Collected Short Fiction, page 171
“That was probably the one time I actually managed to unnerve Ted. I didn’t realize I would, of course, it was sheer torture for me. But then I began to see from his expression that my continued presence in the building, at the same job, riding the same damned elevator, was making him crazy. To Ted, I was acting as if I knew something he didn’t and he thought that was impossible. The dead one was the one with all the facts, not the living one. As I say, I didn’t realize. I was just surprised the day he didn’t turn up and someone told me he’d transferred to a similar position in Washington State. I was pretty sure, however, that he’d actually gone underground—literally, if you see what I mean. I tried to find out but you know what? It’s not that easy to find out if someone’s dead, Internet be damned. Birth records aren’t cross-referenced with death records, never have been, and it’s too much work to start now. And forget asking anyone who knew him. It was obvious what they thought I was.
“So I couldn’t decide what to do. Leave town myself? Stay right where I was, try to cultivate my neighbors, keep close to my friends so they’d see—what? That I wasn’t the kind of girl who went in for consensual rough sex, that I never did anything that would make anyone want to beat me up, that I hadn’t asked for any of this?
“Or had I? When I first went to the police about Ted, their whole reaction to it was basically, ‘Hey, you slept with him, you whore, you deserve to die.’ Funny, I thought that attitude was about half a century out of date—at least half a century—but apparently it’s like the old song says, about how everything old is new again.
“While I was trying not to have a nervous breakdown, stalker number one appeared. Sold aluminum siding, drove around town in a panel truck. Of course I’d see him around a lot—his office was in town, his prospects were all homeowners in residential neighborhoods and suburbs. But I knew as soon as I saw him. He had Ted’s evil grin. He’d blow kisses at me. Everywhere I went, I’d see that truck. Wouldn’t always see him, so I was back to jumping at shadows. Finally, I phoned Betty Felder and told her I had a stalker.
“She was sure it was all in my head. She didn’t say so, but I could tell. So I got a camera, a tiny one that would print the date and time on the film emulsion. I photographed him for a week and took the prints to Betty. She insisted that we go to the police with them right away. I didn’t want to—I didn’t know what I wanted to do—but she told me it was either that or pack up my photos and go home. I had to take direct, constructive action, not cower under the covers. So I went to the police with her holding my hand all the way.
“She let go of my hand when they said they already had a complaint on file from him about me—he had filed a report claiming that I was stalking him, following him around, taking his picture, scaring away not only his customers but also women he was trying to date.”
She laughed again, but it wasn’t a pretty sound. “If that wasn’t my lowest point to date, it was a contender. He really had me that time. I was really on my own now. I was going to just lose it but then, I don’t know, some last reserve of self-preservation I hadn’t realized I had bubbled up and I started wiring myself for sound. Every day, all day, I walked around wired. It was just a little personal stereo, except it was the kind that could record as well as playback. It just looked like I was always plugged into some music or something, but I was actually just waiting for him to talk to me. I knew he’d have to talk to me, especially if I didn’t seem sufficiently terrorized.
“It took two months, but he finally broke down and cornered me in the supermarket and he talked to me as Ted, making threats, mocking me. And I played along but I kept saying very, very neutral things like ‘Please don’t,’ and ‘What do you want?’ and ‘I didn’t do anything’ and, Ted’s personal all-time favorite, ‘Please, you’re scaring me!’
“I took the tape to the police. They made me wait something like five hours to see an officer, but I hung in there, reading a book, ignoring the way they were sneaking glances at me and whispering about me. And for once, I got lucky—the investigating officer I drew was a woman and she didn’t buy any of that what-did-she-do-to-piss-him-off crap. Even better, the store security camera backed me up, and so did one of the stockboys, who had been just around the other side of the canned goods section, shaking in his shoes, thinking someone was going to be murdered right in the store on his shift.
“They put out a restraining order. Betty Felder told me later that they strongly suggested that the guy would be happier in another part of the country. Everyone was so ashamed, she told me. My case officer was going so far as to say that loose lips had probably leaked my previous problems into the public, where this sicko heard them, or overheard them, and decided I sounded like a good time.
“I’m afraid I wasn’t very warm to Betty. I was already watching for the next one. The software engineer. I’d changed jobs and moved again, but he found me. Because he was Ted and he’d always find me. I phoned Betty and told her that it was obvious the aluminum siding salesman had had some like-minded friends. I didn’t even have to go down to the station for that one. The same case officer came out and took a statement, and told me that they were placing a patrol car in my vicinity until further notice. Anyone with similar ideas would see that the police took protecting me very seriously, and it would discourage other crackpots from working out their particular life-plan on me. I could have kissed her.
“But you can see it coming, can’t you? Maybe I did see it coming and decided it was too . . . I don’t know. Maybe I thought Ted was too scared of the police. It turned out that the police were ideal, particularly in this situation. I felt like I was staggering under the load again, especially since it took me a while to notice. I asked my case officer to stop the surveillance, since the stalking seemed to have stopped. She said okay, but they’d keep driving by. Great. Now he had permission.
“Along about then, Steve turned up.” She blew out a disgusted breath. “Which is close to where you came in. Working with you guys, it was just nice, you know? Really, really nice. Normal. Even with a cop following me around. See, that was the catch Ted hadn’t thought of—he’d have to be that cop for a while. He couldn’t commit suicide to commandeer another body without making me look victimized. The idea was to make me look like a psycho and everyone else I accused look victimized. As long as he was the cop, he had to do as he was told, follow orders, really be a good policeman, or forfeit his privilege of stalking me. But most important of all, he couldn’t be anyone else.
“I should have known he’d just wait things out. He must have decided it would be so much better to let me slip into a sense of security. I don’t know what happened. Maybe he staged an accident. I never could find out.
“That’s the sacrifice, you see. Your own life, in trade. I learned it all in the near-death experience. But I told you about that, didn’t I? Starting to repeat myself. But then, it’s getting late, and I’m not going to be awake much longer, I don’t think.
“Anyway, I decided while I was in the hospital getting my wounds dressed and my stitches stitched what I’m going to do. I have to have some choices here, he can’t take everything from me. He thinks he can. He thinks he has. But that’s because he’s been underestimating me. He’s terrorized me for so long in so many ways, he thinks I’m only good for . . . well, being terrorized. Consequently, he wouldn’t believe I’d have the nerve, the absolute brass and steel balls to fight back.
“But I do. I got my nerve, my brass and steel balls, and I got nothing to lose, really. Although I have to say, I’m going to miss you, Cleo. I’m even going to miss Dez, little brat that she is. I really miss Steve, a lot. That’s—well, I’ll have to toughen up about that the way I have about everything else.
“You’re almost snoring now, Cleo. I bet you won’t remember most of this in the morning, and it’s just as well. The less involvement you have, the better. I don’t want him deciding he has to come after you, too.
“Me, I’m going to try a little experiment, something that Ted would never have done, for reasons that become obvious when you think about them. I don’t actually know if it’s possible. It might not be. But I’ll let you know how it comes out. I’ll find a way to tell you personally that my experiment worked. So now—”
When I woke up, the sound was back up on the television. I was staring at the morning Perky Person whose name I couldn’t remember, and listening to her explain how due to a mix-up, the mysterious Lynn or Linda actually hadn’t left the hospital last night and had died of an allergic reaction to some medication, possibly penicillin. She hadn’t been wearing a Medic-Alert tag. The missing person was actually a woman named Agnes Richards, who had been in a car accident that evening and had walked out before her family could come and get her. Her injuries had been severe but not life-threatening, though she was probably disoriented from pain medications, and that may have been why she wandered out. Anyone with any information should call this number.
They put up a photo of her. Sans facial injuries, she wasn’t exactly Linda’s twin, but she could have been her sister.
Then, of course, I had the sense to look around, but I already knew the room was empty.
I was moving into my new apartment when the man with the briefcase approached me. All things considered, I was not delighted to see a strange man approach, even though Linda’s ghost story had been patently impossible. Still, you find yourself spooked by the damnedest things.
He asked if I were Cleo-not-Cleopatra-just-Cleo DiAndria.
“Who wants to know?” I said, resting a box of assorted junk against the side of the van I’d rented for the day.
“Jerry Thornton, attorney involved in the execution of Ms. Linda Doyle’s will.”
“Uh-huh,” I said carefully, unsure whether I wanted to hear any more or whether I should just drop everything and run inside.
“If you’re Cleo DiAndria, I have this for you.” He held up a long white envelope with my name written on it in a familiar hand.
“That’s me,” I said, reaching for it.
He made me stop and show him my driver’s license first before he handed it over.
I put the box down and opened the envelope. Inside were two tickets to a wrestling arena event in town next month, which had been sold out weeks before. How on earth had she managed to get them? Linda had never been interested in wrestling, as far as I knew.
I looked at the tickets again and something caught my eye—the word Ringside.
Somehow Linda had gotten ringside tickets to a sold-out wrestling event and left them to me in her will? I looked inside the envelop for some note or explanation, but there was just a slip of paper with Enjoy! written on it in Linda’s handwriting.
“Something nice, I hope?” said Jerry Thornton, polite but curious.
I looked up from the tickets and glared at him suspiciously. Then I burst into tears.
The only person I would have wanted to take with me to that event would have been Linda. The last person I wanted to take was Dez and I hadn’t thought she’d have wanted to go anyway. But as it turned out there wasn’t anybody else available and Dez did want to go. She’d felt bad about what had happened to Linda. The story I’d given her about my part in it was about how I’d never found her and had just driven around and around all night looking for her, never suspecting that they’d mixed the two women up. Adding to the tragedy was the fact that they’d never found Agnes What’s-Her-Name.
Sitting ringside in the arena, I tried not to think of any of that, nor of anything that had happened that night. Linda’s last message to me had been Enjoy! Bless her heart, I thought. That was just the sort of bloodied-but-un-bowed kind of thing she’d do.
The hysteria in the arena was pretty contagious. After awhile, even Dez was on her feet cheering for this one or that one, talking about buying a T-shirt, of all things. I got a kick out of her. If Linda’s legacy was to bring fun into the lives of little sour apples like Dez, I sure wasn’t going to stomp on her parade.
Familiar music with a very heavy bass line started up and Dez turned to me with a wicked twinkle in her eye. “This is your favorite, isn’t it? The big one?”
“Big Easy,” I sighed, swaying to the beat and listening to the people around me singing something about being born on the bayou. I leaned over her to watch him swagger down the aisle, seven feet of perfect Cajun muscle (or close enough for jazz, the seven feet, the Cajun, and the perfect) and I didn’t even have the sense to feel sheepish. He was so much more perfect in person.
“You’re drooling,” Dez accused me.
“I’ll feel stupid about it later, thanks.”
“No problem, I’m drooling, too.”
He took his time, flinging his gorgeous dark hair around, giving high fives, stopping to kiss hands. Amazing, I thought, how they all know just how to work a crowd, how big to play it and how long—
When he reached us at ringside, God help me, he actually stopped. First, he looked at Dez (he would, I fumed silently) and ran a hand over her hair down her cheek to her chin.
“Ah,” he said in the world’s most exaggerated Cajun accent, “ma p’tite fiUll!”
I thought Dez would actually swoon.
Then he did something I would never have thought he’d do. “But thees the kin’ Ah lak, someone wid a liddle meat on her, eh?” And while I stood there thunderstruck, he picked me up by my elbows as if I weighed five pounds less than nothing and raised me to eye-level.
“Cher, I have a personal message for you,” he said, smiling at me. “This message is, Linda’s experiment worked.”
The world tilted sideways like a carnival ride. I tried to answer but my voice had been canceled.
“You remember dat, cher—Linda’s experiment worked.” Then he kissed me between the eyes before putting me down again and strutting the rest of the way to the ring.
The world tilted slowly back to its usual position. I could feel Dez shaking my arm and yelling in my ear along with about ten thousand other people, mostly envious females. Then Big Easy was in the ring, flexing his muscles. He caught my eye and winked at me.
“Oh, God,” Dez said, giving me a squeeze. “For a minute there, I thought you were gonna die.”
“Not tonight,” I said. “Not tonight.”
2005
Is there Life After Rehab?
“Oral sex and only oral sex,” said a woman’s voice somewhere on my right. “Forget beef consommé, forget gravy, forget any of that shit. It’s got to be oral sex or nothing.”
Now that’s one hell of a conversation to wake up in the middle of, I thought, trying to open my eyes. I was slumped on a sofa in some dimly lit place that smelled like a bar. Had to be one of those cocktail lounges that were springing up around the city of late. Trends, eh? You never know what’s going to be chic next. Or even chicy/Mickey, as we used to say back when the Berlin Wall was coming down. Pronounced sheeky-meeky, it meant something was both trés chic and Mickey Mouse all at once. Can’t tell you who came up with that one, but I can tell you that I find myself using it now more than ever, even though no one knows what the hell I’m talking about.
“But wasn’t that rather, uh, awkward?” asked a different woman, on my left. I struggled to raise my drooping head. With my eyelids fluttering, I could only see what looked like a malfunctioning filmstrip of my own lap and part of two others on either side, both of which were far better dressed than mine.
“That’s the understatement of the decade,” said the woman on my right. I must have passed out during a less interesting conversation, I decided, and my rudeness had driven away whomever had been sitting next to me. Then these two had taken their places. I just hoped they didn’t think me rude for waking up uninvited. “But that wasn’t the worst part,” the woman on my right went on. “You know what the worst part was? Nobody appreciated it.”
Left: “You’re kidding.”
Right: “I don’t kid about things like oral sex. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’, to borrow a saying from you-know-who.”
Both sides laughed together. Obviously, they knew who. I didn’t.
Right: “Nobody appreciated it, not one little bit. Not my boyfriend, not my other boyfriend, not my other other boyfriend—hell, not even my husband.”
Left: “Okay, now I’m shocked.”
Right: “Not any more than I was. A husband who doesn’t appreciate regular blow jobs? How fucked up is that?”
Left: “Fucked up doesn’t even begin to cover it. If it had been me, I’d have been looking around for the other three horsemen.”
Right: “Damned fucking-A right you would have. And I bet they’d have appreciated getting some action.” I felt a hard nudge in my ribs. “How about you? What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I slurred, or I think I slurred, as I tried to focus on her. “I’ve never tried to blow a harbinger of the apocalypse.”
Both women laughed heartily, and one of them gave me an even heartier slap on the back. “Hey, Grace,” called the one on the right. “Your friend came to. You maybe want to get her some coffee?”
Someone grabbed my wrists and hauled me to my feet. “Glad to see you’re back among the living. If you’ll pardon the expression.” Lots more hearty laughter as the same someone took my chin between finger and thumb and lifted my head. I found myself staring into the flawless, near-ebony features of my new best friend, Grace Something-Or-Other. Sweeney? Swanson? Swanwick?
“Do you remember where you are, Lily?” she asked me.
“You’re assuming I knew to begin with,” I said by way of stalling. Things were coming back to me in bits and pieces. Grace Stone. Her name was Grace Stone, and she had brought me here, which made her the best and only friend I had in this vicinity. “I don’t think you ever actually told me where we were going, just that it was a friendly after-hours club that liked to get started early.”
Grace smiled, looking pleased with me. “So you do remember coming here?”
