Her grin widened. “They’re at Gram’s.” For some unknown reason—although I suspected a practical joke—Babs was being very elusive about the boxes. Nathan Haley was an old friend of hers and, as a favor, had saved a lot of the things he’d found when cleaning out the house. She said it was an amazing haul—old pictures and journals and bonnets and mirrors and crushed flowers and even a faded silk bed jacket. She kept promising I could see them, but never produced. I was beginning to wonder if the boxes really existed.
“So?” I demanded.
“So I guess we should go over there some night.” Her eyes twinkled. “You’ll like Gram. She’s a real trip.”
“I’ll drink to that.” I reached for the champagne, but it wasn’t on the floor near the fireplace. “Or would, if I could find that bottle.” I circled the room, lifting up seat cushions, kicking garbage bags. “Where did I put the damn thing?”
“Edgar says this house is haunted,” Babs offered, always quick with the plausible explanations. “Maybe the ghost has a taste for expensive champagne.”
“Yeah, right, Babs, I’m sure ol’ Edgar’s got the answer. If I ever saw a guy who’s not playing with a full deck, Edgar’s the one. He’s just too weird—almost as weird as his hyperactive little dog.”
“Just because he wouldn’t sell you a parking space?”
“He was weird before that—but what the hell does he need two parking spaces for? There’s only three for the whole building, and he gobbled up two for himself.”
“Edgar’s real interesting, a bit self-absorbed, maybe. But give the guy a break—he did buy those two parking spaces before you even looked at this apartment. He was perfectly within his rights to buy them both—and to keep them.”
“I offered him a damn good price.”
Babs shrugged. “I think Mirepoix is the loveliest little thing—she’s a full-breed Pekingese, you know.”
“Mirepoix? Mirepoix? That’s the most incredibly affected name I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s a lovely name. Edgar told me he named her after his favorite town in the French Pyrenees.”
“I rest my case.”
“You’ll see, Ms. Kern. I’ll bet you end up being very fond of Edgar.”
“Don’t hold your breath.” I finally found the elusive bottle behind a scruffy-looking rubber plant. “Champagne?”
“Gladly,” Babs said as she turned in to the bay and stood on her tiptoes to peer through the small panes. “God, this is a great window. ‘All the world’s a stage’!” She took one of her omnipresent scarfs from around her neck, flung it over her head; the fuchsia silk floated down onto an upturned floor lamp. She leaned over and retrieved the scarf with a flourish while I popped the champagne cork. We toasted my new home and talked about moves.
I told her about the last time I moved and how Clay, in his inimitable macho fashion, had refused to hire movers. How he said we could do it all ourselves. How we had laughed and giggled and sweated; and how I spent a week in bed with a strained back. She told me about the time her brother hired a low-rent moving company and how they loaded the truck at the old house and never showed up at the new.
“Well, kiddo,” Babs said, standing up. “Now that I’ve gotten you drunk and cheerful, I’m going to leave before you put me to work.”
“Stay as long as you like—no more work’s going on in this apartment tonight. I’m done for the day.” Apparently she didn’t believe me, because she gave me a hug, waved her scarf, and left.
Babs was right, I was feeling much better; this place was great, my back didn’t hurt, and my furniture hadn’t been stolen. I poured myself a little more champagne and wandered into the bay. Babs was right again—my front yard was a stage.
In the few minutes I stood there, I watched a school of identically dressed businessmen separate and come together as they strode, unseeing and uncaring, past a bag lady pushing her world in a shopping cart. They were followed by a young nanny, more concerned with combing her hair than negotiating her two charges over the uneven sidewalks. Then came a proper Boston dowager on her daily constitutional, resplendent in her practical shoes, dark felt hat, and long, unstylish—and completely unnecessary—coat. I took a sip of champagne, and when I looked back, most of the actors had changed—a runner, a Federal Express man, and a group of Oriental tourists now joined the slow-moving bag lady on the stage. I was never going to leave this place.
I turned and headed for the kitchen, for some coffee and something to sop up the champagne sloshing around in my stomach. The kitchen may have lacked the dentil molding and carved wainscoting of the rest of the apartment, but—and I’d never admit this to Babs—it was actually my favorite room: a narrow galley lined with rows of white Formica cabinets, shiny new appliances, and counters of cobalt blue tile. It shone in stark contrast to our old-fashioned Lexington farmhouse kitchen with its uneven floorboards and worn porcelain sink.
Unfortunately the cupboards of my dream kitchen were bare. I managed to find a box of soggy crackers and some peanut butter in one of the garbage bags, but I had to use my finger for a knife. I washed my nourishing meal down with a warm can of diet soda. Then I dug up a pillow and sheet and crawled into—or rather onto—my bed. I was asleep within seconds. Almost as quickly I was inside a nightmare.
Nightmares have been my on-again-off-again bedtime companions as far back as I can remember. They seem to cluster and clump and stick to one another, and to me, around times of trouble or change, but they are always there—hovering in the wings, reminding me of their presence and power. Once, when I was about nine, I had a bout so bad, my parents sent me to a shrink. Herr Doktor Stieglitz muttered on about symptoms of schizo-adaptive personality structure and indications of temporal lobe epilepsy and charted out a course of long-term therapy that would insure his country club membership for the next decade. My parents yanked me from his couch before the quack even began to address my nightmares.
That night the dream was a real doozy—guaranteed to make it to the Lindsey Kern Nightmare Film Festival. I lay naked on a carpet of lace. Dusty, rose-colored lace. It was everywhere—hanging in graceful waves from the ceiling, floating around the windowsills, covering the walls in its voluminous folds. Little packets of lavender sachet nestled in the creases like Christmas tree ornaments, filling the room with their thick aroma.
Clay, Adonis-like in his naked perfection, knelt at my feet. Gently he lifted my leg and slowly caressed my calf. Our eyes locked. He bent and kissed my toes, then leisurely worked his way up my body.
I moaned and closed my eyes as his lips and tongue played with the sensitive skin on the inside of my knee. With deliberate and almost painful slowness he finally reached my thighs. Then, with just a quick touch of his tongue between my legs, he pushed himself away and leaned back on his arm, leisurely circling my breast with one finger. I moaned again, this time in disappointment as much as in passion.
“Hold on, my impatient child,” he said. “It will be better if you wait.” “Now,” I begged. “Please, please, now …” “Later,” he said. “Later.” His voice became muffled. “Later, later, later …”
Frustrated and angry, I looked up. Instead of Clay’s grinning face, I saw lace rising slowly from the floor and enveloping him. It wrapped around him tighter and tighter, thicker and thicker, until he was transformed into a rose-colored mummy. Clay’s cocoon folded over on itself again and again, becoming totally distorted. The misshapen mummy got smaller and smaller until it was the size of a bowling pin. It hovered over the bed, turned, and floated noiselessly out the door.
I ran through the strange but familiar house, frantically searching room after handsome room for the mummy. I looked under a velvet-tufted couch, behind a brocade chair, and in lavender-scented closets stuffed with hoopskirted dresses of satin and lace. But Clay’s cocoon eluded me—it was always just beyond my reach, hovering around the corner of the next room, just beyond my vision.
My fingers were numb and my feet hurt, but I had to co
ntinue, I had to go on. Finally a blast of cool air stopped my search. I opened my eyes. I was standing on the landing outside my apartment, gripping the handrail, staring down, through the dark, spindly balusters, to Edgar’s landing far below.
2
I had taken on more than I could handle. What did I know about estimating overhead rates, or configuring PCs, or how to effectively position myself in the marketplace? Not much. But, as president of Tech Writers To the Rescue, I was supposed to. I tapped my pen on the printouts spread in front of me and looked around, surveying the room as if for the first time. My office looked as if it knew what it was doing with its “executive-style” desk and chair, its long credenza covered with computer manuals, and its window overlooking Copley Square. If furniture could calculate G & A rates, I’d be all set.
After Clay died, my boss at Data Systems had arranged for me to work as a part-time consultant. At the time my title had been director of technical writing support, but after all I’d been through, I was more than happy to drop out of the rat race and just write a few manuals from home. A few manuals turned into a few more, and finally Jay suggested I set up my own company. Now TWTTR, which had started as an answering machine in Lexington, was a real live technical-writing temp agency with an office on Boylston Street, a part-time secretary, two real employees, and a “stable” of three free-lancers.
I actually seemed to be doing pretty well when it came to getting work and figuring out how to hire and motivate people to do it; it was the pseudo-legal contract jargon that was going to be the death of me. I had three contracts: one was cost-plus-fixed-fee, one was fixed-price, and one was time-and-materials. Each had different terms of payment, termination clauses, nonperformance penalties, and methods of calculating fee and G & A rates. I never should have rented such expensive office space.
The phone at my elbow rang. “Where is she?” demanded an all-too-familiar voice.
“I don’t know, Joel. I’m obviously still at work.”
“She told me you gave her a key to your apartment—are you out of your mind? Giving a fourteen-year-old licence to wander around the city by herself at all hours of the night!”
“Aren’t you overreacting a bit here?”
“Maybe I would be if she hadn’t disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Gone! Slipped out of her bedroom window! It’s ten P.M. for God’s sake! You have to go home and see if she’s there,” he ordered in his older-brother-I’ll-take-no-arguments voice. “Right now!”
I sighed. “All right, I’ll call you in an hour.”
“Half an hour. Nora and I are crazy with worry.”
“Half an hour.” I put down the phone and slipped on my coat. I wasn’t getting much done anyway.
Hilary was just where I expected her to be: seated on my living room couch with her long legs stretched over the coffee table, watching TV and drinking diet soda. “Hi.” Her expression was sheepish and arrogant at the same time.
People said Hilary looked just like me, but I couldn’t see it; she was so much prettier, with her large eyes and high cheekbones. And there was that naive early-adolescent sexiness about her—I could see why a father would worry.
“Hi.” I hung my purse on the coat rack in the entryway and brought my briefcase to the study. “Good spot for the Morrison poster,” I said as I walked back into the living room.
“I hope you don’t mind; I found the picture hooks and a hammer in your kitchen drawer, so I just hung it up in my room.”
“I don’t mind—it’s your picture to put wherever you want.” I sat down on the couch next to her. “So, what’s up?”
“He’s too weird.” She scowled. “I wish he weren’t my father.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“Yeah.” She took a swig of her soda, then handed it to me.
I took a sip. “What’re you watching?”
“Some dumb movie.” We watched the dumb movie in silence for a while. “It’s like he’s in the dark ages,” she finally said. “He says I can’t go on foliage weekend.”
“Foliage weekend?”
“Everybody’s going.” She pouted. “Every year it’s a major event—it’s awesome. All the cool eighth-grade kids go. If you don’t, you’re nobody—totally nobody. He’s wrecking the entire rest of my life!” She stuck her lower lip out farther than I would have thought humanly possible. “And anyways, there’re even chaperones.”
“Is there some piece of this you’re not telling me? Even your father wouldn’t be against leaves and chaperones.”
“He says the chaperones are too young. But they’re not—they’re grown-ups. Like one’s twenty and the other’s nineteen!”
“They wouldn’t also be guys by any chance, would they?”
“Yeah, they’re guys—that’s better protection from trouble, right?”
I grinned. “All depends on your definition of trouble.”
She crossed her arms and glared at me. “You’re on his side!”
“I didn’t say that—as a matter of fact, I may even have an idea.”
“I doubt you could come up with anything that would change that old fart’s mind.” She stared at the TV.
“Hey, he’s only four years older than I am, you know.”
“You guys are like from different centuries.” She turned and looked at me with an expression I remembered from her toddler days. “I wish I could live here.”
“You think he’d buy a chaperone from a different century?”
“You mean you? Like you’d come on foliage weekend?” Hope springs eternal in the teenage breast.
“Yeah, me. I have a new friend who—hard as it is to believe—would probably get off on a weekend of teenagers.”
“A guy? You and a guy?”
“Sorry to disappoint—it’s a woman.”
Her face fell for a second, but her own concerns quickly superseded her concern for me, and she grinned. “Let’s call Dad and ask him right now!”
“Not so fast, Gonzales—let’s just call him. I’ll handle the timing of this—I’ve known your father for a few years now, and I’ve got a feeling tonight’s not the time to approach him with a proposal.”
She knew it too. “I still wish it could be you and a guy.”
I patted her knee and stood up. “Come on, let’s call your dad. Maybe he’ll let you spend the night.”
She followed reluctantly. “It’s been a real long time since Clay—since, you know—since then.”
“These things take longer than you might think. I’m getting better—it’s been better since I moved—but even here I think about him all the time.” I sighed. “Like about how much he’d love this place.”
She scowled. “He’d hate this place.”
“Why do you say that?” I dialed and handed her the phone.
“He’d hate it ‘cause you like it.”
I never got to ask Hilary what she meant by that absurd comment, because Joel refused to let her spend the night; when she hung up, she was too grumpy to talk. I was just as glad she didn’t stay. I was grumpy too. And exhausted.
The past month had been a marathon of unending chores. If it wasn’t business meetings, or a toaster emergency (I needed a quick replacement after I found a mouse impaled inside mine), or a furniture delivery, or the telephone man, it was the ubiquitous garbage bags sitting in the corners of every room, their gaping mouths mute testimony to all my chores still undone. My exhaustion was exacerbated by upsetting dreams about Clay and my father and old Victorian houses, and by an alarm clock that kept going off—when it hadn’t been set—in the middle of the night. I really didn’t need anyone else’s problems. I crawled into bed wishing I hadn’t gotten involved in foliage weekend.
I slept in the next morning and felt much better after a night miraculously free of dreams or the ringing of unexpected alarms. I was also, down to the last major item on my to-do-list: installing the pulsating shower head my mother had given me as a housewarmin
g gift. Although home repair had never been my forte, in the interests of becoming truly self-sufficient, I decided it was time to begin my career as a handywoman.
Clay had had an amazing knack with all things mechanical: he could look at a broken appliance, and it would fix itself; he’d stick a nail in a table leg, and it would stand tall forever; he’d replace a shingle, and the roof would never leak again. “Okay, Clay,” I said to the empty room, “stay with me, pal.” I pulled his old blue plaid flannel shirt from under my pillow and slipped it on; it was faded and worn and didn’t smell like Clay anymore. The shirt hung almost to my knees and did nothing for my eyes—it had turned his a haunting shade of icy blue—but somehow, just wearing it, just the touch of it next to my skin, made me feel more capable.
I got my tools and stood with one foot firmly in the tub and the other on the bathroom floor. I had barely begun to remove the old shower head when the wrench slipped out of my hand and fell, taking a large chunk of tub with it before slamming into my toe. I yelled and grabbed my foot. Somehow, Clay’s shirt didn’t seem to be working as well as I’d hoped.
But I was not about to become one of those helpless widows who was always searching for some guy to do her manly chores; I positioned the wrench again, this time giving it a few extra twists. Now the damn thing was secured too tightly—not only was the old shower head going nowhere, I was scraping all the finish off the surface of the pipe.
It didn’t take a mechanical wizard to conclude that I was using the wrong kind of wrench, but it was the only one I had, so, in a particularly clever move, I yanked the handle even harder. The shower head separated from the pipe with such force that I fell backwards into the tub. I looked down at the hunk of wet metal in my hand and then up at the gaping, scraped pipe hanging forlornly from the wall; a large droplet of water fell on my sock. I started giggling and rested my head on my knees, listening to my slightly maniacal laughter as it ricocheted off the tiles.
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