This Must Be the Place: A Novel (18 page)

But Mona Jones should have known better. Just as she should have diagnosed Arthur Rook’s obsession, she should have known her childhood wasn’t through with her. In all those movies she and Amy watched, all those creatures born of horrific science experiments, all those heroes tormented by the loved ones they failed to save, there was one constant: the past was never past. It always came back to kick your ass.

Mona liked Monday mornings. She liked the bustle of Sherman and Anna and her daughter stirring from their weekend routines, blinking back sleep, guzzling coffee and orange juice as they gathered the will to face another weekday cycle. Bert, who ate breakfast in her top-floor belfry, wouldn’t come down until lunchtime. The hours between eight and noon on Monday were the first in approximately forty-eight that Mona had to herself—to read the paper, to check her e-mail, to nurse a cup of creamy coffee with her feet propped on the arm of the couch, something low and moody playing on the stereo. Pink Floyd, maybe, or early Garbage. Nine Inch Nails, if she needed energy for a day of hard work.

But this Monday was very different, and Mona, uncharacteristically, didn’t mind. She was too curious about what had happened to land Arthur on her doorstep to begrudge him her hours. She did begrudge him Harryhausen, though: she could hear Amy’s cat galloping like a tiny fat pony up and down the stairs and then into the kitchen, around the table, and out into the front hall again. Mona didn’t know a creature with as high a ratio of fat to muscle as Harryhausen could move that fast. She wondered if Amy and Arthur had a small apartment, if this was the first time in years the cat had this much room to run. Yet another question for her patient when he was aware enough to be asked.

She lifted Arthur’s breakfast tray and breezed carefully out of the kitchen. Oneida was standing in the front hall, brushing her hair back into a ponytail before the school bus came. Mona smiled, as she always did when she watched her daughter try to tame the follicular explosion that passed for her hair, and hoped Oneida didn’t catch her. Her daughter had been even more awkward and quiet lately, and the last thing she needed was an indication that her mother was laughing at her. Mona
wasn’t sure what was going on in Oneida’s head—she supposed some of the tension came from the Arthur Rook situation, which Oneida thought was bizarre in the extreme and which Mona didn’t have the energy, at the moment, to explain to her. In time, she might. Mona didn’t feel like sharing Arthur with her daughter—it didn’t feel like any of Oneida’s business. Which was odd, but true: Arthur was the first thing in a long time she didn’t want to share.

Mona was in awe of her daughter. She freely acknowledged it might not be the healthiest way to raise a child; to think your kid was totally the shit surely wasn’t the most objective method of child rearing. She couldn’t look at Oneida without remembering the very first time she held her and the sensation of absolute terror blooming in her chest that made it difficult to breathe and impossible to think. She remembered an intense urge to throw the baby, to get it away from her body; had gone so far as to imagine herself hurling this squirming lump in her arms like a football, spiraling through the air, and then turning and running before she saw if anyone was around to catch her pass. But her arms were locked, rigid and shaking. Her body refused to give up this baby, no matter what her brain wanted.

She didn’t actually fall in love with Oneida until she was five or six—it was definitely after her trip to Los Angeles—when it became clear that Oneida was insanely intelligent and just as bizarre. Finally, Mona had a captive audience: someone who always laughed at her jokes and would make her laugh in return, who wanted to hang out with her, wanted to learn from her. It was a relief: for as insistent as she was that she not give the baby up for adoption, she couldn’t ignore her disappointment during the first years of Oneida’s life. Those years had been an endless maelstrom of diapers and sticky fingers, sleeplessness, and the endless, maddening frustration of trying to communicate with a tiny creature who didn’t even know how to talk. Her own parents took the lead during Oneida’s infancy and were unfailingly supportive. She didn’t know, in hindsight, what she had done to deserve such grace from the people whose lives she’d altered radically without once considering how it might affect them, but she didn’t question it. They were both dead; she missed them. It was enough to go on, to run the house, to be a grown-up, and to raise their grandkid. Their awesome, brilliant grandkid.

“Have a good day, O,” she said. Oneida may have mumbled something in return, but it was lost as she closed the door behind her.

Mona balanced Arthur’s breakfast tray on her hip as she turned his doorknob—he’d lost the privilege of a locked door the second he stole that photo off her wall—and wasn’t surprised to feel Harryhausen hurtle between her legs as she stepped into his room. Mona had left everything the way she’d found it: the postcards on the wall, the clothesline, the little piles of photos and stubs; and the weirdly familiar-looking pink shoebox on the coffee table had struck her as the pieces of a play already in progress, props it would be best not to rearrange. She had no idea what Arthur was thinking when he’d made such a spectacular disaster. It was a mess, yes, but Mona suspected it wasn’t senseless—Arthur had been defacing and cluttering her property to a tune only he could hear, but to a tune nonetheless. She found it strangely charming, that this was what happened when he had a mental breakdown. Because that’s clearly what was going on here: Amy must have left him or cheated on him or otherwise rejected him. There was no other explanation.

She knocked on the bedroom doorframe.

“Room service, sir,” she said, in a clipped British accent. “Are you decent?”

Arthur was awake and sitting upright in bed. He was wearing one of her father’s old button-down shirts, the easier to tend to the wounds on his chest, and had the formidable beginnings of a reddish beard. Harryhausen leaped onto the covers with all the grace of a flying pig.

“So what’ll it be first?” Mona locked her elbow and held his tray aloft. “Change your dressings or breakfast?”

Arthur didn’t respond. He inhaled and blinked and drew his lips back over his teeth.

“Allow me to tempt you.” Mona jiggled the tray enticingly. “For your first meal of the day, which is surely the most important, I’ve put together a delightful combination of juice, toast, and eggs, fresh scrambled with a hint of butter in the pan, slowly and gently coaxed into delightfully fluffy clouds of unborn chicken.”

Arthur’s brow creased.

“Yeah, I went too far with that.” She slid the tray onto the dresser.
“Let’s change your bandages. Maybe by the time I’m through ripping off all your chest hair, you’ll have forgotten I said it.”

Arthur cleared his throat. “You talk like . . . television,” he croaked.

Mona squinted. “That a good thing or a bad thing?”

Arthur smiled a tiny smile and cleared his throat again. He shrugged.

Mona sat on the edge of the bed, tucking one leg beneath her. “What do you remember?” Mona asked.

Arthur wiggled his toes under the covers, to the right of Mona’s hip. Harryhausen tensed to pounce.

“Your name?” she prompted.

“Arthur Rook.” His voice was dry from disuse. “I grew up in Somerville, Massachusetts. Phone number was 617-879-8446. I have a younger brother named David, lives two streets over from where we grew up, my parents are David Senior and Nance, and I—I moved to Los Angeles. Then I came here. On a plane. And a train. And then a cab.”

“What’s your cat’s name?”

“Harry.” He swallowed. The grin was gone, which told Mona he remembered plenty that he wasn’t telling her. He ran his hand over his cheeks. “
I’m
hairy. What day is it?”

“Monday. Do you remember who I am? What happened on Friday?”

“Yes.” He coughed. “Your name is Mona. Jones. This is your boardinghouse. I had dinner with a vet, a shop teacher, an old woman, and your daughter. And then I saw—red. Stones. In a photo . . . frame—oh, did I break it?”

She nodded. The hospital had given her what was left of the photograph after they were sure they had taken all the pieces of glass from Arthur’s chest. The picture of William Fitchburg Jones and Daniel Darby that had been at the top of the stairs her entire life was still whole, albeit covered in Arthur’s blood. She thought it looked kind of cool, actually—anyone else might have thought it was grossly macabre, but Mona appreciated that Arthur had managed to bleed with an artistic sensibility: Daniel and William, sitting in those tortuous-looking Victorian chairs, were covered by a deep red-brown swath like an ink wash. The reddish stroke brought depth to the photograph, and she saw
things she had never seen before: the notch out of William’s ear, which fit with the family story about his stint as a boxer that she always thought was apocryphal. Daniel looked so handsome, so young—Daniel in the picture was probably younger than Mona was now. Arthur’s blood gave them life. She had already reframed it.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I—I had no right to destroy . . . photographs. Family.”

“I forgive you,” she said. Arthur’s eyes wiggled back and forth. Mona, desperately curious and heartened by Arthur’s relative lucidity, decided that today was the day. There was no point in waiting for him to get healthier, no point in waiting for him to heal, before she brought up the subject of Amy. Too much time had gone by for Mona to pretend she had any more to spare.

“I’m not usually crazy,” Arthur said.

“I doubt that,” Mona said, and took a shot. “You’d have to be crazy to marry Amy.”

Arthur made a noise. It was quiet, and it was awful. It was a noise Mona thought only animals knew how to make, and only when they’d been kicked for the hundredth time by a cruel master: a cry that dies in the crier’s throat, a cry that gives up. That realizes there is nothing to be done but be kicked, that there is no reality but this and there is nothing and no one to save.

Oh, no
, she thought.
No.
She didn’t want to know Amy’s secrets, she didn’t want to know them, she didn’t want to know—

“Arthur, you don’t—” Mona held up her hands, bracing for an impact she never dreamed would come.

“Amy died,” Arthur whispered. And he closed his eyes and laid his head back on the pillow. The silence in the room wrapped itself tight around Mona’s head, muffling the sound of Ray Harryhausen, purring, purring, like the dumb animal he was.

8
How Eugene Fell

Once upon a time, long before he ever tricked Oneida Jones into coming to his house alone, Eugene Wendell could think of things all day long and not once, not
one
fucking time, would sex come into it. And then one day, without warning, the most normal, boring things, like a remote control or a butter dish or a tube of toothpaste, began triggering fantasies so compelling and urgent that he’d have to excuse himself to masturbate in the most private (hell, closest) bathroom possible. When he first discovered his brain and body’s new favorite trick, he’d thought it was amazing: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Eugene Wendell would get off at the literal drop of a hat. It was awesome.

But then, just as suddenly—and improbably—it got old. He couldn’t concentrate. He was getting bored. Neither hand was coming up with anything particularly interesting on its own (or together), and he realized he’d kill for the ability to finish so much as a homework assignment without thinking about sex. It was a curse. It was his curse, his alone, and one afternoon, cramming for a history test and momentarily distracted by the image of Dolley Madison with her feet in the air, Eugene realized what he needed: a girl. He needed another variable to make things interesting again, a goal toward which he could channel some of this errant sexual energy. It was so simple, so elemental, it hadn’t even occurred to him.

Or maybe he hadn’t thought of it because finding a girl was going to be impossible. He went to school in the middle of the middle of nowhere, he only had his learner’s permit (no license for another six months, or so his parents thought); and Eugene, despite the fury of his uncontrollable
desire, did not slum. He had standards. He actually cared who he porked, wanted to respect both the porkee and himself as porker. He considered this yet another sign that he was the undiscovered diamond of Ruby Falls: a quality guy, a brilliant guy, who would be duly appreciated by the rest of the world in time.