1986
Queen of the laundry.
—JAS. S. KIRK it reminded me of the J?germeister that Halley and I used to drink in bars when we were young. It tasted like black licorice.
As I turned down another row, I spotted it.
A plot with an obelisk like a rocket ship pointing upward.
A giant phallus. I thought of the shuttle that’d be heading into space soon, of the comet only weeks away, how all the answers to life seemed to be contained in the sky.
I looked up. No sun, no clouds—just a low-hanging expanse of gray. A concrete sky.
I removed my gloves and touched the letters that spelled out Jagr’s name.
The stone was cold, damp from the weather.
The monument faced the Ohio River. I remembered from our field trips to the public landing in elementary school that the first settlers of Ohio rode flatboats down the river, filled with supplies.
The river flowed southwesterly. If I dropped a coin into the water here, it’d drift all the way back to Cincinnati.
I didn’t see a smaller marker—not like the woman on the phone had described.
I got down on all fours and rooted around in the grass until I felt something hard.
I dug through denser dirt than the kind Stella was buried beneath.
Finally, I unearthed a white square stone, the etched name now dark with grime: Opal Doucet.
Who was Opal Doucet?
I still didn’t know. Just a name written on a block of stone.
A name written on a plaque in front of an old factory and also in an old notebook.
Looking up, I could see the river’s strong currents carrying branches downstream.
The last time the river froze over was nine years ago, 1977.
Back then the news warned of gas and food shortages because barges couldn’t travel.
The river was solid and lumpy; the water had iced midwave.
After another heavy snow, Halley and I crossed the river on foot into Kentucky, slipping the whole way, clinging to each other because of the cold, laughing.
“We’re walking on water!” Halley yelled.
“We’re walking on water!” I yelled, too, because it seemed like we’d performed a miracle, standing on that river.
We felt unbound by the laws of nature. Free.
Wyatt got mad afterward. You could have died, he said.
I was younger then. I didn’t think much about death.
I wiped the dirt from the grave marker. I traced the O in Opal, over and over, making little loops with my finger.
With each loop, I tallied what I knew of the woman: She died in the Earthshine factory fire.
She had written a formula for Comet Pills.
Her pills made people happy. She was a witch.
She killed people with her cures. She could talk to the dead.
Bertie knew her, somehow, had kept her book of medicines locked in the safe with the soap formula.
But why? What did this have to do with the Jane Does?
Or with Halley? Or with me? That’s what I needed to find out.
I sat six feet above her bones. By now, they’d turned to dust. I thought about Halley as an urn of ash. She requested her ashes to be scattered in France, and I wondered if the Tuttles would honor that wish, after the deposition, once they’d found out what Halley had left me.
I sat back on my heels and examined the stone.
Stamped beneath the name Opal Doucet were the years she lived and died, that hyphen of her life adjoining her birth and death.
I looked at the numbers. I rubbed the stone again with my coat to be certain I was reading it correctly: Not the year of the fire, 1910, the last time Halley’s Comet could be seen, but later, much later.
1939. The year Halley was born.
CARL JUNG SAID LIFE DOESN’T really begin until you turn forty—that everything up until then is research.
Research.
The storefront of the five-and-ten appeared small, but the inside opened to high ceilings, the shelves stacked taller than I could reach, with a hodgepodge of items in no immediately perceivable order.
Kitchen strainers and candy and cabinet hardware.
Dish towels and electrical tape and WD-40 and Christmas ornaments and little plastic toys, green soldiers, like the ones Wyatt still had somewhere in one of his boxes in our basement.
“Can I help you?” The woman had a pretty face, though she wore too much makeup. Her name tag read: ROXANNE.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Not from around here, are you.”
I shook my head. “How’d you know?”
“Your hair,” said Roxanne. “Only freaks and sick people have hair like that, but you don’t look sick. Are you sick?”
“No,” I said.
“You know, I wore a wig when I was Miss Gallipolis in 1967. You’re in the presence of a beauty queen.”
“Oh. That’s neat,” I said, but the moment I spoke the word, it felt wrong, insulting, like when people said it was neat I was an actress.
“You don’t have to call me your highness. Royal majesty will do,” Roxanne said, then turned down an aisle and started straightening a mess of sorted-through winter hats.
I followed her, watched for a few minutes as she tidied the shelves, then explained I was doing some research. Her bangs fell over her eyes, and she moved them by blowing one strong poof of air upward. “I thought you might know something, seeing that you’re Miss Gallipolis and all,” I said.
I explained to her I was looking for information about a woman who used to live here—a long time ago, but maybe she still had family in the area. “Opal Doucet,” I said. At first I pronounced it “Do-Say,” but then I corrected myself.
“She’s dead, I’m sorry to tell you.”
“I know that,” I said. “I just visited her grave. Puny, compared to her husband’s.”
“I wouldn’t be too keen on buying a fancy headstone either if someone tried to poison me.”
“Jagr?”
“You knew him?”
I shook my head. Roxanne waved me on through the store, and we went back to the register, where she took a drink from a giant Styrofoam cup.
“Well, everyone around here knew him. Richest man in town, anyway—you saw his big penis monument. A doctor who worked at the old hospital. You probably passed it on the way in, big sandstone towers. Not open anymore, obviously. Well, his wife up and used his own medicine on him. Put some poison in his drink and watched him gulp it down.” She slurped her drink.
“He got sick as a dog. Almost died. Then she ran away.”
“To Cincinnati,” I said.
“You know the story, then? People think there’s some answer in big city life.”
“Most people think it’s small.”
“I don’t know the whole thing—just bits and pieces I put together or heard over the years, but gossip’s the best way to get to the truth of the matter, don’t you think?
Apparently, she got into some trouble down there.
Took up with some other man. Her brain wasn’t right.
Too many narcotics rotted it, made her hear voices and all.
She was some kind of druggie. That’s why her husband brought her back and had her committed to that loony bin hospital where he worked.
” She took out a compact and adjusted her hair.
“Now you’re looking at me all funny. What? ”
I was trying to make sense of it. A poisoning. An affair. Voices. Drugs. It sounded like an episode of Stars and Shadows.
“It’s just, Opal Doucet’s name is on a memorial plaque, right in front of the Earthshine factory.” I thought of that plaque now and of the day of the Grand Re-Opening Ceremony when Bertie bought me that dress, yellow, the same shade as the Earthshine canister.
“Well, I don’t know anything about that,” she said, then: “The Soap for Women! Can you believe what they’re saying about it now? Not that I trust all those Jane Doe people. Just want attention, don’t you think?”
On my way out of town, I pulled my car over to that old hospital.
Nothing remained of it except three sandstone towers, like ancient ruins.
An arched door at the bottom and two squares for windows at the top had been filled in with mortar.
Now, nobody could get in or out. I stood there for a while, surveying the turret.
It looked like a witch’s hat, a ledge where the brim would be.
I can’t say I felt a sense of déjà vu, but I felt something.
A warmth in my chest. Wind in my hair. Exhilaration.
Relief. Looking back, I wish I could say this was the moment I knew what Halley had set me on a path to discover, but it wasn’t.
I believed Opal Doucet had been connected to what happened to the Jane Does, and to me. I felt Bertie was complicit.
But I didn’t know it.
So often women doubt what they know because of their way of knowing it. Since elementary school I’d been trained to think only facts mattered. That’s what those lawyers at the deposition wanted from me. Information. Not how I felt, but what I knew.
I needed to speak with Charlie. There could be a simple explanation.
A factual error. I remembered pictures I’d seen of Bertie in The Juggernaut.
In one, she’s standing at the Tuttle Foundling Hospital, distributing packages to a group of new mothers, each holding a bundled infant.
In another, she’s standing on the picket line of the Earthshine Strike in solidarity with the workers.
Halfway home, I pulled over to a telephone booth, got out, and dialed Charlie. Carol, his secretary, picked up. “He’s not taking calls,” she said.
“It’s Nona,” I said. The inside of the booth had been tagged with graffiti. What did they take from you? someone had written on the glass in marker. Beneath it someone else had written: Twenty-five cents.
“I know who it is,” Carol said. “It’s just, the girls—the Jane Does—the protesters … That article in the Inquisitor … Mr. Longworth instructed Charlie to talk to nobody. Not without his clearance first.”
“But…”
“Not even you, Nona. Sorry.” Silence on her end. Some shuffling of papers. I thought she was about to hang up, but then she spoke again, quietly. “Mr. Longworth’s been trying to reach you about that deposition next week.”
“I know,” I said.
“He’s pulled some strings. He found some loophole. You don’t have to testify anymore. What a relief, I’m sure—but you didn’t hear it from me, okay? He wanted to tell you himself.”
I didn’t respond, just pressed the phone to my ear. Outside, cars whizzed by on the road. From inside the phone booth, they sounded like horseflies.
“Nona?”
I hung up.
I held the receiver and listened to the hum of the dial tone until the busy signal jarred me to my senses. What did they take from you? I read, then I swear it, I heard that sound in my head again, that waa waa, like a car horn or a signal or a voice still too far away to understand.