Baggage

by S. G. Redling

  OTHER TITLES BY S.G. REDLING

  Flowertown

  Braid: Three Twisted Stories

  Damocles

  DANI BRITTON THRILLERS

  The Widow File

  Redemption Key

  THE NAHAN SERIES

  Ourselves

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 S.G. Redling

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503950603

  ISBN-10: 1503950603

  Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781503952201

  Hardcover ISBN-10: 1503952207

  Cover design by Stewart Williams

  This book is for my mother.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  I would already be home if I would stop turning around to stare. Cold drizzle soaks through my jeans and my ponytail has taken on so much water it whips like a sprinkler when I turn my head, but I keep turning to look. I’ve seen it nearly every day for six months and I still try to take it all in. After all, the world ends tomorrow. Again.

  I’m standing on a hunk of slate that juts out over the culvert at the hairpin turn on Everly Road. From here I can see most of campus—the glassed-in wing of the library, the dome of the student center, and through the bare branches of the oaks and sycamores that line the wide green, I see the Jenkins Building where I work.

  When I took the job in September, this vista exploded with reds and yellows. My boss said my walk home would get a lot less interesting come winter. Well, it’s February 16 and I can’t think of a thing I’d rather stare at or anywhere I’d rather be. I’m in no hurry at all to get back to my dark apartment and rental furniture. I’m certainly in no hurry to get home to my neighbors.

  Mostly I’m not in a hurry to see what’s waiting for me.

  Messages on my answering machine. Letters in my mailbox. No matter where I go, they find me. No matter how often they find me, I won’t hear or read any of them.

  Unfortunately, I can’t stand here forever and I continue my trek home. When I cut across the road to Everly Place, the ugly, sprawling complex cuts off my view of the town below. Here it’s just a parking lot and dumpsters surrounding the squat two-story collection of inexpensive college housing.

  My mailbox fights me again, like it does every day. I’m tempted to not struggle with the sticky lock, to leave the envelopes and flyers to build up until the mailman has no choice but to refuse to deliver any more. Would they do that? Would that work? If you ignore your mail long enough, does it just stop coming? Tempting, but I don’t put a lot of faith in that plan. The thing about messages you don’t want is that they are stunningly persistent. I don’t read the writing on the envelopes I pull out. I’m not careful and a few of them catch and tear on the inside lip of the box.

  I climb the outside stairs to the second floor, my ears peeled as always for signs that my nightmare neighbors are home. At the landing, I pause. Silence. Thank god. At least I’ll be lucky for a little while. At least I’ll be able to face today’s messages with a little less aggravation. Purse down, shoes off, mail tossed onto the coffee table. I head to the kitchen and see the message light flashing on my answering machine. Maybe it’s just telemarketers. I bargain with myself: If it’s just telemarketers, we’ll have a salad and hot tea. We’ll treat ourselves to something healthy and spend the rest of the evening in soft pajamas with one of those good books we’ve been meaning to read. I push the button and listen.

  “You are receiving a call from an inmate at the Jefferson City Correctional Center. Press one to continue this—”

  I hit delete and reach for the corkscrew.

  There’s no point in putting it off now. I flop down on the couch, trying not to think about how much I hate this furniture. Seriously, I need to get a new couch. Just because I’m broke and this is a rental doesn’t mean I don’t deserve a couch that doesn’t feel like burlap and smell like a German shepherd. Let’s not even discuss the hard wooden arms, covered in drink rings and cigarette burns from the fabric to the uncomfortably sharp edges. The good news is the couch matches the scuffed and scarred coffee table that completes my living room suite. I have no easy chair, and there’s a TV in the corner I’ve never turned on. My “dining room” consists of a faux-brick breakfast bar and two stools. The only window at this end of the apartment sits over the sink, and it does little to illuminate the space. A mercy, considering the space.

  The wine surprises me. I didn’t look at the label—it’s the second of the six bottles I picked up at Kroger over the weekend. Buying six bottles at a time gets me a discount and, more importantly, saves me a couple trips. Some part of me argues that it should save me a lot more trips than it does, but the rest of me shuts that little bitch down. The monsters trolling my brain today squash any fear of alcoholism like the ninety-eight-pound weakling it is.

  Another sip of the wine—Merlot? Pinot? Who knows. Alone, I don’t have to pretend I can distinguish them. Hell, another glass and I won’t even be tasting it, but I let myself toy with the idea of getting up to read the label. Kidding myself, of course. I don’t care what kind of wine it is; I probably wouldn’t remember on my next trip to town anyway. The only reason to get the bottle would be to keep it beside me to make pouring easier. And to put off looking at the mail.

  Just do it. It’s not like you’re going to read it.

  It’s a big haul today. My phone bill, bank statement, credit card bill. Those I toss into the bowl of coins and used corks. Those I’ll open eventually. There’s a flyer for carpet cleaning, one for better car insurance, one for a seminar on Creationism and its role in my salvation. What does it say that this flyer is the highlight of my mail so far? I play with the idea of going just to hear about dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark but the odds are good that the evening doesn’t come with an open bar so the allure is pretty thin for me.

  Behind the flyers, my fingers trace the edges of three envelopes. I see them with my fingertips. I know exactly what they’ll look like—cheap white number ten envelopes, narrow, black lettering uniformly slanted to the right, smudged and creased where they’ve been handled by people who don’t much care for letter writing, people who read the contents with suspicion before stamping them with the red markings of the Jefferson City Correctional Center stamp.

  It’s hard to say when they were written. Maybe all three in one day. Maybe it’s a week’s worth of letters. Does the prison postal system hold mail up? Do they read it
carefully? I don’t know. I probably never will, since I haven’t opened one of these letters in years. With just the most cursory glance, I fan the envelopes out to be sure I’m not overlooking anything, that there’s no golden ticket stashed in among their smudgy white sheets. There isn’t, of course; there never is. I always check and there never is, so I do with these envelopes what I’ve done with all the rest that have arrived in the six months I’ve lived here. I flick them out of my hand over my shoulder, into the hall that leads to the back of the apartment, toward the hall closet. Some of them skitter toward my bedroom. Some of them pile up against the baseboard. Some of them seem to possess a certain self-knowledge and slide themselves under the closet door.

  I don’t check on them. I don’t collect them, not even when I clean. I walk over them; I kick them out of the way. Pretty soon they’ll pile up pretty deep. It’s February.

  My mother writes a lot this time of year.

  I haven’t gotten a card from Jeannie yet. They used to arrive as reliably as dawn. It used to be she would never let a month go by without a card, a letter, a phone call, or all of the above. Especially this time of year. But after this past year, things between us have been different, tender like sore skin that we’re trying to toughen up by ignoring it. Still, it’s February. We’re halfway through the month. To go an entire week—or has it been even longer?—without a peep from her unsettles me. Has she given up on me? Has the horror of it all just become too much?

  And then someone knocks at my door. I know with a certainty that I can’t explain that this interruption is from Jeannie. A delivery. Flowers, probably. Probably in a sunny little smiley mug with a balloon and a cluster of Gerbera daisies. I take my time getting to the door, wishing for once someone would think to reach out to me with a fruit basket or maybe some of those chocolate-covered strawberries from Edible Arrangements. Someone had sent those to the funeral last year. Weird, I remember their deliciousness more clearly than I remember anything else about that whole month. In this moment, I would give anything for a box of those strawberries. Longing for them while bracing myself for flowers, I pull open the door.

  I was right, sort of. Jeannie is the source of the disruption, but she didn’t send a deliveryman. There are no flowers, no strawberries. Instead, my cousin herself stands in the doorway, suitcase at her feet.

  “Don’t even try to close this door, Anna.”

  I have to laugh. She’s so bossy. Jeannie Conroy, my cousin, the savior of my teenage years, the constant lifeguard at the drowning pool of my life. It doesn’t even occur to me to resist letting her in or letting her hug me. As many times as we’ve done this—and we have done this a lot—I’m always surprised at the feel of her. She’s tiny, five-three at best, and underneath her soft, wool coat, she feels like a statue. She’s bone and muscle or as her mother, Aunt Gretchen, used to say, “There’s not an inch of give on her.” She’s as fit as an Olympian and as cute as a cheerleader.

  I’m at the perfect spot in my bottle of wine to acknowledge that nobody on earth ever has or ever will give a better hug. If she’d shown up an hour later, this thought would have brought me to tears. As it is, I just hang on, resting my cheek on the side of her head, not thinking, just rocking back and forth. I can admit to myself how I felt about not hearing from her—I hated it.

  “I knew you weren’t going to call.” She pulls away and looks up at me. Her eyes shine with tears that balance on her mascara. “I wasn’t going to ask permission until we were face to face. So can I come in?” We both know the answer to that so I take her coat and hang it on the hook beside the door.

  “Wine?”

  “Of course.” She stands at the coffee table, hand on her hip, as I fetch another wine glass. I’m glad the bottle I just opened is decent. Jeannie has better taste in just about everything. She peers down the hallway and I know she’s noticed the envelopes on the floor. As I pour her a glass, she finishes her survey.

  “So, this is your new apartment? It’s an absolute shit hole.”

  I laugh. “Good, that’s the look I was going for.”

  We settle on the couch, her comic look of horror telling me we share an opinion on the furniture. We do the usual catching up—how’s the job, how was the trip, we should go shopping, we should have dinner here and there. Jeannie knows the little college town better than I do. She lived and worked here for five years before taking the position at Penn State. She’s the reason I got the job in the first place.

  It’s easy talking with her. It feels so normal, like we chat like this every day. It’s warm and loose. Until it’s not. We both see the moment it changes; we both know the words that are coming out of her mouth before she ever forms them and we both know how hard the conversation is going to become.

  “How are you?”

  It’s different than the first time she asked me. This time she really wants to know, and it makes me want to down the rest of my wine in one swallow, ditch the glass, and drink right from the bottle. Instead I shrug, knowing that won’t fly.

  “Tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  She braces her elbow on the back of the couch, her hand in her hair, her whole body facing me. I have her undivided attention. “Are you sleeping?”

  “Yeah. Pretty well. Yeah.” I do, despite my neighbors’ attempts to thwart me.

  “Good. And you’re working. You like the job.” She says it as a semi-question and I nod. Then I see her gaze move from my face, over my shoulder. She’s looking toward the closet, toward the envelopes.

  “Don’t,” I warn her, and she knows me well enough not to ask. Not that.

  “So, Ronnie’s insurance—have you gotten anywhere with that?”

  “Yep, it’s resolved.”

  “Really?” She brightens and I shake my head.

  “Not in my favor.” Before she can protest, I hold up my hand. “It was suicide, Jeannie. Nobody pays for suicide. The police report finalized it; the medical examiner backed the findings.” She reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. “Hey, I’m lucky I didn’t get charged with murder. You know, they always suspect the spouse first.”

  “Don’t even joke about that.”

  I wasn’t. Or maybe I was, I can’t tell what emotion I’m projecting these days. I don’t even know if there is a word for that emotion. Is there a word for what a person feels when the police question her upon discovering her husband’s body hanging in the hall closet? In the fucking hall closet, of all places? What would that word be? Fear-anguish-rage? It seems like the kind of word the Japanese would have, or maybe the Swedes.

  Whatever it is, I don’t have it. But Jeannie knows.

  She pushes my hair back behind my ears and it doesn’t matter what point in the bottle I have reached, I start to cry. Nothing noisy or gross, just painful cramps in the corners of my mouth that push tears out from behind my lids, my stomach jerking along in rhythm.

  “I’d put my head in your lap,” I whisper, “but this couch is so disgusting.”

  And then we’re both laughing.

  She tells me that it doesn’t matter how revolting the sofa is, she’s sleeping on it for the foreseeable future. She says it in that tone she uses when she will not allow argument. I really don’t want her sleeping here. As ugly as it is, the couch is even more uncomfortable. Plus my plan for the next couple of days (weeks, months) is to remain in that warm and thirsty space between drunk and hungover, until this dark week passes. Until it’s time to pick up the envelopes and put them away.

  But I don’t argue with her. At thirty-four, Jeannie is five years older than I, and when I say she was my savior, that isn’t a remnant of teen melodrama. When I was twelve, she was seventeen. She was an adult and I was a gut-shot wreck of a girl, a de facto orphan bleeding to death from the shrapnel of media infamy. I was tall, even then, and too clumsy to handle words like ward of the state and your mother’s trial, so
Jeannie took them for me. She threw her tiny, teenage frame in front of me, she opened the door of the so-cool teenage bedroom she was forced to share with her too-young cousin, and if it bothered her, she never, ever let me know.

  So even though I don’t want her to stay, nothing on earth would make me ask her to leave. Fortunately, I don’t have to. My neighbors will take care of that.

  We’re at the bottom of the bottle of wine when the neighbors’ evening commences. Tonight’s performance begins with the music—a colon-rattling bass propping up some electronic dance music.

  Jeannie jumps in her seat, spinning to face the wall behind her like the music heralded an emerging beast. “What the hell is that?”

  “That is the soundtrack of my new life.” I don’t have to shout, but I’m tempted to. “To be fair, it’s a nice change of pace from the howling and the fistfights. If you’re really lucky, Katie and Bobby will be in the mood for some rough sex. She likes her hair pulled, he likes her finger in his ass. And they both like to talk about it. A lot. Loudly. Against that wall.”

  Jeannie’s eyes are wide as she turns back to face me. “Have you knocked on the wall? Called the police?”

  “Has it been that long since you lived near campus? Maybe I could save myself the trouble and just shove dog shit under my own door.”

  “Seriously, how long does this last?”

  “I don’t know. It’s usually over when I get up.”

  “You can sleep through this?”

  I nod. “Earplugs.”

  I see the fight leave her. She would do anything for me, we both know that. If I asked her, she would probably stick her own finger up Bobby’s butt. But now she’s seen me with her own eyes; I’m not bleeding or starving to death. I haven’t slit my wrists. Among my sufficient well-being, the filthiness of the couch, and the promise of a long, loud evening, she finally surrenders and agrees to check in to the Days Inn at the bottom of the hill.

  I promise to meet her after work tomorrow and I reassure her that I will be fine.