* * *
A FEW WEEKS LATER, after he’d returned from his road trip, Stacy suggested they take a walk around the tah pits, maybe dip into the aht museum, and then grab a bite at a place called Whisper, during which Greta insisted they whisper as much as possible. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of this sooner, as nearly everything about her sounded like a secret.
“My mother killed herself when I was thirteen,” Greta whispered when Stacy asked if her parents still lived in the area. “So, I was fostered by a few of her siblings. She had six sisters and one brother, and they were scattered across the country and very different from one another, but they all had the same exact voice, so they’d always seemed less like eight people and more like one person with multiple personality disorder.”
“Where was your fahtha?”
“Jail. He told people it was for embezzlement, but the truth was he’d been busted for impersonating a police officer.”
“Was he a bank robbah?”
“Sadly, he was only trying to pick up women. But even if he hadn’t been in jail, living with him was never an option. When I was in high school, he married his accountant. She was sweet, Dominican, half his age. No one knew what she saw in him. A week after their honeymoon, she shaved her head and began dressing in long white robes, because, well, it turned out she was a Santeria priestess. She transformed their living room into a massive shrine to her murdered twin boys, and long story short, she ran away with all his money. In his despair, he stabbed himself in the stomach, samurai-style, except he was too weak to pull the knife toward his heart, and so he just lay there on the linoleum, bleeding out. He waited six hours before calling an ambulance.”
“What an awful way to die,” Stacy said. “My god.”
“He lived. He got married again, twice. Now he’s drinking himself to death in the Florida Panhandle. I don’t even know his address.”
Stacy chewed his straw solemnly. He was drinking seltzer with lime; Greta, the same, plus tequila.
“But enough about me,” Greta whispered. “Did you have an okay childhood?”
“It’s too boring to whispah about,” Stacy said. “My parents are saints. Do-goodahs. If anything, I suffid from too much happiness, which might be why I’ve always been drawn to dahk-sidahs.”
“Docksiders,” Greta whispered. “The loafers?”
“Dark-siders,” Stacy said slowly. “People who live on the dark side. Like my next-door naybuhs. They had eight kids, right, so they raised rabbits. Not to cuddle—they ate them for suppa. Rabbits don’t have vocal cords, but they scream when they’re dyin, and it was all I could hear from my bedroom window. Still, you couldn’t keep me away from that house. I lost my viginity to one of the oldah girls. Her name was Stacy, too. She worked at Cumbahland Fahms. So, you know what that means.”
Free candy, Greta thought.
“It was the beginning of a long, very loving relationship,” Stacy said.
“With convenience stores?”
“The bottle,” Stacy whispered. “Stacy introduced me to alcohol.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen,” Stacy said.
Greta admitted that her mother had been an addict, too. Her drug of choice: terrible news. Nothing gave her mother more pleasure than hearing about the worst thing that ever happened to you, preferably in exhaustive detail, the more visually disturbing the better. The only metric she used to judge someone’s worth: had they suffered enough?
Greta’s childhood had been dominated by run-of-the-mill rescue fantasies, most of which ended with Greta’s being saved by Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Her fantasies finally came true after her mother’s death, when Greta was rescued by Dusty, her mother’s twin. Like Chief Bromden, Dusty was taller than average （six-one）， was nearly deaf （but not faking it）， and had spent many months in a nuthouse.
“Were they identical?” Stacy asked.
“No,” Greta said. “In fact, they didn’t even seem related. Imagine Ali MacGraw and Sissy Spacek sharing a womb.”
Greta had moved in with Dusty, who lived in a tract housing development in southern Arizona. Dusty’s romantic relationships were with incarcerated men and therefore epistolary, so she spent most of her time at the kitchen table, writing long letters in silence. Dusty seemed utterly fulfilled by these correspondences and didn’t want or need anything from Greta. Much of what came out of Greta’s mouth seemed suddenly unnecessary, or perhaps better written down. Since she’d always been a letter-writer, she continued writing to her mother, whom she pretended was alive and in prison for murder.
“How’d she end her life?” Stacy asked.
“She blew her brains out while I was at horse camp.”
“It’s unusual for a woman to shoot herself in the head.”
“She was raised in Reno,” Greta explained. “She was familiar with guns.”
“Did she leave a note?”
“I lost it,” Greta whispered. “When I try to imagine it, her handwriting is either blurry or blacked out, like a redacted CIA document.”
“Maybe you should see a hypnotist,” Stacy suggested.
“I’m not sure I want to remember the note,” Greta said. “I’ll certainly never forget the PS.”
“？‘I love you’？” Stacy whispered.
Greta shook her head.
“？‘I’m watching over you’？”
“The PS wasn’t written. It was… a piece of herself.”
Stacy leaned closer.
“I really shouldn’t be telling you this stuff,” Greta whispered. “We just met. I don’t want to scare you.”
“But I’m not afraid of the dahk,” Stacy said. “Rememba?”
She’d found the horrifying postscript clinging to a fold in the curtains. This had been a few days after her mother’s body had been taken away, her room scoured by professional cleaners. But the cleaners had somehow missed the PS, which was strange because it was the first thing Greta noticed. If they’d missed that, Greta could only imagine what a soul-haunting mess the place had been before. The PS resembled a swatch of leather with a long brown hair attached, and the follicle was visible on the back side. Although it hadn’t been your customary lock of hair and was in fact grotesque, Greta stored it in a film canister, like weed. She just couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. But, after she moved to Arizona, she worried that Dusty would discover it, decide Greta was unstable and therefore unlovable, and then drop her off at the nuthouse and never return.
Rather than bury it in the backyard, Greta tried burying it in the trash beneath the sink, even though it obviously didn’t belong there, surrounded by coffee grounds, banana peels, and burned toast, and the bathroom trash wasn’t much better. She knew the kitchen trash would eventually be mixed with the bathroom trash, and all trash was not the same to Greta. She was deeply unsettled by the thought of dirty Q-tips and tampons sharing a bag with rotten produce, chicken carcasses, and this delicate piece of her mother’s body. And so, she’d wandered into Dusty’s garage, opened an old shoebox, and placed her mother’s remains in the toe of a patent leather shoe.