Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Her eye was caught by an ad for something called an obituary hunter. Addison wasn’t sure exactly what this was, but what she imagined was a search engine you could customize for certain kinds of deaths or for certain people’s deaths. UFOlogists, say. Or nudists. Or the intersection of the two. She was sorely tempted. Decades had passed since the days when she worked at the Santa Cruz Sentinel, but she still took a professional interest.

  Her e-mail contained a message from her editor in New York, saying she was going to call this afternoon. Just to check in, see how the new book was coming. Chat about this and chat about that.

  Addison turned off the computer and went downstairs for her coat and car keys. She told Tilda she had to go downtown, which was true, and she wasn’t so much avoiding the call as refusing to adjust the plans she’d already made in order to accommodate it.

  After parking, she walked a few blocks to the used-book store to check out the bottom floor, as was her habit, see if any Peter Dickinsons had shown up. It was a crime that man was out of print. While in the mystery section, she ran into Carolyn Wallace, and Carolyn made the predictable ironic fancy-meeting-you-here noises. Carolyn had been a year behind Addison at Santa Cruz High School and was one of the few class of ’61 Cardinals still in the area. The last time they’d run into each other was several Halloweens before, at a neighbor’s haunted house. Carolyn had been wearing a black garbage bag over her regular clothes, cinched at the waist, with a top hat on her head. Addison had been carrying a whip and had forty plastic spiders glued to her back. Even though her hat was not right, Addison was clearly Indiana Jones, which maybe meant it was more in the past than Addison was thinking it was. She remembered that she’d had no idea what Carolyn was supposed to be.

  Carolyn had put on some pounds since then, and also added an indigo skunk streak to her gray hair. “I figured if I’m going to be a little old blue-haired lady anyway . . .” she said. She told Addison that the tree in Addison’s old front yard on California Street had had to be taken out, and it was only last week some guys had managed to dig the stump up.

  Addison wished she’d heard this earlier; she would have liked to say good-bye. That tree was a great valley oak, at least a hundred years old—a spring chicken in oak years—and in the bloom of health as far as Addison had known. She’d had a tree house in its branches until a terrible storm had blown the boards two whole houses down the street, where they broke the Bartholomews’ dining room window. Addie’s nest, her father used to call that tree house. Addie’s crow’s nest, because from up there, she’d be the first to see whatever was coming at her. (About which, in retrospect, and specifically regarding her mother’s marital status, ha, ha, and ha.)

  Addison got in her car and drove up California, but the sight of her old house denuded of the tree that had lent the property its only grace was too sad. She turned around at the historic Weeks House without stopping and parked instead in front of the high school. She’d been editor of the student paper, the Trident, for about five minutes once, until her article on Hawaii’s proposed statehood was censored of all references to imperialism and the American-led coup that deposed Queen Liliuokalani, and she’d been forced to quit in protest.

  Shortly after, she’d gotten the Sentinel job. She had come home one day from school, was wheeling her bike down the driveway past the kitchen window, when she’d heard Aunt Joan, her father’s new wife, talking with her mother. Aunt Joan had tried so hard to make things right with Addison at first. There’d been invitations to dinner, the movies; they’d even taken her along on a camping trip.

  In return, Addison had been as unpleasant as possible. She remembered refusing to get out of the car because she was reading a Perry Mason paperback and preferred it to the breathtaking scenery everyone assured her she would see if she’d just look up. Her uncle told her to get the damn hell out of the car, and even though he was a fisherman, he was not a man who swore often, at least not in Addison’s presence. The book was The Case of the Hesitant Hostess. The breathtaking scenery was the Grand Canyon. To this day, Addison still hadn’t seen it.

  In the kitchen, Aunt Joan was revealing her true colors. “She’s eighteen years old,” she was saying.

  “Seventeen.” That was Addison’s mother.

  “He didn’t even tell me. I found the check stubs,” Aunt Joan said. “He doesn’t want you to think you can’t still count on him. You can absolutely count on him. But goodness gracious, she’s seventeen now! Almost grown up!” And then the conversation stopped because the women inside had heard the rattle of the bike chain outside.

  Addison’s mother had come to the window. “Hello, dear,” she’d said. “We’re in here having coffee. Come say hello to your aunt.”

  Addison did that, all frigid politeness, because she would never take another dime, now that she knew that she was taking a dime and that it was so grudgingly given. She hadn’t thought about how her father’s turning into her uncle and getting married might have financial repercussions.

  She went to the paper the very next day and asked for a job. All they had for a starter was in obits, and no one wanted to give that to a fresh young girl who was still in high school and should be thinking about sock hops and soda pops, not deaths and deadlines. Addison had had to insist. It was just a lucky accident, the job’s being exactly the one most likely to drive her mother crazy. When Addison was seventeen there was no one who loved her whom she didn’t hope to drive crazy.

  (2)

  Rima woke up to the sounds of excited dachshunds. Possibly a dozen. Possibly two. Plus wood grinding on wood. Down the hall, in the Our Better Angels bedroom, someone was pulling down the attic stairs.

  Rima seemed to have drooled on Constance’s card as she slept. When she raised her head, it was stuck to her cheek. She made it to the Our Better Angels bedroom just as the stairs landed, her hair in a post-nap state, but her face cleared of all obvious debris. The dachshunds boiled up the steps, baying. “Do you need help?” Rima asked. She had to shout it, and Tilda shouted back no, she could manage. Tilda was wearing green cotton overalls, and Rima could see many things bulging out of the side pockets, one of which was the flashlight.

  There was no way for Rima to pretend that she had been invited. She climbed the bottom steps anyway, stopping on the fourth with her head in the attic and her feet on the stairs. The beam from the flashlight skipped about in the gloom. Beyond it and by it, Rima could make out shapes she knew: the sphinx lamp, the plastic Santas, the old chairs, the shoe box with her father’s name on it. The dogs’ whining fell away into a delightful quiet of heavy breathing and claws on wood. Rima smelled dust. She climbed up the rest of the way.

  Tilda had set the flashlight down, making the edges of the attic go dark. She rolled up her sleeve so the snake showed, took a Swiss Army knife from a pocket, and cut open one of the boxes. She removed a book, put it on the floor. “As long as you’re here,” she said. “You can tape the boxes back up when I’m done with them.” She handed Rima a roll of packing tape. The book on the floor was the hardcover H2Zero. Rima recognized the kelp on its spine.

  Taping up the boxes wasn’t the job Rima would have chosen. She would have been better at slicing them open; she had no gift for gift-wrap. She would try to lay the tape out flat, but it would curl, one sticky side drawn like a magnet to the other sticky side. When she set the roll down and tried to smooth the creased tape, the end would wrap around the roll so that when she picked it up again, she wouldn’t be able to find the end. She would scratch along with her fingernails until they caught on something that would shred as she scraped it free. She would end up with only a small splinter of tape, and would have to go back with her fingernails, teasing another splinter free, and then another, until finally she’d freed the whole, but then, when she’d cut off the ragged edge, she’d lose the end of the tape and have to start all over picking at it with her fingernails. “Sure,” she said.

  They were up here in the attic to gather a dozen first editi
ons. The libraries in New Orleans were holding an auction for Katrina relief; these were Addison’s donation. Not that Rima knew this. She didn’t ask and Tilda didn’t say. But she could see the stack of books growing on the floor and assumed they were for someone.

  Tilda was many boxes ahead of Rima by the time she finished. She took the tape back. “I’ll pack up,” she said. She pointed to the stack. “If you could just take those down?”

  Rima didn’t want to take the books down. Rima wanted Tilda to take the books down and leave her alone in the attic with the flashlight. She couldn’t think how to make that happen. She picked up four, but put two back, playing for time. A faraway phone rang. “The machine’ll get it,” Tilda told her.

  Rima looked off and away into one of the attic’s dark corners. “Martin said he might call.”

  This was a mean and shameful lie. Rima would never have guessed she would stoop so low just to solve a case, and so quickly, too. No wonder Maxwell hated himself. Tilda went swinging down the stairs so fast it was pure luck she didn’t break her neck.

  But there was no point in telling a mean and shameful lie for nothing. Rima picked up the knife and the flashlight. She knew exactly where the shoe box was, and she sawed through the twine, which didn’t snap as quickly as she’d hoped, so she had only a few moments with the box open before she heard Tilda coming back. She laid the twine over the box, hiding the severed ends underneath. When Tilda’s head appeared, the flashlight was back where Tilda had left it and the knife was either where Tilda had left it or not. Since she couldn’t remember for sure, Rima picked the knife up and handed it to Tilda as if she were merely being helpful.

  “It wasn’t Martin,” Tilda said. She was staring at the knife in her hand as if she didn’t know how it had gotten there. “Did he say when he was going to call?”

  “No,” said Rima, and how was that a lie? It wasn’t. She picked up four books and made her way down the stairs.

  When Rima was eight or so, she and Oliver came down with chicken pox, Oliver first and Rima a half-day later. They stayed home from school, which would have been great if they’d been feeling better, playing Sorry and Yahtzee every morning and watching the Zach Grayson murder trial on All My Children every afternoon from opposite ends of the sofa, their feet piled together in the middle so that they could communicate with each other through kicks. Between naps they called for endless cups of hot water with lemon and honey stirred in, which was the drink of choice for invalids in the Lanisell family.

  After a few days, though, everyone involved had had enough. Oliver’s case was light, but he acted as though he had just as much right to misery as Rima did, which was aggravating in the extreme. One morning they quarreled for hours over a geode their father had sent them from Brazil. Oliver wished to break it open with a hammer. Rima wished to throw it from her second-floor bedroom window like a grenade onto the driveway below, which, Oliver said, would break it too hard. There were tears (Oliver’s), and their mother was forced to take the rock away from them.

  At lunchtime, they fought again over who got to deal with the plastic seal on the new jar of peanut butter. Rima wanted to peel it off without breaking it, while Oliver wanted to plunge a knife through it so he could hear it pop, and Rima didn’t even really care; she was just making Oliver cry now because she could. Their mother took the jar away and told them to go sit on the couch in the TV room and play a game in which they weren’t allowed to talk or touch each other until she said so. If they managed to do this, which would demonstrate maturity and control, two things a spy needed, then she would teach them how to be spies. Like she was.

  “You’re not a spy,” Oliver told her, and she asked him if he was sure about that.

  “You’re a mother.” But there was already doubt in his voice. The woman on Scarecrow and Mrs. King was a spy, and her two little boys didn’t know a thing about it, although honestly, they were dumb as posts. How many times did your mother have to miss dinner before you asked yourself what was what? (Their father, now, he could be a spy. He probably was. He was fooling no one.) Oliver followed Rima from the kitchen to the TV room and sat as far away from her as possible.

  When their mother arrived, she was carrying a single tray covered with a red-striped dish towel. She told them that this particular spy training came from Kipling’s book Kim, which she would read to them later at bedtime. Grandma had read that same book and taught her this same game when she was a little girl.

  “Grandma’s not a spy,” Oliver said. “She teaches nursery school.”

  Rima could have pointed out that he had just lost the game in which they didn’t talk until their mother said to. The only reason she didn’t was that she was bored with making him cry.

  The new game was to look at the objects on the tray when the dish towel was removed and then see how many of them you could remember when the dish towel was put back. To this day,

  Rima could tell you many of the things that had been on that first tray. The peanut butter jar and the geode. Rima’s charm bracelet and her toothbrush, Oliver’s Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure and his Adam Bomb Garbage Pail Kids card, a vial of some oil to help you meditate, a pearl drop earring, and a postcard from their father in Argentina, where a few years earlier there’d been a dirty war. Rima had asked him why some wars were dirtier than others, and he hadn’t had a satisfactory answer.

  Oliver and Rima liked the game. They played several times that day and often afterward, making up trays for each other if their mother was busy. As Oliver got good at it, his enthusiasm for spying grew. He became an incorrigible eavesdropper, which lasted many years and maybe the rest of his life. Certainly he always knew more about Rima than she could easily account for.

  Rima helped Tilda carry the books down until all twelve were on the first floor, ready to be wrapped for mailing. Then she went to her room, found her notes in the first place she looked, which was her sock drawer. She closed her eyes to help remember what she’d seen in the Bim box, and then opened them and wrote what she could recall:

  Old newspaper clippings; the top one, at least, with her father’s byline.

  Ticket stubs for a movie.

  A small spiraled shell.

  An invitation to her parents’ wedding.

  A bar napkin with something sketched on it.

  A tiny plastic dollhouse birthday cake, three layers, chocolate icing.

  A ruby-colored shot glass.

  Rima read over the list. Perhaps a real detective would want to find out what was written on the bar napkin, exactly which newspaper stories Addison had chosen to save. But Rima had seen enough to know what she had seen. And she had seen the things a person in love collects when she’s not loved in return.

  She put her notes back into the sock drawer. It was all so long ago. Addison was a different person now. A rich, outrageously successful writer. A rich, outrageously successful unmarried writer. In all the interviews and society columns Rima had read, there’d never been any suggestion of a long-term partner. Or much information of any kind concerning Addison’s social life. It didn’t necessarily follow that Rima’s father had broken her heart for good and all. Addison was a very private person.

  This detecting was for people made of sterner stuff. Already Rima had said something she wished she hadn’t said in order to see something she wished she hadn’t seen. She was finished. Case closed.

  There was no case. Ipso facto pterodactyl, as Oliver used to say, there was really no need for Rima to solve it. She could find something else to do all day. Learn to play the guitar. Dust off her conversational French. La plume de ma tante est sur la table. Take over those secretarial duties, the way she and Addison had once discussed. Make her bed.

  Rima went downstairs to the laundry room to fetch her sheets before Tilda did it for her. She came upstairs with the pile, all soft and smelling of soap, in her arms. On her way back to her room, she stopped to send an e-mail to Martin.

  By evening she was able to tell Tilda he wou
ld be coming again. He would join them for dinner and spend a night at Wit’s End, if someone at the store would switch shifts with him.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  (1)

  The next morning Rima skipped breakfast with Scorch and Cody in order to read the rest of Constance’s cards and letters. She gathered them up and climbed back into bed. Downstairs, she heard the dogs returning from their walk. In the hall, she heard the clock chime the half-hour. Before she had finished reading, it had chimed three more times.

  She’d found five other mentions of Bim, which she sorted into Real Bim and Fictional Bim.

  “Had a Christmas card from Bim,” Constance wrote one January. “You probably already know he’s a daddy. So nice of him to remember me when we haven’t seen each other in so long.” (This was Rima’s father. Real Bim.)

  On March 17, 1978—“We’re as old as the hills here and creak when we walk. Hasn’t been a fresh young face around since the days that Bim used to drop by. Donkey’s years. Father Riker wasn’t thinking of the long term when he decided we were none of us to do the necessary to have children.” (Real Bim.)

  On September 14, 1983—“Will never be persuaded of Bim’s guilt. There are other ways to get out of a marriage.” (Fictional Bim.)

  On February 7, 1984—“I’m afraid the matter of Bim still lies between us, Mr. Lane. Have remembered something pertinent. Bim was extremely allergic to cats. Could never have held one for the time required to paint its claws without suffering hives and severe shortness of breath. Very much doubt that his wife would have even owned one. Unless she was maybe trying to kill him! In which case she deserved it.” (Some combination of Real and Fictional.)

  And on September 30, 1988, the final reference—“Ghastly dream last night about poor old Bogan. He was fixing Father Riker’s roof and I climbed up to tell him to be careful. He came at me with his hammer and his eyes black and dusty like a toad’s. I pushed him away and he went cartwheeling off the roof. And I thought that I could go look, see if I’d killed him. Or I could wake up, which is what I did. Upset me the whole day.