Strange but True (20 page)
At the end of the parking lot, Charlene stops the car and takes out her cell phone to call Information. Since she had interrupted Melissa last night before she could say where she lived, Charlene needs to get her address. First, though, she calls home to tell Philip what she is about to do. It takes her a moment to figure out which button to press in order to turn on the phone, since she only got the thing for emergencies and has rarely ever used it. Once she punches in the number, the phone rings and rings until the answering machine picks up and the mechanical, recorded voice tells her to leave a message after the beep. Charlene doesn't know where he could possibly be, but she begins speaking anyway.
“Philip. It's me. Are you there? Pick up.” She waits for his voice to come on the line, but it doesn't. “Okay, well, I just want you to know that I'm on my way to Melissa's house. I plan to settle this whole thing once and for all.” Again, she stops and waits for him to pick up. During the pause between her words, she even considers blurting out an apology for that hideous thing she said to him so many years ago. But it doesn't seem like the right time, so she waits, promising herself that she will do it as soon as she sees him again. Charlene ends the call by telling him, “By the way, I got you a book from the library. I think you might like it. Well, okay. Bye now. See you when I get home.”
Charlene presses the Off button then pulls out onto West Wayne Avenue, forgetting to dial Information. Behind her, a few stray birds have gathered on the lawn of the library to feed on those crusts of bread scattered there. Not far away, the sign draped over that wreck from a tollbooth accident outside of Pittsburgh rustles in the wind, warning everyone who sees it that
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DRINK AND DRIVE
.
FOR GAIL ERWIN, IT BEGINS AND ENDS WITH A SOCK.
Late on the afternoon of February 3, 2004, exactly thirteen hours before she writes the letter evicting Melissa Moody without warning, Gail can be found downstairs in the dim, low-ceilinged basement of her cozy, well-kept home, folding a week's worth of laundry. First, she tackles the flannel sheets and pillowcases, next she deals with the towels, then two pairs of crisp, unfaded Wrangler jeans, a worn-out sweatshirt with a frayed Police Athletic League patch over the heart, numerous pit-stained Fruit of the Loom T-shirts, her size eight flowery nightgown, and Bill's extra-large pajama bottoms and boxer shorts covered with miniature trout, swordfish, whales, and sharks. Finally, Gail begins balling socks as her thoughts wander the way most people's do when they are balling socks.
Today, she is thinking of how different her life turned out than she had expected. She is happy, most days anyway, but if someone had shown her a picture years before, say it was a snapshot of herself at this very moment, standing in a spiderwebbed basement folding laundry in the small town of Radnor, Pennsylvania, Gail would have said,
No, that couldn't possibly be me
. But three husbands, two divorces, five states, and a dozen jobs later, here she is nonetheless. At least now, at the age of fifty-sevenâwith her hair gone white and her skin papery and creased with soft wrinklesâshe has the benefit of the world treating her more kindly than when she was younger. She supposes that's because people look at her and see the beginnings of a little old lady rather than the troubled drifter she used to be. Sometimes when Gail looks in the mirror and that old woman's face stares back, even she can be fooled into momentarily forgetting the person she once was.
When the socks are lined up in a neat row on top of the plastic laundry basket, Gail is left holding one of Bill's size 10â12, black Gold Toes. It's not the first time this has happened. In fact, their socks go missing so often that Gail is convinced there is an unmarked Swallow cycle on the dial, right between Rinse and Spin. This time around, it irks her more than usual, because she just bought these socks for Bill last Christmas. She lifts the wicker laundry basket and searches beneath. She opens the dryer and bends to stick her head inside, giving it a little spin. The same with the washer. Finally, she leans as far over the machines as possible to look behind them. The only thing back there is a dusty Bounce sheet and a mousetrap loaded with peanut butter, ready to snap.
Common sense tells her to give up. It's only a lousy sock, after all. Gail can buy a whole pack at Target for less than ten bucks. But if there's one thing she hates, it's wasting money. That's become especially true in the five years since Bill was forced to retire from the police department and she left her job as a dispatcher right along with him. Money is tight, and with Melissa Moody defaulting on her rent ever since last summer, it's even tighter. For that reason, Gail gets down on her hands and knees on the cold gray cement floor of the basement and peers beneath the washer and dryer in search of that damn sock. But it's too dark down there to see anything.
What she needs, Gail realizes, is a flashlight. There's one upstairs in the junk drawer by the kitchen sink, but Lord only knows if it has working batteries in it. No matter how many times Gail picks up a new pack at Genuardi's and replaces them, they're dead whenever the lights go out and she needs a flashlight. There's only one way to find out, though, so Gail puts her hand on the nearest of the many wooden support columns Bill installed down here when the floor upstairs felt dangerously close to collapsing. She uses it to help her stand, careful not to prick her hand on the numerous nails that jut out from the sides, then walks toward the stairs. As she's about to put her slippered foot on the bottom step, Gail glances through that forest of columns at Bill's work area over by the cellar's lone window. Since the flashlight upstairs is probably not going to work, Gail decides she might have better luck finding one down here.
She walks to the far corner of the basement and yanks the fishing wire tied to the light above Bill's workbench, which is really just a sheet of plywood laid across two sawhorses. On the surface, there is a wide-open, gunmetal gray toolbox exploding with screwdrivers, cement nails, wrenches of all different sizes, and dozens of other odds and ends. When she pushes those aside and lifts the tray beneath, Gail sees a spool of metal wire, a spool of twine, a chisel, more screwdrivers, a greasy adjustable wrench, garden shears, a hammer handle with no head, another box of cement nails, three shiny green fishing luresâ¦
Everything but a flashlight.
She thinks of Bill at this moment, walking up and down the canyon-like aisles of Home Depot, hands plunged deep in the pockets of his navy blue Dickies, whistling that same old Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard tune. An inch of snow fell earlier today, and he left the house to buy a new shovel since the old one was bent to hell. No doubt he'll return with a bag of assorted junk the way he always does, Gail thinks, despite the fact that he's got plenty down here already. Even though Bill will be home any minute, and even though this area of the house is supposed to be off-limits to her cleaning, she can't help but organize things for him a bit. Gail gathers up the nails and puts them in their box. She collects the screwdrivers, separating the funny round tips from the flat wedgelike ones, then tucks them in separate compartments in the toolbox. She tosses that useless hammer handle into the trash can and winds up the loose spool of twine that Bill uses for his tomato plants in the summer.
It is exactly this sort of compulsive need to organize the world (a need that came late in life to Gail) that served her so well at the police station. Her job description only called for her to answer the switchboard and direct officers over the CB. But the place was so disorganized that she used her downtime to steadily work through the files of fingerprints and criminal records, putting things in proper order. It was a small town police station, after all, so it wasn't like there was a tragedy a minute. Gail had time on her hands and then some. Time enough to flirt with Bill, who she can still remember standing by her desk the very first time she saw him, wearing his dark uniform and holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one of his large hands.
A flashlight.
Gail spots one, the same cheery grass green color as the fishing lures, buried beneath a pile of unidentifiable metal parts. When she reaches her small hand out for it, her eye catches sight of something glinting at the very back of the pile. She leaves the flashlight where it is for the time being, pushes aside a rusted triangle, and plucks out that glinting object, which turns out to be a square glass ashtray with a pack of American Spirit cigarettes resting inside, along with a Bic lighter. So Bill hasn't quit smoking after all, Gail thinks. She shakes her head and makes a tsk sound, remembering all the pity she paid him this last year while he carried on about how hard it had been to kick the habit and how sick he was of wearing the patch during those early months. Little did she know that between those Oscar-worthy performances, he was sneaking off down here to puff away.
As annoying and hypocritical as it is, Gail tells herself that there's no use getting on him about it, considering all the other worries in their life. Instead, she tucks the cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray back beneath the metal triangle, then picks up the flashlight. It is so weightless that there are obviously no batteries inside. When she puts it down, Gail hears something shifting around in the tube. Again, she picks it up, this time giving it a little shake. Again, there is that sound. Something loose, scratching against the interior as it slides from top to bottom to top again.
Maybe it's the discovery of those cigarettes that has her curious; whatever the reason, Gail wraps her hand around the head of the flashlight and twists. The top is fastened so tightly that it won't budge. She tries and tries and tries, until finally she uses her irritation about that damn missing sock to fuel her strength and twists as hard as she can. Her face grimaces. A labored grunt escapes her mouth. Then off it comes. When she tilts the plastic tube of the flashlight upside down, this is what falls into the palm of her hand: a curled foil pack of twelve white, circular pills, all but four of them popped out.
Gail doesn't know what she was expecting to find, but it certainly wasn't this. As she stands beneath the shadowy yellow light above the workbench, a few stray rays of winter sunshine casting upon her face through the tiny cellar window, she stares at the pills behind the plastic and wonders what in the world they're doing here. Without her glasses, it's difficult to make out the letters on the face of each one. But this much she can tell: they do not say Benadryl or Tylenol or any of the other names she might recognize. In the blur of her vision, she sees an
H
and an
E
.
Even though there must be a perfectly logical explanation as to what these pills are and why they are sealed away in a flashlight in the corner of the basement, Gail doesn't like the feeling she is getting. She doesn't like it at all. The moment reminds her too much of all those times in her past when she caught the men in her life up to no good. She can still see herself, the way most of us can, in the vivid distortion of life's most painful memories. She is a twenty-seven-year-old woman married to a man she met at a local pub in her hometown of Lake Falls, Ohio. She is opening the glove compartment in his pickup with the simple goal of replacing the expired Allstate insurance card with the new one that came in the mail. She pulls out the old card and an envelope falls to the floor. When she picks it up and looks inside, there is a MasterCard bill in her husband's name with his work address beneath. As she stares down at the long list of motel charges, tears spring to her eyes. A year later, she is a divorced woman with all of her belongings packed inside her Volkswagen Rabbit, telling herself she will start over again, that one day in the not too distant future, she will be okay.
For Gail Erwin, who hasn't had the easiest of lives, there are more of those sorts of memories than she'd care to count. And now all of them press down upon her, coalescing in a solid, deadening feeling of dread. It is a feeling she thought was behind her. A feeling she thought was one of the trappings of that woman she used to be.
She shakes her head and tells herself to relax.
It has been eight years since she first saw Bill standing in front of her desk with that steaming cup of coffee, seven since they got married in a civil ceremony in Philadelphia, five since he was asked to leave his job at the station, and she chose to go right along with him. Despite the uncertain circumstances of his retirement, Bill has never once behaved in any way that is suspicious to her. And when he arrives home from the hardware store, she will casually tell him about her search for the sock, which led to her search for the flashlight, which led to her finding these strange pills. Then he will offer up a perfectly plausible explanation as to what they are and why they're hidden down here. As she backs slowly away from his workbench, carrying the foil pack with her toward the stairs, Gail can already hear his low, crackling voice offering up an explanation.
Oh, those. They're just pills I took for an allergy once. I tucked them inside the flashlight on a fishing trip so they wouldn't get wetâ¦
Or perhaps,
That old flashlight? I bought it at a tag sale and could never get the lousy top off because it was screwed on so tight. It's good to know my wife is stronger than I amâ¦
Just the thought of those imagined explanations helps corral Gail's feelings of dread as she weaves through those support columns and up the stairs. Inside the living room, the fire in the gray stone fireplace has died, leaving the drafty room in a chill. Gail has never been very good at reigniting the blaze once it has gone out. But she spends a few minutes futilely stabbing at the coals with the poker and tossing wad after wad of crinkled newspaper inside, only to watch it rise up in a sudden flame and quickly burn out. They have lived with this fireplace for five winters, and still she can't master the art of itâa fact Bill loves to tease her about. At last she gives up and leans the poker against the stone.