Authors: Elizabeth Evans

As Good as Dead (32 page)

BOOK: As Good as Dead

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“That’s okay!” she shouted. “Can I help?”

“No, no!” I went back to the key that I’d tried first. It turned. I opened the door and waved a final good-bye to Karen Munsen, who tapped a merry
honk-honk
and drove away.

Something felt wrong as soon as I stepped inside.

What was it? I thought of David Wallace again, hanging in his garage, dead.

The house opened in front of me, somehow . . . bald, unfamiliar. I moved in the direction of the kitchen, the direction I would have moved if I’d smelled smoke. There was no smoke. I hurried past the dining room table with its three Mexican tin candlesticks and four chairs, nothing out of place, but the light beyond the dining room was too intense, the effect uncanny, like the time I’d seen a building whose outer wall had been razed by a wrecking ball, the intimate room within (sweet floral wallpaper, a marble fireplace mantel) left exposed to the open sky.

The eerie feeling persisted for several moments after I stepped into the kitchen—a space all blasted with light—and then I felt a shift. I slipped back in time and realized that the kitchen looked precisely the way that it had looked when we moved in, before the oleander hedge had shaded the west side of the house.

I crossed that light-scoured room and looked out the window over the sink. There—long hidden from view—was the east side of Helen and Nick Schaeffer’s house, plus a long line of freshly cut stumps, bone-bright inside their dark rims of bark. The clear red, bell-shaped blooms that had made the variety of oleander my favorite still were fresh and vivid in the wild heaps of limbs and branches piled along the drive.

I gripped the counter and howled, “Will!”

Chapter 23

He was not in the house or the yard. His car was gone.

I called his cell phone again. When he did not answer, I left a new message, “That was so wrong. I didn’t need to be punished by you.” Then I hung up.

Scaredy-cat.
I had been startled when Jacqueline characterized me in that way, but she was right. I’d shaped my life around those secrets. I’d punished myself plenty, trying to make up for them, make myself good enough for Will. Just one spot of green in the yard. Never a fire in the fireplace because it would “suck heat out of the house” and acids from the ashes might damage our books or computers. Forget spontaneous plans and meals out (“We’re too busy”
or “The prices are outrageous, Charlotte”). Always saving money for travel, though every fucking trip was a trip to Italy or to some archive that Will needed to study.

A child! My god! How could a poor little child even have
fit
into a household like ours?

The doorbell—the door
drill
.

I hurried to answer, my clogs clattering on the tile floors. Who now, who now?

Our dear old neighbors, Nick and Helen Schaeffer. Side by side, with their choppy gray hair, lightweight cardigans, and polo shirts, they looked very much a matched set.

They smiled when I opened the door. “Charlotte!” Nick said. “We don’t mean to bother you, but—well, we saw you folks took down your oleanders!” Helen, nodding, said, “We went to the movies, and when we came home—”

She looked in the direction of the missing hedge and opened her mouth wide to demonstrate their initial surprise.

“A mistake,” I said as I joined them on the steps.

“A mistake? Well!” Nick laughed. “I guess they’ll grow back eventually. Not in my lifetime, but eventually.”

Helen gave his arm a light slap. “Don’t talk like that, Dad,” she said; then she smiled at me. “I guess it’ll be easier for us to wave to each other while we do dishes, now, Charlotte.”

I coughed up a laugh. “Would you like to come in?” I asked. “I could make coffee.” I meant it—why not? I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts!—but they said, no, no, they needed to get supper going. They’d been curious about the hedge, that was all.

“But, oh,” Helen said, “I almost forgot: I wanted to tell you we’ve seen that cat, the one you worried the coyotes had eaten.”

I nodded. “I did, too. Bad Cat. It wasn’t doing very well, though.”

Nick shook his head. “It’s a scrapper. Always has an ear chewed up or something.”

“Well, anyway, I set out food for it,” Helen said.

I laughed. “So did I, Helen. Maybe we’ll put some meat on its bones.”

Meat on its bones.
I sounded like my parents.

The year before, Helen had needed to use a walker for a while. Now, when she and Nick started off across my uneven desert yard, the way that they gripped each other—
hard
—it looked as if they worked at steadying both themselves and each other. I’d seen the pair as gorgeous twentysomethings in a wedding photo on top of their piano (photos like that, whenever I see them in the homes of old people, I get a melancholy sense that everyone must be attractive when they’re young, but somehow we’re incapable of realizing it at the time). The Schaeffers had raised four children, three of whom I’d come to know well enough over the last eleven years that I’d walk over and say hello if they came to town. “Mom,” Nick called Helen, and Helen called Nick “Dad,” which didn’t sound very romantic. Will and I had heard them raise their voices over there on occasion. Still, they always impressed us as being in love. We liked it that we had a pair of old lovebirds for neighbors, and we’d told them so, and each had given the other a proud smile.

Without incident, now they disappeared from my view, into their own yard, and I returned to the house. I walked to the dining room, and looked out the sliding glass door. The backyard appeared pretty grim minus the oleander hedge, but Nick and Helen’s visit had drained some of my anger at Will.

Didn’t I want the two of us to be together until the end of time?

Yes, I did.

In case Bad Cat should come by again, I carried the can opener and a can of tuna and one of the blue-glass Mexican plates to the ramada and set up a little dinner out there.

When I went back inside, I noticed that Will had left his gym bag on the dining room floor, and I picked it up and carried it to the alcove off the kitchen where we did our laundry. Normally, Will emptied his gym clothes into the washer as soon as he arrived home, so I added the clothes and his towel to a few things already in the washer and started a load. His running shoes I carried to our bedroom. So big and heavy—what was it like to move around with those slabs of leather and cloth and rubber on your feet? Usually, the big shoes impressed me, but just now they made me sad, and when I switched on the light in the closet and stepped inside to put them away, I saw how, over time, the heavy fabric that made up the tops of the shoes had developed particular folds in response to Will’s feet, and the leather parts had become crosshatched with both fine and deep wrinkles from his wearing the shoes longer than he should have.

I hugged the shoes awkwardly to my aching chest. I felt almost as if Will were dead and the shoes were relics. Jacqueline probably had been right in thinking that it was for the best that he knew the truth. Still, a hole had been blasted in the dam that held the sweet millpond of our life in place. I hated to lose the old sweetness, even if it meant that the river now could run on, the way it should.

A
whisk
sounded in the dining room: the sliding door gliding along its track.

I set down the shoes, but I waited until I heard Will call my name before I left the closet and went out into the hall.

He had on a baseball cap, and it threw a shadow on his face; even so, I could see something skittish in his expression when he looked at me, and so I did not step all the way through the doorway and into the dining room.

He groaned and he pulled a chair out from the table and sat. He folded his arms on top of the table and then he cradled his head on his arms. Something dandled from his baseball cap, moving delicately up and down with the motion of his breaths. Normally, I would have gone to him and plucked off the thing. I would have shown it to him and we would have laughed.

What was it?

Oh. A twig from the oleanders, somehow caught in the band at the back of the cap while he worked.

Without lifting his head from his arms, he said, “I drove up there. To the Fletchers’. He didn’t know what I was talking about, or else he was drunk, but I told her . . . what you told me. And to leave you alone.”

“You shouldn’t have done that!” I cried. “I was taking care of things! I already recused myself from the judging! I’m an
adult
,
Will!”

“It didn’t have anything to do with you being an adult, Charlotte. I wanted them to know you’d already told me and that I was still loyal to you. Not that I know what that means for us anymore. Everything”—his voice caught—“seems different now.”

“Oh, Will.” I crossed the room to him. I wanted so much to put my hands on his shoulders, rub his neck. “How can learning about something I did twenty years ago change everything we’ve had in the twenty years since?”

“I don’t know.” A hard out-breath dimpled the blue cloth of his shirtsleeve. “It seems that way.”

He sounded sleepy—like a sleepy, crabby little boy.

He doesn’t really want to be right, though,
I thought.
He doesn’t really want to leave me.

I dragged another of the dining room chairs over beside his chair and took a seat carefully. I laid my arm across his back. He didn’t pull away. After a bit, dusk started to come on. Because the oleanders were gone, the house stayed filled with light much longer than usual that day. Even so, the two of us went on sitting there, like that, until after dark.

Acknowledgments

Over the years, the support of the esteemed editor Nancy Miller has meant a great deal to me. I thank Nancy and others at Bloomsbury (Lea Beresford, Laura Phillips, Gleni Bartels, and Susan Brown) who shepherded the book along to publication.

Lisa Bankoff of ICM continues to be my trusted agent, and I am indebted to her.

I am grateful to the editors Beth Alvarado and Pamela Uschuk of
Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts,
for their publication of “As Good As Dead,” the short story that proved the spark for the novel.

Thanks to my daughter, Nora Evans-Reitz, who, with her usual thoroughness and care—even as she traveled on trains and buses—helped me ready the manuscript for submission.

A Note on the Author

Elizabeth Evans’s five previous books are
Locomotion, The Blue Hour
,
Suicide’s Girlfriend
,
Rowing in Eden
,
and
Carter Clay
. She received the Iowa Author Award in 2010. Among her other awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James Michener Fellowship, a Lila Wallace Foundation Award, and the Four Corners Award. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

By the Same Author

Locomotion
(stories)

The Blue Hour

Carter Clay

Rowing in Eden

Suicide’s Girlfriend
(stories)

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