Kelsey was the one who hadn’t gone to college. Kelsey was the one who’d been in rehab for something much stronger than marijuana—OxyContin, maybe. And the girl’s friends had been arrested for drug possession. Her sister had said, Kelsey has broken my heart. But I can’t let her know.
Agnes wasn’t thinking of this. Agnes was thinking, I am a widow, my heart has been broken. But I am still alive.
Whatever the transaction was, how much the dope had actually cost, Agnes was paying, handing over bills to Triste who grunted, shoving them into his pocket. Agnes was feeling grateful, generous. Thinking how long it had been since young people had been in her house, how long even before her husband had died, how long since voices had been raised like this and she’d heard laughter.
They’d seemed already high, entering her house. And soon there came another, older boy, in his mid-twenties perhaps, with a quasi-beard on his jutting jaw, in black T-shirt, much-laundered jeans, biker boots, forearms covered in lurid tattoos.
“Hi there, Aggie. How’s it goin’!”
Agnes, she explained. Her name was Agnes.
The boy stared at her. Not a boy but a man in his early thirties, in the costume of a boy. Slowly he smiled as if she’d said something witty. He’d pulled into her driveway in a rattly pickup.
“Ag-nez. Cool.”
They’d told him about her, maybe. They felt sorry for her and were protective of her.
Her shoulder-length silvery hair, her soft-spoken manner. The expensive house, like something in a glossy magazine. That she was Kelsey’s actual aunt, and a widow.
The acquisition of a “controlled substance”—other than prescription drugs—was a mystery to Agnes, though she understood that countless individuals, of all ages but primarily young, acquired these substances easily: marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, Oxy-Contin, Vicodin, even heroin and “meth.” Self-medicating had become nearly as common as aspirin. Recreational drugs began in middle school.
She was a university professor. She understood, if not in precise detail, the undergraduate culture of alcohol, drugs.
These were not university students, however. Though her niece Kelsey was enrolled in a community college.
Like this, Aunt Agnes.
It was sweet, they called her Aunt Agnes, following Kelsey’s lead.
She liked being an aunt. She had not been a mother.
They passed the joint to her. With shaky fingers she held the stubby cigarette to her lips—drew the acrid smoke into her lungs—held her breath for as long as she could before coughing.
She’d never smoked tobacco. She’d been careful of her health. Her husband, too, had been careful of his health: he’d exercised, ate moderately, drank infrequently. He’d smoked, long ago—not for thirty years. But then, he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer and rapidly it had metastasized and within a few months he was gone.
Gone was Agnes’s way of explanation. Dead she could not force herself to think, let alone speak.
Kelsey was a good girl, Agnes was thinking. She’d had some trouble in high school but essentially, she was a good girl. After rehab she’d begun to take courses at the community college—computer science, communication skills. Agnes’s sister had said that Kelsey was the smartest of her children, and yet—
Silver piercings in her face glittered like mica. Her mouth was dark purple like mashed grapes. It was distracting to Agnes, how her niece’s young breasts hung loose in a low-slung, soft jersey top thin as a camisole.
She brought the joint to her lips, that felt dry. Her mouth filled with smoke—her lungs.
He’d died of lung cancer. So unfair, he had not smoked in more than thirty years.
Yet individuals who’d never smoked could get lung cancer, and could die of lung cancer. In this matter of life and death, the notion of fair, unfair was futile.
“Hey, Auntie Agnes! How’re you feelin’?”
She said she was feeling a little strange. She said it was like wine—except different. She didn’t feel drunk.
Auntie they were calling her. Affectionately, she wanted to think—not mockingly.
So strange, these young people in her house! And her husband didn’t seem to be here.
Strange, every day that he wasn’t here. That fact she could contemplate for long hours like staring at an enormous boulder that will never move.
Strange, too, she remained. She had not died—had she?
There was her niece Kelsey and there was Kelsey’s friend Randi, and bony-faced Triste, and—was it Mallory, with the tattoos? She wasn’t sure. She was feeling warm, a suffusion of warmth in the region of her heart. She was laughing now, and coughing. Tears stung her eyes. Yet she was not sad. These were tears of happiness not sadness. She felt—expansive? elated? excited? Like walking across a narrow plank over an abyss.
If the plank were flat on the ground, you would not hesitate. You would smile, this crossing is so easy.
But if the plank is over an abyss, you feel panic. You can’t stop yourself from looking down, into the abyss.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.
Her young friends were watching her, and laughing with her. A silvery-haired woman of some unfathomable age beyond sixty in elegant clothes, rings on her fingers, sucking at a joint like a middle school kid. Funny!
Or maybe, as they might say, weird.
How long the young people stayed in her house Agnes wouldn’t know. They were playing music—they’d turned on Agnes’s radio, and tuned it to an AM rock station. The volume so high, Agnes felt the air vibrate. She had to resist the impulse to press her hands over her ears. Her young friends were laughing, rowdy. Kelsey was holding her hand and calling her Auntie. It was a TV comedy—brightly lit, and no shadows. Except she’d become sleepy suddenly. Barely able to walk, to climb the stairs, Kelsey and another girl had helped her. Someone’s arm around her waist so hard it hurt.
“Hey, Aunt Agnes, are you okay? Just lay down, you’ll feel better.”
Kelsey was embarrassed for her widow-aunt. Or maybe—Kelsey was amused.
She was crying now. Or, no—not crying so they could see. She’d learned another kind of crying that was inward, secret.
Kelsey helped her lie on her bed, removed her shoes. Kelsey and the other girl were laughing together. A glimpse of Kelsey holding a filmy negligee against her front, cavorting before a mirror. The other girl, opening a closet door. Then she was alone.
She was awake and yet, strange things were happening in her head. Strange noises, voices, laughter, static. Her husband was knocking at the door which inadvertently she’d locked. She had not meant to lock him out. He was baffled and panicked by the loud music in his house. Yet she was paralyzed and could not rise from her bed to open the door. Forgive me! Don’t go away, I love you.
After a while it was quiet downstairs.
* * *
In the morning she woke to discover the lights still on downstairs and the rooms ransacked.
Ransacked was the word her husband would use. Ransacked was the appropriate word for the thievery had been random and careless, as children might do.
Missing were silver candlestick holders, silverware and crystal bowls, her husband’s laptop from his study. Drawers in her husband’s desk had been yanked open, someone had rummaged through his files and papers but carelessly, letting everything fall to the floor.
A small clock, encased in crystal, rimmed in gold, which had been awarded to her husband for one of his history books, and had been kept on the windowsill in front of her husband’s desk, was missing.
A rear door was ajar. The house was permeated with cold. In a state of shock Agnes walked through the rooms. She found herself in the same room, repeatedly. As in a troubled dream, she was being made to identify what had been taken from her.