This Must Be the Place: A Novel (4 page)

“Where ARE you?” Arthur shouted, scaring himself.
“I know you’re here!”

He heard Harryhausen crying again, followed the sound to the living room, saw Amy’s monster movie posters—
The Clash of the Titans
(her One Movie, her religion),
The Thing, The Beast from 10,000 Fathoms
—and saw his own reflection in the framed glass. He tossed the cushions off the couch and found thirty-six cents and a single blue sock. There was nothing else—nothing that he didn’t know—no clues to solve, no hints, no indication.

Nothing to see that hadn’t already been seen.

Shuddering now, muscles twitching with cold and fear, Arthur returned to the bedroom. At some point he had begun to cry. He sat on the edge of the mattress and told himself to calm down, that he’d just
proved he knew everything there was to know about Amy Henderson. He’d seen her. He’d seen
all
of her. She hadn’t told him what he didn’t know because there wasn’t anything to tell.

She
hadn’t known either.

Arthur choked on nothing.

Harryhausen hissed at him and Arthur looked up, and there was Harry, in front of the closet—how stupid Arthur was, not to have looked in the closet. He didn’t have the strength to stand, so he crawled over to the door and pushed it open, and there were all his pants and shirts and Amy’s skirts and dresses, hanging silently, companionably. Suspended. Sleeves waiting for arms that would never fill them. Collars waiting for a throat that had grown cold and still. Shoes entombed and stacked in bright paper boxes. And Arthur, exhausted, fell over on the carpet, hating himself for not being able to see.

He blinked. He breathed. The pile was rough on his cheek. He felt Harryhausen walk by his head and closed his eyes and wished he could just fall away and forget everything, could make it untrue, could make it unhappen. He tried to will himself to sleep for a long time and couldn’t. He opened his eyes again.

And Arthur’s eyes, which had only needed time to adjust to the dark, saw a shoebox. A huge shoebox on the floor of their closet that he’d seen a million times, that he remembered moving into the apartment, even; but a shoebox that—despite its bright pink cardboard, the word
GUMBALLS!
like a cattle brand on its side, big enough to hold a pair of black stiletto boots (pictured) that Arthur had never seen his wife wear—had always been effectively invisible, tucked neatly beneath the hems of their everyday lives. He had never opened it. He had never asked Amy what it contained. He had never even been curious until the day his wife disappeared.

It was so very pink, even in the dark.

He lifted the lid.

He saw Amy.

At eleven o’clock the next morning, Arthur Rook’s apartment would be broken into by Max Morris, who, after Arthur didn’t answer any of his
phone calls, would worry the door open with a credit card only to find the tiny one-bedroom he’d never actually stepped inside ransacked. Gutted. The refrigerator door open, motor wheezing. Papers strewn across the hallway and the bedroom floor. A trail of empty duffel bags and packs like shed skins leading from the hall closet to the bedroom, where, on a bed littered with clothes, an empty space the size of a large case told Max that Arthur had packed and fled. Arthur Rook would never know, but Max, who was a little in love with him (he couldn’t help it; he’d never met anyone so guileless), would put everything away as best he could. He would fold the clothes and place them in drawers and on hangers. He would find Arthur’s cell phone on the living room floor and feel a little less hurt that Arthur hadn’t answered any of his calls. He would stack the papers neatly on the kitchen table and close the refrigerator but throw out the milk (probably spoiled). He would leave the blood in the bathroom. He would see the cat food dishes on the counter and guess that Arthur had taken Amy’s cat with him. Then Max would steal a lukewarm beer for his efforts, and call the police, and sit in the living room and wait for them to arrive, examining a picture of Arthur and the late Amy Rook: huddled together on a beach somewhere, the wind whipping her hair across both of their faces. And Max would hope that his strange, quiet, runaway friend, wherever he’d gone, would be able to find his way back home.

But Arthur’s home had ceased to exist. Its ghost had called to him and told him where to run.

2
Freaks and Worthy Souls

Oneida Jones was a freak. It was nonnegotiable. It was absolute. It was common knowledge among both her fellow classmates and the population of Ruby Falls at large, but it wasn’t until after her twelfth birthday that she ever considered the possibility that it was something to be embraced rather than raged against. Her fellow sixth-graders thought she was a freak because she had huge frizzy hair and dark eyebrows that touched in the middle of her forehead, because she demanded that Mr. Buckley teach them about Japanese internment camps, and because she was named after a spoon (not true). Ruby Falls, in the most general sense, considered her the freak reminder of the downfall of her mother, Desdemona Jones—the Fallen Prom Queen, as Mona was fond of calling herself, even though the title was something of a misnomer; Mona technically never made it to the prom.

Mona, the teenage daughter of Gerald and Mary Jones, pillars of the community, their boardinghouse a veritable Ruby Falls institution, ran away in the spring of 1993—and reappeared that August with a baby. Suddenly there was the infant Oneida and Mona, jiggling her on her hip, refusing to be denied or swept away: in her senior year at Ruby Falls High, shopping in the same convenience mart where all of Ruby Falls shopped, acting as though nothing remarkable had happened. Nobody ever said anything to Oneida about her mother, not directly. But she had spent her young life interpreting the awkward pauses and silences in conversations with the old guard of Ruby Falls, her grandparents’ friends and colleagues, who thought her mother ought to have accomplished something more respectable with her life than having a kid at sixteen and baking wedding cakes for a living.

Oneida thought it was a perfectly acceptable way to live; Mona never gave her reason to think otherwise. When she was old enough to ask questions about her father, her mother always said the same thing: he wasn’t ready to be a dad but I was ready to be a mom, so I brought you home. Her grandparents had always been kind and loving. If they had ever felt awkward around her, it must have been during her infancy, because she didn’t remember anything other than juice boxes, endless hands of rummy, and pockets in cable-knit sweaters full of butterscotch candy, sticky in crackly orange wrappers. They were dead now, and her mother ran their boardinghouse, the Darby-Jones, a rambling mansion built in 1899 by her great-great grandfather, William Fitchburg Jones, and his business partner, Daniel Darby, who had sold hardware, farm tools, and milking equipment to the dairy farmers who still made up the entire tax base of Ruby Falls.

Oneida spent her childhood wandering the old creaky hallways of the Darby-Jones, variously hiding from and pestering the tenants over the years: Alice Cooper, an octogenarian who went to church every day to pray for the soul of that “devil rock musician who slanders my good name”; Roger Beers, an old hippie who worked for the post office and taught her the intro chords to “Smoke on the Water”; Kitty Grace, the former home economics teacher at Ruby Falls High who worshipped John F. Kennedy and had a small tattoo of his profile on her shoulder blade. It was a childhood almost completely devoid of other children. It wasn’t until she went to kindergarten that Oneida understood not everyone had a working knowledge of mah-jongg, knew what
glasnost
meant, or had played with a stereopticon. Once the other kids figured out Oneida had more in common with their own parents and grandparents than with them, they found her largely uninteresting; once Oneida insisted that they would like learning about canasta and the Andrews Sisters, that the ancient set of encyclopedias in the den was a thousand times more fascinating than the Internet and she wanted to tell them all about it, the brand of
raging weirdo freak named after a spoon
(
not true
!) became permanent.

But one month to the day after her twelfth birthday, during a science lesson about the properties of light, Oneida Jones woke up. The tiny voice in her head, that had whispered
You’re weird, nobody likes
you, they all think you’re a freak
, from the moment she climbed on the bus in the morning until she opened her front door in the afternoon, stopped speaking. In the silence, Oneida could finally hear what was happening around her. Jessi Krenshaw was asking Mr. Buckley to explain the difference between reflection and reflaction—
again
—and Mr. Buckley replied in his most sanctimonious tone that light reflacted when it bounced off a surface at an angle.

“What does reflacted light do? Like, can we use it for anything?” asked Jessi.

“Reflaction,” said Mr. Buckley, “is one of the main principles behind lasers. It’s the reflacting power of light that make lasers possible.”

Oneida felt like she’d had a bucket of ice water dumped over her head. Exhibit A: Mr. B had never shown signs of a speech impediment, which, to her mind, was the only excuse for thinking
reflact
was a word. Exhibit B: He was wrong. He was
just wrong
. Refraction occurred when light passed through substances and appeared to bend; refraction was what happened in prisms, not lasers. She knew she was right because she’d spent the previous weekend poring through the L volume of the
World Book Encyclopedia
(
legislature
,
light
,
lunar eclipse
), not to mention she’d done the homework. She looked around the classroom. No one else was paying attention: they were scribbling in notebooks, winding hair around fingers, staring into space. And Mr. B just kept saying it: “Light hits the pavement and reflacts in all different directions”; “If light hits a mirror, do we think it will reflect or reflact?” Oneida put her hand over her mouth to quell the wild whoop of laughter that was building in her body, because she had just figured it all out: If being a freak meant she was the only one in the room to realize her teacher was a complete dumb-ass, then she’d be a freak and be proud of it. In that moment, she consciously chose the lonely, superior life of freakdom. It was a life she was already living anyway, but she accepted it on the basis that it was better to be lonely and right than stupid with friends.

That was the credo by which her entire existence took shape, the mantra that she’d repeat to herself when she moved up to the combined junior-senior high, through middle school and into her freshman and sophomore years, whenever her mother asked if she was having trouble: she never had friends over, she never asked for a ride to the movies or
the mall. Better lonely and right than stupid with friends, she’d think, and tell Mona that the other kids weren’t interesting. They didn’t understand her and it was pointless to pretend she cared about useless things like who was taking who to homecoming and who said what on Face-book and blah blah boring.

“They can’t all be bad,” Mona would say. “There were plenty of boring people in my class, too, but there were a few worthy souls. You just have to figure out how to recognize each other.” Oneida, aside from finding this almost impossible to believe, chafed at her mother’s suggestion that the reason she didn’t have any friends was because she wasn’t trying hard enough. What the hell did her mother know? Mona didn’t have to spend the day bouncing from class to class, struggling to stay awake and interested, when all she really wanted to do was curl up with a book and teach herself what she really wanted to know—which, incidentally, was
everything
, something she was fairly certain was absent from the curriculum at Ruby Falls High.

And then her sophomore year Andrew Lu transferred into the district, and Oneida understood what her mother meant about recognizing worthy souls.

Andrew Lu was beautiful. He was an athlete with skin the color of milky tea and warm dark eyes. He was also the only Asian in the entire school system, and rumor held that he had been born and raised in China until he was eight. He spoke three languages—English, Chinese, and French. He signed up for cross-country, the fall sport for smart jocks, and when he walked through the hall, cool rolled off him in waves. Oneida didn’t understand how anyone under the age of eighteen could possibly be as comfortable in his own skin as Andrew Lu was. She envied him. He fascinated her. She wanted to ask him how he did it: how could he be so confident and yet so
different
from everyone else?