Problem: there was only one box labeled STACEY’S SHOES. I pulled it down and inspected the top. The packaging tape was still intact. The cardboard around it had not been ripped or tampered with. But there had been three boxes of her shoes. Stacey was no Imelda, but she liked her shoes. Which meant that two were missing. Someone had been in here.
‘Hey,’ I said to the dust. ‘It wasn’t me.’
I put the box on top of the others, scanned everything once more and turned away and reached up to drag the metal door down. But I paused, forgetting something. I lowered my arms and turned. I tried to remember what was in each box. How much of her remained, and what I had thrown out or given away. I was drawn to one of the boxes in the right corner, a smaller carton with a blue band of rubber packing tape around the base. Without knowing why, I kneeled and began edging it out from under the stack. It scraped across the concrete floor and popped free, leaving the heavy pillar of boxes above it to canter and tumble down at odd angles. I pulled it to the center of the bay and crouched, peeled off the tape and opened the box.
Inside were three shoeboxes but no shoes, and I remembered how Stacey used to save shoeboxes for other storage purposes: letters and stationery, discarded perfumes, knit hats and mittens she might have worn twice a year. I opened the top shoebox, a shiny black Nine West job now splitting at the seams. Inside this was a small Christmas present. The paper was frosty blue with ice crystals and foil twinkles, tied off with a scissorpermed silver bow. I knew Stacey had wrapped it; that had been her favorite part of wrapping presents, using the scissor blade to strip the ribbon so that it sprung back into a coil. She had loved the texture of it, the rheatrheeeeeat and pop of each strand. The present, or pressie, as Stacey would have called it, had no label, no ‘To: -- and From: --’ tag.
Had I packed this up? I didn’t remember ever seeing it. I had probably found it buried in some closet and thrown it in before moving on. I might have been drunk, angry, in a hurry to get it over with.
I opened the present, crumpling the paper into a ball. Under the paper was yet another box (this was starting to feel like a game of Russian dolls) and I ripped that open too, at last removing from layers of lemon-colored tissue paper a silver photo frame with a glass front. Behind the glass was a photo of Stacey in Cabo San Lucas, leaning against a wooden sign in front of our favorite taco stand, a cold Corona in one hand, a fried shrimp taco in the other, smiling at me, the photographer. Then, to my astonishment (and momentary revulsion), the photo changed.
Now I was staring at a photo of Stacey at home, standing over the sink, looking over her shoulder at me, one hand in dish suds, the other flipping me the bird. Her hair was mussed, she hadn’t wanted me to snap this one. The photo changed again, and again, and I realized I was holding one of those digital frames that scrolls through dozens or hundreds of photos.
I fell back on my ass and leaned against the boxes, holding the frame with both hands as the photos phased in and out, one image of her replaced by another, and sometimes - though much more rarely - with the both of us. I realized this had been intended as a gift for me. A gift from Stacey last Christmas, the Christmas she never had. I hadn’t turned it on. She might have meant for it to be scrolling as I opened the carefully wrapped box of silver and blue. Amazingly there was life in the battery yet, and I sat numb against the boxes of her possessions as the digital frame played through the entire chronology and started again, progressing from younger to older, elementary school to the high school years to college and her twenties, daytime, napping, nightlife, bartending, singing into a wine bottle, laughing, watching me, standing with me, ignoring me, each a photo I had admired or taken, and some I had never seen, ones she might have borrowed from her parents or friends in order to scan them for me. It was, I realized with deepening, almost unbearable weight in my throat, the story of Stacey since I had known her, her every mood and the rise through our history together playing now like a sad synopsis of the first third of what should have been a lovely life.
Stacey at sixteen, the braces have just come off, white spaces on her teeth. So proud.
Stacey at seventeen, pale with nerves in her blue prom dress. Ruffled sleeves, her big hair, so pretty then, so embarrassing in retrospect. I’m next to her and look worse.
Stacey bowling in senior year gym class. Gutter ball. She actually looks sad about it.
Stacey in her Chili’s uniform. Her blonde hair in a ponytail. She had smelled like fajitas and quit after only two weeks, but still gave the restaurant two weeks’ notice.
Stacey riding a mountain bike near the Arkansas River. She is wearing a pink helmet and pink gloves, holding on for dear life. Not talented athletically, but game for the activity.
Stacey and her dad by the U-Haul on moving day. He looks like he wants to kill me for whisking her away to Los Angeles. She looks too young to go. The amount of trust and faith she put in me is staggering.
Stacey in front of Barney’s Beanerie, drinking a Bloody Mary, doing a bad metalhead thing with her finger horns. Our first week in Los Angeles. Her snow-blonde hair is long and straight, almost long enough to reach the top of her butt. God how I loved her hair. Look at her. She’s coming out of her shell.
Stacey with Viggo Mortensen. Spotted him at Starbucks and couldn’t help herself. She looks drunk with lust. Viggo looks embarrassed for her. She loved The Lord of the Rings, the books and the movies. Called them her guilty pleasure. I never understood the guilt part.
Stacey painting the ballroom, her brush extended, she’s too short to even reach halfway up the wall. The optimism of the new move. The endless energy for redecorating. Where did it all go? Into the house, or just away?
Stacey in a puffy parka and knit cap blowing on a cup of coffee, somewhere cold, mountains in the background, maybe Colorado, a road trip I can’t remember. I was probably traveling for work. She looks chapped, cold.
Stacey and her friend Heather Keinzle from Redondo Beach, sisters in pedicure. Happy. She had been in a real funk after learning that Heather was moving away, a new best friend that was not to be.
Stacey eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes on the couch, Henry in her lap staring at the spoon like it is God. Thus begins the stay-home phase, where Stacey would rather spend all day with her dog than go out and be with people.
Stacey staring into her own phone taking her own picture with her pearly white teeth bared, this one taken and attached to a text reminding me to get my teeth cleaned. She always made the appointments, and kept them. She wanted me to take better care of myself. I thought she was nagging me.
Stacey lighting a candle on the dining-room table that is set for Thanksgiving, her chef apron hanging over the stemware. So serious, the pressure of her first holiday meal enormous.
Stacey in the passenger seat of her car on the drive to Pismo Beach, her hair golden and flying in the wind and the Pacific Ocean out her window. We had been fighting. This was one of those make-up trips. She was a downer, unable to summon the false enthusiasm. I don’t remember what we did for two days.
Stacey with a towel around her waist, one arm covering her breasts, shouting at me to stop it. We haven’t had sex in almost two months. This was not the way to get the ball rolling again.
Stacey leaning back on someone’s green Vespa in Santa Monica, posing with a cigarette. For the first time she looks hardened. Something in her has been lost. Is she depressed now? Really? Or was she just annoyed with me this day?
Stacey walking Henry on the path in Laurel Canyon, her floral print sundress tilting off her hips as if an invisible hand were tugging the hem, her gait tight, anxious, scurrying ahead of me.
Stacey looking up from her pillows, flat on her back, her eyes wide and her forehead lined as I stand over her taking this photo in bed, minutes after The Sex. We must have recovered somewhat. Sometimes the sex was still good. But it was like she wasn’t really there.
See them all again. Stacey happy, happy, happy, cool, sometimes surprised, sometimes chagrined, but
almost always a crack of a smile, the eyes glinting with mischief. A normal girl becoming a woman. Two dozen photos, three dozen, four. Sixty, seventy photos in, the cracks begin to appear. More blank expressions than smiles. Her cheeks sucked in, her face drawn in some of the photos. In others, her normally natural white blonde hair a little off, one too many bad highlights, ashen. The forced smile. A tension in the shoulders. In later group photos, she was never quite looking at the camera. Her eyes seemed to be drifting, unfocused. It wasn’t obvious until the second pass, but a presence began to make itself known, the invisible cloud hanging over her. Is it the pall of adulthood, the party ending, or something worse?
Stacey with four friends at Coachella Music Festival, tailgating. She is fucked up in an unhealthy way, worse off than her friends. Muddy boots, someone’s baseball hat askew on her head. She looks miserable.
Stacey napping on the couch with Henry at her feet, balls of wadded tissue on the coffee table beside her. Her eyes puffy, rounded with dark moons. She might have dozed off crying, or was battling the flu. Who would bother taking these? Had I?
The last shot:
Stacey in the backyard at dusk, standing in the fence’s shadow, in that sundress again, a dark shape without a face. Her arms hang limp at her sides. The photo grainy, the light all wrong. She is just a flat cut-out, a negative space too far away. I am nowhere there with her, only angry here. Who took this? Why would she show me these things? What is she doing out there in the dark all alone?
What happened to her eyes?
In this final photo they are but smudges of gray. As if the blue had been stolen. As if they aren’t even real.
12
I rang the doorbell. I knocked. I waited, turning in little circles and watching for movement inside Mr Ennis’s house. Either Annette was not home, which meant she was feeling better and went out for something, or she was not feeling better and was in fact comatose in the back bedroom or wherever she had collapsed last night. I knocked harder. Maybe she had called a friend to come by to take her to a doctor. I didn’t have her phone number. The only thing left to do was walk around and peek into the windows, but I could do that just as well from my balcony, with the scope, without looking like a peeper.
I remembered the lock on Stacey’s storage locker, my fingers spinning the green-faced dial. And I realized it was too late to check for fingerprints. If I asked Bergen or Lucy to have it dusted now, they would find no prints except those which belonged to me.
I stepped off Mr Ennis’s porch and shuffled over to my mailbox. I removed two bills, some home décor and clothing catalogs, and one shrink-wrapped issue of Allure from a subscription I had tried to cancel but which kept arriving month after month.
I was halfway to my porch when a deep voice said, ‘Freeze, muchacho!’
I ducked, genuinely alarmed until the last arc of flying cold water slopped over my feet and wetted the cuffs of my pants. It was about a pint. I turned toward the Gomez place and was greeted by the sight of my neighbor’s son and daughter pumping their bazooka sprayers at me.
‘Yo soy disparo! ’ I cried, miming a bullet wound by pressing the mail to my crotch.
Another line of cold water slapped a diagonal line across my chest and Emilia and Fernando ran away in a fit of giggles. Their father, Euvaldo, was leaning back against his truck, braying in such a way that his gold crowns twinkled in the sun. His dress shirt was untucked and he was running the garden hose over his chrome wheels. A can of turtle wax sat on a cloth rag on the truck’s hood. When we had moved in, the Gomez’s roof had basketball-sized holes in it and the house was up on stilts, waiting for a new foundation to replace the hundred-year-old bricks. The short hedge delineating the property had been something out of Tim Burton, and the Gomez mobile at that time had been a brown Dodge minivan held together with baling twine and duct tape. Now the house was immaculate, the hedge tighter than a nun’s ass, the GMC a $35,000 twin cab with lots of chrome. Euvaldo Gomez was running laps around me and both of us knew it.
‘You working hard today, James?’ His English was clear and he spoke with the clipped cadence of a wrestling coach.
‘Not really, jeffe. How about you? You gonna retire this year? Buy Lupé that beach house on Majorca?’
Euvaldo tossed his head back and emitted another series of jowl-rattling gya-gya-gyahs before cutting himself off as quickly as he had started. ‘I will stop working when I am dead, James. Not one day before.’
During this neighborly ritual, Euvaldo worked his way across my yard sideways, a man walking the ledge of a tall building. This meant home improvement advice or neighborhood gossip.
‘James, James,’ my neighbor was saying, ‘you have a new roommate?’
‘Roommate?’
‘Yes, my friend. A lady friend. It is time for you to get back on the horse, no?’
I did not want to tell the story of how I had met Annette. ‘No, not really.’
Euvaldo was having none of it. ‘Oh, si, cabrón. Bring her to my barbecue Sunday. She can meet the rest of the family.’
Lucy knew the Gomezes, so he must have been referring to Annette. But why was he acting like Annette and I had something going, after only one night? What had he seen? ‘That is very kind, Euvaldo. Maybe a little soon.’
‘You are a young man, James. It is never too soon for love.’
I chuckled. ‘She’s having trouble with the plumbing. I don’t even know her.’
Euvaldo scowled. ‘Why must you hurt me this way?’
‘What?’
‘You can’t keep a secret from me, James. I’ve seen this girl in your house many times. She is very beautiful, amigo.’
Half of the blood in my body dropped to my feet. ‘Hey, come on.’
‘Que?’
‘You’re joking.’
‘About what?’
‘You’ve seen her? In my house, before yesterday?’
The señor must have noticed his gringo neighbor’s change of color, because he stepped closer and spoke in a lower voice. ‘You just met her yesterday?’
‘You’re messing with me, right?’
Euvaldo squinted up at my house, then back to the Ennis place. ‘Maybe I exaggerate a little sometimes, but no, I am positive. This girl, I’ve seen her five, six times, James. Last week, and at least one week before that.’
‘Inside my house?’
‘I thought she was your girlfriend?’
Euvaldo was not only a vigilant member of the neighborhood watch, he was on the board that approved modifications to the historic homes and led various efforts with the city to fund restorations and improvements. He took an interest in people who were not invited guests in his hood.
‘Who is she, James?’
‘I—’ don’t know! I almost screamed. Maybe I was desperate to deny what Euvaldo was suggesting. Maybe I didn’t want to make trouble for her, scare her away. But there had to be an explanation. Euvaldo could be mistaken, a little too vigilant in his neighborhood watch. Lucy might have filled his head with strange ideas.
‘Forget it. It’s a misunderstanding. I’ll talk to her.’ I smiled. It was important to put my neighbor at ease. ‘I’ll tell you about it later.’
Euvaldo let it go, but he looked skeptical.
‘No worries. Thank you, jeffe.’
‘If you say so.’ Euvaldo edged back to his lawn and picked his garden hose up, turning the flow toward the property line. ‘You need to water your lawn, James. Your grass is turning to shit.’
‘I know, I know.’ I climbed my porch steps, biting my cheek.
‘Anything you need, James. We are here for you.’
Last call, over the shoulder, ‘You too!’
This is unacceptable, I thought, slamming the front door. I threw the mail at the nearest wall and stormed into the kitchen. What if she was here, watching me for weeks, snooping around my house? She said she had been trying to decide how and if to approach me. But in my house? Why would she let herself in? What the hell was
she planning to do here? I was livid, as much with myself as with her.
You dumbass, I could hear Bergen say. Didn’t I tell you to stay away from her?
I would ask her what the hell was going on, she would explain it, end of story. And if it wasn’t a convincing story, one phone call and Mr Ennis’s house would be vacant by the end of the week.
The Haunting of James Hastings Page 9