by Mindy Mejia
She wore a big flowery apron and her hair was tied back with a handkerchief. She was the only woman her age I knew who kept her hair long, and it made her seem timeless somehow. She had a strong, calm face and a manner to match, but today there were tremors behind her eyes.
“Well?” She bit it out.
“Mona.” I removed my hat. “Is Bud around, too?”
“Just say it, Del.” Her fingers rapped a rhythmless beat on the side of her thigh while she stood as rigid as a board. It was like her fingers didn’t belong to the rest of her, and I had a bad flash of Hattie half in, half out of the water, her strange dead body disconnected from itself.
“Can I come in?”
“Course, Del.” Bud appeared behind Mona and opened the door wider. He took his wife by the shoulders and backed her up so I could get by. She shook him off and went into the living room ahead of us.
Once I stepped inside, the smell of butter and chocolate overwhelmed me. The kitchen was full of cookies—pinwheels and chocolate chip and sugar cutouts stacked on plates all over the room.
Bud followed my glance. “She was making some for the church bake sale yesterday when we got the call about that body, and then”— he shrugged helplessly—“she just didn’t stop. She wouldn’t go to church and I don’t know if she slept at all last night.”
His voice sounded far away, like I wasn’t standing right next to him, and I didn’t know if that distance was coming from him or me.
I went into the living room and stood by the fireplace, where Hattie’s and Greg’s senior class pictures both hung above the mantel in gold frames. Hattie was leaning on a tree with her arms crossed, wearing a white shirt with a flower pinned on it and a smile that barely lifted the corners of her mouth. She looked happy. No, not happy, really. Satisfied. She looked like a girl who knew what she wanted and just how to get it. She was the child who was going to succeed and make a new life away from Pine Valley and marry some hotshot lawyer and come home only for holidays with a shiny career and a kid or two to show off around town; she wasn’t the child who was going to die. I glanced at Greg’s picture, posing with Bear and a shotgun. He’d had that razor-cut hair long before he signed up for the army and was eager as hell to ship off for Afghanistan the minute he graduated. He was the one who was supposed to die. He was the child Bud and Mona had hardened their skin for, so they could take the news if it ever came.
Bud sat on the couch next to Mona, holding her hand and waiting. How many times had I been in this living room? Hundreds, and every time Bud had made me feel like it was my living room, that those were my family pictures hanging on the walls. I took a deep breath and looked at him now. His hair was going silver and his shirt stretched tighter around his middle than it used to. He looked me dead in the eye, and I told him.
“The dentist sent Hattie’s dental records over to Rochester where the girl’s body is and they compared Hattie’s teeth to the victim. It was a match. It’s Hattie.”
Mona swayed forward like someone had hit her from behind and Bud let her hand go, but neither of them made a sound.
“God, I’m sorry, Bud.” My throat tried to close up, but I forced the words out. “Mona, I can’t tell you how awful I feel. I promise you I’ll find this son of a bitch.”
Mona stared at the faded green carpet. “Teeth?”
Bud looked right through me to the pictures on the wall. “What happened? How did she . . . ?”
“She was found at the old Erickson barn down on the lake and it looks like that’s where it happened. She was attacked by someone with a knife and she died from a chest wound.”
Bud sat perfectly still through the whole description while Mona kept shaking silently.
“You said you couldn’t identify her by her face.”
God damn my mouth. I’d been trying to keep it as simple as possible, to spare them from something.
“The attacker got to her face with the knife, too, but that may have been after she died. We won’t know until the autopsy’s finished.”
Mona let out a low kind of howl. Bud woke up from his trance and reached for her, but she threw him off.
“Get away from me!”
She stumbled up and back into the kitchen, hitting walls and choking on her own sobbing. The farther away she got, the louder her grief poured out. Mona wasn’t a hard woman, but she was as no-nonsense as they came. I don’t think I’d ever seen her spill so much as a tear in all the years I’d known her. Listening to those wrenching cries come from a woman like Mona was just about the worst thing I’d ever heard.
I leaned in toward Bud, who was still frozen on the couch.
“Bud, what was Hattie going to do after the play on Friday? I need to know as much about that night as you can tell me.”
He didn’t act like he’d even heard me, but after a minute he passed a rough hand over his face and cleared his throat, staring at the floor.
“Going out, she said. She was going out with some of the kids to celebrate opening night.”
“She didn’t say who specifically?”
“No. We figured it was the whole crew of them. They’d all gone out the weekend before, too, after they finished building the set.”
“She wasn’t standing with anybody in particular?”
“She was standing with us.” His voice broke and he swallowed. “She was right there with us.”
The crash made us both jump. I ran through the kitchen toward the back bedroom that Bud and Mona shared. Mona lay on her side on top of the remains of a small spindle table. It looked like her legs had buckled underneath her. Her back shuddered uncontrollably among the mess of tablecloth and books and wood. When I tried to see if she was hurt, she started wildly hitting at me and her cries changed into a high, keening sound. I walked back to the living room to see Bud hadn’t moved. His hands were turned palm up on the couch, fingers curled in like a baby’s.
“Bud.”
He didn’t answer. His eyes were unfocused. There was a smear of flour in his hair where Mona’d shoved him.
“Bud.”
Woodenly, he stood up and walked into the bedroom. He bent over Mona, covering her sobbing body with his own. I wiped my eyes and let them alone.
Pine Valley High School was a one-story brick building on the south side of downtown, marking the point where the storefronts on Main Street turned into houses and gas stations. It hadn’t changed since the sixties, when they put on the addition of the new gymnasium.
Pulling into the half-full parking lot, I met Jake outside the front doors and we followed the signs to the “new gym,” where the play was already under way. Three weeks and a lifetime ago I’d promised Hattie I would come to the Sunday matinee performance. Now here I was.
Jake skimmed a program. “Says Hattie was playing Lady Macbeth.”
We sidled inside and took some empty chairs in the back. Two kids were on stage, both wearing white costumes and standing in front of some castle scenery. I recognized the Asian girl, Portia Nguyen, but didn’t know the boy. They were talking in that flowery Shakespeare language I never cared for, but eventually I tuned in to what they were saying. She was trying to get him to kill somebody and he seemed on board with it. At the end of the scene, she crossed over to him, plotting their reaction after the murder.
“We shall make our griefs and clamor roar upon his death.”
He took her hand. “I am settled and bend up each corporal agent to this terrible feat. Away, and mock the time with fairest show.”
He led her offstage, speaking to the darkness.
“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”
Afterwards I pulled the teacher in charge aside and told him I needed to talk to the whole cast and crew. He went pale, but didn’t ask me a thing. Peter Lund was his name, a young guy with glasses and no dirt under his nails.
Lund told everyone he wanted to do a “quick wrap,” and called them into the music room. After the doors closed, it was dead silent as the kids wait
ed.
“Great show, uh—everybody. Portia, you . . . you did well. We’ll break the set down in a minute, but Sheriff Goodman needs to talk to all of us right now.”
He walked to the back of the room, leaving me and Jake alone in front. Some of the girls were already crying. Pine Valley was as small-town as they came, and I knew all of them had heard about the body within hours of the discovery.
I didn’t beat around the bush. I gave it to them straight and they acted about the way you’d expect a group of teenagers to act when one of their own got stabbed to death and showed them all for the first time they were mortal. There was shock and a lot of tears and wailing. Most of the boys turned into cardboard, frozen and ready to be knocked over with a feather. Most of the girls held on to each other. Lund hunched in the back of the room with his head in his hands.
I gave them a little bit for the news to settle in but got to the reason I was there before the trauma took over completely.
“She was killed on Friday night after the play. Now I need each and every one of you to think. Do this for Hattie now. Who did she leave with that night? Did any of you meet up with her afterwards for a party, anything like that?”
“Some of us went down to Dairy Queen, but she didn’t show up there,” said the boy who played Macbeth. He looked more like he was losing his mind now than he had up on stage a few minutes ago.
“Tommy was at the performance, wasn’t he? Didn’t she leave with him, Portia?” one of them asked.
Portia Nguyen unwrapped herself from another crying girl and looked up with a flat, wet face. Her crown was tilted in her hair. “Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t talk to her much. I didn’t even say congratulations.”
“Tommy would have given her a ride if she asked. He would have done anything she wanted him to.”
“Tommy who?” Jake asked.
“Tommy Kinakis,” I answered. Hattie’d been dating him for most of the year, if I remembered right. I’d watched him as an offensive lineman on the varsity team last fall. He was solid, hard to get around, had never let his quarterback get sacked in any of the games I’d been to. If a kid like that wanted to put a knife through somebody, there wasn’t much that would stop him.
“I know what killed her.” Portia stood up and faced me like she was ready to start rattling off one of those long speeches from the play. “It was the curse.”
“Come again?”
Some of the kids gasped and covered their mouths.
“The curse killed Hattie. The curse of Macbeth.”
PETER / Friday, August 17, 2007
CONGESTIVE HEART failure was going to kill me.
I was twenty-six years old and in the best shape of my life. Granted, I had nowhere to go but up. I’d evolved from the skinny high school nerd to a guy who ran at least fifteen miles a week. I could’ve probably even benched weight if I ever dared go into those weight rooms full of sweaty, meathead guys. I ate an organic, vegetarian diet and I didn’t smoke—but congestive heart failure was ruining my life.
“What do you want for dessert?”
I watched Mary across the table. She’d scarcely spoken since they brought our entrees and kept glancing at her watch like we were out past curfew.
“Chocolate mousse?” I asked with a grin. After seven years together, I knew she couldn’t resist anything with chocolate in it. I’m sure a lot of people say that about their wives, but I’d once watched Mary eat chocolate-covered bacon at the state fair. Fried pig fat dipped in chocolate. And she’d laughed at my green face and said it wasn’t all that bad.
“I guess so.” She shrugged.
I waved the waiter over and ordered a coffee along with the dessert. This was the kind of place where you could wave a discreet waiter over, order a caffè americano, and they nodded in approval. Drop lights hung over the tables, wrapping each party in their own cocoon of light. It was modern yet romantic, a place that probably catered to the medical crowd from Mayo. Mary hadn’t wanted to drive all the way into Rochester, but the restaurant choices in Pine Valley were a Dairy Queen or a café that closed at 7:00 p.m. Besides, there was no movie theater in Pine Valley and this was our traditional dinner-and-movie date, except that unlike most couples we always switched the order. Movie first, then dinner, so we could discuss what we saw. That’s what we’d done on our first date when we watched American Beauty and argued over each character’s moral superiority until the waitress actually asked us to leave so they could turn over the table. Lengthy, flirtatious debates weren’t going to cause any seating issues tonight.
The coffee came and I sipped it right away, burning my tongue. I didn’t care. I kept drinking and watching Mary, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong.
Her hair was down tonight, reflecting a luminous gold halo from the light, and it fell in her face as she stared at the table, the other diners, the bay windows, anything that wasn’t me. Mary had an apple face, the kind of wide cheeks that could scoop up happiness and share it with buoyant democracy, but I couldn’t find any joy in her tonight.
She wore her 1950s blue shirtwaist dress, and I’d hugged her when she came downstairs at the house, kissed her cheek, and whispered, “Hello, beautiful.” She smiled and ducked away. I assumed it was because Elsa was sitting on the couch watching us, but Mary acted the same way the rest of the night. Polite. Distant. Like the entire evening was more of a chore than mucking out Elsa’s chicken barn. The movie didn’t help and that was completely my fault. I picked Knocked Up because Mary liked romantic comedies and it had gotten good reviews, but neither of us laughed much. We hadn’t used birth control since our wedding night and after three years of trying for a baby, she had to sit there and watch two idiots pretend to get pregnant in a sloppy one-night stand.
“I’m sorry about the movie.”
She finally looked up at me. “It’s okay.”
“I should have thought of it.”
“No, really, Peter.” Mary sat up straighter as someone came and quietly put the dessert on the table between us. “Babies haven’t been on my mind lately.”
“That’s too bad. After this I wanted to go park the car somewhere and neck. Or more.” I winked at her. She said nothing so I continued, hopeful.
“It feels like we’re back in the dorms again. Waiting for our roommates to leave, or finding a quiet park. Remember the second floor of the Fourth Street ramp? The side where the lights didn’t work?”
She took a spoonful of chocolate and shook her head. “We have to get back. We’ve already been gone too long.”
“Elsa’s done fine on her own for seventy-three years. She’ll make it through another hour.”
Mary took another bite, ignoring me. Then she abruptly set the spoon down and crossed her arms.
“What is it?”
“Ten dollars for chocolate mousse. That’s crazy.”
“Well, it’s even crazier to order it and not eat it then.” I dug in. It was damn good. Light and rich and not too sweet.
“Try another bite. This one’s the ten-dollar bite.” I hovered a spoonful in front of her face and she sighed before taking it.
She started eating again, but quietly, unwilling to engage. I drank the rest of my coffee and tried to draw her out. Nothing worked.
When the bill came, Mary immediately grabbed it. She paid the waiter and picked up her purse. “Are you ready?”
“Elsa’s fine,” I said, rubbing her arm as we walked to the car.
“I know,” she replied, even though we both knew her mother wasn’t fine.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Sixty-eight dollars for dinner, Peter. On top of twenty for the movie. Who do you think is going to pay for all that?”
“I’ve got a job. We’ll have money.” Her irritation was slowly seeping into me now, too.
“You haven’t even started working yet and you’re already spending it.”
“I just wanted us to go out and have a nice time,” I said over the car roof before we
both got in and slammed the doors.
The road to Pine Valley was a dark, flat, two-lane highway lined with crop fields. Neither of us bothered with the radio. The evening seemed, unfortunately, past the point of salvation.
If I was going to be honest—which, with every passing mile of towering cornstalks, sounded like an increasingly reasonable idea—I still couldn’t quite figure out how I’d gotten here.
I was a Minneapolis kid. I grew up hanging out at uptown coffee shops, debating the cover art of my high school literary magazine over pasta at Figlio’s, and spending every weekend flipping through CDs at the Electric Fetus. I met Mary at the U and we got married the summer after graduation. We were probably too young, but Mary’s parents were old. She’d been a late-life baby, their ultimate surprise after years of infertility and relinquished dreams. They gave Mary every opportunity, lavished her with love and support, and in return she wanted to give them the gift of seeing her married and settled. I maxed out my credit card and put that diamond on Mary’s finger and we stood at the altar of her hometown church while Mary’s parents beamed from the front row. The wedding comforted both of us when, the very next spring, her father had a massive heart attack and died planting his soybean fields.
After the wedding, we found a Victorian one-bedroom rental on the bus line, and I started grad school while Mary got a job at one of the banks downtown.
And then congestive heart failure came along.
Elsa, Mary’s mother, started getting weaker and weaker. Mary began driving down once a month to check on her and help out around the farm. There was always some canning to do or an outbuilding to repair or doctor appointments to keep. I tried making jokes about my farmer wife, but Mary laughed less and less. Then she was making trips every weekend and since some of my classes were at night, I wouldn’t see her for days at a time. By the time I graduated and got my teaching license, Mary was spending three days a week in Pine Valley and working ten-hour days in the city to make up for it.