This Must Be the Place: A Novel (10 page)

“This,” Arthur Rook said, and paused between swallows to breathe, “this is the best food I’ve ever eaten.” He took a long swig of water and exhaled. “I want to . . . to
hug
this food.” His cheeks were bright pink and he was smiling. He had a huge smile, Oneida realized, one that made him look like a completely different person—like someone who might be fun to have around, and not just because it was always fun to have a weirdo you could gossip about behind his back.

“You haven’t answered my questions, young man.” A crumble of ground meat trembled on Bert’s lips as she addressed Arthur.

“Which question was that?” Arthur asked. His hand wavered; his fork, carrot speared on its tines, seemed to have forgotten the way to his mouth.

“What brings you to Ruby Falls?” Bert asked.

Arthur’s eyes flicked up and to the right and then back again, to Bert’s face.

“What brings
you
to Ruby Falls?” he said.

Oneida squeaked.

“I was
born
here,” Bert said. Her eyes narrowed. “I’ve lived in this house for twice as long as you’ve lived on this planet and you will show me some respect—”

“Bert,” Mona said quietly.

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” Arthur continued. “I don’t have anything to hide. I’m not—”

“So answer the
question
, young man.”

Arthur looked at Mona—looked right
at
Mona—for help. He might as well have said the words:
Will you tell this old bat to back off?
Oneida saw it. Anna saw it, Mona saw it, and Bert
certainly
saw it.

Bert glared at Mona and ran her tongue over her front teeth.

Mona inhaled. “Bert, please,” she said. “Give him a break.” She
nodded at Arthur. Oneida noticed the glow of gratitude staining his cheeks again, as though he’d made a friend for the first time in his entire life. Arthur Rook’s hunger was as naked as it was unsettling, and Oneida cringed, embarrassed for him. “If he wanted to kill us in our sleep, he’d have done it by now.”

Oneida heard the gentle teasing in her mother’s voice, but Bert reacted as though she’d been smacked.

“You’re despicable, Desdemona. Making excuses—
flirting
, in front of your daughter, with a stranger. A
married
stranger.”

Arthur was married? Oneida squinted across the table, but Arthur’s left hand was half-obscured by the salt shaker.

Mona balked. “I am not
flirting
with him, Bert.” She turned to Arthur. “I’m so sorry for this, Mr. Rook.”

“Arthur,” Arthur said.

“You—” Bert stuttered. “Desdemona Jones, your parents would be ashamed of you.
Ashamed
. Apologizing to
him
after what he’s said to
me
?”

“What did he say to you, Bert, really? What did he say that was so unforgivable?”

“He didn’t say
anything
—that’s what’s so unforgivable. And you—do you have no idea what you have in this house, you silly girl? What you should be protecting? I know more about these rooms and everyone who’s ever slept in these beds and eaten at this table than you can suspect—and that includes you, Miss High-and-Mighty—and I know why and how to protect it. I know
everything
that goes on here”—it wasn’t Oneida’s imagination that she spat those words at Anna and Sherman—“but I can’t be held responsible for your secrets when you let the wolves in at the door. Good night to you all.”

She pushed herself away from the table and Sherman, belatedly, tried to assist and only succeeded in handing Bert her cane. The assorted weirdos, daughters, mothers, and lovers of the Darby-Jones sat together in silence at the dining room table, the emphatic clomp of Bert’s cane the only sound in the entire house. Mona looked over at her daughter, and the faint sheen of fear in Mona’s eyes gave Oneida a horrible chill. Whatever Bert meant by her parting remark, Mona not only knew what she was referring to but agreed—
agreed.
Oneida’s mother had a secret,
and Bert knew what it was, and Oneida, apparently, wasn’t to be told. Despite the meat loaf, the carrots, the fluffy lumps of squash, Oneida’s stomach suddenly felt vast and empty as the Darby-Jones itself: a cold, hollow space echoing with each strike of Roberta Draper’s cane.

Oneida begged off clean-up duty on account of an upset stomach. Which was the truth: Bert’s words had churned her insides something awful. Mona sent her off to finish her homework and go to bed early, and Oneida left without a word. It made her feel sicker to think it, but she didn’t want to be around Mona. She didn’t want to be alone with her mother and be unable to ask what Bert had meant when she spoke of secrets—or, worse, be able to ask, and find out, and then not be able to un-know.

She and Mona occupied the two bedrooms in the Darby-Jones’s rear second-floor wing, their rooms both opening on the main hall and separated from each other by a bathroom, which Mona called the Green Room: a shared walk-in closet and vanity that Mona had to cross to reach the shower and sink. Oneida’s was the smaller room but by far the better: it occupied one corner of the house and had three windows, one with a built-in window seat that overlooked the Darby-Jones property. A giant maple tree grew less than six feet from the edge of the foundation, and the branches had to be trimmed every spring to keep them from growing right into Oneida’s room. She protested the trimming every year, because she liked the idea of being able to climb out her window and down the maple tree, liked having the option of escape. The tree turned a brilliant orange-red in fall, and the late afternoon sun shining through the leaves plastered against the window filled her room with golden red light. Like stained glass, Oneida thought. Like her room was not only secluded but sacred.

Without taking off her sneakers, Oneida flopped on top of her bed and pulled her blue blanket up to her chin. Homework. She had homework to do; not much but hopefully enough to keep her mind off what had happened at dinner. She stuck her foot out from under the blanket and snagged her school bag, dragged it to the side of her bed, and rooted blindly for the ratty school-owned copy of
The Scarlet Letter
that
Ms. Heffernan had passed out on Monday. It was falling apart, the pages stained with Coke or coffee or worse, corners bent and ripped. It occurred to her that this was the exact opposite of a good distraction, as she couldn’t picture Hester and Pearl without seeing Mona’s face and her own, an infant in Mona’s arms, in the framed picture Mona kept on her dresser: a candid taken by Oneida’s grandmother not long after Mona came home from New Jersey. She could have been any baby: big head, big dark eyes, sexless and round. But Mona looked like a statue—a Greek statue, noble beneath the folds of the same blue blanket Oneida lay under—as resolute and unyielding as a piece of marble. With the face of a kid, not much older than Oneida was now, the implications of which Oneida grasped more with every passing birthday.

She hated her brain. It chewed on things—it churned—whether she wanted it to or not.

Mona’s secret was the same as Hester’s. It had to be. The more Oneida thought about it, the more obvious it became. It was the central secret of her entire existence, after all: a secret that had been addressed and sidestepped for so long she’d forgotten there was a real answer, beyond the vague, conciliatory
he wasn’t ready to be a father
—an answer Oneida hadn’t known she was dissatisfied with until that moment. Mona had given her the impression that her father was a nonentity, not worth the time and energy it took even to think about him. Oneida tossed the book aside, spinning with the realization that she had been brainwashed so easily by her mother, had so willingly dismissed the person who had provided fifty percent of her DNA. How could she have lived this life for so long without taking the time to look at it, really look at it, critically?

Bert knew. Roberta Draper knew who her father was.

She stood up and paced. The sun had set and Oneida was surprised by how dark her room had become. She flicked on the overhead light, and the sallow, artificial brightness it threw over everything, coupled with her alarm, caused her to see familiar objects and find them strange. Her bookshelf, painted by Mona with tiny pink and red polka dots, looked diseased instead of cheerful. The blue and yellow ribbons, stamped in white ink with images of microscopes and atoms and words like
SCIENCE, EXCELLENCE
, and
MATHEMATICS
hung limp from her corkboard, unable
to remind her what she’d done to earn them. A jumble of shoes beneath her dresser and a sleeve, red and black striped, dangling from a half-open drawer, held no meaning for her, had been worn by someone else. And her collection of music boxes—Mona gave her a new music box every Christmas—looked grotesque and frightening, the light bending shadows across the shining porcelain faces of rabbits and cartoon characters. She loved her music boxes, adored their precision and mechanical cunning, but in that one moment everything changed. Nothing in the world now seemed sadder to Oneida than to be frozen in wood or china, never playing a new song, twirling in place forever.

She felt she needed to do something, but rushing up to Bert’s room and demanding the truth was far too frightening to imagine. And despite this new ardent feeling of unease about her mother, Oneida knew she ought to confront her first, give her the benefit of the doubt, before plying Bert as a last resort. But not tonight, she thought, wringing her hands. Not tonight. Right now, tonight, she would open her window. Her room was too hot, too stuffy.

The old wood of the window frame was stiff, and her leverage—sitting on the window seat—was poor, but she gave it a violent push and it rattled up. Cold air rushed forward, and she eased her knees over the sill, her forehead against the screen, which she decided to raise, too. Soon there was nothing between Oneida and the outside world, and she breathed in the cold air of early fall and felt calmer. The leaves of the maple tree rustled in her face.

The bottle was tied to the nearest branch. Oneida watched it sway in the breeze for a full minute before she understood that, unlike her other possessions, it actually
was
a foreign object. She barely had to lean out her window to grab it, and when she pulled it closer, the piece of twine that bound it to the maple tree snapped, eaten by the elements. She wondered how long it had been there. What would have happened if it had fallen and she had never found it—whatever it was?

Oneida crossed her legs on the window seat and examined the bottle. It was old, stoppered with a cork, greenish with raised letters, like the bottles she’d seen in antiques shops and flea markets. The embossed glass read
BAKER
’
S TONIC
, but a more recent hand had printed a message in tight, controlled script on a dingy label, half torn off:
IN CASE OF
EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS
. Oneida turned the bottle over in her hand and saw, inside, a tiny scrap of brilliant blue cloth, loosely rolled to resemble a rose—or a cinnamon bun, maybe. It looked soft and downy, velvety, folds undulating from deep midnight blue to a bright azure. Oneida smiled when she realized how much better she’d feel if she could just touch that fabric, rub it against her cheek, feel it warm and rich between her fingers.

She placed the bottle on the windowsill, too worn to wonder, as she would have on any other day, how it had come to hang from the branch outside her window, who had tied it there, when, and why. For now it was reassuring enough to know that, in the course of the coming emergencies, she would have a glass to break.

5
In Dreams

Arthur had always been a dreamer. As a kid he’d rush to breakfast, fresh from adventure, eager to learn what his brother David had seen while he slept. Dave, disappointingly, seldom with anything to report, would slowly blink his ten-year-old lids and shrug, but Arthur had ridden through a pink sky on a cloud of blue cotton candy. He’d been kept in a cage beneath a witch’s kitchen table, fattened up for Thanksgiving, and then watched while the witch’s relatives arrived like actors milling on a stage with tablecloth curtains half-lifted: a parade of stark black high-buttoned boots with vicious heels that had excited him like no dream ever before. He’d even once dreamed himself onto the bridge of the Starship
Enterprise
and had been whipped into a froth of anxiety because he was
supposed
to be on the
Millennium Falcon
; he was in the wrong universe entirely, and Spock had neck-pinched him to shut him up.