Homebodies

by Cheryl Loudermelt

  “I don’t know, Em. We said some words, had some cake, danced, and left. It was a wedding. They’re all the same.” He picked up his bowl again. “What do you remember?” His voice was too casual, his body deliberately lax.

  She shrugged and looked down at Red who had spent the day at her feet. “I should really get him some normal dog food.”

  “Em.” His voice had that fatherly tone she hated. “Don’t change the subject.”

  “I don’t remember anything important. I remember getting married, but you’re right. They’re all the same. I was just thinking about it today. It’s weird we don’t have any pictures. That doesn’t seem normal.”

  Todd dipped his chin. “I’m sure we do. They’re probably just boxed up somewhere. I’ll look for them this weekend if you want.”

  “Sure. It would be fun to see them.”

  “Do you want me to get your dog some food on the way home or something?”

  Far too accommodating. Todd wasn’t the type to go out of his way for anything, especially not for a dog he didn’t even want. He was trying to placate her with dog food, and he thought so little of her that he was certain it would work. She smiled while seething. “If you don’t mind; it would save me a trip, but I can do it.”

  “I’ll do it.” He said quickly. “Tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.” The fight to stay smiling against the gloom physically hurt her face.

  “Sure.”

  Todd looked as though he wanted permission to leave, but she wasn’t ready for him to go just yet. “Who was your best man? I can’t remember.”

  Todd stared straight at the kitchen tile, his lips downturned like melting wax. “It was Scott.” The words seemed to hurt him. “My brother.”

  “That’s right,” she chirped. “I forgot you even had a brother. You guys used to be really close I think.”

  “We were.” Todd swallowed. “Before.” He took a deep breath, and his shoulders shuddered. “We don’t talk much anymore.” Todd snatched his plate and went into the family room. Emily sat down on the tile and petted Red. He wasn’t opposed to the floor; he was as happy in her lap there as he was anywhere else.

  Todd was lying. She was sure, but how much was lie, she couldn’t be certain. The fact that he felt the need to appease her with dog food and weekend chores was enough to prove that he felt at least a little guilty. She suspected he knew right where the pictures were and had put them away on purpose, but she couldn’t imagine why he’d go to so much trouble to hide something she must have eventually noticed was missing.

  And he remembered so much about the wedding. He remembered his brother as the best man, but not Danny as her maid of honor. It would have been impossible for Emily not to seek out Danny’s approval before marrying him in the first place. At minimum, they met at the wedding, but more probably, they’d spent extended time together, and Todd was deliberately avoiding the existence of anything they’d been before.

  Of course, she’d forgotten Todd had a brother, but he said himself, they didn’t talk much anymore, and she obviously didn’t talk to Danny anymore. But there was no reason for that. They hadn’t had a fight. As far as Emily knew, they never really fought, and she felt that even if they didn’t see each other for months, they were the kind of friends that time wouldn’t diminish. By the time she climbed up from the floor, she had made up her mind to try something that was probably impossible. Tomorrow, she would take Red for another car ride.

  11

  She wasn’t exactly sure where she was going, and that was always a bad idea. There were accidents and abandoned cars, and sometimes groups of people blocking the road protesting or walking for some fundraising cause and disrupting traffic. She was hoping that if she just broke up her normal routine, which really only consisted of the path between home and the hardware store or the dump, she might see something that jogged her memory. It probably wasn’t a good idea to let instinct drive the car, but she tried to think as little as possible and just enjoy the ride at least a tenth as much as Red enjoyed letting his ears flap outside the window.

  She had to make some unfamiliar turns. There was a military vehicle overturned in one street, but there weren’t many people around, which was a relief. She nearly got lost cutting through a subdivision that she was pretty sure had been modeled after the master plan of inescapable hell, but when she came out onto a main road again, she knew exactly where she was. Every street sign and mailbox were splashes of familiarity. The last three turns, one down Gracechurch Road, another on 115th avenue, and the last onto Danny’s street, she made from memory.

  Danny’s neighborhood was unusually crowded considering that it wasn’t yet noon. The houses here were older than those in the subdivision where Emily and Todd lived. The neighborhood was rougher. Some of the houses had been remodeled and updated at various points, but some of them were questionable looking, with tin foil covering some of the windows and graffiti on the garage doors. The lack of a homeowner’s association meant that people could basically do what they wanted, and as a result, at least one person on the block had thought that neon pink was a good shade for shutters on a green house.

  She thought someone must have been having a party because the street was filled with cars, and people milled about between them as if they weren’t sure where to go. Rather than pull down closer and risk getting hemmed in by traffic, she parked at the end of the street. Red was looking out all the windows and occasionally back at Emily like he wasn’t sure she was in the best frame of mind. But he was up for an adventure, and his tail wagged as he crawled to the driver’s seat and leapt onto the pavement. They made their way quickly through the lawns to Danny’s front door. Some of the neighbors noticed that there were new people around, and Red circled Emily’s feet like a yellow sidewalk shark. Emily knocked softly, trying not to draw too much more attention, but there was no answer. She didn’t have time to wait. Danny’s neighbors were on the verge of being too friendly, beginning to wander in her direction. Red had his mohawk going on; Emily tried the door, but it was locked.

  She sighed, hardly in the mood for feats of athleticism, but she didn’t have much choice. She moved for the side of the house and told Red to wait for her. She climbed the fence, which was fortunately easier than she anticipated because it was made of wood supported by metal crossbeams that were just big enough to accommodate the toe of her shoe. When she landed with a little grunt in Danny’s back yard, she was happy to see the key stuck in the padlock of the gate. She unlocked it to let Red through, and then locked it again, so she could keep nosy neighbors in the realm of their own damn business. The key she put in her pocket. It wasn’t safe to leave it sitting there. Anyone could let themselves through.

  Danny had let the landscaping go. She’d never had Emily’s green thumb, but it looked like she hadn’t watered the yard or plucked a weed in decades. Red pounced playfully through the high weeds, but the yard made Emily feel barren. She couldn’t be sure because her memories were so full of holes, but she felt as though Danny wasn’t the type of person to let something like this go. Emily turned from the yard to stare at the back of the house. All the curtains and blinds were drawn, except the one over the sliding door. Emily looked inside to a dark kitchen and small dining room. Danny’s style was much richer than Emily’s, with dark woods and grey granite, where Emily had sunshine and daisies. And yet they were such friends. A few generations ago, Danny’s family had been from Italy, and that heritage was dripping from every aspect of Danny’s house. Emily remembered eating shrimp pasta at that dining room table, and the thought of it made her hungrier than she had been in a quite a long time.

  The sliding door was locked too. Emily knocked on the glass with two knuckles. It took a few breathless minutes, but she came. Danny shuffled across the tile, leaving black half-moon footprints in a trail behind her. Her hair was just what Emily remembered, except it hadn’t been brushed and was knotted up on one side of Danny’s face. The hazel eyes Emily had seen dancing with laughter
in her mind were dim and rimmed with streaks of red. Her veins were black and distended, causing her to look older than she really was, and her nightgown had a blood-stained hole in one side that shifted when she moved and showed the grey flesh and bare bone beneath.

  “Hi Danny.” Her voice wasn’t loud enough to carry through the door, but Danny seemed to hear her all the same. Danny tilted her head to one side and took another step toward the glass door. Red growled.

  “No, Red.” She reached down to pet his ears, but her eyes were locked on her friend inside the house. “This is Danny. She’s okay. She’s. . . she was my best friend.”

  Danny pressed her face against the glass; her lips were pulled back away from her teeth and her gums were dry, her tongue shriveled. Emily leaned her forehead against the cool glass too, so that thin pane was the only thing that kept them apart. “I missed you, Danny, even when I didn’t realize you were gone. Nothing has been the same. Nothing will ever be the same without you.”

  Danny pressed a grey hand against the glass, almost like she could understand, like she could want to reach out and touch Emily as much for the pleasure of seeing her as for sickness and hunger. Emily pressed her hand there too, and looked into Danny’s sad eyes, looking for more signs of the girl she knew, but there was nothing. The real Danny was gone, but Emily spoke to her anyway, hoping that the words would sink through. “I love you.”

  Emily pulled away from the glass, and Danny pressed closer to it, trying to come through without knowing how. Emily pushed away the desire to go back to the glass and stay there. She couldn’t stay. She couldn’t remain there and mourn, not because she didn’t have time, but because she didn’t have the strength. Emily took off her shirt and wrapped it tightly around one hand. It took a few tries because she’d never felt so weak, but she busted the window over the kitchen sink, which clattered loudly around the drain and splashed glass across the floor. She put her shirt on again, little shards cutting her arms and abdomen; then she crawled inside.

  And like she’d always done when Em was crying, Danny reached for her with open arms. Emily watched Danny drift away from the door, her friend’s unsteady footsteps over the glass covered floor. Emily pulled the gun from her waistband, it took every ounce of her strength, and she was forced to go inside herself to look for more as she looked down the barrel and leveled the sights at Danny’s head. “I’m sorry I forgot you. I never will again, and I promise, you’ll be all right.”

  Emily closed her eyes and fired. Danny fell away without goodbye. Outside, Red whined, and scratched at the patio door. He was afraid for her, she thought, but there was nothing left to be afraid of. The worst of it was over. The bad part was gone, and there was only Danny left, the Danny she remembered from the fleeting scenes inside her head. Emily stretched Danny out onto her back, closed her friend’s bloodshot eyes, and laid her arms across her stomach to hide the gouge and bone.

  She unlocked the patio door and slid it open enough to let Red in. He burst in on alert, and she allowed him to sniff Danny for a moment, until he seemed aware the danger had passed. Emily had nothing left. She didn’t sit so much as collapse down beside Danny. Emily pulled her knees to her chest, and hugged them with both arms, the gun still gripped tightly in one hand. Red tolerated this, and for a while sat patiently waiting, but he soon began to pace across the threshold of the door.

  She couldn’t help but wonder how many friends Red had lost that he could move on so quickly. It was a barbaric skill to learn, and Emily doubted she’d ever be such a master of it. “I know Red. I want to go home too. But we can’t.” He whined gloomily. “I can’t just leave her.”

  Red sat down with a huff by the patio door and watched the weeds sway in the yard. He wasn’t happy about it, but she thought he was giving her leave to do whatever she needed to do. Emily walked around the house as though she’d been there a thousand times. She supposed that was probably true, even though she couldn’t remember exactly. She had a sense of where to find everything she needed. Something deep in her still knew, even if the rest had forgotten. In the master bedroom, she found some nice things in Danny’s closet. Danny had always had a thing for black shirts, so much that most of the closet was black, which had seemed a little boring before, but was appropriate, considering how things had ended. Emily picked out one that was silky and had little drapes at the elbows like wings, a pair of nice black pants, and one of the hundreds of pairs of glittery-heeled shoes. In a dresser drawer, Emily found a large quilt that looked hand made. All these things she carted to the dining room table, along with hairbrushes and make up, and gauze she found in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

  Though Danny wasn’t a particularly large person, Emily struggled to pull off the vile nightgown. Then she cleaned the wound on Danny’s ribs with a bottle of water she found under the sink and covered the area with tape and gauze, so Danny almost seemed whole again. Emily put Danny’s body in the clothes, and though it took nearly an hour, she managed to smooth the massive knot in Danny’s hair. Emily added a little make up, just enough to dim down the look of Danny’s veins, and brighten her face from the miserable grey. Danny had never been one to wear much in the way of makeup. She had a kind of natural beauty, and that was all Emily wanted, for her to look natural again.

  She petted Danny’s forehead for a few minutes and tried to memorize her face again. It was easy because she hadn’t really forgotten, she’d just refused to remember. Then she kissed Danny’s forehead, rolled her gently up inside the quilt, and dragged the quilt into the back yard. Emily wished the yard was beautiful. If she thought she could manage Danny’s body, she might have carted her to the SUV and taken Danny to rest in her lovely garden, but without help, and with the street so crowded, there was no way.

  Emily found a shovel in a small tool shed beside the house. With great care, she pruned back the weeds and thrust the shovel into the dirt. She slammed her foot down to drive it deep, then threw the dirt into a pile. Digging was cathartic, familiar. This much, she had done before.

  12

  They didn’t enjoy the ride home. Even though she rolled the window down, Red didn’t want to stick his head outside. Instead, Red sat quietly in the seat, but he looked over at her every now and then. She probably looked like something he’d seen at the garbage dump. Her clothes were filthy, her hands and face were brown with dirt, her nails were crusted with dried black, her hair was wild, and her eyes were nearly swollen closed.

  Even when they walked through the front door, Emily couldn’t have said she was happy to be home. She looked upstairs at the long path to the shower and thought of drowning herself in scalding water, but she didn’t think she could wash off what really mattered, and instead, she wandered into the living room to sit on the sofa and stare out into the back garden at the colors and leaves. It was a faraway peace. She knew it existed, but she didn’t have the will or the energy to reach even as far as the backyard.

  When the time came to start dinner, it was an act of sheer will that she managed to wash her hands and create something edible. Even that, she did in a haze. It was like watching someone else’s hands break beans and slice tomatoes. There was a stranger in her body, moving her arms and feet. She didn’t bother making something for herself, and she thought it likely that she’d never really feel like eating again. She set a plate down on the floor for Red, wondering absently if Todd would stay true to his word and bring dog food.

  She left a plate for Todd on the counter and went back to the sofa, where the imprint of herself was still outlined in dirt and dead grass. Like a ghost, she drifted back into the hole as if she’d never left. She disturbed nothing and was nothing. Red laid down beside her after he cleaned his plate; his eyes were intense and his expression sympathetic. While she was constantly shifting between the need to feel connected to some living thing, and the need to curl into herself, she could, in neither case, bring herself to pet him. He was content to lay next to her and be her friend; she was grateful he had no othe
r need.

  She stared at the garden and thought of Danny. The memories were precious because there were so few, but each of them was as vivid as the daylight on her garden. Sometimes she’d be flooded with something new, a look or a feeling. She wanted to feel it all and to feel completely empty. She tried to focus on all those plants she’d raised to life, but she found herself picking dead grass from her jeans and shredding it to tiny pieces with her fingertips instead. The dead grass felt real, maybe especially because it was dead, and if she could destroy it, she must be real as well.

  She wasn’t sure how much time had passed between finishing dinner and Todd coming home, but his food was probably cold. When Todd opened the front door, she didn’t move, or couldn’t. It was hard to be sure. Even when Todd called out to ask her what the dinner was, she didn’t answer him. It sounded like he was too far away to care about, like nothing could reach her in that place on the sofa.

  It wasn’t until he came into the living room and gaped at her with his dinner plate, touched her shoulder and said her name that she momentarily came to life again. He was too close. She brushed his hand away, depressed that she finally felt compelled to speak. “I buried her.”

  Todd had a knack sometimes for asking stupid questions. “Who?”

  She turned her head up to look at him. The room shivered. She felt drunk, but her mouth moved anyway. “Danny. I shot her in the face.”

  “Jesus. You went wandering off? You could have gotten yourself killed.”

  Anger, that was familiar. That was real too. No sympathy, no tenderness. He only wanted to call her crazy, as usual. That was okay. Today she was crazy. Maybe tomorrow too. She blinked at him, the shock in her soul ebbing to aggravation. It was a good thing. Nothing was so reanimating as wanting to bash Todd with his own dinner plate. “Did you hear what I said? I shot my best friend in the face, and I cleaned her up, and I buried her.”