“I want everything,” he said.
FOUR
Bronfman drove to Sheila’s house on autopilot, turning left and turning right and braking and accelerating without design. Muscle memory and a vague consciousness of place were all he had. The events of the day had paralyzed him. They had desiccated him. Coming to terms with this stranger who was himself had clobbered him flat, like a cartoon pancake. And it was not merely because he had discovered, once and for all, that he had never made love, not to anyone, ever, because he had suspected that, he had feared that. It was that he had used Mary Day’s tragic death to wheedle that information out of her grieving fiancé, that he had taken advantage of another person who wasn’t even alive, and he had cost a man his job—all this in a single day. He was approaching monster status. If later tonight his DNA were found at a murder scene, he would just have to shrug and turn himself in, since he probably did it. That’s the kind of day this was.
For another five minutes he drove mindlessly, and almost missed the complex, but he braked just in time and jerked the wheel to the right, bumping the curb before parking in front of her place. He pulled himself out of his car and walked in, zombie style. The television was on, and Sheila was watching it. She didn’t look up at first.
“I’m bingeing on Green Acres,” she said. “Eva Gabor is a little irritating, but you have to love the Ziffels.” Only then did she look at him. “Oh. Oh, my. What’s wrong, Edsel? What happened?”
She stood, hugged him, and then took him by the hand and led him past the unbuilt table and a chair, still in piles, and to the couch. “I’m going to get you a glass of wine,” she said, and she did, and then she sat beside him and studied him, as if she could possibly glean from just looking at him what had happened, what was wrong. Bronfman took a sip of the wine, then he took the piece of paper Sorsby had given him that morning and handed it to her. She looked at it suspiciously, opened it, read it.
“Mr. Bogdan Poge?” she said. “What’s a Bogdan Poge?”
“That’s the contact,” he said. “In Sweden.”
“What contact?”
“At IKEA,” he said, but without the giddy flair he’d imagined bringing to it. Or even the desire to be a hero. “This is the guy who handles the North American division of the IKEA instruction department.”
“Okay…”
He could see that she didn’t know what he was talking about. “You said you wanted a contact at IKEA. Your white whale? So I had a guy at work get it for me. It got him fired. Today. Apparently accessed some file he shouldn’t have. I took him home because he doesn’t have a car. He doesn’t have anything, really. It’s my fault, Sheila. And that’s not all. I’ve done some terrible, terrible things.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Edsel—”
He interrupted her. That’s what it had come to: he was interrupting people now. “It seemed a good idea at the time. I just asked if he knew someone, and he started looking into it and he went a little too far. He’s this far from homeless, I think.”
She read the slip of paper again. “Because of this?”
“He was a terrible employee in general, but this was the last straw.”
She moved closer to him on the little couch and took his hands in hers and then, seeming to think better of it, set them back down. “I was going to tell you, Edsel. Soon. But that was never a thing.”
“What was never a thing?”
“IKEA. I never wanted to write for IKEA.”
“No,” Bronfman said. “You did. You do.”
“When we met, that first time, we were talking and having fun and I was just sitting there and it was my last day in the Cranston Building and I didn’t think I would ever see you again and I just … made all that up.”
She could not mean this. Made it up? Out of thin air? Why? How? Sheila was playful and imaginative and he loved that about her. But this. This was a lie, wasn’t it? Or more than a lie, really: it was a fiction. She was fiction.
“Made it up?”
“But then when we ran into each other again I didn’t want to say, ‘Hey, by the way, all that stuff about writing instructions, ha-ha, that wasn’t true,’ because you seemed so pleased with the idea that I did that, so interested in me. I didn’t want to scare you away.”
“Wait,” Bronfman said. He was having trouble keeping up. As usual. For the first time in his life, he wanted to be mistaken. He wanted to have misunderstood. “So you really don’t write directions or instructions or how-to manuals, or … anything like that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t.”
“Then what do you do?”
Sheila took two big sips of his wine, and then two big breaths. “Not much,” she said. “Honestly. Workwise, I mean. I volunteer at the homeless shelter a couple of times a week. I read a lot and take a lot of walks, of course, mostly with you but also by myself. I have a couple of doctors I see on a regular basis. A little money in the bank from, you know, dead relatives. I watch a lot of television. Fantasy Island, here I come! Ha-ha. I worked over at the Cranston, but it was only on a temporary basis. Giving it a shot. To see how that would be, if I could actually, you know, hold a job. But it didn’t work out. I want so much more from my stupid life. Even that job—I really wanted to like that job. But I was ill-suited for it, as they say. The work was just so dull, Edsel! All I liked to do was talk to people like you.”
“Not me,” he said. “Just people like me.”
“Edsel,” she said. “There is nobody like you.”
Bronfman thought he may have caught up with her now, and was able to encapsulate it like this: she had lied to him from the very first minute they met, and for every minute following it, and for every single day thereafter, all thirty-eight of them. Nothing she’d said was true. At this point he couldn’t be sure her name was Sheila McNabb, even though she had a nameplate saying as much.
“So not only did Sorsby get fired,” Bronfman said, “he got fired for nothing. For less than nothing.”
“I’m so, so sorry,” she said. “How could I have known that something like this would ever happen?”
“So what else?”
“What else what?”
“What else hasn’t been true?”
“Oh.” She thought back. “A lot, I guess. Not everything but … most of everything.”
“You don’t even want to be in the Guinness World Records?”
She shook her head.
“And your list?”
“My list?”
“Of the men,” he said. “The men you’d been with. Before me.”
She turned away. “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably? I can’t remember what I said.”
“You can’t remember? You might consider writing down all the lies you tell, just so you can keep your story straight.”
Bronfman couldn’t look at her. He thought, You’re a stranger to me now. A cliché? Sure. But he saw the truth in it. It was as if she’d taken off a mask he never knew she wore. On the wall behind her was a watercolor of the Champs-Élysées that she told him she’d bought from a street artist in Paris. Probably got it at Target. He stared at that until it blurred into a wash of rainbow colors.
“I’m scared, Edsel,” she said finally. “I’m scared of everything—even you. Scared that if you knew me—if anyone really knew me—you wouldn’t like me very much. So I do this thing. I tell stories. I’m good at that, at least. Telling stories, telling lies.”
The light hum of Cedar Court’s excellent air-conditioning system purred on. Bronfman felt the cool air slip up the leg of his trousers. “I think you’re on to something there,” he said. “Because I don’t like you very much right now.”
“Let me make you a cup of tea.”
“No,” he said. “I’m going. Home.” But he didn’t get up.
“So let me come with you. I want to see where you live. I bet it’s—”
“You lied to me, Sheila,” he said, interrupting yet again, raising his voice to an uncom
fortably high level. “Not just a little, either. A lot. But it’s more than that, to me. You’re not even real. You made yourself up. I have no idea who you are.”
“My feelings are real,” she said. “I’m real. That’s the important thing, Edsel. I really, really, really like you.”
This was not the way he hoped he would hear this. He had waited so long to hear those words—and to hear them now, just as he was leaving her. Timing! She had inflated his heart like an overblown balloon and then stuck a pin into it, just to watch it pop. Only I could get a girlfriend and break up with her at the same time, he thought. Still, he wanted to hear her say it one more time, not knowing how long it would be before anyone said it again.
“You like me?” he said. “Is that true?”
“You know I do. More than like you. I have never pretended that part. And I know you like me, too.”
“I did,” he said. “Before.”
She waved his objection away. “My point is that we care about each other. As long as that’s true, we can figure out the rest. We both have a good baseline to start from.”
“You really believe that?”
She didn’t even have to think about her answer. She nodded, once, with total certainty. “Of course I do.”
He stood up, but didn’t appear to know what to do next. He looked at the piles of wood in the middle of the floor—scattered, undefined, a mess. Just as they were. He kicked what looked like a table leg. “I bet you didn’t put these together at all,” he said. “Not even once.”
“That’s true,” she said. “I didn’t. I tried to, but I couldn’t follow those idiotic directions.”
She smiled a little. He kicked the leg again. “You don’t know how to do anything, do you? Nothing. Are you just … totally useless?” This was the cruelest thing he had ever said to another human being in his life, so callous that it made him wince. But it didn’t appear to hurt her, as he’d intended it to. Even his cruelty fell flat. She just turned a little sad, her smile waning, unplugged.
“No,” she said. “I don’t. Not much. I really don’t know how to do anything yet. I’m no prize. A late bloomer is how I like to think of it. That’s why we’re perfect for each other. You’re the same as me.”
“What? How can you say that?”
“You don’t want anyone to know you, either,” she said. “That’s why you apologize all the time. That’s why you don’t have any friends. Just like me. Because you don’t know how to do anything either, Edsel.”
She wasn’t being contrary, or harsh. She said it quite sweetly. It was just an observation, and, apparently, judging by the tone she took, an inarguable one.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I know how to do stuff. I have a job. I have a life.”
“That’s great. But what do you really do, Edsel? Think about it. Who are you?”
Against his will and his better instincts, he thought about it: what did he do? He woke up in the morning and dressed himself, cleaned himself up, fed himself, drove to work, engaged in small talk, entered numerals and keywords into a program on the computer, made telephone calls, received telephone calls, ate lunch, read some of the newspaper, occasionally “worked out” at the gym, visited with his mother, went home, watched television, ate dinner, slept. And at the end of the day all he had to show for it was half a dozen paper clips twisted into various positions and shapes. His legacy.
“You and I live in a world that’s kind of like a magic trick to us,” she said. “We just stumble through it, hoping no one notices. Edsel, please don’t take this the wrong way but you’re an odd person. Very odd. Of course you don’t want anyone to know you. But the good news? I am, too! Haven’t you noticed that I don’t have any friends, either? Not a single one. That’s odd, Edsel. You collect free pens; I can’t look at someone without turning them into some kind of animal. You never thought that was odd? No, you didn’t. That you wouldn’t think it odd is odd in itself, because you’re so deep into the oddness of who you are that you don’t notice when things are odd around you. As long as I’ve known you, I’ve had two piles of wood on the living-room floor. That’s just crazy, but it didn’t bother you that much, which is really wonderful to me. And, you know, there’s that other thing.”
This, of course, stung him all the way through. “I tried. I wanted to.”
“I know! And I’m fine with that. It’ll happen when it happens, that’s what I think. And when it does it’ll be great. My point is, we’re different from other people, you and me. We’re rufous-sided towhees, Edsel. We make our nests on the ground.”
When the air-conditioning turned itself off, the lights surged a little brighter. Then this person who called herself Sheila McNabb stood before him, blocking his way to the door.
“I have never had a pet in my life,” she said, “unless you count a firefly I trapped in a jar once when I was nine. I’m on all sorts of medication, but nothing illegal or particularly weird. One math credit short of graduating from college. Memorable event from childhood: I was in the car with my grandmother on the way to her church (she made me go) and she ran over a dog and didn’t stop because we were late. All true. I don’t believe in UFOs, but, on the other hand, I sort of do. My parents had lots and lots of problems, the three biggest being drugs, drinking, and me. They dropped me off at my grandma’s place when I was seven years old and never came back. The last I heard, they were somewhere in Central America, but that was a dozen years ago, so I may or may not be an orphan, I’m not really sure. Which may be the only thing worse than being an orphan: not knowing. I’ve never read anything by Charles Dickens. I have a prehensile tail. Threw that in there just to see if you were listening. I can recite the alphabet backward. Don’t go, Edsel. Please. Give me a chance and I’ll tell you everything. What about you? Tell me a little something about you. I’ve never been to France, but I know a little French. Don’t go, Edsel, please? I had my appendix out when I was twenty-one years old, and my wisdom teeth…”
She was still talking when he left. But as the door was closing behind him he thought he heard her say that a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich was her favorite sandwich, by far, bar none, but that may just have been wishful thinking. Not that it mattered anymore.
FIVE
By the time he found his way back to King’s Manor that evening, a war had broken out in his parking lot, or a circus, or the Fourth of July. It was an electric rainbow of pulsating color, reds and blues and greens; three police cars, an ambulance and a fire truck, all parked almost directly in front of his unit. What had he done? What law had he broken? He was guilty, certainly, and he felt that guilt keenly, although bringing this sort of force out for a moral failing seemed over the top. He wouldn’t slam the car into reverse, initiating a citywide chase that would only get him into more trouble, because face it: no one can outrun the law forever. No one. He would turn himself in without a fight.
But he was mistaken. The police weren’t here for him. He parked his car in front of another unit across the lot, and in his rearview mirror saw two medics leaving the apartment next door to his, the one belonging to Thomas Edison. They were pushing a gurney, and on the gurney was what was most certainly a body, what was obviously a body, and they lifted it into the back of the ambulance and slammed shut the doors and sped away, and the police cars and the fire truck followed. All of a sudden it was just Coco, standing on the stoop in front of the yellow CRIME SCENE—DO NOT ENTER ribbons taped across the front door. He watched her watching the ambulance insinuate its way into the traffic with its blaring red lights and ultraloud sirens with a muted, almost paralyzed expression. She wasn’t crying, but he could tell that she had been; her cheeks had a dull-red burnish to them. He had last seen her just a couple of days ago, as he left his apartment on the way to work, and she had been leaving as well. There was a worn-out scruffiness about her then, and she seemed a little sad.
“Good morning,” he had said, but it wasn’t really clear to him whether it was morning to her
or the end of something that had begun the night before.
But today her sadness and grief were so intense that they radiated off her like heat. He almost couldn’t bear to look at her as he approached. But at the top of his stoop Bronfman bravely paused and turned to her.
“Coco,” he said. “What happened?”
She turned and looked at him, puzzled, possibly just realizing that he was there. Her eyes were vacant, and far, far away. “Someone…” She paused, as if searching for the word. But it wasn’t that. She was searching for the ability to understand the word, to process the idea. “Someone killed Tommy,” she said, so softly that her voice barely carried from one stoop to the other. Coco brushed some of her hair back behind an ear and let her fingers linger, slowly combing through a tangle.
“What happened was, if you want to know, they rolled him up in a rug. He was trapped in there. He couldn’t move. Then they shot him, three times,” she said. Now she was talking to Bronfman as if she were recapping a television show he’d missed. No emotion at all. Just the numb, dead facts. “Three times. Twice in the chest and once…” He waited to hear where the third bullet went, but then it became clear to him that she wasn’t going to say anything about it, because what had happened to Thomas Edison with that third bullet was too awful to put words to.
“Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry,” Bronfman said, and as soon as he heard what he’d said he almost punched himself in the eye. Who said that? If he had accidentally bumped into her, that’s what he would have said. But when someone was killed in the apartment next door you said something else, though he had no idea what that something else might be. “That’s so—I don’t know what to say, Coco. It’s tragic, incomprehensible, devastating.”