“I WANT TO be Puchi Puchi for Halloween, Mommy,” Olivia announced with conviction.
The story of Olivia and the raccoon I had killed didn’t end with his burial with full honors. Two nights after the tragedy, Olivia said to me: Mommy, when I saw Puchi Puchi, I didn’t scream because I was scared, I screamed from happiness because I thought it was a present for me. And a week after we adopted Pony: I wanted Puchi Puchi as a pet, not Shesnotapony. One day, when Pony had finally started to understand she needed to attend nature’s call in the yard, Oli caught her peeing on Puchi Puchi’s grave. She screamed at the dog hysterically and chased her with a stick as if she were profaning Oli’s father’s tomb. Obviously, from then on, Pony decided that the best place to take care of her needs was my bedroom, the living room, the bathroom or the kitchen, in that order of preference. How was it possible that my daughter had fallen so in love with a savage, rabid animal and had so much contempt for one desperate to smother her with protection and love?
So Olivia went trick-or-treating in a raccoon costume, an homage to Puchi Puchi, going from door to door with her little pumpkin-shaped basket. Which struck me as interesting. The door-to-door part, not the candy. Looking, trying to glimpse what they had inside the houses, even if just from the front door. A few friendly seconds to get a sense of the place. Ruby was a kangaroo, and I was dressed as the Corpse Bride. Why had that struck me as a good idea?
First house. The Wilkins. Christina and Donald. Retired.
“Hi, I’m Puchi Puchi!”
“Honey, I think you can just say trick or treat.”
Another house. The DeRollers. Dan Jr. opened the door, delighted to see us, and kissed the three of us as if we were his sisters.
“Hi, I’m Puchi Puchi. Trick and treat.”
“Or treat. Trick or treat, Olivia.”
Next house. The Hurlbutts. Tina and Josh. Both on their second marriage. Tina runs the daycare. Josh, no idea. Three children. Jodie (nine?), Karen (twelve?), and I don’t know the boy’s name (fourteen?).
Another house, another, another.
I started getting queasy. Too many people, too many untold stories, too many unknowns. I toyed with the Master Key, which I kept in my pocket with half a Xanax and half a Valium. Both wrapped in foil, easily distinguished by their shape. I didn’t want to take them; I wanted it to be enough knowing they were there.
Until I moved to the island, I wasn’t aware that it was hard for me to establish cordial relationships with people. I had grown up in a controlled, stable, unchanging environment, with the same friends from daycare through high school. My world was closed and recognizable. An island. And inside, it was sweet, fun, good. But when the ground fell out from under me, and I had to start from zero, I realized the effort it took for me to relate—perhaps because I wasn’t looking for friendships, but for suspects. It drained me, trying to keep up the circus all day, the smile, the mask, the disguise. Something similar probably awaited me in the romantic realm, although it was too early to think of reigniting my love life. But the mere thought of going through what I had with Chris . . . again?! Our relationship had been forged over a slow flame, for over eighteen years, if we start from the time I began loving him in secret like a good teenager in heat. Go back to enjoying/getting used to/tolerating the scent, the touch, the kisses, the sex, the manias, the traumas, the defects—mine and someone else’s? And sharing moments, tastes, favorite places, foods. Letting someone into our lives—mine and my daughters’? Having more children? Changing my name? It seemed totally unfeasible.
Another house. Mark and Julia. Olivia was slack-jawed when she saw Oliver dressed as a pirate of the Caribbean, looking like Johnny Depp himself. No trick, no treat, no nothing. Julia didn’t come out. Mark barely looked at me. He just gave a slight, prefabbed smile when I said to him: “Today must be your favorite day of the year, millions of people acquiring new cavities.”
Another house, another, another. And the inn. Karen’s Petite Maison. Karen opened the door dressed as the evil queen from Snow White with a glass in her hand that looked like the holy grail, undoubtedly with wine inside.
“Hi, I’m Puchi Puchi, trick or treat.” Weariness was starting to get the better of Olivia, which relieved me.
“What’s this?! A raccoon and a kangaroo! Somebody needs to call animal control!” Obviously she was already tipsy.
And then her husband, John, appeared in his football uniform, complete with hip protectors, shoulder pads, cleats and helmet. The Virginia Cavaliers. My heart skipped a beat. John swung Olivia up in the air. “I’m going to eat this raccoon for supper!” he said while taking her inside. The same university as Chris.
“You don’t eat raccoons!” Olivia giggled offscreen. No, it couldn’t be. It had to be a mere coincidence. John was much older than Chris—though bald guys like him could throw you off as far as their age. But not even that thought managed to quell the burning in my head. Smile, Alice, come back. Fake it. Disguise. Twenty seconds more and you’ll be out of here. I discreetly slipped half a Valium under my tongue so it would absorb more rapidly and outpace the torrent of blood threatening to drain out of my head.
“I know, he looks pretty silly in his football uniform. He thinks he’s still twenty years old and forty pounds lighter,” Karen said when she saw my frightened face.
John returned with Olivia in his arms. I looked away, having already seen what I needed to see. I just wanted to get home. I was incapable of forming normal, neighborly niceties like: What position did you play on the team, John? What year did you graduate? Fortunately, I was the Corpse Bride so they couldn’t see my pallor under the makeup.
There were three boxes labeled Chris’s Things. An entire life fit into just three boxes. But there weren’t any clothes in them. When he died, his sports clothes—especially his sweatshirts, T-shirts and shorts—had gone into my closet, no matter how much Suz, my best friend from high school, who was always hanging around Chris before we started going out and had always been in love with him, insisted that getting rid of them was a necessary healthy step to get over the loss. I’ll take care of it, if you like, she told me one day, very helpful. And I thought, Right, what you want is to have his clothes for yourself. She was one of the first people I suspected when I saw her crying so ostentatiously and fainting at the mass we held in his honor. But before she regained consciousness, I had already dismissed that possibility. Chris hated the cheerleaders at school. Never in his life had he even gone out for ice cream with one of them. You know why I started playing tennis when I was a little weakling? Because there weren’t any cheerleaders, he said drolly.
I spent a while staring at the boxes, gathering courage. Olivia called to me from her bedroom in a troubled voice. Her stomach hurt from all that candy. She vomited in the bathroom while I held her hair. Pony did the same, almost simultaneously, all over the bedroom floor, provoking my daughter’s rage, because she’d been robbed of the spotlight. When both were calm and asleep, I finally opened the boxes.
The main thing I was looking for were Chris’s yearbooks from the University of Virginia. Maybe I’d find John and some note or comment of the kind friends usually write. I hoped they hadn’t ended up in the trash during one of the top-to-bottom house cleanings we used to like to do, to try and live less encumbered. Operation Dead Weight we used to call it. It’s not that Chris disowned his university years, but he didn’t like to cling to nostalgia or look back, always straight ahead, new projects and interests.
I found two yearbooks, from his freshman and senior year. Almost immediately, I remembered the reason the others were gone. Chris had kept the first because he liked marking where events in his life started and ended. And the last, because it was when the Virginia Cavaliers tennis team won the NCAA national championship, with Chris finishing the season ranked third and reaching the finals of the US Open Junior Championships. The first and the last. The rest didn’t interest him; he said there wasn’t much history there. Or maybe there was too much he wanted to hide? Because our parenthesis was his third year.
I had never looked at the yearbooks before. I felt they were something private, reflecting adventures and stories I hadn’t shared in the first person. I remember what a tough time he had his first year, so far away from me. At the end of the first semester, he even thought about applying to Brown to be closer, though the tennis team and the program were both worse. But I didn’t let him. Those kinds of concessions always end up coming with a price tag. What I really wanted was for him to be in the best possible place for him and for his career.
I started flipping through his first yearbook. Straight to the sports section, to football. Nothing, John wasn’t there. Not in the last year either. I went back through the yearbook from his first year. The whole thing this time, page by page. No results. And again through the last year’s. When I was almost convinced that their going to the same university had been a coincidence, I found him. The first time I’d missed him, he was practically unrecognizable. He had hair—a nineties style cut—an angular face, and a moustache. He was handsome, strong and wiry. Fifth from the right, in the first row: John Rushlow, Defensive Coordinator, alumnus and former Cavaliers teammate, 1984–1988, it read at the bottom of the photo. He was on the team’s coaching staff, pictured with the head coach, proud to come back to the team he loved.
I looked over the first yearbook for the third time, to see if I might have missed him, but there was nothing. So they hadn’t been there together all four years, just part of the time, and when John was an alumnus and his only relation to the university was with the football team. What was the real probability that they’d known each other? Chris wasn’t part of a frat; he hated them. He wasn’t much of a partier; he was there for tennis and his future. Football season ran from fall to winter and tennis season was in the spring, so the possibility of their crossing paths was almost nil. But the more I thought about motives and the statistics in order to discard the possible link, the more I felt John fit naturally into the category of suspect and that I wasn’t shoehorning him, as I had Miriam and Julia. In fact, I considered scratching them off the list and leaving just John as my number one suspect. But I didn’t, because I wanted to feel I was getting ahead instead of moving backward. I felt desperate because this opened a whole range of possibilities I hadn’t considered up to then.
Then I searched Google: lactating mother wine negative effects. There was a certain consensus that, with moderation, not exceeding eight ounces, there was no risk involved for the baby. So I had a glass and a half—I measured the amount scrupulously—from a bottle of Pinot Noir to celebrate my little find.
Before going to bed, I looked into Olivia’s room to be sure she was sound asleep. Something caught my attention: she had organized all the candy by size and color, making squares (if the candy was square or rectangular) or circles (if it was round). Now I understood what she had said to me while she was throwing up: I only ate the ones that didn’t go together, Mommy, the ones that were left over. I had originally thought she was suffering from hyperglycemic delirium, and I reprimanded her mildly for gorging herself. Her stuffed animals were also laid out on the floor from smallest to largest, against the wall, like a lineup of suspects at the police station. I changed the order of a couple of the animals and ate three pieces of candy to break the geometrical perfection.
The next day, when I found my bedroom completely trashed, my first reaction was a blend of panic and paranoia. Clothing thrown on the bed, open closets, drawers pulled out. I’m busted. They’ve come to rob me. To snoop. For what? Chris’s boxes. Someone knows you’re on their trail. They’re on the hunt for you. You need to run; you and your daughters are in danger. Once my little melodrama was over and I’d made sure Chris’s boxes were intact, I was enraged, initially attributing the disarray to Pony. But as far as I knew, the dog didn’t have the ability to open drawers and dump them out. So who then?
I found Olivia in her room, painting calmly, her back turned to me. I stood in the doorway and knocked a couple of times softly to get her attention. She didn’t react. Then I knew it was her.
“Olivia, what have you been doing in my bedroom?” I asked her, not letting my anger get the best of me. I only called her by her full name when I wanted to scold her. That was enough for her to know she’d done something wrong.
She didn’t turn to look at me and didn’t stop painting. She just said: “You change where my things are; I change where your things are, Alice.” I think it was the first time in her life she called me by my name. A clear provocation, like, Two can play at this game.
I was ready to punish her and make her straighten up my room when I realized her dolls were again ordered by height and her candy in almost perfect geometric shapes. But not just that. The books were also ordered perfectly by size and the drawings according to dominant color. I returned to the idea that we might have a genius in the family, to dispel my fear that she was becoming a textbook case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.