When Autumn Leaves: A Novel (10 page)

She knew it would take months, if not years, to get her house and her body into decent shape, but she could do something immediately about one thing, at least. She picked up the cordless phone and dialed four doors down, to Dottie Davis’s.

It could be said that Dottie was Stella’s best friend. Dottie did hair in her kitchen. This arrangement suited her perfectly, as she could entertain and make money at the same time. Dottie was a round, black woman, Stella wasn’t exactly sure how old (Dottie offered up the same number every birthday). The fact that her skin was practically flawless without a wrinkle in sight didn’t help much with guessing.

When Stella knocked on her door ten minutes later, Dottie yelled, “Come in!! I’m in the kitchen!” Stella stepped through and exhaled deeply.

“What in the hell happened to you?” Dottie demanded.

“What do you mean?” Stella put her bag on the kitchen counter. “Hey, where’s Jack?” Jack was Dottie’s grandson, though she called him her “godsend.” Dottie had full custody and she truly loved Jack to pieces. He was such a kind and good and smart boy, he made it easy.

“He’s got a cold, but it’s not bad enough to keep him from reading. Don’t dodge the question. What happened?”

Stella shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing, really. I just tried something out of my grandmother’s book. It’s like . . . courage. A dose of courage. Can I sit?”

“A dose of courage.” Dottie looked at her with one eyebrow raised and her lips pursed. Stella had told Dottie about her Granny Pearl and the things she’d seen her do. It wasn’t like Dottie thought Stella was lying, but she didn’t quite believe her, either. “What exactly could you mean?”

Stella decided to change the subject. “The truth of it is, I can’t stand my hair a minute longer. I know you’ve been telling me for years to give up the henna, and I’m finally ready. I want to cut it, too, but I think I may be too fat for short hair. What do you think?” Stella said this without taking a breath.

Dottie eyed her up and down. “Stella, it’s not that easy. Red is the hardest color to get rid of. I’m going to have to bleach it out and you may end up being more blonde than you want to be.”

“Like platinum?”

“Yep.”

“Perfect. I mean, if I had it my way, I see it as being almost white, you know? But a very light blonde will do.”

“Okay.” Dottie seemed wary, but Stella knew she would go ahead. That was Dottie’s way. She got her point across in a secret code of teeth-clicking and hip-holding with some eye-rolling and arm-folding thrown in for good measure. Stella decided not to read this body language and to follow her own instincts ahead. Dottie put a black plastic smock over her friend and began applying the bleach. While she was doing this, Stella couldn’t sit still. She was either tapping her fingers on the table, bouncing her knee, or shaking her foot.

“Sweet Jesus, Stella,” Dottie groused into Stella’s scalp. “Stop moving. You’re making me nervous.” Stella heard her friend’s teeth click several times before Dottie paused for a moment, holding the black application brush in her hand. “Stella, are you on drugs?”

“No! Why would you say that?”

“Come on. You can tell me.” Dottie put one hand on her hip.

“Dottie, I’m not on drugs, I swear.” Stella was amused at the idea she was so transformed her friend thought it chemical. And maybe it was, but it was all her own brain doing the mixing.

“Yeah, well, I could swear that you’re on speed. Diet pills are drugs, you know.”

Stella sighed. She didn’t want her best friend to think she was in trouble. “Dottie, I’m not on anything, I promise. I just saw things clearly today, is all. I had a . . . revelation.”

“A revelation?”

“I’ve been all this time living with furniture I can’t stand, buying clothes to impress other people, deliberately making myself look . . . what’s the word. Like an impostor. No, more like I’m in disguise, hoping no one will recognize me. I looked at myself in the mirror today, really looked. And you know what I saw? A big ol’ clown, that’s what I’ve become. A joke.” Saying the words out loud to someone made them feel more real, and Stella felt a curious rush of relief and anger all at once.

Dottie stopped what she was doing. “Stella, I’m glad you’ve been takin’ a good, hard look at yourself, should’ve done it a while back, I suppose. But you can’t dismiss yourself as . . . I don’t know. Fraudulent.” She applied the last of the bleach to Stella’s hair. “I mean, the way you put it, it’s almost as if you’re telling me you’ve been living someone else’s life.”

“Oh, but I have. That’s just it, Dottie.”

“Stella, that’s impossible. Are you trying to tell me you were possessed?”

How could Stella convey that that was absolutely how she felt? Completely explaining how she got from there to here would involve more talking than Stella was willing to do that night, or maybe any night, so she said simply, “The past can be a demon, the past can get inside and change you for the worse.” Dottie rolled her eyes, but that was all she did, which meant to Stella that at the very least she half believed her.

The morning after Equinox was totally unlike the day before. The sun came through Stella’s window like a gentle slap, but a slap nonetheless, and Stella opened her eyes furiously. She leapt out of bed, cursing herself for not shutting the curtains. Then she realized that she had to go to work that day anyway and headed off to the bathroom for a shower.

It wasn’t until she fed the cats, had some toast, got dressed, and left the house that she noticed that, for the first time in her adult life, she had not woken up hungry. It was a good feeling, almost as if her body was telling her something important.

She pulled her bike away from the side of the house and pedaled down Keltia Avenue to work. Stella always biked the three or four miles to the
Circle
offices when the weather permitted. That morning, it didn’t feel like a chore. The motion of her feet, the sound of the spokes whirring, and the wind that pushed her hair back off her face were liberating. She felt years younger.

When she reached Brigid’s Way, Stella slowed down and cut into the sidewalk. She pulled her bike up to a nearby rack and locked it in. And although she could feel her thighs rubbing against each other in her drawstring pants, it was a relief to not have to deal with the constricting support hose that she usually wore everyday, even with slacks.

Stella made her way up the stairs and to her desk, not noticing the looks, the hushed whispers as her coworkers muttered to each other at her altered appearance. Her mind was too focused on writing. In fact, she doubted that her fingers would be able to keep up with the speed of her thoughts.

Nina Bruno’s inspecting eyes made the hair on the back of Stella’s neck stand up on end. “Stella? Oh my God! What happened to you?”

Normally Stella would have loved the attention, but today, all she wanted to do was work. “Nothing happened. I got a friggin’ haircut. What’s the big deal? Since when did anyone give a shit about how I looked anyway?”

Stella saw Nina flinch. Her eyes narrowed, and she bared her teeth in a forced smile. “Just a little word of advice,” Nina said, moving closer. She reached out and touched the ends of Stella’s new hair. “People don’t like you enough for you to get away with being such a total bitch. So you might want to tone it down a little.” She left Stella’s office with the same smile on her face.

Stella fought the urge to pick up her letter opener and throw it into Nina’s back, ninja-style. There was that rage again; she shook her head. She didn’t actually want to kill Nina, not with the jail time to consider and all. Maybe just hurt her a little. Wipe that smug smile off her face. She looked over at her computer screen, the cursor on the blank page blinked in an even rhythm. It was so hypnotic, she forgot all about Nina. The words just came to her:
equinox
,
tempest
,
earth
,
sky
. She lined them up and let them pour through her fingers. Writing had never come so easily for her.

When her stomach growled for attention, Stella looked up at the clock. 1:00 p.m. She had worked for four hours without stopping. The article was all but done, so that left the rest of the afternoon to answer letters. People from all over the country wrote in to ask Stella’s advice on down-home remedies for common problems. She published the most interesting letters alongside of her daily article. Her column was syndicated in many small-town papers; it had taken Stella a dozen years and about a thousand phone calls to make that happen. But she was at a point now where new papers were actually coming to her.

She had to eat something, though, before she could get to the letters. She needed fuel. The afternoon outside had the season written all over it. The sky was baby blue, the trees beginning to leaf out, giving depth and perspective to the downtown. Stella walked two blocks up to Pleiades, a small sandwich shop. The proprietor, Nelson Friday, had been a city boy chef, cooking at five-star restaurants. He had come across Avening while traveling with an old friend and decided to stay.

Secretly—well, probably not secretly—Stella had a crush on Nelson. He was in his late forties, tall and dark with brown hair and eyes and a rarely clean-shaven face. Even though his last name was Friday, Stella guessed he was part Latin. His accent, though obviously American, often had a lilt of something else, a pause between words. Although he was kind, he never flirted, and as far as Stella knew (and she knew, she had done her research) Nelson did not have a woman in his life. Stella thought he was probably gay, not that she had ever seen any evidence to support it; it was just her self-destructive style to like a man who wouldn’t be interested in her.

But today, for some reason, she wasn’t interested in the truth about Nelson Friday’s sexual preferences. She was interested in a tuna sandwich so she could get back to her desk. She ordered briskly and whipped out a five-dollar bill.

Nelson looked at her curiously, stuck his large carving knife square in the center of the wooden cutting board, and crossed his arms.

“What?” Stella asked, half smiling. “Have you gone on strike or something?”

“Hmmm. You’re different today.”

“I changed my hair. Does that disqualify me from having lunch?”

“The hair is different, yes, but it’s something else. Not just your clothes, either.”

“It’s nothing,” Stella answered stiffly.

“I don’t like it,” Nelson said with one eyebrow raised.

“Don’t like what? Jeez.” Stella tossed her newly platinum-blonde head. “This is ridiculous. What makes you think you have a right to give me your opinion? I didn’t ask for it.” An alarm bell went off in Stella’s head and rang down to the pit of her stomach. She had been rude. She took a deep breath and said calmly, “I just decided it was time for a change. I have things to do with my life. I needed . . . focus. Is that okay? Do I get a sandwich now?”

Nelson quietly made her order while Stella rapped on the stainless steel counter with her nails. When he was done, she took the bag, and threw a “thank you” in his general direction.

Stella went back to her office to eat her sandwich. She didn’t want to deal with any more people. She knew she had needled people into spending time with her in the past, had pushed herself into people’s lives. She had hated that about herself, but she had never wanted to be alone. It had been so easy to pretend that her acquaintances genuinely liked and wanted her around when she was with them. But it had been a lie, and she had always known it. And now, when she finally didn’t care whether people liked her, when she was prepared to keep to herself, suddenly, everyone was making a fuss over her. She didn’t get it.

That night, Stella dreamed bright and colorful dreams in quick succession, her closed lids flooding with images of both her younger and older self. In one dream, Pearl was the Olympian god Zeus hurling lightning bolts at her from the mountain—even her sleeping self figured out the significance of that one. In another, she was eating her entire house, taking slow and steady mouthfuls of her furniture and floorboards. When she got to her phone, it began to ring. She tried to answer it, but instead began to chew on the cord. The phone rang and rang until she woke with a start, realizing that someone was really trying to call her. She quickly rolled to the other side of the bed to answer it. Late-night phone calls never meant good news.

“Hello?”

“Oh Stella, thank God. I’ve been trying to reach you forever.”

“Dottie?”

“Yeah. Listen. It’s Jack, he’s taken a turn for the worse.” Dottie sounded frantic. “I don’t think he’s emergency room sick, but he has a fever and he’s coughing something horrible. Do you think you could bring some stuff over and work some magic? Really, even if you just look at him maybe you could tell me if I need to get him to a doctor.”

“Give me five minutes or so. Just calm down, Dottie, and go up and sit with him. Do you have a humidifier?”