This was it. Ed Baxter’s house.
She shoved the napkin in her back pocket and walked up the cracked sidewalk toward the front door.
It was impossible to know how she would feel without having had that … experience with Jackson a few hours ago. But right now she was keenly grateful for having had it, because the edge of her anger was filed down and she was able to ring the doorbell without feeling trapped by the specter of the book.
Masturbating in front of Jackson, watching him touch himself, had set her square, somehow. Given her the distance—the armor—she’d needed a few hours ago and had been scared she’d never get.
But still, standing on that cement porch, three short steps up from the dying grass on the lawn, her knees shook and her hands were sweating and her nerves were on high alert. She was going to do this, open up this door so long shut.
When the storm door opened behind the screen door, revealing a small man who looked like an older version of Sean, she smiled.
“Ed Baxter?”
The man—Monica would put his age at about seventy—nodded, reaching out to push open the screen door. “Come on in,” he said, and she pulled the door open the rest of the way so she could slip inside.
A sense of neglect hung over the house, which was clean enough, but sparse. Empty-seeming. A sea of shabby beige. Not dirty, just worn. The few frames on the wall were all cockeyed, the photos faded. There were no knickknacks. No rugs. No blankets tossed over the side of the couch.
It was an eerie tableau.
The table beside the recliner was cluttered with prescription bottles, the only real sign of life.
“Sit,” Ed said, walking toward the kitchen. “You want coffee?”
“Only if you’re having some.” She glanced at the photos on the wall. Sean showing off a gap-toothed smile on Christmas morning. A round, red-headed woman caught in a pensive moment. A couple of family shots with Brody standing a few feet away, his dark eyes like bruises in a very serious face. Looking at the photos, it was obvious Ed and his wife were older when they had Sean.
There’s a story here, she thought, looking at Brody’s little face in the pictures.
Ed came back out, carrying two coffee cups. His hands had a tremor, and the coffee was in danger of sloshing out of both cups. She reached out to help, but he handed her a cup before turning toward his chair.
“Sit,” he said. “You said you had some questions.” He collapsed back in his chair, the coffee splashing up on his already spotted shirt.
“Yes.” She sat on the couch, which predictably sagged, and pulled out her notebook and her recorder. “Do you mind if I record you?” she asked. “It’s only to make sure I get everything.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
She put the recorder on the edge of the couch closest to him and opened her notebook. A strange calm enveloped her. The people she was going to talk about were characters. Just characters. She was researching other people’s parents. Other people’s tragedy.
“Your family has owned The Pour House for three generations, right?”
Ed nodded. Took a sip of coffee. She waited for more but he was silent.
Oh boy.
“Your father owned the bar when my mom was growing up.”
Ed nodded again. “Dad hired Neil … your grandfather … I guess after he got back from Vietnam. Gave him the apartment over the bar.”
“Neil was in Vietnam?”
She didn’t know that. Not that she’d ever met her grandfather, but that explained the service revolver.
“Did you know Neil?” she asked.
Ed glanced at her as if he knew what she was trying to do, the way she was keeping this story at arm’s length. It won’t work, his stony face said. Sooner or later those sharks are going to get you.
“Neil was a good guy. He had a temper, some bad spells. But he was a good man.” Ed took another loud slurp of his coffee, a strange period on the topic of Neil.
“Did you know Simone?” she asked. Her internal calm cracked at the mention of her name, revealing a waiting tremble.
Ed smiled, giving her the impression that whatever he was going to say was only part of the story. The far less interesting part.
“I was older than her by quite a few years. But she was a wild thing. Just wild.” His chuckle sputtered into a cough. “Neil tried, but he was all alone and she … she just ran circles around him. The girl needed a mother, not a father with … well, Vietnam in his head, I suppose. No one was surprised when she ran away. She was … she was never meant for this place.”
“And when Simone came back …?”
“With you, you mean?” He seemed bent on reminding her that she’d been there. A witness. A victim.
Monica nodded.
“She’d been on a bus for two days,” Ed said. “That’s what she said, and it was hard not to believe her. I was running the bar then and the apartment above the bar had been empty since Neil died, so … it’s not like it was a big deal letting her stay there.”
“How did she seem?” Monica asked.
“Seem?” Ed laughed, a gurgle in his throat. “She seemed like a rabbit being chased by a big fucking dog. Pardon my language …”
“She was scared?”
“You … you were scared. A little ghost trying hard not to cry. She was terrified. She was …” Ed shook his head. “You’re the writer. Suffice it to say I’d never seen anyone at the end of their rope like that.”
Monica nodded. She couldn’t take a deep breath without rubbing up against some emotion or dim memory she wanted to avoid. The bus trip—she’d forgotten about that. And now at the mention of it, the memories floated into place. Those long, exhausting hours. The mountains outside the window. Endless games of Hangman. Fried food from gas stations. Falling asleep with her head in her mother’s lap. Mom’s fingers in her hair.
Monica cleared her throat. “How long was she … were we … there before JJ came?”
“JJ showed up the next night. Drunk. Angry. Came charging into the bar screaming for his wife. Calling her terrible names.”
You slut. You goddamn whore. Spreading your legs for every fucking man who looks your way.
Monica shook her head. Whether the memory was from that night or some other night hardly mattered. There were a lot of nights like that. A lot of names. So many memories pushed away for so long were now crowding back.
“Did he know … where she was?” Monica asked.
“Must have—he walked right through the bar to the back alley. Started climbing the stairs.”
“Did anyone try to stop him?”
“He punched Sid Bates to the ground. Kicked him like a dog when he tried to get in the way.”
Monica looked down at her notes. Kicked like a dog, she wrote. She retraced the word dog a few times until it stood out black against the white paper.
“I called the cops,” Ed said. “But when I heard you screaming upstairs—”
Monica’s head came up, but there was no question to ask and Ed didn’t seem to need one.
The crack was a chasm now and she found herself sneaking around the edges of it, terrified of losing her balance and falling in. You thought you could keep your distance from this?
“I grabbed my shotgun and ran out the back.”
“What … what did you think was happening?” she asked.
Be quiet, honey. Just be quiet and no matter what, don’t come out from under the bed. No matter what. Do you understand?
But when the hand reached under the bed and grabbed hold of her shoulder, she’d been unable to stop the scream. It hurt. Daddy was hurting her. And she was so scared.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know what was happening. I just knew I’d never heard anyone screaming like that. Like the world was ending, and when I went outside, JJ was dragging Simone down the stairs by her hair. His hand wrapped around her throat. She was already bleeding. Already all banged up.” Ed swallowed, looked down at his coffee, lifted the
cup, but then set it down again.
“Why the hell are you writing about this?” Ed asked. “I mean … these are bad ghosts.”
Monica nodded, her notes forgotten.
“They are … aren’t they?” she asked. Very bad ghosts. And she wished she could just close her notebook and walk away, but she couldn’t. Jenna. Debt. Mom. She looked up at Ed’s eyes, a faded blue underneath eyebrows as thick as caterpillars. Eyes that seemed old, weathered by all he’d seen.
There was nothing to say, so she just waited for him to keep talking.
Ed sighed. “They got to the foot of the stairs, and JJ was saying all kinds of shit. All kinds of terrible, terrible stuff and then out of nowhere, like a movie or something, Simone … Simone just pulled a gun from the back of her pants—the one her dad always had—and shot him in the chest. Point-blank. He must have flown back about five feet. She ran upstairs and I … I tried to help JJ. But … he was gone.”
Ed stood up, startling the hell out of Monica. She gasped, knocking over the tape recorder. But Ed only shuffled over to the cabinet behind him. All the shelves were empty, but he pulled open a door and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. “I don’t drink the stuff,” he said. “But maybe you want some?”
It was tempting, but she shook her head. Ed put the bottle back in the cabinet. “Suit yourself.”
“What happened next?”
“Next? Well, I told the cops what I saw. Went home, covered in your daddy’s blood, and put my arms around my wife and cried. Cried like a baby for all of you.”
A bitter, stinging tide of tears flooded her eyes and no amount of blinking could make them go away. When they threatened to fall, she swiped them away with her thumbs.
There were more questions, but she couldn’t ask them. She was done. Quickly, she gathered her things and shoved them in her purse. She took one big, bracing sip of the coffee for no reason she could really think of.
“We done?” he asked, and she nodded.
“I might have some more questions,” she whispered around the lump of emotion in her throat, but he shook his head.
“Not for me,” he said. “There’s other people in town who’d be happy to talk about it, I imagine. But not me. I told you everything I remember.”
She stared at him for a long time, the ghosts and the memories a dark fog that swirled around her. Around the two of them. It made no sense that she was both angry at him and grateful to him for bringing back these terrible memories. She’d asked for it, after all.
“Thank you,” she said. She bent as if to grab the coffee cup to hand back to him, but he waved her off.
“Leave it,” he said. “My son pays some girl to come and clean up after me. You … you just go.”
Outside, the sun was a surprise, and she slipped on her sunglasses and all but ran from the house.
Wishing she could just as easily run from the memories.
Jackson was inordinately proud of the fact that the windows, the hundreds of high square windows on the factory, were intact. At most abandoned factories, those were the first things to go. Kids used them as target practice.
Not at the okra factory.
Dean was taking pictures and measurements inside the building, his footfalls echoing in the wide-open space.
“Where’s the machinery?” Dean asked. “I mean, most of these old factories, the companies just closed up and left, leaving a lot of the mechanicals.”
“Del Monte stripped it,” he said, stepping across one of the many cracks in the cement floor. Between the cracks and the holes where the machines used to be bolted down, the floor was a mess. But the rest of the place was sturdy and thanks to volunteers, pretty damn spotless.
“So I guess it offers you a clean slate, doesn’t it?” Jackson asked.
“Listen to you,” Dean said, smiling over his shoulder. “Now you’re a salesman?”
Jackson shrugged, but he couldn’t keep himself from grinning.
Monica, his heart beat. Monica. Monica. Monica.
“But the truth is, it’s a little small for our ovens,” Dean said.
Jackson stopped grinning.
Dean took another spin around, looked up at the ceilings, the far corners. “I gotta talk to my engineers.”
Dean walked out of the building toward Jackson’s car, leaving him to lock up and worry.
Wednesday morning Shelby got up early to get ready for the filming. The film crew. Dean. Monica. She still couldn’t believe that she’d agreed to that nonsense. The more she thought about it as she put some extra effort into readying the studio, the more of a nightmare it seemed, and a see-through one, too. No one was going to believe that Monica Appleby was here—in Bishop, Arkansas—teaching a course on writing.
Considering the last-minute nature of it all, the best “writing students” she’d been able to gather were some of the teenage camp counselors who helped her through the summer. Gwen and Jay had seemed particularly interested.
The only camps she had running at the moment were for the ten-year-old comic-book campers and moms with toddlers, so she spent a few minutes getting out the glitter and glue for the younger kids and pulling out the India ink sets for the ten-year-olds.
“Wow,” a voice said from behind her and Shelby turned to see Monica Appleby in a denim skirt and a tee shirt with Tweety Bird smoking a cigarette.
“Really?” Shelby asked, pointing to the shirt.
Monica started, no doubt surprised to be attacked the moment she walked in the door, and Shelby wished she could just rewind her life. Try again.
But then Monica glanced down and shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. “I didn’t realize there was a dress code.”
“There isn’t a dress code,” Shelby said, painfully aware of how she sounded, how breathlessly and tragically uncool she was compared to Monica, who just reeked of disenfranchised … hipness. “But there are standards.”
Monica’s eyes ran down Shelby’s denim capri pants and the white men’s shirt she used as a smock. It was shapeless; she knew that. It somehow managed to both hide her body and announce all the things she hated about it—her broad shoulders and belly.
She wasn’t feminine in these clothes, she wasn’t anything, and Monica saw all of that, her judgment clear as a bell.
This was immediately going badly between them. In the span of ten seconds they’d picked their corners.
“How about you spare me the lecture and just let me know what I can do to help?” Monica stepped closer, deeper into Shelby’s closely monitored and cared-for domain, and Shelby had to look away or she’d growl. Bar the way. Pick up a paintbrush, poke at her, and tell her to “git,” like one of the stray dogs around her property.
“I’m Monica, by the way.” Her voice was heavy with irony, well aware she needed no introduction.
“I gathered. I’m Shelby.”
From the drying racks she grabbed the comic-book pages that the ten-year-olds had been working on, laying them down in the spots the kids had claimed at their table. From the corner of her eye she watched Monica come closer, her eyes missing nothing. Not the Christmas lights Shelby had put up, thinking they would add something special, or the wires hanging low between the rafters with the toddlers’ masterpieces clipped to them.
“So, how do we do this today?” Monica asked.
“Well, we’re going to pretend you’re teaching a class to teenagers—”
“I said adults only.”
“Well, there was a serious lack of adults interested.”
“How many?”
“None.”
“How many did you ask?”
Shelby sniffed and turned away, putting the last of the comic-book pages down.
Monica’s rich laugh only made her bristle harder.
“You know, this place is really amazing,” Monica said, touching the white twinkle lights Shelby had put up around the coat hooks and cubbies. “If you’re a kid who likes art, this must be paradise.”
“I like to think so
,” Shelby said, nearly snuffing the praise under a cool tide of disdain. Monica continued to walk around, touching the toddlers’ artwork where it hung from the rafters. Shelby couldn’t stop watching her from the corners of her eyes.
“You know, I’m only here because Jackson asked me,” Monica said. “Once the filming stops I’ll get out of your hair. I have no interest in encroaching on your art kingdom. So, how about we stop circling each other like cats and just be civil?”
Well. Damn it! Shelby kind of liked this anger. It felt protective. But she’d been raised to take the high road.
“That sounds reasonable,” she said. “Why are you here so early?”
Monica shrugged, hitching a turquoise purse, which honestly matched not one thing that she was wearing, farther up on her shoulder. She even broke all the fashion rules and still looked good. “This is when Jackson told me to be here.”
As if beckoned, Jackson came in the front door carrying a small tray of coffees. His hair still damp from his early-morning swim, his face split in that wide smile of his that Shelby always loved the best. She was so relieved to see him; he’d balance the scales in this room. With him there, Shelby wouldn’t feel quite so invaded.
But when Jackson’s eyes fell on Monica, it was as if a silent and invisible bomb went off. The whole room changed. The chemistry. The air, even.
The two of them stared at each other, smiling like idiots, and then quickly glanced away, making a bit of a shuffle about the coffees. But Shelby stood there, in the ruins of the world she’d known before Jackson walked in, and tried to get used to the new reality.
Jackson and Monica were having … a thing.
How much of a thing, she didn’t know. She wasn’t that wise in the language of glances and smiles and fingers brushing fingers as they handed each other coffees. But something had happened.
And this, she thought, getting hot, getting good and pissed off, after that lecture Jackson gave her about not screwing up anything for the America Today show. The nerve! The nerve of both of them, standing there trying to pretend that they were truly that interested in Matthew Henshaw’s comic book about a farting robot.
The America Today crew came in with their equipment and another little cardboard container full of coffee cups. The producer was a woman with purple hair who introduced herself as Vanessa, and a man wearing a vest with a ton of pockets started unloading small cameras and a microphone system.
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