Message in a 300 Page Bottle

You read it yourself. I just can't do it any kind of justice.

It's powerful. It will probably be a classic, assigned to high schoolers forevermore.

Grams came out of her room the next evening clutching her copy to her. With tears on her cheeks, she asked, "My God. Did anyone besides me cry at the end?"

Gramps and I were watching Caddyshack. I paused the stream. Gramps held one hand high above his head and Grams smiled at him.

Then he folded fingers and left up a bird.

Now you know where I get it from.

Grams glowered at him, but Gramps might have saved his life by speaking quickly.

"I did. I confess. I just wanted to divert your attention from Doug's grief. He gets embarrassed, dear."

I punched the old fart in his ribs and restarted the movie.

Grams disappeared again, not being a Rodney Dangerfield fan, but she rushed back in ten minutes later.

"News," she gasped.

Alarmed, I said, "What?" I was already aiming the remote.

She just put a finger to her lips and pointed to the book under her arm.

CNN was running the story every ten minutes. The American writer C. Sherman had been attacked by a man wielding a knife inside a Paris bookshop. She was not injured, but the attacker was in intensive care. A retired cop was in hospital with a stab wound, not in serious condition....

"The poor dear," Grams sighed. I thought the dear was either the writer or the cop or maybe both but absolutely not the knifer.

An anchor went on with some background about the author and the international bestseller she was touring to promote. No comment from publisher as yet. The Empty Friend had sparked animal rights protests in several countries. Laws were being changed, decrees issued....

When I heard the phrase 'Smith College graduate', I felt a fingertip run up the center of my back. It was cool but not icy.

My Sherman had gone to Smith. If she had any overlap with C. Sherman, they had to have known each other. Undergraduate society would have forced an acquaintance. Even if it was just both being S last names and having coat hooks next to each other.

Why hadn't she mentioned it the few times we talked about that damn book?

I was driving back this weekend, weather permitting. I had a list of questions for Sherman.

**********

Mary Kay

There was a man at my door. I woke up from a nap and heard shuffling on the porch. My slow waking mind told me they were picking my lock. They had a gun. There would be an accomplice at the back door. I was as good as dead.

I rolled off the couch and tried to squeeze underneath, but it was hopelessly too small. I felt for my panic button. The ring was gone. I saw it in my mind's eye by the bathroom sink.

I laid as still as I could, willing my wheezing terrified breath to steady. Quiet. Quiet.

Then - somewhere in my brain the shadowy figure of a woman flipped her state from blind panic to steaming anger. She stood up in the confines and screamed.

FUCK THIS!

I stood up and I screamed.

"FUCK THIS!"

I ran to the door and flung it open so hard the knob punched into the drywall on the inswing.

"FUCK YOU ASSHOLE! I AM NOT AFRAID OF-"

An alarmed UPS delivery man put up his hands in surrender and scrambled over the icy sidewalk to his truck.

I watched him roar away. I panted, my heart striking quick disco bass.

I examined myself.

I was not afraid.

I packed everything that I could jam into my car. The rest I just left. I was not going to hide anymore. One thing in particular I was not going to be a slave to again. I tossed it down and stepped on it.

I would not stay and risk my best friend becoming an innocent bystander if the next person on my porch came armed with something more lethal than a cardboard box.

That was an altruistic thing I was doing. The other thing, not so.

Until the time Doug actually tells me that he read my book and I see in his eyes that things between us are irrevocably altered, then I can pretend that they are not. I can have my fantasy.

I can have one friend.

I will wait. He has my number. He will call me. But.

What could he say to take us back in time?

**********

Doug

I texted. No reply.

I was standing at her back door, the big sliding door. No answer to my rings and pounding on the front door. I inventoried the near spaces in the parking lot. Her car was gone. Maybe she was running an errand—

Then I saw the plants. Her precious orchids she always bragged about.

Dying.

Must have been without water for several days. How long does an orchid survive in the desert?

I wondered on that as I dug down through the snow and fumbled around until I found a rock the size of my fist with a convenient sort of a point.

I etched a half moon in the door up against the metal frame of the slider.

You can learn a lot in a place of higher education.

I used the rock to punch out the arc of glass. It popped out in a satisfyingly clean shape, and I reached in and unlock the door.

Inside, it was what I thought.

Most of her stuff was gone. The stuff you would take in a hurry. The kind of hurry you would be in to leave the orchids you loved like children to die alone.

I called her. Number no longer in service.

God damn her. What is going on?

I walked into her kitchen with a boiling mixture of dread and anger rising in me.

I almost stepped on it. Black and splayed out on the tiles. Dead and discarded.

I picked up the wig.

The paperback my Grams had bought in Brooklyn, the one I had dogeared reading it deep into a couple of nights, the damn book. It was in my pocket.

I slipped it out and stared at the photo on the back.

Lies and metaphors. The book was full of lies and metaphors.

I was tired to death of this world of lies and metaphors.

I looked at the door I had disfigured.

Another goddamn metaphor.

I wound up and pitched the book. Weakened already by my stone, the plate glass exploded outwards towards the pool in hundreds of shining tinkling shards.

*************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Part Two: 2022

Mary Kay

"You sound happy," my sister said. In her voice was a hidden subharmonic: Why the fuck are you happy?

"You sound happy," she repeated. Sara has an annoying habit of repeating herself. She does it when she knows she is saying something that is undeniably factual.

This time she was halfway there. I did sound happy. I was even kind of maybe feeling a little bit happy.

"Normal people don't sound happy when the test is negative. Maybe if they are trying to not have a baby. But if they are...." She stopped and waited for my rebuttal.

I gripped my phone tightly, wondering if she could feel the pressure all that way. Half Moon Bay to Oxnard. 300 miles. I gripped harder.

"I'm not...." I had nothing. Because I was not.

"Not trying to have a baby? Well, hell, I know one good way not to have one. Don't fuck the asshole. That should do it."

"I'm not...." I let all the air out of me. She was right. Chesley K. Vipin was an asshole. I was with him mostly because the entirety of my family didn't like him from the get go, and so I figured that I would be a contrarian this time. The other method, that is, dating men that other people did like, had spectacularly not worked out for me.

Chess was an artist. He was what he styled as multimedia. This meant that he played with clay, then when he was just getting to the point where his output was good enough to maybe sell a piece, he got bored and switched to watercolors. Or armature sculpture. Or building string instruments.

You would think he was destined to live in a hovel with that life plan, but he had the good fortune to have been born into a family that built and operated strip malls up and down the state. Not the classy ones anchored by a Lowe's or a nice movie theatre. No, the Vipins ran the other kind of strip malls. The ones where the Dollar Store is the classy end and the nudie artwork in the tattoo parlor is high culture.

Slag them all you want. Dollar stores generate a torrential cash flow. Chess lived in a three million dollar four-bedroom a block from the beach. At the moment, his paper mâché fantasy animals were drying on the front and side decks, a thick obstacle course of grey moist yard-high lumps.

He was self-absorbed. Introverted and antisocial. He had no personality. He would make an awful father. Admittedly, I would probably make an equally bad mother, and the combination of the two of us would ensure that any offspring of our union would develop into twisted discouraged humans.

So why was I trying to have his baby?

I had convinced myself that my motherhood window was closing. My OB/GYN did warn me that my womb was a saucer sled poised on the top of a wintry slope. It would soon start to slide down that hill, picking up speed as it descended. Down down down into old maidness and childlessness.

Chess was pliable. He had a nice income and good physical genes, so I chose him to put in the bun.

I have to warn you that my life choices to date have been... questionable, to put it more politely than I deserve.

I stopped the pill and after a month bought a test kit. Then the next month. So on for one full year.

This morning I had looked at the one single pink line in the egg-shaped window and finally realized.

My body did not want to do this. It did not want to conceive with Chess.

I had convinced my gullible brain that it was so, but a deeper and more ancient wisdom inside me vetoed the process.

Where had this wisdom fountain been the last ten years?

**********

Doug

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood.

Thomas Wolfe ended a big ass novel I had to read in junior year at Turners Falls High School with this line, which I thought at the time was pissy bullshit. Of course you could go home again. Maybe if you were some wuss writer you'd be all angsty and sensitive and shit and fall into a swoon when brooding about your youth, but the rest of us could just get in a car and go home. Man, that book was thick. Guy must have got paid by the word.

Tom had nothing to do with the fact that I had not set foot in Turners Falls for four years.

I could go home again. Any time I wanted.

I just didn't want.

It's easy to fall into habits. I skipped the holidays begging workload, then I skipped the family Fourth of July tradition begging more work. Pretty soon I had my own tradition rolling - that of staying away from Turners Falls. Sure, I called. I texted. I even got my mom and dad to video call with me.

I had achieved an equilibrium which allowed me to pretend that I was special.

That I was not getting older. That my family was not getting older.

Then I got the call from dad. Mom had a blood disorder. Malignant. She was going in for chemo immediately.

I tossed some clothes into my car and hit the highway.

Fucking Thomas Wolfe.

**********

Mary Kay

Chess took my leaving him rather well, I think. He just stood behind me as I was packing the very few things I kept at his arts and crafts supply crammed house and said, "Don't forget those measuring cups. I don't want them."

I stopped what I was doing and looked at the wall. Three years of intimacy, sex, one year of trying to knock me up. He worries about a set of measuring cups that he never liked and never used because they were white plastic instead of stainless steel.

What he should have said, assuming he had more situational awareness than a celeriac root, which he did not, was: "You never loved me. You only wanted to have a baby and then write a novel about it."

He would have been correct, and the fact that he did not say it and I had to think it for him didn't make it any less humiliating.

So once again I return in disgrace to my condo in the Castro. I am incompetent in love, but in real estate I am a Lothario. Wait. That is the wrong sex and also the character as I recall was an unscrupulous seducer. I am not unscrupulous.

Another promising relationship has detonated in my face. Promising? Where did that totally not true descriptor come from? The only promise it contained were the ones I invented to delude myself. At least I have my San Francisco bolthole to retreat into and lick my wounds. I bought this place at a dip in the market with the proceeds from Empty Friend. Which is selling pretty steadily to this day thanks to mandatory school reading, and sometimes I feel just a little guilty about that. But did Wilson Rawls have a sad that every fifth grader in the United States has to read Summer of the Monkeys? I don't think so. Neither did his publisher.

The condo now is appraised at about five times what I paid for it. Not many three bedrooms come on the market around here. It is my home. My home I spend little time in. The walls have the same coat of ugly beige paint as the day I received the keys.

A friend once looked around and said I had no nesting instinct.

I am still letting that statement marinate.

**********

Doug

That lasted about a week.

Mom looked surprisingly healthy for such a miserable diagnosis. It was Dad who looked tired and pale. He worried all the time, about his wife, about a possible life without his best friend.

I banned my mother from the kitchen and took over the cooking. One day I needed a lemon for tabouleh. It was a sunny spring day, so I decided to hoof it down to the 7-11 and pick one up. In the elementary school playground they were sitting, watching the kids swing.

M&M. And Claire.

I could have pretended not to notice and just kept walking by. I could have pivoted and headed back for the house. But either I have gotten braver over the years or I have had my give a shit abraded away.

The three looked up as I approached. Mikey smiled. Madison smiled. Claire stood up and walked in the other direction. Without looking back, she kept going determinedly out of the gate and away down the far street until she was gone behind the houses there.

I stood stupid and watched her leave. I remembered the last time I had seen her, the last time she had walked away from me pretty much like she had just done. Four years? Five?

I took her empty spot at the picnic table.

"You still make an entrance," Madison said, nodding toward where we had last seen Claire's stiff back. "Nice."

"She has a tattoo." Mikey poked the Dunk's cup Claire had abandoned. He had been an altar boy at Our Lady of Peace. He spoke these words in the exact tone of amazed reverence he would have used if revealing to me that the Pope had nipple rings.

I didn't ask. I damn well knew it wasn't my name and it wasn't over her heart.

Madison and Mikey were happily married. Three kids, all happy as well. I don't know if they had a dog and cat, but if they did they were also no doubt happy.

I hated it, but their happiness and their loving children had killed me and Claire.

I graduated from Amherst and started at Hurt and McMaster Architecture. Claire graduated from UMass with a degree in hotel management, got an entry position with Hilton, and moved with me into a one bedroom in Watertown.

That accounting sounds like it was cut and pasted from a resume. Here's what actually happened: I was only one month into my job when I managed to find this very nice and affordable apartment - a combination only one probability unit removed from hitting on a scratch ticket - with an easy commute to H&M in Cambridge.

I drove back to Turners Falls to pick up some of my stuff. I had been renting a room in Brighton and had not enough of anything besides empty pizza boxes to furnish a whole apartment. I went to a cookout at Henry's parent's house. Many of my old classmates were there. Mikey and Madison, who were so obviously destined for each other that we were already referring to them as M&M.

And Claire.

She was flush with excitement. She was carrying the offer letter from Hilton in her breast pocket and showing it to everyone like she couldn't believe it.

Now, she said, she just needed a place to live.

**********

Mary Kay

I have a system. It works. It allows me to write. It makes me write.

Ideas swirl in my head. Some appear by their own volition; some I consciously inject. They wind and aggregate and separate and slink past one another until a cluster begins to form. A nucleating agent, a scaffold for the story. Then gaps appear and pieces evolve to fill them. Sorting. Ordering. Chronology. Cause. Effect. And at last, a denouement puts a stopper to the growth of the chain.

I am ready to make an outline. Characters are given names. Places for them to interact.

I start at the beginning. Put my fingers on the home keys and let my created beings tell their story.

They whisper suggestions in my psychic ear. These go as notes, jottings, snatches of a conversation tucked into another blank sheet. Electronic these days, no paper involved anymore.

Today, as Chess so accurately failed to voice, I am beginning the story of two people who meet.

Isn't that every story? It is every story I write. They all turn into romance.

I look at the blank page and start to type.

Boy meets girl.

**********

Doug

Do you know how long determined children can play? How many ways to reuse the same playground equipment they have no doubt seen and climbed and invented games upon hundreds of times?

It's a lot, believe me.

M&M's three kids climbed and ran and left us who call ourselves adults to talk in peace.

I had not spoken in person to Mikey or Madison for... about the same number of years I had not spoken at all to Claire.

My therapist agrees that I am a jerk of historic proportions. Here I have a whole community of friends. Close conspirators in life ready to support me in whatever puddle I fall into, and I just let them rot. I sent a card or two, I called them once or twice. Short catch ups, nothing deep. Not like I needed.

Maybe it's the shock of imagining my mother being erased. I suddenly decided to spill. Almost everything. My therapist says I have to be more spontaneously trusting. Or maybe I say that.

One detail I keep back for now, because I am still not a whole and confident human.

They knew the story from Claire's perspective. How we clicked from the day she moved in. Old friends become new lovers. We were comfortable. We communicated. We went to Madison and Mikey's wedding and had a wonderful time in every spiritual and physical way that the wedding atmosphere brings out in healthy young couples.

I felt it then.

The barest hint of an additional hue in the rainbow of our love. And since I am not totally, just mostly, stupid, I bought a ring and asked Claire to marry me.

Begin one year or so of blissful anticipation.

Then M&M had to procreate, as one does. The birth of their first made them so... that's right, happy. How the very unlikely partnership between Madison, the mannered, stylish, polite woman and Mikey, the rough-tongued, headstrong, abrasive little boy in the skin of a man worked so well was a surprise and a mystery to most of our community.

They were a velcro couple. On close examination, two halves radically different, but when they were pressed together they made a bond that was much stronger than seemed possible.

The addition of a baby just made them more fucking perfect.

I am not totally, just mostly.

I knew Claire wanted that next ring, and she wanted that next step.

I thought I wanted them too.

Be fair to my friend and lover. She was no schemer. Claire had always been the truth-teller in our group, whether or not the truth needed to be told. She did not lie. She did not manipulate.