This Must Be the Place: A Novel (16 page)

7
Mona Should Have Known

Mona should have guessed. She should have known the second he rang her doorbell and stepped into her hall, should have seen it in his dreamy demeanor, the disconnect in his eyes, his apparent lack of interest in both hygiene and social activity. It couldn’t have been any plainer if she had turned his hand over and found, scribbled across his palm in blue ballpoint:
Amy was here.

Amy had always had a way of making men lose their minds. Not their hearts necessarily, though sometimes the hearts came part and parcel—it looked as though Arthur, torn up in all senses of the word, had made the full investment. The boys who fell for Amy in high school were geeks and geniuses, quiet boys with wet eyes and acne and a murderous desire to touch the boobs of a girl who knew William Gibson wasn’t Mel’s brother. Mona had long ago diagnosed it as a case of like liking like, of dorks recognizing in Amy their own zeal for the arcane, their passion for a single activity that would never matter as much to anyone else as it did to them. For Amy, that single activity had been making monsters; for the boys who went nuts over her, that single activity quickly morphed from playing
Magic: The Gathering
in their wood-paneled basements to obsessing over Amy. The end result was always the same: they would make an overture, Amy would stonewall them with a cold silent stare, and they would slink away like beaten dogs. One of them, Ricky Ettinger, fashioned a homemade mace out of a baseball and thumbtacks, swung it at the family dog, and was sent to the psychiatric hospital in Syracuse for a month. Amy took no responsibility for her role in their madness, and Mona, who silently thought
Amy didn’t have to be quite so mean to them, would nonetheless roll her eyes and nod in solidarity.

Mona suspected she must have lost her mind a little over Amy as well—how else to explain a decade of best friendship? Amy Henderson was selfish and self-centered, so self-involved as to be completely innocent: she legitimately forgot to call you for an entire weekend when you’d made plans to see a movie together. She was driven and obsessive and exhausting. But she had the ability to convince you that if you had a real dream, no matter how ridiculous or insane—she wanted to make monster movies, for shit’s sake—you could will it into reality through nothing but frenzy and focus. It was something Mona had only ever thought to believe in when she was around Amy.

Amy came with her own universe, her own reality. If you stood close enough, you were enveloped the way an extra or a piece of set dressing becomes part of a scene: present but invisible. They met when they were both kindergartners at Ruby Falls Elementary, when Amy slipped on a patch of wet October leaves on the playground and Mona helped her back to her feet. Amy had fallen in mud, smearing the seat of her purple Health Tex corduroys with brown, and no sooner had Mona steadied her than the shrieks of laughter began. But even more memorable that day than the taunts of
poopy pants baby
was Amy’s response to the situation: she’d squinted at her tormentors, the kids already growing into the bullies they’d spend their entire lives being, shrugged, turned to Mona, and said, “Whatever. Screw ’em.”

Mona still remembered how she’d imagined the word
screw
as a cartoon, like the letters and words on
Sesame Street
, squeezing into her delicate five-year-old ears and burning as it went. “Ouch,” she’d said, and clapped her hands to either side of her face. Amy had laughed (“Oh, come on, it’s hardly a swear”) and asked if Mona had ever seen
The Clash of the Titans
.

That was the kernel of their friendship, and in many ways it never altered beyond the basic structure set on that cold afternoon when they were five: Amy would do or say something that would either shock or amuse Mona, Mona’s reaction would snap Amy out of her self-absorption long enough for Amy to realize what she’d done, and then they’d go watch a movie. They’d watched many, many movies: monster movies,
horror movies, science-fiction movies, movies about hideously mutated lizards and hairy wolf-men from other planets and slimy serpents born of man’s meddling with science, come forth from the sea to teach their creators a lesson. If there was a creature waddling or stomping or slithering across the screen, Amy wanted to see it; and Mona was genuinely eager to learn why this beast, this being born from someone’s imagination and given three dimensions (or two dimensions, rather, that looked like three) meant so much to her friend.

Mona knew her parents weren’t entirely happy that she was joined at the hip with weird Amy Henderson, raised by her shut-in grandfather in that ramshackle trailer house out in the woods, but the more time Amy spent over at the Darby-Jones, the less Mona’s parents seemed to worry. Amy charmed. Amy was polite. Amy, when Mona’s parents weren’t around, was fond of proselytizing to Mona about how very small-minded and claustrophobic the world of Ruby Falls was, how sad and lame were the lives of everyone they knew, but that was why Mona loved her. Amy had passions, and for a girl like Mona—who, most days, felt as formless and doughy as a hunk of clay—Amy was magic. It was a magic inextricably linked with the dreams and promise of her childhood, which, in retrospect, had been the
specific
dreams and
specific
promise of only one of them. When she tried to recall what she had wanted out of life as a child, Mona could only remember wanting to be Amy’s best friend—until Amy took herself away and Mona grew up without her.

And now she was back.

Harryhausen. The last time Mona saw Harryhausen, he’d been a kitten. She’d gone to visit Amy in Los Angeles, just once, years after Amy ran away, when Oneida was barely out of toddlerhood and Mona was barely an adult. Harryhausen the kitten had thrown up in her suitcase when she had less than an hour to make it to the Burbank airport. And now, after a span of time nearly as long as her entire friendship with Amy, to see Harryhausen the cat, full-grown, puddle himself into a massive pile of fur and fat on
her
staircase—and then in the ambulance, when Arthur was mainlining morphine and grinning like an idiot, to hear him say,
Hi, Amy. I missed you.

Mona, her back pressed against a wall of cubbies stocked with
needles and tubes and bandages, had squeezed Arthur’s hand and he had called her beautiful—
her
, Mona—which was a shock, but then, hey, we’ve all said crazy things under the influence of hospital-grade opiates. His eyes rolled white and he fell under again, and the EMT, dabbing gauze on the weeping lacerations all over his chest, said quietly, almost to herself, “She’s right here. She’s here.” The EMT had hay-colored hair, and there was a weird smell, a sharp chemical trace that made Mona think of seeing her father for the last time in the ICU, and then Mona realized that the EMT was as confused as Arthur and thought she really
was
Amy, and she laughed, far too loud, because how the fuck had any of this happened?

Mona didn’t know how to begin putting the pieces together. She only knew that all evidence pointed to Amy Henderson, the friend she’d had in another life, and the task of reconciling the two Monas—the loyal sidekick and best friend with the landlady baker and single mother—overwhelmed her. Christ, what could she possibly have to say to Amy? What would Amy have to say to her?

All of this crashed into Mona well after midnight, after she brought Arthur home and put him to bed. And then, tucking Oneida in, she’d felt a mixture of terror and dread, overcome with the horror of time (and the loss of it), and it had taken all her strength to walk to her own bedroom, wash her face, brush her teeth, kick off her sneakers, and slip out of her jeans and T-shirt before collapsing to her knees on the floor, pants still around her ankles. A sixteen-year-old weight resettled itself across her shoulders like an elephant shifting its haunches. Mona wound her fingers into the deep green shag carpeting that had been in her room all her life, that Amy had loved because it was the perfect height for tiny monsters to prowl on safari.

What had Amy done?

What did Arthur know?

She crawled into bed and pulled the covers up tight to her chin and thought about the Amy she had known—and how could she be any different? Amy was unchangeable, Amy was still sixteen—and that Amy hardly told anyone anything, so it was a safe bet Arthur Rook had no idea, really, what he’d stumbled into. The silver band Bert had made such a stink about at dinner was, indeed, right there on Arthur’s ring
finger—so did that mean Arthur and
Amy
were husband and wife? (Had she cheated on him, left him?) Not that she ever expected Amy to send a wedding announcement or, hell, invite Mona to her wedding, but—when had
that
happened? She pictured the sleeping Arthur, flat on his back in what had once been her parents’ bed, and tried to imagine Amy sleeping beside him, as she may have. She couldn’t. Mona would have chosen a mad genius for
her
Amy to marry, if she ever married at all. Someone with wild intelligence in his face, knobby hands, a fantastic beard. Not a blandly cute, unremarkable space cadet whose overall aesthetic might be best described as High School Biology Teacher.

Did you even want to tell me, Amy?
she thought, pulling the covers over her head.

So Amy now, as Amy had been then, was shut tight as an oyster, working her grain of sand without comment. Mona had always been the one with some secret to share or crush to confess. Only twice in the course of their friendship had Amy shared a secret with Mona, and both times under the explicit conditions that Mona promise not to tell anyone, ever.

Both times, Mona had promised. She wondered how many secrets Amy had told Arthur, and if that had anything to do with his broken brain. When Amy made you promise not to tell, you ended up swearing to more than you ever expected.

The first time she promised, they were both thirteen. Mona remembered seventh grade as a perpetual state of frustration with Amy: they were best friends. They each had half of a jagged-edged heart charm necklace, but if Amy wouldn’t pay any attention to her or tell Mona any of her secrets, what was the point? They’d been sitting on opposite ends of the blue corduroy couch in the den downstairs, painting their fingernails and half-watching a Godzilla movie. Mona had just confessed to Amy that she wanted Eric Cole to ask her to the middle school spring dance. Amy hadn’t said a word in reply.

“God, Amy. You’re not even listening to me.”

“I am so listening to you.”

“No, you’re not. I could tell you the most horrifying, the most secret and private thing I’ve ever told anyone on the planet, and you’d say, like,
George Lucas would sell his soul to be Ray Harryhausen.
”

“Lucas
would
sell his soul to be Harryhausen.” Amy flexed her hands and blew on her fingernails, freshly painted a sparkly green.

Mona could still feel it—the anger rising in her spine, making her sit up straighter. She could picture herself on that ratty couch, now almost twenty years older and still darkening the den downstairs, could still feel Amy sitting beside her, eyes glued to the television. As easily as cuing up a song, Mona could recall the indignation of having her supposed best friend not bat an eye at her confession—because Eric Cole was an asshole, the kind of kid who threw rocks at stray cats, and yes: Mona would go to the dance with him if he asked her. Why? Because he was cute. No: he was
hot
. He was
dangerous
. But wasn’t Amy supposed to warn her? Tell her Eric Cole was no good? Wasn’t her best friend supposed to care?

“Whatever, Eric Cole’s just a substitute,” Mona said. “Because I’m
really
in love with Ben.”

Ben Tennant lived on the third floor of the Darby-Jones, in the same room that would one day be the site of so much veterinarian-on-shop-teacher embarrassment for Oneida. He was one of the youngest renters ever to live under the Darby-Jones roof: in his mid-twenties but hypnotically adult to anyone under the age of eighteen—and beautiful. He had eyes as blue as paint and thick brown hair that curled at the base of his neck in ringlets like glossy chocolate shavings. He smiled easily and often, and he had a real live dimple on his left cheek when he grinned wide enough to laugh. When he first introduced himself to Mona at dinner, she hadn’t been able to stop her stupid mouth from asking what grade he was in—and no, he wasn’t a student, but he
did
go to high school with her every day. He was the substitute music and drama teacher at Ruby Falls, a position that had only recently been created after the band director wrecked his car (and himself) in late March, creating a temporary position in the music department and, more critically, a directorial hole in the school musical—a yearly event which, aside from the undefeated women’s volleyball team, was one of the few sources of extracurricular pride to be found at RFH. Ben rented at the Darby-Jones to avoid having to drive back and forth every day from Syracuse, where he lived with his fiancée, who was getting her master’s degree from the university. He would move out of the Darby-Jones in late May when
the music program director came back to school on crutches; and though he would return for the next five years to direct the spring musical, he never lived at the Darby-Jones again after that spring.