by Kelly Harms
Now both women are staring at me with wide eyes. “You better talk, missy, if you want us to do any favors,” says Aunt Midge.
I look back and forth between them, pretending to weigh my options. “I just don’t know who to trust…”
Janey looks truly concerned and I push back a twinge of guilt. “If you’re in some bad trouble, maybe you should talk to the police. They’ll help you,” she says.
“Or just tell us,” says Aunt Midge with a greedy expression. “We won’t tell a soul, will we, Janey?”
I look to Janey for confirmation. She looks at Aunt Midge. “I don’t know.… Maybe it’s better if she goes to the authorities with whatever it is.”
“I could never do that,” I tell her. “It’s too, too … dangerous.” Then I purse my lips and look off into the distance as though I’m trying not to cry.
That does it for Aunt Midge. She is frothing at the mouth with curiosity. “Janey, tell her you won’t tell anyone. Swear it.” Her voice is authoritative enough that even I would obey—so I know reliable Janey will do as she says. She nods.
“Fine. I won’t tell anyone. But I still think you could go to the police.”
I wait another moment for the anticipation to build even more, then take another swig of cold coffee. When I’ve swallowed, I look straight at them and deliver the clincher.
“I killed a man,” I wail, and burst into tears. In the ensuing shocked silence, I congratulate myself on my diabolical brilliance.
JANEY
“Do not make loon soup.”
—recipe for loon soup, from The Eskimo Cook Book, 1952
“Oh for Pete’s sake.” Despite her so-called frailness, Aunt Midge leaps off the sofa with great indignance. “Would you listen to this horseshit?” she asks me. “I’m sick of these lies.”
Aunt Midge storms into the sunroom and, like a bolt, Nean follows her. I trail behind them both, forgotten but nonetheless dying of curiosity.
“No, wait,” says Nean, chasing after Aunt Midge. “It’s true. It wasn’t on purpose, but, but…” She slows and begins to falter. “But I had to do something to stop him…” then she collapses onto the love seat and buries her face in her hands. Her shoulders begin to shake.
I want to cross over to her and take her in my arms. It’s the damnedest thing: I hate this woman, truly. She’s ruining everything for Aunt Midge and, by extension, for me. She stole all our stuff, which includes my cookbooks, and trapped us for the night in this house without any real food or personal belongings. Then she stormed her way back in and went to great trouble to keep us from signing our deed, effectively trying to steal the house right out from under us. But I have learned this in the five years since the shyness took over: the one thing that can overcome my fear of people is someone more pathetic than me. I blame this on some quirk of female biology—I would probably try to pet an injured grizzly bear if I got the chance.
I look at the shuddering creature on my—yes, my—couch and then to Aunt Midge, hoping she’ll somehow give me permission to just temporarily befriend the enemy, calm her down, stop her crying. She looks back with hard eyes and shakes her head firmly, and I sigh.
But then Aunt Midge looks back at Nean, or rather Nean’s scalp, since all that is visible of her in her miserable state is the top of her head and her two little fists clenched over her eyes. Aunt Midge’s mouth opens in a little o, and she walks toward the sofa. “What happened to your head?” she demands, when she is standing right over her.
Nean’s weeping slows to sniffles, and she lifts her face up to imposing Aunt Midge. “What do you mean?” she asks, her voice thick.
“There are patches of bare scalp, did you know that?” I dart my eyes to Nean’s head. Sure enough, there are missing chunks of hair right at the crown. “Are you sick?”
Nean instinctively moves her right hand up to touch her hair and I see for the first time that it’s covered in ugly cuts. They’re old and half-healed, but nonetheless in the bright natural light I can see lacerations all over the knuckles and cascading down the back of her hand. Aunt Midge sees it too. She grabs Nean’s hand in hers and yanks it closer, squints. “Janey, get my glasses.”
I obey and bring them to her, and take the opportunity to sit down next to Nean and rest one hand on her back. “What happened to you?” I ask softly, while Aunt Midge is peering through her readers at the injuries on Nean’s hand.
Nean trains her eyes on my face. She’s watching me closely, sizing me up. I try to look open to whatever it is she has to tell me.
It must work because words start to spill out of her. “It was self-defense,” she says. “When they announced my name in the sweepstakes, he got so upset. He’d been drinking, and he … he didn’t want me to leave him, to come here. He said I had to be with him forever. I could never leave him, or he’d kill me. I was so scared…”
Aunt Midge sits down on the other side of her and grabs her knee. “And? And?”
“I just knew I had to get away from him. He was so strong. If I didn’t escape then, I never would. It was the only way.”
Aunt Midge gasps and covers her mouth with one hand. Her eyes are in danger of popping out of her skull. “Nean?” she asks, her voice barely above a whisper. “Did he hurt you? Did he do this to your hair?” She sounds dramatic enough for the Lifetime network, but she’s asking what I want to know too.
Nean nods in solemn silence.
“And did you hurt him back?” Aunt Midge asks, leading her down a scary path.
Nean nods again.
“Did you kill him, Nean?”
Nean lets out a wail and curls her legs into her body like a child, not answering. There’s no need.
“It’s okay,” Aunt Midge singsongs. “It’s okay. Whatever happened, it’s over now.”
Nean says nothing coherent, but the crying slows a little. “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” she says at last, in a quiet little voice I haven’t heard from her before. “He wouldn’t let me come here, and I just wanted to be free.… It was so awful…” She seems to be regaining her composure as she speaks.
“I know, sweetheart,” says Aunt Midge. She rubs Nean’s back comfortingly and Nean falls into her shoulder. Still reeling with shock, I try to ignore a twinge of jealously at Aunt Midge’s tenderness but fail miserably.
After a moment, Nean sits up. “So you see why you can’t tell the police anything?” she asks, suddenly all business. “I don’t know what happened after I left … if they found him … if they know it was me…” she chokes up a little again. “I just have to find someplace safe to hide for a little while. That’s why I was so desperate for this house. I can’t go back there and there’s nowhere else to—”
Nean is interrupted by the sound of car wheels on a gravel driveway. All three of us jerk our heads toward the front windows and gasp a little like we’ve been caught at something illicit. Which maybe we have. What if it’s the police? What if they’ve figured out what happened to Nean’s boyfriend and are coming after her—and us too, for harboring a fugitive?
Suddenly I feel red-hot angry. If Nean is telling the truth, I do feel sorry for her, really I do. But she should have gone to the police right away, not come up here and put her problems on my aunt and me. If we’re in trouble somehow for letting her stay here … I clench my fists, hating all the grouchy energy surging through me like too much sugar on a hot day.
While I think these bitter thoughts, we sit frozen like woodland creatures while we wait for something to happen. When we hear nothing further we all start to relax and turn back to each other. And then the doorbell rings.
I look at Aunt Midge. “The doorbell plays ‘La Cucaracha’?”
She just shrugs, like this is the most natural thing in the world. “You go answer it. If it’s the police don’t tell them anything.”
The walk to the door feels like the green mile. When I get there I peer out the side windows and smack my forehead in the universal sign for “duh” when I realize who it is.<
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“It’s Noah,” I hiss to the other two.
“Who?” asks Aunt Midge, too loud as ever.
“The guy who brought Nean back last night. Maybe he can give her a ride back into town.” I unlock the deadbolt with relief, more than ready to see the back of this girl and all the drama she’s brought with her.
“Like hell he can,” I hear Aunt Midge say as I’m opening the door, and my stomach drops. Behind me, her comment has scared the poop out of me, and, in front of me, Noah is standing there looking really, really good in the same thing he was wearing yesterday, only now his shirt is unbuttoned and a fresh white crewneck T-shirt shows through. Blue jeans and white cotton. My mouth goes dry. I motion into the house and try to figure out what to say. “Come in?” I finally try.
“Good morning,” he says, sounding as jovial as ever, but he doesn’t actually step inside, hovering instead right in the doorframe. “Muddy shoes,” he tells me, and I nod, following his easy gesture down his body to his work boots. I am distressed to find that he looks just as rugged and charming in the daylight as he did in the dark. “How was the houseguest?”
At the mention of Nean, my head snaps around and I see that the woman in question is no longer in view. Aunt Midge has probably spirited her away someplace, possibly under the floorboards or in a secret passage behind the bookcase. This is not good.
“Um…” I try to focus on the braided rug on the floor and not my aunt or Noah. “She’s just fine?” Well. That didn’t sound authoritative at all.
Aunt Midge pipes up and crosses the foyer to Noah. “Good morning! We haven’t met. I’m Janey’s Aunt Midge. Janey tells me you were a big help with our U-Haul?”
Noah smiles and shakes her offered hand. “Well, I did think there was something odd about the situation when I found her by the side of the road. After all, even in Maine most people wear pants for long drives.”
Aunt Midge waves an arm in front of her face and goes into full bluster mode. “Oh, ha ha ha, well, no, nothing odd, just a silly miscommunication. She was taking the truck out to fill it up with gas for us, but we didn’t realize just how low the tank had gotten. Silly old me, I forgot to explain the situation to Janey.”
Noah looks from me to Aunt Midge and back, eyebrows raised. “I see,” he says at last, clearly not buying her nonsense anymore than he should. “But I thought there had been some sort of mix-up over the ownership of this house?”
Aunt Midge chuckles. “Oh, it’s the funniest thing.” I narrow my eyes at her. I haven’t been laughing. “Another miscommunication. My fault! I really need a fresh set of hearing-aid batteries.” She puts a finger to her eardrum, where a hearing aid would go, if she had one, which she doesn’t. I cast my gaze heavenward. The woman has ears like a bat, when it serves her.
Noah furrows his brow. “That is funny.”
Aunt Midge does another one of her creepy forced laughs. “Oh, ha ha ha! Isn’t it just? No matter, it’s all sorted out.” My mouth pops open in surprise.
Now Noah looks truly perplexed. He must think we’re crazy people. “It is?”
“Oh yes. There’s a perfect solution, you see. She’s moving in with us.”
My heart stops and I grab Aunt Midge by the arm and drag her out of the hallway. “She’s doing what?” I hiss the moment we are out of sight. Anger is pushing on the backs of my eyes, hotter and hotter.
Aunt Midge looks at me like I’m the one being ridiculous. “Don’t get your knickers in a bunch,” she says in full volume, as if Noah isn’t ten feet away wondering what the hell is wrong with us. “We’ll just let her stay here until she’s back on her feet and the heat has died down.”
“The heat?!”
“Well, would you rather turn her in and let her rot in jail?”
“She’s not going to rot in jail. It was self-defense,” I whisper.
“Is that a chance you’re willing to take?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not sending the poor thing to Sing-Sing,” she tells me. I resist the urge to point out that Sing-Sing is a long way from here, and a men’s prison. “And besides, we have plenty of room. It’ll be fun.”
I think living with a woman who might at any time steal my car sounds about as much fun as snake handling. Not to mention the fact that, God help me for being skeptical, but her story does seem awfully convenient considering. I mean, if it were really true, wouldn’t she have avoided trouble at all costs, rather than risk us going to the police? Although, something has to explain the clumps of missing hair and bloody knuckles …
I turn away and walk further into the house, buying a moment to think. Is Aunt Midge right? Should we do the neighborly thing and house her until a better solution comes around? I press my eyes tight and a vision of Ned comes to me, as it often does when I’m feeling steamrollered. I ask him for help but he doesn’t move or do anything besides pose there in the front of my brain in his blue parka and ski goggles, and I know in my heart that it’s Ned from a vacation photo I kept of him. Not real, alive, dynamic Ned from my memories, but a flat image that’s beginning to replace them.
I open my eyes and level my best glare at Aunt Midge. “No,” I say. “She is not staying here.” But though I say that, I have already capitulated. I am just putting up the appropriate level of fight now, an “I told you so” worth of struggle in case I need to point it out later.
Aunt Midge knows this—I guess she can read it on my face. “Just for a little while,” she says, her voice now gentle and warm. “We’ll be three women against the law, just like Thelma and Louise and … Brad Pitt. Think of it this way: she’s one more person for you to cook for.” She turns away from me, discussion over, and marches into the foyer where Noah has undoubtedly been listening all this time.
“Son, you willing to give my niece a ride to our truck? We’d like to start getting unpacked and settled in.”
“Of course, ma’am,” he says in a way that makes it impossible to tell if he’s been charmed by her old-lady wiles and is eating out of her hand or if he’s just obliging to get out of this crazy house. “You sure you don’t need me to drop off Nean anywhere?”
Yes! I think from the hallway, wishing for telepathy or at least the guts to say what I want. Yes, get her the hell out of here and leave me alone in my fancy new kitchen so I can try out my new recipe for All-Day Bolognese. But I don’t actually say anything, and Noah doesn’t seem to be able to read my mind. I come round the corner and Aunt Midge is giggling and telling him she’d like to hire him to help us move our stuff in, all the while feeling his biceps like a sixteen-year-old cheerleader. I sigh and go look for Nean to tell her the good news.
* * *
Thirty minutes later I am riding toward our U-Haul in a slightly odiferous Honda Accord built in the year of the Lord’s birth. The Maine landscape is a dense one, and the moment we pull away from the house, all sights, sounds, and especially sweet smells of the ocean drop away and I find myself looking out at a forest that looks not unlike the sort you’d find in Iowa, except with a few more evergreens. This is home now, I tell myself. Soon I’ll get a car and find a job sewing hems somewhere, and it will be just like Cedar Falls, only with a much nicer, much larger kitchen. No big deal. Normalcy is returning, I promise myself.
Except for the fugitive houseguest. And the fact that I am trapped in a vehicle with a stranger. Noah and I haven’t said a word to each other since we got in the car, which is just fine with me. He is a good arm’s length away from me, plus we’ve got a gear shift and two broken cup holders to keep us apart, and I thank the gods that he isn’t driving the beat-up pickup truck with the slidy bench seats that I thought all mountain men were issued at age sixteen. If he were, I would probably have to jump out of the moving vehicle.
Since Ned died I have not been in a car with a man. Period. I haven’t really been in the car with anyone besides Aunt Midge and this hyperattractive blond girl from Wedding Belles Too whose VW Bug was always in the shop. She didn’t ma
ke me nervous; she made me sad. Now it’s been ten minutes of riding in a car with Noah, and I am already neck to toe in little-bitty hives. I know they are going to show above my V-neck T-shirt when they mature in a few minutes. I rest my hand over my neck as subtly as I can until I realize it might look like I am rubbing the place where a dog collar once was. Wearing a collar has to be weirder than getting hives around strangers, so I drop my hand and go for the lesser of two humiliations.
“You’re flushed,” says Noah. My hand goes right back up to my neck without my telling it to. “Is it too hot in here?”
Cool air sounds like a wonderful idea, so I nod and he starts rolling down his window with an old-fashioned crank. I do the same and feel fresh piney air fill the car. “Better,” I say, hoping the redness in my cheeks will go down now.
“We’re not far from where she left the truck,” Noah says. “Maybe five more minutes. It’s actually kind of a lovely spot, in the daytime. The road gets close to the bay, and you can see the sailboats coming by.”
I nod again. But now my head is filled with thoughts of standing arm in arm with Noah on the banks of the bay watching the boats go in and out. God, where did that come from?
“I know it’s none of my business,” he goes on, and my stomach clenches at those words, “but Nean seems kind of fishy.”
I tilt my chin to him. I’m loathe to voice the persistent doubt I feel about the whole situation to him but am actually kind of pleased that he saw through Nean’s blustering. “Well…” I say at last. “It’s complicated.” Then I start coughing. It’s just a few gentle “excuse me” coughs at first, and then my lungs start heaving like a TB patient’s.
Noah turns his eyes from the road to me, looking deeply concerned before turning his head back to drive. “Hey, are you okay?” In response I keep coughing. It’s more of a hack now. I feel like I have something in my throat, but I haven’t even eaten today. What could it be? Am I choking on my own spit?