Day 93 #2
“Hakuna matata,” she replied before setting it back down carefully. “It’s…nice,” she said, although not all that convincingly. The banorah tipped on one side. “Since when do you celebrate Hanukkah?” She struggled to think if Hanukkah fell early or late this year; it was already almost Thanksgiving.
“I don’t. One of my students gifted it to me after I gave him an A on the midterm exam.”
“I hope it came with a gift receipt.” Lally stood the banorah back upright as she had found it.
Jesse studied her carefully and Lally panicked, the way someone might if they were suddenly suspected of wearing a wire. “It was actually quite meaningful.”
“And what about the dog? Was that a gift, too?”
Jesse shook his head. “I had one like her when I was a kid. She’s a shepsky.”
Banorah. Shepsky. These were all nonsense words. “Does she have a name?”
“I haven’t come up with—”
Lally had had enough. “Can we just drop the pretense here?” Jesse had been the one to take a shower, but maybe this was her moment to come clean.
“I’m worried about you. That’s all. Well, no.
That’s not all. I’m also worried about Norman, and you may be the only person on earth who knows where he is. ”
“On earth,” Jesse repeated, speaking cryptically, as was his default seemingly of late.
“Cut the shit, Jesse. Why did you dig up the yard?”
“Why did I— It’s my yard. I pay taxes. What business is it of yours?”
“Your husband’s disappearance has made it my business. Where is my brother?”
Jesse took his glass of Mountain Dew and drank half of it. “You think I dug up the yard to bury your brother? Is that what you’re saying?”
Lally wanted to scream, YES, even though she remained convinced in her heart the answer was no. Then she noticed that the bandages on Jesse’s hands were curling and coming loose.
“Is Norman in the backyard?”
“Have you seen the backyard?” Jesse led her over to the sliders. “I know Norman loomed large in your mind, but that’s an awfully big hole just for him.”
Instead of calming Lally, it made her furious. She thought of the Missing posters she’d seen, and imagined more that she had maybe not. “You’re burying others?”
Jesse laughed maniacally. “And there’s still room for more!”
She shoved Jesse, hard, in the sternum, sloshing his Mountain Dew over the side of his glass. “That’s not funny. You’re scaring me!”
“GOOD. I don’t like what I’m being accused of.” He pushed his wet hair off his forehead and set his glass down. “I’m not burying anyone, okay? I’m not hiding your brother, either. If anything, I’m trying to find him.”
“Underground?” It was at this point that Lally reached her limit.
She was done thinking the best of people, she was done humoring men, she was over it all.
“I want answers, Jesse. I swear to god. Or else.” She prayed he didn’t ask or else what, as, while the threat was far from empty, it was also not yet fully formed. “What do you know about the light?”
Jesse froze. That got his attention. “What do you know about the light?”
Lally kicked a chair in frustration. “That’s it. I’m calling the cops.” She walked over and picked up his phone, both to prove that she knew where it was and to keep him from calling the cops on her.
“Go ahead. You don’t think I already thought of that? There’s nothing the cops can do!”
Lally looked down at her hands and realized she was holding two phones, her own in her other hand. “The light, Jesse! Tell me.”
For the first time Jesse looked scared, a trapped animal with nowhere to run and without the cunning nature to escape his predicament. His eyes darted around the room. “Okay. There was a light that night.”
“What night?” Lally pressed.
“That night. The night Norman—” He covered his eyes at the memory. “Sometimes with light comes illumination. Enlightenment. A lightbulb going off. What Oprah calls ‘the aha moment.’ The light that danced on the apostles.”
“The who?”
“Sometimes light is contact. The transmission of a message. Moses and the burning bush. A message from god? He thought so, a command to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.”
“I hate professors,” Lally muttered, barely under her breath.
“The light of angels bathed a thirteen-year-old French peasant girl—she led the French army in a momentous victory at Orléans.”
Lally’s jaw had gone slack around the mention of angels, and she was struggling to keep up. Jesse had clearly gone around the bend. No amount of sitting in a car with her crush outside his house would have prepared her for any of this. “Are you telling me Norman is Joan of Arc?”
“I am!” Jesse answered excitedly. He moved manically, his long limbs waving in Muppet-like fashion.
“Or, the story of Joan of Arc at least. Because the light turned out to be real! Of course, she also met her end by a very different light, as she was burned alive at the stake, but let’s not go there. ” He shuddered.
“JESSE!” She screamed it loud enough to break through the noise and get his attention.
He walked toward her. She glanced at her phone, silently begging for Harlan to call.
Answer my text. Bang on the door. PLEASE.
Once more she needed this new man in her life to come through.
Jesse grabbed Lally’s shoulders and implored her to listen, his familiar face twisted in anguish.
“There was a light, the night that Norman left.”
Lally was about to wriggle free, but there was something in the way he phrased it. “Left? You mean disappeared.”
“No, I mean left. He left us, Lally.” Jesse bit his lip, an attempt perhaps to figure out how he was going to make her understand. “Come here.”
Jesse led her out into the yard, and they stood at the edge of his obsession.
The evening air was cool, the sky a gauzy pink, the mountains in the distance reflecting light like a painting from the Romantic era.
In short, the setting was almost religious.
And as imposing as the piles of dirt looked from inside the house, it was impossible to get the real scope of what Jesse had done until you looked straight down into the ground.
There was no other way to describe it—this wasn’t just a hole, it was an excavation. This was the work of a true believer.
“What have you done?” It terrified Lally, the piles of dirt too much like the snowbanks that took Robbie.
Jesse stood and stared at his work with a look of both pride and sheer terror.
He stood right on the edge, and when the soft ground began to give away under his feet, he stepped back only enough to avoid falling in.
“The light. Is it religion, Lally? Is it prayer? Is it cosmic, is it divine? Is it ritual, is it some kind of collective unconscious? Is it from our dimension, from another? Is it from the present? The past? The future? I don’t know.
I go over and over it in my mind, and all I can come up with is this shit never happens in the cities.
None of this would have happened if we had stayed in Los Angeles.
This happened because of the desert. ‘Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place and rest awhile.’ Jesus said that to his disciples.
I’ve read all the translations. Some say desolate place, some say deserted place, quiet place, isolated place.
But it’s this place. The desert. It happened here, Lally. There has to be a reason.”
Lally shuddered, and it wasn’t the November air. “Jesse, you’re scaring me.”
“I’m scaring me, too.”
The dog ran outside with her bone, straight into the pit to bury it. Lally’s eyes grew wide. Perhaps they were both serial killers.
“Norman wasn’t scared,” Jesse continued. “Why is that? The light came down and instead of running from it, he stepped directly into it.”
Slowly, Lally reached out for Jesse’s hand and held it, overcome all of a sudden with sympathy for someone who was not her adversary, not a serial killer, but someone she loved clearly in the throes of a full mental breakdown. “Jesse, I’m calling the police.”
“WAIT. I found something.” Jesse scrambled back toward the house and disappeared. He shouted from inside. “Not what I was hoping to, mind you, but it’s something!”
Lally couldn’t imagine what he was hoping to find, but if this was somehow impossibly a clue to Norman’s whereabouts, she wanted to see it.
Jesse returned holding a box, small and wooden with ornate hinges. It was shy of a treasure chest, but more than a jewelry box, and he looked at her like he was wondering if she could be trusted. “Look.”
“You found this, in that hole.” It was comical, almost. A needle in a dirt stack.
They knelt on the ground like kids and opened the box carefully together; a small bit of debris fell from the cracks.
The wood was dark and looked damp, evidence perhaps that it had indeed been long buried.
Inside were paper letters, bundled together with a length of thick yarn.
“They’re from the architects whose names I could never remember, but now I do.
” At Lally’s blank stare he added, “The architects who built this house.”
“I thought Norman built this house.”
“Norman rebuilt this house.” He pointed around at certain parts.
“The glass ell, and the new master—sorry, primary—suite. He updated their design. But the bones of the house are still theirs. Eero and Judith Seidler. Love letters, some of them written right here.” Jesse undid the yarn and pulled the top letter from the stack.
“Do you want to read it?” he asked, offering it to Lally.
“Not particularly.” Still, she took the letter and held it a safe distance from her face as if it might contain anthrax.
“It’s okay, I read them. You don’t have to.”
“And?”
“They were all written on dates with odd numbers. Do you know there are no odd numbers without the letter e?”
With her free hand, Lally pinched the bridge of her nose. “So?”
“I just thought that could mean something.”
“It doesn’t, Jesse. What’s in the letters?”
Jesse exhaled. “Everything.” He flipped through the stack, pausing only to look at dates, which appeared to be in chronological order.
“They were so in love, at first. You’ve never read anything like these.
Deep, romantic love. Like, it was a miracle two such perfectly suited people found one another.
” Lally noticed his eyes grow wet. He wasn’t just talking about the Seidlers.
“And, then, over time, they weren’t. Or maybe they were, but not in the same way.
They took each other for granted. The letters became perfunctory.
More business, less poetry. Angry even, a few of them. And then, one day, they just stopped.”
Lally looked at the envelope in her hand; it suddenly seemed less foreboding. “I guess I’m not the expert here, but isn’t that how relationships are? Isn’t that true of you and Norman?”
Jesse seemed heartbroken. “Exactly. When you’re in it, it doesn’t really feel that way. But this is exactly the story of me and Norman. We built our love story on top of theirs, just like we built onto their house, just like they built Pompeii.”
“The Seidlers built Pompeii?”
Jesse begged her with his eyes to keep up.
“But I was there at the beginning, don’t forget. There was a time you and my brother couldn’t take your eyes off each other. Not to mention your hands, despite my presence. It couldn’t have gotten that bad.”
Jesse shook his head sadly. “I couldn’t see it. But Norman saw the light.”
Lally finally understood, his heartbreak plain as day.
He was as tall as any man she’d ever met, but here, kneeling on the ground clutching someone else’s love letters, he looked like a small wounded child.
“Call off your search, Lally. Norman left. We’re not going to find him.
Call off that man who watches my house.”
Lally replied quietly. “You know I can’t do that.”
“I didn’t hurt him.” He pleaded with his eyes.
“We don’t always know the ways in which we hurt people.”
Jesse nodded, and a tear fell down his cheek. “You’re right. I hurt him in so many ways. I didn’t mean to. But I did.”
Lally hung her head. Maybe what he needed was a priest. “I’m calling the police.” She took out her phone, pressed 911, and hovered her finger over the call button. “We need to report him missing. It’s time.”
“Lally, wait.”
“No, Jesse. No more stalling.”
“WAIT!” Jesse screamed. He grabbed her arm harder than she was comfortable with, but without the intent to harm.
Lally hit call, put the phone on speaker, and held it up for Jesse to see. It rang twice.
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
“YOU CAN HAVE THE EMbrYOS,” he blurted.
Lally’s heart squeezed like a fist.
“9-1-1. Are you able to speak or should I send help?”
Lally remained frozen, eyes locked with Jesse.
“We’re tracing your call. It looks like you’re calling from…the street has no name, but we have your location. I’m dispatching the police now.”
“No. There’s no emergency. That won’t be necessary.”
“Ma’am, placing a false call to 9-1-1 is—”
“Butt dial. Sorry!” Lally ended the call, then dropped the phone like it was poison. She asked Jesse to repeat what he’d just said.
“You can have the embryos. One of them. Some of them. I don’t know. Whatever you need.”
The finality of his offer was a slap to the face. Both of her brothers were gone. “Norman’s not coming back, is he.”
Jesse shook his head slowly, like he was just accepting it, too.
“Call off your search. Call off your search, and you can have the embryos. It’s what Norman would want.
” He held out his hand and she took it. “More than that. It’s what I want.
But you have to promise me something. I won’t be the father anymore, but when they’re old enough to know, I want your child to know I didn’t abandon them.
I want them to know without a doubt that they are loved. ”
And that was when she knew. Yes, her brothers were both gone—but all was not lost. She opened her mouth and closed it, not knowing what to say.
And then she saw it above them: Venus, the evening star.
The brightest light in the sky. She made a wish, a wish to stop being afraid.
To stop being alone. To stop living for other people.
And then, without hesitating any longer, she looked back at Jesse and meekly said—
“Okay.”