She held the creased leather strap on Jonathan’s bag and spoke softly to him. “I don’t know who that is, he is accusing me of some insane thing. Something about his house burning down. I don’t know what he is talking about but he is scaring me and he won’t go away.”
Jonathan’s bag fell in a pouch and he took one long step over it. “I don’t know what you think is going on here, but I think you need to take a walk.” He spoke in a low voice and asked if he understood.
“I understand, alright,” he exuded, straightening himself. “My name is Alan Shetler. And I am going to go find a police officer. Your friend here is going to jail.”
Jonathan wanted to hit the smug stack of shit but restrained himself at mention of the police. “Get the fuck out of my face,” he growled. “Now.” And the man was gone among the sea of people.
They shook it off and locked their two smiles together with joy. He picked up his bag and they walked together as their affection returned. When they got to the escalator Jonathan began laughing and asked in a staunch voice if she was really responsible for burning down that guy’s house. Her arms shot out with the quick ring of jewelry before he went stumbling over the heel at the foot of the escalator. They laughed together. She rubbed herself against his broad shoulder as though a brilliant and beautiful heat was thawing her soul from some long, frozen sleep. They passed underneath that highly pressured place where currents of conditioned air barreled against the humid waves that poured through automatic doors each time they opened. It was there the cop stopped them. There was the angry man again, his arms folded, as if validated by the presence of the law. Jonathan told the officer how offended they were by the guy’s unfounded threats. Then he said if the man accused her any further they would be obtaining an order of restraint and, if he pushed it, they would sue him for defamation.
“What!” he leapt forth, pointing. “That criminal bitch is going to prison!”
Jonathan twisted the man’s breast in his long reach and the slim black officer forced them apart. She spoke directly to the officer, “Sir, I have nothing to hide and I’m not guilty of anything. So long as you protect me from this terrible man I will go to the station as requested so we can clear this whole thing up.” The officer obliged, and they walked into the hot breath of August where he held the door of his cruiser open and she ducked her head inside.
Detective John Ridge emerged from the east corridor of the precinct she suspected led to a row of holding cells. Automatic locks buzzed and the occasional holler came through the wall. She sat across from Ridge’s desk in the department office. People streaked by on the carpet and the phones never stopped ringing. He dropped his weight into the chair which plied back before returning him upright, landing his inquisitive sight dead at her face. She was warm, but she thought if she removed her jacket or showed any sign of stress it would somehow broadcast her guilt. This was confusing because she hadn’t done anything. Now there was the guilt she thought others suspected of her. She stared back coolly at the detective, her eyes glossed with this metaphysical consideration.
He cleared his throat and straightened his tie at the same time as if he always did them together. “Well miss, I must confess, I find you very interesting.”
“I’m just here to clear this whole thing up. I mean, I didn’t do anything.”
“Unfortunately, this may not be that easy.” The detective opened a full manila folder and sat there scraping his chin. “I pulled Mr. Shetler’s file—”
“Mr. Shetler?”
“Yes, the man accusing you of setting the arson fire that destroyed his home in Modesto, California in February of 2005. Had you ever had contact with Mr. Shetler, prior to today?”
“I’ve never even been to Modesto. . . .”
“Well like I said, that’s interesting.” Ridge exhaled and leaned his heavy gut forward, flipping through the files until he hit an earmarked sheet of paper which he flipped around in her direction. “Take your time.”
Dark bangs trailed across softened eyebrows. Eyes, wide and observant, were the faintest bit clouded. The fleshy pocket of lips held a small shadow dashed in the opened mouth. A thin curve descended from a defined jaw to a thin, muscular neck and set of shoulders. Detective Ridge added his own narration, that investigators composed the sketch from the accounts of two eye witnesses who saw this woman walking from the bright, burning home. The crack of disbelief in her stomach became harder to deny. She was looking at a picture of herself.
“Here’s where it gets interesting,” said the detective. “I did some digging around. Turns out that you—or someone who looks an awful lot like you—are implicated in four other arson fires over the past ten years. Local PDs in South Dakota and Maryland still have open files, which means they’re going to want to talk to you, too. Along with the charges Alan Shetler’s bringing against you, it stacks up quite high.”
Ridge stopped when a high pitch broke into breaths of air. He saw that she was sobbing and held out a box of Kleenex. She clenched a tissue and covered part of her face. She was having a hard time breathing. “None of this has anything to do with me. I don’t know why this is happening and I don’t know what to do.”
“What I recommend you do, ma’am, is get yourself a lawyer. Preferably a good one.”
Detective Ridge handed her a packet of paperwork. The top yellow sheet was a notice to appear in court two months to the day in Modesto. He stood and fed his arms through either side of his charcoal blazer, giving her enough time to reassemble herself and the room and to find her way out.
Jonathan slouched as he read a magazine article about a load of gold found in a shipwrecked Spanish brig off the Gulf Coast after the BP spill. A shrimp crew got snagged and pulled up part of the treasure, which was of course taken from them. That’s why y’aint say nothin’ to nobody, never, said one shrimper, much to Jonathan’s humor. When he saw the hallway door open, he chucked the magazine and rose to take his girl around the shoulder and get her home.
That night, it took another episode of crying, a long shower, a valium and four glasses of wine to soften the strain of her now torturous confusion. Jonathan asked if she was positive she did not have anything to do with the fires. She snapped at him and isolated herself by curling up on the kitchen counter, shouting at him in the other room. She realized how it must have looked. She could not get over these other cases, other fires all over the country. That is when she started crying again, but the shower and the booze helped. Her guard down, she gave into the caress of her legs on Jonathan’s lap wrapped in a blanket. The rhythm of their kissing started slow and they moved without care from the couch to the bedroom, where the clothesless pleasure they created shot into her and broke apart the fiery hatred that arose to shield her from the madness of this day. After she came, the two lay sweating in the burgundy sheet. Outside a thunderstorm broke. It pounded the ground outside the window with rain.
For the next two months she searched for a woman who looked exactly like her. It was the only way to stay rooted in undeniable innocence. Otherwise, the pragmatism of her legal defense, the whole drawn out timeline of this delusion would have been too painful. She delved into the records, trying to find arson suspects in the places mentioned in her case who were in their early thirties and matched her description. There were very few serial arson cases—that were not political anyway—and almost none by women. She sifted through the reports of the thousands of houses that burned each year from unattended candles to faulty wiring to pirating cable. News databases returned her over again to the sensational headlines of women who burned down wings of maximum security prisons or accidentally made nitroglycerin in their bathtubs. This led her to the several mismanaged crystal meth outfits that raised whole houses straight off their foundations. Then there were your good old fashioned gasoline fires, which is where she came across two very interesting women.
Christina Johnson was a black widow who burned the three houses and one yacht of her rich husbands. But she was caugh
t in Orlando in ’98 and served fifteen years because a very rare clouded leopard owned by her last husband died in the fire. The other woman was an insurance scammer named Olivia Malvern who torched her own condo, an unfinished housing development, and even the office building where she worked. Her interest in Olivia grew when she found a notice in a small British newspaper that she had died in a car wreck headed south on the 394 from Falmouth out to the Lizard peninsula. That’s where the trail ended. No information about her family, no service. Who was Olivia Malvern, she thought repeatedly. Was it possible this was who Shetler and the police were confusing her with? On the nights she could not sleep at all she frightened herself with the possibility that Malvern was some mastermind who faked her own death and set her up for the fall. Her trial loomed and the haze of late summer was in her head. Olivia Malvern was now an obsession. Twice a week she met her mother for lunch and it was all she could do not to show up each time with some new detail related to this woman. Jonathan received enough phone calls from her where he looked into it himself. After he couldn’t find any information about her either he began to doubt that the woman even existed, let alone had anything to do with the fire in Modesto or any of the others. Eventually, she reached the same conclusion.
The search for this phantom, Malvern, kept her occupied most the summer, and as fall came two months of anguish vanished and the day arrived. She was up at dawn the morning before, sitting in a coat drinking coffee at her kitchen table in the quiet. At the airport she boarded the United flight through Houston to Modesto and checked into a hotel across the street from the Stanislaus County courthouse. She met her lawyer, Robert Salmunz, who greeted her with a soft smile and a personal handshake, cradling the middle of her palm in the reassuring way a doctor might. “Everything is going to be fine,” he told her, and already she believed him. She sat aside the huge dark table and thought how unique the people are who labor in their business of law, unemotionally and efficiently handling these decisions that so alter people’s lives.
He had obtained independently verified witness testimonies confirming every alibi that corresponded to each fire, starting with the arson in question at Mr. Shetler’s home. She found it assuring that what she had known all along was now supported by facts in the real world. She met Salmunz again at 6 a.m. in a sunny room at the central courthouse. They rehearsed her script and the order of their argument. His pronouncement felt legitimate, which is exactly how it sounded when he repeated it verbatim before the court, that nightmarish Alan Shetler, his predatory prosecutor, and the judge elevated before the entire echoic chamber. The night of the arson, in February of 2005, she sat to dinner with her mother and her two friends at Dambruzio’s restaurant on the waterfront in Memphis. It was unable to be denied. The inertia of the whole ordeal and the entire judicial apparatus appeared silly in the face of such a simple and irrefutable fact. The prosecution presented a quite unspecific and superficial depiction of her past that leapt from her family life and personal character to her schooling and occupations that concluded with the truth that not very much was known about this woman, which the judge scornfully remarked wasn’t a crime. Their reply to this was, by some desperate, backwards inference, that really she could be guilty of anything. When this rhetoric cleared, not without some laughter, her brief examination concluded. She watched as the certainty drained from Alan Shetler’s face. The judge called to everyone’s attention that she was not guilty of any of the charges brought against her. It was over.
She had two vodkas on the plane and gazed across the expanse of night that papered the Sierras and stretched luminous across the plains. She didn’t know what returning to normalcy would require, but she looked forward to it. She drifted off for an hour. The plane bumped as it landed at O’Hare and when the cabin lights came on the lady next to her shook her awake. At Jonathan’s apartment on the east side, she had electricity in her limbs. She jumped onto him in the intimate confines of the front hall in his upscale apartment. They played with one another, grabbing and tussling as Jonathan fixed two martinis in the kitchen. They clinked rims and she rapidly recapped the hearing for him.
“You see, I told you it was that Malvern chick all along. I was so looking forward to your involvement in some international blackmail.”
His long frame braced on the black leather couch with the bright Chicago night illuminated behind him. She smiled deviously as they settled in to watch a film. As they lay intertwined, she gazed up at his face in the dark and realized how far away he was. She gripped his collared shirt and pulled more kisses toward her, but the diminishing passion unfolded like a changing season.
Three nights later, after she had returned to Memphis, he called.
“This is going to be hard,” he breathed. “I am in love with a woman, and, well I’ve proposed. You and I have been so close for so many years, and I enjoyed them dearly. But I think it’s best if we don’t speak from now on.” He said how sorry he was and when she didn’t say a word, he hung up.
She got her things together, her body hollowed and uninhabited. Somehow she made the drive north to her parents’ house. There, she sat up in the soft yellow light that warmed the living room and poured her grief out to the consolation of her mother. They put down one bottle of cabernet and opened another. She knew her daughter hurt from more than lost love. She had been in a parallel existence, for months not knowing what would come of this random accusation, then finally having to fly thousands of miles to establish her innocence in front of strangers. Her wisdom was simple.
“When the world requires something like that,” she told her, “you end up having to prove it to yourself as well. You’re not sure why but you figure, what if they are right?”
She told her mother about the guilt that had grown from others believing it. She asked her mother how many things in the world owe their existence to misunderstanding.
“Too many, dear, too many.” She spoke with that mother’s voice, a natural force for empathy, hushed as flowing water. They lay together on the couch, her mother stroking her brown hair that curled around her shoulders. Their empty glasses were on the coffee table next to the second bottle which was now a green receptacle filled with light. It was late, her mother pulled herself up off the sofa, kissed the top of her head, and wished her good night.
She was alone in the stillness of her old home and she took the stairs down to the backyard. She was sleepy and drunk. She removed her sweater because her skin was hot to the touch. It was a crisp early autumn night and the air cooled her body. She lay stretched in the even cooler grass. As she pressed her face into the ground, she relived Jonathan’s betrayal and recalled with melancholy the details of Chicago. There could have been something she missed, but how alien the past few months had been, she couldn’t tell. Her eyes closed, she moved further into the recent, painful memory. Being in the tall corridor, four feet by nine, where she decorated him with affections. The stone reflection of the slate countertop, where he poured Hendricks and the Rossi vermouth and topped off their glasses with the little bottle of Boker’s bitters and three olives on a pick. The cones of the lamps that pushed out transparent light like an office that hung low enough for Jonathan to have to duck under them in the bath and the bedroom hall. The narrow Italian designer closets, and the smell of his neatly stacked work shirts. The way his pant hems all hung unbelievably even above rows of polished Bostonian shoes. His gray satin sheets tossed over the minimalist black bed frame. A single wall of windows, the city pasted in them.
In a space where remembrance was more altering than drunkenness, she traversed her replication of that apartment until her wistful vision turned to slumber right there in the yard.
As she drifted off, Jonathan woke in Chicago, the confines of that same apartment filled with smoke. His heart pounded, and in that second before he knew what to do, he saw her from behind and watched as she stepped through a part in the flames. By the time he shook his fiancée awake, it was too late.
Her body was c
hilled by the night and the Tennessee ground. This sleep of hers was much too heavy to wake from now. Beneath the layers of a deep dream she could sense Jonathan was in trouble. He was poised at the edge of a steep hill, soaking wet from a recent storm. She screamed as he stepped over the edge, but the wind ripped the distance to nothing, and he could not hear her warn him about the danger in the valley.
THE CLASS OF EDUN HIGH
MATTY BYLOOS
In a small town not regularly bothered by strangers or passersby, an old man owned a junk shop that operated like a museum. Inside of it, nothing was ever traded, and no cash was ever exchanged for goods. The old man had a way of making the few patrons who entered the shop feel like they were somehow trespassing, like adults trick-or-treating among children on Halloween.
The old man was making a drawing on a scrap of paper one afternoon as the rain came down outside. It was three o’clock. Every timepiece in the junk shop recorded the minutes and seconds and made sure that he never forgot what part of the day it was. Time mattered little to him anyway. The day after the day he had turned a hundred years old, he stopped caring. And he blamed it all on the high school that he kept under glass.
No one had come into the store for weeks, but maybe it was better that way. The old man had come to find that loneliness treated a person in strange ways, after enough time. It made him feel like someone who he may or may not have recalled from his past was watching him: an uncle, an old neighbor, or someone hiding behind a bush on his short walk home. The feeling was familiar, though it had an odd temperature to it. Loneliness, the man thought, was like an animal. It had a life of its own, collected dust like the rest of the objects in the store, and then after the animal died, it might carry on in one person or another’s memory, like a haunting.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch Page 19