This Must Be the Place: A Novel (22 page)

When Anna first came to the Darby-Jones, fresh from her divorce, she was a friendly stray, looking for a place to curl up. The house needed new blood: Sherman and Bert were fundamentally uninteresting to Mona as friends and companions, and Oneida, despite being the one person in the world Mona wanted to be stranded on a desert island with, was still a little girl. There were certain conversations, certain subjects, that Mona wanted to talk about with a grown-up.

Enter Anna DeGroot, with her severe ponytail, her constant cloud of dog hair, her chatty ease, and her penchant for gossip. Anna knew everything about everyone in Ruby Falls. The veterinary clinic, she said, was ground zero for gossip; when people brought in their pets, they brought in their problems. It was like reading tea leaves—a dog with a shedding problem bespoke owners who fought; a cat spraying all over the house was reacting to his owner’s infidelity. Compounded by the wagging tongues of the assistants and receptionists, not a shred of information remained private. It was through Anna that Mona first heard about Tim Acres, who’d been two years ahead of her in high school, cheating on his wife with one of the seniors on the varsity football team. Anna tipped her off about the quarterly key parties that took place on the dairy farms (swinging milkers, she called them). And even though there was no way to prove it, because she had heard it from Anna, Mona was inclined to believe that the old maid who lived alone on the Blicker
farm really had killed a Jehovah’s Witness who came to her door, salting his corpse like a pork shank and feeding it to wild dogs.

When someone offered her such rare ridiculous pearls, Mona couldn’t help but respond in kind, so she shared what she felt she could and Anna swore due secrecy. It was the kind of friendship she had never had with Amy, one of exchange rather than lopsided revelation. But after several years of greedy gossiping, they started running out of other people to talk about, and Mona began to fret about Anna’s inability to keep her mouth shut. Anna had managed to convince Mona that Mona was different, her secrets were safe, she was special, and Anna would take care of her. Far too late, Mona realized Anna’s ability to instill abject confidence was also what allowed her to keep animals calm right up until she administered that lethal dose of phenobarbital. You didn’t think Anna DeGroot could ever do you any harm, so—of course—you exposed your pale pink belly to the sky.

“Is it what Bert said last week at dinner, about you flirting with the new guy? God forbid, right? That old crone needs to get laid.” Anna blew across the top of her coffee. “I told Sherm he should pay her a visit.”

Mona grimaced. “Too early,” she said. “Too early to think about Sherman and Bert doing . . . anything together.”

“I truly believe she could benefit from that man’s ministrations.”

That was another thing about Anna: she and Sherman had been screwing for years, three or four times a month, whenever one or both of them would get drunk and/or lonely. Mona suspected the easy-access affair was part of what kept Anna from moving out, despite the fact that there were more comfortable apartments all over Ruby Falls. Sherman, like Bert, would live and eventually die in his room, less so from any particular love of the house or Mona’s proprietorship than from an inability to imagine an alternative. Anna complained about the drafts and the moodiness of the plumbing, the antiquated fixtures, the rolling, warped wood floors—but never left.

Mona could tell the lady vet, who was almost ten years her senior, thought of the Darby-Jones as her own personal coed sorority. And while Mona had never technically been to college (outside of a handful of culinary courses at the community college) or pledged a house, she didn’t think the Darby-Jones was exactly Greek material. She regarded
Anna DeGroot’s insistence on her inalienable right to get drunk and get laid as a little desperate, a little pathetic. It made Mona feel sad and odd, like an uncool little sister. She wanted Anna to want more out of her life. But then, Mona couldn’t say with conviction that there
was
more to want. Not in Ruby Falls.

“It might do you good, too, kid,” Anna said, and Mona spat hot coffee back into her mug.

“Egh!” she said. “Sherman was my tech ed teacher. The man gave me a B-plus when I was fourteen years old.”

“What if he’d given you an A-plus?” Anna said, and chuckled.

“Gross. No offense.” A breeze blew through the kitchen, carrying with it the musty odors of early fall: wet leaves, mud, and hay. The smell always reminded Mona of being in school.

“None taken.” Anna folded the paper and pushed it aside. “Not who I was talking about, anyway.”

Mona wrapped her hands around her mug and stared into the dark brown pool of coffee. Her arms prickled.

“The new guy—what’s his name?”

“Arthur,” Mona said, and sighed in spite of herself.

“Whoa! What was
that
?” Anna leaned across the kitchen table, the better to conspire. “How long has it been, honestly? Your sexual peak is right around the corner, Mona—it’s thirty feet straight up—no. Wait. Which part of the house are his rooms over?” Anna poked a finger at the ceiling. “It’s biologically imperative. Go get him, honey.”

“I’m categorically not in the mood to have this conversation.”

Anna cackled. “How long ago were you going out with—what was his name? The UPS guy?”

“That wasn’t me. That was
Legally Blonde
.” It had been a FedEx guy, anyway. And he had been nice and sweet—and unprofessional, considering he asked her out when he dropped off a package. Ron something. They went out for an unimaginative steak dinner, and Mona spent the evening wishing she were with someone smarter and funnier, and feeling bad because she knew he would try to kiss her, which he did, and which was predictably, slobberingly awkward. Her heart wasn’t in it. Only once had her heart been in it—really
in it
, all the way—but that one time had been marvelous enough to convince her that it was worth holding out for,
that everything else would pale by comparison. It had been disastrous timing, a critical distraction at a time and a place when Amy had needed her, and the broken heart that followed had hurt like hell. But still.

It had been worth it.

Anna giggled.

“Don’t you have kittens to spay?” Mona said. Her coffee was already getting cold.

“Don’t you have mysterious strangers to screw?”

“Arthur.”

“Oh, excuse me. Don’t you have
Arthur
to—”

“
Hi, Arthur!
” Mona slammed her mug on the table, which finally shut Anna up. “Nice to see you up and among the living.” But it wasn’t nice, Mona thought.
Go back, go back to your room, Arthur. Go back, so I can join you there. So we can hide from the rest of the world
. She’d spent the last two days sitting with Arthur in his room, telling him stories about Amy. Feeding him the scraps of her own memories: a food Amy liked (scallops); a book she loved (
It
); a shirt she always wore (a ratty Syracuse T, with the Saltine Warrior, the politically incorrect pre-Orangeman mascot). Stories about Amy making monsters out of pipe cleaners and molding clay and the two of them shooting movies, one painstaking shot at a time: Mona manning the trusty Super 8 Amy had found at a flea market, Amy moving her creature’s limbs a fraction of a fraction of an inch at a time.

He looked better every day. Mona liked to flatter herself by thinking the stories she told him, the stories about Amy, were what brought focus back to his muddy bluish-brown eyes and sense to his mind. He had shaved and was wearing one of her father’s button-down shirts again. There was a tiny blotch of old blood above the breast pocket, but otherwise Arthur Rook could have been showered and dressed and ready to go to work.

Then he opened his mouth. “Can you tell me anything about this?” he said. Pinched between his thumb and first finger was a postcard of the New York City skyline, the words
Wish you were here
in flowing script across the top.

No. Someone had cut the word
we
out of a magazine and pasted it over
you.

Mona sucked in her cheeks.

Arthur pulled out a chair and sat down. “Look—on the back.” He slid the postcard across the table toward Mona. Mona could barely bring herself to press a fingertip to the card. She was never meant to read it. “It’s young, all big and loopy—but that’s definitely her handwriting.”

“Her handwriting?” Anna said.

Don’t say her name, Arthur, Mona thought. Please, please don’t say her name. Anna knew plenty about Amy and Mona: she knew they had been friends, that they had run away together—and that there was more to it than Mona had ever told her. Anna was probably under the impression that Amy was the love of Mona’s life, and that Mona had sequestered herself in Ruby Falls as some sort of self-punishing act of repressed teenage lesbianism. Hell. Half of Ruby Falls—the half that didn’t think Mona embodied the slatternly fall of the house of Darby-Jones—probably thought the same thing. If only it were that simple. And if Anna knew that Arthur, however obliquely, was somehow connected to the same Amy—

She wouldn’t let it get that far.

“Arthur, can I talk—” Mona slipped the card into her back pocket. “Oh, Arthur, you’re bleeding.”

Arthur looked down at his chest. The spot over his breast pocket had grown to the size of a half dollar and grew even larger when he pawed at it. “Did I pop a stitch?” he said, his voice high and worried.

Anna laughed. It was the perfect excuse for Mona to glare at her.

“Excuse us, Anna.” And then, pointedly: “Have a good day at work.” Mona abandoned her cold coffee and steered Arthur out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Every step she took, she felt lighter. She felt freer. Free from what would have been an epic interrogation from Anna (and probably still would be, tonight, when they were washing dishes after dinner), free from the truth that Arthur would die to know, and free from every responsibility of her adult life. Free from the cake she really ought to be working on for Carrie Waters-soon-to-be-Kessler. Free from the vague certainty that Oneida was troubled by something, and free from the lingering fear that she and Arthur were precisely what troubled her.

Arthur walked ahead of her into his apartment, and when Mona shut the door behind her, she could have dissolved from relief. Here, in
Arthur’s rooms, she had only to remember and tell stories, and she was loved for it.

And he
did
love her for it, she knew; he loved her baldly, desperately. In his eyes, Mona held all the answers to all the questions it broke his heart to ask; where Anna used her for information, Arthur revered her for it. He needed her, and Mona, who loved to be needed, found she was unable to care that Amy’s widower had tracked her down (how, she still didn’t know), frightened her terribly, lost his mind, and necessitated medical attention. All without her consent—in her house, in her life. Once again, Mona was desperate for new blood, and Arthur, bleeding all over the place, left her feeling sanguine with the promise of the first new friend she’d made in years.

She still knew very little about Arthur Rook himself, other than that he had married Amy and couldn’t let her go. But what she could see of him, the parts of Arthur that registered in her peripheral vision, charmed the hell out of her. When Mona took him dinner on Monday night, Arthur had apologized for the mess he’d made and revealed that it was all Amy’s fault, just as she’d suspected; the bric-a-brac belonged to her. He didn’t offer to clean anything up and Mona didn’t ask, and when she returned Tuesday morning to change his bandages and feed him more tales of Amy with a side of breakfast, it was clear he had been at work all night, organizing, straightening, building. Arthur had transformed his little part of the Darby-Jones into a walk-in work of art. Mobiles dripping Crackerjack prizes and postcard cutouts dangled from the overhead light; a line of tiny plastic dinosaurs wielding SweetTarts like tambourines marched across the fireplace mantel. The clothesline was still strung from wall to wall, and there were vignettes arranged on every available flat surface, tiny sets for miniature plays made of jacks and pins and movie stubs, behind curtains of accordion-folded magazine pages. A forest of paper drink parasols sheltered cat’s-eye marbles, lined up like ducklings, from a looming photograph of Nikita Khrushchev.

Mona poked at the picture. It was glued to the wall.

“You glued Khrushchev to my wall, Arthur,” she said, unsure whether she was amused or pissed.

“I . . . honestly . . . didn’t think about it before I stuck it up there.
Sorry.” He was sitting on the sofa, digging through a huge pink shoebox that, after closer inspection, Mona recognized as having once contained those ridiculous black stiletto-heeled boots that were moldering in her coat closet. At the time, she’d packed the boots by themselves in her suitcase but Amy must have kept the box—for herself, for more than ten years. Mona found this fact oddly moving.

There were plenty of stories she didn’t tell Arthur. Amy having her heart broken by Ben, for one—she would have to make something up about that damned New York postcard, if Arthur remembered to ask her about it again. And running away to Ocean City—she hadn’t decided yet whether she would tell him about that summer. She hadn’t decided whether it would do any good for him, or for anyone, to know. But Mona was low on stories to tell and random factoids to share (the bulk of their friendship was sixteen years old, after all; her memory was excellent, but it wasn’t perfect), and still Arthur asked for more. What else did she remember about Amy? What else had Amy been like—as a little kid, as a teenager? It was strange. If Arthur hadn’t been so obviously damaged, so starved for the ghost of his wife, Mona would swear she was being shamelessly pumped for information. It wasn’t as satisfying, for Mona, to field Arthur’s questions; and it was also more dangerous. The more Arthur prodded her, the closer he brought her to the edge of what she was prepared to share with him. The danger existed that she would let the tiniest detail slip—and the tiniest detail, subjected to Arthur’s endless prompts for more information, could lead to land mines.