“Vivian?” I whisper. “Is that you?”
But she doesn’t make a sound.
The search party for Annie Hayes was organized two days after her parents first noticed she’d gone missing; I heard about it as I did almost all my gossip, from Dick Harte, who ran a dairy farm in Depew and delivered the milk. It had been a bad winter, and the ground was just beginning to thaw from the latest assault: fissures appeared on the blue-veined rivers, still slickly coated with ice; the ground was patchy and raw, the trees had their hackles raised to the wind. On some mornings, with the wind howling and the gas sputtering under the kettle, I even missed Ed. I sweetened my coffee by drinking it through a sugar cube. There was a war on, and at home we felt it this way: in the cold-bed mornings, and sugary grit between our teeth.
Dick Harte had a truck embossed with a cow and the name of the farm, but for most of the winter he made his rounds in an old-fashioned sleigh, hitched to two of his horses. I remember he had the sleigh the day he told me about Annie Hayes and the search party, because he complained that the remaining snow was so slushy and full of muck he’d practically had to turn around; and the horses stood there, breath steaming in the dawn, and I thought of how cold Annie must be, wherever she was.
We were to meet at noon in front of the church in Coral River, a walk of just over four miles. The sky was dense and knotted with clouds, like a gigantic, fleecy eyebrow.
All this has stuck with me.
I don’t remember receiving instructions, or the early part of the search. I don’t remember seeing Thomas among the volunteers, although he must have been there, and it seems strange that I shouldn’t have noticed, since so many men were away. I do know at some point we were fanning out across a field and it had begun to rain. Black expanses of mud grinned up at us between the snow; I was freezing again and had called Annie’s name so often my throat was raw.
How awful, I was thinking. How unbearably awful to lose a child.
I got separated from the group—there was movement in the forest at the edge of the trees; I was sure it was Annie, scared, hiding in the shadows. The rain was rattling hard through the branches, and I could hardly see, my eyes were watering so badly; my fingers were swollen to uselessness.
A few feet into the woods, my foot drove straight through a fine surface of gray ice, down into a pit of mud and pulpy leaves—some kind of animal hole. I pitched forward onto my hands and knees. Immediately I knew I’d twisted or sprained my ankle, and the pain cleared my head. I realized I’d been following some animal, a fox or a deer. There was no child out here, in these woods. If there were, she was no longer alive.
I tried to stand, and suddenly there was a hand guiding me firmly to my feet.
“Are you all right?”
Glasses, beaded with rain; a beard, not too closely trimmed; the smell of damp wool and tobacco; a fine, straight nose, with a bead of moisture hanging from its end.
Those were my first impressions of Thomas.
Afterward he claimed to have noticed me even earlier, standing in the crowd, though I never believed him. I’ve relived that moment so often in my head, I can never be sure what really happened and what we only embellished afterward. But does it matter? We make reality our own, handle it until it is as soft as pressed butter.
There was the offer of a ride; the polite resistance, his insistence—you can’t make it back on your own, not on that foot—and, finally, the yes, thank you, if it really isn’t too much trouble. He kept calling me Miss Lundell, even though Lundell was my married name. I didn’t correct him.
There was his arm around my waist as he supported me across the field through the endless sheet of rain. There was feeling as though we were alone, with a sky of glass above us.
Thomas had a Hudson touring sedan, which felt novel and very luxurious to me, even though it was corroded with rust and the engine turned over several times before it would start. Ed and I didn’t own a car.
Thomas told me he was a professor of classics at St. Aquinas University, in Buffalo; I asked him several questions, and I thought he was ignoring me until he apologized and told me he was deaf in his right ear. He’d lost his hearing as a little boy, after his older brother stuck a pen in his ear, as an experiment, to see how far it would go.
It was then—in the car, as he explained about the pen and why he wasn’t at war, when he had to tilt his left ear toward me so that I could give him directions to the house and twice made the wrong turn, anyway—that I began to love him.
Do you think that’s unrealistic? That this, too, is a story I made up after the fact? To justify and excuse, perhaps—to make sense of everything that came after? Maybe. But it happens—every day, for someone.
Take little Annie Hayes, for example. Two days after the search, it was discovered that she’d been hiding in the cellar of the local pharmacist. His eight-year-old son, Richard Kelly, had been sneaking her chestnuts and milk from the kitchen all week, and they were plotting to run away together. A month earlier, he’d given her free ice cream at the counter of his father’s shop, and she had decided it was love.
Both children were whipped, of course. But Annie did, finally, grow up to marry the pharmacist’s son, and in the spring of ’52, when I had not spoken to Thomas in nearly a decade, I threw handfuls of rice at the new Mrs. Annie Kelly and tilted my face up to the sun to watch it scatter.
SANDRA
Memory is as thick as mud. It rises up, it overwhelms. It sucks you down and freezes you where you stand.
Thrash and kick and gnash your teeth. There’s no escaping it.
Down.
In Georgia, the mud was thick and dark as oil.
Down.
I remember my dad scraping his shoes on the rusted shoe box he inherited from his father, who I met only once, and who had chins like fat rolls of sausage; and my mother, vibrating like a plucked string, hitting high notes of rage, whenever he forgot and tracked mud across the floor.
And further down:
My friend Cissy’s housekeeper, Zulime, smearing cold mud on my arms swollen with poison oak, telling me to hush, now.
The flood of 1987, and the wash of water and silt thundering down the lawn from the river, and the poor turtle on the front porch.
Down and down, until all that’s left is the memory of ghosts.
Trenton’s been slinking around outside, spying, because the cops aren’t gone three minutes before he sticks his head back into the greenhouse. Caroline has gone inside, probably reloading on the sauce. Minna is just standing there, leaning against the shelves, eyes closed, birds twittering through the broken ceiling, sunlight slanting hard as knives.
“What did they want?” Trenton says, trying to act casual.
“Some girl disappeared,” Minna says, without opening her eyes, “from Boston.”
Trenton’s a little less wound up than he was before. His face isn’t so cigarette-ash gray. “Boston? So what’re they doing out here?”
“I don’t know.” She straightens up. “Hey—do you remember Danny Topornycky? Toadie?” Minna waits for Trenton to respond, which he doesn’t. “Forget it. You were too young.”
“What about him?” Trenton says.
“Nothing. He’s a cop now, that’s all. We just ran into him.” She picks at her thumbnail with her teeth. “I always really liked Danny.”
“Don’t,” Trenton says, shoving his hands in his pockets and making for the pantry door.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just don’t.” Then he stops, suddenly, and pivots. “Wait. He’s a cop?”
“Yeah. So?” It’s Minna’s turn to play sullen.
Trenton licks his lips, which are dry, full of flaking skin. “You . . . you have to do me a favor.”
“Do I?” But then: “What is it?”
“That person . . . ” he says. “The person who was shot in the house . . . ?”
Minna rolls her eyes. “That’s just a story, Trenton. I don’t even know if it?
??”
“Just find out, will you?” he says. “Just find out when, and, and . . . who. I’m just . . . curious, okay? Just ask him. For me.”
Minna sighs. “All right,” she says. “I’ll ask. But that was years and years ago. He may not know.”
“He saw her,” Alice whispers, awed. “I told you. He saw her.”
“But he thinks she’s me,” I say. That gives me a nice, long laugh.
Martin better be ready.
I wonder whether he still fiddles with his watch when he’s nervous, whether he still wears socks to his knees, whether his laugh still sounds the same: like a quick explosion.
I wonder whether he kept the letters. Probably burned or shredded them. He knew what I could do, what I would do, if I’d had the chance. He’d fed me nothing but lie after lie until I was choking on them, like one of those geese that gets cream shoved down its throat.
I wonder whether he still does his shopping at Gristedes, and whether it even still exists.
I first met Martin over the watermelons. That’s not one of those expressions, either, that means something dirty even though it doesn’t sound like it. I used to like going to the grocery store, even when I didn’t have two nickels to rub together.
I liked the way the vegetables were all laid out like jewelry in a velvet-lined case: cabbages tucked neatly next to shiny red peppers next to cucumbers next to lettuce, all of it misted over, regular, with a fine spray of water. Sometimes on hot days I’d go to the store just to bend down and put my face over the lettuce and inhale, let the water hit the back of my neck and shoulders, and pretend I was nothing but a cabbage, or a flower in a greenhouse—with nothing to do but be cared for.
Maybe that’s why Caroline was so crazy about her greenhouse. Maybe she liked pretending, too.
I’d seen Martin once or twice in passing. He had the kind of face you remember: broad and flat, with eyes as round as gumdrops, like a little kid’s face that’s just been stretched and pulled a little by the years. He was tall, too: six foot two, and sturdy as a bulldozer. That’s just how I like my men: if I wanted someone I could knock over, I’d start going in for women.
It was July and a heat wave and I’d come to the store to cool off, stick my face in the freezers and under the mist, pick up a refill of tonic and maybe some ice cream to eat for dinner. And there in the center of the produce aisle was a huge display of watermelons: a pyramid of them, stacked halfway to the ceiling, and several of them cut open to show off their insides, juicy and red, winking at me like a promise.
Of all things, it made me think of my mother, how she greased one up in lard before the church social every June, and how the kids would fight to catch hold of it; and spitting watermelon seeds off the front porch and watching the birds swoop down to eat them; and the first bite, letting juice run all the way to your elbow. The heat was making me loopy. It nearly made me start crying to think of how long it had been since I’d had a watermelon.
So I went poking and squeezing and looking for the perfect one, like I’d seen my mother do hundreds of times, working my way around the pyramid and taking my time. I never saw Martin come up. But just when I got my hands around a watermelon, his hands landed on it, too.
“It’s mine,” was the first thing I said, not taking my hands off it.
“I don’t think so,” he said. He didn’t take his hands off, either, so we were standing there, two strangers, holding a watermelon between us.
“Ladies first,” I said.
He laughed. I have a thing for teeth, and he had nice ones. “That’s old-fashioned,” he said.
“I’m old-fashioned,” I said.
“I doubt that.” The smile stayed in his eyes. “I’ve got an idea.”
“What’s that?”
“How about we share it?” he said.
So we did. We drove back to my place, and we polished off the whole damn watermelon and a bottle of Glenlivet he picked up on the way. It was the most fun I’d had in a long time, and I was flattered, too. Martin worked on the Buffalo City Council and had his own business selling medical equipment. He wasn’t some lowlife I’d picked up in a bar.
That first night was great. One of the best of my life, I’d say. I pretended not to notice his wedding ring the whole time.
PART V
THE BEDROOMS
ALICE
“Well, she didn’t waste any time, did she? Couldn’t have been quicker if she’d tripped and fallen on his—”
“Please, Sandra. Not today.”
I’m trying to ignore Sandra’s voice. I am trying to ignore what is happening in the Yellow Room entirely, but the rhythm of grunts and groans, the tapping of the headboard, like a periodic spasm, keeps drawing me back.
There is no way to get around this fact, and no point beating around the bush: Minna is bedding the undertaker in the Yellow Room.
The room smells sweet and slightly rotten. It brings back memories of nausea, makes long-ago echoes in my head—Ed’s hand gripping the headboard, eyes squeezed shut in concentration, a bead of sweat tracing its way from his forehead to the tip of his nose. Knock, knock, knock. Iron and hardness; as though he could pound away all the past disappointments.
Ed closed his eyes and saw railroads. I, too, learned to escape. Maybe that’s why I was able to adapt to this new body so quickly. I severed the connection to the old one long ago.
“Do you know what her problem is? Nymphomania. Sex addiction.”
Sandra fancies herself an amateur psychologist because she did office work for a Dr. Rivers before he fired her for stealing pills. She has the names of over two hundred phobias memorized, as she is fond of reminding me, including the word geniophobia, which is a fear of chins. For the most part, I think that psychology is no better than phrenology.
However, in Minna’s case, Sandra might have a point.
The man was in the house less than twenty minutes before she had him stripped down to his socks and he was mounting her like a dog. That is, in fact, exactly what he looks like: his pale, mole-speckled back reminds me of the shaved, ridged spines of a greyhound.
Minna is closing her eyes. I can tell she doesn’t want to look at him. I used to close my eyes, too, with Ed. The undertaker is speaking, a low murmur of babble words, curses, and exclamations. Impossible to ignore, however disgusting it is.
I try to think my way into the tangle of wiring behind the radiator. Just a little spark . . . a little friction is all I need . . .
“I think I’ve underestimated the girl,” Sandra says. “It’s impressive, really. Just think about it. Urns to underwear in thirty minutes or less! It could be a TV series, don’t you think?”
For two days, Danny Topornycky has been ignoring Minna’s calls; she’s been walking around with her phone plastered to her palm, checking it constantly. Today, she has had better luck.
Are you really here to talk urn styles? Don’t you find it depressing? I could never do what you do for a living. I’m pleasure oriented—that’s what everyone says. I love to have a good time. Do you like to have a good time, Chris?
Now Minna is quiet—surprisingly so. Her face is perfectly composed—a look of relief—as though she has finally, after a period of exhaustion, been allowed to sleep. Christopher Deber, of Deber & Sons, does all the work, and I can’t help but see: the animal haunches rising and falling under the tented sheets.
Then: a gust of air, of Outside. A twinge in our side: the kitchen door opens, and Amy runs into the house.
“Oh, no,” I say. “No.”
Sandra says, “Here comes trouble.”
“Do something,” I say, as Amy heads for the stairs.
“Mommy!” Amy calls, but not loudly enough—not so loudly that she can be heard over Chris’s grunting.
“This is terrible,” Sandra says, but I can tell she doesn’t mean it.
Amy is on the stairs. Chris is saying justlikethathuhyoulikeitlikethat and Amy is running, running. I try to think myself past the steps, ou
t of the banister, into her feet. Turn around, I want to scream. Go back.
“Mommy!” she singsongs. Not loudly enough. She is almost at the landing. Two more steps. One more minute. Chris lifts and thrusts, lifts and thrusts.
Then: a miracle. Amy trips. She stumbles on the last stair and falls flat on the landing, hard, on an elbow. Instantly, she begins to wail.
Minna snaps her eyes open. She launches Chris off her; he practically flies off the narrow bed, hitting the ground with a thud.
“What the—?”
“Shut up,” she says.
“Jesus, I was just about to—”
“I said shut up.” Her voice is low and urgent. She is looking not at him, but at the door, which is open a crack. “Get under the bed.”
In the hall, Amy picks herself up, sniffling. “Mommy,” she wails. For just a second, I have the overwhelming urge to reach up through the floorboards, to wrap myself around her.
“What?” Chris climbs to his feet, covering his Thing with one hand. His body is long and pale and lumpy, and his chest glistens with sweat. “I’m not going to—”
Minna looks at him. “Get under the bed,” she says calmly. “And don’t say a word. Don’t cough. Don’t fucking breathe. Do you understand me?”
“Christ,” he mutters. But he gets on the floor, lying down on his back. He has to uncup himself, and though I don’t want to see It, I have no choice: there it is, socklike and pathetic, already shriveling, the animal that leads men, hot and panting, through their lives. Then he wriggles, wormlike, under the bed, seeping his sweat into our floorboards, pricking us with the sparse constellation of hairs that grow from his shoulders to his waist. His heart stutters against the floorboards—staccato, irregular, bringing memories of other heartbeats. Ed, pounding; Maggie, sucking; Thomas, fitting his body to mine. Sandra, lying naked on the bed, and a small brown spider traveling her neck, her chin, her open mouth, and disappearing finally into the darkness of her throat, where I could no longer see it.
For a second, I truly hate Minna.
“In here, sweetheart!” Minna is rearranging the duvet, so it pools over the side of the bed, concealing Chris from view. She tugs the sheets to her chin, sweeps a hand through her hair.