This Must Be the Place: A Novel (30 page)

Arthur felt good.

Sure, his chest ached and itched and would occasionally weep blood through his shirts—or, rather, Mona’s father’s shirts, which were smooth and cool and crisp; far nicer than he, Arthur, had ever dreamed of purchasing. He had a black bruise the size of a bocce ball on his hip from tumbling down the stairs, and he must have wrenched his neck because he couldn’t look over his right shoulder without a sharp twinge. But his days now were full and different and he felt better than good, actually. He felt
great
.

He hadn’t taken a vacation—a real vacation, not a long weekend or a trip home for the holidays—in years, and he saw now that all the usual excuses (they couldn’t get time off work, they didn’t have the money) had been just that: excuses. Vacations were
worth
it. This sensation of escape, of relief: it was
worth
it. When he slept at night, he slept deeply and long; and when he woke in the morning, he woke to Mona. A small voice in the back of his head would occasionally chirp
Amy’s not here!
and Arthur would hear the voice but not understand why it sounded so concerned. Yes: Amy wasn’t here. But
here
wasn’t anyplace he had ever known Amy to be; she wasn’t missing, and Arthur wasn’t missing her, in this place. If anything, he was discovering her—as she’d been in this house and this town, and as she’d been to Mona.

He had the greatest vacationing companion in Mona Jones. He adored her, so easily it would have shocked him, had he the wherewithal to notice or to care. She brought Amy to life because she had so much of her own to spare. She was the first person Arthur had been able to see clearly in weeks, since he left Los Angeles; he saw that she was tough
and tenacious and sarcastic. She was talented and young. He saw that she had no idea how beautiful she was—as he’d told Amy the last time he saw her, moments after his trip down the stairs. Amy had acted a little surprised; he hoped she hadn’t taken it the wrong way. But he couldn’t help seeing Mona when she was right in front of him.

“You watch all these cake-decorating shows on television,” Mona said, handing him a carton of eggs, “and it’s all about the concept and sculpting and rolling the fondant and air-brushing it and—you know. How it looks.” She ducked back into the refrigerator. “Which is perfect for television—it
works
for TV, since TV can only engage two of the five senses.” She passed him butter and a large bunch of carrots, green tops feathery and ticklish, and propped her elbows on the top of the open fridge door. “But it drives me nuts, because nobody ever seems to care how the cake
tastes
.”

It was Thursday. Mona had knocked on his door and asked if he wanted to help her bake, neither of them acknowledging the awkward conclusion of the previous day: how Arthur had hurt her without thinking, and how Mona had hurt him in return. He felt both deserving and guiltless, because it was Amy’s fault, really. And today, when he thought of Amy, he realized he didn’t want to.

“And isn’t that the whole
point
—the
cake
?” Mona heaved a giant silver KitchenAid mixer from her counter to the kitchen table and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “The frosting is just the, like—well, it’s
the frosting
. If the frosting were the point, it wouldn’t be called cake.”

“You’ve got a whole philosophy here.”

“I’m an existential baker,” she said, and grinned at him. “Metaphysical mistress of pastry.” She shrugged. “Was going to name my company that but it sounded too much like an escort service.”

“The most delicious escort service
ever
,” he said, which made her laugh. She handed him a bristle brush and asked him to scrub and grate the carrots while she separated egg whites. Carrie had ordered her most popular cake, she explained, the four-tiered Stairway to Heaven, which started in the ground with carrot cake, then chocolate, then lemon, and finally ascended to angel food.

“It doesn’t get ordered much, but my personal favorite is Dante’s
Nine Circles,” she said. “Eight layers, nine different kinds of chocolate. I count the ganache on the top as Limbo.”

A silence fell. Mona broke it with the crack of an egg into a big blue mixing bowl. Any other day, this would have been the moment when Arthur induced Mona to tell stories, asking a leading question or showing her some mysterious artifact he’d pulled from the depths of the pink shoebox. But he hadn’t brought anything to show her this morning, and he couldn’t think of anything else to ask about Amy; he was no closer to understanding her will and had, if he was being honest with himself, stopped believing that
his
scrutiny of each and every detail would be the pathway to the revelation he was seeking. The cuff links had already done what they could for him: had made his introductions to Mona, broken the ice (and his body), and brought him into her confidence. Now he knew: it was through Mona that Arthur would find what Amy left behind.

He set his jaw. He was annoyed with Amy, irritated with Amy, for not sharing Mona with him. He didn’t understand what Mona could have done or said to make Amy scoop her out of her life, to deny Arthur this part of her history, of her self. It was just as big a mystery as the postcard, but it was a mystery he felt he had a better chance of solving.

“How about some music?” Mona asked.

“What
does
one listen to while baking a Stairway to Heaven cake?” He accidentally skimmed his knuckles against the grater and winced.

“This part of the country is the undisputed adult contemporary radio station capital of the world. I’m not kidding. You haven’t heard easy listening until you’ve heard it in upstate New York.” Mona flicked on an ancient combination cassette player/radio on top of the microwave. Other voices, fuzzy with static, echoed between them.

“What’s it like, running your own business?” he asked.

“Parts are difficult. That I have to cover my own insurance is a bitch, and so are taxes; but there’s very little overhead, now that I own so much equipment.” Arthur could watch her crack eggs all day—she did it smoothly, cleanly, one-handedly. “And I’m the only lonely little employee, which means if I screw up,
I
have to deal with the consequences. But I also don’t have to cover anyone else’s ass, I don’t have to deal with a shitty boss, I make my own hours and my own decisions
about the jobs I take. I can do eighty percent of it in my PJs”—she pointed at her pants, which were bright green with tiny yellow shooting stars—“while listening to Lite FM. What’s not to love?”

“The Lite FM?”

“It’s my kryptonite. I’d wager many persons born in the mid to late nineteen seventies share the same affliction. Like, whatever radio waves were wafting through the air at the moment of your conception inexorably bonded themselves to your disposition. Ergo: my parents were really into Lionel Ritchie and the Commodores.” She gathered the eggshells in her hands and joined him beside the sink. “C’mon. Everyone has a musical weakness. Even you.”

“Um.” She smiled up at him and he wondered, with something like distant shock, whether this was something he had ever told Amy. Had it ever come up? He couldn’t remember. It seemed like she would have teased him about it, had she known. “My parents had a greatest hits of the Bee Gees album that they played constantly. I’d dance in front of the stereo until I fell over.”

“Do you still?” Mona jammed the eggshells down the garbage disposal. “I bet that makes family gatherings kind of fun.”

“My parents—” Arthur’s voice caught. His parents. He hadn’t thought of his family in days, in a week. In
weeks
, maybe—how long had he been on this vacation, anyway?

“Did you call home?” Mona asked.

He shook his head. The carrot he was shredding was down to a rounded nub and the tips of his fingers brushed against the surface of the grater. His mind was curiously still. He couldn’t imagine what he would say to his mother, to his brother. To his father. And since he couldn’t imagine the act of doing anything about it—of calling them and telling them and dealing with whatever happened next—it didn’t feel like anything he had to worry about. It was unthinkable. It was undoable. It was unimportant.

“I bet you’re a missing person by now.” Mona sloshed the egg whites into the silver bowl on the big mixer.

“I don’t know who would have reported me,” he said. “Unless—maybe Max Morris.”

“Brother of Zack?”

“Max is a guy I worked with. He’s probably the only one who’d miss me.” And for a small sharp moment, he missed Max too—missed his company, his quiet humor, the little donuts from his boyfriend—and then the world became very clear and very bright, and Arthur Rook snapped upright and understood everything that was happening was happening to
him
: Amy was gone and Arthur had run and nothing was going to be the way it had been, or the way he had wanted it to be for the rest of his life. All the air left him and he leaned forward to catch the counter.

And then the moment was over and Mona, her voice small but growing, like she was walking toward him from far away, asked if he was all right, did he want to lie down or—

“No.” He straightened and faced her with a plateful of grated carrots. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’ve looked worse,” he said.

“While true, not comforting. Tell me more about Max.”

His brain sputtered and refused to give up any more detail beyond coworker, carpool, donuts. The subject of Max was tagged in his mind as dangerous, uncharted territory:
Here there be memories
.

“Like I said, we worked together,” he said. “Taking school pictures.”

“Sounds like you had a raging social life out there.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t . . . we didn’t go out much. We went to dinner sometimes, but—I worked a lot. Amy worked all the time.”

Arthur was profoundly unsettled by this conversation and couldn’t quite say why. Perhaps it was the perspective of the vacationer—remote from his everyday life, he sees it for what it really is and finds it lacking. But he had loved his everyday life while he was living it, hadn’t he? He thought he remembered
feeling
as though he did. He pressed the heel of his hand to his eyebrow to ease a sudden stab of pain.

“Hey, I have an idea,” Mona said. “Later, let’s look you up online. Let’s see if anyone has reported your missing ass—”

“No,” he said—harshly. Mona froze and he softened.

“I’m not trying to get rid of you,” she said. “I just think it might be . . . funny to—”

“See proof that no one noticed? I vanished, left my whole life behind, and the world didn’t bat an eye?”

Mona didn’t speak for a while. She turned on the mixer. “I know the feeling,” she said.

The mixer whirred methodically and Arthur felt better. The sound wrapped around his head. It made him think of wind through the trees or the pounding of the ocean: the music of vacation elemental and static, calm, and filling.

Mona knocked on his door.

He knew it was Mona before he answered, and not just because she was the only person in the house he had any tangible connection with: he knew it was Mona because she was knocking on his door with both fists to the rhythm of the Bee Gees’ “Jive Talkin’. ”

“Are you dancing yet?” Her voice was muffled.

“No,” he called, though in a manner of speaking, that’s exactly what he’d been doing for the past hour, for the past day, and the past weeks: dancing with the idea of Amy, with the fact of Amy, around the strange small things she’d left behind. He’d been nose-deep in the shoebox since dinner, amusing himself—and Harryhausen—with a penny racer he half-remembered Amy playing with: a bright blue Volkswagen Beetle he could picture her pulling back and letting fly across their dresser. Or was it his brother he remembered, playing with his own bright blue Volkswagen Beetle penny racer?

“I’m your landlord, Arthur. I can let myself in if I want to.”

He blinked. Time was slipperier every day. He placed the tiny car back in the shoebox and slid it beneath the coffee table. He had cursorily explained to Mona that the box and its assorted contents had belonged to Amy, but he felt odd about giving Mona unrestricted access, about letting her paw through it without his careful supervision. For one, she’d find Amy’s will, addressed to her. He wasn’t ready to tell her about that yet, at least not until he understood more about why Amy had never sent it.

Mona was standing in the hall with a box of her own under her arm: long and flat and maroon in color.

“Scrabble?” she said.

Harryhausen watched as they scrambled the letter tiles in the box top and unfolded the board and then decided, as Arthur knew he would, that this was a perfect time for a nap. It was a perfect time, period; the night was cool but not cold, and it was already dark outside even though it was barely past seven. Mona sat to his left in the old easy chair and examined her letter tiles intently, switching two back and forth and chewing her bottom lip. Arthur eased back into the couch cushions.

“We should drink some warm milk, watch
Matlock
, and call it a night,” he said.