Suicide's Girlfriend (24 page)

“Maybe. It was real friendly when it flew down to me,” the caller said, “but now it doesn't want to be touched. It isn't eating or anything so I think it may be sick.”

Sick
. Candace's chest filled with a bright vapor that immediately rolled up behind her forehead, then down the back of her skull. Still, this time, she did remember to carry the cage out to the Buick. To tell herself, as she pulled on the lights and put the car in gear,
Calm down. Don't drive over some little kid in the street because you're not watching where you're going. Don't speed and get delayed by a cop.

In the dark, in that dark town, it was often hard to read the street signs, let alone find an unfamiliar address, but she located the number without too much trouble. The house to which it belonged, however, looked uninhabited. A small white stucco bungalow. Run-down. A sickly ochre in the light from the sodium lamp at the intersection.

The big birdcage rattled and banged against her thigh as she made her way up the cracked sidewalk. Did the cage smell? As if she were a girl again, coming in from the sloppy hog farm, she worried she might be turned away for stinking.

The top half of the front door was made of glass, uncurtained. She could see inside the house, through a dark and cluttered room to a room beyond lit only by the blue glow of a television. There, a group of boys—nineteen, twenty years old—slouched on the floor and a broken couch. When she knocked, two barking dogs raced from some other part of the house and leapt up wildly against the rattling door. The boys watching the television glanced Candace's way, but made no move to let her inside.

“Kurt!”
one of them finally called over the barking of the dogs.
“It's the bird lady!”

A boy with a shaved head and unlaced boots appeared from some other part of the house and, eyes down, not looking at Candace at all, he came to the door and opened it. “Knock it off!” he said to the dogs, and then, to Candace, “Bird's upstairs.” When he turned and began to walk deeper into the house, she followed. She had known boys in graduate school who looked like this boy and his roommates. Boys who appeared mentally ill, or as if mentally ill barbers had cut their hair. Sometimes they were nice. The poet who had knocked out his own front teeth with the rock had, after all, made an elaborate ceramic card for his mother on Mother's Day and volunteered once a week at a soup kitchen.

In the room that held the television-watchers, Kurt—like a boy sent to bed by his elders—sullenly began to make his way up a metal spiral staircase that looked as if it had been torn out of a prison and installed in the bungalow in order to up the air of depravity in the place.

“Excuse me,” Candace said as she passed between the other boys and their TV show.

Of course, she felt preposterous, annoying, terrified. The spiral staircase rang with her tread. Perhaps she made it impossible for the boys to hear their television show. Perhaps the show was just a cover, anyway. Really, this was where you were killed. Where the crowd leapt upon you and, after torturing you for a good long time, tore you to bits. The end.
The end.

At the top of the stairs, she tried to take courage from the fact that
whoever had decorated the attic space had worked to make it cheerful with bright squares of carpet remnants and pillows.

Across the attic, the boy fiddled with a cage he appeared to have made of hog-fencing. Candace hurried to where he stood. The bird that perched on a twig inside the homemade cage was rumpled, shrunk inside its feathers like an ancient homeless person wrapped up in newspapers against the cold.
Phoul.

“Phoul,” Candace said.

The bird raised her head and gave a plaintive peep.

“Oh, honey,” she sighed, “how're you doing?”

“It was real friendly when it came down to me,” said the boy. Candace understood that he could not help sounding resentful, hurt, just as she could not help rambling while she took the bird from the cage and kissed her beak: “Yeah, she may be a little sick. Her nostrils are inflamed. And see this red paint on her feathers? That's the paint I was talking about. I'm a painter. That's alizarin crimson.”

Tentatively, the boy reached out a hand to stroke the bird. She hissed at him in her old, ugly way—the way she hissed at Carson—and the boy said a bitter, “So I guess it's your bird, all right.”

Candace felt sorry for the boy though he still scared her a bit. She could imagine how things had been. Frightened and hungry and exhausted, the bird had been docile. Perhaps she stayed on the boy's shoulder all the way back to town. She took a seed from his lips, nibbled the fine hairs at the back of his neck. But then she found herself stuck in a cage and began mourning. From the start, Candace had known not to confine the bird to a cage.

“I want to give you a check. A little reward.” She glanced toward the stairs. From what she could gather, the boys below watched a show on public television. Something about the Orient Express, it seemed. Surely a pack of potential killers would not watch a show about the Orient Express. Still, as soon as she handed the boy the check, it occurred to her that Carson would be upset that she had, in effect, given her name and address to a boy who already had her phone number from the Lost and Found page. It was too late, however,
to suggest she give him cash instead, and she inserted the bird in the cage, made her way down the noisy stairs, past the other boys, and out the door.

Is my husband here yet?
She was on Grant Road, waiting at a red light when she realized
that
was what she ought to have said as soon as she reached the boys' house.
Is my husband here yet?
Oh, and she should have left a note at the house explaining where she had gone and why. What if she had been murdered and Carson just assumed she had run off? Periodically, bodies—male, female, hard to identify—showed up in the desert surrounding the city. Everything had turned out fine, yes, but she had not prepared for disaster. Suppose she had ended up dead when she did not mean to, and people imagined she had let herself get killed on purpose?

“He'd be so fucking embarrassed if he knew he actually did it.”

Really, Joyce Burton herself had provided Candace an excellent reason to live, hadn't she: To delay, as long as possible, giving over your story to other people's interpretation.

Calling Carson's motel in Iowa City made Candace feel shy. A little silly, nervous. Though she needed to tell him whom she loved best of her relief at the return of the bird—now curled up wearily in the crook of Candace's neck—Candace understood her news would matter to Carson only because he cared for her.

“I'm sorry it's so late, but I needed to let you know.”

“Hey, I'm really happy for you,” Carson said, and, then, as he moved to a phone in the adjoining room, he called out, “Hey, you guys, Candy found her bird.”

She rested her cheek against the bird's head. One of the children would have hold of the phone now. Would he or she say hello? Apparently not. It seemed Josh believed that Carson and Candace had been involved with each other before the family stopped to buy vegetables;
that Carson had tried to trick Josh into liking Candace before he knew the truth of who she was.

“We're watching a movie,” Carson said. Was that click of the other receiver being returned to the cradle a genuine click? A fake click? She felt too disarmed to respond appropriately when Carson added, “I wish you were here.”

The three of them had made the trip to the hog farm that morning, Carson reported. Candace's mother had taken them on a tour and made them lunch.

“Where was my dad?”

“He wasn't feeling so good, I guess. We didn't see him.” After a moment's pause, Carson said, “Hey, it was fine, Candy. But I
did
have a hard time convincing Georgine that the kids couldn't take home a piglet!” He laughed. “She was funny. She liked the kids, I think. They were good. They asked a lot of questions.”

Candace let Carson continue to draw his cozy picture of the visit. Though she could only imagine her dark little mother dragging herself through the visit, and her father knocking up against the furniture in the bedroom, why not allow Carson's version to stand?

“But I should let you go back to your movie,” Candace said. She knew how bored she sounded. Bored, detached.

“You're my girl, though, right?” Carson asked.

“Right.”

After she hung up, Candace looked in the trash can for Maryvonne's home telephone number. She wanted to tell Maryvonne about Phoul; to hear what Maryvonne now had to say about the pied bird caught by Joyce Burton. Maybe Maryvonne had decided to call the paper or the Humane Society to report the pied bird found. Maybe Candace could tell Maryvonne about how Carson had taken his children to visit the farm and made that godawful place sound just fine.

Candace knew perfectly well, however, that Maryvonne's number had gone with the garbage and recycling that she had put out after Maryvonne and Joyce Burton left that afternoon.

Three-two-five? Three-two-seven?
The numbers together were a flock, so similar it was difficult to distinguish one from the other, and after disturbing several households, Candace gave up trying.

She
did
find the number for the Deep Freeze in the directory. According to the message machine, the Deep Freeze would open at nine in the morning. The special on banana-malt power shakes would last until the end of the month.

In the morning, however, Candace did not call Maryvonne at the Deep Freeze. The truth: Candace felt slightly bitter. Now that Maryvonne had a cockatiel in her possession, apparently she did not care about the fate of Candace's bird.

Phoulish Phlame complained from inside the screen door, while outside—the gravel yard already hot from the climbing sun—Candace dragged the director's chair from its spot by the carriage lamp to the carport. A stepladder would have been preferable to the director's chair, she supposed, but surely the worst she could do in a fall from the chair was to break a leg or an arm, and no one could construe either injury as the result of suicidal impulses.

Carefully—like an acrobat getting ready for a stunt—she clutched the chair's arms, then placed a foot on each of the side supports of the chair's canvas seat; and only after she felt steady in that squat did she attempt to stand.

One swaying moment—then a gasp—before her ribs crashed into the edge of the roof. But she was okay. Okay. She steadied herself, then looked at the mirror. Just as she had suspected, it was ruined, the silvering shoved back in long terrible ribbons, like charred skin. But there was something beautiful in the total effect: through the scrapes in the glass, she could see—like the perfect undisturbed sediment at the bottom of a still pond—a dense layer of eucalyptus pods and old leaves, and, here and there a feather, a bright strand of live cat's-claw vine; and all of this contained by a sweet reflection of overhead clouds and trees.

A perfect composition, she thought, but not hers, and she set to working the mirror close enough to the lip of the roof that she would be able to grasp its edges once she stood on the ground again.

When she was finally down, she moved the director's chair out of the way, and began to pull the mirror toward herself. More scraping sounded. With some effort, slowly backing away from the carport, she drew the edge of the heavy pane onto the top of her chest, then eased the weight onto breasts, down to stomach and the tops of thighs, before making a last painful adjustment and, with hobbled step, moving the mirror back through the screen door and into the house.

With a yelp, she set the mirror on top of Carson's desk. There, her weary self was reflected, and then, a flutter of wings as Phoul instantly flew to Candace's head, landed, peeked over that cliff to see what she could see: bill, small white face, bright eyes. The flyer for the suicide's picnic was visible through the scrapes in the mirror. The still intact silvering—now reflecting the ceiling—hid the suicide's face, but his shirt was visible: a turquoise shirt covered with bright tropical birds, and, below this,
Rick Haynes, 1969-1997.

Candace did not feel angry with Rick Haynes anymore. Though his suicide had been at least partially an act of aggression, who was she to say it had not been an intimate thing, too? Maybe Rick Haynes was capable of being more intimate with another person than she was. Maybe, in killing himself in front of Joyce Burton, he had meant, in his own way, to marry himself to her forever. In another world, that is. A world where suicide expressed the keenest desire to exist, a world where the suicide now lived—like a glove turned inside out and worn on the opposite hand.

Candace could understand that.

Candace supposed she really ought to call Joyce Burton. Tell her about finding the bird. Though this would mean that, later, when Candace was unable to stop herself from telling Carson of the call, he would say, “Good for you! I'm proud of you, Candy! I bet Joyce can use all the friends she can get these days, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find the two of you have a lot in common!”