It was ample time for me to increasingly believe that nothing had happened in the first place. I’d obviously had some sort of lucid dream. There was nothing to it. One proof of this was how I’d gone to sleep wearing the clothes I’d bought at the shop in Goncourt, but woke up naked in bed with no sign of the clothes or dagger I’d worn in Whitewater.
That was proof I’d imagined everything. I’d clearly triggered some lurking psychosis by moving back into my childhood apartment. After all, my mother had died in an explosion, my dad had died during his attempted robbery, and my babysitter had died in a fire, and it’d all happened when I lived in this apartment. So of course I’d experience mental troubles after walking back in through that door. Of course I was going to have a few hallucinations.
A batch of homework consumed a batch of time. Plus, I spent a couple days sketching out ideas for my thesis. Art history, for all the beautiful art, can be boring. I wanted to liven it up, so I was working on an idea of comparing and contrasting the sex lives of Vincent van Gogh and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and of how their women—or in Vincent’s case the lack thereof—had influenced the two men’s art.
For mental breaks, I walked my old neighborhood, letting it evolve into my new neighborhood.
I did have that coffee with my next-door neighbor. He and his boyfriend were right: the coffee was damn good. But I can’t say I developed any real friendship with him. It was my fault, not his. He wasn’t Salena. His plants were the wrong plants. The boyfriend smoked, and it reminded me of how my old babysitter had burned to death in the room where I was sitting. The smell of the cigarette overwhelmed everything else. The visit was short.
I hung out with my sister a couple times, telling Binsa absolutely nothing of Goncourt or giant beetles or the other things I was now certain I’d only imagined.
She accompanied me to several thrift stores so I could accumulate an array of furnishings on the cheap. I ended up with more throw pillows than I would’ve ever bought alone. There were only four of them, but that was four more than I would’ve thought to buy. One of them was embroidered with a cute baby chicken saying, “Yeah, but I shit on the ground.” I suppose I might’ve bought that one even without Binsa.
My sister also bought me some candles as a present, and took me to a grocery store and bought me a fridge’s worth of food instead of snacks.
“You realize that I can function as an adult?” I told her. “All by myself? Alone?”
“I’m rooting for you,” she said. “You’ll get there.” That night, three days after my hallucination of another world, she sat in my kitchen going through a dating app on my phone, showing me a variety of women she hoped could save me from—in her words—my wretched solitary life.
Later, after she was gone, I watched a movie from the 60’s until almost four in the morning. The movie was about a gang of spies who needed to save America from… something? It wasn’t clear. I again went through the dating app, this time looking at all the women Binsa had thought were a good match for me, psychoanalyzing what made them attractive in my sister’s mind.
I also nixed the two women Binsa had mentioned she’d dated in the past. There are certainly worse things than dating the same women as your sister, but you have to actively search for them.
I fell asleep on the couch, fully dressed.
I woke up in bed. Naked.
There was a note on my nightstand. It said, “Quit falling asleep in your clothes.” It wasn’t signed. I stared at the note for a long time. Finally, I took a shower.
When I came out of the shower the note still existed. I got dressed and went to my classes, strenuously avoiding my apartment for the entire day. When I came home, the note was still there, existing. I called Binsa.
“Did you leave a note in my apartment?”
“About what?”
“About, uh, how I fall asleep in my clothes.” I couldn’t possibly tell her how the note implied that she’d undressed me. And carried me to bed. That was absurd.
“I didn’t leave any notes,” she said.
“I know.”
“You know? Then why did you ask me?”
“Because it wasn’t until I was asking you that I realized how stupid it was.”
“Oh. I get that. Sometimes I say things at parties, and then I stay awake all night wanting to punch my own face.”
“Exactly. Okay, bye, sis. Talk to you soon.”
“Wait, Josh!” she blurted. “Who left the note, then? Is it that woman again? The one I saw in your bathroom? You never mentioned her when we were going through the dating app, so I kept my mouth shut in case she dumped you. But, she was so pretty! Is she smart? Funny? Where’d you meet? Are you actually seeing her? Does she have a sister for your sister? Do I get to come to your wedding?”
“Holy crap. Uh, no wedding. That was Molly. She’s a friend, now.” I was hurrying around my apartment, searching for anything else strange. If a note had appeared out of the blue, then what else might materialize?
As I made my rounds, I focused on how Binsa’s mention of having seen Molly in my bathroom meant that Molly was real, and if Molly was real than the magical door in my old bedroom was real. I clicked the switch on my ceiling fan to circulate some air. I was having trouble breathing.
“Just a friend?” Binsa asked. “Where can I get some friends who are beautiful women that randomly appear in my apartment to lounge naked in my tub? You know, personal harem friends?”
“It’s not like that. Listen, I should go. I still have a lot of unpacking to do.”
“We all have a lot of unpacking to do. That’s why I’m seeing a shrink.” She paused, but I could hear her thinking, the way it’s sometimes possible on a phone.
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“Josh?” she said. “Seriously. Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
“You’ll call if you need anything?”
“I will. And same for you.”
“Thanks. I mean that.”
We hung up, and I tossed the phone on my couch, still making the rounds through my apartment, looking for anything amiss, feeling like a soldier on patrol in enemy territory. It was just after seven, which meant it was acceptable to have some bourbon, so I poured myself a small glass with one ice cube, then decided it was a bad sign to try to drink my fears away, so I poured it all out in the sink.
Then I felt stupid, because it was my best bourbon and not cheap, and I should’ve poured it back into the bottle. Beyond that, it was time to eat dinner, and having bourbon with dinner would’ve been perfectly acceptable.
I compiled a few sandwich ingredients from the groceries Binsa had bought me as an apartment-warming gift. I grabbed a loaf of fresh bread, two small tomatoes, and some deli slices of turkey. There was mayo. Cucumbers. Some sort of interesting cheese that Binsa said was her favorite.
I arranged all the ingredients on the counter, paused, and then slid the bourbon over to nestle among them. It was officially part of the team.
“Knife,” I said. “Wait, no. Where’s my cutting board?” I’d need a knife to cut up the tomatoes and slice the bread, cheese and cucumbers, but first I needed the cutting board.
I had a sudden memory of Salena one night, back when I was a kid, making me a sandwich. We didn’t have a cutting board in those days. My dad and I’d just cut things up on a plate. Salena hadn’t liked that, so she’d brought over her own cutting board, saying that cutting boards were an essential requirement of a civilized apartment, that without them you ended up with all sorts of notches in your counter, and that we weren’t barbarians.
“Your daughter’s a barbarian,” I said, now, while looking through one of the boxes marked “kitchen” that were still on the floor. I found the cutting board. All of the knives and the silverware were already in their proper drawers. I found the bread knife and cut off three slices of bread, then cut one of them in half so that I could make one and a half sandwiches. I used a paring knife to cut the tomatoes and slice off a generous portion of cheese. A sample of the cheese had it tasting like Swiss, but sharper, with traces of almond. It was good.
The entire time I was making my sandwich, I was alert to any sounds from my old bedroom, paranoid that something would scuttle out and attack me from behind.
I was also thinking of Salena. She felt like a ghost, now. Not an actual ghost, but at least something more substantial than a memory. I could remember her in more detail, now that I was back in my old apartment. I could recall her scent, suggestive of orange peels and a wood fire. I could remember her laugh. I could remember how much she’d taught me, and how little my dad had taught me.
Standing next to my sink, I could remember the precise words she’d said when she’d caught me walking away from dirty dishes in the sink.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she’d said. “You either do your dishes right away, or leave them for later. If you do them right away, they’re done. If you leave them for later, you’re still going to end up having to do them, but you wear them like a weight until then. So . . . just get things done when you can, Josh. It’s the best way.”
She’d been wearing a green skirt. A white top. She’d had a little brooch in the shape of a jeweled bee. Her feet were bare. She’d left her shoes in her own apartment, just next door.
We’d eaten cold pizza that night, and she’d even made us a pair of cold pizza sandwiches, just for fun. Slices of cold pizza between slices of bread. We’d both known it’d been dumb. That’s what made it fun, and worthwhile to do.
Had Salena ever cast any spells? I thought back to Fridu’s question, and back to the time I’d spent with Salena. I could remember the pleasantly long nights of her babysitting me, the endless conversations we’d had. I realized, now, that she’d been trying to distract me from how my father was steadily abandoning me.
I’d known that I’d been an unwelcome anchor for my father. I didn’t represent the life he wanted, which could be best summed up as a life with zero responsibilities. If I hadn’t had Salena, I would’ve only delved deeper into my thoughts of all the things Dad had been doing rather than spending any time with me.
He’d often come home disheveled and drunken, sometimes overly mellow but more often abusive, making vulgar comments about Salena that she tolerated with a grace and patience that was somehow depressing. She never should’ve been forced to develop those emotional calluses, those casual deflections. My father had been a terrible man.
When I’d been adopted into the Hester family and Binsa became my sister, it’d taken well over a year for me to understand that Ben Hester, my adopted father, wasn’t the same as my father, that he wouldn’t get bored of me after three minutes, wouldn’t yell at me after five minutes, and would always call me Josh, and never once “the mistake.”
“Spells,” I said to myself, standing at my kitchen counter. “Did Salena ever cast spells?” But all I could remember were her stories of fantasy worlds, and as I opened the mayo jar while making my sandwich, it hit me that all those fantasy stories Salena had told me were real. She’d been telling me about the world of Goncourt. She’d been telling me the stories of her life.
The burning horse that galloped its spectral way through Silverbog Marsh on a nightly basis? Real. The brigands that became a flock of sparrows? They’d been real. The dungeon where a princess had been forced to kiss a living skeleton in order to effect her release, bestowing that kiss on nothing but gray bones and cold teeth teeming with scurrying ants? It was Salena who’d given that kiss.
I decided it would be a good idea to write down all the stories I could remember. Maybe there was something in them to help solve Salena’s murder.
Her… murder.
Somebody had murdered her.
Somebody had killed the woman who would let me stay in her apartment while my dad was out for the night. The woman who once fought a mock battle between the sausage and pepperoni on a pizza. The woman who’d had me help water her plants, and who told me all their names and their favorite television shows.
Somebody had murdered the woman who took me for walks to Fern Park, where there always seemed to be a surprising collection of cats to feed, endless cats that pranced and purred, and Salena would laugh and tell me that the cats were like a barbershop quartet, and then we would mentally devise intricate haircuts for each of the cats, all while the cats watched us with the indifferent tolerance of their kind.
Salena had been the type of woman who made everyone around her breathe easier, deeper, and better.
But somebody had burned that woman alive. Someone had meant to do that. Someone had wanted that to happen.
I had to sit at my kitchen table for several minutes, and I honestly thought I was going to break down into tears, but it didn’t happen. I got angry instead. I could feel my fists clenching. I was picturing Salena on the night she’d laughed about a movie we’d been watching, a night where I could later hear her crying through the walls after she went back home.
I was picturing Salena as she drew me the watercolor drawings she liked to draw, the ones with green trees on gray mountains and multicolored fish beneath the sea, and the one time she’d drawn me swimming along with the fish, and when I’d said that I would drown, she’d shaken her head and told me that I needed to remember that she was a witch, and that she would cast a water-breathing spell on me.
It was my thoughts of Salena’s possible spells that gradually drew me out from my rage, letting it subside. I was still hungry. My sandwich remained a work in progress. I reached into the silverware drawer for a knife to spread the mayo, grabbed one, and was about to close the drawer when I noticed the dagger.
It was the one from Goncourt. The one Molly and Fridu had bought me for a present. The one that I’d tangentially used to defeat a giant rat. In the unorganized chaos of the silverware drawer, I hadn’t seen it before. And there was also a note. In the same handwriting as before.
“Didn’t know where you put your knives,” it read. “Hopefully . . . here?”
I picked up the dagger.
It no longer felt foreign in my hand. It felt good. Like it belonged.
It felt like it could help me do something about a witch who’d been murdered long ago, in the days of my childhood.