She pulled into the Dairy Barn. She didn’t want ice cream and she didn’t want Anna to think she was trying to pacify her like a baby but Jeannie’s hands were shaking so bad she wasn’t sure she could control the car. Plus, even though Mom wouldn’t be home until after six and Dad was out at meetings all afternoon, she couldn’t take Anna home in her current state. Her parents would lose their minds if they found out that a reporter had chased them and that he’d gotten to Anna because she had been late picking her up.
Beside her, Anna trembled so hard Jeannie could see it. She looked like she was getting ready to spring through the windshield. Her fingers dug into the straps of the backpack that she clutched to her chest like a shield. She didn’t look left or right, just stared straight ahead.
“Anna?”
Jeannie had heard people talk about shooting daggers with their eyes but when Anna spun on her, it was the first time she’d really understood it. She half expected a punch to sail her way.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. Do you want to talk about a Reese’s Blaster?” Anna kept glaring. “It’s a milkshake where they grind up Reese’s Cups and put in caramel sauce. It’ll totally make you sick and it’s totally worth it.” As she spoke, the fire faded from her cousin’s eyes. Her posture relaxed, transforming her back into the little girl she was supposed to be rather than the angry animal she had been a moment ago. “Do you want chocolate or vanilla?” Anna only blinked. “Let’s get chocolate. Let’s get the big ones.”
She rolled the window down to give their order to the carhop. When the girl had gone, Jeannie rolled it back up and turned up the heat. She made a show of fidgeting around beneath the seat for her purse, pulling out money, giving Anna time to pull herself together. When she straightened back up, Anna sat just as she had before, staring at Jeannie, only now her eyes were soft and huge. Jeannie understood that look. Anna trusted her, was begging her for something she didn’t know how to ask for.
Everyone wanted Anna to talk. She hadn’t talked to anyone. She hadn’t cried, she hadn’t told anyone anything about the day her mother was arrested. The police, Mom and Dad, the counselor, now even the newspapers—everyone wanted Anna to talk about this horrible thing that had happened in the middle of her world, to give everyone the details they couldn’t figure out themselves. There were things that only Anna and her mother knew and everyone wanted Anna to tell what those things were.
Anna trusted Jeannie. Even though they really didn’t know each other that well and they didn’t have much in common, Jeannie could see in her cousin’s face that she trusted her. She wanted Jeannie to tell her what to do. She wanted Jeannie to make everything okay, to make anything okay.
If Jeannie told her cousin to talk, she probably would. Anna trusted her. Jeannie was probably the only thing she did trust at this point. Jeannie had to take care of this. She had to do what was right.
“Everybody wants you to talk about it. Everyone thinks it can help. Maybe it can. I don’t know.”
Anna clutched her backpack more tightly.
“But you don’t have to.” She laid her head back against the seat. “You don’t ever have to tell me if you don’t want. You can if you want, you can tell me anything, but you don’t have to.”
Anna said nothing. Jeannie reached across the seat and pushed back a lock of hair that had come loose from Anna’s ponytail. She tucked it behind her cousin’s ear and kept her hand beside her face.
“No matter what you do, just remember that this isn’t you. All of this, it isn’t you. It’s something that happened to you but it isn’t who you are. I know who you are. You’re my cousin, Anna. This is something that happened. It’s not who you are.”
Anna let go of the backpack. It slid between her legs down to the floor of the car. Her shoulders slumped and she leaned her cheek into Jeannie’s palm. Then she started to cry.
CHAPTER NINE
Nobody leaves.
There’s no reason to stay. Offices are closed; classes are cancelled. They’re predicting more snow this afternoon so traveling won’t get any easier for a while. There are a hundred reasons we should all be bundling up and shutting out the lights and making our way home to our loved ones and significant others. I should be preparing to regret not getting down to Kroger to pick up six more bottles since, by my estimation, I only have two remaining significant others from my last shopping trip.
I could be home, snowed in with Jeannie, stocked up with no place to go and no one expecting us, requiring no motor skills finer than working the corkscrew to ride out the darkest nights of the year. We could coat ourselves in Cheetos dust and body grease, splash a cheap Merlot on the door like lamb’s blood on the lintel as the Unholy Spirit of February blows over the land looking for souls to slaughter.
The dark allure of this image pulls at me with a force even I know is unhealthy. If Meredith were to pull out anything stronger than coffee at this moment, my mind could easily drop into a Swedish art film, complete with hooded figures, screaming birds, and hollow-eyed children.
I want to go to that place. Finally. I can feel the draw of going that far down that hole. That I’m given the chance due to the death—no, the murder—of someone I knew, a man who flirted with me, whom Jeannie slept with, and all the sexual baggage those facts bring with them, good lord, I’m looking at a scorched earth-scene that makes Wagner’s darkest work look like a rom-com. I can almost hear Johann Goethe suggesting that maybe I lighten up a bit.
This makes me laugh. I catch it before it becomes a full-on snort chortle, but Meredith hears it anyway. She cocks a friendly eyebrow, wanting to be in on the joke, but I spare her that. The funniest thing about my thoughts at this moment is how unfunny they are.
I don’t know why everyone else is sticking around but I’m here so I don’t have to go down that hole. As badly as I want to, that’s how badly I don’t want to, and I don’t force myself to justify my logic. I know with decades of certainty that that hole will keep. That pain stays fresh no matter how long I make it wait. Out in the hallway Desiree shushes Lyle, who has laughed abruptly. They whisper to each other, both struggling against that contagious giggling that always breaks out in grim situations. I wish they wouldn’t muffle it. I want to hear Lyle’s throaty guffaw and Desiree’s high-pitched cackle.
I want to keep these corduroy slippers on and keep on eating Meredith’s delicious sausage dip until I burst. I want there to be a reason to just stay put; to stay in this sudden limbo where we’re not working, we’re not leaving, we’re not doing anything really but actively not doing the things we’re supposed to be doing. I wouldn’t even mind seeing Officer Chubby huffing through the building, sniffing and scratching.
Meredith makes no move to leave either. She rolls her chair over to the shelf on the other side of her desk and returns a moment later with a package wrapped in a plastic grocery bag.
“I was saving these for something special.” From the bag, she pulls out a flat, white box tied with a red ribbon. I can smell the chocolate as she lifts the lid. “If we take anything away from what’s happened today it should be that every day is special.”
Twenty-four dark squares fill the box. I read the little card on the lid.
“Hand-made artisanal chocolates; sea-salt caramels, organic lavender, organic ginger.”
“My three favorite flavors in the world.” Meredith gazes at the chocolates. “A gift from my son for Christmas. Ever since he was a little boy, he always paid attention to what I loved. He’s always known how to make me smile.” She gives a sad laugh. “I wish I could have stayed with him in Nashville longer.” She pushes the box toward me.
“Are you sure?” I ask, hoping the answer is yes. “These look expensive.”
“They are expensive. I’ve been saving them.”
“Why would you save these? How could you save them? How could you resist?”
She gives me a look that’s hard to read, a strange mixture of happy and sad. “I like to save things for special occasions. I like to make things last.” She waves at the piles of chaos behind her. “I’m obviously very good at hanging on to things.”
I laugh but resist grabbing a chocolate. “But these are yours. Your son picked them out specially for you. You don’t have to share them.”
“I want to.” She pushes the box closer and I don’t resist any longer. “I want you to eat these candies with me. I want us to enjoy them together. Today. It’s a sad day. Someone has lost everything today.” She picks up a dark square and examines it. “Someone’s heart is going to be broken when they hear the news. Someone is going to wonder if they’ll ever recover from this.”
“Oh my god,” I mutter around the chocolate. Rich, bitter chocolate crumbles around salty, gooey caramel that erupts like ecstasy on my tongue. To be honest, even if it had tasted like cat litter I would have reacted the same way. I don’t want to follow Meredith’s melancholy train of thought. The candy makes it easy to change the subject. Meredith moans around the candy in her mouth.
“Caramel,” I say around the fingers I’m licking just in case I missed a sliver of chocolate.
“Abender,” she mumbles and points to the center row. Lavender. As I reach for another, I’ve never been happier that Meredith is a hoarder. I toast her with chocolate-coated ginger.
“To your son. He’s a good man.”
“Yes, he is. He’s my finest creation. And if you will pardon a mother’s vanity, I think he is the best thing to ever come out of Eastern Allegheny College.”
We both sigh over our treats. Meredith opens her carafe and pours coffee into her mug. She fishes another mug off an S-hook I hadn’t noticed on the shelf behind her and fills a cup for me. “I have cream,” she says, motioning to the refrigerator. “And Splenda. I have sugar, too. And Sweet’N Low.” She spins her chair around and runs her fingers over a row of narrow plastic bins. “I think I still have some agave syrup up here, too somewhere.”
I laugh. “Of course you do. You probably have a small barista tied up in one of those baskets.” I take the cup and tap it against hers. “Black is fine. Perfect. Thank you.”
“My pleasure.” She settles back in her chair, nodding her permission to take another chocolate. The odds are excellent this box does not survive our session. I mmm through another caramel and don’t even flinch when Meredith starts talking again.
“So what about you? Are you close with your dad?”
I know this territory well enough not to react.
“He died when I was young.”
“Oh I’m sorry.” Meredith is the rare type of person who makes that sound sincere. “How old were you?”
“Eleven.”
She makes a tsk sound. “That is young. That’s a hard age.” I’m preparing my answer for the traditional follow-up question but Meredith spares me the lie of how he died. Instead she goes with, “What about your mom? Are you two close? Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“No,” I say, glad to have an answer for the last question that may or may not answer the first two. “I’m an only child. I’m one of those weirdos.” I give the smile that has convinced therapists and teachers for decades.
“Hey, don’t say that.” She wags her finger at me. “I only had one child. There’s nothing wrong with only children. They’re special. As I always say to Derek, ‘I got it right with you. I didn’t need to keep trying.’”
She toasts me with her mug and I take a long time for my sip, very glad at that moment to be drinking coffee, something bitter and stimulating enough to keep me from letting something fall out of my mouth about how much words like that mean to a kid.
“Isn’t it sad,” she says over her cup, “that it takes something as horrible as death to make us stop and take the time to get to know the people around us? This is our second semester together and this is the first time you’ve told me about your father.”
“It’s not the kind of thing to lead with, you know? It was a long time ago.”
“Were you lonely? As an only child?”
My thankfulness at being here is rapidly losing ground to my desire to go home to Jeannie and climb into a bottle as it becomes clear that Meredith plans to keep this conversation in the somber zone. “No, I had Jeannie. We grew up together. I don’t know what it’s like to have a real sister, but I can’t imagine it could be anything closer than what we had.”
“That’s nice. That’s one thing I worried about with Derek. Was he lonely? Would another sibling have made him more social? He’s so isolated. He’s so intense. He broods.”
I look at the ungainly man-child in the photo. It seems we have something in common.
I’m about ready to start brooding myself. I hate to leave this chocolate behind, but if Destiny demands that I spend my day on these kinds of thoughts, it’s best I prepare accordingly. I’m wondering how much effort it will take to get all the way back home, get my wallet, and get down to Kroger and back. Two bottles of wine simply won’t cut it. Then again, I reason, Jeannie is here. She knew Ellis; she’ll want to talk about it. She’ll worry about leaving me alone to go to a dark place. She’ll pick up more wine.
Sometimes it’s just that basic for me.
“Did you and your husband try to have children?”
The question surprises me out of my consumption-strategy daydream. Meredith has never asked me personal questions like this. She’s never struck me as the type to jam a conversational crowbar like that into another person and I’m so surprised by it that I almost answer. I almost start talking. I almost tell her in one awful, wordy, brutally sober monologue about Ronnie and what he was and what I am and why there couldn’t possibly be a worse time in all the world for someone to kill Ellis Trachtenberg.
Two things spare us this conversation. The first is that in my surprise, I inhale a sliver of candied ginger. Not enough to close off my esophagus, just enough to lodge a fiber of the caustic root on my epiglottis so that I immediately start hacking. Meredith shoves a napkin at me and slides my coffee cup within reach. She looks for all the world like she’s preparing to give me the Heimlich maneuver. I flutter my hands in front of me, both waving her off and fanning out the flames I feel blasting up my throat and out over my face.
“I’m okay,” I gasp, riding out the rhythm of my throat spasm. “Ginger.”
“I’m so sorry.” She pushes my coffee into my hand. “Drink. Take a drink. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to take you by surprise.” She waits for me to take a sip of my coffee, keep it down, try another. I nod at her with relief when I believe I will survive. I’m thinking the rawness in my throat was worth it for the distraction it caused, but then she starts again.
“It’s just, you know, I can’t help but think about things like that when I hear about someone dying suddenly.” God damn it, she’s going to keep going there. “I know your husband was sick, but did you want children? Did you try? It’s absolutely none of my business.”
You got that right.
“I have no right in the world to ask, do I?”
You do not.
“But we’re just like that, aren’t we?”
Who? Me? No.
“Women, I mean. I guess maybe we just look at the world a little differently. We look at life differently. Maybe because we can give it, we look differently at anyone taking it away.”
I am seriously considering jamming another piece of ginger deep into my throat, maybe even into hers. She’s not looking at me, which might explain why this woman I have considered my friend for months now has suddenly morphed into this stranger espousing this biological bullshit. I can hear my mother in my head losing her mind over this sort of gender-stereotyping, howling about imprisoning ourselves in our ovaries and dismissing our rightful intellect in the name of hormonal flow.
> Surely if Meredith looked at me, if she looked into my eyes, she would see my mother dancing in my brain, raging and shaking her fist, demanding that her daughter not be lumped into such maudlin, parochial, regressive categories. Surely she would see her outrage, the arguments she had implanted so deeply within me, that no woman’s reality and reasoning be conscripted or predicted by something as primitive as a procreational urge.
Surely if Meredith looked at me at that moment, she would see my mother. She would have to, because she certainly wouldn’t be seeing me, because I am gone. In that moment, I am wholly and totally gone, absent, away. In that moment, I am hiding behind my mother’s rage, protected by the only shield she ever offered me, the most powerful force ever to blow through my young life.
I haven’t spoken to my mother in almost two decades and I can still feel the blast of that heat blow through me, leveling me.
Apparently this apocalypse of mine has gone unnoticed by Meredith because she’s still talking to herself in that soft voice. “Life is so fragile. It’s so worth fighting for. You never realize how much it means to you until you see it taken away from someone else. Then you know, then you really know what is worth fighting for.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about at this point. I’m suddenly aware of how hot I’ve become. I’m wearing tights and thermal underwear under my clothes, the windows are closed to keep the snow out. I’m drinking hot coffee, and coughing up ginger, and scrambling for an escape from this conversation when the most unlikely savior walks in.
A cop.
The cop who watched me walk away from the crime scene.
She’s got another cop with her, which should make me sit up and be cautious—this is a lot of police officers to come through an office in one day—but I’m so desperate to not hear what Meredith is talking about that I once again do the wrong thing. I’ve been here before; I’ve been in the focus of the police gaze before and I know better than to act rashly, but for the life of me I cannot get my shit together.
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