by Melanie Finn
“I didn’t abandon her.”
“Whimbrels are not ducks, Bennett.”
“What did you tell her?”
That you’re dead. But out loud, she said, “That you made a mistake.”
Bennett was looking at her — looking for her, the old Rosie, the silly, young girl. But she was murkier. “What mistake?”
What mistake?
Leaving the toilet seat up, putting the forks away with the knives. Rosie was silent a moment.
“What mistake?” he repeated.
“You tell me, Bennett. What mistake?”
Leaning forward, he crabbed his hands toward hers, then smothered them before she could move away. “We can even pick her up tonight. Surprise her. I know it’ll take a while, there’ll be an adjustment —”
Rosie tried to move her hands, he held fast. Finally, she wrenched them away. “Your touch makes me sick.”
“Be sick then.”
But he released her, he leaned back, stretching, and his shirt gaped open to reveal his hairy belly, a cavernous belly button. What might be in there? Bits of old food, sweat, the lint of unwashed clothes, little lies like lice crawling out. She turned away. When she turned back he slid a sheaf of papers across the table to her.
“It’s the house. I’m giving it to you.”
“How is it yours to give?”
“It was always mine.”
“Not Pinky or Perky’s?”
Again, he reached for her hands, but when she snatched them into her lap, he lowered his head. “I can never atone. I lied, I stole, I abandoned you — I abandoned you, I exposed you and my child to a disgusting, utterly reprehensible person. I was arrested, I’m a felon. There it is, there it is. I don’t expect your forgiveness, I don’t expect your love. But, Rosie, Rosie, I have been so lonely and I have been afraid and all I want is a small life, a humble life. With you, with Miranda.”
Rosie could not suppress her incredulity: “This is still about what you want.”
“OK,” he said. “OK.” His eyes began to water. “I have a psychological problem. An illness. I clearly recognize this. In prison, I had the opportunity to go to therapy. A really wonderful therapist, and she helped me get in touch with myself. My childhood, my parents, my mother’s suicide.” He took a breath, then added. “’Nam.”
She waited, there was more. Always. Jack Nicholson was his brother. They’d robbed the Metropolitan Museum of Art together.
“It’s been tough, it’s been revelatory. The things I had to remember. Consequences I have to face.” He wiped away a solitary tear. “The people I love whom I’ve hurt so very, very badly. The terrible, terrible things I’ve done.”
So many, many adjectives.
“I’ve seen bone poking through living skin, Rosie, in Lai Mai, my second tour was the roughest. The inside of bodies suddenly on the outside, like turning a jacket inside out. I’ve shot a family’s only pig.” He shook his head as if it was heavy with the memory. “Their only pig, they loved it like a pet. And I laughed when I wounded it. Shot its front legs off. Can you imagine? Can you imagine?”
A long silence descended, Bennett held his solemnity. “I’m wounded, Rosie.”
This, at least, was true. She did not know the shape or source of his wounds, but she was now aware of their festering, perhaps even the faintest gangrenous smell of them.
Then Bennett threw out his arms in exclamation, loudly; other customers turned to look: “How can I make it up to you and Miranda? How can I? Tell me! Tell me, Rosie Monroe, and I’ll do it.”
“Leave,” she whispered. “You can leave and never come back.”
“Alas, alas, that is the one thing I cannot do.”
She felt his weight upon her, the way she’d once borne him as a lover, now he was stones, he was granite ledge.
He tapped the papers, he implored, “Rosie, this is the title to the house, you’ll see the notarized letter giving it to you. I want you to have it, I want you to feel secure. Whatever happens in Maine. You’ll have your own place.”
Her voice was even, she was calm, she grabbed the paperwork: “Nothing will happen in Maine.” Getting up, she put a twenty dollar bill on the table, not even waiting for the change. In the car, she fumbled for the keys, her hands were shaking. The coffee gurgled rebelliously in her stomach.
A storm moved in from the west that night. The wind and rain came clawing at the house, the darkness absolute so that she could not see the lights of town down the valley. The storm felt staged, as if Fate had decided that it needed not only to make manifest Rosie’s inner turmoil but to create the creepiest conditions possible for her to be alone in the house. She was grateful that Miranda was safe, and grateful for the lights in Billy’s house. Beside her bed she had placed her flashlight. The batteries worked, the implement was heavy in her hand.
Yet she could not sleep, the surrender was impossible. Her blood was electric in her veins, her heart raced. Why was there not a God, a useful God who might be persuaded to intervene and turn Bennett into a tree or a swan or constellation — far, far away, twinkling at night? She had phoned Ginny, and Ginny had reassured her. “Miranda is just fine, she and Margo are having a great time.”
Rosie was waiting for Bennett to come. He would always come, always, always. They would sit at the table, speak as adults, sensible, practical. Other children at school had divorced parents; they managed their loathing, they even sat together at school plays and stood together on the sidelines at softball matches. Custody, child support, the long summer holidays — these could be negotiated. And Rosie would find a way to explain to Miranda the resurrection of her father.
Dawn sun slipped into her room. Outside, the fields were gauzy with low mist. Birds sang. The chickadees, white-crowned sparrows, and vireos exalted the new day. Billy’s dogs set up a howl. They had been restless in the night, there must be a bear nearby. For a while Rosie lay still, it couldn’t be more than 4:30, there was no need to rush. For the briefest moment, she indulged herself: Bennett had left, vanished, forever.
Then: the creak-creak of the floorboards downstairs. At first, Rosie was certain she’d misheard. The storm had loosened a gutter, the screen door had blown free from its latch — the usual disintegration of the house. But the next sound was distinctive: water running from the tap, on, then off.
She was certain she’d locked the door.
A lazy little lock.
Rosie jumped up, pulled on her dressing gown, ran downstairs.
Bennett was just putting the kettle on the stove. “Want some tea?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Making tea.”
Bennett calmly made himself a tea, he knew where everything was.
“This is my house now. You gave it to me.”
“So I did.” He got the milk from the fridge. “Call the police, then.” He gestured to the phone. “Oh, wait, the power’s out and you’ve got one of those electric ones with voice mail.”
Suddenly, she recalled what Mary had said about leaving a message, and there’d been no message. Bennett. Bennett had been here. Possibly for days, ghosting in and out of the house. Listening to her messages. Poking around. With his droit de seigneur he handed her a tea.
And because something very ancient was stirring within her, she took the tea. She was walking like a deer through the dark forest, aware of every movement and sound, the predators woven within the very tapestry of the trees. And she heard Billy’s dogs, heard them in this heightened context, and their howling was not hunger or greeting; it was full of distress. Rosie sipped her tea — he’d made it for her exactly as she liked with plenty of milk — and looked out at the fields, toward Billy’s.
“I have to be at work early today,” Rosie said.
Bennett got down on one knee before her, though he did not try to touch her. “I want you to marry me.”
For the briefest second she was profoundly sad — that this might have been the truth, a beautiful second chance, the sto
ry they’d tell their grandchildren, when Grandpop came home from jail and Granny took him back and they got married. However, that required not just delusion, but an entire rewriting of their story — what had happened, who she was, who he was, not could be might be, but as a fact, like a stone, like the blade of a knife: Rosie, Bennett.
“I have to go to work. We’ll talk about it later.”
“Who taught you to drive, Rosie?”
“I taught myself.”
“Not that little freak?”
Rosie looked blank.
“You know,” Bennett said. “That fat little dyke.”
Rosie simply turned back upstairs. Dressing quickly, she considered Bennett’s choice of words — fat little dyke. He’d always thought Billy was a man.
She moved down the steps to the car, she heard herself breathing. When she glanced in the rearview mirror, Bennett was watching her, leaning casually in the door frame with his cup of tea.
Once she’d rounded the corner by the gravel pit, she parked and back-tracked through the woods, approaching Billy’s place from the river. She was afraid to call out, she could not be sure how far her voice would travel on such a still morning. If she could hear the dogs at her house, then Bennett could just as easily hear her voice. Breaking from the woods, she had to cut across open ground. She could not see Bennett, and thus she convinced herself he could not see her, a flash of mere seconds as she ran.
Never had she been inside Billy’s house. It was untidy but not dirty. Piles of unopened mail, newspapers, clothes; tatty furniture covered in old blankets — where Billy nested in her evenings. It was quiet, no hum of the fridge, no tick of a clock. As Bennett had pointed out, the power was out.
“Billy?” Whispering, from room to room. “Billy?”
Up the stairs. It was a surprisingly big house once you were in it, built for a large farming family a century ago. With only Billy, three of the bedrooms were empty but for their worn furniture. The remaining room, under the narrow eaves at the north end of the house, must be where she slept, though it was the smallest and the darkest.
Entering, Rosie immediately understood why Billy chose this room for her own: the view fell directly onto her own house. A chair faced the window. Billy had sat here for hours, for years, watching their lives — the kitchen where Rosie cooked, the small garden where Miranda played and Rosie hung up the laundry. It wasn’t repulsion that Rosie felt — anger at Billy, outrage at Billy; but a creeping sense of dread. Billy would never have willingly let her find this shameful coveting.
Bending forward, Rosie peered out the window. And there was Bennett.
She jumped back, almost falling over the chair. Of course Bennett couldn’t see her, he didn’t know she was here. She returned her gaze, watching him move around the kitchen. He was looking for something. At last, he came outside, marching in his belly-carrying way to the small woodshed Billy had helped her build. He reappeared with her shovel, went back into the house. Rosie could just see him open the basement door and descend.
Billy, she was certain — those cold words, dead certain — Billy had been sitting here and seen Bennett enter her house. Maybe even days ago. And she’d gone over there to challenge him.
Turning now from the window, Rosie opened the drawer beside Billy’s bed. Took out her handgun. Think. She sat on the bed with the gun. Think clearly, think well. But her brain was buzzing, too much was happening too fast. She checked the gun’s chamber. A fat, full round. Billy had told her to keep a gun in the house because “events turn.” But Rosie had always refused. Guns were for food. Billy laughed, “Salts fa food, peppahs fa food. Condimunts not gonna fuckin impress who needs impressin.”
Rosie stood, she went downstairs and out the door.
Across the field, along the path she and Billy had worn over the years, founda patcha morels, We had some leftover stew, Could you help with the woodshed, Figah’d this jacket’d suit for Miranda. Conversations fell between them like leaves, simply, delicately; they had divided their lives, an intuitive choreography of separation and gentle interdependence. They never shared too much, they never entered each others’ houses. Yet in this lonely place, they had relied on each other, honoring a quieter friendship. Rosie had thought this was what Billy wanted, too. But now she understood — not the secret of Billy’s salacious desires or some dark pedophilia — but her longing to be among the clattering evening kitchen and to help hang Miranda’s clothes on the washing line and sit at the table with Miranda’s homework. Rosie remembered the day when Billy had driven her back from prison up in Newport. The pretty butterfly earrings. Billy had never worn them again.
Stop the ruckus in yer head, she thought as she walked, the circus parade, and she balanced into herself, her breath, her heartbeat, the way her legs propelled her, muscles bunching, extending. Into the house, smooth with snakelike silence. Reaching the open kitchen door, she could hear Bennett in the basement, whistling a jazz tune. She moved, soundlessly across the floor, and she was at the top of the stairs when he turned and looked up. Billy’s body was at his feet.
Because he had his way of seeing her fixed in his mind, Bennett seemed not to note the gun. He remembered her vulnerability, the drab girl in MoMA. He could not see this Rosie, hardened, burnished, sharpened. His face had no particular expression, he might as well have been gardening with the shovel in his hand. His eyes met hers. What did she see? Only the form of his eye, the iris, the pupil, the white shot through with red veins. The eyes were not the windows of the soul, they were a mechanism for viewing out, they belonged entirely to their owner. What she saw was Bennett looking at her. That was all.
His gaze shifted to the gun in her hand: he was amused, dismissive. “Rosie, my girl,” he chuckled. “Is that yours?” Rosie felt the beautiful winnowing of purpose, the stillness within her, how she’d locked Miranda in her room in order to hunt and how she’d let the guy at Tire World in Littleton fuck her for a set of snow tires, she’d cleaned the toilets of junkies in a motel, she knew the names of every bird in the woods, she gathered mushrooms and wild plants, she loved the first scent of mud in the spring, she knew green wood from seasoned, she’d driven home from work so many late nights with Miranda asleep in the back of the car, she’d saved up for Miranda’s skiing lessons and orthodontics, she’d learned to use the snow plow on Billy’s truck, and she washed the feet of the dying with great tenderness. A girl like you, a girl like you: Rosie felt the fit of her skin upon her flesh, the shape of her skull, her ears, eyes, lips, and she knew her form. Bennett was still smiling, and she stopped the ruckus in her head, she saw briefly, Bennett with his expensive cheese, his bottle of wine, coming out of the supermarket, then she breathed this image aside, she did not move, the gun floated up, Bennett did not notice, still only saw a girl who looked better with her clothes off, a girl who would never leave him no matter what he did, and she shot him, the loud retort reverberated around the basement, and for a moment she blinked as her ears whined. It was a clean kill.
Billy was smaller than Rosie had thought, for she wore her clothing in layers — two pairs of jeans, three tee-shirts, two flannel shirts, and this even in the warmer days of late spring. She had died either from falling or from Bennett smashing her head, Rosie could not tell, there was only the open wound, a surround of shattered and protruding skull, blood on the basement’s earth floor. Kneeling down, Rosie shrugged her shoulders under the body, hefted herself up like a weight-lifter and climbed the stairs. Her thighs were shaking, burning by the top stair, yet Rosie knew the worst thing she could do would be sit down to rest.
Outside, she staggered, up the trail into the rough woods. Behind her, Billy’s dogs were wailing. Into the woods, they folded behind her and she climbed up. The briar, tree roots — all these she had to sense beneath her stumbling feet, beneath the dense layer of obscuring leaves; the mud, the sudden depression of a woodchuck hole, the winter’s deadfall. Saplings caught on her jacket or hair and whipped back into her face with a spiteful
snap. Crossing the stream and up the steep bank besotted with sumac, Rosie slipped to her knees, dropping Billy. She was exhausted, she couldn’t heft Billy to her shoulders. So, she stood, hooking Billy’s feet in her elbows and dragged her like a deer. At last, she reached the cemetery. In the quiet afternoon, the busy chickadees and grosbeaks flitted through the clearing, and the broad oval of a pileated woodpecker with the telltale swoop-snap-snap-swoop of her flight.
Here, amidst the mossy, crumbling headstones, Rosie left Billy. Small creatures would find her first and eat the soft tissue of her eyes, her lips, her genitals, and then the larger scavengers, coyotes, ravens, crows. Within days, Billy would be scattered, disintegrating, she would be among the wild cranberry and within the hobblebush, under birch roots, aloft in the bellies of turkey vultures. Maybe one day a hunter would find part of her, a hand bone, the gentle arc of her skull, maybe soon, maybe never and Billy would be absorbed within the mountain as all the other unaccounted dead. Rosie wanted to cover her with ferns, she wanted to build a monument, but Billy would have told her, them mountains’ll be moiy bed and tha skoiy’s a blanket.
It was dark by the time Rosie got back to the house. Adrenaline had suppressed her hunger but she was thirsty and drank long, cold glasses from the kitchen tap. Then she scooped the water over her face. The tap dripped and she listened to the drips, drawn out like a single note on the piano, clinking in the sink.
She was not done.
Down the stairs, narrow and dark, beneath the warm water heater and the frazzle of electrical wires, lay Bennett. His shirt had come open, revealing again the pothole of his belly button. He was soft bellied, she could see that now. Fat. He must weigh well over 200 pounds. How then, how then could she move him? Could she haul him up the stairs with a system of pulleys? But that would be a visit to the hardware store, a receipt, someone seeing her. Already there was the waitress in the diner, perhaps others who’d seen Bennett. Rosie looked down. The tidy rosette on his forehead might be a joke, it might be a lie, and briefly she felt a jolt of fear that he would rise up — he was not gone, he was returning and in his fury, he would place his hands around her throat and kill her. She nudged his hip with her boot, his belly jiggled, and then she knelt and tried to lift his arms above his head, thinking she might drag him incrementally up the stairs.