Island
The sound didn’t reach me for a couple seconds. It needed to heave up the register and make itself heard among the conditioned air pushing through the same vent. Still, I was able to catch a look at her from the window. Tabitha was running out of the house. She kept on running down the street, never to return. Or at least that’s how it felt.
There she was, escaping her own home right in front of me. Her heels made little self-important clomps while binoculars flopped heavily against her chest from their station around her neck. As far as she knew I hadn’t seen anything. I might’ve even been a little bored, upstairs watering all her plants. One sip for the alocasia on her bedside table, one sip for the sansevieria in the corner. I had just been thinking about how corners are both the threateningly sharp edges of things and the intentionally clear spaces that make room for other things. This contradiction appealed to me, as all contradictions do.
Had Tabitha finally figured out that I was attempting to brainwash her? That I was conducting elaborate experiments and exchanging information privately with her peers? Or was she checking up on me? She probably didn’t trust me to do a good job with the very plant duties she’d assigned. I don’t trust Jennifers, she’d told me once.
I should have known; Tabitha doesn’t think I’m serious about plants.
A soft doom settled over the staircase as I descended. I opened the hall closet. She’d taken the empty briefcase with her. I tried not to forge any meaning from this act.
When Tabitha handed over her house keys last week, she said she was off to have a love affair with a renowned topiarist. They were taking a cruise to some island or other. I never asked her for an exact location, didn’t think to coordinate any coordinates.
“I hate to bother you with this,” she’d said, “but I’m cultivating quite a collection, and I’d like to avoid the nuclear option.”
By this she did not mean to nuke her greenery, but rather to ask a member of her nuclear family to water them.
“You know Cheryl. She’s plant resistant. She finds the very existence of plants overwhelming,” she’d continued.
Maybe this had been Tabitha’s plan all along. The experimentee becomes the experimenter. Or something like that.
It was probably time to consider forming a search party. But devoting thought to such a task was too much for me. The term has always sounded inappropriately festive. She left me—and she left me blanched, husked, aproned by murky leaves that were enshrouded by blackout curtains. And she was running—because she was running around with some sculptor of the very living things she’d left behind. As if they needed to be augmented. When we all know those stegosaurus-shaped shrubs (or whatever he created) are strictly for show, just like this friendship.
So instead of a search party I hosted a regular party. People had stopped inviting me to social engagements a long time ago. This way, I could get back in the game and Tabitha could be put on notice—as long as she bothered to notice.
The most important guest was Jack. His dealings and backchannelings could extract the most minor discrepancies from whatever Tabitha claimed to be doing. I made Jack a custom commemorative cup as a gesture of appreciation for his attendance. I’d shellacked Tabitha’s face to the cup with a question mark beside it, a look of disgrace smeared across her over-plucked eyebrows. It doesn’t matter whether or not I found it in the dumpster later.
“I know about your rash,” he said when I gave him the cup.
“Oh, that?”
“Yeah. I’ve been observing you. But I’ve seen worse. They know me over at Memorial. I can make a few calls.”
I guess I should mention that Jack is my estranged dermatologist. You shouldn’t make me spell it out for you, the whole situation. We’ll leave it there. Jack had something most people didn’t: public admiration. If there were still papers, you’d see his name in all the papers. But like in a good way.
“I’d also recommend seeing someone about your limp. You look injured,” he said.
“Injured? Do I look injured to you?” I cartwheeled around the kitchen island.
He nodded as if he’d expected me to do this cartwheel demonstration all along.
So Jack was inspecting my gait and I was struggling to recall how many kids he’d produced. Most of his patients believed he’d fathered secret ones anyway.
“I’m glad Tabitha’s mom doesn’t know anything about this. It’s a good thing she died,” I said, drawing back from the conversation with drawbacks—one of the few tap dance moves I still remembered.
It’s my firm belief that after each and every party an ambulance should arrive and an EMT should lovingly place a blanket over your shoulders. But we can’t get what we want. Otherwise the whole system of need would collapse. Even if a soothing ambulance ride would really do the trick.
Guests hustled to their cars, and where I usually felt relieved I only felt drowsy.
It’s said that the ground is solid. You could call it a safe bet. So when a massive sinkhole opened up in Tabitha’s neighborhood while she was still away, gulping her house down in one easy bite, the only safe bet was never knowing what happened. Never convincing Tabitha to explain how her life had gone south. Or north, for that matter. Which meant my only recourse was to keep busy by planning who I’ll haunt in that highly referenced rumor of an afterlife. And, not like Jack would have you believe, leapfrogging around the perimeter of his dermatological practice.
Hey, at least I’ve not gone looking for her. At least I’ve not gone looking for you.
Claire Hopple is the author of six books and the fiction editor at XRAY. Her stories have appeared in Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Forever Mag, and others. She grew up in the woods outside of Pittsburgh, PA and currently lives in Asheville, NC. More at clairehopple.com.