The Words Between Us, page 24
“And Peter said to him, ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’ And Jesus answered, saying, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and started to sink.”
The pastor pauses and looks around the room into the faces of his little flock. And then he looks at me, the black sheep in the back who is just thinking, Why does it have to be about Peter?
“Isn’t that how it so often is?” the pastor says. “We ask God for something, he grants our request, and almost immediately we begin to fear. We fear the dangers around us, we fear the unknown, we fear he’ll let us drown. We don’t trust him to keep us safe. We don’t trust him to follow through. And as we sink into the raging water, there are two things we can do.” He pauses and holds up one finger. “We can forget about God—ignore the fact that he’s standing right there, within reach—and instead flounder around on our own, trying to keep our heads above water as we slowly sink. Or”—he holds up a second finger—“we can call out to him. And that’s what Peter does. He cries out, ‘Lord, save me,’ and immediately Jesus reaches out to him. Immediately. He takes hold of him and says, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ And they get into the boat . . . and the wind stills.”
The wind stills.
That’s how it feels. I had trouble articulating it to Sarah back when we were all stuck in my apartment the day my father was supposed to be executed, but that is what Brick & Mortar Books has been to me. A still point in a storm. Dave Dewitt had been one. And for a little while, that was what Peter was. That was how it felt to be with him—in his car, in the motel, at the precipice of Niagara Falls, at the edge of the abyss of Lake Superior. Each time a new book appeared in my locker. Each time a padded manila envelope appeared on the counter. A moment of peace, a moment without doubt, a moment I felt that, were I called to, I could walk on water, I could hold back the wind.
After the sermon comes to a close and everyone else sings a song, I force myself to be polite and shake some hands—every hand, in fact. I am enthusiastically invited back by everyone there. Each of them smiles. Not one of them stares or whispers off in a corner. When Dawt Pi and I can finally extricate ourselves from the proceedings, she follows me to the car.
“We have to stop at the store first and get The Professor,” I say.
“Where are we going?” she says.
“Sussex. Where I used to live.”
“You lived here?” Dawt Pi says as we pull up to the trailer.
It is rustier even than when I last saw it, and if Mary and the gnomes are still there, they are obscured behind a thick curtain of summer weeds stretching nearly up to the windows. The cemetery has been kept mowed, though the grass is brown and a few of the trees have been cut down. And beyond it, the dead house still slumps, its wood siding practically bare, its roof caved in in places.
“Yes. I lived here.” It takes a moment for my hand to obey my brain’s command to open the car door. “Let me just look. I’ll be right back.”
As I step up onto the porch I see a note on the door, faded from years of unfettered sunshine.
Property of St. James Catholic Church
NO TRESPASSING
The door is locked. I step down to where Mary used to stand, push through the weeds, and cup my hands around my face at the window. The blinds are closed, but one slat is gone, no doubt the work of an unsupervised parrot sometime in the distant past. Through the dirt and the narrow opening I can see that the place is empty.
The puzzle pieces come together in my mind. Grandma had likely left her worldly goods to the church, and they had probably brought everything to their thrift store where Grandma had volunteered each week, using the proceeds to pay for her burial after she had been so cruelly left behind by her ungrateful “cousin.” There’s nothing to find here.
I turn to go back to the car, but my foot catches on something and I pitch forward. A gnome—just one—lying on his back, forgotten. The red paint of his hat has faded to pink, and the blue of his coat has been chipped away by time and weather. But his smile is still there, as are those vacant eyes.
I step around the trailer and consider the dead house.
Dawt Pi is standing at the open passenger door. “Is it locked?”
“Yeah. But nothing’s in there anyway.” I open the back door of the car and pull out the travel cage we picked up on the way out here.
“What are you looking for?”
“A letter.”
“Why did you bring The Professor?”
“You’ll see.”
I lead the way through the cemetery, only glancing at Emily Flynt’s grave out of the corner of my eye. When had Peter last knelt there?
Through the metal grate at the front of the travel cage, The Professor has a clear view of our destination as we clear the gravestones and start across the expanse of weeds to his childhood home. I can feel him flapping and hopping around in there. I lead the way around to the back, then open the cage.
Dawt Pi pulls him out. “What are we doing with him?”
“He’s going to help.” I pull a folded envelope from my back pocket and hold it up to him, just as I had the key to the lockbox all those years ago. “Find the letter, Professor. Find the letter.”
But he’s not interested. The envelope drops to the ground. I pick it up. “Let’s bring him inside.”
“We are going in there?”
“Yes. Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but The Professor and I are.”
She looks up at the house doubtfully, then sets her mouth in a line. At my questioning eyebrows she gives a little nod, and we step out of the sun and into the musty dark.
It’s all as it was, only worse for the intervening years, a tomb filled with the dusty artifacts of a mundane life. Every few steps I hold the envelope in front of The Professor and repeat my request. “Letter. Find the letter.” But he gives no indication he’s heard. There are no mysterious incantations from some long-forgotten game show. Nothing but the sound of the house crying out weakly under our feet.
In the kitchen, we open every drawer. Nothing. We search rotten couch cushions and dusty tables. Nothing.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I say.
We enter the sanctuary of my mother’s childhood. Light streams through the window where the doll once sat. The bedspread is faded on the corner from the decades of constant sunlight. I kneel at the bed, offer a hasty prayer to Dawt Pi’s God, and bow down to the floor. I run my hand along the floor in a pattern, back and forth, farther and farther into the space, then turn it up to the underside of the box spring and do the same.
“Big money, big money,” says The Professor. “No whammies.”
“Yes!” I say, straightening and pulling the envelope back out of my pocket. “Put him on the floor, Dawt Pi. Letter, Professor. Find the letter.”
The bird scrapes around on the floor for a moment, but he doesn’t seem to be looking for anything. He nibbles at the corner of the bedspread. I hesitate. Visions of my grandmother’s bed askew and slashed, of her broken body stuffed into the small space between it and the wall, of the trails of blood running down her face.
I scoop The Professor up and put him on top of the vanity, then begin systematically disassembling the bed, layer by layer. Dawt Pi helps me fold what’s left of the moth-eaten bedspread, then the blanket and the sheets. We move the mattress and check for holes along each seam, looking for a hiding place. Nothing. Coughing in the thick air, we put it all back together and start on the dresser. Drawer by drawer we paw through whatever Lindy left behind when she made her escape from Sussex. Nothing.
I sit back on the floor in defeat.
“The Professor is gone,” Dawt Pi says.
She starts for the door and I follow. We look through the two other bedrooms, she for the bird and I for the key to my father’s freedom, but the objects of our respective searches elude us.
I’m closing the last drawer in my uncle’s room when I hear Dawt Pi call up the stairs that she’s found The Professor. I have found nothing. Perhaps there is nothing to find. How can I tell my father that I’ve failed?
I pick my way down the treacherous steps. Dawt Pi is standing at the fireplace, The Professor on her shoulder, gazing at the yellowed family portrait over the mantel.
“This is your family?”
“That is my grandmother, a grandfather I never knew, an uncle I never knew, and my mother.”
“You look like her.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“She is in prison too?”
“Yes, but not for much longer.”
“Will she come back here once she’s out?”
“I—I don’t know.”
I have never considered what my mother might do once she’s released. Where does one go after more than two decades in prison? Would she try to reclaim her life in Amherst? How could she? No one is waiting for her there—no job at the university, no grand home on an oak-lined street, no swanky rooms filled to bursting with money and influence. No daughter. She wouldn’t be welcome back in Amherst. Would she be welcome here? Would she return to River City as I had?
“Let’s go,” I say. “The letter’s not here.” I start for the hole in the back where the door had once stood.
“Wait, Robin. You should have this.” She takes the photo off the wall and holds it out to me. “This is your family.”
I tuck the photo under my arm, and we head for the car.
“Want me to take you home?” I ask.
Dawt Pi looks at the time. “Take me to Bob Evans.”
“Bob Evans?”
“It’s where we eat lunch after church. They will still be there.”
“Bob Evans it is.”
I head for Magellan Bridge and feel a sudden affinity toward the Spanish explorers after whom River City’s bridges were inexplicably named. They never quite knew where they were going, and when they got there they sure made a mess of things. But at least they answered the call of the horizon. At least they took a chance. They set their course for the unknown, weathered hardship and rough seas, and made an indelible, if sometimes ignominious, mark on human history. They surrendered to the will of the wind and the strength of the sails, looking to the heavens for guidance through the dark nights. And there was something to admire in that.
I pull up to the door of Bob Evans to let Dawt Pi out.
“Park the car,” she says. “In the shade. There.”
I park as requested but do not turn off the car.
“Let’s go,” she says.
“Me? No thanks. I can’t leave The Professor in the car.”
“Yes you can. It’s not hot and you are in the shade. Open the windows. Let’s go.”
I suppose after dragging her around that death trap of a house on a fool’s errand, it’s the least I can do. And if a bunch of men can get on a boat while the crowd is warning them about how they’ll fall off the edge of the world, surely I can eat at Bob Evans with a few friendly strangers.
34
Then
A lot can change in more than a decade, so I was surprised and a bit disappointed when I returned to Sussex’s main drag on a gray and windy November day in 2012 to see that it was all basically the same—the same houses, the same fences, the same businesses—only dingier. I guess there were a few differences. The video store was gone. A Chinese restaurant had become a Mexican restaurant. The giant willow tree at the corner of Spruce and Centerline Road had been felled. But the meat market was there, and the bakery, and the chain fast-food restaurants. I did not drive by the school or the cemetery or the dead house. I wasn’t ready for that, and I wasn’t sure I ever would be.
Nearby River City, however, had changed. Some storefronts were now boarded up, but I couldn’t remember what had been there in the first place anyway. A long-defunct factory was being turned into something other than an empty shell. Most of downtown had gotten a new coat of paint. The number of pharmacies seemed to have doubled.
Across Cortez Bridge I turned down Riverside Drive and passed by the old playground, which now sported a prominent warning sign about arsenic in the wooden play structures. Beyond the marina I turned left onto Midway Street. The bars were all still there, as was Mystic Rhythms Aromatherapy Shop. I parked in an angled spot right by the entrance, slipped The Professor a few peanuts to keep him occupied, and pushed through the heavy shop door. It smelled exactly the same—like sandalwood and what I now recognized as marijuana. The lady with the long gray hair and the scarves drifted in from the back. She looked like Sussex did: basically the same, but dingier.
“How can I help you?” Her voice still sounded like feathers.
“I’m just browsing.”
The sound of my own voice at a conversational volume startled me. I moseyed around for a few minutes, aware that she watched me from behind the register.
“You know what,” I said, stronger now, “maybe you could help me. I’m just back in town after a long time away, and I’m looking for a place to rent.”
“Oh? What brings you back?”
“I’m not exactly sure. I kind of had a feeling about it, is all.”
“Oh, I understand that. I have psychic leanings myself.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant.” I hesitated and tried to line up my jumbled thoughts into something that made sense. “I mean, I realized that I’m an adult and it’s probably time to stop running.”
She tilted her head but said nothing.
“So do you know of anything? I’d prefer not to be in a big apartment building, but I’m not really looking for a house either.”
“Just up the road there’s an apartment above the old art studio. That whole building’s for sale, actually.”
“I don’t remember an art studio on this street.”
“It was only there for about three years. It’s been empty now for quite some time. It’s too bad it failed. Mark was a fine artist and a regular customer of mine. But it’s one of those cursed places, you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing works there. I’ve been in this location since the 1970s, and I’ve seen ten or twelve businesses in that storefront. They all fail. Some don’t even last a year, but usually they go under around year seven or eight.”
“That’s a bummer. It’s up the street?”
“Yes. Nearly the top of the hill. Same side.”
“I’ll check it out.” I picked up a lilac-scented candle and took a deep breath of its intoxicating bouquet. “Oh, I’ve got to have this.”
“Good choice.”
She rang me up, wrapped the candle in paper, and popped it into a little bag along with a book of matches. I left my car at the aromatherapy shop and walked up the hill to Chestnut Street. It was easy to tell which building had been the art studio. The brick on the side of the corner storefront sported an enormous mural of a billowing American flag that took up almost the entire wall. There was no sky behind it or landscape under it, and the edges of the flag were somewhere out of frame.
I came around to the front and was somehow not surprised to find that it was the very same building that was for sale when Peter and I had gone Christmas shopping in 2000, the first and only other time I’d been in the Mystic Rhythms Aromatherapy Shop. The striped awnings were gone, but the beautiful leaded glass door was still there. I peered through the glass between cupped hands. Except for some empty shelves that lined the walls, the place was devoid of furniture.
“What would you put there?” Peter had asked me.
A bookstore.
And why not? I didn’t have a job or the prospect of one. I had lived so frugally with Dave Dewitt, I still had plenty of money. The recession had hit hard in Michigan, and the real estate market in most towns still hadn’t recovered. Maybe this was why I was here. Maybe this place had been calling me to come back and breathe new life into it. The woman with the voice of feathers said nothing worked here. But all that really meant was that nothing had worked here yet.
Within the week, the place was mine. The realtor was dubious when I warned him that I wouldn’t have a credit history because I’d never gotten a loan or used a credit card or even had a bank account. But when I told him I could give him the asking price in cash, he didn’t question my finances further. After all, he’d been trying to unload the place for years.
The day I moved my few belongings into the apartment, River City had its first dusting of snow. I gave The Professor free rein of the place, just as he’d had up in Dave Dewitt’s house, until I could buy a nice big cage, cleaning up his messes whenever I came upon them. I emptied my suitcases, hung my wrinkled clothes in a closet, and lined up a few pairs of shoes. I laid an old quilt on the floor where I would sleep until I got a bed and set my mother’s old doll against the wall. On my belly on the quilt, I looked into her sun-bleached face.
“What do you think?”
She didn’t answer, as I hadn’t for so many years.
The doll and The Professor were my only company now. I felt a little silly addressing them like humans, but after I’d listened to Dave talk practically nonstop for over a decade, the silence in the apartment was deafening. Now that I was talking again, I couldn’t stop myself. From the doll I got silence. From The Professor I got occasional mimicry and frequent bites. We’d been through a lot together, but that didn’t exactly make us friends. It simply meant that all of his bad memories were associated with me.
I busied myself that first week with cleaning. I stood inside the big picture window downstairs with a bottle of glass cleaner and a roll of paper towels, watching fat snowflakes drift down from the clouds. I swept the floors. I dusted and oiled the shelves. I got down on my hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water and scrubbed. The dirt came off, but the splatters of paint—evidence of an earlier chapter in the building’s story—were there to stay.
I spent the next several weeks scouring thrift stores and the nooks and crannies of the big antique mall across the river, looking for secondhand shelves and tables for the store and furniture for the apartment. I read books and articles about all the boring legal stuff associated with running a business. I filed permits and stood by as inspectors poked around and gave me advice about old plumbing and the ticking-time-bomb electrical system.
