The Ghosts of Lovely Women Read online

  I picked up my books from Fred’s desk. “Well, again I’m so sorry, and I’ll be at the wake and funeral, of course. Will she — will you be—?”

  Somehow they interpreted my clumsy question. “It will be a closed casket,” her mother murmured. “With lots of pictures on top. Pictures of her in all the plays, the chorus, the homecoming parade—”

  Her voice broke and her husband moved in, clasping her in a bear-like embrace. Fred looked discreetly at the wall and I made my exit. On my way out I saw someone I recognized — it took me a few seconds to realize it was Kelsey McCall, the detective who had come to my house to look at the website. She and a young man in a suit were on their way into Fred’s office. This place was Grand Central today.

  Rosa was standing in front of some administrative mailboxes, delivering junk mail. Next to her was Kathy Olchen; the club mailboxes were here, too, and Kathy was the moderator of the American History club. She clutched her mail while looking over her shoulder at Fred’s office.

  “That’s her parents in there?” she whispered.

  “Jessica’s? Yes.”

  Kathy seemed in an odd mood; she stared at the mail in her hand, then shook her head.

  “Duh— I took the wrong mail,” she said. “I always do that; the box is right above mine.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “Are you upset about Jessica?”

  “I guess,” Kathy said. “These last couple days — wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  Kathy turned suddenly to Rosa. “When Jessica Halliday went here — she was president of the drama club, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Rosa, surprised.

  “So she had permission to come in here and check the drama club mailbox?” Kathy was pointing at it, her face thoughtful.

  “Oh, yes. She and I used to have some lovely chats. She would stand there and read her mail, and we would talk. She was such a lively girl, so playful.” Rosa looked sad, and angry too.

  “Yes she was,” said Kathy vaguely.

  Rosa sighed, finished delivering ads for cell phones and timeshares (why they thought teachers could afford them, I don’t know), and patted Kathy’s back. “This will all blow over.”

  “I’ll be back later,” Kathy said, and walked swiftly out of the office.

  “Okay, hon,” said Rosa. In the same comforting way she patted my shoulder as she passed me on the way back to her desk. “Long day, huh?”

  “And still it goes on.”

  The endless day. That made me think of Jessica’s comments about Waiting for Godot, and the famous existentialist line “Will night never come?” Jessica had found this heavy-handed, much to my amusement at the time.

  I’d held on to her notebook, mainly because I wanted to read it. Since her parents probably didn’t know of its existence, it was not a big deal. And perhaps I’d get an idea why Rosalyn wanted it so badly.

  Feeling sleepy, I marched myself back upstairs for my Period 6 class. These were sophomores, just like my Period 4, and they too had been working through Macbeth. “How did we like Act II?” I asked them after I took attendance.

  “Ugh, too much murder!” said Jenny Bart in the first desk. “It’s so gross!”

  “The gross is what makes it good,” said Scott Elliott.

  Normally I loved Macbeth, but in my current mood I had to silently side with Jenny. Too much murder, indeed.

  Nine

  “Why — what’s this? Someone’s been at the lock!”

  —Torvald, A Doll’s House, Act III

  I graded papers in my classroom for about half an hour after school, then remembered that I needed to let P.G. out and raced to the parking lot. It was drizzling and gray, but I’m one of the few people in the world who like that kind of weather, especially when the sky has a metallic sheen and the air smells like earth and flowers. I snuggled into my car and set the radio dial to oldies, which, on this station, meant music from the 80s and 90s. They were playing a song by someone named Paul Young and I really liked it.

  I tapped the steering wheel and thought about the day — Jessica, Danny, Rosalyn, Derek Jonas. I smiled for no reason and hummed with the radio. My afternoon was going to be spent like pretty much every other afternoon — grading papers in my silent apartment. I’d grown so used to this pattern that I found I couldn’t abide much noise anymore. I wasn’t able to think. Sometimes I played quiet music in the background, but when I was grading it had to be classical, or I found my mind wandering away from the often tangled ideas in the papers I read, and helping to untangle them took uber concentration.

  I parked my car in its usual spot, grabbed my mail, and went upstairs to retrieve my tail-wagging friend, who conveyed, I swear, a bit of reproach at my lateness. As reparation I walked him for an extra block, despite the drizzle. We walked past Derek’s apartment, but saw no sign of him today. I remembered him saying “I’m not stalking you” and it made me laugh. Then I remembered Richard, and I stopped laughing.

  I couldn’t find my key, which was annoying. I lost my keys constantly; either I left my home keys at work or my work keys at home. I would have to make a note to look on my desk for it. With a sigh I pulled a spare out of my wallet and entered my apartment.

  P.G. and I snuggled into our space, and I drank tea while I tried to finish my grading. I had a tendency to rake a hand through my hair while I read, and after forty-five minutes I feared I would go bald if I didn’t take a break. The phone rang; I looked at it fearfully and realized that I really needed to get Caller I.D. Taking a deep breath, I strode to the wall and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Hey.”

  It was my sister, Lucky. Her name is Lucretia (only slightly better than Theodora), but we’d always been Teddy and Lucky. Even my parents couldn’t bear to call us those cumbersome names once they’d saddled us with them. “What’s up, Luck?”

  “Matt and I are going away for our own spring break. Our neighbor Tom agreed to water our plants and feed Mimi, but I just wanted to let you know. We leave tonight. We’re going to Colorado.” She sounded thrilled. She and Matt had been married for three years, but Lucky always sounded like a newlywed. I felt a jolt of envy.

  “Thanks. I’ll put that on the calendar. You both managed to get away from the rat race, huh?”

  “We made it a priority. I feel like I don’t even see my husband these days.” Matt and Lucky were both career-focused people, which was why I had no niece or nephew as of yet. Lucky was my little sister, but she’d embraced marriage and its attendant responsibilities rather early in life. By twenty-four she’d found herself with a husband, a mortgage, and a good job as a college admissions counselor. Matt was a lawyer. They were well-matched, but always busy. This, I realized, would be very good for them.

  “Well, I hope you have tons of fun.”

  “And sex.”

  “That, too.”

  “How are you doing in that department?” asked my ever-nosy sister.

  “Richard sent me another e-mail,” I said.

  Lucky’s voice grew shrill. “Are you kidding me? I want you to call the cops, Teddy.”

  “And tell them someone sent me an e-mail expressing concern? Yeah, they’ll hop right on that one.”

  “But there’s a pattern — a pattern of harassment. He’s weird.”

  “But clever. There’s nothing here that I could even remotely use to get a restraining order or anything else. I’ll just keep ignoring him. It worked for a year.”

  “Oh, Ted. I wish this guy had never been in your life.”

  “Ditto.” The brief romantic affair I’d enjoyed with Richard had descended into jealousy, petty arguments, childish recriminations. Cutting off the relationship had been a wise and mature decision on my part, and one I’d never regretted, although it had been messy and exhausting.

  Lucky sighed. “How’s your beagle?”

  “He is well,” I said, scratching P.G.’s hard little head.

  “I’m going to keep checking on you f
rom Vail. Meanwhile, could you tell Will about my vacation? I think he’s the traveling bachelor again, and he doesn’t respond to e-mails or voicemails. There is such a thing as social etiquette.”

  Our brother Will was a computer genius who worked for a software company and traveled constantly. We were proud of him, but we complained about his travel schedule, as families tend to do.

  I laughed. “Yeah, I don’t think our brother ever read that book. I’m sure he’s traveling, Lucky. He was in Japan last month, and last time I had a burger with him he told me he was headed for Sweden in a couple days.”

  “Very glamorous. Maybe he’ll bring home a Swedish bride.”

  “Right. Okay, suddenly I’m starving. P.G. and I are going to get some dinner.”

  “Okay. Love you, Teddy.”

  “Love you, too. Enjoy the mountains.”

  *

  P.G. and I had a favorite dinner destination, minutes from Pine Grove in Chicago: it was called Dig’s Dogs, and it was the only park-and-eat burger/hot dog joint still in existence, as far as I knew. The wait staff didn’t roller skate up to the window as in the 1950s, but they did approach the car and take your order. It meant that my canine and I could dine out together in style. P.G. loved it — he stuck his head out the window for the entire ride, letting his silky ears flap in the wind, and when he arrived he got his own small burger — that was the deal. I made him eat it in separate bites. He had learned to sit politely on the passenger seat and wait for me to distribute them.

  Tonight Dig’s Dogs was not crowded; maybe everyone was home having soup to avoid the drizzly cold. P.G. and I sat and munched. I pulled off a piece of his burger and put it on his seat. P.G. siphoned it up and chewed noisily.

  “Gross, P.G.” I looked at the rain on the windshield. “What makes someone kill a nineteen-year-old girl who is ultra popular?” I asked him, returning to the thought that had been flitting in and out of my mind since I’d heard of Jessica’s death. Then I remembered that the journal, the pink kitty journal, was in the copious depths of my purse. I finished my burger, gave P.G. the rest of his, and took it out.

  The goal of the response journal is to encourage analysis by processing one’s personal responses to the book in question and then pursuing the questions and ideas that arise. Jessica had plenty to say about Waiting for Godot, The Stranger, and existentialism in general. “I wonder about the authors,” she said. “Couldn’t they just have suffered from depression? Isn’t hope just something that you have because you’re happy?”

  Huh. Sometimes students were such philosophers, I thought. I looked back at the notebook and noticed the name “Olchen.” I scanned down the page and got to this: “I’m doing the psychological study project in Miss Olchen’s class, and I’ve learned a lot about people and their behavior. I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve made my own diagnoses about several people, and they’re very interesting.” Here I had written in the margin “This is not pertinent to your assignment, Jessica.” It sounded so bitchy, now that I looked at it. The prim and proper English teacher. But that was my job, to focus them, to tell them not to wander off on tangents or try to pad the paper with nonsense.

  “I’ve learned that at least one of my friends is truly paranoid, and it makes her do weird things. And a couple of guys I know are major, major misogynists. They deny it, but everyone denies what he is. I learned that, too. I think even my own father is a misogynist sometimes, and I wish he would change because I don’t want my brothers to grow up resenting women or talking down to them the way I think my father does. I know, Miss Thurber — you’re asking what any of this has to do with the assignment. You’re going to write that in the margin with your purple pen. But here’s the thing: we’ve read all these works about male-dominated societies and oppressed women, and I think even in these existential works there’s a hint of it, and I wonder if the oppression of women doesn’t somehow contribute to the men’s despair? Women are never allowed to achieve their true place in the world, therefore the world is out of balance, or as Hamlet would say, “Out of joint.” So here’s my theory: the men are despairing, existential, because of the very imbalance they created.”

  This was way out there; it didn’t really make sense, but it was typical of Jessica’s writing — always asking, always reaching for ideas, never afraid to vocalize a thought. And some of the things she said, she wrote, bordered on genius. How had I never seen how gifted she was? Had I acknowledged her burgeoning feminism? Had I offered enough encouragement?

  “Who are the misogynistic friends, P.G. ?” I asked my dog, who had curled up on his seat.

  “Is this just a random assessment, or is this important?”

  Jessica’s journal was long and filled with the sort of intellectual ramblings that I had just read. The light was fading; I decided to finish reading at home. P.G. was obviously ready for some basket time, in any case.

  We drove through the dusky streets, leaving the city and returning to the very suburban aura of Pine Grove just a few blocks later. I parked in my usual spot, feeling a bit like a hamster in a maze. Stay within the lines. Was it Jessica’s journal that had me feeling that life was full of meaningless patterns?

  P.G. and I made our leisurely way into the building, pausing in the lobby to look at some magazines the mail carrier had deposited on the floor. “Not ours,” I murmured, and we boarded the elevator. P.G. got a kick out of the ride, and I was feeling lazy. We emerged on my floor, the third floor, and right away I knew something was wrong. It seems odd to say I felt it, but I did feel it — an unwelcome presence. A sense of incongruity. And when I moved down the hallway, brows furrowed, I saw the truth: my door was open. Not a lot; it was barely open at all. But when I went to put in my spare key, I realized that the door was ajar and unlocked. Someone was in my apartment.

  I froze; under pressure my brain had gone on vacation, and for many seconds I had absolutely no plan, no idea what to do next. Finally I began to think. I didn’t have my cell phone with me — it was inside the apartment, plugged in and charging for a new day. In order to call the police I’d have to go to a pay phone; the same was true if I wanted to call my parents, my brother or sister. In any case Lucky was leaving for vacation and my parents were too far away. My near neighbors were either elderly or not likely to be home — one worked nights and another was a perpetual socializer. I wasn’t going to risk old Mrs. Bettenger’s safety.

  Before I knew it I was back on the elevator, then running down the dark sidewalk. P.G. was at my side. We winged our way down one block and over two until we reached the building Derek Jonas lived in. “Be home, be home,” I murmured to myself. I went into the little lobby and found the nameplates near the mailboxes. Most of them were typewritten, but the one which said JONAS was handwritten; perhaps he was too new a tenant to have had the new plate made.

  I rang his buzzer; something was twirling around in my stomach, causing a ticklish pain. “Come on, come on,” I said. P.G. growled out his frustration.

  “Yes?” said Derek’s voice.

  “Derek, it’s Teddy. Can I come up? Or can you come down? I have a problem.”

  He buzzed me up immediately. “Second floor,” he said.

  P.G. and I ran up the stairs. Derek was standing in his doorway, holding a child. I stopped, shocked. He was holding a child: a boy with curly blonde hair and a sweet face like an angel on a Christmas card. He looked to be about two or three. His chubby legs were wrapped around Derek, and his little bottom sat on Derek’s crooked arm.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  Derek smiled. “This is my nephew, Charlie. Charlie, this is Teddy.”

  The boy held up a little hand, and I realized that he was tired, almost half asleep. “Hi, Charlie,” I said. Then I looked at Derek. “Someone’s in my apartment. I couldn’t call the police because my cell is in there. P.G. and I went out for dinner and when we came back I saw my door was open, and—”

  Derek leaned forward and grabbed my arm with his free hand.
“Come in here and call the police. They’ll tell you when it’s safe to go over there.”

  “Right,” I said. Derek pointed to his phone, which sat on a built-in sideboard against one tangerine-colored wall. I walked there stiffly and made the call; the dispatcher began to ask me questions, but I was distracted because the baby — Charlie — was reaching for me, making fussing sounds.

  Derek apologized, saying something about Charlie preferring women, and then somehow I had the boy and Derek had the phone. I accepted the child automatically, half fearing a screaming scene, but to my surprise he nestled his little head against my shoulder without a fuss.

  I looked around, rocking slightly to soothe the little boy. Derek had a nice place, although the décor was rather simple. Elegant, though, I saw as I admired the furniture. Charlie put chubby arms around my neck. He was kind of sweaty.

  “Seesaw?” he said.

  “What?”

  “See song?”

  “You want me to sing you a song?”

  “Yeah.”

  He closed his eyes in anticipation. It might be the cutest thing I’ve ever seen; it helped that I could see his pudgy face up close. The kid was all sweet lashes, plump lips and perfect skin. He was a cartoon of a cute baby.

  Derek was still on the phone; he seemed to be giving the operator his address and phone number. “Uh— okay, Charlie. Let me think.” I made my way to a different room — a bedroom that had a little crib in one corner — so that Derek wouldn’t hear me singing. I had a pretty good singing voice, but I wasn’t in the habit of serenading anyone except myself. I found a chair near the crib and sat in it, leaning back so that Charlie wouldn’t slump forward.

  I tried to think of something I’d heard on the radio. Willie Nelson’s craggy face popped into my mind, and I started to sing “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain.” This was one of my dad’s favorites. I was very tentative, but Charlie seemed to like it. He snuggled right against me like he was ready to be there for the long haul.

  After a while I was less self-conscious, and I tried to make the song very pretty and soft so that Charlie would fall asleep. I felt a bit disoriented; first my apartment was invaded and now, somehow, I’d ended up holding a baby in Derek’s. I felt safe, though, and so did P.G., who was already curled up at the foot of the bed.