Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Nineteen

Leo met her first. In high school, Leo met everybody first. It was hard not to notice him, afire in his mismatched madras plaids, fluorescent stripes, and outrageous red tennis shoes. At five foot six, he was the shortest boy in the senior class, weighed not much more than a hundred pounds, and was already balding. However, with a ready grin and an intellect as bright as his plumage, Leo sparkled in a thousand colors, bright as the Hope Diamond. Sooner or later, everyone got drawn to Leo.

“You wouldn’t believe this girl in my American lit class, just transferred in,” he said as we walked home at the start of the second semester. “She’s a junior, at first glance as bland as an egg white scrambled with skim milk.” Leo was contemplating a career as a novelist then and spoke of everything in terms of metaphors, similes, and other things I didn’t understand. “Until she smiles, and then, man, her face lights up like”-he paused, because only a brand-new simile would serve such a goddess-“like the Encyclopedia Britannica in a silk dress.”

I laughed, picturing blue-bound books dressed for a prom.

He stopped, his pale, narrow face intent. “I mean it, Dek, she is the most beautiful, the most wondrous, most amazing, smartest-”

I held up my hand to silence the spew. “All right, she’s perfect. And you’re in love… again.”

“She wants to be a writer, too; a George Eliot, a-”

“What’s this new girl’s name?”

“Don’t laugh; it’s sort of a boy’s name,” he said.

“I got branded with ‘Vlodek’ at birth; I never laugh at names.“

“Maris.”

“Like Roger Maris, the Yankee slugger?”

“Indeed,” he said. That was a word he was using a lot, our senior year. Indeed.

“What’s her first name?”

“That’s it.” He smiled. “Maris. Her last name is Mays, like Willie Mays. Her mother told her she named her Maris Mays so boys would never forget her.”

We started walking again.

“It’s a perfect name for a great woman writer,” he said after we’d gone another block. “Like George Eliot, like-”

“Indeed,” I shouted at the corner where I turned off to go to work at the laundry. I didn’t think he heard me; I didn’t think he even noticed I’d peeled away. For all I knew, he kept talking about Maris Mays all the way to his house.

I spotted her the next day, a blond shadow of medium height, in an almost colorless gold-tinted corduroy jumper, keeping to the walls as she moved between classes. Rivertown High allowed that, allowed anonymity, perhaps more than most high schools. Like all schools, Rivertown had cliques: the jocks, the activists, the physically superior-the noticed. They were small groups, though, for those were days of marauding Japanese steel and murderous Taiwanese efficiencies, when Rivertown students came home to announcements of layoffs and factory shutdowns, predictions of financial freefalls, and fits of uncomprehending rage. A pall hung over Rivertown, as noxious as any of the clouds of smoke that used to blanket the town, only this time it extended past the factories to darken the halls of the high school as well. Most of the students at Rivertown lived under that cloud, stunned, just trying to get by. There was no time for cliques.

A week later, Leo grabbed my arm outside the door after school. “You’ve got to meet Maris.”

“Indeed,” I said, trying not to grin at my perfect one-word sarcasm.

She came out a couple of minutes later. She wore an open green coat, a starched white blouse-a novelty at RHS-and pale gray jeans. Her blond hair hung straight down to her shoulders, framing a face that at first glance might have been unremarkable.

She smiled. Leo was right. It transformed everything.

Leo stood up and shrugged out of his traffic-stopper orange parka, warm at last. He held his hand out for my cup. “We’re under control,” he said. “We can have another.”

When he came back, he handed me my mug, then snapped off the plaster lamp. The outlines of Maris’s old typewriter blurred just enough to give us some distance. I squeezed the coffee mug with both hands for warmth.

Leo sat down. “So now you know who your client is,” he said again, for perhaps the fifteenth time. All fifteen times, it hadn’t been a question, it had been a prompt.

My head was a muddle of too many images, old and new, mixed together, of a blond girl and a burned cottage, of the smell of spring and the stench of fire, of blue eyes and red blood spots. Each of them flew by, too quickly to seize. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think. So I offered up what I’d said the previous fourteen times. “It changes everything.”

I stared for a while at the space heater, because there was no place else left to look. I didn’t want to look anymore at Maris’s typewriter, and I didn’t want to look at Leo, because it would just prompt him again.

“What will you do?” he said anyway.

“What will you do?” Maris asked. We were two blocks from school by then, marching three abreast on the sidewalk. Or rather, they were marching on the sidewalk. I was trying to keep up beside them, hobbling over the small mounds of snow on the fringe between the sidewalk and the street like a man new to wooden legs.

“Go to college, I suppose,” I stammered. It wasn’t her beauty that was making me stutter, though she had that, in aces. It was her directness, the unblinking way she asked me the question, and then waited, as though what I was going to say might change her life.

“Where?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Surely you must know. You’re going to graduate in five months. Surely you must know what you’re doing after high school.”

On the other side of her, Leo arched his eyebrows in a pantomime of Groucho Marx. He knew that in the places I lived, college was never discussed. The only future I had was to be shoveled out, like ash from a fireplace, as soon as I graduated. Nonetheless, he was enjoying the discomfort that was knotting my tongue. He was my best friend.

“I don’t know,” I stammered again.

“Maris.” Leo laughed, rescuing me. “Don’t get bogged down in what Dek doesn’t know. It will stop your life.“

She laughed then, too, and they marched, and I hobbled, on.

“All this time, I believed…” I stopped, sipped coffee and Jack, and tried again. “All this time, I believed she was…”

“Dead,” Leo finished for me.

“Disappeared forever.” I couldn’t say “dead,” not for Maris. Even during the worst months, in the dark times between two and four in the morning, I’d never said that. “I just figured if she were OK, she would have found a way to let me know.”

“Everybody thought she’d been abducted.”

I looked at the low, partially shadowed thing on the card table. “I know.”

“It’s good; she had a life.”

I turned to stare at him.

He looked away. “Sorry,” he said, “I just meant at least she wasn’t abducted and killed back then, like the cops thought.”

“I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Her disappearing?”

“Sure, that. And the rest.” I was angry at her now. I wanted to throw her old Underwood onto the snow. “But that charade, that Louise Thomas business about a will.” I set the cup down on the floor, hard, spilling. “That was cheap.”

I’m sure-

I cut him off. “Crap. She could have called.”

“Back then?”

“Damned right; but now, too. If she needed help, why the hell didn’t she call, ever? I wasn’t just some fucking jamoke.”

Leo got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with the bottle and a paper towel. He blotted up the coffee and Jack. “Mr. Daniels and I are going home,” he said, reaching for his parka.

We walked down the stairs.

“I would have gone to her,” I said.

“Of course.”

I opened the door. “Then, or now.”

He stepped out, then turned around. “I couldn’t help it. I had to have that old typewriter examined.”

Ludicrously, a fragment of an old, better moment came to me. I smiled, remembering the word.

“Indeed,” I said.