Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (10 page)

We hung in there through the holidays. We even managed to find some small degree of pleasure in each other’s company—mulling cider, watching Christmas movies on TV, stringing lights around the outside of our house.

Our cul-de-sac was festive with lights and lawn ornaments, even the inflatable kind—Santas in sleighs, snowmen in snow globes, penguins waving, Snoopy wearing a Santa’s hat, Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger decorating a tree.

Mr. Mendes was more restrained, but even he couldn’t resist hanging a wreath and putting an electric candle in each of his front windows. One evening I had to knock on his door because the mail carrier had left a piece of his mail in my box by mistake. It was a letter, postmarked Miami and addressed to Mr. Hugo Mendes in a feminine handwriting. I knocked on the door and even rang the bell, but though there were lights on inside, Mr. Mendes never came to see who had decided to call on him. I shaded my eyes and peered through the glass sidelight of the front door. I could see down a hallway to the family room, and there in the corner was Popcorn’s cage, the door open. Mr. Mendes had draped the cage with a string of white twinkle lights. I tried the storm door and found it unlocked. I left the letter between it and the front door, sure that Mr. Mendes would find it.

It wasn’t long before Vonnie or I began walking into our bedroom to find the ceiling-fan lights on. At first we thought that one of us had been forgetful, neglecting to turn off the lights when leaving the room. We picked up the remote that controlled them and punched them off.

Then one night we went to sleep only to wake up shortly because the lights had come on. I sat up in bed. “Did you?”

Vonnie was lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling as if she were seeing the most amazing thing. “No,” she said. “Did you?”

“The battery in the remote must be bad,” I told her. I turned off the lights. “We’ll replace it tomorrow.”

Which we did.

That night, the lights came on again.

“Just take the battery out,” she told me.

The next night we came upstairs for bed, and voilà, the lights were on.

“How can that be?” I said. “There’s no battery in the remote.”

Vonnie shook her head. “This is getting spooky, Lex. This house.”

She’d never liked the house. Not even the fifteen years we’d lived there had made her feel at home. It was the most popular style of home in Columbus—a four-bedroom two-story. The bedrooms and two baths upstairs. A formal living room, dining room, kitchen, family room, half bath, and laundry room on the main floor. A neat little box of a house composed of smaller boxes inside. There was no flow, Vonnie said, and I had to admit she was right. The front door opened up to a wall, and each time we had guests and it was time for folks to enter or leave, we all did an excuse-me, squeeze-by, and shuffle in our pitiful entryway. We had more than 2,100 square feet of living space, but because it was split between up and down, and because the living space downstairs was sectioned the way it was, we often felt like we were living in an efficiency apartment.

I’ll give Vonnie credit, though. She spruced that house up come the holidays, and our good spirits carried us into January and through most of February. She tried her best to make our house a healing home. We had candles and silk flower arrangements and throw pillows and pottery, and everything was positioned just so. We had Henry, who curled up on the window seat or on the bamboo mat in the family room.

A house with a cat was a peaceful house, Vonnie said.

“Even if that cat’s Henry?” I asked.

“Yes, even Henry. Prince Boo-Boo-Ca-Choo.”

We were trying.

But this thing with the ceiling-fan lights had us spooked.

“It must be the receiver in the fan going bad,” an electrician said when we consulted him. “Get a new one from Home Depot, and I’ll install it.”

A good fellow working at Home Depot gave us a receiver from an old display model that was like our fan and didn’t charge us anything. “This should do the trick,” he said.

But it didn’t. I took the fan apart, found the receiver that was in it, and saw immediately that the new one wouldn’t fit.

That’s when Vonnie called the manufacturer, intending to order a new receiver from them. But the customer-service rep on the other end of the line said, “You know there’s a code you have to set on the receiver, don’t you?” Vonnie reported this all to me once she was off the phone. “There are four pins you can set either up or down in whatever combination you choose. Same with your remote. It has to be set to the same combination. Have you checked that?”

No, we hadn’t. The rep explained that all the fans were set to the same combination when they left the factory, and the manufacturer recommended resetting the combination during the installation process. If someone in the neighborhood had the same fan, and if we and that neighbor hadn’t changed our combination, it would be possible that the neighbor’s remote would control our fan and vice versa.

“Has anyone moved into your neighborhood lately?” the rep wanted to know.

“Mendes,” Vonnie said to me with glee in her voice. She even said, “Aha!” And I feared that soon she’d rub her hands together and shout,
Eureka!

She had no use for Mendes and was only too glad to blame the business with the ceiling fan on him. He was too smug, she said. Him and those flashy clothes and his bright red car and that bird?
What a dog-and-pony trick,
she’d said all the times that autumn when she’d heard the neighbors talking about Popcorn and what a delight he was.
Isn’t that a mixed-species metaphor?
I asked her, and she gave me the stink eye.
You know perfectly well what I mean.

The truth is she was jealous. Everything about Mendes—his clothes, his car, his bird—cast a spotlight onto our own lives and made it impossible to hide from the fact that, despite Vonnie’s efforts with interior decorating, there really wasn’t anything pretty about us.

Take that couch, for instance. Take Henry, who came home after getting the short end of a number of fights. Sometimes a hind leg was dragging. On other occasions there was blood matting his chest or bite marks on his haunch or a bare spot on his tail. Take my drinking, which left me sullen and closed off. Take the way Vonnie and I lay down in the dark each night, weary with the burden of staying together long past the point when we should have said good-bye. We didn’t even have the diversion of the ceiling fan once I flipped the pins and changed the combination.

“Wait a minute,” Vonnie said. “If it’s indeed Mendes’s fan that’s been causing the trouble, wouldn’t that mean our remote would have been doing the same thing to his?”

“I suppose.” I looked out our bedroom window to Mendes’s house across the street. “But nothing should go wrong now that I’ve changed the code.”

We stood there awhile with nothing more to say. Then she walked out of the room. I heard her footsteps on the stairs. Spring was coming, but we were at the end.

For some reason, I pointed the remote toward the window and pressed the button that turned on our fan. To my surprise, Mr. Mendes’s garage door began to rise. Surely, it couldn’t be because of my remote. Surely, I thought, Mendes himself was opening that door.

Soon the door was fully up, and I saw that the backup lights on Mr. Mendes’s Volvo were on, and he was backing down the drive. The garage door lowered itself as he started up the court, and I stood there, trembling, still shaken by what I’d thought was possible.

T
hen Popcorn disappeared. “Lit out for the wild blue yonder,” Vonnie said when she came home one afternoon from grocery shopping at Giant Eagle. “I saw the signs.”

“Signs? Do you mean you’re psychic? You saw this coming?”

It was late March, and the first warm days of spring were upon us. We had our sliding deck door open, and a breeze stirred the wind chime Vonnie had on a hook in the ceiling above the floor vent. The chime had hung there all winter so that each time the furnace kicked on, the harmonic tones could soothe us. That chime, the Bamboo Wind Dancer, was the last artifact from Vonnie’s feng shui days. As winter deepened, she began packing everything up. Gone were the candles and the silk flowers and the pottery and the Zen sand garden and the Buddha fountain. Little by little, our house became Spartan. Dishes disappeared from cabinets. Knickknacks and clothes got boxed up and bundled off to Goodwill. I watched our house get loud with emptiness. Just that morning, before I opened the windows and the doors, I noticed how every little sound—footsteps, throat clearing, doors closing—made an echo. We were living in a cavern.

“Since when have I ever seen anything coming?” she asked me. “I’m talking about the reward signs.”

I saw them that afternoon when I went out for a walk—flyers taped to the street sign poles:
LOST BIRD!
There were yard signs, banners spread between two stakes, driven into the ground at the entrance to Saddlebrook Estates. They advertised a website: www.findpopcorn.com. By evening, there were flyers wedged between screen doors and their frames, or stuffed in behind the red flags on mailboxes throughout the subdivision. I saw Mendes delivering them that afternoon. Apparently, he’d taken off work so he could deliver those flyers. I’d never seen him in such a state. Disheveled. He wore a pair of dark gray sweatpants, the ends of the drawstring flapping loose at his crotch, and a faded maroon polo shirt that may have been fetching once but now was just drab. He had on white socks and a pair of house shoes, the shapeless kind covered with tan corduroy. Nothing like his customary sartorial splendor.

“Mendes!” I called to him from across Appaloosa Court. He was coming down the driveway of the house on the corner, a sheaf of flyers hugged to his chest. I could tell he hadn’t shaved or combed his hair. “Mendes,” I called again, but he wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t even look at me. He waved his arm over his head as he went on up the court.

“Like he was telling me to go to hell,” I said to Vonnie when I got back to the house. “I know he’s upset, but jeezy Pete. Whatever happened to common courtesy?”

“It went out the window,” she said. “Flew the coop.”

We laughed because that was the story with Popcorn. He saw his chance for daylight, saw all that sky through an open deck door, and he made his break. Vonnie and I laughed and laughed until we were both doubled over, holding our sides. We laughed until our hoots turned into something else, something I couldn’t quite identify until Vonnie said,“Lex, I’m done. I can’t live with you anymore.”

I knew, then, that our laughter had been the hysteria of letting go.

“We’ve both known it awhile,” I said, and she agreed. We were talking quietly now, and after the explosive noise of our hilarity—a percussion that sent Henry running to find somewhere to hide—our voices were too small for the sorts of words we were saying, words you have to say when you’re finally at that place where you have no other choice, words you have to find for love passing, for lives once lived together now coming apart. “It’s been no picnic these last few years,” she said, and I stood there as she counted off all the things that made it so.

My drinking, for one, which I had to admit had become more frequent those last months. “Look at that couch,” she said. “You bought that when you were drunk. Just look at that ugly couch.”

I didn’t know how to explain that I’d bought it because I’d given an innocent salesgirl cause for alarm. I didn’t know how to say I’d wanted to prove I was a decent man.

Vonnie went on with her list. The way I’d stopped being her friend, she said. “I used to be able to count on you, Lex.” She stopped before she filled in the rest, the part about how I wasn’t there for her anymore and hadn’t been for some time.

Guilty. We were strangers. Like everyone, we’d set forth with no idea of that ever happening, but it had, and now there we were.

Not for long, though.

“I’ve found a townhouse,” she told me. “I’m moving out.”

S
o there were two stories causing quite a buzz in Saddlebrook Estates that spring—Popcorn was missing, and my wife, after thirty-three years of marriage, had left me. I was fifty-five years old, and I was alone. I didn’t even have Henry because the night Vonnie packed as much as she could into her car, saving a space for his carrier, he slipped out the door, and when it came time for her to gather him up, he was nowhere to be found.

“I’m sure he’ll come back soon,” I told her.

We stood in the driveway in the dark, keeping our voices low because the neighbors were out—the Hartwells and the Ship-leys and the Biminrammers, everyone talking about Popcorn and poor Mr. Mendes—and we didn’t want them to hear us.

“Call me when he does,” she said. She opened the door to her Explorer, an SUV now stuffed with what she’d decided was most important to her, important enough to carry away from our house. She turned back to me. “Call me on my cell.”

I stood there a long time after she’d driven away. My life felt strange to me, and I didn’t know what to do next.

Then I saw him. Henry. He came from the direction of Mr. Mendes’s house, slinking, belly low, across the street. I saw him as he passed through the glow of the streetlight. Then he disappeared into the darkness, and I didn’t know where he was until, finally, I felt him rubbing against my leg.

We went inside. I picked up the phone, meaning to call Vonnie’s cell, meaning to tell her to come back and get Henry, but then he jumped up on that couch and began primping it with his front paws, making his bed, getting comfortable. He didn’t care how ugly that couch was. He just knew it was a good place to sleep after being out on the town, a comfort I’d provided for him. He looked up at me once and meowed without making a sound. Then he closed his eyes and went to sleep, and I couldn’t make that call. It was the two of us now.