Melanie said, “You don’t mind living this far from school? From your friends?”
“I’ll be honest with you. There was a, uh, ill-timed tryst, let’s call it, with my roommate’s sister. It was a good time to move.” He laughed and shrugged.
It was momentarily beyond Melanie’s comprehension, how silliness between young single people could necessitate a move across town. Had she once cared about things like that?
He said, “How much hunting are you going to do in there?” He waited, squinting his eyes and widening the hole in the knee of his jeans with one finger. He was pure empathy, and she almost couldn’t stand it. She might cry again, or run out the door.
Instead she said, “The problem is I don’t know what I’m digging for. I mean, I don’t know what physical objects I’ll find, but beyond that — I don’t know if I’ll find peace, or just more disturbance.”
“Like what if they had a kid.”
“They didn’t.”
“Right. Sorry, right.” He looked lost. “Have you tried talking to the Hungarian couple downstairs? The guy doesn’t speak English, but his wife does, and they’ve been in the building forever.”
She said, “The ones they interviewed in the Trib. The ones who didn’t know.”
“László and Zsuzsi. It’s like Zsa Zsa, but different vowels. She was an opera singer. Holocaust survivor, too.”
“Yeah. The article said that, about the Holocaust. Can you imagine? I just — it’s hard to explain, but I think I need to compartmentalize. Whatever was wrong with my fiancé, that was one thing he clearly did very well.”
“Compartmentalize?”
“I’m just here to sort objects.”
“Listen,” he said, “speaking of which. I’ll take anything you don’t want. I’m doing a project.” The grin was back, and he led her past the kitchen to what had once been his grandfather’s study. Jed lifted the flap of a cardboard box and pulled out a handful of LPs, their jackets sun worn and softened. “These are from Brooke, on the ground floor. She lost her aunt. She kept the collectible ones, but this crap”—a mangled Burl Ives—“is more valuable to me.” He showed her a manual Smith Corona, a bag of old shoes, a stack of TV Guides, and a chess set, from the inheritors of apartments C, F, G, and H. “I’m sure your person’s family wants her stuff. But if there’s anything extra, or anything you can’t deal with. I’m crazy about this project.”
She swallowed the urge to point out that Vanessa Dillard was not “her person.” She said, “What will it be?”
“It’ll be… part of my thesis show. Other than that…” He threw up his hands. She realized, when she smiled, how unaccustomed to it her muscles had grown.
Melanie now had three piles to make: the things on the family’s list, intriguing items for Jed, and the artifacts she intended to examine in greater detail when she had the stomach. The Evidence, she felt like calling this last collection. She had no intention of keeping Vanessa’s possessions, and she planned to send a letter (along with the package containing the jewelry, the family photos, the pewter turtle from the bookshelf) saying that although it would take a while to get her affairs in order, she would soon hand over the apartment’s entire contents. She hoped they’d understand.
Her sisters kept telling her she was right to sell and profit from the apartment itself. After all, the caterer, the band, the woman from the reception hall — they’d been apologetic but firm that no, the deposits could not be returned. Then there was the dress and Michael’s engraved ring. And Melanie had missed, so far, twenty days of work, only a fraction of which her boss forgave. (“But don’t you count yourself lucky?” he’d asked. “To be rid of the bastard?”) She considered the apartment her settlement in the civil suit she hadn’t needed to file.
A cracked seashell went into the box for Jed. A sheer black thong, too: What mother would want her daughter’s thong? For the family, a silver bracelet left on the coffee table. An asthma inhaler for Jed. For her own box of evidence: Vanessa’s dead cell phone. Three slim photo albums. She dropped them in by the corners as if they’d been dipped in poison.
Deep in the desk was a phone bill from 2012, with certain charges circled in green — the remnant of some battle with Verizon. Melanie rested her water glass (Vanessa’s water glass) on the counter and scanned the page. Between those circled charges, many calls to Michael’s cell and office. Eleven thirty at night. Three in a row on a Saturday afternoon. This was a year before she’d met Michael herself, before he stole her from her date at a rooftop party and took her for Korean barbecue and midnight bowling, before he put his hand on her wrist and told her his wife was dead.
What the hell. She said it aloud, to the walls and dead plants. She put her forehead on the carpet and screamed the same thing. What. The. Hell. Spoiled by movies, she wanted a video montage to fill her in. She wanted to find a diary with every sordid detail. She wanted the moral permission to call Vanessa’s mother and brother and friends. “Just the past twenty years,” she’d say. “Just give me the past two decades, more or less.”
On the other hand, there was very little of Michael in the apartment. The bottle of scotch could have been his, but who was to say? There was more than one toothbrush in the bathroom, but she had no DNA swabs. On the floor of Vanessa’s closet, behind a row of purses, was an XL T-shirt from the investment firm where Michael worked. She put it aside for Jed.
Then she sat on Vanessa’s couch, Evidence box in her lap. Like a train passenger with luggage on her knees. There were footsteps in the hall, and she flinched. But of course they passed. Who would have been looking for her? Part of her was still waiting for a second bunch of reporters to show up — the tabloids, perhaps — but a wave of tact had apparently washed over the city, as if kindness had leaked out with the gas.
Melanie almost wished there were some intrepid reporter snooping around, interviewing Michael’s cousins, asking what kind of lunatic could pull off so flagrant a lie. Her mother had offered to hire a PI, but really — what would one even find? That the man was a sociopath. Maybe that he and Vanessa had planned to run off with Melanie’s money. None of it would be useful. All of it would be humiliating. So here she was instead: gumshoe, archivist, bereaved.
She should have waited — for more distance, for a shot of whiskey — but sitting right there she opened the top photo album. Baby pictures from the early seventies. A sweet girl, growing, losing teeth, a Laura Ashley phase. The album ended with a shot of Vanessa and her brother at a picnic table, shooting sarcastic glares at the camera. Melanie pulled out the next album to see what havoc adolescence had wreaked, and was greeted instead with a wedding portrait: Vanessa and Michael, nose-to-nose. The same Michael but slimmer, a goatee, smiling so broadly that lines spread from his eyes where one day there would be permanent creases. Vanessa’s dress was simple, off the shoulder, still chic sixteen years after the fact. Melanie shoved the box from her lap and scooted down to the carpet to flip through the other pages. Michael’s late parents she’d seen before in his own photos. There they were, dancing. His sister, with whom he’d always said he had a falling out, would be that concave brunette posing wanly between Michael and his mother. But beyond that, she didn’t recognize a soul. Not the raucous men in tuxedos, arms around Michael, hands mussing his hair. Not the old woman kissing his cheek. Twenty faces around the cutting of the cake. She knew no one.