“I kept imagining the varsity team as my pallbearers.” I paused for a moment to determine if I’d actually said this
out loud. “I could just
see
it so clearly in my head. All in their suits and ties. Every one of them, strong and youthful and just a little bit sad. Me just a withered, lifeless body in a box. And them carrying me like that. They’d put me in the ground and they’d be depressed for a while, but they’d get over it. They’d move on with their lives. Because they’d have to. They’d have parties and girlfriends and jobs. Decades would pass, and I’d just be a sad story they’d tell their kids.”
I could hear Mona breathing. I didn’t open my eyes.
“And I hated them for it. I
hated
them. So badly that I couldn’t look at them, couldn’t talk to them. Even the ones who were m
y friends. Hated
them. I keep saying that word but it’s not ugly enough to describe how I felt. I was scared too. But I think what I felt the strongest was hatred. And that, in itself, scares me.”
“Do you still hate them?” Mona asked.
“I don’t have any reason to hate them now. I’m still here. I’m one of them.” I laughed at this statement without knowing why. “Not that I know any of them now.”
“Was it just them? That you hated?”
I finally opened my eyes. Mona was perched very tentatively on the couch, with her hands clasped between her knees. I closed my eyes again and said nothing. A few minutes later, I heard Mona get up, walk to the kitchen, and turn on the faucet. She returned with a glass of water.
“Here,” she said. “Better pound a few of these.”
After I had a few sips, she said, “I think it’d be healthy for you to get out of the house. There’s a place I’ve been meaning for us to go.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you’d better drive.”
“Brilliant,” she replied.
• • •
There was only one other car
in the Freeman Park lot.
“We have to park here and walk,” Mona told me. “You know you can’t drive on the little side roads of the park anymore? You can only walk them now. I wonder if the Brownlow case had something to do with that?”
I stared into the naked cluster of trees.
“It’ll be dark soon,” I said.
“We’ll survive,” said Mona. “You ready?”
“Where are we going?”
“The scene of the crime, naturally. And what better time? The sun is setting.”
“You know where it is?” I asked.
“Not exactly. But we could probably figure it out, or at least get close. This is the back end of the park. It’s not far from here—we know that.”
“To what end?” I said.
“I dunno.” Mona shrugged. “Closure?”
“I hate that word,” I muttered.
“Oh, Billy,” she said, opening her door. “Don’t hate
words
. Hate the people who misuse them. Let’s go.”
“I wish she’d given a few
more details,” Mona said. “This path is longer than I expected. I mean, it could’ve been anywhere along this stretch of road.”
Mona stopped and looked down a small ravine.
“Couldn’t have been around here,” she said. “Or she would have said something about that stream.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, stomping my feet on the brown, flattened snow where the path had been plowed. I looked down at my boot laces. They were tied so tightly, so securely. Like someone’s mother had tied them. Already I couldn’t remember doing it.
“No,” Mona admitted, and began to walk again.
I followed her. It was freezing. The kind of cold you can just imagine dying in. The kind of cold that makes you want to take every living, breathing thing you can find, bring them all home, put them all to bed.
“Mona,” I huffed, “what do you think we’re gonna find? You think if we find the right spot and kick away a little snow, we’ll find a copy of
Beyond the 38th Parallel?”
“Of course not,” Mona said, and then stopped again.
“Maybe around here,” she said, and took a noisy breath, maybe hoping to smell something. A bloody residue of some kind.
“Maybe,” I agreed. My face was starting to stiffen, and I was trying not to move my lips too much. My hands were also freezing, as I’d forgotten the gloves Mona had given me.
“This isn’t at all what it looked like when it happened,” she said. “I wish it hadn’t snowed so much last week.”
She was turning slowly, taking in the path, the trees, the low branches.
“We’ll never see it like she did, anyway,” I said. But Mona continued to scrutinize the unremarkable scenery.
What did she see in these bare branches? I wondered. Thin, pointed fingers, reaching for empty white air. I shivered. What did she expect to see? What did either of us expect?
Nothing, I decided. I expected nothing. I’d never have come here if Mona hadn’t suggested it. I wouldn’t come to such a spot, expecting it to echo some life-or-death promise. Expecting it to smell of some bittersweet slaughter.
“Do you think he wonders how it might have been if it had never happened?” Mona asked, still gazing at the trees. I assumed she was talking about Dan.
“Probably sometimes. But he doesn’t seem one for idle wondering.”
“I think you’re wrong,” she said. “He’d probably be married now, if she hadn’t walked this way that day. He might even have a few kids. Can you imagine—Dan with kids?”
“Yeah, actually,” I said. “The day I first met him. I imagined him with a wife and a little white house and a lawn. A boy and a girl. Maybe even a collie.”
“Are you joking?”
“No,” I said. “That’s what I pictured.”
“But sometimes one little thing changes everything.” Mona sighed. “Or at least, one thing sticks out in your mind as the thing that changed everything, whether or not it’s really to blame. Like, I always think about my stepfather and his shirts. I mean, there was another dry cleaner two blocks away. What if he’d gone somewhere else?”
“Then what?” I said, wondering if this conversation was worth freezing to death for.
“Then I never would’ve been a rich girl. No one would have ever spray-painted
Rich Bitch
on my car in high school. I never would’ve started wearing all of this J. Crew clothing, or gone to Middlebrook. I wouldn’t be here right now talking to you. I wonder all the time who I would’ve been.”
“What do you think?”
“Maybe someone more sincere.” Mona slanted her gaze sideways, thinking. “Less intellectually superficial. Maybe I’d have been a nurse. Something like that. Or gotten a degree in public health at the state university. Maybe I would’ve wanted to help people. Maybe I’d still live in Ohio. Maybe I’d be taking better care of my mother.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”
Mona shrugged. “Maybe I’d have been a slutty cheerleader in high school. That probably would have been more fun than Rich Bitch.”
“Tiny girl like you,” I said. “They probably would’ve always had you at the top of the pyramid. I’d like to have seen that.”
“You know, that incarnation follows me around. I see her sometimes. Looking at me, chewing her gum, wearing her polyblend pants and her sensible nurse shoes. I think she pities me. She probably hates me too.”
“She doesn’t exist,” I told her. “So quit worrying about her.”
As we walked, she continued, “There should be a word for it, for this thing I’m talking about. Seems a common enough experience. It would be a word like ‘doppelganger,’ but of course, different.”
“Well, how would you define it?”
“I’ve given it some thought, believe it or not. At my desk once. If I had to define it, it would be something like ‘the imagined alternative persona of … of an individual who conjectures about his, um … potential identity had critical events or circumstances of his life been altered.’”
“Alternatively,” I said, “‘who you might have been if things were different.’”
“Don’t you have a little ghost like that of your own?” Mona asked. “That person you might have been had one time or another happened differently?”
My fingers and toes were frozen. I didn’t want to go any farther.
“That’s not the ghost I’m worried about right now,” I admitted.
Mona tipped her head back while she waited for me to continue, blowing big, deliberate puffs of fog out of her mouth.
“Remember I said this year was my last bender?”
“Yeah.”
“I want to mean that.”
“Why wouldn’t you mean it?” She continued to blow fog rings.
“Well, for one, it didn’t really have much of a feeling of finality to it.” I had to look away from her to explain. I felt like I was pouring my heart out to the Little Match Girl. “And it’s hard for me, sometimes … to really
mean
anything. You know what I’m saying?”
Mona stopped her puffing. “Maybe.”
I looked up at the bare treetops again. It occurred to me that it probably wasn’t just “cancer” I’d been avoiding saying all of this time. “It’s like … you can choose to believe in something, or you can choose to believe in nothing. But both are actually really terrifying, when you think about it. So I just sit on the fence and watch and hope someday one or the other won’t scare me to death.”
“By believing in
something
, do you mean …” Mona looked a little uncomfortable. “Like, God?”
“No,” I answered. “By ‘something,’ I mean
anything.”
Mona reached out and tugged a piece of bark off a tree. She crumbled the bark to bits and sprinkled them onto the snow.
“Sounds like you need a new plan, Billy.”
It wasn’t the response I was expecting, and I didn’t know how to reply.
“Next year,” she said quietly. “December twenty-eighth. You’ll spend it with me.”
“It’s not just about December twenty-eighth.”
“I understand that. But let’s start there. Next year—no bender. We’ll just go to the movies together or something. Or make a big fancy lunch. We’ll both play hooky.”
“I appreciate the offer,” I said. “But I have a feeling we’re not going to both be in Claxton anymore a year from now. Samuelson’s a cool place, but I’m pretty sure lexicography’s not my life’s work.”
“That doesn’t matter. I’m promising you now. If you’re somewhere else, I’ll meet you there.”
“I really don’t know where I’ll be. Maybe I’ll be somewhere far away.”
“Wherever it is, it’s a date. I can fly anywhere. We rich girls are good like that. My stepdad’s got frequent-flier miles coming out of his ears.”
“But you’re afraid to fly,” I reminded her.
Mona stepped closer to me and put her hand on my arm. I couldn’t really feel it through my thick coat, but it was the first time I noticed her gloves. They were a shiny black leather, instead of her usual purple mittens. Probably a Christmas gift sent from home. I had no idea they made sleek black gloves for child-sized hands. There was something macabre about this little black hand, but it was surprisingly comforting to have it on me.
“Yeah,” she said, gripping my arm a little tighter. “I am.”
“Okay,” I said. I took her hand in mine and squeezed it just for a second before letting go. “Good plan.”
We stood there shivering and stamping our feet for another moment before she announced, “I think we’ve found all we’re gonna find here.”
Mona came back up to my
apartment for a little while after we left the park.
I gave her the new article and the full stack of cits to read. She spread them out on the table while I started a kettle of hot water for tea.
When she was finished with everything, she asked, “What do you think we should do with this?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Well, I’m not suggesting that we bring this to the police or anything. But we
are
holding something here that they’d want to know about. I don’t know if we can justify just saying nothing, doing nothing.”
“I’d say it’s more up to Dan than up to us,” I said. “I mean, if he’s known about them all these years—”
“Do you think he really has? It’s possible he was just saving face.”
“No. He knew all the content of the cits.”
“And it’s not really
Dan’s
decision anyway.”
“No. And he knows that. It’s
hers
. That’s the whole point. That’s why he wanted me to put the stuff back. To leave it where we found it. He knew Mary Anne better than anyone. So he knows best, I guess.”
“But it seems such a shame, in a way, to just scatter it again. We said from the beginning that this was clearly someone who wanted to be found out.”
“Maybe she just wanted to feel like someone knew besides her. And someone does. Dan does. Red does. Now we do. Maybe that’s the whole point. And the only point.”
The kettle whistled and I poured us each a mug of tea.
“So that’s it?” Mona asked glumly. “We’re done?”
“That’s it. I suppose.”
“So what do we do now?”
I pushed the sugar toward her, along with Tom’s spoon.
“Now we sweeten our tea just right,” I said. “And drink it all while it’s still warm. And I think I still owe you a double-plus joke.”
“That’s right.” She blew on her tea before taking a sip. “Lay it on me.”
“Well, I’m not sure if this is your style, but it kind of fits the situation.”
“No disclaimers. Just tell it.”
“Okay, well, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are on a camping trip together. In the middle of the night, Sherlock nudges Watson awake and says, ‘Watson, look up. What do you see?’ Watson replies, ‘I see millions of stars.’ And Sherlock says, ‘And what does that tell you?’ Watson sighs deeply and says, ‘Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies, and it’s therefore very likely that we are not the only intelligent life in this universe. Astrologically, it tells me that Saturn is in Leo. Theologically, it tells me that God’s creation is vast, and we are comparatively insignificant. Meteorologically, it tells me that the sky is very clear and we will probably enjoy a beautiful day tomorrow.’ Sherlock is quiet for a moment, and then says, ‘Watson, you imbecile. Someone has stolen our tent.’”
Mona smiled. “I’ve heard that one before,” she confessed. “Sorry.”
“Okay then,” I said. “Have you heard about this new breed of dog that’s half Doberman, half collie?”
“No.”