by John Searles
A memory surges up in her mind then of Ronnie pleading with her in that rushed voice on prom night. Come on, Missy. Don’t be pissed. I didn’t mean to mess up our plans. As quickly as the memory comes, Melissa forces it back down. She doesn’t want to think of all the time she wasted being angry at him in those final hours of his life, no thanks to Chaz. She removes her hands from beneath the steering wheel and rubs the spot on her shoulder where Charlene jabbed her. It feels as though she has been stung by a bee, or maybe an entire swarm. But she is used to pain—in fact, she has come to crave it. “I understand why your mother’s upset. I know how difficult it must be to accept what I’m saying.”
“Difficult is hardly the word. Melissa, it’s—”
“Do you still have Ronnie’s old Mercedes?” If he is going to tell her again that it’s not possible, she doesn’t want to hear it.
“I guess. I haven’t been in the garage since I moved home. But I doubt my mother got rid of it. The woman treats his retainer like it’s a museum relic. She keeps everything of Ronnie’s. I mean, everything.”
So do I, Melissa thinks as she stares straight ahead at the Chases’ garage. On the other side of those three red doors, the 1979 cream-colored 300 DSL Ronnie bought with his father’s credit card from a used-car lot rests quietly like a game-show prize waiting to be revealed. Melissa pictures Mrs. Chase going out there each week and starting the engine to keep it from dying the way she must have to do. She imagines her sitting in the leather seat where Ronnie used to sit, sliding Ronnie’s silver key into the ignition, placing her foot on the pedal where Ronnie used to place his. It is just not fair, Melissa thinks. None of it is fair. “We were supposed to take that car to the prom instead of renting a limo,” she says out loud without really meaning to. She has a habit of this, though normally no one is around to hear except Mr. and Mrs. Erwin, whom she spends so much time with that she thinks of them less as landlords and more like surrogate parents. Melissa doesn’t know how she would get by without them.
“What did you say?” Philip asks.
“I said, we were supposed to take that car to the prom instead of renting a limo.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“It was Chaz’s big idea.”
“Chaz,” Philip says, and Melissa thinks she detects a tone of disgust in his voice, which he quickly confirms. “I never understood why Ronnie hung out with that guy. I couldn’t stand him.”
“Yeah, well, me neither.”
She stifles a yawn. This conversation, this night, these last nine months, have left her exhausted. She feels as though she could put her head against the steering wheel and sleep for years without waking. It is only a matter of time, she figures, until Philip brings the conversation back to the baby, so she braces herself for another round of accusations and questions. But he keeps right on blathering about Chaz. “I mean, what the hell kind of name is that anyway? His parents might as well have called him WASP idiot.”
Melissa lets out a laugh, despite herself. Even that small effort depletes her energy more.
“Don’t tell me. He went off to Princeton or some other Ivy League college. By now he’s probably in law school somewhere, thanks to his parents who greased the wheels for him by making donations every step of the way. God forbid people in this town make something of their lives on their own.”
“Actually, last I knew, he went into the air force.”
“Oh. Well, whatever. It’s still a stupid name.”
Melissa glances at him in the rearview mirror again. Only this time, she stops thinking about Philip in relation to Ronnie. She finds herself wondering about the kind of person he has become these past five years. Last she knew, he was waiting tables at the Olive Garden over in Wayne and taking classes at a community college in Philadelphia. “Where were you living before you moved home?”
“New York.”
“Did you like it?”
“Mostly, I guess. It’s crowded and expensive. But it’s a lot more exciting than Pennsylvania.”
She asks him how long he lived there, and he tells her about four and a half years. He goes on to say that one night, months after Ronnie died, he got fed up with his job as a waiter and his part-time classes. In the middle of his shift at the restaurant, with his midterm poetry portfolio due the next morning, he punched his time card and walked out the kitchen door. A short while later he was on his way into the city. “I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t the job or the classes that got to me. It was my mother. She was too—well, as you just witnessed, she can be pretty unbearable.”
It’s odd, Melissa thinks, because the way Charlene looked and acted from the moment she opened the door this evening was in direct contradiction to Melissa’s memory of her. She wasn’t thin, even back then, but she certainly wasn’t as big as she is now. And she used to seem so spunky and full of life. “Why did you come back?” she asks Philip.
“Like I said, I had an accident.”
“Oh, yeah. Skiing.”
“Skiing,” he says again, running his index finger around the rim of his turtleneck.
She can’t say why exactly, but Melissa gets the feeling he is lying, or at least that he’s not telling the whole story. Either way, she lets the conversation die, because it’s none of her business and because she is distracted by her thirst. Despite the problem her swollen stomach presents, she manages to lean over and drag her hand along the cluttered floor, locating her bottle of Poland Spring. It’s the kind with a pop-top, which is supposed to make it easier to drink from, but Melissa finds it more difficult, since the water has a way of spilling through the gap where her front teeth used to be. As she lifts the bottle to her mouth and takes a sip, Philip finally brings the discussion full circle.
“Missy, what you just told us doesn’t make any sense. It’s been too many years—”
She pulls the pop-top from her lips, inadvertently making a faint tsk sound as she does. “Want some water?”
“No. Did you hear what I just said?”
“I heard you.”
“And?”
“And I told you already that I’ve only ever been with one person. Ronnie. On the night of our prom.”
“Well, I don’t know what to say then, if you’re going to keep insisting on something so … so ludicrous.”
“You can say that you believe me.”
“But that’s just it. I don’t. And for that matter, I don’t believe a word that woman said on the tape. People like her are just out to make a fast—” Philip cuts his sentence short. Melissa can almost hear the next bit of faulty logic forming in his mind, before he asks, “Is that what you want? Money?”
She takes another sip and wipes the dribble with her sleeve. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” she tells him.
The truth is, Melissa hasn’t been able to work at either of her part-time jobs—answering phones at an insurance company and washing sheets at a motel in Conshohocken (both places where people don’t have to look at her face). The jobs became too difficult for her, given the countless mornings she spent with her head over the toilet, vomiting, and the confusion and anguish she suffered when she first realized what was happening to her. As a result, she is more than six months behind on rent. Still, money was the last thing on her mind when she came here tonight. So when Philip persists with his questions about whether this is some crazy scheme she cooked up for cash, Melissa cranes her neck around and tells him, “Look. I don’t want anything from you people, except for you to believe me. And if you don’t, then that’s your decision. I just thought you had a right to know, since Ronnie is going to be a father in a few more days.” At this, Philip’s mouth drops open the way it did earlier in the kitchen. But the expression does little to stop her. “So if you ever find yourself curious about your niece or nephew, I live right across town at 32 Monk’s Hill Road. You’re welcome to come see the baby for yourself.”
When Melissa is finished, she feels breathl
ess and bone tired. The compassion she’d seen, or thought she’d seen, in Philip’s eyes is gone. Now that she has resigned herself to the fact that he is not going to believe her, she wants him gone as well. Philip must sense what she’s thinking because he pulls on the door handle, bringing a rush of winter air into the car, washing over her hot skin like a salve. “I guess there’s nothing left to say then. Except good night.”
“Good night,” she tells him.
There is his cast and crutch to contend with, so it takes Philip a full minute to slide across the seat and gain firm footing on the icy ground. Once he’s finally standing, Philip looks back at her in the driver’s seat. “Actually, I do have one more thing to say. Maybe it’s not my place to tell you this, Missy. But I think you need some sort of professional help so you can get through this. Not just a doctor to deal with the pregnancy, but a counselor or someone you can talk to about grieving for Ronnie. It’s like, I don’t know, you’re stuck or something. And now that you’re having a baby, I think your mind is getting confused and all mixed-up about what’s happening to you.” Philip stops to take a breath. “The only thing I can think is that it’s like this biography I’m reading about Anne Sexton. When she got pregnant, it really screwed with her head.” Again, Philip pauses. When he speaks next, his voice drops lower. “Things only got worse for her instead of better. And I wouldn’t want the same to happen to you.”
“Are you done?” she asks.
“I’m done.”
“Good. Well, thanks for the advice. Now close the door so I can leave.”
Instead of the loud slam of an exit his mother made, Philip shuts the door so gently that there is nothing but the softest click. Melissa shifts the car into reverse, steps on the gas, and rolls out of the driveway so quickly that chunks of frozen gravel kick up from under her tires and spit at Philip as he hobbles toward the house. When he reaches the top step of the porch, he turns to wave, but Melissa looks away at the road before her, slams the car into drive, and takes off up the street.
“I’m not crazy,” she says as the tears start again. “You believe what you want. But I know what is happening to me. I know.”
By the time she reaches the stop sign on the corner, her skin, which was merely hot before, is on fire. She finds it difficult to breathe. Melissa turns off the heat and rolls down the window, letting more cold air fill the car. A rope of snot is coming from her nose, and she mops it up with her sleeve. If someone were to ask before tonight, she would have said that it wasn’t possible for her to miss Ronnie any more than she already does. But as she picks up speed again and the bare trees and dark houses flash by outside her window, Melissa is overcome with a new kind of sorrow and loneliness, worse than anything she has ever felt.
I am all alone in this, she thinks, or maybe says, out loud.
That’s when the kicking starts, harder than she has experienced before. She imagines the baby’s feet pushing and poking against her womb, fighting to be let loose into the world.
“Not yet,” she says, pressing her palm flat against her stomach as her face crumples in tears. “Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.”
At the intersection of Matson Ford and King of Prussia Road, Melissa turns right, then makes a quick left onto Blatts Farm Hill. She is taking the long way home on purpose, driving faster now, doing forty-five in a thirty-five zone, then fifty. As she zips over the hill and snakes around the third sharp curve, she glances in the direction of the stump on the side of the road. Melissa has seen it there hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, but she stretches her neck in hope of catching another glimpse. The sky is so starless and black, though, that it’s impossible to see it there in the shadows, skinned of so much bark that someone might mistake it for a boulder rather than the remains of an old tree.
The memory sweeps over Melissa anyway.
She and Ronnie are sticking their heads through the sunroof of the limousine, their mouths open wide, shrieking, howling into the night as they whip around turns and sail over the hills. Melissa’s stomach drops, then drops again, as though she is riding the most thrilling and terrifying roller coaster of her life. Down below, Chaz and Stacy are tickling their legs. One of them—most likely Chaz—pinches her ass.
“Cut it out!” Melissa screams, but her voice is sucked into the night.
Ronnie leans his head down and shouts at them to knock it off. When he looks up again, Melissa tells him that she thinks she swallowed a bug. He asks her how it tasted, and this makes her laugh. Ronnie licks his lips and leans forward for a kiss, but the limo winds around another turn and they lose their balance. Melissa’s hair comes completely undone and goes wild around them, thrashing and snapping at their faces. When they steady themselves, Ronnie gathers it behind her head and kisses her, slipping his tongue quickly in and out of her mouth. When he pulls away, he tells her, “You know I love you. Even if tonight didn’t go as planned, I love you no matter what.”
“I know,” she tells him. “I love you too.”
By the time Melissa comes to a stop in front of 32 Monk’s Hill Road, most of the snow has blown off the hood, roof, and trunk of her Corolla. Her driveway, which is nothing more than a patch of dirt beside the road, has been cleared of snow too. Mr. Erwin must have shoveled it while she was in Philadelphia seeing Chantrel earlier tonight. Melissa parks the car and cuts the engine. Before going inside, she sits for a moment, gathering her strength as she stares out at the three tiny houses huddled together, caravan-style. Closest to the street is her cottage, which consists of nothing more than a ten-by-ten living room with a kitchenette along one wall, a bedroom barely big enough for her single bed, and a minuscule bathroom with a mildew-stained shower stall instead of a tub. To the left, and slightly back from her cottage, is the Erwins’ place, large enough for a real kitchen with a table and chairs, plus a decent-size living room and bedroom. It even has a basement with a washer and dryer, instead of a crawl space like the one beneath her cottage. Farthest from the road, closest to the woods, is the vacant house that has never been winterized. All three used to be hunting cabins in the 1940s and were abandoned until the Erwins retired from the police department—she was a dispatcher, he was an officer—and bought the property as an investment.
Melissa leans forward and spots the soft yellow glow of the lamp beside their bed. She can picture them inside, snug beneath the covers, pillows fluffed behind their heads as Mr. Erwin reads one of those books of funny facts he loves so much and Mrs. Erwin turns the pages of a Mary Higgins Clark novel, trying to guess the killer. Even though Melissa is tempted to knock on their door the way she does when she needs to talk, she stops herself. She hasn’t told them the truth about the baby. Instead, she made up a story about a boy she was seeing who took off the moment she became pregnant. The lie would make it difficult to explain to them what’s bothering her tonight.
Finally, she rolls up the window and gets out of her car. When she opens the front door of her cottage, the stubborn smell of stale cigarette smoke lingers in the air, though she quit months before, when she first realized she was pregnant. Melissa steps inside and Mumu, her cow-spotted cat, winds between her legs, purring. She scoops him up in her arms and buries her scarred face in the animal’s soft fur. Mumu is the pet her parents gave her as a sort of consolation prize for the way they treated her after Ronnie died. He is one of the few things that she took with her when she left home. Melissa keeps on nuzzling until the cat has had enough and leaps from her arms, then pads off into the bedroom. That’s when she turns on the light and looks around at the messy stack of newspapers on the coffee table, the baskets of tapes and books by the ripped sofa, her clothes strewn everywhere, a row of empty wine bottles on the floor by the kitchenette.
With one hand on her queasy stomach, Melissa steps over a pair of dirty black stretch pants and goes to the mantel of the stone fireplace, where there are even more pictures of Ronnie. She picks up one that is identical to a photo on her dashboard. He is on the plaid blanket they used to keep s
tashed in the darkroom. As she stares down at his starry smile and bright eyes, Melissa feels something slip inside of her. All the books she has read about communicating with the other side, and all the psychics she has visited, say the same thing: if you talk to the dead, they will listen. So instead of allowing herself to buckle again, Melissa speaks to Ronnie the way she often does late at night.
She tells him that she finally worked up the courage to go to his family.
She tells him how disappointed she was that his father wasn’t there, since she hoped to see him most of all.
She tells him that his brother was hurt in an accident.
She tells him about the way his mother screamed at her when she broke the news.
She fills him in on every last detail of the night until her feet grow sore from standing there so long. Melissa carries the picture to the sofa, stretches her body out on the scratchy cushions, and rests the frame facedown on the mound of her stomach. “Your mother is so different now,” she says into the empty room as she gazes up at the stain-blotched ceiling. “Do you remember how happy she used to seem?”
As Melissa loses herself in the memory of the first time she met Charlene, her heavy eyes flutter shut. Her mumbling grows hoarse and incomprehensible in the retelling. She and Ronnie had snuck out of school and gone to see his mother at the Radnor library for diesel money for the old Mercedes. His parents had taken away his credit card to punish him for buying the car on a Visa in the first place, so he was always in need of cash. Behind the counter stood a big-breasted librarian with two blond curls sweeping up from the top of her forehead. She reminded Melissa of one of those women from a Cross Your Heart bra commercial, her mammoth breasts lifted and separated beneath a fuzzy blue sweater. When she looked up and smiled at Ronnie, Melissa assumed it was his mother. But then she pointed and told them in a harsh, unfamiliar accent that fused all her words into one, “Charleneisinthestacks.” Melissa felt relieved, because there was something unlikable about this lady, though she couldn’t name what it was. She followed Ronnie through the maze of shelves, alternating between staring at the back of his faded Levi’s and glancing up at the titles of obscure books, until they spotted his real mother, standing atop a metal stepladder with small holes like a cheese grater on the surface of each step. She was dressed in a pleated blue skirt and blazer, a gold frog pinned to her lapel. Before she noticed them, Ronnie took Melissa’s hand and led her around to the other side, where he proceeded to push the book Charlene had just shelved back in her direction so that it fell to the floor. His mother climbed down the ladder, picked it up, and reshelved it, only to have Ronnie shove the book back out again. It was just the sort of prank that would infuriate her own humorless parents, but Charlene stuck her arm through the shelf and grabbed Ronnie by the wrist. “Ronald Chase, I hereby place you under library arrest!” she said, and the two of them started to laugh.
