This Must Be the Place: A Novel (48 page)

“I don’t have any proof. I can’t.”

“This is—this can’t
be.
” Oneida covered her face with her hands and prayed that it wasn’t true—prayed that the sensation creeping over her wasn’t real and wasn’t to be trusted—because she
did
feel it, sense it, as the truth. Her truth. And whether it was because Arthur so utterly believed what he was telling her that his conviction was contagious, or something innate, something native to her own heart, was responding to the truth of its creation—she didn’t know and she didn’t care. She only knew that she believed him. She believed her biological mother was not Mona. She believed the woman who had given her her life was dead—never to be known, never to be seen, never to be thanked or blamed or cursed or communicated with in any form. Death was the price of life. That was mortality.

She was done. She had reached the end of her quest for knowledge. She now knew more than she ever wanted to know: she had learned that she didn’t know who she was or where she came from. And she had learned that someday, without warning, she could die.
Would
die.

Arthur had succeeded in grasping one of her hands. Then he talked to her for another fifteen minutes. It was all about Ocean City, all about New Jersey—some of which Oneida knew (that Mona had worked at a pizza place) and some of which Oneida didn’t want to know (that Amy hadn’t even left a note). He asked if she was all right.

“Of course I’m not all right.”

“If there’s anything I know about your mother—”

“Which one?”

“Your mother. Mona.” Arthur grimaced. “She loves you. As much as one human being can love another.”

“She used me.” Oneida’s voice was dull and deep. It was someone else’s. “Her best friend ditched her and she was afraid and alone. I
know
her, Arthur. She needs to be needed. She needs an audience.
Enter abandoned me: I needed a world and she needed to be one. She used me.”

“No,” Arthur said. “That’s a gross oversimplification. Please, you have to talk to her about this.”

“Thank you for telling me.” Oneida untangled her legs and stood. Her knees were sore. “And don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

Arthur knew she was lying. She felt his worry, felt his concern, follow her back to her room. She didn’t care if he told Mona; she imagined his conscience would force him to. If Mona came to talk to her about this, that was fine. Oneida didn’t hate her. What she felt for Mona was something too complicated to go by a single name: for a moment she felt pity for a girl her age who had been left behind, who was probably still waiting for someone to come back for her. Then came a sure sense of awe for the woman who’d raised her, who’d had more of a choice in the matter than Oneida ever dreamed. But these were faint and, like her voice, the province of another person entirely. They were nothing compared to the swollen knot in her chest that crowded her heart, that was spreading—down to her stomach, up to her throat—numbing her body from the inside out.

I want to feel something good, she thought. I
have
to feel something good—right now, right now—

She grabbed the green glass bottle that Wendy had tied to her tree, the bottled blue velvet that would feel good between her fingers, that had been waiting patiently on her dresser to be broken in case of emergency.

It was an emergency.

She broke it.

23
Wake Up and Grow Up

On Monday, Arthur packed. He folded his clothes, even the dirty ones, and stacked them neatly in the bottom of his giant backpack, which still gave off a faint feline musk and probably always would. He folded the striped button-down that had belonged to Mona’s father and placed it on the dresser, and then reconsidered, since it had a smear of his own blood across the breast—a little more personal than a Lacoste logo. It wasn’t right to leave it for Mona to deal with. Nothing wrong with a souvenir, anyway.

With every sock and T-shirt neatly stowed, he felt lonelier.

He had nowhere to go. Nowhere to be.

He could go back to Los Angeles. He would make amends to his boss and to Max, and he would go back to work. He would deal with the question of Amy’s body. But Arthur would never be able to cook in his kitchen without remembering his wife sitting on the counter, swinging her legs; without feeling her knees pressing against his hips and tasting vanilla bean ice cream as she spooned it into his mouth. He would never be able to brush his teeth without seeing Amy reflected beside him in the mirror, gargling mouthwash. He would never sleep in his bed without hearing her sigh in her sleep, or snicker, which killed him. Los Angeles had always been a town of ghosts, of zombies and phantoms, and now they were in his apartment. It was a life too haunted for Arthur to fathom living.

He could go back to Boston, to Somerville. His parents—well, his mother—would welcome him with open arms and regular feedings, and his father would hand him a beer and they would watch the Red Sox on television. His brother, David, and his sister-in-law, Denise, would
have him over for parties and introduce him to new, nice girls every weekend. They would never talk about Amy. They would never mention her name again. His family had been technically supportive of his marriage, though he did know his mother was hurt that he eloped (until David got married a year later with much fanfare, after which she didn’t seem to mind). But Arthur knew none of them understood it—none of them understood
her
. She represented everything about Arthur that his family humored under the assumption that he would grow out of it. They would see his return as natural and a relief, and his life with Amy would pass into family apocrypha. Arthur would wake up in ten years married to a nice person and have several nice kids, and he would wonder if he had ever lived anywhere and any way other than this.

It wasn’t such a bad future, he thought. He only wished it had a place for his past.

Harryhausen howled.

He could stay.

“No,” he said out loud. He
couldn’t
stay here. He’d already done more than enough damage to this world—this world that was barely real, that could blink out of existence, he thought, given the slightest provocation. Arthur followed the sound of Harry meowing into the cheery front room, slightly shabby but loved and cozy, and knew he wanted to stay and stay and stay. He had always been more at home in his dreams than his real life.

There was a knock on his door.

Mona was standing in the hallway, just as her adopted daughter—no, her
sister
—had stood the day before. He hadn’t had an opportunity to be with Mona, to really see her—just the two of them alone—since he’d told Oneida the truth. Mona never made him swear, but Arthur knew she’d told him the truth about Oneida’s birth in confidence, and now he saw Mona with the eyes of one who had betrayed her trust. She looked older. More breakable and more human. She appeared less an overgrown teenager and more the adult that overgrown teenager had been trying to become for the past sixteen years, with hints of the woman she would be for the next forty or fifty. Her eyes were clear and open, softened with lines that told Arthur she had laughed, had lived, and had lied; her jaw was firm and resolute. She was lit from behind with something
warm that danced as it burned, the way a candle gives life to the paper skin of a lantern. He imagined her face framed with bright silver hair, the creases around her eyes and her mouth deeper and longer.

“Explain this.” She thrust a folded paper at his chest and pushed him, hard, knowing that he was still a stitched-up mess. She wanted to hurt him, and he couldn’t blame her.

She shoved him aside and walked into his room. Arthur shut the door behind her and unfolded a piece of three-hole-punched notebook paper, strafed with thin blue lines.
Mona
, it read.

I know about Amy. Arthur told me. I know that you love me but I don’t know what that means. I’m going away until I figure it out. Don’t worry and don’t come looking. I’ll find you when I’m ready.

“Who do you think you are?” It wasn’t quite an accusation; and Arthur, who had never been able to recognize a rhetorical question to save his life, thought he finally knew the right answer.

“I’m Amy’s executor,” he said.

Mona punched him. He hadn’t been expecting it, had never been sucker-punched in his life (unless you counted the way that Amy died). Blood rushed to his nose. His skin flamed from his cheek to the edge of his nostril, which was warm and suddenly wet. He croaked with shock.

“Amy doesn’t get a say here, Arthur. Amy gave up her right to have anything to do with my daughter when she dumped her in a tub.”

“I don’t—disagree—”

“Arthur, wake up.” Mona held her hands in front of her, fingers splayed, trying to palm the truth like a basketball. “I—
Jesus
—Amy Henderson was a piece of work. She wasn’t this brilliant, magical creature. That was an illusion, Arthur, it was make-believe, and I’m sorry that you loved it, but you
have
to see that now.
You have to see that now.”

“I don’t—”

“She left her
baby
!”

“What can’t you forgive her for?” Arthur’s face stung. “Abandoning her child or abandoning
you
?
”

“I have to choose?” Mona shouted. “What can’t you accept: that you
loved a person who did a very bad thing, or that you loved a person you didn’t really know?”

“Grow up, Mona,” Arthur said. “No one’s the same jerk they were at fifteen, thank God. You screw up and you figure life out. You change. Amy grew up and Amy changed into something fantastic. You didn’t know her.”

He thought of the postcard.
You knew me better than anyone. I think you knew me better than me.
And Arthur understood.

His Amy.
His
Amy—the same woman who looked at a pile of metal and wire and saw the blueprints for life, whose fingertips were soft, whose mind was single and absolute—had once been a young girl in an untenable situation. Had been a body with a desire, then a body in thrall to biology and curiosity, and finally a body in a position to make choices she had no precedent for surviving. His Amy created realities out of sheer will. His Amy had spent her waking life pretending. And his Amy had been a girl with the imagination and the will to plan her own escape and then to plan it again: she had her child and she left her child behind because she had to. To continue to pretend, to create the life she imagined for herself, she had to. He shuddered. Would she ever have told him? Would she have wanted him to know? Or would she have kept her secret her own, for the rest of the days she never had the chance to live?

He was so very weary of useless questions he would never know how to answer.

But she hadn’t totally abandoned her child or her friend: she had left them with each other. And in doing so, she had also left her husband a trail of bread crumbs to find her again. To see her—to see
all
of her—for the first time.

“What did you
tell
her, Arthur?” Mona leaned against the back of the chair and hugged herself. She was furious and her voice warbled. “Did you tell her everything?”

“No. I just—I told her Amy carried her.
Had
her. That you found her and brought her home.”

Mona shut her eyes.

“So she knows her mother abandoned her. You stupid bastard.” Mona looked away and shrugged her shoulders melodramatically. “And you know what the funny thing is? You want to hear the punch
line, Arthur? This morning I was feeling really awful about what
I
did to
you
.”

“You didn’t do anything.” He sniffed, felt his nostril clog with blood, and pressed the sleeve of his shirt to his nose. Were you supposed to tip back or forward for a nosebleed? The pain felt good. Deserved. He almost wished she’d punch him again.

“I called Max Morris.”

His legs buckled and he came down hard on the couch.

“Two days ago. The morning after I told you everything that happened in Jersey.”

“But—”

Mona pointed at his half-filled backpack, leaning against the doorway to the bedroom. “Look at what you’re doing. Look, you’re packing. You know you can’t stay here. You know you have to go home and finish your other life.”

“But how did you even find—”

“Little thing called the Internet. Pardon my tween, but:
duh.
Nobody hides anymore. Nobody
can
hide anymore. I mean, how the hell did you find
me
?”

He wiped gently at the base of his nose and examined his sleeve, soaked through in a Rorschach blot that didn’t look like anything at all: just his own cherry-red blood in a shapeless smear that defied reason or interpretation, that held no meaning or solution.

“I was going to tell you on Friday,” he said. “When I came to your room with the shoebox, I was going to tell you how I got here.” He pressed the bridge of his nose with his fingertip and was rewarded with a fresh stab of pain. “I can’t believe you punched me.”

“Tell me now, Arthur. Tell me what the hell that box has to do with any of this.”