We’re smiling again and I got us out of the jam. I bring you down to the red sofa, the Red Bed. We are spooning. We are one. Your voice is small, scared. “I don’t know what to say right now.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
Silence falls on us like Guterson’s snow falling on cedars. We are learning what it feels like to be alone in private. You feel what I feel. Warm. Safe.
I shouldn’t tell you this but you’re here. You came. “So the day after we first talked on the phone, before I started working at the library… I bought a cashmere sweater.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I didn’t know it in the moment, but I got home and put it on and realized it… it felt like you.”
“I think you’re aware that I like that sweater.”
Licious saunters into the room and you light up. “Oh God,” you gasp. “Licious is even cuter in person. Come here, baby.”
Licious leaves the room—fucking cats—and you nestle into my chest and I kiss your head. “All of our cats are cute.”
You stroke my chest. “I like the way you say that. Our cats.”
We could be teenagers on a beach in the nineties and we could be in the hospital beds in our nineties and there’s something old about us together, something young. And then you pat my hand. “Joe, I should probably go.”
I hold you. “You should probably not say ‘should probably’ so much.”
I get an F in pillow talk and you’re wiggling away, you’re on your feet and you’re putting on your skirt and what do I say to make you stay? You pull on one boot and then you reach for the other and then you flinch. “What was that noise?”
The Whisper Room is almost soundproof and it better not be my dog. “I think I have a mouse.”
“Well, don’t worry. Riffic will take care of that. He’s the toughest one in the bunch.”
You are fully dressed by now and I’m still lying on the couch, a big spoon with no little spoon underneath and I can’t read your face. Is that guilt? Regret? You mumble something about humane mousetraps like we’re in a fucking Facebook group chat about exterminators and I nod, like I give a shit about mice right now.
I stand up. Do I touch you? Do I hug you? “Do you want something to eat?”
You shudder and tell me again that you should probably go and then you laugh because of what I said about your should probablies and I should probably build a time machine because I ruined it. The afterglow.
“See, Joe, this is the problem.” You open the door and you open your mouth and you look at me and you look away and just say it, Mary Kay. “You should probably stop being so perfect… I’ll um… I’ll see you soon, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Soon.”
Tastic creeps up on us and rubs against your leg and you pick him up and coo. “Oh God, Tastic, you are the cutest, you are! You are my perfect little baby, yes you are.”
You’re wrong—Tastic is the neediest and Riffic is the cutest—but I don’t question your judgment and you go before I say something stupid and YES! You called me “perfect” and that’s what I’m going to be from now on. If I were your cat, my name would be Perfect.
When you’re gone, I lean my head against the door. I want you to pound on the other side and beg for more, but that’s not gonna happen. Perfect men aren’t greedy. They’re grateful. I go into the kitchen and I like the idea of us in split screen, opening cabinets and going through the motions as we replay every nanosecond of our first （almost） time. I put the overcooked salmon and the blackened steak onto a plate. I get the Heinz ketchup. I grab a couple Hostess Cupcakes and the tray is ready.
I glance at my red sofa. You were there. You’ll be there again.
I open the basement door. The tray is heavy and each step is a challenge. But at the same time I have no fear of falling. I’m not walking. I’m floating. Perfect.
But then I make it to the bottom of the stairs and I stop short. Something is wrong. The room is silent. Lifeless.
And then I see her. Melanda’s facedown on the floor of the Whisper Room. There’s blood on the floor, on the glass wall, and the TV is down too. Shattered.
I drop my tray and I scream her name. “Melanda!”
I grope for my keys and I’m in the Whisper Room on my knees and I’m too late. She used the television set and there is blood, so much blood, and I grab her shoulders and I whisper. I hope. “Melanda, can you hear me?”
But her heart is silent—I am wasting my time—and that’s when I realize the blood on the wall isn’t spatter. It’s writing. She used her own blood as ink. Finger paint. Her last words, her goodbye:
Single White Female.
20
This isn’t a misdemeanor. This is a crime and Melanda’s the shark inside my shark, the body in my house and it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. If you hadn’t come over tonight…
No. This isn’t your fault. She did this. Not you. Not me. Melanda.
I can’t let my empathy get the best of me right now. She chose to end her life on my property and she left me to do the dirty work, to clean up the mess. I turn off the security cameras and delete my files—I don’t like snuff films—and if some twisted voyeur techie already saw what she did, well that’s the point, isn’t it?
She did it. Not me.
She will never be coming around again and as it all sinks in, well, in some ways I could kill her for what she did to us. Her blood is on my fingertips, it’s on the walls of my Whisper Room and she was in this room because she attacked me. I grab her phone. I can’t call 911. I can’t trust the Injustice System—if only you knew—and I can’t bury her in my yard. Fecal-Eyed Nancy is a nosy Nextdoor app–addicted gossip and I crack a smile. Is there something wrong with me? No. Laughing at funerals is a common phenomenon. We laugh at death because we have to, because what is more ironic than being stuck with a very smart, opinionated woman who can’t weigh in with her thoughts at a moment when I could really use her fucking help?
I could take her to the dock and let her sink to the floor of the bay, but the tide gets low. I could put her in the trunk and drive to the footbridge by 305 but I like that footbridge. I could dump her in Murden Cove—the smell is bad enough there as it is—but once again with the low fucking tide… For her it was easy—Single White Female—but this is hell on me and unlike that daytime-soap-loving sociopath in Fargo, I don’t have access to a wood chipper. And why would I fucking want a wood chipper? It’s not like things worked out for him and we all know how it ends—chills—and I will not end up in the back of a fucking police cruiser.
Goddammit, Melanda, why me? Why my house? I know she had her reasons. I’ve read the phone—I had to know everything about you—and I read her journals—I had to know everything she won’t put in the phone. I know that as recently as two weeks ago she was sick about never having had a baby.
I want to have one but then I go into Blackbird and those mommies are so smug as if giving birth makes them more of a woman than me and they’re so BORING and they think they’re so INTERESTING and how can I want to be one of them? UGH MK is lucky she did it early before all these women turned into martyrs and HELLO they have husbands and ok so the husbands don’t unload the dishwasher unless they’re asked to do it but they do it, you know? MK is lucky and I’m not lol I know. Get over it! Sigh.