This Must Be the Place: A Novel (39 page)

Mona decided on Sunday—after Eugene went home and they ate dinner and Oneida, unasked, helped clean up. She even said, “Thanks, Mom” in a gravelly whisper, barely audible over the slosh of the dishwater, which Mona acknowledged with a nod that stood in for the relieved whoop she would have rather expressed. The last dish dried and put away, Oneida retreated to do homework and Mona went looking for Arthur, who’d said a few positive words about the roast, pushed himself away from the dinner table, and promptly disappeared.

She found him sitting on the back porch, keeping company with Oneida’s old friends—the badminton racquets, the folding lawn chairs, and the mangled rakes. She sat beside him on a wobbly picnic bench (the picnic table long since lost to dry rot), and they didn’t speak for a long time.

“Where . . . am I?” Arthur finally asked.

Mona’s heart quickened. “You’re in my house,” she said. “The Darby-Jones. In Ruby Falls.”

Arthur blinked rapidly. He turned to her. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “But I don’t . . . I remember how I got here, but none of this feels—real. I don’t know what—it means.”

He swallowed.

“I think something about that—what I did today. That collage. Something about it.”

“You helped two impressionable kids cheat. Maybe it’s your conscience.”
Shut up
, she told herself.
Just shut up and let him think this through
. But she couldn’t. “I wouldn’t worry about it. It was
way
too good for Dreyer to be fooled into thinking they did it by themselves.”

Arthur nudged her with his knee. “Would you kiss me?” he asked.

This close, it was impossible to ignore the black crescents under Arthur’s eyes or the hungry confusion in them. Mona’s stomach fell away. So the person she’d gotten to know these past couple of weeks wasn’t real, after all—had only ever been a waking dream.

Oh, Amy
, she thought.
You almost killed him
.

“Please,” he said. “Please, I think . . . I think I want to wake up.”

Mona looked out the porch windows. Every day it was getting darker earlier. The long shadow of the house stretched out across the grass, all the way to the trees.

Everything you want and everybody you love, you lose: whether through waking or dying, you always lose the past to the future.

Arthur sniffed. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m asking. You know how things are in dreams: they make sense, but they don’t. Not when you really think about them.”

Mona licked her lips. She thought of the last man she kissed—the FedEx guy or the UPS guy. (How horrible was that? She couldn’t even remember what express mail service he worked for.) It had been on her front porch, not this back one, but still. That’s your lot in life, Jones: always kissing strangers on porches.

“This is Walt Disney’s fault.” Arthur shook his head. “Who the hell gets woken up by a—”

Mona turned his face with her fingertips. “Wake up, Arthur,” she said, and kissed him on the mouth.

She scared him; she could tell. He pulled back, but only for a second, and when he kissed her back, briefly and gently, she felt warmth in her throat. A tickle in all four chambers of her heart that could have been electricity. And something more: she felt that all the different Monas that ever were and ever would be could be shown to this person. Would be safe with him.

Arthur sat back. He turned his palms over and shook out his arms.

“I’m still here,” he said.

Mona nodded. “Must not have been true love’s kiss.”

Arthur tried to smile.

“I assure you,” Mona said, “this place is very real. And you are very real and very here.”

“If you say so,” Arthur said.

“Fuckin’-A, I say so.”

He smiled. “You kiss your daughter with that mouth?”

No,
Mona thought.
I kiss Amy’s daughter with this mouth
.

“I think it’ll just—take a minute. Or two. Kiss me again?”

Mona smiled at him and wanted to cry. “One at a time. I think your system can only handle so many shocks.”
And I’ve got a good one for you. Oh, Arthur, I’ve got a nice big shock for you. Guaranteed to wake you right the hell up
.

She had decided. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be right: she would tell Arthur everything he wanted to know, even if it meant he woke all the way up and left this dream behind. She would tell him that Amy was pregnant when they ran away. She would tell him that she had kept and raised Amy’s baby as her own.

Mona woke up on Monday morning with the words heavy on her tongue, poised to spring forward as soon as she mustered enough breath, but Arthur was so invested in wanting to develop the Waters-Kessler wedding pictures he’d taken on film that her breath shifted like the wind.

“How much room do you need to do that?” she asked. “How many square feet?”

“Not many. I need space for basins, for a drip line. If there’s a water hookup, all the better.”

“We can use the broom closet on the third floor. If you don’t scare easily.”

Arthur mumbled around the piece of strawberry-rhubarb-covered toast in his mouth. “Whyz tha’?”

“Some chick drowned herself in the third-floor broom closet in the nineteen-tens. Dunked her head in the mop basin and didn’t come up for air.”

“So you’re saying there’s a water hookup.”

“You sick bastard, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

They drove back to Syracuse, to the art supply warehouse on Erie Boulevard. Mona amused herself by juggling blocks of polymer clay
while Arthur selected chemicals and papers and other assorted supplies. They ate lunch at the neighborhood Italian place Mona’s parents used to go to on special occasions—anniversaries, birthdays, and her graduation from high school, when an infant Oneida had painted herself, her booster seat, and the majority of the booth in marinara sauce. Mona hadn’t been back since they died, but nothing about the restaurant had changed. She made Arthur inspect the mural of Sicily on the rear wall, and there they were, in black ballpoint, hidden in the scraggly leaves of an olive tree: her initials and the date.

“I had to do it quick, while my mom went to the bathroom. There was no way she would have ever let me get away with defacing property like a delinquent.” Mona, full of pasta and cheese, which always made her feel overwhelmingly content, poked at her handiwork. “It was my dad’s idea.”

Arthur reached across the table and took her hand. Mona was past caring whether it was wrong or right or selfish or delusional. She adored him, and that was that.

And she didn’t want to see him torn apart, fully woken before he was ready, broken and disconnected and all because of Amy (or what was left of her). She convinced herself that this was why she didn’t tell him on Tuesday, when he developed the negatives; or Wednesday, when he made so many prints he had to string extra drip lines over her bathtub; or Thursday, when he presented her with a photograph he’d taken when she didn’t think anyone was looking. She’d been trying to be inconspicuous while the bridal party arranged itself up one of the grand staircases of the Landmark Hotel. Arthur had caught her leaning below one side of the sides, black pant cuffs and sky blue dress hems rising step by step above her head. She was smiling a Mona Lisa smile, sure with one glance and faint with another, hair falling over her eyes and arms crossed over her stomach.

“Very mysterious,” Arthur said.

“Not as much as you might think,” Mona said.

She went to bed on Thursday night with a knot in the back of her head that ached all the way down her shoulders and pulsed in her temple. She had never told this secret to anyone. Yes: she had told Anna who Oneida’s father was, thinking it would prepare her for a conversation
with her daughter that seemed necessary in the abstract. Halfway through the revelation, Mona realized she had nothing to say about Ben Tennant but his name. She didn’t know anything else, and couldn’t say more without revealing the other secret: the secret that had been hers and hers alone for years. She didn’t even know how to begin telling it, so she didn’t. It was safer that way.

So where did the story start, exactly?

Did it start the afternoon they watched Godzilla ravage Tokyo, when Amy first cried over Ben Tennant, when she told Mona about the postcard and her broken heart?

Did it start the night of the winter semiformal, when Mona talked with Ben in the lobby of the Landmark, Amy threw a purse at her head and ran, and Ben followed?

No: all that was backstory. Supporting evidence, details of the case. The story Arthur came to Ruby Falls to hear—the story Mona hadn’t told a soul except her mother, in the year before she died—started in Amy’s bedroom on a spring day in 1993.

When Mona opened her eyes on Friday morning, there were no more costs and no more benefits to analyze. There was only an attack to plan and a liquor cabinet to assess. The vodka was lower than Mona remembered from the last time she checked, which was probably months ago. She would have to talk to Sherman, who loved his afternoon cocktail, about replacing his share of the booze.

There was an almost-full bottle of tequila, and Mona added
pick up lemons
to her mental to-do list. She left a menu for the Milky Way Bar and Grill on the kitchen table with her usual Friday night take-out note (
All tenants: write down what you want, leave your $, dinner by 7
) and left the Darby-Jones. She didn’t wait for Arthur to wake up. She didn’t want to see him yet, not today.

Mona drove into town, picked up three lemons and a box of tissues at the convenience mart, and then drove out to Route 12 with all the windows down. She passed a bus rattling on its way to the high school.

The only indication that anyone had ever lived on this particular desolate lot in the woods was a mailbox by the side of the road, listing to
the right, door lolling open like a rusty tongue. Mona pulled off the road and walked the overgrown driveway on foot, until she was standing in the middle of a flat treeless patch. Not much was left of Amy Henderson’s house. Mona didn’t know what, legally, became of the property after Amy’s grandfather died, but whoever owned it had razed the squat box that had started its life as a double-wide trailer, that had kept Amy dry and mostly warm.

Mona faced the direction she’d come from and turned to the right, toward what would have been the front corner of the house. She walked over the earth to the former site of Amy’s bedroom.

She thought she would feel something other than cold, but at first she didn’t. She closed her eyes and tried to remember everything about that afternoon after school, when Amy kicked off her sneakers, threw herself down on her bed, and said, “So I’m pregnant,” the way one might say, “So I’m hungry.”

That was how this story began:
Once upon a time, Amy Henderson kicked off her sneakers and said “So I’m pregnant” to her best friend.

Mona hadn’t known if she was allowed to ask questions, had barely been able to grasp what those questions might be. She remembered hugging herself and saying, “I’m so sorry.” It had been spring, late April, sunny, warm, and damp, and Amy tucked her legs beneath her and said, “Don’t be sorry. It’s OK. I mean, it’s not OK, but it will be.”

Mona, thirty-one and freezing in the ghost of Amy’s house, suddenly felt cool linoleum floors beneath her bare teenage feet. Smelled the musty damp that clung to the shabby rugs and orange curtains. Behind her, she could sense Amy’s looming bookcase, shelves sagging under the weight of too many books about movies and monsters and creatures and the various methods of making them. Mona was always terrified the bookshelf would tip in the night, crushing her in her sleeping bag on Amy’s cold floor. She never slept when she slept over at Amy’s.

“What do you mean
it will be
—are you going to, you know—um, abort?” Mona was blushing so deeply she felt her head would burst into flame.

“No.” Amy blinked rapidly. “No, I don’t want—I don’t want to. I want to see what happens. Plus it costs money I don’t have to spare. I
need everything we can get—everything, between the two of us. We need money to get out of here.”

“Oh my God, Amy, it’s—what are you—”