“I—I—” I stutter on the first sound. “I—I’m sorry.” It takes such an effort to get it out that I practically holler it at her. What am I sorry for? “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” I stammer. No, that’s not it. So I keep going. “I’m sorry I was so … stupid. I didn’t mean to be.”
Mrs. Grimshaw’s face changes a little. She nods. Neither of us thought I was going to say that. She steps back and turns away, leaving the door open. I can see into the house, see the trash spilling off the counter and onto the floor, the potato chip bags and juice boxes and plastic spoons and broken toys. People always said the Grimshaws lived like rats in this house, that it should be condemned. I never knew what they were talking about. I came here day after day, and I never saw any trash. All I saw was people. Now I see the trash. A heap of garbage bags leans against the house, dating from when Whitney and Dallas were in disposable diapers. It’s been gathering for years. Then I hear a window slam shut and the TV goes off. The only noise left is the slow bang of a shutter in the wind.
I stand there on the stoop and listen to the irregular rhythm of the cars going by on the highway, and every now and then the Jake brake of a truck already stuttering for the ride down the hill. So this is the end of the story. She went back to LA for a second shot at leaving all this trash behind, and there’s nothing I can or should do about it. At least now I know where she is, and I can think of her again, developing her act at the Over Easy.
Grimshaw’s gone. She’s really gone this time. I can feel it. And why wouldn’t she go? Why would anybody come back here? There’s nothing to come back to. So she’s gone. She had her choice, and she made her choice. And this time I don’t have to go get her. I ball up the letter and throw it on top of the trash.
* * *
About a week after that, I’m in French 4 Fun, listening to the foreign exchange student attempt to use French to describe his life in Kenya, and Mrs. Kmiec shows up at the door of the classroom and knocks.
“Oui?” Mlle. O’Shea says to her.
“Mrs. Pentz would like to see Serena. She says it’s important.”
Mlle. O’Shea looks at me sadly, her hands clasped in mock disappointment, and asks me what I’ve done now. “Oh, ma fille. Qu’est-ce que t’as fait maintenant?”
“Sais pas, eh, moi?” I shrug, getting up out of my chair.
Mlle. O’Shea laughs and claps. “Très bien fait!” We’ve been watching French films, and I’ve been practicing my gestures in class—the shrugging, the hands, the attitude. It’s almost the end of the period, so I gather up my books and bring them with me. I follow Mrs. Kmiec down the hall, as if I need her to lead the way. We go past the open doors of the classrooms and hear the teachers’ voices droning like bumblebees in the summer, and we go past the miles of empty lockers, down the stairs, around the corner by the vending machines where the portraits of all the past principals of Colchis High hang, all the way to Mr. Van. When I come into her office, Mom is facing the window overlooking the parking lot.
“You should put your portrait up there,” I tell her when I come in. “Next to Mr. Van’s.” She turns around, and her face is puffy and tearstained. She’s twisting her wedding ring around and around. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, Serena. Something really terrible has happened.” She starts to cry. Her tears don’t instinctively alarm me. She’s always cried fairly easily, and what is terrible to her is rarely terrible to me. I prepare myself to fake the shock of learning about Scot’s long-standing affair with Nanci Lee, although why she had to pull me out of class to tell me, I don’t know. I’ll tell her what I’ve learned recently about Grimshaw, that some people fit together and some people don’t, that absence and loss can either be an ache or an opportunity.
“Look at you,” she cries. “I wish I could express how very proud of you I am.”
“Why? What happened?” I ask.
Gripping the back of her chair, she closes her eyes for a few seconds. “Amen,” she whispers. She opens her eyes. She sits on her couch and pats the cushion next to her. I sit.
“Serena. It’s about Melody. Grimshaw.” She takes a breath. “Melody Grimshaw is…”
“Dead.” We both say it at the same time. I don’t know why I say it, because it’s obviously not true, but it just seemed like how that sentence was going to end. So I stare at my mother, waiting for her to tell me what’s really going on. She stares back at me. She takes both my hands and tells me that there was an incident in a motel room. She starts talking to me about shock and grief and bereavement, about counselors and all the help that’s there for me, while I’m still waiting for her to break the news about Scot and Nanci Lee.
I take my hands back. “Can I use your phone?” I ask. “I know where she works, in LA. I went there. I’ll call her.”
Mom moves in close. “Oh…” she breathes. She takes my face in both her hands. Her palms are cool and dry. I’d forgotten how they felt. “My darling, precious child. My sweet girl.”
I take her hands down and then I get up and go to the office phone on her desk. It was a mistake to let the silence last this long. “It doesn’t matter if she still hates me,” I tell my mother. “I mean, I know you have to let people go sometimes, but I let her go too easily, just because she got mad at me. Being mad—that’s not the end of the world, is it?”
“No,” my mother says. “It’s not.” Tears are running down her face.
“We’d get mad at each other,” I explain. “She gets sick of me, sick of my big mouth and bad attitude, just like you.” I pick up the phone and stare at my mother, who stares back at me. She takes the phone out of my hand. She leads me back to the couch, and we sit down.
“Her body is being flown back today,” she says.
“Whose body?”
“Hers. Melody’s. Melody’s body.”
I pull away from her again, move over to Mr. Van’s leather chair, and put my elbows on my knees. My head fills with this rushing, ringing noise. My hands cover my ears. My mother kneels next to me. A gale-force wind starts blowing through my head. Then a sound like rattling metal takes over and gets louder and louder until that dies down, too, and all that is left is a harsh note in my ears that repeats itself over and over in a familiar way. It was the crow, I realize, the crow on the Lone Pine Indian Reservation, that morning when we stood by the side of the road together and all we had was each other. Then I hear her voice, talking about Mike, so clear it’s like she’s standing in the room. I push it away, and as I do that, I realize I will never hear it again. All that’s left is the cawing noise, over and over. That doesn’t go away. I open my eyes.
“Her dead body?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“From Los Angeles?”
“No,” she says. “From Las Vegas.”
“Las Vegas?”
Mom brings a chair over next to me. “I called Allegra. She’s coming down. I’m taking the next two days off.” A long silence stretches in which my mother starts crying again and my mind is full of useless thoughts, thoughts like I bet those are Mr. Van’s African violets over there by the window.
“Was it an accident?” I ask. The minute the question comes out, I know the answer. I knew it before I asked. There has never been a moment in my life where I didn’t know.
She shakes her head. “No.”
In the time it takes me to ask the next question, the clock ticks, the phone rings on Mrs. Kmiec’s desk outside the door and she takes a message, the bell rings, the noise of passing students fills the hallway and then subsides. The longer I wait to ask the next question, the more time I have for it not to be true. I think I’ll let so much time go by before I ask it, that I won’t ask it until we’re all dead and the answer won’t matter.
I clear my throat. “Was she killed?”
“Yes.”
I remember those hands, that thing stretched into a rope, those empty eyes. I saw that she didn’t love him and how weak he really was. I remember Scot telling me about football
: where the enemy is vulnerable, they are dangerous.
“Was it Mike Lyle?” I ask.
She nods. “He strangled her.” She starts to cry again. “With a pair of panty hose.” She blows her nose and offers me a Kleenex. I shake my head. She takes about four. “The chief of police wants to talk to you. I told him not today, though.”
“Okay.” I remember him coiling up the body stocking in his hand and then stretching it. I can see his eyes, standing before me in that little kitchen, and I can hear his voice. How come I can remember him, and not her?
“I’m sorry, Serena.” She’s crying so hard she can’t talk.
“It’s okay, Mom. You can cry for both of us.” I give her more Kleenex, and she dries her eyes again. She sobs out another apology, and I tell her again that it’s okay. As I watch my mother cry, I wonder how I got to be a thousand years older than she will ever be. There’s not a tear in me. Everything is dry and empty and old. There is some ratlike feeling scuttling around the edges of my brain, but I don’t pursue it.
“I knew they were a couple,” she says. “But I didn’t know—how long were they together?”
“About a year.”
“Jesus.” She stops crying and stares at me. “A year? Why didn’t—” And then she stops herself. “But—is that why she was in California?” I nod. “And that’s why you went out there?” I nod. “You were worried about her?” I keep nodding, even though I have no idea if it’s true. “Worried about her … with him?” she asks.
I open my backpack and take my upward mobility notebook out, find Grimshaw’s postcard, and hand it to her. It’s been in there since the day I got it. She looks at the front and then she reads the message on the back. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
“It’s the one she mailed to the school just before April vacation,” I tell her.
“Oh my God,” she breathes. “Oh God forgive me.”
“Do you know any of the details?” I ask her.
She falls apart again, and I have to wait for her to collect herself enough to tell me the rest of the story. Grimshaw had left Mike and Los Angeles, applied for work in a casino in Las Vegas, rented a motel room, alone, and Mike found her there, probably after looking for a while. They know she had left him once already, and it may have sent him into a rage when she did it again. There were people in both adjoining rooms, but nobody heard a thing. She hands me a business card.
“The police chief thinks you may be in danger. We’ll go down to the station tomorrow.”
“Mom.” I lean forward and throw the chief’s card into her wastebasket. “I’m not in danger. What do you think her brothers would do to him if he came back here?”
Mom starts to cry again and pounds her knees. “I could kill him myself,” she says. “I really wish I could.”
“Is there going to be a funeral?” I ask.
“Saturday. At ten. Pastor Don’s been with Mrs. Grimshaw since they found out.” The door to the office opens, and Allegra walks in.
“That’s nice of him,” I say. “But I doubt she wants him there.”
“Serena, I’m really sorry,” Allegra says. She’s been crying, too. She comes forward to give me a hug. I get up and suddenly feel dizzy. All the blood drains out of my head, and I totter backward a few steps.
“Mom,” Allegra says. “Look at her. She needs to lie down.”
“No, I’m okay,” I tell them. “I just want to go.”
“I need one more minute with Serena,” Mom says. “Serena, wait a minute.” She waits until Allegra goes. “Mrs. Grimshaw has requested that—” She sighs. “That you not attend the funeral.” The ratlike feeling pokes its head above the white surface of numbness and grins at me. I feel ice-cold. The gale in my head starts again while my mother explains that for some people when the pain is too great, they turn it into anger and look for someone to pin it on.
“Mrs. Grimshaw never ‘requested’ anything in her life.”
“You’re right. It was harsher than that. But it needs to be respected.”
“Don’t worry, Mom. I’m not going to crash my best friend’s funeral.”
“It turns out that Melody called from Las Vegas. Her mother wouldn’t take the call because she was still too angry with her. That woman has a lot to live with.”
Suddenly, all my blood rushes back into my body and I feel hot.
“She could have called me.”
fourteen
THE FIRST NIGHT AFTER THE news of Grimshaw’s death, nobody at home knows what to do with me or for me or about me, so to spare us all, I just go to bed. I feel like I’m lying in a coffin looking up at a closed lid. I’m not looking forward to waking up, either, but when I do, the sun is shining in my face and I have too many covers on. I remember right away about Grimshaw. There is no respite from this. I sit up and stare at my feet on the floor next to each other. I try to “get it,” to pound it into my head that she’s dead, my friend Grimshaw is now a dead body, lifeless, in a box, soon to be put in the ground forever, amen. I can’t make myself believe it, though, and I don’t feel anything, either. Maybe I’m the one who’s dead. The girl I used to be had a friend named Melody. Neither girl exists anymore. That feels true enough. I take a cold shower, and then I turn it all the way hot, and then all the way cold again, but it doesn’t help. I find my mother in Zack’s room, sorting through old clothes and toys. Nobody else seems to be around. I sit down next to her, and she enfolds me in a hug.
“I’m sorry, Serena,” she says. “I’m so, so sorry.” Her eyes are still puffy from yesterday. I unwrap myself from her arms.
“My face feels odd,” I tell her.
“Odd how?” She puts her hand to my cheek. It’s not that I can’t feel her hand; it’s more like it feels as if it’s on someone else’s face.
“Numb. Rubbery.”
“It’s nearly noon,” she says. “You’re probably hungry. Let’s eat some breakfast.”
At the table in the breakfast nook, she sits across from me. The sun is bright against her back, and I can’t see her face. She asks me a lot of questions, what did Grimshaw do in Los Angeles, what did Mike do in Los Angeles, how was he connected to her job, what was my relationship with Mike like, etc. She cocks her head and laces her fingers around her coffee cup. It’s what she does when she’s carved out time to listen. I can’t answer her questions, though. The thoughts inside my head are clear enough, but conveying any of them to her seems impossible. Maybe I’m afraid all answers would bend back to me and what I did, and I don’t even know what I did. I just don’t feel ready for my own mother to find out how guilty I am. I chew on some of my breakfast—scrambled eggs and home fries and bacon—but none of it has any flavor. Even orange juice tastes dead. Mom watches me intently as I take a sip and then push it away. Coffee is good, though. She made it strong. That I can taste.
I follow the sound of her voice around all morning. It’s like a cord towing me along from room to room as she sorts through drawers and closets, making piles of old things. She tells me stories from her life, what a jerk her father was, how she met my father, how I remind her of him. She apologizes for not telling me more about him, but what do I care about a dead girl’s dead father? Her voice takes me from room to room, and I hang on to my mug of coffee with both hands. We go outside, and she takes a deep breath and tells me how much hope there still is in the world, even though it might take me a long time to find it again. I still have my whole life in front of me, and she’ll help me think about college. Maybe the right thing now is to take a gap year before college and do something with my love of French. Maybe Mlle. O’Shea will have some ideas for us. We end up in the backyard, where the sun is young and strong and the sky is enameled blue and the new grass and trees throb with green. Mom is still talking, now about the garden Scot wants to put in back here. He tried turning over a plot last fall, but the sod is so thick that even his monster tiller couldn’t bite through it. So we have to turn it by hand. I walk out into the middle
of a patch of dirt clods and tufts of new grass. She wrestles a shovel out of the ground. It looks like it spent the winter there.
I drop to my knees, pick up a sun-warmed clod of dirt, and crumble it between my palms. The hard, winter-washed gray gives up easily to the cool brown dirt inside, and a dust-colored spider hurries away with an egg sac in its mouth. Mom starts turning clods over with the spade, and I come along behind her, breaking them up with my hands, picking out the earthworms, shaking the loose dirt out of the clods of last year’s yellowed grass. We work through the afternoon. She takes a break once, and comes back out with hats and a jug of water. When Allegra comes home with Zack and Nora, they join us. Allegra sets up her speakers on a folding chair next to the garden and baroque trumpet music wafts out over our backs as the sun goes down. Then Scot and Aaron pull in, home from baseball practice. Scot’s brought two bags of Chinese takeout for supper, and he sets the boxes on the ground next to the garden and runs in and out of the house with blankets and drinks and dishes. Aaron stands next to me in his baseball uniform and glove, scuffing the dirt with his toe. Nobody knows what to say to me.
Everybody takes the next day off, except Aaron, who is starting pitcher that night in a game against Linerville. The garden is turned by early afternoon. I think we’ve turned over about five times more ground than anybody will ever plant, because nobody knows what to say to me when we stop. In the evening, we go to Aaron’s game. We’re not the sort of family who does things like this, and when Aaron sees all of us lined up on the bleachers, he gets stressed and can’t concentrate. He walks so many batters his coach takes him out of the game, and Colchis loses.
* * *
On Saturday, Mom has to go to Grimshaw’s funeral, so Allegra and her on-and-off-again boyfriend, Tyler, and I get in her car and drive for a long time. Allegra puts Italian love songs on. The day is warm, the windows are open, and the speakers are loud.
The Spaces Between Us Page 21