Mad Love (9 page)

“I said I would.”

As soon as I’d slammed and locked the door, I threw
Death Cat
back into the junk-mail box. Then I stripped off my clothes and stood in the shower, cool water tumbling over my shoulders. I worked a leave-on conditioner through my hair. The label promised to “fight the frizzies.” But though the texture of my hair returned to normal, the unsettled feeling in my stomach didn’t go away. It shifted, moving up through my torso.

Need. I need.

Cleaned and conditioned, cortisoned and bandaged, I sat on the couch. The air conditioner droned its refrain. The new writing books sat at my feet like eager puppies.
Read us, read us, read us
, they squealed. But reading was the last thing I wanted to do.

I really need.

Our brick building sits in the middle of the block. The Spanish lavender on the upstairs balcony and the stained glass window above the entry add splashes of color, but mostly the building is unexceptional. You might stroll past and not even notice it, eyes drawn to the Tudor next door or the pink stucco number around the corner. But on that particular day, at that particular time, while the exterior was as ordinary as dry wheat toast, the interior was a different matter altogether. For something extraordinary was happening inside one of the first-floor apartments.

When Franz Kafka’s hero woke up in
The Metamorphosis
, he’d grown a pair of antennae. His entire body, as it turned out, had transformed into an insect. As I sat on the couch in a tank top and shorts, though my long brown hair and short legs were the same, something was changing.

A yearning, the likes of which I’d never known, grew and grew until it churned like a busy swarm.

Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol
.

I
wanted, more than anything, to be near Errol. Yes, that demanding, handsome guy in the black hoodie who believed he was Cupid and who had thrown something at me. That guy.

When I reached out, I wanted to find him standing there. When I listened, I wanted to hear his voice. When I inhaled, I wanted to inhale his scent. I didn’t ask myself why I felt that way, didn’t wonder why my thoughts had moved from Tony—who was clearly obsession-worthy—to Errol, who was clearly … weird. Wait. The old me thought he was weird. The new me focused on the beauty of his name. A strong name. A hero’s name. I grabbed a notebook and wrote his name. Then I wrote
Alice
+
Errol
, the way you do when you’re a kid. I wrote it a second time, bigger and bolder. I wanted to write it everywhere, so I ran into the bathroom and grabbed a tube of pink lipstick and wrote across the mirror,
Alice
+
Errol
. Across the wall,
Alice
+
Errol
. Across the shower,
Alice
+
Errol
.

That’s when a scratching noise skipped down the hallway. Had Errol come for a visit? I threw the lipstick tube into the sink, stumbled down the hallway, and opened the door.

“Meow.”

“Oh, hi, Oscar.” A massive orange tomcat wound between my shins.

“Hello, Alice.” Reverend Ruttles stood in his own doorway, across the foyer. He wore a white button-up shirt, as always, but his reverend’s collar was reserved for church duties. “We’ve got chow mein,” he happily announced, for the reverend loved few things more than Chinese food. “It’s Wednesday lunch. Remember?”

Since my mother’s hospitalization, I’d been eating Wednesday lunch at the reverend’s. “I’m not hungry,” I said, scratching my bandaged welt.

“Not hungry? Nonsense. It’s Wednesday. Wanda will skin me alive if I don’t feed you a healthy lunch.”

“Alice, get your booty over here and eat,” a melodious voice called from the reverend’s apartment. Oscar the cat pranced toward the voice. “I made wontons especially for you.”

My stomach growled but I didn’t care. What was Errol’s last name? How would I find him if I didn’t know his last name? If I went back to Neighborhood Bagels and waited, maybe he’d show up. Maybe he was a regular and someone at the counter knew where he lived.

“Alice?” The reverend had hobbled across the foyer. He took my arm. “You’re mumbling to yourself. Clearly you are in need of food.”

“I need to go to Neighborhood Bagels.”

“Bagels? Nonsense. Why would anyone choose bagels over chow mein?” Though weak in the knees, the reverend’s grip was still as strong as a young man’s and before I could explain, I was standing next to a table set for Wednesday lunch.

A clean, cheerful place, the reverend’s apartment, but that had not always been so. There was a time when I didn’t want to go in there because it smelled disgusting. Those were the months when he’d almost given up on life. Fortunately, someone had come along and had set things right.

I was ten years old when Mrs. Ruttles had her fatal heart attack. My mother held my hand when we stepped into the sterilized hospital room, which was sickly sweet with the scent of get-well bouquets. The reverend sat beside the bed, his head bowed. A machine stood nearby, bleeping with each worn-out beat of Mrs. Ruttles’s heart. I watched the screen bleep and flash, bleep and flash—life itself reduced to an annoying noise.

“Is there anyone you want me to say hello to in heaven?” Mrs. Ruttles asked when my mother coaxed me toward the bed. The dying woman’s eyes, once bright green, had faded to a mossy gray. Mrs. Ruttles, her voice barely a whisper, repeated the question.

“Lulu,” I whispered back.

The reverend raised his head. “Lulu?”

“The dog we had when Alice was very little,” my mother explained.

“My dear, dogs do not go to heaven,” Mrs. Ruttles said, closing her eyes. “Pick someone else.” Then she gasped for air.

My stomach clenched. I ran from the room with its poisonous stench and torturous noise, where death waited in the corner, ready to pounce. My mother found me outside and we sat on a bench beneath a broad oak. “Of course dogs go to heaven,” she said, holding my trembling hands. “Don’t you let anyone tell you differently. In fact …” She smiled cherry red at me. “Dogs run heaven.”

Following Mrs. Ruttles’s death, it came as no surprise that the reverend did not take well to living alone. The church ladies did their best, but after a year had passed they eventually stopped bringing salmon loaves and Jell-O salads. Grief sickened the reverend and he retired from his church. Day after day he shuffled to the mailbox in the same sweatpants, the sour odor of unwashed feet trailing behind.

“Enough is enough,” my mother said, and she placed an ad for a roommate. The ad went something like this:

Older, male roommate wanted for older, retired reverend. Must be quiet, clean, and have conservative values. Good references necessary and domestic skills appreciated.

Archibald Wattles, never Archie, was not what anyone had in mind when they pictured the perfect roommate for the reverend. In hindsight, he shouldn’t have been such a surprise. Once a neighborhood of affordable rents and retired couples, Capitol Hill had slowly become the gay center of Seattle. When Archibald, a legal secretary, stepped into the foyer in his perfectly creased slacks, polished loafers, and blow-dried hair, my mother whispered to Mrs. Bobot, “This should be interesting.”

The reverend was asleep on the couch in a stained undershirt and sweatpants. “Poor fellow,” Archibald said in a soft voice. He asked about the rent while collecting strewn socks and underwear. He asked me about school while beginning a wash load. While he and my mother discussed the lack of available men, he loaded up the dishwasher. While he and Mrs. Bobot discussed the benefits of using one’s imagination while cooking, he whipped up a pot of cream of potato and onion soup from the meager ingredients in the reverend’s pantry. The scent of the soup woke the reverend, who stumbled to the kitchen table and ate like a stray dog.

“Is this your wife?” Archibald asked, holding up a small, framed photo.

“Yes,” Reverend Ruttles replied, wiping away tears. “She took such good care of me. I’m lost without her.”

“My partner, Ben, died last year,” Archibald said, wiping tears from his own eyes. “I’m lost without him.”

“Partner?”

“Yes. My boyfriend.”

My mother, Mrs. Bobot, and I stood quietly in the corner, watching as Reverend Ruttles absorbed Archibald’s words. My mother wrapped her arm around my shoulder as we waited for the reverend’s reaction. The silence felt endless. Then, soupspoon in hand, the reverend said, “This is the most delicious soup I’ve ever tasted.”

Archibald moved in the very next day, along with his cat, Oscar. Soon after, the sound of vacuuming and bursts of Lemon Pledge filled the morning air. On Sunday nights, the reverend’s apartment once again smelled like pot roast. Within a few months he was back on his feet, attending church and his community meetings, and greeting everyone with his usual, “Praise the Lord, what a glorious day.”

And so it was, on that Wednesday at lunchtime, that the reverend gently pushed me into a chair. “Wonton?” Archibald asked, holding out a platter.

My mind still raced with Errol. The faster I got through lunch, the faster I could get out there and find him. I heaped food onto my plate. “Thanks.”

“Can you believe this heat wave?” Archibald asked.

“Mmmmph.” My mouth was already full.

“Don’t eat so fast,” Reverend Ruttles said. “You’ll get acid reflux.”

I grabbed another wonton. “I’ve got something to do,” I said between doughy bites. A jittery current ran through my body as if I’d had too much coffee. Is it normal to be annoyed by a guy one day and yearn for him the next? I could barely remember a time when I hadn’t felt the yearning, which seemed as much a part of me as the blood flowing through my veins.

“What do you have to do?” Archibald asked, smoothing the tablecloth.

“Just stuff.” I scratched my bandaged spot, then plunged my chopsticks into some chow mein. What did Errol look like under that hood? Was his hair long or short, straight or curly?

“We can help,” Archibald said.

“You can?” A clump of noodles slid off my chopsticks. “Do you know Errol?”

“Who?” Archibald asked. He’d taken to wearing Hawaiian shirts during the heat wave. That day’s shirt was covered with an orange bird-of-paradise print. “Did you say Errol?”

I chewed like a gerbil. “Uh-huh. Hey, do you have clam juice? I’m thirsty.”

The reverend sat back in his chair. “Did you say you want clam juice?”

“Um …” I screwed up my face.
Do I actually want clam juice
? Errol drank clam juice. “Yes, I do. Clam juice. Craig’s Clam Juice would be nice.”

“Sorry. Don’t have any. But we have tea. How about some tea?”

“No, thanks.” I snagged another noodle clump. It would be rude not to have any clam juice for Errol when he came to see me. I wanted to have all his favorite things, whatever they were.

Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol
.

I was about to take a bite when someone at the table said my name. “Yes?” I answered.

The reverend looked up. He’d been struggling with a piece of celery, trying to trap it between the smooth wooden sticks. “Are you speaking to me?”

“You just said my name. You said
Alice
.”

The reverend set his chopsticks aside and stabbed the celery with a fork. “I didn’t say
Alice
.”

“Nor did I,” Archibald said.

“Oh.” Having eaten as much as I could, I pushed my bowl aside. “I need to go,” I said, wiping my mouth on a crisply ironed napkin.

Alice
.

“Yes?”

“What?” the reverend asked.

“You just said my name again.”

The reverend shrugged. “I didn’t.”

“Nor did I,” said Archibald.

Alice. Find me, Alice
.

Pressing my palms on the table’s edge, I leaned forward. “Listen. Someone just said, ‘Find me, Alice.’ ”

Reverend Ruttles and Archibald leaned forward and tilted their heads. For a few moments, we sat in silence. Then I heard:

Alice, find me, Alice.

Neither Archibald’s nor the reverend’s lips had moved. “There it is again,” I said, jumping to my feet. My bowl wobbled. Where was it coming from? It was a man’s voice, distant but clear, but not just any man’s voice. I recognized it from Neighborhood Bagels and from Elliott Bay Books. Errol’s voice was calling to me, telling me to find him.

Archibald and the reverend shared a long look. I knew that look. I’d exchanged it many times with Mrs. Bobot when my mother had spun into one of her moods.

My hands dropped to my sides and I stood very still. My gaze darted between the two men as they watched me, worry deepening the creases in their faces. Even Oscar the cat, who lay in the fourth chair, stared at me with unblinking green eyes.

Find me. Find me. Find me
.

Again, no one’s lips had moved. No one had flinched. Only I had heard the voice.

A shiver ran down my spine.