by John Searles
“Come on,” Richard says after there is still no answer. “Let’s forget this.”
Charlene points to the next house, only fifty feet or so away, and asks who lives there. Richard thinks back to that chipper, snowy-haired woman who showed Melissa and him the place all those years ago. Then he remembers her husband, who struck Richard as the kind of guy you might spot sitting in a pub in any number of seaside towns—strong arms, a gravelly voice, a weatherbeaten face. “The landlords,” he says.
“Well, I think we should ask if they saw Philip here yesterday.”
Knocking on Melissa’s door is one thing, but Richard doesn’t want to wake the couple just because Charlene has a feeling. “If you’re so concerned, why don’t you try calling Philip again?”
“Fine, I will.”
She retrieves her cell phone from her pocket, presses the Callback button, and holds it to her ear. That’s when something odd happens. Richard hears two faint rings that are not coming from the phone in Charlene’s hands. As far as he can tell, the sound is coming from somewhere around the side of the house.
“Do you hear that?” he asks.
“Hear what?”
“The phone. It’s ringing.”
Charlene shakes her head. “Of course it’s ringing, Richard. I just called Philip back.”
Instead of trying to explain, he reaches up and takes the phone from Charlene. “Listen.”
A moment of silence follows, and Richard begins to wonder if he imagined the sound. But then he hears it again: a single muffled ring from somewhere around the side of Melissa’s house. Richard can tell by the puzzled look on Charlene’s face that she heard it too. Quickly, they step off the cracked cement stoop and look in the small yard between the two houses. There is nothing to be seen except a trampled patch of snow by the landlord’s basement window. Just beyond, that third house sits at the edge of the woods, all its windows covered with cloudy sheets of plastic. They appear to shiver in the breeze. The ringing has ceased, so Richard holds the phone to his ear, where he hears Philip’s voice asking him to please leave a message after the beep. He hangs up, intent on calling back right away so he can listen for that sound again. But just as he is about to press the button, another noise comes from that third house in the back. It is the creak and slap of a door opening and closing, followed by heavy footsteps. A moment later, the landlord with the weathered face appears from inside the vacant cottage. He places a shovel against the side of the house, then walks toward them, wiping a thick layer of dirt from his fingers and coming to an abrupt stop at the trampled patch of snow.
“Morning,” he says.
Richard holds his thumb to the Callback button but does not press it. “Good morning,” he says as Charlene falls silent. She is still holding out her neck, listening for that ringing even though the sound has long since stopped.
“Can I help you?” Bill Erwin asks.
Behind him, the plastic over the windows of that vacant house shivers more violently with a passing gust of wind. Richard notices a number of black birds perched on the sagging roof. He looks away from them and into the deep-set eyes of Melissa’s landlord, who is standing with both his unlaced boots planted in the snow. Charlene is keeping her silence, so Richard takes his thumb off the Callback button and says, “I don’t know if you remember, but we met years ago. I’m Richard Chase. I came here with Melissa when she first looked at the place.”
Bill shifts one of his large dirty boots against the ground. “That’s right. Nice to see you again. I must admit that I’m not used to getting visitors this early.”
“We’re here to see Melissa,” Charlene tells him, speaking up at long last.
“Melissa? Well, she’s at the hospital. Someone from there called early this morning to tell my wife and me that she had the baby.”
At the mention of the baby, Richard sees a residual glimmer of hope flash across Charlene’s face. It is quickly replaced by the slack look of disappointment he remembers from the night before. “Is she at Bryn Mawr?”
Bill reaches up to scratch his forehead, accidentally knocking his hat from his head. Richard and Charlene watch as it falls to his feet, seemingly in slow motion, before he stoops down and clumsily drags it across the snow to scoop it up. When he is standing again, the hat squeezed in his two thick hands instead of back on his head, there is a pained expression on his face. “That would be the place,” he says and offers a weak smile.
In Richard’s memory, this man had been warm and welcoming that summer when they first came to look at the place. He even remembers him talking to Melissa about his garden, telling her that she could help herself to anything he grew there. He told her that in the wintertime she could use the firewood he kept out back as well. At the time, it made Richard feel good that Melissa would have someone watching out for her. Now, though, Bill Erwin seems shifty and nervous, different from that memory. “Is everything all right?” Richard asks. His fingers have grown cold, so he slips the cell phone into the pocket of his old suede coat.
Bill’s smile widens. “Everything is fine. Why do you ask?”
Richard decides to let it go. It’s early, after all. Besides, the man probably doesn’t like the idea of people wandering around his property unannounced. “No reason,” Richard says.
“Well, then, I better get back inside. It’s cold out here. Good seeing you again.”
“Wait,” Charlene calls as he turns to go. “By any chance, do you know if Melissa had a guest yesterday?”
Bill stops, then slowly turns back to face her. “A guest?”
“A young guy with his leg in a cast. He was driving an old cream-colored Mercedes.” She pauses. “Our son.”
Bill wrings his hat in his hands, considering the question. “Can’t say that I saw anyone like that around here. Things were pretty quiet, though they won’t be for long with the baby and all.” After that, he excuses himself once more and disappears inside the largest of the three houses.
When the back door scrapes open and shut, Charlene says in a loud whisper, “What a creep.”
Richard agrees, then pulls the cell phone out of his pocket and presses the Callback button. As they wait to hear that muffled ring, Charlene takes a few steps into the side yard, getting closer to that patch of snow where Bill Erwin had just been standing. But there is no ring to be heard anymore. Richard holds the phone to his ear and listens as the call goes through to Philip’s voice mail. Again he hangs up and calls back. This time, Richard steps into the side yard too, staring over at that abandoned house, where those birds have congregated on the roof. Bill Erwin’s shovel remains propped against the wall just below one of the plastic-covered windows. When there is still no sound, Richard says, “Maybe we imagined it.”
“No,” Charlene tells him as her eyes scan the yard. “I know what I heard. Try again.”
He does try again. As a matter of fact, he tries three, four, five, six more times. And when there is still no ring, even Charlene’s certainty begins to fade.
“I could swear I heard it,” she says, letting out a sigh. “But it was just that once. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we just got carried away.”
Richard gazes over at the landlord’s house. All the curtains are drawn, but he can’t help the feeling that they are being watched.
“What should we do now?” Charlene asks.
“I think we should go to the hospital,” Richard tells her, turning away from those windows at long last and staring into her worried eyes. “Maybe Melissa can help us figure out what’s happened to Philip.”
chapter 15
“HELP ME,” SHE SAYS, WINCING FROM THE PAIN. “I’M ABOUT TO have a baby.”
The woman behind the desk grabs a telephone, punches in a few numbers, and barks into the receiver, “I need assistance up front, right away.” After putting down the phone, she springs from her seat and calls to someone at the other end of the hall. In what seems like seconds, Melissa is surrounded by nurses, who are less organized than she
might have imagined. A short one, whose lumpy body is stuffed into her tight white pants and shirt, calls for a wheelchair. When a young male orderly appears and wheels it toward her, they ease Melissa into the seat. Another nurse, who has the same sort of papery skin and snowy hair as Mrs. Erwin, asks Melissa if she has been timing her contractions.
“No,” Melissa tells her. “Not really.”
“That’s okay.” The woman holds up her wrist and looks at her slim silver watch. “We are going to start now. You just let me know when you feel the next one coming on. All right?”
“All right.”
“Who is your doctor?” she asks.
“I don’t have one.”
“Do you mean that you don’t have one affiliated with this hospital, or you don’t have one at all?”
“I don’t have any doctor at all,” Melissa says, feeling ashamed of this fact for the first time. She thinks of Dr. Patel all those years ago and his list of plastic surgeons. She thinks of Ronnie’s father and that ID card he used to wear around his neck, just like the ones hanging from all the nurses’ necks right now. “I haven’t visited a doctor in a very long time.”
The nurse’s expression becomes more apprehensive then, causing her faint resemblance to Gail Erwin to fade away. She seems wary of Melissa, far less gentle as she rattles off a list of questions: “How many months has it been since your last period? … How long since your water broke? … Are you allergic to any medicines?” In the midst of all this chaos, yet another nurse appears with a clipboard in one hand and a chewed black pen in another. In a harsh, nasal voice, she badgers Melissa about insurance information, which she doesn’t have. “Okay, let’s back up to the beginning. I need you to give me your full name.”
“Melissa Ann Moody.”
“Do you spell that M-O-O-D-Y?”
“Yes.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-three years old.”
This begins an endless session of questions and form signing, interrupted only when Melissa feels another contraction coming on. She informs the nurse with the papery skin, who begins timing. After the pain rises up in Melissa and then subsides, the woman with the clipboard resumes her questions. At the same time, the orderly gives a push and the rubber wheels of the chair start to move. Melissa leans her head back and stares up at the white squares of light in the ceiling, blurring into a single streak. Her thoughts grow hazy and white. She finds herself slipping out of the present moment only to be thrust into the clarity of a distant memory. In this memory, she is sitting alone in the living room of her cottage on Monk’s Hill Road late one afternoon last spring. She is listening to her Jewel tape while numbing her ear with an ice cube in order to give herself another piercing. Just as she is about to stick the needle into her lobe, there is a knock on the screen door. She looks up to see Mr. Erwin’s lined face on the other side.
“Hey,” she says and puts down the needle while absently holding the ice cube in one hand.
“How you doing?” he asks, smiling so big and wide that his yellow teeth can be seen through the mesh of the screen.
At the sound of his gravelly voice, Mumu wakes from her catnap and leaps from the sofa, scurrying down the hall the way she always does when Mr. Erwin comes around. On the stereo, Jewel somberly croons about a boy who broke her heart. It used to be one of Melissa’s favorite songs, but lately she has grown tired of this album, so she doesn’t play it as often as she once did.
“I’m okay,” she tells Mr. Erwin and means what she says.
More and more, there are days like this one when the sun is shining, and a breeze moves through the windows of her cottage, and she feels a shift in her spirit. It is the feeling of happiness returning to her life after all this time. It’s not that she has forgotten about Ronnie, but Melissa has begun to lose faith in the notion that he might return to her somehow. As a result, those prayers she says by her bed each night are beginning to grow shorter. Some evenings, she finds herself praying for different things altogether, like guidance about what she should do with the rest of her life. She has even started looking in the paper for a job she might like better than washing sheets at that ratty motel in Conshohocken and answering phones for those grouches at the insurance company.
“I brought you flowers from the garden,” Mr. Erwin says, and holds them up so she can see the bulbous white tips of a dozen or so tulips through the screen. “If I leave them in the ground, the deer will get to them. So I figured I’d gather some up for you.”
Melissa feels a sudden, wintry pinprick against the top of her bare foot. Startled, she looks down and sees that it is nothing more than drops of water from the melting ice cube in her hand. She puts what’s left of it into a glass on the coffee table, then goes to the door and pushes it open. Mr. Erwin steps inside, his presence so large and hulking that it never fails to make the cottage feel even smaller. He glances around at the piles of dirty clothes and books and tapes on the floor, the framed pictures of Ronnie that Melissa has only recently considered removing from the mantel. Even though the Erwins have assured her that they don’t care how she keeps the place, she sometimes gets the feeling they don’t like the clutter—especially Mrs. Erwin, who keeps their house neat and organized. “Sorry about the mess,” Melissa says.
“Don’t be sorry. It’s your place, so you do as you like. Heck, if it wasn’t for Gail, I’d be living in a pigsty next door.”
Mr. Erwin hands her the tulips, and Melissa sees that his fingers are caked with soil from the garden. She thanks him then goes to the kitchenette to look for something to put them in. Since she doesn’t own a vase or anything remotely like one, Melissa settles on a large pasta pot. When she fills it with water and places the flowers inside, the white heads barely peek out over the top. Still, they look pretty to her. If there is one lesson she has learned in recent years, it is to find the beauty in life’s imperfections. Melissa sets the pot on the counter beside a bottle of wine she uncorked a short while ago, since she likes to have a glass while doing her piercing. Bill Erwin’s gaze lingers on the bottle, so she asks, “Would you like some?”
He glances at the window that looks out onto his and Gail’s house. It takes him a long moment to answer, but finally he tells her, “Yes. A glass of wine sounds good to me.”
Melissa opens her eyes.
Her thoughts return to the present, where she feels her next contraction coming on. The lanky young orderly is still wheeling her toward the elevator. Two of the nurses still flank her, but the woman with the clipboard is gone. Melissa tells them what’s happening, and the lumpy nurse holds her hand as the pain rises up inside of her until it is almost unbearable. When it recedes, they inform Melissa that the contractions are coming less than three minutes apart, so they need to move quickly. At the elevator doors, the woman with the clipboard appears again and says that she forgot to ask Melissa if there is anyone she would like the hospital to notify that she is here. For a fleeting instant, Melissa actually considers giving her parents’ phone number. It’s been years since she felt even the slightest pang of longing for their presence in her life, but something about the chaos of the present moment has her missing them—especially her mother. But then she thinks of the way they punished her after that day in the cemetery when her father caught her with her arms around Richard Chase. They locked her in her room. They refused to speak to her. They took away her television and phone. All of that was unfair, but none of it was as cruel as what her father did on the ride home from the cemetery. What Melissa cannot and will not ever forgive for as long as she lives was the way he struck her countless times—the back of his hand becoming a sort of frantically spinning windmill that slapped and slapped and slapped against her face, which was already in so much pain.
“You can contact Gail and Bill Erwin,” Melissa says when the memory becomes too much to take. Even though some part of her is still angry and confused about that eviction letter Mr. Erwin explained away as a mistake, Melissa gives their phone number i
nstead.
The elevator doors finally part, and they move inside the boxy silver space, large enough to fit a small car. The button for the eighth floor is pressed. The doors close. The squat, lumpy nurse says, “I’m going to talk you through what’s about to happen, Melissa. We’re taking you up to the maternity ward, where Dr. Halshastic will examine you to determine exactly how dilated your cervix is. If you’re dilated more than ten centimeters, then we’re going to begin the birthing process. Do you understand?”
Melissa tells her that she does. Then she takes a breath and looks toward the white light on the ceiling. Her thoughts go spinning backwards again to that afternoon last spring.
When she finishes pouring the glass of wine and hands it to him, Melissa asks where Mrs. Erwin is at the moment. Once more, his gaze shifts over her shoulder to the window. “Home cooking dinner, I suppose.”
“What’s she making?” Melissa asks, simply for something to say. In all the years she has lived in the cottage, never once has she felt nervous around Mr. Erwin. Today, though, she senses an odd tension in the air as he clenches and unclenches one of his soiled hands, and his eyes stay fixed on that window.
“Nothing fancy. Probably just some burgers or fish sticks.” At last, he looks toward Melissa. “You’re not going to make me drink alone, are you?”
She already had one glass before he arrived, but the tense feeling is enough to make her pour another. “Of course not,” she tells him.
“That’s more like it,” he says, then raises his glass in the air. “To your pretty new flowers.”
Melissa raises hers too. “To my pretty new flowers,” she says.
He takes a gulp, then another, before making himself comfortable on the sofa. Melissa stands by the counter, feeling awkward still. A warm breeze cuts through the cottage, and the late afternoon light fills the room, casting a brilliant orange glow on everything. It makes her think of the renewed sense of happiness she has felt lately, the sense that she might be okay after all. Melissa recalls an ad she circled in the paper for a job working at a veterinarian’s office. She has yet to call, but she thinks the position might suit her, since the animals won’t care about the way she looks.
