Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  Hometown: Belarus.

  “Times are tough.”

  Maybe Blake was a friend of Magda’s, and he’d convinced his mother to let her rent a room in their house. He wanted to help her. Oh, he was in love with her, maybe. But he was too young for that. He was only fourteen. He’d barely started spurting hair in his armpits. He’d never kissed a girl, poor Blake. But he must have been a special kind of boy to take an interest in Magda. He must have understood her situation with the visa, and that going back home to her family was far worse than any fate possible in a place like Bethsmane or Levant. Blake must have covered for her in certain cases, with the police, or inquiring higher authorities, the agency that had hired her. This was why he couldn’t make a fuss about her death. He was protecting her. She had sworn him to secrecy: “I can’t go back to Belarus. It’s awful there. My father, he is alcoholic. He beats me and my sisters. Please, help me. Look, I have money saved from my McDonald’s job.” How could Blake refuse?

  Place of residence: A rented room in Blake’s mother’s basement.

  I pictured the house on a back road off Route 17, just over the Bethsmane line. A one-story clapboard ranch house, a dilapidated garage, a field of wild grass, rusted wire fencing around a small grove of pines in the back. I knew I was fortunate to have my place on the lake, far from that kind of trashiness. My property was rustic, certainly. It was fit for living in, insulated, and when I bought it I was told that the plumbing could be improved upon, but I hadn’t found that necessary. The toilet they suggested was the kind that lit the contents on fire. They said that would be better for the environment, since the pipes just emptied into the ground. I’d looked at other cabins, too, before moving to Levant. One picture the realtor sent me showed a badly weathered farmhouse. All the wiring and pipes had been ripped out, and the roots of a tree were scrambling their way through the brick half-story foundation around the house. Bethsmane was poor, and Levant was poorer. I often saw houses with pine boards over the windows, sheet metal over storm-torn siding, bright blue tarps covering crumbling roofs. Such was the condition of Blake’s mother’s house, I imagined. Perhaps the bank had been threatening her with foreclosure, and so she’d had no choice but to allow Magda to rent out the basement, and keep it a secret. “Don’t tell anybody, or else I’ll have to claim it,” Blake’s mom said. “Nobody can know she’s here.”

  I had no sense of rental rates in a place like this. Was one hundred dollars too much or too little for a basement room with a bed and dresser in a cheap house in this kind of nowhere? I had no idea. I could make an estimate based on what kind of salary Magda would make, working under the table as a nurse’s aide for the senile old person. That was hard work, and most people couldn’t afford to hire real professional aides or to live in a retirement home with constant care. My guess was that a girl like Magda could be talked into accepting something like six dollars an hour. Six fifty, maybe. If she worked forty hours a week, that gave her two hundred forty dollars. According to Walter, rent should be one’s weekly salary. For Magda, as desperate as she’d be, and as desperate as Blake’s mother would be to cover the monthly mortgage, which was what—four hundred dollars?—my guess was that she charged the girl two hundred dollars per month to live in the basement, utilities included but no food. Blake might have snuck her down a sandwich every now and then, but Blake’s mother wouldn’t have liked that. Shirley. I could picture her now, cold eyes but a pleasant manner. She probably worked as a customer service representative, or a telemarketer. There was a call center up in Highland. She’d be good at that. She’d be good at sounding and acting like there was nothing strange or wrong, no problems. Everything was taken care of, everything was wonderful. I was very glad I didn’t have a phone.

  The basement, where Magda slept and sat around on her afternoons off, and spent weekends alone, huddled under the bedspread, subsisting on snacks from the drugstore—Hershey’s chocolate bars, potato chips—was barely what I’d call a “residence.” She wasn’t residing. It was like she was waiting out a sentence. I felt bad for her. Had I known she’d spent all winter starving and shivering like a blade of grass in the frost, I would have taken her in. From the little I knew of her, I already liked her. We could have kept each other company, and Charlie would have loved her, too, after an initial spate of jealousy. I think she’d have appreciated my kindness. We’d make a home together, stoking the fire, cooking, napping in the afternoons. She could have laid her head on my shoulder and cried, and I would have petted her silky black hair and told her everything would be all right, and then maybe she wouldn’t be dead now. Maybe she’d be out there, rowing across the lake, waving to me and smiling, alight in the sunset, her face a beam of golden light, like an angel, like some kind of magic girl. But no, she’d been banished to that basement. It was dark down there, just a bare bulb hanging from a wire, and maybe a little lamp Magda had picked up at a yard sale for a dime, the kind that clamps onto a book so you can read in bed without disturbing your husband. I’d had one of those. Walter didn’t like it. He thought I was making a fuss of things, just to get his attention. “If you want to read, read, why do you need to sneak?” He wasn’t really angry. He was just pushing my buttons, since I was always so panicky about secrets between us. I was always feeling like he was hiding something from me.

  “There was traffic where? And why? Some kind of accident? Describe the car for me. Describe the scene. How light was it when you left your office? You see? You see? I worry. I need to know these things.” I would have worried the same way about Magda. I would have been up all night waiting on her, too, if she’d gone out. I would have made a bed for her on the couch. I never sat on it. I’d use the roller to get all of Charlie’s hair off, and get her a nice new down-filled pillow. I bet she never had such a nice pillow, the poor girl. She was like Cinderella down in Shirley’s basement. It was cruel. She was paying for this crummy hell, and for what? To stay out of Belarus? To have freedom here? That wasn’t any kind of freedom, no. Something awful must have happened back home for her to want to stay here, knowing only the highway and the forests, the summer job at McDonald’s. Maybe a few parties, drinking cheap beer, a skinny-dip, that was all the fun she’d have here. There wasn’t even a rug on the hard concrete floor of Shirley’s basement, just a few sagging cardboard boxes of Shirley’s dead husband’s useless belongings: an antiquated electric razor, wide polyester ties, a money clip, shoes made of fake leather, so tough and sharp they’d cut your feet. The whole cheap suit was down there. Shirley was saving it so Blake would have something to wear at graduation. Could they be that poor? Is that what life was like? As much as I complained of Walter leaving me alone at night in Monlith, or traveling too much, there was always money. There was always heat, and nice carpets and fluffy towels, food in the fridge, a newspaper on the front step every morning, and I was embraced from time to time. In the winter I had an entire closet full of warm things to wear. And poor Magda, she had nothing. Just those beat-up tennis shoes. Winters were so cold in Levant. Maybe when the temperature dropped below freezing, Magda unearthed the clammy boxes and pulled on the dead man’s slacks and jacket to stay warm, huddled back under the blanket, which was probably one of those afghans old ladies knit, pilly and stiff and ugly, and full of holes. Wasn’t she miserable down there? Well, Magda was tough. She would insist on enjoying herself. I imagined she had some kind of music equipment, one of those little players with the foam earphones. Maybe she’d listened to the radio, just like I did. To Pastor Jimmy. To public radio. To the bad music on the college station. I imagined she’d rock back and forth on the bed, eat her peanut butter crackers or corn chips, and look up at the small windows just below the low basement ceiling, startled now and then by the loud clank of the oil heater or a flushing toilet, Shirley’s heavy feet crossing the living room floor above her. It must have been awful to live in someone else’s home that way, like Anne Frank. Horrible, horrible.

  Charlie, sensing my distress, ro
se from the floor where he’d been curled up by my feet and put his head on my knee. “Do you have to potty, Charlie?” Did Shirley’s basement even have a toilet? I could imagine that Magda, like some third-world prisoner, did her business in a bucket, and waited for the family to be out of the house before she carried it up the stairs and emptied it into Shirley’s toilet. If Magda was as tough and funny as I was imagining, if she was as interesting, she saved a little from that bucket and used it to give that wicked Shirley some pee in her special nonfat milk. Or she dipped Shirley’s toothbrush in the pee. A flake of excrement nestled between the bristles. Ha ha! I nearly laughed, picturing the kind of silly revenge she might think up. That was pretty wretched. Where did she get that attitude? Perhaps she’d had a father who liked to make nasty jokes. Maybe she was carrying on the tradition.

  This father. I could picture him. He was like my father: of average height, with a thick middle, in a paisley sweater and scarf, big cheeks covered in white whiskers, a beard turning orange from tobacco, always a newspaper in his hand, not for reading, but for carrying around as he paced the neighborhood, as though to appear—when he bumped into a neighbor—that he was on his way to the park to smoke his pipe and read the paper, but he never got to the park. He simply paced and puffed, stopping whoever was on the street with a moment to spare, to discuss things, share news, brag about his children, complain about the state of affairs and so forth. Magda’s father was like that, only he always had a dirty joke ready to spring at the last moment. Like all comedians, he was depressive. The funniest people always are. He probably jumped off a bridge or hung himself in the closet. Maybe this was why Magda was so quick to sign up for the summer fast-food job when the representative visited her high school. One more reason not to want to go back home. “My father beat me and my sisters.” It was a reasonable lie. Blake would have had more compassion for her if there was an active threat. “My mother does nothing to protect me.” Poor Magda. With parents like that, I’d hide in a basement, too.

  Family: Unsupportive.

  Now on to friends. She must have made friends with the other teenagers from Belarus who came over for their McDonald’s summer on Route 17. I imagined the organization had them stay in some unused building, maybe a ski chalet up in the mountains, empty for the summer, and got some grizzly local to drive them to work and back in a retired school bus. But that seemed unlikely. And homestays would have required too much checking in, too many waivers, too much that could go wrong with the local families. They may even have just camped outside. The summer months in Levant were ideal for outdoor sleeping. My first nights at the cabin, I’d slept on the couch with the windows open. I’d even thought about dragging out a blanket to the hammock and sleeping under the stars. Perhaps the Belarus McDonald’s Staffing Company stashed the teenage workers in the pine woods, in fact, picked them up and dropped them off on the side of the road. They’d be too far away for anyone to come and complain of foreigners, strangers, weird kids. And there was the lake to tempt them. “Come to America, you’ll stay in a rustic resort locale, work in a clean American restaurant, practice your English, wear a nice uniform, make friends, have a good time.” They could have stumbled upon my little cabin by the lake, had parties, taken shelter from the bugs. There had been no evidence of trespassing. When I moved into the cabin, it was empty but for the old refrigerator, the small table painted Girl Scout green, and the remains of what you might call a mural, little white stencils of girls diving and dancing and shooting bows and arrows. If the teens from Belarus had been there, they’d have had to sleep on the floor. I imagined their mildewed towels drying on the line between the trees, a group of them standing in their old-fashioned underwear, dripping with lake water, staring at the lame, rotted ropes of the old swing. They’d all probably be getting pimples and gaining weight from all the McDonald’s they’d been eating. Or maybe they didn’t eat any of it. Maybe there was some rule against them eating it. If they had even a French fry, the manager would threaten to send them home.

  Magda would have confided in at least one of those teens: “I’m not going back to Belarus. I will run away. If they look for me, tell them I got on a bus, I took a ride, I went to California, far away. I’m not here.” And the day the van came to collect them for the long drive to the airport, back to Belarus, back to high school, now tanned and with a few American dollars in their pockets, Magda was long gone. But why had she stayed in Levant? What kept her here? She could easily have hitchhiked out, even taken a bus with her meager earnings. There must have been something or someone keeping her here. I pictured her now, sitting on the floor of the cabin with her back against the wall in front of me, smoking a cigarette in her letterman jacket, which I knew now she must have bought from the Goodwill in Bethsmane. She’d brought no winter clothes with her from home. She would look at me with a shrug as though to say, “What do you want to know?”

  You must have found Blake to be a bit of a nuisance, someone you had to entertain from time to time. Just a child who looked up to you, right, Magda? You allowed him to think that once he was older, the two of you could have some kind of romance?

  Another shrug.

  Did you send a note back with your friends from Belarus? “Give this to my father.”

  I heard her voice in my mindspace.

  Don’t try to find me. I am very far away and I am never going home. Good-bye forever.

  I couldn’t think of what Magda’s mother would do when she found out, or what the staffing company would say. Would the Belarus police be involved? Would there be an investigation? A missing person’s report? I doubted it. The company would get too much flak. And what did it matter, just one girl? Let her go. Let her have her fun, her life. The mother would probably assume she’d gone off with some rich old man. To hell with Magda, the mother said. I have other daughters. What more could she do? Call a lawyer? Pshhh. Who could fault her for not chasing Magda down? There was the note to point to. I am never going home. Good-bye.

  Friends: All back in Belarus.

  One of them must have delivered Magda’s note personally to her mother. Slid it under the apartment door.

  Don’t try to find me. I am very far away and I am never going home. I am gone. Good-bye.

  I clucked my tongue. Again Charlie put his head on my knee. “Don’t worry, little boy. She’s in a better place.” Silly how I lied to my dog the way one lies to a child to protect it from harsh truths. Heaven was not for me. Pastor Jimmy and his congregants, scattered throughout the land as far as the signal reached, and my Charlie, heaven was for those little gullible souls. Walter was not in heaven. I knew that. He was dead. All that existed of Walter were his ashes. Again, I thought of that urn, how I’d yet failed to take it out in the rowboat and dump the ashes in the lake and be done with it. A chill ran through me thinking of doing it now, in the night, under the dim moon that sat like a clock in the sky. Night had fallen as I’d been writing and thinking. I sipped the coffee, cold and bitter. I read Magda’s note again. Don’t try to find me. Charlie pawed at my leg, hungry. I put down my pen and went to the fridge, my steps creaking loudly in the silent cabin. I looked out onto my garden, imagined the little seeds burrowing for warmth in the ground. Had I planted them correctly? In the fridge the chicken sat, raw and dead, and I didn’t feel like roasting it. I opened a can of lentils, poured them into a bowl for Charlie, and set the bowl on the floor. He looked up at me as though I had just kicked him. “I’m sorry,” I said, and poured myself a glass of water. It was ice cold, and had a strange acrid taste that reminded me subtly of Walter’s aftershave, but I forced myself to drink it. I took an apple back to the table. Charlie followed me, but I pointed at the bowl. “I’ll make you chicken tomorrow. Eat the lentils or go to bed hungry.”

  Relationship status: Single.

  That was easy. She couldn’t have been married, and if she’d had a boyfriend, he wasn’t her boyfriend anymore. She was dead, after all. But if she had had
a boyfriend while she was alive here in Levant, I imagine it would have been a rather tricky situation. I pictured two lovers, in fact. One young, handsome, supple in personality and body—finely muscled and flexible, I mean—with a strange wide face, but thin, gangly even, not quite filling out his body. Aha, I nodded. Another suspect! His name would be something archaic, but silly. Leo. Leonardo, Magda would call him. He was still a child himself, could offer her nothing but affection and tenderness, sweet kisses. Magda would have been far more mature than him. Oh, this would have made Blake jealous, if he’d known about it. Magda wouldn’t want to hurt Blake, so she must have been secretive. She and her boyfriend would have had a private meeting spot, someplace unlikely and romantic. The birch woods, perhaps? “What are these bruises?” Leo would ask her, kissing her neck like a fawn. That was a very good question.

  There must have been another, more brutish kind of lover, someone Magda was indebted to, someone who knew her secret status as a stowaway, a runaway, an illegal immigrant, an absconder, and who used that information like an ax he carried over his shoulder, ready to swing it down on her the moment she refused him. But who would do that? Someone not quite right in the head. He wasn’t evil exactly, just sick in love. Desperate to keep Magda near him. Perhaps he was the son of the old man Magda was paid to care for. I could picture it: Magda dutifully wiping down the kitchen table after the old man had eaten his soup, Henry coming home, a live fire burning in his loins after a hard day of work. And he’d come down on Magda, backing her into a corner. And although she’d submit eventually, there was always a debate, a reckoning, a promise that if she didn’t put up a fight, he’d pay her the daily wages, let her go, keep mum to authorities. Magda was at his mercy, and yet, somehow, I also got the feeling that Magda enjoyed some part of their arrangement. Perhaps it was only that it gave her freedom: spending money—cash—in her pocket. Maybe just that? I wondered. She could have been the kind of girl to get into the dark and dirty, to relish some kind of painful intimacy, forced not against her will, but by choice, to submit to the man. Perhaps he wasn’t as awful as I’m imagining. Perhaps he really was something like Harrison Ford, like Walter. But his disability made it hard for him. And Magda was attracted to that vulnerability. Poor Henry. Poor Magda. I wonder if they made love there on the kitchen table while the old man watched and dribbled drool across the lap of his pants. My goodness.