Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017

Honey, Hold Me by Zoë Z. Dean

Zoë Z. Dean’s debut short story, “Getaway Girl” (EQMM 11/2014) won the Robert L. Fish Memorial Award for best short story by a new American author and was selected for he 2015 volume of Best American Mystery Stories. Her work appeared in EQMM again in May/June 2017. With this third story for us she’s making her mark as one of our most original new writers!

The 911 recording was scratchy, distorted: At first, it made Deena think of the tricks the projectionists had shown her the summer she’d sold concessions at the little five-screen movie theater downtown.

The lobby hadn’t been air-conditioned and it was a constant struggle not to drip sweat down into the popcorn butter or onto the jumbo-sized boxes of Dots or Junior Mints. Once the last showing had started, she had always slipped into the projection booths, little boxes of cold air, and bribed Stu-the-projectionist with soda and nachos to let her sit out the duration. He was thirty-seven, bearded, pudgy, and more interested in the flickering images below them than he was in her, but in the downtimes, he taught her what he called the tricks of the trade with the assumption that she was as interested in it all as he was, that she would “put in her time” with the licorice whips outside and then move up to usher, then to projectionist herself, maybe — in a pipe dream — manager. Deena had just wanted to stay cool.

But some of it she absorbed, especially when Stu talked about the sex scenes back in the days of real film — “the outlaw era” — and how they would get snipped out, still by still, by hopeful, sweaty-palmed projectionists from one coast to the other. Which, he said, she might have heard about from Fight Club. She hadn’t seen Fight Club? She had to see Fight Club, like, now.

Deena had tilted her head against the chugging, Freon-scented box of an AC unit and nodded. Fight Club, sure.

He took that for a solid commitment and breezed on. “It’s like VHS tapes.” All of this was delivered in a kind of monotone hush, the better to not be overheard by the audience. “You probably don’t remember tapes, do you?”

Deena had the premature nostalgia of her generation: For the first time, she tilted herself away from the rush of air. “We had all the Christmas specials on those, Rudolph and Frosty, and home movies, and—” She laughed, her hand cupped over her mouth in deference to Stu’s obsessive need for quiet. “I used to wake up at two in the morning to tape episodes of Buffy. I’d buy these eight-hour tapes at the dollar store and they’d never hold more than six episodes, eight hours my ass, but I had all of season five. We only got the right station at two in the morning, for some reason, I never figured out why.”

Stu was looking at her with a curious near-tenderness that Deena would only be able to dissect years later, when she taught high-school students with a near-complete ignorance of MTV.

“Okay,” Stu said. “VHS tapes. You’re definitely too young for this, unless you have, like, really shitty parents, but it used to be that if you rented anything really steamy from Blockbuster — which was so hard to do anyway, because they wouldn’t stock anything good, uptight corporate assholes — or wherever, you hit a sex scene, you’d see it wobble.”

“Like...” Deena glanced down at her breasts and willed him to follow her gaze without, somehow, being creepy about it: She had recently discovered in herself the inability to allude to her own femaleness, which didn’t serve her well in getting tips.

Stu snickered. “No. No jiggle. We’re talking your basic distortion. See, someone before you, your ordinary American pervert in those dark preInternet days, would have been watching that scene and rewinding it, watching and rewinding, and again, and again, until it wore the tape. So your audio would get all messed up and your picture would get trashed. VHS, that was really bad technology. Don’t let anybody ever convince you it was like the vinyl of your almost-generation.”

“The vinyl of my almost generation,” Deena said, ten years later.

The detective — Cassell, she remembered, Lucas Cassell — looked at her. “Sorry?”

“I was just — can you play it again?”

“We don’t have to do this right now.” He covered his phone with his hand, like she was a child and would forget it was still on the table.

Deena wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m listening now. I was just distracted. It’s not as clear as I thought it would be. Not that I thought about it, but—”

“The sound quality’s not very Hollywood,” Cassell agreed. “But if you need to do this later, we can do it later. No? Okay. Here we go.”

He pressed play. Green digital spikes sprouted like grass on the black screen, tracing the ups and downs of Deena’s mother’s voice, the 911 operator, the background chorus of smaller, fuzzier sounds. It was somehow crushingly mundane: not very Hollywood. The 911 operator had one of those flat, sing-songy Hoosier voices; Deena’s mother’s voice was shrill, panicked. The digital grass leapt up alarmingly. What was her emergency? Her husband. He’d fallen, he’d slipped in the bathroom, his head, the blood. Was he breathing? Yes, please hurry, yes, he was breathing, he was talking, honey, honey, are you okay? Hold on, Kenneth, hold on.

And then, like they were playing catch with the word and Deena’s father had grabbed it out of the air, this, faint and fuzzy but there: her dad’s voice. “Oh, honey. Honey, hold me.”

A fresh burst of weeping from her mother. “Please! Please hurry!” A rattling off of their address: staccato beats on the screen.

The rest of it, Deena already knew, because she had arrived only half an hour after the ambulance: She had seen the huge red splotch of blood on her mother’s soaking wet blouse from where her mother had cradled her father in her arms. “In my arms,” she’d kept saying, over and over again, as the water off her neat khaki capris had spread dampness into the bedspread. “He died in my arms. I held him. He wanted me to hold him. Oh God.” She hadn’t even turned the water off in the shower: that was something the police, their hands swallowed up in blue latex, had had to do. The gloves had infuriated Deena. What did they think was happening here? She had screamed at them, but it had been her mom, quietly rocking back and forth, the EMTs had given the settle-down shot to. Even now, her mother’s arm was lightly bruised on the inside of her left elbow.

“I’m sorry,” Cassell said, after the file closed out into silence.

Deena nodded. Tears were standing in her eyes and so the nod was just the barest dip of her head, so she wouldn’t shake them out.

“I mean it. For your loss and for — upsetting your family. My partner, he’s the one who listened to the call the first time, and his hearing’s not what it used to be. He didn’t pick up on your father’s voice. You can confirm it’s your father’s voice?”

She looked at him and he held up his hands, like a little boy caught playing cops and robbers.

“I have to ask.”

“It’s my dad,” she said.

Cassell’s eyes were clear; he could nod with more confidence. He had the kind of square-jawed, craggy network TV cop face, hard but earnest, the kind of guy who never cried and who didn’t believe in apologies or coincidences, and Deena could tell she was supposed to read all kinds of things into that nod. She wasn’t interested. If Cassell could not outright say that he was sorry for taking her mother’s fingerprints while her father lay dead twenty feet away, if he could not admit how moronic it was to not have listened to the 911 call in full and to have heard her dad’s last words that would render all their suspicions not only moot but terrible, then Deena had no time for him. None. She had her mother to shepherd; she had a funeral to help arrange.

“Did you play this for my mom?”

“Of course not. She knows what he said.”

“Then why play it for me? She already told me.”

“I thought you’d like to know.”

“Proof? That my mom wasn’t lying to me about my dad’s last words? That she wasn’t lying to me about not killing him? Can you leave, please?” Cassell slipped his phone into his pocket. “Proof is good, Deena,” he said. “It’s the not knowing that hurts you. You would wonder, eventually. You’d look at the bills your mother could suddenly pay without a flinch, you’d look if she married again, you’d start to doubt, but now you won’t. He wanted her with him when he was dying: That’s what you’ll know, now. And you won’t wonder at all.”

“You’re saying I have you to thank for that?”

He had already turned around to leave, so he just said over his shoulder, “I’m just saying you should be thankful. Proof is something most people never get.”

Deena went on without being thankful. She took time off work. She spent an afternoon on her hands and knees on her mother’s bathroom floor, trying to scrub blood out of the grout between the tiles: Cassell had given her the number of a cleanup company that handled crime scenes but it felt wrong to trust her father’s blood to strangers. She wore her fingers to the bone. In the end, the grout just looked a little rusty, and that had to be good enough. Her mother didn’t seem to notice it.

She had hardly noticed the funeral either. It had been hopeless to try to take her shopping, so Deena had gone through her closet twice looking for a demure black dress: She kept turning up cocktail gowns, too low-cut or too glamorous, and finally had to settle for navy. They’d been on their way to the funeral, the lead car in the black-flagged highway processional, when her mother had suddenly said, “I want a hat.”

“Okay,” Deena said, looking out the window. “We can get you a hat.”

“No, now. I want a hat now.” Her mother touched her head. Her hair was brown but graying, not touched up at all since her husband had died, and it was as though she had spent the last two weeks trying to formulate this single thought: a mourning hat, black, with a little veil. Deena tried to explain that they didn’t make those anymore or that, if they did, no one wore them, that her mother would look out of place. Finally, she said, “It doesn’t go with your dress,” and her mother looked down at the dark blue-clad knees and said, “Oh,” flatly, and began to weep.

She arrived at the funeral still crying, her disarrayed hair blowing slightly in the breeze. Deena wished Cassell were there, so he could see everything they had to be grateful for.

But in the end, her mother got her hat. Its veil was just a little half-circle of black tulle. Despite Deena’s prior reservations, she looked good in it. She wore it for the next month or so in church, pinned into her freshly retouched hair. “Kenneth would want me to look my best,” she said. Deena believed this to be true. She went with her mother to pick out new lipsticks; to stand by her in department stores while experts with heavily plucked eyebrows redid her mother’s makeup. It was all comforting, in its way: the way eating disorders picked up during stressful times refocus all of the energies on the physical. (Deena had spent half her freshman year on the bathroom floor.) She was confident her mother would pass through it.

They ran into Cassell at the grocery store.

“You look well,” he said, with every sign of politeness.

“She does, doesn’t she?” Deena’s mother said, as if that had been what he’d meant. “I keep telling her she doesn’t have to follow me around. A girl her age should be out with someone other than her mother.”

So finally, reluctantly, Deena let herself separate from her mother. “I’m half an orphan,” she said sometimes, usually when she had a drink in her hand. But eventually she too started to look well: stopped drinking so much, went back to consistently washing her hair, remembered why it mattered to wear socks that were at least in the neighborhood of matching. She pulled out of a work skid that, bereavement or no bereavement, would have cost her her job if it had gone on much longer. She bought a headset for her phone and started calling her mother only when she was in the car going somewhere else, which seemed like a practical way to deal with one’s family.

Any reminiscing about her father only ever seemed to make her mother cry.

“Do you think she should talk to a therapist?” Deena asked her friend Lilly.

“Do I think she should talk to a therapist because she’s sad her husband died? No, Dee. I don’t think you need to jump to that.”

“I’m serious. I don’t break into tears every time I talk about Dad.”

“Yeah, but you let all your fish die. People respond to grief differently.”

Years later, after her mother had passed away too, Deena thought about that: about grief, and differing responses. She took the loss of her mother more easily — perhaps loss was something you got better at with practice, or maybe she’d always been that way, and it was just the confusion around her father’s death — with a flash, she remembered the patch of blood on her mother’s damp blouse, the scratchy 911 recording — that had made it so difficult to bear. Cassell had been right, she could finally admit that. In the end, it had been better to know for sure.

She’d inherited the house but didn’t want it. Maybe it was superstitious of her, but she couldn’t think of using the master bedroom where her mother had died in her sleep, or the master bathroom where her father had slipped; the house didn’t feel cursed or haunted, but it felt full of death, with no room for her. She’d list it and clear out, let the real-estate agent handle everything. She would even sell it furnished, she decided, after she picked through the valuables and sentimental childhood remnants: her mother’s jewelry, her father’s collection of hunting lures, their shared library of everything from poetry to pulp science-fiction novels.

The house had stored the history of them like stripes of rock and geologic eras: here a drawer full of hand-knitted tea cozies, there a box of old Christmas ornaments that had only looked good on their white aluminum tree from when she was ten. Her old school projects, even a little self-sculpture of herself made out of painted clay. She actually laughed — personal nostalgia was poignant, cultural nostalgia was funny — when she came across the spare closet off the laundry room that held a neatly boxed Super Nintendo and cassette player. But her parents had been slow adapters: Her father had painstakingly taped whole seasons of British comedies off PBS over the course of several years and had refused to give them up to DVD, instead labeling the tapes with masking tape and Sharpie by season and episode. The VCR was still hooked up in their bedroom, bulky and anachronistic.

Deena found the boxes of tapes next to the Nintendo and ran her finger down a peeling Fawlty Towers label. Nothing to be done with them, really, but she didn’t want to get rid of them, either. She hoisted the box and the contents shifted and for the second time that day, all thoughts of death left her. Underneath the sitcoms were their old home movies, taped diligently, first by her mother and then by her father (who claimed he’d “developed an eye”) over the first ten years, at least, of her life; a handful of them even before that. She wouldn’t dig too deeply into those old ones — her parents had been remarkably uninhibited, and it wasn’t impossible that she might see more than she wanted to see.

But she plucked out one, Deena, Halloween, 6, and, settling the box down on top of the washing machine, went upstairs. She loaded the movie into the wheezing VCR.

It started midstream: She was little, six years old, dressed as a tiger with a long, curly orange-and-black striped tail, as if she’d confused “Tiger” and “Tigger” and no one had stopped her. She had jumped into her father’s lap. Her mother, the hand behind the camera, was laughing, the camera shaking slightly, something Deena now associated most with horror movies. She rewound the tape a little, watching frames slowly flicker in and out, thinking again about Stu and the summer of movies. She played it again to watch herself creep low into the kitchen, moving on all fours, surprising no one because there was nothing more conspicuous than a kindergartner in bright orange accompanied by a low look-how-frightening-I-am growl. When she got close to her dad’s place at the kitchen table, she sprung up, half beast of the jungle, half Tigger again, and bounced and pounced into his lap shouting, “Grr! Grr!”

Her dad’s face shimmered slightly with a look of love so deep it brought tears to Deena’s eyes. His mouth was shaking from suppressed laughter. He put his hand on her back, between her shoulder blades.

“Don’t eat me, tiger! Don’t eat me! Fierce man-eating tiger.”

“Grr, grr,” little Deena growled, mushing her face against his shirt.

The tape started to roll a little and Deena tapped the tracking button on the ancient remote to try to still it, but the quality was shot: garbage technology, the vinyl of no one’s generation. She looked at her dad’s face as the static pitched it to and fro. On the screen, she was attacking him with all her little-girl fierceness and he was trying hard to pretend she was a monster. Sharing the joke of it with her mother. He looked up, his eyes meeting the camera. His gaze was so bright.

“Oh, I’m scared,” he said. “I’m so scared. Oh, honey. Honey, hold me.”

Deena’s breath caught in her throat. She rewound the scene, played it again. She watched the way the video seemed to crumple under the weight of the memory, under the weight of the scrutiny. Her scrutiny. And—?

“Oh, honey,” her father said, from the depths of the battered tape. “Honey, hold me.”

© 2017 by Zoë Z. Dean