Threats (21 page)

The ladies looked at this different boarded-up house in the neighborhood where they had lived together ever since. In silence, they individually considered the span of their lives. One of the ladies thought about the word “still,” and the other thought about the word “here.”

 

60.

THE DARKENED WINDOWS shifted the home inside further. Even the heavy curtains had let in some light, but the boards allowed total darkness and safety. David thought about how his life would be different if he had boarded up the windows ten years earlier. Perhaps the outside world would have vanished for Franny and himself and they could have lived their days in the confines of the property in his name. He figured that if Franny came back, she would be surprised to see the windows boarded up, but she would eventually understand. The dark outlines of the furniture in the rooms gave the couches and chairs the look of sleeping animals.

The sounds outside were quieter. David could hear a snow sweeper's muted progress along the residential road. It seemed as if he had covered his own ears and eyes with a piece of fabric. The silence of the old grandfather clock was a negative energy. David pushed an ottoman over to cover up the fireplace.

He turned on the kitchen light and pulled the threats out of their drawer, spreading them out on the countertop. He couldn't remember the order in which he found them and switched the papers around trying to figure it out. The threats were on different types of paper. There was the craft store receipt, the fortune cookie scrap, the computer paper, the thin ticker-tape strip, the index card, the pages torn from a notebook. The words were typed in the same style, as if they came from the same machine. He let his eyes unfocus until the words became symbols.

He looked for other clues on the paper. It would be meaningful if he could find out for certain that each threat had been created or printed at the same time. If he could determine the order in which they were intended to be read, he might be able to uncover some code in their language.

David looked carefully at the threats. It was possible that a third party had snuck into the house, created each unique threat, and hid them in each corner while David and Franny were sleeping. It was possible.

 

61.

OBJECTS from the basement had begun to creep into the main house. Before, when the house was full of other people, the mess had been more easily confined. It was as if the others created a gravity and the individual items were an orbiting constellation of junk. In those first years of his son's re-residence, David's father would head down to the basement with a cardboard box and come up with papers and ancient bank records, and he would spend the afternoon inhaling paper dust next to the old shredder, carrying bags of shredded paper to the curb. Every time he went into the basement, he would come up with a new bag of the same general garbage, like a fisherman drawing up a crab pot. “Clean home, old heart,” he said.

It had started with the water heater explosion, which caused an inch of bank receipts to plaster the floor. They dried and flaked eventually, their lower layers turning soft and causing the basement to take on the sweet smell of wet newsprint. After they replaced the broken glasses, Franny had remarked that David would need to go down there with a shovel and clean it up, but he didn't, and she did not mention it again. They closed off the basement but scrubbed and dusted and generally maintained the rest of the home's three bedrooms as if they were still all occupied.

After Franny was gone, a layer of dust and skin particles and hair built up over the wood floor. It mixed with the oils in David's feet as well as the dirt from his shoes and his visitors' shoes and gummed together, creating a thin layer of grime that gave the floors a softness. Sticky wafers of grime and hair layered behind doors.

The dust on the floor began to creep up the walls. It fell over itself to make a patina of grime, first on the baseboards, then up the curling lower portions of wallpaper, then broadening to darken the walls nearly to the ceiling. David took a damp washcloth to a portion of one wall, and the single clean swab made the rest look even worse. The moisture from his cloth dripped and accumulated dust, leaving a slick behind it on the way down like a woman's made-up face after a long night of crying. One corner of the wallpaper was peeled back on itself like a filigree, and David took the edge of the paper between his fingers. Behind it, he could see part of what looked like a word. He pulled the wallpaper off the wall and saw another page, yellowed with wallpaper glue, pasted there:

I WILL STAPLE MY ADDRESS TO YOUR WINTER COAT, LITTLE ONE. THEY WILL SEND YOU TO ME NO MATTER WHAT YOU CLAIM.

He hooked his fingernails under the threat and peeled it off, making glue fall, silent as snow, onto the floor. The wallpaper had been there for at least seven years, since he and Franny had put it up together. David moved a chair in an attempt to cover the spot and added the threat to his collection.

Empty broth cans had begun to accumulate around the threats still spread across the countertop. Junk mail lay across the kitchen counters and the table. Bills and notices surrounded Franny's ashes on the coffee table in the sitting room, and the magazines and newspapers were a glossy presence surrounding David every night in bed. He still slept under her coat, but added a layer of dental X-rays under it. It felt as if she was lying lightly on top of him and fish scales filled the divide between his body and hers.

David's body cluttered at the same rate as the house. His hair began to grow long again and curl like a boy's in ringlets above his ears. He washed his clothes at the laundromat, avoiding the machine in the garage. Below the layer of his clean clothes, the crevices of his body began to foster their own microsystem. He began to think of himself as a piece of dense bread.

In the bed, he found himself valuing his inability to move. He might wake and peel a perfume ad or sports page off his face, leaving a wet smudge that he eventually lost interest in cleaning.

He borrowed books from the library about sleep disorders and books about coping with loss. When the words didn't make enough sense, he pulled the pages from the books and lined the mattress with them and kept them under his body at night. He sweat on them, and they offered their insular heat, cells of therapeutic text sinking into his own cells.

He started the bad habit of keeping cartons of food on the bed, until the ants came. Even after he made the effort to clean the cartons away, the ants remained, lost in the pages and sheets, apparently satisfied with the pieces and crumbs they still found. They greeted the corners of his eyes and lips in the morning.

David had always felt uncomfortable in his bed, always shifting his body and stretching his legs. Now that the confinement of paper meant he had nowhere to go, his body became resigned to its diminished accommodation and was held still. He was surprised to find it much easier to sleep. Sometimes he would stay in bed for hours after waking, feeling the proportions of paper around him with the edges of his body. He sensed himself molding the paper into a permanent shape. It was a kind of meditation.

 

62.

AILEEN was sitting in the rocking chair on the porch. It was unclear how long she had been there, but he remembered registering the sound of wood rocking in the wood groove hours earlier, when he got out of bed. He had thought it was a memory of sound and only realized she was there around lunchtime, when he saw the back of her head through a crack in one of the boarded windows. He tapped the window, and she turned and waved. He beckoned her inside.

“Listen,” she said, stomping ice from her boots onto the welcome mat. “Frances put this in my coffee cup in the break room.” He shut the door behind her. She dug into her purse and held a handwritten note out to him like it was a piece of identification:

I WILL CREATE A SET OF WORK RESPONSIBILITIES THAT ARE INCONVENIENT AND DEMEANING TO YOU. I WILL CONVINCE YOUR BOSS TO RUN WITH IT. WE WILL CALL IT THE BATHROOM SCRUB CHALLENGE.

“I think it's about me,” she said, flipping the paper back and reviewing the words. “It's embarrassing. Frances and I shared cleaning duties, but sometimes when I was with a client I asked her to touch the mirror up a little. Do you think she was angry with me?”

“I don't think she could write that.”

“One of the girls saw her writing it. I found it in my coffee cup months ago and asked around, and one of the girls saw Frances do it. That area is employees only. We don't let anyone else in there. She wrote it.”

It was very quiet in the house, and David realized that he had grown accustomed to the rocking chair's constant noise. “May I have it?” he asked.

She held the page closer to her body, against her stomach. “I feel like she would be angry if I showed it to you,” she said. “Can you imagine? Maybe it's a bad joke. I would hate it if she wrote this about me. I mean, she wrote it out and everything. One of the girls saw her.”

“If she wrote it, I can give it to the police.”

“Maybe you could avoid telling them that it might be about me. I'm so embarrassed.”

“I'm sure it's not about you.”

Aileen turned the paper over, examining each side. She folded it in half and unfolded it. She placed her palm on the words and closed her eyes. It looked as if she was trying to absorb the words into her skin. “I can't keep it. The police should see it. If you really think it will help.”

David thought about the threats on the countertop. “I'll show it to the police.”

“Thing is”—Aileen looked at the page in her hands—“the thing is that we never called it anything. We would never call it the bathroom scrub challenge. It's so unlike her to be cruel in that way.” She folded the page again, rolled it and unrolled it. “Maybe I could keep it. You took everything else of hers.”

“You're right when you say the police should see it.”

“I saw you had taken everything of hers from the salon. It's fine. You were within your rights. But when I saw, I sat behind the front desk and cried about it. I'm not the kind of woman who cries. This was after closing. I saw everything was gone. Of course, you were well within your rights. The next girl in that room would have put on the apron and put the oils on her fingers without even knowing about them. Really, it's better you took them. But this is all that's left.”

He thought of Aileen crying, the LED display of the cash register illuminating her face with a machine-green light.

“I think about everyone who has died where we are.” She leaned forward to speak, then leaned back and held her hands over her stomach, clenching the rolled-up threat in her fist. “We make such a fuss when someone dies in a house now, because the proper place to die is in a hospital or a nursing home, or maybe on the street, but never in a house where we spray antibacterial solution on the counter and scrub the floors and vacuum two or three times a week. Two times a week. What a rude thing, to die in a clean house. Better to go to a place where there is a professional level of clean, we think. We've got it figured out. Yet think of the age of the earth and the age of humans on the earth. Think of the number of people in the thousands of years who have died on this very spot. Actually bled out over the ground on which we sit and think about how impolite it is to die in a house. How narrow-minded of us, how selfish.” She unrolled the scrolled threat and held it. For a moment it seemed as if she was going to rip it apart.

When she looked at him, he could just barely see the inner ear parting within the sheen of her lips. She handed the page to David, and he felt the warmth from her hand. After she left, David walked into his kitchen. He cleared some of the broth cans from the countertop, where the threats were still laid out like a treasure map. The pages were all different shapes and colors. Some looked as if they had been around for years, while others were crisp and new. The new threat was stained across one edge with coffee.

 

63.

THE SECURITY MAP over the dresser featured points of potential entry and methods of resistance. There was a triple-lock system for the door in the den and a series of traps that could be set around the door if the intruder managed to bypass the locks. Franny had wanted to board up the workroom door in the basement, because they never went in there and it seemed possible for an intruder to enter the house through the room's small storm windows. The plan included some trenches dug in the backyard. A speculative mark on the side of the page suggested that there was room in the family budget for dogs.

Before he got into bed, David brushed aside a line of ants walking over the pillow. He lay down and felt a piece of the mass more obtrusive than usual against the back of his neck. He reached and pulled out the envelope he had left on Franny's side of the bed days or weeks ago. He took the paper out of the envelope and read:

IF YOU'RE HERE, DON'T LEAVE. I'M HERE IN THE HOUSE. IF YOU'RE HERE, I WILL FIND YOU.

He held the page to his chest and sensed his body alive under it. He felt a great sadness, which caused him to tear off a sliver of the page and put it in his mouth. He packed the sliver into his right anterior molar and tore off another, a thin strip, which he rolled into a ball and pressed into his left anterior molar. He packed the paper into his teeth again and again until each molar was stuffed full, plus the spaces within the single divots of his premolars and behind the deep divots in his maxillary central incisor. David ran his tongue across the newly smooth teeth. It tasted like he was holding a small book in his mouth. He longed to read his words to Franny again but had eaten them. He went downstairs.

Marie was sitting at the kitchen table. “I wanted to try some coffee,” she said. Her hands were stung and swollen to the point where she had to hold the cup by pressing it between the tips of all ten fingers. She brought the trembling mug to her lips.

“Do you need some diphenhydramine?” he asked. It was hard to talk. He clenched his teeth to compact the paper further.