As she finished, Vanessa’s phone gave a short buzz. Melanie jumped, tipping over the polish, and a pink puddle oozed across the cream carpet. She stepped around it. Fifteen messages had arrived from the cellular cloud. None were Michael, and the first was Walgreens. The second was from the morning after the leak: “Evelyn K.,” the screen announced. A woman with a crisp British accent. She said, “Well, yes, let’s talk, Ness, but you know what I’m going to say. I’m going to tell you he’s a narcissist, and he thinks you’re his mother. That carousel just goes round and round again. I will most definitely be using the word wanker.”
Melanie had the brief instinct to jot down the message, as if Vanessa would step through the door soon and pay her for house-sitting. Instead she deleted it. She’d be passing the phone to the parents, who doubtless didn’t need confirmation that Michael was a wanker.
The message had verified something she’d felt in her bones: Vanessa couldn’t have known about Melanie, about the wedding. If she had, surely she’d have confided in this friend, or what was the point of asking advice? And if the friend knew, stronger epithets would have been employed.
The phone lay in her hand like a grenade. The other messages were all from the two days following the leak, six of them from “Mom.” They’d be panicked and wrenching, and Melanie understood that listening would be something she could never undo, a far deeper violation than going through the photographs.
And more dangerously: Somewhere in that phone, if she touched the right button, would be old texts from Michael. They’d be adoring or angry or sexual or mundane. They’d be cryptic. They wouldn’t be about her, but about whatever this tenuous, unkillable thing was they had between them. It would be like watching them kiss.
She mustered enough clarity — it might have been the most mature moment of her life — to see that this would be the worst thing she could do to herself. There were other places she could be. There were other ways to hide from the ghost of her wedding. She needed to leave, and not come back alone.
She picked up the tote bag of items for Jed and decided it was full enough: T-shirt, thong, inhaler, seashell, an Animal Control magnet, a very old pack of cigarettes. She carried her shoes — her toenails weren’t dry — and knocked on his door till he opened it, wild-eyed and happy. She put on her silly movie star voice. “This is good-bye, old friend!”
He blinked, and Melanie wondered what she looked like. Not good, presumably. He said, “Then you have to see the project!” Before she could make an excuse, he swept her back to the study, where there stood what looked like a huge dollhouse, or a bookshelf with a roof. Two cubbies wide, four rows tall, of freshly sawed plywood. In each compartment, a display. “I’m calling it Dearly Departed. Or possibly Aftermath. The outside will look like our building. I’m thinking of this photo-realist idea where I cover everything with paint that looks just like the thing itself, but — you know, it’s paint.”
As he pawed through the tote bag, Melanie explored the structure. On the third story, in the space corresponding to this one, a Golden Oldies record jacket perfectly filled the back wall. In front of it sat the infamous bottle of antidepressants and a cheap plastic apple. Next door, in what would have been apartment F: a Joe Cocker album behind three plastic film canisters. The fourth floor was full, too. A crucifix necklace in front of Louis Armstrong, a phalanx of chessmen in front of Glenn Gould solos. But Vanessa’s apartment was empty. “I wanted you to pick the music,” Jed said. “Check it out, I have opera arias for the Hungarian lady.” He pointed to the ground floor, where the back wall was indeed filled with Maria Callas’s face. “I want it to be like the music they’re hearing in heaven. Because I’m doing this whole thing with echoes. Right?” Melanie stooped to poke at the small leather satchel in apartment A, the calligraphy pens and ink bottles in C. “Do you think I should leave the Hungarians’ floor empty, though? Is that too literal? I mean, they’re not dead, but visually there won’t be balance. My adviser would hate that. Should I ask them for something?”
Melanie flipped through the stack of remaining records and found an Etta James one from 1973. Only a Fool. She pushed it carefully to the back wall. “I think Vanessa would have liked her, too.”
Out of all the things in the bag, Jed had settled on the stale cigarettes. He dumped them on the small floor in front of Etta. “These’ll be cool. I can get some height, once I glue it all. Oh, and look. The typewriter won’t fit, so I want to set it out for people to type their thoughts. Like this.” He pushed the Smith Corona, and the TV table it sat on, in front of the house. He waited for her reaction.
In a previous life, she’d have kissed him right then. She’d have led him to the bed. She wondered, though, not for the first time, if she’d ever really want someone again. What was the point, when you could never know him even a little bit?
There was a piece of yellow paper in the roller, so Melanie walked around and started typing. The keys were loud and deep. It’s beautiful, she wrote. Let’s go get something from Zsuzsi.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t bring herself to leave. But she found herself somehow invested in Jed’s project now, and its completion might feel like closure. She’d never answer her million questions or sort through all Vanessa’s things, but she could see the last room of the little museum filled. She slipped her shoes back on.
When they knocked at apartment B it was László who answered. He waved them toward the kitchen table, turtling behind with his walker. Zsuzsi wore a bathrobe over a nightgown, and she stopped washing dishes to sit with them, rubbing lotion into her palms. Jed explained the project—“a memorial to the ones we lost,” he called it — and asked if there was any small object she’d like to contribute. Melanie was taken aback by how vigorously Zsuzsi nodded, by how quickly her eyes filled. She grabbed Jed’s forearm. “This I have been waiting,” she said. She disappeared into another room while Jed and Melanie looked at each other bewildered and László eased himself into a kitchen chair.
She came back cupping something between her palms, and waited for Jed to extend his own. It was a stuffed gray mouse, worn moleskin stretched over a lumpy plaster body.
László let out a monosyllabic shout, angry rather than startled, then mumbled to Zsuzsi in Hungarian. She shot back, repeating something firmly until he was calm. She brought him a glass of water, and he reclined to stare at the ceiling, his head too heavy for his long, thin neck. Melanie wanted nothing more than to leave — she should have known this was a mistake — and she was surprised that Jed seemed so planted in his chair, waiting out the storm as if it were a real one from which he was responsible for sheltering the little mouse.
“This comes from my sister. She also is murdered by the gas, but many many years.”
Zsuzsi pronounced “gas” like “guess,” and Melanie fixated on this just as she’d fixated all week on Vanessa’s possessions instead of Michael’s death. They were killed by the guess.
“László, he is okay. I tell you a whole story. Because you know that the gas comes back for a reason. Yes? And here you are this beautiful couple full of life. Do you see what it means to have your life in front of you?”
Jed said, “We do,” and he put his free hand solidly on Melanie’s knee. It was half a gesture of restraint, and half a display for Zsuzsi: Yes, we are a couple if you say we are, and we will stay a couple till you’ve finished your story.