I scream.
She disappears.
Her black hair. Her white nightgown.
That night. I went to the bamboo basket by the door and dumped its contents to get my car keys. I was going to find Michael and Lani and catch them in the act.
Only I didn’t make it that far, did I? Drunk and angry, I was trying to navigate that deadly section of the Hana Highway when a dark-haired girl in a white nightgown darted from a stand of rainbow eucalyptus trees into the road. I slammed on the brakes, but the girl’s body punted into the air like a rag doll. My car skidded toward the cliff, and everything went black.
The dark-haired girl was Nariko.
I never saw her face.
I never saw yours, Nariko hisses.
Red Shift: Mama wants me to tell you Nariko was killed by a mujina. A woman without a face. She thinks you are a very kind person. You seem gentle and responsible, like you would never do something like hide from the consequences of your actions.
Oh my God.
I am mujina, the woman without a face. I killed Nariko. I killed her because I was drunk and angry.
She didn’t deserve to be a victim.
But now I know who does.
When Lani answers her phone, I say, “Let’s go for a ride.”
DOORS
F or the first time in the two decades of making this same, frequent, six-hour drive to Provincetown, Elise’s knees were stiff when she got out of the car. A second sign that she was getting old; two weeks ago on her fortieth birthday, she’d suddenly noticed age spots—faint but unmistakable—on the backs of her hands. She checked them again now, and even in the fading January daylight she could see them. They seemed to be getting darker, in fact.
She sighed and opened the trunk. She hoped she would age gracefully. This would be her last trip. Her mother, who had still lived in the Bradford Street house Elise had grown up in, had died this past fall. Elise was going to spend the next month cleaning out the place and making arrangements to put it up for sale.
The process loomed. Mom had always been a hoarder of junk. Not good junk, like antique dolls or rare China. Not useful junk, like Christmas gift bags that could be reused or jars that could be cleaned out. Mom’s junk was from the beach. Boxes of smooth stones, baskets of shells. And the worst: bowls of seagull bones. The only saving grace was the junk had, at least, been stacked in the corners so a person could walk.
After Elise’s father had died and Elise had moved away, however, Mom had started gathering driftwood, dirty bottles and cans, and dried-out seaweed. The collection had outgrown the corners. It had swallowed every available surface and was a layer deep on the floor. It had become so bad that when Elise visited she stayed in a hotel.
Until five years ago. Her mother had become so frail it was necessary for Elise to visit once a month. It was hard to find a place to stay: in the summer, everything was overbooked; in the winter, the bed and breakfasts and beachside motels closed down. It was feast or famine. The feast was a hassle, because she had to make plans months in advance. The famine had a creepy air. She imagined the darkened windows of the inns eyeing her as their No Vacancy signs creaked in the winter wind. Even when she was younger, she’d wondered why they hadn’t just put up signs that said Closed for Season. To her way of thinking, No Vacancy implied that the empty buildings were indeed not empty at all; that in fact, they were full to capacity. The people moved out at the end of the summer. And that was when the ghosts, or God knew what else, moved in.
So she’d rented a small apartment in a converted shingle-style house on Commercial Street. And here she was, getting ready to stay in it for the last time.
A door banged. Her neighbor, Pete, emerged from his apartment, lit a cigarette, and walked toward her.
“Hey.” His voice was deep and heavy. Pete was single and a loner—like herself—who’d confessed that Elise was pretty much the only person he hung out with. They’d been known to tie one on together in each other’s apartments during her stays, catch movies at the Cape Inn or hit the bars more than a few times.
She smelled the sea, and the reason for her visit pressed on her again. “Thanks for ordering those dumpsters for me.”
“No problem. They’ll be at your mom’s first thing tomorrow.” He stuck the cigarette in his mouth, went to the back of her car, and hefted her suitcase like it was his own. Then he slung one of her grocery-crammed recyclable shopping bags over his shoulder. “How was your drive?”
“It was great. No traffic, nice and sunny.” She reached into the trunk and grabbed her toiletry kit. “Has it been this warm here all week?”
“Yeah, we’ve been in a thaw. But bad rains, too. You missed those. Like monsoons.” His boots made sucking noises in the muddied path to their doors. “Which reminds me, be careful in front of your place. It was wicked muddy so I put some cardboard down. And in the big storm two days ago your door kept blowing open, so I went ahead and changed the latch, and now it’s pretty tightly closed so you can’t just push it open anymore.”
“You didn’t have to do that.” She knew he was one of the luckier year-rounders who had a steady job with a construction company in town, but that he enjoyed doing handyman work on the side, so much he’d earned the nickname Rent-a-Pete. Still, even though they both considered each other friends, she’d always felt a barrier between them, and she couldn’t decide if it was don’t take advantage or don’t get too close. He’d offered to order the dumpsters and she’d let him, since he’d insisted a friend owed him a favor anyway. But now he’d been careful to lay down some cardboard and fix her broken door. “How much did the hardware cost?”
“Nothin’, don’t worry about it. I had extra stuff in the shed.” He took a key from his pocket and unlocked her door, motioning her inside while he flicked his cigarette into a galvanized metal bucket on the concrete stoop. “See? Now you got a real lock that actually works.”
They stepped inside. Pete set the suitcase near the front door and the grocery bag on the kitchen counter. “I’ll get the rest of your stuff.”
“Really,” she said. “Just leave it. I can get the rest.” She admired the apartment’s uncluttered openness: the cathedral-ceilinged lower floor’s streak-free windows embraced the view of her small yard and hibernating rose bushes; the eight windows in the upstairs loft washed the white walls in the gold cast of the sinking sun. But it was little comfort when she remembered the task ahead of her at her mother’s.
She noticed that while she’d been having these thoughts, he’d been unpacking her groceries.
“I can do that, Pete. Really.”
He stopped and looked at her. “You’re not coming back after this—I know that. With your mom gone, there’s no reason to keep it. You’re going to put your place back up for rent and I’ll get stuck with a neighbor I can’t stand.”
She laughed; he’d referred to the person who’d rented the place before her as Pretentious Polly. “Lightning doesn’t strike twice.”
“Exactly.” He opened the door. “I’ll be back.”
She watched him through the glass. He rummaged in the back of her car, pulled out two more boxes, closed the trunk, and headed toward her. She quickly tried to look busy. When he returned, she was stacking Lean Cuisines in her fridge.
“This is all you had back there,” he said. “After you’re unpacked, wanna go down and get a beer or something?”
“No.” She shut the freezer door. “I’m pretty tired.” The truth was, as glad as she was to see him, she wanted to be alone. Open a bottle of wine, maybe finish the whole thing.
He nodded. “So what time do you want to go tomorrow?”
Elise blinked. “Go where?”
“To your mom’s. You didn’t think I was going to let you fill two dumpsters by yourself, did you?”
Her cheeks flushed. She had never let anyone she knew in her mother’s house. When she was growing up, she’d been so ashamed of the clutter the two friends she did have weren’t ever allow
ed over. She was afraid if they saw the freaky things her mother collected they’d leave her. “Pete, I appreciate the offer, but—”
“Come on, El. I took the week off and put myself on call to get you started, and I can pitch in on the weekends,” he said. “You’ve got nobody to help you with this. I don’t mind.”
“It’s not that. It’s that . . .” What? What was she going to give for an excuse? “I—I really want to do this alone.”
She felt tension between them, though she didn’t know why. He didn’t say anything. He just stood, looking at her, seemingly puzzled. Then, after a long moment, he heaved a sigh, held up his hands, and said, “Okay.” He went to the door, set his hand on the knob, and looked back at her. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
He left, and a second later, she heard his footsteps on the other side of her kitchen wall.
~~**~~
Just as Pete had promised, the two dumpsters were camped on the lawn: brown behemoths plastered with bright red TRASHMASTERS! Truro, Mass. decals. They were the largest available, but she suddenly wished they were big enough to just pick up the entire house and cart it away. She knew the place had been falling into disrepair since her father had passed, but she hadn’t realized just how bad it had become.
The house was a Cotswold cottage style, the only one of its kind in town. She sadly realized she’d have been proud to grow up in it had the place not been such an embarrassing mess—it was perched on prime land overlooking Commercial Street and the bay. Its brown shingles were weather-beaten and fading, ivy choked the front sitting room windows, the roof sagged, the white gutters angled unnaturally, and the garden was a tangled mat of dead plants. A dirty, chipped wrought iron bench sat next to a cracked birdbath full of greenish ice.
She shivered in the wind, and reached into her pocket for the keys.
The front door was stuck, and she shouldered it; it popped open with a thwuck. The wind chimes Mom had hung on a nail on the back of it banged, tinkled twice, then crashed to the floor.
The first thing to hit her was the smell—faint sulfur, perfumed soap, and dust. She stepped farther in and something cracked beneath her foot. I’m going to get killed in here if I don’t put some lights on, she thought. She palmed for the wall switch and flipped it, but the overhead light didn’t come on. It must have blown out—she’d kept the electricity going so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. She felt her way toward the half-moon hall table, and reached for the lamp. The toggle was stuck, but she persisted. When the light came on, she grimaced in disgust.
Bowls of bones lined both sides of the hallway. There was just a tiny path for her to sidle through to the kitchen. Again. Because the last time she’d seen her mother, about a week before she’d died, Elise had cleared it out.
~~**~~
It was late September, and Elise had received a call at work from the guy who delivered her mom’s groceries. Her mother had hurt herself, though the guy didn’t know how. “She’s okay now,” he said. “Just some cuts and bruises. I called the ambulance and she’s in the hospital.”
She’d had to throw some clothes in a bag and make the rushed trip home. It turned out her mother was all right—no broken bones, nothing serious—but it was then that she’d realized she had to do something more than just visit once a month. The conversation she’d known would someday be necessary was going to have to happen that day. The thought of having to deal with it made her angry, afraid, and full of dread.
She’d picked up her mom at the hospital and had barely spoken to her the whole ride back to the house. Instead, she tried to decide how she was going to broach the terrible subject. The house would have to be cleaned out. It would have to be repaired, put up for sale. And her mother would have to be moved—but where? She didn’t want her mother living with her. There was no room, anyway. She had a tiny little apartment that was neat and orderly and only had a few pieces of furniture. Perhaps specifically spartan in reaction to her youth’s forced immersion in her mother’s clutter. Should she place her mother in an assisted care facility? A nursing home of some sort? Where the hell did a person even start with a project like this?
By the time they’d gotten to the house, she was frustrated and enraged. After a long, difficult navigation through the bowls of bones and baskets of shells in the hallway, Elise cleared off a kitchen chair, deposited her mother in it, and put on water for tea. After, that is, she’d found and washed the kettle, which was covered with sticky grime.
“We have to talk, Mom.” She opened the cabinet where she remembered the tea cups were kept.
“I know you’re worried about me, but I’ve been doing very well lately.”
Elise grabbed a cup. It was chipped and a crack ran down its interior. “I wouldn’t call this accident doing well. What happened?” She reached for another. It had a broken handle.
“I . . . I just fell, that’s all,” her mother said. “I’ve been so busy working on things.”
“You fell.” Elise wasn’t sure she believed her. She reached for a third cup. Broken. “I think we have to talk about your future.” A fourth cup. This one had a chunk out of the bottom and had been badly glued back together. “What the hell? Do you have any cups in here that aren’t broken?”
“I haven’t used those cups in ages,” her mother said. “I don’t have time for tea anymore.”
Elise stopped what she was doing and closed her eyes, trying to center herself. Then she turned and faced her mother. “Look. I’m just going to come out and say it. I think it’s time we work on cleaning this place out and putting it on the market. I can look into getting you a place near me.”
Her mother fiddled with a paper towel on the table; Elise watched her fold it, crease it, unfold it, press out the crease. “I think this has been working out fine with your visiting me.”
“No, Mom.”
“It has.”
Elise sighed and rubbed her temple; a painful throbbing had come out of nowhere. “It worked for a while, yes. But I’m trying to be realistic. It’s time for things to change. It’s not safe for you here anymore.”
Her mother was still worrying the towel. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m doing important work here.”
“Yes, I know.” She tried to keep from groaning; she had been listening to her mother say that for the past five years, and knew that what the older woman defined as work was wandering the beach. “I know, but maybe it’s . . . maybe it’s work that you could do at the new place.”
Her mother smiled faintly. “There are no beaches in New York City, dear. I have to be here to do my work.”
Elise pressed her lips together, then returned to her search for cups; she found two acceptable ones, finally. Filthy with a layer of dirt, but intact. Her stomach lurched. “Mom, look at these.” She held them out. “You don’t clean; you don’t keep yourself up. I realize that this is hard.” She went to the sink and turned on the water. “But you won’t have to worry about it anymore. Someone else can do it for you.”
“This is my house, and I intend to die in it.”
The cup Elise was washing was so caked she had to scrape the film off with her fingernails. The process nauseated her. “Mom. Really.”
“I can only do my work here.”
Elise shut off the water. “Dammit! Your only work is hoarding. Period. That’s what you do, that’s what you’ve always done, and that’s what you’ll continue to do. You can’t take care of yourself anymore. I’m going to come up here every weekend and start getting rid of stuff whether you like it or not, and I’m going to start looking for another place for you to stay near me. That’s the end of it.”
“How dare you—”
“And until—” she rummaged in a drawer for a garbage bag. “Until I can get you out of here, I’m starting today so at least you can walk.”
“What are you doing?”
She shook the bag open, moved into the hall, picked up a bowl, and shoved it into the bag. “I’m
doing this because it’s not safe. You can’t have all this stuff blocking the hallways. You’re going to end up really breaking something.”
“I need those things! You leave those bones where they are! If they break—I want you to leave them there.”
She picked up another basket. This one smelled of sulfur. “Not sea bones, Mom. I’m talking about your bones. In your body. You were lucky this time. You might not be next time.”
Her mother was quiet for the moment. “You can put them in the bag and put them in the living room.”
Elise picked up a bucket full of bottles and crammed it into the bag. “The living room is full. When was the last time you could even sit in there? I’m not going to trade one obstacle course for another.”
“Put them on the stairs, then.”
“They’re going where they should’ve gone years ago.”
The teapot screamed. Elise kept throwing stuff in the bag. Her mother got up from the chair and moved into the archway.
“Don’t you throw out my things,” her mother yelled. “I don’t go to your apartment and throw out your things!”
“I don’t have piles of worthless shit in my apartment!” Elise was shocked at how loud her own voice was, at how mean and damaging the phrase actually sounded. Her mother didn’t respond, and Elise didn’t bother to look at the woman’s expression; she had work to do.
“Don’t throw them out—please don’t throw them out. Stop it!”
“I won’t watch you live in piles of garbage anymore!”
“You get out, young lady. You get out of my house right now!”
Elise stopped and looked at her mother. It struck her that, old as Mom was, frail as she seemed, she was still formidable. She suddenly felt like she was ten, and her stomach roiled.
“Get out, young lady. Go back to your city. Go home.”
“Mom—”
“Go.”
She looked at the hallway, felt the weight of the bag full of baskets and bones in her hand. At least the hallway was clear now. “Fine.”
The Shadows Behind Page 16