The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (24 page)

“Guess he told you that,” she said.

Lily nodded. “Was it a kind of game?”

Dolores’s foot pressed the gas pedal and the car moved faster. “Told you ’bout that, too, did he? Guess it was foolhardy of me to think he’d keep that to himself. Game? We played the game, all right. I’d lose myself, and he’d find me. I’d hear him stomping around and get real hot—”

Lily cut her off. “He didn’t say that. He wouldn’t say that.” The pain in her voice was obvious, and Lily regretted it.

Neither of them spoke for about thirty seconds.

“Don’t take it too hard,” Dolores said finally. “There’s a whole lot worse in this world than that kind of game playin’. There’s a lot of men right here in town who’ve got a game no one’ll play with them. I oughta know. It don’t do nobody no harm, an’ it’s a comfort to them. I ain’t ashamed of it.” She paused. “The funny thing ’bout it is even weirdos run in types. There ain’t nothin’ new under the sun. Kinda makes you wonder.” Dolores lifted a hand from the wheel and flapped it.

“But hiding’s your game, Dolores, not Ed’s.”

Dolores slowed the car. “It takes two to play, honey.”

But Lily saw the woman’s face go slack with emotion. She’s better-looking when she’s mean, Lily thought. Dolores drove across the railroad tracks slowly, and Lily pressed her nose to the window. When she turned back to Dolores, the woman’s face looked pink and moist with what may have been tears, although Lily couldn’t see any drops in her eyes.

When they turned onto Division Street, Dolores said, “I didn’t take money, you know. Only for the modeling.”

“Right,” Lily said. The car stopped in front of the Ideal Cafe, and Lily remembered she didn’t have a job. I’d better try to make it up with Vince, she thought, opened the door and slammed it shut. “Thanks,” she said to Dolores, who was slumped over the wheel in a posture as dramatic as it was irritating. “What’s the matter with you?” Lily spoke in a sharp voice.

Dolores lifted her head and looked at Lily with large, sincere eyes. “Tell the old lady thanks for the food and stuff.”

“What?” Lily said.

“The stuff she brought over to me Sunday morning. It was real neighborly of her. I was pretty low at the time, so I didn’t say much, but she’s a good woman, and I’d like you to tell her so. Tell her I’m glad she told me what she did. She’ll know what I mean.” Dolores smiled sweetly. Then she tossed her long hair over one shoulder and said, “See you around,” her voice lilting with false femininity. She tugged her dress down to her knees, wiggled her buttocks into the seat and turned the key. Lily moved back from the window and would have let Dolores drive off with her bicycle if she hadn’t seen it in the partly opened trunk. “Stop!”

Lily’s screaming at Dolores and the subsequent ordeal of untying the rope and lifting the bicycle out of the trunk didn’t go unnoticed. It wasn’t clear whether Dolores felt the customers in the Ideal Cafe staring at them or whether she saw Beulah Bjornson stop dead in her tracks outside Tiny’s Smoke Shop to watch them. If she did, she didn’t show it, and Lily couldn’t help admiring her obliviousness even if it was just an act. She took her bicycle by the handlebars and said, “Thanks, Dolores.” Then she added, “I mean it,” because for some reason she did.

Wheeling her bicycle toward the cafe window, Lily looked inside. Two middle-aged women in Martin’s booth stared back at her, and before Lily had time to squelch the impulse, she had dropped the kickstand on her bike and was making goggle eyes at them. She stuck her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers. It was a silly, childish thing to do, but looking at those two astonished faces through the glass, Lily couldn’t help feeling it was worth it.

3

Walking up the stairs, Lily heard scraping noises from Mabel’s apartment. She should be at Ed’s now, Lily thought. Something’s gone wrong. Mabel was sweating when she came to the door, and Lily realized that she had never seen the woman perspire even in the worst heat, but now drops of sweat stood out on her upper lip, and her forehead shone with moisture. She was wearing a big white shirt rolled to the elbows, and her thin white arms were trembling.

“Mabel,” Lily said. “What’s going on?”

“I moved it back.” She gestured at the room with a limp hand and sighed. “The whole room.… I didn’t know where I was anymore. It was so stupid of me. I thought it was time for a revolution, you know, a new order, but I found it awful, just awful.… I was so unhappy with the sofa over there.” She pointed. “It was like trying to learn Russian at fifty-seven. I did try that. My brain had calcified by then, and I simply couldn’t do the cases, much less those sounds. It should have been a lesson to me, but oh, no, I had to be clever and bold and disrupt it all. My nerves simply couldn’t take it, and pushing all that heavy furniture around…”

“You moved the furniture? When did you move the furniture? Are you crazy? You should have asked me to help you.” Lily looked at Mabel’s hands. The knuckles were red and swollen. She studied Mabel’s face. “Dolores says thank you for the food, and she said that I was supposed to tell you she’s glad you told her what you did, that you’d know what she meant.”

“You’ve been to see her, too, have you?” Mabel looked closely at Lily.

“No. I ran into her at Frank and Dick Bodler’s.”

Mabel looked puzzled. “You don’t mean those men with the bags who look like they just crawled out of a mine?”

“Yup,” Lily said and folded her arms. Then she said softly, “Why did you go to see Dolores?”

“I wanted to ask her about Ed and, and the portrait.”

“Why didn’t you ask him?”

“I wanted the other side. And I wanted to know about the ghosts.” Mabel wiped her upper lip. “I have to sit down.” She sank into the sofa and sighed, her legs straight out on the floor in front of her.

Lily sat down beside her. “What did she say?”

“Not a thing. I talked. I guess she heard me. I wasn’t sure.”

“She’s fresh as a daisy now,” Lily said.

“The portrait’s bothering me, Lily.” Mabel rubbed her cheek gently, as if it were another person’s skin. “I don’t know what to do. You should see it now. We worked today. It’s, it’s, oh, I don’t know, when I look at it, I feel upset. I’m well aware that no one’s going to care one way or the other about the identity of the old lady in Edward Shapiro’s painting, and yet I feel that I’m being pulled into a crisis a part of me willed and another part resists. I’m not sure Ed fully understands it. I’m not sure he even knows what he’s doing, but there’s something in him that’s aggressive, not his manner, you understand, but the work—he strikes the heart.” Mabel swallowed. “He painted his wife. Did you know that?”

Lily shook her head.

“It ended the marriage.”

Lily didn’t say anything.

“I guess it started out all right, and then something went wrong. He didn’t go into it in detail, but you know what he said?”

“No.”

“He said he
saw
her, really saw her.” Mabel looked into Lily’s eyes.

Lily moved her eyes away from Mabel to the window. She wondered what Ed had seen, and why she found it upsetting, but she said, “It’s just a painting, Mabel. You’re all worked up over nothing.”

Lily stared into Mabel’s white face and she spoke to her softly. “Is it the story in the boxes?”

Mabel turned away. She didn’t nod or speak.

“Partly,” she said in a soft voice.

Then a suspicion took sudden hold of Lily. “I’d be careful what you tell Dolores. You shouldn’t trust her, Mabel. She could easily blab anything you say to the girl who does her nails down at Miriam’s, to Willy at the shoe repair, to anybody!”

“I’m not sure that’s who she is, Lily.” Mabel smiled with her mouth closed. Her eyes looked shiny as she pushed away a wisp of hair from her forehead.

The two women sat on the sofa beside each other without talking for a long time. Lily thought about being fired and about rehearsal and that Martin would be at the Arts Guild, and then she told Mabel about Martin. It was a partial confession because she omitted details that had become part of the story, even though they weren’t really a part of it—Helen Underdahl Bodler and the shoes she had stolen and burned and buried, Dolores in the grass, and Dick and Frank in that house. But Lily told her about Martin’s note and the map, about Becky Runevold and the rocking chair. She told her about leaving work and snooping in Martin’s house and finding the T-shirt. Mabel listened intently. She listened so hard her small body tensed all over, and when Lily finished, Mabel lifted her chin, stared at a blue wooden egg that lay in a bowl on the coffee table and said, “There are any number of explanations for that shirt,” she said. “You do understand that, don’t you?”

Mabel’s words echoed in Lily’s head after she had said them. She remembered touching the blue fabric, remembered feeling it was tainted, the sign of an unspeakable thing. Why had she been so sure that it had belonged to the girl people were seeing? Why hadn’t it entered her mind that it might belong to somebody else: Martin’s sister or a friend? Lily looked into Mabel’s face. “Yes,” she said. “But I feel there’s something…”

The woman folded her hands in her lap and said, “Yes, there is something. A mind burning holes in the world.”

Lily didn’t answer this, and yet she didn’t deny that the enigmatic sentence made a kind of sense to her.

“Would it be okay if I sat in on rehearsal tonight?” Mabel said. “I would like to watch anyway, but perhaps if I saw him…” She didn’t finish.

“I think that’s a good idea.” Lily needed an ally, and she didn’t want to face Martin alone. “He acts like he’s got something on me,” she continued, “like a blackmailer or something.” Lily stopped talking. It was you, she said to herself and stared at the floor. The possibility, mad as it was, that she might have lost time and consciousness, that she might have remembered wrong or forgotten a crucial event played like a little tune in the back of her mind. It wasn’t that she accepted what Martin had said as the truth, but she acknowledged uncertainty for the first time, and she felt it as an annoying melody of doubt, like a stupid chorus from a television commercial or pop song that you hum almost without knowing it, and every time you try to get it out of your head, you can’t.

*   *   *

Martin’s cuts must have been healing well, because he used the hand freely both onstage and off-. Mabel sat in a folding chair in the second row throughout, and Lily worried that there was nothing for the woman to see—in Martin, at least. Watching him herself, Lily saw an unobtrusive, cooperative young man who made a good Cobweb. He stared a little too much and blinked too little, but so what? Everybody was used to that. Lily began to wish he would do or say something to reveal himself. She hoped he would send her another note she could show to Mabel or that he would make a scene in front of the cast. While she was pretending to sleep at the rear of the stage and had opened her right eye just enough to see Martin patting Bottom’s Ass head, Lily heard Mabel laugh loudly, and she daydreamed that Martin suddenly broke out of his role as Cobweb, turned to the audience and confessed. She didn’t invent the exact content of the confession, but in the fantasy he shocked the audience. She saw him red-faced and stuttering, his arms flailing. By the time the fairies left the stage, the story had progressed to a point where the cast had jumped him and was hauling him off to the police station. After that, Lily decided to push her luck.

She took her chance once rehearsal ended and Martin walked past her carrying three costumes over his arm. He was headed for the stairs, and despite the fact that they were not alone—Jim, Denise and Oren were talking just beyond the doors—Lily moved close to Martin and said in a strained but quiet voice, “I know what you’ve done.”

Martin stopped and faced her. He stared, but his face didn’t move.

“I’m telling you I know,” she repeated.

Martin nodded at her but didn’t speak.

Behind Martin, she saw Mabel. Her eyes met Lily’s, and in that instant Lily understood what she had done. She wasn’t only lying. She was pretending to know what she didn’t know, and it occurred to her that this ruse could put her in jeopardy. Martin appeared to be looking through her as he prepared to speak. His mouth moved, and his bandaged hand clutched at the blue material of the costumes. He motioned with his head for her to step aside with him and began to talk, stuttering badly over the first syllable, but the words were clear enough, and after hearing them Lily felt as if she had been kicked hard in the stomach: “So you’ve been to the cave and seen her.” He paused. “I mean,
it.
” Martin moved his head to one side. “D-d-did you expect me to deny it?” Then he looked down at his shoes. “You didn’t move her, did you?”

Lily shook her head, but not in response to Martin’s question. She couldn’t accept what she had heard. Has he said what I think he’s said? Martin’s words had come and gone so quickly, and nobody else seemed to have heard them. Denise was giggling into Jim’s face, and Lily saw Martin turn and walk down the stairs with the costumes as Mrs. Wright announced dress rehearsal for Thursday. “We’re close, people, very close. You have two days of rest, so rest well and get ready for a big weekend. There’ll be no stopping Thursday. If you make mistakes, it’s like a real performance, just make the best of it.”

Mrs. Wright’s voice sounded remote. Lily didn’t move. She heard chatter and footsteps and then someone hitting the triangle that was used when the fairies came onstage.

It was Mabel who decided to follow Martin. Lily reported the conversation in a voice she barely recognized as her own. She didn’t know how she managed to repeat those words at all, but she did, and then she wondered if she fully believed them. The two women sat together in Mabel’s old Saab and waited for Martin to walk through the doors, which he did in a matter of minutes. They watched him say good-bye to Mrs. Baker and saw the woman pat his shoulder affectionately. He walked slowly to his truck with his head down, his wrapped hand looking very pale in the darkness. He climbed into the cab of his truck and drove away. Mabel allowed the truck to move ahead of them for a block and then pulled the Saab onto the avenue and began to follow Martin out of town.