Way too fat and old and slow.
She sips her drink, rattles ice, fans her face with the back of her hand. Fuckem, she thinks. Then, "Fuck you!" she shouts. From somewhere down the block a car radio thumps a deep bass beat. "Fuck you!" Mimi shouts again. The neighborhood is still. Fireflies signal fitfully in the grass. Mimi heaves herself up again, pads back into the house for another splash of gin.
And isn't it just like Meena to fixate on a guy like Ralph Wendell? she thinks. Shakes her head. But what's the big mystery? Obviously the guy is dead. Most likely he killed himself. Most likely he's fish food, at the bottom of the lake. Or he's lying in a cornfield somewhere, with his brains blown out. Who knows why. Who cares?
Somebody must because there are flyers all over the place and people out looking for him on horseback and in helicopter and a reward has been offered for any information regarding his whereabouts. The paper said they're going to use sonar to search the lake tomorrow. The wife was quoted in the newspaper just this morning, telling about a dream she'd had where her husband was found alive in the woods, thin and unshaven, with a broken leg and a busted collarbone, curled up in a bed of leaves next to a kindly deer, who gazed up with liquid black doe eyes, smiled, and whispered, "Welcome."
Weird.
But didn't Meena see that story? Mimi wonders now. Seems like she must not have or else why would she have asked whether there had been any more news? Must have been so busy taking care of her old man that she didn't have a chance to look at the paper.
Mimi picks up the phone and calls Meena back, but there's no answer. Maybe they went out for a Dairy Queen.
Poor Meena. Her father was in his nineties already. And didn't Mimi try to be a friend, didn't she keep telling her and telling her, trying her best to get Meena to wake up and face facts: "He's going to die, you know he's so old!" But Meena didn't want to hear it: "Not yet, he's not. He's fine. Look at him! He's twenty years younger than he really is!"
Whatever.
But what Meena will do, once he does go, Mimi can't imagine.
She waits a half hour, then tries the number again, and still there is no answer. Must've already gone to bed, she thinks. Tomorrow she'll stop by the house to see just how bad Joe Krejci is and whether Meena needs her.
Keep positive thoughts, Ralph Wendell's wife had said at the end of the article about the dream and the deer. That's what to do. Keep positive thoughts, and stay hopeful for the best.
All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well...
Old Ralph Wendell will turn up again soon enough, Mimi's sure of it. And when he does, then the mystery will be over and he'll be forgotten and nobody but the wife and maybe the kids will bother to think twice about him again.
Meena veers away from the path that leads down toward Will Gidding's compound and trudges upward instead, following a narrow dirt trail toward the silver aspens that stand shimmering in the sunlight at the top of the rocky hill. The climb is hard, she's out of shape, not used to this, and by the time she gets to the top she's short of breath and panting, but she presses on as the path flattens out again and winds around to the left, into the cathedral shade of the lodge pole pines.
The world seems full of possibility, suddenly, in her dazzled state of mind. Fanciful alternatives; lucid dreaming. What if she stayed here? What if she got a job at the Wal-Mart? Stocking shelves, handing out
shopping carts, helping customers, it doesn't matter what exactly, almost anything would do. What if she rented a house or a room someplace and made up another identity for herself, what if she kept telling people that her name is Libbie Grandon and she made a birth certificate and then got a Social Security number and a bank account and a credit card? Hasn't she seen such stories in the movies, plenty of times, and on television and in her magazines? Don't people do this, don't they start themselves all over again for all kinds of reasons, some innocent and some not? Isn't that what America's supposed to be all about, the land of opportunity? Reinvention, starting over, new life, new self, new world?
Too bad Meena never had a chance to make up a real plan, though, the way that man Ralph Wendell must have done. He had to have spent years and years at it, she thinks, coming up with forged ID cards and the phony bank accounts that he squirreled his money into a little bit at a time so his wife wouldn't notice it was missing, until he had enough piled up to last a while. Long enough to get him going, anyway.
Meena has always admired that quality in a person, the ability to think ahead. Because she's never been much good at it herself. Maybe after a while she and Mr. Gidding will get to know each other better, maybe they'll get to like each other, they might get married and then she'll be Libbie Gidding and her identity will be secure. Maybe she will never go home, why should she? Maybe she'll just stay right here. Maybe this is exactly where she belongs. Maybe it's her fate. The dog stopping her, the cabin keeping her, and now the forest, drawing her in.
Because, honestly, how can she go back now? Isn't it too late? And what would it be like if she did? Pulling into the driveway as if nothing's happened, acting as if nothing's changed. Letting herself in through the back door, into the kitchen. The house quiet. Dark. Stuffy and hot. But also clean. Spotless. And undisturbed.
The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci Page 18
