Poe Page 11

  Nada. I’m the invisible man. A trickle of sweat inches its way down my back; I’m not used to walking so fast.

  “And then I find out—like I’m famous or something. I went into that weird little Christian store and the guy behind the counter wanted to get a picture with me.”

  At this she snorts derisively, which I take as encouragement. Technically it’s not talking, but it is a sound, a form of verbal communication.

  “And the guy had this book and he was, like, it’s five hundred dollars, like I don’t have five hundred dollars, and I was all, like, no problem, and man, you should have seen his face when I laid out that cash on the table…”

  Lisa stops short at the bus stop, crosses her arms over her chest, and peers down the street. A beige Cadillac lurches by; one wheel is slightly flat, and the exhaust sputters a plume of blue smoke as it turns the corner.

  “And then I saw the book, and it’s all in Greek and Russian, really old actually.” I’m now blathering away like the proverbial idiot. “I found some weird shit of my dad’s after he died, like this ring, and the symbol on the ring is in this book, and I’m thinking maybe this is all happening for a reason. I mean, when would I have five hundred dollars to blow on something as stupid as an antique book—”

  “Wait,” says Lisa, holding up her hand. “Your dad is dead?”

  “Sure, my parents were killed in a car accident. When I was in college. You didn’t know that?”

  “No,” she says tersely. “Like I said, we don’t really know each other.”

  Awkward pause.

  “I’m sorry,” she adds a little more gently. “About your parents.”

  “Yeah, well,” I say, and here—Shit, not now, not now—tears start to well in my eyes, so I quickly turn away from her, look toward the Devonshire Bank. There’s an old-fashioned clock that hangs out over the sidewalk, and I watch the second hand tick, gather myself. A lumbering bus approaches, the 49B.

  “My car died yesterday,” says Lisa quietly. “This is my bus.”

  It stops in front of us, and there’s a whoosh as the doors open.

  I turn to her.

  “I’ve never had a nickname in my life,” I say quickly. “My birthday is September 3, I’m twenty-three, and I dropped out of college senior year when my parents died. I was majoring in English. I have a scar on my right knee from a bicycle accident, I like tomato sauce and ketchup, but strangely don’t like tomatoes, and I write shitty obituaries for an even shittier newspaper. In my spare time I pretend to be a novelist.”

  “You getting on, Miss?” calls the driver.

  “I like chocolate cake—never vanilla, never—I’m allergic to penicillin and being on time for work, and I don’t have a favorite color, because why play favorites? I’ve been told a few times—okay, more than a few times—by the opposite sex that I can be an idiot. Yesterday I admit that I went more than a few steps past idiot to asshole. But I was jealous. Okay, so you know me. Now you know me.”

  “That’s all superficial stuff,” says Lisa.

  “But it’s a start, right? Lisa, all I want is a shot to get to know you. Just one. I won’t blow it.”

  The driver leans over his steering wheel. “Either you’re getting on or you’re not.”

  Lisa doesn’t move—doesn’t look at me. Her gaze is fixed somewhere between the second and third step of the bus. A moment passes. Another. But finally she looks up at the driver.

  “Not,” she says firmly. “He’s giving me a ride.”

  The driver mutters something unintelligible, the doors of the bus close, and I think that maybe, just maybe, doors of another sort altogether open.

  “Right here—no your other right,” says Lisa.

  We’re on the outskirts of town cruising down South Street, and I turn the car onto an unmarked road that’s not much of a road. I wish I had a Jeep instead of my Mustang, because with all the teeth-jolting potholes, I can’t imagine the muffler will make it out alive. We pass a wide field that’s planted with corn in summer but is now just a barren, weedy lot. On the left is a lonely gas station, Friendly Fred’s.

  The houses are smaller here, single-story ranches and shotgun shacks, not like the looming Victorians downtown. Some are fenced, enclosing a scattering of horses, sheep, and goats, while others have scrubby front yards and wire chicken coops. In one yard a tire swing hangs from the branch of a thick maple tree.

  “Right here,” says Lisa as we approach an unpaved driveway marked by a tall elm tree. She’s tense for reasons I can’t imagine, but I know enough not to ask.

  The driveway is rutted deeply, gashes in the frozen earth that I try to avoid by driving on the shoulder. A couple of chickens scatter before us, squawking in protest, and then a two-story farmhouse rises in front of us. It’s the same house from Lisa’s laptop pictures, and its simple white paint stands in stark contrast to the surrounding brown and dormant field. A hulking, abandoned thresher rusts quietly at the far edge of the property near where a forest begins. I put the car in park and turn off the engine.

  “This is your house?”

  “Not mine. My mom’s. Get ready.” Lisa opens the car door and steps out into the chill afternoon air.

  “Get ready for what?”

  No answer.

  I get out of the car and feel a gentle arctic breeze brush against my cheeks. It’s amazing how quiet it is out here in the country; the sound of my feet crunching across the thin layer of icy snow seems absurdly loud. But suddenly the silence is broken by a massive pit bull, which barks fiercely from the sagging porch. I’m grateful to see that it’s chained.

  “Buddy doesn’t bite,” says Lisa. “Much.”

  “Gee, thanks for the heads up.”

  Lisa just smiles at me nervously.

  A barefoot little girl charges through the front door of the house, braids flying behind her. She clutches a crayon drawing and launches herself into Lisa’s arms.

  “You’re home, you’re home, you’re home! What’d you get me?”

  Lisa gasps in mock surprise, twirling the girl in a circle. “Was I supposed to get you something? I forgot.”

  “No you didn’t, no you didn’t!”

  “Well,” says Lisa, putting the girl down, “there might be a little something in my bag. Where are your shoes?”

  The girl ignores the question. “Life Savers, I know it’s Life Savers.” She stops short when she sees me, an unfamiliar man standing next to an unfamiliar car, and then I recognize her: a little older maybe, but definitely the girl with the pink boots in the photos.

  “Who’s this?”

  “My friend Dimitri.”

  The girl eyes me warily. “What do you play?”

  I look to Lisa; some help here please? But she’s trying to cover a smirk with her hand.

  “Well, ah, what do you like to play, hide-and-go-seek?” I sound like a very bad and transparently phony imitation of Mr. Rogers.

  The girl gives an exasperated sigh, like I’m hopeless. “I play bass guitar. See?”

  She holds out her hand, and I can see her thumb has a large callous. “But Lisa’s teaching me to drum too. I’m pretty good at it.”

  “I’d like to hear you sometime.” At this her face brightens considerably.

  “Maybe later,” says Lisa. “After you’re done with your homework. And found your shoes.”

  “Damn it,” the girl mutters.

  “Amelia!” Lisa’s voice is sharp. “What did I tell you about swearwords?”

  Amelia kicks at a clod of frozen dirt with her bare feet. “I can decide if I want to use those words when I’m older and have a record deal, but for artistic purposes only.”

  “What kind of record deal?”

  “With a major label,” grumbles Amelia.

  “Exactly,” says Lisa. “Now go find your Life Savers and leave Dimitri alone for a few minutes. Think you can do that?”

  “Okay,” says Amelia, mimicking Lisa in a pitch-perfect lilt.

  “Interesti
ng parenting style,” I whisper in Lisa’s ear. I can’t miss the fact that the girl bears a striking resemblance to Lisa; they share the same Roman nose and wide brown eyes.

  “Interesting auntie style,” says Lisa.

  “This is called getting to know you. I wasn’t judging.”

  “Sure you weren’t,” says Lisa, heading up the porch steps. As if on cue, Buddy starts to growl at me menacingly, his yellow teeth bared. He looks like he’s blind in one rheumy eye, and patches of his mangy fur are missing, revealing pink skin beneath.

  “C’mon,” says Lisa. “You’re not scared, are you?”

  “Me?” My voice squeaks. “Scared?”

  My heart does start to pound as I take the first step and Buddy continues to snarl, but I think to myself that the hospital wasn’t so bad, was it? Maybe they’d put me back on the VIP floor again while the neurosurgeon team attempts to reassemble what’s left of my face.

  But as soon as I’m on the porch, Buddy turns into a doggy marshmallow, his stump of a tail starts to wag, and he sniffs my crotch in a decidedly interested way. Dogs and kids—now I remember why I avoid them.

  “See, he likes you,” says Lisa, barely containing a laugh.

  As if to further make the point, Buddy heads around behind me and starts sniffing my ass.

  “A lovely pet,” I say. “I feel violated.”

  “Buddy!” Lisa whistles, and Buddy settles slowly onto the porch floor with a whine. “Good boy,” she adds, and his stumpy tail wags in response.

  “You ready for the house tour?” She seems jittery, and I remember how revealed I felt when she was in my apartment, how I saw it through her eyes, all its flaws and imperfections.

  “I was born ready,” I say.

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that.” She inhales deeply. “Okay.”

  Together we step inside the small entry. The walls are paneled with fake dark oak, and the wall-to-wall carpet is a bright Astroturf green, like the house was built on the remains of a miniature golf course. Narrow stairs lead to the second floor, and the banister is clumsily painted white, as if it was primed but no one ever got to the painting part.

  She leads me into a tight living room. There’s a large seventies-era TV that’s built into an armoire, an awful sagging red-plaid couch covered with an orange crocheted afghan, a La-Z-Boy upholstered with cracked black leather, and an oak-veneer coffee table, the kind that comes in a box from Kmart and you assemble with a hex key wrench. Above the TV hangs a tall painting: an owl sitting in a seed-shaped helicopter while a curl of wind blows beneath. I step closer and see that a tree in the background has a human face, and the leaves are actually tiny hands. It’s part Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, part surreal Salvador Dali, in a dark green wash that gives it an antique vibe.

  “My mom paints,” says Lisa. “She has a studio in the barn out back.”

  “Nice,” I say, and Lisa shrugs, as if everyone’s mother paints owls in helicopters.

  The rest of the walls are covered with photos, the typical family brass-framed portraiture. I see Lisa through different stages of adolescence, including glasses and braces. Her hair was a different color when she was young, more of a mousy dirty blond than the deep auburn it is now. There are photos of a boy growing up as well, his hair the same mousy blond until his late teens, when he starts to sport a jet-black Mohawk. In one picture his eyes are heavily made up, and they stare directly at me, as if the photo is alive somehow. Possessed. I involuntarily shiver.

  “Daniel,” says Lisa. “My brother.”

  There are complicated emotional layers in the wistful and sad way she says “brother,” but something else as well—a trace of fear, a tangible anxiety. Her finger absently traces the thin line of her scar, which is just visible above her jacket collar.

  Suddenly Amelia tears through the screen door; it swings shut behind her with a loud thwap. “I found them, I found them!” She’s already pulled at the top of the wrapping and is prying out an orange candy with her thumb.

  “Who wants a Life Saver?”

  “I do,” says Lisa quietly. She reaches out her hand, and Amelia drops one on her outstretched palm.

  Amelia gives me the rest of the house tour while Lisa heads out to the barn to retrieve her mother. (She loses track of time, Lisa tells me, and can paint all night if no one reminds her to eat.)

  “This is the kitchen,” says Amelia, dragging me by the hand. It’s small but functional, with beige painted cabinets, a scratched yellow linoleum floor, and a matching seventies olive-colored stove and refrigerator.

  “I did these,” says Amelia proudly, pointing to some watercolors attached to the fridge with magnets.

  “They’re great,” I say.

  “Not as good as Nana’s,” says Amelia, “but she says I have potential if I can develop my point of view.”

  Before I can comment on that I find myself being dragged through a tiny dining room. There’s barely any space between the chairs and the wall, but Amelia squeezes through easily, and I catch a glimpse of more abstract owl art, smaller square canvases this time. There’s a black owl with demonic bat wings in one, standing in an empty field that’s eerily similar to the one behind the house. A figure huddles behind a thresher: a young woman.

  “My room is upstairs,” says Amelia, pulling my arm so hard I’m afraid it will come loose from its socket. The stairs creak as we go up. The green wall-to-wall carpeting continues, but here the walls are covered with different panels of mismatched wallpaper, stripes on one, faded flowers on another. Amelia pulls me into the first small room on the right; it’s painted bright pink, and the walls are covered with art and sheet music. A guitar sits on her small white bed, and a few lone dolls are scattered on the floor, looking neglected.

  “You can get into the attic from my closet,” she says proudly, as if that were the best feature.

  Next I’m pulled into a slightly larger room, painted a plain white. It has a queen-sized bed in a Shaker-style bed frame, and the sparse accessories are neatly arranged. There’s a Japanese vase containing dried milkweed pods on the simple dresser, a wooden rocking chair on a braided rug, and a carved and painted wooden owl sculpture sitting on a rustic bookshelf, continuing the theme of owls from the canvases. A third, smaller room seems to be primarily used for storage; there are sagging cardboard boxes, an assortment of plastic Christmas trees and garlands, and a sewing machine in the corner that doesn’t look like it’s been used in the past decade.

  “And this is my dad’s room,” says Amelia. The door to this room, unlike the others, is closed.

  “Um, I don’t know if we want to disturb your dad,” I say.

  Amelia sighs and rolls her eyes. “He’s not here,” she says, as if my ignorance is astounding.

  She opens the door. A small rush of stale air escapes. I peer in past the doorway. The walls are painted black. The ceiling is painted black. The carpeting has been torn up and the wooden floors are painted black. Even the windows are painted black. It’s like a dark cancerous cell, and I get a lightheaded, dizzy feeling just looking at it, like I’m back in the watery abyss at the bottom of the Aspinwall well. The closet doors are mirrored, reflecting the light from the hallway and Amelia’s small and fragile image. A mattress, stripped of bedding, has been pushed up against one wall. There is a four-pronged candelabra on the floor, and here, oddly, are the only colors in the room: the melted candles are blue, white, yellow, and black.

  “Uh, is your dad coming back anytime soon?” I’m hoping the answer is never.

  But if Amelia hears me, she ignores the question completely. “You want to see something cool?”

  Before I can answer she’s pulled me into the room, and then she shuts the door behind us, which is painted black as well. Instantly it’s pitch black and claustrophobic. I hold my hand in front of my face and can’t see it.

  “Maybe we should go see what Lisa’s up to,” I say, trying to hide the obvious panic in my voice.

  “Wat
ch,” she says breathlessly. I hear the click of a light switch.

  A black light flickers on overhead, casting us both in a purplish glow.

  “Look,” says Amelia, pointing to the walls.

  The walls are literally covered with glowing tables and numbers scrawled with a yellow highlighter, so that they can only be seen with the door shut and the black lamp on. There is something strangely logical in its obvious madness; the same square of numbers is repeated over and over.

  “He’s getting better,” says Amelia in a tiny voice. This is as much of a question as a statement.

  “I’m sure he is,” I say, giving her hand a squeeze. “I’m sure he is.”

  CHAPTER TEN: DEVIL IN THE CORNFIELD

  Dinner proves to be a simple affair—frozen pizza, frozen peas, with vanilla ice cream for dessert. It’s nicely familiar and yet also strange to be eating at a table with people, a family. I’ve gotten used to eating fast food alone, watching the evening news—my mother would be horrified. The dishwasher hums, the microwave beeps, chairs scrape on the floor, and I feel like an outsider as everyone else maneuvers through their evening ritual—“Amelia, did you put the butter on the table?” “Anyone seen the salt?” “Who drank the last of the milk?” It’s all words to a language I’d forgotten.

  Lisa’s mom, Elizabeth, seemed to stare right through me during our introduction, until Lisa said I was her friend the writer.

  “I’m trying to find my point of view,” I said, winking at Amelia.

  Elizabeth sighed, gripped my arm. “I didn’t find mine until I was forty. Don’t give up.”

  We eat off paper plates, and Elizabeth and I surreptitiously examine each other while pretending not to. Elizabeth must be fifty but looks forty, with long dark gray hair pulled back in a braid. There are smudges of blue paint under her fingernails, a few spatters of yellow on her cheek, and she wears an oversized man’s white shirt over a pair of simple jeans.

  “So, Dimitri, what do you write?”

  “Obituaries,” I say, reaching for the salt. “And I’m working on a novel. But I’m thinking about tossing it.”