Honey

by Brenda Brooks

  Most of the motels were shuttered: Wigwam, Crystal Beachside Nook, the Driftwood Lodge. Only the Villa Capri had managed to make it through the years by offering weekly rentals to itinerant farm workers and then, after they drifted south, guys working the highways during winter storms. Its cracked neon sign flashed on and off as it had for fifty years; a lithe blonde woman in a red bathing suit diving over and over again into the darkness. The owner’s TV screen flickered from a room somewhere in the back. I noticed a van parked at one end of the motel and an RV at the other, around the side next to a broken swing set.

  Up ahead lay a section of old railroad track just before the intersection, now drifted over with snow. By the time I got there I was traveling so slow the tires caught for a second and set about whining and polishing the frozen metal. And in that second a commotion caught my eye around the side of the motel, like a gigantic wing lifting off in a gale. I rolled down the window as the tires released and looked back. A white tarp. And when it snapped back in the wind, there it was. I would have known one single taillight on the Eldorado anywhere — I would know it now, and all my life, and even at the end. It was parked at the back of the motel, acres of drifting snow and hacked-off cornstalks spread out behind.

  I pulled off the road about a block farther down, next to the old train station, turned off the car, and tried to still the tremor in my hands. The RV was fancy and newish, lit by what might have been an old camp lantern turned down low. Was my blackmailer, and maybe worse, off in another car somewhere doing things I didn’t want to know? If so, right then would be the time to charge in, slice through the rope that might have been cinched tight around Honey’s wrists (at least I hoped so — a fucked-up wish, but the only truth I could stand), and drag her out of there. As I started to get out of the car, the RV door swung open. A few seconds passed before I caught my breath, pulled the door all but to, and switched off the car’s interior light.

  She stepped down, closed the door, and pulled on her toque as she walked across the lot toward the van, zipping her parka as she went. The door slid open, she reached in and took something out, and walked back to the RV. A bit of music drifted out onto the cold air and then dropped away as the RV door closed behind her.

  Even though she was more or less the same height and build, and the Greyhound toque was unmistakable, I knew it wasn’t Honey. Honey would have stopped to have a look at the sky, since she was free to do so, and wouldn’t have bothered zipping the parka. Also, her jeans would have been barely scrunched into the tops of her boots. Honey Ramone, buccaneer.

  I waited until the manager’s lights went out (it was about 11:30 by then) and approached from the rear, next to the rusting swing set and the cornstalks whispering in the breeze. All the windows on the RV were tinted dark, but if I angled myself just right I could see, through the passenger door window, fragments of the interior, like little pieces of a flickering mosaic, which my eyes shifted this way and that in an attempt to assemble into something that made sense. Two washed-out letters over her left breast were all I needed to know she was wearing the shirt she’d bought at the marina the last summer we vacationed up at the river with my parents. I saw a portion of her hand raise a fragment of wine glass to the whole of her lips — and had to turn away and stare at the frozen ground for a few seconds. Wood smoke drifted past on the cold air and I realized the RV must have one of those tiny wood stoves popular with campers, hunters — and cold-blooded extortionists. When I looked back I realized it wasn’t cards they were playing after all and heard myself whisper the incredibly stupid truth out loud.

  I would have known the shuffle of those little hardwood tiles anywhere — and for a few seconds I could hardly hold it together while the old laugh or cry impulse set in, and I realized what a stupid joke life is and how much like a certain kind of movie. I couldn’t help but picture myself old and washed-out and drawing my last breath with the name of that horrible board game on my lips (Honey’s pronunciation) just like the old guy in Citizen Kane, except that his last thought was about something beautiful and lost. But then, so was mine — every night.

  A camp hatchet leaned against the steps leading up to the door and I thought of pulling a “Here’s Johnny!” but the hatchet was on the small side, and so was I. And who was I kidding? Even with everything she’d done, I still couldn’t play her antagonist.

  I walked back to the car, numb to the twenty below and oh-so casual, because who cared if anyone saw me? And anyway they were too busy picking locks to see anything but moolah and victory up ahead. I thought about how, if that woman in the brand-new mobile home had been the Honey I knew, I would call her up right then and there, and wouldn’t we kill ourselves laughing when I laid out the whole scenario: how my mother had locked the insurance money into a trust and now someone was going to have a helluva time picking the bank’s iron-clad pocket.

  In the meantime? Someone could go on playing a dirty game by the cozy fire while — how had she put it? — the only one who matters in this godawful world sat outside in her dad’s old Chevy on the coldest night since 1912.

  17.

  The next morning, I took a cab to the foot of Duvalle Street and made my way to the rear entrance of the house through assorted backyards. It was only a matter of time before Detective Smith, or someone, decided to knock on the door at Havenhurst, and what was there left to say? I needed to think, a bit of time and space with fewer traces of Honey, which in reality meant that I’d have to drink myself into a stupor and then slip into a coma. But a girl does what she can.

  A few more text messages came in: Deadline looming. Time’s up. Don’t fuck with me. I didn’t answer. Why bother with these insane games? I was afraid I’d respond with so much droll familiarity that Honey would realize they were busted, and then she’d be gone. I wasn’t ready for that. I told myself this was because I hadn’t yet come up with the perfect response to her betrayal, like the final twist in one of our favorite movies, the sort of thing that would nail her and redeem me. But the truth was I must have misread the movies, and my own heart, because there was no redemption or revenge. I just wasn’t ready to see her go.

  Two more irate texts arrived the following day, as I watched the backyard fill up with snow. I’d forgotten to store the patio set in the garage and the umbrella and chairs lay half-buried, a kind of polar beach complete with a few outdoor cushions tossed among the drifts. When I didn’t respond to a third text, another video came in. By then my emotions were so eroded, my mood so, well, noir, I felt like making popcorn and inviting Honey and that femme fatale of hers over to watch the show. I played the part of the sap, of course.

  The video was filmed in the RV out at the Villa Capri; a little corner of the diving woman’s legs flashed in the dark and disappeared into the neon waves. They had decided, it seemed, to give me a tour of the domain, maybe by way of shoving that $50,000 RV in my face. I was ready to shut the video down, call Honey, and end the farce, when the camera continued along the windows, the banquette, the dining area, and down the hallway to a bedroom.

  She sat with her back pressed against the bed’s headboard. The camera caressed her body the same way it had the long, burnished length of the mahogany boat at the storage facility, emphasizing the fact that only with the eyes, or the lens, could you do such intimate things to someone without actually touching them.

  I knew it was her in spite of the gloom and long before the closeup of her face because I was so familiar with every inch of her, although her hacked-off hair took my breath again. She was bound at the wrists and wore nothing but the Serpentine River T-shirt and a pair of underwear, her knees drawn up to her breasts. The other one had gagged her, no doubt with her consent. She didn’t bother feigning a wild, terrorized expression. She knew I wouldn’t buy that. Even her deception was polished in the sense that she knew to leave things rough, convey the opposite of what you might expect. No desperate, frightened loss of control and playing to the camera f
or her. Instead she looked into the camera’s lens (my eyes), controlled, somber, and let her dry, parted lips say, without saying anything at all, Jesus, Nic. Get me out of this.

  I turned off my cell, heartsick at the lengths she would go to hurt me, at what she would agree to do in order to fulfill their combined desires.

  And then, just as quickly, I switched it back on again. Because a little flash of something had impressed itself on me, like when you close your eyes and the ghost of what you just saw remains intact for a few seconds before fading away. I tapped replay and endured the trip once again: her back to the headboard, knees drawn up, wrists bound in front of her, hands clasped together. My fingers zoomed in: the goddamn bowling pin wedding ring. She’s laughing at you, whispered a voice from that gloomy inner mob of mine.

  If I could have gotten my hands on the money I would have stuffed the whole lot into a garbage bag, driven over to the Capri, and dropped it at her feet; all so that I could look her in the eyes and tell her to take it all. Take it. Go stare at the empty sea. Kick back on your rose-colored beach without me. And then I’d give her a violent kiss and walk away.

  On the other hand (and I know this will sound insane, or at least unsound) I had to stop myself from calling her and admitting I couldn’t get the money, that she should get the hell out of Buckthorn before it was too late. Love is strange, but memory’s stranger. I just couldn’t forget the two of us at age twelve, dancing to “Lover’s Concerto” in my bedroom; at fourteen, lacing up our skates at Crystal Lake; her walking back into my life on the worst day I’d known; the naked weight of her the first time anyone had ever really touched me, the kind of touch I only ever wanted from her. There were moments when the reality of those memories swept everything else away — even that night at Fortune Bay with the MG. Even what she seemed to be doing to me at that moment. But then a thought crossed my mind like a shadow falling on snow when something silent and wild passes overhead, a fantasy as unacceptable to me as it was stirring: for a moment I was the woman in that dingy RV bedroom with Honey. I untied the gag and tossed it away but left the other ties in place. And then I drew her down beside me and, without saying a word, reviewed every lesson in persuasion, and restraint, and the most acute forms of pleasure that she’d ever taught me.

  * * *

  The next day, Christmas Eve, I got a black and white movie clip, two minutes and twenty-eight seconds spliced into the present straight out of the past. I could almost taste the rum we knocked back as kids while Inez lay passed out on the La-Z-Boy and Hitchcock’s Mrs. Danvers tried to convince Rebecca to throw herself out the window into the sea: You’ve nothing to live for, really, have you? And tacked on the end, a text that said, Deadline Xmas. The girl was killing me. For a few seconds I thought of answering with Rebecca’s own plea: What have I done that you should hate me so?

  I had about $8,000 in my personal account and would have offered it to them gladly if I’d thought it would end this thing once and for all, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough because Honey, having had access to the account at the bank, knew what was at stake — we both knew what all of it meant. I had to get out of there, escape the phone for an hour and think, so I walked into town about 4 p.m. to try to clear my head. It was the first Christmas without my folks, and I needed the people, our little bit of last-minute consumerism, the lights, the local traffic, such as it was, in our little backwater.

  Every year town council hoisted the same rickety Holiday Greetings banner over Main Street and installed red bows on the lamp posts along the boulevard. In the daytime it looked like the usual crappy impoverished street, but at night in a late December winter a kind of magic set in and everybody forgot the streets were crumbling, the stores closing, and how broke they were. For a little while everyone felt good no matter how close they were to the edge. Skaters in the park, the Salvation Army Santa with his bell, shoppers going into hock over gifts for their kids, everybody knocking off work early. So what if the whole devout thing had deteriorated into some kind of festive illusion. It was still transcendent in its own way: the night-time streets strung with blue, red, yellow lights, the carols issuing from the tinny speakers over the door at Robinson’s. And after all there were still houses in Buckthorn where a few happy, shiny people went on living, even if they were just getting by, even if they drank too much and screwed up the words to “O Holy Night.” My father said it was the reverence you brought to a song that counted. “The meaning of faith is your own to decide.” I guess it was because I was thinking about him, and my mother, and the whole goddamn mess I had gotten myself into with Honey that I got all teary at that moment, standing in the last of downtown Buckthorn in the snow. It choked me up how everyone was willing to go on believing, in spite of everything, that it still made sense to mix fancy drinks, shower people with gifts, and hang glitzy bulbs on trees.

  He came up behind me as I stood staring at the motorized elves in Robinson’s window, then apologized for startling me and asked if I had time for a hot chocolate. Was this guy kidding me? Because his invitation, when you considered the foundation, so to speak, of our relationship, struck me as the funniest, most innocent thing left in the world. How could I not accept?

  We settled into a window seat at the Sugar Bowl and he ordered up two good old reliables and one of those flaky scones (a croissant) and asked if I wanted anything else. Then he went on a bit about last minute shopping and the kids at home, bouncing off the walls with excitement. This time, instead of the Naughty sweater, he wore a Rudolph tie clip his girls had given him the Christmas before. He said he looked forward to them becoming teenagers so they’d forbid him to ever wear it again, but meanwhile he showed me how the flashing nose worked, and turned it off again. We sipped our hot chocolate and sat looking out the window at the daubs of light from the street lamps and the cars coming and going, tires spinning in the Buckthorn slush.

  For the first time, he didn’t start by asking if I’d heard from Honey. My sense was that he was going over something in his mind, piecing things into place, reviewing for flaws. When he finally spoke it was as though he was talking to a trusted friend, or at least a decent listener.

  He said there had been some new developments in “the Aurbuck thing.” “Surprising developments,” he said, reminders that you should never be shocked about the stuff human beings get up to. “I wouldn’t ordinarily talk about such things before they hit the news, which they will tomorrow, but maybe you’d be interested in hearing a few details about the banker from Torrent.”

  “Okay,” I said, eager in spite of myself. It seemed my caution had gone weak in the knees because of the festive magic of hot chocolate. If this kept up we’d be buying each other gifts.

  “Because it seems that his past had come back to haunt that guy. There’s a name for that, I think. You know, you do shitty stuff and pay for it later?”

  “Karma,” I said, thinking about Inez and her tea leaves, the old Ouija board.

  “That’s it — karma,” he said. He gazed out at the skaters in the park while he bit into his croissant. He took a sip of hot chocolate, wiped his chin.

  “This Aurbuck guy had done a fair number of nasty things — some financial, some personal — to an assortment of people and had some karma waiting in the wings, I guess you could say. Specifically, a woman named —” he slipped the notebook out of his pocket and flipped through a few pages, as if he didn’t know every detail by heart “— Eva Lynch.”

  He looked up at me. My eyes offered nothing since I’d never heard the name before.

  “One thing I’ve realized in my years on the force is that if you do enough bad things to enough people, pretty soon you end up doing something bad to the wrong person — and then look out.” It was the sort of cautionary tale my mother would have told.

  “See, this Eva Lynch person is a case in point, because Aurbuck had allegedly cheated her, and several others, out of thousands of dollars through a fake inve
stment deal called Innisfree Vineyards, which is nothing more than a big fancy limestone entranceway in front of a few acres of scrub and brush up near Ergo Township. You know Ergo Township? East of Torrent?”

  “Not really.”

  “No matter. The thing is this Aurbuck guy collected quite a pile of funds from lots of takers but when 2008 rolled around and the investment hadn’t materialized, they wanted their money back, like everybody else in the universe.”

  “Well, my folks knew something about that,” I said.

  “Yes, a lot of folks do. And this includes Eva Lynch, who it seems this banker chap strung along for quite a few miles, I mean romantically as well as financially. He swindled her out of an inheritance along the way, putting on the dog at a pretty impressive cottage which clients like her were paying for and cruising his pals around the lakes in fancy boats she didn’t realize she’d bought herself. Until she did. And then . . . ” He looked at me and waited.

  “Karma,” I said.

  “Bingo. Because it turned out that Lynch was what you might call a pretty unstable person and being swindled didn’t improve things.” He stuffed some more croissant into his mouth. Another gulp of hot chocolate. “By the way,” he said, “why didn’t you tell me about the break-in at your house?”

  How the heck did this this guy know these things? He had to be the best neighborhood gossip of all time. I thought about lying (why quit then?) even though it was clear he knew all about it. I shrugged it off and lied to some degree. I told him I hadn’t thought of it as a break-in.

  “No? What’s your definition of a break-in?”

  “I guess when someone smashes a window, throws things around, fills up their van with your stuff. I figured it was somebody who wanted to steal something to sell for drugs.”