Carolyn Parkhurst - The Dogs of Babel

“Yes, it is,” she says. “And who am I speaking to?”

“Paul,” I say.

“Well, Paul, honey, why don’t you tell Lady Arabelle your birthday, so we can get started.”

“September twentieth,” I say. “But I’m not calling for a reading.”

“Oh, no?” she says. Her voice is smooth as warm caramel.

“No,” I say. I try to figure out where to begin. “I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks. You see, my wife died last October, and then a couple of months ago, I was watching TV, and I heard you talking to her on one of your commercials. She’s the one who said, ‘I’m lost, I don’t know what to do.’ Do you know the one I’m talking about?”

“Well, of course I know the commercial, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything about any one particular call. It’s confidential, for one thing, and to be honest with you, I can’t say I remember the details of every call I take.”

“No, of course not. But if you could just think about it for a minute, if you could just try to remember. It’s very important to me.”

She starts to say something, but I interrupt her and go on in a rush. “As for confidentiality,” I say, “I’m sure you have your rules, but do they still apply when the person you spoke to is dead?”

Lady Arabelle sighs. “You know,” she says, “it may not even have been your wife’s voice that you heard. It might have been another woman entirely. Isn’t it possible that in your grief you might have been mistaken?”

“I know my wife’s voice,” I say. I’m surprised at the coldness of my tone. I take a breath and compose myself. “Anyway,” I say, “I found it on my phone bill. October twenty-third. Eleven twenty-three P.M. Eastern time. You spoke to her for forty-six minutes. Surely you can remember something. You can at least try.” She doesn’t say anything, so I continue. “Look, you’ve got me on the phone for five dollars a minute, and I’m not planning on hanging up until I get an answer out of you. How often does an opportunity like that come along?”

She doesn’t laugh, but when she speaks, I can hear she’s softened. “Why don’t you tell me about your wife?” she says.

And so I do. I tell her everything I can think of. I tell her about how I met Lexy; I tell her about how Lexy died. I tell her about the lonely months I’ve spent since then, unraveling clues that may not be clues at all. My work with Lorelei, the open gate, the empty yard. I have no idea how long I’ve talked, but when I finally stop, my throat is dry.

There’s a long silence after I finish talking. “Lady Arabelle,” I say. “Are you there?”

“I’m here, baby,” she says.

“So… did that help?” I say. “Did it help you remember anything about Lexy’s call?” My voice cracks. I don’t think I’ll be able to bear it if she says no.

“I think I can help you,” she says. I let out a breath that sounds like a sob. “I don’t remember the call, I have to be honest with you. I get a couple hundred calls a month, and most of them sound pretty much the same after a while. But I do keep notes.”

Notes! Oh, God, she has notes from Lexy’s phone call! I don’t trust my voice to answer her.

“I’m writing a book,” she says. “About my experiences as Lady Arabelle. Starting last fall, I’ve kept notes on every call I’ve taken. If you give me the date and time again, I can look and see what I have, and I’ll call you back.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you. I can’t tell you…”

“I know, baby,” she says.

I give her the information and my phone number, and we hang up. I’m shaking all over. I feel jubilant, and I feel afraid.

It’s full morning now, and the sun is coming through the windows. I’ve got to calm down. I’ve got to find something to occupy my mind while I wait for Lady Arabelle to call me back. I sit down to compose a “Lost Dog” ad, but as soon as I write the words “Missing: Eight-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback,” tears come to my eyes and I have to put down the pen. Instead, I go into my office and turn on my laptop. I still haven’t finished listing the books on the shelf. I stretch out on the floor in front of the bookcase and begin to list the books on the bottom two shelves.

To Have and to Hold (Ours. It’s a book about writing your own wedding vows. We bought it before we got married.)

The Toad Not Taken: The Linguistic Value of Puns (Mine.)

Out of the Rat Race and into the Chips (Mine. It was written by the grandfather of a girl I dated in college. It describes how the author started his own mail-order business and was able to make lots of money and still play golf every afternoon.)

Your Fortune in Mail-Order Selling (Mine. Same girlfriend, same grandfather.)

Exercises for a Healthy Heart (Mine. It’s a novel that I found misshelved in the fitness section of a bookstore.)

A Handbook of Dreams (Hers. A book on dream interpretation.)

Flesh Wounds (Hers. A wryly funny collection of short stories.)

Papier-Mâché Arts and Crafts (Hers.)

Put a Lid on It: Managing Your Anger (Hers.)

Learn to Play Piano in Fourteen Days (Mine.)

The City of One (Mine. A futuristic sci-fi thriller.)

A History of the English Language (Mine.)

Stone Shoes and Other Fables (Hers.)

That’s all of them, and I still know nothing. I’m beginning to feel sleepy. I was up all night, after all. I put my head down on the carpet. It feels blessedly soft against my cheek. I close my eyes and sleep.

I dream that I come upon Lexy sitting in the kitchen, chopping an onion. In the dream, I can feel my eyes stinging from the sharp smell.

She looks up at me and smiles. “I was going to peel it,” she says. “But you can only peel so many layers before you have to cut it.”

“Lexy,” I say, “you’re alive.” But what I feel isn’t surprise or joy or wonder. I’m furious at her. I’ve never been so angry.

“I meant to call,” she says.

“You meant to call?” I say sharply. “Well, that does me a lot of good.”

Lexy laughs. “Sorry,” she says.

“You can’t just come back here,” I say. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? What the fuck were you thinking?” I’m shouting at her now.

“Do you want me to go?” she says, standing up from the table.

“No,” I say. “Just go back to cutting your fucking onion.”

The dream gets strange after that—there’s something else, something about how Lexy needs her body back, the body I buried. I don’t know how we’re going to get it back for her. “This is your fault,” I yell at Lexy. I’m screaming, I’m out of control. “If you hadn’t let it go in the first place, we wouldn’t have to get it back.”

I wake up with the anger still hot in my stomach. The phone is ringing. I look at it for a moment, disoriented, before picking it up.

It’s Lady Arabelle. “I found my notes,” she says. “There’s something you’re not going to want to hear.”

I take a deep breath. “I’ve got to know,” I say.

“All right, honey. Listen to me, now.” She waits a moment. I can hear her rustling through pages of notes, although I know she already knows what she’s going to say. Break down Lady Arabelle and what do you find? Read and bleed.Lay bare.

“Your wife,” Lady Arabelle says. “She was pregnant.”

I’m silent for a long time. When I finally speak, my voice sounds very far away.

“Yes,” I say. “I know.”

Ididn’t know before she died. She never told me herself. It showed up in the autopsy, of course; Detective Stack called to give me the news. She was two months along. But I knew even before that. I had found a scrap of paper, a corner of cardboard from a box that had contained a home pregnancy test. I didn’t find the test itself; she was careful to get rid of that. But in the bathroom trash—I’ll admit now that in those first days, I tore apart the house looking for hints as to what had happened, I went through every piece of lint on the carpet and every soggy, coffee-stained envelope in the garbage—and in the bathroom trash, underneath the tissues and cotton swabs and tangles of minted floss, I found a scrap of pink cardboard that she must have missed. It was one of the… anomalies I found during those terrible days. One of the clues that started me down this path. The piece of cardboard had three letters on it: CLE. I didn’t recognize the lettering or the color of the cardboard as anything we had had in the house recently, so I went to the drugstore with my little pink scrap in my hand, and I walked the aisles until I found the box it matched up with. The letters were from the word “clear,” and the box contained a home pregnancy test. And I knew.