Laura Benedict: The Erstwhile Groom

Finally, the door is open. Kurt is afraid to look inside the room, but he steels himself and squats down to inch his way in, the beam of a flashlight leading him on.

* * * *

Kurt lay in bed, looking at his burned and swollen hands. His hands had killed a man, yet he felt little remorse. It would take time for Livia to come to him, he knew. But he would be there for her, waiting.

“Kurt!” His mother’s voice was a fierce whisper.

Kurt sat up to see his mother in the doorway in her long nightgown, her gray and black hair hanging over her shoulders.

“There’s someone in the house,” she said. “In the basement.”

“No,” Kurt said. “There’s no one there.” But he felt the fear rising in his body.

“He’s pounding on something,” she said. “I can hear him.”

Kurt couldn’t speak. No one had broken into the house. The knowledge that Danny Kelley was still alive down in the hidden room flooded over him.

“Go!” she said. “You’re the man now, Kurt. Do you think your father wouldn’t go and see? You get his gun from the bureau. I will call the police.”

Kurt, his hands shaking, went to his father’s empty room and got the gun.

“Don’t call the police,” he whispered as he went downstairs. “Promise me you won’t call. Let me do this.”

“You call,” she said. “I don’t want to go back down there.”

He closed the bedroom door and heard her lock it behind him.

In the dark kitchen, he opened the basement door and stood, listening, to Danny Kelley.

* * * *

The musty air of the room steals his breath away just as it had when he had first stood there beside his father a lifetime ago. The beam from the flashlight picks out a pair of shoes lying in the middle of the floor. They are surrounded by toy soldiers — a hundred or more — and look like giant fortresses that the soldiers had been unable to scale.

Knowing that the shoes cannot be all that is left of Danny Kelley, Kurt forces himself to slide the beam across the wall, where he sees the familiar scratchings of the slaves who’d once hidden themselves here. But he doesn’t stop to examine them. They are nothing to him.

He finds Danny Kelley, who is little more than a dusty pile of outdated, cheap clothes with bits of bone sticking out of them, in the corner behind the door. For more than twenty years, the Danny Kelley of his nightmares and dreams was a ghoul, a half-alive creature who lived behind a door that was twenty times the size of the one standing open behind Kurt. Danny Kelley was the echo of a hoarse voice, cries punctuated by the sound of weakening fists pounding at the door. But the bugs — the eaters of the dead — had long ago made their way through the hard-packed dirt and found Danny Kelley.

Finally unafraid, Kurt inspects the wall nearest the skeleton to see if maybe Danny Kelley had scratched Livia’s name into the wall with his dying strength. But Kurt had emptied Danny Kelley’s pockets before putting him in the room, taking his cigarettes, money, keys, and matches. Danny Kelley had died in the dark, an erstwhile groom forever separated from his bride. But he would no longer be alone.

* * * *

Kurt’s mother would not leave the house until it was over. For those first few days, the most worrisome days, the days when Kurt would begin to shake and sweat at work thinking about Danny Kelley, she would play the piano for hours on end to keep from hearing the noise coming from the basement. At night she played the radio just loudly enough. She would make Kurt cold suppers so she wouldn’t have to linger too near the basement door. They would eat on the back porch or upstairs in his father’s old bedroom. Then, for a whole day, then two, then three, they heard nothing.

* * * *

Kurt replaces the shelves and restocks them, filling a single bag to take upstairs. He crumples the empty bag that had held the fertilizer he’d hurriedly sprinkled over Brent’s body at the last moment, hoping that it had enough lime in it to have some effect.

He finds Livia sitting at the dining room table. Livia — who he knows is made of iron inside — sits slumped over the table with her head resting on her arms. His heart aches for her, for Mitzy. At his touch, Livia looks up. Her face is lined with care, but she hasn’t been crying. It is Mitzy who will be their biggest worry.

Kurt sits in the chair beside her rather than at his usual place at the head of the table. Upstairs, Mitzy, with the help of a couple of painkillers from an old prescription, is finally sleeping.

“I was thinking,” Kurt says softly, “of who Brent reminded me of.”

Livia shakes her head. “No, not now,” she says. She reaches out to cover Kurt’s hand briefly with her own, then goes into the kitchen. Kurt hears her get a glass from the cabinet and turn on the faucet. The water runs and runs, and the sweet, domestic sound of it blends with his single thought: She knows about everything.

For the benefit of Eda Hidebaugh, when it is full dark, Livia combs back her hair and Kurt helps her don Brent’s letter jacket. He watches as she backs Brent’s car out into the alley and drives away to leave it in the lot of a bar to which he often took Mitzy. A half-hour later, praying that Mitzy will stay in her stuporous sleep, Kurt picks up Livia and drops her off a few blocks from home.

He is waiting when Livia comes in by the front door, which is hidden from Eda Hidebaugh’s gaze. When she holds out the handkerchief that he had given her to wipe her fingerprints from the car, Kurt takes her into his arms to pull her firmly to him. Her body feels soft and malleable to him, as though he could pull her close enough that they could become one person. She belongs to him now, and no one else.