This Must Be the Place: A Novel (23 page)

“So—you didn’t answer my question.” Arthur came out of his bedroom with a roll of athletic tape and a square of gauze. “Did that postcard mean anything to you?”

Mona reached into her back pocket. It was message-side up in her palm.
Fine, fate,
she thought,
fine, I’ll read it
.

All it said, in Amy’s hand, was
I really do wish
. . .

“I don’t know,” Mona said. She swallowed. “You want to lie down?”

Arthur, unbuttoning his shirt, sat on one end of the couch. Harryhausen bounded into the room, ran three tight circles around the coffee table, and sprang up off the couch to the back of the chair nearby, where he froze, four legs tensed, tail straight up and thick as a bottlebrush.

“Is he normally like this?” Mona sat beside Arthur. She spun the athletic tape around her finger.

“No.” Arthur pulled his shirt back behind one shoulder. “He’s usually cranky. Or depressed.” He leaned back against the pillows, and Mona, looking at his shredded body in full daylight, felt like crying. Arthur was plastered with tiny intersecting cuts, but had three deep lacerations: one crossing from his left collarbone to his breastbone, one across the top of his belly, and a third zigzagging between them. Almost like a lightning bolt—the Harry Potter of torso mutilation. She frowned and then laughed at herself, and was glad she hadn’t said that out loud.

“You look like a jigsaw puzzle,” she said. She leaned closer and lifted the bloody gauze over his heart. “I think the stitch held. You probably just stressed it when you showered. So tell me, Arthur”—he
had
showered; she smelled soap—“what do you do?”

“What do I do?” His voice was loud, this close. She heard it echo in his chest. “When I’m not terrorizing my wife’s old friends?”

Your dead wife’s old friends
, Mona thought. She nodded. “There can’t be much money in that.”

“I’m a photographer.”

She folded a piece of gauze in two and pressed it against the fresh blood. “Let’s get a little clot going,” she said, because she thought it would be good to explain why she was holding it there, leaning over him, for longer than a second. “A photographer living in Los Angeles. Are you a soulless paparazzo?”

She sensed his head, above her own, shaking in the negative. “School pictures and head shots, mostly.”

“When you’re taking the head shots, can you tell if they’re going to be famous? Is there some kind of phantom image, like a shining orb around their heads?”

“Not exactly,” Arthur said. Mona resisted the urge to lift the gauze and check the clot. His chest rose and fell as he spoke. “But, in a way, with all of them, every—every time I looked through my lens, I could tell how much they wanted me to like them. Not just me, I guess. How much they wanted the world to like them. It’s almost like their . . . desperation. Their hope. It glowed.”

“Are we talking spirit photography? Very New Agey.” She smiled to
let him know she was teasing and then realized he couldn’t see her smiling at his chest.

“It only happened with actors. Any of the crew guys I took pictures of, they just looked like normal people. Kind of nerdy but normal. I took a series at the shop where Amy worked, not for commission but just, for, you know—”

“In the name of art.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m Dorothea Lange gone Hollywood. Photojournalist documenting the downtrodden practical-effects Techies, living hand-to-mouth in their Lucasvilles.”

Mona laughed. “So you
are
a dork. Amy was dork catnip.”

“Dorknip?”

Mona smiled. “Technically.”

“So dorks loved her?” Mona heard a hesitation in Arthur’s voice that wasn’t there a moment before. Arthur didn’t like to hear anything about Amy that contradicted what he already believed or could imagine about her, Mona had noticed. It was like he couldn’t stand to be reminded of the things he didn’t know about her, things he couldn’t even guess. Yet another reason to exercise caution in telling him everything she knew. “Like who?”

She lifted the gauze and replaced it with a fresh piece. “No one, really. She didn’t love them back, that’s for sure. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean anything by that.” She smoothed two strips of athletic tape over the gauze as quickly and gently as possible. “All set.” Mona sat back on the couch. “Don’t listen to a word I say. Seriously. It’s like, open mouth, insert foot, never remove foot from mouth.”

Arthur threw his shirt back over his shoulder but didn’t rebutton it. He reached for the giant pink shoebox on the coffee table, source of all Amy’s garbage, and pulled out a green plastic key chain. Heart-shaped. Cracked, a white plastic fissure clouding the center like an old scar.

“Can you tell me a story about this?” He dangled it on his finger.

Mona bit the inside of her mouth. She saw this exact chain with two keys on the ring, lying in her open palm; she smelled the ocean and felt the sun burning the skin between her shoulder blades.

She shook her head. “No idea.”

Mona hooked the shoebox with her finger and pulled it closer. She
drew out a playing card: an ace of hearts with the word
YES
written in black block letters across its face.

Arthur smiled. “That card,” he said, “is the reason we got married.”

“Tell me,” Mona said. She tucked her feet beneath her.

“We went to Vegas.” He blinked rapidly. “For the weekend, just for the hell of it. We’re both terrible, terrible gamblers—not like we have an addiction: we just suck at it. It’s embarrassing. Statistically speaking, I am a worse gambler than probability allows for. A monkey will play better blackjack than me.” Arthur scratched at his chest absently. “We go out for a nice dinner, we wander around and look at how insane everything is—I’d never been before—and somehow we ended up at this disgusting dive of a casino. There are all these sad, sad people, over-weight and pale and really unhappy-looking, and I remember turning to Amy and saying,
Why are they so sad?
And she said”—he cleared his throat—“
They’re unhappy because they never fell in love. But I did once, and I can never be unhappy, no matter what, because you never forget what that feels like.

“And I—I still can’t believe this was my idea, but I’d like to thank Jose Cuervo, Jack Daniel’s, and Captain Morgan for their invaluable contributions. We went to this tacky-as-shit gift shop on the strip, picked up a deck of cards and a marker, and I wrote
YES
on the ace of hearts and
NO
on the ace of clubs and
MAYBE
on both jokers. And I shuffled them all back into the deck and told Amy to pick one. To just—pick one. So we stood on the sidewalk in Vegas and she closed her eyes and she picked a card—”

“She actually picked the ace of hearts?” Mona, sitting with her legs crossed like a little kid, rocked forward.

“She picked the eight of spades.”

Mona snorted.

“But this is—this is the part of the story that’s really the story. She threw the eight of spades over her shoulder and kept picking. I forget what she picked next, but she definitely got one of the
MAYBE
jokers at one point, and”—Arthur started to laugh—“we’re standing on the sidewalk in Las Vegas, a couple of drunk idiots playing cards, and Amy’s shouting,
That one doesn’t count! That one doesn’t count either! That was practice!
And she just kept picking and flicking them away and we’re
definitely drawing a crowd at this point, but she still hasn’t picked the card she wants. Until we’re down to one card. Just one card left in my hand, and we’re dying laughing, someone’s calling security, and Amy says,
Oh, screw it, I don’t
care
what the card says. Just marry me already.”

“And you did.”

“And we did. Stood in line with a crowd of drunken fools at one of those twenty-four-hour chapels. And it was the
YES
card, the last card in my hand. She held it up when the officiant asked if she did take me, Arthur Rook, to be her lawfully wedded husband. I didn’t know she kept it until I found it in this box.”

“How long had you been together before that?”

Arthur shrugged. “Six months, maybe. They’re right: when you know, you know. Amy knew; and when Amy knew something, I knew it too. She made believers out of everyone she met.”

“She did.” Believers and fools, Mona thought: because there was something unsettlingly singular and past-tense about her initial confession, that she fell in love
once
. She had to give Amy more credit than that, though; no one
really
falls in love when they’re a teenager. What Amy felt for Ben Tennant was an isolated incident of average teenage lust, the kind everyone grows out of. If only Amy could be classified as an average teenager.

Arthur flapped the card between his fingers and inhaled. He pitched it neatly back into the box.

“So, Mona,” he said, “what do
you
do?”

“When I’m not patching up widowers?”

“Oh, no.” Arthur turned pale. “I’m a widower.”

“No! God, didn’t I tell you to stop listening to me? I mean, you
are
a widower, but you don’t have to think about it, yet. Or ever. I bake wedding cakes.”

“What?” Arthur whipped his head back.

“That’s what I do. I bake. Wedding cakes. I started my own business about ten years ago and I run it through word of mouth and the Internet. I own the house, so there’s just taxes and upkeep, and between the rent I collect, my inheritance, and the cakes—that’s how I live. That’s what I do. When I’m not mothering.”

Arthur was still a little stunned. He thought for a moment, blinked,
and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Why aren’t you married?” he asked.

It stung and Mona couldn’t pretend it hadn’t. Her brow wrinkled.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said. “It’s none of my business, I just thought—maybe you were like me. The other side of me, now—you know.”

“What, orphaned by Amy?”

“A widow.”

Mona took a deep breath. She could tell he had meant no harm, was embarrassed to think he had hurt her, and didn’t understand what to apologize for, or how; and after almost sixteen years of fielding similar questions, Mona couldn’t have helped him. She couldn’t vocalize the way she felt about the path she’d chosen, had never found the precise words. She decided that if anyone ever asked, flat out, without pretense and with an honest desire to know how she felt about her life, she would hand them half a ripe cold grapefruit and tell them to sink their front teeth into the soft flesh. They’d shiver at the cold ache in their teeth and the bitterness on their tongue, but she’d tell them to keep sucking at the pulp, keep sucking until the juice became sweet and refreshing, until all you wanted was the other half, even though you knew how much that first bite would hurt.

“We’re a matched set,” she told him, because it was easier and not quite a lie.

“I’m a social oaf. Always have been.” Arthur rubbed his eyes. “And I can’t remember the last time I made a new friend.” It was a shrewd apology, and Mona accepted it with a smile she hoped looked sincere. She had a problem taking her own smiles seriously.

“Me neither,” she said.

“So you bake!”

Mona laughed. “Yes, I bake. I make sculptures out of sugar. I play with fondant.”

“Well, if you bake as well as you cook—”

“Suck-up,” Mona said, and then cupped her palm around her ear. “What’s that? You’d like to go downstairs and help me make this insane cake I have to put together for Saturday? You’re good with your hands,” she said. “And you’ve got an eye for detail. You’d be a lot of help, if you’re willing.”

Arthur considered for a moment. “Sure,” he said.

They smiled at each other for a beat longer than they probably should have. Arthur was the first to blink.

“Did Amy know that you baked cakes?” he asked.

Mona thought. “I don’t know,” she said. “She knew I could bake, that I liked to bake. She was there when I first learned.”

“Where did you learn?” he asked.

“Jersey,” she answered.

Just like that, the gate was open. He’d done it without meaning to, as she’d known he would; Arthur had found the point of entry to the stories and the secrets she didn’t want to tell. But who was she protecting anyway? Amy’s memory? Arthur’s heart?

Arthur looked at her expectantly.

“I haven’t told you about that summer,” Mona said. “Amy and I . . . when we were sixteen. We ran away.”

“Are you—” Arthur sat up straight. His eyes narrowed. “Are you serious? You ran away from home? God, that’s huge. Why haven’t you—have you been hiding this? Why?” There was panic in his voice that Mona hadn’t expected, panic and concern.

“More like . . . saving it,” Mona said.

Her heart had finally realized what was going on and was thumping painfully. So the real world was going to intrude on this perfect, imaginary one after all; she would be accountable. She would have to know and to tell. The time to float, suspended in memories, was abruptly over. “It’s the best part of her I have left .” The words stuck in her throat, came out thick. She uncrossed her legs.

“Mona, wait.” Arthur, more alert than she had ever seen him, reached across the couch and grabbed both her hands. She was ashamed that her first instinct was to pull away, to retreat, to protect herself, but Arthur reached for her hands again and held on. “You don’t owe me a thing.”

“I know,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”
Oh, shit, Mona,
she thought;
your heart could be in this one. Your heart could really be in it. This is so—so unfair, so screwed up, that the first new blood in your life in years is tainted. This is Amy’s fault. Everything—everything in your life—is because of Amy.

“For not calling the cops?” Arthur tilted his head. “For feeding me? For letting me sleep here?”

“You paid for the last two.” Mona turned her hands over so that she and Arthur were palm to palm. She rubbed the outside of his pinkie with her thumb. She thought of pinkie swears with Amy, of her shaky little finger. She felt horrible and happy. “Unless your check bounces. It’s not going to bounce, is it?”