“What are you doing, sweetie?”
“I have to bury William. He was sick and then he died,” she answered, clutching the shovel so hard that the knuckles in her hand were white.
“Who’s William?”
“My groundhog. Now he’s dead.”
“Really? Let me see.”
Annie set down the box and lifted the lid. There lay William, still as a rock or a clump of earth, but that was because William was a stuffed animal and that had always been his nature.
“Are you sure he’s gone?” I pressed on the groundhog’s chest. She nodded soberly.
“Do you think he’ll mind being buried, Aunt Neave? I thought about it, and maybe since he’s a groundhog he won’t mind being under the ground. But I don’t know.”
“Are you afraid that he’s scared?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Let’s consider that,” I suggested. “Let’s have tea and think a bit.”
We did that, and in the end William was returned to life, though not to the same one he’d been living only a few weeks ago.
I went home to my apartment but couldn’t settle anywhere. The kitchen was suddenly enormous and the light pouring in through the large windows felt hard and white. I moved restlessly from chair to table to sofa and back around again. I tried reading the first of the books that always sat by my bedside, then the second, and a third, and tossed every one of them aside. The books ended with the joyful union of lovers, safe in worlds of their own making. I’d thought that those worlds, the book worlds, were the truer ones. Now with safety, love, joy, all at such a distance, that seemed less certain. Maybe The Pirate Lover was just a lie, spun to comfort the gullible. This thought was so horrible that I fell asleep in order not to think it anymore.
Nights when I was alone in the warehouse apartment I sank into my largest armchair with a book or a pile of Good Housekeeping propped on my belly, crumbs from whatever I was calling dinner in a halo around the pages. Ladies’ magazines had an inflexible seasonal pattern that was soothing when it wasn’t annoying: “Best Christmas Ever,” “Start the New Year a New You,” “Thanksgiving Side Dishes,” “Best Brownies Ever,” “Lose Ten Pounds,” “You and Your Teenager.” Then there was “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” which also seemed to cover the same territory it had when I first met it. Every marriage began to seem riddled with the same rot, every hopeful piece of advice too flimsy to hold the crumbling thing together. I revisited the books that I’d read by Mrs. Daniels’s fire, watching Jane Eyre commune with spirits that urged her to flee temptation, feeling oddly soothed when the Cyclops ate a few more of Odysseus’s men, and I revisited Electra once more as she made her way through the break in the wall and fell into her chained lover’s arms.
I tried on the possibility that I might never feel safe again. I missed Lilly. I played checkers with Annie. I comforted Jane and Snyder. I longed for something that was related to but not Charles Helbrun III. I didn’t mention Charles Helbrun’s proposal of marriage to anyone. I knew what they’d say, and I didn’t want their voices mixed up in my own thinking.
“Let me think,” I said to Charles when he called. “Give me time.”
A practical man, an accommodating negotiator, he agreed to wait for my call and leave me to think. I had surprised him. I promised not to take too long.
* * *
I woke up in the big stuffed chair that sat in front of the apartment’s biggest window, again. A plate with the one remaining piece of toast on it sat on the floor at my feet. I’d been reading, watching streetlights, looking for circling cars or figures looking up at my windows. I might have refused Max’s advice to never stay here alone at night, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t watching for him. Waiting. I’d nodded off and when I regained consciousness I was tipped over on one side, the cushion under my face wet from drool.
A shower and three cups of coffee and I was off to work. I let a catering service representative and a consultant I talked to on the telephone think I was Lilly without correcting them. The consultant had called to discuss the seminar Lilly had hired her to run: “Love and Romance—Their Links to Sales.” My secretary left at the normal time but I kept on until around eight. I walked up the stairs to my apartment thinking about the way Max Luhrmann’s sentences tended to have solid-sounding ends. I decided I would try not to think about anything: not Lilly, not the growing disorder in my apartment, not Max. But you can’t control your mind. The triangle of exposed throat.
That night a storm whipped tree branches against the windows of the upper-floor apartment and I fell asleep in the chair, again. In the morning I walked through my usual routine: coffee, shower, clothes, keys, coat. I had an appointment with a new sales manager and so, instead of walking down the inside stairs to our offices I headed out the back door and the outside landing, the quickest way down to my car. I swung open the door and turned to lock it.
Hanging smack in its center was a little tail of blond hair, streaked through with a subtle highlight or two, bound at its root with the silver clip I’d given Lilly for her seventeenth birthday.
NEAVE
Move to the Rubber Duck
The officer who answered the call told me that cutting hair and putting it on a door was not a crime. I hung up and paced the apartment like an animal for perhaps an hour. Then I took the step I was probably waiting to take all along: I called Max. He hadn’t needed anybody to explain that ponytails nailed to doors were a very bad sign. He’d put me in his car and driven us to the police department, where he represented our concerns because at this point I wasn’t driving safely or speaking clearly. The uniformed officers at the desk suggested that someone had left part of a wig as a joke. Max then jumped over the divider and headed toward the door labeled PRECINCT CAPTAIN.
A very large patrol officer stepped into Max’s path. He was thickly muscled and about half a foot taller than Max. He moved deliberately, sure of himself, planting himself and crossing his arms. “You can’t come back here, bub.” Max stepped around him and shifted his weight quickly to evade an arm when the patrolman flung one out to stop him. He turned to face the cop who was advancing on him.
“You are not going to touch me,” Max said quietly. “I am not going to touch you.” He took my arm and led me past. “Excuse me,” he said coolly as we brushed by. We reached the back of the station unmolested, moving through a little pool of quiet all around us.
Ten minutes later the precinct captain had called in a detective and was agreeing that when somebody left a human ponytail on a door, that was bad. He was not reassuring. The husband, we told him, hadn’t been found or questioned, or, as far as we knew, even looked for. “It’s different now,” he told us. “The meat was a clear threat. You should avoid being alone in your apartment for a few days, Miss Terhune. We’ll nose around. Keep in mind that you actually don’t know who left it.” He asked us for every employer or address we knew for Ricky. He asked for a list of any employees who’d been fired or had quit abruptly. He asked about enemies. Did I have enemies?
Max was tightlipped as we walked to his car. “You can put some things together to last you a few days,” he said as he turned the ignition. “You don’t have a choice anymore, Neave. If you won’t go to the Rubber Duck, we’re heading for your sister’s house.”
But there was that clear image in my mind of Ricky trailing me to Jane’s, parked in a dark car outside her home, watching Annie move through the lighted rooms of her home. “I’m not going to Jane’s.”
“Then your brother’s.”
Again, I imagined Snyder opening the door and finding Ricky Luhrmann standing there, possibly with a large blunt weapon in his hand, some spittle at the edges of his mouth. “No,” I said. “Not Snyder’s either.”
“Then that’s it. The Rubber Duck.”
I could see the thick hank curving away from the nail. The silver clip. “I don’t know.”
“Neave. The ponytail.”
I was so tired—so flattened and
beaten and scared. I could feel Max feel all those things on me and gather himself to bear down, right now, while I was vulnerable. He’d seen my face when I put that hank of hair in a brown paper bag to take to the police station. He’d seen the shaking hands and blank eyes.
We didn’t speak as we walked back up the stairs to the door, where a few strands were still snarled around the nail. We stood on the iron grate landing and looked at the silky twist of hairs. Something dark lapped up inside me.
“Max, what was your sister’s name?” I asked. “The one who died when she was little.”
“Pansy.”
“What did she look like?”
“A pansy. A pretty little happy thing.”
I plucked the stubborn remaining hairs from the nail and held them up over my head until a breeze took them.
“All right,” I said finally.
“You’ll move to the boat?”
“I’ll go there tonight. Maybe tomorrow. I don’t know about further than that. It’s no guarantee, Max. If somebody wants to find me, all he has to do is follow me when I leave the office at the end of the day and trail me to the boat.”
“He won’t go near you during the day when you’re surrounded by people. He’ll stay away until he can be sure the staff is all gone, but you’re going to start leaving before the office empties out—leaving when you’re still surrounded by people. He’ll wait until after hours before he cruises by, expecting you to be alone. If your car’s gone, he’ll wait for you to come back. But you won’t come back because you’ll be safely asleep on the Rubber Duck. You’ll get to the Duck a different way every night. Different routes. Sometimes you’ll take a bus. When you drive, you make the rearview mirror your best friend. You think anybody’s following you and you can’t shake them, go to your sister’s. Not the boat. I only wish I could tell you to come to my apartment, but we know he’s got a close enough interest in my comings and goings to make me an undesirable backup plan.”
I looked at him. “People tend to find what they look for,” I said.
“You don’t have to help them by standing still in an obvious place. I don’t think the first thing he’ll think of is a slip in a Charlestown marina. Please, Neave.”
“Okay.”
“Tonight. We’ll move some of your things and you’ll stay on the boat.”
I agreed, too close to the hanging ponytail to resist him.
I followed him to the Rubber Duck at her slip in Charlestown and let him lift me over the rail into the boat. He left me in the snug cabin. I lay down on the bunk with the soft bumping slap of the water beneath and around me. The refrigerator was stocked according to Max Luhrmann’s idea of need: coffee, milk, bread, bologna, peanut butter. I waited for sunrise and when it came I boiled water in the little electric heater and made myself toast, which I smeared with peanut butter.
Charles would be angry if he knew I’d moved to this boat and not told him about it. I thought about anger being his first probable response. Charles Helbrun was most comfortable when he was in charge, and this, in many circles, made him terrifically attractive. People, powerful people, asked him to sit on their boards specifically because of his ability to radiate power, to engage and persuade and control. He had money and respect. When he was with me he listened to me with care. He had introduced me to the universe where men wore English suits and women wore Parisian scents and everyone knew how to order wine: a world of complete safety. Many beautiful women had pursued him without success. As his wife, no social door in the city would be closed to me if I wanted to walk through it. No policeman would dismiss my concerns as frivolous. No day would end alone with a peanut butter sandwich and a Mars bar. There would be no watching my rearview mirror for pursuers. I would be watched over; I would be listened to; I would be treated carefully by powerful people.
If I said no to Charles, I might never marry. I could live out my entire life alone. If I said yes, I could walk down an aisle in flowing white silk, Janey wildly happy and Annie in a puffy pink dress, me with my gaze fixed on Charles: handsome, clear-eyed, disciplined, faithful Charles, waiting for me at an altar. I could have that.
I screwed the top back on the peanut-butter jar and rinsed the coffee cup. I left the Rubber Duck, walked to a bus stop in the nacreous six a.m. light, and went directly to the office. The moment I reached my desk I picked up the phone and dialed his number. It was barely daylight but I knew his habits. He’d been up for an hour already and was probably on his third cup of coffee, strategizing, laying out his day. He picked up immediately.
“I am honored that you asked me, Charles. But I won’t marry you.”
NEAVE
The Rubber Duck
Ruga brought it to my attention that I was scaring the Be Your Best staff. “You act crazy, you cancel meetings, you don’t get orders in, and you look like you rolled in hay. All the time. Look at your nails, all bitten and raggy. Look at your hair! You act like the company’s going down the tubes so they look for new jobs.” She stood me in an inconspicuous space to observe the office movements at strategic points of every day so I could see a little gang leaving early, taking long lunches, spending time on the telephone—rats thinking the open water was a better bet than my particular ship. This year’s sales conference was so close and here I was, nominally in charge, alienating friend and foe, leaving the office for long stretches without explanation.
“Look,” Ruga said with a shrug, “you wish this to happen? What are you thinking?”
She was right. I had to straighten up.
A week after I’d started going to the Rubber Duck I went to the parking lot behind our building and found all my car’s tires slashed, flattened right down to the pavement. I didn’t need to wonder who had done it. Max had been right. Ricky had been here, maybe been here night after night, and not found me. Tonight he was determined to keep me from leaving. I felt the rush of something like cold water in my chest. I scanned the street. I walked around the block, looking. There was no sign of him; no dark figures of any kind sitting in cars for no apparent reason. But the tires hadn’t been slashed for no reason. I called Snyder.
“Snyder,” I said, “I need a favor.”
“What’s the favor?”
“Oh, for chrissakes. How many favors do you owe me? What difference does it make what the favor is?”
“Fine. All right. What do you need?”
“I need a ride someplace. And then I need you not to mention where you take me to anyone. Not even Jane.” I named a street corner about a half mile from Be Your Best and told him to meet me there. I called a garage to have them put the car on a flatbed and haul it off to get new tires. I put a change of clothes in a bag, pushed my hair under a hat, settled a large pair of sunglasses over my face and walked out of the building with the last salesgirl to leave. I walked quickly to the block where I expected to find my brother. He was waiting.
“Why is all this so secret?” he asked. “Is something wrong with your car?”
“Just give me a ride, Snyder.” I directed him to the docks in Charlestown, taking a discursive route and checking the rearview mirror regularly. Nothing. When I got out of the car I looked Snyder directly in the eyes. “You won’t mention where you dropped me off to anybody. Anybody at all.”
“How will you get back to the office tomorrow?”
“There’s a bus I can use. You don’t have to worry about it. I can trust you on this, right, Snyder?”
He nodded soberly and I believed him.
I walked down the quay to the Rubber Duck, stepped over the side, and unpacked some of my old defenses against confusion and fear: books, cookies, and a magazine or two. More recently I had added Milk Duds to my arsenal. I stretched out on the tiny bunk and picked up Ladies Home Journal, flipping to a “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column describing a wife’s supposedly flirtatious behavior around other men, a party ending with her slipping out with her husband’s handsome brother.… Confronted with her own secret desires, the wife offere
d a couple hundred words of apology that looked to me like nothing but a description of the husband’s shortcomings. He had been so distant, so indifferent to her intellectual and spiritual needs. The attractive brother had made her feel noticed for the first time in so long.… I could hear exactly what Lilly would have said to this one: “Get a job,” she’d say. “She’s an idiot, and the husband is a bore. She’s dying of bore-ism with that man.”
I opened my old copy of The Odyssey and a yellowed paper dropped to the deck. I picked it up and opened it: Boppit’s commendation from the armed forces for service above and beyond the call of duty. How could it have been here all along when I’d flipped through this book so often without seeing it? I would give it to Jane. Maybe I’d frame it first. Now I lay it open beside my rocking bed and felt grateful about Boppit, and sad about his untimely death beneath our old Chevy’s back wheels. He’d been a brave dog. A good dog.
I thought about the way Boppit seemed to be confused when his ears flicked up, because they were so uneven. I listened to the slap of waves on the tires tied to the dock. I fell asleep.
I was in a rocking place, someplace where the floor moved. I was pursued, running! I was so frightened I could hardly breathe, and I struggled to run faster. I was in a labyrinth of dark wooden corridors, tiny doors on either side of the narrow passages I rushed through. I heard the thing behind me, the heavy, lumbering animal steps, the sounds it made when it breathed. Somewhere above me I heard barking and a voice. Lilly’s voice! I turned around to retrace my fleeing steps and find a way upward, to the voice and the barking. Endless walls and closed doors and the thing behind me so close! And what was hanging from the doors like little tails? Were they bundles of hair? I had to find the door that would lead upward and away. Then I was not running through the narrow corridors but struggling in the water, everything dark around me and a hand on my arm, pulling me down. I resisted, kicked and pulled until I realized that I was having no difficulty breathing or seeing even though I was submerged. In fact, the water moved against my body in the most wonderful way. I turned to see what or who had pulled me here. The sensations of water against my chest, my legs … how lovely!
The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Page 23