In Case We're Separated

by Alice Mattison

  “I already did. I called Sue and the cops.” Sue was the director. Jo hadn’t called him, Josh noted. “Could you get some food? I’m so hungry!” she said then. He rushed for the phone book and ordered from an Italian restaurant that delivered; he set the table. He asked questions, which she answered.

  “Do you want a drink?” It was what one said.

  “Do we have anything?”

  They had beer and a bottle of bourbon someone had left there. He poured some bourbon for each of them. Jo added water to hers. “This is good,” she said.

  “He had a knife?” Josh asked for the second time.

  “He had a knife.”

  “A young kid?”

  “No, middle-aged. White. He looked like my comp lit professor.”

  The doorbell rang and she jumped. “The food,” he said apologetically.

  Then, as they ate, the phone rang. “Don’t answer,” said Jo. The caller didn’t leave a message. A minute later it rang again, and this time, to Josh’s relief, Jo answered. “Hi, Laura,” she said. Laura was Josh’s second cousin. He’d seen her only a few times as a child, but they’d become friends at Brandeis. Jo hadn’t met Laura or talked to her before, but she didn’t hand Josh the phone, though he stretched out his arm. From across the room, he could hear Laura’s voice chiming up and down in Washington, D.C. His cousin in her ignorance was being cheerful after Jo’s bad experience, compounding his own awkwardness.

  Then Jo put her hand over the mouthpiece. “She wants to stay here Friday night.”

  “Do you mind?” Josh said.

  She shrugged. They had room, now that Jo had at last moved out of the supposedly haunted back bedroom and into his. They’d gone out for a beer on a Friday night and talked late. As they walked home, he took her hand. “Do you feel strongly that roommates should keep things platonic?” he’d said as they entered the apartment. His hand was almost trembling in hers. He let go to find his key.

  “No,” Jo had said. “No, I don’t, as it happens.” Once inside the apartment, she had reached for his hand again.

  Now he began clearing the food. Laura, who worked for a congresswoman, had grown up in Boston, but her parents, divorced, lived elsewhere. Josh was flattered that when Laura came to Boston, she wanted to stay with him.

  Jo and Laura continued talking. To Josh’s surprise, Jo told Laura the whole story in more detail than he’d heard it. She stood and turned, stretching the curly cord around her elbow and then revolving slowly as she spoke, until it was released. She listened, talked, listened. “No, no,” she said once, her voice urgent. She leaned forward, and her hair fell forward; then she tipped her head back to clear her face, then leaned forward again. “It wasn’t precisely shame,” she said. She laughed bitterly. “In the nudity department, it didn’t exactly count.”

  After a pause she said, “Fear of getting killed.” Soon she hung up. “They’re coming on Friday in time for supper, which they’re going to bring.”

  “They?”

  “Her boyfriend. Chandler?”

  “I didn’t know Laura had a boyfriend.”

  The director had urged Jo to stay home the day after the assault, but Jo felt uncompromisingly competent, and arrived at work on time. The other teachers knew what had happened; all day, gusts of concern passed to her through walls, or as doors closed. Each adult seemed surrounded by a swirling windstorm of pain. Ignoring them, Jo read picture books to her charges in a loud voice, one book five times.

  But at night she was immobile in front of the television, not knowing if she wanted Josh to speak to her or not. “I’ll give you . . .” he said, finally, coming to stand behind her. She was watching an old movie. He stood watching behind her, one hand on her shoulder, but didn’t speak again.

  “No,” she said. The movie was a crime story in black and white, set in Scotland, with looming stone fireplaces and sooty pots. A mute child was the only witness to her mother’s murder.

  “Is she too traumatized to talk?” Josh said, after a while.

  “She never talked.”

  “Where’s her father?”

  “No father. The girl had a signal, and the mother cut her a piece of bread. Then the mother went out of the room and died, while the girl watched through the window.”

  “She’ll talk,” Josh said.

  He annoyed her. She turned off the TV, went to bed, and pulled the blankets around her.

  In the morning, Josh said, “I dreamed that movie. In my dream, the mother came back to life.” Like the mother before she was murdered, he was cutting bread. He liked bread from the bakery, not the supermarket.

  “That’s sillier than the real movie,” Jo said.

  “She was under a pile of wood and the child pointed. Then somebody pulled the wood off. I remember long golden planks lying across the mother, and how she stared up at me.”

  “You pulled the wood off?”

  “I guess I was in the movie.”

  In the movie, the mother had been stabbed with the bread knife, not buried under planks. Josh’s bread knife looked nothing like the knife of the man who had assaulted Jo, but Jo found herself angry with Josh for owning and using a knife, for being a snob about packaged, sliced bread. She ate cold cereal.

  “Since I moved into your room, I don’t dream,” Jo said. “The ghost stayed in the back room.”

  “Now the multitalented ghost causes dreams.”

  “You don’t believe me, but you never slept in there.” Jo prided herself on her coolheadedness. The ghost (if that was the right word) was a breath of pessimism, of dread; it could always be sensed in particular parts of the apartment, never in others. The ghost was evidence of her resistance to sentiment, not the opposite. “The ghost was a murderer,” she said. “Or she was murdered.”

  He looked away. “Once you said the ghost was in here,” he said. The knife was in his hand. His orange curls hadn’t yet been brushed.

  “No I didn’t.” Not in the healthy kitchen. She brought in a notebook and drew a map of the apartment. With dots, she outlined the haunted area. She knew just where her feelings changed.

  “The bathroom is closer to the kitchen,” Josh said. He took her pen and corrected the drawing.

  “That’s not precisely my point, is it?” Jo said.

  Friday night Josh hurried to meet Laura’s train at South Station. She jumped into his arms. Chandler was hairy. He and Josh grunted and nodded: Greetings, fellow primate. Josh instantly disliked Chandler for daring to sleep with his cousin, who rumpled Josh’s curls and said, “You look great!” She handed him a colorful stuffed tote bag, and they took the Red Line to Davis Square. As they climbed Somerville’s narrow streets she said she and Chandler had met at a party three months earlier.

  “And you’re already calling him your boyfriend?” Josh said. “Jo and I didn’t even shake hands for a year.”

  “Impressive technique,” said Chandler from behind them. He spoke in a rich voice that was a little too loud. “How did you get her to shake hands after only a year?”

  At the apartment Chandler shook hands with Jo and the other two laughed. Josh stepped forward and also shook hands with Jo, and she nodded as if that happened all the time. Jo was a little stern, quiet compared to Laura, who knocked into objects, which quivered behind her but were not harmed. She was short, with wild, light-colored hair something like Josh’s. Leading the way into the kitchen, Laura announced that she’d learned to cook Ethiopian food. She’d frozen an entire meal and had let it thaw on the train. She took packages wrapped in foil and plastic from the tote bag. “People began sniffing as we left New York,” she said, grabbing her hair as if she’d lost something in it. She’d made injera—the flat sourdough bread—and two kinds of stew.

  While Josh and Jo heated the food, Laura phoned an old roommate, and Chandler examined the apartment. “I bet this place once had beautiful doorknobs,” Josh heard him say to nobody. “When a place like this is renovated, why do they put in ugly doorknobs?”

&
nbsp; Chandler took tiny pieces of the bread Laura had made, barely enough to pinch a bean or a cube of potato, while Laura, Jo, and Josh tore off handkerchief-sized pieces and seized all the food they could. “Explain to Jo how we’re related,” Josh said as they ate. “I can’t.”

  “You always make me do that,” Laura said. “Our mothers are cousins. Our grandmothers are sisters. Your grandma is my great-aunt Sylvia. My grandma is your great-aunt Fanny.”

  “Great-aunt Fanny!” said Josh. “I can never remember how I know her.”

  “You’re just pretending.”

  Chandler said, “Why do people go on and on about families?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” Josh said. He meant rude questions. Being with Laura made him giddy. Together they grew younger, drawn back to the suitcase of potential babies that their great-grandparents, whose names were Sonia and Joseph, had dragged from the old country.

  Then Jo said, “I think I saw the man today.”

  “What man?” said Chandler.

  “The man who did that to you?” Laura said. Her voice had become softer, slower.

  “I’m not sure,” Jo said. “I was having tea at Carberry’s with Sue. A man and a younger woman were eating lunch with a little girl. He wasn’t wearing the same jacket, but I saw his face when he looked at the baby.”

  “Did you call the cops?” said Chandler. Laura must have told him about it.

  “I didn’t even tell Sue.”

  “You definitely should have called the cops,” Chandler said.

  Jo seemed to be speaking only to Laura. “Monday I thought he’d invented the baby, because how could a real father do that? But every guy has sperm. The thing is, what if he really brings her to the center?”

  “Of course he won’t.” Laura clutched her hair.

  “I wish I were sure it was the same man,” Jo said. “In a movie, he’d have a birthmark.”

  “Why a birthmark?” said Chandler. They were all squeezed together with their knees touching. Josh thought he saw Jo hitch her chair away from Chandler.

  She said, “When they finished lunch, the woman got up to buy a cookie, which she broke into three parts. So sane. I couldn’t stand it. I told Sue I didn’t feel well and ran out of there and walked about a mile. I couldn’t stand it whether or not it was the same man. I was late getting back to work, but nobody cared. They expect me to be crazy—the crime victim. Maybe I’ll become mute, like the kid in the movie.”

  “A movie with a birthmark?” Chandler said. Jo didn’t answer, so Josh told him about the child who’d witnessed her mother’s murder, but before he could describe his dream, Chandler said he thought he remembered that film. “Doesn’t the murderer come back and kill the little kid?”

  “You like this guy?” Jo said quickly to Laura. “I don’t think I do.”

  Josh saw Laura decide to take this as a joke. Then Jo said, “He never opens his mouth without saying the wrong thing. I couldn’t possibly call the cops. They’d think I imagined it. Maybe I did imagine it. Maybe I made the whole thing up.” She stood, looked at Josh, then said, “I’m going to bed.”

  Josh and Laura were left with the dishes. Chandler went for a walk after Jo went off to bed, and Laura explained that he smoked. “Jo must despise me,” she said to Josh. “I should have said something.”

  “I think she’s crazy about you,” Josh said. “It’s me she’s mad at.”

  “I’m hung up about Chandler,” said Laura. “Jo doesn’t respect that. I don’t either.”

  “Should I tell her to talk to the cops about the guy in Carberry’s?” Josh said.

  “Of course. It was definitely the same guy,” said Laura.

  Listening from the next room as she tried to sleep, Jo was surprised that Laura thought herself despised. Jo was glad Laura had come, and didn’t blame her for being unable to school her feelings about Chandler. She felt bad for being difficult. She marveled that Laura was sure about the man. Jo had never considered calling the police a second time.

  In the morning Jo was the first awake. She put on sweat clothes and went for a run. The crowded little streets looked shabby. It was March, and the chain-link fences were not yet blurred with spring green. Jo ran to the bike path on which she ordinarily walked to work, and then ran along it, searching the face of every passerby for the man with the knife or the woman who bought the cookie. She ran past the day-care center, then stopped running, turned, and walked home past Carberry’s. If she’d brought money, she could have bought muffins and scones for the guests. She looked inside at couples with small children, older men with younger women.

  As she let herself into the apartment, she heard voices. “Of course not,” Josh was saying.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Laura.

  “Were you talking about me?” said Jo, coming into the living room.

  “We were talking about your ghost.” Laura was standing, a hairbrush in her hand.

  “Did you hear her?” said Jo.

  “I asked Josh if you believed in the ghost,” Laura said. “You know, the way you believe in that chair—and he said no.”

  “But I do,” said Jo, glancing at the chair—her only piece of upholstered furniture, which she’d bought in college from a friend. It was brown, shabby and comfortable. Chandler was sitting in it. “You didn’t see her, did you? I just hear her.” Then Jo walked past them into the kitchen. She ran the cold water, filled a glass, and stayed to drink it. Then she refilled it and returned to the living room.

  Chandler’s feet stuck out into the room. Jo would have liked to sit in the chair.

  “Do you want to go out for brunch?” Laura said. “We’d have to do it soon—later, we’re meeting my old roommate.” She brushed her hair forward, then back.

  “But you did hear the ghost, didn’t you?” Jo said. “Otherwise, how did you know about it?”

  “We didn’t hear it,” said Laura. They stood facing each other.

  “So you told them?” Jo said to Josh.

  He was standing in the doorway. “Chandler wanted to know why we pay so much rent.”

  “You told him how much rent we pay?”

  “People are curious about Boston real estate,” Josh said.

  “It’s even more than I pay,” Chandler said.

  Josh said, “So I told him we pay extra for a ghost. The ghost of a murderer.”

  “That makes me angry with you,” Jo said quietly. She took a sip of water.

  “Why?” Josh stepped backward, out of the doorway and into the hall. Then forward again, back into the doorway.

  “Because it’s making fun of what I think,” she said, but that wasn’t the only reason.

  “Do Chinese people believe in ghosts?” said Chandler.

  Josh pressed his hands into the doorjamb, pushing up a little on his toes. “Jo is Korean, not Chinese,” he said.

  “Korean-American,” said Jo tersely. “Born here.”

  “Ghosts are such a fad,” said Chandler. “Everybody’s got ghosts. Or they burn stuff to get rid of ghosts. Do you burn stuff?”

  “No,” said Jo. “There’s no getting rid of her. She’s just here, as ordinary as that chair.”

  Chandler stood, walked to the window, turned back. He said, “That’s why you won’t call the cops. You think they’re the same.”

  “Call the cops about the ghost?” said Jo.

  “You know, Jo,” Josh said, still pressing on the doorjamb, “sometimes the ghost does get a little boring. The man, unfortunately, was real. The ghost isn’t real. Okay?”

  “About the man,” said Chandler.

  “The ghost is real,” said Jo, and she seemed to feel herself grow taller and thicker, as if each limb stretched, and her feet pressed with additional weight into the floor.

  “But Chandler’s right,” Josh said. “Ghosts are a fad. We only know about them because we already know about them.”

  Jo said, “If you don’t say I might be right about the ghost—might, I’m not saying you ha
ve to say I’m definitely right—if you don’t say I might be right, I’ll overturn this glass of water on your head.”

  “That’s not the issue,” said Josh, so Jo crossed the room, and with joy raised her arm (Laura cried, “Don’t!”) and emptied the glass of water on Josh’s head.

  He saw her black hair swing as she tipped her head back to watch the water rush down on him. The water was cold. Jo dropped the glass, by mistake, Josh thought, and Laura took over, policing them so they didn’t slip in the wet and cut themselves on the broken glass. Chandler stayed where he was, silent. “I’m sorry,” said Jo, sounding slightly awestruck. She ignored Laura’s instructions, stepped toward Josh, and put her arms around him.

  She was trembling—that was why she dropped the glass. She might even have been crying. Then she said, “I need a shower,” but before locking herself in the bathroom she handed Josh a towel and said, “Take off your clothes, Joshua.” Holding the bathroom door open, she sang:

  A Joshua sat on the railroad track

  His heart was all aflutter.

  Around the bend came Engine Ten,

  Uh-oh, Joshua butter.

  When Jo closed the bathroom door, Laura decided that she and Chandler ought to leave immediately. “Jo will understand,” Laura said. “Give her my love. Tell her thanks. I’ll call her next week. I’ll send her an e-mail.” They were spending the night at the old roommate’s place, leaving early the next day. She’d already packed, and Josh stood, wet and getting colder, while she went for their bags, kissed his cheek, and got Chandler out the door.

  Josh stripped, leaving his clothes in a heap. He got into bed, pulled up the covers, and gradually began to feel less cold, then warm. By the time Jo turned off the shower, he was a little sleepy. She came in, naked, and got into bed with him. She began to talk slowly. “I let the ghost into my head, and I sing songs that kill the children,” she said. “And kill you, too. Did I make the man come? Did I make him take out his knife?”

  “No,” Josh said. “It’s not a real train.”