The Decoding of Lana Morris Read online

  Chet shrugs. “Mrs. Harbaugh’s thoughts are Mrs. Harbaugh’s thoughts. They ain’t mine.” He smiles. “I like the Mrs. Hairball moniker, though. It fits her. She’s the kind of gal a town like this coughs up pretty often.”

  Lana says, “It’s yours, free of charge.” She doesn’t like Mrs. Harbaugh, and she’s hoping Chet will use the nickname on one of his podcasts. Which reminds her of something, so as she leads him into the house for his package, she says, “I heard that Chief Chetteroid guy on K-SOD asking questions just like we were asking the other day.”

  “Who?” Chet says, playing dumb, which Lana ignores.

  “Stuff like, ‘Which would you rather lose, your right hand or your right eye?’ ”

  “Who’s this again?” Chet says blandly.

  Lana begins to hand him the package, then, eyeing the address, pulls it back. “Uh-oh. This isn’t addressed to you. It’s addressed to somebody named Chester.”

  Chet says, “You’re a funny girl, Lana,” but he doesn’t say it with his usual sarcasm. It’s more like he’s trying to pay her a compliment, which is something new for him, and it makes Lana a little nervous. She shoves the package his way and says, “So what Above Average Novelty did Chester send away for?”

  Chet seems to want to answer, but finally doesn’t, not really. “I’ll get back to you on that one.” He lets his eyes linger on hers.

  “Are you okay, Chet?” She has to admit, without the mole and with his little double life, he’s become more interesting.

  “Yeah, pretty much,” he says, and gives it some further thought. “I had Ding Dongs and Dr Pepper for lunch. I don’t think I should’ve done that.”

  “How many Ding Dongs?”

  “Seven or eight. And two Dr Peppers.”

  Lana grins. “That’s some staunch dining, Chester.”

  Chet laughs, but it’s as if there’s something going on inside him he doesn’t understand, and it has nothing to do with dietary insult. He sighs and starts to go.

  “Hey, Chet. One little thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When Chief Chetteroid was doing his either-ors, he said, ‘Which would you rather lose, your mother or your father?’ and you know what he said?”

  When Chet doesn’t answer, Lana says, “He said, ‘Both.’ ”

  Chet stares, waiting.

  Lana says, “I suppose the chief was going for humor, but if you run into him, you tell him that the guys and gals over at Snick House think it was kind of a low blow.”

  Chet lowers his eyes, and when he raises them again, he looks abashed. “Okay,” he says, “if I see him, I’ll tell him.”

  27.

  That day passes, then another, and Garth’s mother still doesn’t show. Wednesday, Garth doesn’t want to go to the library and clean books because, he tells Mrs. Arnot, “ ’Other is ’oming day.”

  “Say again, Honeybear?”

  Mrs. Arnot calls everybody Honeybear, except Tilly, who she calls Miz Pinkerdilly or, sometimes, Miz Pinkerdilly Pie.

  “Garthy’s waiting for his mother,” Tilly says glumly before slipping into the backseat of Mrs. Arnot’s cranberry Camry. “But her’s not coming. No. Her never comes.”

  “She might, though,” Lana puts in quickly, and, strange to say, these are her complete thoughts on the subject. It’s been four days and her certainty in the sketch paper has slipped a little. Now, when she thinks of it, she thinks, Maybe it works, and maybe it doesn’t.

  Mrs. Arnot opens her car door and says cheerfully to Garth, “You sit in the front today, Honeybear. It’s your turn to ride shotgun. And if somebody comes for you, Lana will call the library. Right, Lana?”

  Lana nods. “I’m on it, Garth-man. She comes and I’m here for you.”

  But Garth’s mother doesn’t come, not that day and not Thursday, a day when Whit is in Marquette painting a convenience store, or on Friday, when Whit is first at the hospital with Veronica and then back in Marquette, or on Saturday, the day that Veronica is discharged from St. Marie’s.

  28.

  Lana is sitting on the floor with Tilly, playing Candy Land, a game easy for Lana to Tilly-rig because Lana controls the cards. She slides cards from the top of the deck (and, when need be, the bottom), and she turns to see if Alfred is still copying headlines from the latest Wal-Mart circular. He is. His handwriting is large and jagged, like graffiti. PRICES LASHED, he writes. It makes Lana want to get him something more profound, like Shakespeare or the Bible, but she knows it’s just making the letters that he likes.

  The house of pathetic doodlers, Lana thinks.

  Garth is outside playing with a tennis ball. He throws it to himself, high in the air, and then usually misses it. He’s been eating even less lately, and Lana wonders if somehow, without really saying anything, she got his hopes even higher than before, and nothing happened, so now he has no reason to hope at all. It’s depressing. She thought she could do something really good for somebody who’d had something really bad done to him. So what was that? A serious misreading of the facts? Wishful thinking? Delusions of grandeur?

  “Double red,” Lana says to Tilly, and moves herself past Lord Licorice.

  Then she hears the familiar chug of Whit’s old diesel, faint, but growing louder, and Lana’s heart seems to beat louder, too. Whit’s coming and he isn’t bringing a cook and a housekeeper. He’s bringing Veronica.

  The Ice Queen.

  Whit comes in first and drops a plastic sack of clothes and Veronica’s purse—the blue purse, the one that used to have the plastic bag of pills in it—on the coffee table. He’s left the front door open, and Lana turns to see if Veronica will follow him through it. She won’t, at least not yet. Veronica is still sitting in Whit’s truck, staring forward, a frozen expression on her face, and Lana suddenly knows that as bad as things were without Veronica to help, they’ll be worse now.

  Whit goes back out. On the coffee table, Veronica’s blue purse is within arm’s reach.

  Do something. Hurry.

  “Want a stick of gum?” Lana whispers to Tilly, who looks up from the game board.

  “What gum?” she says.

  Lana nods toward Veronica’s purse, and Tilly grins.

  “Shhh, then,” Lana says, and, after glancing out the door—Whit has just now gotten Veronica out of the car and onto her feet—she grabs the blue purse, unzips it, and peers in. The bag isn’t there, she’s sure the bag isn’t there, but then, rummaging with her hand, she finds something plastic and fishes it up.

  The bag of pills.

  So they’re still there. They haven’t been erased away.

  Muffled voices and shuffling footsteps on the walk. “Easy,” Whit is saying, and Veronica keeps groaning and saying “Shit” again and again.

  Lana pulls the bag of pills out of the blue purse and freezes. What now? Slide them under a cushion? Shove them down her pants? Heave them into a corner? And then what? Veronica would figure it out and then she’d be not just the girl who stashed drugs in her closet but also the girl who stole them back out of someone’s purse. No, no, no. She needs a plan, not something stupid like this.

  Frantically she jams them back into the purse, zips it closed, and pushes it back on the coffee table.

  “No gum?” Tilly says.

  “No gum,” Lana says in a tight whisper, and when it seems possible that Tilly might put up a fuss, Lana slips the Queen Frostine card from the bottom of the deck and turns it over for Tilly, who shrieks with ecstatic surprise.

  “Good one!” she says, and moves her gingerbread man way past Lana’s.

  Veronica’s appearance, when she enters the room, is shocking. She’s sweating, her face is grayish white, and she leans heavily on Whit for support. Hooked over her one arm is a black metal cane. Her left shoulder is wrapped in bandages that disappear under a sleeveless flowered top, and the open sleeve of that arm sticks out slightly, like a mouth saying the letter O. The rest of her isn’t normal either. Her hair is pulled into a ti
ght, oily ponytail, and without eyeliner or mascara, her eyes, when they dart toward Lana, look surprisingly small and fierce.

  “Rest,” Veronica gasps, and she and Whit stop in the middle of the room.

  Alfred looks up briefly from his lettering. “Hi, R-R-Ronnie,” he says, and Veronica, who’s been taking in the details of the room, lets her eyes dart to him for a moment, but she doesn’t speak, not that Alfred expects her to. He just grins and goes back to his work.

  Veronica turns her eyes on Lana and blinks but doesn’t speak. She doesn’t have to. Her expression says it for her: What have you been up to?

  “Hi,” Lana says, and then forces herself to add, “Welcome home.”

  Veronica frees her one arm so that she can take the black cane in hand. Without taking her eyes from Lana, she points to a corner of the room and says, “Cobwebs.”

  F. U., Lana thinks. F. U. cubed. She says, “I’ve had lots to do.”

  “Yes, I’ll bet you have,” Veronica says, and for a moment the old ice is back in her eyes, but then she gasps and sighs. “I’ve got to lie down,” she says in a low, miserable voice, the voice of someone who needs others to know of the ordeal she has suffered, is still suffering, and intends to suffer for quite some time. Whit half carries her up the stairs. Lana can hear the thud and scuff of his boots as he moves around the room, tucking Veronica in, she imagines, making her comfortable.

  For Lana, the lone bright spot of these circumstances is that she doesn’t feel guilty. Erasing Veronica’s arm in the sketch didn’t cause Veronica’s loss of limb. It was just coincidence. Because the facts are all there to see. If the pills are still in Veronica’s purse (and they are) and if Garth’s mother is still in the great beyond (and she is), then the paper is just paper. If it ever had magical properties, which Lana doubts, it doesn’t have them now.

  In the strange, altered silence, Tilly loses interest in Candy Land. She holds the Queen Frostine card in her lap and stares out the window.

  “Hungry?” Lana asks. Neither Tilly nor Alfred answers, but it’s eleven-thirty, and at noon Carlito will be back from his speech therapy. Besides, Lana has a sudden craving for cheese toast and Chicken and Stars soup. It was her mother’s favorite meal when she was off the pills and alcohol enough to think about eating—Chicken and Stars soup with parmesan melted on white bread.

  29.

  Tilly slowly stirs two oversized cans of Chicken and Stars in the big copper-bottom saucepan while Lana sprinkles parmesan onto the bread and slides it into the toaster oven.

  “Alfred?” she calls. “Thirty seconds to grubville.”

  Alfred doesn’t answer.

  “Bubbles!” Tilly says, and Lana knows this means the soup is boiling. She turns the heat down and asks Tilly to stir a little more just to keep her busy. Lana puts out six bowls and place settings, slides four pieces of cheese toast out and four more pieces in, and then calls, “Come and get it!”

  As she ladles soup for herself and Tilly, she calls, “Soup’s up, Alfred.” Then, “Alfred?”

  Silence from the living room.

  Lana’s hand freezes for the long moment it takes for this silence to sink in, then she drops the ladle into the saucepan and rushes into the living room.

  Alfred is kneeling beside the sofa, so absorbed in what he’s doing that he doesn’t notice her. He lifts a black pen out of Veronica’s purse and drops it in his tote bag. Then a tube of lip gloss. He unfolds what appears to be a receipt, and he adds that to his tote bag.

  “Alfred!” Lana says in a low, tight voice, and his hand jerks out of Veronica’s purse.

  After the look of shock, his expression dissolves to remorse. “S-s-sorry,” he says.

  “I know you are, Alfred,” Lana says, and puts her hand on his, “but you know you’re not allowed to take things from anybody’s purse.” Lana picks up the purse, looks for the plastic bag of red pills, and can’t find them. Don’t panic, she tells herself. Don’t panic.

  She takes out a cell phone, a pair of sunglasses, and a mashed package of gum. She can hardly breathe. She looks at Alfred. “What else did you take?”

  Alfred shakes his head.

  “Hand me what you took,” Lana says.

  Alfred hands her the pen and the receipt.

  “Everything!” she says.

  He shakes his head, and she says, “Lip gloss, Alfred.”

  “Okay,” Alfred says, rocking back and forth a little.

  He hands over his tote bag. Inside it, along with the lip gloss, an ID badge, and two of the special black pens Alfred buys at Wal-Mart, Lana finds an empty plastic bag.

  It’s hard for Lana to steady herself. She holds the bag in front of Alfred’s face. “Did you eat anything out of this?”

  Alfred looks away from the bag.

  “Alfred!”

  He looks off, frozen with fear.

  “Okay, Alfred,” Lana whispers. “Stick out your tongue. Let me see your tongue.”

  Alfred shakes his head.

  “Please,” Lana says. She sticks out her own tongue, and this time Alfred copies her. His tongue is bright synthetic red.

  “R-R-Red Hots,” he says.

  Lana runs up the stairs two at a time and grabs Whit’s arm just as he’s setting the bedroom door closed behind him.

  “Alfred took all the pills,” Lana whispers, tugging him toward the stairs.

  Whit follows but at a normal pace. “What pills?” he says.

  Lana says, “The pills! The ones Veronica planted in my room. You left her purse on the table and I forgot to put it away and when I came back in, he’d eaten the pills out of the purse! He thought they were Red Hots.”

  They reach the living room, where Alfred is still kneeling abjectly by the sofa. Whit puts his hand on Alfred’s shoulder and says, “It’s okay this time, Alfred. Those were just candy. But you could have hurt yourself. You know that, right?”

  Alfred nods.

  Lana can’t believe what she’s just heard. “What’re you talking about?” she says. “What do you mean, just candy?”

  But Whit doesn’t answer. He gets Alfred to help him put Veronica’s things back into her purse, and then he zips it up and says, “There. We’ll put this someplace out of harm’s way, okay, Alf-man?”

  Alfred nods again, and Whit heads upstairs with the blue purse.

  Lana goes into the kitchen and opens a Fresca. She can’t stand Fresca, but it’s the only soda in the fridge. Tilly, she notices, hasn’t left the table during the little crisis and has in fact used Lana’s absence to eat everybody else’s cheese toast. There are crumbs around her lips and on one cheek. “Everything okay?” Tilly says, still chewing.

  Lana nods. “I guess so.”

  Alfred comes in and begins eating. Lana slides more cheese toast out of the toaster oven and sets it on the table, which she knows will keep Tilly and Alfred occupied. She’s leaning against the kitchen counter holding the cold Fresca can against her cheek when Whit walks in. “You all right?”

  She waits for him to settle himself close to her. Then, in a low voice and as calmly as she can, she says, “What I saw that day when she accused me was not a bag of Red Hots.”

  “Well,” he says in an amused tone, “maybe Red Hots was what you’d call a misnomer. They were actually more like red placebos.”

  “Placebos?”

  “Pills that look like pills except they don’t have anything in them.”

  “I know what placebos are,” Lana says with some irritation, but the truth is, she feels like she’s chasing behind all this. “How did they get there?”

  “How did what get there?”

  “The placebos,” she says through tight teeth.

  “Oh.” Whit ducks forward and grabs a piece of cheese toast from the table. “Nurse friend of mine switched them out for me.” He takes a big bite of the bread.

  “Why?”

  He swallows, then brushes crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. “So if Ronnie ever did get around to
sending those pills to the lab, they’d come back negatory.”

  Lana feels this news enfold her in its embrace. The pills are gone. She will stay. Whit has protected her. She’s afraid if she looks at Whit, she might cry, so she again presses the cold Fresca can to her cheek and looks away. “Why?” she says in a faint voice.

  “Why what?” he says.

  She turns to look at him. “Why did you do that for me?”

  He’d been about to take another bite, but now he stops. He straightens up and turns her way and lets his eyes settle into hers. “Oh, I guess you know why,” he says, “every bit as well as I do.”

  For a long moment everything except Lana’s heart seems still, and then, from overhead, there is a dim thunk thunk thunk and Whit turns his head to listen.

  The sound comes again—thunk thunk thunk—but this time it’s louder and Tilly and Alfred are listening, too.

  “What’s that?” Lana says.

  Whit with a wistful smile says, “That would be the patient upstairs.”

  “What’s she pounding with?”

  “Her cane.” His smile widens slightly. “The cane is a tool of many uses.”

  After Whit has departed to see what Veronica wants, Tilly says, “Who’s pounding?”

  “The Ice Queen,” Lana says.

  30.

  Thunk thunk thunk.

  It’s always the same. Three thunks. Then, if Whit or Lana doesn’t call upstairs to ask what Veronica wants, there will be three more thunks, louder and more insistent. Whit never waits for the second set of thunks; Lana always does. Veronica’s been home four days now, and Lana notices Whit is making himself scarce. “Jobs to bid, jobs to do,” he says, and off he goes, chugging away from Snick House.

  Thunk thunk thunk.

  Lana steps out of the kitchen, where she’s serving breakfast to the Snicks, and yells, “What do you want?”

  “Breakfast,” Veronica yells, loud enough so she can be heard and yet weak enough that she’ll seem frail. Dr. Gooch, a youngish, unmarried guy, a little goofy-looking with his long neck and big bobbing Adam’s apple, has prescribed total bed rest.