The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Mary Stewart Atwell Maynard from Alaska Quarterly Review

Leaving Maynard had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. The keys were in the ignition, my suitcase was in the trunk, and he had gone in to make sure that the stove was off. What was I supposed to do, wait for him to come back so I could say for the thousandth time, “Please, Maynard, I don’t want to go to Memphis”? This was my opportunity, and I took it. The hula dancer on the dashboard looked hipshot, and before I pulled out I pushed hard on her high hip to set her going.

I was counting on the fact that it would take him a while to realize I was really gone. He would worry that he might have misunderstood the situation. What would be more embarrassing than the cops pulling up at the same moment I got back from the grocery store, having run out to pick up some cheese doodles for the trip? Theresa would have to talk him into reporting the car stolen, and even then he would want to negotiate — to make the cops promise they wouldn’t be mean to me. All told, it couldn’t take less than a day and a half for them to get on the road.

The problem was that I only had one tank of gas. I had wanted to go to Florida, but when I looked at the map and looked at the needle dipping toward the three-quarters mark, I decided to go visit my cousin Stanley in North Carolina instead. I’d gotten a postcard from him the year before and I’d kept it because it was the only postcard anyone had ever sent me. On the front it had a picture of a beaver holding up a fish, and underneath it said “Catching the Big One in North Carolina.” From what Stanley said on the card I thought it was the kind of town where you could just walk into the post office and ask for somebody and they’d draw you a little map on the back of a wanted poster, but when I did that the postman said, “You can’t get there from here.”

“That’s the stupidest expression I’ve ever heard,” I said. “You can get anywhere from anywhere.”

“Not in a Cadillac you can’t,” the postman said. He had a little red mustache that glittered when he looked up to see who had rung the bell over the door. “He’ll tell you,” he said and disappeared into the back, leaving me with Milo. He smiled, and I was glad I had the little pistol that Maynard had given me for my eighteenth birthday tucked inside the lining of my purse.

I didn’t know it yet, but Milo wasn’t really scary. “How long are you planning to stay?” he asked as the Cadillac chugged up a slope that didn’t seem to have any top to it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll leave before winter, though. I hate winter. I always wanted to go to Florida, but my husband said it was too expensive.”

“Your husband?”

“Well,” I said, “he’s not really my husband,” and Milo laughed. I was surprised that he didn’t seem to want to talk about the baby. All anybody wanted to talk about was the baby. For the last month Maynard and Theresa hadn’t let me go anywhere, not even for a walk, as if I didn’t know better than anyone when I was going to have it. Milo had stopped the car, and before I knew it he was helping me out, as gently as if I’d been an old lady. He was a lot bigger than Maynard. I had to tilt my head all the way back to look up at him. “Can you give me a hand with something?” I asked. “I need to store the car someplace for a while.”

“I’m sorry, I just can’t,” Stanley said. He looked a lot worse than the last time I’d seen him. Almost all his teeth were gone, and he kept wiping his hands on the tablecloth. “I can’t take care of a baby. I can give you a little money, though — not much, but a little. Enough to get to Florida, probably. Isn’t that where you want to go?”

“Stanley,” I said, “it’s good to see you,” and for a moment he stopped wiping his hands and looked at me. “This is a nice house,” I said, and I meant it. It was cozy. Until you heard Stanley talking about Peter and Luke and John and realized they weren’t just friends of his, you’d think he was a mostly normal person. “So tell me about Milo,” I said.

“Oh no,” Stanley said, shaking his head. “I don’t know if I’d feel worse about setting you up with him or setting him up with you.” But when Milo came over later that night, I could tell that Stanley was trying to leave us alone together. We stood out on the porch, where down in the valley we could see smoke rising like a kitchen fire.

I looked down into the tangled branches of what Milo called a laurel hell. The smoke rose from the middle, making a trail like a snuffed candle. He’d emptied the Cadillac’s gas tank first so it wouldn’t explode. “When will it stop burning?” I asked.

“By tomorrow, most likely.” Milo put a sure, firm hand on the small of my back. I thought he looked worried, but with the beard it was hard to tell for sure. “No one sees the valley from this angle except me and Stanley,” he said. “And the DEA.”

I turned to face him, folding my hands under my belly and widening my eyes. I’d been practicing this pose for a long time, since before I met Maynard even. “Who are you?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”

“You tell me about yourself first,” Milo said.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. But he didn’t believe me, and when he came back the next day I knew I had to tell him at least part of the truth. Some men wouldn’t have cared where you came from, but Milo wasn’t one of them. “I lived with Maynard and his sister,” I said. “They were nice to me, I guess, but you get tired of people being nice to you all the time. Anyway, it wasn’t really about me at all; it was like they were being nice to the baby through me. And then Maynard decided that I went out too much and that I was going to have to stay at this special hospital in Memphis until the baby came, and I don’t like hospitals, so Heft.”

“So it’s not Maynard’s baby?” Milo asked.

“Are you kidding?” I said. Because that was really funny to me. Then I remembered that Milo did not know Maynard. “I met him at the bus station,” I said. “He hung around looking for girls like me. I know that sounds creepy, but it was just that he was too shy to meet people in the regular way. And I needed a place to stay, so it worked out for both of us.”

“And there were other girls there at the same time?”

“Oh no,” I said. “They’d left before I even got there. Your turn,” and I poked him on the arm. He was lying on his back in Stanley’s bed. Stanley was at his lab, and through the window we could smell the sweet smell of chemicals cooking. Milo turned and put a hand on my belly.

“Don’t you worry about Maynard coming to look for you?” he asked.

“Oh, he’ll find me,” I said. “I was hoping to get to Florida just because it would cost them more to look for me down there, but it doesn’t really matter. I’ll get home one day and he’ll be standing in the yard with Theresa. Theresa is his sister,” I added, because I couldn’t remember if I’d told him that. “She and Maynard look alike at first, but when you get to know them you realize that it’s just the shape of the face. I think he’d be willing to let me go, but Theresa wouldn’t let him. She’d say they’d spent too much money on me already.”

Milo lay with his hand on my belly, as still as if he were listening for a train. He was very dark and sad, and I knew that something bad had happened to him. He had run away to the loneliest place he could imagine, to a godforsaken mountaintop where his only neighbor was a crazy man who talked to Saint Peter as if he were right there in the room, but trouble had been seeking him and had found him, even here. I was that trouble, and it was not the first time. “So you walk into the yard and Maynard and Theresa are standing there,” he said. “What do you do then?”

“I was thinking they might like it down there with the car,” I said.

Milo’s hand stilled over my navel, and for a second I thought

I might have the baby soon, against my will. Up until then I’d always thought we had an understanding. He lay quiet, and then he jumped up and got dressed in the kitchen.

I wasn’t sure what I’d done. There is a time for saying things like that, just as there is a time for saying “I love you,” and I’d been pretty sure I knew when it was. “I was just kidding,” I called. In the doorway I saw Milo’s shadow waver, and I coaxed him back into bed.

What I realized is that the Bible never gives you enough information. Pulling the baby on the raft had been Stanley’s idea — he’d had a vision, but he left me to figure out how to make a raft of rushes, whatever those were, and daub it with slime and pitch. I thought about going down to the library to use the computer and see if I could find a little diagram or something, but I’ve heard that they keep track of what you look for.

I won’t lie: for a while I hoped that Milo would help me with the baby. I think if Maynard had seen me with a man like him, he would have turned around and gone right home. Or maybe Milo and I would have been in Florida by then, living not on the water, which would be too expensive, but close enough to it that you could hear the wind in the trees at night. That was what I thought at first, but I found out pretty quick that Milo didn’t want anything to do with a baby. Sometimes at night I would go and stand at the cliff’s edge and wonder what would happen to my body if Het myself fall — down into the laurel hell, coming to rest among the ripped empty packages of Sudafed and the wreckage of Maynard’s Cadillac.

Stanley stayed sober for a whole day to help me, and he cut the cord and cleaned up after, but when the baby cried that night I had to roll myself out of bed and crawl across the floor to get to him. A few days later I washed up and went down the mountain to get a job, and the first thing I bought with my employee discount was a little yellow life raft. I was hiding in the bushes when the old man with the dog found it, and I stuffed my fist in my mouth to keep from screaming.

But things get better. One of the girls from work helped me dye my hair in the employee bathroom. They had me working in lingerie, and while I refolded the underwear that people had to rummage all through before they decided not to buy it, I’d catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and smile like at a stranger. When the police came up to Stanley’s, I felt enough like another person that I almost convinced myself when I told him that I had never been pregnant; I didn’t know what that man from the post office was talking about. If I’d had a baby, I said, what hospital had I gone to? They’d checked every one within a three-hour drive, and nobody had a baby at home anymore.

I could feel Stanley watching me, and when they were gone he picked me up and swung me around in his arms. Later I found out that Milo had lied too, telling them he’d never met a pregnant lady at the post office and Stanley’s cousin never had belly that he’d seen.

It was summer, and even when we kept the windows open we sometimes had to change the sheets twice in one night. Stanley wandered around in the dark and we could hear him babbling and praying. Sometimes sleep wouldn’t come at all, and we’d borrow Stanley’s car and drive down to the neighborhood where the baby lived with his new family. The people who’d adopted him were just the ones you’d expect: the husband was a minister; the wife was fat and made cakes for bake sales. They’d named him Joshua. The newspapers had called him Moses, and I guess before he was adopted his legal name would have been Moses Doe. I told that to Milo and he said it sounded like a blues singer.

It felt nice to have Milo beside me. It was on one of those nights, driving around the part of town where the rhododendron were trimmed and did not look anything like hell, that I told him why I’d really left Maynard, I mean the main reason. I was looking for Theresa’s cigarettes, and it was there in her underwear drawer — the list of all the girls who had lived with them before me. I knew that was what it was because my name was at the bottom, not my real name but the name they called me. They were all happy names: Jessica, Renee, Stephanie, and then mine there at the bottom, the only one without a line through it. “I don’t mean they’d done anything bad to them,” I said. “They probably just ran away like I did. But there had to be a reason why they didn’t work out, don’t you think? They’d all been there, and they’d all been pregnant, but there weren’t any babies in the house. So then I started thinking, what did they know that I didn’t? And then I started thinking that once my baby was born, Maynard and Theresa wouldn’t have any more use for me. I tried to make him love me,” I said. “It would have been safer, you know? But I don’t think he did really.”

Milo pulled me against him. He pressed against my hip, but even though it would have been okay probably — I mean no one would have seen us — I said, “No.” We were parked across the street, and I could see the window that was the baby’s window, which I knew because of the nightlight. On Milo’s shoulder I would be tall enough to reach the sill. Why not, I thought. The baby was mine anyway. I would change his name back to Moses, and we would live in the house where you could hear the ocean in the trees. But there is a time for doing things if you’re going to do them, and when it had passed we were still sitting there in the dark.

Where were the other girls — Stephanie, Carla, Amanda? I pictured them in big cities, in banks and libraries, walking through crowds of strangers. Their lips curled slightly and I saw that they were thinking of me too, pitying me for having run only to this mountaintop, where Maynard could still find me. I hated those girls. They must have had money, or someone to run away to who was better than Stanley. They shook their hair out like in shampoo commercials and smiled disdainfully. You could have done it if you wanted to, they said. You could have hitchhiked to Florida once the car broke down.

Milo wasn’t with me the night the policeman was there. I drove to the baby’s house alone, but I’d only made it twice around the block when I saw the cruiser. He stood by the driver-side door as if he were waiting for me, and since he’d already had time to read the license plate I figured that the best thing was to act as normal as possible. I parked across the street and rolled the window down. “Do you know how to get to Memphis?” I asked, which was stupid because Memphis was five hundred miles away.

Cops like to walk slow, I’ve noticed. Maybe it’s because they’re fat, or maybe it makes them feel important to think that someone has to wait for them. He leaned down by my window, bracing his hand on the ledge. “You come here a lot,” he said.

“No, sir,” I said. “I just got lost, that’s all.”

“You got lost last night,” he said. “And the night before that.”

He squatted beside the car, and I noticed the little red mustache strung across his upper lip. Before I could think, I asked him, “Do you have a brother who works at the post office?”

I knew what I’d said before he did. His hand went to his holster, and when he opened his mouth I could see the threads of spit that connected his lips. I opened the door and banged it into his chest. That must have knocked his pistol right out of his mind, because when I got the car turned around he was still kneeling in the middle of the road, one hand on his belly and the other raised as if signing for mercy. I thought of the dog worrying the life raft while I crouched in the wet bushes by the riverbank, and I hit him as hard as I could.

I didn’t tell Milo what I’d done, but he must have read about the policeman’s death and put two and two together because he stopped coming around. I stopped going to work. I slept a lot, and it seemed that whenever I woke up Stanley was standing by the open refrigerator fussing about how we were going to eat. Then I woke up and it was night, and I could hear him down in the laurel hell talking to John the Baptist. I went to the bathroom and on my way back I saw that he had found the little gun Maynard had given me and left it on the kitchen table. I wanted to tell him I would never need to kill myself. I could always go somewhere else; it was he and Milo who were stuck here. Then I tried to think when was the last time I had a conversation with Stanley that actually made sense, and I realized I couldn’t remember.

When I woke again, I thought at first I was still dreaming. I had heard Maynard’s voice in my head before, and this time he sounded just like he did in my nightmares, worried and fretful. But a Cadillac exactly like the Cadillac Milo had pushed off the cliff was parked in the driveway, and when I pinched myself to make sure I was awake they saw me. Theresa ran for the front door, but I got there first and shot the double-bolt. “What have you done with him?” she said. “Where is he, you selfish bitch?”

“Come on out, honey,” Maynard said. “We’re just excited to see you, that’s all.”

While I pulled on my bathrobe, I heard Theresa whisper, “Go around and see if there’s a back door.” But I opened it quick, surprising them. Maynard’s face turned a strange color and he stepped back, feeling with his toes to make sure the ground was still there.

“That’s the one you gave her,” Theresa said. “It’s not even loaded, I bet.”

“Yes, it is,” I said. I had bought the bullets at work and loaded them myself. “Walk,” I said, and they backed up to the cliff edge. I knew I had to do whatever I was going to do, because Milo was coming down the path from his cabin and he was still too far away for me to guess what he was thinking. I looked in Maynard’s eyes, which were as blue as Moses Doe’s, though of course that’s just a coincidence.

“Ashley,” he said. “Please. Don’t do this.” But Ashley is not my name.