Right on.
But of course they didn't mean it. After you left, they forgot all about you. And for years you would think about that moment, you would wonder, what if you had gone with them? What then? But you couldn't get yourself to imagine the difference that might have made in your life. To see clearly what might have happened, what you might have become.
No, your father's shadow was too great, it loomed too large and dark upon the possibilities of your imagination. Of course he would have stopped you. Or, even if you did manage to get away, he would have come after you. He would have tracked you down, he would have found you, and he would have brought you back home. Where you belonged.
This was summer, 1969. It was a time of madness and confusion: riots and revolution, massacre and murder, assassination and war. Everything was changing. Everybody had gone crazy. Nobody was safe, and nothing was sacred anymore.
When you rounded the corner onto Otis Road and turned toward your father's house halfway up the hill, you would see the sign in the Grandons' front yard next door: FOR SALE.
Then Mr. Grandon's blue convertible would come down the hill from the direction of the park. It would pull into the driveway and stop, and as you watched he would get out and climb the steps up to the kitchen door, where he would smooth back his hair, square his shoulders, and cough into his fist. Then he would knock, step back, and wait.
The door opened. Mrs. Grandon was framed in light. She shook her head. He leaned toward her, took her hand, brought her close and held her. After a while he let her go, and she turned away, allowing him just enough space to sidle inside.
July 2006
Now Meena has left the main trail, and she is lost. She's climbed up away from the cabin and into the wilderness. Pale sylph, she is following the moonlight, chasing after the stars, and even if she wanted to she would not know how to find her way back again.
She is not alone. There is something else here with her, and she's aware that it's been tracking her for a while. Its presence is huge and warm. She can hear it, lumbering heavily, too cumbersome and clumsy to be a fox or a deer. Now and then she sees it, a patient shadow, hanging back. A monstrous presence, stalking her. A bear.
She stops, and it stops, too.
Holds her breath. Listens. She shivers. Looks around. Peers into the trees to see. Calls out.
"Hello?"
There's no answer. Only the chuffing of its breath and the soft shifting of its weight as it stirs.
Again: "Hello?" The sound of her own voice shakes her.
And now: an approach, cautious. Heavy footsteps, twigs breaking, a being moving closer... And then the huge black shadow swaggers forth.
Panting with fear and expectation, Meena steps toward it.
The bear holds its ground. Black eyes gleaming, it watches. And then it lifts its forefeet, heaves itself back, rises up, and stands. Half again her height, it looms. Head wagging. Teeth gleaming. Soiled snout, matted filthy fur. It sways and murmurs, belches out a deep low growl.
Meena steps closer still.
A paw swipes out at her, testing. She shows a palm. Then swipes back. It rears away, regains its balance, snorts and heaves itself forth in full charge.
She brings her hands up to her face and tumbles backward. It gnashes at her folded arms, cradles her head, lacerates her scalp with curled claws. There is a loud crack and she feels her left arm snap out of its shoulder socket and hang. Her eyes are closed, blinded by blood. Now it is lifting her off the ground and throwing her down onto her stomach. She moans. Hunkered over her, it works in silence. Her bones shatter and grind inside her flesh. She pulls her head in, humps over herself. Teeth sink into the small of her back. Slide up her spine, gnaw at her shoulder, her neck, her head.
Its weight on top of her. Crushing her. With a scream, she thrashes free and rolls away, gasping for gurgled breath, coughing on blood. Its breath in her face, foul and hot. She flails, it takes her forearm in its teeth, stands, pulls her up and tosses her away. She flies, falls, lands with a groan, the wind knocked out of her.
And then it's over her again.
It picks her up, tucks her close and, hobbling three-legged, it carries her a few yards before it drops her. It stands over her, shaking its big head, spraying slobber, blood, phlegm, flesh. She clings to the ground, holding her face and stomach down. It cuffs her, bends and sinks its teeth into one soft buttock. Chews. Sits back, waits. Prods her lifeless body with a paw. Waits. Prods again.
And then, just as it's giving up, just as its turning away to leave her there, Meena is rolling over, she's opening her arms, and so, with a groan of pleasure, it's thrown itself upon her once again.
As she surrenders herself, as it splits and tears her open, Meena is whispering: "Yes."
All her self containment, all her self-restraint, the years of saying no and no and denying herself, punishing herself—for what happened, for what she didn't know and what she didn't do, for who she was and who she wasn't—now they are over, now she is saying yes.
She is screaming: "Yes."
Howling: "Yes."
Yes.
Nowhere
1969
There was a time in your life when you thought it was possible that Mrs. Grandon might marry your father and become your mother. There was a time in your life when you thought that with Libbie out of the way and Mr. Grandon gone such a thing could actually happen to you. You would be a family and you would live happily ever after: your father, your stepmother, and you.
But no. Instead, by the end of that October, they were all gone. Libbie and Fox had run off to California and left your father in the lurch, as promised. Mr. and Mrs. Grandon had sold their house and paid off all their bills, including what they owed your father. They'd come back to each other and, choosing discord over loneliness, they'd found a way to make a new start for themselves elsewhere. For a few years there were Christmas cards: postmarked Chicago first, then Minneapolis, and finally Davenport, before they stopped altogether, and you never did hear any more word from the Grandons again.
When Libbie got a Ouija board for her twelfth birthday, she thought you ought to use it to try and conjure the spirit of your dead mother. You locked yourselves up in Libbie's room, turned off the lights, lit a candle for effect. You sat on the floor, facing each other, cross-legged Indian style, with the board placed just so between you. Libbie was serious, but you had your doubts. Libbie closed her eyes and bowed her head, and at first you did the same. Then you peeked, eyed Libbie's white hair shining, her fingertips poised on the planchette, nails chewed ragged.
Nothing happened; the planchette was still. The room was quiet. Your breathing the only sound. A sputter of the candle, guttering. Libbie's eyes popped open and she saw that you were watching her. She cried your name, drawing out the e's, stretching it into six syllables of frustration, in the high cicadic whine of her high soprano: Me-e-e-na-ah-ahhh. She said, "You have to close your eyes."
Chastised less by Libbie's intent than by the sound itself, you squeezed your eyes tight and murmured: "Sorry, sorry, sorry, okay, okay. " Libbie's sigh, a billow of a breeze. And still she had to reach across to punish you with a pinch. Scolding: "Concentrate!"
You flinched away, dropped your fingertips down onto the planchette again and held your breath and waited, waited, waited, until: it began to move. All on its own, it seemed. Stopped in the high right corner. "YES." And you were trying to remember, what was the question again?
"Are you here with us?" Libbie asked.
And "YES," the board replied.
"Are you Agnes Krejci?"
Again the planchette moved and circled around and came back: "YES."
You could hear a basketball pounding on the driveway outside. John, his sneakers squeaking against the cement. Rags at his heels, barking. A car honking on the street, a siren wailing in the distance, a squirrel chittering in a tree.
Libbie whispering, "Where are you now?"
Spider legs, high-stepping up the na
pe of your neck, a whisper up your spine as Libbie read out the message: I-A-M-N-O-W-H-E-R-E.
Then, at that moment, thunder at the door so loud that you and Libbie both screamed.
But it was only Mrs. Grandon, knocking, calling out, "Libbie! Telephone!"
Libbie, running downstairs to the phone, Gingi Noone calling. You were left behind, upstairs, alone with the Ouija board. Whispering, "Are you still here?" Your fingers on the planchette. "Mother?"
But nothing happened. She wasn't there.
Never had been.
By the end of that October, they were all gone. And by the end of that October your father had not spoken to you for more than two months. It was a matter of stubborn principle, in his view. He had your confession—that you had let Mrs. Grandon take advantage of you, that you had allowed Mr. Grandon to kiss and fondle you, that you had not told him of Libbie and Fox's plans—and he had your respectful apology and he even had his money, too, except for the unpaid rent, but the fact of it was that you had purposefully deceived him. This was a breech that Josef Krejci simply could not, in good conscience, overlook or overcome. His silence was for your own good. It would teach you a lesson. Because if you couldn't be counted on to behave yourself with propriety, if you could not tell right from wrong, if you could not be trusted...
And so in those weeks that you lived in the empty spotlight of his willful abandonment, you felt yourself begin, again, to disappear.
The Grandons' house had been sold to a young family from St. Louis, who had not yet moved in. Its rooms were empty; its windows were dark. The street was quiet, and the neighborhood seemed deserted, as if the world had been abandoned, but for you.
And your father. The front door opened, and there was Josef Krejci, heading out on one of his walks. Coat collar turned up. Hands in his pockets. The inchoate shade of his body, framed as it was in the light of the streetlamp. A large man dressed in a dark wool coat, his body squared by the padded shoulders, the wide double-breasted front as flat and formless as a soldier's armored shield.
From your window, you watched him walk away. The early evening light drifted gray as chalk dust against a schoolroom's blackboard slate. He rounded the corner and was gone. The bare branches of the butternut tree in the Spivaks' yard across the street rose up into the twilight sky, and in the midst of their tangle could be seen the even darker and senseless-seeming knot of a squirrel's nest way up high.
You would be downstairs in the living room when he came back, bringing the smell of early winter inside with him. Stamping his feet, cheeks rosy with the cold, breath steaming. He would pull off his gloves, shrug out of his coat, and hang it up in the hall closet. He would look up, see you, turn away. Go into his study and close the door. A moment later, there would be music. The smell of pipe smoke. Clink of bottle against glass.
Soon you would get up and go into the kitchen and fix dinner. You would sit down together at the kitchen table to eat it. Josef would read the newspaper as he ate. You might ask him where he'd been. What he'd done. Who he'd seen. But he wouldn't say. He would clear his throat. He would not utter a word. Maybe you'd turn on the television later. Or maybe he would build a fire and you'd sit together in silence, watching the flames. Maybe you'd go to bed early and tomorrow would be another working day and the next day after that and then the next one after that. While your secret screams, muffled by the unfathomable distance that he'd put between you, went unheeded and unheard.
You had to break a window at the back to get into the Grandons' house, and you cut yourself on the glass. You had a flashlight, even though you knew your way around and didn't really need it. Its white light skimmed the walls, made shadows lunge forward, then cringe back.
You went into every room, and you looked in every closet, but there was nothing, no one there. Only your own footsteps echoing. Your own breath, your own shadow, your own pulse.
You opened some windows upstairs.
You sat in the middle of the floor in what had been Mrs. Grandon's bedroom. You took off your clothes. You were bleeding.
Somehow your father knew. Somehow he was there.
You lounge in your father's chair in the living room of the small stone house on Otis Road, and you wait for him to come home. You sit quietly, with a book open on your lap, but you aren't reading, you're keeping an eye on the summer twilight beyond the window glass, and from here you will have a full view of the front door when it opens, framing the inchoate shade of Joseph Krejci's body when he returns from his evening walk.
Julia Bell's hands had been tied at the wrists, that's what Leo said. And her feet, at the ankles. Curtain cord, it looked like. Window shade. Clothesline. Tossed into the woods, she rises, spins upward in a wide and graceful arc before she falls and crashes, lands moaning, rolls and then settles against the hard ground into which her flesh will, with stunning slowness, soften and spread, liquefy and sink and, finally, blend.
Your mind circles around and around, but always it comes back to this: the bones, the skull, the ropes, the guy wire, the steel pin. The leathery flesh of a dead girl, stringy as old meat and cobwebbed with rot. Bones bleached clean. The pearly gleam of her smooth, socketed skull.
But where is Julia now?
"Your mother is an angel," Matka says, and her hand reaches out toward the little girl and her bent knobbed fingers clumsily brush from her glittering eyes a web of windblown hair. "Your mother is a star."
You lounge in the chair, with the book opened in your lap. You aren't reading, you are waiting. The book is balanced upright on your knees, and hidden in the crease of its spine is Libbie Grandon's silver cross, plucked from the woodland floor.
Soon your father will be home. Soon the front door will be opening and you'll be looking up to see him there, his expression full of expectation. Dinner. Some small conversation. Maybe you'll wonder, only for a moment, where he's been. What he's done. Who he's seen. Only for a moment, and then you'll let it go. You won't ask him. He won't tell you. It doesn't matter. Maybe you'll watch television. Maybe you'll sit together reading for a while. Maybe you'll go to bed early, because after all, tomorrow is another day.
July 2006
Down at Aspenglo a shadow moves. Thin and quick, it skitters across the yard like a blown leaf, drifts up the steps to the porch, and slips through a crack in the door into the cabin's main room, where the fire has died and the air is cold and still.
The shadow is Holly Gidding, and even in the dark of the middle of the night she knows her way around because she's been in here many times before, and also this cabin is an exact replica of her own. Sure of herself and of her intent, she creeps barefoot across the cold floor, steering carefully around table, sofa, and chair before stopping to peer into the bedroom to see the tousled bed and suppose that somewhere underneath the mounded comforter a lady named Libbie Grandon is sound asleep, knocked senseless by an afternoon of hiking in the invigorating mountain air.
It didn't have to be this way, Holly thinks. The lady could have been more understanding. She could have agreed to let Holly come along, but she didn't. Too bad.
The lady's suitcase is open on the floor amid a spill of clothes, and her purse is on the dresser, within such easy reach that Holly can snap it up without taking another step. She cradles it close to her body as she glides back toward the window where a haze of yellow moonlight floats in to help her see what she has. Now Holly's arm is elbow-deep inside the purse and she is digging through its contents: car keys, glasses, Kleenex, billfold, and a blunt roll of bills wrapped in a thick rubber band.
Outside in the forest, a scream: bobcat shriek, owl screech, rabbit squeal, coyote howl, or maybe it's the coloratura ululations of the mating elk. Holly freezes at the sound, holds her breath, waits for the shape beneath the covers in the bedroom to stir, but that woman in there sleeps on, undisturbed.
As silence settles back over the scene again, Holly makes her getaway. She glides off, out the door, over the porch, down the steps, and across the thin yard to
the Jetta, parked in its sea of dandelions and summer weeds. Gritting her teeth, she opens the door, cautiously. Warns herself: Careful now, be quiet! Sets the purse gently down on the seat. Reaches in and slips the keys into the ignition. Cheers herself on: Almost there now, almost... Pulls the gearshift into neutral, and bracing her body against the door frame, pushes the car back, rolls it down the slope of the driveway to the shale strewn road.
Congratulates herself: Okay, yes, good! One last look at Aspenglo, still as a painting in its wash of enchanted mountain moonlight, before she makes up her mind—Now!—and turns away, hops in, slams the door, grips the key and starts the engine. The Jetta's tires spew stones as the car wheels around and Holly, expecting to see the cabin door fly open and the woman running after her, guns it and tears off. No headlights yet, and she teeters dangerously toward the dropoff edge before regaining the road and slowing to a safer crawl. Brake lights glowing, the black Jetta winds downward to the highway, where it stops. A semi-trailer truck roars by, leaving silence in its wake. Holly leans forward, flicks the headlights on, and turns toward the Interstate, where she'll climb the westbound ramp, merge with the sparse midnight traffic, and be gone, to the triumphant clamor of her own whoops and cheers.
Later Holly will stop for gas and breakfast, and after she's ordered what feels to her to be an extravagant meal of eggs and bacon and toast and juice, then she'll sit back and take the time to more closely examine the contents of the purse she's stolen. The cash. The checkbook from the Farmer's Bank in Linwood. The Iowa driver's license, with Meena's photo on it, the Social Security card and the credit cards with her name.
In Linwood Mimi Hanrahan will be waking up with a bad feeling gnawing at her gut. On the table by the bed sits a glass with the dregs of her gin from the night before, a fly floating indelicately on top. She should stop drinking, she thinks. Next to the glass, an ashtray, overflowing with lipstick tainted butts. She should stop smoking, too. She finds a butt of decent length and uses a match to light it. Takes a drag, then crushes it out among the others. Peers at the clock. Almost ten-thirty. Shit.
The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci Page 26
