Wit's End (9 page)

Mrs. Whitson hadn't let them sleep together—they were too old for that, she said—and she'd made Oliver stay in the TV room all by himself while Rima took Becky Whitson's bed, with Becky in a sleeping bag on the floor. Becky was four at the time, and she'd cried because Rima not only wouldn't play Chutes and Ladders with her the way she did when she babysat, but told her that she hated Chutes and Ladders, had always hated it, that she would never, ever play it again.

Which she never did, exactly, except that when Oliver was fourteen, he made a whole new board (but used the old spinner) for a game he called Shaker Heights High Chutes and Ladders. There was a chute for mean girls in the hall, one for a pimple on the end of your nose, one for a stupid question you asked in class that made everyone laugh. But most of the chutes involved your father's saying something sadly quotable about you in his newspaper column; there were so many of these that the game was all but impossible to win.

This was mere solidarity on Oliver's part. When he did appear in their dad's column, he appeared as he was—high-spirited, generous, original. No doubt Rima also appeared as she was. Whose fault was it that Rima as she was looked so much worse than Oliver as he was? She missed her father desperately, but she didn't miss the columns in which she'd starred, saying things she hadn't said, or sometimes had, only they'd been horribly misunderstood or else they were accurate but meant to be confidential. Now there was only Rima, private citizen. Now only Rima lived to tell the tale. If there could be said to be a bright spot anywhere, this was it.

The Shaker Heights High board was still in a closet in her father's house, with the Sorry and Parcheesi and Trivial Pursuit. Someday Rima would have to deal with all the things in all those closets.

None of this was what she told Scorch. Instead, in the moments between people's knocking on the door, she said that her father's death, being what it was and pretty awful all by itself, had also reminded her of Oliver's death—too painful to be comprehended at the time and therefore still seeping in slowly, even though four whole years had passed. “Everything was better with Oliver,” Rima said, and she was crying again, because, unbelievable as it sounded, the rest of Rima's life had to be lived in its lesser, no-Oliver form. No one would ever call her Irma again unless she made them. “The thing people don't understand about grief,” Rima said, “is you don't just feel sad. You feel crazy.” She was choking on her own breath when she said this, so there was no way she didn't sound as crazy as she felt.

Death was death, she went on, and reminded you of nothing so much as death, though her father's had happened over time, with time to think about it, while Oliver had been gone in a minute, killed a mile from his house by a drunk driver, so that Rima had even heard the sirens and not known whom they were for.

Scorch leaned closer into the mirror, turning her head from side to side to see the braids she'd made out of soap and hair. “Wasn't the drunk driver Oliver?” she asked.

Rima felt as if, out of the blue, she'd been punched in the gut. This was not the way she liked to tell the story.

And just that quickly she was ready to go back to Wit's End and her solitary room on the floor she had been promised would be all hers, and was now sharing with Martin. She offered to get a cab, but everyone else was willing to call it a night too, especially Scorch, who had to be back at Addison's in a few hours to walk the dogs.

Cody had had only two beers, and those at the beginning of the evening. He had stopped drinking so that someone would be sober enough to drive home. Scorch told Rima this in a careful, expressionless voice, as if she had no point to make by it.

The road home was dark, no moon, no bonfires on the beach, just the green light from the little lighthouse floating over the black ocean, and a bright window in Rima's bedroom at Wit's End, where she must have forgotten to turn the light off.

It wasn't until Rima was getting out of the car that she thought to ask how it was that Scorch knew how Oliver had died.

“I read it on Addison's blog,” Scorch said.

Rima could see Addison's wireless on her laptop in her bedroom, but no one had given her the key, and until someone did, she was stuck with her own server and the intolerable dial-up. She wouldn't have connected if she hadn't really needed to see Addison's blog and needed to see it now. She brushed her teeth, and when she came back the site had only just finished loading.

Rima dreamt that Maxwell Lane was kissing her. He was nothing close to seventy-two years old. She felt his breath on her cheek, his tongue moving nearer to her mouth. It was all so real she opened her eyes to find that she was, in fact, not sleeping alone.

Pressed against her right thigh was a furry lump she assumed was a dog, since a second dog was draped over her neck, thoroughly licking her face. Which made the dream an extremely embarrassing one, especially when she recalled that this same man had been reaching for her father's cock in some online sex fantasy just the night before. Was that what inspired the dream? Something to seriously not think about.

The room was warm, and the dog on Rima's neck was damp with her own sweat. Rima moved her (him?) aside and saw that it was Berkeley; Berkeley's fur, she had figured out, was slightly darker and curlier than Stanford's. She put her other hand under the covers and felt around until she found Stanford's little bony rump.

It was a puzzle, the dogs' being here. She hadn't thought they liked her all that much. Plus, it meant, it must mean, that she had left her bedroom door open, which she never did, and would she have, last night of all nights, with Martin just down the hall?

Besides, it was a high bed. The dogs could never have gotten into it without help. Maybe one could have stood with its front paws on the bed frame while the other scaled its back in some unlikely dachshund Cirque de Soleil, but even then there would be only one dog in her bed, not two. So either she had reached down and helped them up while she slept or someone else had tiptoed in and planted them in her bed. The latter didn't seem likely, until you remembered that she was living with people who thought nothing of posting your picture on the Internet without your knowledge or permission and were therefore capable of anything. (To be fair, it was mainly a picture of dogs; Rima had been barely visible in the background. Out of focus and covered with a chenille throw. Still.)

If Rima had been hoisting dachshunds into her bed last night, what else might she have done all drunk and unaware? She had a taste in her mouth like stewed Band-Aids. Her head was heavy and far too large, and the sun in the room seemed at best unnecessary, at worst malicious. She had to pee, and she had the niggling sense that something bad had happened, which she thought at first was explained by the blogs, her Sleeping Beauty picture, and her father's appearance in flagrante delicto with Maxwell Lane, but then she remembered she'd had a breakdown over Oliver. Scorch had said something mean about him. When Rima remembered what she'd said, it wasn't mean so much as true, though really, what could be meaner than that?

Oliver had had a wild side, which Rima admired and encouraged. Loved. If Oliver had been along last night, he would have picked up the clown early in the evening and partied with the band after. Oliver always maintained that it was a sad night when you couldn't even manage to party with the band. Rima remembered something his high school counselor had told her. It would be better for Oliver in the long run, she'd said, if we weren't all so charmed by him.

Oliver would be alive today if he'd had a proper mother instead of Rima to raise him.

Something was happening downstairs, something only a dog could hear, and suddenly both dogs were awake and alert, places to go, people to see. Rima lifted them down, and they raced for the sure-enough wide-open door, the hall, the stairs, yapping hysterically. She got up to use the bathroom and noted that she was in the clothes she'd worn the night before. Only her shoes were missing. She hoped she hadn't left them at the bar.

She brushed her teeth, combed her hair, changed her clothes, and readied herself to face the breakfast table, but this proved to be a false start and she went back to bed instead. Maybe she could sleep some more, dream about Maxwell Lane again, but she didn't and she didn't.

The next time she got up, the morning was over. She looked under the bed for her shoes, which weren't there, but she found a piece of paper, which she pulled out and read.

What a busy evening Maxwell had had! Rima might have almost suspected the hidden presence of a twelve-step program in his life. Step nine: Unfinished business. But the handwriting was her own. What else had she done last night, all drunk and unaware? She had written a letter.

In fact, she remembered writing it now, how it had all been done in a burst of drunken merriment. It was deeply unsettling to remember that she'd been drunk and merry, however briefly. Surely that wasn't a good combination. Surely that wasn't a good look for her.

By the time she made it to the kitchen, Scorch had come and gone, the dogs had been to the beach and back. Addison and Tilda had eaten breakfast and also lunch. Martin's door was shut when Rima passed, so she thought he was still sleeping, but it turned out he'd already left. Tilda, who'd hoped for dinner with him the night before and breakfast with him this morning, who'd shopped with that in mind—lamb chops with crushed mint, mashed potatoes with garlic and cheddar, eggs with chorizo—was hiding her disappointment by telling Addison about an article she'd read at the dentist's. According to this article, dying has its own smell. Not death, not the finished product, but the process of dying. The article said that someone named Burton could be taken through a hospital ward and could pick out those patients who would die, considerably before their doctors made the call.

“Did I say that Burton was a dog?” Tilda asked. “A bluetick hound.” This was the sort of information Tilda could be predicted to like—mystical, but faintly scientific, and with animals.
There is a larger world than you allow, Mr. Lane.

Rima liked it less. Was there a household anywhere, she wondered, in which death and murder were discussed more often at meals than in this one? The
Spook Juice
dollhouse minus its corpse had been moved accusingly to the kitchen counter. Rima had to reach over it to put in her toast, which she did, then waited, while Addison and Tilda bickered amiably about whether a mystery writer would be more suited to solving a murder (Tilda's position) or committing one (Addison's), until the toast popped up behind the dollhouse roof like the morning sun.

She joined Addison and Tilda at the table. “This is why conservatives so love a good mystery book,” Tilda was saying in an aggressive non sequitur. She was in the mood for a fight and didn't care with whom. “It's the bald-faced fantasy that the world is run by competent adults.” She looked closely then at Rima, leapt up in a competent-adult way. “I have just the tea for you,” she said. “A cleansing tea. A great morning-after tea.”