I like the possum detective but I’m not ready to let her in the house. Other people’s eyes make it a place I don’t recognise. She seems to understand that.
‘Do you know where your mother is?’ The possum detective asks the question suddenly, in the middle of another conversation about sea otters (she actually knows a fair amount about them). I smile because I can see that she is enjoying the conversation about sea otters, but also using it to be a detective and try to surprise me into telling her the truth. I like it; that she’s so good at her job. ‘Should I still be looking for her?’ she says. ‘You have to tell me, Ted.’
I think about what to say. She waits, watching.
I don’t know much about the world but I know what would happen if they find the bones. The excavation, the pictures in the newspaper, the TV. Mommy, resurrected. Kids will go to the waterfall at night to scare each other, they’ll tell stories of the murder nurse. Mommy will remain a god.
No. She has to really die this time. And that means be forgotten.
‘She’s gone,’ I say. ‘She’s dead. I promise. That’s all.’
The possum woman looks at me for a long time. ‘Well then,’ she says. ‘We never had this talk.’
I walk the possum detective to her car. As I’m going back to the house, I notice that the last ‘s’ on the street sign is wearing away. If you squint it might not be there at all. Needles Street. I shiver and go inside quickly.
The bug man is gone. His office is cleared out. I went to see. Now I talk to the bug woman. The young doctor from the hospital fixed me up with her. The bug woman comes to the house sometimes and sometimes I go to her office, which is like the inside of an iceberg, cool and white. It contains a normal amount of chairs. She is very nice and doesn’t look like a bug at all. But I still have trouble with names. And so much has changed. Maybe I need one tiny thing to stay the same.
She suggested that I play back my recordings to see what I have forgotten. I’m surprised to find I’ve used up twelve cassettes. I really didn’t think I recorded that much but that’s why I need the tapes, isn’t it? Because my memory’s so bad.
They’re numbered so I start with 1. The first twenty minutes or so is what I expected. There are a couple recipes, and some stuff about the glade, the lake. Then there’s a pause. I think maybe it’s finished, so I’m reaching over to switch off the recorder, when someone starts breathing into the silence of the tape. In and out. Cold walks up my arms and legs. That’s not my breath.
Then a hesitant, prim voice starts to speak.
I’m busy with my tongue, she says, doing the itchy part of my leg when Ted calls for me. Darn it, this is not a good time.
My heart leaps up into my mouth. It can’t be – oh, but it is. Olivia, my beautiful lost kitten. I never knew she could speak. No wonder I could never find the tape recorder. She sounds sweet, worried and teacher-like. Hearing her is wonderful and sad, like seeing a picture of yourself as a baby. I wish we could have talked. It’s too late now. I listen on and on. I don’t know why I’m crying.
It is called integration, the bug woman tells me. It happens, sometimes, in situations like ours. Integration sounds like something that happens in a factory. I think they just wanted to be together, Olivia and the other one. Anyway, Olivia is gone and she won’t be back.
The bug woman always tells me to let feelings in, not shut them out, so that is what I try to do. It hurts.
There are other voices, among Olivia’s recordings – ones that I don’t know. Some don’t use language, but grunts and long pauses and clicks and high songs. Those are the ones that move through me moaning like cold little ghosts. In the past I tried to shut them in the attic. Now I take time to listen. I’ve spent too long covering my ears.
Dawn wakes me these days. I surface slowly from a dream full of red and yellow feathers. My mind echoes with green sounds and thoughts that are not my own. I can taste blood in my mouth. I never know whose dreams I am going to get in the night. But the body actually gets to rest, these days, instead of being used by someone else while I sleep. So it’s worth it.
Other things are different too. Three days a week I work in the kitchen of a diner across town. I like the walk, watching the city slowly grow up around me. Right now I just wash dishes, but they tell me that maybe soon I can start helping the fry cooks. There is no work today – today is just for us.
Without plywood over the windows, the house seems made of light. I get out of bed, careful not to tear the staples that run down my side. Our body is a landscape, of scars and new wounds both. I stand and for a moment there is a wrestling in the depths of us. The body sways dangerously and we all feel sick. Sulky, Lauren lets me take control. I steady us with a hand on the wall, breathing deeply. The day is full of these seismic, nauseous struggles. We are learning. It is not easy to hold everyone in your heart at once.
Later today, maybe Lauren will take the body. She will ride her bike and draw, or we will go to the woods. Not to the glade, though, or the waterfall. We don’t go there. The blue dress of rotting organza, her old vanity case, her bones –
