Death in Her Hands

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  Relationship with men: Complicated.

  Relationship with women: Distrustful.

  I couldn’t forget about Shirley. I wondered how the woman of the house would regard the girl in the basement. Magda wasn’t so pretty as to elicit the kind of resentment grown-up women can have for sexy teens. I’d never been jealous of any young woman’s looks. For me, it was like seeing a cute little squirrel. This one has big eyes, that one has a charming stripe, et cetera. But some women really take offense at youth and beauty. Good for Magda, she had only the former. Not that she was unattractive. I think she was very attractive in her attitude. And her skin—creamy white, “snow” white they say, like the fairy tale. For a moment I pictured Magda as Snow White, sweeping my cabin, birds alighting on her shoulders. But Magda wasn’t nearly as cheerful. Perhaps that’s what saved her from inciting Shirley’s resentment: Magda was a sourpuss. Knowing she was down there, knowing that she must be exploiting herself somehow in order to pay for her pathetic little home in the basement, must have inspired a bit of guilt in Shirley. She was a mother, after all. And maybe she didn’t like Magda smoking down there. “Go down and tell her I don’t want my house to smell like those disgusting cigarettes,” she’d tell Blake when he came in for dinner. Shirley would be at the stove, stirring a pot of macaroni, her temper high, cheeks flushed.

  “OK, Mom. You want me to tell her now?”

  “Well, no, not now. Later. And don’t tell her mean. Just tell her it would be better if she did it outside. And tell her it’s bad for her health. A girl her age, she’s still growing.”

  Magda scared her. That’s it. Magda was a bit scary. She was tough. Her accent was thick. Her voice, low and raspy, made her sound like a hit man. I could imagine her male cousins in Belarus, tall, loping thugs in dull black leather jackets, huge shoulders, ready to whack you with a club if you insulted anyone in the family. Magda would have been like them, had she not been born a girl. My guess was that, for her to want to stay hiding out in Shirley’s basement in Levant, cleaning up an old man’s spittle and having sexual relations with his son, life back in Belarus must have been pretty awful. Thank God she got out of there. In a huff, I turned the questionnaire over again and reread Magda’s note: Good-bye. Don’t try to find me. I am never going home. I am gone. And even though I knew the note I’d found that morning in the birch woods hadn’t gone quite like this, it seemed like the two notes could have been written by the same person. And while Charlie pawed at my ankles, I dared to write a new note.

  My name is Magda, I wrote. Nobody will ever know who killed me. It wasn’t Blake. Here is my dead body.

  I got up and pulled a throw blanket from the couch and wrapped it around my shoulders. I was shivering, I realized. I suddenly wished I had a cigarette, though I hadn’t smoked in fifty years, not since I’d met Walter and we’d decided to quit together—he his awful cigars, me my cigarettes, which at the time didn’t trouble me at all, they were like air, they were like my oxygen. If I smoked one now it would make my head spin. Just a little smoke from the wood-burning stove had me in coughing fits. Maybe I had cancer, I thought. Maybe I was dying, too.

  Here is my dead body, I thought, sitting back down. Who would find me here, dead in my cabin? Poor Charlie, he’d starve. He’d have to bust out of here somehow, chase down chipmunks. Maybe he’d learn to catch fish in his teeth, though I worried the little bones would catch in his throat and hurt him. Eventually, someone would come by and find me, my skeleton slumped over the table, the note snagged under the bones of my hand. My name is Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed me. Charlie stared at me brokenheartedly.

  “I’m not dead yet, Charles,” I said, petting his head and ruffling his ear. I could hear him swallow, and a pang of guilt forced me up again, holding my pencil between my teeth—like a real writer! I fried three eggs, shoved two of them into Charlie’s bowl of lentils, and ate the third myself, off the fork, blowing on it and nibbling it as I went back to my writing table, then swallowing it nearly whole.

  I went through the next few questions easily.

  Job: Former fast-food worker. Now home aide.

  Favorite pastimes: Smoking cigarettes, listening to the radio.

  I wondered whether Magda was the kind of girl who read fashion magazines, who aspired to be rich and famous. Maybe this was part of the great plan to hide out in Shirley’s basement. She was saving money, and then she’d get out of there, down to New York City, or out to Las Vegas, or Hollywood. I could picture Magda looking at old travel guides to Miami, Florida, where everybody was tan and wore string bikinis on roller skates, with the palm trees and tacos, everybody friendly, dancing, everything clean and pink and the ocean warm, so inviting.

  Why hadn’t Walter and I ever gone on a fun summer getaway? Because Walter wasn’t much for good times. He liked schedules and work. He felt life was best spent being productive. I agreed with him for the most part when he was around, and I’d had my days free to do what I pleased. I did puzzles, I read some books, I walked through Monlith’s shops and things, saying hello to people who knew me. I strolled through the public parks. I was a bit like my own father the way I’d just linger around, waiting for someone to strike up a conversation. But that was Monlith. People were bored, especially the women. Magda would want excitement. She’d want to go to Miami Beach and meet some billionaire on the seashore. I could see her in a black, glittery, cheap bikini, her skin white, so white she’d have to wear a big hat to protect her face. “The body is perfect but the face, it’s a little piglet.” Well, I liked Magda’s face fine, what I could see of it, as I imagined it smushed into the soft birch wood floor. She was just lovely if you asked me. And any old man would be lucky to spend even a few minutes in her company. I wondered how far Magda’s scheming went. I wondered, too, had she’d gone back to Belarus, if she’d sign up for one of those Russian bride websites. But then she’d end up with a short, cross-eyed ex-military factory worker and have to live somewhere like Idaho. Just picturing the vinyl place mats and the fake marble countertops of the kitchen she’d have to sponge down after making the man fried chicken had me turning over the questionnaire again.

  Nobody will ever find me. Good. You are free, Magda. Nothing bad can happen to you now. You can’t make a single mistake. Everything you do is right.

  Favorite sports: None.

  Not in the way people have favorite sports teams or players here, at least. People, men and boys especially, but some women, too, seemed to ally with sports teams as though it were a matter of personal pride. What had these fatsos done but sit and stare? What had the fatsos contributed, apart from buying the sports drinks and bragging to their friends that their team was the best? Is that really how you show your support? Wave a flag? What was support but a vocalized wish? A hand on a shoulder, at most? When Walter died, a few neighbors and some of Walter’s colleagues dropped by the house to offer their support. How was I to take that? Did they think I would call them up to say, “I’m ready for that support you offered, how can you help me?” I didn’t know how to ask for what I needed. I didn’t even know what I needed. The university had handled the memorial, the interment, the reception. Walter’s secretary had called me with several options of urns. Of course, I approved the purchase of the most expensive. She pressured me into it, but I wouldn’t have felt good about taking the cheaper one—badly polished steel—or the cheapest, which was just unvarnished pine. But maybe the pine would have been better. Then I could have just left the wooden urn out and let the centipedes eat it. That was more civilized than dumping the ashes out into the water, then rowing back to the shore with the empty brass urn. What would I fill it back up with? Dirt from the garden? Plant a tulip bulb?

  Favorite foods: Pizza. Peaches. Orange soda.

  Strongest positive personality traits: Resilient. Self-reliant. Manipulative.

  Strongest negative personality traits: Rude. Secretive.

  Sense of humor:


  Like her father, Magda found humor in cruelty and stupidity, buffoonery. She poked fun at people who were slow and fat and ugly. She was full of spite and arrogance, and it made her laugh to push someone unpopular down in the mud. Back in Belarus, people had thought she was a bully. But she’d had to be. She’d had to be tough, coming from that kind of family. She wasn’t soft and girly. But I think underneath the hardened exterior, under the swagger, the eye-rolling, the flat expression she put on to dissuade interest when she did make an appearance to buy canned soup and candy at the market, she was actually sensitive and tenderhearted. She had to be. Why else would I have liked her? Perhaps I’d even passed her in the grocery store once, and I’d been too concerned with my own feelings of being out of place—I’m old, a stranger, an invader, unwelcome, paranoid from days on end of isolation in my cabin—to notice the other odd one out. Magda in her dirty tennis shoes, long, slippery hair hanging over her face like a sheet, hunched shoulders, carrying her basket of cheap, nonnutritive foods to the checkout, chewing Bazooka gum. In the winter, she must have worn a black knit cap. I could almost remember seeing her in the fluorescent aisles, wondering who would be going around in tennis shoes in such cold weather, no socks. “Kids today.” I probably clucked my tongue, and assumed the girl was on drugs, a bad seed. Poor Magda. What she really needed was a soft cushion by the fire, someone’s lap to lay her head on. I’d have cooked for her, fed her back to health and serenity. “Go swimming now, Magda, it will be good for you.” And we could have joked. We could have laughed at Charlie. Scrabble would have been fun to play with Magda. I’d teach her high-scoring words, and we could laugh at them together. “Exorcize.” “Quixotic.” “Whizbang.” “Maximize.”

  Temper: Short.

  Magda couldn’t stand people who talked too much. It really drove her crazy. “Dumb American bitch,” I can imagine her saying under her breath behind the counter at McDonald’s while some teenager gabbing on her cell phone stood there, pointing up at the menu. Having to be anybody’s servant must have made Magda furious. She had too much pride to be anyone’s slave or mistress. Maybe the senile old man she cared for got the brunt of her temper. “You stupid, ugly old man! You pee on yourself! You smell like caca! Vile dog!” How much would it take for her to hit him, to take some book and bash him on the head? “You cry now? You are like a baby, crying for mama? Everybody must take care of you, because you are so dumb, like a dumb dog, shitting on itself. Pah!”

  Will readers like or dislike this character, and why?

  I felt I had gotten to know Magda, and I liked her. The questionnaire had worked. Magda felt real. She had become important to me. We had bonded. I missed her, even. I wished we could have met in real life, even just to shake hands. I wished that she could have seen me so she’d appreciate everything I was doing for her, bringing her back to life in this way, investigating her murder, giving her a voice, My name was Magda, so on and so forth. I didn’t love her as I loved Charlie, or as I had loved Walter. I loved her the way I loved the little seedlings soon to sprout in my new garden. I loved her the way I loved life, the miracle of growth and things blossoming. I loved her the way I loved the future. The past was over, and there was no love left there. It hurt me to think that Magda was dead, life wrangled out of her body, that she’d been so abandoned, with nobody but maybe Blake to attend to her corpse. It is easy, I thought, to find great affection for victims, emblems of vanished potential. There is nothing more heartbreaking than a squandered opportunity, a missed chance. I knew about stuff like that. I’d been young once. So many dreams had been dashed. But I dashed them myself. I wanted to be safe, whole, have a future of certainty. One makes mistakes when there is confusion between having a future at all and having the future one wants.

  Four

  Neither Charlie nor I could sleep that night. It was eerily still out, no wind or rustle, and that late coffee had set my nerves on edge. Charlie, especially, although he’d eaten most of his eggs and lentils, was fussy and kept rising and repositioning himself on the covers. And I’m afraid the lentils must have given him indigestion, since every now and then a pungent aroma crept up toward me, and I had to bury my face in the pillow. My own stomach was rumbling, but I had no appetite. All I could do was try to wait for morning. It was pitch dark for so long. I wasn’t scared, exactly. It wasn’t that I was imagining monsters or demons creeping through the woods. I knew there were no ax murderers out there. If there was, Charlie would be scratching at the door, howling his head off. And then it would be easy enough to get us both into the car and drive straight out of town. All I’d have to do is put my feet in my slippers, run down the loft stairs, grab my keys, and out we’d go. An ax murderer wouldn’t be very quick on his feet, carrying an ax and all. Charlie’s warning would give me time enough to collect my coat and purse, even. I wasn’t worried that I would be hacked to death, fed to the wolves, even if there were wolves out there, which there weren’t. At least none that we’d ever seen. Nor bears. Though there were foxes. But the most they were known to do was break into people’s garbage and make a mess. They were no worse than skunks or raccoons or opossums. Still, I’d taken a butcher knife up to bed with me and had slid it under the mattress. Just in case. Because who knew? Who knew? . . . And that was what was keeping me awake—not knowing, and wanting to know.

  Where could Magda be, and how had she gotten there?

  The questionnaire was all filled out, and I had a growing list of potential suspects. But this did not placate me. There was so much more work to be done. There were people to locate, to question, and how I would do this was unclear. I was not a detective. I had no magnifying glass, no handcuffs. I was a civilian. I was a little old lady, according to most people. I’d have to sneak, I’d have to sniff. I’d have to be a fly on the wall, and overhear what I could, glean, detect things through vibrations. I’d have to use my psychic abilities. Didn’t Walter always say I was a witch? Walter would have thought the whole thing obvious. Oh, his constant insistence on spoiling every good murder mystery movie was so much machismo. “It was the pool boy,” or “It was the housekeeper,” or “He’s a homosexual,” or “It’s all a dream.” He really was a spoilsport. But so was I. I did not like tension or suspense. It made me nervous. I’d tear at a stack of napkins, eat a whole package of cookies while I stared at the screen. But I guess I enjoyed that, actually. It made life exciting. I liked fear. “Oh, you’re a drama queen,” Walter had called me when I picked a fight, usually over money, or how we would spend a weekend. I liked to do out-of-doors things, but Walter was too cosmopolitan. “I will not go swim in a lake and have microbes enter up my penis. Would you like that? For me to get some sexual diseases? Do you know what germs are there? It is a cesspool. It isn’t for people. People swim in bathtubs. Maybe, if you are careful, a swimming pool. Because it has chlorine, Vesta. Don’t you know? My cousin had dysentery his whole life from one sip from a river in Bahl.”

  “You have it upside down. It’s good for you, Walter. It’s good to get a little dirty sometime. We can go hiking. I thought you liked hiking. We can go up the mountain. There’s a little hotel up there.” I was looking at a pamphlet for Dratchkill. “It’s not expensive at all. And look, they have room service. No buffet!” Walter hated buffets.

  “It is not like in Europe,” he said. “It is not the Alps. You’ll be with loud pedestrians. There will be ugly people everywhere, shaking their babies up and down. I prefer we go to the city. To a museum. But I suppose you’d like me to take you to Disneyland. We could visit the movie studios, maybe see some hotshots. Your favorite even, Harrison Toyota?”

  That was Walter’s way of making fun of me. The most adventurous time we had was stopping at a roadside restaurant on the way down to Kessel. Walter got sick from it, insisted I keep my distance from him in bed that night. Just like Charlie, I thought, laughing. Walter could be such a child sometimes. “There, you see? You have it your way. I’m punished for being even a little adve
nturous. Trying your disgusting guacamole.”

  But this was Walter at his most German. He was far too civilized. He was a scientist, after all. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t loving. He was very loving. He’d come from a loving home. His parents, he told me, would renew their wedding vows every night over dinner. He did it with me sometimes, mostly sarcastically. “Vesta, my dear, would you like an ear of corn, and with it, I thee wed,” or “Will you take this leg of lamb as a sign of my undying love and holy matrimony, amen?” We’d been married at a courthouse, honeymooned at a fancy hotel in Des Moines, where Walter was working on his dissertation. It was enough for me, I’d thought, but I didn’t know what I really deserved. I’d deserved what any nice young lady deserves.

  It wasn’t warm enough yet to crack the window, and somehow I felt that would be like an invitation to whatever malingering spirit might be outside. Ghod, the black ghost I’d put on my list of suspects, was pacing in the back of my mind. Walter would have thought me foolish to conjure up something so abstract, but that didn’t matter. Walter didn’t know anything, though I assumed he must know much more now that he was dead. He could be up there somewhere, conversing with Magda. They might even be watching me—Walter with his schnapps, Magda with her orange soda. What were they saying? I hoped they could see just how smart and courageous I’d been, how industrious, how clever. Walter was probably shaking his head back and forth.