Threats

by Amelia Gray

  It was six long months’ worth of trial, her lawyer flown in from Chicago. He was a broad-shouldered man who managed to physically intimidate the judge from across the chamber. The lawyer spoke of the disastrous effects of the powerful and powerfully in-vogue teratogen the grieving mother had ingested while innocently pregnant. Pregnancy was one of the world’s most innocent conditions, the lawyer claimed, resting his hand on the mother’s shoulder while she sobbed. It all added up to six months of trial delays and jury recasts and that city lawyer’s patient explanation and re-explanation of what a mother could and couldn’t do under duress, what the psychological texts stated, what that might prove, his expert witnesses consulting their years of knowledge to bolster the fact that a mother who had the power to end a child she had viewed as a living defect was not a mother at all, but rather a creature acting under the influence of insanity. Chico took the stand again and again to perform his dull role of explaining the scene as he saw it, the medics not bothering with the heavier equipment once they saw the child’s bloat in the water, the absence of a pulse. Chico sometimes sat in the gallery during his lunch break and watched how easy it was for the court’s hands to be tied by procedure. He thought of how he had been offered a position in Columbus, how glad he was in hindsight that he hadn’t taken it, watching how the system stuttered. He imagined the broad-shouldered lawyer carrying the judge like a child in his arms.

  The third picture Chico had found in the house was of the woman from city hall, the wife, the decedent, standing with another woman. The decedent was holding an armful of flowers and wearing a cap and gown, a graduation photo. She was grinning, exposing a wide expanse of teeth. The other woman held up a fistful of black combs. Chico observed the images carefully. Understanding them each individually would help him gain a fuller understanding of the world he was intruding upon. He did feel like an intruder, looking at these other people’s photographs. Still, he looked, taking in their details.

  35.

  DAVID SOMETIMES MISSED HIS PATIENTS. He thought of his old friend Samson’s plaque layer, listening to his lies about brushing as the hygienist’s floss nicked eruptions of rot-stenched blood. The gums had begun to loosen and peel from his teeth like pages in a book, and still Samson said yes, brushing every day, yes, flossing after meals, why there’s floss in the truck, yes of course.

  The behavior of each new patient could never be predicted. Some young children would come in and immediately relax in the big chair. Others clung to their mothers and screamed while David darted into their mouths with his periodontal probe. Some mothers would cry, working their children up even more. Children were usually sensitive enough that a parent unconsciously gripping them could put them off dentistry for the rest of their lives. He saw the impulse to squirm and cry in adults as well, though all but the very old tended to keep calm. David’s knowledge and preferences of parenting techniques extended to the boundary of his examination room.

  There were the older girls and boys, the teenagers. They arrived at the office without their mothers, holding their parents’ insurance cards and blank checks. When there were two teenagers in the waiting room at once, the whole building could sense the tension. Nobody could handle it. His receptionist would close the glass partition and go out back for a smoke. In the examination room, David prodded their teenage mouths and tried to figure the age his baby sister would be at that moment, had she survived.

  There were men and women who did care for their teeth well and nevertheless had problems. He coaxed weak enamel from talonid surfaces, the grinding flat of the tooth giving way to pre-cavity areas. David felt the problems in a tooth even before the tooth made its problems known to its owner, before the ache in a bite of ice cream, the stinging intake of winter air. He could graze the tooth and feel something lurking.

  What had made David a good dentist—an excellent dentist, in his opinion—was his keen ability to sense weakness prior to its development. A patient would come in without tooth pain, talking about a football game, and be surprised to learn that a cavity needed to be drilled and filled. David would point to the darkening patches on the X-ray, still subtle even there, as if the damage was being viewed from under a rippling layer of fluid. A lesser dentist might not even be able to spot it. The patient would frown at the image but relent, knowing precisely as much as he did before but trusting David’s professional opinion. The patient might wince through the Xylocaine but would hold as still as a sleeping dog while the dentin was breached and burred, Dycal installed to obliterate the possibility of a return, a white resin filler approximating the shape and texture of a tooth so closely it made David wish for his patients’ sake that the entire procedure could be performed without their knowledge, that they could come in unknowing and leave unknowingly improved. It seemed a kindness to improve upon an individual without his knowledge. David didn’t understand why anyone might see otherwise, particularly not the dental board of Ohio, composed as it was of former dentists and medical administrators who had presumably once felt the same protective urge for their patients, a nurturing urge they might feel for their families.

  36.

  DAVID once saw Franny apply five layers of makeup to her lips. She lined them first with a pencil and then applied lipstick, some kind of powder, lipstick again, and then another tube that also looked like lipstick but was perhaps not lipstick. He had tried to kiss her afterward but she held her hands over her mouth.

  The salon’s facial treatment room was dimly lit. Scented oils in bottles lined the wall. The room smelled so strongly of Franny that David had to take a seat on the rolling chair beside the bed. It felt better to be sitting on the chair. The room didn’t spin so much as it rocked slightly, unevenly, a cradle guided by a distracted hand. David wondered if Aileen would notice if he put his face against the wall.

  “Here’s where she spent most of the day,” Aileen said. “Extractions, peels, facial massages, oil treatments, waxing.” She laid down her scissors and counted off the list on her fingers. “She was the best in the local business, besides me.”

  “Ha,” David said. He rolled backward on the chair, away from her and toward the wall.

  “David, I’m so glad you came to see us today. I’ve wanted to talk to you ever since it happened. I have so many questions. Could you answer some of my questions?”

  “I’ll try,” David said. He dispensed a small amount of lotion into his hand and rubbed his palms together. The lotion lathered, and he realized that it was soap. “I have some confusion,” he said. “It’s been difficult to sort things out.”

  “Is it true that the police have been by the house?”

  Tea candles were burning in misshapen sand-colored bowls. David rested his wrists on his knees, his soapy hands palms up. He put his forehead against the wall and then the side of his face. He closed his eyes. “They want to talk about what I know,” he said. “I’m always disappointing them. I don’t know anything.”

  “You don’t know what happened at all?” she asked. “Where did you put your water?”

  “Did you send some women from the salon to my home?”

  “Some girls?”

  “Some women, some girls. A group of them arrived a few days ago and said they had been sent to cut my hair. They were very kind and helpful. One of them cut my toenails.”

  “Some girls,” Aileen said. She took a deep breath in and looked at the door. She was silent for long enough that he thought she hadn’t heard part of the question. “A group of girls. Yes, I sent over a group of girls from the salon. I thought it might make you feel better.”

  “Thank you, it did.”

  “I was worried you would find it too difficult.”

  “Not at all,” he said. He wanted to rinse off his hands in the room’s sink but didn’t want to seem insensitive. “It was nice to see people, and they were such nice girls. I’d like to pay them for their services.”

  Aileen waved off the suggestion. “Think nothing of it, David. It’s the least we can
do to help. We’ve all been so worried about you, and so curious.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Frances was one of my closest friends.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s easy to be curious.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’ve gathered some of her personal effects.” She pulled a box out from under the treatment sink and handed it to David. “I thought you might like to have them.”

  The box was closed and David wanted to keep it that way. He felt that opening the box would release Franny’s ghost, that life after the box had been opened would make a distinct shift to a new form, a sugar cube dissolving in a saucer of tea, a hair trimmed from a nose. The hair, the nose, each altered forever. Aileen was watching him with a slight frown. He tucked one finger under the cardboard edge and opened it up. It looked to be the contents of a locker. There was an empty folder, a half-crushed package of chips, eight dollars in crumpled bills. Her aesthetician license, featuring a photo booth–size Franny grimacing through makeup. A folded apron lined the box. David searched the apron pocket, thinking about the times his wife had put her hands there. He found a paper scrap that could have come from a fortune cookie:

  TRY TO KISS ME. SEE WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR LIPS.

  Aileen was watching him. Her lips seemed to have been injected with a chemical designed to increase their volume. David had heard about this type of treatment from his wife. The chemical made her lips look smooth and unreal, as if she had thoughtlessly mouthed a piece of slick plastic until it fused to her skin. David thought of the clear plastic spreaders he put in his patients’ mouths before X-rays, how the piece curled their lips into animal grimaces. He thought of his own lips, which felt dry and seemed to be peeling off in ribbons, a ticker-tape parade on his face.

  “If you ever need my help, you shouldn’t hesitate,” Aileen said through the protrusion on her face, handing him her card.

  He accepted it with the threat fortune in his palm.

  “Think of me as your listening ear,” she said. Her lips seemed more capable of listening than her ears, which were masked behind a perfect shelf of platinum dyed hair.

  He thought of a wet slit in her lips opening to reveal an inner ear, prehensile, protected by the mass around it. Her lip’s inner ear would be prepared to listen in the precise way that inner ears are able to listen.

  David stopped by the decorated waiting room before he left. Above the coffee station, a palm-size painting of a girl in a dress caught his attention. The girl’s dress was flounced and dotted with pink and black. She carried a tiny umbrella in her gloved hands and smiled in a compelling way that caused David to lean even closer to her face. He leaned very close.

  She’s lying, the girl said.

  “Well, yes.” The force of his whispered breath close to her pushed the curls back from the girl’s face.

  It is time to go home. You won’t like what you find there. The girl rustled the umbrella, releasing crystal droplets. The drops sank into her dress where they landed. The girl’s lips were so tiny that they must have been painted on with a single brush bristle bound to a toothpick with a single hair.

  David saw a corner of something sticking out between the frame and the wall. He shifted the box of Franny’s things to one arm and worked the paper out from behind the frame. The frame was delicate and shivered against his movements as he unstuck the paper. The page was a thin receipt from the frame shop, featuring Franny’s dark signature. David tucked it into the box and held it protectively against his stomach as he left.

  37.

  ON THE WAY TO THE BUS STOP, he picked up pears and bread from the grocery store, paying with Franny’s eight dollars from the cardboard box, which he held in both hands. He made pleasant conversation with the cashier about eating pears in the winter. The cashier said that the pears came from New Mexico and that she had never been to New Mexico but imagined it was nice.

  He carried the pears in a paper bag tucked into the box and navigated the icy walk toward his home. As he got close, he saw a van parked out front. A few people took photographs and stepped carefully across the snowy drive. His first thought was that they were police, but he saw people of all ages, adults and children. Everyone was wearing overstuffed coats and new boots and hats. They were tourists.

  “What are you doing here?” David asked a man aiming a silver wafer of a camera at his front door.

  “This is the house,” the man said. “Where It Happened.”

  David felt as if he was reading titles on a bookshelf. “Where What Happened?”

  “That Poor Woman.” The man reviewed the shots on his wafer.

  “Everything Is Dead, but It’s Still Kind of Nice,” said a woman observing the frozen house plants on the porch.

  Two children chased each other around the mailbox and up the driveway. They were saddled with heavy canvas bags that looked to be full of newspapers. “Say You’re Sorry,” one called out to the other. “I Never Will,” the other called back.

  “I Have to Leave Here,” David said. “You People Are Driving Me Insane.” He couldn’t leave. He wanted to put the box of Franny’s personal effects in a safe place inside the house and eat one of the pears. The tourists were treating the whole house as if it were a personal effect. The two children had taken a brief pause from chasing each other to stand at the shrubs under the windows and crush the leaves’ ice pockets between their knit-gloved fingers. A woman who was presumably their mother saw David looking at them and walked behind the house without comment.

  David approached a woman sitting with her back to the van, drawing the front porch on a large sketch pad spread out over her lap. “How many of you are there?” he asked.

  “Ten,” the woman said. “Were you the husband?”

  “Was I the husband,” David said.

  The woman squinted. “We’re not going inside,” she said. “We wouldn’t go in there. This whole thing has been on the news, that’s all.”

  “What has?”

  “The case, the warrant.” She picked a piece of charcoal from a sheet of wax paper on her lap and squinted at the porch. Her right hand was blackened by the coal, and flakes of it dotted her blouse. He craned his neck to observe her sketch and saw that her rendering of the porch resembled a buffet counter.

  “Stop that,” he said.

  “Stop what?”

  “You’re drawing my front porch.”

  “They’re looking into things, you know. They are calling this a case of interest.”

  A man opened the passenger door of the van and produced a brown bag lunch. David saw a child asleep on a stack of newspapers inside the van. The man leaned against the van and unwrapped a candy bar.

  “We drove an hour to come see it,” the woman said. She added a sneeze guard to the buffet.

  “Hour and a half,” the man said, unwrapping his candy bar and taking a bite.

  “There’s a warrant?” David said. “To arrest someone?”

  She smudged the cashier station with her thumb, squinting up at the house for reference. “It’s to search the place, I think. I don’t know, maybe it’s an arrest thing too. I hadn’t heard all of it.”

  “This is all news to me.”

  “And you’re news to us. Your picture is all over the place. It’s file footage from when you were last in the news, after some accident in the park. Can you believe how time progresses? You look a bit older now.”

  David thought of the accident in the park. He had been shocked by a hanging power line while his mother was talking to a friend. He hardly remembered any of it, but in the following years he had become the example case for parents to teach their children to avoid all manner of unknown danger. “I was five,” he said.

  “Time flies”—she tapped the pad—“when we’re having fun. I’m trying to have the most fun with the time I have. You know, I used to work as a large-animal vet, but today I’m an artist by choice. My best paintings come from places with a wealth of emotional … emotion
al”—she looked to the man and then to the sky and then to David again—“currency. A wealth, or at least a favorable exchange rate. You get the concept. When I saw this on the news I just knew it was time to start a new piece. Then all I needed to do was rent a van and spread the word.”

  The man crumpled the candy wrapper and put it in his paper bag. “Drove a full hour and a half,” he said. “Wouldn’t believe the snow right outside town. We’re simple folk.”

  “You would not believe how simple we are,” said the woman.

  “That’s a good thing,” said the man.

  “You would not believe how good it is.”

  The man spit into the road. “I get the sense there’s not a lot he would believe.”

  “I believe that there are trespassers on my lawn,” David said.

  “So call the police,” said the man. He stuffed the wax paper from his sandwich into the front pocket of his jeans. “They won’t need directions.”

  A child ran by with a messenger bag full of bundled newspapers.

  “They could be here in thirty minutes or less,” the woman said. “Like a pizza.”

  “Faster than a pizza,” said the man.

  The woman had begun to sketch a child standing in front of the house. The child was holding a pane of window glass like a tray. David saw other children fighting over more glass against the garage door. Children who looked too young to be walking staggered back under the fragile weight of their find. He didn’t recognize the glass and didn’t know how it had come to rest against his garage door. It looked like a windowpane, but he didn’t see the frames or brackets. He thought for a moment that the glass was sheets of ice but saw that the children were holding it with their bare hands.