Undeliverable (17 page)

He snorted and headed for the door. “You’re on your own.”

The line at the deli was longer than normal. The weather was slightly cooler than it had been recently and people were out taking advantage of the pleasant Saturday. He returned after about a half hour and walked into the warehouse with the sandwiches.

“Lunch is served.” There was no answer, and the radio station on the computer was waiting to be prompted that someone was still listening.

Ben walked down to the sorting room, thinking that Sylvia must still be shredding. As he opened the door, he could hear that the shredder was humming but not active. He felt his stomach tighten with a small niggling of fear before he came around the side of the device and found Sylvia sitting on the steps. For some reason, the machine instilled an exaggerated fear of someone falling in and getting shredded.

He handed her a sandwich before unwrapping his own. “Sorry I’m late. Finish the shredding?”

“Almost.” Sylvia made no move to open her lunch, just sat on the steps staring off into the space between him and the machine. It was unsettling for Ben, and he tried to draw her attention back to the warehouse.

He cast about for a topic that might get her attention and noticed the stack of still-full bins to the right of the shredder. “Interesting definition of almost.”

She looked around until she saw the bins still waiting for her. “Huh? Oh, yeah.”

“Earth to Sylvia.” Ben flopped onto the stair next to her and bumped her with his shoulder. “What’s going on with you?”

“It’s nothing.” She stood and he saw that she was holding a letter written on wide-ruled notebook paper.

Ben held out his hand for the letter. “What have you got there?”

“I said nothing.” She went to toss the letter into the shredder and stopped, hand extended, then came down the stairs and handed it to him. She grabbed a box of shredding, climbed the stairs and dropped the contents in.

The letter Ben held had apparently been written by a young girl, with the bubbly and self-conscious writing of someone who wants their writing to be “pretty.”

It was heartbreaking in its simple child’s logic. Be good, get what you want. But Ben knew that was not how the world worked from firsthand knowledge. “Sylvia, where did you get this?”

She took an envelope out of her pocket on her return trip and shoved it at him, still not saying anything. It had been addressed:

“Man, no kid should have to lose a parent. At least she didn’t have to watch her daughter go. There is something distinctly unnatural about a child going before her parents. It’s not right.” Ben put the letter on top of the bin that Sylvia was about to carry up the stairs. When she got to the top, she picked up the letter, glanced at it once more, then let it fall with the others into the shredder.

“At least she didn’t have to grow up without them. She didn’t have to scream in the dark at the monsters and have no one there. She didn’t wait and wait for them to come back. She didn’t think it was her fault.”

Ben opened his mouth and shut it again. He frowned. The girl in the letter had only lost her mother. He wasn’t sure now what Sylvia was talking about, but it wasn’t that letter. He thought he might be close to finding out what Sylvia was hiding, but he didn’t want to scare her off.

“Sylvia, what happened?” He was pretty sure she’d try and run away from talking about this again, so he leaned back against the rails, blocking the way down. She could either talk or jump the last five feet.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She slammed the off button on the machine and turned, studying her options for egress.

“Look, you know about my heartache, and they have always said it’s good to share. So share.”

“I shared damn well enough!” She took the leap to the bottom of the steps, landed awkwardly, and hopped around on one foot, cursing for a couple of seconds before testing her weight. When she found it would hold well enough, she started limping out of the sorting room. She was going to hurt herself more if she kept walking on the ankle, so Ben hurried to block her way.

“If you don’t want to talk, fine, but sit down before you hurt yourself any more.”

“It’s your damn fault, anyway.” But she sat down at one of the sorting tables, reaching down to rub the offending extremity.

Ben followed her over and perched on the edge of the table, far enough away that he felt less like he was hulking over her, hoping she would be less likely to try running. “How does it feel?”

“I killed my parents, happy?” she snapped.

He hesitated. “Not exactly what I meant.”

“At least, I thought I did.” She stopped rubbing but stayed hunched over, not looking at him. “When I was twelve. We were out late, and I wanted to stop at McDonald’s and get a happy meal because I really wanted the toy.” She snorted. “They were running a My Little Pony promotion, Hot Wheels cars for the boys, of course. But I really wanted that pony.”

She paused but Ben said nothing, not wanting to interrupt the flow of words now that they had started.

“I was throwing a fit in the back of the car. Dad was driving, and he turned to say something to me, something about not stopping since it was so late, and a drunk driver swerved over the middle lane. The police said there was nothing he could have done. Even if he’d been looking at the road, nothing he could have done. It was too quick. But I thought it was me. I had caused it.” She finally looked up at him. “I went a little crazy. Tried everything I could think of to kill myself because I thought I didn’t deserve to live after that. My grandmother didn’t know what to do, she was already fairly old by that point. So she gave in to the social worker’s suggestion and had me committed. Two weeks of lockdown. And when I got back to school, word got out that I was crazy. Crazy enough I had to be locked up. I hate being called crazy.” She ran out of breath. “It feels okay.”

“Being called crazy?” He was trying to absorb everything she’d just thrown at him so his brain wasn’t quite up to speed.

“No, dumbass, my ankle. It feels okay.” She stood unsteadily and then took two giant steps forward. “Yup, fine.” She started back to the warehouse and Ben scrambled to catch up.

He had known there was something in her past she wasn’t happy about, but this was so far beyond what he had been expecting. “So you’ve lived with your grandmother ever since then?”

“Except for the couple of summers at an internment camp to keep kids from killing themselves, yeah.” She glanced up at his incredulous face. “Jeez, joke much?”

He threw his hands up in exasperation. “Well, you drop a bomb like that, it takes a person a moment or two to catch up. Don’t make a joke for the next five minutes or so; I’m still processing.”

“Stop processing, start inventorying while we eat.” They had reached the warehouse and she shoved the list into his hands. “My turn to climb the shelves in search of buried treasures.”

“But, you’re okay now?”

“You mean, am I going to off myself when you turn around?”

“No, I only meant—”

“It’s okay, I know what you meant. But no, no medication, no suicidal thoughts, the occasionally normal and totally healthy homicidal thoughts, which my therapist told me were perfectly natural. Next, 1965, September.” She waited for him to indicate he’d found the relevant page, but when she heard nothing, she turned to face him again. He was staring at her, trying to determine whether she was joking again or not.

“Christ, my five minutes not up? No, I’m not homicidal, no I’m not in therapy, no I don’t think I murdered my parents anymore, and yes, I still carry some scars—small scars—because of it, but that’s it. Stop looking at me.”

“Sorry, I just—” He had spent so long wrapped up in his own problems, he’d forgotten the kind of pain other people had to deal with on a daily basis. This forceful reminder was proving quite enlightening.

“And no sorry. None of it’s your fault. And 1965, September.” She made shooing motions when he still didn’t turn the page. “Go!”

“Right, 1965...found it.” And that was that, he thought. At least she had finally shared.

They worked until eight that night, stopping for Chinese around five, and made plans to carpool into the “theater district” early the next afternoon. Atlanta didn’t have a theater district per se, but a lot of the theaters were around the same neighborhoods. During dinner they figured out where the shows were playing and the approximate end times to better lay out a map of where they wanted to be at what times.

Sylvia printed out another theater’s playbill. “Nice, Wicked is playing this weekend. Lots of good people there. They like a sob story.”

Ben took offense to her implication. “This is not a sob story!”

“Boy goes missing, father keeps hunting after everyone else gives up, but can’t find him. Of course it’s a sob story. Same as a witch who can’t seem to get along with anyone, and is shunned for being better than they are. Good sob stories, all.”

“Can you please stop calling it that?”

“Can I call it a heart-wrenching story?”

He thought for a moment before responding. “Yes. That’s better at least. Doesn’t make it sound like it belongs on the Lifetime channel.” Ben took the playbill from her and noted the times on a map of the neighborhood that he had printed from a website. “Is that all of them?”

“Looks like it. The last theater is undergoing renovations, so they’re not playing anything.”

“Good, looks like the earliest one gets out at two. Shall I pick you up at noon so we can find parking and a good place to stand?”

“Sounds good to me. Now let’s get back to those shelves. We’re almost there!”

Ben arrived outside of Sylvia’s house at ten minutes to noon and stood on her sidewalk a moment to admire the landscaping around the 120-year-old house. It was impeccably painted with neatly weeded and mulched butterfly gardens that surrounded the cozy two-story, plantation-style home. As he went to ring the bell, he noticed a sign declaring the house a historical monument. Made sense for the outside to be so well taken care of, then. They would receive a yearly stipend for keeping it up.

The door flew open and Sylvia stood in the doorway, hair yet uncombed and a smudge of red paint on her cheek.

“Crap, is it noon already?” She glanced at her watch as she rubbed ineffectually at the red stain. “You’re early. Serves me right I guess. I’ll meet you in the garden out back. There should still be a plate of muffins back there.” The door slammed in his face again. Ben’s mouth had remained open through the brief tirade and he now closed it, contemplating the lion’s head knocker staring at his nose. He shrugged and turned to the back of the house.

Passing through a side gate, Ben entered what he could only describe as a recreation of the Secret Garden. A low stone wall encircled the small backyard, entirely engulfed in ivy, with a tall weeping willow over a small pond and rioting flower beds. The small section of grass that was allowed to remain featured a metal bistro set with a teakettle and a plate of muffins. On one of the chairs was a terrier mix, fast asleep on his back, feet twitching in the air.

As the gate clicked shut behind Ben, the terrier dismounted the chair in one swift roll, coming instantly to attention. It fixated on the strange man in its territory and trotted up to him, tongue lolling, to sit at attention at his feet.

“Well, hello.” He squatted down to offer his hand to the mutt, who ignored it and continued to study Ben. The dog stared until Ben became uncomfortable and finally broke eye contact with it. With a single whuff, it sat up on its hind legs and offered Ben its paw. Laughing, he shook it, and the dog trotted to the screen door and let out one sharp bark.

Sylvia’s voice echoed from inside the house, “I know, Owney. Entertain him, will you?”

Owney snorted and trotted back to the bistro set, jumped into the chair he had previously vacated, curled up in the sun, and promptly went back to sleep. Ben took the opposite chair and picked up a muffin. He took a bite while studying the dog and was surprised to find the pastry was stuffed with bacon and cheese.

Sylvia came out the back door, wiping the last of the paint off of her hands. “I see you have met my Owney.”

Ben nodded, trying to swallow. “I did. Interesting name.”

“I’ve had him since I was thirteen. Right after I got out of the center, Grandma bought me a puppy. I guess she felt I needed company, so we went to the pound and came home with this ruffian.” Owney’s feet twitched, but he ignored his owner. “His name comes from the mascot of the USPS rail system at the turn of the century—a stray that wandered in off the streets and adopted the whole of the U.S. postal system. Traveled the world. Little terrier mutt like mine.” She tickled Owney’s stomach while he dreamed, causing him to twitch off of his chair. The dog shook himself and glared balefully up at his owner until she broke a piece off the muffin Ben was holding and tossed it to him. He wolfed it down and wandered off to inspect the perimeter.

“I couldn’t help but notice how stunning the house is. A bit unexpected from a girl who professed her family to be dedicated civil servants forever.”

“That’s my mom’s side. This is my dad’s family house. Old Atlanta. We have boxes of photos upstairs that date back to the early days of the city and the building of this house.” She slouched into the chair her pup had recently vacated. “I keep the gardens as Grandma liked. Riotously overgrown, but well kept.” She leaned over to the nearest bed and ran a hand through the foliage. “It’s easier than it looks with this postage-stamp yard. Plus all the hard work to landscape it was done long before my time. Doesn’t take much to keep mature plants happy.”

“Well, it’s lovely.” Ben dusted the crumbs off of his hands and stood, both eager to get started, but also somewhat reluctant to leave the beautiful retreat. “Shall we?”