She did not go back to her car then, but went straight to the condo and walked up the stairs to the third floor, leaving a thinning trail of water behind her. Entry was easy: she had no difficulty finding the right key to open the doorknob lock, and Olivia Korhonen had been in too much of a hurry to throw the deadbolt. Mattie wiped her shoes carefully, nevertheless, before she went inside.
Walking slowly through the graciously appointed apartment, she realized that it was larger than she recalled, and that there were rooms that Olivia Korhonen had not shown her. One took particular effort to open, for the door was heavy and somewhat out of alignment. Mattie put a bruised shoulder to it and forced it open.
The room seemed to be a catchall for odd gifts and odder souvenirs-“tourist tchotchkes,” Virginia Schlossberg would have called them. There were no paintings on the walls, but countless candid snapshots, mostly of women, though they did include a handful of men. Their very number bewildered Mattie, making her eyes ache. She recognized no one at first, and then froze: a photo of herself held conspicuous pride of place on the wall facing her. It had obviously been taken by a cell phone. Below it, thumbtacked to the wall, was a gauzy red scarf that she had lost before Olivia Korhonen had even joined the Moss Harbor Bridge Group. Mattie pulled it free, along with the picture, and put them both in her pocket.
All of the photographs had mementos of some sort attached to them, ranging in size from a ticket stub to a pair of sunglasses or a paper plate with a telephone number scrawled on it in lipstick. None of the subjects appeared to be aware that their pictures were being taken; each had a tiny smiley face drawn with a fine-tipped ballpoint pen in the lower right corner. An entire section of one wall was devoted to images of a single dark-eyed young woman, taken from closer and closer angles, as though from the viewpoint of a shark circling to strike. These prints were each framed, not in wood or metal, but by variously colored hair ribbons, all held neatly in place by pushpins of matching hues. The central photo, the largest, was set facing the wall; there were two ribbons set around it, both blue. Mattie took this picture down, turned it around, and studied it for some while.
Hurt, still damp, bedraggled, she was no longer trembling; nor, somehow, was she in the least exhausted. Still cold, yes, but the coldness had come inside; while a curious fervor was warming her face and hands, as though the pictures on the walls were reaching out, welcoming her, knowing her, speaking her name. Still holding the shot of the dark-eyed girl, she moved from one new image to the other, feeling with each a kind of fracturing, a growing separation from everything else, until the walls themselves had dimmed around her and the photos were all mounted on the panelings of her mind. She was aware that there were somehow more there than she could see, more than she could yet take in.
The police will come. They will find the body and find this place. They’ll call her the Smiley Face Killer. The photographs were pressing in around her, each so anxious to be properly savored and understood. Mattie put the dark-eyed victim into her pocket next to her own picture, and reached out with both hands. She did not touch any of the pictures or the keepsakes, but let her fingers drift by them all, one after another, as in a kind of soul-Braille, and felt the myriad pinprick responses swarming her skin, as Olivia Korhonen’s souvenirs and trophies joined her. It was not possession of any sort; she was always herself. Never for a moment did she fancy that she was the woman she had killed on the beach, nor did any of this room’s hoarded memories overtake and evict her own. It was rather a fostering, a sheltering: a full awareness that there was more than enough room in her not for Olivia Korhonen’s life, but for what had given that life its only true meaning. Aloud, alone in that room filled with triumph and pride, she said, “Yes, she’s gone. Yes, I’m here. Yes.”
She walked out of the room, leaving it open, and did the same with the apartment door rather than pull it shut behind her.
Outside the stars were thin, and there were lights on in some of the neighboring condos. Mattie got in her car, started the engine, and drove home.
As chilled as she still was, as battered and scratched, with her blouse ripped halfway off her shoulder, there was a lightness in her, a sense of invulnerability, that she had never felt in all her life. The car seemed to be flying. With the windows down her damp hair whipped around her face, and she sang all the way home.
Reaching her house, she ran up the steps like an exuberant child, opened the door, and stopped in the hallway. Don was facing her, his face flushed and contorted with a mixture of outrage and bewilderment. His pajama jacket was buttoned wrong, which made him look very young. He said, “Where the fuck? Damn it, where the fuck? ”
Mattie smiled at him. She loved the feel of the smile; it was like slipping into a beautiful silk dress that she had never been able to afford until just now, this moment. Walking past him, she patted his cheek with more affection than she had felt in a long while. She whispered, hardly moving her lips, “She killed me,” and kept on to the bedroom.
Filament by K. L. Cook
FROM One Story
WHEN SHE WAS SEVENTEEN, Loretta discovered that she was pregnant with Blue Simpson’s child, a shame really. Not because Tildon turned out to be a bad son. (In fact, he would do quite well, thirty-two years later, buying and operating a chain of successful southern fried chicken franchises.) It’s just that Loretta’s future seemed genuinely promising before this turn of events. She’d graduated high school as the valedictorian when she was sixteen. Granted, this was in Honey Grove, Texas, so there were not that many students, certainly not that many bright ones, but she had nonetheless impressed her teachers enough to skip a couple of grades, and then went off to college in Denton on a full scholarship to study journalism. In Denton, she met Blue, a strawberry-headed pipe fitter and apprentice welder from Bug Tussle who liked to two-step. At the beginning of her sophomore year, he took her dancing every night for three straight weeks. By the end of that time, Tildon was conceived. Blue and Loretta hastily married during a freakish October snowstorm, and she gave up her academic pursuits and, until after Blue’s death, her dream of becoming a reporter.
Tildon arrived the following spring, followed by two miscarriages that left her depressed and wishing she could return to the promising trajectory of her old life. But then Melinda was born, and Tanya soon after. They’d moved to Charnelle in the Texas Panhandle, where they lived in a too-small, too-hot cinderblock house near the drive-in. On summer weekend nights, she and the kids and Blue would climb up to the flat, pebbly roof, set up folding chairs and a blanket, and watch the double feature for free. Those nights-as the Panhandle dusk turned a velvety blue, as the kids fell asleep in their sleeping bags, as she and Blue sipped beers and she nestled in the crook of his arm with a blanket wrapped around them, and, on one occasion, they actually made love, quietly, thrillingly, during the final fifteen minutes of Double Indemnity-those nights were, Loretta would reflect much later, the best times of the marriage.
Blue worked at Charnelle Steel, and Loretta stayed home in the cramped house and cared for the children. She gradually realized, too late, that she had no special knack for mothering. It wasn’t that she felt a particular animosity toward her children, but rather against motherhood itself. At first she was ashamed of this epiphany, but after a few years, she no longer tried to deny it. She didn’t confess it to others, certainly not to Blue or the children. People tended to harbor a grudge against mothers who seemed to dislike their own, even though, from what she could tell, it was a common enough occurrence. To acknowledge her feelings, to herself at least, eased her conscience a little and rekindled the sense of disciplined observation and fidelity to truth, no matter how unpleasant, that had made her want to pursue a life in journalism. The effort to be kind and compassionate also demanded from her a rigorous testing of her spirit that was, she felt, not unlike prayer, even though she didn’t consider herself a religious woman.