This Must Be the Place: A Novel (41 page)

Arthur sat and Mona opened her mouth but made the mistake of eye contact.

“Don’t be scared,” she said. “It’s not a terrible thing. It’s just a difficult thing.”

She grabbed his hands, which were cool. “I’m telling you this,” she said, “because you want to wake up.”

“I
have
—I think I have—that’s what I was coming here to—”

“You’re not all the way awake yet.” Mona inhaled. “You can’t be, because you don’t know what I’m about to tell you—even though I think it’s why you came here. To know this.

“In August, in Ocean City,” she started to say, but her throat closed and her eyes stung.

She was coming home from spending the night with David Danger, which she did more often than not these days. But last night she’d been spending the night in the most euphemistic sense of the words—she’d had sex, for the first time, and it was so strange and thrilling and she didn’t know what to do with herself. It was nothing like she expected. It was awkward and it hurt and she didn’t think she came. At least, she had expected orgasm to be more exciting than—that. It seemed the kind of thing you wouldn’t doubt occurring, if, in fact, it had occurred. David had been kind and she didn’t feel used or embarrassed or like she had done anything wrong, but there was a nagging feeling, a fuzzy feeling, like her brain and her body had stopped talking to each other. She didn’t feel entirely solid. She was tired and a little hungry. It was six in the morning, and she wanted to go to sleep.

The door was open.

Mona shouldn’t have, but she went into the motel room. Mona shouldn’t have, but she called for Amy. Mona shouldn’t
have, after she saw the bloody sheets on what had been Amy’s bed, but she kept walking, past her own bed, to the bathroom.

There was a streak of dried brown blood on the pink tile. Red blood glowing against the white porcelain tub.

In the tub.

It didn’t move.

It didn’t look like anything. It was wrinkled, and purple, and it didn’t move.

Oh, Jesus Christ, Amy, she thought. Oh, Amy. Oh, Jesus.

Last night—she called last night from David’s place, to let Amy know where she was and tell her not to worry—Amy had sounded like Amy, normal Amy. Amy said she was going to watch
ER
and go to bed, and she’d see Mona in the morning. Since Mona had picked up Amy’s housekeeping shift at the Seahorse, Amy barely left the motel room, but she didn’t seem more or less happy than usual. She watched a lot of television. She sucked on ice cubes out of the pink plastic ice bucket, refilling it at least three times a day. Mona made sure she ate, bringing home pizza and salads and pastries from the House of D’Angier. Mona made sure she got up and walked around. “Confinement isn’t so bad,” Amy said one night, when they were watching reruns of
Saturday Night Live
and eating chicken wings. “Except for how I’m so freaking fat.”

Had she been planning this the whole time? Mona had been spending the night frequently at David’s, but had Amy deliberately waited for a night she wasn’t around—could you do that? Could you control your labor like that? How had she done this—how had she gotten this baby out without waking anyone up, without passing out, without dying? Because she was Amy, Mona thought. Because she was Amy Henderson, and she did whatever the hell she needed to do. But there was a monstrousness to this act that chilled her; Mona couldn’t fathom how Amy was capable of doing this. Of squirting it out and leaving it behind. Mona couldn’t breathe.

It was so small. It was too small.

Mona really couldn’t breathe. She was going to pass out. She
grabbed the bathroom sink and forced her breath to leave her lungs. It came out high-pitched, at first no more than a whine, and it slowly, slowly built into something like a high howl.

The baby opened a mouth round and dark as a grape and screamed back.

Mona and the baby screamed at each other. The baby, who was a girl, opened her eyes and stared at Mona. Mona had never been more terrified. She had never felt more alive or been more certain that someday she would die. She had never felt more necessary to another living creature as she did to the baby girl in the tub, tiny, wrinkled, purple, abandoned. Mona ripped one of the coarse white towels, bleached stiff, from the towel rod and wrapped up the screaming baby, who screamed louder when the rough nap touched her skin.

Mona stumbled out of the bathroom, slamming the door back on its hinges and staggering into what would become the rest of her life. The baby was warm and impossible in her arms and she hated and loved it. She looked around the room for more signs of Amy and only found conclusive evidence of her absence—a missing suitcase, an empty open drawer. On top of the television, where the picture of Amy and her parents used to be, was a leftover pizza box, full of grease and dried red pepper flakes. There was no note. The baby was the note.

Oneida wouldn’t have a name until a week later, when Mona was back in Ruby Falls, sitting in her parents’ kitchen and ladling sugar into her Rice Krispies. The words would jump out at her from the shining back of her spoon and strike her with their toughness and their strangeness: Oneida Stainless. But named or not, she was Mona’s from the moment Mona stepped out of the motel room. Oneida was Mona’s when the EMT crew rolled up, called by a hysterical guest who’d seen Mona, shivering and clinging to a bloody towel that didn’t look empty, rocking back and forth on the motel’s concrete steps. Oneida was Mona’s even when the doctor at the Ocean City Medical Center, brows raised knowingly, challenged her refusal to be examined. And Oneida was Mona’s when her parents
came to the hospital in New Jersey to collect their daughter and their new granddaughter alike. The lawyers recommended they formally adopt Oneida as their own, which they did—but Oneida was always Mona’s.

And Mona, the blurry daughter of the Darby-Jones, who thought she might one day be a funny girl or a baker, discovered the person she was meant to be: the mother of Oneida Jones.

To Arthur, she said, “Oneida is Amy’s. Amy ran away because she was pregnant, and she ran away again after—after she gave birth somewhere between a bed and a bathtub in a motel in Ocean City.” Arthur’s mouth opened but Mona held up her hand. “I kept her. I wanted her because she gave me—she gave me a future. Amy wasn’t just my best friend, Arthur, she was my
only
friend, and she was going to take herself away. Amy was wonderful and terrible. Terrible. She didn’t want her daughter, she left her behind, in a bathtub, Arthur—she had her alone, she had her all by herself, and once the baby was out of her body Amy just left her behind. She was the only thing Amy left behind, and I kept her.”

Mona didn’t feel the least bit drunk anymore. She felt like she was falling, fast and straight, and the bottom would never rise up to meet her.

Arthur was white. He shook his head once, twice.

“Come
on
, Arthur,” Mona said. The tequila rolled her eyes for her. “She doesn’t look anything
like
me.”

The truth of her own words came in like the tide and pulled her under. She felt it flood the deepest hollows of her heart—her liar’s heart, her coward’s heart, her weak and utterly delusional heart—and all the years of lying to herself bowed inward under the weight of water, the walls she’d built around the truth flimsy and porous as paper. And Mona Jones, who had spent the past sixteen years of her life believing she was a mother, remembered that first she had been a thief.

19
Revelations

Eugene Wendell had lost his mind. He would have done anything in the world to get it back, but it wouldn’t come. It was gone.

What he had in place of a mind was a high whining fear, occasionally spiked with panic, cold bursts of anxiety, and bouts of intestinal distress. He didn’t know who he was anymore (other than a stupid kid who’d blown his father’s cover, who’d told on his father, who’d opened his big fat mouth, for reasons he couldn’t even remember having). This wasn’t like a project. This wasn’t art. He was unmoored and floating and nameless.

And then somehow he was hauling his mother’s drum kit into his high school gymnasium. One more thing, on top of everything else, that felt categorically wrong. But he had to believe that, even if he’d never said anything to anyone, it would still feel weird to see his mother on the makeshift stage beneath the basketball hoop, pulling her hair back in a ponytail and discussing the sound system with John LoCosta, senior class president, King of the Douchebags.

And Halloween had always been his favorite holiday.

“Pick it up, Donnie!” Patricia, arms wrapped around a tom-tom, passed him on the right.

What’s that supposed to mean?
Eugene had such a feeling of impending doom, it was amazing he could put one foot in front of the other, let alone traverse the entire gym lugging a kick drum.
Oh
,
Patricia
, he thought, sick to his stomach, watching her quickstep ahead of him,
you were right, you were so right.
He’d ridden a tidal wave of anxiety into the early hours of the morning, researching art forgery on the Internet, which his sleep-deprived mind had condensed into a series of abstractly
terrifying propositions: fraud—grand larceny—incarceration—flight—and Elmyr de Hory, who was, according to Wikipedia, something of a rock star when it came to forgery, and who’d spent his final years in Ibiza before committing suicide on the eve of his extradition to stand trial for crimes relating to something like eight million counts of intentional fraud.
What Astor did was stupid. What Astor did was illegal. What Astor did would tear his family apart.

What Oneida knew would tear his family apart.

He had had a chance to realize it, long ago; Patricia had been trying to help him. Patricia had been trying to wake him up, and he’d chosen to stick his head deeper in the sand. He’d gone so far as to make his own piece of fraudulent art. He’d entrapped Arthur, who was a nice guy, who Eugene actually liked—this was so bad, he could barely wrap his brain around all the levels of bad this was. The Wendells were so screwed up, they couldn’t possibly be saved. It was only a matter of time, and Eugene had lit the fuse.

Patricia set the tom-tom on the stage and cocked her head. “Donnie,” she said. “Nice costume.” She pointed at his shirt. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, a gray hooded sweatshirt, and a black T-shirt with a glowing white rib cage on it. He’d thought it was a decent effort, considering his strict policy on dressing up (only conceptual/ironic costumes allowed after the age of twelve). But Patricia’s intimation that this was, in fact, some sort of identifiable character costume was another sign that forces were at work behind the scenes, and they were forces that hated him.

“Oy, kid,” Patricia said, “I thought you were supposed to be hip.” She vaulted onto the stage and it shivered beneath her. They hoisted the kick drum between the two of them, and when Patricia took it off his hands, Eugene hopped up behind it.

The Ruby Falls Halloween Carnival was always held at the high school. It was the only place in town big enough to host a dance at the same time as a bunch of dippy booths and games for the elementary school kids. There’d been a lot of town meetings about whether it was better or worse to cram all the kids of Ruby Falls, ages five to eighteen, into one building on the Friday before Halloween, but Eugene didn’t see what the problem was. Did the school board actually think seven-year-olds
were going to score weed off some junior and then go smoke up together in the bathroom? The little kids stuck to the games in the cafeteria and toured the Haunted Home Ec Room, and the dance was so locked down, chaperoned to within an inch of its life, that the two groups hardly crossed paths. At most, high-schoolers with younger siblings hurried them through everything, drove them home, and came back to the dance, which lasted until midnight.

“Or until they kick us off the stage,” Patricia had said, when she announced that Insane Armhole, her hastily composed band, would be making its debut in the very room where she’d once refused to play volleyball on the grounds that it violated her constitutional right to pursue happiness. She’d found a guitarist: a very short coworker at McD’s named Chas, who had a shaved head and thought it was funny to ask existential questions to no one on the drive-thru intercom. Eugene had had the pleasure of driving up in Vlad the Impala, Oneida in the passenger seat, the
PLACE YOUR ORDER HERE
box in the middle of a rant about the myth of objective truth as co-opted by a capitalist society.

Patricia said the drummer she’d lined up fell through, but Eugene guessed the truth: she hadn’t even tried to find one. Their mother was a far better drummer than anyone Patricia would find on the Internet or the bulletin boards at the community college. And Maggie said, “Sure, why not?” like she’d actually been asked, when they all knew if she didn’t agree to help, her daughter would throw an atomic conniption fit.