Threats (12 page)

The box was closed and David wanted to keep it that way. He felt that opening the box would release Franny's ghost, that life after the box had been opened would make a distinct shift to a new form, a sugar cube dissolving in a saucer of tea, a hair trimmed from a nose. The hair, the nose, each altered forever. Aileen was watching him with a slight frown. He tucked one finger under the cardboard edge and opened it up. It looked to be the contents of a locker. There was an empty folder, a half-crushed package of chips, eight dollars in crumpled bills. Her aesthetician license, featuring a photo booth–size Franny grimacing through makeup. A folded apron lined the box. David searched the apron pocket, thinking about the times his wife had put her hands there. He found a paper scrap that could have come from a fortune cookie:

TRY TO KISS ME. SEE WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR LIPS.

Aileen was watching him. Her lips seemed to have been injected with a chemical designed to increase their volume. David had heard about this type of treatment from his wife. The chemical made her lips look smooth and unreal, as if she had thoughtlessly mouthed a piece of slick plastic until it fused to her skin. David thought of the clear plastic spreaders he put in his patients' mouths before X-rays, how the piece curled their lips into animal grimaces. He thought of his own lips, which felt dry and seemed to be peeling off in ribbons, a ticker-tape parade on his face.

“If you ever need my help, you shouldn't hesitate,” Aileen said through the protrusion on her face, handing him her card.

He accepted it with the threat fortune in his palm.

“Think of me as your listening ear,” she said. Her lips seemed more capable of listening than her ears, which were masked behind a perfect shelf of platinum dyed hair.

He thought of a wet slit in her lips opening to reveal an inner ear, prehensile, protected by the mass around it. Her lip's inner ear would be prepared to listen in the precise way that inner ears are able to listen.

David stopped by the decorated waiting room before he left. Above the coffee station, a palm-size painting of a girl in a dress caught his attention. The girl's dress was flounced and dotted with pink and black. She carried a tiny umbrella in her gloved hands and smiled in a compelling way that caused David to lean even closer to her face. He leaned very close.

She's lying
, the girl said.

“Well, yes.” The force of his whispered breath close to her pushed the curls back from the girl's face.

It is time to go home. You won't like what you find there.
The girl rustled the umbrella, releasing crystal droplets. The drops sank into her dress where they landed. The girl's lips were so tiny that they must have been painted on with a single brush bristle bound to a toothpick with a single hair.

David saw a corner of something sticking out between the frame and the wall. He shifted the box of Franny's things to one arm and worked the paper out from behind the frame. The frame was delicate and shivered against his movements as he unstuck the paper. The page was a thin receipt from the frame shop, featuring Franny's dark signature. David tucked it into the box and held it protectively against his stomach as he left.

 

37.

ON THE WAY TO THE BUS STOP, he picked up pears and bread from the grocery store, paying with Franny's eight dollars from the cardboard box, which he held in both hands. He made pleasant conversation with the cashier about eating pears in the winter. The cashier said that the pears came from New Mexico and that she had never been to New Mexico but imagined it was nice.

He carried the pears in a paper bag tucked into the box and navigated the icy walk toward his home. As he got close, he saw a van parked out front. A few people took photographs and stepped carefully across the snowy drive. His first thought was that they were police, but he saw people of all ages, adults and children. Everyone was wearing overstuffed coats and new boots and hats. They were tourists.

“What are you doing here?” David asked a man aiming a silver wafer of a camera at his front door.

“This is the house,” the man said. “Where It Happened.”

David felt as if he was reading titles on a bookshelf. “Where What Happened?”

“That Poor Woman.” The man reviewed the shots on his wafer.

“Everything Is Dead, but It's Still Kind of Nice,” said a woman observing the frozen house plants on the porch.

Two children chased each other around the mailbox and up the driveway. They were saddled with heavy canvas bags that looked to be full of newspapers. “Say You're Sorry,” one called out to the other. “I Never Will,” the other called back.

“I Have to Leave Here,” David said. “You People Are Driving Me Insane.” He couldn't leave. He wanted to put the box of Franny's personal effects in a safe place inside the house and eat one of the pears. The tourists were treating the whole house as if it were a personal effect. The two children had taken a brief pause from chasing each other to stand at the shrubs under the windows and crush the leaves' ice pockets between their knit-gloved fingers. A woman who was presumably their mother saw David looking at them and walked behind the house without comment.

David approached a woman sitting with her back to the van, drawing the front porch on a large sketch pad spread out over her lap. “How many of you are there?” he asked.

“Ten,” the woman said. “Were you the husband?”

“Was I the husband,” David said.

The woman squinted. “We're not going inside,” she said. “We wouldn't go in there. This whole thing has been on the news, that's all.”

“What has?”

“The case, the warrant.” She picked a piece of charcoal from a sheet of wax paper on her lap and squinted at the porch. Her right hand was blackened by the coal, and flakes of it dotted her blouse. He craned his neck to observe her sketch and saw that her rendering of the porch resembled a buffet counter.

“Stop that,” he said.

“Stop what?”

“You're drawing my front porch.”

“They're looking into things, you know. They are calling this a case of interest.”

A man opened the passenger door of the van and produced a brown bag lunch. David saw a child asleep on a stack of newspapers inside the van. The man leaned against the van and unwrapped a candy bar.

“We drove an hour to come see it,” the woman said. She added a sneeze guard to the buffet.

“Hour and a half,” the man said, unwrapping his candy bar and taking a bite.

“There's a warrant?” David said. “To arrest someone?”

She smudged the cashier station with her thumb, squinting up at the house for reference. “It's to search the place, I think. I don't know, maybe it's an arrest thing too. I hadn't heard all of it.”

“This is all news to me.”

“And you're news to us. Your picture is all over the place. It's file footage from when you were last in the news, after some accident in the park. Can you believe how time progresses? You look a bit older now.”

David thought of the accident in the park. He had been shocked by a hanging power line while his mother was talking to a friend. He hardly remembered any of it, but in the following years he had become the example case for parents to teach their children to avoid all manner of unknown danger. “I was five,” he said.

“Time flies”—she tapped the pad—“when we're having fun. I'm trying to have the most fun with the time I have. You know, I used to work as a large-animal vet, but today I'm an artist by choice. My best paintings come from places with a wealth of emotional … emotional”—she looked to the man and then to the sky and then to David again—“
currency
. A wealth, or at least a favorable exchange rate. You get the concept. When I saw this on the news I just knew it was time to start a new piece. Then all I needed to do was rent a van and spread the word.”

The man crumpled the candy wrapper and put it in his paper bag. “Drove a full hour and a half,” he said. “Wouldn't believe the snow right outside town. We're simple folk.”

“You would not believe how simple we are,” said the woman.

“That's a good thing,” said the man.

“You would not believe how good it is.”

The man spit into the road. “I get the sense there's not a lot he would believe.”

“I believe that there are trespassers on my lawn,” David said.

“So call the police,” said the man. He stuffed the wax paper from his sandwich into the front pocket of his jeans. “They won't need directions.”

A child ran by with a messenger bag full of bundled newspapers.

“They could be here in thirty minutes or less,” the woman said. “Like a pizza.”

“Faster than a pizza,” said the man.

The woman had begun to sketch a child standing in front of the house. The child was holding a pane of window glass like a tray. David saw other children fighting over more glass against the garage door. Children who looked too young to be walking staggered back under the fragile weight of their find. He didn't recognize the glass and didn't know how it had come to rest against his garage door. It looked like a windowpane, but he didn't see the frames or brackets. He thought for a moment that the glass was sheets of ice but saw that the children were holding it with their bare hands.

“You'll cut yourself,” he said, walking toward the child by the porch, walking faster, jogging. The child saw David approaching and ran wordlessly, arms spread, fingers clutching the edges of the glass.

David considered chasing the child. He felt watched by the man and woman by the van. “Control your children!” he called out. The children by the glass looked back, but the adults didn't seem to hear. A pair of women emerged from the woods, arms locked around a substantial log. “Please leave!” he shouted. “I am calling the police.” The women walked by without hearing and loaded the log into the back of a four-door sedan. David headed for the house. He stepped to the side to avoid an old woman prying a souvenir shard from the porch rail. He unlocked the front door and locked it behind him.

He put the pears on the kitchen counter with Franny's box from work. Then he threw the junk mail and the paper bag from the grocery into the basement. The slick circulars stuck to the stairs.

 

38.

THERE WAS A DIFFERENCE in the way the air felt on David's face and neck. Someone had been inside the house.

The intruder was an expert tracker. In the kitchen, the tracker had opened the refrigerator door and examined the contents. He or she had moved the jar of mustard a half inch to the left. David wondered if anything had been found there.

The threats were still in the silverware drawer, curled up against the spoons. The tracker could have found them and recorded their contents. David imagined the faceless tracker crouched over them, transcribing their contents into a notebook and then gathering them carefully, putting the sugar threat back into its plastic baggie, realigning the staples perfectly. David placed the stapled baggie in another baggie. Somewhere out there, he knew, there was an advertising salesperson who had updated “bag” to become “baggie” to make it more appealing to the baggie-buying class, which had once included David's wife.

Franny's cardboard box was on the kitchen counter. The edges had lost their shape when he crushed them against his chest on the trip home. He couldn't determine the age of Franny's aesthetician's license photo but decided it was about ten years old, judging by her hairstyle. He folded it once and put it in his robe pocket. He took a closer look at the receipt that had been taped behind the frame and found words typed over the page:

David thought of Franny paying for a threat with a five-dollar bill and receiving seventy-nine cents in return. He thought of her pink wallet with the clasp, and he slipped the receipt into the sandwich bag with the other threat and put it into his pocket with Franny's aesthetician's license.

It seemed best that he not make any sudden moves that might alert the tracker, in case he or she was still watching. He boiled water, stirred cinnamon into the pot, poured the mixture into a mug, and took it to check the rest of the house.

Whoever had been there went upstairs as well. The tracker had taken fiber samples from the carpet where it began again at the top of the stairs. David could tell that things had been disturbed.

Items from the bathroom counter had been collected. One of Franny's travel-size bottles of hair product was open in the sink, leaking down the drain. David wished he had photographed the area before leaving the house. The water in his mug bloated the cinnamon. David watched the water rolling over the dark texture of the spice. He tipped back the cup and allowed the wet lump of cinnamon to roll into his mouth. It was like eating a hot slug.

“David,” someone called from downstairs. The slug quit its progression down David's throat. He coughed to dislodge it, coughed again, swallowed.