Maybe she should wait until she had more time, until things were settled. She had to get the house in shape for the party. The party was important to her. It would be the official threshold into her new life.
She reopened the notebook, added more to her list.
Tomorrow she would call the bookstore accountant and get back on track with her business. She had to get the store checkbook back from Elmore, who would surrender it gladly. She needed to schedule meetings with salesmen. She could do those during lunch hours, have them meet her at a restaurant near the Bank.
Once she got caught up, everything would run smoothly. Then she’d have time to read the notebooks.
She realized that she’d forgotten her salad and pulled it toward her.
She wondered, as she stabbed radicchio leaves and enjoyed the tang of vinegar, if she was doing the right thing in staying silent, but spent only a second on the answer, which was, how in the world would she know? She might do more harm than good if she told Megan and Brian what she’d done. Their lives might fall apart too.
Finished with her dinner, she opened the back door, carrying her glass of wine, and stepped onto the porch landing, high above the yard, and into the evening, always an enchanted time. Lightning bugs flickered in the dusk. Whens’ swing set, all bright paint and as many rings and trapezes and seesaws that could be squeezed onto one play structure, his holy grail of motion, gleamed against a backdrop of misty woods.
To her left, their land dropped swiftly to the fast-running creek spilling from the viaduct. Kudzu completely enveloped her father’s outdoor kitchen, and a tangle of climbing roses and woody vines obscured the tile-roofed stone grotto Sam had built for Bette down by the creek. Jill slapped a mosquito, and recalled her mother sitting down there, laughing with her father about how her cigarette smoke kept the bugs at bay.
It was more than a memory, though. It was as if Bette’s laughter rose from behind the veil of vegetation; as if her brother and sister, still kids, were running down the hill yelling at each other. It was almost as if she smelled cigarette smoke, and maybe she did, from across the street or something.
Jill descended the stairs with resolution. Memories would definitely splay across her vision—brilliant, lovely memories, intense, and overwhelming—but she just had to live with them and let them go. She was here now, and they were part of being here. She had to come to grips with it all, although now, as Venus appeared and the cicadas took up their rhythmic whirr, she suddenly felt frail and rent.
She made it to the bottom of the stairs and a few steps into the wet grass, with Manfred on her heels, when the house phone, still on the kitchen wall where the old phone had been, rang.
She set the wineglass in the grass—of course it spilled—and ran up the stairs, only because it might be Whens, rattled anew about crushing hugs and perfume. But she was too late. The answering machine clicked on.
“We need the Device,” a muffled male voice hissed. “Now.”
She picked up the phone in time to hear the
click
as the caller hung up. “Hello?”
Silence.
* * *
In her attic garret, Bette stubbed out her cigarette and tried to trace the call, but failed. She turned out the light and lay back in her bed, aching, simply aching, for Sam.
Megan and Brian
THE WALKING MAN
May 10
I
T WAS ABOUT EIGHT O’CLOCK
on a Friday evening.
Megan sat at the dining room table, where the
Washington Post
was spread out, reading the funnies and avoiding the dishes. Sometimes she got through the funnies and the op-ed page before the dishes got the better of her. It was rather Jillish of her, she had to admit. Megan was always the neat, orderly sibling, sweeping, dusting, mopping, and complaining about her older sister’s physical, philosophical, and emotional messes. But dishes … they were another matter altogether.
It was Jim’s turn to put Abbie to bed. Sloshing sounds and bits of song emanated from the upstairs bathroom.
Megan looked up from the funnies when Bingo, their golden retriever, ran to the door, barking. Brian’s truck was out front. She was surprised. Brian lived downtown, and they generally didn’t get together more than once a month.
Megan jumped up and ran to open the door for him. “It is
so
nice that you’ve come to help me clean up.” She grabbed a Pyrex dish that had macaroni and cheese burned onto it, stacked that with other dirty dishes, and carried her pile into the kitchen.
Brian shrugged and began rinsing plates and handing them to Megan, who slotted them into the dishwasher. “Have you talked to Jill lately?”
“Just yesterday. Why?”
“Whens has been calling Bitsy lately, talking about a ghost.”
“And?”
“It seems strange.”
Megan snorted. “Whens, if you haven’t noticed, is strange. So, what kind of ghost?”
“What do you mean?”
“Casper, for instance, was friendly, white, and floaty. ‘Kind to every living creature.’ Seems to me that if there is a ghost, it must have some specifics.”
“Yeah. Maybe even neurochemistry.” Brian rubbed his forehead with his wrist and grabbed another plate.
“You think that a real person is in the house? Besides them?”
“It’s so big that ten street people could be living there undetected. I guess I’m just nervous about Jill living in that big house alone.”
“She’s not alone. She has Whens and she has Manfred.”
“Right. She refuses to keep a gun.”
Megan glanced at Brian. “Spare me your NRA idiocy, please. Aren’t guns illegal in the District? Do you keep guns in your house, with two children?”
“No, of course not. I keep mine in the work trailer, locked up. But I think she needs some kind of protection. There are some bad neighborhoods just a couple of streets over. She’s just like Mom and Dad, though. She ignores all that. I’ll bet she doesn’t even lock her doors at night. She always has been kind of … I don’t know, unaware that bad things can happen.”
“Brian, downtown is a lot safer now than when we were growing up, and nothing happened to us then. Not a damned thing.”
“Yeah. I suppose.”
“Well, what do you want to do?”
“I’m thinking—just wanted to run this by you—maybe Cindy and the kids and I could move in. We’re renovating that house in Northwest to move into, but it’s going really slow because I have so much business, and the apartment is driving us nuts.”
“It’s fine with me. I wondered why you didn’t move in there in the first place.”
“It was so … closed up. I don’t know. It wasn’t inviting to us.”
“Maybe Cindy thought it might revive your drinking habit?”
“Maybe. The mind of woman is often difficult to discern.”
“Just about everything was difficult for you to discern a few years ago.”
“I agree,” he said mildly, rather disappointing Megan. Sometimes she missed the old, fiery Brian.
“You playing guitar much?”
He shrugged. “I sit in somewhere every few weeks. When you guys come out with your power sleep drug, let me know.”
“You’d probably just use it to take on three more jobs. Delegate! Why can’t Cindy do that? I’ll bet she’d do a fine job.”
“Oh, she would. But in case you haven’t noticed, she has a more-than-full-time job already, and she wouldn’t give that up for anything. You’re right, though. I haven’t found anyone who knows enough to pay attention to all the things I care about. You can take a lot of shortcuts in construction, and I never do.”
“You’re just obsessive,” said Megan. “There are drugs.”
“I hope you’re taking those particular drugs.” Brian bent over the macaroni and cheese pan and scrubbed hard. “Why did you let this burn? Oh, of course,
you
wouldn’t. It was Jim. You have him on double duty tonight? Cooking
and
bedtime? What a slave driver.”
“I’ll be on all weekend. He has a Sunday night deadline. Just let it soak.”
Brian wiped his hands on his pants, leaned against the counter, and folded his arms. “I guess it’s not really that Jill’s alone. It’s that she isn’t … herself.”
Megan nodded. “I’ve thought that too. But I’m not sure why. Actually, that’s a kind of psychosis. Thinking that someone has been taken over by someone else. That’s what those mass psychosis movies in the fifties were about.”
Nestled within the field of memory studies was the new theory of false memory formation. She had been reading more about this, thinking that perhaps Jill was a victim. “Maybe stress has caused her to make things up that she believes are real.”
“Can people do that?”
“They can and do, all the time.”
“Jill said she saw Mom and Dad while she was in the hospital.”
“She was on some really heavy drugs. I think she misses them even more than we do. Especially Mom.”
“So you don’t think she really could have.”
“Do you … think she
might
have?”
“Mom was never found. I mean, not her … we never had a funeral or anything.”
“No, there was never a body.”
“And Dad—well, same for him.” Brian put soap in the dishwasher and turned it on. “I mean, it could be one of these false memories you’re talking about, or a hallucination, or—”
“Or she could have really seen them. Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“Well, I guess—I just got mad at Jill when she said that. I know that sounds—”
“Just like you. What else did she say?”
“After that, she just shut up. I asked her about it last week, and she looked at me like I was the crazy one.” He looked around the now-clean kitchen. “Man, you’re lucky I came by. You’re so slow—”
“‘Meticulous’ is the word. But don’t try to change the subject.”
“No, ‘slow’ is the word. It would have taken you all night. I’ve got to go home and do it all again.”
“Oh, poor thing. I’m glad to hear that you do something around the house.”
“It’s that or death.” Brian grabbed a large glass, opened the refrigerator, got some iced tea, and followed Megan into the living room. Jim, upstairs, said to Abbie, “Okay. But just one more.”
Brian sat down and took a long drink of tea. “We should have tried harder to find Dad. I think that’s part of the problem. Everything feels unfinished.”
Megan lounged back on the couch and put her feet up on the coffee table.
“Maybe one of us should go now,” said Brian.
“To Germany? You mean Jill.”
“Well, she’s the obvious one.”
Megan laughed. “Great idea. A nice trip to Germany to find our vanished father right after she gets out of the booby hatch. You do remember that she went nuts the last time, right?”
“She has less responsibilities than we do,” Brian protested.
“Yeah. Just a five-year-old, a dog, a bookstore to manage, a full-time job, and a lot of legal shit to keep up with.”
“Well, there’s that…”
“What was your plan? Keep Whens at your house and bundle her onto a plane with a map?”
“Something like that,” he admitted. “She’s been strange ever since she came back from New Orleans twenty years ago. Remember? She was supposed to interview for college and wrecked the car.”
“She and Dad would never talk about that either. Maybe we should ask Jill about seeing Mom and Dad in the hospital again.”
“Isn’t she kind of … fragile? I mean, I don’t want to be the one who lands her back in the loony bin.”
“Seeing them again is what we all want to happen. I dream about them all the time. I’m sure she imagined it, but if we ask, it might get her talking about things we need to talk about.”
They heard the barely audible click of a door closing. Jim, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, tiptoed down the stairs. “She’s out at last. Iced tea, Brian? Didn’t your sister offer you a beer?”
Megan sent Jim a look that said, loud and clear:
Brian! Shouldn’t! Drink!
Jim ignored it. In his oft-expressed opinion, Brian was a grown-up. Megan wasn’t sure.
Brian said, “Well … it is Friday.”
“Indeed.” They heard the
whoosh
of bottle tops being removed with a church key, and two
clicks
as they hit the counter. Jim brought Megan a bottle of San Pellegrino water without asking. Her aversion to drinking alcohol often led to mild needling in her family, but this time, Brian let it pass without even mentioning how much more expensive her fancy water was than his beer.
“You know,” said Megan, “my memories of those times are kind of hazy.”
“We were young.”
“Sure, but … remember Mom, in Hawaii? How—glowing—energized, she was? She loved us. How could she just … leave us? Something happened. She was kidnapped, or something. And how…”
“Abbie?” said Jim, turning around in his chair. Abbie was standing at the top of the stairs.
“I need cereal,” she said.
“You need to go back to bed.”
Instead, she came downstairs and went into the kitchen.
“No. You already had some milk.”
She walked into the kitchen, opened a low cupboard, and took out cereal boxes, which she set on the floor.
“Abbie. Put those away and get back to bed.”
She pulled a baggie of small figures from the depths of the cupboard, held them to her chest, and hurried up the stairs. She slammed her bedroom door.
“She just wanted the Spacies,” said Megan.
“They’re still pretty popular. Remember when we first got them?”
“Yeah. They were so cool. Girl astronauts. Before we even went to space. I guess kids all over the world had them. I brought a few of the old ones from the house for Abbie to play with. Maybe I should have put them in the safe-deposit box—I bet they’re going to be collectors’ items.”
“Yeah. Did you ever notice that they heal up when the dog chews them or kids decide to crush them with an asteroid? Kind of spring back, like the plastic swells, or something. I’ve heard that if you could cut the damn things in half they’d grow two, but the new ones don’t do that. I think it made the cereal manufacturers mad.”
“Oh, Brian, you’re so naïve. They’re an early form of nanotechnology. Molecular replication. The government decided they were dangerous and insisted that they be taken off the market—not that anyone in any government lab has been able to crack the code and disable them, or use it for anything else. Whoever really developed them was way ahead of their time.”