by Amy Gustine
No one had asked Brian this question, and until this moment he would have said he didn’t want anyone to, but now that someone had, he wanted to answer.
Brian described that afternoon. It had been a little like using an escort service, except because the girl wasn’t a professional, that had made it better and more difficult at the same time.
Obi nodded. “Yes.”
When she sat with her legs apart to show Brian she hadn’t worn any panties, he’d reached up slowly and she’d had plenty of time to close her legs or tell him to stop. He couldn’t say for sure what he’d touched. “It just made me so happy that she trusted me.”
Obi turned toward the patio door.
“Sir?” Brian asked. “Sir? Do you believe me?”
Obi was sixteen, barely three months into his license, when he ran a red light, T-boning Gerald Sorens, a paunchy father of four with a bumper sticker across his rear window. Everything we see is a shadow cast by what we don’t see. Forty years later he still couldn’t account for it. He hadn’t been speeding or drunk or fiddling with the radio or talking on a cell phone. There were no cell phones back then. It was broad daylight, but the sun was at his back. Despite all this, Gerald Sorens died on a gurney in the middle of the intersection, five police cars directing traffic around him while Obi knelt in the plastic shards of shattered headlights, praying.
“Sir?” Brian asked again. “Did you hear me?”
Obi looked down at the note. “It’s when we’re innocent that we’re confused.” Then he smoothed the rough draft and the edited version he’d pulled off Jolly’s door over his knee, one on top of the other, folded them together into a perfect square and put them in his pocket. He and Brian sat in silence, staring at the sand-colored carpet. Neither man wore a watch and there were no visible clocks, no audible ticking, nothing at all to mark time, not even the sun, which shone fixedly on the opposite wall like a bare bulb. Time made no difference now. If you cannot understand or be understood, if you cannot make amends, what good are the hours and the days and the weeks?
But Karen was waiting. Obi made himself speak up. “I think they missed something. Jolly must have left a note. She had to have left something.”
“Did they look at her computer? Emails and stuff?”
Obi brightened. “They said they did, but maybe not. Or they didn’t understand.”
Brian went next door and brought back Jolly’s laptop. In a few seconds he had it booted up and he’d opened her emails. Sitting at the table, they analyzed each message, memo, and PowerPoint presentation for hidden meaning. Finding nothing by way of explanation, Obi slumped in his chair. “I thought for sure there’d be something.”
“I’m sorry,” Brian said.
“If not a note, then a clue. Something.”
“Maybe it’s in code. Something the police wouldn’t notice.”
Obi looked at him strangely.
“That’s dumb. Sorry. I watch too much TV.”
“No, that’s what I thought. That she might have left a code.”
They sat for several more seconds considering this until Brian said, “What if I taped her place? You know, before you touch anything, I’ll video it exactly as she left it. Then you can study it all you want.”
“You have a camera?”
Karen kept saying she wished they’d bought a camera so they would have video of Jolly, but Obi was secretly glad they didn’t. He felt pretty sure he wouldn’t make it if he had to watch her or hear her voice.
Brian retrieved the camera from a black bag under the TV.
“Don’t touch anything,” Obi said. “Just tape.”
“Yes, sir. I got it.”
Brian unlocked Jolly’s door and went in, leaving it wide open. From where Obi stood, in the doorway of Brian’s apartment, he could see a trapezoid of beige wall that could have belonged to anybody.
Brian was gone several minutes. Occasionally he would call out what he was doing. “I’m in the kitchen, looking in the dishwasher.” When he was done, he and Obi sat side by side on the edge of the coffee table and watched the playback over the TV. Repeatedly, they freeze-framed the video to discuss the arrangement of objects—how book titles might be combined to spell out a message, if seemingly innocuous bills and shopping lists could have hidden meaning. They discussed what significance there could be to Jolly having no medicine of any sort in the house except the Percocet she’d overdosed on. No Tylenol or Advil, no NyQuil or Sudafed or Pepto-Bismol. While they dissected and discussed, writing notes and rewinding the tape a hundred times, the sun finally gave up for the day. At some point one of them turned on a light.
“Sir, I don’t think there’s anything here,” Brian said. They were seated across from each other on the floor, the notepad from the airline disassembled, its pages scattered on the coffee table and covered with anagrams of the words Jolly left behind via cereal boxes and shopping lists.
The feeling made its way from Obi’s knees to his chest again and he began to sob. “What am I going to tell her mother?” he bleated, bowing his head and pinching the bridge of his nose until his knuckles went white. “She had to have a reason.”
“Tell her it was my fault,” Brian said. “Tell her Jolly lived next door to a depraved soul unworthy of her, and if he’d only been a better man, Jolly would still be here.”
Obi looked up, sobs still shaking his shoulders.
“Tell her it was me, that I’m the one to blame,” Brian repeated.
Obi sucked in his breath several times. When his shoulders finally went still, he whispered, “Can you do me one more favor?”
“Of course.”
“Can you bring me Jolly’s things?”
Brian nodded. Obi gave him the list and one by one he carried Jolly’s things to her father. Her hairbrush. The tarnished silver spoon ring Karen’s brother had made. Her college diploma. Her key ring with the Siamese cat that looked like the cat she had in grade school. A box of warranty cards, receipts, and instructions he’d already videotaped and dissected for secret meaning. Perfume bottles and a tray filled with lipsticks and blushes. Old yearbooks and greeting cards. A swimming trophy from high school. A camera, a boom box, and an iPod. A stuffed frog she’d carried everywhere until she was seven.
When Obi satisfied himself that everything on Karen’s bring-home list had been collected, he sent Brian back to pack the remaining things for charity. At three a.m. Brian touched his shoulder. Obi had fallen asleep on the floor in front of the balcony door, which looked like the black mouth of a deep cave.
“Sir? Sir? You want to lie on the couch?”
“Is it all done?”
“Yes, sir, it’s done.”
Obi struggled to a stand, stiff from lying on the thin carpet. Outside the heat sat waiting, even without its sun. Brian stayed in his own place while Obi went over to Jolly’s.
A neat line of boxes along one wall. Across the room a purple couch and yellow chair, a silver coffee table, sheer drapes layered below velvet side panels, an enormous mirror framed with black glass. Somehow, in his zeal to find the smallest clue, Obi had not noticed the furniture itself on the videotape. It wasn’t what Jolly had brought from Columbus. That had been a profusion of flowered slipcovers and tables in need of a fresh coat of paint, a rickety coatrack made of old canes lashed together with twine and picture frames whose original life had been as racket presses. Obi opened the empty cupboards one by one, then the medicine cabinet and the closets. He made himself glance at the bed, but it was stripped bare, a mattress on a metal frame that could have belonged to anyone, to a complete stranger.
Movement on the balcony caught his eye and Obi rushed over to the dark glass, flipped the lock and pushed open the door, for a crazy moment thinking Jolly had been out there all along. Brian was leaning over the railing of his balcony, the hook of an old-fashioned umbrella employed midair to snatch a red bikini from the spines of a potted cactus. Looking up at Obi, Brian lost his balance and for a moment dipped forward like
a gymnast on the uneven bars. Obi lunged to catch him as the umbrella dropped three floors, its metal a sharp crack on the stone garden below. Brian righted himself. He and Obi looked at the suit, still snagged on the cactus.
“Sorry,” Brian said. “I didn’t want to leave it there.”
Obi picked up the bikini’s top and examined it in the light from the living room. Dangling cords connected two small red triangles decorated with gold stars. It didn’t seem like clothing at all. Jolly swam in a one-piece blue Speedo with wide shoulder straps. Obi tossed the bikini across the gap to Brian. “This is nothing like Jolly. I don’t think it belongs to her.”
Brian folded the suit carefully into a single neat triangle like a flag. “Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.”
Obi turned away. Now he could go home. Jolly didn’t live here anymore.
HALF-LIFE
Sarah didn’t apply for the job with a plan. She just wanted in.
Melanie Cuppernell was returning to work as a third-grade teacher and needed a nanny for ten-month-old Grayson and almost five-year-old Beatrice, who’d missed the kindergarten cutoff. “You’ll have to keep her entertained.” Melanie laughed. “And let me tell you, that’s no easy task.”
During the interview in a bright room with yellow sofas and paintings thick with color, Melanie asked questions Sarah could answer truthfully. Where was she from? Here. Age? Twenty-two. How long had she nannied for Melanie’s friend Rachel? Two years. How long had she worked at the daycare before that? Two years. Melanie didn’t ask about her family, so there’d been no need for lies, though Sarah had a string prepared because Nancy, the social worker assigned to her when she aged out, had warned against telling employers Sarah grew up in foster care. “Some people see it as a negative.”
If asked, Sarah claimed her father died when she was two and her mother, a retired secretary, lived in Florida. This narrative had satisfied Rachel and it would satisfy Melanie. Sarah had refined it to such simplicity, it was impossible to forget. To such banality, no one ever wanted more. If she ever married, Sarah’s husband might want more, but husbands, like other family, were bestowed by the universe, and so far the universe had not been all that forthcoming.
At the end of the interview, Sarah affected a lighthearted voice and asked, “So, are you related to Judge Cuppernell?”
“He’s my dad,” Melanie said. “Do you know him?”
Sarah shook her head. “Just the name.” Judges’ names appeared in the newspaper and on yard signs every few years. Sarah wasn’t worried about her own name being recognized. Melanie would have no reason to know it and the Judge, if he remembered, which seemed unlikely, would probably dismiss it as coincidence. Before scheduling the interview, Sarah had gone to the library and checked. There were nine Sarah Andersons in Toledo’s white pages and so many on Facebook the computer crashed trying to load them all.
As Melanie backs out of the driveway that first morning, the first time Sarah is alone with the children, Beatrice looks at her with trusting eyes. “What do you want to do?” Her voice rides high with anticipation.
“Nothing,” Sarah says, trying out cruelty.
“Well, we have to do something. That’s what Mommy hired you for.”
Melanie had not lied when she called the girl precocious.
Weekdays Sarah arrives at seven thirty, by which time Melanie has left for school and her husband Aaron stands by the front door, tapping at his phone. Every day he says, “Bea’s in the kitchen and the baby’s up, I think,” until one morning Sarah says it before he can and after that Aaron smiles and salutes her as they pass in the foyer. “It’s all yours, Captain.”
She imposes a schedule similar to the daycare. “It will get you ready for kindergarten.”
Beatrice balks. “I do what I want.”
“Not anymore.”
Grayson waits, half awake, in his crib. Diaper change, face wash, breakfast, tooth brushing, clothes, then a walk, though Sarah allows a little variation here. Bea can take her bike or scooter. Snack time, reading time, playtime, lunchtime, nap time (Grayson) and craft time (Bea), TV time, another walk, song time, snack time (kids) and cooking time (Sarah). At Rachel’s cooking was both harder—her twin infants liked to be held a lot—and easier—unlike Bea, the babies never questioned why there were two dirty pans but only one loaf of banana bread.
Sarah makes spaghetti because no one counts pasta strands. She makes casseroles because women like Rachel and Melanie don’t have plans for the leftover ham or the vulnerable half of last night’s green pepper. When Sarah tells Melanie, “Just warm it up, it’s all baked,” Melanie, like Rachel, doesn’t notice the ragged edge of the casserole, which attests to its having been cut and the larger portion transferred from the 9x12 to the 9x9 bakeware.
“You’re such a good cook!” Melanie exclaims instead. “I can’t believe what you make out of stuff I throw away.”
“My mom taught me.” It’s one of the few true things she’s ever revealed about her mother, who made delicious meals out of things Sarah couldn’t name, like a blade-shaped lettuce she put in a pan with black water. One time Sarah tried describing the black water’s taste to a stocker at the grocery store, but the woman looked at her like she was nuts. Embarrassed, Sarah switched stores, afraid to run into her again. Months later, at Rachel’s, she sniffed the contents of a brown bottle on the counter. Balsamic vinegar. A taste confirmed: this is what her mother cooked the lettuce in.
Week four, Thursday afternoon. While Grayson is napping and Beatrice is in the basement making Play-Doh cupcakes, Sarah sneaks out, locking the door to make it appear as though she’s still in the house, then stands behind the garage knee-deep in yard clippings and mounds of white-veined dirt dislodged from last year’s pots. Disturbed by Sarah’s footsteps, bees emerge from beneath one of the mounds and draw their turbulent pattern in the air. Sarah takes several steps away and regards the lurch of her watch’s second hand. One minute. Two.
It takes only three and a half minutes. Three and a half lousy minutes!
Beatrice’s muted voice hollers Sarah’s name, the “ah” long and echoing, while the bees slowly retract into their nest. As the minutes grind on, Sarah strains to detect any change in the child’s tone, but fear is not discernible in so muffled a version. Beatrice doesn’t come out, or even open the back door, and Sarah remembers how it is to be a child, the unspoken boundary between your life and out there. Your apartment. Your mom. Your kitchen table. You do not cross that boundary alone, and no one has to tell you that. Sarah’s mother never told her. She just knew: you wait.
Twenty minutes and the shouting has stopped. The feeling in Sarah’s stomach is both familiar and strange. A memory she had not remembered until now.
She slips from behind the garage, forces herself to sidle past the climbing rose she will later learn Melanie’s mother planted forty years ago. The Judge’s wife comes by several times a year to fertilize and trim the plant, worrying over its blooms because Melanie lacks a green thumb.
Sarah opens the door and hears Grayson crying, finds the two of them in his room. Beatrice has somehow gotten her brother out of the crib and sits with him on the floor, paging through his favorite book, her high-pitched voice wavering through tears, trying to interest him in what the zebra is going to do about his stripes.
When Sarah appears, instead of rushing to her, Bea levels a knowing, angry look. “I thought you left.”
“I just went outside a minute.” Sarah sits down cross-legged and takes the baby, rocking him against her chest, his feet anchored in the flesh of her folded thighs. “You should have come out.”
“Gray was crying.”
Sarah scowls. “Did you wake him up?”
Beatrice shakes her head. “He was crying and you weren’t here. I had to get him out of his crib.”
“Did you drop him?”
“He was crying because you left.”
Ah, Sarah thinks. Smart girl. Knows how to turn things around. But so does
Sarah. “He was crying because you panicked. I’m gone a few minutes and you panic.”
“I didn’t panic.” Beatrice looks both defiant and ashamed.
“I was just in the backyard. Did you even look out the window?”
Pause. “Yes. You weren’t there.”
She’s lying, yet it’s Bea’s truth now. The narrative she will continue to tell herself. And her mother probably. Sarah’s chest tightens again. By four p.m. today she needs a more compelling narrative for Bea to pass along.
The narrative she provides is pain and pleasure.
Grayson sits in his highchair, swirling fingers in the crushed, seedy remains of raspberries, which he eats by the carton, as if they weren’t a dollar an ounce. It seems unlikely, but Sarah remembers picking raspberries with her mother. Unlikely because they had no car, so they must have gone with a friend. Sarah remembers only a few first names. Barb. Joan. Mindy. Without last names, there is no way to claw back the years.
With Bea back at her Play-Doh bakery, Sarah takes the baby outside and sets him near the bees’ nest, glancing around to be sure she’s unobserved before prodding it with a stick. When several bees emerge, she traps two in a glass jar laced with sugar water, then slides the lid of the jar away and presses its mouth against Grayson’s bare back, tapping hard on the bottom to startle the bees. To her surprise it works and one of the bees stings the baby. He lets out a wail that tumbles into gulping sobs.
Sarah pulls out the stinger, then rubs the wound, pressing hard enough to distract the nerves. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she tells the baby. “I had to do it. I had to.”
Inside she shows Beatrice. “Stay away from the back of the garage. There’s a bees’ nest in the ground. One of them stung your brother.” The red circle with its center puncture has already bloomed to two inches. While Grayson wails and Beatrice sits beside him singing, “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, my baby,” Sarah makes an ice pack and applies it to the baby’s back.