So my instinct, to keep you believing me, Mr. Muscatine, is to twist the truth. That truck did not come into my lane, and I didn’t drive off the road to avoid it. I didn’t sit there afterward, shivering with fear, as the truck roared and rumbled on, oblivious to some frail old lady’s daily brush with mortality.
To be honest, I couldn’t tell the truth even if I wanted to. My eyesight is not good after dark, and I was quite tired and emotional. That truck may not have come into my lane at all. It seemed to be inching over, growing louder, repelling my car with a reverse magnetism, but maybe my morbid imagination invested the truck with malevolent intent. Maybe I was just thinking of Lydia asleep at the wheel.
I turned off the pickup and listened to the wind whistling through a crack in the window. I huddled into my fur. Tiff had loved my coat when she’d been small, but now she despised it.
“I can’t believe you keep wearing it,” she’d told me a few days before.
“You used to call it Trudy,” I told her. “You would beg me to put Trudy on so that you could fall asleep in my arms petting it.”
Someone stood at the window of my pickup, tapping the glass, a young man and woman in stocking caps and face piercings. “Please go away,” I said. I guess they reminded me of the meth addicts I’d written about last winter, a newlywed couple who’d frozen to death in the subzero night. “Please,” I said. “I have no money. Please, I beg you, go away.”
“No, no,” the woman said, pressing her hand flat against the glass. She smiled. “No, ma’am. We just stopped to make sure you’re okay. Are you all right?” I looked over to their car stopped on the shoulder. They’d turned on their emergency flashers. There was a child, a toddler, sleeping in a car seat in the back.
“We can make a call for you,” the man said, holding up his cell phone. “We can call anyone you want us to.”
“How terrible of me,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Ignore me, I’m a crazy woman. You aren’t safe from me.”
“Don’t apologize,” the girl said through the glass. She winked. “He’s pretty scary, particularly with that long, curly hair like a girl.”
I put my hand against the glass, where her hand was. “I’m just fine, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m very good. But could you tell me what you saw? Did that truck come into my lane?”
“We didn’t see what happened,” she said. “We just saw your pickup sitting here and wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and start your car and drive back onto the highway?” the man said. “We’ll follow you.”
“You’re too kind,” I said. “Let me give you something. I lied before, I have money. I want to give you something to thank you for stopping.”
The woman pulled her hand from the glass and waved the offer away. “Absolutely not,” she said. “You have a happy Thanksgiving,” she said.
I really wish they wouldn’t stop for people, I thought, driving back onto the pavement. I worried about them, so vulnerable, with that child. I looked in my rearview mirror at their headlights. I could’ve been a trap. I could’ve been bait for something sinister. They’d had no way of knowing. They eventually passed me, the man waving, the woman pressing her hand against the glass of her window. I put my hand against my window too.
· 33 ·
For her cell phone’s ringtone, Tiff was using the screams of a woman being knifed in an Italian horror movie. In the middle of the night of Thanksgiving Day, Tiff’s friend Nat, knowing of the chronic insomnia that had plagued Tiff since the age of seven, tried calling Tiff repeatedly, setting off the screams again and again. But Tiff had forgotten her phone in the living room and was upstairs in her bed, watching, with earphones deafening her to the rest of the world, another Italian horror movie on her laptop. The screams woke Ivy, and though she knew they were unlikely real, they were nonetheless unsettling.
Ivy went downstairs in her ex-lover’s pajamas. She’d been wearing Prof. Chester’s flannel pajamas, pajamas she’d bought him for Christmas in Paris, for so many years that they’d faded from a sky blue to a near-white. In an ugly scene, as he’d packed to leave her five years before, she had unpacked everything he’d put in the suitcase.
“Stop being an infant,” he said. Prof. Chester grabbed her by the arm, lifted her away from his clothes, and shoved her against the wall, where she tumbled and fell against an end table, rapping her funny bone hard and breaking a lamp. Ivy sat there, sobbing.
“Where am I supposed to go?” she cried. They’d been subleasing the apartment from another professor, also on sabbatical. He would be returning in a week.
“Go home to your family,” he told her. He needed nothing at all from her—not forgiveness, not respect. She’s been my wife for twenty-five years, he’d told Ivy when he’d announced he was going back to Mrs. Chester. That’s important to me. “You have a child,” he told Ivy. “You know, that was one of the things that first attracted me to you. A young single mother, taking a night class, improving her life. It was touching. When I suggested you coming to France with me, quite frankly, I was surprised that you said you would. And kind of disappointed, in a way. So things, for us, started falling apart from the very beginning. You weren’t who I thought you were if it was so easy for you to leave your little girl.”
The screams of the phone had stopped by the time Ivy reached the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs. She cocked her head, perked her ears, listening to the house. Her watch, left on the kitchen counter, ticktocked louder than she realized it ever did when it was on her wrist. A rack rattled in the fridge as the motor ran, causing wine bottles to jingle. She reached in to stop the jingling, then decided to empty the almost-empty bottle of chardonnay. Earlier she’d thrown away the chipped wineglasses, but now she pulled one from the trash, rinsed it off, and poured herself the last glass of wine.
Ivy took a needle and thread from a kitchen drawer to repair a button of the pajamas. She’d also kept two of her professor’s shirts and a necktie, all of which she still wore. Perverse, she realized, but Prof. Chester, villain though he was, was the great lost love of her life. She didn’t want it to be that way—it wasn’t a romantic notion she’d concocted. It just was. She’d contemplated, now that she was back from France, signing up for another of his courses. She fantasized sitting in the first row on the first day of class, stunning in a long white winter coat, doused in the French perfume he used to buy her. Prof. Chester, she’d say, raising her hand, why, in your scholarship, do you so aggressively refute the lesbian interpretations of Myrtle Kingsley Fitch’s The Ladies of the Katydids? Is it because of Mrs. Chester’s history of lesbian affairs throughout your marriage, including one with one of your colleagues at this very university? Is it because of your own feelings of inadequacy in keeping your wife satisfied that you fear careful analysis of gender roles?
After Prof. Chester had left her in Paris, returning to his wife, Ivy had answered an ad in the newspaper—a woman seeking a roommate. So Ivy kept her money in savings and lived for five years in a small bedroom, afraid to return to Nebraska for the very reason she’d left in the first place—she was a terrible mother for Tiffany. She worried she’d be even worse if she returned so heartbroken. She had thought Prof. Chester would take care of her forever. He would’ve taken them in, and he would’ve helped her provide for her daughter. She’d been so enraptured by that portrait of the rest of her life that her life was not easily reimagined. She stayed in France because she thought that might win Prof. Chester back. Within a year, as a woman of Paris, he’d want her again, she reasoned.
Ivy heard the horror-movie screaming again and followed it to the living room, where the cell phone sat on a sofa cushion. She answered it.
“Is Tiff there?” the girl on the phone said.
“Of course not,” Ivy said. “She’s in bed.” She then said, “Do you realize what time it is?” only because it was something that every parent eventually said.
“Oh, I’m s
orry,” the girl said. “This is Tiff’s friend Nat. Usually she’s up. Because of her insomnia.”
“Tiff doesn’t have insomnia,” Ivy said.
“Oh,” Nat said. “Okay. But she does, kind of. She’s had it since she was little. We talk in the middle of the night all the time. I have insomnia too, ever since my parents split up.”
“I can’t imagine,” Ivy said.
“Well, I’m very sorry I bothered you,” Nat said. “I’ll just text her. She can read it in the morning, I guess, but she’ll really, really, really want to know about it.”
“Happy Thanksgiving, Nat,” Ivy said. Ivy closed the phone and sat on the sofa in the dark, finishing her wine. In a few minutes, the phone chimed and lit up with its text message. Ivy flipped open the phone and dialed, with one thumb, Prof. Chester’s house. Stop calling here, Mrs. Chester had told Ivy once, years before, but it had sounded less like a demand than a plea. He won’t talk to you. And I won’t let him change our number because we’ve had the same number for our whole marriage. We are not changing this number.
The phone rang, but Ivy hung up. Leaving an unfamiliar phone number on their caller ID, in the middle of the night: it satisfied Ivy.
Ivy went back upstairs and opened Tiff’s door. Tiff looked startled and pulled the plugs from her ears and slapped shut her laptop. “I couldn’t sleep,” Tiff said.
“Apparently you never sleep,” Ivy said. “Nat says you’re an insomniac.”
“Well, yeah, but we all are,” Tiff said. “Nobody I know sleeps at night.”
“You left your phone downstairs, and it’s been … screaming.” She held it out to Tiff.
“Oh,” Tiff said, laughing a little. “Sorry.” She threw aside her quilt, scooted over, and patted the bed. “Get in with me.”
Ivy crawled in next to Tiff and pulled up the blanket. They lay in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, where the stuck-on stars glowed green from the moonlight.
Ivy had received a B— in the lit class she’d taken with Prof. Chester (And that was me being pretty generous, to be honest, he’d told Ivy as they’d taken a bath together).
Tiff read Nat’s text. “I have to call Doc, Mom,” she said. “Pronto.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ivy said. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Do we have a CB radio?” Tiff asked. “Do we even know what that is?”
· 34 ·
A truck driver—perhaps the very same trucker who’d possibly driven me off the road?—had been the first to hear Daisy on the CB radio that Thanksgiving night. Miranda, he’d heard among the chatter of the CB. Desiree. He knew the Miranda-and-Desiree books well, because he’d read them aloud to his kids. Though the woman’s voice was soft, too soft, he concluded that what he was hearing must be The Coffins of Little Hope. He texted his son about it, and his son texted his sister even though she sat in the chair next to him at the dinner table. They then texted all their friends.
Doc stayed up all night that Thanksgiving, making calls, gathering information, disrupting sleep in a number of houses, determined to be the first to report any news of a leak of parts of the forthcoming eleventh book, even if the leak had originated with his own printing plant. I couldn’t sleep that night either. When Tiff and Ivy, in their coats and pajamas and winter boots, walked to Doc’s house across the street, I was standing at my window naked, in the dark of the den, sipping hot bourbon and watching the snow. My white hair, full of knots and frizz, hung long and undone down my back. If anyone had been able to see in, they would’ve thought they’d seen a ghost.
After my run-in with the truck hours before, I’d arrived at Ivy’s house and spoken not a word of the incident. I had nibbled at Ivy’s un-appetizing feast, careful not to let my still-jittering hand clink the fork against the plate.
“How was Lydie doing?” they’d asked.
“Oh, she was here and there,” I’d said. Ivy had mulled the wine, and I’d stirred and stirred it with a cinnamon stick.
So upon arriving back at my house after dark, I’d stripped naked only because I could, because I could pace through my own rooms without anyone thinking I’d gone batty, without anyone rushing after me to cover me up. One normally doesn’t think of being naked as a privilege, but it really is, I suppose, when your beauty and privacy have left forever. On the interstate, on the drive to the nursing home, I’d been passed by a young man on a motorcycle. Though the day had been cold, he’d worn no coat, and the wind had lifted his T-shirt, exposing his skin. That naked patch of flesh had seemed so tender, so in danger from any scrap of highway shrapnel, and I’d stared, captured by his skin’s startling vulnerability.
But when I saw Tiff coming back out of Doc’s house and walking across the street to mine, I put on my fur coat to answer the door. I waited a bit after she rang the bell so she wouldn’t know I’d been up and rattling around so very late in the night.
“Do you have a CB radio?” Tiff asked.
“Why are you whispering?”
“Because it’s night,” she said.
“Why do you want a CB radio?” I asked.
Tiff affectionately petted the sleeve of my fur coat. “We should release Trudy back into the wild,” she said.
“Trudy’s much too old and mangy,” I said. “She’d just be the day’s kill for some stylish leopard-print coat. Why do you want a CB radio?”
“If you tell me that you have one, I’ll tell you why I want one.”
I didn’t have one, but she told me anyway, and I slipped my feet into my slippers, buttoned my coat up as far as it would go, and followed Tiff to Doc’s car. The stepmother of Tiff’s friend Lucas drove a semitruck, and we were all off to cram ourselves into the cab to see what we could hear.
Which was nothing, as it turned out. Doc sat in the driver’s seat fiddling with the CB radio’s knobs, Tiff and I in the truck’s sleeper, ears peeled for any suggestive bit of static.
I shivered and pulled my coat tighter around me. “What are you wearing under there, Great-Granny?” Tiff asked. “Some flimsy nightie?”
“Guess again,” I said. “Something even flimsier.”
“Like what?”
“Like nothing,” I said.
“You’re naked?” Tiff whispered. “What’s wrong with you? Is Lydie’s Alzheimer’s contagious?”
“I don’t know if I even believe in Lydie’s Alzheimer’s,” I said. Tiff tugged on a loose red thread in the embroidery of my slipper, quickly undoing the petals of a rose. I slapped Tiff’s hand away.
Pauline Creechly, a portly forty-something who wrote articles for Doc, arrived at the semitruck in a trench coat and stocking cap. On first sight, you might think chubby Pauline, with her pin curls and holiday sweaters, capable only of a homemaker’s advice column, but she was a master of the redneck felony story, bringing a brisk, gum-chomping attitude to every local tale of domestic violence and trailer-park dogfighting. “Whoever it is has been off the air for over an hour now,” Pauline said, flipping open her notepad with an affected snap. “But I chatted with some folks who heard it. They told me the story—it sounds particularly morbid. If it’s really The Coffins of Little Hope, Wilton Muscatine was in a pretty crappy mood when he wrote it. But here’s the interesting part—Roy at the truck stop said it sounded like Daisy’s voice. Our girl Daisy may be indulging in some serious copyright infringement.”
“Beautiful,” Tiff mumbled.
Part
SEVEN
· 35 ·
Daisy began reading chapter two on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Doc had bought a CB radio from a junk shop in the next county over and positioned it atop his dashboard—the radio had a tricky dial, and its cracked speaker hissed with every sibilant, but considering Daisy’s hushed, listless delivery, we weren’t missing much. Everyone was left to guess the specifics of at least half of what she read aloud. We parked as close as we could to the Crippled Eighty, but word had already widely spread of this potential unofficial leak, this illegal, inexpert
performance of a book still two weeks from release, and hundreds of the impatient had driven, some for miles, to be within range of her frequency, to be the first to know what they could of Miranda and Desiree’s plight.
We found ourselves—Doc and Tiff sitting in the front seat of Doc’s car, Ivy and I in the back—piecing the story together from snippets of the heard and the misheard. Doc would hear Daisy say the undertaker while Tiff would hear the undertow; Ivy heard something about bones in a butterfly net while I heard something about bends in a bubbling creek. Nettles in Miranda’s lace may have been needles in her face, depending on your sense of the book’s sinister intent. In Doc’s car, we listened and debated.
“False,” Tiff said, hugging a pillow. She wore her pajamas beneath her parka. “Miranda and Desiree are not gigglers.”
“I don’t know,” Ivy said. She sipped cold mulled wine from a lidded cup. “I could imagine those girls giggling over something. But I thought she said they were sniffling, not giggling.”
“Shush,” I said.
All the transcripts that listeners later posted online varied in marked ways, and podcasts recorded from the original CB broadcasts were mostly unlistenable, Daisy’s voice too muted, the static too distracting.
“The end of chapter two,” Daisy finally read. Only a moment of silence passed before the people in the cars up and down the road honked their horns and flashed their lights, a spontaneous gesture of community. We all heard it, we all seemed to be saying. We all were there.
The Coffins of Little Hope Page 10