I believe she thought that her daughter killed me. So that her messages were going into the ether. It must have assuaged her pain. That was the least we could do, Eleanor and I. Not responding was the least we could do.
The next day, one came that made me forcibly send Eleanor home in that moment. I was throwing out all my cheap dishware. I passed the full-length mirror and caught sight of myself. I was wearing my mother’s slip dress for what would be the last time. I’d dyed it red with Rit liquid dye in the shower. The shower would be stained forever. Now the color was uniform from top to bottom. I looked like a young girl in the mirror. Perhaps it was a trick of the light. My eyes shone with the absurdity of it all. I felt peace, you see, because I’d embraced the madness. And yet I don’t believe it was madness. I use the word as shorthand. The world will call it madness. You can’t convince normal people otherwise. There’s a simple small line at the mouth of hell. It’s not a big deal when you get there. It’s just another step is all. If you ever cross it, as I did, you will see that black things become the most honest ones of all.
You must remember that most people don’t like to hear when bad things happen. They can tolerate only a little here and there. The bad things must be comestible. If there are too many bad things, they plug their ears and vilify the victim. But a hundred very bad things happened to me. Am I supposed to be quiet? Bear my pain like a good girl? Or shall I be very bad and take it out on the world? Either way I won’t be loved.
That was when my phone dinged. My heart jumped. I thought it might be Alice. But it was Mary.
because of you i held my dead boy in my hands. he was blue he turned blue in my arms! do you know what its like to hold your dead baby in your arms!!!
Upon reading it, I threw the phone against the wall. It hit the frog vase with my father inside. The vase cracked into several pieces and all of my father’s ashes were lost to the floor, to the grains and crevices of the uncleanable wood. At first I tried to scoop them up. But my hand came back with dust and strands of hair and an uncooked lentil. So I vacuumed the whole area. It was less painful than I would have expected. My mother’s ashes remained intact on the mantel.
Eleanor walked in from the deck where she’d taken to sunning herself in the early afternoons.
—I heard a noise. Are you okay?
Since the miscarriage, she’d been attending to me so kindly. She never asked me about Lenny, about the way it happened. Just like her father, she was careful not to ire. She was a quiet, wonderful listener. In an eerie way, the girl and I loved each other. But that didn’t take away from the prison of it all.
Now that Lenny was gone, she’d floated the notion that she wouldn’t have to leave until his cousin up in San Francisco sold the place. I worried about the cousin coming for the watch, but I never heard a thing.
In fact, the only person who said anything, who made me feel culpable, was Kevin. Several days after Lenny’s death, Kevin approached me as I was getting out of my car. We said hello. It was the first time we’d seen each other in a while.
—I wanted to offer my condolences, he said.
—What do you mean?
—Lenny, I mean. Death in your house, Miss Joan.
He placed one of his elegant hands on my shoulder and looked at me. I willed my body not to tremble. He knew. I knew that he did.
—Don’t beat yourself up about it.
—About what?
—You know, he said. You couldn’t have saved him.
Later I would sit with that line. I would wonder which man Kevin was talking about. I could swear I’d seen something in his eyes. A flicker of my history.
—Sorry to know you’re going. I wish we could have gotten to know each other.
—We kept very different schedules, I said.
He smiled and regarded me. Since coming to California, I’d known two men—River and Kevin—both of whom looked at me in ways that didn’t repel me; that did, in fact, the opposite. They made me feel girlish and small and protected.
—You’re pretty, Kevin said. He said it very plainly, like it was an obvious thing but something which needed to be recorded in the atmosphere all the same. I struggled to remember if I had ever been called pretty.
I smiled and thanked him as though it were no big deal and yet it broke my heart in the holiest of ways. That man did more for me in one line than any man had ever done. The word pretty. That fucking word.
He nodded and backed away from me slowly, his eyes on me in a hallowed way, until he opened his underground door and disappeared. Three months later a private jet would go down over Musha Cay and I didn’t have to read the story to know that he had been on the flight. I felt that it was my fault, because he had shone a light on me.
Back in the house, Eleanor was waiting. Likely she’d been looking out the window. I was more frightened of Eleanor than I was of anyone coming after me for murder or, worse, theft. I worried that if I didn’t make a change, she and I would become
