Audrey’s Door (20 page)

“Just a sec,” she told him, because she knew this room would haunt her. It would burn into her memory like that butterfly had burned her eyes. She wanted to make sure she saw every detail, so her guilt didn’t fill its unseen crevices with images even uglier than the truth.

She started with the mattress. It had been flipped recently, so she turned it over again and found urine stains. Then she ran her fingers inside the places where the fabric had ripped, but found no roach droppings nor red pinprick evidence of bedbugs.

Next to the door was the closet. She dragged a chair over to it and ran her finger along the plywood, looking for hollowed-out hiding places. Found one on the sweater ledge. Obvious if you’re looking for it, which meant nobody had cared enough to look. Her hand came back with a fistful of 5mg Valium, which she pocketed.

“Shit,” Saraub said.

“Yeah. But I could have guessed. Betty hid things for rainy days. I want to make sure there’s not a note. If it was a suicide, she’d hide it and expect me to find it,
because she wouldn’t want anyone else to read it. I’m not getting high enough to see this ledge. Give me a boost?”

Saraub bent down, and offered his joined hands. She took off her black flats and stepped into his palms. With a grunt he lifted her up above the ledge inside the closet. She ran her fingers along the dusty edges in search of a note. Nothing. He put her down. She walked the perimeter of the room, peeked under both beds. The old woman sat, hands clasped and smiling, like she was waiting for her big close-up. Audrey climbed up on the desk chair, and unscrewed the glass light fixture in the ceiling. Pills fell like rain. They hit the floor and bounced, then rolled in all directions.

Pills from heaven!
she thought.

“Why so many places?” Saraub asked as the two of them got down on their knees and played 52 pickup with Valium and lithium; neither wanted Betty’s roommate playing monkey-see monkey-do and following Betty’s lead after they were gone.

“It’s what prisoners do. They hoard, because it’s the only way they can have any control…Actually, that’s why people with OCD rearrange, too. To control the unknown.”

He peeled off his wool jacket and tied it around his waist. It had been a while since he’d had the money for a custom suit, and she saw that its lining was full of moth holes. “That’s a terrible way to live,” he said.

“Can’t have everything,” she said, then handed Saraub some of the pills she’d swiped from under the bed, so they both had a handful. “Now we can be drug dealers.”

She was about to leave but spotted one last hiding place. The desk screwed into the wall—she pulled out the middle drawer and flipped it over. A sealed white envelope was taped between wooden slats. On it Betty had drawn a young woman with a half grin. Prettier
than Audrey, with a warmer, more symmetrical face, but then, about certain things Betty had always been kind. Beneath it she’d written in neat cursive:

Audrey’s face burned. Her breath came fast. Just then, the old woman leaped up from the bed. She was surprisingly agile. In one fluid motion, she and Audrey were nose to nose. “That’s mine!” she shouted. “I’ll cut your throat!” Reams of spit flung from her mouth. “Go away! This is my house now!”

Audrey made a fist. Saraub almost charged. Then they remembered; this was an old woman.

Her socks were brown support hose. Betty’s muumuu fit her like a loose Hefty Bag. “Mine,” she snarled. Drool hung from her chin, and dandruff drifted in the air like snow.
She’s got no soul,
Audrey thought.
That’s why she’s acting so strangely. Ever since the surgery, there’s a hole where her soul used to be, and through the vacuum its absence left, something slithered.

“Give it to me!” the woman shouted.

“No, it’s mine!” Audrey answered, then balled her free hand into a fist. They faced off, noses inches apart. The woman’s breath was animal crackers, and she was the first to flinch. The animation faded from her scarred-up eyes. She retreated and sat back down again, then smiled blankly, as if her outburst had never happened.

Audrey pressed the paper to her chest to smooth it, then put it in her pocket with the pills.

“Let’s get out of here,” Saraub said.

She nodded. “Ooooh, yeah.” They walked out, and as they did, the woman called: “I know who you are! You’re the one who builds, but you do it all wrong. You’re no good to anybody!”

Audrey bit her lip and squeezed the note tight.

When the doors to the elevator shut, she pressed her openmouthed face into Saraub’s thick arm, making a round, wet mark on his shirt, and cried dry tears.

In the parking lot, they sat in the car but didn’t drive. The sprawling hospital spread out like a mirage, as far as she could see. Birth and death, and nothing that resembled living, in between.

S
he spent all of Thursday and Friday at Betty’s bedside while Saraub worked in the lobby, or at the motel. Friday night, they ate BLTs at Shorty’s Diner. In her mind like low-level noise pollution, heavy wings flapped.

Their waitress was a big-hipped high-school girl with rosy cheeks who spent her downtime giving them the stink eye from the lunch counter across the room. They looked different from everybody else. They weren’t wearing jeans, for one. For another, Saraub was Indian. Strike three, she’d returned her baloney sandwich and asked for the butter to be scraped from the bread. Upon its return, she’d checked for spit, then worried it might be snot, then decided to be safe, since her temporary crown was bothering her anyway, and not eat it at all.

The table where they sat was greasy, and a wire poking out from the vinyl booth had scratched her thigh. She
blotted now with a napkin and fought the strange temptation to taste the salty redness.

“When are you going to take her off life support?” Saraub asked.

She looked out the window, where the sky out there was too big, and found herself homesick for The Breviary, whose sheltering walls would never permit such a question. “I’m not.”

“But you heard what Burckhardt said. She’s not waking up.”

She thought about that photo. And the list of the places they’d lived. And the promise she’d made to Betty, that she’d broken. Too soon. She could not have this conversation right now. Maybe not ever.

“You worry about your own family. I’m not abandoning her because of some doctor. She’s my mother, and I promised never to leave her.”

Saraub opened his mouth as if to speak, then swallowed a french fry instead. Then the rest of the fries, all in a few bites. “Bob Stern from Sunshine called my agent,” he said when he was done.

“Yeah?”

“It’s a go. Contracts went out last night. I start in D.C. with Senator McCaffrey, then back to New York to interview that former Servitus CEO. After that, the editing starts. Probably in Los Angeles, where they’ve got cheap suites.”

“Oh!” she clapped her hands together in delight. “That’s wonderful!”

He nodded. “Call came last night. I might have to leave tomorrow morning, but my agent’s trying now to see if he can push it back a week.”

She was so happy she beamed. “Well, don’t screw it up on my account. The movie’s more important.”

“Is it?”

“Of course. This is your dream. Aren’t you thrilled? I
think I might pee my pants I’m so happy for you. Why aren’t you happy?”

He leaned forward, and she saw what he was going to ask before he asked it. Leave it to Saraub to make lemons out of lemonade: “Why won’t you be my wife?”

She looked down. Then reached into her pocket, and felt the hard ring. Her face turned red, and even as she did it, she knew she should keep her big mouth shut. But it had been on her mind all week. She’d been hiding it from him every morning, moving it from one pocket to the next. And why had she brought it, anyway? Had she really thought one of the rich crones at The Breviary was going to pick a lock? “You should take this back,” she blurted.

He wouldn’t touch it, so she put it down between them on the plastic table, while the teenaged girl at the counter gawked. “I can’t do this right now,” she told him.

He picked it up and turned it, so that the diamond faced up. “You should grow up.”

“Don’t. Let’s do this nice.” She was crying as she said it, so she shielded her eyes with her hand like a downward salute, to keep him from seeing.

“My dad died two months before we met,” he said. “You know that, right? Or maybe you don’t. You’re so caught up in your own bullshit, maybe you never even put those two things together. Why do you think I was looking for a woman online? Because I’d become the man of the family, and my aunts and uncles and mother planned this life for me that I didn’t want. So I found my own life. I found you. You’re what I want. The whole package, OCD and all.”

“I don’t know what to say,” she said.

“Try.”

She shook her head. “You have to understand. I can’t think straight. I’m not myself right now…. Ever since
The Breviary, I think I had some kind of break. There’s this door I’ve been—”

He jerked up from the table and threw down a twenty-dollar bill, then leaned over her, furious. “After all we’ve been through, you pull this. You’re a real chickenshit,” he said. His mouth was close enough to her ear that she could feel his breath. Then he stalked out of the restaurant, while the stink-eyed waitress gawked.

He was waiting in the white Camry when she got there, which probably hadn’t been his chosen method of dramatic exit. They drove back to the hotel. For a moment she thought he planned to call a taxi from the lobby, but he accompanied her to room seven.

She didn’t dare turn on a light, or listen to voice mail, or watch television. Instead, she sat on her bed, and he sat in his. Five feet apart. Silence. The room was so dark that she could see the shine of his eyes.

“I’m sorry about all this,” she whispered.

He sniffled. Crying or congested? She couldn’t see to tell. “No. I shouldn’t have brought it up. You’ve got things on your mind.”

She could hear the frustration in his voice. The urge was strong, but she fought it and closed her eyes. Tried to sleep. Imagined folding the distance between their beds until it disappeared. The sound of his sniffling was terrible. It ached inside her like thawing frostbite.

She got up and felt her way toward him. The frostbite burned. She climbed into his narrow bed. She was crying again. Chest hiccuping with sobs. A nameless pain, upon which the past and future were both heaped. She was the old Audrey, full of hurt and dreams, and the new one, scarred and bitter.

She took his warm hand. Congestion, not tears, after all. He pulled away, but she held his fingers firm and pressed them inside her nightshirt. After a while, he faced her. She closed her eyes, and felt his breath as he brushed the hair from her neck with his lips.

This moment was new and frightening every time. Like a magic trick you have to trust will work, over and over again. The doubts. Why bother? She wasn’t in the mood. Too tired. Too sad. She wasn’t much good at touching, anyway.

She hesitated, and he waited, done now with coaxing her affection. The duvet was prickly green polyester. Dirty, she guessed. She peeled it from the bed and let it drop. Then pulled off her shirt and trousers, too. He did the same. They were both naked on the sheets. He hid himself, sucking in his belly, and she ran her fingers along it, then kissed his skin until he sighed, and let go.

“What do you like?” he always used to ask. She’d never known how to answer that. Instead, she’d pretended, even though it had shamed her to look at him, and with her smile, lie. She’d never come, not even by her own hand. And every time they’d made love, the lie had gotten bigger, and she’d dreaded it more. But the lie was better than the truth: she was dead inside. A ruined person who would never be normal. Would never feel pleasure, or accept love. There is only so much from which any person can ever heal.

Now, he kissed her, and ran his hands along the curves of her body. The parts she liked, and the parts that shamed her with their imperfection: lumpy thighs, pointy breasts, hips so narrow they belonged on a boy. He touched them, and she closed her eyes, and let him. Always, at this moment, she’d have pretended her delight, then distracted him away from her. This time, she stayed quiet. With nothing to lose, she decided to be honest.

She expected nothing. Silence. The night would be ruined, and he would know the extent of her betrayal. He’d leave in the morning, as he should. It had not been fair to ask him to come to Nebraska.

His hands worked slowly, and then fast. She lay back, and as he touched her, an unexpected thing happened.
An unfamiliar release. Her first instinct was to roll away. Run into the bathroom and hide. But she stayed.

He was different than before. Less tentative. She wondered if, in her absence, he’d practiced with someone new. Something happened. A shiver inside her that grew. Unexpected and terrifying. “Stop,” she wanted to tell him, but she didn’t because she liked it.

Soon, they were both breathing fast. The shiver built up like a bubble that suddenly burst. She stifled herself, confused and panting, thinking it was over, but there was more. The bubble burst again. And again. She cried out, then laughed, then screamed.

Afterward, they lay like spoons, still never speaking a word. She’d missed the feeling of his skin, and his warmth, and the weight of him in the bed. They stayed like that for a long time. “Ummm,” she said, as if to tell him,
wonderful.

She thought he’d fallen asleep, but then he whispered, his voice low and resigned, like something inside him had broken. “I can’t go through this with you anymore. It’s too hard.”

Her smile went slack. His words were familiar. She remembered that once, she’d said them, too. Only, not to him, but to Betty. “I understand.”

He squeezed her tight. And then, he let her go.

She woke the next morning to discover that he was gone. He did not leave behind the ring, a stray Snickers wrapper, or even a note.