Puppet (28 page)

“Do you live with her?”

“Oh, no. I just stopped by to see if she needs anything. Then she saw you, and she insisted I come over immediately.”

“I’m glad. It’s nice to see you again.”

“Nice to see you too. And I’m really sorry about your mother. Did she have some kind of breakdown or something?”

Or something, Amanda thinks, spotting a stooped figure in a long, white flannelette nightgown and a pair of fuzzy blue slippers rapidly descending the steps of the house across the street. “Oh, my God. Sally, your grandmother … Mrs. MacGiver, wait. There are cars—”

An approaching driver blasts his horn as old Mrs. MacGiver steps off the curb without looking, her slippers disappearing under the snow. “What the hell!” the driver yells out the window.

“Oh, hold your horses,” Mrs. MacGiver shouts in return, thumping on the car’s front fender and swatting away her granddaughter’s restraining arms, squinting through the cold sun at Amanda. “Who are you?”

“Grandma, for God’s sake. You have to get back in the house. You’ll freeze to death out here.”

“I know you,” Mrs. MacGiver says, her watery blue eyes focusing solely on Amanda.

“Grandma, you have to get back inside.” Sally tries to surround her with her arms, but her grandmother wriggles away from her.

“I’m Amanda Price,” Amanda tells her, the name sounding no less strange for having repeated it. “Gwen’s daughter.”

Sally quickly removes her coat, throws it across her grandmother’s shoulders. “At least put this on.”

“I hate raccoon coats,” the woman grouses.

“Please, Grandma, raccoons are hardly an endangered species.”

“Hah! As far as I’m concerned, they aren’t nearly endangered enough. I hate the damn things.”

Amanda bursts out laughing, wondering whether life could possibly get any more absurd. “It’s nice to see you
again, Mrs. MacGiver, but I think Sally’s right. It’s way too cold to be out here in just a nightgown and slippers.”

“I’m freezing,” Sally concurs, her teeth already chattering.

Mrs. MacGiver takes several tiny steps forward, her spindly fingers reaching for Amanda’s cheek. “Puppet?” she asks.

Amanda takes a sharp intake of breath, feels the air freeze in her lungs as Mrs. MacGiver’s fingers brush across her face.

“Puppet,” Mrs. MacGiver repeats, now wiggling her fingers in the air, as if operating the strings of a marionette. “Puppet,” she says with a giggle. “Puppet, puppet. Who’s my little puppet?”

“Okay, that’s enough. You’re kind of freaking me out here, Grandma,” Sally tells her, spinning the old woman around. “She drifts in and out,” she offers by way of a parting explanation, leading her grandmother back across the street toward her house. “Nice to see you again, Amanda,” Sally says with a wave, before gently pushing her grandmother inside the house and closing the front door behind her.

Amanda tries not to replay the scene in her mind. But even after the two women have disappeared, and even after Amanda has returned to her mother’s house, closing first the front door and then the door to her old bedroom, where she takes refuge under the covers, she can still hear the words echoing in the stillness.
Puppet
, the walls whisper as she presses the frilly, pink comforter against her ears.

Puppet. Puppet. Who’s my little puppet?

A
MAZINGLY
, Amanda falls asleep, not waking up until almost eight o’clock that night. “This can’t be right,” she marvels, pushing herself out of bed and squinting through the darkness at her watch, tapping impatiently on its round face before lifting it to her ear to hear it tick. “Something’s obviously screwy. This can’t be right.” She flips on the delicate white-and-pink-flowered lamp beside the bed and checks the time again. “No, this isn’t right.” Except that it’s dark outside the window, and the moon is a high, luminous crescent amidst a smattering of bright stars. Can it really be eight o’clock? At
night?
Can she really have slept away an entire afternoon?

Amanda makes her way down the stairs to the kitchen, flipping on the lights as she goes, and compares the big, white clock on the wall beside the stove to the stainless-steel watch on her wrist, noting a discrepancy of only three minutes. “I can’t believe it,” she tells the empty room, hearing her stomach growl to announce its lack of recent nourishment. She opens the fridge and peers inside, sees a large carton of orange juice and a smaller container of skim milk, as well as some eggs, a
couple of Granny Smith apples, and an old, withered lettuce that she quickly discards in the garbage bin underneath the sink. “Nothing to eat. Why am I not surprised?”

She checks the freezer, rifling through several bags of frozen peas and corn, before finding a package of Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese behind a large bag of frozen bagels. “Thank you, God,” she says out loud, hearing her stomach rumble its appreciation, as she pops the package into the microwave oven. Minutes later, she stands in front of the oven, gobbling the creamy, cheese-covered noodles straight from the container, shoveling one forkful after another of the steaming macaroni into her mouth, and scraping the bottom of the small package until not a speck of sauce remains. “All gone,” she says proudly, washing dinner down with a glass of water, then deciding now was as good a time as any to water the plants. Nothing more depressing than a houseful of dead plants, she tells herself, finding a pitcher and filling it with lukewarm water, then balancing on a chair to sprinkle the row of leafy plants that line the tops of the counters. She moves on dutifully to the dining and living rooms and does the same with the plants there.

It’s funny, she is thinking as she returns to the kitchen to refill the pitcher. She wouldn’t have thought her mother had such a green thumb. But the plants are all doing miraculously well, their branches full of lush, green leaves, uniformly shiny and healthy, so perfect as to be almost fake. They
are
fake, Amanda realizes minutes later, watching the water she’s pouring spill over the side of a dark blue china pot on the mantel over the fireplace. “My God, they’re all fake. I don’t believe this.” She runs back to the kitchen and grabs some paper toweling, quickly wiping up the spill from the mantel before it has
time to leave a stain, then retraces her steps, checking the leaves of all the counterfeit plants she’s already watered, and careful to clean up any mess she might have made. She repeatedly looks over her shoulder as she wipes away unsightly spills, as if afraid her mother might descend the stairs at any moment to berate her for her carelessness and stupidity.

Her task completed, Amanda lowers herself to the living room floor and sits cross-legged on the gray carpet, wondering when she stopped being able to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Truth is stranger than fiction—isn’t that what they say? But when did it get so hard to differentiate between the two?

Probably around the same time her mother started shooting total strangers in hotel lobbies.

Although the man calling himself John Mallins was no stranger to her mother. Amanda is certain of that.

She looks toward the tiny front hall, deciding she should probably call Ben. He’s undoubtedly wondering what happened to her. Didn’t she promise to call him as soon as she settled in? She sidles over to where her purse is propped up against her overnight bag in the middle of the foyer floor where she dropped them more than eight hours earlier and retrieves her cell phone, staring at it for several long seconds before finally tossing it back inside her purse. Hell, he knows her number. Let
him
call if he wants to speak to her. Which he obviously doesn’t, she decides, pulling out her phone again to check for messages, finding none.

So what now?

She’s already slept away an entire afternoon, eaten her frozen dinner, and watered the fake plants. What’s
left? “How about an after-dinner drink?” she asks, crawling toward the liquor cabinet in the dining room, finding nothing inside it but a dozen old crystal glasses and a couple of large fruit platters. “You didn’t even keep any liqueurs?” she demands of the empty house, returning to the kitchen and searching through the cupboards there. When had her mother stopped drinking anyway? And couldn’t she have kept a little something around in case company dropped in? What’s with all this herbal tea crap she keeps finding? “Oh, well, why not?” She’s probably been drinking a little too much herself lately, she decides, filling the electric kettle with water, then plugging it in, and waiting for the water to boil.

She sips the surprisingly good, peach-and-raspberry tea while rifling through the various kitchen drawers, finding a desultory collection of old newspaper recipes, now yellowed with age, and stained with grease, in the first drawer she opens. There’s a recipe for a cold cream of avocado soup that makes her mouth water, and another one for a cranberry-and-orange soufflé that sounds divine, as well as a whole stack of other recipes for creative things to do with chicken. Amanda reads through all of them, trying to connect these obviously much-used recipes to her mother, a woman who rarely cooked anything other than frozen dinners, and whose idea of dessert was to open a can of fruit cocktail, if she remembered dessert at all.

The next two drawers are filled with ordinary kitchen items: stainless-steel cutlery; colorful, cotton dish towels; round, plastic place mats covered with pictures of succulent purple and red berries; white paper napkins, trimmed in blue and pink swirls. There’s a drawer filled to bursting with instructions for operating
the various kitchen appliances, along with their accompanying warrantees, and another drawer weighted down with saved wooden chopsticks and plastic cutlery from various take-out restaurants. A telephone-address book sits on top of a large manila folder in the drawer directly underneath the phone, and Amanda flips through the book’s pages, not surprised to find most of the pages blank. Nothing under
M
for Mallins. Nothing under
T
for Turk. Although Corinne Nash is listed under both
C
and N. On impulse, she checks the A’s, and gasps when she sees
AMANDA
printed large across the middle of two pages,
AMA
on one side,
NDA
on the other. Beneath both halves of her name is a list of all the phone numbers she’s had since she moved away, as if her mother has been following her from place to place, and from man to man, up to and including her current home and office numbers in Florida, although her mother has never called her at any of these numbers. Amanda makes a dismissive clicking noise with her tongue, then tosses the book back inside the drawer, about to close it when she decides to check inside the large manila folder.

“I’m wasting my time,” she says, remembering that Ben has already searched through these very drawers and come up empty-handed. Still, that was before she’d spoken to Rachel Mallins, before they’d heard of a man named Turk, before the puzzling autopsy report had come back. It’s entirely possible that Ben, having no idea what he was looking for, might have missed something. She opens the folder, turns it sideways to get a better look at the papers inside.

Report cards, she realizes, lowering herself to the bench along the wall of the little breakfast nook, and
spreading the report cards across the laminated tabletop. PALMERSTON PUBLIC SCHOOL. Name: Amanda Price. Key to Grading: A = excellent, B = good, C = average, D = unsatisfactory, NA = not applicable. And then a list of marks: A’s in reading, creative writing, handwriting, spelling, and math. A’s in School Citizenship and Study Skills, although only C’s for Participation in Class Discussion.

Amanda is a quiet and conscientious student, always a pleasure to have in the class. Again this term, she has produced excellent written work, and her stories are both fanciful and well told. However, I wish she would speak up more in class.

I am very pleased with Amanda’s progress. Her homework is always done and presented on time, and her book reports are done with care, although she needs to proofread her work so that unnecessary errors could be avoided. She’s very quiet in class, although she seems to get along well with the other children.

Amanda is a quiet, pleasant, hardworking individual and I very much enjoy having her in my grade five class. Her project on Japan was well researched and interestingly presented.

“What the hell?” Amanda asks out loud, scanning the seemingly endless supply of reports, from junior kindergarten on up. “She saved them all? No, of course she didn’t,” she says, answering her own question. “It was my father who saved them. She just couldn’t be bothered throwing them away.”

Once again, I was simply too much of an effort, she thinks, perusing the rest of the report cards, noting the concern in the teachers’ comments that started to appear when she transferred into junior high—
Even though her grades are good, I’m a little worried about Amanda’s attitude
—and the impatience that was evident in their comments by
the time she reached high school.
Amanda would benefit from a stronger work ethic. She prefers to coast on her natural ability and lacks discipline. Her attendance in class also leaves something to be desired.

“Passed, didn’t I?” Amanda demands, slapping the folder shut and jumping to her feet, then dumping the folder with all its report cards into the garbage bin underneath the sink. “Made it into law school, didn’t I? Near perfect LSATs. Hah!” What the hell am I doing? she wonders, quickly retrieving the report cards from the garbage and picking off several wilted lettuce leaves before returning the folder to its former resting place in the drawer. I’m going crazy, that’s what I’m doing. And why not? “It runs in the family,” she announces to the empty house. She returns to the foyer, throws her purse over one shoulder and her overnight bag over the other, and totes them up the stairs, pushing one weary leg in front of the other, hearing her muscles groan, as if she is navigating a steep mountain. Might as well go back to bed, she decides, suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue.

Maybe I’m coming down with something, she thinks. Maybe I picked something up on the plane. Everyone knows planes are hotbeds for germs. All that stale air. People cramped together in a narrow, confined space, coughing and sneezing. And then the extreme change in the weather, the cold air she’s no longer used to. Not to mention the circumstances that have brought her here, the reunion with her mother and former husband, the unpleasant reminders of a past she thought she’d put behind her. It was enough to make anyone tired. Plus all that damn snow she shoveled. No wonder her arms ache and her back is stiff. No wonder she’s exhausted. No wonder all she wants to do is climb into bed and go back to sleep.