He looked in at Mary Beth’s room. It was a small room, four cold pale pink swirled plaster walls, a dresser with mirror, a chest of drawers, a double bed with a dark pink spread. There was a stuffed toy, a tiger, on the bed, a childhood keepsake she’d had with her in their apartment. Little else in the room suggested Mary Beth’s personality. This summer was the only time in her life she’d lived in this room. Her mother and father had moved into this house after she’d left home for college. So this was not a room she’d lived in, really.
But there were some books on the chest of drawers: Kurt Vonnegut, some science fiction, a couple of non-fiction paperbacks on ecology and such.
And his picture, that stupid U of I senior picture, was framed on her dresser. And a couple snaps of them together were stuck in the mirror frame. He removed them. Put them in his billfold.
“That’s stealing,” a voice said.
He turned and saw a plump woman in her late twenties in jeans and sweater. Her hair was dark and long and she looked very much like Mary Beth, but with a wider face, which made her not quite as pretty.
“Hi Laurie,” he said. He’d never met Mary Beth’s sister before, but he felt he knew her.
“Hi there, Crane,” she said, and smiled and came across the room and hugged him hard.
They looked at each other with wet eyes and then sat down on Mary Beth’s bed. She took his hand in both of hers.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said.
“I didn’t see you at the funeral.”
“I wasn’t there, I had to stay with Brucie.” She gestured toward the doorway.
“Brucie? Your husband?”
“No. You’re thinking of Bruce. He was my husband. Emphasis on was. We split up.”
“Mary Beth never mentioned...”
“It wasn’t too long ago. Two months.”
“Brucie is Bruce, Jr., then.”
“Right. Ten months old yesterday.”
“I’d love to see him.”
“He’s next door, in my room. I live here, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Since the divorce, I live here. I’m not surprised Mary Beth didn’t tell you about it, because it’s all a little bit of a downer. And talking with you on the phone once a week, well, it was something she looked forward to. She didn’t want to talk about depressing stuff, I’m sure.”
“Depressing stuff. Just how depressed was she, Laurie? She never gave me any indication...”
“Like I said, your phone calls were a bright spot in her week. She didn’t want to spoil ’em, I guess.”
For a while Laurie sat silently and so did Crane; her hands felt cold around his.
“What happened, Laurie?” he asked her.
She looked at him with a face that was much too much like Mary Beth’s and said, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Laurie, Mary Beth wasn’t depressed one day in the two years I knew her.”
“She wasn’t all that depressed this summer, either. Just kind of blue.”
“Kind of blue.”
“Worse, I guess, the last week or so.”
“What happened the last week?”
“Crane, I was close to my sister, growing up. But we didn’t talk much this summer. Something was bothering her, that much I know. What it was, exactly, I don’t know.”
“It had to be something...”
“Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought. Never depressed a day while you knew her, huh? Well, a week after she got home I found her up in the middle of the night, sitting in the bathroom, bawling.”
“What about?”
“I don’t know. Her period, maybe, who can know? Only it was more often than that... I found her bawling like that four or five times.”
“And she never said what was troubling her?”
“Once she admitted to me that she was thinking about Dad. He died of cancer about three years ago, you know. They were close. Being in this house reminded her of him, and that got to her.”
“Got to her enough to make her do what she did, Laurie?”
“Who can say?”
“You mean you can understand it? You can understand somebody going into a bathroom and... and...”
“Slashing their wrists? I don’t understand it, exactly. But I can see it. Haven’t you ever thought about killing yourself, Crane? Hasn’t everybody?”
“Maybe everybody else has. I haven’t. It’s a fucking waste, Laurie! It’s the biggest fucking waste I can imagine.”
“Why? Because life is so wonderful? What’s wonderful about it?”
He pulled his hand away from hers. He didn’t like what he was hearing coming out of this face that was so much like Mary Beth’s. He didn’t like the sickness that Laurie seemed to have, in a small way, that Mary Beth must’ve had in a larger way.
She must’ve sensed it, because she seemed to soften, reaching out and touching his shoulder as she said, “She loved you, Crane. I know she did. You were the most important thing in her life.”
“A life that meant so little to her she flushed it down the goddamn toilet.”
He stared at the wall. Laurie wasn’t saying anything. When he looked over at her, she was crying into her hands.
“Laurie,” he said, putting an arm around her, “it’s been rough on you, too. I know that.”
“I... I do know one thing that depressed her.”
“Yes?”
“Brucie.”
“Brucie?”
“Brucie. My little Brucie. She was unhappy for him.”
He didn’t understand that. He let it pass.
“Laurie, who found her?”
“Mom. In the morning. Mom came and got me up. Mary Beth had been gone for hours by the time we found her.”
“Can I see where it was?”
“Sure,” she said, shrugging.
She led him there.
He hesitated a moment.
Then he looked in and saw a bathroom, shining clean, guest towels hanging.
“I don’t know what I expected,” he said.
“I know,” Laurie said. “It should be more dramatic than just a bathroom. But it’s just a bathroom. It’s the only one in the house, too, so both Mom and I were forced to use it, and that helped us, in a weird way. It helped make it just a bathroom. I use it sometimes and don’t even think about her lying there.”
He looked at Laurie. She was looking at the bathroom floor, blankly.
“Laurie,” he said, guiding her back into the hallway. “Are you okay? I mean... are you really okay?”
“You mean, am I gonna be next?” She smiled a little. “I don’t think so. I’m depressed. My sister just killed herself. I got a right to be. And, anyway, I got Brucie. I still got little Brucie. I live for that kid. You want to see him?”
“I sure do.”
She took him into her room, a blue room with a bed with ruffled blue spread, and a Jenny Lind crib with a blue blanket nearby. She peeked in the crib and began playing with the well-behaved child, who made cooing, gurgling noises back at her.
Crane looked in at the child.
Brucie was adorable, but it wasn’t hard to see why Mary Beth had been disturbed about the boy.
He didn’t have any hands.
Chapter Five
The street light on her block was out, but there were lights on in the downstairs of the big white two-story house. It was a gothic-looking structure with no porch and paint just beginning to peel. There were trees on either side of the place and the overall effect was rather gloomy. He knocked on the door.
He put his hands in his pockets and waited. It was a cool evening; perhaps he should’ve stopped back at the motel for his jacket. There was no sound except the crickets. No sound from within the house, either. He knocked again.