by John Searles
And then the crying begins. This is a man who has made grave mistakes before, but never one as grave as this. And the reality of what his sudden rage and fear has produced this time brings an onslaught of strangled sobs. Between each and every gasp for breath, he repeats one single question: “What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?”
The only thing that stops this crying is the warm feeling of more blood pooling around his bare feet. Bill turns and searches for something to stop it, and that’s when he finds the lint-covered sock that went missing, dropped behind a black flashlight on the floor and a box of Tide. He picks it up and presses the scratchy material to the wound on Gail’s head. In seconds it is soaked through, and the blood keeps coming. Bill is about to look for something more substantial when a banging noise comes from the top of the stairs. He stares up at the rotting floorboards, the same way Gail did yesterday, and hears the sound again.
Someone is at the door.
Without thinking, Bill yanks off his T-shirt and tries his best to make a tourniquet around his wife’s head. Even though he did this to her, he wants to save her. That is all he wants right now. But whoever it is up there keeps banging, and Bill is afraid that it might be someone who saw what happened. And that person might go to the police. So he leaves Gail and climbs the stairs, then rushes down the hall to the bedroom, where he wipes the coffee from his brow, the blood from his hands and feet with a towel from the laundry basket. When he throws on another shirt, Bill goes to the living room and opens the door.
Melissa Moody is standing on the stoop—one hand on her stomach, the other clenching a piece of paper, tears streaming down her face.
“What is it?” Bill asks in a breathless voice. If she witnessed what happened from the windows of her cottage, and this is the reason for her tears, he doesn’t know what he will do.
Melissa holds out the letter she found beneath her door. When he takes it from her, her voice croaks out the words, “This note … from your wife… I can’t… I don’t have anyplace to go.”
As Bill stares down and reads Gail’s graceful handwriting with all its slopes and curls, his hands begin to shake. So this is what she was doing when he woke up this morning and found the bed empty. This is what she was doing when it finally dawned on him that she must know something. And when she came back inside and went to the kitchen to make coffee, Bill got the idea to go downstairs, push those tools aside, and see if the flashlight had been touched. Still, he had not planned on losing control, the way he had so many times in his life. He had not planned on something so horrible and irreversible to occur.
Once he is finished with the letter, Bill crumples it in his hands and takes Melissa nervously, tentatively, in his arms. Her soft, tender body feels familiar and foreign all at once, because he has never held her this way before. Not like this. The touch of her skin so close to his sends the shame he has felt all these months spreading through him like a poison. The two of them stand there just like that, shaking, clinging to each other, while down below in the damp darkness of the basement, Gail struggles for her every breath.
“You go back to your cottage,” Bill tells Melissa after hugging her against his chest for what seems like hours. “You have nothing to worry about. This has all been a terrible mistake. You are like a daughter to us now. Gail and I would never turn you away.”
chapter 10
THE MAN ON THE PHONE SAID THAT HIS BUZZER WAS BROKEN, SO he instructed Philip to shout up from the street when he arrived. The plan sounded simple enough until Philip reached the slim brick building on Sixth Street, just off Avenue A in the East Village. Given the steady stream of foot traffic and customers pouring in and out of the health food store on the first floor, he feels ridiculous screaming a name that sounds like it is straight from the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. Philip stands on the sidewalk in the middle of this brisk October afternoon, listening to bits and pieces of passing conversations as he waits for the right moment to start yelling for Donnelly Fiume.
“The manager promised that the flaxseed was finally supposed to be in on Tuesday, so where the hell was it? This is beginning to get abusive,” a gaunt man says to an equally gaunt woman as they step out of the store and walk down the street, leaving a whiff of BO in their wake.
Why is it always the health nuts who look so sickly, smell so funky, and are forever in a crabby mood? Philip wonders as he thinks of the no-butter-no-cream-no-oil freaks who come into the Olive Garden. Over the years, there were so many times when Philip wanted to scream in their faces, “You are in an Italian restaurant! What the hell do you want us to serve you, a rice cake?”
But of course he never did anything of the sort, since he had to suck it up in hopes of getting a decent tip. Whenever Deb Shishimanian was in one of her good moods, she and Philip used to joke that the restaurant’s slogan should be changed from “When you’re here, you’re family” to “If you’re here, you’re an asshole.” Thankfully, Philip doesn’t have to worry about that place any longer. It has been almost twenty-four hours since he walked out during his shift, and he has not missed the job even once. Last night, he parked his car in the garage at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, checked into a suite overlooking Broadway, and ordered a turkey club from room service—all courtesy of his father, since Philip finally christened the emergency credit card.
When the door to Nature’s Melody Health Foods swings open a moment later, out steps a woman so sweaty she looks as though she has just finished running a marathon. Beneath her arm, she is carrying a tightly rolled purple mat. At first, Philip thinks she is talking to herself until he sees the cell phone wire dangling from her ear. “The thing about Bikram is that it’s a lot like growing up in Texas,” she says. “Every summer was so damn hot, it was like a three-month Bikram session. I swear that’s why I adjust so easily. Plus, I was sick of Pilates. All that rolling like a ball and clapping like a seal. I just don’t see how that was helping to downsize my ass.”
As Philip watches her tight, slender body stroll away on the sidewalk, it occurs to him that he has only a vague idea what flaxseed, Bikram, and Pilates even are. Still, he looks up at the two windows on the fourth floor and decides that he has a good feeling about living over this store. So what if the glass on the apartment windows has a thick yellow film on it? So what if the sills are cluttered with an assortment of sickly looking plants that remind him of the ones in his high school science classroom? There is something about this place he likes. And when there is finally a break in foot traffic, Philip lifts his hands to his mouth and shouts, “Donnelly! Donnelly Fiume!”
His eyes stay fixed on the dirty windows, but no Donnelly Fiume appears. As he waits for some sign of life, Philip glances down at the bright pink flyer in his hands:
Sublet Available
Immediately
Furnished and Pristine
Studio Apartment
Fourth-Floor Walk-up
Prime East Village Location
Must be able and willing to care for my
loving pets while I am out of town
$1,000 a month plus utilities
If the windows are any indication, this Donnelly guy had exaggerated about the pristine condition of the place, but it was nothing Philip couldn’t fix with a bottle of Windex and a few rolls of paper towels. As far as the pets are concerned, the more Philip thinks about it, the more he likes the idea of having cuddly, loving animals around to care for and keep him company. After all, he doesn’t know a soul in the city, so life is bound to be lonely at first. Besides, after wandering into two different real estate agencies today, Philip had been left with the impression that the best he could hope for would be a short-term lease on a cardboard box somewhere in Queens—if he was lucky. Both brokers told him the same thing: he’d need his last three pay stubs, a security deposit, first and last month’s rent, as well as a letter of reference from his most recent landlord if he hoped to secure an apartment. Even if Philip did have the pay stubs, most of the mone
y he made at the restaurant was in undeclared tips, so his checks would not impress anyone. As for a letter of reference, his most recent and only landlord was his mother. He doubted they’d accept a letter from her, not that she’d write a very nice one after what she had said to him yesterday.
Luckily, as Philip wandered along St. Mark’s Place—where it seemed to him that a person could get anything he wanted, from acupuncture to tattoos to pizza to Thai food, all in a single stretch—he spotted the pink flyer taped to a street lamp. At the bottom, there were several small slits cut into the paper so people could tear off Donnelly’s name and number. But Philip ripped down the entire sign and three more like it down the street, because he had already figured out just how competitive this apartment-hunting business was.
“Donnelly!” he shouts again when a full two minutes pass and no one appears in the windows. “It’s me, Philip Chase! The guy who called about the apartment!”
This time a woman with a bright, multicolored scarf tied over her head appears. She waves to Philip then drops a balled-up towel down to the street. Philip extends his hands to catch it but chickens out at the last second, the way he used to during Little League games when the coach stuck him in right field. After the towel smacks against the sidewalk Philip picks it up and finds a gold key inside. He walks to the front door and lets himself into the small vestibule that leads to the stairs. The interior of the building smells like a church meeting room—a combination of weak coffee and old perfume, as well as a hardy dash of carpet deodorizer thrown into the mix. The slanted wooden staircase is covered with a threadbare, burgundy rug. The Pepto-Bismol pink paint is peeling off the walls in large, plate-size slivers. If I want lead poisoning, Philip thinks as he begins clomping up the stairs, I know where to come.
When he reaches the fourth floor, he hears what sounds like Judy Garland’s voice singing about a trolley going clang, clang, clang, and a bell going ding, ding, ding. From somewhere else in the building—up one more flight perhaps—there is a faint chirping sound, though it doesn’t quite register with Philip, since he is distracted by the music.
The door is open the slightest bit but he knocks anyway.
“Come in,” Donnelly’s thin voice calls over the music. “I’m on the phone, dear. I will be with you in two shakes.”
Philip steps inside the cramped, cluttered apartment as Donnelly continues his conversation behind an Asian-style dressing screen with an assortment of scarves draped over the top. Other than that screen, the first thing Philip notices is the wall opposite the front door. It is plastered with row upon row of framed black-and-white head shots, like the kind Philip saw when he stopped in a deli at lunchtime to buy a bottle of water and a sandwich. He had recognized a few of the people in those photos—Tom Selleck, Martin Scorsese, Connie Chung. But the faces before him now don’t look the least bit familiar, though every single one is personally autographed to Donnelly:
For my pal, Donnelly—Love always, Gaylord Mason
To the world’s best backstage dresser! xoxo Sylvia Gassell
Thanks for making me look so damn good out there, Donnelly…
Kisses, Polly Bergen
Beneath the photos is a marble fireplace that must not work since the inside is filled with a hodgepodge of half-melted candles, the wax pooled and hardened on the floor around them. A few feet away, there is a dusty wooden bureau with a martini set and a record player on top, playing that Judy Garland song. To the left is a large suitcase, the hard vinyl kind nobody uses anymore. Just beyond is a minuscule kitchen with two stools tucked beneath a small counter, shelves instead of cabinets, an old gas stove, and a squat refrigerator with a large silver handle. Philip puts down the towel, then turns to close the door. There is a hinged piece of wood attached to the back, painted with a mural of New York City. Once closed, the door blends with the scene on the rest of the wall—taxicabs, hot dog vendors, fire hydrants, and all the rest. There is a Murphy bed, he realizes, folded up and concealed by the mural too. As cluttered and small as the studio is, this detail makes Philip smile. The place is far from perfect, but he is already planning on how he can make it more livable—washing the windows, bringing the plants back to life, dusting the furniture, shaking out the Oriental rug.
“Due to some unfortunate and unforeseen events in my sister’s life,” he hears Donnelly say into the telephone behind that screen, “I need to sublet the place immediately.”
There is something distinguished about the way he talks. Philip noticed it on the phone earlier as well. Donnelly enunciates almost every consonant and vowel that comes from his mouth in a way most people don’t anymore. It makes him sound regal and dramatic, as though he just stepped out of an old black-and-white movie. The way Philip imagines the people in those photos on the wall might sound if they started talking.
“No time for references,” he hears Donnelly say. “I’ll know when I see you if I trust you or not. No, you mustn’t come tomorrow. You have to see the place today or it will be gone. As a matter of fact, I have someone standing here right now, and I have five others lined up for later this afternoon.”
All this, and everything else he goes on to say, is verbatim what he told Philip on the phone: he is in a rush to find someone to take the apartment, because he needs to leave town and care for his ailing sister. He doesn’t know if he will be gone only a few months or much, much longer. He has a lot of people coming to see the place. And finally, he wants two months rent up front in cash. Because of that last detail, Philip went to Citibank on the way here and took an advance of two thousand and change on the emergency credit card. He figured that if he liked the apartment he would need to act fast. Now he’s glad he did. At least, that’s what he thinks until he hears Donnelly say, “We will discuss the pets when you arrive.”
The pets.
Philip glances around the room, expecting to see a dog or a cat he hadn’t noticed before, curled up on the floor asleep. But he doesn’t see any such thing. At that very moment, Judy Garland stops clang-clang-clanging and the trolley song comes to an abrupt end. Automatically, the needle lifts from the record and goes back to the beginning. In the silence before the song starts up again, Philip hears the chirping sound—louder than before. He looks at a closed door against the back wall of the kitchen and realizes that it is not coming from upstairs as he had thought earlier. It is coming from in there.
Philip doesn’t like this new development at all. Ever since he was a kid, he has been afraid of birds. He can trace the phobia back to one of his mother’s anniversaries at the library. Her coworkers had a party for her, and among the many gifts she received was a small green parakeet in a cheap metal cage from that Polish woman his mother used to complain about. Nobody—not his father, not his brother, and certainly not his mother—liked the thing very much. But Philip detested the creature more than any of them.
He couldn’t stand the sound of its scaly feet flitting around the cage.
He despised the way it screeched without warning.
He hated the commotion it made while flapping its wings.
Worst of all, Philip dreaded the times when it managed to bend the flimsy bars with its beak and get loose. The bird (no one ever bothered to give it a name) flew around the house, swooping and soaring, sending the entire family into a tizzy. His mother would gather Ronnie and Philip, and they’d hide in the bathroom beneath the stairs. Meanwhile, his father attempted to catch it by tossing a towel over its body when it flew by in a green blur. And if his father happened to be at the hospital when there was a jailbreak? Philip was sent to do the job. The best day of his life was when the bird flew out an open window and kept going. He can still see his mother slamming that window shut and saying, “Good riddance.”
“I need to go now,” Donnelly tells the person on the phone. “I will see you in an hour. I’ll certainly try to hold the place, but I must warn you, it is going to be tough.”
After he hears the sound of the telephone being set back in its cradle,
Philip turns to see the woman with the multicolored scarf over her head step out from behind the screen. She smiles at Philip then goes to the record player and turns it down. Philip is confused a moment until he realizes that it is not a woman at all. It is Donnelly Fiume. He is a short, slender man with skinny wrists and long fingers cluttered with colorful jewelry. As far as Philip can tell, he is not a transvestite exactly, or even a drag queen. Donnelly is just an older man whose features are unusually feminine, his clothing too. Spidery lashes frame his wide eyes; he has a slender nose, slightly bulbous at the tip, plump lips, and a narrow chin. He is wearing tight white pants and a shirt made to look paint splattered, as though Jackson Pollack had a go at it. Something about the scarf over his head gives him the appearance of someone getting ready to step onstage, or who has just come off. Philip has never been very good at guessing people’s ages but he puts him at somewhere around seventy.
“All right, cupcake,” Donnelly says in that thin, overly articulate voice as he brings one hand to his cheek. “Let’s have a look at you.”
Philip stands still, feeling self-conscious because he is wearing the same black jeans and denim shirt as yesterday. He figured finding a place to live ranked higher on his list of priorities than buying a new wardrobe.
“My, my,” Donnelly says after his eyes finish roaming up and down Philip’s lanky body. “Aren’t you the picture of the new kid off the bus? Where did you say you were from? Kansas?”
“Pennsylvania,” Philip tells him.
“Forgive me. I can’t keep track of what everyone tells me when they call. So am I right?”
“Right about what?”
“That you just got off the bus.”
“Half right,” Philip tells him. “I moved here last night.” The word moved sounds strange coming from Philip’s mouth—escaped would be more appropriate. “But in a car, not a bus,” he adds.