S
am throws open the front door of the cottage and finds Mena sitting at the kitchen table. The room smells of tea. The teapot is steaming on the table.
He is still out of breath, panicked. He had taken the paraphernalia he found in Finn’s room and driven it to the dump. He thought he might be able to do the same thing with the plants if he could just get to them without being followed.
“Did Effie leave?” he asks.
“Who is Dale Edwards?” Mena asks, lifting up a letter from the table. Her voice is trembling.
“Oh, Christ,” he says, taking the envelope from Mena. “Another letter?”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Mena asks. Her face looks pained, hurt.
“I didn’t want you to worry,” he says. “She’s just some ridiculous English major. She says she’s got an editor who’s offered her a book deal to write a biography on me. It’s stupid. I told her I wouldn’t authorize it, but she keeps insisting. I think she’s full of shit.”
“Dale Edwards is a woman?”
“A
girl
. A twenty-something-year-old girl.”
“Where did
this
come from?” Mena asks, handing him a piece of paper from the envelope.
He takes the paper from her, turns it over in his hands.
He has forgotten. He has managed, somehow, in the last nine months to put images like this out of his mind.When he remembers Franny, it is always the way she was before. Before she became a sliver of a girl, before she wasted away.When he conjures her now, he always remembers her whole.
“Where did she
find
this?” Mena asks. “And what in the hell is she threatening to do with it?”
Sam takes it in his hands and forces himself to study the pictures. He reads the entries, all three of them. “It’s like a journal,” he says. “A diary.” He feels the small blue diary in his back pocket. He thinks of that tiny gold key.
Mena stands up and starts to pace around the small kitchen. She picks things up, examines them as if she’s never seen them before: spatula, pot holder, whisk. She stops and turns to Sam. “Why is this woman doing this to us? What does she
want?
”
She takes the printout from his hands and looks at it again. Her hand flies to her mouth. “It’s sick, Sam,” Mena says, and crumples the paper into her fist.
“I’ll contact her. Make her stop. We can get the police involved if we need to. We have rights to privacy.”
“I mean
Franny,
” Mena says. “Why didn’t we know about this?”
May 22 (101)
Breakfast: one piece toast (no butter!), tea
Lunch: yogurt, carrots
Dinner: two pieces pizza (gross! At least I picked off the pepperoni)
May 23 (103—NO MORE PIZZA!!!!)
Breakfast: one apple
Lunch: yogurt, carrots
Snack: a granola bar from the vending machine
Dinner: nothing!!!
May 24 (100)
Breakfast: oatmeal (weekends are hard)
Lunch: turkey sandwich (scraped off most of the cheese and mayo)
Dinner: pastitsio, my favorite ... ugh, I hate the weekends!
P
age after page after page. May, June, July, August.
There must be a word for this,
for this sense that the proof was here, right here.That a flimsy gold clasp was the only thing between them and the truth. A word to explain regret so deep Sam can feel it in his bowels.
S
unset and a blinking VACANCY sign.
Dale is pacing in the motel room. The Mercedes is gone now, but she keeps checking the window to see if the man and woman have returned. She goes to the bathroom and peels the tissue paper wrapper from a glass. She presses it against the wall and listens. She can only hear muffled sounds, white noise, but maybe she’s just not listening closely enough. Even when her arm starts to cramp, she is too afraid to put the glass down in case she might miss something. She switches hands, shaking her arm, and the cramp, loose. She nearly jumps out of her skin when her cell phone rings, dropping the glass, which shatters on the tile floor. She flips the phone open and whispers, “Hello?”
“Baby, it’s Momma.Where are you, honey? You need to let me know.” Her mother’s voice swims to her through the phone.
Dale is sweating so much the phone is slippery in her hand. The AC is still out.
“I gave Dr. Middleton a call today, and he’s concerned that maybe you’ve stopped taking your medication.You didn’t stop taking your pills again, honey, did you?”
When Dale thinks of the pills, she thinks of the Tilt-A-Whirl ride at the Arizona State Fair, the swirling, twirling reds and blues as they wound their way down the toilet, their candy-colored trails, swirling, staining the porcelain.
“I’m fine, Momma,” Dale says.
“I’m going to send you money for a ticket home. Do they have a Western Union where you are?”
Dale can hear the slur in her mother’s voice; she’s been drinking, taking her own pills, for a few hours now.
“No, Momma!” Dale says loudly, and suddenly she is thirteen years old again, when all of this started—back after her father first left and she could still hear his voice in her head at night when she closed her eyes, singing the lullabies he’d never sang. She’d press her pillow against her ear to drown it out, but it was still there. And it was there even when she wasn’t dreaming, whispering,
Let me take you for ice cream, sweetie,
telling her to meet him at the Thrifty.
You want peppermint, sweetie? With jimmies?
And then she was putting one foot in front of the other, tracing the white lines that separated the lanes of traffic. She could hear the cars honking, but he kept coaxing, insisting. Her sneakers were new, brand-new and white. She dragged them as she walked, scuffing them against the dirty pavement. One foot in front of the other. And then her mother was running across three lanes of traffic to get her, but she kept walking and the horns kept honking. When her mother reached her, putting one heavy arm around her shoulders and trying to steer her toward the median, Dale screamed, “No, Momma!” and sat down in the middle of the road.
There was the hospital after that, the emergency room first for the bump on her head (how did that happen?) and then later all the swirly pills, a flimsy paper cup, lukewarm water and sleep. Until finally, the Tilt-A-Whirl finally slowed down. And she wasn’t dizzy anymore; she could finally feel the ground beneath her feet. And she understood that you don’t ever walk down the middle of the street in the middle of the summer in Phoenix.
No one knew about those days, and even the memory of all that seemed to belong to someone else. And as long as she kept taking the pills, for years (how many?), she was normal. She went to school. She stood in line at the cafeteria holding an orange plastic tray. She raised her hand in class. She took tap dancing lessons. She swam in Sarah’s piss-warm pool. Her mother gave the pills to her along with a chalky Flintstone vitamin every morning. She went to her appointments at Dr. Middleton’s office, sat in his scratchy chair. When one pill stopped working he gave her another. The record kept spinning. She was normal. Normal. She went to high school. College. She wrote papers on Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
.
She only stopped taking the pills when she was feeling better. When she fell in love with Fitz. And then later when she started to write her book. She had a hard time concentrating at first. The pills made the words too soft. But when she stopped taking them, all of a sudden it was like the clouds lifted. It reminded her of the time when she was ten and she’d had to have her ears irrigated. After the whoosh of warm water, and the earwax came out in ugly brown chunks, she could hear again.
Clarity
. The drugs had stuffed up her head. And now all that junk, that smothering cumulus was gone, leaving only the clear blue sky of her real thoughts.
Dale hears the door to the next motel room over open. She looks out the window, but the Mercedes is still not there. She runs back to the bathroom and then wonders if they are on the other side of the wall with their own glasses, listening.
“Momma?” she whispers into the phone, and then she turns on the water in the tub so whoever is listening won’t be able to hear her.
“What is it, honey?”
The water crashes into the tub, Niagara Falls, and Dale sits down on the toilet lid.
“Dale?”
“Love you, Momma,” Dale says, flips the phone closed, and tosses it into the water.
M
ena makes bread. She watches her hands as they pull the hot loaves from the oven. As they pour olive oil into a pan, as they cut through the yielding rind of a lemon. She listens as the oil crackles and spits, contemplates the way the shrimp curl in on themselves as she tosses them into the heat.
Every night, they came together for dinner. She knew it was a luxury a lot of other families did not have: this ability to convene at the dining room table at the same time each evening. This ritual was a relic of some other time. Her friends, like Hilary and Becca, with their busy lives and busy husbands and busy children, complained that their families were like ships passing in the night. Dinner was something grabbed quickly from the refrigerator or eaten at the desk by the glow of a computer monitor.When their children came over to play with Franny or Finn, they were fascinated by this nightly communion, by the smells in the kitchen and the six o’clock gathering around the table. She was the only mother she knew who planned meals for the family an entire week in advance, who started thinking about what she would feed her family the moment she rolled out of bed in the morning.
The first time Franny missed dinner for ballet class, Mena felt like someone was tearing her heart out. At first it was just on Tuesday evenings. Mena didn’t like it, but it wasn’t as though she had a choice. That was the only time Intermediate Pointe was offered. But by her sophomore year there were classes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. On Fridays. And then there were rehearsals. Sam and Finn and Mena still assembled at dinnertime, but Franny whisked through the kitchen, her ratty ballet bag slung over her shoulder, grabbing a banana or apple from the bowl on the kitchen counter. Mena would fill a plate and save it in the oven for her, but Franny always said she had gotten something after class: grabbed a piece of pizza with friends, a bowl of noodles, a cheeseburger.
Breakfast in the morning was always on the go: hot muffins or thick slices of homemade toast swaddled in napkins and cradled in hands on their way out the door. The lunches Mena packed, stuffed into brown paper sacks.
The doctor warned Franny at her physical earlier that summer that she was too thin, and she’d shrugged it off. He’d smiled when she’d explained her hectic schedule. Mena had sat in the uncomfortable chair and looked at Franny’s long, thin legs dangling from the examination table. She was swimming inside the paper gown, her collarbone and elbows razor sharp.
When the doctor sent Franny to the restroom with a plastic cup, he’d said to Mena, “Have you noticed anything different in Franny’s eating habits? In her exercising habits? Does she skip meals? Avoid eating around other people? She’s lost seven pounds since her visit last year.”
Mena had felt like she’d been slapped. She thought of Franny’s empty space at the table.
“She’s always been thin. She and her brother were preemies. She was always in the bottom tenth percentile.” Mena wrung her hands.
“Her BMI is sixteen point five,” the doctor said, his brow furrowed.
Mena waited for an explanation.
“Body mass index. She’s underweight, not severely, but it is a red flag. Are her periods regular?”
Mena blushed, looked down at her hands in her lap, watched as they twisted and turned.
“Besides her weight, she appears to be a healthy young woman. I’ve ordered a complete blood workup, and we’ll do a urine test. But we need to consider the possibility that there is an underlying psychological problem.”
Mena shook her head. “She’s
fine,
” she says, smiling. “She does well in school. She’s just very, very active. I’ll make sure she eats. She forgets sometimes.”
“I want to make a referral. My wife has a friend who specializes in eating disorders.”
Wide-eyed, Mena had taken the doctor’s name and stuffed it into her purse.
In the car, she said, “The doctor is worried about your weight.”
Franny swatted the air in front of her and laughed.
“He says you need to start eating more. And healthier stuff. No more French fries for dinner. No more vending machine snacks. I’m going to start sending some real food for you to have between school and ballet.”
“Okay, Mommy,” Franny said, leaning her head against the back of the seat and smiling at Mena. “Don’t worry,” she said then, and squeezed Mena’s hand. Mena felt the bones in her grasp and it made a shiver run down her back.
“Promise,” Mena said.
“I promise.”
Tonight the room smells so good: lemon and garlic. She crumbles the block of feta in her hands. She rolls her neck, feels the headache in its nape. She closes her eyes and opens them again. Tosses the last of the shrimp into the hot oil. Checks on the soup that simmers in a pot on the stove.
“Dinner!” she hollers.