by Cote Smith
“What’s this for?” Lia said.
Her mother pointed at the card resting on the typewriter’s keys. Lia opened it up. On the inside it read, For your next story.
* * *
The late fall weather in Eugene was fitting. The interminable gray, the pestering rain. It reminded Lia of a book she vaguely remembered her mother reading to her as a child. Something about a lonely boy whose feelings reflected the weather, or was it vice versa? She spent those first few weeks in her parents’ A-frame, sleeping, reading, self-loathing. The house didn’t have an attic exactly, but the top room, previously designated as her father’s office, was only accessible through a narrow set of stairs her parents had yet to venture up since her arrival. They left Lia alone to wallow up there, her father, she presumed, not wanting to deal with his moody daughter, while her mother refused to acknowledge that she had raised a young woman of such weak resolve.
They seemed better, Lia had to admit. This new start had shaken them free from the past. At dinner, the only time Lia shared their company, their faces were bright as they exchanged details about their respective days. Her mother relayed an anecdote about one of her students who was always late. Her father talked about how well his landscaping business was doing. “I know it’s a cliché,” he said, “but the grass is actually greener here. Must be all the rain.”
Yet Lia remained unconvinced, by her mother in particular. She remembered their last phone call, how with just a little pressure she’d been able to make her mother reveal what Lia thought was her mother’s true self. Lia studied her now, as her mother spoke, as her mother listened, looking for a twitch of the mouth or flicker in her eyes, any crack that might break her façade. It was difficult. Either because her mother had finally mastered her role, or because, and Lia thought this much less likely, she was genuinely happy. Unlikely, but not impossible, Lia supposed. Her mother was teaching again, this time as an adjunct at another community college. But what about Limetown? Emile? Lia didn’t dare bring either up to her mother or father, though she did wear Emile’s scarf around the house, draped over her jacket, upon which she prominently displayed his pin, her uncle who had heard the future, though no one in the present or recent past had heard from him.
In late November, exactly one month after Lia’s expulsion, her mother ascended the stairs to the top room, where Lia was alternately reading John Donne and gazing out the octagonal window.
“You could be reading that for school,” her mother said.
“I did,” Lia said, “for Brit Lit. It was one of the classes I failed.”
Her mother sighed. She once said being a parent was the best workout she ever got, but all the exercise was in patience. “This isn’t you,” she said. “This isn’t the daughter I raised.”
Lia turned from the window. “And who are you? Today, I mean. The dutiful teacher? The disappearing wife?”
“Apple.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Lia.”
“Alison.”
“I’m not here to argue with you,” her mother said.
“And yet.”
“I’m letting you know that you’re enrolled. At my school. Classes start first week of January.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Part time. Only six credit hours. Your tuition is free because I’m faculty.”
“Mom,” Lia said, “I’m not going back to school. Especially a community college.”
Her mother folded her arms. “Then you have until the new year to find a job and a place to live. This isn’t a shelter.”
* * *
The campus, if Lia could call it that, consisted of a single building—a converted mall—located in the one part of Eugene without verdant trees. The walls of each classroom were faux stone, too hard to hang any decorations, so most remained blank like a jail cell. Lia was enrolled in two classes: Topics in Mathematics, a pre-req she was certain she would never use, and JOUR0165: Introduction to Mass Communication, a course she assumed would repeat everything she already knew.
“My name is Tamra Dobbs,” the journalism instructor said on the first day of class. “You can call me Tamra or Ms. Dobbs. Not Professor Dobbs, not Doctor Dobbs. I’m neither. And if there’s one thing I like about journalism, it’s that we aim for accuracy. For facts.”
Lia zipped up her hoodie a little tighter. Since her expulsion, she made a daily attempt at forgetting the failure that was her on-air debut, but it seemed the world had an infinite number of ways of reminding her. She kept her eyes down as Tamra listed other facts about herself. She was twenty-six, with a master’s in journalism from Oregon. She taught not because she was good at it, but because it supplemented the meager salary she made working for the local paper. Lastly, she was married, but didn’t have any kids. And she didn’t want any either. She had practically raised her little brother and wasn’t interested in doing anything of the sort again. “So make sure you have your shit together,” she said. “Know the syllabus. Know the assignments. And if you’re going to miss class, keep your lame-ass excuses to yourself.”
Perhaps the worst part of the community college, Lia realized, was that she would consistently run into her mother, whose office was just down the hall from Lia’s math class. Early on her mother made a point to wait for Lia outside the classroom each day and invite her to her otherwise poorly attended office hours. She was obviously trying to keep an eye on Lia, and by week two Lia had grown weary.
“You don’t have to check on me,” Lia said. “I’m going to class.”
Her mother forked at the salad she brought from home. She’d grown the lettuce and spinach herself in the garden she started in their backyard. A new hobby she said was good for her and the environment.
“Just making sure I’m getting my money’s worth,” she said.
“You said tuition was free.”
“Tuition, yes. Books, no. Learn anything good today?”
“I learned no one wants to be here, including my instructors.”
Her mother looked around her dreary office. “Yeah. It’s not great, is it?” She chomped a baby carrot. “But I’m happy.”
Lia stole a crouton. As angry as she was at her mother for enrolling her, it was, at the very least, something—a path she could pretend led somewhere.
“You’re really happy?” Lia asked.
“I am.”
“Dad too?”
“It took some work, some apologies on my part, but I think so.”
“What about Limetown?” The question had escaped her mouth before she had a chance to stop it.
“What about it?”
“Mom,” Lia said, and waited for her mother to look at her. “You don’t have to pretend with me.”
Her mother paused her lunch, put her fork down. “Who said I was pretending? No, I’m serious. Did you hear what I said? Lia, I’m happy. Let me be happy.”
Lia opened her mouth, but this time was able to snag the question. She said nothing. She watched her mother pick up her fork and finish the rest of her salad, leaving a few cherry tomatoes behind, which she had grown but never liked.
“I don’t even know why I put these in here,” she said.
* * *
Math was held in a renovated movie theater auditorium, big enough that Lia could sleep through class without anyone noticing. With Mass Comm she wasn’t so lucky. She was one of eleven, which by the second week shrunk to nine. Tamra made Lia sit up front after catching her sleeping in the back, zipped up in her gray hoodie, an artifact of her relationship with Julie. From that point on Tamra kept an eye on Lia. She called on her whenever her hand wasn’t raised. At the end of the month each student would present their first unit projects to the class, and Lia, who avoided eye contact when Tamra asked for volunteers, was assigned to go first. She had two weeks. Two weeks to figure out what specific area of mass communication she wanted to explore. To conduct firsthand interviews (recommended), collect a wealth of credible information via
three scholarly sources (mandatory), and present those facts to the class in a compelling fashion.
Lia complained to her mother about the project, how it seemed high schoolish in nature, how she couldn’t think of a single topic that wasn’t obvious (the Internet, television) or wouldn’t be done to death by her classmates. They were sitting in her mother’s office again. She’d stopped stalking Lia after class, but Lia found herself lunching with her anyway.
“What about this?” her mother said. She held up an empty envelope. “I still get mail, personal mail, to the adjunct who was here before me. And when I say personal, I mean personal. Love letters. You know, the kind of stuff your dad pretends he doesn’t like.”
“So.”
“So this adjunct has been dead three years. Isn’t that, I don’t know, tragic? I tried writing back, telling the poor soul that this woman is dead, but there’s no return address. Just a name.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Well, where did my letters go? Where do they go if they’re not delivered? I mean, something has to happen to them, right?”
“Sure, Mom.”
She threw the envelope at Lia. Maybe it wasn’t the worst idea. The topic did fit all of the assignment’s criteria, or it would if thoroughly researched and properly presented. As Lia sat in her room that evening, brainstorming, she had no trouble imagining how her project would unfold. Though for all the well-laid plans, the outlines and word clusters, she couldn’t make herself care. This wasn’t Limetown or Menninger. This was the US Post Office.
That night she dreamed she was back at Deakin, in her dorm, lying next to Julie. She was sleeping in her dream. No, she was awake. There was a thud at her door, and when she opened it, she found a manila envelope tucked under the mat, the same kind that had contained the transcript about Moyer’s death. She tore it open and pulled out not a transcript, not a letter, but a stack of postcards. From Utah. Colorado. Idaho. Even Kansas. They were blank, but Lia recognized the pictures from Emile’s box of belongings. They were the same cards she’d found in the attic, the ones her father burned in anger and memoriam. She spread the postcards on the table, trying to make sense of them. Perhaps she could find a pattern. But she couldn’t tell what was the starting point and what was the destination. What did it all lead to? In her dream, she sat at her desk and flipped over the manila envelope to look for the return address, which before, in the waking world, had led her to Menninger, to Moyer, McNellis, and a dead end. There was a different address in her dream. The words were jumbled. But when she woke up, sweating, her mouth dry, her mind had no trouble putting every letter in its proper place, until the puzzle was complete and she knew with certainty: Limetown.
“Lia,” her mother said. “Apple, wake up.”
Lia blinked away the dream. She had no idea of the time, but it was dark. The moon glared outside her window, a watchful eye. Her mother stood over her with a glass of water.
“Mom?”
“I heard you moaning,” her mother said. “All the way downstairs. I thought you were a ghost.”
* * *
There was mail at Limetown, a piece of trivia that always struck Lia as odd. In the Limetown Commission Summary (the official report, which was promised, had yet to be released), Lia recalled, there was that brief description of the town itself: the single-family homes, the picket fences, and, contrary to all logic, the mailboxes. They were all empty of course, and not a single piece of mail, incoming or outgoing, had ever been located, but as Lia ate breakfast the following morning, sitting across from her mother, she wondered what would happen if someone sent a letter now. If she bought a postcard from Eugene, addressed it to Emile Haddock, Limetown, Tennessee, where would it end up?
“Mom,” Lia said. “Those letters you keep getting at your office. Have you tried sending them back?”
“Of course,” her mother said. “But without a return address, there’s not much they can do. You know, I went to the post office after our talk yesterday, and the lady said if I handed the letters to her they’d just end up in the dead letter office. She didn’t explain what that was, but it doesn’t sound pleasant.”
“They shred them?”
“Shred them, burn them. I don’t know. You should look into it, for your project.”
So Lia followed her only lead and went to the post office. She carried with her feelings of doubt, misgivings leftover from her Menninger mistakes. But her mind performed its trick, the same maneuver it first used in Lawrence, practiced and repeated in Australia. Ignore the fear, the shadow looming a step behind you.
Inside the post office, at the help desk, she found a woman who looked miserable and not much older than Lia. She’d probably only worked there for a year or two, Lia imagined, which in post office time translated to an eternity.
“I have a question,” Lia said, when she finally made it to the front of the line, “for the dead letter office.” She hadn’t spent too much time planning what she would say, only that she was a college student working on a communications assignment. She wanted to know what happened to dead letters. (Though, in the back of her mind, she told herself that if she learned something that might shed more light on Limetown in the process, so be it.)
“We’re not called that anymore. You’re not a philatelist, are you?”
“A what?”
“That’s a no. How can I help you?”
The woman—Robyn, according to her upside-down name tag—was already looking at the customer behind Lia. Lia adjusted her plan. Robyn didn’t want to answer any questions for some college kid’s class project.
“I lost some mail. Or, I think I did. A friend of mine sent me something, but I never got it.”
“Was it a package?”
“I don’t know.”
“If it was a package, it was probably auctioned off by now. Was it valuable?”
“He never said.” Lia paused before the next lie. “He’s dead now.”
Robyn pursed her mouth, unaccustomed, Lia guessed, to dealing with any human emotion other than anger.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Here’s a form.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it. Fill it out and we’ll let you know.”
“How long does it take?”
“Forever. But your friend won’t mind. Next.”
“Hold on,” Lia said. The emotional appeal wasn’t working. “I’m working on a project. For school.”
Robyn put her face in her hands. “Oh my god. Make it stop.”
“Could I interview you sometime? It wouldn’t take long.”
“If I say yes, will you leave?”
“Yes.”
“Then here.” She handed Lia a business card, not from the post office.
“You’re a DJ?”
“I follow my dreams. Can’t you tell?”
Lia called Robyn the next day.
“Really,” Robyn said, “the forms just go to my friend at the central branch. We used to be in a band together. He owes me a favor.”
Lia wondered if all postal employees were failed artists, or if it was just everyone who lived in a college town who wasn’t in college.
* * *
They met that night at a place called the Bourgeois Pig, a coffeehouse and bar downtown. Robyn was buying. She didn’t mind, she explained. Having spent most of her adult life thus far as—in her words, a broke-ass musician—she had yet to figure out what to do with the modest amount of money a normal job provided.
“To giving up,” Robyn said. “And to the dead letter office.” She winked at at Lia. After class that day, Lia had gone home and changed, ignoring her mother’s look of approval when Lia told her she was going out with a friend. Her mother, who so obviously wanted Lia to go along with the fantasy that this was a normal life they were leading. The whole thing made Lia want to drink.
“So,” Robyn said, “are you chasing ghosts or bringing them back to life?”
Lia glanced at Rob
yn, unsure what to say, what to reveal. She wouldn’t even fully admit to herself what she was pursuing. Was it just the project, or was there something more?
“Neither?” Lia finally said. “It’s just a project I’m working on for this journalism class.”
“Right on, right on. So is that your thing? Journalism?”
“It used to be, yeah.”
“But not anymore?”
“I don’t know,” Lia said, and peered into her empty shot glass.
“Well,” Robyn said. “I know all about running into the wall of reality.” She raised her glass again. “But I say, fuck reality. Here’s to busting through.”
“To bursting through.”
“You’re yelling.”
“What? No. It’s the music. The music is yelling.” Lia laughed. “I don’t drink a lot.”
“No kidding.”
“And I don’t have many friends.”
“Is that right.”
Lia shifted in her seat, and felt the notepad she’d brought with her in her back pocket. She was supposed to be interviewing Robyn, taking notes. Instead, she scooted closer.
“I took this test,” Lia said. “It said I have a sympathy problem. Not an empathy problem, mind you. I’m very good at that. I get what people are feeling. I just don’t care. How do I fix that?”
“You drink, Miss Fish,” Robyn said.
“Miss Fish?”
“It’s Haddock, right?”
Lia took the first shot.
Robyn smiled. “We’re going to have so much fun.”
* * *
Lia didn’t remember calling a cab. She didn’t remember the ride across town to the central branch. But here she was, standing in front of the post office, a beige brick building built in the fifties and refusing modernization ever since. Robyn kept saying they shouldn’t be here, though she did so with a childish giggle. “This is wild,” she said. Lia steadied herself as Robyn unlocked the back door with the key her friend had slipped her. The world was off its axis.