Strange but True (14 page)

“Whatever, she's still a slut.”

“I am not having this conversation. If you keep talking like that, I am hanging up. That's your last warning.”

Charlene is quiet a moment before she says, “You also stuttered when you neglected to tell me that you caved and let Ronnie keep the Mercedes even though we agreed he should sell it.”

“Charlene, that was a long time ago. Besides, those were isolated incidents. You can't build a federal case around the fact that I stuttered after hearing what was admittedly some very strange news.”

“Well, just tell me this: Is it possible?”

“I am not going to speculate—”

“Just answer, yes or no. As a doctor, is this sort of thing possible? To freeze someone's sperm?”

Richard hesitates. “Of course, it's possible, but—”

“Yes or no?”

“Well, then, it's yes, Charlene. Yes. It is possible. Are you happy?”

“Thank you. That's all I wanted to know.”

Holly leans on Richard's wide wooden desk and stares out over the ocean, wondering what in the world all this is about. She hears Richard take a breath. Then, in a softer, collapsed sort of voice, he says, “Charlene, I have to go. Holly and I are supposed to have lunch with some friends in a little while.” He pauses. “Are you still there? Did you hang up? Hello?”

For a moment, Holly thinks that Charlene did hang up, but then her voice comes through the line, quieter and gentler than she's ever heard her sound. “You know something, Richard? She kept asking for you. Twice anyway. Even at the time, I thought it was odd. When she first got here, she looked up the stairs and said, ‘Is Mr. Chase here?' Then later in the car, she said she was hoping to talk with you. Don't you think that's strange?”

Richard is quiet for a moment. Finally, he says, “Well, the whole thing is strange, Charlene. She is a troubled young girl. Listen, I need to go. But tell me one more thing. How is Philip doing?”

“Fine. You know, a big grouch as always.”

“Well, tell him to call me if he needs anything. He never calls me.”

“The phone works both ways, Richard. You have the number here, and you have his cell number too. So you could get in touch if you really wanted.”

“I know. It's just that—Well, tell him I said hello.”

Since the conversation is winding down, Holly carefully places the phone in its cradle then scoots back to the kitchen. As she plugs in the juicer and starts the machine whirring, she feels a mix of emotions spinning inside her. First, there is the guilt about having done what she just did. Then there is the utter confusion as to what they were talking about—from Richard suggesting he go there, to freezing someone's sperm, to all the rest. Serves me right, she thinks and mashes half an orange onto the nose of the juicer while bits and pieces of the conversation ring in her head:

This is just the sort of freak stunt my ex-husband would pull…

I'm a heart surgeon. Not a mad scientist…

Just answer, yes or no… Is this sort of thing possible?

She kept asking for you… Even at the time, I thought it was odd…

By the time Holly finishes filling two glasses and scraping out the pulp from the machine, Richard comes padding down the hallway in his bare feet. He has put on a baggy yellow T-shirt with the faded words
BRYN MAWR HOSPITAL
on the front and has evened out the part in his hair. When he finds Holly in the kitchen, holding the glasses in her hands, Richard takes one look at her and says, “I'm sorry I acted like that about the toilet bowl. I just, I don't know, that phone call rattled me out of a sound sleep.”

“It's okay,” she tells him, his conversation with Charlene still echoing in her mind. “From now on, I'm just going to call you Mr. Ty-D-Bol.”

Richard kisses her on the cheek—a cheek, she thinks, that is no firmer thanks to those ludicrous exercises. “You were funnier when other people wrote your jokes,” he tells her.

“Sad but true,” Holly says.

They fall into an uneasy silence, and Holly senses that heaviness about him again. “Is everything okay?” she asks.

The question causes a strained look to come over Richard's face. His eyes grow wide and worried. His mouth hangs open in the same haunted expression that Philip and Charlene had both worn the night before when Melissa Moody first entered their lives again. Richard doesn't answer so much as grunt.

“Should I take that as a yes?”

He stares down at the kitchen floor, absently running his tanned big toe along the grout between two tiles as he sips his juice, a fleck of pulp sticking to his top lip.

“Richard, are you all right? Look at me.”

Slowly, he lifts his head to meet her gaze.

“What is it?” she asks. “What's wrong with you?”

“Holly,” Richard says, and she can sense by the somber tone he uses just to say her name that whatever's about to come next is serious. “I've never told anyone this before. But I—Well, it's about my son Ronnie's high school girlfriend. Melissa Moody. The girl he took to the prom the last night he was alive. Something happened that summer after he died. Something I've kept secret all these years.”

HALFWAY THROUGH THE BAND'S RENDITION OF WHITNEY HOUSTON'S
“Heartbreak Hotel,” Stacy comes back from wherever she's been for the last fifteen minutes and shouts into Melissa's ear. A mammoth black speaker is vibrating so close to where Missy is sitting that she hears her sister's words all wrong: “Missy, I need to walk it's new!”

“What?” she shouts back over the steady throb of bass.

“What?” Stacy shouts at her.

“No, I'm asking you ‘what?' What do you need to do?”

“I said, ‘I need to talk to you!' Some place quiet and private!”

“Now?”

“No, I was hoping to make an appointment for some time next month! Of course, now!”

Missy looks around their table. When they arrived an hour before, it had been perfectly arranged with a pink floral centerpiece, white plates flanked with shiny silverware, and glasses embossed with the words,
Radnor High School Senior Prom, Starry Night, June 18, 1999
. Hundreds of tiny yellow lights twinkled against the lattice that stretches between the beams of the inn's vaulted ceiling, giving the place a magical, enchanted feeling that made Missy smile the moment she stepped inside. Now, though, the gold-painted chairs are empty and pushed haphazardly away from the table, the tablecloth is smeared with food stains, dishes of half-eaten pasta primavera and chicken cordon bleu are scattered about. Waiters are everywhere, busily rushing around in their ill-fitting black-and-white uniforms, but not one of them has been by this table in at least a half hour. And those twinkling lights on the lattice near the ceiling are lost in the frenzied bursts of the strobes blinking to the beat of the music. Melissa turns back to her sister, whose emerald green dress appears alternately softer then harsher, depending on the flashing light. “But Ronnie and Chaz are about to come back from taking pictures with the team! Then we're going to start dancing!”

“I don't care!” Stacy yells in her ear. “This can't wait! Let's go to the bathroom! Now!”

She grabs Melissa by the hand and yanks her out of the seat so fast that her purse falls to the floor. Melissa feels dizzy from all the champagne they drank in the limousine. As she watches it drop, she worries that the lightbulb inside will shatter, or worse, the clasp will pop open and her packed clothes will spill out in front of her sister. She scoops up the purse and feels the sides to be sure the bulb is still in one piece. As far as she can tell, it is. Melissa clutches the bag close to her waist as Stacy leads her by the hand toward the bathroom. On the way, they weave through a colorful sea of their classmates, all shouting to one another over the music. Most of them are red in the eyes from whatever booze they managed to sneak in or drink before they got here. A few reek of pot. Melissa checks out the dresses on the other girls, ranging from formal ball gowns to ghetto prom style. Seneca Lawson, for one, is wearing a glittery black dress held together on each side by a ladder of silver, tinsel-like strands. Her breasts are poised to pop out the top at any moment. In profile, she looks just about naked.

“What are you staring at?” Seneca asks Missy, flipping her long, pinstraight brown hair over one of her bare, bony shoulders.

A prostitute, Melissa thinks but doesn't say. Instead, she tells Seneca how pretty she looks and how much she loves her dress, since she doesn't want to start trouble tonight. Even though Melissa knows she should be enjoying herself—living in the moment, as people always say—all she really wants is to be away from this place, out of this dress, wearing the clothes packed inside her purse, sitting beside Ronnie in the front seat of his Mercedes, driving toward the B and B in Rehoboth, Delaware, where they booked a room for the weekend.

“Did you see that dress?” Melissa asks her sister. “Or should I say, half a dress?”

Stacy doesn't answer. She keeps weaving between people on their way to the glowing red
EXIT
sign. The motion of being pulled like a water-skier behind the speedboat of her sister makes Melissa's already woozy stomach woozier. Her nausea got worse on the ride over in the limousine and hasn't subsided since. Finally, they break from the crowd and walk down the hall, their heels sinking into the worn green carpet. When they reach the bathroom, a long row of wilted girls is waiting outside the door, their backs pressed against a mural that depicts the history of Radnor Township. “Shit,” Stacy says. “There's a line. Follow me down this hall instead.”

Melissa has had enough, so she tugs her hand free. “I'm not following you anywhere else unless you give me some hint as to what this is about.”

Stacy keeps her eyes on those girls, who look so glum they may as well be gathering firewood with the weary settlers in the mural behind them. “You really want me to discuss our personal life right here in front of other people?”

“I guess not,” Melissa says.

“Then come on. Walk down here with me.”

Begrudgingly, Melissa follows, though she makes a point to walk beside Stacy, rather than being led by the hand. They pass more of those murals—one of a blacksmith hammering a piece of metal, another of a stiff-looking man with a beard speaking at a podium in the town square, another of a group of women all wearing kerchiefs and preparing a feast. “I am getting a serious case of mural-itis,” Missy says. “Somebody save me.”

Still, her sister doesn't smile. She hangs a right down a dimly lit hallway where the murals come to an end and the carpeted floor slopes for wheelchairs. Here, the walls are wallpapered with hundreds of miniature horse-and-buggy silhouettes. The sight of them, raining down all around Melissa and Stacy, reminds her of the day trips to Amish country they take every summer with their parents. Compared to those families—dressed in unadorned black, living without electricity, never having a drop of alcohol or caffeine, quilting and farming their lives away—her parents actually seem normal for a change. “Have you been here before?” Missy asks as Stacy stops outside a door that is slightly ajar, then peeks inside. “You seem to know this place awfully well.”

“Just guessing. Come on. Let's go in here.”

“Stacy, this is ridiculous. We can talk in the hallway.”

“I don't want any of those waiters interrupting us.”

Melissa cradles her elbows in her hands, her heavy purse slung over her shoulder. “Fine. But I'm only going in there if you promise to make this fast. Ronnie and Chaz are probably back by now and wondering where we disappeared to.”

Stacy doesn't offer any such promise, but Melissa steps inside the minuscule room anyway. The only light comes from a small rectangular window overlooking the parking lot. As her sister runs a hand along the wall in search of a switch, Melissa goes to the window and pulls back the tattered blue curtain to stare out at the caravan of limousines in the lot. There are easily fifty parked out there, most of them white, all of them with the same black glass and studs of light lining the doors. Melissa wonders if they look the same on the inside too. She wouldn't know since the only limo she has ever ridden in was the one tonight. Stacy, Chaz, and Ronnie loved every moment of it. They kept hopping from seat to seat as they sipped their champagne, propped up their feet, and made announcements like “This is the life!” (Ronnie) or “We are seriously stylin', my friends!” (Chaz) or “I could
so
get used to this!” (Stacy). The whole while, Melissa smiled and pretended to enjoy herself too, but the truth was, she hated the experience. There was something claustrophobic about the way the ceiling pressed down, sealing them inside, except for the small rectangle of that sunroof. The thing Melissa found most disconcerting of all was not being able to see out the front window as they drove. So as the rest of them blathered on about how great it was and how they wished they could have taken a limousine to school every day for the last four years, Melissa sat there sipping her champagne and feeling sick. She didn't say a word about it, though, since it was obvious they wouldn't understand.

“Found it,” Stacy says.

A bare bulb in the center of the ceiling comes to life, shining down on the stacks of Executive Choice toilet paper, blank receipt rolls, fuzzy white dish towels, milk crates filled with glass ashtrays and salt and pepper shakers, empty Corona Light, Heineken, and Rolling Rock cases, and countless unmarked white tubs of who knows what. The small space reminds Melissa of the darkroom at school, only without the red glow and pungent odor of the developing chemicals. Through the wall, she hears the bass of the band, beating and beating and beating as the singer belts out “La Vida Loca.”

“Okay, Stacy. Now that we're safely sealed inside this isolation chamber, would you mind telling me what's so urgent that you had to interrupt the entire evening?”