Poe (19 page)

By the time Lisa arrives I’ve borrowed a few things from my neighbor Doug to spiff things up and detract from the overall homeless-shelter
interior décor. Apparently some people still own cloth napkins and iron them no less. (Not a big fan of the new chair, though, is Doug. One glance and his verdict was, “The point of design is to encourage relationships, not scare them away.”)

Anyways.

My first article for the
Eagle
detailing the spooky happenings here on Grant Street (
MESSAGE FROM THE GRAVE
) is almost done, I’ve got a pizza on the way from Del Fino’s, and I’ve even discovered a forgotten stash of bottled water that I’d put away in case of snowstorm-induced electrical outages—an amazing find, because I’d hate to serve Lisa water from the tap, which is yellowish from the old copper pipes. And all my effort is worth the moment when Lisa enters, slips off her jacket, and says, “It smells
so
much better.”

Then she sees the chair, and her eyes widen. “That is the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen.” She settles happily in the egg and spins it around.

“Jealous?”

“Completely.” She stops the chair and then points to the opposite wall, where the photographs had been. “What’s up with that?”

In my cleaning frenzy I made the decision—hey, who needs a corkboard when you’re living in a low-rent dive and have plenty of pushpins? So I’ve started my collage, tacking the torn-in-half photos to the wall, as well as the copies of the old
Eagle
articles and my handwritten mystery list.

Lisa puts a finger to her temple with a pained expression. “Are you writing on walls now too?”

Ooohh. Didn’t think about that one. “This?” I say, trying to make light of the subject. “This isn’t writing on walls. This is writing on
paper
, then tacking the paper
onto
the walls. Completely different. Apples and oranges.”

Lisa groans.

“What—you have a corkboard with lyrics? I don’t make morbid associations about that.”

Before we can get started with another argument—again, is this the Poe effect? We only seem to have arguments here—the pizza dude arrives, blessing us with pepperoni-induced peace and harmony.

“Place mats?” asks Lisa, her mouth full. She seems wary of them, and they do look too expensive; not the kind of thing you want to drip pizza sauce on.

“Doug, my neighbor’s,” I admit. They don’t look quite right on my bamboo coffee table with paper plates and plastic cutlery, but oh well.

She shakes her head sadly. “You spent five hundred dollars on a book you can’t even read and you’re borrowing your neighbor’s table linens? Do you not
know
how to shop online?”

“I got the chair,” I protest.

She gives me a serious look. “How much did you pay for the chair?”

“Okay, it was free,” I admit. “But you know what they say: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Plus you’ve got to
see
this book.” I jump up to get my messenger bag.

She raises a hand. “No, I
don’t
.”

“Really,” I say, rummaging through my closet. That’s something I feel like I can do now—open my closet without wallowing in a pity party for one. Interesting. “It’s cool,” I add. “Very goth.” I find the book and okay, it really doesn’t look all that cool, the gray
MacGyver
duct tape ruins the effect, but still. When I turn to show Lisa though, she’s got her bag over her shoulder and is opening the door.

“I’m not doing this,” she says quietly. Her face is soft, as if she’s about to cry.

“Wait,” I say. “Doing what?”

“You
know
what. This is
exactly
how it started before.”

“For Christ’s sake, Lisa, I’m not Daniel; I’m really not. I would never,
never
hurt you. Is that what you’re scared of, that I’m going to go crazy and try to kill you?”

“Daniel is not
crazy
. He has a disease—”

“A disease that made him think stabbing you was a good idea.” Instantly I’m filled with regret as her face goes a whiter shade of pale. “Look,” I add more gently. “All I’m asking is for you to explain. One minute you say he has a disease—that he’s schizophrenic, and that’s why he attacked you—and then the next minute you’re scared I’m going to end up like him just by reading some book. By taping notes on my wall. As far as I know, reading and organizational skills aren’t big risk factors for psychotic breaks.”

“It’s not that simple,” she says tentatively. She sits back down in the egg-shaped chair but holds her purse in her hand, like at any moment she might still leave. I settle on the couch and let her think for a minute.

Finally she says, “To Daniel it was all a big game at first, a challenge. He looked at my grandfather’s numbers like they were an interesting puzzle, and then, it’s like the more time he spent with them, the more they seemed to hold him. Possess him.”

“I thought your mom said she’d thrown all that stuff out.”

Lisa sighs heavily. “She did. But I wanted some privacy and decided to move into the basement. Daniel helped me rip up the old carpeting, and the numbers were there on the cement floor in white chalk. I washed them away, but Daniel jotted them down in a notebook first.” She stares intently at her hands.

“You can’t think this is
your
fault.”

“Sometimes I’d be sitting across from him,” she says softly, “just like I’m sitting across from you, and I knew he was thinking about them. Repeating them in his mind over and over. He was so
sure
of himself at the beginning. He kept saying there was a reason we’d found the numbers, that he could figure out what they meant… He was so convincing that he convinced me. But he didn’t figure it out, because there was nothing
to
figure out. And a part of me wonders… What if I’d done something different? What if I’d said something?… Stopped him?” She twists the straps of her bag between her fingers, and for a moment we’re both silent.

“Look,” I finally say, “there’s a big difference here. No family history of mental illness. Okay, maybe my mom was on the OCD side when it came to cleaning, but no schizophrenia.”

“But why take the chance?” she asks in a small voice. “Why not just leave it alone?”

A good question.

Two candles also borrowed from Doug burn low on the table, flickering weakly, almost about to go out in a pool of melted wax. A cold wind blows through the eaves of the house, rattling the windowpane. It’s a lonely sound.

I pull at some loose thread where the couch is worn away. “My parents died. One minute they were here, calling me to let me know they were coming out for the weekend, and then a few hours later they were gone. Forever. No warning. I had no bad feeling; no black cat crossed the street—it was a completely normal day. I was worried about my novel; I was planning on going to the corner store to pick up some flowers for my mom; CNN was on; there were kids playing on the street. I went to a party. Then, when I got the call, it was like,
what the fuck
? Because the next day nothing changed. The sun shone, the kids played baseball, CNN was covering the same news. My whole life disappeared, and the world went on as usual. That scared me. It scared me more than anything. Because then, what’s the point? There is none.”

“But that’s just it,” says Lisa. “It’s random. It’s all random and there is no point, so you’ve got to take your happiness where you can find it. You almost died but didn’t. So now enjoy what you’ve got.”

“What’s happening to me now is
not random
. The symbol on my father’s ring is the same symbol in the book.”

Lisa shakes her head dismally. “Dimitri, a
dollar sign
is a symbol. Ever see that in more than one place? It doesn’t
mean
—”

“But it could—”

“This is all about your father, isn’t it?” A statement more than a question.

I swallow. “No. Okay,
maybe
. But let’s look at this logically. Hypothesis A: Daniel is completely off-his-rocker nuts. Then there can’t possibly be any harm if I read the book, right? Insanity isn’t communicable.”

Lisa gives me a guarded look. “Well that’s Hypothesis A.”

“Right. Then we have Hypothesis B, which is that Daniel is
not
crazy. Instead something is going on that has to do with Aspinwall, or the numbers, or my father, or something else we don’t understand. But if we go with that assumption, then Daniel spending the rest of his life in an asylum isn’t going to help him, because he’s not insane.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“What I’m saying is that the only way to help him would be to understand what’s wrong. There are too many coincidences for all this to be random. I feel like there’s a thread that’s connecting it all, that there’s a direction, a path.”

“A thread, a
path
,” murmurs Lisa. She looks at me with an expression I can’t quite read and then leans over, placing a hand over one of the candles. The delicate skin between her fingers glows an incandescent red. “Let’s say Hypothesis
B
is right, and it i
s
all connected. What’s at the end of that path?”

“I don’t know,” I admit.

“I do,” says Lisa. “And it’s not good. For anyone.”

“That was the end of Daniel’s path. And I’m not Daniel.”

“You keep saying that.”

For a moment we don’t talk—we just sit there silently. An obvious impasse. There’s no way for either of us to win.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen if I really start to pursue this,” I finally say. “But I know that I need you, Lisa.” I twist one of the couch’s threads around my finger. “I need you to tell me if I’ve gone too far. I need you to throw me a line.”

“My track record as a lifesaver is not that great,” she says bitterly.

“You’ll know,” I say. “You’re maybe the only one who will.”

Lisa doesn’t answer. Instead she slowly passes a finger through the edge of the dying flame, making it ripple, playing with it. “You know, Daniel always used to do this when we were kids. I’d wonder why he never got burned. He said it was magic. But there’s no such thing as magic.”

“Is that a no, then?” I ask softly.

“I didn’t say that.” She pulls her hand back from the candle, looks me in the eye. “
Okay
, I will throw you one, and only one, line. If I say pull back, pull back. If I say run, you run. Will you promise me that?”

I swallow and nod. The magnitude of this concession is not lost on me.

“Because if you don’t… I can’t be there with you when it ends. Badly.”

The flame dies, and smoke curls from the burnt wick.

I stand—hold my hand out to her. “I wouldn’t want you to.”

Around ten, at a reasonably decent hour, I give Lisa a ride home.

“You want to come in?” she whispers, her breath hanging in the cold air. Of course there’s not much point in whispering; Buddy has announced our arrival with a fit of barking that could wake the proverbial dead, or worse still, an anxious mother. A light pops on in Elizabeth’s second-floor bedroom.

“Yes,” I say, “but then I won’t want to leave.”

“Hmmm,” she says, nuzzling my neck while she places a hand on my thigh. “And is that a bad thing?”

“Hey,” I say, gently pushing her away. “Don’t start the engine unless you’re going for a ride.”

She eases out of the car and smiles. “I thought writers needed to suffer for their art.”

“Well thanks to you I’m going to be taking a cold shower as soon as I get home.”

“That’s not suffering, that’s dating a tease.”

She puts her hands in her jacket pockets, and I watch her go up the front steps, slightly hunched against the cold, illuminated by the Mustang’s round headlights. She looks smaller somehow, more vulnerable. At the top she gives Buddy a gentle pat but doesn’t look back before opening the front door, which briefly casts a warm light on the porch.

It’s a long and lonely ride back home alone. The ghostly streets are empty and deserted, except for the liquor stores and bars—today is Friday, the day for cashing welfare and social security checks in these parts. I pass a dirty middle-aged man sitting on the curb in front of Ace Liquor; he drinks from a bottle in a paper bag, swaying slightly. I wonder if he’s someone’s father. There was about a month in high school where I seriously wondered if my continuously absent father was leading some kind of double life, if maybe he was an alcoholic. I’d seen a television special outlining the signs, unexplained absences being one of them. So I’d ride my bike to the bars, find an inconspicuous spot, and watch the door, imagining myself a detective on a stakeout. I did see other people’s fathers, like Mr. Sprague with some woman, not his wife. An occasional teenager would try to get in, but they’d be escorted back out on the sidewalk five minutes later with one less fake ID. But not my father. Never my father.

I could usually tell about a week before he left that he would be going on one of his unexplained trips. My mother would get into a
mood
. The first bad signs were the dust bunnies under the bed. Next came the envelope with cash for me to buy lunch at school. I was the only kid in my class with an industrial stainless steel lunchbox and four-course gourmet meal, but each day leading up to my father’s departure, my mother would get up later and later in the morning, leaving me to fend for my own with cereal for breakfast, or if she wasn’t looking, chocolate chip cookies. Frozen items would make an appearance at dinner, peas and french fries, and I knew things were
really bad when I’d come downstairs to find a tinfoil-wrapped TV dinner at my place at the table.