Only Flesh and Bones

by Sarah Andrews

  I dialed the number Elyria had given me. It rang six times before it was answered, which told me a little more about Ms. Bloom—namely, that she did not employ the services of an answering machine. The sounds that came over the wire when she lifted the receiver told me even more: I heard the concluding booms of the 1812 Overture and the loud slurping sound of a washing machine, all but drowned out by a very excited canine ruckus. “Hel-LO?” she bellowed.

  I said, “Ms. Bloom? My name is Em Hansen. Elyria—”

  “Wait! Hold on a minute—I can’t hear you!” The cannon stopped in midboom. The machine shifted into a drain cycle. And I heard her utter more quietly, “Stanley, you son of a bitch, shut up!”

  I began again. “My name is Em Hansen. Elyria gave me your—”

  “Elyria! Yes, of course. You’re the unemployed geologist from Wyoming who moonlights as a detective.”

  “Well, ah—”

  “You got some hot young stud you’re gonna move in here, or is it just you?”

  I sighed. “Just me.” Well, there was Jim Erikson, but he was out in California, and sweet as he was I wasn’t so sure if it was smart for me to see him again, and—

  “Any friend of Elyria’s. The room’s a hundred fifty a week—private entrance, hot plate, midget reefer, and a bathroom the size of a suitcase, you shut up by ten P.M., and don’t bitch about my dog. When will you be here?”

  “Monday okay?”

  “Monday? Sure, I’ll be here. I’m on Baseline Road above Sixteenth, the stone house with the ugly fence. Come around to the back so Stanley doesn’t think you’re a mailman. You don’t have to knock.”

  “Stanley will alert you to my presence.”

  “Yes. If I don’t come to the door within five minutes, come back in an hour.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t wear perfume. And try to be here by daylight.” The line clicked, and I heard a dial tone.

  Mother saw me off at noon, after one last morning wrestling with fence posts and barbed wire and a lunch of her best can of soup. As we cleared up the dishes she looked kind of sad, but somehow I knew her mood didn’t have much to do with the thought that I’d soon be gone. As we walked out across the hard-packed earthen yard to my truck, she said, “Don’t make yourself a stranger.”

  “Okay.” I paused, uncertain what else to say. It was being too easy to leave, devoid of emotional tension. What had I expected? The kind of verbal wrangling we used to rope each other into?

  My mother stood with one hand on a blue jean-clad hip, the other tracing the ritual of cigarette smokers everywhere, fingers stiffening into a vise as she inhaled, now whipping the little white fetish into a downward arc, now flicking it to free the ash. She was off the alcohol, the addiction that had rendered her incapable of working, but wouldn’t this habit kill her just as surely? Squinting at me through a cloud of exhaled smoke, she said succinctly, “It’s been nice having you here, dear.”

  I stared at the ground, worrying a pebble out of the dust with the toe of my boot. “Um …”

  “It’s okay, Emily. It’s something of a milestone for us if we’ve already said what needed saying.”

  Still I waited. I was waiting, I guess, to see if she would hug me. Or say she loved me. Surely that needed saying, but she said nothing more.

  I climbed into the cab and rolled down the window and said good-bye. As I reached up to grasp the wheel, she patted my arm and said, “I’m proud of you.” I smiled an acknowledgment of this gesture, the sort of smile that finds its way to your lips out of habit and manners, then fired the engine, put the old beast in gear, and set it to rolling south. I was five miles from the Colorado border before it even occurred to me that I could have initiated something closer than a pat on the arm myself.

  The drive took me down Interstate 25, which parallels the Laramie Range and the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies twenty miles out into the plains. The weather was fair and moving toward hot, and by two o’clock the first cumulus clouds were already darkening into thunderheads over the Arapaho Peaks and spilling out across the plains. I watched them grow with fascination, thinking nostalgically of the mornings and afternoons I’d spent up in the skies overhead, learning to fly a small airplane, getting bounced around on the moist, boiling air that forms such traveling pillows. Or beginning to learn; when I’d lost my job, I’d had to quit. Flying was just plain expensive. But an efficient mode of travel, and beautiful: in the time I’d already spent zigzagging around property lines and making right-angle doglegs and slowing for traffic in this slow-moving truck, I could have flown from the ranch to Boulder and back again. And had a better view.

  Perhaps I’ll be working soon, I told myself. Then I could afford more lessons, even get on to the big cross-country legs I’d have to fly in order to qualify for a license. And a job might lead to financial stability, and financial stability might lead to—what? Settling down? I laughed at myself, old gypsy Em, vagabond of the western plains. When the trumpets blew, I was likely to be the last single woman standing.

  I found myself thinking about Jim Erikson, my sort-of boyfriend out in California; about how I’d tried to tell him how stimulating the weather is in the high plains and the mountains, and how splendid it is when the seasons change. He had listened quietly, no doubt wondering at my taste for drama. I had stared back blankly at him, biting my tongue against the obvious comeback that being an emergency med tech on a volunteer fire department wasn’t exactly a way to relax. But he sure was easy to stare at, all six feet three of him … .

  An hour later, I was still thinking about Jim as I pulled into the alley behind Betty Bloom’s stone house on Baseline Road in Boulder. It’s named Baseline because it lies along an early survey baseline, and it runs bullet-straight east to west up the ramp of alluvium that forms Boulder’s “Hill,” that district of older homes and shops that surrounds the University of Colorado. Betty’s was a fair-sized house built of red Lyons Sandstone with the most god-awful-looking picket fence I’ve ever seen. It rose six feet high through three courses of pickets sloppily painted green, mauve, and international orange, and I can’t say the boards were laid on with any kind of skill. The house itself looked sound enough, no yawning chinks in its stone armor, no cascading bits of roofing tile or sagging gutters. I shut down the truck, locked the door with a ritual “I’m back in the city” sigh, and pushed my way through the back gate.

  Stanley the dog turned out to be a Bouvier des Flandres, an enormous black moving-mop-type dog with a small brain and big devotion to duty. He barked himself silly, lunging at the window by the back door, planting his forepaws again and again like a bad sped-up movie of raucous step aerobics. His nose greased the glass with fresh spinnerets of slobber as hanks of tangly black hair whipped the thin, frail membrane of glass that separated him from me. I took a deep breath and was just muttering a litany against dog defenestration when a hand reached out for his collar and applied an authoritative jerk. Stanley shut up and dropped to the floor. End of demonstration.

  The door crunched open, and I got my first look at Betty Bloom, my new landlady.

  About fifty, voluminous head of wiry red hair gone mostly to gray. An appealing oval face; pale, amused eyes; skin like milk. She wore canvas shorts and a lavender tunic with no collar, and she had fetched her hair back into a loose elastic covered with bright purple fabric. Her feet were bare. Gauging by their surplus of dirt and calluses, she seldom wore shoes. “Em, come in,” she murmured. “Don’t mind Stanley; he’s just a big baby. So, Elyria tells me you’re on another case.”

  Had I told Elyria that? It wasn’t like Elyria to pass on that kind of information, even if I had. Figuring I could handle the dog but not any bullshit, I stated, “She didn’t really say that, did she.”

  Big grin. Flashing spark in the eyes. “No. Just checking. Coffee?”

  Smiling back, I said, “Make mine black.”

  FOUR

  SEVEN o’clock found me winding my way through Genesee, a community
of enormous cedar homes built during the oil boom of the late 1970s. After nearly twenty years in place, it still looked like the Martians had just landed the development there yesterday, plunking each behemoth structure down at the end of its perfect strip of black asphalt with an alien disregard for setting. As usual, the homes looked oddly deserted. I steered around quaintly engineered curves until I found the Menkens’.

  Cecelia had grown since I’d seen her last, and I was startled to find that she had gotten quite tall. As I parked my truck and walked up the driveway toward where she stood loitering by the three-car garage, she seemed to loom, and I realized that even when I reached her, she would be looking over the top of my head. How long had it been since I’d seen her? A year? I decided that aside from the awkward height she had attained, she still looked a child: no hips, no buns, no tender swelling twixt clavicles and sternum. It had to be hell.

  She had herself kitted out in a short black leather skirt, a skintight T-shirt, a voluminous campaign jacket, and a fumbling attempt at eye makeup; an attempt, I was sure, to look sophisticated, but a kid is always a kid, no matter how you package her. She’d gotten her hair under control, at least. Her once-wild medusan mop of dark hair now hung just to her jaw in a chic pageboy.

  The look in her eyes made my heart sink. They had taken on a hard, sleep-deprived shadow, and her smear of a mouth dove painfully at the corners. I caught myself sighing, feeling as sorry for myself as I did for her. Where was the confused but cuddling child I had taught to race her quarter horse around the barrels? As she looked up and saw me, the corners of her mouth flicked upward for a moment before giving in once more to the weight of loss and adolescence. “Em,” she mumbled, lurching away from the wall of the garage and shambling toward me, hands thrust deep into the pockets of her jacket. “Glad to see you.”

  “I’m glad to see you, too, Cecelia.” And I was. Why is it that any thousand shifty-eyed teenagers glimpsed on the street can be written off as slouching delinquents to be avoided, but when just one of these half-formed creatures turns a hopeful glance our way, we lose all caution and greet her with an undefended heart?

  I held out my arms for a hug.

  Cecelia contorted her body into a cave-chested twist and looked anywhere but into my eyes as she shuffled closer. A few inches from me, she threw herself onto me like a stevedore discharging a sack of grain onto a waiting cart.

  Bracing my feet, I caught her in my arms and squeezed. “You’re taller than I am now,” I declared, for want of a more inspired opener.

  “Mmpf.”

  “It’s been rough, huh?”

  She began to sniff.

  I ran my hands through her hair, coaxing her sniffling into a bawl, saying, “I’ve missed you. I feel rotten not coming to see you sooner. Did your dad explain that I’ve been out of town?”

  Head nodding up and down. Hoarse coughing.

  “There now. There.”

  “You never called,” she said reproachfully.

  “Um, sorry.”

  “I mean, shit, you—”

  I cut her off, a mixture of guilt over not better acknowledging her pain and self-pity arising from my own making me impatient. “Couldn’t be helped,” I said. She stiffened. I tightened my hug, reaching into her for another dose of importance.

  Cecelia abruptly pulled away and stuffed her hands up against her face. “I hate this. My nose gets all red.”

  “Need a Kleenex?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I don’t have one. We’re outside, so blow it on the ground like I taught you for skiing.”

  Cecelia twisted her now-swollen lips in a rueful smile, bent, placed a finger to each side of her nose, and blew. When she had wiped her hand on the tiny scrap of lawn the developer had insisted on planting in this semiarid part of creation, she slung an arm around my shoulders and leaned her head against mine. She had to crane her neck. “Missed you, too,” she allowed, approximating a kind of offhanded candor.

  “So things have been bad.”

  “The pits.” She rolled her eyes. “Sorry. Haven’t lost it like that in months.”

  “Maybe you need to do it more often.”

  “No, it sucks. I mean, I’m glad to see you, but you know? I got to go on living. At least, that’s what the shrink keeps saying.” She shrugged, a sulking gesture of such unappealing awkwardness that no one who had slipped the mighty bonds of adolescence would hope to replicate it. Suddenly, she threw herself against me again and whimpered. “You always understand. You’re my best friend in the whole world. You love me better than anyone!”

  Embarrassed that I felt so pleased to hear such sentimental nonsense, I said, “Tell me about the shrink.”

  Cecelia’s eyes suddenly widened in terror. “I don’t remember a thing!” she blurted.

  “I’m not investigating your mother’s death; I’m here for you. Remember, I never even met your mother.”

  She nodded, eyeing me with bald suspicion.

  “Listen, Celie, life’s tough enough when you’re sixteen—”

  “Almost seventeen!”

  “Right, and you’ve lost your mother the hard way. Not good. Worse yet, your dad says you were there when it happened. When she was murdered,” I said, choosing harsh words to cut through the pompous crap she must have been getting from everyone, “so you should be able to finger the person who killed her.”

  She hung her head.

  “But you can’t. So help me with this. You just don’t remember the incident, or is there a bunch else missing?”

  She lifted her head, stared blankly into the air beside my head. “That day, and the whole week after, except bits,” she recited. “It happened on a Tuesday, and I can remember from Saturday, waking up back here.”

  “When did you come down from Wyoming?”

  “Friday. Or so I’m told. Dad says it took a few days to get the—um, body released.”

  “Your dad drove you?”

  She looked away. Shrugged. “I guess so.” Her voice took on an earnest tone. “It truly sucks, not knowing.”

  “Because you’d like to know who killed her.”

  She looked up, confused. “Well, yeah, but also because I usually have such a good memory. I mean, here I was an honor student, you know? And I can’t remember what happened in a whole week!”

  We went on talking like that for half an hour or so, getting nowhere, and for longer during dinner. Her reactions to my questions quickly wore a circular groove in the conversation, looping around what should have been her major concerns—the loss of her mother and a desire to avenge her death—and reconnecting again and again to seemingly minor ones. It was like chipping solid frost out of an old-fashioned icebox, lots of effort for frustratingly little gain, and all the time worrying that I’m going to stab the wrong thing with the pick and ruin the mechanism.

  The effort to guide Cecelia’s train of thought onto a cogent track got worse when her father entered the conversation over dinner. He served grilled venison steaks, which he sliced into with carnivorous glee. “Go ahead, Cecelia dear,” he urged, “tell Emily what you can remember. You can trust her.”

  Cecelia set her jaw in refusal.

  After enormous bowls of double-chocolate ice cream, we moved into the living room and Menken prodded her again. “Really now, Cecelia dear, barring this therapist woman, you’ve been without the companionship of an older female for over half a year. Let Emily help.”

  This time, Cecelia gave him a smoldering glare.

  The cumulative fatigue of too many miles and too many emotional turns in one day moved me toward the door. “You know, I think it’s time for me to call it a day,” I said.

  “Let me walk you to your truck,” Menken said, turning a smile on me that seemed a degree or two too warm.

  I grabbed Cecelia by one skinny arm. “Let Cecelia walk me out, J. C.; we got more girl talking to do,” and as I backed out through the doorway, I added, “I’ll give you a call soon and we’ll talk job contacts,
okay?”

  “Anytime.” He beamed.

  Taking one last stab with the mental ice pick before I climbed into my truck, I asked Cecelia, “So what does this therapist you’re seeing think is going on with you? Or have you asked her?”

  Shrug.

  “I thought so. You just go because you father takes you, right?”

  Shrug. “The headmistress said I should go. Dad just agreed.”

  “So who takes you?”

  “I go by bus.” She whimpered, craning her neck to lay her head down on my shoulder once again.

  I reached up and stroked her hair, stirred by the weight of her need. Stopping to turn toward her, I put my arms around her and held her close, imagining briefly that if she had been my child, I would have taken such good care of her that she would not be needing some hired gun to straighten her out. It wasn’t hard to see why this therapy wasn’t getting anywhere. It had to be a cold, lonely ride downtown to a psychotherapist’s office when you’re sixteen, almost seventeen, gawky, your mother is dead, and you don’t want to be there in the first place.

  Cecelia clung to me like a limpet. “I hate going to her, Em. Why can’t I just come live with you?”

  So much for maternal fantasies. The truth was I could barely look after myself, and I didn’t want to give that fact a whole lot of contemplation. “Do you go at the end of the day?” I asked, keeping the conversation on matters I thought I could handle.

  “They let me out of study hall and gym class for it. I go twice a week.” Shrug. “It sucks big time. It’s this little bitch on spike heels who looks like she wants a cigarette more than she wants to talk to me. And all the other girls at school are jealous that I get off so much.”