Strange but True (31 page)

“Forget it,” she tells him and waves her hand in the air. “I was angry. I wasn't making sense. Like I said, I've had a rough day. But I'm not sure why you even came over here if all you wanted to do was tell me again how crazy I am. I think I got the point from you people last night.”

“That's not why I'm here. I came because my mother left a message saying she was on her way to see you.”

“Well, she hasn't been here. I can tell you that much.”

“Are you sure?” Philip asks.

“Don't you think I would remember a visit from her?”

There it is again. In the corner of his vision, Philip sees something glinting outside the window. But when he looks, there is nothing there. He lets out a breath and tells himself that he should go home and get into bed. Clearly, he is exhausted and drained by this experience. He will just have to drive himself back and hope that the officer is bothering someone else by now. For all Philip knows his mother might have changed her mind about coming here. That would be just like her. Maybe she was struck by some sudden craving, and at this very moment, she is standing in the checkout line at the Genuardi's, laying the ingredients to rice pudding or a tuna casserole on the conveyor belt. Maybe Philip will arrive home and find her cooking something up. The thought actually makes him miss her. He feels sorry about giving her such a hard time this morning when she wanted to talk—so many other times too.

“I better get going,” he says.

Melissa steps toward the door and puts her hand on the knob. “Do me a favor, Philip. Don't come here again unless you've changed your mind.”

He tells her that he won't be back. “But if my mother shows up, will you please have her call me?”

“I don't have a phone,” Melissa says. “It got disconnected months ago. I couldn't keep up with the bills.”

Philip wonders briefly, the way he did last night, if all this really is part of some scheme she came up with for money, but he decides against it. “Then how did you call our house yesterday?”

“From a pay phone on my way back from Philadelphia.”

He remembers then the sound of cars speeding by her in the background when he first answered the phone last night. “Well, my mother has a cell, so she can call me on that.”

Melissa pulls open the door. With the help of his crutch, Philip steps past her onto the stoop. It is just about dark now. He looks up into the trees to see if those birds are still there, but it's difficult to tell in the dying light. Philip is about to walk away when he glances over at Bill Erwin's house and thinks of that rectangular bulge in his shirt pocket, the way he pulled out a cigarette before going inside.

Cigarettes, he thinks.

He turns back to Melissa. “You really haven't smoked in all these months, have you?”

She shakes her head no. “Of course not.”

“I believe you,” he says. “I know that sounds strange. I'm sorry I didn't before.”

“What about the rest?” she asks, pressing her hand against her stomach. “Do you believe me about the baby too?”

Philip sighs. As he stands there in the darkness, he tries to imagine the possibility—beyond the medical scenarios from the newspapers he mentioned to his mother this morning, since those are clearly not the case. But try as he might, Philip cannot make himself believe in miracles any more than he can make himself believe in God again. He tells Melissa, “I want to believe you. Probably more than you will ever know. But there is something inside me that won't allow myself. I'm sorry.”

There really is nothing left to say then except good night. Melissa closes the door and Philip begins maneuvering up the walkway to his brother's car. He stops just once and pretends to be fussing with his cast while staring over at Bill Erwin's house, thinking of those cigarettes in his pocket again. Though he is a long way from figuring out the truth, Philip's initial dislike of the man has turned to suspicion now, bringing him that much closer.

Since he doesn't want to call attention to himself standing there any longer, Philip keeps going until he reaches the Mercedes. Once he is seated in that awkward position and the engine is started, he steps carefully on the gas pedal. As he is pulling away, Philip turns back for one last look at the houses. The curtains are still drawn at Bill Erwin's place, and nothing but the dimmest of lights shines from Melissa's windows. Philip stares toward the third house and notices that glinting once more. This time, he gets a good enough look to see that it is a light, turning on and off. He is wary of slamming on the brakes, though, so he continues moving forward while craning his neck to determine exactly where it is coming from. As far as he can tell, it must be from that house with the plastic over the windows.

Before he makes the mistake of veering off the road, Philip forces himself to look ahead. After he rounds the first sharp turn, he realizes that this stretch of Monk's Hill Road has hooked around in such a way to place him on the other side of the woods near that third house. He pulls the car over. For a long while, Philip sits and stares out the window into all those trees, trying to get a glimpse of that flashing light again. It is not possible to see it from here, though. Briefly, he considers turning back and driving by the front of the houses. But if Bill Erwin had been watching from his window when Philip arrived today, he could very well be watching now. Still, something won't let him leave. He has a suspicious feeling about that man, a worried feeling about his mother's whereabouts as well.

Philip turns off the engine, opens the door and climbs out of the car. Armed with only his crutch and cell phone, he stands perfectly still at the edge of the woods. Breathing in the frigid winter air. Listening. Just on the other side of those trees, he can hear the sound of plastic snapping in the breeze. He figures that the house cannot be very far away. Without wasting another second to debate the matter, Philip steps into the woods. The hardest part is making it over that first mound of snow left behind by the plows. Once he is inside, it is not so terribly deep, and the large wool sock over his toes does the job of keeping his toes warm. Each time Philip begins to slip, he pitches his crutch in the snow and shifts his weight onto it in order to keep his balance. Even though it difficult to see at first beneath the canopy of tangled branches, he soon figures out that if he stares down at the white floor of the woods, the reflection of the moonlight illuminates a makeshift path toward the house.

The closer he gets, the louder the sound of that plastic snapping in the wind. Before long, Philip sees the boxy, black silhouette of the vacant house, rising up at the edge of the woods. Somehow, he manages to make it the whole way without falling. Philip touches his hand to the back wall and pauses there to catch his breath. Finally, he tightens his grip on his crutch and steps around the corner to the side of the building. When the light blinks on and off again, he realizes that it is not coming from this house at all.

It is coming from a window in Bill Erwin's basement.

Philip watches as a single beam of light spills out over the snowy lawn before going dark again. For a good five minutes, he stands in the shadows, watching it go from dark to light to dark again. He glances down at the glowing green face of the cell phone in his hand and has the sudden urge to call the police. But what exactly is he going to tell them? That there is a light blinking in someone's basement? And that he happened to see it while trespassing? Or worse, while driving by in a car he was told not to drive?

Philip does not make the call.

But he does not turn around and leave either.

Even though some part of him is working on the notion that the flickering light is nothing more than the product of faulty wiring or a dying bulb getting ready to blow, he cannot help the overwhelming feeling that there is something more to it than that. And once his suspicion has completely taken hold, Philip steps away from that vacant house and moves as quickly as possible across the lawn before making a final, clumsy dash toward the basement window. Since he is unable to bend one of his legs, Philip leans forward as far as he can and hangs his head down in order to see inside. The light is off now, but he waits. When it comes on a moment later, Philip peers inside. He sees nothing but a bunch of wooden columns, and then everything turns black. Once more, he waits. And when it comes on this time, Philip looks more closely and can tell that it is a flashlight shining across the room.

Behind him, there is a noise.

Philip jerks his head around to look, though he doesn't see anything. There is only the sound of that plastic rustling in the wind. He turns to face the window again just as the light comes on. It sweeps along the wall like those searchlights he used to see some nights over the sky in New York. Philip looks to the right of that table with the tools and glimpses what is unmistakably a woman on the floor holding the flashlight. She turns it off before he can make out anything more. The sight startles Philip so much that he falls backward from that awkward, leaning position. But he does not let go of his cell phone. He sits in the cold snow and brings it in front of his face, making up his mind to dial 9–1–1. His hands are shaking. His fingers feel big and unwieldy against the tiny buttons. He presses 6 instead of 9, then hits Clear and tries again. He hits the 9 correctly, but presses 2 instead of 1. Again, Philip hits Clear.

When the light flashes on in the window again, he flinches and drops the phone into the snow. Philip reaches down to try and find it, then hears a noise behind him again. He tells himself that it is just the plastic rustling in the wind, that he should ignore it and focus on locating the phone. Still, he can't help but look. And when he turns, Philip sees a figure looming in the darkness and coming closer. The light flashes on in the basement window once more. It has an effect like lightning, illuminating everything around him for just a few seconds—long enough for Philip to glimpse the image of Bill Erwin, holding a shovel in his hands and raising it high above his head.

IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING RONNIE'S DEATH, MELISSA'S PERIOD
stops coming. At first, she tells herself that it is simply the trauma of it all. She does nothing but lie upstairs in bed, her face covered in bandages, as she watches the thirty-three-inch wide-screen Toshiba television set that her parents bought and set up in her room. It is fully loaded with every cable channel she could ever want—MTV, VH1, HBO, Cinemax, Show-time, Comedy Central, A&E, Bravo, CNN, MSNBC, public access, and dozens more—a consolation prize, Melissa thinks, that is supposed to make up for the fact that her boyfriend is dead.

For days on end, she leaves it on the Discovery Channel as show after show comes and goes, detailing all sorts of unusual facts about animals and insects and outer space that Melissa never knew before. She learns that the average spider can weave a web in thirty to sixty minutes. She learns that centuries ago people believed the appearance of a comet in the sky was a sign of evil, which foretold plague, famine, and death. She learns that beavers can hold their breath for up to forty-five minutes. That the planet Venus spins in the opposite direction of all the other planets in the solar system. That the longest sustained flight of a chicken on record is thirteen seconds. That emus and kangaroos cannot walk backward. That birds can see in color, while dogs and cats only see in shades of black and white. That male anglerfish attach themselves to their female counterparts and never let go, since their vascular systems unite and the male becomes entirely dependent on the female's blood for nutrition.

Melissa takes in all this information, though the truth is, she could be watching anything, or nothing at all. The only reason she keeps the TV on is so that her parents won't continually come in the room to check on her and pray together the way they do if she turns it off. Let them bother Stacy instead, she thinks. Her sister was fortunate enough to survive the wreck with nothing more than a broken arm. Even though her face will not be scarred the way the doctors at the hospital said Melissa's will be, even though her boyfriend is alive and well, all she does is complain. While her parents fuss and tend to Stacy's every need, Melissa stares at the television and replays that scene in the storage closet with Ronnie again and again.

He packed condoms for their trip.

Of course
, he packed condoms.

But he did not have any with him in the closet, since they were tucked inside his duffel bag in the trunk of the old Mercedes. They'd both had plenty to drink by then, but Melissa refuses to blame what they did on alcohol. If she wasn't going to get the opportunity to go away with Ronnie—to have sex in that canopy bed at the Archer Inn, to wake up in his arms—then she certainly wasn't going to stop what they were doing on that floor all because of a stupid condom. And now she is glad she went through with it, because as it turns out, that was her final chance to be with him.

As it turns out, she might very well be carrying his child.

But as much as Melissa wants and wishes and prays for that to be true—if for no other reason than to keep some part of Ronnie alive—she tells herself that just because her period has not come does not mean she is pregnant. She has been late before. It is probably just the shock of it all. And the chance is highly unlikely, considering they had sex just a single time. That is what she keeps repeating in her mind as one week passes, then another. Finally, on a sweltering summer afternoon, seventeen days after the accident, fourteen days after her period was due, Melissa turns off the television. When her mother walks in the room around one o'clock, holding a tray of gazpacho soup and a soft roll (the only kind of food Melissa can eat because of the trouble with her missing teeth and sore gums), she says, “Mom, I need you to take me to CVS.”

Melissa has her driver's license, but her parents barely let her take the car before the accident, never mind now. Her mother sets the tray on the nightstand and sits on the bed. Around them, there are dozens of cards, several wilted flower arrangements, and a number of Mylar balloons floating by the ceiling with
Get Well Soon
messages on the front—all sent from church parishioners, Principal Hulp, various teachers and people at school. As she waits for a response, Melissa looks at her mother, who keeps her eyes cast downward. Even in such hot weather, she is wearing a knit top and cream-colored pants instead of a T-shirt and shorts like Missy. The bright sunlight streaming in from the window lends a waxy sheen to her smooth skin. In that melodic voice of hers, she says, “Your father and I can go there for you. What is it that you need?”