This Must Be the Place: A Novel (47 page)

“Nobody knows who got your mother into trouble, dear,” Bert said. “No one but your mother. And the boy, I suppose, though who knows if she ever told him. I wouldn’t have put it past her to lie to him. She’s always been a bit selfish.”

“Hey.” Oneida bristled. “That’s my
mom
you’re talking about.”

No, it’s not.

A raw silence filled the air. Arthur put his other hand over Oneida’s and said, “I’d have been honored.”

It caught her completely off guard and she pulled away. “You don’t know anything, Bert,” she said, her voice low. “I have to go.” And she pushed herself off the settee, sending up a plume of dust.

Bert, flustered, craned her neck to watch Oneida leave. Arthur stood and followed, kicking over another stack of magazines.

Oneida was sitting on the fourth floor landing, perched high over
the sunny center of the house. She’d pushed her glasses up into her hair and pressed both palms against her face. Arthur sat beside her.

“I meant that,” he said.

“Thanks.” She sighed. “Hypothetical Dad.”

She wasn’t crying. If she had been, or if she’d been any other person in the world besides Amy’s daughter, and therefore a stoic to the core, Arthur wouldn’t have told her. He would have left the revelations of the day stand with the anonymity of her father (who even he, Arthur, knew more about than Bert). But Amy wanted her daughter to know. Amy sent him to Ruby Falls to tell her daughter the truth.

“I could have been your step-dad,” he said.

Oneida dropped her hands and her glasses plopped back down over her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I was married to your mother.”

Oneida’s mouth pulled tight at the corners. “What do you mean?” she said.

“Her name,” Arthur said, “was Amy.”

They sat in silence at the top of the house, suspended: Oneida with her arms propped on her knees, her hands limp, and Arthur, next to her, wishing he could see her eyes for the glare off her glasses. If he could only see her eyes, he thought. If he could see them, he’d see that he’d done the right thing. This was what Amy wanted. He’d faithfully carried out her final will, made her final testament.

But Oneida hid, her lenses pools of white, reflecting the dim hallway bulb above them and all the ambient sunshine from a November day that had dawned too bright—light like an ocean wave, crashing through the first floor, pooling in the front hall and rising up through the empty core of the house; until the house was full and there were no shadows, no dark corners, no places for the truth to hide. A whole world, drowned in light.

22
Bottle, Broken

Oneida thought,
Huh.

Then she felt a bone—tiny, fragile as a bird’s—in her throat. She swallowed against it once, twice, but it was stuck.

“What”—she whispered around the bone—“what do you mean?”

Arthur looked less sure of himself. Frightened, even. His eyes darted back and forth.

“Don’t you dare,” she said. “Tell me what you mean.”

“Come down to my room,” he said.

“No.” Oneida swallowed again, and again. That stupid bone. “Tell me here, tell me now.”

“Mona raised you,” Arthur said. “Amy carried you.”

The bone snapped, and when Oneida swallowed again it sank its jagged points into the soft flesh of her throat. “But that’s . . . impossible,” Oneida said. “Why would you tell me that?”

“Because it’s true,” Arthur said. “Please, come down to my room, I can show you—” He pulled on his face with his hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to prove—”

“Fuck you, Arthur.”

Oneida ran downstairs.

Mona was sitting in the kitchen, drinking a giant mug of coffee like every other Saturday morning of Oneida’s life. She looked up when Oneida appeared in the doorway.

“How are you feeling?” Mona asked.

I don’t know. Like I’m choking on my own blood.

“Fine,” Oneida answered. She tried to swallow.

“There’s fresh coffee and some grapefruit in the fridge. The troopers
called a while ago. They need a statement about last night.” Mona’s eyes shivered in their sockets. “I told them we’d be there at ten.”

“Fine.”

And it was fine. Oneida told the troopers everything she’d told the police in the ER the night before, though her speech was considerably less slurred.

“Is that true?” Mona asked when they got back in the car. “What you said about Andrew and Eugene?”

“Of course it is,” Oneida said, and thought,
I told them the truth. I didn’t tell them everything, but what I told them was true.
I told them Eugene broke Andrew’s guitar; I didn’t tell them he did it for me. I told them Eugene and Andrew got into a fight at the dance; I didn’t tell them Eugene was freaked out and afraid I would spill his wonderful secret, his beautiful secret, which I will never tell, ever, to any soul on this planet or any other plane of existence I ever happen to reside upon. And I told them what Andrew Lu told me: that our group history project screwed up his GPA and he wanted revenge. I didn’t tell them that I could have been nicer to Eugene Wendell when I had the chance. I didn’t tell them Eugene Wendell was a worthy soul, finally: a worthy soul and a freak and my only friend.

“I’m so sorry.” Mona sighed. “That you went through all that. And I’m so sorry you didn’t feel like you could tell me about any of it until—now.”

Oneida didn’t respond.

Oneida didn’t know what was happening. She sat next to her mother in the car and they didn’t speak, and Oneida tried to imagine what it would be like for Mona to
not
be her mother.

“Honey,” Mona finally said, “you know you can always come to me. You can always use me. That’s what I’m here for.”

Use me
. It was an offer that didn’t strike Oneida as particularly ironic until after dinner, when Arthur told her everything and she realized that Mona had used her first.

Dinner was awful. Bert was quiet and jittery, probably afraid that Oneida and/or Arthur would spill her gossip about Daniel Darby and William Fitchburg Jones (whether she would be more upset about her association with scandal or having been scooped, Oneida could only
guess). It was the one piece of information gleaned in the past twenty-four hours that gave Oneida any of the old pleasure: the first time she walked up the main staircase and saw the photograph in the front hall (which now had a strange reddish stain all over it) with new eyes, she smiled. What better way to immortalize the meeting of worthy souls than side by side in a photograph, facing each other forever, in the house where they once lived. But then she saw old Mrs. Fitchburg Jones in the same photograph—grim, sad Mrs. Fitchburg Jones—and heard Bert’s words in her head:
She’d been lied to. For years
.

Oneida hated to think she might know exactly how that felt.

Sherman and Anna must have been having a spat, because neither spoke a word to the other. Arthur was absent and Mona, usually able to make the most mundane conversation cheerfully, was in a funk. You could taste it in the food: colorless, bland, heavy with mood. Oneida excused herself before dessert.

She lay in bed,
The Scarlet Letter
, still unread, beside her head on the pillow. She couldn’t even imagine what Arthur thought the truth of her life was. Oneida remembered one of the first things Mona had ever said about him—
Arthur Rook is not a well man
—and how she had then asked,
So why is he still here?
Mona acted like she had some sort of responsibility toward Arthur, for his general health and safety and sanity. It couldn’t be human kindness: her mother was nice, but she wasn’t
that
nice. God, everything had made more
sense
when Oneida thought Arthur was her father.

She snorted, because
that
was hysterical.

If Eugene were here, he would tell her to find out; she’d gone to see Bert for him, had gone looking for the truth in his honor. Mona had called the Wendells and was told, brusquely, that Eugene was still in the hospital, unconscious—stable, but out. Oneida half-imagined that the truth, whispered in his ear, would have the power to wake him; and if Arthur could arm her with an even larger truth than she’d ever imagined, there was no way Eugene could sleep through its revelation.

Oneida sat up straight. For Eugene, for herself, it was time to know. She would conduct an experiment with Arthur, she would gather data, she would draw conclusions, and she would have a hell of a story to share. A thought struck her: She could potentially exonerate Mona Jones.
What if Mona Jones had not had an illegitimate child at sixteen?
What if she finally had proof that her mother—that Mona wasn’t a waste, wasn’t a screwup, wasn’t what Ruby Falls thought she was? And what if disproving the rumors hurt worse than bearing them ever had or ever could?

Arthur was sitting on the green loveseat in his room when Oneida, who knocked but didn’t wait, stepped inside. He turned at the sound. Oneida could see he was holding a postcard. A huge pink box sat on the coffee table in front of him.

“What the hell did you mean?” Oneida shut the door behind her with a hollow thud.

Arthur set the postcard down. “Are you sure you want to know?”

Last chance, Oneida thought. She bit the inside of her mouth and tasted pennies. She heard a soft tapping—claws on the tile in the bathroom, maybe—and Arthur’s fat tabby rushed toward her, winding in and around her legs like a plume of furry smoke.

“Harryhausen used to do that to your mother,” Arthur said. “He was her cat. This whole time—he knew.”

Oneida slackened against the door. Arthur was right—this stupid cat had been pestering her ever since Mona gave him free run of the house. She had to keep her bedroom door shut all day to keep him out of her sheets and her closet and from rolling around on her shoes. She slid down and the cat rose on his back paws, sniffing the air wildly. Oneida couldn’t bring herself to pet him. Not yet.

“Tell me,” she said, and looked up to see Arthur watching her. Studying her. “Stop staring at me like that,” she said.

“You look so much like her. Except for your hair . . . she was sort of blond.”

Oneida rubbed her eyes. “I don’t understand how this is possible,” she said. “I don’t—Mom—”

Arthur left the sofa and sat on the floor in front of her, Harryhausen between them. “What do you know already? What has Mona told you?”

Oneida shook her head. “No,” she said. “
You
tell
me
. Then I’ll tell you how wrong you are.”
Or how right you are.
Her face burned. The world around her began to swim like it had in the emergency room.

“OK. Amy and Mona were friends in high school. Amy ran away
because she was pregnant. With you.” Arthur rubbed his arms. “Then Amy—ran away again. And Mona brought you home and raised you.”

Oneida felt a chill in her gut. “The hell does that mean,
Amy ran away again
? What, did she squeeze me out and skip town?” She almost laughed but caught it in time; it would have turned into a sob anyway. Harryhausen had crawled into Oneida’s lap, and her hands involuntarily ran through his furry pelt. Her leg tickled with the vibration of his purr.

Arthur didn’t want to say anymore. She could tell from the way he opened his mouth and held it open but didn’t look her in the face.

“That part—all of that, you need to talk about with Mona.” Arthur shook his head. “I only knew my Amy, and I loved her. I just”—his voice caught—“I adored her. She was magnificent. She made monsters, you know—”

“Monsters?” Oneida squeaked.

“In movies. Movie—oh, I didn’t mean
you
.” He grimaced. “She was a puppeteer and animator. She made monsters and creatures and fantastic—critters.”

“Magnificent,”
Oneida sneered. “So where is she now? Did she dump your ass too?”

Arthur’s eyes opened wide and he blinked. He was—

Arthur was crying.

The truth struck Oneida Jones in the face. Or maybe she had been the moving object all along, rushing headlong toward the truth like a crash-test dummy hurtling at a brick wall—the truth immobile, her own velocity the steadily increasing variable. Her boyfriend was in the hospital, unconscious. Her mother was not her mother. This stranger had been married to a woman named Amy, and it was because of Amy that Oneida was alive—

But Amy was no longer alive.

“Oh, screw
this
!” Oneida shouted. Harryhausen, spooked, hissed and leaped away. She felt his claws through the fabric of her jeans. “Are you kidding? First you tell me my mother’s someone else, then you tell me she’s
dead
?
”

Arthur tried to reach for her hand but Oneida shoved him away. If she hadn’t already had her back to the door with no place to go, she
would have fled that instant. “You’re
sick
, you know that? You’re disgusting.
Why would you tell me this?”

“It was an accident.” Arthur seemed to be having trouble swallowing.
Choke on it,
Oneida thought. “She was electrocuted. At work. I promise you it’s all true—”

“Give me one reason to believe you.”