This Must Be the Place: A Novel (49 page)

The shoebox was sitting on the coffee table, as it had for weeks, and now it loomed like a pink elephant between them. He removed the lid and pushed it closer to her, until one corner jutted over the edge of the table. The postcard was right on top.

“It was the closest thing to a will I could find.” Mona, still standing, hovered over the open box expectantly until Arthur nodded and she reached in for the card. “I admit I—I wanted the parts she left behind
for myself. I thought I could use your memories to discover them, to figure out what she was talking about.”

Mona’s lips moved as she read.

“I never dreamed,” Arthur said, “she meant a daughter.”

Mona’s brow creased. “She didn’t,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“She wrote this in nineteen ninety-three. Right after she left New Jersey. She had no idea I kept Oneida until years later. Four—five years later.” Mona tucked in her lip. “This is why you told Oneida, isn’t it. This postcard. You thought Amy would have wanted her to know that she was special. That Amy left her for me, to me. Like a bequest.”

“Yes,” said Arthur.

“Did it ever occur to you that Amy knew exactly where her daughter was and never tried to contact her? And never told you about it, and never once talked to me in all those years?” Mona flicked her thumb against the edge of the card, and the old paper bent. “She didn’t want her to know. She didn’t want to know
her
. And
I
didn’t want Oneida to know that her mother—her mother”—Mona swallowed—“her mother threw her—”

She stopped speaking. And before Arthur even knew it was happening, Mona lunged hard on her left foot and swung the right up violently to kick the shoebox. She connected with the jutting edge and it launched, spinning, exploding in the air. Postcards and clippings and photographs flew up and sailed down lazily; mood rings and key chains and buttons caromed off the table and the couch, skittering like plastic shrapnel. Most of it landed on Arthur. He sat perfectly still, nose still bleeding, coated in the confetti of someone else’s memories. Clues that had been intriguing, had inspired him and kept him company, but were themselves meaningless objects: that could point to places or to people but that would never tell him their secrets.

“She saved all this junk but she threw away her daughter.” And Mona ripped the postcard in half three times and tossed the bits in the air.

Arthur didn’t dare move.

“I’m not happy I punched you.” She disappeared into the bathroom and came back with a tissue. “But I’m not sorry, either.”

He accepted the tissue and dabbed at his nose but he wasn’t paying attention to anything other than a strange new sensation in the very center of his body, which felt raw and unprotected. Open. He felt his ribs had cracked apart and his heart and guts lay exposed to the cold breezes of the world; and if he didn’t wipe the pieces of Amy off of his body soon, they would crawl inside and congeal, and stopper him like a bottle, forever.

“Max just called from the road. He should be here in about two hours,” Mona said. “Finish packing.”

She closed the door behind her when she left.

Max brought Amy. In a brown parcel that he handed to Arthur—after enveloping him in a hug that made Arthur’s eyes sting—in a small silver-plated tin, were the ashes of Amy Henderson Rook.

“Ashes?” Arthur said. He didn’t like how heavy the tin was. Or rather, how heavy it wasn’t.

Max tilted his head. He was sitting on Arthur’s green loveseat, Harryhausen comatose in his lap. “Do you remember, at the funeral home?”

Arthur heard the sound of crystal vibrating and this time, instead of cutting away to a different scene, his brain rolled film of what happened after the morgue—when Max went with him to the funeral home. Stantz hadn’t been able to stand it, had abandoned them to return to his own, still-living wife, but not before plying Arthur with an anecdote: that Amy always joked about having Viking ship burials for her creatures, about setting them on fire and floating them down the trickling LA river after their movies had wrapped. “I’m not sure she ever did it, though sometimes her critters would disappear. I don’t know why I thought of that just now,” Stantz said, and shook his head, because he knew exactly why he’d thought of that just now but couldn’t say the words.

There had been a squat crystal vase—hardly a vase, low like a bowl—with a few white votives floating in three inches of water. It sat on an end table in the hall outside the empty viewing room, where Max was speaking quietly with a very large man in a dull suit. Arthur had dipped his fingertip in the water and ran it around the rim of the vase and it sang so low he thought he might have been making the sound up.
The sound rose, even though Arthur wasn’t anywhere near the vase, when the man in the dull suit asked if he would prefer to have the remains embalmed or cremated. “I understand there is no will,” he had said, “and no family.” The man’s eyes were the only part of him that weren’t dull; they were small and mean and wanted to get on with it, and Arthur heard the crystal sing so high his ears ached and he thought
No family?

No family.

“Viking funeral,” he muttered.

The director made a notation on a peach-colored form and Arthur signed where Max pointed.

“I do. I do remember, Max.” He felt winded and wobbly, as though his recovered memory had passed through every part of his body. Though he supposed cremation was perfectly fine, that Amy wouldn’t have minded in either case. Like she had said about her grandfather when she didn’t even go to his funeral: she was dead. She didn’t care. His ears popped and he set the tin back on the table.

Max swallowed. “They called me when they couldn’t get in touch with you, after they, you know,
after.
And the thought that she’d just sit there unclaimed was more than I—anyway. I thought you’d want them.

“I called the cops when I found your place all ripped to heck,” Max went on, coloring, “and the police tracked your flight to New York City but you were just . . .
gone.
Your parents are freaking out, Rook. Completely.” He smiled. “
Oh Max, you’ve got to find ahr Ahty. Weah so wurried.
How come you don’t talk funny like them?”

“I do. When I’m with them.”

“God bless Desdemona Jones,” Max continued. “She called me out of the blue on Saturday, explained everything, said she’d even pay for my ticket out here to collect you. Said she didn’t want you to go off wandering alone again when she sent you out the door.”

When she sent you out the door
. That hurt. All of this hurt—to think that he was being removed, systematically, from this life; that people he cared about were conspiring behind the scenes. Not that he blamed any of them. He didn’t belong here. It didn’t matter that it felt like home.

“So of course I call your parents again, I say you’re fine, and that I’ll take you to them.”

“Max, you really didn’t have to—I mean, I could have . . . I’m sure my brother would have come for me. You flew across the country to—what—drive me from New York to Massachusetts?”

“
Mona Jones
flew me across the country to drive you from New York to Massachusetts.” Max grinned at him. “I’m sorry, I know I’m going on and on, I’m just so fucking
happy
to see you, Rook. To see that you’re safe. That you’re OK. You look pretty good—you look
great
, considering.”

“If I took off my shirt,” Arthur said, “you’d take that back.”

Max reddened. “I have to be honest,” he said. “Booking like that was a hell of a thing to do. A hell of a dick move. For weeks I’ve thought that if I had only stayed with you that night, none of this would have happened. You’d be going to work, Amy might not be—” He gestured to the silver box on the table, where a similar receptacle for Arthur’s wife, only large and pink and cardboard, had so recently sat. Max cleared his throat. “Things would be different. You’d still be home, instead of . . . here. In this place, wherever it is. You know I can barely get cell reception? And what’s with all the trees, are these people loggers? It’s like freaking Twin Peaks out there. If you see a dwarf in a red suit, run.”

“Home is a moving target,” Arthur said. He sat on the couch beside Max. Harryhausen raised his head in languid greeting.

Max put his hand on Arthur’s arm. “Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong? Other than—everything, I guess.”

Arthur nodded and said thanks for coming, which he wasn’t thankful for in the least. He was flattered that Max had come so far to be the first person from his old life to enter this half-life, now rapidly drawing to a close, and he was grateful that Mona had known enough to realize that Max, not someone from his family, would be best equipped to shepherd him back. But he wished he’d never been found at all.

What he really wanted to thank Max for was leaving him alone that first night, for effectively tipping the first domino. If Max had stayed, Arthur would never have come to Ruby Falls. Arthur would never have met Oneida or Mona and would never have known Amy for everything she truly was and had been all along: a mysterious, magnetic, and cruel creator.

After Mona left, he had brushed the pieces of the pink shoebox off
his body like a man who believes himself covered in something unclean, something that crawls; but Amy was back, she was still there, on the coffee table, more herself than ever. He could hold Amy’s ashes—her entire body—in his hands, and he couldn’t pretend. He held Amy in his hands and thought:
So this is you. This is all that’s left of you. The parts I loved. The parts that Mona knew and has a reason to hate. All the parts of you that ever were: no longer missing, waiting to be found, but all right here in my hands.

He didn’t know what to do with her, didn’t know what she wanted. Not anymore. The certainty he’d felt when he found the postcard, and then when he’d known that Amy wanted him to name her heir, was gone. In its place was a dull, sonorous ache that made his breastbone thrum like a tuning fork. The ache was understanding: Amy was finite, and whether he loved her despite the things she’d done was irrelevant. Their time together was over. There was nothing he could do to change any of this. This was his life, and, except for an obese cat with a superiority complex, he was alone.

Though not quite alone, never alone, not in this house, as dinner—Max in Oneida’s seat and Anna and Sherman sniping at each other more than usual and Bert staring both Max and Arthur down like a sharpshooter—reminded him. Mona had thrown together a massive pan of ziti. Now he wished he had the appetite to devour it with the proper gusto: gusto that said
I can’t thank you for everything you’ve done, and I can’t apologize for everything I’ve done, and that Amy did. But I feel that stuffing my face with this food might be a start.

He shoved a forkful in his mouth and burned his tongue on hot cheese.

Mona wasn’t even paying attention. She’d ignored him since Max arrived, preoccupied, Arthur could only guess, with worry for Oneida. Arthur assumed she had called the police, but he didn’t know; she didn’t tell him. When Bert asked whether Oneida would be joining them for dinner, Arthur heard a thickness in Mona’s voice when she said her daughter was having dinner over at a friend’s house.

“Oh, good for
her
,” Anna said. “She’s always had a hard time making friends.” Her eyes narrowed. “Or is this
more
than a friend?”

“Just a friend,” Mona said. She poked at her ziti.

“So tell me what you do, Anna—for a living,” Max chirped. Arthur smiled, grateful. He’d already explained to Max about the missing daughter and confessed his role in her flight—and the story behind his swollen, purpling nose. When Arthur was done, an awed Max repeated,
God bless Desdemona Jones
.

Anna’s cheeks plumped as she smiled. “I’m a vet. Country vet. Dogs, cats, horses, the occasional guinea pig. I once treated a goat with asthma.”

Max looked to Sherman.

“I teach shop,” Sherman said. “At the high school. Pardon me—
technology education
.”

“Oh, so you must have known Amy.”

Arthur could have killed him. Could have redirected his fork from his mouth straight into Max’s chest. He’d told Max about Oneida, but he hadn’t thought to mention that his connection to Ruby Falls was still a secret to everyone other than Mona—though, really, what was the point anymore? Oneida knew. There was no one left to protect.

Sherman’s bushy brows rose in confusion and Max clarified. “Amy? Arthur’s wife? I don’t know what her name was before Rook.”

“Her name was Henderson. Amy Henderson,” Mona said. Both Anna and Sherman froze mid-chew.

“She must have been an amazing student. I saw some of the crazy stuff she built, that one time—Rook, remember, when we went on set to take pictures? And she was controlling that purple sea monster thing, with all the tentacles?”

“I haven’t thought about her in years,” Sherman said. “Not since the two of you ran off like a couple of jokers.” He frowned at Mona.

“You’re
married
to
Mona’s
Amy?” Anna’s face lit up like a pinball machine. She turned to Mona, laughing. “I can’t believe you kept a secret this big for so long,” she said. “I didn’t think you had it in you!”