On her way to the door, Effie pauses. “Can you send Charlie over in about a half-hour to help me and my hysterical society lady friend move some stuff? I mean, historical. Although she is a bit hysterical. These ladies need to get their heads out of their damn bustles, if you get my drift.”
“Of course.” I grin. “I’ll tell Charlie.”
From the stoop, I watch her navigate across the thick carpet of golden brown Bermuda, disappearing into her overgrown front garden until all that’s visible is her hat bobbing like a bluebird above a mound of fountain grass.
For sixty-one years, Effie has occupied the frilly yellow house next door, a Queen Anne cottage that, like our 1920s Arts and Crafts bungalow, sits in the middle of Fort Worth’s famous historical Fairmount District. Effie can’t remember the exact number of paint colors she’s slapped on her spindlework and fish scale shingles over time, but she dates things by saying, When the house was lilac, or When the house was in its awful brown period. Effie still pulls her Cadillac boat out of the garage to attend the neighborhood monthly historic preservation meeting. She revels in dragging Charlie, one eyeball at a time, away from her iPhone and assaulting her with neighborhood history. The trolley once rumbled down our street, which is why it is wider than most of the others. Over on Hemphill, there used to be a fantastical mansion with a life-size windmill on top, until it mysteriously burned to the ground.
When the phone inevitably reasserts its magnetic force on Charlie, Effie just brings out the hard stuff: tales about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who lived in Hell’s Half Acre only three miles from here, or the creepy, boarded-up pig tunnels that run under the city. “That’s how Judas goats got their name,” Effie asserts. “By herding pigs to slaughter to spare themselves. Back when, goats herded as many as ten thousand pigs a day through Fort Worth’s underground tunnels to their miserable fates in the Stockyards. Like New Yorkers in the subway.”
Generally, when it came down to Effie vs. Twitter, Effie won. “Kids need a sense of place,” she liked to admonish me. “A sense that they all aren’t living and talking in outer space.”
Back in the kitchen, I firmly root myself in the uncomfortable present, on the one kitchen stool that obediently twirls little half-circles. I sip my tea and stare at the card on the flowers. It begs to be opened. I reach over, tug it off its plastic holder, lift the tiny flap, and pull out a flat cardboard square decorated with a cartoon spray of balloons.
I miss you.
Love, Lydia
The card slips from my hand onto the counter. The corner begins melting into the ring of sweat left by my iced-tea glass. Lydia’s name blurs into a purple stain. Not the handwriting I remembered, but maybe it isn’t hers. Maybe it is the florist’s.
Why would Lydia casually send me flowers? Wouldn’t she understand that I’m still in mortal daily combat with them? That I’m hanging on to the bitter shreds of our fight after the trial? We hadn’t talked for seventeen years, since her family up and left without a word. The flowers seem like a taunt.
I yank the arrangement out of the vase, splashing my jeans in the process, and slide open the glass door to the back yard. Within seconds, pink Gerbers and purple orchids are scattered on top of the funeral pyre of my compost. I carry the vase to the recycling bin sitting empty outside the two-car garage that backs up along our fence line. Bemoan that Charlie should have taken in the recycling bin two days ago.
No reason to panic and think my monster sent these and signed Lydia’s name. I open the gate to the slim ribbon of grass that is our side yard. SpongeBob’s squeaky voice wafts from an open window next door. That means the babysitter is inside, not the fussy lawyer parents with matching Tesla sedans.
I learned a long time ago to pay attention to what is usual, and what is not.
To retrieve an encyclopedia from the smallest sound.
I round the corner. No one has planted any more black-eyed Susans under my bedroom windowsill. The ground is smoothed flat and swirled, like a pan of chocolate cake batter. The thing is, I hadn’t done any smoothing or swirling.
And my digger is gone.
Tessie, 1995
“If you had three wishes, what would they be?” he repeats.
His latest game.
The curtain had gotten us nowhere last time. I had no clue why I was drawing it. I had told him that it was an ordinary curtain. Still, like there was no breeze. When I didn’t bring in my drawings today, he didn’t bring it up. He noted my boundaries, unlike the others, but he’s irritating me in whole new ways. For instance, now insisting I show up for his little interrogations twice a week.
“Really?” I ask. “Let me see. Do you want me to say that I wish my mother would come down from her puffy cloud and give me a hug? That I wish I wasn’t living in some kind of Edgar Allan Poe poem? That I wish my three-year-old cousin would stop snapping his fingers in my face to see if he can magically make me see? That I wish my father would yell at the TV again? I need a whole lot more wishes than three. How about this: I wish I weren’t answering this stupid question.”
“Why do you want your father to yell at the TV?” A trace of amusement in his voice. I relax a little. He isn’t mad.
“It was his favorite thing. Yelling at Bobby Witt when he makes one of his wild throws. Or walks somebody. Now Dad just sits there like a zombie when the Rangers play.”
“And do you think that’s your fault?”
The answer to this is too freakin’ obvious.
I wish I’d never met Roosevelt, so I wouldn’t have needed to buy a Snickers bar, so I wouldn’t have been walking out of that drugstore at 8:03 P . M . on June 21, 1994. I wish I never cared about winning, winning, winning.
“It’s interesting that you bring up Poe.” Already moving on.
I’d bite on that one. “Why?”
“Because most people on that couch who’ve endured a psychic trauma compare their experiences to something in more current pop culture. Horror movies. Crime shows. I get a lot of Stephen King. And John Paul. When did you start reading Poe?”
I shrug. “After my grandfather died. I inherited a lot of his books. My best friend and I got into them for a while. We read Moby-Dick that summer, too. So don’t go there, OK? It doesn’t mean anything. I was a happy person before this happened. Don’t focus on things that don’t mean anything.”
“Poe was mired in his lifelong fear of premature burial,” he persists. “The reanimation of the dead. His mother died when he was young. Don’t you think that could be more than coincidence?”
A hammer is pounding my brain. How did he know? Just when I thought he was an idiot, he surprised me. He was always going somewhere.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asks.
Oscar picks that moment to readjust himself. He licks my bare knee on the way back down. Aunt Hilda yells at him idiotically all the time, “No lick! No LICK!” but I love his slobber. And right now, it is like he is saying, Go ahead, take a chance with this one. I want you to throw the Frisbee to me someday.
“The college girl from East Texas… Merry or Meredith or whatever.” I speak haltingly. “She was alive when they dumped us in that grave. She talked to me. I remember her both ways. Dead and alive.” With eyes like blue diamonds and with eyes like cloudy sea glass. Maggots hanging out in the corners, twitchy pieces of rice.