The Mystery of Hollow Places

by Rebecca Podos

  Before I know it, my bus is boarding. I settle into a seat in the rear, pull the hood of my coat up, curl inward around Dad’s book, and accept that there’s no turning back.

  Thankfully, I make both bus transfers in Springfield and in Hartford, Connecticut, and disembark outside the Cumberland Farms. The “bus stop” is a row of black iron benches outside the convenience store, gleaming with ice, and not a cab stand in sight. I’ve hung around Boston enough to know how to fish for taxis, but this isn’t exactly the city. Beyond the parking lot is a street stuffed with two-family housing in a faded rainbow of unhealthy colors. I’m not even sure which direction to head to get to Pines Road, and I can’t call a cab company.

  All right, so it was fairly dumb to cross state lines without any kind of cell phone. Unsure of my next move, I stand on the sidewalk and tuck my chin into my jacket. It’s no warmer in Windham than in Sugarbrook, and as a bonus there’s a cold, ripe fog, the sky dull even though sunset is hours away.

  The only thing I can think to do is retreat into the little yellow-lit store. I wait in line behind a woman buying yogurt raisins and lottery tickets to talk to the clerk, a boy about Chad’s age. Watching me through bleary eyes, he drones, “Can I help you?”

  Everyone is always asking me that.

  “I was wondering, how do I hail a cab around here?”

  “Have to call one, I think. Try Ace Taxi Service. You gonna buy something?”

  I lean in toward him the way Pari Singh leaned into Chad, draping my hip against the counter, propping one elbow on the conveyer belt. “See, that’s the problem. I don’t have a phone on me, so I can’t call. But if you’ve got a phone . . . I’m really stuck, you know?” I can’t possibly replicate the Pari effect, not with my hideous coat, my strawberry hat, my puffy eyes and raw lips.

  “My phone’s in the back room. Are you gonna buy something, or what?”

  The old man behind me coughs pointedly, rearranges his bags of chips on the belt.

  I straighten, defeated. “Look, just . . . please? Please, can you help me?”

  He curls his bottom lip, fuzzed with a feeble little soul patch. “Whatever. I got a break in twenty. Have to hang around till then. Now can you get out of line?”

  So I loiter in the canned-goods aisle until Shaggy from Scooby-Doo takes his break, and use his phone to call a cab while he taps his foot impatiently on the tile floor, pack of cigarettes and lighter in hand.

  When the taxi arrives it takes me to Pines Road, which is actually a condo complex. Identical peach-colored two-stories snake around the development. It looks nice here. Nice and neat, with perfectly flat-topped shrubs below each white shuttered window, and a fancy knocker on every door. Old-fashioned lampposts at the foot of each walkway look like miniature, twinkly brass houses.

  The ride costs me $14.45 and I peel off a two-dollar tip, thinning my bankroll even further. Before I climb out of the taxi I ask for the time.

  “Around four,” the driver says, checking out number fifty-six through his passenger side window. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” he says. “Want me to wait till you get inside? It’s starting to snow.”

  I shake my head and pull my gloves on. “No, thanks. I’ll be okay.”

  The whole trip down I was wondering how it’d feel to ring the doorbell, but it’s not a problem. Even before I cup my hands and peer through the glass of the side window into the dark beyond the door, I can tell there’s no one home.

  So I sit down a front stoop identical to the front stoops around it, sheltered from the snow by an overhanging (and pristine) gutter, and I wait.

  And wait.

  I don’t know for how long. The already-dark sky darkens further, and snow powders the shrubs around me until they’re white-capped, and I have to cross my legs and run my hands briskly over my jeans to keep the blood in them. To distract myself I dig into my bag, meaning to pull out Dad’s book but landing on the MFA brochure instead.

  With shivering hands, I flip to the picture of my mother and try to untangle the little knot of hurt I feel when I look at her.

  All this time. She’s been all across Massachusetts—and beyond!—and still when it came to it, I managed to track her down quick enough. Here I am one week later, freezing on her front stoop.

  Meanwhile, I’ve been in the same house my whole life. We’ve never changed our phone number. For god’s sake, we never change the magnets on the fridge.

  I don’t really care about her, I tell myself. I don’t feel this way because I miss her. I don’t even know her. I only miss the family I’ve been imagining since I was six years old and first heard my bedtime story; the family we will never be. And that kind of missing hangs around like the pain of a rotten tooth, throbbing when it’s knocked against. Maybe this is horrible, but that was okay, I figured, as long as somewhere out there, she was in pain too.

  I could forgive my mother for being cursed, and lonely, and troubled waters. All of that made sense. But I don’t think I’ll be able to forgive her if she’s happy.

  After a while, after my fingers have stiffened around the paper and drifting snowflakes have dampened and bled spots of ink, a car pulls up and parks in front of number fifty-six. A tall black man in a crisp trench coat and red knit cap climbs out.

  I think about sweeping off my strawberry hat so I’ll be taken seriously, but I’m not sure I could raise my arms high enough if I wanted. While I’m weighing my options, the man shuffles up the front walk, head down against the snow. Flakes cling to his cap and the shoulders of his coat. Fishing his keys out of his pocket, he stops just in front of the stoop. “Can I help you?”

  My lips are numb, and I have to scrub my gloved fingers across them to get them warm and working. “I’m waiting,” I chatter, “for Sidonie. She lives here, doesn’t she?”

  He squints against the wind as snowflakes pearl his long eyelashes. “How long you been out here?”

  I twitch my shoulders upward.

  “Okay, but . . . I think you’d better wait inside. It’ll be a little while. She’s at her class.” Unlocking the front door, he chuckles and says, “You’re not a process server or an assassin or anything, are you?”

  “I’m actually kind of her long-lost daughter?” I try to throw my arms up casually, like, What can you do? but my limbs are so stiff with cold and my winter gear so constricting, they just flop fishlike by my sides.

  He blinks at me, frozen, one boot through the door. “Seriously?”

  SEVENTEEN

  While Todd Malachai stuffs our winter gear into the closet, I stand in the doorway to the living room and examine their home.

  It’s cozy. Artsy. The walls are a warm color that makes me think of caramel drizzled on ice cream. In no particular line or order, big paintings splatter the walls. Animals, forests, beaches. Most are impressionistic. Above the brown leather couch there’s a horse with a bulbous head, like you’re looking at it from inside a fish bowl. All over, there are green cotton-ball trees and oceans so choppy, they’re triangular. I put my nose up to the closest painting and read the scratchy signature in the corner of the frame.

  “They’re Sid’s.” Todd comes up beside me. “She’s in her art class now. Just a little group they got going on the college campus. Meets Wednesday evenings . . . but I digress. So. You’d be Joshua’s daughter?”

  Shocked, I turn to him. “Do you know my dad?”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t mean . . . I just, I knew Sid had a past before we . . . How did you find us? Not that—I’m not sorry you did. I’m not . . .” He spreads his arms. “I’m not too sure what to say. Never been in a situation quite like this.”

  I give him a weak smile.

  “Some tunes while we wait?” He crosses to a bookshelf next to the couch and bends over a sleek black box on one of the shelves. With a long finger he presses a button, and a lid pops open, revealing a record player like the Prices have, though theirs hangs on the wall in their den. Todd thumbs through a stack of records beside it, pluc
ks one out, and slides it below the needles. Fast saxophone ripples over the speakers. “Art Pepper.” He holds up the sleeve. “One of the greatest. Don’t suppose you’re a fan of West Coast jazz?”

  “Um, not really.” I reach out and touch the frosted-glass shade of a lamp on the side table, pluck a tile coaster with a big M on it off the neat stack next to the lamp. It’s cold and heavy in my hand. “Dad’s a classic-rock guy. Twisted Sister and stuff. He calls it hair metal.”

  “He seems like a cool guy,” Todd says. It occurs to me that technically speaking, I’m talking to my stepfather. I resolve at once not to like him, though that resolve mushifies when he asks, “You hungry, Imogene? I was just about to make myself a snack.”

  All I’ve had since dinner last night was the fistful of vending machine crackers and mini cookies. I can feel my stomach grumbling at the mention of food. “I’m fine.”

  He shakes his head. “That’s too bad. I don’t think I can eat the whole box of pizza bites myself. At least join me for moral support.”

  Their kitchen is small and buttery yellow and smells like cinnamon, which could just be an air freshener, but makes me hungrier anyhow. My mother cooks in this kitchen. Todd shakes frozen pizza bites onto a foiled cookie sheet, and pops a whole second tray of spicy pot stickers into the oven without asking me. I touch the handle of the silverware drawer. My mother eats yogurt with the spoons she keeps in here. It all seems preposterous.

  “You like cranberry juice?” he asks. I nod, inspecting my technically-stepfather-who-definitely-isn’t-likable-or-handsome while he roots around in the fridge. Except he is handsome. Gone is the old flat-top haircut of prom night. Now his curly black hair is shaved close, sprinkled with gray. His skin is rich red-brown, and a light blue sweater tugs across his broad shoulders when he grabs a bottle from the back of the fridge. I remember that he’s years younger than Dad, and if his shoulders are a little less stooped, why shouldn’t they be? He got the girl.

  He plunks a glass down on the counter in front of me. “Does someone know you’re here? I don’t suppose your father dropped you off. I don’t even know how you made it out here.”

  “It . . . took a long time,” I settle on.

  “I’ll bet. We’re kind of in the sticks. Is there anyone you want to check in with?”

  I take a nervous sip of juice, wishing for the courage of a Captain and Coke about now. “When will Sidonie be home, do you know?”

  “They usually wrap up around six. It won’t be long now.”

  The clock on the microwave blinks 5:47. If I were to leave now, catch a ride from Todd to the Quick Mart, I might even make the six o’clock bus—my last chance to beat Lindy home, no harm, no foul. “I can wait.”

  “I figured.” He nods. “So. What shall we talk about in the meantime?” He smiles, but in a likable way, unfortunately.

  I ask him to tell me about my mother, of course, so he does. He tells me how they met—how they met again—about five years back. He was visiting his niece, a dancer with the Nutmeg Ballet in Torrington. He would’ve left town right after the matinee show, but his niece begged him to stay and take her to dinner, so he did. On his way out of town, he stopped at a gas station for cigarettes (he was a chimney stack of a smoker back then, he assures me). And who should be paying for her gas in cash at the counter but his old high school girlfriend Sidonie Faye, all grown up. Even though Todd had a long drive ahead of him and had already eaten dinner, even though it was a Sunday and he had work early the next morning at this mattress store in Fitchburg, he asked her to come eat with him without a second thought. They hadn’t seen each other in maybe twenty years, and he’d always missed her, always wondered what happened to her when she left for school and never came home.

  They talked. A lot. She told him that while studying abroad—

  “In Sweden or Switzerland?” I interrupt.

  He scratches his chin and guesses it was one of those S-countries. Anyway, a letter had found its way to her from Boston, battered and much rerouted. It told her that her mother had died, that Sidonie was needed to come claim the body. That’s how she found herself back in the States, alone. One of those girls determined never to look back once she left their dinky little hometown and less-than-perfect childhood, she’d broken off with all her friends from high school, and the only surviving family in the area was a cousin she’d fallen out of touch with. She felt like she was floating, unattached to the place that had been her home, and too upset to go back to her life abroad. Then, when there was no one else, the forensic pathologist who’d worked on her mother was there, of all people. My dad helped my mother find a part-time job at the museum through a friend of a friend, a way to use the art degree she’d abandoned. He even helped her find a place to stay in Boston, a little apartment with a garden on the building roof. He was older than her, but soon enough they were together. When she felt her depression closing in, this dark cloud she’d struggled to outrun all her life, he convinced her to leave the city with him. A small, slow town in the suburbs would be good for them, he said.

  Here in the story, Todd winces as the egg timer bleats beside the stove. He stops to extract the baking sheets.

  “What about me?” I ask, hopping up onto the counter, the way Lindy hates. Do you think it’s wise to put your backside where we slice tomatoes? she always asks. But this way I’m eye-level with Todd Malachai, and I doubt he’s going to yell at me. “Did she ever even tell you she had a daughter?” I search his face for the truth.

  He looks away. “No. If she had, we’d have gone from there. But I never asked. I suppose I guessed, though, because of the sketchbook.”

  “What sketchbook?”

  “You’ll see when your mother gets here.”

  While the food cools and my stomach consumes itself over the smell, Todd tells the rest of the story.

  When my mother left Sugarbrook—and she was never very clear on why she’d left, or how or when—she stayed with a work friend, then after she quit her job, a new boyfriend, and another after that. They never lasted or made much of an impression, and none were very good to her. (“One was in a band, and not a jazz band,” Todd adds.) Eventually she left the state entirely, and landed in Torrington. While she crumbled crackers into her soup in a little diner, my mother confessed to Todd Malachai that she felt she was floating once again. Lost. Todd told her if she ever came back to Fitchburg, she’d have a friend. He could help her, and coming home might be good for her. There was even a new place in town, a place his brother-in-law had gone in the months after he was laid off.

  She thanked him, insisted on splitting the bill, and left. He never thought he’d see her again, until a month later when she was knocking on his door, telling him that she’d quit her job, that she was finally, really ready to get help.

  “And what, she just barnacled on to you?” I sneer. “You take her in, and she takes your money and crashes your truck?”

  “Huh?” He frowns.

  “Your great-aunt Hilda told me about her.”

  Todd surprises me by laughing. “Oh, no! That wasn’t your mother. You really did your research, though, huh? God, Aunt Hilda was thinking of Jen Lavato. Surprised she remembered her. That girl was a piece of work. I was dumb to run around with Jenny. My dad hated her, called me a fool. He was right. That was something like a decade ago, before he died.”

  Hilda said as much, thinking back. Of course, if I was any kind of actual detective instead of a stupid kid pretending, I might’ve seen the truth, and not the story I wanted to be true.

  “It wasn’t that kind of thing with your mom,” Todd continues. He hands me an overfull plate and leans back against the counter, contemplating a pizza bite. “She wouldn’t take anything from me. I told her I had a spare room above the garage, but she insisted on paying rent, and paying for enrollment at New Hope. Said her cousin had sent her some money and helped her out.”

  Now I know why Mom called Lilian Eugene asking for cash after all those years apart. />
  “But you weren’t, like, together?”

  “Not for a while. Not until she got help, and said she felt strong enough for a new start. She had a job offer here in Windham—one of the doctors at New Hope connected her with a lawyer friend looking to hire an assistant. She asked me to come with her, so I did. She proposed to me last year.”

  “How romantic.”

  We stuff our faces in silence for a while, and after refilling my plate for me, he starts up, “Normally I wouldn’t be telling you her story like this, Imogene. I’d say it was hers to tell. But you’re probably carrying around a lot of real hurt. That’s natural. I just wanted . . . I’m explaining so you’ll give her a chance. Try to listen to her. She’s had a hard life.”

  “I really don’t care.” I shove my twice-emptied plate away.

  Just then the front door opens and quickly shuts, and a woman’s voice calls out from the far room. “Sweetie? Sorry I’m late. Traffic was a bitch in the snow.”

  “We’re in here!” he shouts back, watching me. I try to keep a blank face, but I can feel the blood draining out of it, pounding straight into my heart. I wipe my suddenly sweaty palms on the hem of my sweatshirt and try to find a pose that says Fuck you, world. I settle for sitting up straight on the counter and crossing my arms to stop myself from cracking my knuckles.

  “Who is ‘we’?” And then my mother is standing in the kitchen doorway.

  Ticking my head to the side, I examine her: a small, thin woman with lots of mouse-brown hair waving down to her elbows. Framed by all that hair is a small heart-shaped face. Big hazel eyes under pointed brows. Thin lips that rest in a kind of amused miniature smile. Under one arm she carries a big drawing pad. Her coat is off, but a flouncy blue scarf is tucked under her narrow chin. My chin.

  “Hi, Mom.” It comes out rough and dry, like the sound of Dad rasping a hand down his unshaved cheek.

  “I knew it,” she whispers. “After the phone call. Imogene? How . . . ?”