Doing Time (41 page)

Mel is standing on the curb in front of her father's house, digging in her knapsack lor the key and wondering how she could have misplaced it, or why she has misplaced it, wondering if maybe she has misplaced it on purpose. She is aware of the dream and thinking: I'll be a sibyl, a seeress, I'll see halos and auras, III predict the future …

It is noon and the cab has just dropped her off and she's had a headache since this morning when she led Omaha.

“Til find the keys,” she says out loud, surprising herself with her sarcasm … and immediately remembers an inside pocket on her windbreaker.

The house has been empty for a year. It is brick and stone, three stories under a red tile roof. 1 here are turrets at the front corners, three-quarter round with bay windows on all floors, medieval strue tures that to Mel have always seemed an architectural afterthought. Out: front on the lawn is the stocky red pimpcr her father planted before she was born, and at the curb, towering over the street, the roots so effortlessly heaving the pavement aside, is the ancient sycamore that has been around longer than the houses on the block. The hedge separating the yard from the neighbor's is frantic with growth, hut the lawn has been mowed — the real estate company has seen to that — although the first thing Mel noticed from the taxi was that no one had taken down the blue window awnings this past winter, and now they look faded and sad. Sad windows and sad gray walls, the welcome mat missing from the front steps, ivy gone wild and snagging the rain gutters, the chimney fascia spilling its rust down the wall overlooking the driveway, I fer lather's castle, his crumbling fortress in the middle of die block.

On the porch, knapsack harassing her shoulder, Mel fingers the key from her jacket and aims it at the lock, noticing as she does that her hand is trembling.

She is here to meet the woman from i he real estate company. There is a buyer lor the house, and a good offer. Paul, Mel's brother in Omaha — where Mel has spent the last year recovering — has come to Denver twice this month to arrange the sale, and actually Met didn't have to return. But the deal didn't include the furniture, room after crowded room of turn-of-century tables and chairs, antique wall hangings and rugs, thousands of knickknacks — and ostensibly Mel has come for this: to sell or store the furniture, or as she told Paul before she left, to check her room one final time, to see if there is anything she wants to keep.

Mel closes the door behind her but then swings it open again because the air in the hallway is stale. She eases her knapsack to the floor and looks down the length of the narrow room. To Mel the hall has always been the unfriendliest room in the house, a dim passageway of hardwood floors and empty walls, so unlike the other rooms. There are heavy sliding doors, closed now, to the parlor on the left and the dining room on the right, and farther along there are single doors to the den and to the closets under the stairwell. Toward the rear of the house is an entryway to the kitchen, and next to it, another door — the service stairs, a metal spiral in a narrow shaft from basement to roof.

Which was how he got to them, so quietly, she and her father light sleepers but never hearing the familiar creak of the staircase in the hall, the groan of the wooden banister , . .

… She awoke with the barrel of the gun pushed between her lips, icy metal against her teeth, the reading lamp turned above her and shining in her eyes. He wore a ski mask, a ratty blue parka that rustled as he moved. All she could think was that she was naked beneath the covers. He drew the gun from her mouth and pointed it at her head and with the other hand shoved a note in her face — so as not to reveal his voice? she wondered, squinting, trying hard to focus on the words. The safe, it said. Where was the safe, and what was the combination?

But there was no safe. She hesitated, and then couldn't speak. He motioned for her to sit up. She did, spilling the covers to her lap. Curiously, she wasn't afraid. She felt her heart race, felt her skin turn cold; her eyes stung in the brightness of the bulb and what puzzled her was that she knew this man would probably kill her — and yet she wasn't afraid, as if in her mind there wasn't room or even time enough for fear.

He took her arm and pulled her from the bed, spun her around, and jammed the gun in her hair — her wild hair, springy curls out past her shoulders — and pushed her to her father's room down the hall …

Mel opens the sliding doors to the dining room. Nothing has changed. The walls are cluttered with eighteenth-century engravings and elaborately framed mirrors. The Queen Anne dining set, the china case, look recently polished; the crystal glassware and figural silver are displayed exactly as they have always been.

She walks through and into the kitchen. The refrigerator door is open; the light is off. She closes the door and lifts the phone off the wall and holds it to her ear, knowing there will be no dial tone. Except for her bedroom, this was her favorite part of the house, here at the oak table in the breakfast nook where she'd read or do her homework, the afternoon sunlight angling through the bay windows. By the time she was twelve, she was mostly alone here. Her father could no longer afford the maid, and by then her brother had left home permanently. And so after school she would bring her books to the table by the window, and then with cookies or maybe a cake in the oven she would dream up salads or fix casseroles that too often her father wouldn't show up to eat, but even so, the idea of something ready on the stove or warm in the oven was a comfort to her.

Mel hangs up the phone and, returning to the hallway, hears a car pull up out front — and knows it is Beth, the real estate lady who is selling the house. This wasn't Mel's idea. It was Paul who had called Beth from the airport. But then in a way it was Mel's idea because it was she who had insisted on coming back, and selling or storing the furniture was the handy excuse, something Paul would understand. Paul who had ignored her all her life and who now acted as though he needed her, as though he needed to protect her.

Mel walks to the front door. Beth steps out of her shiny car and looks up at the giant tree spreading high above her, and somehow at that instant Mel realizes that the new owners, whoever they are, will cut it down, will decide it is too old and too big for the neighborhood.

“Such a lovely tree,” Beth calls from the curb. She wears a white suit with low heels to match, a floppy spring hat that Mei thinks is silly. Approaching the porch she says, “I hope it survives. You know, this Dutch elm disease is rampant here.”

“It's a sycamore,” Mel says, and Beth shrugs and flips a hand in the air as if to say: Sycamore, elm, what's the difference?

Beth is a retired housewife, in her late forties, Mel decides. Her nose is too long and her mouth too wide but other than that she is attractive in a motherly way. Paul has been in touch with her since last fall, ever since he and Mel agreed to sell the house. Paul, at twenty-nine, is ten years older than Mel; he is a dentist in Omaha where he lives in a boxy suburban neighborhood and cares for his two young sons, a result of a recent divorce. For the past eleven months, ever since she left the hospital, Mei has been recovering at Paul's, taking care of the boys when she was able. Paul has made trips to Denver about the house, but Mel couldn't return, not until she was ready. And then one night when he was away she dreamed a crazy dream, a dream similar to the recurring nightmare but different because this time she knew she was dreaming; like a spectator at a film, she saw herself return to her father's house, watched as she moved from room to room reliving the horror of that night — and abruptly the dream shifted to a distant future in which she had arrived at an unknown faraway place, and there in her mind had grown numb and therefore comfortable and as a bonus had acquired these strange mental powers — she could read people's auras, she could see their lives unfolding, minute by minute — a future in which she existed in the same spatial dimensions as everyone else and yet in a time slightly ahead, so that even her own days were predictable … a future also in which the nightmare of the past had ended, had vanished as, in a sense, she herself had vanished.

… The man snapped the overhead light on, and her father sat up as they entered the room. He sat up blinking, and there wasn't much else he could do, not with the gun at her head, naked as she was and with the man gripping her neck from behind. The man pulled her father out of bed, motioned for them to lie on the floor, face down. He grabbed a blanket and tossed it over her, a thing that surprised her, but then he knelt above her and yanked the blanket down and forced her hands behind her back where he taped her wrists, moved to her ankles and taped them also, then started on her father. And her father kept asking, Why? and Who was he? and What did he want? over and over, with the tape tearing, screeching in Melody's ear. But the answer when it came was only the note, this time held low to her father's eyes. Where was the safe? What was the combination?

But there was no safe. Her father told him: There never was a safe, not in this house. On the dresser — take the wallet, the watch — take the TV, anything. Just don't hurt them.

And Melody kept thinking: He won't hurt us, he only wants money, he'll take the wallet and leave …

He began with the paintings on the wall, tore them off one by one and threw them to the floor, then moved to the closet, ripped the clothes out and pulled all the boxes off the shelves. No safe. He stopped, chest heaving, and Melody could feel his anger, could almost see the air around him boil with rage. He stood above them for a moment, then suddenly grabbed her father by the hair and pressed the gun to his forehead … and Melody waited, wanting desperately to be afraid, wanting fear to release her, to feel it as a poison in her blood, pumping into her mind, pumping everywhere at once …

There was a life insurance policy, a few dollars in a checking account, a trust fund for her college tuition. Paul sold the car and gave her half the money, but she gave it back as monthly rent — even after the hospital bill, her half of the insurance policy and the money from the house would be more than enough.

As for the trust fund, her father had never mentioned it. But that was like him, not to tell her. Losing his wife when Mel was born, silent and brooding, a tall man with sunken eyes and permanently hunched shoulders, he rarely told her anything: There were entire days when he didn't speak to her, so that she grew up trying too hard, hoping to replace not only his loss but her own. There were financial problems. Eventually he sold the printing company that had been his grandfather's and his father's and took a job in the press room at the
Denver Post.
And Mel had finished high school and had attended her graduation ceremony alone, had spent a year after that working odd jobs and hanging around the library downtown — and he hadn't said a thing about a trust fund.

“You know what I like about this place?” Beth says. “It's so quiet.” She pats the wall next to the front door. “It's so solid.”

Mel considers smiling but isn't sure it won't come out as a frown. Although Beth is right: The house is quiet. Mel's paternal grandparents lived and died here before she was born; they were, as her mother and her mother's parents were, more of the silent family she never knew. Growing up, Mel embraced the silence, took it for her own, but Paul came up angry, hating this house and leaving as soon as he could. Now Mel isn't sure what to think — this was never a happy place, never a place for a child, really, but it is all she knows. And now she must forget it — she must walk through it, room by room, erasing it from her mind.

She slides open the doors to the parlor. The furniture is untouched — the sofa and loveseat by the fireplace, the octagonal table in the turret bay, the Estey pump organ against the wall. There are too many tables: coffee tables and end tables and corner tables, all busy with knickknacks that have never meant a thing to her but to which she now feels an unwelcome attachment, knowing they are hers to dispose of.

“Try the sofa by the fireplace,” she says to Beth. She is aware of having acquired a short fuse: since the hospital she has found it difficult to listen to her brother complain about his divorce, and today in the taxi on the way from the airport she snapped at the driver when he tried his small talk. Mel doesn't wish to be rude to Beth, but neither does she feel a need to explain — it is simply that she must do this alone. “I'll be back,” she says.

She climbs the stairs to the second floor, crosses the balcony, and enters her bedroom. The room is sunny; the drapes have been drawn from the window overlooking the backyard, probably by her brother on his recent visit. Here, there is a thin layer of dust over everything: the massive headboard on the bed, the heavy walnut dresser with the teardrop pulls, the books piled on her desk and floor — it was never a girl's room, never frilly, although when she was six her father relented and exchanged the antique wallpaper for Pooh characters: Owl and Eeyore and Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet following in circles the multiplying tracks of a Woozle — the wallpaper that seems faded and brittle now, about to peel from the walls.

She stops at the window. The lawn in the backyard is patchy, blemished with debris brought by the winter wind, and the dogwood tree, bursting with hundreds of clusters of brilliant white flowers, seems delirious, abandoned to nature. Beyond the fence there is the wide expanse of the neighbor's lawn, and across the street, the country club where as a child she would spend her weekends — alone on winter Sundays she would test the frozen creek, hike the empty golf course that became her private estate; the trees she would climb were make-believe houses where she'd perch in her heavy coat like a silent bird, watching frosted cars glide by on a nearby avenue. She was a tomboy; she was more a boy than a girl; she thought of herself as odd and graceless and at fault, and with her brother so much older and her father hardly home even when he was, there was no one to tell her different.