The Mystery of Hollow Places

by Rebecca Podos

  The clock ticks away the silence while a cat with what might be a sinus condition jockeys for position in Lil’s lap, wheezing and purring in turns. She stares into its snot-streaked face, and who knows what she sees there, but her voice is duller and distant when she speaks again.

  “Well, I really got to be running out now.”

  Unexpectedly, Jessa leans across the table. “Im is your cousin and you just met her. Can’t you stay for a while?”

  Lil levers herself stiffly off the floor, shedding animals from her lap as she rises. “It’s my doctor’s appointment. Not supposed to be late. But I have some pictures and things, if you want to take them with you.”

  “That would be great. Anything you can give me. And maybe your number, so I can call you sometime? I’ll leave mine in case you remember anything.”

  She hesitates in the kitchen doorway. “Just hold on a minute.” With a last look, she ducks into the hallway.

  I jump as Jessa slaps her hand over mine. “Okay, she’s weird, Im. I mean, like, I know teachers are weird—I had Mrs. Marconi in sophomore year, and she had, like, a deli in her desk? Not chips or breath mints or anything. Lunch meat, pickles, huge bottles of Pepsi in the bottom drawer. But your second cousin is unusual.”

  “Maybe it’s the curse,” I say, fingering the stone in my pocket as I watch the biggest of the cats mount the kitchen counter, flop backward, and lick the dark fur between its legs.

  “What curse?”

  I shrug.

  Lil makes her way back into the kitchen with a small stack of photos and time-rippled papers in her hands. “Here’s all I got. That’s my number on that sticky note, but it’s a home phone. I don’t see much need to carry a little phone around all the time. If I wanted to talk to anybody, I’d call. And I usually don’t want to talk.”

  Greedily, I flip through the pictures. There’s a fuzzy baby photo in the pile, a little bald, hazel-eyed girl wriggling on a patchwork quilt, her oversize head tilted toward the camera with great effort. In Dad’s office there’s a picture of me just like this. I’m maybe a few months old, wallowing on a blue shag rug strewn with soft, plasticized baby books, my enormous skull wobbling so precariously that even though it’s a moment frozen on film, you could swear I’m about to face plant into Goodnight Moon. Dad insists “book” was my first word, though sometimes Lindy swears the first words out of my mouth must have been “I’m fine, I don’t need any help, go away.”

  Next is a picture of two little girls, the younger in brown pigtails, the older one a dirty shade of blond. Mom and Lil stand on the lawn of a church. Lil surprises me by tapping the picture with a fingernail bitten down to the skin. “That’s the church we used to walk to each week. And our mamas would let me and Sid take the long way around Crocker Field on the way to Sid’s house for Sunday lunch. I swear you could hear the crack of the baseball bats from her backyard. Smell the hot dogs.”

  I nod, wondering what goes on in Sunday school—Dad and I are not church people, though I’ve been in one, for Ma Ma Scott’s funeral.

  In the next picture, Mom is still small, but alone by a wiry, forked birch tree in a front yard, the sky behind the little house awash in the yellow light of bad weather. Chain link borders the scrappy yard. My mother’s childhood home?

  I flip to a Polaroid of teenage Sidonie in a very early-nineties prom dress, in front of a tall brick building with Fitchburg High School, Home of the Red Raiders emblazoned on a sign. Her dress is long and straight and silvery, with a ruffled bit draped over her breasts like a curtain valance. Her date stands behind her: a tall black teenager with the kind of high pillar of hair I recognize from nineties TV shows. The tip of her head comes up only to the padded shoulders of his navy suit. Even though she’s awkward in the picture, elbows away from her body, pink-lipsticked smile showing all the wrong teeth, he looks thrilled to be with her. His grin is huge, and his hand rests lightly on her arm, like if he couldn’t touch her he wouldn’t believe his luck.

  The last and latest is Mom, pregnant in the shade of a birch tree, in front of a gray stone fountain I recognize from the Patty Linden Memorial Park in Sugarbrook.

  Clutching the photos, I want to say, Great, this helps; here’s my number and thanks for your time. I’ll make my way out of this dim apartment, which is weird—pickles-in-your-desk-drawer weird. I wasn’t expecting Lil to bake us scones or break into “Be Our Guest,” but if she couldn’t have been happy to see me, she might’ve been . . . interested? Instead of acting like her estranged cousin’s daughter is some Girl Scout selling charity magazine subscriptions to support underage monkeys or cure albinism.

  Jessa stands up from the table, which is my ticket to ride. But when I open my mouth, the one question I’ve wanted to ask all along bubbles out. “Did she ever ask about me?”

  Lil’s whole face slides downward just a bit, but she clamps her jaw and tightens up. “Last time we talked, she never said much about anyone but herself.”

  I wish I knew what Lil was thinking. Sherlock Holmes would know. On the one hand, that guy is bug nuts—he’s selfish, rude, and messy. He leaves beakers and pipettes and knives and poisoned shoe polish lying all around. Sometimes Watson wakes up to find Holmes watching him from the foot of the bed at five a.m. He solves a lot of mysteries after sulking on the couch in his sitting room for days. Confession: when I read A Study in Scarlet, the first book about Sherlock Holmes and his lifelong sidekick, Dr. John Watson, I paid particular attention to the scene where Watson walks in to find Holmes on his back, staring with dulled eyes at the ceiling of No. 22IB Baker Street. Dad did the same in the bad times, a few of which I’d seen before we went to Lindy, and I thought maybe it was because that was how he figured out his mysteries. So Dad needed a little help sometimes—so what? Holmes needs Watson, and not just to fetch his shoes or write his biography. Watson brings him cases to solve when he’s been sitting around for weeks shooting morphine and cocaine. Watson’s the keeper of all the knowledge Holmes considers beneath him—literature, philosophy, politics. He didn’t even know the Earth revolved around the sun till Watson told him so, for god’s sake.

  But flaws aside, Sherlock Holmes can read people like no other detective. He spent his whole life studying regular people instead of learning how to become a regular person. When he meets Watson, he knows the guy has been an army doctor in Afghanistan by the stiffness of his arm, the tan on his face, and the paleness of his wrists.

  I look at Lilian Eugene and try to read her life. Once she had a husband. Now she lives alone, and if she has coworkers or boyfriends or girlfriends over to visit, there sure isn’t any evidence around her apartment. Lil didn’t even have a second chair set out before Jessa and I came, and there are pictures of no one anywhere, unless you count a Garfield calendar tacked up by the wall phone. I think of how she sat on the kitchen floor with her babies, though it physically hurt her to do it. How her clothes were covered in their hair before they walked all over her, like she spends her whole life down there among them. I think of the bobblehead in her car, the Petco bags she lugs her school stuff and cleaning supplies around in, like she’s got an endless hoard of them. The cats are absolutely everything to her, and she doesn’t love them halfway; she loves them hard.

  Once Lil had a cousin, and they loved each other enough that even after they lost touch, she was my mother’s emergency contact, the one person Mom trusted to come if she was called. Maybe Lil loved Sidonie Faye hard, that little girl drawing creatures in the tent in Fitchburg, the girl she shared her family with. Then Mom slipped away, called her once for money and never again, and Lil closed all that love up and put it away like a book on a shelf. So I come around after all this time and she acts like we’re strangers, even if we’re connected by something as everything-and-nothing as blood. I almost wouldn’t believe even that connection, except for Lil’s chin, the tip of an aging heart.

  “Okay. Thanks for your help, Lil.”

  “If I could tell you more, I would. But by the t
ime she left your daddy, I didn’t really know her anymore.”

  A stray thought stops me in the doorway. “Hey, did she ever say anything about marrying Dad? Whether they were, or were planning to, or anything?”

  Lil looks surprised. “I guess I always thought they had gotten married. Like I said, we weren’t close at all, not at that point. I was shocked she called me up when she left. But she did talk about getting married, once. In the beginning, when she first came back. Sid said she could see herself happy, and if she and your daddy tied the knot, she wanted to do it on the same date they’d met. Their anniversary, kind of. She thought it’d be romantic, on account of the holiday. I told her sure, though secretly I thought that was strange, because that was the same day she went to claim Siobhan’s body.”

  “And that day . . . was it Valentine’s Day?”

  “Yes, 1995, that would’ve been.” Lil blinks at me. “Why, that day mean something to you?”

  NINE

  It’s not that my dad is superstitious, but . . . he does like to find the meaning in things.

  He claims it’s because he tells stories. That it’s the job of a writer—even writers of popular medical mysteries—to sift through random events and watch patterns emerge, like finding constellations in a giant star-speckled sky. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t write during the bad times. He once said in a session with Lindy that things seem meaningless in the bad times, and how can he write if he can’t find meaning?

  In the spring at the very end of seventh grade, Dad and I were brainstorming a place for our two-man family vacation. It was his idea, a “you survived middle school, now gird your loins for high school” adventure, he called it. We were at the Subway on East Main, in our traditional front corner booth farthest from the bathroom, eating our traditional Spicy Italian on flatbread and Chicken and Bacon Ranch Melt, which we enjoyed at least twice weekly. (Dad wasn’t so much of a cook before Lindy came around.) On the greasy-skating-rink table, there was an ad for Subway’s new Santa Fe Wrap. While we ate, Dad scribbled a list of possible places on the back of the ad. Niagara Falls, he said. The Grand Canyon, he said. Hawaii, I said, which he dutifully wrote down as: Hawaii (yeah right). When our sandwiches were reduced to lettuce shreds he tucked the ad in his jacket and we headed out. We then proceeded to the parking lot, where we had to squeeze our slightly fatter selves around a Hyundai Santa Fe that’d parked too close to Dad’s truck, forcing him to shovel me through the driver’s side.

  As we backed out, Dad braked to stare at the back of the Hyundai, then plucked out the Subway ad, and with an alligator clip he had me fish from the glove box, clamped it to his sun visor like a postcard. “What do you think, Immy? Santa Fe, New Mexico. Purple mountains? The Rio Grande? Big sunsets? Saloons? The Wild West!”

  I buckled in. “Because of a sandwich wrap?”

  “Because of a wrap and an SUV. The stars are aligned.”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  But that night on TV, the Pirates game Dad had wanted to watch was canceled for rain. So we turned on the DVD player, having neglected it for months, and up came the last movie we’d left in the machine: Ace in the Hole. As you may or may not know, Ace in the Hole is an awesome, twisty fifties noir about this drunk, disgraced big-city investigative journalist who has to go work for a crappy little paper in Albuquerque. Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  Dad tossed aside the extra-butter popcorn we were splitting, and our platter of ham roll-ups (our family recipe—like Fruit Roll-Ups, almost as gummy, but made with prepackaged ham from the convenience store instead of fruit). He stood, spread his arms to the heavens, and shouted, “THE STARS ARE ALIGNED!” And so that summer we spent a week in Santa Fe.

  We hiked Tent Rocks and ate ice cream made to look like baked potatoes at the Cowgirl and shopped for cheap art at the street market in Old Santa Fe. On the last evening before our ten a.m. flight home, while we perused the gift shop of our pink adobe motel for every kind of chili product available—from red chili jam to chili chocolate to chili-flavored soda—the cashier told us about this great, isolated lake in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Though I was pretty sure we’d be captured by hill people, Dad was like, “Nah,” so we set out in the late evening.

  It was dark and cool when we got to Santa Cruz Lake. Beyond the parking lot was a squat beach and, reaching out into the water, a long metal dock. We clanked over the walkway to the end of the dock and spread out a blanket. The water was dark and pretty deep. It lapped gently at the dock maybe a foot below the platform, the hush, hush, hush of it the only sound forever. We lay back and tilted our faces up into a million stars you could never see from the suburbs. Instead of the Sugarbrook sky, filmy and gray with streetlights and stadium lights and neon signs, the sky out there was huge and dusty with limitless solar systems.

  “See, Immy?” Dad said hoarsely. “The stars are aligned.”

  The very next book Dad wrote was The Case of the Weeping Woman. The plot had Miles Faye traipsing out to Santa Fe to help a cousin accused of drowning his girlfriend in Santa Cruz Lake. Weeping Woman went big, his biggest novel yet, and in interviews he said he was inspired by the universe, New Mexico, and Subway.

  If we hadn’t seen the ad for the Santa Fe Wrap. If the Hyundai Santa Fe hadn’t parked so obnoxiously that we paid particular attention to it. If a mass of air hadn’t cooled to its saturation point, condensing water vapor into clouds that poured rain on a ball field in Pittsburgh, leaving us no choice but to turn on the DVD player and find Ace in the Hole. For Dad there’s some kind of mystical significance behind the ifs, playing one big cosmic game of connect-the-dots. Not god or anything. Meaning.

  Even when I was little and playing literal connect-the-dots in my coloring books, it kind of seemed like bullshit. Whatever blocky shapes emerged from my crayon, they never really looked like flowers or balloons or boats. Just jagged approximations in purple wax.

  What I’m thinking is: Of course there was a Santa Fe Wrap advertisement in our booth—we always chose that table because it was farthest from the bathroom. That meant it was closest to the front door, where every few minutes a customer would let in a blast of baking heat or biting cold, depending on the season, making it pretty undesirable to everyone but us, so whatever ads were plopped on the table before the breakfast shift likely stayed there past lunch. And duh, we passed a Hyundai Santa Fe on our way out; it is, after all, a top safety pick. And sure, Ace in the Hole was in the player. It’s one of our favorites; we once went through a snap where we watched it six times in a month. There’s a reason for everything, if you look hard enough. An answer for every mystery.

  If Dad met my mother on February 14 of 1995—the day he showed her the body of Siobhan Faye and gave her a stone heart, as much a twentieth anniversary as any for my I-now-know-unmarried parents—then Lindy was wrong about Valentine’s Day meaning nothing to Dad, especially if he and Mom had ever talked about marrying. That day meant everything to him, even when nothing else did; I know because even in the bad times, he told me my bedtime story.

  I’m on his trail. I’ve felt it all along, and if I wasn’t 100 percent positive he was off trying to save my mother, I am now. This is proof, actual and undeniable. What’s more, I think he left the heart for me not as a clue, but as a map. Hoping just this once I would see it too, the picture in the stars, and use it to find my way to him.

  TEN

  “Why are you doing that with your face?” Jessa winces at me while I lead us through the frosty parking garage.

  “Doing what? I’m smiling.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a crazy smile. Like you’re gonna pour me tea and make me a hat.”

  “I just feel like I’m on the right path,” I say, breathless with the body-slamming, finger-burning cold and with something else entirely. With this small balloon of excitement rising in my stomach.

  “And you think this because . . . ?”

  On the third level, I spot my Civic. We heave ourselves inside the car and
I fumble to turn on the heat. How can I tell her about Valentine’s Day and the lie of my parents’ marriage and stone hearts? About the stars and the constellations? I can’t, not even close. “It’s—hard to explain.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She sounds dubious, but I’m only half paying attention as I ask myself what I know.

  My mother grew up in Fitchburg.

  My mother was good at art.

  My mother was troubled waters, like her mother before her.

  “Hey, you want to, like, take a break tonight?” Jessa asks. “I mean, where are we gonna go on a Sunday night, anyway? Just a little break. My parents are visiting my grandma, so the soccer team’s coming over.”

  The soccer team she’s talking about doesn’t exist as an actual soccer team anymore. It’s just a few guys from Chad’s old team, the Sugarbrook Sandpipers, who went to Boston colleges. They hang out in his basement bedroom with beer, the WiiU, and the secretive scent of weed drifting off them.

  Dad avoids social gatherings even in the best of times, and when I can’t get out of them, I fulfill my very important duty of shoring up the wall. I fold my arms and cross my legs and try to find a cool position that communicates I am perfectly happy jammed in my corner and have a lot of clever things to say, but there’s no need to talk to me to make me prove it. When the glittering Times Square ball dropped on the big screen at the Prices’ New Year’s Eve party last year, I was at the snack table with a pig-in-a-blanket in my mouth so it didn’t look like I expected anyone, much less Chad Price, to make with midnight kisses.

  “Um, possibly.”

  “Jeremy’s bringing Yuengling just for me.”

  “That’s gallant.”

  I hand Jessa the photos to hold, but flip through a few loose pages at the bottom of the pile. I unfold a brittle piece of butcher paper to find drawings in thick, dark pencil. As soon as I realize what they are, I tuck them into my coat pocket to pore over in private. This is a part of my mother I’m not ready to share.