Threats (18 page)

A faded burgundy polo shirt extended an inch above one of the folded sub-stacks, and she examined it, frowning, removing it from the stack and pulling it over her head. It made a tight fit over the pair of long-sleeved shirts she was wearing, plus the T-shirts underneath, one of which advertised a theme park she had seen once while walking a long way. She smoothed the collar and felt where the fabric had been torn at the seam.

After she put the polo on, the sub-stacks were perfect. Shelly took out a pocket level and balanced it on top. The bubble hesitated at the center, then settled. She descended from the footstool and walked around the folding table, examining it from all angles. “The line is so clean,” she said. Anyone would be pleased to see her achievement. She pulled a chair to the table and stood on it, taking in the aerial view, then plucked the level from the stack, placed it in her pocket, and smoothed the dimple it had made on the top shirt. It seemed as if the shirt had been created for the sole purpose of finding its way there, to the table, to become perfectly folded atop another shirt. It looked like a photograph of a stack of folded clothes, but Shelly knew she had created it from ordinary objects and an idea in her head, and the pleasure of that fact added to the moment.

She knew that only the passing of time would evolve her thoughts on the scene. Crossing the room, she leaned against the far wall and watched her perfect pile. Another woman with a laundry basket paused in front of it and nodded once. Shelly was filled with pride. But time passed, and sure enough, the feeling of perfection began to diminish. It seemed as if the hemline on a folded skirt was slightly askew, peeking out above the rest like a taller man in a lineup. She walked closer and saw the pills of cotton clinging to a sweatshirt. She nudged a pair of socks into order, but the whole thing still felt wrong. In one motion she gathered up the two stacks of clean clothes, turned to the nearest washing machine, and dumped them within. She dug into her pocket for quarters and reached for the soap.

 

51.

COLD MORNINGS grew colder, and the plywood made a poor heat barrier over the kitchen window. It shuddered against the wind and grew damp at the edges. The heater would have worked itself to death, solely for the purpose of sinking warm air into the wooden window. Ants moved in branched lines up the walls toward the second floor. David stopped turning the heater on and went to bed wearing a wool cap.

One particularly cold morning, he got up while it was still dark and put on his ski jacket. He got back into bed, under Franny's coat, feeling bundled, as if he was between a pair of sleeping bags, as if he was camping in his empty bedroom, feeling warm and confined.

The next morning, he brewed a pot of coffee and brought a cup of it to the garage. Marie was writing in a notebook at her desk and looked up to smile at him. It was as warm as a greenhouse inside the garage. David noticed the space heaters mounted on the walls, strung from the ceiling with electrical wire. Power strips lined the garage like rattraps. A massive ceramic-coil heater dominated Marie's desk. The wasps clustered around David's face in greeting.

“Good morning,” she said.

He set the mug down on her desk. “Who's paying the electrical bill in this place?” he asked, covering his mouth with his hand as one of the insects came to investigate the source of moving air.

“Coffee. That's sweet of you.” She tapped a silver thermos by her elbow. “I have tea already, but thanks anyway.” She had a glossy magazine open next to her notebook. There was a column full of tally marks on the notebook. In the magazine, a woman's mouth held a diamond between her teeth. David considered the potential for irreversible damage to the woman's enamel.

“You wouldn't have a wasp problem this time of the year if you didn't have heaters everywhere.”

“They keep me company. It's important to have a harmonious work environment. With the heat on, they get more done during the winter than I do.”

“How's the research going?”

She shrugged. “‘Love' pulled ahead,” she said. “I'm recounting. Too early to tell.”

A wasp plunged its stinger into the thick wall of David's boot. He bent and pinched it out, crushing it in the process. He flicked its corpse aside. “Have you been leaving threats around my house?”

“You found more after the one in the sugar?”

“They're spreading.”

“Well, it's not me. But thank you for asking instead of accusing. I could see on your face that you were intending to accuse.”

“You understand how I might suspect it.”

“People jump so quickly to the conclusions they wish to make. You finally realized I've been conducting business on a piece of your property. But you're a reasonable man. You understand that things are never precisely as they seem. It's a trouble with people. We get one idea of an outcome in our heads and we can really run with it into the sunset. Fortunately, you're the kind of man who allows things to happen to him instead of forcing them to happen.” She considered for a moment. “‘You finally realized,'” she said, writing it down. “Exactly.”

“There were two threats at my wife's workplace. I wish I would stop finding them.”

“If wishes were fishes,” she said.

“One was tucked within her personal effects.”

“That would certainly lead you to another conclusion.” She flipped through pages in her notebook until she found a loose page. “This was behind one of the wasp's nests. I found it this morning when I was sweeping the floor.”

She offered it to him, and he took it. The page felt brittle, as if exposed to water and years.

CURL UP ON MY LAP. LET ME BRUSH YOUR HAIR WITH MY FINGERS. I AM SINGING YOU A LULLABY. I AM TESTING FOR STRUCTURAL WEAKNESS IN YOUR SKULL.

“I don't like that at all,” David said.

“It's a dark one.”

“And you're not writing these?”

“Are you joking? My mother died of a brain injury. There is no way I'd use it as a symbol.” She sipped her tea. “How ugly.”

“Who is doing this?”

“Probably it's whoever you least suspect. Or most suspect. I forget how that goes.”

“I need to understand what is going on in my home.”

She flipped back the pages of her notebook and began to read aloud. “‘Your wife made some decisions during her life, decisions to which you weren't privy. That's normal in any relationship. The moment one fully realizes this truth can lead to a difficult transition. You move awkwardly from ignorance to knowledge like a baby falling down a set of stairs inside a bucket,'” She lifted her eyes. “Pardon the expression.”

A wasp landed on David's neck and took a circuitous route around his hairline, considering potential nesting points.

“Surely your wife was not writing threats,” Marie said. “That doesn't really seem like her, does it?”

“I don't know what seems like her.”

“Don't speak, think, or act out of frustration, David. That makes a fool of us all.”

He thought about it. Two wasps sparred on the lip of his coffee mug. “I don't know what seems like her,” he said.

“You should tell the detective of this new finding.”

“I'll tell him when it's time,” David said, “and if you want to remain in business in my garage, you'll allow me the time I need.”

Marie pressed her lips into a line and regarded David for so long that he thought she had been paralyzed by a stinging wasp. “Fair,” she said finally. “You'll figure it out soon.”

“My childhood friends say they saw her.”

“When?”

“A few months ago. She told one of them that she was learning a language.”

“Your friends must have been mistaken.” She poured another thermos cupful of tea.

“That's what I told them.”

“What was once your wife is currently located in a box on your coffee table.”

“Well, that's a tough way to put it.”

“Indeed it is.” Marie cradled her thermos cup as if it was a precious jewel. A wasp hovered and landed on the frame of her glasses. She didn't blink. The wasp lost interest and flew away.

“Do those things ever sting you?”

She put down the cup and held up her right hand toward David. Her palm was studded with welted stings, swollen red and oozing fluid. “You need someone around,” she said. “The human soul longs for comfort in times of grief.”

“Are you licensed to practice? Do you have any kind of training?”

“You don't have to be hurtful.”

“I'm sorry,” David said, “but I don't know why I just apologized.”

“Probably some kind of latent boyhood issue,” she said. “An anal obsession, maybe. LSV-II220. Let's work on it next time.” She wrote down the appointment in her notebook before pressing her hands to her face, blocking out the light. He left her there.

 

52.

AT VARIOUS POINTS over the course of dental history around the world, different cultures were convinced that cavities were caused by worms. There were enough worms manifest in the rest of the body that it seemed possible for very small worms to coil inside a tooth or between two teeth, spreading decay and ruin. The Sumerians believed in the worms as early as 5000
B.C.
, the Muslims determined that the theory was garbage in
A.D.
1200, and the French figured it out about five hundred years later, using microscopes. But there were bright sides to the error, and one of the brightest sides was the glut of beautiful worm-related art that came out of all cultures. One French carving featured a molar, done in ivory, the size of a human tooth. This ivory tooth could be opened to reveal a carved dual scene of the worm itself imagined as a demon in Hell, devouring the impious whole—screaming, pathetic individuals thrown into one of Hell's general fires, perhaps in preparation for the tooth worm or as an alternative fate.

In hindsight, the tooth worm might have done its part to contribute to the ruin of David's dental career. He first saw the French carving in school, and subsequently, whenever he looked into a mouth, he imagined the coiled serpents. He saw them in the deeply troubled molar profiles of his squirming patients at the free clinic, where he completed his training. He saw them in the texts he studied, in back issues of
Dentistry Today
, in the diagrams and charts on the wall of his office. By the end, he saw them in all of his patients. Individuals with previously clean X-rays came in with teeth that hummed, foreign movement under his explorer.

A pair of concerned parents brought in their little one, not quite ten months old, who cried and didn't take his bottle. There was no pediatric dentist in the area, and the child's father was the son of one of David's father's old friends. David's hands shook with a fear of what he might find. The boy's mother sat in the chair and cradled her son, shushing him and kissing his forehead and then making kissing noises and holding the child's head still. Sure enough, the soft nubs of infant teeth pulsed with the worm. David didn't even need to prod at the new teeth to know they were deeply flawed. A young life spoiled. The child wept and pulled his head away from David's gloved fingers. The young mother started to cry even before David said he would have to administer a local anesthetic and drill the four teeth. She cried out then, when he said it, and her husband came running in from the waiting room and asked to know what was the problem, what had made his young wife weep—he was quite young as well; David realized he was dealing with three young people—the young man heading toward David in a way that suggested he might lift David from his chair and throw him against the wall, on which was mounted an expensive light box that nevertheless still had a problem with the circuitry that caused a flickering and would certainly be destroyed if David was thrown against it, and so David raised both hands, the dental explorer shivering in his left, his right extending toward the young husband, who demanded again what the hell was the problem anyway. David kept his hand extended for a tense moment, and then the man reached out, confused, and shook David's hand. David placed the dental explorer on its sanitized tray. The receptionist leaned in from the other room but David shooed her off. He explained to the young couple the ways in which an infant could develop tooth trouble, perhaps by using the bottle as a pacifier or being allowed to sleep with it. The mother started nodding, though tears were now streaming liberally down her cheeks, the woman weeping in guilty silence, aware as she was of her own complicity in letting the child fall asleep with his bottle, which he loved so much and was sometimes the only way to get him to sleep. After a series of long days for all of them, her discovery had been such a welcome piece of good news. The child would sleep with a bottle! It had to be near empty, just a hint of milk warm against his lips. She had worried about making this decision but remembered the nurses at the hospital and their comforting chorus of “it's your baby” while she cradled the foreign thing, the baby, which was hers.

When the call came in that David's license would be revoked owing to reports of suspected and proven gross malpractice, he wasn't surprised. He remembered the fallen look of the woman's face as he pushed the needle into her infant's jaw, and he knew that this would not be the last he heard from her, that his close attention, his kindness and care, would be repaid with betrayal.

Of course he would fight the charges for years, dwindling his financial resources. It was a matter of personal pride in his work. When he returned from court each time, his wife and his father listened to his stories while looking into middle distance, because they did not understand that it was a matter of personal pride.

He lost the appeals. Nothing more could be said.

 

53.

THE MORNING featured a chill that might try to convince you to stay down if you happened to slip and fall. The weather might question your actions as you stretched out on the frozen path, pointing out that as long as you continued to rest with your back on the ground, you could see the sky.