Strange but True (30 page)

“You drove Ronnie's car here,” she says, her voice weighted with longing, just as it had sounded last night when she inquired about the car then too.

Philip turns to her and nods, but Melissa keeps her eyes on the old cream-colored Mercedes. “We were supposed to take that car to the prom instead of renting a limo.”

“I know,” Philip tells her. “You mentioned that yesterday.”

Melissa stops staring out at the street and brings her gaze to him again. “I did? Oh, that's right, I did. I just woke up from a nap, and I've had a pretty rough day, so I'm not thinking straight. Would you like to come inside?”

Philip doesn't see another choice just yet so he steps into the confines of her cold, dark house. Inside, the chilled air smells less like chimney smoke and more like stale cigarette smoke, the same as her car. The thought of her puffing away during her pregnancy squelches any pity Philip had been feeling for her ever since they separated last night. In its place, a sense of doubt and apprehension returns, along with a distinct feeling of disgust.

“Do you want to sit down?” Melissa asks, adjusting the sagging cushions on her tattered sofa and smiling that eerie, closed-lip smile.

Reluctantly, Philip puts aside his crutch and takes a seat, crossing his arms in front of himself. He cannot help but feel bothered by how happy she is to see him. He knows he should tell her this instant that he has not changed his mind. He knows he should ask about his mother again and make sure to get an answer this time. But as his eyes adjust to the dim light, and he begins to take in the details of his surroundings, Philip is startled into speechlessness. Before him on the coffee table is a messy pile of newspapers, at least twenty of them, all from the day after his brother died with the photo of that crushed limousine on the cover. Over on the mantel of the fireplace are more pictures of Ronnie—two of them duplicates of the ones taped to her dashboard. Philip's eyes go to the bookshelves next, and he scans the titles:
Visits from the After-Life, To the Other Side and Back, Blessings from Beyond, Conversations with the Dearly Departed, The Dead Are Always Watching, The Language of the Deceased, Breaking Through to the Fourth Dimension
, and countless others. He spots just one lonely title that is not like the rest:
Your
A
to
Z
Guide to Pregnancy
.

Maybe she should look under
C
, he thinks, and read up on the effects of cigarette smoking on fetuses.

“Philip,” Melissa says. “Did you hear me?”

“I'm sorry, what?”

“I asked if you wanted something to drink.”

His gaze moves past her to a row of empty wine bottles on the floor of the kitchenette. This girl has lost her mind, Philip tells himself. What other explanation can there be except that she has lost her mind?

Melissa must sense what he is thinking, because she says, “Those bottles are really old. Obviously, I don't drink any alcohol right now because of the baby.”

“Obviously,” Philip says, more confused than ever.

“I just have cranberry juice or water to offer you.”

He tells her water is fine while silently urging himself to ask about his mother. But he feels nauseated now. Not just from the ten cups of coffee roiling in his stomach, but also from being thrust into this shrine dedicated to his brother's memory. Philip has to pee as well. “Can I use your bathroom?”

Melissa glances at the closed white door at the end of the short hallway. “Sure,” she says. “No one but me and my cat ever goes in there, though. So it's a bit of a mess.”

“That's okay,” Philip tells her and forces a smile. “You saw the way our kitchen looked last night.”

He uses his crutch to stand and makes his way down the hall as her cat darts out of nowhere and runs behind the sofa. Once he is inside the tiny bathroom, Philip takes a deep breath and unzips his jeans. As he stands over the toilet, looking around at the mildewed shower curtain beside him and the dirty Kitty Litter box on the floor, he wonders how this could have happened. How could a girl who once seemed so normal wind up as this damaged young woman living in this creepy house, surrounded by memories of her dead boyfriend and believing that the baby inside her is his?

Yes, the accident was terrible.

Yes, she obviously loved Ronnie.

But it has been nearly five years—long enough for most anyone to move on.

By the time Philip finishes peeing, he is no closer to an answer. He flushes, zips his jeans, then turns around to use the sink. That's when he catches sight of something he hadn't noticed in his rush to get to the toilet. There, on the back of the bathroom door, hangs Melissa's prom dress. The sleeves torn. The lace shredded. The bloodstains dried to a murky black color on the yellowed material. The sight of it, a ghost rising up before him, causes Philip's mouth to drop open once more. His stomach twists into a tight knot that won't loosen. He yanks open the door and hobbles down the hallway to find Missy sitting on the sofa, two glasses of water before her on the coffee table, that black and white cat beside her now. She runs her hand from the V-shaped fur between its ears all the way down to its spotted tail, shaking out the loose hair between her fingers.

Philip tells himself that he should get the hell out of here. Cop or no cop back on the roads waiting for him, he should leave. Now. He wants no part in this insanity any longer. In the end, though, he does not heed his own advice. Caught up in his dismay, disgust, and confusion, Philip finds his mouth moving, and he does to Melissa exactly what he came to prevent his mother from doing. At first, his words come out in clumped, disconnected phrases. “That dress on the back of the door … All of these books… So many copies of the newspaper.” Philip stops and puts his hand to his cheek, then gathers his thoughts and presses on. “Melissa, this is what I was talking about last night. There is something terribly wrong with you.”

Missy stops petting the cat as the last bits of loose fur float in the air around her. The tight-lipped smile she had worn since she first opened the door and saw Philip fades from her face.

“I'm sorry, Melissa. But there is no other way to say it. You have a serious problem. It's like you're stuck on my brother. And no matter what miracle you think has happened with this pregnancy, the fact is he is dead. Ronnie is dead. You have to stop pining and obsessing over someone who is no longer here. Even if he was still alive, the truth is, most high school relationships don't last anyway. The two of you probably wouldn't even be together anymore.”

The words keep coming, and though he doesn't realize it, the sense of urgency Philip feels causes his voice to climb higher and higher until he is shouting at her. The cat leaps from the sofa and scurries down the hall. Melissa presses her hands together in the shape of a tight little prayer over her stomach. Only twice does she interrupt. First, when Philip tells her that she should not be smoking, and she says that she has not had a single cigarette since the day she realized she was pregnant. Second, when Philip points to those wine bottles on the floor, and she insists once more that they are from a long time ago. Philip plows right over her denials, though. He keeps rambling on and on until finally returning to the horrible, undeniable fact of that dress on the back of the door.

“Why on earth would you keep something like that around to look at every day? I just don't understand, Melissa. Why?”

When he is finished, she does not burst into tears the way she did last night after his mother yelled. In fact, she does not say another word. Her hands stay pressed together in that prayer position over the mound of her stomach as she rocks gently back and forth on the couch. Behind her, through a split in the curtains over the picture window, Philip can see the neighbor's house and that stone chimney with the smoke rising up from it.

“Well?” he says.

Melissa looks at him with her scarred, motionless face. She does not respond.

“Well?” Philip says again.

Finally, she opens her mouth. In an angry voice, charged with conviction, she tells him, “I am not crazy. You believe what you want, but I know what is happening to me. I know. And I don't have to explain myself to you. Because you have no idea what I've been through.”

“Melissa, we all went through it. Maybe you were in the accident with Ronnie. But we all lost him that night.”

“I'm not talking about the accident!” she shouts. “I'm talking about what happened that summer after!”

“I don't understand,” Philip says. “What happened?”

“Why don't you ask your father? Or go find mine and ask him.”

He is about to ask what she means when there is a heavy knock on the door. My mother, Philip thinks. He cannot remember the last time he felt this grateful for her presence. But when Melissa rises from the sofa and opens the door, Philip sees that it is not his mother after all. A tall, lumberjack of a man steps inside the house, wearing a faded John Deere cap, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a gold Timex ticking on his thick, hairy wrist.

“I heard shouting,” he says in a deep, gravelly voice as his gaze travels to Melissa then to Philip, then back. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything is fine, Mr. Erwin. Thank you.”

Philip remembers that police officer's question when she squinted at the cluster of houses:
Isn't this Bill Erwin's place?
He studies the man's face, which looks so haggard and weathered that he may as well be scarred too. His size and height leave Philip feeling dwarfed in his presence. It is the way he used to feel back in high school when Jedd Kusam cornered him in the hallway. The way he felt that last night in Donnelly Fiume's studio when he opened the door to see that tall, muscular stranger standing there.

“You were the one the cops stopped out front a while ago,” Bill says.

“Cops?” Melissa says. “What cops?”

So someone had been watching after all, Philip thinks. “It was just one cop. And it was nothing really. No big deal.”

Bill Erwin won't let it go. “What was the problem?”

“The officer wanted me to—” Philip stops before saying that she wanted him to get a ride home, since he doesn't want this man to offer one. There is something about him that Philip doesn't like. As he tries to determine exactly what that something is, he notices a rectangular bulge in the front pocket of his flannel shirt, pressing against the raggedy material. “I was driving too fast. The cop gave me a warning. That's all.”

The answer seems to satisfy him, because he softens his tone when he speaks next. “We all know you have to be careful on these roads.”

After that, he asks Melissa once more if everything is okay. When she tells him that everything is fine, he turns to go without so much as saying good-bye to Philip. Melissa closes the door behind him, and Philip steps closer to the window by the sofa and pulls back the curtain. Outside, the sky is growing dark. Bill Erwin is almost a silhouette as he moves across the lawn then stops at the front door to pull a cigarette from his shirt pocket and light it. He takes a long drag then stomps his boots on the mat and steps inside.

Philip keeps watching but cannot see, of course, as Bill closes the door behind him and walks inside the living room of his and Gail's house. He cannot see, of course, as Bill stands on the braided rug by the basement door, fidgeting with that cigarette as he listens to the sound of Gail moaning in the basement. Somehow, he had managed to stop the bleeding. Somehow, by some strange miracle, she is still alive down there. For this, Bill is grateful, though he does not know what to do next. If he takes her to the hospital, she is certain to tell the first person she can about how this happened to her. Eventually, she will speak up about Melissa and those pills, which will lead the police to believe that the things Donna Fellman said years ago were true. Eventually, that will lead them to suspect Bill of those other women over the years, which could lead them to that vacant house in the back. So instead of taking her to the hospital, Bill dragged the comforter and quilts from their bed down to the basement. He arranged them on the floor, lifted her body, and placed her on top of them. He gave her water. He put ice packs on her ankles, which have ballooned to impossible sizes.

But her moaning won't stop.

Bill opens the door just a crack and tells her, “Please be quiet, dear. Please. I'm thinking about what I should do. I need quiet so I can figure out what we should do next.”

It seems that all through their marriage he has been waiting for something like this to happen. He thinks of all the nights he sat at the table while Gail cooked dinner. Bill would look up at the large knife in her hand as she pulled it out of a drawer to slice a roast, and the same questions would flash though his mind:
What if I lost control the way I did with those other women? What if something in me rose up and I grabbed that knife from her?

He does not want to think about that now. Until he can figure out what to do next, he goes about making another check of the front and back windows the way he has done compulsively since this morning. Then he takes down one of the books from the shelf,
Weird News from Around the World
, to calm his nerves. He reads a story about a man in New York City who spent his days begging on the streets, then took all the money he made back to his six-bedroom house in New Jersey. Another about a family in Switzerland who was stuck on a faulty ski lift for thirteen hours in bitter cold and winds, but survived. Bill keeps on reading as Gail moans beneath him, and outside those birds stay perched on the branches, and next door, Melissa and Philip argue back and forth.

Finally, Melissa says, “Look, I don't want to fight with you anymore.”

Philip is about to look away from the window when he notices something glinting in the corner of his vision. He stretches his neck to see what it was or where it came from. But whatever it was is gone, so he turns back to her. “What did you mean before about my father?”