Baggage

by S. G. Redling

  “It’s okay, Meredith.”

  She’s got her advocate voice on. “I don’t want you to think that I’m messing with anything that belongs to you or that I’m violating your space.”

  “It’s okay, Meredith. Really. It’s okay. Put the phone anywhere.”

  She only looks partially reassured. She looks at me like she’s trying to figure out if there is something really wrong with me. God knows, I’m familiar with that look. She nods and pulls the phone out of her pocket. “I just thought you should know you have messages.”

  Jeannie sighs an impatient sigh, her back to us. I know Meredith is trying to be helpful. I really should be nicer. I wave my hand toward the counter. “Please, I’ll listen to them later. Just put it down.”

  But Meredith doesn’t. She turns to face me at an odd angle, leaning over the counter so her back is to Jeannie. She holds up the phone between us and taps the screen. She keeps her voice low.

  “You have a message,” she says again. “One you might want to hear?”

  I am not in the mood for this but even less in the mood to argue. I snatch the phone from her, swipe it to life and put the message on speaker so I can concentrate on filling my own glass. I expect to hear Jeannie’s voice, demanding to know why I’m not picking up the damn phone on this day, of all days. I’ll delete it after the first “God damn it, Anna.” Shouldn’t take long. Instead I hear a man speak, his tone soft and well-modulated.

  “Hello, Anna, it’s Ellis. Um, Trachtenberg.” He clears his throat, which I can barely hear over the sharp breath I suck in. Meredith’s eyes are wide, her hands clamped over her mouth. Her face flushes red right up to her strawberry-blond hairline. Jeannie slams the oven shut as the message plays on.

  “I was wondering if we could talk. I was hoping”—he sighs—“I was hoping we could talk. I have something for you, something I’d like you to have.” I hear background noise and then the unmistakable creak of an office chair. He sounds like he’s talking to himself and I can’t help but wonder who the hell leaves a message like this. I’m tempted to yell “Get to the point!” but even I behave better than that. When I’m sober. Which I really wish I weren’t at this moment.

  “You know what?” Ellis is still talking. “I’m just going to come by your office. It’s late but maybe you’re still there. If you’re not, I’ll just leave it for you. Or I’ll get it to you tomorrow. It’s supposed to snow tonight.” I can hear the smile in his voice. “Gilead is absolutely gorgeous in the snow. Maybe you’ll let me take you on a walk to some of the better views from above campus. Okay, wow, I’m going on and on, aren’t I?” There’s that charming laugh again. “I’ll wrap this up and try to do this face to face. If you get this, call me. I’ll be in my office all night. I’ve got a lot of work but I would really like to give you something. Tonight, if possible. Or tomorrow. Whatever works for you.”

  He pauses and sighs. “Goodnight, Anna. I’m thinking of you. I hope you’re well.”

  The call ends and a woman’s voice comes on, instructing me to press one to hear the message again—as if that would ever be an option—seven to delete, nine to skip. I’m reaching to push seven when Meredith grabs the phone away from me.

  “You can’t delete that!” Her face is very red.

  Jeannie snorts and reaches for her wine. “Oh please,” she says. I hadn’t realized she’d come so close. “That’s a standard Ellis message. He loves being mysterious. Trust me, you can delete it. He’ll leave more.”

  Meredith looks like she might faint. It takes her a few gasped sounds before she can make the words. “How can you say that? My god, how can you talk about him like that?”

  Jeannie rolls her eyes. I want to stop her before she says anything else but my thoughts won’t fall into place.

  “Come on.” She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, which is entirely possible. “What are you going to do? Transcribe it and put it in your hope chest? He’s probably got another book for you or a poem, something dark and spare about the symbolic purity of snow.”

  I hold up my hand to stop her but Meredith speaks first.

  “You are a horrible person.”

  “Hey!” I snap, but Meredith won’t be stopped.

  “You have always been a horrible person and now you’re just proving it.”

  I don’t know what she expects Jeannie to say but I’d bet she isn’t expecting a laugh. Jeannie can pack more derision and dismissal into one laugh than any five people could ever hope to achieve as a team. She cocks her hip, waggling her wine glass like a prop, and I know how withering her tone will be before she speaks.

  “Hey, Meredith? I don’t know what kind of romantic fantasies you may be constructing vicariously through my cousin, but I think I know Ellis a little better than you and—”

  “He’s dead.” I say it quickly.

  “Yeah,” Jeannie nods, smiling, not hearing me but assuming I’m backing her play. “Ellis Trachtenberg is a bore who thinks he can talk his way—”

  “He’s dead, Jeannie.” She pauses, hearing me. “Ellis was killed last night. That’s what the crime scene was. That’s why the police were there.”

  She almost spills her wine when she sets it down, gripping the counter hard. “Oh my god,” she whispers once and then again. “What happened?”

  Some of the redness has left Meredith’s face and her tone isn’t warm, but it is less caustic. “Someone killed him in the basement of Jenkins. Last night. It must have been late.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “I don’t know. The police didn’t say.” Meredith shakes her head and then stares at Jeannie. “What did you think had happened? When you went by the school, looking for Anna, and saw the police?”

  Jeannie ignores her question. She stares at me. “He was killed last night? Yesterday?” I don’t answer. “Did they arrest anybody?”

  “Not when we were there,” I say. “They were asking us questions. All of us.” I say it before she can ask. I don’t think she would ask anything in front of Meredith. I don’t think she will say anything about the horrible coincidence of the date of Ellis’s murder.

  Meredith waves my phone in front of me. “Did you tell the police about this call? Did you tell them you talked to Ellis?”

  “I just got the message. You heard it when I did.”

  “Because you forgot your phone.” Meredith says it like an almost-question, like a doubt, and now I can feel my cheeks burning. If someone walked in on us at that moment, we’d look like a trio of sunburned broads or maybe a communal hot flash.

  “Yeah, Meredith, I forgot my phone.” My voice rises. “I forgot it. I walked out without it and I didn’t get my messages. Guilty as charged.”

  Jeannie puts her hand on my arm, distracting me from whatever is coming over me long enough to see tears in Meredith’s eyes. She looks like I just slapped her.

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, Anna. My god, you can’t think that I think you had anything to do with something this horrible, can you?” She stands, looking a little unsteady. “This has just been a terrible day. I’m really sorry if I’ve upset you. I’m going to go. But you really need to tell the police about this message. You may be the last person Ellis talked to.”

  “Besides whoever killed him,” Jeannie says.

  “Obviously.” Meredith looks exasperated. She pulls her purse higher onto her shoulder and starts backing away toward the door. “I’m going to go. It’s been a long, hard day. I’m going to leave you two alone to do whatever it is you all need to do.”

  Jeannie and I say nothing as she leaves.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  After Meredith leaves, I can’t tell if I feel more awkward or less. It’s not the first time my boss has made me aware of just how bad I am at being a person. Emotions flow through her naturally and logically; they tend to fall off of me like scabs. Sometimes I f
eel like watching her and learning from her. This is not one of those times. Jeannie is here with a case of wine. It’s snowing again and the day is not going to get any brighter, literally or metaphorically.

  Meredith was worried about me. She was upset about Ellis and she seemed to be having a hard time forgiving Jeannie for her innocent but snarky remarks about the dead man. She looked tired and she could probably smell those delicious enchiladas Jeannie put in the oven. I should have invited her to eat with us. I should have apologized for being so weird. At the very least, I should have given her her thirty dollars back, but I didn’t. I let her leave in an unsettled state.

  And now that she’s gone, I relax.

  I’ll make things better with Meredith later. This isn’t the time for that. My job and my boss will keep. The letters on my floor and coffee table will keep. Later, I’ll scoop them up and put them in the box that’s waiting for them in the closet. Later. I’ll take care of everything later, but not now. Now Jeannie is here. February 17 is behind me and we’re going to make sure it stays there for another year.

  This is what we do.

  We eat. Chips and guacamole, enchiladas, ice cream. We drink bottles of red and open a bottle of Baileys but because of all the food, I don’t drop off that cliff of oblivion. Instead I float on this warm ocean of carbohydrates. We play backgammon and rummy; we watch two episodes of Judge Judy. Jeannie beats every contestant on Wheel of Fortune and I shut her down during Jeopardy!.

  Jeannie pulls out her phone and a little bullet speaker and starts DJ-ing blasts from our past. We bounce from Britney Spears to Korn to Eminem to Queens of the Stone Age—songs we both know all the words to, songs we’ve both been drunk on. Songs that came after the worst of my childhood.

  We sing songs we sang when I was in high school and she was in college, and when I was in college and she was in grad school. We sing songs we sang together in bars and in cars and on double dates. We howl through “Nookie” and roll through “Country Grammar” without a bump or a worry. We interrupt each other with mentions of guys we slept with or didn’t sleep with or wanted to sleep with or shouldn’t have slept with. We shout names and bars and drinks at each other and respond with eye-rolls or shrieks or groans.

  Jeannie drives this bus but I copilot right beside her. We know this road and we don’t veer out of our lane. We don’t look too far back; we never, ever mention certain names. We bring up no humiliations or heartbreaks. We keep our melancholy superficial. We recite stupid pieces of poetry that for some reason we both know. There’s no Keats or Wordsworth; these are hokey poems about racehorses and dead dogs and kittens at St. Peter’s gate.

  Neither of us mentions it, but we know we sound just like our mothers. I remember hearing them, sitting on porches and lawn chairs, or slouched around dinner tables or on sofas late at night, early in the morning, drunk on white wine or vodka or maybe even high.

  Their voices would change as they talked, losing form and control as they morphed from mothers and professors and artists and wives back into their original form—the Lewis girls, Gretchen and Natalie, pretty, blond sisters from eastern Kansas, dealing with the fallout from their own fucked up parents. They would turn to each other in times of crisis—when Grandpa Boo died, when Uncle Jeff lost yet another job, when my dad got arrested for something I wasn’t allowed to know about. They’d put their kids to bed and banish their husbands to golf courses and TV rooms. They would establish the rules of truce with the opening of the first bottle and then they would get sailor drunk, laughing and singing and letting the other see in them the girl they used to be.

  I always loved hearing them and only now do I understand what they were really doing. They were calling ghosts. They understood that there are unholy nights when malevolent spirits roam the earth. These aren’t traditional demons; they answer to no priest. They’re terrors and griefs and losses and they can drag a soul to hell faster than any claw-footed beast. There’s no point pretending they’re not there. No, the thing to do when the demons come for you is to call up the lesser demons of your own, hide in plain sight among the silly, frilly, ridiculous demons of your shared stupidity, letting the clamor of them drown out the banshee howls, letting the hilarious frenzy of them beat the bushes, fill the shadows, and clog the abysses so nobody falls into them.

  You don’t defeat your demons. That’s pop-psychology bullshit. You outwait them. You talk over them. You bore them with your silliness when they roar up at their most powerful. You find someone you can trust, someone you can count on not to call them down by name, and you ignore those motherfuckers until their time is up, until the bus that brought them in rolls up to take them back to the bleachers of hell where all they can do is catcall and threaten.

  It’s probably not healthy and it sure doesn’t solve anything but some things can’t be solved. Some things just have to be endured. Jeannie knows that. Our mothers knew that. We come from a long line of endurers.

  The snow is on our side, insulating us and isolating us. The light stays low and blue, never reaching night blackness, never becoming true daylight. Sounds stay lower than our singing—we hear snowplows and cars sliding, salt trucks grinding along, and the occasional scrape of a shovel somewhere on the grounds. My neighbors cede the floor. I’m the noisemaker tonight. Today. Day and night tumble together, marked only by piles of corks, wadded up napkins, and dirty plates. We wake up at one point and have cinnamon rolls, but I don’t know if they’re dessert or breakfast.

  The only slip off our carefully charted path is a small one and I’m not sure who makes it. Ellis Trachtenberg comes up. Just a mention of him as a man—so it must have been Jeannie who brought that up—and by the time it’s out in the conversational herd, thoughts of his death trail behind it like a smell. Jeannie, always better than I at all things soothing and healing, addresses the issue with simplicity.

  “Shitty timing.”

  That’s all she says about that and pulls a bag of tater tots from the freezer. Slammed appliance doors punctuate the statement, clattering cookie sheets clear the air. No talk of the odds, no calling down the demon that wants this to be a pattern—February 17, the day of dead men. I ignore the pernicious whisper: One is a tragedy. Two, a coincidence. Third time’s a charm? No, sweetheart, that’s a curse. That’s a curse. That’s a curse.

  That whisper would deafen me if Jeannie didn’t pick that moment to blast “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” and in seconds we’re howling along with The Replacements and eating French onion dip with our fingers.

  I’m pretty sure this is breakfast.

  I never pass out but I do sleep a soft, thirsty sleep that makes me feel puffy and fuzzy when I wake up. Jeannie’s in the bed beside me, the Cosmo Bedside Astrologer stuck to her cheek. I forgot we’d been reading that. Jeannie had been highlighting important passages in it the way we used to do in high school. I forget that part too until I find the pink highlighter has scrawled some cryptic message onto my pillowcase while we slept.

  A half-empty package of Twizzlers fall off my lap as I sit up, trying to figure out why I’m awake. My phone. I hear it ringing. It’s been ringing for a while. I wonder why my answering machine doesn’t kick on before I realize it’s my cell phone that’s resting dangerously near a puddle of water that’s splashed from a now empty glass by my bed.

  “Hello?”

  I don’t hesitate to answer it. I’m too sleepy to worry and too saturated with the safety of Jeannie’s presence.

  “Finally.” Meredith. “I was starting to worry about you. You didn’t check your e-mail.”

  “Not yet.” Good lord. “What’s up?”

  “Well, we’re open today. You’re late for work.”

  “I thought the offices were closed today.” I realize my mistake as I say it. Today is Friday; I missed Thursday. I’m dreading the knowing questions from Meredith about how one misses an entire day but they don’t come. Instead, her to
ne is odd, loud, distracted.

  “Yeah, yeah, I thought as much. You’re on your way?”

  I can’t tell if she’s speaking to me. “Uh, yeah?”

  She whispers into the phone. “You are home, right? At your apartment?”

  “Yeah.” Why is she whispering? Is she still talking to me?

  “Alrighty!” Loud voice again. “Shake a leg, sister. See you in a bit.”

  The call ends and Jeannie flings the magazine off the bed.

  “Why does she talk so loud?” Jeannie buries her head under the pillow. “I could hear her. How can you be late for work? You said the offices were closed.”

  I don’t bother explaining, knowing the answer will dawn on her like it did for me. I hear her “Oh yeah” as I drag myself to the bathroom. She follows me, nudging me out of the way to brush her teeth, stepping past me to pee while I tie back my hair. It’s nice in kind of a gross way, sharing my bathroom with Jeannie like we used to.

  “You don’t have to get up,” I say. “I’m going in to work. You can sleep.”

  She wants to come down to campus with me. Funeral arrangements for Ellis will be posted somewhere; people will be making plans. She wants to see her old coworkers; she knows better than to count on me to get the plans correct. Plus I get the feeling that she doesn’t want to end our little bender. We have to be sober—or work on getting there; we’re in uncertain territory right now—but she seems to feel the same glow I feel. We didn’t fight at all last night. We didn’t needle or provoke. We laughed and cried and ate and sang and we’re both happily stuffed and hungover from it. We don’t want it to end.

  She drives me to campus. The roads are clear and salted for now although more snow hangs dark in the clouds. She parks illegally and follows me into Jenkins through the north door on the first floor. We hear people in the hallway as we head for the stairwell. This is Ellis’s floor. His coworkers mill around and a sense of limbo pervades the floor. Jeannie hesitates, drawn to her former coworkers, drawn to the center of attention, but then she pushes open the stairwell door and waves me through. She’s not done with me yet.