Bones & All (7 page)

Perfect. This was so perfect. “That would be wonderful, thank you, Mrs. Harmon.” I stashed my rucksack behind an armchair and followed her into the kitchen with the rest of the groceries. Everything was just what I pictured a real home to have: photos of laughing children on the refrigerator, quilted calico place mats around the table, stained-glass suncatchers in the windows—a frog, a sailboat, a four-leaf clover. Above the light switch a painted angel carried a banner that read
BLESS THIS HOUSE AND EVERYONE IN IT
. We'd never had things like this anyplace we'd lived. The room smelled like cinnamon.

After opening a few cabinets I figured out where the groceries should go. The fridge was pretty well stocked for one person, and I could see by the big glass jars of flour and sugar on the counter that Mrs. Harmon loved to bake. There was a cake, I couldn't tell what kind, in a clear Tupperware box next to a bowl of apples and bananas.

She shrugged out of her jacket and traded it for a red gingham apron hanging on a hook beside the refrigerator. “The electric can opener is the greatest invention of the twentieth century,” she said as she used it to open a tin of cat food. “When you get to be as old as I am you'll see why.”

Puss (was that really his name? It was like calling myself “Girl”) waited by a stainless steel bowl on the floor by the window, swishing his tail, as Mrs. Harmon came over and dished out the cat food with a fork. “Now for
our
breakfast.” She took out a frying pan and pointed to the sofa in the living room. “Make yourself at home, Maren. Can I get you something to drink? Orange juice?”

“Orange juice would be great, thanks.” I sat down and ran my hand over a blue and red zigzag afghan draped over the back of the sofa. We'd never had throw blankets at home—if we got cold we'd just take the comforters off our beds. Throw blankets, like place mats or window ornaments, were not necessary.

I turned to look at the pictures on the end table as Mrs. Harmon shook her new carton of orange juice, opened it, and filled a pair of glasses. Her wedding portrait was watercolored, so that her cheeks were pink like cotton candy and the garden around her and her husband glowed like the Emerald City. Sometimes people change so much you can't see them in their younger selves, but Mrs. Harmon wasn't that different. They looked like they could've been movie stars. The photograph had brown matting, and in gold script at the bottom I read:

M
R. AND
M
RS.
D
OUGLAS
H
ARMON

J
UNE
2, 1933

“Your husband was very handsome,” I said as she handed me the glass.

“Thank you, dear. We were married fifty-two years.” She sighed. “Dear Dougie. I'll be joining him soon enough.”

“Oh, don't say that,” I said automatically.

She shrugged and went back to the kitchen, lighting the burner and dropping a big dollop of butter into the frying pan. “Can you guess how old I am, Maren?”

“I'm no good at guessing people's ages.”

“You'll get better at it as you get older. I'm eighty-eight and a half.”

She was older than she looked. “I hope I'm like you when I'm eighty-eight and a half.”

“Why, thank you, dear! If there's a nicer compliment I can't think of it.” I looked around the room as Mrs. Harmon let the frozen hash browns cook with the bacon. We lapsed into an easy silence. I found it comforting, the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. “It doesn't bother you, does it?” she asked.

“What?”

“The clock. My niece says it ticks so loudly she can't hear herself think.” She put her hand on her hip as she transferred the hash browns and bacon to a spare plate and started on the eggs. “I find it reassuring, myself. After all, the passage of time is the only thing we can be sure of in this world.” Mrs. Harmon dropped two slices of bread in the toaster, took the eggs off the stove, and arranged our plates.

It was the best breakfast I'd ever tasted. You can't feel entirely hopeless with a warm meal in your belly—a warm,
honest
meal—and being with Mrs. Harmon was even better. She made me forget, for a little while at least, that I didn't have a place to go home to anymore. Mrs. Harmon smiled at me as she sipped her orange juice, and it hit me then: She trusted me.

I took our plates to the sink and washed them along with the frying pan, and with a murmur of thanks she laid herself down on the sofa and pulled the red and blue afghan over her. The white cat hopped up and settled itself on her tummy. “Ah, Puss,” she said, and rubbed him behind the ears.

I sat in the armchair by the door and noticed on the table beside it a white wicker basket brimming with balls of yarn in sherbet colors, raspberry and peach and baby blue. “Do you knit?” Mrs. Harmon asked, and I shook my head. “I have bags and bags of wool, but I'll never be able to use it all. I can't do much needlework these days—my arthritis prevents it.”

“Maybe you could teach me. I mean, if it wouldn't hurt your hands too much.” I'd never thought of learning how to knit before, but now out of nowhere I wanted to very much. I wanted to knit myself a sweater I could hide inside.

“I'd love to, dear. I'll just have a little rest first.” In my mind I was already knitting a hood like the Grim Reaper's. I would wear it up so no one could see my face.

“You look tired yourself, Maren. Why don't you take a nap in the spare room?” Every time I hear the words “spare room” I think of Narnia.
Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom, where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe
 …

“No one has come to stay with me for ages,” Mrs. Harmon was saying. “I think spare rooms ought to be used as much as possible, don't you? It's the first door on the right past the kitchen. Then when you wake up, we'll have tea and cake. I baked a carrot cake yesterday. And I'll teach you how to knit, and when you go home I'll give you a bag of yarn to take with you. Won't that be nice?”

After a night in an abandoned Cadillac, it sounded like a dream.

I watched her eyelids grow heavy. “Have a nice rest, Maren.”

“You too, Mrs. Harmon.”

Then she startled herself awake with a thought. “Oh! Perhaps you should call your mother?”

I shook my head. “She's not expecting me back until later.” I didn't like lying to her, but maybe it wasn't as much of a lie if you wished it were true.

“Ah. Good.” Mrs. Harmon closed her eyes, and I went down the hall and opened the door on the right. It was the fanciest bed I'd ever seen, with a dark mahogany headboard carved with laughing cherubs—too old, too strange, and much too marvelous for an ordinary house like this—and a pinwheel quilt in yellow and blue. A big chest of drawers with a mirror on top stood at the far wall, and there was a chair in the corner with a red velvet cushion. It was the nicest Spare Oom there ever was.

On the night table I found an antique sculpture, a sphinx cast in bronze with wings outspread. I picked it up—it was much heavier than I expected, and covered in soft emerald-green felt on the bottom—and when I read the inscription I realized it was a trophy:

THE LUCRETIAN CUP
IS HEREBY PRESENTED

TO
DOUGLAS HARMON,
WITH GREAT ESTEEM

AND ADMIRATION FOR HIS OUTSTANDING ESSAY ON

THE NATURE OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS.

T
HE
C
LASSICAL
S
OCIETY OF THE

U
NIVERSITY OF
P
ENNSYLVANIA,
J
UNE
1930

It was a proper prize, not one of those cheap-looking knickknacks my classmates would get for winning a softball championship. I ran my fingers over the sphinx, over her paws and her wings and her face, proud and remote. She made me want to strive for something, to earn something beautiful I could hold on to for the rest of my life.

I put the trophy back on the table and turned down the bedclothes, peeled off my dirty socks, and slid between the snowy covers. The pillow was cool on my cheek. I understood now why the smell of laundry soap was so comforting: Things couldn't be too hopeless if somebody was still bothering to wash the sheets.

*   *   *

I slept, and when I woke up I stretched like a cat. The house was still. I went into the living room and knelt beside the sofa. “Mrs. Harmon?” I don't know why I kept calling her name. As soon as I touched her hand I knew she was dead.

I'd never seen a dead person before—well, you know what I mean. A funny feeling went through the fingers I'd touched her with and spread up my arm and all through the rest of me, and even though I was kneeling by the sofa the floor seemed to fall away beneath my feet.

I shook myself and stood up. The white cat was curled up on his cushioned stool by the fireplace as if nothing had changed. He lifted his head and looked at me, then closed his eyes and rubbed the side of his face against his paw—as if to say,
So what?

No more Fancy Feast for you,
that's
what. I went back to the sofa and tugged the afghan up to Mrs. Harmon's chin, as if I could warm her up. Again I caught sight of the knitting basket, and I took a couple of balls and a set of wooden needles and slipped them into my rucksack. “Thanks, Mrs. Harmon,” I whispered.

Then I wandered through the rooms of the tidy little house, looking at old pictures and fingering all her handiwork—the doilies along the center of the dining-room table; the pearl-buttoned cardigan draped over the back of a chair, as if it were resting on somebody's shoulders; the embroidered proverb,
A MERRY HEART DOETH GOOD LIKE A MEDICINE
, above the light switch in her bedroom—without really seeing any of it. I went back into the Spare Oom and got into bed, only because I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't leave her like that, but I didn't know who to call, and even if I did I wouldn't have known how to explain my being here. Someone was bound to think I'd done something wrong.

I decided to go back to sleep and pretend for a while like none of it had happened. I didn't know what else to do.

No cake—no knitting lesson—and no one left to trust me.

*   *   *

There was a noise in another part of the house, and that's what woke me the second time. It must have been early evening. I sat still in the bed, straining my ears, and in a few seconds I heard it again. There was somebody here—somebody still living.

I opened the door and it drifted down the hallway, the sourness of a meal that should have only been tasted once. I smelled blood too, but it wasn't quite the odor I knew. Maybe a dead person's blood doesn't smell or taste the same.

There was a figure framed in the darkened hallway, kneeling over the sofa. It was the old man I'd spotted from the bus. I could see his missing ear. His head was burrowed deep into Mrs. Harmon's belly—there were shreds of her blouse on the carpet—and her arm fell across his back, stiff as a plank, as he plunged into her nose-first. Mrs. Harmon's head was gone, but there were thick locks of silver hair across the arm of the sofa.

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. How could I scream, when it was all so familiar to me?

If he knew I was there he gave no sign of it, nor did he seem the slightest bit agitated. I couldn't see his face, but I knew he wasn't sorry. He chomped and chewed and swallowed calmly, methodically even.
Is that what I look like when I do it? Do I make those horrible noises?

When he was done with her belly he reached back and grabbed her long purple fingers, and the crunching started. He inched down the sofa, still sitting on his heels, as he munched on her legs. I wanted to look away, but I never did.

When he was finished he rocked back on his heels and let out a belch that would have registered on the Richter scale. “Pardon me,” he muttered as he drew a grubby yellow handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his mouth. “You got nothin' to worry about,” he said as he stuffed the kerchief back in his pocket. “I never eat 'em live.” At no point had he turned to look at me. Somehow he just knew I was there.

He reached around him, gathering the scraps of her clothing and stuffing them into one of the bags we'd brought the groceries home in. Her brown leather shoes stood neatly where her feet had been, awaiting their next outing like it would ever happen. The man glanced at me, then reached over and slid them behind the floral dust-flap.

When I finally spoke my voice sounded like I'd borrowed it. “I thought I was the only one.”

He shrugged. “Everybody does.” He pulled something out of the crumpled afghan on the sofa and jingled it in his hand. It was a tangle of Mrs. Harmon's jewelry, the rings that had been on her fingers and the locket of cream and pink enamel around her neck. Cupping the jewelry in a dirty hand, he got up to the sound of creaking bones and settled himself in the armchair beside the sofa. He made as if to dip his hand into his shirt pocket, then decided against it.

“Here,” he said. The stranger leaned forward, and I held out my hand to accept the little pile of jewelry. Then he drew a tarnished silver flask out of his shirt pocket and tipped it. I watched his Adam's apple bob as he gulped.
Washing her down
. I'd only known Mrs. Harmon for an hour, but in that moment I missed her like I'd known her all my life.

I went to the mantelpiece and untangled the rings from the chain, laying the jewelry out piece by piece in front of the old pictures Mrs. Harmon had remembered her husband by. A dashing Douglas Harmon in soft focus regarded me with a benevolence I didn't deserve.

“Listen here. High time we introduced ourselves. Name's Sullivan.” The man got to his feet and held out his hand. His eyes were pale blue under his shaggy gray eyebrows. “Sully, for short.”