Abroad (16 page)

Love always, Taz

October 16, 1994

The papered box was, thirteen years later, found by the police. They came to search my room at home, thinking perhaps the reason for my murder had to do with a stalker or a spurned lover, someone who came all the way from the green hills of Lucan.

You can imagine how the Irish cooperation with the Italians went. The officers were vaguely excited, as it was a famous case—in the tabloids and all that. But the drive from Dublin to Lucan backed up, it was raining, and my mother, who was still heavily in shock, forced them to sit down to an incredibly awkward cup of tea.

Apologetically, the officers came into the room, opening drawers with gloved hands, looking for letters, notebooks, anything that might give them a hint as to who might have wanted me dead.

“I’ve got something,” the younger one said finally. He was standing on a chair, looking on top of the closet. Carefully, he slid it off the shelf. Sitting together on the bed, just as Babs and I had all those years ago, they bent their heads over the papered box.

“Boyfriend notes?”

The other shook his head. They lifted the lid and sifted carefully through the candy and rocks. The elder picked up the two envelopes, marked:

To Tabitha Deacon, from Tabitha Deacon, to be opened in 2014.

and

A note for the future from Babs. Open in 2014!!!

Neither officer said anything for a moment.

“Might as well—”

“Yeah.”

My mother had come up the stairs and was silently watching them through the doorway. They read my note, then put it down. Then they read the other.

Another pause.

“Mrs. Deacon…” the elder officer said.

“Yes?”

“Who is Babs?”

“A friend. They are—were—friends.”

The officer handed her the note.

Dear Tabitha,

You are a real arse sometimes. Remember how you didn’t want to do this time capsule? Now you’re glad, see? Arse. Love you anyway.

Babs

My mother stared at the note for a full minute. The officers shifted on their feet. Finally she put the letter back in the envelope.

“So this is nothing…” the younger officer said.

“They were nine.”

“Yes…”

“
Please.
” My mother’s voice was low. “I’m still here, do you understand?”

The men just stared at her.

“It’s not supposed to be this way. It’s
never
supposed to be this way. We go first. Do you see? But I’m the mother and I’m still
here.
”

*   *   *

We were still best friends, Babs and I, even after all those years. She had grown somewhat pretty, in an off-kilter sort of way and morphed into a hipster, even, wearing black horn-rimmed glasses. She had been in New York for a science conference, and had bought them there. She had never visited Italy and couldn’t relate at all to my stories of Jenny and the B4. It was the first time we’d faced a real distance between us, and it was becoming a problem.

“Why does it matter if you sleep with men or not?” she asked when she called the day after the hike to the tomb. “It sounds like you’re having a nice time with them, but this advice is very odd.”

“It’s about power,” I said, parroting Jenny. “It’s about staying ahead of feelings.”

“No, that doesn’t really make sense either. There’s nothing powerful about being … a…”

“Slut?” I said.

“Taz!” Babs’s tone was disapproving, and it irritated me.

“I just think you’re not understanding the situation.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “Maybe,” she said. “I just worry about you. Are you certain you’re all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Maybe Mum’ll give me some Christmas money to come over. It’s only the first of October. I can ask. I’ll try. I really will.”

I hung up, an odd feeling in my belly. The cold truth was, I didn’t
want
Babs to visit. For one thing, I was certain Jenny wouldn’t like her. For another, I knew what she would bring with her—the baggage from my past. And what if she happened upon the fact that my new friend was a drug dealer? One who passed herself off as “small time,” but who now had me translating for her either in person or on the phone at least three times a day?

But the very thought of not wanting Babs around was a betrayal. I certainly didn’t like Jenny and the girls better. It was just that, at the moment, they seemed to understand me more.

I sighed, restless, and tried to work. As I sat there, thumbing through my book on Etruscan stone reliefs, Claire came out of her room, fresh from an afternoon nap. Due to her increasingly frequent absences, this sort of meeting was becoming more and more rare.

“Oh, good! You’re here. I never see you.” She rubbed her eyes. She had a waitressing job that often had her out late. “Hey, I need a coffee. Let’s go to our place.”

It bothered me, the way she ordered me around sometimes, but I was glad for distraction that day. “Our place” was a little café just steps from the cottage, an unexpectedly pleasant spot with a lovely patio looking out at the busy street and the basketball court. Grifonia had surprisingly few good cafés like this; even the Italian spots were usually filled with loud foreign students looking for “authenticity” who took the tables and forced the locals to the sides. But the owner ran a tight ship, shooing out loud and disrespectful clients. The bar gleamed; the espresso maker hissed with cheerful resilience; glasses clinked with the confidence of an expert barman doing his job.

We were sitting outside. It was British weather—the air was crisp and smelled of burning wood; the sky was sharp blue. “Isn’t this coffee like no other coffee in the world?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Well. I hear the coffee is also pretty good in Turkey. Finland maybe.”

“Taz. You’re so fucking
literal.
” She picked up the tiny cup, sniffed it, and put it down again. “It’s hell on the stomach, isn’t it? I’m so jonesing for a latte right now, but the Italians say it’s disgusting to drink milk after noon.”

I looked down at my cappuccino. Claire loved to proclaim herself an expert on Italian culture, even, sometimes, to our Italian flatmates.

“Now.” She leaned forward, stirring her espresso. “Tell me again about your home. I want to know all about it. Like,
everything.
”

I smiled politely, a bit disheartened. I often felt, when fielding Claire’s questions, that she was looking for a specific answer I was never going to be able to give.

“What is your house like? Is Lucan one of those cute Irish villages with leprechauns and crap?”

“It is rather cute. But it’s just a suburb. We’re getting swallowed by the malls and the sprawl.”

“And your house?”

“Oh, a very normal house. Four bedrooms. Fuzzy carpets.”

“Taz, come on.”

“What?”

“Is it a
happy
house?”

I looked out at the square. The same woman was always there: thick but small, dusty, visibly strung out. Her outfits varied—today she wore a too-short yellow dress. She could have been anywhere from twenty-five to fifty. At one point in her life she had probably been what Jenny would call “a shag-worthy girl.”

“A happy house? You’re very American, aren’t you? Raised on sitcoms.”

“Well?”

I shrugged. “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

She shook her head, annoyed. “
Plenty
of people live in unhappy houses. Like my house before my parents divorced. We had this big fancy place, with, like, these stupid remote-control fireplaces. That’s what I remember most. You’d press these buttons and then, boom! I thought it was the most awesome thing in the world. But my parents used to tear into each other. It was a fucking battlefield in there.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It’s cool. It made me who I am. Now my mom lives in, like, a tiny bungalow in a shitty area near the train tracks, while my dad’s still in his fucking disgusting McMansion. But she’s happy.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“Whatever. But your house is perfect, huh?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I mean, my father doesn’t live there anymore.”

“He left?”

“He lives in Dublin. Left when I was six.”

“Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Everything’s for the best. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I just don’t have anything to complain about.”

“God, Taz.” She’d finished her coffee by now and had moved on to mine.

“What?”

“You just never give anything. You’re so …
serene.
How the fuck am I supposed to get to know you?”

“With time, I suppose.”

“Just give me one thing. Something to go on.”

“All right.” I looked out at the park again. It was hard and ugly, with just a few trees struggling for light. The woman in yellow was now sitting with the woman in white I’d seen the other day. She was even thinner than I remembered, really nothing more than a skeleton covered in skin. The two were leaning over an old book of some kind.

“Taz?” Claire prompted. I turned back to her.

“Sometimes I picture … dying. What it would be like. You know.”

“I totally
don’t
know. Like suicide?”

“No,” I said. “I’d never do that. Too scared.”

“Fuck yeah.”

“But I feel like maybe I know … what it’s like. I don’t know.”

Claire looked at me carefully. “So? What’s it like?”

“Well, I read a lot of Sylvia Plath in school—”

“Oh, man. A Plath freak?”

“I suppose. Well, no. I just read. And when she attempted suicide, she wrote … well … something like, ‘I succumbed with bliss to the whirling blackness.’”

“‘With bliss’?”

“Or ‘blissfully.’ Something like that.”

“Death is not fucking blissful,” Claire said, lighting a cigarette. “If anything,
sex
is blissful. Sometimes. But fucking death?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean—”

“Let me tell you something,” she said. “I’ve got this uncle, and he has a ranch. Like, in the rolling plains, you know? Sea to fucking shining sea. Mountains, rivers, whatever. Looks like a movie. But the point of the place is to slaughter these cows, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. So I watch sometimes. It’s seriously screwed up. And the most fucked up thing is they—my uncle and his partners—have these
hugging
machines so the cows don’t get scared. They smell the blood, they see the blade, but this … electronic hugger holds them until they bleed out, and they never shake. Like, at all. My uncle says it’s humane.”

“God.”

“You might trick yourself into thinking whatever the hell Sylvia Plath said, but it’s bullshit. Or else my uncle wouldn’t spend three hundred thousand on an electric cow hugger.”

She looked at me over her cigarette.

“Do I have to worry about you, Taz?”

“Absolutely not. I was just conversing. A thought. You know.”

Something caught my eye. The women I’d been looking at before were walking slowly, arms linked, down the dark alley that led to our house.

“Perhaps we should—”

Then, with a sudden jerk Claire lurched over and embraced me. Her iron café chair knocked to the stone ground with a clatter. I wriggled a bit, but she was strong, and held me fast. Her hair brushed my face. She smelled of soap and coffee.

“Just had to do that,” she said, finally releasing me.

“So you’re my electric cow hugger, eh?”

Claire laughed, righting her chair. I stood to go, and she reached over and squeezed my hand. When we got back to the house, Gia and Alessandra were sitting at the table. The sharp scent of marijuana hung in the air.

“
Bellas!
” Alessandra said. She stood up and kissed us both. I was getting more used to this. Claire, of course, loved the custom and took the opportunity to kiss anyone she could. “How are you?”

“We picked some figs from the orchard,” Gia said, nodding to the basket on the table. She wore a crooked, stoned grin.

“That’s amazing!” Claire gushed.

And here, the afternoon briefly varies from what I know happened to what I know didn’t. Because in truth, I know that Claire dumped the fruit in the sink, and then all of us went to our respective rooms to get ready for the evening. That we soon called out farewells and drifted to different corners of the city: Claire to a tavern, me to a party with Jenny, the Italians to dinner in the home of yet another friend they wouldn’t introduce us to.

But soon blood would flow, and the others would, knowingly or not, change the truth. Their lies were out of fear, I suppose. Though it could have been something else. Didn’t I, who had in the past weeks transformed myself from the mouse I’d been, know the power of changing reality? Or perhaps it had something to do with the geography of the house itself, its precarious position on the edge of that hill. A strong wind, or an earthquake, and we’d topple downward. How could any memory in such a house be trusted?

So I, too, feel I may create one tiny scene that I deeply wish had happened. A lovely false memory we’d all have to hang on to, if we had been closer, or the hour had not been so late.

You see, it was a Friday. The four of us sat down at the small table, talking and laughing. We were still innocent, all of us. Our elbows knocked, and the air smelled of fresh coffee. Claire washed the figs while Gia told us stories about her family’s small farm outside Florence. Alessandra told us, shyly, about the first time she’d been in love back in Milan. Bringing the knife and a slab of wood over, Claire put a row of green figs in front of us.

Yes, I know what happened to that knife.

But I can tell you we’d never seen such fruit, none of us. Once sliced, those lumps of chlorophyll revealed their gleaming, bruised hearts. The seeds clung to our teeth. Juice streamed down our wrists.

Four almost-women, sitting at a table.

We tore into the fruit and ate.

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