I finished planting the seeds, covered all my buried treasures in a thin layer of topsoil and used the hose to spray a fine mist over the little garden plot. It wasn’t the ideal place to grow a garden, I knew. Better outside the den windows, or off the narrow patio that faced north, toward the shed. Next summer I’d strategize. I’d be smarter by then, I thought. For now, I was pleased that I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do. I collected my tools into the red plastic pail and threw a rock I’d unearthed into the pine woods so I wouldn’t trip on it. Charlie, seeing the gesture from afar, galloped up from the lake, wanting to play.
I threw him a stick. It soared through the air and skidded deep into the pines. Charlie went after it, deftly but at a respectable pace. He was calm and happy enough not to be hysterical. He knew it was just a stick, after all, and not a hunting rifle firing at some grouse or hare or marten. There was no bleeding body tumbling through the underbrush to snag and deliver. He took his time. In the moments that I was alone there, waiting for Charlie to come prancing back with the stick between his teeth, a gust of cold swept through as a cloud covered the sun, and I shivered and felt a little melancholy, and my mind drifted once more to Walter. It was a simple thought: He was gone and would never return. He was deceased. He was only ashes now, sitting in the bronze urn on my bedside table on the second floor, which was just a loft area over the kitchen, with a window above my headboard so I could gaze up at the stars over the lake at night. The loft wasn’t meant to hold much weight, so all I had up there was the bed and table. Any more and I feared the floor would give way and we’d go crashing. When Charlie tossed and turned at night, I could hear the beams creaking. Not that I was truly worried. I slept so well in Levant. It was deadly quiet, just a few loons cooing. I had held onto Walter’s ashes for longer than I thought I would. I’d brought them out to Levant with the idea that I could scatter them in the lake—my lake—and have him disintegrate into the water so that I would always have him there, lapping at my feet, enveloping me when I swam, or tickling my fingers as I grazed the surface on my boat rides to and from the little island—my island. But I hadn’t scattered them yet. Soon, soon, I told myself. When it gets warmer.
I whistled for Charlie. I could hear him scrambling around, probably pawing through the dry, slippery pine needles. Charlie had never met Walter. He might have been born the day Walter had died, in fact. I’d never done the math before, but now it seemed to make sense—one life vanishes, another arrives. Nobody will ever know who killed her. I knew what had killed Walter. It wasn’t something I liked to remember. Those last nights in the Monlith hospital ward, how the nurses looked down on me pityingly, the doctors idle in the doorway. “Any day now,” they kept telling me, as though Walter’s death was taking too long, and I’d been acting impatient for it. As though death were something to wait for at all. No, I wasn’t that type of woman. I wouldn’t wait for death. I would hold on tight to life, caress Walter’s hand, pet his head, kiss him on the cheek and forehead, as long as there was life still in him. I had no idea if he could hear me when I spoke. I talked a lot while he was dying. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. We’d spent nearly four whole decades together in Monlith, barely talking some days, not out of spite, but just that there seemed to be no need. We were of a mind. We knew each other. But then, suddenly, when Walter was dying, I had so much to say. I cried and wished and prayed, though I’d never been a praying woman before. “Oh, please, God, give him one more day,” I said, head down next to his on the starched, white pillow, a sour chemical smell emanating from his wan body. And each day, my prayers were answered. Until the day they weren’t. And then he was in a better place, as they say. But not quite gone. His body was there, lying in repose quite calmly, as though he’d had a hard day at work and had taken, as sometimes he’d been wont to do, a sleeping pill or one of my lorazepams. “Is he just sleeping?” I asked the nurse. How silly. “I was just talking to him like I always do, and then that machine started . . .” I’d done my best. I’d been as interesting as I could. I’d tried very hard to keep Walter there in the room with me. Years before his illness, I’d said, “If you die before me, please, send me a sign. However you can. Just let me know that you’re around, and that it’s all right over there, wherever we go when we die.” He must have thought I was just joking. “Yes, yes, Vesta. I will. Don’t worry.” I tried to remind him in the hospital room. I even spoke up to the air in the room, as though Walter had left his body and was in the space above his bed, floating in the cold, sterile air of the hospital. Over the next few minutes, his body went slack in a way I’d never seen it. His hands became cold. A blur.
Charlie came back, scampering now not with the stick I’d thrown out there, but a rotting red branch of fallen pine, feathery almost in its soft state of degradation. “Good boy,” I called him, and patted my pocket for a treat. They were in my coat, however, which I’d hung up after the dawn walk. The treats were crumbled now, most likely, between the black rocks that had held the note down on the ground. Her name was Magda. I shook the thought away. All I had to do now was go back inside, rest for a while, and begin preparing lunch for myself out of the last bits of food I had to tide me over until the next day, which was Monday, when I’d go to town for my weekly shopping. I took the radio out of the window and turned it off. Charlie was standing in the open doorway with his big rotting tree branch, not wanting to drop it and come in.
“My name was Magda.” I imagined a voice on the Christian call-in show. “Nobody knows who killed me. It wasn’t Blake.”
“Good morning, Magda,” Pastor Jimmy might say. “I’m sorry to hear about your problem. I hear a deep sadness in your voice today. If it is any consolation, you are not alone. All of God’s creatures die. Death is a natural part of the life cycle, and it is not an end. Don’t for a minute see it as something to feel bad about. May I ask, where are you calling from? And how might I help you? Do you have a question to ask?”
“There’s my dead body, out there in the birch woods, across from the old Girl Scout camp that now belongs to Vesta Gul. I don’t know if there’s anything you can do for me, pastor. I just thought I’d call in.”
“Vesta Gul, you say? What kind of name is that?”
No answer.
“Do you have a message for Mrs. Gul, in case she’s listening?”
“Please, come and find me. I’m out here, somewhere near you. You’re the only one who knows.”
What silliness.
The voice I’d imagined was more like my voice—polite, a singsong lightness under the gravity of death. Magda would be more high strung. Any dead girl ought to sound hysterical. I had never allowed myself to sound that way. Walter nipped my moods in the bud the moment a twinge of anything untoward showed on my face.
I shook my head and opened the refrigerator.
“Charlie,” I said, “let’s go to town. All this food is old and yucky. And I want a good cup of coffee. My head is spinning.”
And with that, I wiped off Charlie’s paws and grabbed my coat and purse and Charlie’s leash from the hook on the wall, and we tucked into the car. I didn’t lock the cabin door. No, I wouldn’t. There was nobody lurking out there in the woods, I told myself. Suspicion invites danger, doesn’t it? Keep the imagination soft and happy, and only good things will come. If there was somebody lurking out there in the woods, it was only Magda. And she was dead. Here is her dead body. Was that so terrible? There were dead things everywhere—leaves, grass, bugs, all of God’s creatures died, and the ones in the woods—the squirrels, the mice, even the deer and bunny rabbits—none of them were ever found. None of them were ever buried. What’s so wrong about that? Nothing. God’s green Earth, I told myself.
We drove out down the gravel path and onto the dirt road and onto Route 17. I didn’t even look up at the birch woods as we passed them. I didn’t want to. I didn’t need to. And there was nothing I needed to do that I didn’t want to d
o. That was why I came here, to Levant—only to do exactly what I wanted.
Two
The town of Bethsmane was ten miles from my cabin. I rolled down my window and then Charlie’s, and I stuck out my elbow and he stuck out his snout, eyes shut in what looked like ecstasy at the thrill of the wind rushing through. I swung around the lake, passing my one neighbor’s overgrown driveway marked with a rusted mailbox at a sharp curve in the road. The dark pine woods spread up to Route 17, which I took going east, past the small store with its single gas pump and signs for hot coffee, milk, eggs, live bait, and ice. I had only been there a handful of times to buy matches and basic provisions during the winter, when I’d been too sleepy and worried about driving over the icy roads as far as Bethsmane. The man who worked there was middle aged and quiet and badly scarred. The left side of his face was deeply pocked, and down the middle of his face, over his nose, which was just a little jump with two downward-facing holes, was a rectangle of skin laid over his face like a carpet. If you’d asked me to guess where it had come from, I would have said it was from the man’s forearm, since it seemed to have been shaved down and sunburnt and wrinkled in a way that men’s arms would get, if they were to shave them. That strange piece of skin was seamed up around the forehead and down both cheeks, like a ventriloquist’s doll, and ended at his mouth, which was normal, maybe a bit browner than most. His chin seemed intact, unremarkable. When he turned to the left and only his right side was visible, he looked almost handsome, despite the lump of nose that in profile looked like a cat’s. From the right, he had thick hair, his forehead and eye socket and cheekbones were finely contoured, masculine, with one nice eye, thoughtful and not unintelligent. His hair was carefully combed, I noticed, perhaps so much so because his hairline on the left seemed to have been reconstructed. There was a weird geometry to it with strands not all flowing in the right direction. I couldn’t look at his left ear, like a candle melted down to the bottom. And the nose. It was really awful. It was hard to look him in the eye as I’d paid. “Hunting accident,” he’d said. I’d wondered since then how a person gets shot in the head like that by accident. I didn’t know much, nothing really, about guns and hunting. Rifles. Buckshot. I’d heard those words. I knew people hunted deer in the surrounding areas, but it was forbidden in Levant. Nobody was hunting deer or anything else in the birches, or in my pine woods. Signs were posted. As I drove, I wondered whether it was possible Magda had been killed by accident. Not every death was a murder, after all. But was anything really done by accident? Pastor Jimmy, in attempting to soothe a caller’s anxiety, often proclaimed with utter assurance that “nothing happens in God’s universe by accident. Everything happens for a reason.” That old line.
Bethsmane was ugly. There were “For Sale” signs on every other truck and mobile home. It seemed preposterous that someone would choose to live in such a place, inhabit one of the cheap aluminum-sided factory houses, send their children to school in the mornings, drive to work—Where? To do what?—then come home at night to sit on their couches and watch television. That was a sad thought. I pictured family dinners: green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, glasses of orange soda and cheap beer, chocolate ice cream. That was not how I wanted to live.
I parked in the lot in front of Save-Rite and cracked the windows of the car for Charlie. “I’ll be right back. Now don’t you howl.” Inside, I went quickly to the produce section. There was not a wide variety to choose from, and I always bought the same few things: one onion, two beefsteak tomatoes, which were cold and mealy, one greasy cucumber, one head of green cabbage, one head of iceberg lettuce, two carrots, two lemons, an apple, an orange, a bag of red grapes. From the chilly back end of the meat department I chose one whole chicken and a package of beef bones for Charlie. Then a carton of milk and a small container of cottage cheese. Then coffee and the half dozen bagels from a shelf by the bakery, where brightly decorated birthday cakes sat beside a fogged-up glass case of donuts. I watched a fat woman pull a small square of parchment from the dispenser, open the opaque lid of the glass case, and select what must have been a dozen chocolate-covered donuts, dropping each in the paper bag, licking her fingers and wiping them on her black wool coat, which was buttoned tight around her bulging midsection, the back flap gaping and splitting up the seam. This was one type of person I had come to recognize on my trips to Bethsmane: heavy women, big as cows, whose thick ankles seemed about to snap as they tottered up and down the aisles with their huge shopping carts filled with junk food. It was a Sunday afternoon. I wondered if that woman would be eating those donuts alone in front of her satellite television, projecting herself into the drama of her daytime soap operas, or idly wishing that she might win a new dinette set or a trip to Boca on The Price Is Right. I’d watched that show once at my dentist’s office back in Monlith.
Had Magda been one of those fat women? I didn’t get that impression. Here is her dead body. I pictured her teenaged, lithe and slouchy, with long black hair, an oversize letterman jacket with white leather sleeves, some patch on the back attesting ironically to her allegiance to a local sports team. Her legs would be long, too long for her jeans. A bit of skin would be visible in the gap from the cuffs of her jeans to her white socks. Her sneakers were black or blue and nondescript. Dirty and worn down, charmingly, I thought. She wasn’t the kind of girl to walk around in high heels, pretend like she’s some prize to be won. And yet she must have been special. A coolness, perhaps, and a rough, innate glamour. With a name like Magda, there must have been something exotic about her. I could relate to her in this way, as my parents had come over during the war, carrying with them their paranoia and strange persuasions. I could imagine that Magda’s parents were immigrants, too, or perhaps simply loyal to their heritage in a way that most people here were not. “We’ll call her Magda.” Truly American parents wouldn’t name their daughter that. I imagined that, like my parents, they were Eastern European, and cold, from a cold place with hard winters and old ladies in fur hats and shawls, cathedrals, thin soups, strong homemade liquor, a gray city world, or harsh farms and steep hills, a stray wolf that terrorized the town, et cetera. Perhaps Levant reminded Magda of home. She didn’t mind the fat ladies at the supermarket, the cheap aluminum houses. She found the place beautiful, yes, but shadowed with a sad reminiscence of her past, her homeland. Levant was like a hiding place, a resting spot. It’s very stressful to be plucked from one world and plunked down in another. One loses her roots, no matter how hard traditions are clung to. I’d seen it in my parents—traditions change. Food, holidays, modes of dress. One assimilates, or forever lives as though in exile. Poor Magda, the adjustment must have been hard. And so, I felt I knew her. I was a stranger in Levant, too.
Walter was from Bremen. When he was tired or sick, the accent got thicker, v’s for w’s, zo and ziss, hissy and short when he got drunk, “Please, Vesta, go to bett.” Perhaps Magda’s mother tongue made an appearance as she pleaded for her life in the birch woods. “Vie, vie?” Where had she come from? Budapest, or Bucharest, or Belarus? Istanbul was too far east. Warsaw, or Prague. Belgrade?
My own parents had come from Valtura, a small town on the Adriatic. Farmers who sold their land before the war began in earnest, they came by boat with no plan at all. They had me late in life, raised me on the flatlands of Horseneck, where the only other immigrants were a family from China. Not that I minded much. I blended in fine at school. When everybody’s poor, the little differences don’t matter as much. People were homey in Horseneck and in Shinscreek, where we moved when I was in high school. I had a happy childhood. My parents never let me forget how lucky I was. They’d had a son before me who’d drowned in Valtura. “You were spared the peasant life” was how Walter explained it to me when he first met my parents. When we were engaged, we went to visit them in their little apartment in Shinscreek. It’s not a very wonderful memory. I saw clearly how I had to abandon my roots in order to live a more comfortable life with Walter. It was
an easy choice, but also a sad one. We both agreed we needn’t complicate things by having children. Neither of us wanted any children.
Magda could have been my daughter, I thought briefly. Her age would make sense if I’d had her very late, too late, a fluke, an accident, a miracle baby. And that would have been the only kind of baby I’d ever have. Walter had forbidden me from using contraceptive pills. He said they sapped a woman’s integrity. We had our methods. I left it up to Walter. It was messy but better than any alternatives I could think of.
I could imagine this daughter of mine as an adolescent, turning her back to me in defiance, running up the stairs in the old Monlith house. I could imagine her room, pretty wallpaper torn off on one side, notes and photo-booth strips and postcards pinned to the wall and stuck in the frame of her mirror over a bureau littered with gum wrappers and old cassette tapes, dog-eared vampire mysteries and detective novels, a rusted Swiss Army knife, a big dusty pinecone, a tube of cheap orange lipstick.
“Leave me alone,” I could imagine her mumbling if I knocked on her door while she was reading. I could imagine her calling me Mom, a long and irritated ah-sound. If only Charlie could learn to talk. I’d always wanted to be called something other than what my name is. Vesta, Miss Lesh, Mrs. Gul.
Death in Her Hands Page 4