Strange but True (6 page)

Any response Melissa can think to offer is certain to sound flimsy when faced with such fury, so she stays quiet. All this crying has left her eyes and nose running. She feels drained of energy as she joins her shaking hands together, prayerlike under the steering wheel, in an effort to still them.

“Say something!” Charlene screams. “Say something before I strangle your scrawny little neck!”

“Cut it out,” Philip says. “Give her a chance.”

A heavy silence falls over the car then. Nothing can be heard but the hiss of hot air from the dashboard vents. If it weren't for Charlene and Philip, Melissa wouldn't have bothered with the heat at all. As it is, her skin feels slick and slippery with sweat beneath her clothes. No matter what she has done these past nine months, Melissa has been unable to cool down. There have been ice-cold showers. There have been nights in bed with the covers kicked off and the windows wide open. Those efforts work for a short time, but sooner or later, the fever that burns inside of her returns. It is the baby, Melissa knows. It is all part of this strange miracle.

“Well?” Ronnie's mother prods.

Finally, Melissa opens her mouth and says the only thing she can think to say, “It's true.”

Charlene is about to start screaming again, but Philip cuts her off, “Melissa, you know very well that it can't be true. It's not possible.”

“You don't believe me now,” she tells him, pressing her hands tighter together and trying to keep her voice from cracking. “But you will.”

“I don't understand,” he says. “Do you have some sort of blood test or something to show us?”

“No. I made the decision to stay away from doctors, because I know they won't understand either. That's why I was hoping Mr. Chase—”

Before she can finish, Charlene and Philip sputter over each another. “You're nine months pregnant and you haven't even gone to a friggin' doctor!” Charlene shouts at the same time Philip asks, “Then what proof could you possibly have that would make us believe?”

Melissa's mind is so muddled and fatigued that she hears a hybrid of these two things:
you're proof pregnant could possibly have a friggin' doctor believe
. It takes her a moment to disentangle and decipher each statement before she tells Charlene, “No. I haven't,” and Philip, “You will believe when I have the baby.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because you will see its resemblance to Ronnie.”

“That's it. I'm getting the hell out of this car!” Charlene yanks the door handle and steps outside, somehow managing to snag her arm in the seat belt. There are a few seconds of mad wrestling until she dislodges herself and shouts at Philip, “Are you coming or not?”

“In a second.”

She lets out a guttural sound from the back of her throat that signals her absolute exasperation with him too. “Suit yourself, stupid,” she says, then leans her flaccid, blinking face into the car and looks deep into Melissa's eyes. “You, young lady. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Melissa swallows hard and shakes her head from side to side. “I loved your son. And I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Charlene's only response is to slam the door.

Neither Melissa nor Philip says a word as they watch her stomp up the walkway, pound up the front stairs, then disappear into the house. When the porch light goes dark, Melissa feels disappointment scrape against her insides.

Maybe, she thinks, maybe if I hadn't told them so much at once, or maybe if I hadn't played the tape of Chantrel. Or maybe … maybe … maybe… Her mind spins out all the possibilities until finally settling on the fact that it is too late now.

What's done is done.

Behind her, Philip clears his throat. Maybe, she thinks, maybe he stayed behind because he wants to believe me after all. She glances at his pale, angular face in the rearview mirror. It seems odd to her how little he resembles his brother. Unlike Melissa and her sister, somehow Philip and Ronnie had managed to inherit the exact opposite genes from their parents. Ronnie had his mother's wide eyes, his father's broad shoulders and olive skin, whereas Philip has his father's squinty eyes, his mother's slumped posture and pasty complexion. Still, there is a kindness about him that reminds Melissa of Ronnie, a familiar compassion in his weary eyes.

“Sorry about her,” Philip says in a gentle, reed-thin voice, which is yet another distinction from Ronnie, who sounds, or used to sound, like a DJ on drive-time radio.

A memory surges up in her mind then of Ronnie pleading with her in that rushed voice on prom night.
Come on, Missy. Don't be pissed. I didn't mean to mess up our plans
. As quickly as the memory comes, Melissa forces it back down. She doesn't want to think of all the time she wasted being angry at him in those final hours of his life, no thanks to Chaz. She removes her hands from beneath the steering wheel and rubs the spot on her shoulder where Charlene jabbed her. It feels as though she has been stung by a bee, or maybe an entire swarm. But she is used to pain—in fact, she has come to crave it. “I understand why your mother's upset. I know how difficult it must be to accept what I'm saying.”

“Difficult is hardly the word. Melissa, it's—”

“Do you still have Ronnie's old Mercedes?” If he is going to tell her again that it's not possible, she doesn't want to hear it.

“I guess. I haven't been in the garage since I moved home. But I doubt my mother got rid of it. The woman treats his retainer like it's a museum relic. She keeps everything of Ronnie's. I mean, everything.”

So do I, Melissa thinks as she stares straight ahead at the Chases' garage. On the other side of those three red doors, the 1979 cream-colored 300 DSL Ronnie bought with his father's credit card from a used-car lot rests quietly like a game-show prize waiting to be revealed. Melissa pictures Mrs. Chase going out there each week and starting the engine to keep it from dying the way she must have to do. She imagines her sitting in the leather seat where Ronnie used to sit, sliding Ronnie's silver key into the ignition, placing her foot on the pedal where Ronnie used to place his. It is just not fair, Melissa thinks. None of it is fair. “We were supposed to take that car to the prom instead of renting a limo,” she says out loud without really meaning to. She has a habit of this, though normally no one is around to hear except Mr. and Mrs. Erwin, whom she spends so much time with that she thinks of them less as landlords and more like surrogate parents. Melissa doesn't know how she would get by without them.

“What did you say?” Philip asks.

“I said, we were supposed to take that car to the prom instead of renting a limo.”

“So why didn't you?”

“It was Chaz's big idea.”

“Chaz,” Philip says, and Melissa thinks she detects a tone of disgust in his voice, which he quickly confirms. “I never understood why Ronnie hung out with that guy. I couldn't stand him.”

“Yeah, well, me neither.”

She stifles a yawn. This conversation, this night, these last nine months, have left her exhausted. She feels as though she could put her head against the steering wheel and sleep for years without waking. It is only a matter of time, she figures, until Philip brings the conversation back to the baby, so she braces herself for another round of accusations and questions. But he keeps right on blathering about Chaz. “I mean, what the hell kind of name is that anyway? His parents might as well have called him WASP idiot.”

Melissa lets out a laugh, despite herself. Even that small effort depletes her energy more.

“Don't tell me. He went off to Princeton or some other Ivy League college. By now he's probably in law school somewhere, thanks to his parents who greased the wheels for him by making donations every step of the way. God forbid people in this town make something of their lives on their own.”

“Actually, last I knew, he went into the air force.”

“Oh. Well, whatever. It's still a stupid name.”

Melissa glances at him in the rearview mirror again. Only this time, she stops thinking about Philip in relation to Ronnie. She finds herself wondering about the kind of person he has become these past five years. Last she knew, he was waiting tables at the Olive Garden over in Wayne and taking classes at a community college in Philadelphia. “Where were you living before you moved home?”

“New York.”

“Did you like it?”

“Mostly, I guess. It's crowded and expensive. But it's a lot more exciting than Pennsylvania.”

She asks him how long he lived there, and he tells her about four and a half years. He goes on to say that one night, months after Ronnie died, he got fed up with his job as a waiter and his part-time classes. In the middle of his shift at the restaurant, with his midterm poetry portfolio due the next morning, he punched his time card and walked out the kitchen door. A short while later he was on his way into the city. “I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't the job or the classes that got to me. It was my mother. She was too—well, as you just witnessed, she can be pretty unbearable.”

It's odd, Melissa thinks, because the way Charlene looked and acted from the moment she opened the door this evening was in direct contradiction to Melissa's memory of her. She wasn't thin, even back then, but she certainly wasn't as big as she is now. And she used to seem so spunky and full of life. “Why did you come back?” she asks Philip.

“Like I said, I had an accident.”

“Oh, yeah. Skiing.”

“Skiing,” he says again, running his index finger around the rim of his turtleneck.

She can't say why exactly, but Melissa gets the feeling he is lying, or at least that he's not telling the whole story. Either way, she lets the conversation die, because it's none of her business and because she is distracted by her thirst. Despite the problem her swollen stomach presents, she manages to lean over and drag her hand along the cluttered floor, locating her bottle of Poland Spring. It's the kind with a pop-top, which is supposed to make it easier to drink from, but Melissa finds it more difficult, since the water has a way of spilling through the gap where her front teeth used to be. As she lifts the bottle to her mouth and takes a sip, Philip finally brings the discussion full circle.

“Missy, what you just told us doesn't make any sense. It's been too many years—”

She pulls the pop-top from her lips, inadvertently making a faint tsk sound as she does. “Want some water?”

“No. Did you hear what I just said?”

“I heard you.”

“And?”

“And I told you already that I've only ever been with one person. Ronnie. On the night of our prom.”

“Well, I don't know what to say then, if you're going to keep insisting on something so … so ludicrous.”

“You can say that you believe me.”

“But that's just it. I don't. And for that matter, I don't believe a word that woman said on the tape. People like her are just out to make a fast—” Philip cuts his sentence short. Melissa can almost hear the next bit of faulty logic forming in his mind, before he asks, “Is that what you want? Money?”

She takes another sip and wipes the dribble with her sleeve. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure,” she tells him.

The truth is, Melissa hasn't been able to work at either of her part-time jobs—answering phones at an insurance company and washing sheets at a motel in Conshohocken (both places where people don't have to look at her face). The jobs became too difficult for her, given the countless mornings she spent with her head over the toilet, vomiting, and the confusion and anguish she suffered when she first realized what was happening to her. As a result, she is more than six months behind on rent. Still, money was the last thing on her mind when she came here tonight. So when Philip persists with his questions about whether this is some crazy scheme she cooked up for cash, Melissa cranes her neck around and tells him, “Look. I don't want anything from you people, except for you to believe me. And if you don't, then that's your decision. I just thought you had a right to know, since Ronnie is going to be a father in a few more days.” At this, Philip's mouth drops open the way it did earlier in the kitchen. But the expression does little to stop her. “So if you ever find yourself curious about your niece or nephew, I live right across town at 32 Monk's Hill Road. You're welcome to come see the baby for yourself.”

When Melissa is finished, she feels breathless and bone tired. The compassion she'd seen, or thought she'd seen, in Philip's eyes is gone. Now that she has resigned herself to the fact that he is not going to believe her, she wants him gone as well. Philip must sense what she's thinking because he pulls on the door handle, bringing a rush of winter air into the car, washing over her hot skin like a salve. “I guess there's nothing left to say then. Except good night.”

“Good night,” she tells him.

There is his cast and crutch to contend with, so it takes Philip a full minute to slide across the seat and gain firm footing on the icy ground. Once he's finally standing, Philip looks back at her in the driver's seat. “Actually, I do have one more thing to say. Maybe it's not my place to tell you this, Missy. But I think you need some sort of professional help so you can get through this. Not just a doctor to deal with the pregnancy, but a counselor or someone you can talk to about grieving for Ronnie. It's like, I don't know, you're stuck or something. And now that you're having a baby, I think your mind is getting confused and all mixed-up about what's happening to you.” Philip stops to take a breath. “The only thing I can think is that it's like this biography I'm reading about Anne Sexton. When she got pregnant, it really screwed with her head.” Again, Philip pauses. When he speaks next, his voice drops lower. “Things only got worse for her instead of better. And I wouldn't want the same to happen to you.”