The Used World (41 page)

The attic—what a mess. Hazel had no idea where the trash had come from, or why every time she climbed these stairs she found a new dead bird. It was like an elephant’s graveyard, but for pigeons. She stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the damage. Rain was steadily dripping in one pot, but in the larger one, the washtub, it was streaming in. The problem was the slate tiles on the roof—no one would replace them and Hazel couldn’t give up and have the roof shingled. When she raised the issue with Caroline, her mother’s answer was always the same: let it fall, dear. Let it fall to the ground.

The fans were working—she turned them on and off—and one of the three leaks had stopped, probably because some dead animal was momentarily filling the hole. She walked from one eave to the next, from Edie’s Love and Ganga Corner to the bar where her uncle’s uniforms had hung. A myth, she thought, running her hand along the boards, that any place is haunted. You walk into an attic, you see a child’s wheelchair, a crutch. You think, It’s here, the past is here. A few years later you carry the wheelchair and crutch down to a truck, park them in a warehouse, and someone else picks them up—who’s haunted now? Where is the past, exactly? Once a week a neophyte, someone from the college, would stand in front of her at the store and say, “My gosh, it’s right there, isn’t it? I can feel the history of this [eggbeater, bean grinder, tablecloth] in my hands. Isn’t that amazing?” And Hazel would nod, try to sound polite as she said, “Oh sure. That’ll be twelve-fifty.” Maybe she should hang a sign by the cash register,
WHATEVER YOU’RE THINKING, KEEP IT TO YOURSELF.

She walked into the eave with the east-facing window. She turned on her flashlight; her mind was blank. If she had been a child and had been asked what she was doing, she’d have said, Nothing. It felt that way. Nothing. I’m just sweeping these flies off the windowsill. I’m just kneeling in front of these boards. She pressed against the seam and pushed, then slid the boards toward her. A bead of sweat slid down the side of her nose, just missing her eye. She stopped. The rain seemed to be slowing, just a bit. Hazel sat down, looked at the opening she’d made. She was a woman who’d tried to figure out what to do with what she’d been given, that was all, and she knew when she was wrong.

She hadn’t been wrong to hate Vernon, but she’d been wrong to see him as her rival. What muddied, crazy thinking—true only for her and for no one else. Vernon had said it himself at the entrance to the emergency room, screaming at Hazel and at Albert, who was trying to help the ER nurse get Finney onto a gurney. “
You
killed her,” he screamed at Hazel, pointing his finger right in her face. You killed her.

She pulled the boards open another inch, almost enough to slip her flashlight inside. Killed Finney, killed Albert. Caroline had trusted Hazel to know Finney’s history—it was
her job,
after all—but Hazel had seen her work as beginning and ending with getting Finney through the door, getting the problem taken care of so they could all start again. A clotting disorder? Who would ask about something like that when Finney had seen the light for just a moment, and Hazel’s task was to swoop in and take advantage of it? And how could Hazel not have known about it, anyway?

Her flashlight revealed a crawl space about the size of a closet. In one corner there was…it looked like a pile of old newspapers, mostly shredded. There was a cigar box, the lid askew. A pile of old bottles—God, it was the same everywhere—men and their bottles. In the opposite corner she saw half a doll, the other half in shadow. She swung the flashlight across the rear wall…nothing else. And then, just to the left of her head, on the opposite side from where she’d begun, an old wooden box.

Vernon had screamed,
You killed her,
and Hazel just stood there, studying the face Finney so adored. She wanted to reach out and lay her hand against his cheek, she’d never seen a more beautiful man in her life. I get it, she whispered, I get it now. It was just a sickness, or no—no—a condition, like color-blindness or a clubfoot. A man so beautiful was necessarily harsh, the Greeks even had a phrase for it. And what was it Finney said?
He can be so tender, you don’t know him.
He was a labyrinth, and at the center there was either a trapped hero or a monster. Then he screamed again, “You and your mother killed her and I…” and Hazel lost her train of thought about beauty, and kicked him as hard as she could in the groin. He doubled over so fast he looked like a puppet with a broken string. But there was no relief in the gesture, because as soon as she saw his knees hit the ground, she knew Finney was really dead.

She brought the box out of the crawl space and just held it. Hazel was here in Rebekah’s name, trying to measure and overcome Rebekah’s battle. The little red-haired girl, holiness itself, born less than a year after Finney died. A miracle after all the years they’d waited, Ruth had told her daughter. There was no doubt Rebekah was at risk, and had been since Christmas Day, but this morning when Hazel awoke she felt various strands converging, and she knew she had to act. If there was really a baby in this box, then every step Hazel had taken, every word she’d spoken, had been in good faith. But if there was nothing here…then she was a tired old woman with some astrology books and a bunch of cats. Smoke and mirrors. She sighed, slipped her thumbnail under the rusty latch. Her bifocals weren’t centered and she couldn’t quite see what she was doing. “Ah, dammit,” she said, lifting her glasses with one hand while the other fumbled with the latch. Sweat ran into her right eye, then into the left. Why hadn’t she just gone out there, to Peter’s? Hazel stopped, lowered her glasses. Why was the answer here, in this little casket? She had called Claudia to go because that was a story she was telling called Claudia and Rebekah. And their story didn’t start here, in this attic, it didn’t start or end with Hazel.

She took a deep breath, lowered her head into her hands, smearing her forehead with rust. She sat that way a long time, listening to the weather. Marguerite Henrietta Post had lived in the house alone until she died at seventy-three. The outline of her story had been easy enough to trace at the county courthouse, but there was no record of a baby, and of course there wouldn’t have been. An unmarried woman from old money. You do what you have to do; Caroline had said it herself, it was her mantra in those days. Hazel tried again to lift the latch, halfheartedly. It was no good. A different kind of person would have taken the box with her, might have kept it in her house as a macabre reminder, someone younger or with more nerve. Someone else might have buried it, said some words over the bones. But Hazel just stuck it back in the crawl space, closed the boards.

Outside, she held her hands up to the sky, let the rain wash them. She trudged around to the back of the house, to the clinic entrance. Now
there
was a crime scene: broken windows, ivy crawling through the frame. She walked up the steps, shone the flashlight inside. The plank floor of the waiting room was still stained with blood, Jim Hank’s in a wide pool near where the desk once sat, and Finney’s over that and all the way to the door. And footprints in the blood—Caroline’s, Hazel’s, Albert’s. Hazel had made one halfhearted attempt to clean it, but barely got as far as the first spot before collapsing, sobbing and sick. She’d been grateful there was no one there to see her. But it hadn’t been a crime scene, had it? Albert guaranteed it with his death.

He’d driven home from the hospital raging so furiously, Hazel was more than a little afraid he would harm her. She and her mother had destroyed everything he’d worked for, he yelled, they had robbed him of a lifetime of spotless conduct and honorable accomplishments. The more he screamed at her, the more she told him, not out of fear but because in truth she hated him and she was enjoying watching him change colors and tug at his necktie as if it were choking him, and her life was going to be seriously short of pleasure from that night on, she was certain. At the house they’d found Caroline packing her records into cardboard boxes, and Albert hit Caroline once across the mouth, then strode screaming toward the barn, where he’d grabbed a can of kerosene and used it to start a fire in the fire ring. He intended to burn everything, every trace of evidence. He got the box Caroline was holding by raising his fist a second time, but as soon as he was out the door Caroline said to Hazel, “Tell me what we must do to stop him.” Hazel was thinking, thinking, there were guns in this house, there were guns in every house in America, but where? She was thinking but there was a roaring in her ears, too, it wasn’t just shock or grief, it was a noise. “Ah, your sister is home,” Caroline said coolly, as though she weren’t bleeding from the mouth. And just like that, Hazel knew she had an answer.

“Edie!” she’d yelled, running outside. “Charlie! Daddy has hit Mother and he says he’s going to kill her! He’s gone crazy, look—he’s burning medical records.”

Edie and Charlie, stoned stoned stoned. They both looked at her a beat too long, as if their electrical devices needed new batteries. Then Charlie said, “What’d you say, man?” just as Albert ran back toward the house, screaming at Edie and Charlie to leave, this was nothing to do with them.

“Oh yeah?” Charlie stepped up into Albert’s face.

“You hit Mother?” Edie said from behind Charlie.

“Get out of my way.” Albert pushed Charlie away, and for good measure, spit at him.

And then Charlie was backing Albert toward the fire using just his chest, not pushing him, not swinging. Hazel and Edie followed at a safe distance. The men were shouting in each other’s faces, and sometimes Albert got the upper hand and Charlie would have to take a step backward, but more often it was Albert backing up. Her father stopped suddenly, just stopped. His face was scarlet, then white. He raised a finger to point at Charlie (or maybe at Hazel) and collapsed to the ground.

Charlie turned back to Edie, rubbed his hands together proudly. “Blew that fucker’s gasket,” he said.

They loaded Albert in his own car to return to the hospital he’d just left. “Hazel,” Caroline said, “stay here. Salvage what you can of that box in the fire ring. Get all my other boxes, put them in my car. I want you to take them to this address, it’s a woman on Washington Street in Jonah….”

“Mom,” Hazel said, looking at the scrap of paper in the dome light, “this is on East Washington. That’s the projects.”

Caroline looked confused. “And?”

“You want me to go there alone?”

“Darling”—Caroline rested her open hand on Hazel’s face—“I am so sorry. But you’ll survive all of this.”

What Caroline had meant, of course—and it had taken Hazel a good long time to figure it out—was that nothing could break
her.
She had married whom she married and stayed with him because she had work to do, and nothing was going to stop her. He was in the backseat gasping for life and Caroline made sure those boxes were secure.

The rain was slowing down, light returning to the sky. Hazel sat down on the clinic steps, looked out at the barn. Her mother hadn’t planned it, but she hadn’t even had to lie. Someone broke into the clinic, threatening her and her daughter. No, she’d never seen the man before. Yes, it seemed he’d had Finney, who was suffering a miscarriage, in his truck. No, she didn’t know why. The stranger had also assaulted Finney’s husband, Jim Hank, with a crowbar; yes, the boy in Critical Care. No, he couldn’t speak to the events because he was in a coma. The policeman who’d interviewed Caroline said no one at the hospital had ever seen the man before, the one who’d dropped off the dead girl, he was a complete stranger. Caroline suggested perhaps he was a member of a cult or some such, there were so many of those around these days. And Albert died neatly, his original will intact. The money he’d been saving to donate to the hospital to build a wing in his name was still in their joint savings account. Caroline moved it all, every dime, into an account she shared with Hazel, and off they went, Caroline into a neat, small apartment in town where she began to compile her life’s work, and Hazel to the Used World Emporium. Somebody had to do something with all that junk.

Hazel stood, tried to wipe off the back of her coat. The four-story barn was collapsing; the back half was already down, shoulder-hunched against the rain. Hunters had added thousands more holes to the corncrib, and somebody snuck back fairly often and had a fire—there were always fresh ashes in the fire ring. The temple will fall because the temple is always falling, Rebekah had said to her in exasperation, in a conversation about prophecy. Hazel had laughed, said the temple will fall, there will be terrible weather and firstborns will die. A corrupt man will lead the state and there will be blood in the streets. That’s the easiest stuff in the world, she’d said to bright-eyed Rebekah. Tell me something harder, like how my next step will set into motion a chain of events I could
never
foresee. Tell me how to live with the outcome.

Hazel opened her car door, paused as she always paused before leaving. She looked at the meadow, the treetops, the old county road, and down the lane toward the mailbox, where she had felt herself filled with spirits in a long-ago month just like this one. As she watched, they streaked past, as they often did, the cemetery dogs, a blur of muscle, fur, and intention. She’d seen them many times before. She remembered asking Edie if she could see them, when Edie was the sort of teenager who had undoubtedly seen stranger things, and her sister had answered, “We live in the damn
country,
Hazel, damn dogs
everywhere.
”