This Must Be the Place: A Novel (14 page)

“Dani’d make a pretty lame stew. Maybe they could grind her up, make Daniburgers.”

“Ha, gross,” Andrew said, and then, more firmly, “See you tomorrow.”

“ ’Bye,” Oneida said. With a click, the connection to Andrew Lu and the rest of the world died, without her being prepared for the loss of either. She lay still on her bed for a while, listening to herself breathe and trying not to think. Waiting for a reason, she thought, to feel normal again.

The relativity of normal was something Oneida had never truly appreciated until she’d come home from school the day before and almost stepped in the pool of dark congealed blood in the front hall. Her foot froze in midair over the basketball-sized puddle, her brain having issued an immediate moratorium on movement until it had a chance to figure out what the hell was going on. That was blood, wasn’t it? Real human blood seeping between the yellow and blue tiles of the foyer. And if there was blood in the foyer, and it was dark and starting to dry, and her mother hadn’t cleaned it up yet—

The moratorium repealed, Oneida flew through the house to the kitchen, where her mother’s baking equipment lay spread over everything. A lump of fondant had dried to a hard white stone in the big blue mixing bowl. She ran through the dining room, the study, the family room, and back through the foyer again, though it wasn’t until she thought to call her mother’s cell phone that her energy had any focus or direction. Her hands shook as she held the kitchen phone to her ear and when it went directly to her mother’s voice mail—
You’ve reached Desdemona Jones and the White Wedding Baking Company. Leave a message and I’ll return your call as soon as possible. Thanks for calling; it’s always a nice day for a white wedding
—Oneida dropped the receiver and slid
down against the green cabinets, hugging her knees to her chin and chewing her lip until she pulled a strip of skin free with her teeth. She stared at the fridge opposite her, dotted with magnets and old school papers tattooed with As and 95s and 92s and 100s in red ink, but nothing else. Her mother had left no note. There was blood in the front hall; there was no note; there was no Mona.

She didn’t know how long she sat there, but it was long enough for the sun to set, for the chill of night to settle over the house. She was kneeling over the pool of blood with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex when the front door opened and Mona, struggling under the arm of Arthur Rook, came home. Oneida saw them before they saw her. Her mother was concentrating hard on maneuvering the tall man through the door and into the house, and Mr. Rook, wobbly, disheveled, eyes large and glassy, looked like he wouldn’t notice his own hand if he held it in front of his face.

“Mom,” Oneida said, but her mother didn’t notice. She wasn’t sure if she’d spoken out loud, so she tried again. “Hey, Mom,” she said, and stood up, Windex in hand.

“Oh—oh, honey, I’m sor—” Mona, spent, couldn’t finish, and Oneida wasn’t sure the state her mother had arrived in was any more comforting than the grim worst-case scenarios she had imagined while waiting. Mr. Rook leaned against Mona heavily, his head bobbing, and Mona staggered across the hall. Her face crumpled and the look she gave her daughter—imploring, remorseful, and, worst of all, pitiable—made Oneida want to run up to her room and never come out. But she did exactly what her mother wanted to ask for but couldn’t: Oneida took Arthur Rook’s other arm and the two of them carried him upstairs.

As soon as they laid him on his bed, Mona sent Oneida downstairs to reheat a bowl of chicken soup, and Oneida, no longer sure if any of this was real or not, was stunned into complicity. When she returned with the bowl of steaming soup on a tray, her mother was leaning over Mr. Rook, dabbing at his chest with a cotton ball. She tipped a bottle of iodine against the cotton she held in her hand and Oneida, thankful she had already set the tray on the dresser, saw where the pool of blood had come from: a mass of jagged lacerations across Mr. Rook’s chest, trailing lumpy stitches and red welts. He had been shaved, and the black
bristles against the raw pink of his skin made Oneida’s stomach turn and cheeks color. Head tilted back on the pillow, eyes closed, mouth slightly open—he was absolutely pathetic and, worse, Mona was gazing at him with the rapt, tender attention Oneida had never seen directed at anyone but herself, struck low with the chicken pox or the flu. This time she
did
run to her room, without saying a word to her mother, without dinner, and without any intention of ever coming out again.

There was a knock on the door about fifteen minutes later, and Mona entered before waiting for Oneida to respond. Oneida was curled up in her bed, under the sheets, only visible from the eyes up. She watched her mother sit on the edge of the bed beside her and felt Mona’s hand run through her unruly hair.

“I am
so
sorry, Oneida,” she said. Oneida blinked. “He tripped on the stairs while he was holding a . . . picture frame. You know, that photograph in the main hall. It—it all happened so fast, I got in the ambulance with him and didn’t think how long it would take, how long we’d be at the hospital.”

Oneida hurt in a way she had neither a name for nor the words to talk about. She let Mona go on.

“They kept him awhile to make sure his brain wasn’t—I guess his concussion was minor compared to the cuts, thank God.” Mona took her hand out of her daughter’s hair and pushed her own back from her forehead. She sniffed loudly and pressed her fingers to her temple. “I feel terrible. Arthur Rook is not a well man.”

“So why is he still here?” came out before Oneida could evaluate its impact on the situation.

Mona acted as though she didn’t hear Oneida’s question. “I should have left you a note, I know . . . or told Anna or Sherman or—where are they? Have you seen them?” No, Oneida thought; nobody was around. She rolled over, away from her mother. Mona didn’t seem to notice the intentional diss and kept right on talking, about how sudden it had been, how she had acted without thinking, how it would never happen again, and how his cat was wandering around the house, be careful about leaving the front door open.

A tiny flame of rage sputtered in Oneida’s chest. She had never felt anything remotely resembling rage toward her mother, but there it was:
a spark of resentment, pure and sharp, that she knew neither how to control nor if she even wanted to. How dare her mother leave her like that all afternoon? How dare she care more about a strange man than about her daughter? How dare she put her, Oneida, through that hell of uncertainty and barely do anything to atone for it? Oneida learned on Friday evening that true anger is completely cold and completely silent. Her mother, hand wavering, touched Oneida’s cheek and kissed her good night, but Oneida remained motionless, empty, mute. She hated her mother. She hated her mother for making her love her like that: blindly, foolishly, without asking questions, assuming an understanding that clearly didn’t exist. She’d been abandoned and betrayed by her best friend.

It was only seven o’clock but she forced herself asleep and didn’t wake up until just after midnight. Her mouth felt mossy, so she climbed out of bed and padded into the bathroom that connected her room with Mona’s. When she spat the last of the toothpaste into the sink and turned off the water, she clearly heard a sob from her mother’s room, a short truncated howl that produced no reaction in her own heart, no flare of sympathy or compassion.
Good
, Oneida thought, and flicked off the light.
Cry yourself to sleep. See how it feels.

Since Friday night, Oneida had only spoken to her mother three times and looked her in the eye twice. From all appearances, Mona hadn’t noticed. She acted like it was perfectly normal for her to spend an hour in the morning and an hour at night changing Mr. Rook’s dressings, feeding him, keeping him company. And that horrible cat—Ray something—had free run of the house: Oneida would find it sleeping on her bed, rolling on her dirty clothes, rubbing up against her legs when she thought she was completely alone. Home was not home anymore, and Oneida could hardly wait to get out of the car and away from her mother. Which was saying something, considering Mona’s old station wagon was idling in that freak Wendy’s driveway.

“So I’ll pick you up at five?” Mona said, the chirp in her voice suggesting she was dropping Oneida off at the mall instead of the cave of a raging teenage psychopath. Oneida nodded and opened her door, closing it again on Mona’s admonitions to
have a good ti
—

She walked up the cracked flagstone path and didn’t turn to see Mona drive away. The Wendell house had been hard to find, the driveway marked by nothing more than a dented gray mailbox one stiff breeze away from toppling off its post. The driveway itself was endless, meandering and rutted. When it finally ended, the only sign of nearby habitation was a bright green door set into the side of a hill, a hill that gradually revealed itself to be the front of a house, so weather-worn and gray it looked like it had always been there. The door was at least freshly painted, but Oneida saw no doorbell or knocker. She pulled her jacket tighter and rapped on the green wood, praying that Andrew Lu was already inside.

The door opened before she had a chance to drop her hand. She jumped and let out a little shriek because there was Wendy: standing in the doorway, silent and still. He was wearing a black T-shirt with an anarchy symbol drawn on it in what looked like red nail polish.

“Hi, Spoony,” he said and swung the door wider. “Enter.”

Oneida heard rock music playing from somewhere within the house, then a very loud cymbal crash and singing. Wendy rubbed his scar and said, “Seriously, get in here.”

Oneida did as she was told. The Wendell house was little more than a dark cramped hallway that stretched in either direction into darkness, the walls coated in synthetic wood paneling. The music came to a jumbled halt and a few voices filled in the silence. The sounds were coming from somewhere beneath them and to the right, and Wendy, noticing the curiosity that Oneida was unable to contain, motioned for her to follow him down the hallway.

“Um, is anyone else here already?” she asked.

“Nope,” Wendy replied.

“Oh.” Oneida wished she’d worn her watch. A watch would give her that tiny hint of control: over knowing exactly how early she was, how long she’d have to wait until someone else showed up—and, should she become lost in the bowels of the Wendell residence, how long she’d been held captive. “My mother is always early, sorry about—”

“You’re late.” Wendy didn’t turn around when he spoke. He continued to stalk down the dark hallway, so that Oneida couldn’t help but notice how skinny he looked from behind. His bony elbows jutted out
of his sleeves like twigs, and his jeans hung off his butt like a scarecrow. Oneida heard her mother’s voice clear in her head:
This boy has no ass.

“I’m gonna show you something,” Wendy said, spinning to an abrupt halt. “And I’m gonna make you promise never to talk about it with another human being, living or dead.” He spat in his hand. “I’m gonna make you shake on it, and if I ever hear you broke this promise, I’ll kill you. I know you know I can.”

The music started again, much louder, much closer. Oneida’s heart was beating so hard and fast she felt light-headed and gross. The impulse to run back down the hall, run outside, run to her mother—Mona couldn’t have made it to the end of the driveway yet; it was too long—was checked by a new voice in her head, terrifying and obstinate:
Your mother would say you’re being ridiculous, that she had to get back to Mr. Rook. Your mother would drive away without you.

Wendy’s black eyes blinked. “Wow,” he said. “You’re so easy to mess with, it’s not any fun.” He kicked his foot into the wall and a door, barely distinguishable in the murk, swung open.

There was no way Oneida could have been prepared for what lay beyond the door from what she knew of Wendy and from what she knew of the realm of possibility in Ruby Falls. A short flight of stairs led down into a cavernous white room, light streaming in from an enormous picture window that looked out over a rolling valley of trees rippling yellow and red against the blue fall sky; the house was built into the side of a hill. The white walls were covered with brightly colored paintings, some of which Oneida recognized with a start: a garish portrait of Marilyn Monroe in robin’s egg blue and bubblegum pink; a man in a bowler hat, face obscured by a bright green apple. But in the center of the room, surrounded by overstuffed and mismatched chairs and sofas, was a band. A girl with long blond braids, a few years older than Wendy or herself, was hunched over a green electric guitar, and an older man, chubby and bald, played an acoustic guitar with a plug snaking out of the bottom. Most shocking of all was the drummer: she was also blond, wore a bright blue tank top, and looked at least ten years older than Mona.

Wendy pointed at the drummer and said, with not a small amount of pride, “That’s my mom.”

Oneida didn’t recognize the song or understand any of the lyrics other than the chorus, which repeated
here comes your man
again and again, but she liked it immediately. It had a driving, bouncy beat, and the guitars sounded—to Oneida, who had never played an instrument other than that idiotic recorder she was required to learn for three weeks in the third grade—bright and happy. It made her feel hopeful, like the plodding beat could pick her up and carry her to its destination; it made her think of ticking second hands, dripping faucets, the little red line that traced the path of Indiana Jones’s travels across old brown maps. When Wendy’s mom brought her sticks down with a finality that made Oneida clap before she could help herself, she felt as though she’d traveled somewhere far away, miles from Ruby Falls.