The Open Curtain (15 page)

Her aunt reached down to the coffee table, took a saltine from its plastic sleeve then commented on doing so, as if this act might be of interest to Lyndi, might even aid in her healing. She pronounced the last syllable like tines of a fork.

“You’ve got to go on,” she said, munching as if tranquilized. “You can’t let yourself fade from existence.”

Whatever,
thought Lyndi.

Her aunt tugged at the hem of her dress.

“I’ve been married twice,” she said. “Actually three times, but the second one didn’t count because there was hardly any sex to speak of. So I know a lot about wanting to die.”

Then her aunt’s eyes were tearing up, the last corner of the saltine slipping from her hand. Lyndi looked around for Kleenex. There wasn’t any. Still crying, her aunt reached into the plastic sleeve for another saltine.

“Together we’ll make it through,” her aunt managed through tears, spitting cracker dust. “You and me against the world, kiddo.”

Dear God,
thought Lyndi,
kill me now.

It was hard to stay clear of her aunt’s chats, but once her aunt was chatted out, Lyndi was able to slip away. She would go to the library to read and do homework. She continued doing her homework though certain of her professors had suggested she’d done well enough so far; they were willing to just give her the grade she deserved to that point in the class, give her time to recover. This
was
recovering, she felt, doing things she would do if her parents were still alive, though her aunt claimed a better term for it was
denial.

Whatever it was, she was doing it. Up at seven, showered, made up, making her own breakfast. Her aunt stumbled in to eat with her, rubbing her eyes, falling back on a terry-cloth robe once her peignoir was dirty. A glass of orange juice, and then her aunt would quiz her about the coming day. If she didn’t have her schedule sufficiently full, that was grounds for scheduling a chat; if it was too full her aunt would rattle on about denial, threaten to set up an appointment with a
counselor.

“Not a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist”—her aunt didn’t believe in pseudo-scientific hoodoo—“but a good plain honest-to-goodness counselor, grain-fed on common sense.”

“Grain-fed?” Lyndi asked.

“Don’t you get smart with me, Missy,” her aunt said, wagging her finger. “Turn me against you and who else you got in the world?”

No one, it was true, but she wasn’t convinced that no one was a step down. Her aunt seemed more of a contradiction each day, an amalgam of many different anxieties in collision. Not a remarkable woman exactly, but a woman pieced together with more than a few visible seams. These seams all a result of
coming to terms
and
not fading out of existence.

She placed egg, scrambled, on a plate.

Lyndi juggled the chats and the threats about counselors, walking a line that would allow her a minimum of the one and nothing more than the threat of the other. Her aunt seemed to regard Lyndi as an indentured servant, leaving all the meals to her niece, though Lyndi’s experience with cooking was minimal. The grocery shopping, too, was left to Lyndi and that, along with school and cooking and laundry, kept her busy enough that she was barely lying when she told her aunt she had a full schedule. The one task Aunt Debby reserved for herself was to give Lyndi what she called
a complete fashion makeover.
“A new you for a new life,” her aunt kept saying. As it turned out, Lyndi was an
autumn
and had been dressing all wrong for her coloration. Her whole wardrobe was
disastrous,
would have to be abandoned in favor of
muted tones.
Her makeup too wasn’t quite right; surely an
Avon Lady lived in the neighborhood?
You know, Avon Calling?
When Lyndi claimed she didn’t know, her aunt shook her head. “Not to speak ill of the dead,” she claimed, “but your mother didn’t teach you a damn thing about what it takes to be a woman.”

There were trips to the mall, her aunt lamenting over Utah’s lack of high-end boutiques. Clothing at Nordstrom and JCPenney, most of which made Lyndi look like she was eighteen going on forty-five. Professional outfits straight out of realty ads, business skirts that buzzed against her thighs when she walked, pastel twin sets, sweater dresses with fringed sleeve ends. Her aunt was there, beside her, each time holding up something new and even less to her taste. Lyndi was sent, laden down, to the fitting room, made to come out wearing each outfit, twirl, slide on to the next. Then on to the Brass Plum, more wearing, more whirling, bags slowly accumulating with clothing that had nothing to do with her and that, if she wore them at all, would feel imposed, borrowed. Ahead: a makeup counter garrisoned with stick-thin women plastered with artificial faces, accessories clicking against each other like mandibles. Two sturdy women wandering the lingerie section, a man watching them surreptitiously from across the aisle. A seeing-eye dog guiding a woman who was pale-eyed but who had none of the mannerisms of the blind. Lyndi’s hand grabbed, tugged onto a counter, palm up. Escalator halfway across the store, three children running up and down, treads clanking. A faint sensation at the extreme of her arm. “Tell me what you think,” a voice saying, but was it to her? An array of bottles, all hues. Light fixtures, circular, long broken lines. Aisles below, between sections and centers, jagged and strung about. “Do try, dear”—her aunt’s voice, bored—“do make an effort.” Near the escalator two children tipped over a mannequin, its grinning head rolling off. Watching her own hand coming off the counter and toward her face, as if propelled.

“Darling, whatever can be the matter? You’re shaking.”

“I’m fine,” she said, hearing her voice resound from a distance. She could not bring anything quite into attention, her eyes flicking rapidly from one thing to the next. The perfume was too strong on her wrist. “I need air,” she claimed.

“Shall I go with you, dear?” her aunt asked.

There were bags at her feet and she pushed through them, stumbled down the first aisle she came to. She half-turned and looked back, saw her aunt behind her smiling oddly, her mouth moving too slowly. The film of her life was running down. The aisle swerved abruptly out from under her
feet and she found herself plunging through racks of clothing, hangers jangling, glints of light everywhere. An aisle again and she followed it around a curve to find herself at a perfume counter, staring at somebody’s aunt.

“I thought you needed air,” the aunt said.

“I,” she said, then clamped her mouth shut and pushed off again, going the other way this time and keeping to one path until it led her round and about and out of the store into the mall proper. A larger interior courtyard with hundreds of people milling about, a fountain, kiosks strung in all directions with sunglasses and blown-glass animals and temple replicas, strange solitary plants scattered and dying in awkward pots, arranged without pattern across a faux-marble floor. Paths to either side, no sign of air. Somebody beside her, asking was she all right, but she could not see him precisely and then she was off and away again, sloping right. Shops everywhere, neon glaring, another fountain, a food court packed with tables and chairs, crowded with people and bags and babies and food. Through them and out the other side, past rows of identical shops, face wavering in the glassed fronts, and then, at last, the end of the path, a set of doors leading outside.

Open air, light. It was dizzying. Standing on the edge of the sidewalk, under an awning, the parking lot slick with rain now past, its smell still strong in the air. Walking, starting up one row, cutting between cars, cutting back again until she was near a car that looked like hers but wasn’t. She looked around for her car, couldn’t see it. She felt her pocket for the keys, realized her aunt still had them in her purse.

She found a lamppost, sat on its base with her back against it, and waited. At first she covered her face with her hands and then, when her breathing steadied, she uncovered her face and stood again to look for the car.

And then suddenly she saw, passing by her in slow procession, her family: her father, dull-eyed and pale, his keys out and held awkwardly, his skin hanging open and gaping at his throat. He stopped and turned his eyes upon her briefly, then continued on. Her sister, nervous and birdlike, then her mother, slightly behind, pale. Behind them, gaze averted from her, was Rudd, holding his throat, limping.

She waited for a glimpse of the killer. When he didn’t come, she stood to look for them, saw them climb into a car that looked like hers but wasn’t. It pulled away. Yet when she went to where the car had been, it was still there. She stood staring at it. When she tried the door, it was locked.

She walked back toward the mall, where a taxi was parked just outside the nearest entrance. She climbed in.

“I need to go home,” she said.

“Where’s home?” the driver asked.

She started to offer her address, trailed off. “The hospital,” she said. “I want to go to the hospital.”

“Anything you say,” he said, looking at her in the rearview mirror. He started the cab, drove.

H
er aunt returned to California, pronouncing Lyndi
hopelessly self-absorbed and wading neck-deep in denial,
threatening to come back at a moment’s notice if Lyndi should prove healable after all. Lyndi, bored and alone, started going regularly to the hospital and sitting beside the comatose Rudd. His throat was unpacked, the stitching removed to reveal a dribbled red scar slowly fading pale. She would sit with her hands in her lap, near the head of the bed. Once she pulled his eyelids open with her fingers. She saw a thin slit of blue under one lid, what was visible of a rolled-up eye. Under the other lid she only saw white.

They fed him from tubes. As the days went by he grew thinner, his cheekbones becoming sharply defined, the skin settling on his face. Sometimes she helped the nurse move him and change the sheets, saw the sores beginning along his legs and back. Sometimes too she would speak to him, ask how, or if, he had known her mother and father and sister. What had it looked like, she asked him, a man coming at him, covered in her parents’ blood, brandishing a knife or razor or sharpened rock or shard of glass? She imagined four men, one for each possible weapon, all of their faces obscured. Or perhaps the killer was a fifth man, with a different weapon, with no face at all. They all crowded in her head, jostling. Or perhaps the killer had approached from behind, she said, partly to Rudd, and he had had no warning—a sharp, hot pain at his throat and a rush of blood down his shirt.

He had survived, she told herself, and for that reason would have to stand in for father and mother and sister all at once. They were connected through violence.

Sometimes, if she was there still by early evening, Rudd’s mother would come. Once Lyndi tried to introduce herself, but his mother merely
regarded her oddly, half-smiled, and said nothing.
Are you deaf?
Lyndi almost said. Instead, she got up and left, and from then on departed quickly whenever his mother arrived, going to get some dinner and then coming back once she was certain his mother would be gone.

In her head and sometimes out loud she had conversations with him. What did he like to do, what TV shows had he grown up watching, who were his favorite movie stars? “No,” she said, when he did not answer, “really? Me too.” How was high school life? Was he sorry to miss graduation? “No friends? No girlfriend? No one to visit you? What? A nice looking boy like you?” The policeman at the door sometimes stared in, watching her. Sometimes she drew the curtain around herself and Rudd, but still felt the policeman staring at her feet and ankles. She started sitting on the edge of the bed, which was high enough to keep her feet above the bottom of the curtain. She told Rudd about her aunt, about her parents and sister. She talked until the policeman came in at the end of the night to usher her out—“my shift’s over; nothing personal, but visiting hours are long gone”—locking the room door and going home himself. “My family didn’t even
like
the mountains,” she would tell Rudd the next day when she came back. “They hadn’t been on a picnic in years. You wake up one morning,” she said. “You decide to go to the mountains, on a whim, and you’re killed. What about you?” she asked. “Was it a whim for you as well? I can say anything to you,” she said. “Something utterly random. Pigskin,” she said. “You’re the only boy in the whole world I’ve ever been able to say pigskin to,” she said, and then wondered why she had said that, of all things. She traced the pink scar across his throat with her finger,
pigskin,
let her hand glide along his jaw and up to cup his ear. She had already spoken hours to him, why should she not touch him? She ran her fingers into his hair.
What do you care about?
she wondered.
What do you believe in?
Perhaps, she thought, he is not so different from me.

A nurse came in and undid Rudd’s restraints. She rolled his body to one side of the bed, the tube that ran down his throat tightening against his neck.