Dwellers (3 page)

“Really?”

We sit together in miserable silence.

“Can I see?” Louis asks, and I am more than glad to hand the planner to him.

6

LOUIS PORES OVER the contents of the planner during dinner. The tables have turned—now I’m the one scarfing down rice and fish while Louis ignores his plate.

“You need to eat something,” I say, echoing his words for me earlier. How far away that beef stew seemed now, pre-chest freezer. Pre-dead girl.

From the various slots in the planner, we uncovered a purple pen, a torn ticket stub to a play at the university, a folded piece of paper with equations marked “Fundamental
Accounting”, a flyer for a jeans sale (“UP TO 75% OFF!”), and small cardboard cards covered in calligraphy script.
Sweetness. Elegance. Fuck.

Louis turns the pages of the planner, every now and then turning to me and pointing at something the girl has written. We look at her calendar. It is March.
Final group paper due.
She has
encircled a date in April.
Solo trip—can’t wait to see you, Vigan!!! Can’t wait to get OUT of here.

She is supposed to enter her senior year in college by June. She has notes up to that month, sweet June that she never saw.
Online pre-enlistment. Comm 180.

I suddenly find it hard to breathe.

“This poor girl,” Louis says.

“I hope it’s not her,” I say. “The one in the freezer. I hope it’s not Meryl.” But that would mean an anonymous corpse and a potential witness to the
crime.

We come upon a page filled with names and phone numbers, but Louis skips ahead, probably planning to deal with that later.

“Look at this,” Louis says.

The page shows a photo of people sitting in a circle. Cut from a magazine, taped on the page.

Meryl used black ink for her notes and wrote in beautiful cursive.

The next page is an Alice in Wonderland collage, blonde Alice in a blue dress with a mushroom umbrella. The Cheshire cat. Lace. Glitter. Pink swatches. We turn the page.

I DON’T WANT to go home, to be honest. I’d avoid it if I can. This is all they see: one hundred and seventy pounds. I am doing well in my studies, thank you for
not asking, and yes this dress doesn’t fit me anymore. Alice ate the Eat Me Cake, the foolish slut.

I WAS 120 POUNDS when I entered college. I bought bigger jeans, upped my shirt size. It didn’t feel like a big deal. I was enjoying myself. But one time I came home and
my mother looked at me and said, “You are so fat”, with such incredulity and such disgust that every spoonful I consumed felt like a sin.

THE NEXT PAGE shows another magazine cutout, a photo of a gray-haired couple smiling at the camera.
We’ll love you if you are exactly
this
size!
the caption
reads.

There was a time when my cousins and I went out and had a spa day. A cousin of mine apparently saw the (petite) masseuse roll her eyes while kneading my shoulders. My cousin said, she’s
too big for you, isn’t she? And they all laughed and of course I had to laugh because I had to be a good sport, I can’t be fat AND sensitive, oh no, because I did this to myself,
didn’t I? Then we had dinner and I ended up paying for their food. I don’t know why I do this to myself.

I HAVE BEEN called a whale. I have been asked in jest if I were pregnant, and why the gestation period was so long. Someone in class I didn’t even know very well asked
me to come over, gestured “wide” with her arms, and asked, “What the hell happened?”

I HAVE MORE stories like this. Maybe you’d like to sit down.

I HATE: PENCIL skirts, scuba gear, sleeveless tops, family reunions, college mixers, a gathering of any kind that involves people looking you up and down and passing judgment
on you even before you open your mouth, i.e. she is fat, therefore she is: lazy, undisciplined, greedy, has thunder thighs that will rip apart the dress she’s wearing any. Second.
Now.

THE FUNNY THING is I go on a diet, I drink lots of water, and my classmates eat pizza and burgers and drink soda every day yet they remain reed-thin while I am this. And the
world looks at us, points at me and says I eat like a monster. I did not create this body—it was given to me.

I AM ALSO a pretty decent artist, but who the fuck cares.

THERE IS A pastel drawing of a little girl with her arms spread wide. Over her is a rainbow, and over the rainbow is an arc of words that read,
Fuck your heart, appearance is
everything.

APPEARANCE IS EVERYTHING.

Immediately following this is a list of food and measurements, like this:

THIS GOES ON for three or so pages.

Then:

I AM DOING my best. I really am, but I lose the weight and then gain it right back.

I WANT TO do this for myself. I think, This is for my health (though I am healthy! I am!), but I feel like I am doing this to lord it over my mother, to wipe the smirk off my
cousin’s face, to answer the girl who had the audacity to ask me, What the hell happened? This is what happened, bitch.

BUT I FAIL. I fail and I fail and I fail.

I HEAR THE girls talking about fasting but I can’t do it. I want to. It’s the fastest way to make myself disappear.

WHY CAN’T I do this? Why can’t I just slice off this flab and get on with my life?

I FEEL THE urge to jump on a bus, any bus, to anywhere, and just go away and never come back.

CAN WE JUST stop making me feel like shit already? Can we do that?

I WANT TO love myself, but it appears that I am not allowed to.

YOU ARE SO fat, you are so worthless, you take up the space meant for better, more disciplined people, WHY DO YOU EVEN BOTHER, MERYL?

THE VERY LAST entry is dated January 1, the New Year, and reads:
I am so tired of this body.

7

I MISS PACING. I miss putting my hands in my pocket and striding from one end of the room to another, because I can, because I want to, because I am frustrated and anxious and
movement helps ease this sinking feeling.

I push myself away from the table and wheel out of the dining room, through the living room, and out the door onto the front porch. There is a soft breeze. I wonder where the breeze is coming
from. Is there a sea nearby? The street we are on is narrow and quiet and sad, the sea’s antithesis.

I think of everything other than Meryl and her last words, but of course every thought circles back to her.

I hear the door open behind me. Louis steps out to sit on the porch ledge.

“It’s probably the most harrowing thing I’ve read in my life,” I say.

Louis looks past the gate, at the other houses. “If that was her in the chest freezer,” he says, “it looks like she was starved to death.”

“She sounded like she
wanted
to starve to death.” I shake my head. “It’s a horrible fixation.”

“Why was she here?” Louis says. “What was her connection to you and me?”

To Louis and Jonah, you mean
, I think.

I think about the planner, where we found it. I wheel across the porch toward my bedroom window. I peer inside. The low bookshelf. The bed, the bedroom door beyond. It is a bungalow, after all.
The window is large. It is a short drop.

“She was trying to get out of the window,” I say. “Someone trapped her in the bedroom, blocking the doorway. She hoisted herself up onto the bookshelf to open the window and
her planner fell into the gap.”

And then what? She wasn’t able to open the windows fast enough. Someone wrapped his arms around her and pulled her back into the house. I imagine her kicking, scratching, her sneakers
hitting the books, the books falling to the floor.

We go to my room. We look at the hardwood floor. We can see scratches, but we don’t know how long they have been there. Last night, last month, years ago?

“But why?” Louis asks.

Why would she come here? Why would anyone want to keep her here?

Why do we need to care?

“Louis,” I say, “let’s not get involved in this.”

Louis sighs and sits on the edge of the bed. “We keep the body a secret,” he says. He says it deadpan; I can’t tell if he’s judging me.

“Yes.”

“And the planner?”

“We bury it. Burn it.”

“And then what?”

And then—

I don’t answer.

“And then we wait for you to get better,” says Louis. “And while we wait, there is the danger of the police or Meryl’s family finding out where she was last
seen.”

“She’s probably been missing since early this year,” I say, “and yet her body’s still here.”

Just a few days ago, a young woman approached the gate and asked if Meryl was in this house.

Louis doesn’t bring it up. “All right. You get better. We leave this city, go someplace else. With bodies and identities that may be guilty of a crime.”

I don’t say anything. Then: “Let’s take the body out of the freezer and bury it.”

“At the risk of our neighbors seeing something?”

“What neighbors?” I scoff.

“You’re right. It’s a quiet street. But are you a hundred percent sure there’s no nocturnal teenager looking out of his window into our backyard right now?”

“There’s the spell,” I say.

Louis falls silent for a moment. “Well,” he says. He stands up, begins to pace. I wish I could do the same. “It’s flimsy. It won’t hold up for long. And it’s
only meant to keep uninvited people out, not make the house invisible.”

“We find another body to switch to,” I say.

He stops walking. “I told you,” he says. “We can’t do this again. You saw what happened to—”

I know. I know. But—

“We were able to make the switch perfectly,” I say, and almost instantly feel the throb of pain in my right leg, my ruined knee, the throb increasing in magnitude, crushing like a
vise.

Louis runs out and comes back with opioids and a glass of water.

“What’s the endgame here, Louis?” I ask, minutes later. I imagine myself at sea, I imagine the pain as a series of waves, ebbing, leaving.

“I’m sorry,” Louis says, and I am instantly angry at him for ignoring my question. “I didn’t mean to fight. I’ll bury the planner in the garden tomorrow. That
should be easy enough. My first thought, really, was to move the body, but I can’t—” he pauses “—I don’t want to touch her.”

The anger dissipates. I think of him, the real him, in our previous life, five years older and brighter, kinder, more compassionate, than my own father. I remember the forbidden books he
smuggled into the estate so I could have something more worthwhile to read, some world more worthwhile to visit. Something to aspire to. His stories and the books he brought created something that
wasn’t there before—a want—and I still can’t decide if this first act of rebellion against our fathers is a good thing or a bad thing. If it was worth it.

“I hope they abandon the search soon,” Louis is saying now. “I checked online, there is a small article about a missing student named Meryl Solomon. There is an ongoing search.
There are social network groups talking about her and her last whereabouts but they all seem stumped.”

Look at what has happened to us, I think.

“What’s the endgame here?” I ask again.

He doesn’t reply.

“You plan to stay in these bodies until we die?” I say.

“Do you have a better plan?”

I am so surprised by his rage that I am rendered mute.

“If I could give you my right leg I would,” Louis says, “but I can’t. These are the cards we were dealt.”

I give myself a pep talk every morning: you are injured but you are away from the estate, you are with your cousin who is kind enough to take care of you, you have a chance to live a new life.
You should be grateful, you should be grateful, you should be grateful.

But I have listened to the doctors, I have read the literature. I should be able to use crutches along with the brace to move about in the first six weeks post-surgery (“early
weight-bearing is encouraged”) but the pain is incredible. Even my left leg can’t seem to carry me. Sometimes I can’t feel anything below my right knee. I know—I am
sure—that there will be more surgeries down the road, years of rehabilitation, recurrent dislocations, chronic pain, dependence on drugs, and a brace I have to wear my whole life. If Meryl
was still alive I would tell her,
Rejoice in your life, rejoice in your beautiful, healthy body, in your lack of hurt.
I would tell her family and her detractors that they are fools, that
they have marred a crystal-clear happiness. I mourn Meryl. I mourn the boy who once climbed a tree, fell from its branches, and rebounded just a week later, ready to play again. I mourn my previous
body, now probably locked up in a morgue somewhere, about to head to an unmarked mass grave. It was disease-free, resilient, and strong. It was not in pain. Such a waste, I think now, but:
you
should be grateful, you should be grateful, you should be grateful.

“I don’t want to be stuck in this body,” I say, and I am surprised by the hitch in my breath, the tears on my cheeks. My ruined knee throbs. I cover my face with my right hand.
I want to be left alone, I don’t want to be touched, but when Louis leans forward and embraces me, I don’t push him away.