Eventually, when I couldn’t feel my fingers and my toes had gone numb in my boots, I went home. The sun had set, and I remember the strangeness of the streets in the dark: the gray crust of snow over everything, the rutted sidewalks, the Christmas displays behind vividly lit windows.
I saw my sisters even before I pushed open the gate: both of them pressed face and palm to our front windows, the glass fogging with their breath, watching for me. Behind them, my father was pacing and my mother was sitting on our small cream-and-yellow-striped sofa, white-faced, with her hands in her lap.
Standing in the dark, knowing that I would go inside and everyone would fuss over me, was one of the happiest moments of my life. It was like staring into a snow globe and knowing I could shrink down and pass through the glass, that we would all remain forever suspended, safe, even as the world continued, dark and vast, outside our little boundary.
My sisters squeezed me until I thought my breath would run out. My mother cried and called me darling even as my father made me lie over his legs so he could spank me. I went to bed with a backside red as an apple, but my mother brought me soup so I wouldn’t catch pneumonia, and Olivia and Delilah piled in bed with me and read from my favorite book, The Wind in the Willows.
Thomas and I should have had an ending like that. We were to take his car to New York City, and from there a bus to Chicago, where Thomas had a cousin who would help us get set up. I imagined several jewel-colored rooms filled with books, a fire in the grate, and snow falling softly on dark streets outside our windows. I imagined lying with Thomas under a blanket filled with down, talking late into the night, waking up with the tips of our noses cold and the windows patterned with frost.
I imagined that we would be happy together, that together, we would be home.
CAROLINE
Caroline had now learned how to make a lemon tart, and that you should never actually boil an egg. She couldn’t stop reading Adrienne’s blog, TheGoldenSpoon, and refreshing the page in the hopes that more pictures would appear.
And yesterday, due to some happy accident, a series of maneuvers that she would never be able to replicate, she had found a profile that listed a hometown and even a zip code; and then, from there, after paying the ridiculous sum of $14.95, she had a telephone number. She had stared at it, stunned, for a good five minutes. She almost wished she could tell Trenton, who was always accusing her of being hopeless at computers. Trenton and Richard were amazingly alike, for people who had spent hardly any time together.
Look what I did, she wanted to say.
She told herself that she only wanted to hear the woman’s voice. Just once. She felt she would know then; she felt everything would become clear. Whether or not she was the one. Why Richard had done it. Why he’d done all the things he had done.
She picked up the phone and listened for a moment to the dial tone. How many times in her life had she reached Richard here, in this house, on that number? She always imagined their voices entangled somewhere in the wires when they spoke, caught up in a grid she didn’t fully understand, passing back and forth. Once the calls were disconnected, she imagined the echoes of old conversations would be trapped there, floating back and forth with no exit, like ghosts.
Caroline’s hands were shaking so much that she misdialed the number the first time, reached an Italian restaurant, and had to hang up and start over. The second time, she managed it.
The phone only rang once before it was snatched up. “Don’t tell me you’ve gotten on going west,” a woman said, her voice hurried, impatient, and lower than Caroline had expected from the photographs.
Caroline was seized with sudden panic. She had not expected the woman to pick up so soon—or even at all. She had not thought of what she would say. But she needed Adrienne to speak again. Was she the one? Caroline didn’t know, couldn’t decide.
Too many seconds had elapsed. “Hello?” Adrienne said—it was Adrienne, that Caroline knew—dragging out the last syllable already. “Are you still there?”
“Hello,” Caroline croaked out.
Instantly, Adrienne’s tone changed. “Who is this?” she said carefully.
Caroline didn’t answer. One second, two seconds.
“Who is this?” Adrienne repeated. “Hello?”
“Wrong number,” Caroline said and hung up. The blood was thundering in her ears, and the room was spinning. She tried to think herself down the phone line, into the kitchen—because she was sure Adrienne had answered in the kitchen, no doubt interrupted in the middle of making lemon soufflé or chicken soup from scratch—tried to imagine the mouth pressed to the phone, the hands with their neat nails, the jeans dusted with flour. Had she and Richard met in hotel rooms? Had he gone to visit her and sat with his shoes and socks off at her kitchen table, shirt unbuttoned, drinking wine, laughing, eating the food she had cooked him?
She didn’t know. Already, she could hardly remember Adrienne’s voice. She’d been too nervous.
She redialed, pressing the phone so tightly against her jaw it hurt. This time she would say nothing.
Adrienne picked up again almost immediately. “You did it again,” she said. This time, she sounded bored.
Despite her intention to say nothing, Caroline was so startled, she spoke up. “What?”
Adrienne cleared her throat. “You dialed the wrong number again. Who’re you trying to reach?”
Caroline couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She was listening so hard, she wished she could squeeze herself into the receiver and travel the line herself.
“Is this one of Bella’s friends? If this is one of Bella’s friends, I don’t care what your parents do, but in my house prank calls get you a good old-fashioned grounding.”
“It’s not . . . I don’t know Bella,” Caroline said.
There was a short pause. “Listen,” Adrienne said. Her voice had turned fearful. “Listen. Whoever you are. Don’t call back.”
Then Caroline was listening to the dial tone again.
SANDRA
It took me nearly two weeks to track Maggie down. Back then, there was no e-this and online search—just columns of identical names, and lots of dialing and dead ends and finger cramps.
At last, I got her. She was a low-voiced woman who paused before every sentence as if she was debating whether to speak at all. Even when she picked up the phone, she paused, and I counted several seconds of heavy breathing. By the time she said hello, I was about to hang up.
Why did I call her? Why did I think it was important?
Up and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly you’ve run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then it’s oops, sorry, turn’s over.
“Are you Maggie Lundell?” I said. “From Coral River?”
“Not anymore” is what she said. Then: “How did you find me?”
“I found a turtle with your name on it,” I answered.
There was another pause. And then a sound like she was overcome with the hiccups. It took me a moment to realize she was laughing.
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “I knew he would come back.”
Maggie arrived two weeks later. How could I have known it wasn’t a good idea? That even then, Alice was waiting, watching, twitching in the walls like an overgrown cockroach?
It was a day that made me glad I’d left New York and the Lower East Side and its crusty people, with faces like moth-eaten cloth. Here it was all bluebells and honeysuckle, climbing roses and birds chasing each other across the sky—a place where nothing bad could happen.
A bit of golden dust unwinding like smoke in the sky announced her; then a wide, boxy maroon Mazda came bumping up the drive. The owner matched the car: wide and squat, with a square jaw and a thatch of bright red hair, cut short. I pinned her for queer right away.
She moved slowly, deliberately, the same way she spoke. It was only eleven a.m., but when I asked her if she
wanted a soda or something to drink, she said, “Got any gin?” I liked her right away.
We sat on the deck and bullshitted for a few hours—she told me about the way the house had changed, and about the turtle she’d named Norman, and how she suspected her mother had deliberately turned him out of the house, and I told her about how I’d ended up in the middle of Buttshit, Nowhere, USA, and how glad I was. She was interested in the New York scene. She’d been living in San Francisco for three decades but had grown tired, she said, of all the “faghags.” She’d followed a job to Philadelphia after she found her last girlfriend cheating with her ex-husband—“an engineer,” she said, as if disgusted.
I didn’t blame her. I’d been with an engineer once in my life, and every time we were screwing around I felt like I was some kind of mechanical model he was trying to deconstruct or decode. Pull a wire here, twist a nob, oops, that’s not working, how about pressing this button? It’s like he expected me to start beeping and flashing a green light.
She did installation art and worked in TV production to make ends meet.
As we got deeper into the bottle, she started pausing less, talking a little freer, telling me about some of the stuff she did—trash cans inverted and made into toilets, that kind of stuff, but I’ve never been much of an art lover, and I certainly don’t know why someone would pay fifty grand for a piece of rusted metal, but whatever floats your boat. She told me, too, about the commercial work: regional stuff, mostly, although I had seen one of her TV advertisements for toilet bowl cleaner and thought it was very well done.
The afternoon lengthened and sharpened, too, like a microscope had been adjusted; the sun, the drinks, the coolness of the house every time I went inside to pee. I told Maggie about where I worked, the Rivers Center for Psychiatric Development, and about the kooks and the weirdos my boss researched: phobics, neurotics, psychotics, freaks of all shapes and sizes.
“It’s the liars I’d be most interested in,” she said. “What do they call it? Compulsive liars.”
“What about them?”
She stared out over the back lawn; sloping down toward the woods, it dropped suddenly into shadow where the sycamores and the oaks began. “Aren’t we all, in a way? Liars, I mean. Unable to help it.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’ve always been a straight shooter. What you see is what you get.”
“But that’s the whole point.” Her voice had softened as she got drunker. She wasn’t slurring, exactly, but where before she spoke in short staccato, now her voice was all melody. For a quick second, I thought of Georgia, and even missed it—the tip of a hat, the drawl of the postman saying hey there, little lady. “We don’t know we’re lying,” she went on. “Not about ourselves, anyway. Everything we see, everything we remember—it’s all just made up, isn’t it?”
A fly was drowning spectacularly in her half-empty glass. She went to take a sip, grimaced, and then fished the insect out with an unsteady finger.
“Looks pretty damn real to me,” I said and laughed.
We’d finished most of the bottle of gin before I got around to showing her the suitcase. I was sorry almost as soon as I did, because just like that the good times were over, and I realized—with the kind of bottlenecked clarity only a solid afternoon of drinking brings—that she was very, very drunk. Later that night, I would come upstairs and see her passed out in my bedroom, clothes on, spread-eagle, mouth open in a puddle of drool.
She was quiet as she examined the objects one by one, like she was puzzling over a crossword. I started getting impatient and made a joke about it, but she didn’t seem to hear me.
I started thinking about food, and whether I should eat something and risk killing my buzz, or whether I should just open the whiskey, which I didn’t particularly want to share. Would she notice if I refilled my glass in the kitchen? Was she too drunk to notice?
“This isn’t my father’s jacket,” she said abruptly. Her eyes were red and her mouth wet, like a wound in the center of her face. “It’s too small. Not his style, either.”
I was bored already—wishing now that I had asked her to leave, so I could open the whiskey and drink it in peace, while the shadows swallowed up the hill.
“I never really knew her,” Maggie said. A little bubble of spit had formed at the corner of her mouth.
“Who?” I asked automatically.
“My mother,” she said. “My father, either.” She was quiet for a bit, and I thought this might be a good time to excuse myself, take a pee, sneak some whiskey into my glass. She wouldn’t even notice.
But then she blurted out: “Did you know your parents?”
I knew what she meant, but I didn’t think it was the right time to tell her: about my dad playing tug-of-war with his buddy’s privates, about my mom babbling to Jesus in nonsense words behind the chipped white doors of the Holy Light Pentecostal Church, and bleaching the walls until plants withered in their vases and cats asphyxiated on our doorstep.
So I just said, “Parents are a bitch.”
That’s more or less how I’ve always felt about it, anyway. Parents teach you a lot of things, but the most important thing they teach you is this: how people will fuck you up in the future. If they’re any good, they teach you to get used to it.
“She never said she loved me,” Maggie said. She didn’t bother to try and wipe her nose or eyes, just sat there with her thick arms useless in her lap, one hand still wrapped around her drink. “Never once.”
Something in my stomach tightened, like she’d sunk a fishing hook just below my belly button and started to pull. I never could stand the sight of crying—hadn’t cried myself since I was a little girl and Mom walloped me ten times over the head with the King James Bible after she heard me tell my cousin Richie Rodgers to “go to hell.”
And maybe it was because I was thinking of that—the old home in Georgia, and Richie, and what had happened to him—but when Maggie looked up at me, eyes big and pathetic and desperate as an animal’s, I had a sudden memory of this time when I was twelve and my uncle Ronnie took me hunting. Richie was there, too: by then fourteen, with a face like an open sore and teeth too large for his mouth and a laugh like a donkey getting kicked.
Ronnie and I split off from Richie—I don’t remember why—and halfway through the afternoon we came across a deer, and Ronnie fired like an idiot, too far to the right. Still, the deer ran for a good half a mile before collapsing. By the time we got to it, it was gasping, kicking in pain, eyes rolling up to the sky. And I remember it fixed on me for a second and I could practically hear it: kill me, it was saying. Please kill me. Ronnie was shooting with shells the size of a thumb and I knew that inside the deer, a hundred sharp-toothed pellets had exploded like shrapnel, burrowing into its organs.
I grabbed Ronnie’s shotgun and fired three times straight into the deer’s head, until it didn’t even look like a deer anymore and I knew it could feel nothing.
That’s exactly what Maggie looked like in that moment—like that deer, silently pleading with me. And I knew that those unsaid words, I love you, were her own exploded shell: that those hurts were embedded deep, killing her slowly. I guess we all have some of these—memories like artillery shells, fired at close range.
“Well, maybe she didn’t, then,” I said to her. It may seem cruel, but sometimes, you got to just pull the trigger.
And like I said: I didn’t know Alice was watching.
CAROLINE
Three more seconds. Two. That’s all she needed.
She had to know.
She knew she shouldn’t. She tried to stop. But her fingers weren’t obeying her brain.
Caroline picked up the receiver and dialed Adrienne’s number again.
PART VI
THE ATTIC
SANDRA
Martin loved the attic. Don’t ask me why. Until he insisted on exploring the house bottom to top, I’d probably been up there twice in the whole time I lived in Coral River: once, to unload the dump of stuff
my dad saddled me with after he died; and once to check for a dead animal after the whole house went rank with a bad smell. (It was a raccoon and I found it after two days of searching, in the old laundry chute; it had crawled halfway up the wall before getting stuck. The plumber had to draw it out with one of those steel wires they use for breaking up matted hair in the drain.)
If you’d asked me—if you asked me, still—I would have said attics are like the spleen of a house. Ignored, forgotten, useless.
But six months after Martin and I first shared that watermelon, we went exploring. It had been snowing for days—that was a bad winter. Even in the ten seconds he stood inside the door, stamping ice from his boots and shaking it from his beard, a half inch of snow gathered on the kitchen floor and afterward melted all over the linoleum. He hadn’t been inside twenty minutes when they announced on TV that the road back to town was closed.
“I guess I’ll have to spend the night,” he said, putting his arms around me. Cheeky bastard. Like there was any doubt.
We were deep into a bottle of cognac (Martell, 1950) when he said it: “I want to see where you live, Sandy.”
“You’ve been here plenty of times,” I said. “Besides, I never get to see where you live.”
He ignored that. “I’ve seen the kitchen. I’ve seen the den. I’ve seen your bedroom.” He leaned forward and put his hands over mine—warm hands, but raw from the weather and the cold and rough from long-ago summers spent hauling lobsters at a wharf in Maine, calluses that had never gone away. Funny how the past gets down into the skin.
It was so cold in the attic we could see our breath hanging like miniature ghosts. Martin went back downstairs for a second bottle of cognac and a blanket, and we sat together on the hardwood floor, between the boxes, inhaling the smell of wood and damp and cold.
“Close your eyes,” Martin said. “Listen.”
“To what?” I said. There was nothing: no sound at all. Even the house was still, wrapped in its drifts like a fat old baby in a blanket.