Deeply Odd

Fifteen

The spacious store offered aisles of well-mended secondhand clothing, paintings and an array of decorative items for the home, costume jewelry, an entertainment aisle with CDs and DVDs, shelves of used books, old toys fully restored, and much more.

Among the expected merchandise were fanciful items that were intriguing or puzzling, and which might have been amusing if I had not been cold, wet, and freaked out by recent events. A pair of five-foot carved-wood hand-painted blue heron had been adapted as lamps and held lightbulbs in their fierce beaks. A pygmy hippopotamus as large as a Shetland pony, preserved by an expert taxidermist, stood on a stone base that bore an engraved silver plaque with the words PEACHES/BELOVED COMPANION/IN MY HEART FOREVER.

Shoes squishing, dripping and splashing, making more of a mess than Peaches had probably ever done, I prowled the aisles, looking for Mr. Hitchcock and Boo but primarily for Annamaria. The customers, who had arrived under the protection of umbrellas, regarded me mostly with sympathy. But perhaps my eyes were wild and my demeanor fevered, because a few seemed to see in me a waterlogged lout, and they were quick to get out of my way, grimacing with disdain. Others went pale with fear as if I were the equivalent of Jacob Marley, from A Christmas Carol, back from the dead, wrapped not in symbolic chains but in the waters of some river in which I had drowned.

Because I had not come here to shop but instead to find two ghosts and a pregnant enigma, my hurried passage from department to department and my befuddled look caught the attention of a clerk in a Salvation Army uniform. She approached me with evident concern and a buoyant manner in excess of what I had seen in employees of other stores. Judging by the look of me, perhaps she might have expected that, in addition to directing me to recycled kitchen utensils or manufacturer’s-surplus dental-care products, she would also have a chance to save my soul.

In her early forties, with hair the color of brandied cherries, skin as pale as powdered sugar and as smooth as buttercream, freckles the precise shade of cinnamon, and a smile as winning as that of a ponytailed little girl in a current TV commercial for ice cream, she looked sweet, and she was. “Oh, dear, dear, dear, the day hasn’t been good to you, has it? You look chilled to the bone. How can I help?”

There was no point in asking if she’d seen the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock or a ghost dog, and it seemed inappropriate to stagger into a Salvation Army facility and boldly announce that I was looking for a girl.

And so with my usual aplomb, I said, “Well, through the window, I thought I saw an old friend. I don’t mean really old like elderly. I have an elderly friend in the car outside. She’s eighty-six, but she doesn’t look it, though she screams when she looks in a mirror. The friend in the car, I mean, not the friend I thought I saw in here. The friend I thought I saw, Annamaria, she’s a girl. Not a little girl. Like eighteen. Dark eyes and hair, petite, with this smile that makes you feel everything will be all right even on the worst day. Don’t get the wrong idea, ma’am. I’m not stalking her. She didn’t jilt me. She’s not my ex-girlfriend or girlfriend or anything. I only have one girlfriend, and she’s forever. I don’t mean Mrs. Fischer, the elderly lady in the car. Mrs. Fischer’s just a friend. She thinks she’s my employer. But I’m not a chauffeur. I’m a fry-cook. Although not recently, what with one crazy thing after the other.”

When I finally wound down, the clerk said, “You must be Thomas.”

For a moment, I seemed to have exhausted my supply of words, and then I found a few. “Yes, ma’am. How did you know?”

“Your sister purchased some things for you.”

“My sister?”

“She said you’d be along in a while. She’s a very self-possessed young woman. Very impressive. With such a graceful and kind way about her.”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s her, all right. What did she purchase?”

“Just what she knew you’d need. Come with me.”

As she led me toward the back of the store, I said, “Did she purchase Peaches, the stuffed pygmy hippo?”

The clerk’s laugh was musical. “You’re teasing me.”

“Did she?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Good. I couldn’t fit it in the car. I’d have to put wheels on Peaches and ride her home.”

“You have your sister’s sense of humor.”

“We’re a funny family.”

“I asked when the baby was due, and she said she’d been pregnant forever and still had a few years to go.”

“That’s Sis, sure enough.”

We arrived at a short hallway with changing rooms on both sides, where customers could try on the secondhand clothes.

The clerk said, “There’s a basket in the room. If your new things fit, just put all your wet clothes in the basket. Your sister said you’d want to donate them.”

At the last room on the right, an OCCUPIED sign hung on the doorknob.

“It’s your room,” she said. “I reserved it when your sister said you’d be along shortly.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I’m sorry for dripping all over your store.”

“Oh, dear, don’t you worry. That’s why God made mops.” She patted me on the shoulder and left me alone.

On a bench in the changing room were a white T-shirt, a pair of briefs, socks, blue jeans, a blue crewneck sweater, a pair of Nike basketball shoes, and a black raincoat with a hood.

Everything fit perfectly. I left my wet clothes in the plastic laundry basket.

In the right-hand pocket of the raincoat, I found a disposable cell phone. It rang in my hand.

I felt as if I were in a Mission Impossible movie. The internals of the phone would probably melt into slag as soon as we finished our conversation.

“Hello?”

As always, her words seemed to float to me on the warm currents of her voice. “Do you remember the promise you made to me when I gave you the pendant with the bell?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Because the walls of the changing room were thin, I lowered my voice. “You said some people wanted to kill you. And you asked me if I’d die for you. I said yes, somewhat to my surprise.”

“But not to mine. When my hour of need arrives, how will you be able to die for me if you’re already dead from pneumonia?”

“I was just a little wet.”

“And I’m just a little pregnant. You should wear galoshes, too.”

“I’m not a galoshes kind of guy. Where are you right now?”

“Where you left me. At the cottage by the sea, with Tim. We baked cookies, and now we’re eating them while we play cards.”

“How could you be at the cottage, a couple hundred miles from here, and buy me these clothes?”

“Every place is the same place in the end.”

“Another riddle.”

“You hear riddles, but I never speak in them.”

High in the flooded sky, thunder crashed like great structures falling into ruin, and here below, the building vibrated as if with a premonition of its own destruction.

I said, “The clerk told me you called yourself my sister.”

“People hear what they need to hear.”

“I wish you were my sister.”

I swear I could hear her smile when she said, “That’s sweet of you, odd one, and I know you don’t intend to diminish me.”

“Diminish you? What does that mean?”

“It means what it means, as you will understand in time.”

In the silent wake of the thunder, more intimate sounds arose from the ductwork behind a ventilation grille, in the back wall of the dressing room, near the ceiling. The soft ponk and bink of sheet metal dimpling and tweaking under some weight. An intermittent ticking accompanied by a faint slithering noise.

“Now tell me,” Annamaria said, “have the events of the day made you afraid?”

“For a while there, yeah. But I’m okay now.”

“Acknowledge your fear, odd one. Fearlessness is for the insane and the arrogant. You are neither. Those who rely on you for their lives will be well served only if you fear what you should fear. You are a unique soul, a child of grace, but you can still fail yourself and others.”

I thought of the Green Moon Mall in Pico Mundo, nineteen months earlier, when many had been saved but some had died, when among the dead had been she whom I loved more than myself, more than life.

I sat on the bench where I had found my fresh clothes folded and waiting for me. “Truth is, ma’am, I’m more afraid than I have been in a long time. And I’m afraid to be afraid.”

“Afraid to be afraid, but why?” she asked, though it seemed to me that she knew me as well as I knew myself and that her question was therefore moot.

“Because I’ve always gotten by on grit and little more. Or be fancy and call it fortitude. I can endure pain and trial, and not lose hope. Grit and wit — laughter in the dark is my surest defense. I usually hold off fear with a joke, but that only works for a while. What true courage I might have is limited and comes from desperation, brief spurts, just enough to get through a crisis. If the crisis is protracted, as I suspect this one will be, if fear is constant for too long, then courage will for darn sure bleed out of me when I need it most.”

Annamaria was silent so long that I thought I had embarrassed her with my confession, but that seemed not to be the case when she spoke. “Young man, there are few people who understand as much about themselves as you understand about yourself, to the depth that you understand it. But your greatest strength is that there are things you don’t recognize about yourself.”

“Which would be what?”

“There’s one kind of ignorance that is the very essence of enlightenment, and I won’t tell you what it is, because it is an ignorance that makes you so beautiful.”

Evidently, I hadn’t embarrassed her, but the word beautiful embarrassed me because it had no relationship to the mug I see in mirrors. “Another riddle,” I said.

“If you want to think it is.”

The hardest crack of thunder yet shook the afternoon, as if the sky were stone that had fractured clean through. Either echoes of the thunder rattled the sheet metal or something in the heating duct was agitated by the storm.

I said, “What frightens me is, there’s a difference in what’s happening today, this time, this situation….”

“Yes,” Annamaria said, as if she knew of my recent experiences.

I said, “The spirits who seek me out aren’t for the most part malevolent, just lost. The evil that comes my way is mostly stuff we might see in the newspapers and wouldn’t find unusual. An old high-school friend turned child-killer, cops gone bad, terrorists with a boatload of nukes … But what I’ve seen today is different in kind and magnitude. Stranger. Darker. More terrifying.”

“Anyone who learns the true and hidden nature of the world will be terrified, Oddie, but there’s a safe harbor past the terror.”

“Is that what I’m learning today — the true and hidden nature of the world?”

“Tim promises he’ll save two cookies for you. They’re very good, if I say so myself. Listen, because of who you are, it’s inevitable that eventually you will peel the onion, so to speak, and see the truth of everything.”

“I’d rather just chop the onion, fry it with a dribble of olive oil, and put it on top of a cheeseburger. Sometimes I have a dream in which I’m nothing but a fry-cook, with a paycheck every Friday, good books to read, and all my friends in Pico Mundo.”

She said, “But that is only a dream. Your life has always been a journey metaphorically. And since you left Pico Mundo, it has become also a literal journey from which you can’t turn back.”

I watched the grille over the ventilation duct and thought about the quartet of rats abandoning the Phoenix palm in formation, but no pointed twitching nose or radiant blood-drop eyes appeared.

She continued: “Every journey has a destination, known or unknown. In a journey of discovery like yours, the pace quickens and the disclosures mount steadily toward the end.”

“Am I nearing the end of mine?”

“I’d guess that what’s behind you is much more than what lies ahead, though you have a way to go yet. But I’m not a fortune-teller, odd one.”

I said, “You’re something.”

“Be afraid in proportion to the threat,” Annamaria said, “but if you trust yourself, we will see each other again—”

“ ‘—when the wind blows the water white and black,’ ” I finished, quoting her words from earlier in the day. “Whatever that means.”

“It means what it means, Oddie. Remember, there are cookies waiting here for you.”

She disconnected, and I switched off the disposable cell phone.

When I stood up from the bench and stared at the grille near the ceiling, all grew quiet in the duct beyond.

I tucked the pistol in a deep pocket of the raincoat and opened the changing-room door, prepared — though not eager — to learn the true and hidden nature of the world. But first I stopped in the thrift-shop men’s room. Even the most urgent journey of discovery must allow time for the journeyer to pee.