Dodging and Burning

by John Copenhaver

Taking the coffee cups to the sink, Bunny asked, “Whatever happened to Letitia Greenwood? I know she lived into her eighties.”

  “Everything was taken from that woman—her son, her husband, her grandson, her wealth, her position in the community. Everything. She even ended up in Twin Oaks for several months following the accident. She was completely off her rocker there for a little while.”

  “I couldn’t have survived all of that.”

  “But she did. And wouldn’t you know it, when she was in her seventies, she started turning up at church again. Sam and I were newlyweds, and although we weren’t especially religious then, we decided to go the Presbyterian Church when I was expecting my first child. It seemed like the right thing to do. During those years, from time to time, I would see Letitia sneak in after the beginning of the service. She was always dolled up, wearing hats and dresses that were fashionable decades earlier, her hands always in gloves. Often men in the congregation would tend to her and offer her a seat, but no, she refused politely and said she preferred to stand at the back. I sang in the choir, so I could watch her from where I was sitting. She cocked her head back and closed her eyes, trying to take in the sermon. Her body language broadcast two messages across the sanctuary—‘Leave me alone’ and ‘Look at me.’ The guilt that clung to my family had left no visible traces on her. Not a bit. Every now and then, she would stop listening to the minister and look out over the congregation. ‘I’m Letitia Greenwood,’ I imagined her saying, ‘and my family created you people. You’re all my children.’”

  “How did she die?”

  “I’m surprised you don’t know.”

  “I didn’t get back to Royal Oak often, and Mother didn’t talk much about the town. She never liked it there. And Daddy—he wanted me to forget about the entire incident with Jay. He wouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “I see. Well, the day Letitia was diagnosed with cancer, only a few days after her eightieth birthday, she went home, took the same gun she shot Jay with, so they say, and shot herself in the heart. She had to use her cane to press the trigger, but she managed it—willful to the end.”

  “Did she leave a note?”

  “No—but an article ran in all the local newspapers detailing her life. That was her note, I suppose.”

  “What a remarkable woman.”

  “When I was a girl, I was terrified of her.”

  “Me too!” Bunny laughed. “I’m still a little frightened.” She cleared her throat and then looked at me dead-on. Her eyes seemed like they were made of the same dark, silvery substance as the pearls around her neck. “It’s time to get down to business. Follow me into the living room. I’ve uncovered something you must read.”

  Bunny crossed the living room to a sturdy, cherrywood desk, topped with a new laptop and a cluster of framed photos of her sons and grandchildren. Behind the desk, built into the wall, was a bookshelf stacked high with rows of mystery novels and thrillers. I recognized some of the authors’ names, and for a second, I considered asking her if I could borrow a few. She picked up a folder and gestured for us to sit on a cream-colored damask sofa that faced out the bay window. It was patterned with little gold lions.

  “What are you working on now?” I asked, curious about the computer.

  “Well, I was working on a novel about a famous double murder from the ’80s, the Bakker-Jones case. But I stopped when I received the package. Recently, I’ve been writing about this.” She handed me the folder. “And I guess you have too.”

  “Just for me, you know. Not to be published.”

  “I’m sure it’s wonderful.”

  “Not by a stretch.”

  “Pish—don’t say that!”

  “I’ve been writing off and on for years. I started back in my early twenties. I wrote it like I was writing a letter to Robbie. Everyone needs an audience, right? When those photos arrived in the mail, I decided it was a sign I needed to write about that summer, so that’s what I’ve been doing. Writing it all out, filling the gaps best I can.”

  “Look inside the folder,” she directed, smiling and sitting on the sofa beside me. “Tell me what you see.”

  I sifted through the folder. “Where did you get these?” I said, amazed. “I thought they were long gone.”

  “I found Lily’s partner, Georgiana Gardner. I paid her a visit after our last phone call. She’s the one who sent us the images. Lily kept them all these years, because of this.” She pinched a piece of card stock out from under the photos and handed it to me. Jay’s handwriting was scribbled across it. “She received this folder only days after he died. This note was attached. She saw no point in telling us about it. Georgiana disagreed with Lily and, after her death, wanted to honor Jay’s wishes.”

  I read Jay’s note, folded it, set it aside.

  What it implied, that Jay had planned to die, rattled me, but it also gave me greater courage to say what I had come to say. I mustered my strength and took Bunny’s hand. She shrunk from me and gave me a nervy glare, but I went on. “I need to say something to you. It’s something I didn’t understand when it happened, only years after the fact. This note confirms it. The last time I spoke to Jay, he told me the story behind the photos.”

  “You mean the friend in drag. Terry Trober. I know.”

  “That’s right. Robbie’s doppelgänger.”

  “He died in an air raid.”

  “That’s not how he died. Not really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jay slept with Trober and betrayed Robbie. In a guilt-ridden mental break—a fugue, they call it—he beat Trober and left him to die. The air raid just finished him off. Jay didn’t tell you the whole story.”

  Bunny’s mouth opened. She was about to tear up.

  I wanted to comfort her, but I needed to tell her everything, so I went on, still holding her hand in mine. “The last time I spoke to Jay, he was talking about that tale in Weird Stories, ‘A Date with Death.’ Do you remember it?”

  “I do. You read it over and over that summer.”

  “It’s Robbie’s. What I mean is, the story is his. He wrote it and submitted it to Weird Stories, but he never saw it published. He was in the Pacific. In it, a woman sees her future in a magic photo album but does nothing to stop it. That’s where Jay got the idea to create a story about a photo—”

  “My mother helped me pick out lingerie for my wedding night,” Bunny broke in, slipping her hand out of mine. “It embarrassed me, but she gave me some good advice. I’ll always remember it. She said, ‘Bonita, sometimes a woman wears her clothes like a fortified wall, and sometimes, for the rare individual, she wears them like an open door.’ For you and me, those photos of Lily were an open door. Jay was inviting us to pull back the layers—Lily, Foxy, Terry—and discover him.”

  “The more we saw who he really was, the more he loved us.”

  “And feared us.”

  “The woman in Robbie’s story has her future shown to her but doesn’t believe it. It’s not the future she wants. So she doesn’t do a thing, not a damn thing. She denies it even when it’s right there with its hands around her throat. That’s what Terry was, the ugly truth about things, about the future, about love especially, and Jay beat him to death for it.”

  “Jay was like a code with no cipher,” Bunny added, “so he brought his photos to us, hoping we could tell him what they meant. But he started rearranging the facts, spinning a different tale, telling himself we needed the veneer of one story to understand the other. But that didn’t happen. We all fell in love with the lie.”

  For a second or two, we didn’t say a word. The sunlight in the room had a strange pink glow. Then, straightening my posture and gathering my nerves, I said, “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told another living, breathing soul.”

  Bunny clasped her hands in her lap.

  “On the day Jay died, when Letitia raised her shotgun to shoot Papa, Jay stood in the way on purpose,” I said. “He saved Papa’s life. He wanted t
o die. I think it’s why he confronted Papa in the first place.” Her hands were balled into fists now. I continued. “The night before, after he told me about what he did to Terry, he kissed me on the forehead. It was odd to me then, but now I know it was a kiss good-bye.” It was difficult for me to look at her. She was so still, and her face was blank as marble. “The guilt I dropped on you, what I said—I never should’ve called you a murderer, Bunny. It wasn’t right. I was an angry little girl. I didn’t know what the hell I was saying.”

  We sat there in silence for a time, Bunny looking away from me, out the window. As the sun crept below the homes across the street, the light seemed to retreat and advance, changing the very nature of the objects in the room. It warmed the faint beige of the area rug in front of us and the pale fabric of the sofa, the little golden lions blazing to life, but cast the bookshelf cubbies into shadow and darkened the living room’s red walls to a musty wine color. I felt gloomy but relieved. The truth was out.

  Bunny pulled out a handkerchief, dabbed her eyes, and said, “It’s cold in here.” She stood up and walked to the fireplace. “I apologize. I’m not being a thoughtful hostess.” She pressed a button, and the gas log clicked then caught. The blue flames began toiling away at the fake firewood. I thought, If only those damn flames knew the wood would never burn.

  From beside the fireplace, she said, “We’re all responsible for his death. All of us. Your father, your mother, Letitia, Lily, you, and me—and Jay himself. Not to mention the war. Hitler. Mussolini. Hirohito. The list could go on and on. But I’m not interested in doing that. We must let it go.”

  I nodded.

  She returned to the sofa and switched on a floor lamp. “Would you like more coffee?”

  I didn’t answer her. One of the photos of Terry Trober’s beaten body was lying there on top of the folder’s contents. In the light from the lamp, it looked different somehow, like it was shot from an angle I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t a print Jay had shown to us or Georgiana had mailed to us. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing—and then, like that, I was. “Look, Bunny,” I said. “You can see his face better.”

  She fidgeted with her reading glasses, picked up the photo, lingered over it, and set it down. Without a word, she went to her bookcase and started hunting for a book.

  “What is it?” I said, but she held up a finger.

  Once she found what she was looking for, she flipped through it, earmarked a page, and brought it to me. It was a how-to book on photography. The chapter she’d marked was called “Dodging and Burning.”

  “I had to research photographic techniques for The Black Box,” she said, picking up the photo of Terry again. “I think Jay dodged this.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He held a cardboard cutout or even his finger between the enlarger lens and the paper as he developed it. Doing that alters the exposure and brings out the details of Terry’s face. He used a similar method to create the images of me at my eighteenth birthday party.”

  “I see,” I said, still confused. She was moving fast.

  “It’s even possible he burned-in the originals.”

  “Burned them?”

  “Another technique. He dropped a photographic veil over Terry’s identity by doing a localized overexposure of his face.”

  She removed her glasses. “Well,” she said with a sigh and an uneasy smile. “I have something you must read and take with you.” She placed the photo upside down on the coffee table and slipped a yellowed envelope out from underneath the stack of photos. She handed it to me, and I slid the letter out and unfolded it. It was addressed from Robbie to Jay.

  I read it.

  To see your handwriting, Robbie, to hear your voice, to imagine you wedged in a bunk on a destroyer writing that letter before lights out, was—I don’t know what. Magical, that’s the only word for it, as cornball as it sounds. What you said about the weather in the Pacific, about Mama and Papa, about Royal Oak, about living in the city and getting an apartment with Jay, about the funny Australian soldier—everything you put down, each determined word of it, had flickered out years ago, but here in my hands were the remains.

  When I reached the lines about the crossword puzzle, I stopped—an idea in my old brain had flapped its wings. I glanced at the puzzle and again at your comment. My heart nearly flew out of my chest. “Bunny,” I said. “Do you realize what this is?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is a message, a secret message. Because the military examined the mail, Robbie and Jay hid messages to each other in cryptograms, love letters in code. Jay told me about it that night.”

  “All those notes in the tree trunk.”

  “That’s right. The inspectors might’ve thought they were spies if they came across a cryptogram in a letter, so he and Robbie had to disguise them.”

  “I’m not sure if I follow you.”

  “Jay’s cryptograms were always based on a connection between numbers and letters. A=2, B=4. That connection is just as plain as day here. Don’t you see it?”

  “The crossword puzzle?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how do we figure it out? We need a cipher, don’t we?”

  “I just don’t know. Let’s see. Maybe the words, if put in a particular order, make a sentence.”

  Bunny went to her desk and grabbed a pen and paper. We listed Jay’s answers in order and checked to make sure they were right—Eve, Amos, Indian summer, gangrene, R and R, winning, -ings, less, furlough, island, Nemo, Dumbo, U-boat, Orson Welles, leopard, Virginia, nemesis, wish, AWOL, lend, lunar, Veronica Lake, eagle, “Undecided.”

  It didn’t make a bit of sense, so we tried something else. Many of the answers were related to the military—gangrene, AWOL, R and R, furlough, U-boat—which seemed fitting given your surroundings. Other answers were related to movies or entertainers—Amos, Nemo, Dumbo, Orson Welles, Veronica Lake, and “Undecided.” Others were animals—leopard and eagle. What were you two up to?

  “Orson Welles!” Bunny blurted out. “There’s a word we need that will unlock it. We need our Rosebud.”

  I nodded, but we were still nowhere. We just stared and stared, our eyes burning a hole in the paper. We were hungry to solve this last mystery—and that hunger made me feel like I was a twelve-year-old girl again, following Jay through the woods, staking out the Vellum house, reaching out for his hand in the funhouse, driving the station wagon down the mountain, stopping Lily on the train platform. I felt close to Bunny too. We’d finally understood something about each other. We both loved mysteries, and we loved Jay because he was a mystery.

  “Why do you think Jay didn’t write in ‘Undecided’?” she said. “He finished all the other answers but stopped on the last one.”

  “Maybe once he knew it, he didn’t feel like writing it in.”

  “That doesn’t sound like him.”

  “Wait!” I said. “Read the part of the letter about the crossword. What did Robbie say?”

  “‘Anyway, I’ve enclosed a crossword puzzle,’” Bunny read. “‘I’ve made it hard. Have fun! Oh, by the way, thanks for the word search! But I never know where to begin. I’m terrible at it.’”

  “‘Where to begin.’ It’s an odd thing to write to Jay. It’s a message. He means the first letters of the words.”

  “Do they spell something?”

  We listed the first letters of each answer. First, we ordered them “Across,” then “Down,” but it was gibberish. Then, we wrote the first letter of each word in the order of the numbers for each crossword prompt. Number one was leopard, so the first letter was L. We wrote down the following—

  L E A V I N G W A R W I L L F I N D U L O V E U

  And then, it became clear—

  LEAVING WAR WILL FIND U LOVE U

  I was speechless. It seemed impossible, all of it, just impossible.

  Did you die in the war or simply disappear, Robbie? If you went AWOL, how’d you do it? Did you switch tags with
a dead soldier, like the Aussie had suggested? Were you hinting to Jay about your plan? Could you have really pulled it off? Did you pull it off?

  As I was sitting there, you came to me again, materializing out of a cloud of dust, the mail truck speeding off and you walking toward me, the sun dodging and peeking around your head, transforming your messy brown hair into tufts of gold. And I saw your strange smile, a little cocky but sweet, meant just for me, and I ran to you. Will you read a story to me? I said. Not this time, Cee, you said. I’ve got a life to live. I’m going to live it even if it means breaking the rules. Important rules. Let that be your story. Tell that story yourself.

  “He could still be alive,” Bunny said with a punch of excitement. “He could be out there, an old man. He could’ve had an entire life. A happy life.”

  I remembered Jay’s dream of Miami—he was there with you, standing beside you, holding your hand and staring out at the water, digging his feet in the sand. It had saved him in the Ardennes. It had pulled him out of the snow and set him back on his feet. But it hadn’t saved him from himself. But maybe, just maybe, you had lived that postcard dream, away from Royal Oak, out from under Mama and Papa’s cruel expectations. Maybe you escaped. Maybe.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Bunny asked, touching my arm.

  “Fine. Just fine.”

  “A Date with Death” came to mind again. I never liked the ending, but I always felt closer to you when I read it, hoping with each read I’d find a new way for it to end. I never understood why you didn’t give the main character a way out. The best part of a story is the escape, and you knew that.

  So I’m going to believe you were like a hero from a better story: you braced yourself against the side of the ship, dodged flak from antiaircraft gun, ducked enemy fire, grabbed a life vest, and jumped from the destroyer before it sucked you under the water—and I know, I just know, you found your way to shore and to a town right out of South Pacific, and then on a cargo ship heading who knows where. And maybe you never contacted me because you heard news of Jay’s death, and it broke your heart. You figured Royal Oak—all of us, even me—stood for everything you were trying to leave behind. That may not be what happened, not exactly, but it’s what I’m choosing to believe. It’s an old woman’s right. I know somewhere out there you’re warming your old body in the sun with a stretch of ocean at your feet and thinking about me, wondering if I’m alive, if I’ve had a good life.