Strange but True (3 page)

“She told me that Ronnie is happy in heaven. He plays football all the time. He remembers the rose corsage he gave me on prom night.”

As she talks, Philip has to fight the urge to limp back to the sofa bed and pick up his Anne Sexton biography or turn on Letterman, which is starting right about now. He hasn't done much this past month but read biographies of famous poets and watch TV. This moment reminds him why: his real life sucks. Melissa goes on to tell them that Ronnie misses his parents and that he visits the house a few times a year, especially on Christmas Eve. Philip is tempted to ask if he haunts them
before
or
after
Ebeneezer's house, but he refrains. When he can't stand keeping his mouth shut a second longer, he stands to get more coffee. That's when Melissa puts her hand on his. Her fingers feel as brittle as an old woman's, the pads chapped and warm.

“Philip,” she says, looking at him with that eerily motionless face. “Ronnie had a message for you too.”

Even though he knows better, even though it makes him cringe inside, even though he tells himself not to, Philip asks, “What did he say?”

Melissa reaches into her shirt pocket and pulls out a cassette. The blue writing on the label has the woman's name and today's date:
CHANTREL
: 2/3/04. “I think you should hear it for yourself.”

“There's a tape?” his mother says. “Why didn't you tell us that sooner?”

“Like I said, I wasn't sure where to begin.”

The only working stereo in the house is behind Ronnie's locked bedroom door, along with his maroon and white football uniform, the Canon AE-1 that he got for his last birthday to take pictures for the yearbook, his collection of beer T-shirts that say things like
BEER: HELPING UGLY PEOPLE HAVE SEX FOR
2,000
YEARS
, and a hundred other remnants of a teenage boy's life. The only difference, of course, is that this teenage boy is dead.

“We don't have a cassette player,” Philip says.

“Yes, we do,” his mother tells him. “In the family room.”

“It doesn't work.”

“Yes, it does.”

“No, it doesn't.”

“Yes, it does.”

“No, M. It doesn't. No one but me listens to music in this house. So I should know. I've tried it.”

“We could listen in my car,” Melissa offers, realizing what must be obvious to anyone in their company: these two require a referee to reach even the smallest of decisions.

Philip's mother pushes away from the table, the legs of the ladder-back chair scraping against the tile floor. “Fine. That's what we'll do then.”

“You two have fun,” Philip tells them. “I'm not going.”

As his mother stands, she makes that volcano mouth and shoots him another one of her disgusted looks. “What, your brother sends you a message after all this time and you're too good to hear it?”

“It's not that I'm too good to hear it. It's just that—” He stops. In both of their eyes, he sees how desperately they want—make that
need
—to believe this. As ridiculous as it is to Philip, he doesn't have the heart to take their foolish hope away. “It's just that it'll be too hard to fit in the car with my cast and all.”

“No, it won't,” Melissa says, rising slowly from the table. “You can squeeze in the back.”

Outside, the walkway is slippery. Philip manages to steady himself with the help of his crutch. His mother, who is bundled in a black wool cloak that gives her the silhouette of a wide-winged navy jet, like the kind Philip once saw sweep over the city sky during Fleet Week, walks ahead with Melissa. Her attitude toward the girl has done a complete one-eighty. She has asked Melissa to drop the formal “Mrs. Chase” in favor of her first name, Charlene. She is even holding Melissa's hand in a way that looks like she is clinging to her, desperate for this unexpected connection to Ronnie. His mother's new tack makes Philip just as uncomfortable as he'd been with her rudeness earlier, because he knows how quickly she can change her mood and lash out—especially if she doesn't like what she hears on the tape.

The roof, hood, and trunk of Melissa's old Toyota Corolla are buried beneath a cake-layer of snow. A veneer of ice covers all the windows, except for a small patch cleared from the front windshield, as though she could only be bothered to do the bare minimum necessary to operate the car. When Melissa opens the back door for Philip, the smell of stale cigarette smoke and a faint undercurrent of rotting fruit or maybe old shoes instantly assaults him. Again, he has to wonder about a pregnant girl whose car smells like smoke. He wipes the seat clean of tapes, paperbacks, and a pair of gray sweatpants, then makes himself as comfortable as possible, considering the arctic feel of the air inside. It is not just cold—it is that certain kind of biting cold, particular to a car before it's been started on a bitter winter night. The seats feel hard and unyielding. The air stings the inside of his throat when he breathes it in. As he rubs his hands and waits for his mother and Missy to settle in up front, Philip looks at the dirty sweat socks, wrinkled jeans, T-shirts, and what he at first thinks are small black pebbles but then realizes are dead flies against the back window. His mother had cut Melissa off before she'd told him exactly where she lived in Radnor. Judging from the looks of things, he is beginning to suspect that it might very well be in this car. Philip turns to examine the seat pockets, stuffed with plastic grocery bags from Genuardi's and a math textbook with thick block letters on the spine that read:
ALGEBRA FOR YOUR FUTURE
. Finally, he glances at the floor and notices the labels on the cassettes that he pushed down there a moment before. He recognizes a few—Jewel:
Pieces of You
, Natalie Imbruglia:
Left of the Middle
, Hole:
Live Through This
—but the others look homemade and have the same handwriting as the one Melissa is about to put into the tape player, only with different names and dates:

Helene, 6/18/01

Davida, 12/23/99

Rasha, 3/17/02

Lyman, 6/18/03

To quell the uneasiness growing inside of him, Philip leans forward between the seats as Melissa starts the car then turns on the heat. That's when he sees a row of pictures taped to the cracked vinyl dashboard. From behind the yellowed, peeling tape, Ronnie smiles back at him with that infamous underbite. His sandy blond hair tousled, his eyes a dazzling Windex blue. In one shot, he is wearing his maroon and white football uniform and kneeling on an empty row of bleachers. In another, he is stretched back on a plaid blanket wearing a T-shirt from his collection:
BEER: THE ONLY PROOF I NEED THAT GOD EXISTS
. In another, he is dressed in a tuxedo and standing beside Melissa in front of a white brick fireplace. Her lacy dress is spotless, since the photo was taken before they piled into the limo to come home that night.

Philip wonders if his mother is beginning to realize how truly bizarre this visit has become. But then she taps her nail-bitten finger against Ronnie's senior class picture and says, “I have this one too. Only it's the eight by ten. I keep it on my dresser.”

“I love that picture so much,” Melissa says, pressing her hands flat against the vents to check on the hot air. “You can really see how blue his eyes are.”

Were, Philip thinks and leans back in his seat.

The ice on the windows gives the car an igloo feeling that leaves him all the more cold and claustrophobic. Through a small opening, like a fishing hole in the ice, he stares out at their mammoth Pennsylvania flagstone house with its wide sloping roof and tomato red shutters. One of his earliest memories is of the day they first came here when he was only four, just before Ronnie was born. They'd lived in an apartment on Spruce Street in Philly while his father finished his residency at Penn. Compared to those cramped quarters, this house felt palatial. Philip could still remember how happy he'd been when his mother—as pregnant as Melissa at the time—let him run up and down the empty hallways, his squeals of delight echoing around them as she trailed after him, teasing,
I'm gonna getcha… I'm gonna getcha… Mommy's gonna getcha, getcha, getcha…

“It might take me a minute to find the spot on the tape,” Melissa says. “Because there were other people there tonight who she called on before me.”

Philip looks away from the house and toward the front seat again. In the firefly glow of the dashboard, the scars on Melissa's face have faded. It is the slightest bit possible to glimpse the girl she used to be. He glances at his mother and tries to see her former self as well—the one who came to this house all those years ago and let her son run up and down the hallways, laughing as she followed him through the dining room and up the stairs.

“I think I found it,” Melissa says.

When Chantrel begins speaking, her voice is not the heavily accented or cigarette-rattled sort Philip expects. It is smooth and calm. Articulate. The sound makes him think of the ER nurse at St. Vincent's who held his hand and spoke in soothing tones in his ear:
You've been through quite an ordeal. But you are going to be okay
.

“There is a young person speaking to me with the initial
R
,” Chantrel says.

“Is his name Ronnie?” Melissa asks on the tape.

“Yes. It's Ronnie. He is telling me how much he misses you. He is showing me flowers. They look like they might be roses. Does that sound correct?”

“He gave me a rose corsage the night of our prom … the night he died.”

That's all it takes for Chantrel to begin filling in the blanks. Each time Melissa provides another detail—the rented white limousine, Ronnie's love of sports and photography, her overwhelming grief—Chantrel runs with it. She tells her that Ronnie comes to visit his family a few times a year. She tells her that he likes to play football with other teenage boys who have died. The whole time, Philip wants to scream: What about his Social Security number? Or what about the name of his first-grade teacher? Or his beer T-shirt collection? Or the first time our father took us to play golf and I got in trouble for accidentally hitting Ronnie in the stomach when I swung? Or what about anything a little more fucking specific?

“I see someone writing a letter,” Chantrel says. “Yes, someone is writing a letter. That is what Ronnie is showing me.”

“Are you sure it's not a poem?” Melissa asks.

Philip remembers then that he had read one of his poems at the funeral. It was the first time he had admitted to his family that he liked to do something other than read and watch TV. The poem had been called “Sharp Crossing,” and it was an extended metaphor about a young boy who climbed over a rusted barbed wire fence and cut himself on his way to the other side. Philip's poetry professor at the community college had loved it. But all the journals he'd submitted it to after he moved to New York had sent back a polite form letter of rejection. Only one lousy editor took the time to scrawl something on the bottom, and even that wasn't encouraging:
Less metaphor, more meaning!
Philip used the letters to line the tank of that grotesque snake as well as the cage of the vicious mynah bird he took care of in the studio he sublet from Donnelly Fiume—
that
rejection went on top.

“Hold on,” Chantrel says. “Indeed, it is a poem. Does someone connected to Ronnie like to write poetry?”

“His brother,” Melissa says on the tape.

“Does his brother's name begin with a
B
?” There is a moment of silence during which Chantrel must realize she's gotten it wrong. Then she says, “I'm sorry. I heard him incorrectly. He is showing me what I think might be a
D
or a
T
.” Another pause. “Does his name begin with a
T
or a
D
, or perhaps a
P
?”

Or an A, B, C, D, E, F, G? Philip thinks. Or maybe H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P?

“Philip,” Melissa says to her. “It's his brother, Philip.”

“Yes, that's it. Sorry, the connection was bad for a moment. Ronnie wants you to tell him that he loves his poetry.”

“Did you hear that?” Melissa says now, looking at him in the rearview mirror.

Philip forces a smile, but it makes him feel like crying. He glances at his mother, who is making the volcano mouth again. When the tape stops, her voice erupts so loud and sudden that it startles Philip. “That's it? That's what you woke us up in the middle of the night for? To tell us that Ronnie likes Philip's poetry!” She says the last word with all the emphasis on the
p
, like she is spitting out something rotten—to her, Philip's poetry
is
something rotten.

“M,” Philip says when he sees the look of surprise on Melissa's face. “Cut it out.”

His mother stops to take a breath, but she is not done yet—far from it.

“How dare you waste my time with this bullshit? Do you know how hard it is for me? Do you? Every single day of my life I have to walk by his door. Every single day of my life I have to wake up and think my son is dead! You can just go on with your life, like Chantel or Chandra or whatever the fuck her name is said on the tape, but I will never go on! You can get knocked up by some guy without bothering to get married and live happily ever after, but this is it for me. Do you understand that? This is my life!”

“M!” Philip shouts again as tears well in Melissa's eyes and spill down her sad, ruined face. “Enough. Come on. Stop it.”

But she won't stop. And she is wielding her finger now like a weapon, pointing directly at Melissa's face when she says the word
you
or
your
, then jabbing it into her own chest when she says something about herself.
“You
think
I'm
supposed to be impressed by those scars? Honey,
you
may look like that on the outside because
you
happened to be with him on the night he died. But
you
have no idea how disfigured and downright ugly
I
am on the inside because of what happened to
my
child. And if
you
could see it,
I
guarantee
you'd
run the other way. So do us both a favor, little girl, and back this shit box out of
my
driveway and don't
you
ever come back.
You
go have
your
bastard child and live
your
fucking life. But leave
me
alone.”