Strange but True (7 page)

“Are you done?” she asks.

“I'm done.”

“Good. Well, thanks for the advice. Now close the door so I can leave.”

Instead of the loud slam of an exit his mother made, Philip shuts the door so gently that there is nothing but the softest click. Melissa shifts the car into reverse, steps on the gas, and rolls out of the driveway so quickly that chunks of frozen gravel kick up from under her tires and spit at Philip as he hobbles toward the house. When he reaches the top step of the porch, he turns to wave, but Melissa looks away at the road before her, slams the car into drive, and takes off up the street.

“I'm not crazy,” she says as the tears start again. “You believe what you want. But I know what is happening to me. I know.”

By the time she reaches the stop sign on the corner, her skin, which was merely hot before, is on fire. She finds it difficult to breathe. Melissa turns off the heat and rolls down the window, letting more cold air fill the car. A rope of snot is coming from her nose, and she mops it up with her sleeve. If someone were to ask before tonight, she would have said that it wasn't possible for her to miss Ronnie any more than she already does. But as she picks up speed again and the bare trees and dark houses flash by outside her window, Melissa is overcome with a new kind of sorrow and loneliness, worse than anything she has ever felt.

I am all alone in this, she thinks, or maybe says, out loud.

That's when the kicking starts, harder than she has experienced before. She imagines the baby's feet pushing and poking against her womb, fighting to be let loose into the world.

“Not yet,” she says, pressing her palm flat against her stomach as her face crumples in tears. “Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.”

At the intersection of Matson Ford and King of Prussia Road, Melissa turns right, then makes a quick left onto Blatts Farm Hill. She is taking the long way home on purpose, driving faster now, doing forty-five in a thirty-five zone, then fifty. As she zips over the hill and snakes around the third sharp curve, she glances in the direction of the stump on the side of the road. Melissa has seen it there hundreds, maybe thousands, of times, but she stretches her neck in hope of catching another glimpse. The sky is so starless and black, though, that it's impossible to see it there in the shadows, skinned of so much bark that someone might mistake it for a boulder rather than the remains of an old tree.

The memory sweeps over Melissa anyway.

She and Ronnie are sticking their heads through the sunroof of the limousine, their mouths open wide, shrieking, howling into the night as they whip around turns and sail over the hills. Melissa's stomach drops, then drops again, as though she is riding the most thrilling and terrifying roller coaster of her life. Down below, Chaz and Stacy are tickling their legs. One of them—most likely Chaz—pinches her ass.

“Cut it out!” Melissa screams, but her voice is sucked into the night.

Ronnie leans his head down and shouts at them to knock it off. When he looks up again, Melissa tells him that she thinks she swallowed a bug. He asks her how it tasted, and this makes her laugh. Ronnie licks his lips and leans forward for a kiss, but the limo winds around another turn and they lose their balance. Melissa's hair comes completely undone and goes wild around them, thrashing and snapping at their faces. When they steady themselves, Ronnie gathers it behind her head and kisses her, slipping his tongue quickly in and out of her mouth. When he pulls away, he tells her, “You know I love you. Even if tonight didn't go as planned, I love you no matter what.”

“I know,” she tells him. “I love you too.”

By the time Melissa comes to a stop in front of 32 Monk's Hill Road, most of the snow has blown off the hood, roof, and trunk of her Corolla. Her driveway, which is nothing more than a patch of dirt beside the road, has been cleared of snow too. Mr. Erwin must have shoveled it while she was in Philadelphia seeing Chantrel earlier tonight. Melissa parks the car and cuts the engine. Before going inside, she sits for a moment, gathering her strength as she stares out at the three tiny houses huddled together, caravan-style. Closest to the street is her cottage, which consists of nothing more than a ten-by-ten living room with a kitchenette along one wall, a bedroom barely big enough for her single bed, and a minuscule bathroom with a mildew-stained shower stall instead of a tub. To the left, and slightly back from her cottage, is the Erwins' place, large enough for a real kitchen with a table and chairs, plus a decent-size living room and bedroom. It even has a basement with a washer and dryer, instead of a crawl space like the one beneath her cottage. Farthest from the road, closest to the woods, is the vacant house that has never been winterized. All three used to be hunting cabins in the 1940s and were abandoned until the Erwins retired from the police department—she was a dispatcher, he was an officer—and bought the property as an investment.

Melissa leans forward and spots the soft yellow glow of the lamp beside their bed. She can picture them inside, snug beneath the covers, pillows fluffed behind their heads as Mr. Erwin reads one of those books of funny facts he loves so much and Mrs. Erwin turns the pages of a Mary Higgins Clark novel, trying to guess the killer. Even though Melissa is tempted to knock on their door the way she does when she needs to talk, she stops herself. She hasn't told them the truth about the baby. Instead, she made up a story about a boy she was seeing who took off the moment she became pregnant. The lie would make it difficult to explain to them what's bothering her tonight.

Finally, she rolls up the window and gets out of her car. When she opens the front door of her cottage, the stubborn smell of stale cigarette smoke lingers in the air, though she quit months before, when she first realized she was pregnant. Melissa steps inside and Mumu, her cow-spotted cat, winds between her legs, purring. She scoops him up in her arms and buries her scarred face in the animal's soft fur. Mumu is the pet her parents gave her as a sort of consolation prize for the way they treated her after Ronnie died. He is one of the few things that she took with her when she left home. Melissa keeps on nuzzling until the cat has had enough and leaps from her arms, then pads off into the bedroom. That's when she turns on the light and looks around at the messy stack of newspapers on the coffee table, the baskets of tapes and books by the ripped sofa, her clothes strewn everywhere, a row of empty wine bottles on the floor by the kitchenette.

With one hand on her queasy stomach, Melissa steps over a pair of dirty black stretch pants and goes to the mantel of the stone fireplace, where there are even more pictures of Ronnie. She picks up one that is identical to a photo on her dashboard. He is on the plaid blanket they used to keep stashed in the darkroom. As she stares down at his starry smile and bright eyes, Melissa feels something slip inside of her. All the books she has read about communicating with the other side, and all the psychics she has visited, say the same thing: if you talk to the dead, they will listen. So instead of allowing herself to buckle again, Melissa speaks to Ronnie the way she often does late at night.

She tells him that she finally worked up the courage to go to his family.

She tells him how disappointed she was that his father wasn't there, since she hoped to see him most of all.

She tells him that his brother was hurt in an accident.

She tells him about the way his mother screamed at her when she broke the news.

She fills him in on every last detail of the night until her feet grow sore from standing there so long. Melissa carries the picture to the sofa, stretches her body out on the scratchy cushions, and rests the frame facedown on the mound of her stomach. “Your mother is so different now,” she says into the empty room as she gazes up at the stain-blotched ceiling. “Do you remember how happy she used to seem?”

As Melissa loses herself in the memory of the first time she met Charlene, her heavy eyes flutter shut. Her mumbling grows hoarse and incomprehensible in the retelling. She and Ronnie had snuck out of school and gone to see his mother at the Radnor library for diesel money for the old Mercedes. His parents had taken away his credit card to punish him for buying the car on a Visa in the first place, so he was always in need of cash. Behind the counter stood a big-breasted librarian with two blond curls sweeping up from the top of her forehead. She reminded Melissa of one of those women from a Cross Your Heart bra commercial, her mammoth breasts lifted and separated beneath a fuzzy blue sweater. When she looked up and smiled at Ronnie, Melissa assumed it was his mother. But then she pointed and told them in a harsh, unfamiliar accent that fused all her words into one, “Charleneisinthestacks.” Melissa felt relieved, because there was something unlikable about this lady, though she couldn't name what it was. She followed Ronnie through the maze of shelves, alternating between staring at the back of his faded Levi's and glancing up at the titles of obscure books, until they spotted his real mother, standing atop a metal stepladder with small holes like a cheese grater on the surface of each step. She was dressed in a pleated blue skirt and blazer, a gold frog pinned to her lapel. Before she noticed them, Ronnie took Melissa's hand and led her around to the other side, where he proceeded to push the book Charlene had just shelved back in her direction so that it fell to the floor. His mother climbed down the ladder, picked it up, and reshelved it, only to have Ronnie shove the book back out again. It was just the sort of prank that would infuriate her own humorless parents, but Charlene stuck her arm through the shelf and grabbed Ronnie by the wrist. “Ronald Chase, I hereby place you under library arrest!” she said, and the two of them started to laugh.

As the sound of their laughter echoes in Melissa's memory now, the image of that moment fades to a gauzy white nothing in her mind. She feels as though she is falling, like that book Ronnie pushed from the edge, only instead of dropping quickly to the floor, she is plummeting through a long tunnel, falling and falling and falling, until finally, she is asleep.

Melissa begins to snore, a habit that came with the pregnancy, and her arm inadvertently stretches out so that her hand comes to rest on the coffee table beside that messy pile of newspapers. Upon first glance, someone visiting this cottage might look at those papers and assume they are nothing more than leftovers from recent weeks, yet to make their way to the recycling bin. But if that someone—say it was you—were to look closer, you would notice that every single one of those papers has the same date at the top: June 19, 1999. What's more, you would see that they all have the same black-and-white photo on the front page of a limousine crushed into a thick oak tree on Blatts Farm Hill.

And now that you are looking, downright snooping in fact, do you see what's right next to those newspapers? It is the decoy diary Melissa used to fool her father five years before. And next to that? A newer, black leather diary with Melissa's name emblazoned in gold enamel on the front, a gift from her sister just before they stopped speaking.
For my sister and best friend
, the inscription reads.
Although it doesn't seem like it now, you will start over, and you will be happy again one day. I promise. Love, Stacy

All of the pages are blank.

Across the room, there is that row of wine bottles in the kitchenette—their lips sticky with old wine, their bottoms filled with sediment and sludge—every one of them from more than nine months before, when Melissa spent lonely nights like this getting drunk and smoking cigarettes on the sofa before spewing prayer after endless prayer on the floor beside her bed.

Just to the right of those bottles is a small white refrigerator with a freezer compartment big enough for two empty ice trays, a sack of Starbucks coffee, and one more thing shoved way in the back. If you push aside those trays and that coffee and reach your hand deep inside, you'll pull out a red, freezer-burned clump that will be unidentifiable unless you hold it to the light. That's when you'll see that this thing in your hand is Melissa's rose corsage from prom night, which she keeps frozen inside like a heart that's stopped beating.

Don't drop it because you will wake her.

Put it back behind the ice trays and the coffee. Close the freezer.

There's one more thing you'll want to see, far more disturbing than anything so far, behind the bathroom door. But as Melissa said to the baby on the car ride home:

Not yet
.

For now, leave it there as she sleeps and the world moves quietly around her. Mumu the cat is prowling in the kitchenette too, hunting for mice. Next door, Mr. Erwin switches off the bedside lamp and falls into a restless, fitful sleep beside his snowy-haired wife, who lies awake thinking of the way she spent her day, doing laundry, then cleaning the cluttered work area in their low-ceilinged basement, only to turn up an unexpected mess. Their refrigerator hums on and off, releasing the same pings and ticks as the engine of Melissa's car cooling in that makeshift driveway beside the road. The wind, which blew so hard earlier, has died off, leaving the woods around the three small houses in a perfect hush.

Across town—back up Monk's Hill Road and through the crisscross of streets to Blatts Farm Hill, down through the intersection of Matson Ford and King of Prussia Road, up Dilson Avenue and down to the Chases' large gray-stone colonial at 12 Turnber Lane—Philip tosses and turns on the foldout sofa in the family room while his mother sleeps soundly upstairs with the help of the pills she swallowed before bed. Again and again, he replays the conversation with Melissa, not yet considering that what she said could somehow be true, but wondering if he should have been nicer to the girl.

When it is clear to him that he is too preoccupied and troubled to sleep, Philip sits up and turns on his tiny book light, glancing at the antique clock on the wall. The hands point to four-thirty, though it is really somewhere around three. He opens his Anne Sexton biography. The pages smell musty, like a book bought at a tag sale, which it may as well have been, since he picked it up at a used bookstore on Broadway just a few weeks before he went over the edge of that fire escape and dropped to the alleyway below. Philip turns to a random page. Rather than plodding along sequentially through biographies, he much prefers to flip around to the various periods of the subject's life depending on his mood, mixing up the order of events, then putting it together afterward like a puzzle in his mind. When he looks down, he sees that the previous owner of the book had scratched a few lines of a poem in black pen in the margin: