Special Topics in Calamity Physics (38 page)

I was aware of a certain convenience-store calm coursing through me, steady and ho-hum as the thrum of the beer fridge. Where I wanted to go, whom I had to talk to, was plain as the mirrored windows, the display of gum and batteries, Diamanta's hoop earrings.

"It's a whodunit," I said. "I was wondering if I could borrow your car."

16

Laughter in the Dark

H
annah was wearing a housedress the color of sandpaper, crudely scissored off at the hem so tiny threads hula-danced around her shins when she opened the door. Her face was bare as an unpainted wall, but it was obvious she hadn't been sleeping. Her hair hung serenely by her cheekbones and her bright black eyes bumblebeed from my face to my dress to Larson's truck to my face—all in a matter of seconds. "Goodness," she said in a hoarse voice. "Blue." "I'm sorry I woke you," I said. It was the sort of thing you said when you arrived on someone's doorstep at2:45
^AM

"No, no—I was awake." She smiled, but it wasn't a real smile, more of a cardboard cutout, and instantly I wondered if I'd made a mistake in coming, but then she put her arm around me. "God, come on in. It's freezing."

I'd only ever been in her house with Jade and the others, with Louis Armstrong warbling like toads, the air full of carrots, and it felt claustrophobic now, forsaken and dim like the cockpit of an old crashed plane. The dogs peered at me from behind her bare legs, their gaunt army of shadows slowly advancing toward my feet. There was a light on, the goosenecked lamp in the living room, and it spotlighted papers on the desk, bills, a few magazines.

"Why don't I fix you some tea?" she asked.

I nodded and after squeezing me again on the shoulder, she disappeared into the kitchen. I sat down on the lumpy plaid armchair next to the stereo. One of the dogs, Brody with three legs and the face of a senile sea captain
woofed
in disgust, then hobbled over to me, pressing his cold wet nose into my hand, smuggling a secret. Pots coughed behind the kitchen door, a tap whimpered, a few moans from a drawer—I tried to concentrate on these mundane sounds, because frankly, I wasn't feeling all that marvelous about being there. When she'd opened the door, I'd expected a terrycloth bathrobe, her hair a hornet's nest, a heavy-eyed, "Sweet Jesus, what's happened?" Or, hearing the doorbell, she should have taken me for a mulleted highwayman thirsty for gruel and a warm lady, or a livid ex-boyfriend with tattoos on his knuckles ("V-A-L-ER-IO," it spelled).

I had not foreseen the stiff, clapboard manner with which she'd greeted me, the bare bones welcome, the whisper of a frown—as if I'd been wired for sound all night and she'd been privy to every defamatory chat, banter and tête-à-tête, including the one in which Jade accused her of Mansonian ties,
and
the one from my head, when the reality of Cottonwood smashed into the reality of Zach Soderberg and I was temporarily manslaughtered. I'd driven to her house (40 mph, barely able to merge, out of my mind when passing a semi or what resembled a wall of tulip poplars) because I loathed Dad, and could think of no other decent place to go, but I also sort of hoped seeing Hannah would lay to rest those other conversations, render them funny and invalid, the way a single scientific sighting of a Mysterious Starling
(Aplonis marvornata)
could tear it right off the Extinct Species list, throw it up on the dire, but decidedly more encouraging Critically Endangered.

Seeing her, however, had made it worse.

Dad always warned that it was misleading when one
imagined
people, when one saw them in the Mind's Eye, because one never remembered them as they
really
were, with as many inconsistencies as there were hairs on a human head (100,000 to 200,000). Instead, the mind used a lazy shorthand, smoothed the person over into their most dominating characteristic — their pessimism or insecurity (sometimes really being lazy, turning them into either Nice or Mean)—and one made the mistake of judging them from this basis alone and risked, on a subsequent encounter, being dangerously surprised.

A gasp of the kitchen door, and she reappeared, carrying a tray piled with a sagging piece of apple pie, a wine bottle, a glass, a pot of tea.

"Let's turn on some lights," she said, pushing with her bare foot a
National Geographic,
a TV
Guide
and some mail off the coffee table before sliding the tray across it. She switched on the yellow lamp by an ashtray, cruddy with dead-worm cigarette butts and thick light splashed all over me and the furniture.

"I'm sorry to be bothering you like this," I said.

"Blue.
Please.
I'm always here for you. You know that." She said the words and the meaning—well, it was there, but it was also sort of grabbing its suitcase and heading for the door. "I'm sorry if I seem a bit... out of sorts. It's been a long night." She sighed, and staring at me, reached forward and squeezed my hand. "Really, I'm glad you showed up. I could use the company. You can stay in the guest room, so forget about driving home tonight. Now tell me everything."

I swallowed, jittery about where to begin. "I had a fight with my dad," I said, but then to my surprise —just as she picked up the paper napkin and, biting her lip a little, set about folding it into an isosceles triangle—the phone began to ring. It sounded like human screams—Hannah had one of those bleating 1960s telephones, probably picked up for a dollar at a yard sale—and the sound made my heart throw itself melodramatically against my ribs (see Gloria Swanson,
Shifting Sands).

"Oh, God," she whispered, visibly annoyed. "Hold on."

She disappeared into the kitchen. The ringing stopped.

I strained to hear her voice, but there was nothing to eavesdrop on, only

silence and the pings of the dogs' collars; they nervously raised their heads off the floor. Almost immediately, she reappeared, again with that small smile shoved onto her face like a tiny child forced onstage.

"That was Jade," she said, returning to the couch. With secretarial concentration she became absorbed with the teakettle, lifting the lid, scrutinizing the floating tea bags, tapping them with one finger as if they were dead fish.

"I take it you two had quite a night?" she asked. Glancing at me, she poured the tea, handed me the 1 HEART SLUGS coffee mug (not reacting when some hot water dripped off the side onto her knee) and then, as if I'd been begging her all night to pose for an oil portrait, she stretched out across the entire couch, glass of red wine in hand, her bare feet pushed beneath the cushions "You know, we had a terrible fight," she said. "Jade and I. She left here absolutely enraged with me." She was speaking in an odd, teacherish voice, as if explaining Photosynthesis. "I don't even remember what it was about. Something mundane." She tilted her head toward the ceiling. "I think it was college applications. I told her she needed to get organized or she might not make it. She flew off the handle."

She took a sip of wine and I sipped my oolong tea feeling pangs of guilt. It was harrowingly clear Hannah knew the things Jade had said about her—

either for certain, if Jade had called her and confessed (Jade could never be a confidence woman, mortgage shark or shyster due to her overwhelming need to explain things to her victim), or simply assumed it given their argument. Most spectacular of all though, Hannah was visibly irked by it. Dad said people do all kinds of odd things when they're on the defensive, and now Hannah was frowning as she rubbed her thumb around the rim of her wineglass, and her eyes, they kept moving between my face and the wineglass and the piece of apple pie (that looked like it'd been stepped on) back to her wineglass.

I couldn't help but stare at her (her left arm boa-constricting her hip) like an investigator inspecting fingerprints on a bedpost, desperate to find the truth —if only a smudge of it. I knew it was an absurd thing—lunacy, guilt and love couldn't be eked out by connecting freckles, or shining a tiny light in the dugout of a collarbone—but I couldn't help myself. Some of the things Jade had said had stuck to me.
Could
she have purposefully drowned that man? Had she really slept with Charles? Was there a lost love hiding somewhere in her outskirts, her periphery—Valerio? Even when she was in a sullen, distracted mood, as she was now, Hannah
still
grabbed one's headlines, shoved other less captivating stories (Dad, Fort Peck) to page 10. FADE OUT: Dad, Fort Peck (my dream he'd go play Che in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), FADE IN: Hannah Schneider twisted along the couch like a piece of shimmering trash that had washed up on a beach, her face speckled with sweat, her fingertips nervously playing with the seam meandering through her dress.

"So you didn't make it to the dance?" I probed, my voice flimsy.

The question shook her awake; it was obvious she'd forgotten the question of why I was here, that I'd just shown up in a four-door Chevy Colorado truck in Sunburst Orange, unannounced, with no shoes. Not that I minded; Dad was a man who always assumed he was the Primary Subject, Group Focus, Chief Plan Under Discussion, so the fact that Hannah, after I'd mentioned my fight with him, blatantly snubbed him, shook him off as a non-event—it was kind of fantastic.

"Things ran late," she said blandly. "We made pie." She looked at me. "Jade went, didn't she? She stormed out of here saying she was going to find you."

I nodded.

"She can be a strange girl.
Jade.
Sometimes she can say things that are — how should I .. . well, they're horrifying." "I don't think she means anything by it," I suggested quietly. Hannah tilted her head. "No?" "Sometimes people say things simply to fill silence. Or as a way to shock

and provoke. Or as exercise. Verbal aerobics. Loquacious cardio. There are any number of reasons. Only very rarely are words used strictly for their denotative meanings," I said, and yet Dad's comments from "Modes of Oration and the Brawn of Language" weren't making the slightest dent in Hannah. She wasn't paying attention. Her gaze was snagged somewhere near the piano in the dark corner of the room. And then, scowling (lines I'd never noticed before darting through her forehead), she reached over the arm of the couch, yanked open the end-table drawer and seized a half-empty pack of Camel cigarettes. She tapped one out, windmilled it agitatedly between her fingers and looked at me with anxious interest, like I was a dress on sale, the last in her size.

"Surely, you must realize," she said. "You're such a perceptive person; you don't miss anything" —she interrupted herself—"or maybe
not.
No. She hasn't told you. I think she's jealous—you speak so lovingly of your father. I'm sure it's hard for her."

"Tell me what?" I asked.

"Do you know anything at all about Jade? Her history?"

I shook my head.

Hannah nodded, and sighed again. She fished a pack of matches from the drawer and lit the cigarette quickly. "Well, if I tell you, you have to promise me you won't say anything to any of them. But I think it's important that you know. Otherwise, on nights like this, when she comes to you so angry . . . she was drunk, wasn't she?"

Slowly, I nodded.

"Well, on occasions like—well, like
tonight,
I can understand if you'd feel" —Hannah thought hard about what'd I'd feel, biting her lip like she was deciding what to order off a menu —
"confused.
Disturbed, even. I know
I
would. Knowing the truth will put everything into context for you. Maybe not immediately. No—you can't understand what something
is
when you're close to it. That's like looking at a billboard an inch away. We're all .. . what do they say .. . farsighted .. . or is it near—but later, no, that's when"—she was talking all of this over with herself—"yes, that's when it always becomes clear. Afterward."

She didn't immediately continue. She contemplated, with narrowed eyes, the fuming end of her cigarette, the tatty ears of Old Bastard who'd crept over to her, licked her kneecap and then slumped to the rug, tired as a summer fling.

"What do you mean?" I asked softly.

A shy, sort of mischievous smile was sneaking into her face—though I couldn't be certain of this; every time she moved her head the yellow lamp-light raced across her cheekbones and mouth, but when she faced me fully it dashed away.

"You can't tell anyone what I tell you," she said sternly. "Not even your father. Promise me."

I felt a nervous knife-stab in my chest. "Why?"

"Well, he's protective, isn't he?"

I supposed Dad
was
protective. I nodded.

"Yes, well, it'd traumatize him, I'm sure," she said distastefully. "And what's the point of that?"

Fear began to course through me. It made me woozy, like I'd injected it into my arm. I found myself rewinding the last six minutes, trying to figure out how we'd taken this bizarre detour. I'd shown up, intent to perform a quiet, un-choreographed routine on Dad, but I'd been shoved into the wings,

and here she was, the seasoned artiste commanding the stage, about to begin her monologue—a terrifying monologue by the sound of things. Dad said it was imperative to avoid people's fervent confidences and confessions. "Tell the person that you must leave the room/' he instructed, "that you ate something, that you're ill, that your father has scarlet fever, that you feel the end of the world is imminent and you must rush to the grocery store to stock up on bottled water and gas masks. Or simply fake a seizure. Anything, sweet, anything at all to rid yourself of that intimacy they plan to lay on you like a slab of cement."