When Willa’s turn comes, she glances at Frank, not a word but all the terrible things right there in her eyes for him to see, unspoken resignation, surrender, and then she goes down the aisle and stands behind the lectern.
Frank wakes from a dream of rain and thunder, and Willa’s sitting cross-legged at the foot of their bed, nothing on but her pajama bottoms, watching television with the sound off and smoking a cigarette. “Where the hell’d you get that?” he asks, blinking sleepily, and points at the cigarette.
“I bought a pack on my break today,” she replies, not taking her eyes off the screen. She takes a long drag, and the smoke leaks slowly from her nostrils.
“I thought we had an agreement. Didn’t we have an agreement?”
“I’m sorry,” but she doesn’t sound sorry at all. Frank sits up and blinks at the TV screen, rubs his eyes, and now he can see it’s Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.
“You can turn the sound up, if you want to,” he says. “It won’t bother me.”
“No, that’s okay. I know it by heart, anyway.”
Then neither of them says anything else for a few minutes, they sit watching the television, and when Willa has smoked the cigarette down to the filter she stubs it out in a saucer.
“I don’t think I want to go to the meetings anymore,” she says. “I think they’re only making it worse for me.”
Frank waits a moment before he replies, waiting to be sure that she’s finished, and then he tells her, “That’s your decision, Willa. If that’s what you want.”
“Of course it’s my decision.”
“You know what I meant.”
“I can’t keep reciting it over and over like the rest of you. There’s no fucking point. I could talk about it from now till doomsday, and it still wouldn’t make sense, and I’d still be afraid. Nothing Zaroba and that bunch of freaks has to say is going to change that, Frank.”
Willa picks up the pack of Camels off the bed, lights another cigarette with a disposable lighter that looks pink by the flickering, grainy light from the TV screen.
“I’m sorry,” Frank says.
“Does it help you?” she asks, and now there’s an angry, sharp edge in her voice, Willa’s switchblade mood swings, sullen to pissed in the space between heartbeats. “Has it ever helped you at all? Even once?”
Frank doesn’t want to fight with her tonight, wants to close his eyes and slip back down to sleep, back to his rain-cool dreams. It’s too hot for an argument. “I don’t know,” he says, and that’s almost not a lie.
“Yeah, well, whatever,” Willa mumbles and takes another drag off her cigarette.
“We’ll talk about it in the morning if you want,” Frank says, and he lies back down, turning to face the open window and the noise of Mott Street at two am, the blinking orange neon from a noodle shop across the street.
“I’m not going to change my mind, if that’s what you mean,” Willa says.
“You can turn the sound up,” Frank tells her again and concentrates on the soothing rhythm of the noodle shop sign, orange pulse like campfire light, much, much better than counting imaginary sheep. In a moment, he’s almost asleep again, scant inches from sleep.
“Did you ever see Return to Oz?” Willa asks him.
“What?”
“Return to Oz, the one where Fairuza Balk plays Dorothy and Piper Laurie plays Auntie Em.”
“No,” Frank replies. “I never did,” and he rolls over onto his back and stares at the ceiling instead of the neon sign. In the dark and the grey light from the television, his favorite crack looks even more like Mars.
“It wasn’t anything like The Wizard of Oz. I was just a little kid, but I remember it. It scared the hell out of me.”
“Your mother let you see scary movies when you were a little kid?”
Willa ignores the question, her eyes still fixed on The Philadelphia Story if they’re fixed anywhere, and she exhales a cloud of smoke that swirls and drifts about above the bed.
“When the film begins, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry think that Dorothy’s sick,” she says. “They think she’s crazy, because she talks about Oz all the time, because she won’t believe it was only a nightmare. They finally send her off to a sanitarium for electric shock treatment – ”
“Fuck,” Frank says, not entirely sure that Willa isn’t making all this up. “That’s horrible.”
“Yeah, but it’s true, isn’t it? It’s what really happens to little girls who see places that aren’t supposed to be there. People aren’t ever so glad you didn’t die in a twister that they want to listen to crazy shit about talking scarecrows and emerald cities.”
Frank doesn’t answer because he knows he isn’t supposed to, knows that she would rather he didn’t even try, so he sweats and stares at his surrogate, plaster Mars instead, at the shadowplay from the television screen. She doesn’t say anything else, and in a little while more, he’s asleep.
In this dream there is still thunder, no rain from the ocher sky but the crack and rumble of thunder so loud that the air shimmers and could splinter like ice. The tall red grass is almost as high as his waist, rippling gently in the wind, and Frank wishes that Willa wouldn’t get so close to the fleshy white trees. She thinks they might have fruit, peaches, and she’s never eaten a white peach before, she said. Giants fighting in the sky, and Willa picking up windfall fruit from the rocky ground beneath the trees. Frank looks over his shoulder, back towards the fissure in the basement wall, back the way they came, but it’s vanished. The wall and the fissure.
I should be sacred, he thinks. No, I should be scared.
And now Willa is coming back towards him through the crimson waves of grass, her skirt for a linen basket to hold all the pale fruit she’s gathered. She’s smiling, and he tries to remember the last time he saw her smile, really smile, not just a smirk or a sneer. She smiles and steps through the murmuring grass that seems to part to let her pass, her bare arms and legs safe from the blades grown sharp as straight razors.
“They are peaches,” she beams.
But the fruit is the color of school-room chalk, its skin smooth and slick and glistening with tiny pinhead beads of nectar seeping out through minute pores. “Take one,” she says, but his stomach lurches and rolls at the thought, loathe to even touch one of the things. She sighs and dumps them all into the grass at his feet.
“I used to know a story about peaches,” Willa says. “It was a Japanese story, I think. Or maybe it was Chinese.”
“I’m pretty sure those aren’t peaches,” Frank says, and he takes a step backwards, away from the pile of sweating albino fruit.
“I heard the pits are poisonous,” she says. “Arsenic, or maybe it’s cyanide.”
A brilliant flash of chartreuse lightning, then, and the sky sizzles and smells like charred meat. Willa bends and retrieves a piece of the fruit, takes a bite before he can stop her. The sound of her teeth sinking through its skin, tearing through the colorless pulp inside, is louder than the thunder, and milky juice rolls down her chin and stains her Curious George T-shirt. Something wriggles from between her lips, falls to the grass, and when Willa opens her jaws wide to take another bite Frank can see that her mouth is filled with wriggling things.
“They have to be careful you don’t swallow your tongue,” she says, mumbling around the white peach. “If you swallow your tongue, you’ll choke to death.”
Frank snatches the fruit away from her, grabs it quick before she puts any more of it in her belly, and she frowns and wipes the juice staining her hands off onto her skirt. The half-eaten thing feels warm, and he tosses it away.
“Jesus, that was fucking silly, Frank. The harm’s already done, you know that. The harm was done the day you looked through that hole in the wall.”
And then the sky booms its symphony of gangrene and sepsis, and lightning stabs down at the world with electric claws, thunder then lightning, that’s only the wrong way round if he pretends Willa isn�
��t right, if he pretends that he’s seven again, and this time he doesn’t take the flashlight from the kitchen drawer. This time he does what his mother says and doesn’t go sneaking off the minute she turns her back.
Frank stands alone beneath the restless trees, his aching, dizzy head too full of all the time that can’t be redeemed, now or then or ever, and he watches as Willa walks alone across the red fields towards the endless deserts of scrap iron and bone, towards the bloated scarlet-purple sun. The enormous black things have noticed her and creep along close behind, stalking silent on ebony mantis legs.
This time, he wakes up before they catch her.
The long weekend, then, hotter and drier, the sky more white than blue, and the air on Mott Street and everywhere else that Frank has any reason to go has grown so ripe, so redolent, that sometimes he pulls the collars of his T-shirts up over his mouth and nose, breathing through the cotton like a surgeon or a wild-west bandit. But the smell always gets through anyway. On the news, there are people dying of heatstroke and dehydration, people dying in the streets and ERs, but fresh-faced weathermen still promise that it will rain very soon. He’s stopped believing them, and maybe that means that Willa’s right and it never will rain again.
Frank hasn’t shown the white card – FOUND: LOST WORLDS – to Willa, keeps it hidden in his wallet, only taking it out when he’s alone and no one will see, no one to ask where or what or who. He’s read it over and over again, has each line committed to memory, and Monday morning he almost calls Mr. Zaroba about it. The half hour between Willa leaving for the cafe and the time that he has to leave for the copy shop if he isn’t going to be late, and he holds the telephone receiver and stares at Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s card lying there on the table in front of him. The sound of his heart, the dial-tone drone, and the traffic down on Mott Street, the spice-and-dried-fish odor of the apothecary leaking up through the floorboards, and a fat drop of sweat slides down his forehead and spreads itself painfully across his left eyeball. By the time he’s finished rubbing at his eye, calling Zaroba no longer seems like such a good idea after all, and Frank puts the white card back into his wallet, slipping it in safe between his driver’s license and a dog-eared, expired MetroCard.
Instead he calls in sick, gets Maggie, and she doesn’t believe for one moment that there’s anything at all wrong with him.
“I fucking swear, I can’t even get up off the toilet long enough to make a phone call. I’m calling you from the head.” He makes only half an effort at sounding sincere because they both know this is only going through the motions.
“As we speak – ” he starts, but Maggie cuts him off.
“That’s enough, Frank. But I’m telling you, man, if you wanna keep this job, you better get your slacker ass down here tomorrow morning.”
“Right,” Frank says. “I hear you,” and she hangs up first.
And then Frank stares at the open window, the sun beating down like the Voice of God out there, and it takes him almost five minutes to remember where to find the next number he has to call.
Sidney McAvoy stopped coming to the meetings at the synagogue on Eldridge Street almost a year ago, not long after Frank’s first time. A small, hawk-nosed man with nervous, ferrety eyes, and he’s always reminded Frank a little of Dustin Hoffman in Papillon. Some sort of tension or wound between Sidney and Mr. Zaroba that Frank has never fully understood, but he saw it from the start, the way their eyes never met. Sidney never took his turn at the lectern, sat silent, brooding, chewing the stem of a cheap, unlit pipe. And then there was an argument after one of the meetings, the same night that Zaroba told Janice that she shouldn’t ever go back to the cemetery in Trenton, that she should never try to find the staircase and the blue light again. Both men speaking in urgent, angry whispers, Zaroba looking up occasionally to smile a sheepish, embarrassed, apologetic smile. Everyone pretending not to see or hear, talking among themselves, occupied with their stale doughnuts and tiny packets of non-dairy creamer, and then Sidney McAvoy left and never came back.
Frank would’ve forgotten all about him, almost had forgotten, and then one night he and Willa were coming home late from a bar where they drink sometimes, whenever they’re feeling irresponsible enough to spend money on booze. Cheap vodka or cheaper beer, a few hours wasted just trying to feel like everyone else, the way they imagined other, normal people might feel, and they ran into Sidney McAvoy a few blocks from their apartment. He was wearing a ratty green raincoat, even though it wasn’t raining, and chewing on one of his pipes, carrying a large box wrapped in white butcher’s paper, tied up tight and neat with twine.
“Shit,” Willa whispered. “Make like you don’t see him,” but Sidney had already noticed them, and he was busy clumsily trying to hide the big package behind his back.
“I know you two,” he declared, talking loudly, a suspicious, accusatory glint to his quavering voice. “You’re both with Zaroba, aren’t you? You still go to his meetings.” That last word a sneer, and he pointed a short, grubby finger at the center of Frank’s chest.
“That’s really none of your goddamn business, is it?” Willa growled, and Frank stepped quickly between them; she mumbled and spit curses behind his back. Sidney McAvoy glared up at Frank with his beady eyes. A whole lifetime’s worth of bitterness and distrust trapped inside those eyes, eyes that have seen far too much or far too little.
“How have you been, Mr. McAvoy?” Frank said, straining to sound friendly, and he managed the sickly ghost of a smile.
Sidney grunted and almost dropped his carefully-wrapped package.
“If you care about that girl there,” he said, speaking around the stem of the pipe clenched between his yellowed teeth, “you’ll keep her away from Zaroba. And you’ll both stop telling him things, if you know what’s good for you. There are more useful answers in a road atlas than you’re ever going to get out of that old phony.”
“What makes you say that?” Frank asked. “What were you guys fighting about?” but Sidney was already scuttling away down Canal Street, his white package hugged close to his chest. He turned a corner without looking back, and was gone.
“Fucking nut job,” Willa mumbled. “What the hell’s his problem, anyway?”
“Maybe the less we know about him the better,” Frank said. He put an arm around Willa’s small waist, holding her close to him, trying hard not to think about what could have been in the box, but unable to think of anything else.
Two weeks later, the dim and snowy last day before Thanks-
giving, Frank found Sidney McAvoy’s number in the phone book and called him.
A wet comb through his hair, cleaner shirt and socks, and Frank goes out into the sizzling day; across Columbus Park to the Canal Street Station, and he takes the M to Grand Street, rides the B line all the way to the subway stop beneath the Museum of Natural History. Rumbling along through the honeycombed earth, the diesel and dust and garbage-scented darkness and him swaddled inside steel and unsteady fluorescent light. Time to think that he’d rather not have, unwelcome luxury of second thoughts, and when the train finally reaches the museum, he’s almost ready to turn right around and head back downtown. Almost, but Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s card is in his wallet to keep him moving, to get him off the train and up the concrete steps to the museum entrance. Ten dollars he can’t spare to get inside, but Sidney McAvoy will never agree to meet him anywhere outside. The man’s far too paranoid for a walk in Central Park or a quiet booth in a deli or a coffee shop somewhere.
“People are always listening,” he says, whenever Frank has suggested or asked that they meet somewhere without an entrance fee. “You never know what they might overhear.”
So sometimes it’s the long marble bench in front of the Apatosaurus, or the abyssal blue-black gloom of the Hall of Fishes, seats beneath a planetarium-constellation sky, whichever spot happens to strike Sidney’s fancy that particular day. His fancy or his cabalistic fantasies, if there’s any difference. Today Frank finds him in t
he Hall of Asiatic Mammals, this short and rumpled man in a worn-out tweed jacket and red tennis shoes standing alone before the Indian leopard diorama, gazing intently in at the pocket of counterfeit jungle and the taxidermied cats. Frank waits behind him for a minute or two, waiting to be noticed, and when Sidney looks up and speaks, he speaks to Frank’s reflection in the glass.
“I’m very busy today,” he says, brusque, impatient. “I hope this isn’t going to take long.”
And no, Frank says, it won’t take long at all, I promise, but Sidney’s doubtful expression to show just how much he believes that. He sighs and looks back to the stuffed leopards, papier-mâché trees and wax leaves, a painted flock of peafowl rising to hang forever beneath a painted forest canopy. Snapshot moment of another world. The walls of the dimly-lit hall lined with a dozen or more such scenes.
“You want to know about Monalisa,” Sidney says. “That’s why you came here, because you think I can tell you who he is.”
“Yeah,” Frank admits and reaches into his pocket for his wallet. “He came into the place where I work last week and left this.” He takes out the card, and Sidney turns around only long enough to snatch it from him.
“So, you talked to him?”
“No, I didn’t. I was eating my lunch in the stockroom. I didn’t actually see him for myself.”
Sidney stares at the card. He seems to read it carefully three or four times, and then he hands it back to Frank and goes back to staring at the leopards.
“Why didn’t you show this to Zaroba?” he asks sarcastically, tauntingly, but Frank answers him anyway, not in the mood today for Sidney’s grudges and intrigues.
“Because I didn’t think he’d tell me anything. You know he’s more interested in the mysteries than ever finding answers.” Frank pauses, silent for a moment, and Sidney’s silent, too, both men watching the big cats now – glass eyes, freeze-frame talons, and taut, spectacled haunches – as though the leopards might suddenly spring towards them, all this stillness just a clever ruse for the tourists and the kiddies. Maybe dead leopards know the nervous, wary faces of men who have seen things that they never should have seen.
Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) Page 24