"Will they bite?" said Myra, reaching for my foxes.
"Don't touch that," said Reenie. "With your sticky little fingers."
"No," I said. "They're not real. See, they have glass eyes. They only bite their own tails."
"She said, if only you'd known, you'd never have left her in there," said Reenie. "Supposing you'd known. She said whatever else, you weren't heartless." She frowned sideways, at the glass of water. She had her doubts on that score. "Potatoes was what they ate there, mostly," she said. "Mashed and boiled, she said. Skimped on the food, took the bread out of the mouths of the poor nutcases and loony birds in there. Lining their own pockets, is my guess."
"Where has she gone? Where is she now?"
"That's between you and me and the doorpost," said Reenie. "She said it was better for you not to know."
"Did she seem-was she…" Was she visibly crazy, I wanted to ask.
"She was the same as she always was: No more, no less. She wasn't like a loony bird, if that's what you mean," said Reenie. "Thinner-she needs to get some meat back on her bones-and not so much talk about God. I only hope he stands by her now, for a change."
"Thank you, Reenie, for all you've done," I said.
"No need to thank me," said Reenie stiffly. "I only did what was right."
Meaning I hadn't. "Can I write to her?" I was fumbling for my handkerchief. I felt like crying. I felt like a criminal.
"She said best not. But she wanted me to say she left you a message."
"A message?"
"She left it before they took her off to that place. You'd know where to find it, she said."
"Is that your own hankie? Have you got a cold?" said Myra, noting my snifflings with interest.
"If you ask too many questions your tongue will fall out," said Reenie.
"No it won't," said Myra complacently. She began humming off-key, and kicking her fat legs against my knees, under the table. She had a cheerful confidence, it appeared, and was not easily frightened-qualities in her I've often found irritating, but have come to be grateful for. (Which may be news to you, Myra. Accept it as a compliment while you have the chance. They're thin on the ground.)
"I thought you might like to see a picture of Aimee," I said to Reenie. I had at least this one achievement I could show, to redeem myself in her eyes.
Reenie took the photo. "My, she's a dark little thing, isn't she?" she said. "You never know who a child will favour."
"I want to see too," said Myra, grabbing with her sugary paws.
"Quick then, and off we go. We're late for your Dad."
"No," said Myra.
"Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home," Reenie sang, scrubbing pink icing off Myra 's little snout with a paper napkin.
"I want to stay here," said Myra, but her coat was pulled on, her knitted wool hat was flumped down over her ears, and she was hauled sideways out of the booth.
"Take care of yourself," said Reenie. She didn't kiss me.
I wanted to throw my arms around her, and howl and howl. I wanted to be comforted. I wanted it to be me that was going with her.
"‘There's no place like home,'" Laura said one day, when she was eleven or twelve. "Reenie sings that. I think it's stupid."
"How do you mean?" I said.
"Look." She wrote it out as an equation. Noplace = home. Therefore, home = no place. Therefore home does not exist.
Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow.
I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.
The message
Yesterday I was too tired to do much more than lie on the sofa. As is becoming my no doubt slovenly habit, I watched a daytime talk show, the kind on which they spill the beans. It's the fashion now, bean-spilling: people spill their own beans and also those of other people, they spill every bean they have and even some they don't have. They do this out of guilt and anguish, and for their own pleasure, but mostly because they want to display themselves and other people want to watch them do it. I don't exempt myself: I relish these grubby little sins, these squalid family tangles, these cherished traumas. I enjoy the expectation with which the top is wrenched off the can of worms as if from some amazing birthday present, and then the sense of anticlimax in the watching faces: the forced tears and skimpy, gloating pity, the cued and dutiful applause. Is that all there is? they must be thinking. Shouldn't it be less ordinary, more sordid, more epic, more truly harrowing, this flesh wound of yours? Tell us more! Couldn't we please crank up the pain?
I wonder which is preferable-to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin-everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone-and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?
I carry no brief, for better or for worse.
Loose Lips Sink Ships, said the wartime poster. Of course the ships will all sink anyway, sooner or later.
After indulging myself in this way, I wandered into the kitchen, where I ate half of a blackening banana and two soda crackers. I wondered if something-food of some sort-had fallen down behind the garbage can-there was a meaty smell-but a quick check revealed nothing. Perhaps this odour was my own. I can't overcome the notion that my body smells like cat food, despite whatever stagnant scent I sprayed on myself this morning-Tosca, was it, or Ma Griffe, or perhaps Je Reviens? I still have a few odds and ends of that sort kicking around. Grist for the green garbage bags, Myra, when you get around to them.
Richard used to give me perfume, when he felt I needed mollifying. Perfume, silk scarves, small jewelled pins in the shapes of domestic animals, of caged birds, of goldfish. Winifred's tastes, not for herself but for me.
On the train coming back from Port Ticonderoga, and then for weeks afterwards, I pondered Laura's message, the one Reenie said she'd left for me. She must have known, then, that whatever she was planning to say to the strange doctor at the hospital might have repercussions. She must have known it was a risk, and so she'd taken precautions. Somehow, somewhere, she'd left some word, some clue for me, like a dropped handkerchief or a trail of white stones in the woods.
I pictured her writing this message, in the way she always set about writing. No doubt it would be in pencil, a pencil with a chewed end. She often chewed her pencils; as a child her mouth had smelled of cedar, and if it was a coloured pencil her lips would be blue or green or purple. She wrote slowly; her script was childish, with round vowels and closed o's, and long, wavery stems on her g's and her y's. The dots on the i's and j's were circular, placed far to the right, as if the dot were a small black balloon tethered to its stem by an invisible thread; the cross-strokes of the t's were one-sided. I sat beside her in spirit, to see what she would do next.
She'd have reached the end of her message, then put it into an envelope and sealed it, and then hidden it, the way she'd hidden her bundle of bits and scraps at Avilion. But where could she have put this envelope? Not at Avilion: she hadn't been anywhere near there, not just before she was taken away.
No, it must be in the house in Toronto. Somewhere no one else would look-not Richard, not Winifred, not any of the Murgatroyds. I searched in various places-the bottoms of drawers, the backs of cupboards, the pockets of my winter coats, my supply of handbags, my winter mittens even-but found nothing.