Suicide's Girlfriend (22 page)

That evening, the story that Candace relayed to Carson about the loss of the bird seemed to go by much too quickly and the pressure she had felt to speak to him was not relieved. While Carson said words of comfort, she stared at her reflection in the night-backed window over his desk, and she took some satisfaction in the fact that she had
not
drawn the shades.

Could it be that Carson's rules drove her to careless rebellion? That some lunatic was now able to look in at Candace, all alone in the house, because she kept up the blinds in revolt? But that wasn't the whole story. She
had
to keep the blinds raised so that if, by some wild chance, Phoulish Phlame should fly by, she could look in and see Candace through the glass. Stop. Announce that she was home.

“You called the newspaper?”

“It'll be in tomorrow. And I called the Humane Society and the
Shopper
”

“You know to be extra careful about talking to strangers on the phone?” A statement that was also a question. “Some nut could see your notice.”

Adult voices drifted across the telephone line. A scraping of chairs. Laughter. Carson was staying with a former colleague and her husband,
people with whom Carson and his ex-wife had been friends. Tomorrow, Carson explained, he and his kids might drive to the hog farm; then they would take a couple of rooms at a motel on the edge of Iowa City, a place where they could eat and swim and just loll around. When Carson said the name of the motel, Candace flushed. Before she knew Carson, while she was still an undergraduate, Candace had been at that motel with a man she met while working at the movie theater. The man came from Pennsylvania and had a connection to the big college testing company down the road from the motel. Danny Halverson. Danny Halverson took Candace out for dinner at the motel's restaurant, a big beef and whiskey sort of place with plaid banquettes. Afterward, when Danny Halverson suggested they stop by his room for a drink, Candace thought it would be unsophisticated to object. Of course, she
was
unsophisticated. Downright
dumb
, she later realized—though she had been to the dorm rooms of a few boys by then. The boys, like the other people in her classes, assumed she was like them. They did not know she found the university a foreign country. She had kissed a few of those boys. She did not object when plump but handsome Danny Halverson kissed her. A grownup wearing a three-piece suit and an aftershave lotion that made her simultaneously want to laugh and swoon, Danny Halverson struck Candace as the visual equivalent of the restaurant below them. After he took off her shirt, however, Danny Halverson revealed that he had a camera in his room. He wanted to take pictures of Candace without her clothes. Though Danny Halverson's fleshy neck turned pink at the announcement of his desire, Candace found him sufficiently intimidating that she did allow him to snap one picture (bra, jeans, sneakers) before she announced a need to use the bathroom, and slipped out into the motel hall with a bath towel draped over her bare shoulders, and made her way to her room in the bus driver's house, first, by walking in the boggy ditches between the motel and town, then darting through backyards and alleys.

Carson said, “There's no reason you couldn't fly up here, Candy. If you're feeling too bad. You could drive on to Illinois with me.”

“But I'm supposed to be
working
. And how could I leave, anyway, while I'm waiting to hear about Phoul?”

Carson sighed. “I suppose Joyce felt awful about it. How'd she seem to be doing, anyway?”

Candace did not mention Joyce Burton's drinking for fear she might be tattling. Which struck her as an accomplishment until she considered the possibility that perhaps she did not mention the drinking for fear it would make Carson even more concerned about Joyce Burton's state of mind.

Did Candace love Carson so because, by having to consider his mortality, she found her own, and, then, curled at its side—almost invisible, that embryo that had waited for a source of nourishment to come along—her morality?

As soon as the two hung up, Candace felt lonely, and she went to the refrigerator, where she had posted Maryvonne's telephone numbers.

“There wasn't any bird around when
I
got to Valley National! And am I in deep shit at work now!” said Maryvonne. “Oh, and that woman called again, you know? The one that scared off your bird in the first place? She's coming by to make a copy of my cockatiel tape. I guess she wants to find your bird. Is she weird? Like, do you think she'll screw up my tape?”

“Oh, no.” For a moment, discretion stopped Candace from saying more; but then a sense that she ought to defend Joyce Burton arose in her, and she added, “She's been through a lot lately. You may have read in the paper—a student at the university killed himself last week? That was her boyfriend. I mean, he did it in front of her. The creep.”

“I saw that! That was awful! So you know them, huh?”

“Just a little,” Candace said, then sternly corrected herself, “Not really. He was my husband's student. My husband knew him. That's why she came by the house. To bring back books he'd borrowed from my husband.”

Maryvonne made a loud shivering noise—ooooo! “So now you got books in your house some
dead
guy read. . . .”

The books sat on Carson's desk, among them a pamphlet on microfossils and a volume of
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

“Talk about creepy newspaper stories, though!” Maryvonne made her shivering noise again. “Did you see that one about the scuba diver that died in the forest fire? Some place in California?”

Candace did not answer. She felt suddenly guilt stricken, hot. How could she have offered up Joyce Burton's sad story to a stranger? She was a monster!

“Stop me if you heard this,” Maryvonne continued, “but, like, after this big forest fire in California, the Forest Service guys found a body in the ashes, and it was dressed in full
scuba gear
, and they're all, like, scratching their heads. ‘How'd a guy in
scuba gear
end up in a fucking forest fire?' Then this investigator's reading his newspaper over breakfast, and he sees some local diver guy disappeared on a dive, and, oh,
shit
, he realizes what happened is, this guy, out diving, got scooped up by one of the big planes they use to take up ocean water to dump on
forest fires!”

Was that story true? After Candace got off the telephone with Maryvonne, she told herself it was
not
true. It was probably one of those apocryphal tales, like the one in which the medical student goes to receive his cadaver, and it turns out to be his fiancée.

Still, that night, when Candace climbed into bed, the scuba diver story came back to her, and she could not stop herself from imagining the horror of being scooped up by a huge and noisy thing, trapped, absolutely trapped, and then falling from the sky into roaring flames. To distract herself from such imaginings, Candace tried to unravel the horrible fascination such stories held. With their freakish coincidences, their ironies, they were quite different from the sad story told by the Gulf War vet. The vet went about telling his story in an attempt to inspire others, and, perhaps, even himself; telling his story gave him a reason to live.

The column numbered 16 in the Personals section of the
Arizona Daily Star
was the one for Lost and Found. Candace, reading the column while waiting for the kitchen timer to ding, remembered how reluctantly she had checked it in the weeks after Phoulish Phlame first flew down to her at the pool.

The kitchen timer was set to ring at nine o'clock, the hour at which the Humane Society would open, and Candace could give them a call.

Among the lost: a set of Snap-On tools, a conure named Petra, an aged basset hound needing medicine, a tennis bracelet, the cockatiels belonging to Maryvonne and Candace, a briefcase whose return would bring a reward, no questions asked.

Found: four mixed-breed puppies, a gray cockatiel, a set of bow and arrows, an elderly black Lab, a medieval-type costume (call to identify).

If no one claimed them, could Candace please have the puppies, the old black Lab, the gray cockatiel? She stared at the column, trying to make her yearning for Phoul form a concretion so dense its gravity would pull the bird home.

“Oh,” said the friendly Humane Society worker who took Candace's call, “just a minute ago, when I pulled in, there was a guy in the parking lot with a white cockatiel, and while I opened up, the family that'd lost it pulled in!”

“But, how'd they know for sure it was their cockatiel?” Candace was panicky, her cheeks inflamed. “I mean, my cockatiels white, too. And I have a friend who's got a white one, lost, too.” At her use of the word “friend,” Candace blushed. Such presumption! “Did you take their phone number or anything?” she asked hopefully.

“It was their bird, miss.” The Humane Society woman was now firmly disapproving. “The children recognized it right off.”

After the Humane Society woman hung up, Candace stared out at the blue-blue sky. Had it cooled off at all last night? Recently, she had read an article stating that, in Phoenix, the mushrooming buildings and streets now trapped so much of the desert heat that the city no longer experienced the relief of nighttime cooling.
In fast-growing
Tucson and Phoenix, development moves into open land at the rate of one acre an hour
. “Hey!” On the mirror upon the carport roof, house finches and sparrows and white-winged doves now devoured the seed she had put out for Phoulish Phlame. She pounded on the screen door until the birds flew off; then she picked up the telephone again.

Maryvonne proved gratifyingly distressed by the Humane Society story. “Did you give them our numbers?” she asked. “In case the people call back?”

“Yes.” Candace looked out at the carport roof. The birds had descended on the seeds once more, but now they flew up as a small blue car parked in front of the old Buick.

An enormous basket began to emerge from the driver's side of the car. No, not a basket. One of the enormous sombreros that certain tourists picked up down in Nogales, but that no Mexicans actually wore anymore—if they had ever worn them at all.

The person beneath die sombrero began to approach the house. Joyce Burton. Who, spying Candace at the window, called out, “I got a cockatiel in my car!”

“Hold on,” Candace told Maryvonne. “That woman's here who borrowed your tape and she's got a bird.” Candace set down the telephone, though she could hear Maryvonne demand: “What color? Put her on!”

Joyce Burton was red-faced with excitement, so Candace did not feel at all embarrassed running across the gravel yard to the little blue car.

“By the back right—no, there it goes!”

The bird inside the car flew, shrieking, to cling to a window that Joyce Burton had left cracked open at the top.

“Phoul,” Candace called. She could see that the bird's back was not entirely white but marked by asymmetrical blotches of yellow and gray, but for both her own and Joyce Burton's sake—perhaps this bird could turn into her bird?—she stayed with hands cupped against the window, staring in, until she had no choice but to turn to Joyce Burton and smile and shake her head.

Joyce Burton removed the sombrero and slapped it gloomily against her thigh. “How do you know for sure?”

“The markings, and she wouldn't act like that with me. But, hey!” Candace smiled. “It's amazing you
found
a bird, Joyce! And
caught
it! Come on and we'll tell Maryvonne. I think her bird's white like mine, but I bet she'll want to come see this one, just to make sure.”

When the women entered the house, they found that Maryvonne's voice continued to buzz from the telephone on Carson's desk and, apparently meaning to enter into the spirit of things, Joyce Burton shouted from across the room a jolly, “Hey, Maryvonne!” When she picked up the receiver, however, Joyce Burton made a face of repugnance before she said in a normal voice, “Why don't you come over to Candy's and check out this bird?”