The Secret Letters

by Abby Bardi

  “Where’s Milo?”

  “He went home to shower,” she said, like it was about time. “That’s what you need to do now, too.”

  “I don’t have a home.”

  “True.” She squinted at me. “You look like shit on a shingle.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Come on, I’ll take you over to my house. You need to go lay down or something. I was about to head back over to Bayview.”

  The thought of being stuck in her big, too-clean house in the cul-de-sac gave me the heebie-jeebies. “I’m fine. I’ll come to Bayview with you.”

  “No, you need to rest. And you’re wheezing.”

  “Am not.”

  “Well, you can’t just sit around in hospitals.”

  “You’re just sitting around in hospitals.”

  “I didn’t inhale a bunch of smoke and almost get killed rescuing people.” She sounded like she might start crying.

  This scared me. Suddenly I remembered my panic in the middle of the night. “The dogs, what about the dogs?”

  “Don’t worry, I let them out.”

  “Were they okay?”

  “Of course.” Then a light bulb appeared above her head. She dug into her purse and handed me a key.

  I stared at the key. It was as familiar as my own hand.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ll drive you.”

  “No.”

  “Julie, don’t be difficult,” she said, in a voice I’d heard her use on her kids. “You need to rest. If anything happens, I’ll call you. I’ll even come get you. Okay?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  In a tired voice, she said, “Go home. There’s nothing you can do for either of them now.”

  She was right, for once, and even on a good day, it was her way or the highway. She steered me into the elevator and through the crowded lobby, where she bullied some guy into watching me while she got her car.

  She took an alternate route that made sure we got nowhere near town where my building was, or wasn’t. Somehow over the past few days, everyone on our street had gotten the bat-signal and dug out the Christmas decorations. Giant inflatable Santas, penguins, snowmen, and Grinches smiled creepily from every yard. Our house looked naked, without so much as a wreath on the door. Norma parked at the curb and tried to come around to help me out, but I waved her away. “Seriously, I’m fine,” I said. Before she could protest, I jumped out, lurched up the front path, pulled the key out of my jeans pocket, struggled with the lockbox the realtor had put on, and opened the door. I turned and waved to her until she drove away.

  Inside, everything was completely silent. I flipped on the ceiling light, then flipped it off again and turned on a lamp. The living room carpet was streaked like someone had just vacuumed. Everything smelled the same as ever, a combination of air freshener and sweat and the dirt floor of the cellar. It felt weird that my mom didn’t come rushing out to greet me, throwing her arms around me and crushing the life out of me while yelling at me for being late, or early, or on time. I must have made some kind of sound because Sally and Max came bounding down the stairs and jumped all over me. I put my arms around them both and relaxed into their dogginess, then sat back on the couch and put my feet on the coffee table, since there was no one to yell at me for doing it, and the dogs flopped at my feet. I closed my eyes. Passing traffic rattled the windows, and I could hear Sally snoring as I drifted off.

  The ringing phone made me jump, and at first I had no idea where I was. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the old yellow wall phone.

  “Just checking on you.” It was Norma. There was almost no one else it could have been. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure.” I was so foggy, I could hardly speak.

  “Ricky’s still critical, but he’s holding his own.”

  I tried to say “thank God,” but it came out as sort of a bark.

  “I’ll call again soon,” she said, hanging up.

  Since I was in the kitchen, I decided to scrounge something for lunch, or dinner, whatever it was. The fridge was empty, except for a carton of soymilk and a packet of vegan ham. I found a loaf of million-grain bread in the cupboard, threw fake meat between a couple of slices, and tore into it. It tasted like slimy cardboard, but I didn’t care. I had just stuffed most of the sandwich into my mouth when I heard a knock at the front door. I opened it, still chewing, and saw a square-faced blond guy I sort of recognized, though at first I couldn’t remember where I knew him from. Behind him were people with cameras shining bright lights on me. “Channel Two News,” the blond guy said. “Are you Julie Barlow?” I nodded, still chewing. “Miss Barlow, we’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Before I could say no, the reporter turned to face the camera and said he was so-and-so with a news exclusive, an interview with the proprietor of the popular Main Street restaurant that had just burned down. “Tell us about your visit to Madame Rosa.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. “Is that what you want?” I wiped my mouth on my sleeve.

  “Would you say she predicted the fire?” the news guy asked.

  “Predicted?” Oh sure, when one minute someone says you’re going to be lucky and the next minute your restaurant is burning down. “No, I wouldn’t say she predicted it.”

  “How long have you been consulting Madame Rosa?”

  “It was my first time.”

  “Do you think the fire was caused by the tarot cards?”

  “Caused by the—no, of course not.” I thought about slamming the door on them, but they were wedged in the doorway, and I didn’t want them to film me yelling at them, since that was probably just the kind of thing they loved and would show over and over. “That’s a crazy question,” I couldn’t help adding, though privately I thought maybe it wasn’t so crazy, like maybe the cards had somehow moved the universe in the direction of total destruction. I wasn’t sure how that might work, but it was in the back of my mind like muzak in a grocery store.

  He asked me some questions about Pam and Ricky and how they were, and then he asked me if I had been to Main Street since the fire. I said I hadn’t, and he tried to talk me into going down there so they could shoot me in front of the restaurant, but I told him I needed to rest, so finally they packed up their equipment and left to cover other people’s tragedies.

  I lay on the couch and tried to doze off again, but every time I got close to sleeping, I’d hear all the ghosts in our house yelling, laughing, arguing, listening to heavy metal (Donny), having sex (my mom and Frank). Ricky whining because he wanted candy. Frank coming home after work saying, “Where’s my sweet girl?” These sounds were stuck in the walls. People said Main Street was haunted, and there was even a ghost tour, but I had never believed in stuff like that. Now it was starting to seem definite, like the stars really were loose, like Ray said. The fire had burned a hole in reality and I was waffling in and out of it, and time was as mushy and colorful as Jell-O.

  Great, I’m going nuts, I thought. I jumped to my feet, threw on a jacket that was probably Pam’s, slammed out the front door, and took off on foot down Main Street. I knew my car was still parked somewhere in town, if it hadn’t burned up, so it made sense to go get it. I limped down the hill as fast as I could, trying not to wheeze. Just past the curve of the street, I could see the row of shops where my restaurant was. From a distance, they looked fine, but when I got closer I saw a huge hole in the side of my building. By the light of the streetlamp, I could see clothes still hanging in my closet. I thought about trying to rescue them and wash them in my mother’s old Kenmore, but when I got closer, I found the stairs to my apartment were gone.

  The front window pane of the restaurant lay in pieces on the sidewalk, and no one had boarded it up. Everything smelled of smoke, but if I squinted, the dining room looked almost normal. A layer of broken glass and ash had fallen on everything, but the tables were still set, and it seemed like business as usual until you looked more closely. Painted buffalos still roamed across back wall,
but now they appeared to be melting. The wild colors of Ray’s painting of the Sun Dagger had streaked, but I could still see cliffs and sun.

  Further up the street, I found my car under a layer of ash and some kind of foam. I picked a parking ticket off the windshield, tossed it on the ground, and drove away.

  XVIII

  I spent the next few hours at the Double T Diner on Route 40 poking a crabcake with a fork. When I got back to the house, I found Star in the living room, wrapped in Ricky’s blue bathrobe. She looked surprised to see me. “Oh, hey Julie! They were doing some tests and they wouldn’t let me in, so I decided to come home and take a quick shower.”

  “Did you drive?” I asked, since I didn’t think she had a car.

  “No, I took the bus. Well, three of them.”

  That sounded horrible. “Hey, I’ll drive you over there in the morning,” I said. “You probably ought to try to get some sleep first.”

  She was giving me a weird look, and then I realized she was probably thinking I was a total bitch for not going to see Ricky right this second, though it was nearly midnight and we’d all had a rough couple of days.

  “Yeah,” I said, like I’d heard her thoughts. “See, I was in the hospital myself. I guess I had a little smoke inhalation from when I went into the building.”

  “Oh my God, you were in the building?” Apparently she hadn’t been consulting local media.

  “Yeah, I was the one who carried Ricky out.”

  She let out a little scream and burst into tears. I patted her on the arm until she calmed down enough to say, “Oh God, Julie, you’re the best, best sister ever!”

  “Not really,” I said, thinking of the thousand shitty things I had done as a sister, such as tying Ricky up and sticking him in a closet.

  “They kept telling me he didn’t even know I was there, but I know he knew. He’ll be so glad to see you.” She wiped her eyes on the bathrobe’s sleeve.

  “I’ll be glad to see him, too,” I said, though the idea of seeing him in that condition scared the hell out of me.

  “He doesn’t look too bad,” she said, adding that he would be well soon and totally back to normal and everything would be okay. I expected to hear the words “fine and dandy,” like my mother would have said, but she didn’t say them. She still wanted to go right back to the hospital, but I talked her into trying to catch a few hours of shut-eye by telling her he required rest and didn’t need anyone sitting there keeping him awake, so she finally caved and went upstairs to his room.

  I went into the room formerly known as Pam’s and mine and lay down on the single bed without even rolling down the crocheted bedspread. When I woke up with a start, it was light outside. I stumbled into the kitchen and found Star in a too-large, tie-dyed T-shirt, drinking a cup of herbal tea. “Oh, great, you’re dressed,” she said. I didn’t bother to tell her that these were the clothes I’d been wearing for two days now, and I had slept in them, and they were the only clothes I owned. She seemed anxious to get going, but offered to make me some coffee. She poured the coffee into a tall paper hot-cup that must have come from her coffee shop and I started to sit down, but she hustled me out the door.

  On the way to the hospital, she wanted to talk about Ricky. She asked me about our childhood and what kind of memories I had of him.

  “I was ten when he was born,” I told her. “We all thought of him as our toy. He was this cute little munchkin in striped T-shirts with drool all over them, always staggering around and bumping into things, then falling down hard on his butt.” I told her how he had blond curly hair like an angel, and how our mother cried the first time she cut it. Star seemed to like hearing this stuff, so I went on and on, telling her about how he broke his arm falling off the back of Frank’s pickup, and how once he stuck a piece of corn up his nose and we couldn’t get it out, and how he used to puke on us all the time because his stomach was delicate, as my mother put it. I could tell she was loving it, so I just kept it coming.

  When we got to the hospital, I discovered she was wrong about Ricky: he did look bad, in fact he didn’t look like Ricky, and I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming. Most of his body was wrapped in white bandages, and I couldn’t see his face past a big plastic tube hooked up to a loud machine. An IV hung over him, with a bunch of other tubes going in and out, and he wasn’t moving, like he was frozen. Star whispered something in his ear. We were in gowns and masks, so maybe he didn’t recognize us, but he didn’t react at all. Star started yakking, telling him how she ran into me, and how glad she was to see me and how I was telling her about the good old days when he was my cute little baby brother. She chattered on, though it was kind of hard to hear her through her mask, crazily cheerful like she’d been in a million burn units before, and Ricky made no response the entire time, just lay there beeping. She told him the doctors said he was doing great and was going to make a full recovery. I didn’t know if the doctors really said this, but she sounded like she believed it. She went on blathering goofy stuff, then turned around like she suddenly remembered me, and said, “So, sweetie, guess who’s here?”

  “Hey, dude,” I said, through my mask. It felt weird to talk to someone who didn’t seem to be awake, and who didn’t seem to be Ricky. “It’s me. Julie. You’re doing great. Just great.” I couldn’t think of what else to say, but I added a couple more dumb things and then Star jumped back in again.

  She went on talking, and every so often I added something so he’d know I was still there, if he knew anything at all. I wanted to crawl away and find some dark place to hide. Since telling her about our childhood, I could only think about cute little baby Ricky with his wide toothless grin and messy curls, toddling around the house and climbing onto everyone’s lap. I was just about to break down and sob when suddenly I remembered the time I was watching him through the window in the backyard and I saw him pick something up off the ground. I ran outside to try to stop him and got there too late to keep him from popping a piece of dog shit into his mouth.

  “Hey, Ricky,” I said, laughing a little, though I still felt like weeping. “Remember the time you ate dog shit?”

  “Oh no, you didn’t,” Star said.

  “Yeah, he was around two. He picked it up and stuck it in his mouth. I had to dig it out of there with my finger.”

  “Oh my God.” Star’s laugh had an edge of hysteria. “Oh my God, that’s so funny!”

  “I called him Dog Boy for years,” I said, feeling ashamed of myself.

  “Did you hear that, honey? I’m going to call you Dog Boy from now on.”

  I could see tears streaming from her eyes, but she went on babbling in that perky, cheerful way, and she was still going strong when I waved goodbye and crept out of the room. I went into a bathroom and cried for a while, then splashed water on my face and went to find my car in the giant garage.

  My next stop was to see Pam. Since I didn’t have a job now, I figured I could just spend my time driving back and forth between hospitals. There were probably other things I should be doing, I thought, like talking to my insurance broker and seeing what kind of coverage I had for fire (I hadn’t paid much attention when I took out the policy), but I didn’t care about them.

  The front desk gave me Pam’s new room number, and when I got there, I wasn’t surprised to find Milo in the hall, reading a magazine with a sailboat on the cover. He gave me a hug when he saw me, and I had that weird feeling again, just for a moment, like I was falling. “Your brother is in there with her,” he said.

  At first I thought he meant Ricky, then Donny, but when I stuck my head in, I saw Tim in a chair next to Pam’s bed.

  “Julie!” she said when she spotted me. Her voice was croaky.

  I was so happy to see her awake I couldn’t speak. I stood there opening and closing my mouth until a nurse came in and snapped, “Only one at a time.” I waved hello and goodbye to Tim, then went back to the waiting room and sat next to Milo. His eyes were red and had bags under them, b
ut he had shaved and looked a lot happier than last time I saw him. “What’s the latest?” I asked.

  “The doctors say the hyperbaric chamber really helped.” He gave me a bunch of statistics on exactly how much it had helped, especially with the CO2 levels in her blood.

  “What’s Tim doing here?” I asked, since Milo seemed to know more about my family than I did.

  “He got here early this morning. I guess he took a red-eye.”

  “Wow.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “He’s an interesting guy.”

  “Is he?”

  “I liked his partner, too.”

  “His what?”

  “His friend, Alex. I’m sorry, I assumed they were—”

  “No way.” I burst out laughing. “That Alex guy is just his friend.”

  “Anyway, he was telling me about his business. It’s fascinating.”

  “Repo? It’s horrible. I hated it.”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  “Yeah. But it turns out everything’s dangerous.”

  Milo stroked the side of his face like he was having deep thoughts. “I guess you take a risk with anything that matters.”

  “No shit. And what do I have to show for it?”

  “It was an incredible place, Julie.”

  “Next time I want to take a risk, I’ll go bungee jumping.” I saw Tim coming down the hall from Pam’s room. “Or I’ll go back to repo.”

  “You’re not working for me again,” Tim said. “People came crying to her and she gave them back their cars.” We gave each other the expected hug.

  “He docked my pay,” I told Milo. “It cost me a fortune to work there.”

  “Well, you know you always have a job at the Wild Hare,” Milo said.

  “Thanks,” I said, though the thought of having to go back to work for someone else, even Milo, made me feel like puking. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have to talk to the insurance guy.”

  “We should have the money from the house sale soon,” Tim said.