This Must Be the Place: A Novel (8 page)

He froze. He heard Harry digging under the edge of the door, growling, trying to get in.

There it was again—a white dot that swung back and forth in the trees outside his window. He crept to the window and cupped his hands around his eyes.

Someone was in the trees outside. Someone—he saw a hand on a branch, a leg through the waving leaves—had climbed the tree outside his window at 4:30 in the morning. He squinted and saw another hand, holding a flashlight. A flap of fabric, light-colored. Maybe the hood of a sweatshirt.

There was a whip crack and then a body appeared in mid-air, a magic trick falling to earth. Arthur watched as a broken branch and a boy hit the ground fifteen feet below. The branch bounced. The boy—a teenager, in a hooded sweatshirt, thin as a rake—landed with a grunt and rolled to his side, moaning and coughing. The moaning told Arthur he was at least alive and, given that confirmation, Arthur felt no particular need to call for help. He was watching a movie: a movie he was part of, but a movie nonetheless. It was too early for secondary characters to die senselessly. This little stunt was clearly just this character’s introduction.

The boy stood and rolled his head on his neck. He opened his eyes to gaze longingly to the left of Arthur, at the other end of the house. Arthur stared at the boy and felt like he was watching himself, had traveled fifteen years back in time to witness a moment he had never been brave enough, in high school, to attempt: an alternate history playing out before his eyes. The boy blew the house a kiss and staggered away in the dark.

“Did you see that, Amy?” Arthur whispered. “What do you think . . . what do you think it means?” He sat back on his feet and laid his palm flat on the lid of the shoebox. Then he closed his eyes and flipped the box open, stuck his hand inside, and fumbled until his fingers closed around something small, something paper and delicate, that felt right.

Arthur opened his eyes. Between two fingers he held a cookie fortune.
Someone
, it said in tiny red letters,
from the past will return to steal your heart
.

Arthur spoke and knew it to be true. “The boy is in love with Mona’s daughter,” he said, and slumped forward. He was asleep before he hit the floor.

4
Dinner at the Darby-Jones

Arthur Rook didn’t go to dinner for four days. During that time, Oneida saw him come out of his room only once, to ask for a cup of laundry detergent—which was particularly odd, because he didn’t ask to use the washing machine. When she told Mona about his strange request (which she had complied with, because, after all, she was a good landlady’s daughter), Mona gasped, pressed her hand to her throat, and said, “Dear God. You know what they say about strange men who drink laundry detergent.”

Arthur appeared, like the ghost that supposedly haunted the third-floor broom closet, to all the tenants of the Darby-Jones in turn, in increasingly odd anecdotes they discussed over dinner. Anna DeGroot was the first to see him, on Sunday afternoon. He came up behind her when she was locking the door to her room and, without even introducing himself, asked if she could direct him into town. “Scared the absolute crap out of me,” Anna said, jabbing her fork in the air for emphasis. “And I really didn’t know what to do with the question. Did he want a ride? Did he want to walk? If that was the case, did he understand that town was about two miles away?”

“So what’d you tell him?” Mona asked.

“I offered him a ride, of course.” Anna shrugged. “You know I’ve got a soft spot for strays.”

Anna was the town’s veterinarian. She had moved into the Darby-Jones four years ago when she divorced her husband, and Oneida, despite realizing it was strange that Anna continued to rent a single room from her mother long after she could afford to move out on her own, couldn’t imagine life without her. She was a short, plain woman with curly brown
hair pulled back in a ponytail with the aid of copious bobby pins and clips, as though her hair, should she not take special pains to hold it back, would explode. She spoke to everyone as though they were frightened animals, in soothing, measured tones that cultivated confidence, security, sleepiness. She was gentle but firm; Oneida could imagine her at the clinic—smelling slightly of disinfectant, dander, and the indistinct tang of animal fear—setting cat bones, wrapping cones around the heads of mutts, soothing an anxious German shepherd moments before putting it to sleep. The euthanizist within Anna both unnerved and awed Oneida. She suspected, beneath the curly, fuzzy exterior, that Anna possessed a core of titanium steel, one that allowed her to kill family pets as a matter of everyday business. No doubt it was this same strength of will that allowed her to screw around with Sherman Russell, the high school shop teacher and another resident of the Darby-Jones, without anyone—other than Oneida—knowing about it.

Oneida had discovered their affair the previous spring when she woke up thirsty in the middle of the night, went to get a drink of lemonade from the kitchen, and passed Anna’s rooms on her way to the stairs. At first she’d been afraid Anna was having some kind of fit or was being strangled, but then, in a humiliating moment of clarity, she understood. Sex was happening. Behind that door. In her house.
Right now
. She’d run back to her room, not caring who heard her feet pounding along the creaky hallway. Oneida had seen enough movies to know that kids occasionally stumbled on their parents having sex; it was usually played for comedy, but, at the time, Oneida didn’t see anything remotely funny about it. She felt dirty, like she’d been spying and had found out something she couldn’t forget. It was equally disturbing as an object lesson in the dangers of getting exactly what she wished for: maybe she didn’t want to know
everything
after all.

The next morning, Sherman Russell, a short man who wore plaid flannel shirts and motorcycle boots and let kids she wouldn’t trust with a pencil operate giant saws, had greeted her over his morning cup of coffee nonchalantly. Were they all pretending it hadn’t happened? That Oneida hadn’t heard the queen bed with the carved acorn newel posts thumping against the floor and the wall, hadn’t heard Anna’s voice, sounding alternately alarmed and thrilled, calling Sherman’s name?
Anna poured herself a cup of coffee shortly thereafter, offered a cordial good-morning to all, and opened the
Ruby Falls Register
to the sports section. Oneida realized that what was going on between Sherman and Anna was a secret. More than a secret—it was illicit. Maybe they thought her mother would kick them out if they were discovered, which didn’t make any sense at all to Oneida; if anything, Mona would just insist that they each continue to pay rent before blessing them to boink with impunity.

More likely, they were keeping their relationship a secret for her sake.
Most of all,
Oneida thought, and giggled into her bowl of cereal, it was so patently ridiculous,
most of all, you’ve got to hide it from the kids
. Well, the kids find things out, and then she heard another song in her head:
The kids are quite aware of what they’re going through
. She felt happily full of knowledge, buzzed on information. It was a complete reversal of the way she’d felt the night before, and she understood it wasn’t the knowing of things she craved—but the knowing of things that other people didn’t.

Which made gossiping about Arthur Rook over dinner the highlight of Oneida’s day. Anna continued by saying that Arthur had accepted her offer of a ride into town, and they had both gone into Avery’s, the convenience mart whose limited selection Ruby Falls depended on for its basic necessities. “So we meet up at the checkout in about twenty minutes, right?” Anna said. “I’ve got the usual: bread, lunch meat, veggies, toothpaste. And I’m trying not to say anything to this poor guy, who’s clearly—
clearly
—bonkers, but I’m watching all this random stuff roll by on the conveyor belt—”

“Like what?” Oneida asked.

Anna bugged her eyes.

“Rubber cement. A pad of multicolored construction paper. Scissors.” She paused. “Toothpicks, I think. Tape. String. And kitty litter.”

“It’s a good source of fiber,” Mona said.

Sherman grumbled something into his lasagna. Oneida assumed it was a tacit condemnation of arts and crafts; it was common knowledge that Sherman and Mrs. Brodie, the art teacher at Ruby Falls High, despised each other. Rumored reasons spanned from a long-ago love affair that ended badly to a war over parking spaces in the faculty parking
lot. Oneida suspected Sherman hated Mrs. Brodie because Mrs. Brodie was a hippie, and Sherman, who kept a sawed-off shotgun under his bed, did not truck with pacifism of any sort.

“Finally, I couldn’t help myself.” Anna dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “I tried to be kind of jokey about it, but I pretty much asked him what the hell he was doing. I think I said something like, ‘Is this some new Hollywood diet?’ because he looked a little taken aback, as though never having been formally introduced meant I wouldn’t know anything about him.

“Anyway, he shrugs it off but I can tell I’ve made him think of something, because he runs back into the aisles for a second. And when he comes back, he has a jar of peanut butter and a box of Froot Loops.”

“At least he’s not starving himself,” Mona said. She wound a string of molten mozzarella around her fork and slid it between her lips.

Sherman laughed gruffly and passed his plate to Mona for a second helping. “Joker doesn’t know what he’s missing. More for us, huh?”

“You saw him too, didn’t you, Sherm?” Anna asked. There was something almost professional about their rapport, Oneida thought. Their casual familiarity, covering for a greater intimacy, felt studied and cautious to Oneida, so the end result was that it didn’t feel casual at all. She didn’t understand how they could ever think they were fooling anyone.

Sherman nodded and swallowed the giant lump of pasta and cheese he’d just shoved into his mouth. He propped his elbows on the table and splayed his hands, setting the scene. It was the same stance he took whenever he explained a new project in shop, meant to convey the responsibility and seriousness required to operate large machines designed to rend and tear. “It’s night, late,” Sherman began, flexing his fingers. “I forget which night: Monday; let’s say Monday. I go down to the kitchen for a snack and this joker is sitting at the table with a glass of something red in front of him.”

“Like blood?” Mona took a sip of water. “So he’s a vampire?”

“But here’s the thing—all the lights were off. So I don’t see the kid until I flick on the switch and suddenly he’s just there, with this glass of red junk, and he doesn’t flinch or jump or say anything. Kid just looks up at me and sort of blinks, and he looks—kid looks drunk, frankly, and
I’ve seen enough drunk kids in my life to know what they look like. Glassy eyes. Kind of hollow and dead.”

“Rude,” said a quiet voice, crackly as paper, that belonged to Bert Draper, the oldest resident of the Darby-Jones, and also the quietest and most likely to fade into the background. “Inexcusable,” she clarified, with a sharpness that signified the conclusive judgment on Arthur Rook.

Roberta Draper had lived at the Darby-Jones all Oneida’s life and all of Mona’s as well. She was eighty-seven years old and the very last of the Drapers, who had once owned the largest dairy farm in Ruby Falls. She was so pious Oneida wondered why she never became a nun. She had lived the life of a nun, with or without the habit—she had never married, kept herself cloistered in her rooms, and made no secret of her disapproval of everything: chiefly, Mona’s decision to raise a child without a husband and civilization at large’s decision to become a cesspool of sin, flesh, and tabloid magazines, to which, despite reviling them, Bert was utterly addicted. Mona would pick up a copy of the
National Enquirer
or
Us Weekly
whenever she went to the grocery store and leave it in a highly visible location for Bert to pick up, condemn, and eventually take back to her room to peruse. Maybe that’s why she never became a nun, Oneida thought. Bert was excellent at recognizing sin but terrible at resisting it.

Bert was mobile for a crone pushing ninety; she walked with a cane but she didn’t really need it. She liked having something to announce her presence, and the cane’s sharp clomping could be heard throughout the house whenever Bert was on the move. There were five separate rooming quarters in the Darby-Jones, two with their own baths. Bert had one of these, and it comprised the majority of the top floor. Mona had offered to move her into the second-floor rooms-plus-bath—the space Arthur Rook now rented—but Bert had insisted: all she needed was her cane, and she could manage all four flights of stairs quite well, thank you very much. The end result was that Oneida, Mona, Anna, and Sherman would be sitting at a dinner table full of cooling food as they listened to Bert’s cane clomping closer and closer, a blip of archaic sonar, until finally—finally—Bert Draper would shuffle into view, gush that they needn’t have waited for such an old bag of bones, but radiate pleasure that she had, in fact, managed to teach the younger generations
the importance of manners, of propriety, and, most of all, of self-restraint.