Surviving Amelia

by Rand, Naomi;

  “It must be,” Amelia said.

  “But you have to still be alive somewhere?”

  “In heaven, do you mean? It must be getting pretty crowded up there, what with all the spirits dancing around.”

  “It’s only this? What’s the point?” Muriel asked.

  “Don’t be silly. Whatever we do, whatever we make of what we have, that’s the point.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “I guess it has to be,” Amelia said.

  I GUESS IT has to be. Muriel heard Amelia saying it. She lowered the gun and walked back into their bedroom. She opened the closet, and found Albert’s suits, the winter weight worsted wool and the summer weight striped cotton. She hadn’t thrown any of his things away. She was wearing his cardigan sweater. She slept in his shirts.

  Down to the end of the hall and up the stairs into the attic. It was nothing like the attic at her grandmother’s. That was full of mystery. There had been a stuffed reindeer head mounted and left leaning against a wall, a wedding dress with a crinoline veil, old crockery, her grandfather’s scimitar collection, a Chinese vase with a crack in it.

  Here, her children’s lives were boxed up. They had walked away and she’d said, “What do you want?” They’d replied, “Nothing.”

  The gun was shoved into the pocket of his trousers. They hung loosely on her, held up by a belt. It was loaded. Loaded for bear. Or smaller game. What did she weigh, anyhow? Not more than a hundred and thirty. Not even that.

  The attic had been made into their son’s room. He’d wanted to come up here once he hit Junior High. The walls were still painted dark blue. The curtains framed the one small window. His dresser still held his baseball and hockey trophies, Most Valuable Player 1949, 1950, and 1951, and a posed photo of the Medford high school baseball team, all smiles when they won the state championship.

  Muriel opened the top of his dresser drawer. He’d left behind a change in case he slept over. She touched the plaid shirt. Then backed away and opened the closet. There were his old sports uniforms. An ancient Olympia typewriter sat on the desk. His bulletin board still had clippings of his favorite players; Ted Williams playing the last game he played before heading off to Korea.

  Muriel set the gun on the desk. She sank into the chair, feeling her courage ebb. She forced herself to pull open the right hand drawer. Pencils worn down to the nub, old ball-point pens, an art gum eraser, letters opened but left inside their envelopes, gift cards, birthday cards, be my valentine, all mixed in together.

  She swallowed, then lifted the gun and turned it on herself. Opened her mouth. Stuck the barrel inside. In movies they made it seem easy, natural. But the barrel tasted rancid and oily. She gagged. She wanted to spit it out. Muriel forced herself to hold the gun steady. When her breathing slowed, she reached round for the safety and took it off. A click. Her finger sank down to the trigger. She shut her eyes.

  There were things to think about. How selfish this was . . . doing away with yourself. How there was no excuse for it. How there would be such a mess to clean up and someone would have to do it. How she was never inconsiderate, how she was kind and doting to a fault. Yet was it wrong? Every day all she wanted was for this misery to be over with. Why couldn’t it be her turn?

  Albert had wanted to do it.

  He’d bought the gun.

  Wasn’t it as if he were giving her permission?

  Her finger tucked round the metal trigger and pressed. She told herself, there’ll be an end then and you won’t have to think anymore, the thinking’s what takes the most out of you. Waking up every day and trying to get through, waking up and for a moment thinking it was another day like all the other days that had gone before, then realizing that it wasn’t, that it would never be that way again.

  Amelia’s answer to her question came back to her.

  “Is that enough?” she’d asked.

  “I guess it has to be.”

  The gun tasted horrid. She pulled it out of her mouth, retching. Then stood, needing to wash the taste out of her mouth. She had to get rid of the damn thing.

  Years and years ago, she and Amelia had stood shoulder to shoulder inside that rundown barn, tucked behind a house on the main street in Atchison. It was a town set in the heartland of a great and powerful country. That country was only a part of the continent of North America, one of several continents dotting the planet. If you looked at life from that perspective, your own small part was inconsequential. Although it was all that you were given. It was all that you knew.

  Muriel also knew what she’d done so long ago, taking a breath and steeling herself, then lifting the rifle onto her own shoulder. Narrowing her sight, she’d said, “My turn now.”

  7

  Amelia

  October 1980

  FATHER HAD BROUGHT the rifle and hidden it with all the rest of the presents strewn under the tree. When Amelia opened it, Grandmother gasped and sprang to her feet. Trembling with anger, she pointed her finger at him. “Edwin Earhart, have you lost your mind?”

  Amelia had written about this in her own book, The Fun of It. The book sat on the shelf, directly above Muriel’s bent head. While Muriel read what she’d written, Amelia stewed. How was it possible to get everything wrong? In Muriel’s version, Amelia was a wrecking crew of a sister, bent on destroying even the most benign fantasy. She used logic like a hat pin, sticking it into the colorful balloon and deflating Muriel’s innocence. She’d murdered Santa Claus! All she’d said was that Christmas seemed a little, well, preposterous and besides, they weren’t that young. Muriel had been at least nine, quite possibly ten. For that particular Christmas, Amelia was the one living with their grandparents in Atchison. Muriel had been in Des Moines. There were three travelers getting off the train to visit, Father, Mother, and Muriel disembarking in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. “It’s in the book, just open it!” Muriel didn’t hear a word. Amelia reached out impulsively, forgetting. Her fingers slid through the cover, the vellum, and out the other side. It was a nauseating visual. She pulled her hand back as if stung and curled it into a frustrated fist. Then panicked. She tried to breathe through her nerves. There was something she was missing, some clue that would lead to empowering her and give her back control. This was her dream. Her nightmare.

  Amelia knew she was feverish. It was the only rational explanation. She was lying on the beach, delirious, and dying of exposure. This mental state was the beginning of the end. Soon she would stop breathing altogether, done in like that martyred rat. Her heart thrummed against her chest. Her breath came in snatches. Stop! Amelia couldn’t. If she wasn’t dying, then she was already dead and this was purgatory. She had been sent to live as a shade in Muriel’s house in Medford. Hadn’t she stood behind Muriel when her sister washed her hands in the bathroom and seen the evidence? Only one woman was reflected back in the mirror and that woman was Muriel. If she was a shade, if that was true, then God did exist and had a wicked sense of humor. Jehovah or Krishna or Mohammed or whatever it was, had sent her packing, sticking her here in the place she’d hated living in most of all, Medford. The more Amelia thought about it, the more this seemed the likely answer.

  This morning had begun the same way all mornings seemed to, here in Muriel’s house. At five a.m. on the dot, her younger sister awoke and went to the bathroom to perform her libations, wearing what had to be Albert’s bathrobe. It was striped and way too large for her tiny frame. Albert was gone, but clearly not forgotten. There were photographs of him everywhere. It seemed to be a recent loss. Muriel’s torpor was one clue. The pile of condolence cards, another.

  Muriel moved slowly. It took her over an hour to get ready to descend to the first floor. When she did, she made a beeline for the kitchen. Water was put on for tea. Muriel sat at the breakfast table waiting, watching the sun come up. When the kettle whistled, she poured water into a teapot and let the tea seep. As she sipped on her first cup, she studied the view. At six twenty seven, the newspaper slapped the front do
or. Muriel retrieved the morning Globe. Then she cooked breakfast. One egg over easy and a slice of Wonder Bread, popped in to toast. It wasn’t the same toaster Amelia had sent them; this model was thin, the burnished metal gleamed. Muriel set the dial to two and used the lightly toasted bread to scoop up the yolk of the egg.

  Every day she ate the same dull meal. And every day, as Amelia watched her eat, her own stomach growled out a protest.

  When Muriel was done, she set the dishes in the sink and went off to her study to work or really just stare at the walls.

  So the morning passed. Muriel used the toilet several times and made another cup of tea. On an exciting day, the telephone rang. When she answered it, she sat in the comfortable chair set next to a small round table. The phone was also new. The one Amelia had paid for had been heavy and black. This was compact, a cheerful tomato red. The top fit neatly onto the bottom, nesting there. Sometimes Muriel made a call herself. When she did, she held the phone away from her and put her glasses on. The squares showing the numbers glowed.

  “Hello,” Muriel said brightly.

  That was what passed for excitement for her sister. The workings of the house were far more interesting than its owner. Take the toilet, there was no chain pull to release the water. A handle in the back did the trick. What made it work? Amelia would have liked to take it apart and figure out the basic mechanics. But that would have meant more than the right sized wrench and a bag full of plumbing tools. She would have had to be able to grasp those same tools. Instead, she was forced to play the role of dispassionate observer, observing miracles as they appeared all around her. The burner on the stove lit without a match. Then there was that box at the end of Muriel’s bed upstairs. It flickered to life and on it all sorts of stories and news programs played as if on a movie screen. Two nights ago, it was something she knew, the wonderful Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Gary Cooper was perfectly cast as a naïf. It was interrupted for commercial announcements. Muriel was bored; she’d use the time to get a snack. Amelia loved them. A cartoon tiger swore Frosted Flakes were great; a beaming mother presenting an orange box of Tide detergent claiming it made her whites whiter; and, best of all, planes flew the friendly skies heading east, west, north and south. BOAC, TWA, Pan American. Air travel was convenient. Do it and you, too, could see the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. A soothing voice said that the world was bigger than ever, with “More places to go, more things to see.” The final shot was always a plane taking off and sailing away. How huge they were. And no propellers on the wings; instead, there were closed tubes that hid engines, hung below each wing. There were so many windows, surely room for more than a hundred passengers. Pan American boasted their fleet flew round the world every single day.

  Impossible.

  Amelia’s reverie was interrupted. The phone rang. Muriel went to get it out in the hall.

  Muriel ate lunch at noon. The meal consisted of whatever had been left in the fridge from dinner the night before. Muriel subsisted on a diet of chicken, chicken, and more chicken. To accompany it, she ingested fresh or leftover salad. The leftover version was kept in a glass mason jar overnight. The resulting mess was gray and desiccated. Once the meal was over, it was time to go. Muriel slipped into her coat and exited stage right, escaping through the front door. She returned approximately five hours later. In that time, Muriel might have gone for a constitutional or flown to the moon and back. Amelia could hardly know. She was not allowed to accompany her.

  There were very strict rules. One of them was this. She wasn’t allowed to leave the house. The first time Muriel pulled on her coat, Amelia walked with her to the door, intending on stepping out with her. She was rudely shoved back inside. Thinking Muriel had done it somehow, she turned and realized it wasn’t possible. Her sister was busy, fumbling in her purse, extracting the house key. Muriel walked over the doorjamb and closed the door in Amelia’s face. When Amelia tried to open it, no dice. Frustrated, she was left to wander. A kitchen window was open. Amelia put her hand out to feel the air, and her palm slapped against an invisible brick wall.

  She was trapped here in Medford; worse, in the house she’d paid for, this place she’d fled from. It was deserved, this purgatory. It was payback for all those years of freedom.

  When Amelia’s legs began to ache, she slid down and sprawled on the floor. Through trial and error she had learned not to support herself by leaning against the furniture. It wouldn’t hold her. More than once she’d toppled over, with painful results. At night, she slept on the Kashan rug she’d given to Muriel and Albert as a wedding present. It was a threadbare oriental, but better than the hardwood. The lack of comfort didn’t bother her. She was used to roughing it. What did, was being trapped. Still, waking, she told herself things could change. It was a new day. Her optimism faded as the minutes ticked by. By the time night fell, she was spent and miserable.

  There went Muriel, crunching the autumn leaves underfoot. Oh, to do that, to inhale the crisp air, to know the season full and close. Tuesdays and Fridays were shopping days. Muriel would return with two bags of groceries. She subsisted on skim milk, Cream of Wheat, eggs, Wonder Bread, the inedible chicken, a small roast, or chopped chuck.

  Thinking of it made Amelia’s mouth water. She was so hungry. She could literally eat a horse. Really, she could, carving it off the bone from fetlock to rump. She had to be starving to death. If she could only wake up, she might save herself. She was the one who had made the homemade fishing spear. It had worked well enough. She’d harpooned quite a few of those brightly colored fish. Then Fred sickened. She’d had to nurse him and it went on so long, there wasn’t really enough food, even for one of them. By now, the signal fire would be out. She could try and start it again as she had the first time, rubbing sticks together until they sparked, then blowing cautiously until the spark became a flame and caught hold of the dry twigs she’d gathered.

  “Weren’t you ever a boy scout?” she’d asked Fred.

  “Me?” he replied, laughing. “They knew better than to take me.”

  He was joking. That stopped soon enough. Poor Fred.

  Poor her. He was gone, but she wasn’t. Amelia salivated, thinking of how she’d grilled those iridescent bodies. All she wanted was that island back again. To feel the grains of sand under her fingers, to hold it, to hold onto something, to enjoy the sensation of a pebble rolling in the palm of her cupped hand. Yes, to start there and move on to save herself, but first the morsels of fish, charred to perfection, sucked right off the bone.

  It’s a puzzle, Amelia told herself. You’ve always been good at puzzles. You’re the one with the logical mind. Father always said so. He’d sit us down and ask us both the question. “Mary is twice as old as her best friend Genevieve. Genevieve is five years older than Pauline. In five years Mary will be three times as old as Genevieve. Tell me my darlings, how old is Genevieve now?”

  “Five.” She’d known the answer immediately.

  “How did you do that?” Muriel asked. She was still working it through on the paper.

  THE FRONT DOOR shut with a bang. It was Muriel. Amelia found her in the kitchen, restocking the larder.

  “There,” Muriel sounded pleased. The bags were folded, put into the closet. Muriel opened a drawer and retrieved garden clippers. She headed out, leaving the screen door ajar. It offered a thin sliver of daylight. Amelia mentally measured the opening, and then edged closer. No brute force pushed back. Slowly. Surely. She lifted her right foot and put her toe into the opening.

  The reproach was immediate. Her body was flung back. She landed hard on the checkerboard tile floor. The light fixture in the center of the ceiling buzzed and fizzed. A breeze blew in through the screen, taunting her.

  “What did I ever do?” she demanded aloud, shaking a fist, “What do you want from me?”

  No one answered. That was when she thought it.

  When you’re dead, you’re dead.

  As soon as she did, she fought back. I’m not. T
his isn’t death. It can’t be.

  What was it then? Madness? Amelia thought of those boys she’d cared for up in Toronto. Back from the front, they’d changed forever. She’d seen firsthand what a fragile organ the brain was. How unprotected. Only a slim carapace sheltered it from the elements. When those shocked soldiers awoke, they’d lost so much. Some couldn’t lift a fork to their mouths. Others had to relearn how to walk. There were doughboys whose memories were shattered. The doctors termed some of the cases fascinating. Amelia hated that word. She went home and cried for them. Blond, blue-eyed Tom Luddow, a farmer’s son from Calgary, saw everything as fresh and new. She would have a conversation with him and then have it again two minutes later. For Tom, it was always now. His parents sat with him, looking wild-eyed at each other. Down the ward at the other end, Richard Jones could only communicate using an invented language. He thought everyone else was at fault, that he was speaking clearly and rationally, and that they were doing it to torture him. He grew so agitated he had to be put into restraints. It was horrid and humbling, bearing witness to what happened when human wiring shorted out.

  Hers was clearly fizzing, the circuits gone awry. She was going mad, mad as the proverbial hatter. Amelia sat up on Muriel’s kitchen floor, grabbing her knees and rocking rhythmically.

  Muriel entered, bearing a clutch of roses. She snipped the thorny ends off, then used the shears to cut the stems in two. She took a plain white vase from a shelf above her head, filled it with cold water, and made an arrangement. The honeyed fragrance filled the room. “Oh,” Muriel said, stepping back to admire her own handiwork. Hot pink. Orange. Vibrant Reds. The last breath of summer, the last hope.

  Amelia got to her feet.

  Muriel filled a kettle and set it on the stove. An orange ring of flame shot out, inside a cerulean blue heart. When the whistle shrilled, Muriel poured the boiling water into the waiting teacup. She dunked the bag several times then set it on the side to reuse. “Waste not, want not,” Muriel said. It was one of Grandmother Otis’ axioms. Funny to imagine that, in this version of her life, Muriel was frugal. The Muriel she knew better had been a bit more profligate. It was one of their ongoing disputes, how money Amelia lent to them never lasted long. She’d paid her ransom and gotten out. The down payment for this house, help with the mortgage, children’s clothes and toys, appliances, she’d offered to do whatever they needed, even to take in Muriel when she wanted to leave Albert. Was it out of guilt or love? How did one separate the two?