Strange but True (44 page)

Charlene is about to say something more when she stops and points her finger in the air, as though she has just been struck by an idea. “I'll be right back.”

After she excuses herself and steps into the hallway, Melissa feels awkward and unsure of what to say now that she is alone with Richard. The intimate rapport of those conversations they shared in the cemetery seems unlikely now. Thankfully, Richard makes an effort at small talk. As he goes on—first about the cold weather, then giving her the names of two doctors he still keeps in touch with at the hospital in case she needs anything—Melissa notices that he is not looking into her eyes the way he used to do. But it no longer matters to her. She watches his gaze go to the blue index card on the side table by her bed. It's the one the nurses gave her, and it lists the baby's birth weight, measurements, and blood type. Melissa reaches over and picks it up. “Can I ask you something?”

Richard lets go of the footboard and puts his hands deep in his coat pockets. “Of course.”

“Do you remember your sons' blood types? I mean, since you're a doctor, I figure you might.” When Richard tells her that he does, she asks, “So you remember Ronnie's then?”

“Yes. He was type A.”

Melissa stares down at the information on the card. She knows her own blood type, because she had asked one of the nurses to look it up on her chart this morning. “Can a type A mother and a type A father make an AB baby?”

“I'd have to check to be sure, since I'm a little rusty,” Richard says, “but I don't think so.”

Missy folds the card evenly down the middle then slips it beneath her pillow. “Thanks,” she tells him. “There's no need to check. I have things pretty much figured out.”

Just then Charlene steps back into the room, holding out her cell phone. “There is someone on the line who wants to talk to you.”

The previous discussion about Philip leaves her with the feeling that it is going to be him on the other end of the line. But when Melissa takes the phone and says hello, she hears a different voice altogether. “Melissa, honey. It's your mother.”

The words bring back the pang of longing she felt for her presence last night. She remembers all the times when her mother tried to contact her over the years and Melissa hung up the phone, ripped up the cards, and refused to answer the door. In the gentlest of voices, she says, “Hi, Mom.”

Her mother is silent and Melissa can tell by the sound of her short breaths coming through the receiver that she is crying. “I've missed you so much,” she says finally.

“I've missed you too,” Melissa tells her. Then she asks, “Would you like to come here?”

“I would like that a lot.”

“Me too. But I want you to come alone. Without him.”

Her mother doesn't push the issue. She simply tells her that she understands. “I will come by myself. Tell me. Is there anything you need?”

Melissa looks up at the clock again, expecting the nurse to bring the baby in any minute. “There is nothing I need.”

“What about the baby? Does the baby need anything?”

“The baby needs everything, Mom. Including a name.” All this time, Melissa thought she would name the child after Ronnie if it was a boy, but she no longer thinks it's a good idea. “You can help me pick it out.”

“Okay,” her mother says. “I will be there before you know it.”

After they hang up, Melissa thanks Charlene and hands the phone back to her. When she sees that melancholy smile on her face again, Melissa says, “I'm sorry I couldn't help you figure out where Philip went.”

One last time Charlene tries to make her remember. “Are you sure there wasn't anything he said that might have told you something about his plans?”

“No. He just came in the house. He was looking for you because he said you left a message that you were coming by. Then we started arguing. Then my landlord came over—”

“Your landlord?” Charlene and Richard say at the same time.

“Mr. Erwin,” Melissa says, reluctantly speaking his name. “He came because he heard us fighting.”

“So he saw Philip there yesterday?” Richard asks.

“Yes,” Melissa tells them. “Why?”

“Because that's not what he told us when we went there this morning,” Charlene says. “He said he never saw anyone at your house at all.”

OUTSIDE THE SMALL, RECTANGULAR BASEMENT WINDOW OF THE
Erwins' house, a lone black bird blindly pecks at the trampled patch of snow where Philip had fallen in the moments before Bill Erwin raised his shovel and brought it down upon his head. From where he lies on the cold, damp floor of the cellar, Philip can see it pecking and twitching and shaking its oily wings. His mouth is gagged with a scratchy wool sock and covered with duct tape. His legs are bound at the ankles, his arms at the wrists, both with endless amounts of fishing wire that digs into his skin with the slightest of movements. There is dried blood on the back of his neck that itches, driving him mad because he cannot scratch it. Nevertheless, he is breathing. For that, Philip is grateful. As he shivers from the cold, all the things Gail Erwin explained to him in the short while she was conscious replay in his mind.

She told him about the pills she found in a flashlight.

She told him how she linked them to her husband's involvement with Melissa.

She told him that he came after her when he realized that she had discovered his secret.

There is still so much more he wants to know, though it's not possible to find out, since without warning Gail's voice grew faint and she stopped speaking again. The only sounds that punctuate the silence of the dank, shadowy cellar are her erratic breaths as well as the thunder of Bill Erwin's footsteps as he paces the floor above. Philip stares up at the wooden slats as they sag and creak with his every step. During the hours he has spent on this floor, Philip's mind has drifted in all sorts of directions. Those footsteps make him think of the days when his mother used to take him to the library for the story hour she hosted. He remembers the way she would stomp her feet on the red and gold carpet to imitate the monster from
Jack and the Beanstalk
rumbling around up in the clouds.

His mother.

Philip wonders if she has even bothered to take notice of his absence. And if so, has she done anything more than fold up the sofa bed, throw his stuff in the garbage, and wish him good riddance? Since there is no way to know for sure, and since he doesn't think the answer would give him much hope if he did, Philip tries his best to stop thinking about her. He turns his attention toward the basement window again, where a short while before he had seen someone's legs moving. Impossible as it was to call for help with his mouth gagged, he tried. Nonetheless, nobody heard.

Now there is only that lone black bird out there. The sight of it pecking at the ground makes Philip think of Donnelly Fiume's mynah bird in New York City. He recalls that last night in the studio on Sixth Street when he sat by the window, the way he had so many times throughout the years, waiting for whatever made-up name he had used to be called from down below. When the shout finally came, Philip balled up the keys in the very same towel Donnelly first used to throw the set to him, then tossed them to the street. It was only a matter of seconds before he heard the familiar clomp-clomp-clomp on the crooked old stairway. After taking one last sip of coffee, Philip walked to the door and waited for the knock on the other side, wondering what the person would look like when he opened up.

In all the time he had been having strangers over, Philip had come to expect that in person they were and weren't what they described. Yes, one might be six feet tall with black hair and blue eyes as he claimed in their exchanges on the computer. But somehow Philip always filled in the details differently. He neglected to imagine the gray crescents of dirt under one's fingernails, or the smell of too much cologne splashed on to cover up the need for a shower, or the foggy, disconnected feel of another's eyes that made Philip think of a fish gone bad. And there was something else about these visitors that was different in person: once this one or that one was standing inside the small studio or sitting on the edge of the Murphy bed, the easy lingo of those Internet conversations was gone. Sex was easier than talking. The entire time it was happening, Philip told himself it would be the last, though it never was.

At least not until the night when he opened the door and saw that the man on the other side was exactly how he described himself to be and more: six foot four, broad-shouldered, with a buzz cut, a square jaw, and a grim expression. Philip had learned to exaggerate his own appearance over the years, and this time his hyperbole left him worried. “Hi,” he said, not liking the way his voice sounded so thin and stretched, the way it did when he was nervous.

“Take your shirt off,” the man told him when he stepped inside.

His words came out so slurred and distorted that Philip knew the guy was either drunk or high. The red, watery state of his eyes confirmed it. Normally, there was some sort of preamble to these events—a quick discussion of comfort and approval. The way this one skipped over any of those flimsy formalities left Philip both more excited and more afraid. Philip stared into the square, rugged face of this stranger, thinking how much he resembled Jedd Kusam from high school. In his memory, Philip could still see Jedd pushing his books to the ground, shoving his head into a locker, and saying, “Repeat after me: ‘My name is Dickless Fairy.' ” He thought of that dictionary in the library, where Jedd and his friends covered all those definitions of words like
faggot, sucker, ugly
, and dozen of others, then put Philip's name beside each one. Why, he wondered, was he attracted to the exact type of person who taunted him all those years ago? It seemed like a cruel joke his mind had played on him, a curse that would never allow him to forget the insufferable humiliations of his past.

“I said, take your shirt off.”

Philip had the sense that he should tell him to leave, but he found himself reaching down and tugging his shirt up over his head. Standing there before him, Philip felt as cold and pale as a plucked chicken. He could not remember the name this guy gave—was it Mike, or Joe, or Ted? Either way, he decided it was probably as phony as the names Philip used during these encounters. So for that reason, he switched it in his mind, silently dubbing him Jedd since he looked enough like him. At the sight of Philip without his shirt, this Jedd let out a hideous laugh.

“What?” Philip asked.

“You have a little kid's body. Haven't you ever heard of a place called the gym?”

Philip looked down at his hairless, underdeveloped chest, the small curve of his stomach, his lanky white arms, and was filled with shame. He made the motions to put his shirt back on when Jedd wrenched it out of his hand and threw it on the floor, shouting, “Thanks for wasting my time, asshole!” With that, he lifted off his own shirt, revealing a hard, thick-veined body covered with tattoos. There were so many dragon faces with long curly tongues and flames and wild eyes and cryptic symbols inked into his skin that it didn't look like skin at all. It was more like staring at a strange map of some sort, or an optical illusion, that fascinated and revolted Philip all at once. Jedd looked him in the eyes and said, “That's what a man's body looks like. Memorize it, you fucking loser.”

“Listen, you should just go,” Philip told him, hating the sound of his voice still, hating everything about himself and his life at the moment.

But he did not go anywhere. Instead, he craned his neck around and stared at the mural of New York City on the wall. “It's like fucking Alice in Wonderland in here. What the hell kind of freak are you?”

“Just go,” Philip said again.

“First I have to piss.”

Philip glanced over at the door to the bathroom, thinking of Baby and Sweetie inside. “The toilet doesn't work.”

Jedd walked to the door and pushed it open anyway, then stepped inside and slammed it shut. Philip had invited all kinds of men here, and certainly there had been times when things didn't go as expected, but he had never experienced anything like this. In some distant corner of his mind, he supposed he had been waiting for it to happen all along. He thought back to those early days in the city. He remembered reading in the newspaper about a pianist who was last seen leaving a bar with a man he met there, only to be found by a friend the next day, murdered in his apartment. There had been a black-and-white photograph of the building in the paper, one Philip recognized from the neighborhood. And the same force that compels most of us to gape at the scene of an accident took hold of Philip too. He made a point to walk by the building later that day. When he looked up, Philip saw that the windows of the third-floor apartment were splattered with blood. What more of a cautionary tale could he have asked for? he wondered. Regardless, he went right on engaging in this shameful habit of his—all just to ease his insatiable loneliness for a short while.

Behind the door, the bird squawked. “What are you doing in there?” Philip called.

“This place is a fucking zoo, man.”

“Please,” he pleaded, standing directly outside the door now, arms crossed in front of his hairless chest. “Please get out of there and go. I'll call the police if you don't leave.”

As he waited, Philip retrieved his T-shirt and slipped it back on. When the door opened, Jedd stood before him with his pants unzipped, his penis actually hanging out in front of him. Philip hated himself for looking, but the flick of his gaze was automatic, uncontrollable. Why? he wondered again.

“You like it?”

Philip turned his eyes away. He said nothing.

“I'll be on my way.”

He gave Philip a good hard shove as he passed. But Philip was so glad to see the guy leave that he didn't care. He raced to the door and closed it behind him, twisting the dead bolt that was concealed in the street scene of the mural. Never again, he promised himself, leaning his back against the door and releasing a breath. Never again.