The Mystery of Hollow Places

by Rebecca Podos

  “Uh-huh. So, she’s usually home?”

  “Right now, she’s at . . . what do you call . . . water aerobics or something. For old people. Her home aid will bring her back around one thirty, after they do their shopping. I know this because she comes knocking every damn day at one forty-five to change a bulb or fix her doorbell or some nonsense. And I work nights, you know?”

  “Right, yeah, I’ll definitely check with her. Thanks for your time.”

  Chad nods his thanks, and we leave his porch as the door shuts tight, the bumblebee rattling in the window.

  “So.” He blows into his cupped hands.

  We stand on the front walk under a tent of thick gray clouds, without anywhere in particular to go. It’s not even eleven now. That’s a lot of time to be alone with Chad Price.

  “I guess we could sit somewhere, get coffee or something?” I offer. There must be a coffee place or two in Fitchburg. A Starbucks at least. With my petty cash, I can even afford to put whipped cream in mine.

  Chad taps a finger against his chin. “Or we could find you a prom dress.”

  I stare at him.

  “Isn’t that your alibi?”

  “It wasn’t an alibi so much as a lie.”

  “So what’ll you tell Lindy when you come home with no dress?”

  “I’ll—”

  “And what will you do when prom comes? Tell her you’re going, then run and hide in the attic?” He pokes my shoulder, though I can’t really feel it through the down in my coat. “You’ve lied yourself into a corner, Imogene, and that is the corner of the Sugarbrook gymnasium on prom night. What do you think the theme will be? Ours was ‘This Recession Has Really Killed Our Prom Budget.’”

  I remember Chad’s prom night. I saw it happening from the window in my living room, having elbowed aside the old plaid drapes. My fingers were chalked orange from the supersize tub of Cheez Doodles wedged between newlyweds Dad and Lindy on the sofa. They were settling in to watch The Thin Man. It was Dad’s 111th viewing and Lindy’s first. As the opening credits ran, I spied on Chad and his date, Beth Holmes, posing for pictures in the Prices’ driveway. From a block away they were only specks, him black and white in his suit, her glittering in blue, a diamond that’d caught the sun. Beth was not only the girls’ tennis team captain, she was president of Key Club, the collection of mostly popular girls who rang bells for the Salvation Army around the holidays, organized G-rated car washes for the local animal shelters in the spring, stuff like that. Though I couldn’t see the details from that distance, I could imagine them. Her tennis arms, her petal-pink lipstick, her signature fruity perfume smell. And not cheap-fruity, like girls who bought spritzers in plastic spray bottles at Walmart. Expensive, designer-fruity. Pomegranate with hints of saffron and ancient redwood, or something.

  I watched their shiny, shell-white limo glide by, knowing Jessa and Jeremy were in there too, behind the black windows. Jessa was the only sophomore at prom that year, and in her gold dress and with her flat-ironed red-gold hair, she looked like a living Oscar statuette. She looked fantastic in every picture I saw of her afterward, and I saw so many.

  When May rolls around she’ll go with Jeremy again, I’m sure. I was planning on staying home and watching Ace in the Hole with Dad. Or maybe going for our traditional Spicy Italian on flatbread and Chicken and Bacon Ranch Melt in our booth by the door, for old time’s sake.

  But Chad’s right. I have lied myself into a corner, unless the school gym burns down.

  Could I burn the school gym down?

  I could not.

  I flail around for a reasonable excuse, landing on “If I spend all my cash on a prom dress, I won’t have any money for gas. I’ll be right back where I started.”

  He taps his chin again as he thinks. “So, get a cheap dress.”

  I give him the side-eye.

  “Oh, come on. You could find something at Home Depot and it’d look better on you than all the girls who shopped on Newbury.”

  “Untrue.” To hide my blush, I fiddle with the strap on my bag. “And I don’t think Home Depot sells prom dresses.”

  “There’s a thrift store in town. Not thrift . . . consignment? We always stopped at the Olive Garden to eat after Fitchburg games, and there’s a place next to it. It has tons of girlie dresses in the window. Little Mermaid–style and everything. Jessa said they were ‘like, cute for secondhand.’”

  “This doesn’t seem like a productive use of our time.” A Lindy-ism, if ever I’ve repeated one.

  He shrugs. “It’s your choice. But you’re stuck, and you need to find something, unless you can weave a gown out of lies.”

  I’m hoping we won’t find the store. Unfortunately, Chad has a fantastic memory. Once we backtrack to the Calvinistic Congregational parking lot and pick up my car, it doesn’t take him long to find the Olive Garden and the thrift store—sorry, consignment shop—next to it. The bells above the door jingle as we slip into Suzanne’s Dress for Less. A salesgirl waves at us and asks if we need any help, but I can’t stop staring at the height of her fancy heels, like bamboo stilts.

  I wade cautiously toward the rack of dresses along the back wall, while Chad plunges in. He pulls one out and holds it up at arm’s length. It’s scaly and slightly iridescent, a kind of mystery fabric that flashes olive green and copper and gold at certain angles. “Reptilian,” he comments. “Very cool.”

  I trail my fingertips across silk and sequins and a lot of Frankenstein-style polyester blends. There’s a knee-length pink thing that looks like an iced cupcake, and a long yellow gown shaped like a partially peeled banana. I find a shimmering silver dress and start to pick it up, but when I think of the one Jessa lent me, crumpled at the bottom of my hamper and smelling of rum and misery, I sour on the idea and shove it back.

  This is stupid. I’ll think up an excuse before prom. Play sick, somehow. Or Dad will get me out of it. . . .

  Uneasiness simmers in the pit of my stomach. I shouldn’t be thinking of prom or pretty dresses or Chad, not when Dad’s been away without a word for six days now. I try to check the time on my phone before discovering it’s dead, then pull Chad’s wrist up to read the digits on his big calculator watch. One hour before Tilly is back from Water Aerobics for the Ancient. An hour and I might have some answers. What’s an hour? I’ve waited six days. I can wait sixty minutes. Besides, he’s not missing, I remind myself. Just searching, like I am.

  “How’s this?”

  Chad plucks out a dress and dangles it by the hanger. And it’s . . . not terrible. Vintage-looking, but not old-fashioned. Deep red, like wine, with a heart-shape neckline, a high waist, and the kind of full, just-below-the-knee skirt Jessa claims works for sizable thighs. It’s the kind of dress a girl might wear in the old noir mysteries Dad likes. In those movies, a girl is either good, or she’s one of those girls, as Liz Bash would say. Either a Mrs. Maximilian de Winter, or a Rebecca. This is the kind of dress one of those girls might wear when she’s still acting sweet in front of the detective, but we on our couches with our Cheez Doodles know she’s trouble.

  It’s a pretty sexy dress. A pretty sexy dress that Chad is holding out to me with one eyebrow raised, and a smile I’ve never quite seen before.

  As I stand here considering it, I ask myself, what do I know?

  I know I’ve had this Guinness Book of World Records Longest-Running Crush on Chad since fifth grade. I remember the exact night it happened. A girl in Jessa’s ballet class had told her how to summon Bloody Mary, and she wanted to play the game. Even kid-size Jessa was pretty good at getting what she wanted. While she chanted the name three times in the flickering light of a Glade candle, I stayed by the bathroom door, knowing that just outside, Chad had sweetly volunteered to stand guard. Just in case Mary showed, he said. When he rattled the knob violently I screamed, tripped over a wet towel that might’ve been Mary’s grasping, bloodied arm on the dark bathroom floor, and burst out into Chad’s arms, Jessa close behind. Tucked into his then-s
crawny chest, he smelled like mint and strange spices at once (toothpaste and boy deodorant, I later realized). That was it. The die was cast.

  I have never asked a guy out in my life. Haven’t even slipped one a “Do you like me? Circle yes or no” note. Lee Jung asked me to be his girlfriend, and Jeff Keating asked to kiss me behind the bounce house at the low-budget Sugarbrook fair that goes up in the mall parking lot each year, and A.J. Breen, the only boy to write me love letters, slipped a cartoon drawing of me drinking a milkshake into my Trapper Keeper in middle school, asking me to sit with him at lunch. But I never asked anything from a guy. What’s the upside? The possible outcomes as I see it are:

  1) I’ll like them but they won’t like me, resulting in pain.

  2) We’ll go out and I’ll realize I don’t like them and have to dump them, resulting in pain.

  3) We’ll go out and I’ll end up really liking the boy, only to have him dump me for Cassie Pavia, who stands at the electronic pencil sharpener in front of Josh Davis’s desk with her hip popped while Josh moans, “Cassie, you’re killing me with that body.” Result: Pain.

  I mean, how are two people ever supposed to like each other the right amount in the right way at the right time? Impossible.

  But I also know that Chad Price is looking at me with big green eyes and one dimpled cheek, his blond hair fuzzed from pawing through racks of fabric, all of this making me warm and misty, and he’s offering me a beautiful dress that I want him to see me in. Are these random occurrences, or fate? Unconnected dots or a constellation? And isn’t this what I’m supposed to be doing?

  Having faith?

  For once, don’t be tough, I tell myself. Be brave.

  I snatch the hanger away. “I will try this on if, if . . .”

  “If?”

  I inspect the crisp red fabric, the size (seems right), the fifty-five-dollar price tag (about forty more than I wanted to spend), the stitching along the neckline (like he believes I’m fascinated by the construction of this dress). “If you put on a suit and come to prom too.”

  His smile wobbles, confused.

  “Just, if I have to go, I don’t see why you get off. You’re my accomplice in this.” I stare at the dress in his arms and wonder if he can sense the breath trapped in my body.

  “I can see I’ve been tangled in your web of lies,” he says, grinning again. “Yeah, I’ll go.”

  I sweep off to the fitting rooms, keeping it together pretty well. But as I kick my boots and jeans off and slide into the gown, the fist of my heart unclenches, and maybe it’s the blood flowing again, the air pumping in and out of my lungs (so much air, I can’t get enough of it! And it all smells wonderful!), and I know I shouldn’t, but I feel so light. I’m a mayfly on the breeze. A balloon. A beam of moonlight. A sun.

  FOURTEEN

  While we wait in my car for Tilly Donahue’s return from elderly water aerobics, the sky spits freezing rain that blurs the windshield. The last real clumps of snow beside the storm drains glitter dangerously; fresh ice will make for a thrilling drive home. But it’s dry in the Civic, the heater sputtering heroically onward, and Chad and I are playing the picnic game.

  “I’m going to a picnic and I’m bringing an apple, a barracuda, Captain Morgan, a deciduous pine, elephantiasis of the balls, a falafel truck, and . . . Gaussian frequency-shift keying.” He smiles, triumphant, little C’s punctuating the corners of his lips.

  “I bet you don’t even know what that is.”

  “That is not a requirement in the picnic game.” He grabs a fistful of Lucky Charms from my Baggie, which we’ve been passing back and forth, and separates out the marshmallows. Sorts them further in piles of balloons, horseshoes, rainbows. They all taste like sweet packing peanuts to me, but I like that he bothers. He dusts the cereal bits from his palm into my waiting hand, and his eyes light up. “And I do so know what Gaussian frequency-shift keying is, because we’re doing a unit of FSK modulation in my engineering elective. It uses a Gaussian filter to—”

  “Fine.” I dump the cereal in my mouth and sneak a look in the rearview mirror. My dress hangs in its black plastic garment bag in the backseat, like a promise. “I’m going to a picnic and I’m bringing an apple, a barracuda, Captain Morgan, a deciduous pine, elephantiasis of the balls, a falafel truck, Gaussian frequency-shift keying, and Hannah Montana.”

  Chad’s lip curls. “Of all the picnics in the world, this is the worst. You couldn’t bring Hillary Clinton?”

  “Take your Captain Morgan and your elephantiasis of the balls and go, or keep playing.”

  “No, let’s play a different game. Let’s play I Spy.”

  “I hate that game,” I protest.

  “Nobody hates I Spy.”

  “I do. Oh, ‘I spy something gray.’ But it’s February in New England. It’s all gray.”

  “Okay.” He tosses a marshmallow heart in the air and catches it with a click of his jaws. “What about Would You Rather?”

  I know this is his way of distracting me, but better a stupid game than sitting in a silent car, cracking my knuckles until they ache and feeling more nervous by the second. “Okay. Would you rather be able to read books, or be able to read minds?”

  “I can’t read books if I can read minds?”

  “One or the other.”

  He drums two fingers against his lips, and I remember my fixation on his mouth in his basement bedroom. “Reading minds would make it easier to be a doctor. But let’s say books. I’m pretty sure the majority of minds are boring. At least in Sugarbrook they are. Present company excluded.”

  A good answer. “Would you rather . . .”

  “You already had your turn, turn-taker. Now it’s mine.” He roots around in the Baggie for a last marshmallow bit and comes out empty. “Would you rather . . . be able to go to the future, or be able to visit the past?”

  “Are we talking my past, or the past of humanity?”

  “Your past. Not, like, Oregon-Trail-and-long-underwear past.”

  “Easy. The past.” The rain’s falling a little heavier now. I watch it blacken Tillys’ driveway in inky splatters.

  “Why? What if the future’s awesome?”

  “With global warming? Unlikely. And I like the past. It was nice. All our problems were easier.”

  It’s true. I mean, it wasn’t all lollipops and Disney movies, but the past is safe. If I could visit, I’d find all the happy parts with Dad and me and live in them over and over. And besides, I honestly don’t know what I want from my future anymore, because at this moment I have no idea what it will look like. If Tilly Donahue is the lead that helps me find my mom and dad . . . then what? I’m not wishing on a star for my biological parents to get back together, get married, book us all on a big family road trip. I know my mom’s got real problems. So I don’t believe that this time tomorrow we’ll be outfitting the guest room in Mom’s favorite color (blue, like Dad’s? Red, like mine?). I don’t know what the world will look like with all of us in it. But it has to be so much better than not knowing her.

  Chad nods. “Yeah. I kind of miss my old problems too. When losing your science textbook under your bed was this huge deal. And I could tell my mom I wanted to be a doctor without having to worry about actually being a doctor, or getting into the right programs, or the right hospital, or being happy.”

  “But you want to be a doctor, don’t you?”

  He gives a helpless little half laugh. “I’d better.”

  “Hmm. So what would you pick? The past or the future?”

  When he looks at me and bites his lip, I feel my pulse in my ears, and I think this is what it feels like to really want a boy.

  Whether he would’ve picked the past or the future, I’ll never find out, because a beige car pulls up the driveway of the little brown house. Tilly Donahue and her home aide, I presume. The aide slides out, waddles to the other side of the car, and gently pries the old woman out by the elbow. She guides her across the icy-slick flagstones along the front walk
. All I can see of Tilly is a cloud of permed white hair above the collar of her fur coat. Who wears a fur coat to water aerobics?

  Quickly they duck inside, out of the weather.

  “Ready?” Chad asks.

  “Yeah,” I whisper, then louder, “yes.”

  When we’re shivering and blinking frozen water out of our eyes on the sidewalk, he offers me his hand. “In case I slip,” he says, and smiles.

  I take it this time and even though I’m out of the beautiful red dress that made all my weird curves look like they were supposed to be there, back in my hoodie with the chewed drawstrings and jeans with Swiss-cheese knees, I could almost dance up the driveway and onto the porch. I ring the doorbell, and with his free hand Chad palms back his hair, wet and peaked with rain.

  The narrow young face of the home aide floats in the window. “Hello?” She answers the door, still hung with a glittery Valentine’s Day wreath of pink hearts speared with arrows. Without her own coat on, I can see she’s hugely pregnant under a tent of a sweater.

  “Hi!” I chirp, and repeat the story of the school project, the long-lost aunt. I’m getting pretty slick at lying my way into people’s homes. Which I don’t think is wrong. Maybe just . . . Machiavellian. “So Tilly’s neighbor said she might be the best person to help us. Since she knows a lot of what happens in town.”

  The aide laughs. “He’s not wrong. Just hold on while I ask Tilly? She might be tired out.”

  Ten minutes later and with glasses of lime seltzer in our hands and a bowl of licorice hard candies in front of us, Chad and I are sitting down on the couch in Tilly’s living room. There’s a definite theme going on—framed embroideries of shamrocks and saints and those little hand-heart-crown combos all over. On the shelf above the fireplace are dozens of little ceramic leprechauns. In an armchair under a big stained-glass wall hanging of the green, white, and orange Irish flag sits Tilly Donahue: a hawk-nosed, coral-lipped, bird-boned woman in a caramel velour tracksuit. There are a dozen rings at least on her bent fingers, big, polished hunks of pink and blue and green and tiger-eye stone. As she fiddles with the cellophane wrapper on licorice after licorice, she’s only too happy to talk. She’s already complained to us about the weather, her sore hip, her nasal congestion, and her cataracts with the same pride in her cloudy eyes as a collector showing off her prized postage stamps. The aide retreated to the kitchen after settling Tilly in. Probably she’s heard all of this three times today already.