Baggage

by S. G. Redling

  Ronnie thought she didn’t like it. He ran from room to room, chattering, wide-eyed, pointing out the space he would have for an office, pointing out the tiny laundry room hanging off the back of the house, pacing out the bigger-than-expected bedroom and the big-enough kitchen. Then he took her by the hand and dragged her to see what he thought would be the selling point for Anna.

  A tiny bathroom with an old claw-foot tub.

  She turned from the bathroom and kissed him, closing her eyes to the sight and her ears from the alarm clang-clanging inside of her.

  He pressed her up against the bedroom door and banged the anxiety right out of her.

  Moving in brought the second warning. They each packed secrets that neither wanted unpacked but the house was small and they couldn’t be avoided. Anna saw Ronnie’s first—a battered leather bag that looked like the shaving kit Jeannie’s father used to keep under the sink. Ronnie tucked his there, too, back behind the Drano and the extra pack of toilet paper. Anna found it when she went looking for a bandage and, not knowing it was a secret, pulled back the zipper. No real reason. She thought she’d see his razor, maybe find the shaving soap that made his skin smell so delicious. Instead she found bottles, short orange plastic bottles with labels covered in strange prescription names and long dosage warnings.

  Seroquel. Clozaril. Zyprexa.

  She didn’t know what they were for but she knew she’d never seen them before. She zipped the bag and shoved it back under the sink just as Ronnie stuck his head in around the door. He saw the cabinet slam shut and stared at her for a second with no expression.

  Then he grinned, that crooked tooth winking at her. “Hey babe, let’s clear some of those boxes out of the living room so we’ll have a place to crash tonight.”

  Ronnie stacked boxes of books high against the wall to the kitchen—they had way too many books for the tiny house—and Anna waited until he was bent to the task before opening the two cartons she’d packed and carried in herself, boxes with “personal” written in solid red letters on the tops and two sides. Those she dragged over to the hall closet that sat just where it was supposed to and held nothing more than a few wire hangers and a broken umbrella.

  She felt a twist of anxiety when she examined the closet. It was tall, its walls extending high up into the crawl space with deep shelves over her head. Closets weren’t supposed to be so high, not hall closets. Not this closet. She looked out at the cartons she needed to unpack. They didn’t hold enough to build the wall.

  There was nothing to be done about it now. More boxes would come.

  She opened the first carton and started unpacking the smaller boxes. These she stacked in the back of the closet, side by side, tight in the narrow space. The two oldest were the largest. They were from when she still lived with Jeannie’s family. They nearly filled the bottom row. The smaller boxes came next. Anna had to shove one into the gap between the bigger boxes and the wall. She had to wedge it in there. That was okay. They needed to be steady. They needed to stay put.

  She worked quickly, stacking the boxes, three on the next level—stack, wedge, align. She fitted shoeboxes and small cartons together like a puzzle she assembled every time she moved. Every year the puzzle gained another piece. Every year she made it fit. The ninth and final box she set on top of the second row. The box wasn’t full, none of them were. The cut-off dates couldn’t be altered. Full or not, the boxes were closed on March 1 and another box was brought in. Eventually she would have enough to build a wall.

  “Hey, babe.” Ronnie knelt beside her and she jumped, almost knocking the top box over. Her fingers dug into the cardboard. “What are these?”

  “Letters.”

  “Really? That’s a lot of letters. Who are they from?”

  “My mother.”

  “Do you want to put them somewhere else?”

  “No.”

  He suggested moving them to the office they could share. He offered to put them in the crawl space where they would be safe or even to buy her an actual file cabinet. He reminded her that the vacuum cleaner and coats and boots went there as well.

  “This is where they go.” She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t take her hands off the cardboard wall in front of her. “They go in here like this. This is where they go.”

  “Okay,” he finally whispered and leaned in to kiss her temple. “That’s where they go.”

  And so they moved their secrets in with them.

  It worked for a while. They found their places within their new home, bumping into each other here and there, finding room for each other’s comforts and private spaces. They were happy and Anna told herself that most couples probably went through those same awkward adjustments going from dating to living together.

  So when it came time to adjust from living together to getting married, Anna had grown so accustomed to the occasional run-ins and missteps, she hardly noticed the alarm clanging deep in her gut. She made up half of a couple now. She had a place. They had been dating for eight months, living together for two. She had gotten accustomed to normal, even if she wondered if maybe they weren’t getting it exactly right.

  Ronnie wanted a Christmas wedding. What could be more normal than that?

  He said his family didn’t celebrate any holidays and that he wanted a real reason to celebrate Christmas. He wanted to invite his friends from Illinois and make it a long celebration. Ronnie hadn’t made many friends in Chattam yet and Anna knew that it bothered him more than he expressed. He went on longer and longer hikes and bike rides even as the Nebraska winter bore down on them. She heard him talking to himself more than once and started noticing that he often wouldn’t sleep through the night.

  She didn’t say anything to him about it. What could she say? Since moving into the little yellow house in Chattam two months before, he had found her asleep in the tub no fewer than half a dozen times. He would lead her back to bed and kiss her. He loved her and she loved him but it seemed neither of them had the tools or the inclination to examine these odd edges.

  Ronnie decided to try before their wedding.

  Three days before Christmas, two days before their wedding, and the day before Jeannie, her husband, and all of Ronnie’s friends would descend upon their home, Ronnie pulled Anna into his arms. He led her to the doorway to their bedroom, the first place they had made love in their new home. The space had an intimacy about it. The gateway to their couple-space, they often bumped into each other in this doorframe and almost always shared a kiss there. Here they weren’t in the bedroom, they weren’t in the hall. They weren’t anywhere but with each other and both relaxed under the stained pine molding.

  She let him pull her down to the floor where they sat cross-legged, backs against either side of the doorframe, hands tangled up in each other’s. He looked into her eyes and smiled.

  “This is it.”

  She nodded, breathy and nervous.

  “We’re doing this,” he said, squeezing her fingers. “We’re getting married.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you ready?”

  The clang-clang-clang she’d grown so accustomed to grew just a decibel, not enough to silence her. “Yeah.”

  “Me, too.” He leaned in to kiss her. “I need to tell you something. Something you already know but I need you to hear it from me. I know you’ve seen my medication.” She nodded. She had never said anything about the pills. “I’ve been under treatment since high school. I got sick in middle school.”

  He rubbed her hands as he told her about the breakdowns, the bizarre behavior, the terror and the pain he had caused his family. He told her about the shame his mother felt having to commit him his second year of college and how hard he worked to ride out the misdiagnoses and incorrect medications. He told her that he became a teacher because he was afraid to have children of his own and thought that would be the closest he would ever get
to being a father. He promised that he would work every day to stay well enough to be the man who could love her for the rest of her life.

  He cupped her face in his palm. “You make my life worth living.”

  There it was—his wedding gift to her. The black leather bag underneath the sink with his secret in it was worth more to her than any diamond ring. He didn’t ask for anything in return, either. He just wanted to tell her the truth; that was the kind of man Ronnie Ray was. He loved her and he trusted her and she trusted him.

  So she told him.

  She told him everything—all the details, all the parts she could remember, and did her best with the parts that remained cloudy. She talked and talked until every last bit of it was out of her and he took in every word. He didn’t interrupt; he didn’t comfort her. He just listened in that way that had made her fall in love with him in the first place. When she finished, she stopped talking. She waited for him to leave, to recoil, at least to reconsider joining his life to hers, but he didn’t do any of those things. Instead he kissed her.

  The first February after they were married was the first February in sixteen years that Anna Shuler wasn’t afraid. She didn’t have to bear its dark weight alone. This was good since neither of them was fully prepared for winter in Nebraska. Icy wind, snow drifts, the low, dark skies combined to drive them both indoors, together, close and quiet. Weather kept Jeannie from being able to visit in February and Ronnie took care of her. He let her talk when she needed to and left her alone when she wanted. He woke her up in the tub and led her back to bed whenever he found her there.

  By spring, the clamor of alarm within Anna had fallen all but silent. By summer, she began to hear it again.

  Ronnie made new friends—a cycling group that took impossible journeys over hundreds of miles. They would be gone for long weekends, pushing their endurance, pushing each other. His new friends encouraged Ronnie to work out more, to become a vegetarian and worship his body, even while they urged him to party harder. They smoked a lot of weed and invited Anna to join their drumming circles and sweat lodges. They formed bands and held poetry slams. They made manic plans for food co-ops and art colonies and government protests that never got past the yelling and smoking stage. Ronnie seemed to enjoy it and he didn’t pressure Anna to join in.

  By August she could see the dark circles under Ronnie’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. In September, she noticed he didn’t keep his leather bag of pills under the sink. In November, she began to ask him about it and in December he told her he had found a new doctor and was trying a new regimen.

  He had more energy, she had to give him that. His body hummed beneath her fingertips. He ran and cycled and lifted; he ate organic everything and only drank microbrew beer and locally sourced wine. His temper grew edges.

  She didn’t help. She didn’t know how. Not only that, but the bang-bang-bang of internal warning had numbed her affection and she found herself provoking him. She’d spit out the (admittedly hideous) locally sourced boysenberry wine in front of him. She laughed at his new devotion to rhyming haiku, arguing the absurdity of practicing an art form that by definition did not exist. He threw a drawer across the room during that fight. She answered by whipping a volume of Basho’s poetry at his head.

  February was right around the corner. She knew how fast it would come in and in those dark moments, a part of her longed for it. As terrifying as it was, she knew it. It knew her. The intimacy she had felt with Ronnie now seemed like a dream, the kind of delusion prisoners must conjure when rotting at the bottom of a hole.

  The hole was reality and it was just a matter of time until she was blown back into it.

  Jeannie called her a lot. She talked about coming in, asking Anna if she needed her. Anna knew she did but couldn’t say the words. It hurt Jeannie’s feelings, being cut out of this role in her cousin’s life. Anna wanted to comfort her, but something about that low Nebraska sky kept Anna’s mouth shut. Something about the sharp lines of Ronnie’s drawn cheeks told her that there was no shortcut off this path.

  As January wrapped up, he started asking her about it. He brought up details and asked questions under the guise of comforting her, encouraging her to talk about it, but Anna saw through him. This wasn’t concern. Ronnie fixated on details, he chewed on them the way he chewed on his gluten-free bagels and vegan Nori wraps. He hungered for them and Anna decided to let him starve.

  February 17, Ronnie left for school early, riding his bike despite the sub-zero temperature. Anna called in sick, glad for him to be out of the house. She couldn’t relax once the afternoon rolled in, knowing he would be home, knowing what he would want to talk about. So she warmed up the car and drove down to the BW3 on the other side of town.

  Beer, wings, trivia, sports—the bar was packed and loud. Nobody noticed the woman in black in a corner booth, a trivia console in front of her as a decoy, a pitcher of beer in front of her as a mission. The waitress had eyed her curiously on her first pitcher, suggesting she order some wings or mini corndogs. When the second pitcher ran empty, the waitress stopped asking. Ronnie would have argued with her over what he called “shitty American piss beer.” For Anna, it went down as smoothly as champagne.

  She decided to go home. Driving carefully down the dark, flat roads, Anna thought about what they were doing to each other. It wasn’t enough to say she didn’t know any better. She should try to know better. She should try to break the cycle of destruction that she had internalized. Jeannie loved her and that had never led to pain. Aunt Gretchen and Uncle John had made their marriage work despite all sorts of craziness nobody outside the marriage could know.

  She pulled up in front of the little yellow house, the house so similar to her childhood home. But this wasn’t that house. This wasn’t that life. This was her life, the life she was making with Ronnie. It didn’t have to burn just because her mother’s life had.

  The lights glowed in the window, looking so cozy. She wanted to go in. She wanted this to be home, her home, their home. A real home. But when she opened the door, she knew she was wrong.

  What did she see first? The note? Or the shadow from the closet door? All sounds fell away as the clang-clang-clang within her hammered at the inside of her skull. A poem. Ronnie had left her a poem—a jagged mess of ugly words scrawled across the back of an envelope. Not just words—rhyming haiku. His last jab at her? Not quite. It wasn’t just any envelope. This was a letter from her mother.

  That’s why the closet was open. He had opened a box—the tenth box, the new box. He had dismantled her wall. She looked only at the boxes when she pulled open the closet door. White cardboard picked up the faint light of the living room, cut with the shadows of the heavy weight dangling in front of them. Shoes. Cycling shoes, toes turned toward each other, swinging.

  A carpet of white envelopes splayed from the spilled box. Not perfectly white. Blue ink marched across the fronts of them; red stamps broke up their smooth surfaces. Something else now, too. Black. Red. Brown. Stains. Spatters. On the envelopes, on the boxes. Blood soaking into them. Or was it seeping out of them? She didn’t know. She couldn’t tell. She couldn’t see anything but envelopes and boxes and cycling shoes dangling off of legs that swung, all that hard-won muscle useless now.

  Her eyes would go no farther than his hands. Those beautiful long thin hands that had reached for her and opened her up. That had held her and worn the ring that promised that she made his life worth living.

  She had to call the police. She had to call 911. She wanted to call Jeannie. She walked without looking, wanting to find the phone in the kitchen. Instead, she found herself in the bathroom, plugging the tub, running the water.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Ms. Ray?”

  Hinton stands in front of me again, her hand near her gun.

  I nod and rise to my feet. “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  She escort
s me to the patrol car.

  Gilead’s police station looks more like a down-on-its-luck insurance office. Dropped ceilings, cubicles, tan paint on drywall and industrial green carpeting make the open front room feel dead even though phones are ringing and three officers in uniform march about energetically. Behind a glass wall, an older officer nods at Hinton and buzzes us through a metal door. The detective waves me through in front of her and guides me to a smaller version of the front room. Metal table, plastic chairs, same ugly tan walls.

  I take the seat she points me to as she closes the door.

  “Do I need an attorney?”

  “Did you kill Robert Alistair?”

  It takes me a second to place the name. Robert Alistair sounds so dignified, not fitting for my neighbor Bobby. “No.”

  “Okay.” Hinton picks up a cardboard file box from the corner and brings it to the table. Of course she’s not going to tell me to get a lawyer. Just because I have the right to one doesn’t mean it’s encouraged. “I have a few questions for you.”

  I probably should ask for a lawyer but I don’t. All my energy goes to keeping me from dropping my head onto the table and pretending none of this is happening.

  Hinton puts the box to the side and leans forward on her elbows.

  “Where is Karmen Bennett?”

  That’s not what I’m expecting. “I thought she was here. You brought her in.”

  “For questioning, yes. We didn’t charge her with anything. Her father came to pick her up last night. Have you seen her?”

  “No.”

  “What is your relationship with Karmen Bennett?”