The Underneath Page 6

  I’ve never had so much sex as when I was in dangerous places, and it didn’t matter with whom, Sam, Marco, Rick, the waiter, the interpreter, a dozen other men I hardly remember. It was sex, like food, like water, brusque and impersonal, good, bad. No apologies were necessary, no regrets, no lies, no promises, a cigarette instead of a kiss at the door.

  There was simply no time for introspection, certainly no time for love, nor weeping. No time, we were too busy with deadlines, with arranging travel to the next story, competing with each other, lusting and drinking and sleeping on beds or floors, in airport lounges, in bars.

  And now I have time, lots of it. And no fear. And no sex.

  I have a lovely view. My children go to Kamp Wahoo where they are fed Fluff sandwiches and Pop-Tarts and come home reeking of chlorine and sunscreen. They tell me about a boy with his arm in a cast who’s not allowed to swim. And I’m writing because Sam told me—because Sam, not Michael, saw the problem: “Write, write, you have to write. Whatever happened, whatever happened then, there, you have to write, even if you make it up, the truth will be there just the same.”

  13

  The white walls, the dark night. In here, out there. These demarcations amplified her solitude. She sat at her desk. She stared at the screen. Nothing happened. She lifted her hands to the keyboard, she lowered them. She took another sip of wine. And another. As a journalist, she’d never been wordless; the stories had been outside her, all around her. In a sense, they still were: the dozens of notebooks she’d retained, now stacked on the desk and under it. She could pull any one open and know the story, Goma, Addis Ababa, Lokchoggio, Mogadishu. And more than the story: the dust, the light, how a cockerel always crowed at dawn and there was always a lone dog barking in the night, woof woof woof, like a satellite pinging in hope of a response. She used to put a dirty pair of underwear on the very top of her suitcase so light-fingered baggage handlers wouldn’t pilfer. She could bargain with taxi drivers in French, Swahili, Amharic and Arabic. She knew smells. Jasmine on the trellis outside a hotel window in Kinshasa, wild grass after a thunderstorm in the Serengeti, the different smells of smoke—wood, garbage, bodies. The notebooks were stained: wine, beer, grease, mud.

  “What are you writing?” Michael asked when she’d first established herself in a corner of the living room in London. Because there had been offers. At first. Articles, the odd book review. But there just wasn’t sustained work, freelance or otherwise, the newspaper world was going-going or gone, journalists were like whalers and chimney sweeps. Bloggers had taken over. An agent, a friend of Michael’s, had urged her to consider a memoir, “Lynsey Addario, but with more sex and drugs.” She wondered how this person knew about the sex and drugs. Perhaps she’d been infamous.

  “Write,” Sam had said. “You have to write.”

  As if she were tunneling, a prisoner digging with a spoon. As if there were a direction, a place the words would take her. Rather than mere habit: the prisoner tries to escape because he is a prisoner, it’s what prisoners do.

  She sat, her ass turning to cement in the hard wooden chair in the white house in the dark hills. She preferred discomfort while writing, it kept her leery.

  At last, she pushed herself back from the desk and stood. The back of her legs had gone to sleep, her hips ached. She stretched and wandered into the bathroom, climbed up on the toilet to check her phone. There was only a text from Michael: “We need to talk.” Oh, they would talk. Who would have the kids on the weekend, who would keep the house, how would they divide his money.

  Leaning back against the tank, Kay felt the coolness of the porcelain through her dress. She wasn’t looking, merely gazing when she noticed an incongruity in the beadboard paneling below the towel cupboard. She peered. Indeed, there was a vertical seam in the wood. She got up off the toilet, crossed the bathroom, and knelt on the floor: a door, about three feet high and the same across.

  It was impossible to pry the door open with her fingers, so she scouted around for a tool and selected a nail file. She ran the blade up, discerned two hinges on the left side. On the right, a little inside latch that gently popped.

  The space was small, more like a cubby. It was empty. Kay stared into the dark. Why was the latch on the inside? It made no sense unless someone was locking themselves in. And did that somehow make more sense?

  Crouching down, she edged herself in. She felt like a child. Perhaps this was just the compression of space, making her smaller and at ground level where adults seldom dwelt. Surprisingly, she could sit up, almost comfortably, even though her legs were bent, either cross-legged or loosely folded. It wasn’t as claustrophobic as it first appeared. She shut the door, and the darkness was almost complete.

  She could hear her breath, she had tremendous awareness of her body in the dark, her proprioception heightened, the boundary of her skin, the bones of her face and hands. She felt oddly calm, insulated.

  It was impossible to track time in such dark, but she felt she’d sat quietly, meditatively, for a dozen minutes before she became aware of the sensitivity of her fingertips. Her hands were on the floor, and she could feel the grain of the wood, the precise ridges—and this despite the heavy surface lacquer. Slowly, she traced her fingers out to the walls of her enclosure, and up, across the surprisingly rough texture of the paint. The tiniest globlet rose like a mountain from the plain to her touch. The intimacy was almost sensual—as the tightly focused attention to the detail of a lover’s back or neck.

  She traced the edges and corners of the enclosure, in front of her, around her, and down. And here she discovered a divot in the wallboard. Twisting her body to reach behind her, she found, further along, a hole, big enough for her finger. She stuck her finger in, wiggling the tip on the other side. Leaning in, she tried to see. She sucked her finger, wetting it thoroughly, then stuck it back in the hole. She felt the air, the space beyond. She withdrew her finger, and sat quiet and still, safe and unknown. She was soft-edged darkness, blurred around the edges like a charcoal drawing.

  The moment she cracked open the door, the bathroom light leapt in at an accusatory angle. As she began to unpack herself, she saw it: scratchy strands of writing just over her left shoulder on the wall.

  DIRTY SQUEAL SQUEAL

  DIRTY PIG SLIT YOU OPEN

  She touched the words lightly, as one might hieroglyphics, or perhaps, braille. They weren’t carved in or painted on. The writer had used indelible black marker. There was nothing to be gained by her touch, except to confirm the existence of the words. She couldn’t feel with her skin what was between them, inside them. That required another sense altogether.

  Sitting back on her heels, she considered: who. Frank, Maria, the boys? She considered: why. A joke, an angry child, an adult. A man. She tried to think objectively. The awkward handwriting looked childish, but might not necessarily be that of a child; it was difficult to write evenly at such an angle. The words were aggressive. SLIT YOU OPEN sounded like a rape. And it was something men did, they slit open women, children. A woman, on the other hand, would have written with more self-hate: SLIT ME OPEN I’M A DIRTY PIG.

  Frank, she thought. Frank. And Frank is, perhaps, not well in the head. Frank is, perhaps, in a mental hospital or at a treatment center. Which, perhaps, accounts for Alice’s reticence.

  Carefully, Kay closed the door. She moved the laundry basket in front of it, because, God knows, Tom and Freya wouldn’t go anywhere near it. The laundry basket emitted an impermeable force field, repelling children and their clothes, so they were forced to leave them all over the floor instead.

  *

  At dawn, a doe and her two fawns grazed in the field beyond the lawn. Kay paused in her making of breakfast, the soft-boiled egg Tom wanted, the toast severed of crusts for Freya. She admired the doe’s grace, the absolute precision of her movements, her ceaseless vigilance. Her entire reason for being alive was her children.

  Dirty pig, squeal squeal. The words skittered into Kay’s brain. They w
ere like spiders, she could feel them, up there, above her, in that odd little cupboard. They were too near the children, they might escape, crawl out. Kay felt a swipe of panic. Absurd.

  The fawns leaped and twisted and bucked, they charged and nuzzled, then stopped and aggressively jabbed their mother’s udder with their damp muzzles, even though they didn’t need her milk anymore. Sometimes, the doe stepped forward to discourage them and they shimmied away from her in the damp grass, leaping in the silken warmth. They knew nothing of winter, they did not even suspect.

  Kay went up the stairs, the narrow, steep stairs almost like a ladder. At the top, she peered into the bathroom; the laundry basket was as she’d left it, the secret cupboard completely hidden.

  What would Michael say, had he seen it? Dismissed it? “People are strange,” he would have said. “That shouldn’t surprise you.”

  But why these particular words? This malevolent haiku—rather than a banal scrawl of “The Patriots suck” or a cursory rendering of a vagina or penis. It was a code, it meant something more than its words. And why the cupboard, the secret recess, locking from the inside?

  She moved on past the bathroom door, the floorboards creaking underfoot.

  Sun edged around the heavy cotton curtains in the bedroom, illuminating her children as they slept in a froth of white sheets and stuffed animals. Kay stood over them, loving them. Now was the time to love them, when they would not shy away, when the wrong thing would not be said and the juice would not be spilled and the story did not need to be written. They were hers in such moments, completely. She touched Freya’s blond head, Tom’s smooth back. “Wake up, my darlings, wakey wakey.” Tom turned instinctively toward her, curling his body around her thigh like a snake seeking a warm rock.

  14

  JAKE WAS PROPPED IN FRONT of the TV, something loud and angry. Ben hated the TV. He’d have been outside, in the woods, despite the black flies, the deer flies. If Jake was his child he’d turn off the TV, he’d take him out. And he will, that is what he will do when he becomes Jake’s guardian. It was in the woods that a boy could find what he needed to get by, he could learn his resilience. But Jake was leery, Jake was timid, the TV had been Jake’s stalwart companion for the many, many hours of his mother’s nods. Ben kissed the boy on the head. “I love you.”

  Shevaunne stood out on the deck smoking. When she saw Ben, she stubbed out her cigarette, pushed open the screen door and came inside. “I got the test today.”

  “I know.”

  “Obviously I’m not going to pass.”

  “Sure you are.” Ben showed her the brown paper bag he’d got from Slim and took out a plastic packet about the size of take-away soy sauce. The label read Willow Bend Supplements.

  She screwed up her face. “Is that piss?”

  “You had a toke,” Ben confirmed. “It would look suspicious if you were totally clean.”

  She snorted. “Don’t you know they watch you?”

  “That’s why it’s in this little plastic bag. You store it in your underwear.”

  Shevaunne regarded the packet of urine for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she said at last.

  He stood near her, close, almost like a lover. “Yes, you do.”

  15

  Freya’s missing sneakers, a blue sock, a green pencil, a yellow pencil, a spoon, three inter-linked paperclips, a peach stone, a Harry Potter CD now badly scratched, paper cut into dozens of pieces, a red hair tie, 16 pennies, a pink t-shirt, a rubbery carrot less three bites, books, an empty reel of Scotch tape, an orange sock.

  Kay dutifully collected these items, the maternal choreography of bending, gathering, no longer nuts and berries but bits of LEGO. She shoved the vacuum cleaner under the sofa, under the chairs, across the floor. The machine began to falter, so she opened the canister. The bag was reusable. She lifted it out, walked to the trash and emptied the contents. Amongst the dust, the indeterminate debridement of Frank and Maria’s living, was a single pale-blue disposable surgical bootie.

  For a moment, Kay simply held it. As an objective fact, it was nothing. She might describe the specific blue, the texture of the material, the elastic binding the whole together. When she touched it, nothing happened, it exuded no smell, and she was not psychic, she had no visions. But she had found it. It had been there to be found. In a way, the house had provided it to her. As it had the cupboard upstairs. Look here. The house was revealing itself, coyly. Not, of course, in a crazy, Stephen King way, Jack Nicholson leering down the corridor of a haunted hotel. The house wasn’t doing anything. But there was a tilting. It was as if her family had so changed the house, shifted the habit of its gravity, that revelation became possible. Objects slid free. She stuffed the bootie in her pocket and went out to the car.

  The Town House was a house like the house on the hill she was living in, Frank and Maria’s, a house like other houses on hills or in valleys or towns. You just couldn’t tell from the outside what was inside, what was underneath. General Christmas, for instance, had been an excellent shop-keeper, he kept his prices low, the shelves well-stocked. He even extended credit to his poorer customers for things like gin and matches.

  Kay walked up the wheelchair ramp, there was only a screen door so she pushed this open. The office was pokey, the antique computer with its dusty screen probably still ran on DOS. A large scroll of maps hung on the wall behind the desk. No one was at the desk.

  “Hello?”

  Along one wall, a huge vault displayed folios and leather-bound land records. She eased around the room to the maps, flipped through them. A topography of the town, a county map, a state map, a property map demarcating the property boundaries. Kay found Frank and Maria’s land. WILSON, it was written. Wilson, Wilson, she knew now.

  On the desk lay a copy of the town report. She flipped through: the school budget, the road budget, financial statements, property transfers. Under the property taxes section was a list of delinquent payers and the amount overdue. Kay was surprised at this outing, it seemed shaming; everyone knew you hadn’t, or couldn’t, pay.

  “Can I help you?”

  Kay turned, abandoning the report.

  The woman was dark-haired, apple-cheeked, wearing a floral sundress. She smiled, “I’m Nadine, the clerk here.”

  “And I’m Kay Ward, hi.” Kay returned the smile. “We’re renting the house up the road. The Wilsons. Frank and Maria.”

  “Is that AirBnb? I hear a lot about that these days.”

  “No, it’s not AirBnb, we found out about it through another site.”

  “Lovely views. Tough in the winter.”

  “I can imagine. Wow, winter, I mean, maybe I can’t imagine. Um, Nadine, do you know how I could get in touch with Frank and Maria?”

  “Alice would be the person to ask. She’s caretaking the place, right?”

  “She doesn’t know.” Kay was cheery, a cheery visitor. “What a beautiful part of Vermont this is.”

  “It’s not called the Kingdom for nothing,” Nadine enthused.

  “My husband and I are thinking we might buy a place here, we’ve really fallen in love.” Kay made a vague gesture to the property maps. “Do you know what’s for sale? The Wilson’s place, maybe?”

  “Oh, you’d be better talking to a realtor. But as far as I know Frank’s not selling, no.”

  Kay noted the exclusion of Maria from ownership. “Do you usually see them around?”

  “Not unless he comes in here.”

  Again, the singularity of Frank. Kay glanced again at the property maps. She could make out the road, the boundaries of Frank’s land—Frank’s not Frank and Maria’s. It comprised nearly 300 acres buffered by a state park, no neighbor for a mile in either direction. She thought how the thick woods must absorb sound. “And you have no idea where they might be. Family? Vacation?”

  Nadine cocked her head. “He has a cabin up north.”

  “A cabin?”

  “Derby, Granby? Not far from the border. His mother’s fami
ly were from there, old Québécois.”

  “And Maria’s with him?”

  “Maria?” Nadine was alert now.

  “His wife.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “Their kids?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are they?”

  Nadine’s lips opened, then closed. Thin, with the faintest trace of peach lipstick.

  Kay pressed on, her voice light, airy. “When did you last see them—Frank, Maria, the boys?”

  Nadine pulled her chair closer into the desk, putting it firmly between herself and Kay, her shield. “I’ve already told you I don’t know where they are but I’m sure they’re just fine.”

  But Nadine wasn’t sure, not 100 percent. Kay could see the tiny fissure in the facade of certainty she’d tried to maintain. And not just now, right now, but before. Maybe for quite a while Nadine had sensed the Wilsons were not all right. This was a small community; Nadine knew most of the business there was to know: who was delinquent on their property tax, who was selling their land, who was buying, who was building, who had special-needs kids, who had disabilities, who applied for state heating aid. Nadine was not sure; Kay heard the lightest inflection, 20 years as a journalist had tuned her ear.

  As a mother, she was merely late.

  16

  LACEY WAS A LARGE WOMAN, her upper arms like boiled hams, she dressed meticulously. She wore bright blue shoes, and she kept her hands well, she had pride in her dainty extremities. She had a large folder open on her desk, the morning light shining directly on it like an annunciation—Shevaunne’s life: the record, exclusively, of her misery, her addiction, her failure. Normal people did bad things and didn’t get caught and those bad things could be forgotten or forgiven and then they evaporated. But people like Shevaunne could never shake them off, the folder got thicker and heavier, the gigabytes or whatever on the computer swelled like over-hydrated cells. The good that Shevaunne did—there must be some, the simple act of not abandoning her son at the interstate rest area while she got high—these were not accounted for.