Miss Me When I'm Gone (7 page)

Chapter 10

“I Don’t Wanna Play House”

“I Don’t Wanna Play House” was, of course, one of Tammy’s big hits during her golden year, 1968. The abandoned-wife narrator of this song laments at hearing her daughter proclaim to a playmate, “I don’t wanna play house,” because she’s seen her parents play it and it doesn’t look like much fun.

And those who find Tammy to be a bit “too much” are apt to point to this one as such, along with “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” It’s all a tad too pathetic, a little too suburban and domestic, a little too manipulative of the audience, showing the harsh realities of a marriage from the viewpoint of the little kids.

But it perhaps could be an anthem of my generation, as well as the one before us. Not Tammy’s narrative in the song, but that of the daughter she quotes. We’re the little kids who’ve seen the marital wreckage of yesteryear and declared it unsuitable for ourselves. We see Tammy’s expressions of suffering and reject them. We are too smart and too strong to be like her. We don’t want or need a man—or any mate—in the same way women of her generation did. It is entirely different for us.

Because, you see, relationships between men and women have completely evolved into something that does not resemble Tammy’s experience in the slightest. If you are a smart, modern woman, you will certainly never muffle your sobs into a pile of laundry, or spend a whole day worrying about the cold expression on your husband’s face when he left for work that morning, or hear your four-year-old echo back at you some frustrated utterance that makes you realize how miserable you must sound to the rest of the world. No, our generation is too enlightened to ever be so domestically dysfunctional as all of that.

And I believe I thought this once. I was indeed a child for having that thought—or at least incredibly naive. To think one could love and marry and maybe start a family and never feel any of these sorts of things that Tammy always sings about so pitifully and so beautifully.

I really was a brat to think that once. “I don’t want to play house.” To think I could have everything I want and not have to play at all. A really clueless, insufferable brat, playing entirely outside of the house.

—Tammyland

Chapter 11

“Bedtime Story”

78 Durham Road

Emerson, New Hampshire

I sit outside my mother’s old house on a weekday, when no one’s home to feel creeped out to see the ghost of Shelly Brewer lingering on the side of the street in a Toyota. The little bungalow seems a bit prettier now than when Shelly rented it. The dark brown paint has been switched to a gentle blue. It still has thick white trim—brighter now, it seems to me. Gone, though, is the adorably lopsided window box where Shelly used to plant her marigolds.

My last visit to Shelly’s was in March 1985, a few days before she died. It was during a school vacation, and I went to see her before the weekend because I had a kiddie party that Saturday that I desperately wanted to go to. Shelly understood and accommodated.

If I’d been there on the weekend, I would’ve been there when she was killed. Maybe I would’ve been killed, too. Or she wouldn’t have been killed at all. There’s that to think about.

Anyway, there were a few things that were memorable about the visit. One was that I brought her a drawing I had done. I thought she might like it better than a ditto with a red “100” scrawled across the top.

So I drew her a picture of a crow. I loved crows, loved drawing them—pressing the crayon hard into the paper to make it dark and shiny, giving it the oily look of a real crow’s feathers. And birds were easy, if you did them from the side and didn’t try to make them too fancy.

When I was finished, I wasn’t sure if Shelly would like it. Maybe a crow was too dark and gloomy. I had a friend at home who said so when we drew together. So I put a pink bow on the crow’s neck and had it holding the string of a big, blue balloon in its claw.

When I presented it to Shelly, she said she loved it, and really seemed to mean it. She brought me to the drugstore and we picked out a plastic frame for it—black, to go with the crow. The pharmacist even admired it. When we got home, Shelly propped it up on her coffee table and said later she’d find a spot for it on the wall and hang it.

And then—I remember it being within minutes of her propping up the picture—Shelly decided to have a serious talk with me. She said she wanted to tell me that she’d made a decision about something. And I might hear people talking about it, and that it might upset me or my mom. But that she wanted me to know that she loved me, no matter what happened.

My first reaction was that she didn’t really like the crow so much, after all, but was just trying to be nice, knowing that a serious conversation was coming.

Shelly continued. She said that the most important thing she wanted me to remember was that if someone was ever hurting you, it was important to do something about it right away. To either hit back or tell someone who would help you. Whatever you decided to do, the important thing was to do something immediately. Not wait and see if it would happen again. That was what she wanted me to remember from this.

I told her that no one was hurting me. And she said that that was good, she was glad. It didn’t seem to me we understood each other, about her plans or about my crow. The conversation ended there, as Shelly suggested we make ourselves a little lunch.

That evening, though, I felt I understood a little better. There was a knock on the door, and my heart sank. Frank, I thought. He’d been completely absent this visit, allowing Shelly to focus all of her attention on me.

When Shelly opened the door, I heard her say, “My kid’s here. She’s asleep.”

She let the person in anyway, and as they started to talk, I was relieved to hear it was a woman. This wasn’t unusual. Shelly’s friends seemed to know my bedtime—occasionally they’d come and visit with her after I was in bed. And I continued to busy myself fashioning my stuffed monkey into funny contortions, as I sometimes did when I couldn’t sleep.

Then Shelly said something that made me sit up straight in my bed. She said, “It’s more complicated than money. I don’t really want money. And all the money in the world wouldn’t even get me Gretchen back, anyway.”

Get Gretchen back?! So it was true. Someday Shelly might bring me back here and be my mother. I couldn’t imagine it. Would she start pretending to care about my dittos, my 100s? Would she let me take ballet? Did the Emerson school cafeteria have chicken nuggets?

The TV was burbling loudly, so I couldn’t hear everything. Eventually, though, I heard the other lady say something loud enough for me to hear. Something like: “If you think you would hold up in a fight against him, you’re wrong, Shelly.”

This scared me. She was probably talking about Frank now. I could figure out that much, because I knew how much Shelly and Frank fought. She was warning Shelly about Frank. It seemed to me a lot of people didn’t really like Frank: me, Nantie Linda, Aunt Dorothy, Grandma, the neighbors.

And yes, it was a relief to know that others knew what I knew. That Shelly and Frank fought. It was not a relief to hear someone else sound like they were worried Shelly should be afraid of him—like I was.

It seemed to me, after a few minutes, that Shelly and her guest were getting angry at each other.

Shelly said, “If he doesn’t stop, I’ll go to the police.”

“You think the police will believe you?” her friend asked. And she told Shelly she should be careful.

A little while later, Shelly’s friend left, and the TV droned on into the night.

A few weeks after Shelly died, the framed picture showed up at my mom’s house in a box of things her mother sent her, for her and me to remember Shelly by.

I had
seen
that bird drawing. In college. I thought about it on my way up to see Gregor.

I didn’t remember what year it was now, but I came into her room one day after a holiday break and saw it sitting on her bookshelf. I asked who’d drawn it, thinking maybe a young cousin or babysitting charge. And she told me she had drawn it when she was a kid. I probably gave her a funny look. Displaying one’s own framed childhood drawing was, fittingly, a decidedly quirky thing to do—but a bit on the egotistical side for Gretchen. I believe the drawing disappeared within a week.

Chapter 12

I have to admit, Gregor annoyed me before I’d even met him.

“Gregor? Like the bug in the Kafka story?” I’d asked Gretchen when she first told me about him.

“Yeah,” she’d said. “But he’s nothing like that guy, really.”

That was true, I’d soon learn when I met him. I had to admit he was very attractive, but for his creative facial hair. He almost always wore a scarf with his dark, pec-hugging T-shirts—more often than not, a cowboy kerchief, which seemed to me pretty contrived, but with her later-in-life attraction to things country . . . who knows? Maybe Gretchen found it charming.

And I didn’t care for his light red goatee. He looked like a leprechaun—a young, narrow-faced, hipster leprechaun.

Now, as he led me into his and Gretchen’s chilly, high-ceilinged apartment, he seemed just a sad leprechaun. He wasn’t wearing a scarf of any kind—only jeans and a loose green T-shirt that said
THE JESUS LIZARD
on it. His feet were bare, and he kept placing one foot over the other and curling his toes, as if he were self-conscious about them.

“How’re you holding up?” I asked, handing him the laptop that Nathan had sent me.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m trying to get a new place fast. Because it’s hard to be in here.”

“I can imagine. Did you two have a lease?”

“Yeah, but they’re letting me break it. They understand.”

Gregor led me to a spacious room with two desks—one slim and black, one heavy and oak. The black one had on it two neat stacks of magazines and had a clock over it that had the word
NOW
at each of the twelve hours instead of numbers. The wooden desk was dusty, scattered with paper clips. Over it was a framed poster of a mallard floating in brown, rippling water.

“We shared this office space, Gretchen and I,” Gregor explained.

“Let me guess,” I said, pointing to the second desk. “That one was Gretchen’s.”

“Yeah. Her parents didn’t ask for the duck poster back.”

Gregor paused while he hooked a couple of cords from the small drive on his desk to the Mac I’d given him.

“It’s not any easier since the Waterses took Gretchen’s stuff away. It’s even more depressing. Like there’s this big empty hole where she was.” He pushed his leather chair toward me and gestured for me to sit in it. “I’m sorry. How are
you
doing?”

“Not so great. Reality’s setting in, I think. It feels worse now than it did a couple of weeks ago.”

He nodded, then glanced at my belly, as if that factored in somehow. I swiveled away from him slightly.

“Yeah,” he said, looking away again. He glanced at the computer. “Um. Uh-oh. It says this is gonna take six hours.”

“Oh, really?” I said.

“Oh, shit. I had no idea. I’ve never had to use the Time Capsule before. I don’t know why I thought it would just be, like, zip-zap.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I can kill time around here for a few hours. There are some things I’ve been meaning to shop for—I noticed you have the big mall down by the exit. Is there any kind of a baby store there?”

“Uh . . . yeah.” Gregor hoisted himself onto his desk, pulled up one leg, and grabbed his toes. “I’m not sure. But it’s a pretty big-ass mall.”

I felt silly for asking him this. Of course he didn’t know. But I wondered if he regularly used terms like
big-ass,
and if Gretchen liked it.

“And maybe . . . I mean, I don’t know what you had planned for today, but maybe you and I could get out of here for a little bit, grab coffee or lunch or something. I thought maybe we could chat about Gretchen’s project some. I bet you know more about it than her family does.”

“Yeah, prolly,” Gregor said, picking at his pinkie toe. “Sure, that’d be a good idea. You hungry for lunch now?”

He glanced at my belly again.

“No,” I said. “Is it even eleven o’clock yet? But if you want to talk now, how about coffee?”

Gregor let go of his foot. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s do that.”

I allowed Gregor to drive, and he chose a tiny coffee place with dim lighting, holey couches, and creaky wooden tables covered in African fabrics.

“Gretchen wrote here sometimes,” Gregor told me as we waited in line. “But never for long. An hour, maybe two. She told me it was hard for her to concentrate in one place. She’d try coffee shops, she’d try the library, she’d try home. She’d even write at McDonald’s sometimes. She could never settle into one place to write.”

“Maybe that came from her experience with
Tammyland,
” I suggested. “Since with that, she was always writing from a different place. At a Dairy Queen over a sundae, over a piece of key lime pie at a folksy diner, or whatever.”

“That was more about the food than surroundings, though. She thought it would be cute to make it look like she was stuffing her face on southern food or road food the whole time. But half the time she was writing in her hotel room and just making up where it was written.”

“She told you that?”

“Yeah.” Gregor shrugged. “This time around, I think it had to do more with the fact that she was really having some kind of writer’s block.”

A similarly goateed guy behind the counter gave Gregor a nod of recognition before taking our orders: Gregor’s cappuccino and my chai. Coffee still made my stomach turn, unfortunately.

At our table with our drinks, I prompted Gregor.

“So . . . you were saying. Writer’s block. Gretchen was having a little trouble?”

“Um . . . yeah.” Gregor dumped three raw sugar packets into his cappuccino. “You know, she wouldn’t just switch places she’d write. She’d switch notebooks. I don’t know how many notebooks the Waterses gave you, but it must’ve been a lot.”

“Yeah. Piles and piles of them.”

“I think the idea was that she kept starting over.” Gregor stirred his cappuccino and then licked the little spoon before tucking it carefully next to his cup. “A new notebook was, like, symbolic. Or she’d try a more fun or more expensive notebook with a cool cover, to get her spirits up. Or she’d have a new idea while she was in a grocery store. Buy a cheap notebook there, go to the nearest Starbucks, write there for a while. So there were notebooks everywhere. She started to lose track of what she’d written where. One time she tore apart the whole apartment looking for some piece she’d written about Willie Nelson. When she finally found it, she was like . . . ‘Oh . . . it’s not as brilliant as I remember it.’ And just tossed it aside.”

I smiled a little. The process reminded me of watching Gretchen in the final hours of writing a paper in college.

“I don’t know how much of the drafts and stuff you’ve read, what you’ve seen in her notebooks or whatever so far . . .”

“Well, I’ve gotten that she was playing around with another country music book. This time with the focus more on the male musicians, right?” I asked. “Or at least, that was the original idea.”

“Sort of,” Gregor said, putting his cappuccino to his lips and waiting for me to continue.

“And that she was getting a little more personal this time. There was more about her family’s past.”

Gregor put down his cup and scratched at his leprechaun beard. “So you know all about Shelly, I guess?”

“Yeah. She didn’t ever keep that a secret. Didn’t talk about it much, but it wasn’t a secret. And I’ve read enough to know she was writing a bit about Shelly.”

“Shelly and . . . what happened to her,” Gregor added. “And who her biological father was. Did you catch on to that?”

“Yes. I read a little bit to that effect, and her agent confirmed it.”

“I think the idea with that is that it would fit with the male musician theme. And she was feeling pressure from her publisher to write something that felt like a companion volume to
Tammyland.
Seriously, I don’t think she had any daddy issues before she started on this thing. She had her dad. Mr. Waters, I mean. She didn’t care about whichever of the punks Shelly knew in high school happened to sire her.”

I shrugged. “That’s the impression she always gave to me, but it was hard to ever really know what was going on in Gretchen’s head. Maybe when she started to research the book, she started to care. Sounds like it.”

“Maybe. But in the end, I think she was writing mostly about Frank. You know . . . the guy who killed Shelly. The boyfriend?”

“Right,” I said. “Now, what was his last name?”

“Oh, man . . . I actually don’t remember. She usually just called him Frank. But I’m sure his name is all over Gretchen’s manuscripts. It should be pretty easy to find.”

“Is he still in jail?” I asked.

Gregor looked surprised at the question. “No, Jamie. Gretchen never told you? He never went to jail.”

“How could that be?”

“Well, the story is that he was partying all night that night, came home in the morning, and found her beaten and bleeding to death. Everyone thinks he made that up, of course. That he beat her up. But just because everyone thought it doesn’t mean it stood up in court. The case against him was weak, I guess. There were some odd circumstances that morning. The defense used them to their advantage.”

“Jesus,” I said. My heart sank a little deeper for Gretchen. Why hadn’t she ever told me this? How was it that Mr. Lucky Charms here knew it and I didn’t?

“There was something that really bothered her, that she learned about the morning her mother died. Her mother apparently said something as she was dying, to one of the medics or something, that implicated Frank. But it wasn’t enough to convict. The last time we really discussed it, that’s what she talked about.”

Gregor paused for a moment, picking at his lower lip. “Her attitude about Frank was different than with the paternity stuff. It was almost like she found the paternity issue . . . I don’t know,
amusing,
almost. But not the Frank stuff. Obviously. Not that.”

“There wasn’t a chance this Frank guy was her father?” I put my chai down. It was getting a little cold, which made it taste kind of sickening sweet. “Could that have been what disturbed her so much?”

“Uh . . . no.” Gregor shook his head. “It was pretty clear Shelly didn’t know Frank till Gretchen was five or six or so. She met him when they both worked at the factory.”

“What factory is that?”

“Emerson has a dog-food factory.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, I don’t think Frank even grew up in Emerson. I’m pretty sure he moved there later, for the factory work. Gretchen never talked like he was even a possibility.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s good to hear.”

“After a while she kept saying to me that she’d figured out that the real story wasn’t about who her father was. The real story was about Frank and what happened that morning with Shelly.”

“The real story . . . meaning . . . what she truly wanted to write about?”

“Write about and research, yeah,” Gregor explained. “I mean, maybe that’s just what she told herself. Cuz the whole father thing was becoming too close or too weird or something.”

“So was she gonna somehow write about George Jones and Willie Nelson and those guys along with her mother’s death?” I asked.

“Yeah, I don’t know how well that theme held up as she got deeper into researching her mother’s death. But researching that became her main focus. Kind of an obsession, maybe. For one thing, she was spending all of her time up there in Emerson. But there were other little things. Like, she bought this digital voice recorder. She showed it to me. She said she was starting to use it when she interviewed people. She was convinced she was going to catch someone in a lie, catch someone giving themselves away. And she’d have
proof
.”

An uneasy feeling came over me as I thought of the casual P.S. in Gretchen’s final e-mail to me:
In your days as a reporter, did you start to develop any skill for telling who is lying to you?

“Catch someone . . . meaning Frank, I assume? Or someone connected to him?”

Gregor shrugged. “I guess. By then, she was getting kind of short with me in general. I’d stopped asking a lot of questions.”

“Where’s the voice recorder now?”

“I don’t know. I assume her family took it with everything else. If you want to listen to what she got, you ought to ask her brother if he’s seen it.”

“Yeah . . . I guess I should.”

It seemed to me that if Nathan had it, and had any inkling that it was part of Gretchen’s project, he’d have given it to me. Maybe, I thought with a start, it was in Gretchen’s purse—the purse she’d supposedly had at the reading and the 7-Eleven but not when they found her.

“Did she play you anything she recorded?” I asked. “Tell you what she got people to say?”

Gregor shook his head. “Not really. She talked to me about it less and less in the last month or so. We were . . . having trouble. She was spending days, sometimes whole weeks, up there in New Hampshire with her aunt Dorothy. I almost got the feeling she was avoiding me.”

Gregor hesitated, glanced at me, gulped the dregs of his cappuccino, and then glanced at me again.

“And I think she was talking to Jeremy more.”