Want Not (7 page)

Finally, he said, “Thanks for all the help,” with all its gently implied finality. “It’s easy going from here.”

“Yo,” Christopher replied, whapping Elwin’s chest with the back of his palm, and grinning unhappily, “that’s what neighbors do, right?” He sucked back a belch, with obvious though appreciated discomfort. “That’s what it’s about, right?”

“Right,” Elwin answered, adding softly, “You the man.”

“Nah,” Christopher said. He grasped for something else to say, some immodestly modest rebuttal, but none came; he was either too drunk, or too drained, or too flattered, or too mooky and young. “Nah,” he repeated. Then his expression sagged, those ice-blue eyes drooping downward in private defeat. He ran his fingers through his hair again: still no hat. His shoulders slumping, and a sigh whirring through his nose, Christopher turned toward the house. “Fuck that old man,” he muttered, and headed inside, lazily scanning the snow, as he went, for the four-leaf clover of his ejected beer. This time, when the door shut behind him, the icicles held fast; they’d been warned. Elwin listened, but there was no gunshot, not even the reverb of raised voices. When he looked up, the light in Big Jerry’s bedroom was out. Back below the fire escape, he picked up the knife, and the flashlight, and resumed dismantling the deer.

By the time Elwin finished—having sliced and sawn the salvageable flesh of the doe into backstraps, tenderloins, shanks, a shoulder roast, and one dubious slab of ribs (both hams, having borne the brunt of the pavement, were wrecked), and having exhausted an entire roll of plastic wrap and half a roll of aluminum foil in swaddling the meat, the sheer glut of which forced him to evacuate much of his refrigerator’s contents and even then spilled over into a cooler he dragged up from the basement, and having then collected and washed all the tools from outside, and bundled all the remaining deer parts (including the severed head, with its jutting pink tongue) into ever more black Hefty sacks, so that the multitude of trash bags piled against the house resembled the aftermath of some civic festival, and rubbed the snow with his boot to conceal or at least pinken all the bloody spatters and driplines, and (almost forgetting) untied the pelt from the quad hitch and stuffed it into yet another Hefty sack—the eastern sky was unblackening, the soft gray of dawn edging the horizon. He wanted to shower, but didn’t have the energy; instead he undressed, emptying his BlackBerry and keys and change onto the nightstand, and collapsed into his bed, groaning in weak protest at the uninvited light creeping across the walls. From downstairs he heard the heavy click-clack of Bologna’s claws on the floor, as the dog rose from his bed, then the
thwap
of the dog door flapping closed behind him. Poor old guy, Elwin thought. Must’ve finally picked up the scent of all that meat, like an astronomer viewing the glow of a distant star that’s been dead five hundred years.

By force of ritual—or addiction, as Maura claimed: “Crackberry,” and all that—he checked his BlackBerry before completely nesting in. Holding it high above his head, he noted the reddish-black gore under his thumbnail as he tapped the small screen. A message from his sister. He knew what that was about: his father, who’d also called—six times during dinner, it appeared. Also there were late-night emails from his students, which he ignored or skimmed (“I was wondering if the 500–750 words counted toward quotes used from the Lanza book, or [if] this limit [is] only in reference to our own thoughts and ideas expressed in the paper . . .”), various bits of Listserv pollution (
DELETE
, he pressed;
DELETE
;
DELETE
), and then one email, sent late that afternoon from Rochelle, in her semi-lovable, semi-competent way, which aroused a curious frown: “Somebody from the government called today,” she’d written. “I wrote it all down but I can’t find the message.
SO SORRY!!!
It was some governemtn [
sic
] agency. Department of Something :) It will turn up! You know it always does. Have fun with Dr. Horten tonight! ;)
AND HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!
”

Somebody from the government, Elwin wondered, as he replaced the BlackBerry on the nightstand and, to depressingly little effect, flicked off the lamp. In his bleary, blood-encrusted state, which precluded logic or chronology or anything resembling cogent thought, he imagined only one possibility: the State of New Jersey, or maybe some obscure federal agency, wanted its deer back. They’d seen him, they knew. It was government property, and theirs to dispose of. He’d broken some sacred but little-known code, the New Jersey equivalent of
saltu,
enforced by the waste-management mobsters who got paid by the pound for every last scrap of metal, plastic, rubber, paper, wood, stone, fruit, vegetable, bone, and flesh they dumped into those mountainous, methanating piles. With his eyelids rolling shut he silently challenged them, all those myriad Big Jerrys he imagined storming his desolate house and raiding his fridge: Come take it, and me with it. Please. Why didn’t you find me earlier? I’m
here.
And then, darkness: as black and airless as the Hefty sack in which the doe’s severed head lay sideways, nestled on a pillow of her stiffening organs.

L
IFESOLUTIONS 24-HOUR SELF-STORAGE
was located on an otherwise farmy and intermittently wooded stretch of two-lane near the New York border: an agglomeration of steel buildings painted red, white, and blue and arranged in something like a hopscotch pattern. With its overexpanse of parking, its high, barbwire-crested fencing, and its excessively fulgent security lighting, it brought to mind a small-scale penitentiary. Sara Tetwick Masoli was there to retrieve a roasting pan, and maybe also (if she could possibly figure out which box it was in; she wasn’t about to dig through them all) the china from her first marriage, but the process—plugging in her security code at the gate to induce its yawning, automated opening; plugging it in again on the keypad by the door; then traversing the long, fluorescent-lit hallway, her echoing heel-clicks as loud as ricocheting bullets, to the corrugated overhead door of Unit #592—made her mission feel weightier: an overdue conjugal visit, perhaps, or as witness to an execution. She unbolted the thick brass lock and, with a monstrous rattle, raised the door. “Oh my,” she said.

She hadn’t remembered the awesome
bulk
of it. Or the awesome disarray of it all, for that matter: No obvious starting point presented itself, no on-ramp into this miniature cityscape of stacked cardboard boxes and rectangular plastic bins and overstuffed square shopping sacks with various irregular bits (a pink bicycle handle here, a lampshade there) poking between the boxes. Everything had been pushed and piled toward the back of the ten-by-fifteen-foot unit, for which she’d been paying $59 per month for seven years, so that it sloped upward from where Sara, biting her bottom lip, and feeling like an irresolute mountaineer, presently stood. She considered bailing on the whole chore—that’s why they made disposable roasting pans, right? And the china, like everything from her first marriage, was tainted anyway. “Honey,” she said to herself, in the weirdly over-colloquial and vaguely black/Southern voice she often used when addressing herself in moments of indecision, as if equipping herself with her own personal Oprah, “you can bail on this.” But no, she decided. I can’t. It’s just
stuff.
Get over it, honey. Start digging.

At forty-three, a widow and mother of a teenager (she wondered, now that she’d remarried, if she wasn’t a “former widow”—but that seemed oxymoronic, like being a former amputee), Sara still retained a bright tang of youth. Something of the cheerleader she’d been, back in Ohio, still clung to her: in the nutty, summer-camp tint of her skin; in the elfin gleam of her smile, the nervous flutter of her laugh; and in the wheaty, sunlit color of her hair, which was the same shade of blonde you saw, chemically replicated, on women idling away their afternoons at the Neiman Marcus at the Short Hills Mall. Hers was natural, however. This was her inheritance from the Anglos and Saxons (quite literally: her father’s people were English, her mother’s German) who’d seeded her family tree, and was a point of feminine pride. Like the organic produce accorded its own VIP aisle at the ShopRite, her hair was value-added for what it lacked: ammonia, peroxide, p-Phenylenediamine. Her daughter Alexis used to say it smelled like apples, “or maybe celery. Something you eat peanut butter with.”

Her figure, short and supple, was not quite so natural—a point of mild discomfort. Throughout her life she’d never minded her small breasts—dainty little knolls, no bigger than ice cream scoops, that disappeared completely under the gentle compression of a sports bra. Or at least she’d
thought
she’d never minded them. Her husband, Dave, suggested otherwise: that a bit of surgical augmentation (“nothing ridiculous,” and his Valentine’s Day gift to her) would provide an incommensurate boost to her self-esteem. Eight months later, she still wasn’t used to them. They rode high and hard on her chest, pressing strangely against her clothing and threatening to spill out; and the way people stared, men and women both, she felt as if she was wearing a nametag (“Hi! My name is Candi”). She wasn’t sure if she’d ever get used to them—or ever come to like them, as Dave had promised. But Dave liked them. She supposed that was good, but a part of her didn’t like Dave liking them. It felt something like sexual roleplaying—not that she’d ever dabbled—but instead of having to wear some creepy nurse’s or policewoman’s outfit on the occasional weekend night, to maintain marital ignition, she had to wear it—or rather
them
—all the time. Even in the bathtub, where her silicone C-cups continued to surprise her, breaching the soapy surface like sea mammals rising for air. She missed the sight of her corrugated ribcage, looking elegant and slightly bohemian above the neckline of a dress. For years, since before her first marriage, Sara had gravitated toward women who, like herself, gravitated toward men in finance, but she’d never felt she was one of them. She’d lived in Prague, she’d had a decent if stunted acting career in her twenties (the unbalanced high points: her role as Anya in an off-Broadway revival of
The Cherry Orchard
and her appearance in a commercial for Coast soap, in which, ecstatically lathered in the shower, she cooed, “Oooooh, that scent!”), and now spent her summer weekends working a cooperative farm-share in Sussex County: She was different. Cold and gelatinous, her upgraded breasts argued otherwise, however. They introduced her before she could open her mouth, establishing (in her mind) the subjects of discussion: money or sex, both of which she found . . . uninteresting, or maybe just overworn. So they made the world go round: so what. Her silver Audi Q5 made
her
go round, and the only time she wanted to talk about it was when the car broke down.

“If I were a roasting pan,” she said aloud, “where would I be?” In response, the piled boxes merely stared at her, unblinking, unyielding. She hadn’t visited the storage unit in years—why would they recognize her? She moved the topmost boxes closest to her from right to left, noting as she did the brief descriptions of their contents written, in fat black Sharpie ink, on the sides and tops (
ALEXIS, DOLLS; SARA, CLOTHES; ALEXIS, ART; LIVING RM, MISC
.; and two cryptically marked
ATTIC
,
???
). “Aha,” she said, spying the word
KITCHEN
jotted on a box near the floor. The box was too small to contain a roasting pan, but she opened it anyway: an espresso maker; a citrus zester; a stainless-steel cocktail shaker onto which was etched
MARKETBOLT ANNUAL MEETING, THE SCOTTSDALE PRINCESS, SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ., AUGUST
10–14, 2001
; a pigtail-corded handheld blender; some individual tart pans; an analog meat thermometer; and a white apron, never worn (never even unfolded from the crisp square it came packaged in), emblazoned with the title
WORLD’S BEST MOM
. Nothing she needed.

She fingered the apron for a moment, its virginate starchiness, its embroidered sentiment. She didn’t recall Alexis giving her this—oh, maybe vaguely—and almost snorted at the thought of Alexis giving it to her now: at the impossibility of it, that is. Alexis would probably just bookmark the title with asterisks, the way she noted sarcasm in her text messages: *
WORLD’S BEST MOM*. WHATEVER
. Alexis was at that age, seventeen, when mothers come into view as tyrants or imbeciles or both. Sara wasn’t sure which category she fell into, nor did she much care; she’d been seventeen once, too, and knew these phases passed. Not that she wouldn’t mind this one passing quicker. Just last night she and Alexis had had it out over college applications, over Alexis’s mulish determination to attend Richard Varick College in the city, which was where her father had gone—along with every other Long Island meathead who wanted to break into Wall Street. Varick was okay, she supposed, but just barely—mid-tier, and wholly devoid of cachet. The great sin of parenting, Sara felt, was letting your children aim too low. Allow them to settle, and that’s just what they’d do. Loose expectations were like junk food; kids just gorged themselves. She replaced the apron in the box and moved on.

What caught her eye, on the next box that she lifted, was the handwriting. It wasn’t hers.
BRIAN
, it read, in unfamiliar blue cursive, and for a moment she failed to make sense of it. But then of course, she remembered. Her sister Liz had packaged up all of Brian’s stuff for her. “I don’t want to see it,” Sara had told her, “I don’t want to have it, I don’t want it near me.” But Alexis might, Liz had said, adding gently, “someday.” It was Liz, in fact, who’d rented this unit for her, who’d done the initial piling which Sara, over the years, had occasionally supplemented with boxed-up obsoletisms (like the zester, displaced by her microplane, or the analog meat thermometer, displaced by a digital model, etc.) and various other non- or no-longer-essentials. With a small huff, Sara transferred the box leftward, in order to keep digging for the roasting pan, then paused. That was seven years ago . . . seven years and two months. And now she had Dave: the completion of her circle, the satisfying epilogue: the closure everyone had urged her to seek. She stared at the box, wondering how many like it were stacked here, and what they might contain, and bit her bottom lip again. Something irresistible, in an electromagnetic sense, drew her nearer to the box—some archaeological allure, like uncovering a time capsule while digging in the garden. But this was
her
time capsule—
her
archaeological record—
her
life, or at least some broken shards of it, dumped into all these cardboard squares. What harm could there be, at this post-closure point? Sighing, she sat down on the
KITCHEN
box, its top slightly crumpling beneath her weight, and after sliding some other boxes away with her feet, to clear some room, she opened the box marked
BRIAN
.