by John Searles
As the sound of their laughter echoes in Melissa’s memory now, the image of that moment fades to a gauzy white nothing in her mind. She feels as though she is falling, like that book Ronnie pushed from the edge, only instead of dropping quickly to the floor, she is plummeting through a long tunnel, falling and falling and falling, until finally, she is asleep.
Melissa begins to snore, a habit that came with the pregnancy, and her arm inadvertently stretches out so that her hand comes to rest on the coffee table beside that messy pile of newspapers. Upon first glance, someone visiting this cottage might look at those papers and assume they are nothing more than leftovers from recent weeks, yet to make their way to the recycling bin. But if that someone—say it was you—were to look closer, you would notice that every single one of those papers has the same date at the top: June 19, 1999. What’s more, you would see that they all have the same black-and-white photo on the front page of a limousine crushed into a thick oak tree on Blatts Farm Hill.
And now that you are looking, downright snooping in fact, do you see what’s right next to those newspapers? It is the decoy diary Melissa used to fool her father five years before. And next to that? A newer, black leather diary with Melissa’s name emblazoned in gold enamel on the front, a gift from her sister just before they stopped speaking. For my sister and best friend, the inscription reads. Although it doesn’t seem like it now, you will start over, and you will be happy again one day. I promise. Love, Stacy
All of the pages are blank.
Across the room, there is that row of wine bottles in the kitchenette—their lips sticky with old wine, their bottoms filled with sediment and sludge—every one of them from more than nine months before, when Melissa spent lonely nights like this getting drunk and smoking cigarettes on the sofa before spewing prayer after endless prayer on the floor beside her bed.
Just to the right of those bottles is a small white refrigerator with a freezer compartment big enough for two empty ice trays, a sack of Starbucks coffee, and one more thing shoved way in the back. If you push aside those trays and that coffee and reach your hand deep inside, you’ll pull out a red, freezer-burned clump that will be unidentifiable unless you hold it to the light. That’s when you’ll see that this thing in your hand is Melissa’s rose corsage from prom night, which she keeps frozen inside like a heart that’s stopped beating.
Don’t drop it because you will wake her.
Put it back behind the ice trays and the coffee. Close the freezer.
There’s one more thing you’ll want to see, far more disturbing than anything so far, behind the bathroom door. But as Melissa said to the baby on the car ride home:
Not yet.
For now, leave it there as she sleeps and the world moves quietly around her. Mumu the cat is prowling in the kitchenette too, hunting for mice. Next door, Mr. Erwin switches off the bedside lamp and falls into a restless, fitful sleep beside his snowy-haired wife, who lies awake thinking of the way she spent her day, doing laundry, then cleaning the cluttered work area in their low-ceilinged basement, only to turn up an unexpected mess. Their refrigerator hums on and off, releasing the same pings and ticks as the engine of Melissa’s car cooling in that makeshift driveway beside the road. The wind, which blew so hard earlier, has died off, leaving the woods around the three small houses in a perfect hush.
Across town—back up Monk’s Hill Road and through the crisscross of streets to Blatts Farm Hill, down through the intersection of Matson Ford and King of Prussia Road, up Dilson Avenue and down to the Chases’ large gray-stone colonial at 12 Turnber Lane—Philip tosses and turns on the foldout sofa in the family room while his mother sleeps soundly upstairs with the help of the pills she swallowed before bed. Again and again, he replays the conversation with Melissa, not yet considering that what she said could somehow be true, but wondering if he should have been nicer to the girl.
When it is clear to him that he is too preoccupied and troubled to sleep, Philip sits up and turns on his tiny book light, glancing at the antique clock on the wall. The hands point to four-thirty, though it is really somewhere around three. He opens his Anne Sexton biography. The pages smell musty, like a book bought at a tag sale, which it may as well have been, since he picked it up at a used bookstore on Broadway just a few weeks before he went over the edge of that fire escape and dropped to the alleyway below. Philip turns to a random page. Rather than plodding along sequentially through biographies, he much prefers to flip around to the various periods of the subject’s life depending on his mood, mixing up the order of events, then putting it together afterward like a puzzle in his mind. When he looks down, he sees that the previous owner of the book had scratched a few lines of a poem in black pen in the margin:
The woman wonders why he murdered their love
But the killer in him has gotten loose
She knows she should run while there is still time
But she pauses here
Soon to be dragged into darkness
Philip doesn’t know whether it is a copy of something Anne Sexton had written or an attempt to imitate her. Either way, the words have no particular resonance to him, so he turns to another section and begins rereading a chapter about Anne’s parents, who died one after the other in March and June of 1959. After twenty minutes of reading, he finds himself lingering over a passage from a poem she wrote called “A Curse Against Elegies”:
I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you—you go ahead,
go on, go on back down
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your old bad dreams.
Philip’s thoughts return to his brother, of course, and to Missy. Again, he begins to mull over all that happened tonight until finally he is just too tired to think or read anymore. His arms droop slowly like the heavy branches of the trees outside, and the book comes to rest on his chest. His eyes shut.
As the night passes, the starless winter sky over the small Main Line township of Radnor turns to an inky, fathomless black. The roads become empty and drained of all life. Even the highway on the outskirts of town is soundless, except for the occasional whoosh of a tractor trailer barreling past the exit ramp that leads to Radnor. And when it seems that it can’t get any darker or quieter, the first bits of sunlight break on the horizon. The light comes slowly at first, then more quickly. Outside the cottage at 32 Monk’s Hill Road, a family of crows perches on the dented gutters, twitching their necks and pecking at their oily black wings before flapping away in a sudden rush.
Melissa doesn’t hear the footsteps approaching her small house, but she wakes to the shhhhhh sound by her front door. Lifting her stiff neck off the ratty arm of the couch, she squints her eyes and looks around to see if Mumu has caught another mouse. But the cat is asleep, purring loud and steady at her feet. Just as she’s about to close her eyes again, she spots a small white envelope on the floor by the front door. She stands and stretches, putting a hand to the back of her neck while glancing out the window for some sign of the person who left it there. Whoever it was is gone. Her first thought is Philip. Perhaps he reconsidered and wrote her a note, or maybe even one of his poems, to let her know that he believed her after all. Mumu is awake now too and sniffing at the envelope. Melissa kneels down, brushing the cat away. She picks it up and pulls out the piece of unlined paper.
Dear Melissa,
I am terribly sorry to have to write this letter, but as of the first of this month, you are seven months behind on your rent. Mr. Erwin and I have been very patient and understanding due to your condition. However, we cannot allow you to occupy the cottage any longer if you are not going to pay the amount we agreed upon when you signed the lease. Please understand that we rely on this money as a main source of income during our retirement. And for that reason, we have no choice but to kindly ask you to vacate the premises as soon as possible. I know this
may come as a surprise, but we hope you’ll understand. We regret this more than you know.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Gail Erwin
chapter 4
WHEN CHARLENE OPENS HER EYES IN THE MORNING, THE FIRST thing she sees is a spider spinning a web in the corner of the skylight above her bed. Normally, she’d stand on the mattress and squash the little fucker with a towel, but she feels so listless and groggy from the three Tylenol PMs she gulped down the night before that she just lies there and watches its spindly legs moving in and out as it creates an ugly, hodgepodge sort of web. Charlene used to host a children’s story hour at the library, and she liked to read from a picture-book edition of Charlotte’s Web—that is, until one of the mothers complained that the spider’s death on the last page was too sad for the kids to handle. “Inappropriate reading” were the exact words she used. Back then, Charlene had smiled politely at the woman and promptly removed the book from her reading list. But if she was working at the library nowadays and a parent dared pull that kind of nonsense, Charlene would tell her and her daughter where to go. After all, they might as well get used to the cold, hard fact that death is as much a part of life as waking up in the morning and brushing your teeth. Whether they like it or not, sooner or later it will wreak havoc on them too.
This kind of thinking has become one of Charlene’s favorite pastimes. There is nothing she likes more than imagining what it would be like to tell off the countless people who walked all over her years ago. She loves conjuring up the look of surprise on each and every one of their faces as she lays into them. Her mind goes down this road so often that she keeps a running list in her head that she thinks of as her People I’d Like to Rip a New Asshole list, or P.I.L.T.R.A.N.A., for short. (Philip isn’t the only one in this family with inside jokes.) Charlene’s possible victims include that surly checkout girl at the specialty-food store in Radnor who once refused to let her use a debit card because her purchase was fifty cents short of the twenty-dollar minimum, even though Charlene had shopped there for years; that high-strung carpenter who messed up the light switch in the garage then never returned her calls to come and fix it; that bitch on the phone at the cable company who wouldn’t credit her bill despite the fact that the repairman was a no-show for three appointments; and then the repairman himself, who finally did show, only to leave without fixing the reception when Charlene went into another room to answer the telephone.
And the list doesn’t stop with people she knows either.
Some days, Charlene loses herself in thought for hours at a time just thinking of all the celebrities she’d like to tell off as well. There’s that greedy Martha Stewart, that big-mouthed Dr. Laura Schlessinger, that pervert Howard Stern, that fake-saint know-it-all Dr. Phil… And still there are others who she wouldn’t even waste her breath telling off but who she thinks could benefit from a good old-fashioned bitch slapping: Michael Jackson, Björk, the Osbourne family (with the exception of Sharon, who Charlene has a soft spot for because of her battle with colon cancer), George and Laura Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld. And in case anyone thinks she is partisan in her hatred, they needn’t worry because Charlene considers herself an equal-opportunity bitch slapper and would happily give Bill, Hillary, Tipper, and Al a smack or two as well.
At the very top of this list are the three people Charlene despises most in the world: Richard, Holly, and Pilia. Richard, her ex-husband, because he up and left her after Ronnie died. (Yes, Charlene knows she became impossible to live with in the aftermath, but what the hell did he expect?) Holly, who met Richard at a medical convention in Vegas, where she was working as a third-rate stand-up comedian with an apparent habit of hopping into bed with married men. And Pilia, the Polish ice princess of a librarian, who used to act so smug, with her Lana Turner sweaters stretched over her giant breasts. Ever since Pilia stepped foot in the library some seven years before, she had been after Charlene’s position as head librarian—and now she has it. Someday, Charlene thinks as she stares up at that spider in the skylight and grinds her jaw, someday, I’ll storm into that library, march right up to the front desk, and stick a pin in those mammoth tits of hers.
Last night.
In the middle of this daily regimen of hatred, the memory of the previous evening comes flooding back through the haze of sleeping pills: that girl with the scarred face and missing teeth returning to their lives again like an apparition, only to deliver such preposterous news.
This baby inside me belongs to him.
The mere echo of those words sends a wave of nausea sloshing through her stomach. Charlene moves her clammy mouth around and spits into the wastebasket beside her nightstand, which is overflowing with empty SnackWell’s packages, Doritos bags, and other ghosts of junk food binges past. When the nausea passes, she lifts her worn-out body from the bed and goes to the bathroom. She pops open the T for Tuesday compartment of her plastic pillbox, drops two blood-pressure, one cholesterol, and an anxiety pill into her mouth, then puts her lips beneath the faucet for a gulp of water. The mirror is too scary to deal with this morning, so she turns and walks down the hall. On the way, she passes what she thinks of, quite literally, as the closed doors of her life—both her sons’ bedrooms and her ex-husband’s study. Then she passes the lopsided constellation of dusty pictures along the staircase. One of Richard and her standing in a white gazebo at their wedding. Another of Philip in a maroon cap and gown at his high school graduation. And a whole slew of pictures from when the boys were young on various family vacations: shoveling sand on a beach in Hilton Head, riding the teacups at Disney World, standing outside their favorite cheese steak joint in downtown Philly with both sets of their grandparents, who are no longer alive. Given Charlene’s mood this particular morning—given her mood most mornings, in fact—the pictures are enough to break her heart, so she does her best not to look.
At the bottom of the stairs, she turns and cuts through the foyer into the dining room, then comes to a stop just outside the archway to the family room. The drapes have been pulled almost completely shut, so the inside is shrouded in shadows. Philip is sprawled out on the sofa bed, sound asleep. He looks to her like some poor shipwrecked soul washed ashore on a mattress with all of his worldly possessions—the phone, the remote controls, a blue box of tissues, that biography he’s been reading spread open on his chest with his tiny book-light still lit. From where she’s standing, Charlene can see his bruised toes sticking out of the bottom of his cast. She can also see the long, jagged slit on his throat since, for some reason, he has removed the bandages. It makes her stomach unsettled just to look at it. “Are you awake, Philip?”
Silence.
She knows she should leave him alone and let him rest, but she can’t help herself. “Philip, are you awake?”
Without opening his eyes, he pushes the book aside then rolls over, burying his face in a pillow. In a muffled voice, he says, “I am now.”
Charlene steps into the room, the wooden floorboards creaking beneath her bare feet. A single shaft of sunlight shines through the divide in the drapes, and she walks through it as she moves closer to the bed. “Do you always have to be so sarcastic?”
Philip lifts his head from the pillow and squints at her. His hair is sticking out in all directions the way it always is first thing in the morning. Back when he was in school, she used to tease him, naming his various bedhead looks over breakfast: I see that today you’re sporting The Don King… The Pat Benatar… The Pilia (since her hair was forever swept up in two dramatic curls at the top of her forehead). Even then, Philip had been a grouch in the morning, so he never laughed at her jokes. “Me?” he says now. “Do you always have to—Never mind, it’s too early for this.”
He rolls over, giving her a more complete view of his neck. The sight of that wound—puckered and red like a set of diseased lips that have somehow slid down onto his throat—brings back the slosh of nausea she felt upstairs. “Why did you take off the bandages?”
“Dr. K
ulvilkin said it would heal faster if I let it breathe.”
She thinks of those lips again—sucking in air, then blowing it out. “I hate that doctor’s name. He sounds like—”
“I know who he sounds like, M. You’ve mentioned the similarity every day for the last month. But it’s Kulvilkin, not Kevorkian. And besides, you don’t have to go to him. I do. So stop worrying about it.”
“I wasn’t worrying.”
“Good,” he says.
“Good,” she says.
“Good,” he says.
She tells herself to let it go, that she doesn’t always have to get the last word, but it slips out anyway. “Good.”
Philip groans and buries his face in his pillow. Charlene inches closer to the bed, then plops herself on the edge of the mattress. She looks down at her white legs sticking out of her white nightgown. There are dozens of purple explosions, a regular fireworks display going on beneath her cellulite, more than Charlene remembers noticing before. As laughable as it seems now, there once was a time when men complimented her about her legs. But unlike most people, she doesn’t mind getting older. Charlene feels grateful that there’s no more worrying about the way she looks, no more of those constant, silent comparisons between herself and other women. She is happy not to be like Holly, who at forty-three (only eight years younger than Charlene) exercises obsessively and eats nothing but a steady diet of vegetables and tofu in order to keep herself looking like a spandex-wearing skeleton. All that effort, and it doesn’t make her look truly younger, or happier for that matter. In fact, Charlene thinks it makes her look sad, like she’s trying too hard to be something she isn’t anymore.
