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Letters from the Dead

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

ARRIVAL

June 16

Tommy didn't like the place from the first, didn't like the way the paint peeled from the old wood and how the screens were full of little holes, which meant the house was going to be lousy all the time with sandflies. Plus, he wasn't happy about the way his mother and Rosie were clucking over the joint, like they had just discovered paradise by the sea. And the dump was really isolated, the beach just stretching away for mile after boring mile with no sign of anything he associated with the seaside, no hamburger stands and cotton candy and amusement arcades.

On top of this—and maybe this was the worst thing of all—was the fact he didn't feel too comfortable with Rosie's kid, Lindy, who was thirteen years of age and acted as if girls were the queens of all creation and boys something pretty lowlife.

Tommy struggled out of the beat-up wagon. He shaded his eyes from the sun and looked toward the beach house. It was about a hundred yards from the shoreline and it had really suffered for years, battered by storms, with shingles loose on the roof and slats hanging from the balcony that ran the length of the upper floor. It was a real downer of a color as well, a sort of shit brown. He turned to the wagon and he saw Lindy climb out, pulling herself over a heap of suitcases.

She stood beside Tommy and looked up at him, and he wondered why, if he was the same age as her, she made him feel so goddam inferior. Women, he thought. You could never really tell about them.

He stuck his hands in the pockets of his pants and looked gloomily at the house. The plain fact was, he missed the hell out of his dad and he wasn't exactly receptive to spending the whole summer without him. But then all the other kids whose parents were divorced or separated told him the same thing: Hey, you get used to being split between them because you gotta get used to it and there's no way you can just shuffle back and change the whole deal. It made him feel sad, though, like there was a tiny hole in his heart.

Maybe it wouldn't come to that. Maybe there wouldn't be any divorce. They'd just get back together and everything would be normal and this period of what they called a trial separation would come to an end. He sure hoped so.

Lindy, who had long carrot-colored hair and wore a Judas Priest T-shirt, shuffled her feet in the sandy soil. "Did you see the village back there?" she asked.

Tommy nodded. "The pits," he said.

"Right," Lindy said. "I mean, tell me about a one-horse dump."

Tommy remembered the village about eight miles back down the narrow blacktop, a place called Cochrane Crossing and the nearest place around—but it didn't look like it was going to be a whole lot of laughs going there for a visit. One church and one general store and one tavern. There wasn't even a traffic signal, for Christ's sake. He suddenly thought about his home in Syracuse and he realized he missed the neighborhood already. He missed his buddies, especially Norm, who was his best friend.

"Hey, you guys!" This was Lindy's mother, Rosie, calling. She was standing close to the beach house, her camera slung round her neck and her big black leather camera bag suspended from one shoulder. She was always taking pictures. Every time you turned round, there she was snapping away and looking serious. Tommy's mother, Martha, had some idea of composing a book with Rosie. Martha was going to write the text and Rosie take the pictures. It was going to be about the moods of the seaside, an idea Tommy considered extremely boring. He shaded his eyes now and looked at Rosie, who had the same color hair as Lindy, only she wore it real short, as if she'd been scalped by an angry barber.

"Hey! Why don't you kids start dragging some of the luggage out of the car, huh?"

Lindy sighed and went back to the wagon, but Tommy didn't move for a while because he was watching his mother and thinking how, if he ever got married himself, the woman would have to be as beautiful as Martha. She was small and thin and she had long fair hair that curled around the back of her neck, and she had a kind face with those eyes that always seemed to sparkle. She saw him looking and she smiled, raising an arm to wave. Tommy waved back, then he walked toward the wagon where Lindy was hauling a bag out. The Judas Priest T-shirt strained as Lindy moved so that you could see her little pointed breasts. Embarrassed, Tommy looked away.

Inside the wagon there was a whole heap of stuff. Suitcases and bags and pieces of moldy food and spoiled fruit from the long trip down here and scattered clothing and Kleenexes. They'd stopped once on the way down, spending the night at a hotel outside Washington, which he'd liked a lot because there was color TV and he got to share a room with his mother, and in the coffeehouse next door there had been a couple of video games. He'd bet anything there weren't any video games in Cochrane Crossing, for Christ's sake. He'd bet there wasn't even TV back there.

He reached inside the wagon and pulled out a suitcase, which he started to drag toward the house. At the back of the house there was a small grove of stunted trees that leaned backward from too much exposure to the wind. They were crooked and spooky and they didn't look like they'd be worth the trouble of climbing. Jesus, what the hell was he going to do here for the next six weeks? Play with Lindy or something. Oh, sure. He imagined she'd be out all day collecting seashells and sorting them into little bundles at night.

Dreary City.

He reached the house and climbed up onto the porch. The two women had already disappeared inside. He set the suitcase down because it was damned heavy and he rubbed his sweaty hands together and looked toward the shoreline. Way out there in the ocean the waves sparkled and rolled. He watched the tide come slithering up on the shore, flecks of foaming water. There was something awesome about the way the whole thing moved.

He shrugged and thought he'd at least get some fishing done this summer and maybe go looking for crabs along the sands. Then, picking up the suitcase, he stepped through the screen door and into the house, where he could hear the sounds of the women laughing at something.

Martha said, "What would you call this kind of furniture, Rosie? What would you say it was? Salvation Army Modern?" And she slumped on the plastic sofa and laughed, looking around the living room at the sticks of bargain-basement furniture and the ugly little pictures on the walls and the threadbare material of the drapes.

Rosie set her camera bag down and put her hands on her wide hips and whistled. "Thrift-store Contemporary," she said, then she went to the window where she looked out across the beach. "What the hell, it's cheap, and we didn't come here for the luxury. Anyway, we can always make the joint look a bit better."

Martha yawned. The long drive had tired her. She watched her friend stand at the window, seeing the way sunlight made the orange-red hair shine. She wondered sometimes about Rosie's energy, where it came from and the sense of resiliency that accompanied it. You could take Rosie into a flophouse and instead of seeing the cockroaches scurry across the furniture she'd say something positive about the view from the window. It was a matter of seeing possibilities, Martha thought. She stretched her arms and saw Tommy struggle across the floor with a suitcase. The kid paused and looked at her with that small smile that always threatened to break her heart. Sweetness and light. And for a moment she felt a tiny passing sense of sadness because what lay between her and her son was an absence, a concept of a family broken, a missing father.

Charlie.

Why did he have to be such a perfect asshole?

She rose from the sofa, hearing the plastic crackle under her body, and she tried to get the circulation going in her legs. Sometimes, at the age of thirty-five, Martha could feel the body yielding and the bones complaining and the breasts, as if they had lives of their own, sagging audibly in the night.

"This place smells," Tommy said.

Martha moved toward her son and ran a hand through his uncombed hair, and what touched her just then was the extraordinary resemblance the boy had to his father, the same determined mouth and the wide-set eyes and the straight nose. Later, he'd be as handsome as Charlie, but what she hoped was that he wouldn't turn out anything like her husband, with all the fault lines in the personality and the flaws in simple human considerations. Especially she hoped he wouldn't turn out to be, like his father, a liar.

"We'll get the windows open," she said. "Then it won't smell so bad."

She was conscious of Lindy at the other side of the room, Lindy with that strange mixture of arrogance and awkwardness that so many times characterized adolescent girls. She was standing at the foot of the stairs, staring upward, tugging at the waist of her blue jeans.

A foursome, Martha thought. Two women (one divorced, the other separated) and their kids.

A whole lot of spaces in here, things missing, pieces of the psyche broken, memories of pain. Rosie had divorced Herb four years ago and she still spoke about him with extreme bitterness, as if the memory of Herb were a poisoned cell she was destined to carry around forever inside her brain, something locked away in a place beyond the scope of an emotional lobotomy.

Lindy said, "I wonder when somebody last lived here."

And Rosie, drawing a finger through the dust on a windowpane and making a curious curled design, said, "I'd say twenty years ago. Maybe twenty-five. Could be half a century, the way this dust feels."

"Which reminds me," Martha said. "Wasn't there something about the place being cleaned before we moved in? Something about a new paint job?"

"I seem to remember something about that," Rosie said, already spotting something outside that she needed to photograph, already unzipping her camera bag and taking out her Canon, which she handled as if it were a holy relic.

"Let's get that suitcase upstairs, Tommy," Martha said, and she helped him drag the burden upward, listening to the creak of the stairs as they moved, hearing the strange noises of the house all around her—it was as if it had never quite settled into its own foundations and never would, a trespassing thing that would one day be reclaimed by the sea.

On the landing she paused and she put the suitcase down. There were four doors ahead of her along the dim corridor. She pushed the first one open and looked inside: a small bedroom with a window and a door that opened out onto the balcony. The bed was narrow, covered with an old-fashioned patchwork quilt, and there was a dressing table with an oval mirror.

"You like this one, Tommy?" she asked.

The boy nodded casually. "It's fine."

"You sure?"

Tommy shrugged and moved toward the bed, which he tested with the palms of his hands. He appeared satisfied. Then he opened the door to the balcony and suddenly the room, which had been stuffy as the rest of the house, was filled with raw salt smells of the sea.

Martha examined the other rooms.

Each had a door that led to the balcony, each was furnished in exactly the same way as the one Tommy had chosen. Except for the room at the end of the corridor—which was small and had faded wallpaper of an antique floral design—there wasn't much to choose between them. She opened the balcony doors in each of them and let fresh air surge in from the beach and then she stepped out onto the balcony and looked for a time at the sea and the way the damp sands glistened at the shore's edge. It was good after the city to take the biting air into her lungs and let the breeze invigorate her, good to feel it move through her hair and press against the rumpled T-shirt she wore.

She walked the length of the balcony, noticing the grove of twisted trees that grew at the back of the house, seeing a solitary blackheaded gull rise over the arthritic branches and vanish toward the ocean.

A whole summer here, she thought.

A whole summer out of the sweat of the city. A whole summer of not having to listen to any more of Charlie's lies.

She turned her face when she heard the balcony creak behind her. She saw Tommy come toward her, his arms spread on either side as if he were a tightrope walker, his face tense with concentration.

He stopped beside her and she slung an arm around his shoulder.

"So, what do you think, champ? You gonna like it here?"

The kid raised his face and looked at her seriously. "I guess."

"Can't you do any better than that, huh?"

He was silent for a long time, shuffling his feet around, gazing out toward the sea, which seemed suddenly distant and flat, the sun spread across its surface like a flashlight on a sheet of glass.

"Who used to live here?" he asked.

Martha shrugged. "I don't suppose anybody lives here on a regular basis, Tommy. The owner rents it out during the summer. Maybe the fall as well."

"What about winter?"

"I guess it's empty then."

The kid seemed to absorb this fact with great interest, as if he found something unusual in the idea of a house lying empty for months at a time. The truth was, she didn't know whether the place was empty or not—in fact, she knew very little about the property or its owner, having seen it advertised under VACATION RENTALS in a newspaper; then the matter had been conducted by correspondence with a company of lawyers called Bradley Brace and Dunning in Atlanta, who apparently handled everything to do with the place. A contract had been drawn up and a rent check paid and a key had been sent to Rosie by mail, and what Martha had assumed all along was that the house belonged to some absentee landlord who didn't want to be bothered by any details. Indeed, it had been in one of the letters from Bradley Brace and Dunning that the promise had been made to have the house clean and freshly painted—an unkept promise, obviously, but suddenly it didn't seem to matter very much to her.

She hugged Tommy closely against her body.

"We'll have a terrific summer, kid," she said.

He looked up at her and she could see he was forcing an optimism, forcing a bright smile.

"Yeah, we will," he said.

"And you're going to get along well with Lindy, right?"

"Right."

"Right?" she asked again, hearing a tiny doubt in his voice.

"Right."

She held him tighter still as the wind rose up off the face of the sea and the sun, like a candle momentarily doused, slid behind a cloud.

When she'd taken a couple of shots of the shoreline—quick unstudied shots, taken more out of impulse than any real desire to get something good—Rosie stuck her camera back inside the bag and wandered into the kitchen. She knew she'd be doing most of the cooking, since Martha's culinary efforts, if you were charitable about them, left something to be desired.

Taste, mainly.

That and flavor.

One time she'd eaten one of Martha's concoctions, a vegetarian stroganoff, that had left her feeling disabled for several days. It was as if tiny chunks of mushroom and little sticky slivers of onion and dollops of cream had clung to the inside of her head, having traveled an upward route from her mouth. At least Martha didn't pretend to be a decent cook; she was kitchen-clumsy, she didn't know the kind of concentration that cooking needed, she thought everything could be thrown together and done in a hurry.

Rosie stood in the kitchen doorway and ran one hand through her short hair as she stared at the long narrow room in front of her. The refrigerator had been young in the days of Ozzie and Harriet and the sink was discolored porcelain and the kitchen table stood on wobbly legs. She wondered vaguely if you might ascribe the quality of "charm" to the place, but that wasn't going to cut it. She turned "rustic" around in her mind, but that wasn't going to do it either.

Try tacky and inadequate.

She wandered toward the sink, opening closets as she moved, seeing a variety of mismatched ancient saucepans, lids, collections of plates, knives and forks, utensils and an antique juicer that surely belonged in the Oster Hall of Fame. She opened the refrigerator and looked inside at the bare metal shelves. And then she moved to the window, folding her arms beneath her breasts and looking back across the room from another angle.

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Excerpted from Letters from the Dead by Campbell Armstrong. Copyright © 1985 Campbell Black. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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