PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “You look perfect just the way you are.”

  I pulled my robe in tighter. “I thought you said you wasn’t looking?”

  Jayden shrugged. Then he smiled again and so did I. ‘Cause there was one thing about Jayden that was undisputable. He didn’t talk no crap. If he said perfect, he meant it.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  When it came time for me to chase down some sleep, I lay there, my nose aimed at the ceiling, my toes pointed due north, my brain about as scrambled as a plate of diner eggs. Seemed that attached to every warm thought of Ridley was a sneaky little thought of Jayden tagging along for the ride. I kept thinking of that song Mama used to sing all the time. I love you just the way you are.

  But he hadn’t said that. He hadn’t said love. He’d said I looked perfect the way I was. Perfect and love was two totally different things.

  Wasn’t they?

  After an hour or so of twisting and spinning in my sheets, I got up and went over to my desk. I took hold of those two little blue pills that Ridley gave me, unfolded that tissue paper and placed them on the back of my tongue, washing them down with what was left of some water in a bottle next to my dresser.

  I needed to put all this unrest to rest. Once and for all.

  Seven

  This time when she came to me, she wasn’t all dewy and wet. Those crazy cornrows was framing her face in a stiff frizzled crown, like she’d recently been anointed Queen of the Dead and then swiftly electrocuted. Bee or Bea had a look of minor irritation on her face, especially so when I told her what Mama had said. And then she argued with me. Wasn’t like she was hollering or nothing like that. She just had her brow all scrunched up above her eyes and a straight line where her mouth was supposed to be.

  “Well, your mother’s wrong. You aren’t dreaming.”

  If I wasn’t lying down in bed, my feet otherwise occupied with being prone, I’d a’tapped my toes in annoyance. “Well, I beg your pardon, Bee or whatever, but I do believe I’m asleep. I mean, I said my prayers, took my relaxation pills and tucked myself under the covers. That’s about as asleep as I know how to be.”

  Bee or Bea sighed. “I’m just saying . . . this isn’t a dream. I’M not a dream. And I’m counting on you to set the record straight for me.”

  “Okay, but how exactly do you expect me to do that? I don’t even know who you are and I don’t know your mama. Do you expect me to go door to door asking complete strangers if they once had a daughter who died in the Pacachi River? No offense or nothing . . . I mean you do know you’re dead right?”

  The white haze that surrounded her suddenly went gray. Her image began to fade into nothingness. It was as if I’d hurt her or something, which was not my intention. Well, maybe a little. Maybe beneath my words I was worried about how Mama had said this visitation thing would be bringing me bad luck. Maybe I really wanted this lady to go away and never come back.

  “Truly, if I didn’t think you could do it, I wouldn’t have come to meet you. Besides, don’t you realize that’s another reason you’re still alive? If you had nothing left to accomplish in your life, that river would have swallowed you up and spit you out for good. Forever.”

  For a woman without a mouth, she sure did have a lot to say for herself. I closed my eyes up tight and pressed the heels of my palms to my lids. If this wasn’t a visitation I didn’t know what it was. I felt a tangle start in the pit of my belly, as if someone was beginning to tug on a string attached to every troublesome emotion I owned, starting a knot that I feared might never come undone. Dreams didn’t have physical sensations. In dreams, dead people didn’t know your name. Did they? That’s when I hatched a plan to help this Bee or Bea. So that perhaps she could make her peace with stuff as it was and be high-tailing it on outta my sleep, hopefully before launching all that rotten luck Mama was always worried sick over.

  “Okay,” I said, with my eyes still clamped shut. “I’ll try. But can you tell me where your mama is?”

  I waited her for to reply. And waited. I removed my hands from my face and looked ‘round. She was gone. Without even so much as a goodbye or a thank you. Whoever this woman’s mother was, she surely hadn’t raised her daughter up with much in the way of manners.

  All at once my bedroom came back into view. If I had been sleeping, I was wide awake now. I slowly crept from my bed and over to my dresser drawer, the one where I kept my panties and such personal effects. I opened it quiet as a whisper and reached my arm all the way to the back. When my fingers grazed the matted, furry hair, I snatched it and pulled it out. My lucky troll doll. Papa Roosevelt had given it to me for my birthday one year, instead of a rabbit’s foot cause he’d said he thought a child keeping hold of an animal’s foot was sorta disturbing. He said this ugly little doll would ward off evil in my and Mama’s life. I kept it hidden on account of every time Mama looked at it she seemed to wanna start crying.

  I brought that troll, with its big ole’ popping eyeballs, over to my bed, and tucked it under my pillow. In the event Bee or Bea decided to come on back and wish me a lovely evening, I would be armed and ready.

  #

  The very next day Mr. DuPont picked Mama up real early and took her out for a Day of Surprises. That’s how she kept on saying it, as if it was some sort of spectacular occasion, like the Olympics or something. So first thing out the gate, while I was still dressed in my jammies, I grabbed the laptop and hunkered down at the kitchen table, and did me some honest to goodness sleuthing. I looked up the history of fatalities that had taken place on Skinners Bridge. There wasn’t many - three in all, the first being a man who’d been hired as a member of the original construction crew and he had a bit of a drinking problem. Got liquored up on his lunch hour one day and toppled over the measly rail. Smashed his head on a large boulder and died instantly. Seems a crying shame, not to be capable of controlling one’s urge for alcohol. Mama’d had a couple of scoundrels like that in her life, who loved the bottle more than anything else. She called that lot the Liquid Losers.

  The second death came about ten years after that, and this time it was an eighty-ish year-old homeless woman they called Jane Doe since no one had stepped up to claim her. She’d apparently wandered too close to the edge and lost her footing, or so it was reckoned. Folks figured if that poor lady had had a family that would have kicked up a fuss; the town might have bothered erecting a halfway decent guardrail. But since nobody saw fit to complain, nothing got done about it. People simply went on with their living, thinking it best to take extra care when crossing the bridge, walking right down the center, real gingerly-like.

  I knew straight away I’d find her story next, that red-haired ghost or whatever she was. I pushed in closer to the screen and read real slow, so as not to miss one word.

  “The third and most recent life claimed by the Pacachi River was that of twenty-seven year old Vivienne R. (victim’s last name has been withheld at the request of her family.) It is rumored that Ms. R committed suicide by jumping off Skinners Bridge into the icy cold river water in the middle of a particularly raw, February winter. Friends of Vivienne claim that she’d been despondent over the break-up of a long-term romance and had spoken of being unable to deal with it. Ms. R’s mother fell ill sometime after her daughter’s death and it is believed that her own health failed considerably as a result of losing her only child.”

  I relaxed my spine into the chair. So her name wasn’t Bee or Bea at all.

  She was Vivienne.

  She musta said V or Vee and I’d heard her wrong. Right then it was as if her cold, wet hand scaled my spine. It was like I knew her inside and out—like we was one and the same. I knew all about what she felt, how her heart was broken clean in two. How she thought she’d never find another man she could love so deeply, so purely. I knew how she’d walked aimlessly on that frigid evening, her skin soggy from her own tears. She’d ended up on that bridge without even really thinking, draped in a long suede shawl, fighting against a mean wind spitting hail i
n her face.

  I knew that her heart didn’t want to go on, not one more hour, one more second without that man’s love wrapped ‘round it.

  I knew she’d ambled over to the rail. She’d sized it up. Real puny, she decided. Hardly worthy of keeping anyone safe. Vivienne R. fixed a set of bloodshot eyes on that black water below. She couldn’t swim. And darkness scared her. She’d moved in closer, tighter. Her teeth was clenched. Her fists, too. Her ribs was clamped up against her chest.

  The Magical Knowing was pinned on high, tuned in to her every move, her every sentiment. She loved her mama. If she let herself fall, her mother might never get over it.

  She took a step back.

  And yet, that’s where it left me. With that woman perched on the verge of right and evil. Of going on or not. The pain of life or the solace of death.

  She’d said she hadn’t meant to die. She’d told me that she surely had not taken her own life. Vivienne wanted me to set the record straight. It was so important to her that she barged right into my sleep at will. Was she lying? For certain there was an important chunk of her story that had gone missing. I heaved a sigh. Without her last name, how would I ever be able to find her family?

  I looked over at Mama’s flowers, the ones Mr. DuPont had given to her. They was hung over like they’d been partying hard on some of Papa Roosevelt’s homemade moonshine (‘cause even though he was a wealthy man, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a hayseed, country boy at heart.) Little yellow petals was framed in dark brown edges. Once-green leaves was now wrinkled and crunchy and gray, kind of like old Franklin himself.

  I thought perhaps I ought to toss them in the trash, as a sort of public service to dear, sweet Mari Kaye. But I knew that woman. Only too well. I knew she was fixing to take hold of one of them pathetic petals and press it between the pages of one of her books of love poems. If Mama was so inclined she’d write her very own—Mari’s Sonnet of the Scoundrels. I’d tried consulting with the Magical Knowing as far as Mr. DuPont was concerned. Was he just another loser who would only end up hurting my mother, the way all the others had? Yet, anyone with the Knowing can tell you. You don’t ask. It tells. What it wants. When it wants. It wouldn’t give up anything more on Calvin A. DuPont till it was damn good and ready. Same rule applied to Vee.

  I had one final look at the computer screen. Miss Vivienne R.’s words rang out between my ears.

  “ . . . don’t you realize that’s another reason you’re still alive? If you had nothing left to accomplish in your life, that river would have swallowed you up and spit you out for good. Forever.”

  I closed the lid quickly. She was right. That nasty ole’ Pacachi had ate her up, but it didn’t take me. I vowed to find her mama if it was the last thing I did.

  Eight

  I’d been effectively abandoned. Left flat. I suppose I had it coming to me. It was a good old fashioned game of tit for tat. Frankly I’d never known Mama to be so petty. I had to presume it was the influence of one persnickety Mr. Calvin A. DuPont.

  Sure there was some that might say by my going off with Ridley all the way to the opposite end of the universe, I was abandoning my mother. Some people of the most critical, analytical and cynical in nature. Those folks would say, “Truly,” they’d say, “what’s your mama gonna do by her lonesome in Alabama while her baby girl is traipsing willy-nilly all over Johannesburg?”

  My answer would be that she wouldn’t be by her lonesome. She had Mr. DuPont and he had her. And this morning he whisked her off to some lovey-dovey motel by Lake Arrowhead, two hours from home, where they was planning to stay for the entire weekend. Up till now, through all the scoundrels that had come before, Mama had never seen fit to leave me to my own devices for even one night. Yet off she went with her pink paisley print Wal-Mart luggage at her feet. She’d kissed me once on each side of my face, like we was actors in one of them kitschy foreign films, and she tucked her matching silk pink paisley scarf behind her shoulders as she trailed Mr. DuPont out to his car. He’d carried her bag, as if he was her personal chauffeur. I don’t think I’d ever seen Mama looking happier or pinker in all her born days. She’d stalled by the door, waiting for her fancy beau to open it for her, in true gentlemanly fashion. In that minute she’d brought her hand to her mouth and smooched her palm, then sent an air-kiss off to meet me. I reckon I was supposed to reach up into the invisibleness and catch it before it went sailing off into the wide blue yonder.

  I didn’t. Mostly because I wasn’t crazy about the look on Mr. DuPont’s face, the way his lids hooded the whites of his eyes. The way his smile seemed as if it was drawn on in light red marker. The way his hair shined with the artificial products of vanity.

  It wasn’t the Magical Knowing that was bugging me. This time it was only him.

  “Have a lovely weekend, Truly,” he said, calling out to me with a wave.

  “And the very same to you,” I spoke out in return. My voice playacted as if it didn’t positively despise the likes of him, for Mama’s sake. ‘Cause that’s what good daughters did.

  I closed the door, shutting away the sight of the happy couple in all their glee. What made this particular abandonment all the more troubling was that Ridley had to work. Said he wouldn’t be ‘round for the entire day Saturday, well into the evening hours.

  I considered calling Gwendoleen and finally having some girlfriend bonding time. But, damned if I even knew her number. I climbed the steps toward my room, counting them as I went along. Mama always said she could solve most of her daily dilemmas by the time she got to the twelfth one. And so I pondered as I went along. What was I to do with this day all to myself? What to do? WHAT TO DO?

  Vee’s face popped into my head between the sixth and seventh step. I knew she was waiting on me to help her find some everlasting peace. By the ninth step Mama’s warning was back, ringing through my ears, trying its best to creep me out about the dangers of visitations from the dead. As soon as I set foot on the twelfth step it hit me. Just like that. As if by some stroke of divine intervention. I knew what I was gonna do with this day. I knew exactly what I HAD to do.

  I aimed for my bedroom and to my closet, collected my white denim jacket and my handbag where I had stored some cash. I reached in and counted it out. Twenty . . . thirty six dollars and fifty three cents. That oughta cover a tank of gas right fine. I looked over toward the window.

  What I needed now was a personal chauffeur of my own.

  #

  Jayden slipped a Motorhead CD into the slot and pumped the volume, blasting the stillness that had been waiting on the music to fill it. He was always saying, “There’s only one way to travel and that’s with a little Motor in tow.” He was wearing his aviator sunshades, the ones that made him look like a movie star. Jayden could have been as popular as any of them teen idols, like the ones that graced those magazine covers at the supermarket check-out stands. He could have gone off to Los Angeles, California and signed up with one of those agencies where they take lots of pictures of you and put you in commercials and stuff. He was all that, Jayden was.

  I kept Mama’s address book opened on my lap while I flipped through the pages. Jayden had this little bow on his lips which seemed to say he was glad to be along with me today, even if he hadn’t said so outright. His fingers was cupped loosely ‘round the steering wheel of his pickup truck whose engine rippled beneath my feet.

  “Butler County?” he asked.

  “Butler County.”

  About a year or so ago, Jayden had traded his old stick shift in for this newer automatic model. I remember when he tried to teach me about how the gears worked, when to slip from second to third and such. We’d had us a whole mess of laughs that day, with me making his truck buck ‘round like an ornery bull. Back then there was nothing between us we couldn’t talk about. There was nothing we passed before the censors in our brains before letting fly off our tongues.

  But now.

  Now we kinda kept this block of unspoken sentences between us, sitt
ing right there in the middle of that front seat, brushing up against Jayden’s thigh. And we smiled it away whenever we could, pretending it was nothing more than thin air, pretending there was no Ridley, no South Africa. Nothing but two friends and the open Alabama roadway at their beckon call. Yet deep down we knew it wasn’t so. Deep down we felt the way our lives had shifted gears in the past few months. There was no escaping the truth. We’d changed. We’d become automatic. Yeses and no’s and polite grins and topics of avoidance.

  Jayden slipped me a glance from the corner of his right eye. “You really dig that hair color, huh?”

  I pushed the loose ends behind my ears, more than once. “I don’t know. Sorta.”

  The Motorhead singer was bellyachin’ about how he wasn’t a nice guy after all—like he was in Sunday confession or visiting his therapist. After a while it gave me a hacking pain between my eyeballs. “You really dig this album, huh?”

  “No good?”

  “Well . . . if the mood strikes, I guess.”

  Jayden leaned forward and pressed the “off” button, plunging us into a sudden ear-piercing silence. I wasn’t sure which was worse. All at once I was feeling right conscious of myself, as though everything about me fit like a pair of shoes two sizes too small. My elbows pinched, my knees puckered, my nose twitched. I ran a pair of shaky hands over my hair once again. “No good?” I asked softly.

  Jayden turned and looked at me dead-on. His gaze was soft at the corners and I knew he wouldn’t say it. Even if he positively hated the eggplant. He’d never say so out loud.

  “Well . . . you know. I think you’re good the way your Mama made you.”

  I nodded.

  “Great, really . . . ” he said quietly, as if he hardly wanted me to hear.

  Though I did.

  I sat back and closed my eyes. Off I went. Time traveling, the calendar set to rewind. In that by-gone moment Ridley wasn’t as of yet in my life. Neither was Mr. Calvin A. DuPont. I had never fallen off Skinners Bridge and I’d never met that odd woman, Vivienne R. The Magical Knowing was responsible for sweet, simple things like making sure to warn me against ditching school for the mall, since it turned out the assistant principal was shopping there that day. And Jayden was the too-cute boy-next-door who might still become the man I would marry one day.