This Must Be the Place: A Novel (46 page)

Thank God she was safe: drunk but basically unhurt. He would remember how she had looked in the emergency room forever. He’d made a point of leaving Mona at reception so he could see Oneida alone. Well-meaning curator though Mona was, Arthur needed to see the girl he now knew to be Amy’s daughter and feel however he was going to feel that first time without interference. He wanted no context, no filter, no descriptive placard mounted unobtrusively on Oneida’s lower right side, bearing the mark of this particular work’s creators:

Amy Henderson & Ben Tennant

Oneida Jones

Circa 1992

Skin and blood on bones

And so he saw her: a ghost dressed entirely in black. A collapsed star in the center of a bustling Friday-night emergency room, Amy-shaped without being Amy, worn and woozy. A baby half grown. Now she was fast asleep beside him, a companionable comet streaking down Route 81 in the dark. In every art theory requirement Arthur had ever taken, at the heart of every essay about experience and subjectivity he’d ever wrung out of his typewriter at three in the morning, Arthur had regurgitated the usual theories about the untrained eye: the gaze, the myth of impartiality; about how you could never see something without seeing yourself through it.

Which is probably why he looked at Oneida and thought,
I could have been your dad.

How, in what possible world? he wondered. But still—any world was possible. Any accident could happen.

His vacation was over. He woke up early on Saturday and considered the terrifying option of calling his parents but decided to clean his room instead. His room—more like his disease. Harryhausen approved of the exorcism, and perched on top of the loveseat in a shaft of sunlight, bulk spilling in furry flaps over the sides, blissed out and purring. Arthur untacked the clothesline and the paper-clipped cards and the beaded runners. He disassembled the dioramas and at last regretted gluing Khrushchev to Mona’s wall. Each tiny work was a sketch, he realized, a cartoon made in preparation for the only real work of art he’d made in years, that he’d ever made, period: the collage of Amy taken out to sea and out to space. The best thing he’d ever done, and two high school sophomores had used it to cheat on their history project.

He’d helped Amy’s daughter cheat.

Amy would have loved the hell out of
that
.

He understood now what had happened when he put the collage together, could name the trigger in his brain that made him ask Mona for a kiss. With the collage, he was burying Amy the way he’d buried goldfish as a kid: in a paper box with a few trinkets to keep her company. And the pink shoebox—it was just another vessel for her corpse, more mausoleum than museum. It had reminded Arthur that Amy was more than a series of anecdotes and memories, that she had had a body, and that he would have to go back to it. He would have to deal with it as intimately as he had dealt with the pieces of her that were made of paper and plastic and tin.

“I need to know, Harry.” He scratched at his chest. “Shit, Harry. I need to know what they did with her body.” He felt queasy and he gagged. Waking up to the world again was murder—every part of him pounded, every piece was heavy as lead. He put the bits of Amy back in her shoebox: the pink monkey, the green Lucite key chain, the ruby-red cuff links, the pictures from Zuma Beach. And the postcard that had
led him to the Darby-Jones, that he’d intended to finally deliver to Mona on Friday night when she ended up delivering the news of Amy’s daughter instead.

He reread his wife’s loopy handwriting:

Mona, I’m sorry. I should have told you. You knew me better than anyone—I think you knew me better than me. Don’t worry, I swear I’m happier dead. Anyway, I left you the best parts of myself. You know where to look.

Wait.

Arthur’s brain caught like a gear and stalled, then turned. Amy never sent this postcard. Amy had sixteen years to send this postcard and she didn’t, and
that had to mean something
. It had to mean she had kept this postcard because it was an important memory. She had left this postcard to be discovered upon the occasion of her death, discovered by someone who would know where to look. Someone like Arthur, with the hope, perhaps, that it would lead him to Ruby Falls—as it had—so that Arthur could name her heir—

“Oh!” He stood up so fast Harryhausen hissed and bounded away.

Mona wasn’t Amy’s heir. Oneida was. Her
daughter
was.

Amy wanted Arthur to tell Oneida the truth.

“Oh,
shit
,” Arthur said, because in his new, wholly awake state, the power of this realization gave him an instant skull-splitting headache. He leaned against the sofa for balance. “Oh, shit,” he repeated softly. So this was what he came here to do. This was what he could do for Amy: he could tell her child about the woman her mother had grown up to be. The talented and driven woman, whom he had loved with all his heart; who had been Mona’s friend but not a very good one; who checked herself out at the age of sixteen, chose a new life on the other side of the country, and died again, sixteen years later, by accident.

But
this
. This was no accident. This was what Arthur was meant to do. This was the one thing that only Arthur—only Arthur Rook—could do for Amy.

He had to do it now. He had to do it today. It was too late to wait a second longer.

Arthur flung open his door, and there was Oneida, fidgeting in the hallway.

“Hi,” she said.

“Oneida.” Arthur pitched forward with lost momentum. “How are you feeling today?”

She shrugged. “My head kind of hurts.” She was nervous—he could tell from the way her hands were fluttering—but she was looking at him with a concentration that made him wonder, for just a second, if she already knew. She didn’t blink.

“Would you help me—do something?” she asked. “I could use some company.”

She
did
know. Or she suspected, at the very least. Arthur smiled and felt a twinge of pride in Amy’s stead: she was smart as hell.

“Of course,” he said. “Whatever you need.”

She let out a long breath and nodded. “OK,” she said. “Please don’t say anything yet, until—just let me handle it. OK?”

Arthur nodded. Oneida about-faced and marched away. But they didn’t go downstairs, to the kitchen where Arthur knew Mona could have been grinding coffee; and they didn’t knock on Mona’s bedroom door, where she might have still been sleeping it off. Instead, Oneida climbed up two flights to the top floor of the Darby-Jones, where Arthur had never even set foot, and knocked on a heavy wooden door. Her knock was answered by a methodical tapping: the slow and steady approach of a cane.

“Hi, Bert,” Oneida said, when the ancient woman finally opened the door. Bert squinted at Arthur, scowled, and addressed Oneida.

“What’s the trouble?”

“Can we come in?”

“Can’t keep you out, can I?” Bert turned and clomped away.

Bert’s rooms resembled not so much an apartment as a belfry. The ceilings were pitched at odd angles to follow the eaves of the house, which was perfect for a stooped old woman like Bert but treacherous for Arthur, who felt unsteady and off-kilter. Oneida must have been having similar difficulties—she was fairly tall (like her mother)—but no: either Oneida was familiar with the terrain or she was naturally more nimble, because she was already sitting on a red settee that was pink with dust.
Bert settled into a rigid-looking leather chair opposite her guest, and both women looked back, gauging his progress. He knocked over a stack of tabloid magazines and Bert clucked her tongue.

“Sorry,” he said. He sat beside Oneida and she bobbed up on her end of the old cushion.

“Don’t bother. For the record, Mr. Rook, I would never have let you in if you hadn’t been accompanied by this young lady. I don’t like you and I don’t trust you and I want you to know precisely where you stand.”

So that dinner—with the vet and the shop teacher and this old woman—had actually happened. Arthur was still sorting his memories of the past four weeks to determine which had been real occurrences and which hadn’t. They had all felt real enough at the time, but so did dreams while you were still dreaming them. The only memories he trusted were of Mona: Mona talking to him about Amy. Mona teaching him to knead fondant. Mona at the wedding. And Mona on the porch, trying to wake him with a kiss.

“That’s fair,” Arthur said. “I was an insolent little shit.”

“I’ll thank you not to swear. But yes, you were insolent.”

“Actually—Bert. Why I came here, it’s about”—Oneida’s voice wobbled—“it’s about something you said at that dinner.”

“Should have known you wouldn’t pop by for a nice chat and tea.” She crossed her gnarled hands over the top of her cane. “What do you want?”

Oneida adjusted her glasses. “You know an awful lot about this house. And the people in it. You said you knew—everything.”

“I do know everything.” A television from another room suddenly went to commercial, the volume spiking. “I know that big oaf who teaches at your school is going to get his heart broken by the divorcée, and I know you”—she pointed at Arthur—“
you
are going to leave just as suddenly as you came.”

Oneida frowned and turned to Arthur, who hadn’t known that about himself until Bert said it—hadn’t known it but knew it now. It was absolutely true. He would have to leave: suddenly, and soon. This wasn’t his life, it wasn’t his world, and it wasn’t his dream or his vacation anymore. Loneliness licked at his heart.

“Bert, what do you know about—my mom?” Oneida’s voice was so
small, Arthur could barely hear it. Bert definitely didn’t, and continued to rant.

“I know you, missy, are also going to leave and not come back other than for Christmas and maybe your mother’s birthday, and it’s going to break
her
heart. I know Roger Beers used to grow marijuana by the third post in the split rail fence on the northeast corner of the property. And I even know why that poor girl drowned herself in the broom closet. Your mother ever tell you about her?”

Oneida shook her head. “I only know that it happened. Bert—”

“That woman never tells you anything, does she?” Bert, again, didn’t notice, but Arthur saw Oneida’s cheeks color. “It was Mrs. William Fitchburg Jones. Killed herself—dunked her head in a basin and held herself under—because she just couldn’t go on living anymore. And why do you think that was? That’s right, she’d been lied to. For years. And she learned the truth and couldn’t go on living that lie. Now what do you suppose that lie was, and who told it to her?”

Oneida cocked her head to the side.

“Her husband. Mr. William Fitchburg Jones, who gave you your last name, who built this house—he lied to her for as long as they were married. And the lie he told her was that he loved her.”

“Bert—” Oneida tried to interrupt, but Bert had been waiting her entire life to tell his secret. The opportunity took twenty years off her face.

“That’s
right
—he didn’t love her. Never did! But he married her anyway, because it was the proper thing to do, it was then and it’s still the proper thing now, when you get a girl in trouble—not that your mother would know anything about that.”

Oneida’s hand darted across the settee toward Arthur’s, wrapping around his like a fierce, cold little claw.

“The truth is”—Bert cleared her throat—“all his life, Mr. William Fitchburg Jones only really loved one person. Loved that person until the day he died, and they lived here together, in this house—and do you want to guess who that person was?”

Arthur and Oneida, hands clasped on the ragged and rotting settee, leaned forward. Bert grinned, exposing a partial bridge that shone silver in the dim light.

“His portrait’s in the front hall.”

Oneida started, crushing Athur’s hand in a spasmodic squeeze.

“They were lovers!” Bert whispered. She cackled with glee. “William Fitchburg Jones and Daniel Darby—their entire lives, they were lovers. It’s the God’s honest truth, as passed to me from Beth Carrington, she was their cook for fifty years and was still in the kitchen when I was a young thing and first moved into the house—oh, now
she
knew
everything
.”

“Bert!” Oneida squawked. “Bert, is Arthur my father?”

Bert’s face froze, lips pursed to a point.

And then Arthur realized what Oneida had asked.

So
that’s
what she thought,
that’s
what she suspected. It made sense, of course; she didn’t even know her mother was a mystery to be solved. “Oneida,” he said gently, “why didn’t you just ask me? Why go through Bert?”

Oneida pressed her eyes shut tight. “I wanted to make it impossible for you to lie to me.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Bert asked.

“Is he my father?” Oneida asked Bert. And then, turned to Arthur: “Are you?” She didn’t open her eyes.

“No,” Arthur said. Just saying the word, he felt the loss of the past and the future alike. “No, I’m not.”
But I could have been.