“Let’s get her out of here. Then you go on ahead to your father’s house. Get him ready. I’ll clean up here. We can’t leave any evidence behind.” She grabbed Mrs. Polk’s feet again. The weight of her body was like a tub of water. Her head fell back toward me, her mouth hung open. When I looked down into it, her teeth were brown, her gums nearly white. She was as good as dead already, I thought. Rebecca stopped to cover her with her robe before we carried her out the front door. We moved carefully, but it was impossible not to bump her rear end on the frozen steps. A few times Rebecca slipped and let Mrs. Polk’s legs hit the snow on the path to the sidewalk. It was slapstick, ridiculous, and I remember the jubilance rising from my chest into my throat. Once the woman was in the car, I paused to exhale, looked up at the sky, the stars spangled across the darkness like splattered paint. I thought I might burst into hysterical laughter under the quiet of that night, the beautiful stillness. I could feel the entire universe revolving around me in that moment. Rebecca looked tense. I shut the car door and put my death mask on then, tried to contain my excitement. I can’t tell you what I was thinking. I’m not here to make excuses.
“I’ll see you,” Rebecca said suddenly, turning to dash back into the house.
I called out after her. “I’ll be waiting!” My voice bounded loud across the snow-filled yard. Rebecca turned and put a finger to her lips to hush me. “We can go anywhere we want,” I said, hushed. “Just the two of us. I have money. No one will ever find us.” I gave her my address. “A block from the elementary school. Can you find it?”
She just waved, hopped up the icy stairs, and closed the door behind her.
THE END
I left X-ville without a single family photo, so all I have are my shifting memories to go on. I remember Dad as I left him — drawn and unconscious on the bed. Joanie I think of as a young girl, sensual and pretty and mindless. Mom, as I’ve told you, is harder to picture. I imagine just the frothiness of her graying hair as she lay dead in her bed, me curled up beside her, waiting to catch my breath before going out to tell my father, drunk for weeks already, that she was gone. “Are you sure?” is what he asked as I stood there in the stuffy, hot morning sunlight. I remember it — that image of loneliness, looking back at the half-open door to the room where my mother was no longer sleeping. The bathroom was where I went to cry. I remember my reflection vividly, eyes swollen and red in the mirror. I took off my clothes, still shaking, my arms ropy and useless as I held myself and sobbed in the shower. She died when I was just nineteen, thin as a rail by then, something my mother had praised me for.
I never liked looking at photos of myself. I’d been a pudgy child — that pale and homely girl in grade school who could not climb the rope or run as others did in P.E. Fat, loping thighs caused me to waddle in clothes my mother bought a size too tight in the hope that I would somehow change to fit them. And as I grew older, I remained short but whittled down to a small, birdlike stature. For a while I kept a little gut, doughy and oblong like a child’s belly. By the time I left X-ville, though, I was a scarecrow, hardly an ounce of flesh to pinch, which was how I liked it. I knew that wasn’t quite right, of course. I vowed to eat better, to dress better when I grew up. Be a real lady, I thought. I suppose I figured that once I left X-ville I would grow six inches, become shapely and beautiful. I thought of Rebecca, imagined her in a swimsuit, narrow hips and long, elegant thighs like models in the fashion magazines. A healthy glow. Maybe Rebecca could help me somehow, I wished, guide me, tell me where to go, how to dress, what to do, how to live. The picture of my future I’d had in mind before meeting Rebecca turned out to be somewhat accurate: I’d move into some ramshackle apartment, maybe a girls’ boardinghouse where I’d be free to do such wonderful things as read newspapers, eat a spotted banana, go for a walk in the park, sit in a room like a normal person. But being with Rebecca could set me on a different path, I hoped. I wanted to do something great with my life. I wanted so badly to be someone important, to look down on the world from a skyscraper window and squash anyone who ever crossed me like a roach under my shoe.
Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life. When I was twenty-four, the most I wanted was a cramped afternoon among strangers, or to dawdle down a sidewalk without my father waiting for me, to be safe someplace far away, to be home somewhere. As I’ve said, my disappearance was not the solution to all my problems, but it did allow me to start over. When I got to New York late on Christmas Day, I was sobered and hungry and my body was cramped and my face was swollen. I walked around Times Square all evening and went to a dirty movie because I was cold and too nervous to check into a hotel, worried that the police were after me. I was scared to speak to anyone, scared to breathe. That’s where I met my first husband — in the back row of that movie theater. So you see, what came after this story ends was not a direct line to paradise, but I believe I got on the right road, with all the appropriate trips and kinks.
• • •
In the quiet darkness of that cold Christmas morning in X-ville, I parked the Dodge in my driveway, left Mrs. Polk slumped in the passenger seat, and barreled through the snow to the front of the house and went inside. I didn’t think to pack a suitcase, though I knew then these were my last moments in that house. My father awoke as I came down the attic steps stuffing the gun and my money, all the cash I had, into my purse. I never did empty my father’s bank account, or cash my last paycheck. I wondered for a long time whether I’d stand to inherit the house after my father died, but after a decade or two, assuming he had passed away, I decided to forget about it. There was nothing in that house, no part of it that I wanted enough to go back to claim it. In any case, I am dead in X-ville, a ghost, a lost soul, a lost cause. When I found my father standing halfway up the stairs that morning, he was already drunk. He had a hat on and a coat wrapped around his shoulders over his usual robe and boxers. He looked as though he’d seen a ghost.
“Something’s staking us out from behind the house,” he said. “I heard it breathing all night, dug inside the snow. A hoodlum it was not.” He shook his head. “Some kind of wild animal. A wolf, maybe.”
“Get into bed, Dad,” I told him. There was a bottle on the floor. I picked it up.
“Did you see it?” he asked, straining to lower himself down to sit at the top of the stairs, a decrepit king on his splintery throne. I sat down next to him, handed him the bottle, and turned to face him, watched him drink, his eyes milky, hands quaking.
“There are no wolves,” I told him, “only mice.”
It took him just a minute or two to suck all that gin down. I remember how he grew sleepy — the effect of the gin came over him like a spirit entering his body — and like a child his head lolled, mouth frowned, eyelids fluttered like dying moths. I helped him up, gripping his arms at the elbows, and he fell onto me, neck clammy against my cheek. “Mice?” he mumbled. I led him into my mother’s bedroom, laid him down, kissed his spotted, swollen hand.