Rebecca Makkai: Music for Wartime

Melanie now had three piles to make: the things on the family’s list, intriguing items for Jed, and the artifacts she intended to examine in greater detail when she had the stomach. The Evidence, she felt like calling this last collection. She had no intention of keeping Vanessa’s possessions, and she planned to send a letter (along with the package containing the jewelry, the family photos, the pewter turtle from the bookshelf) saying that although it would take a while to get her affairs in order, she would soon hand over the apartment’s entire contents. She hoped they’d understand.

Her sisters kept telling her she was right to sell and profit from the apartment itself. After all, the caterer, the band, the woman from the reception hall — they’d been apologetic but firm that no, the deposits could not be returned. Then there was the dress and Michael’s engraved ring. And Melanie had missed, so far, twenty days of work, only a fraction of which her boss forgave. (“But don’t you count yourself lucky?” he’d asked. “To be rid of the bastard?”) She considered the apartment her settlement in the civil suit she hadn’t needed to file.

A cracked seashell went into the box for Jed. A sheer black thong, too: What mother would want her daughter’s thong? For the family, a silver bracelet left on the coffee table. An asthma inhaler for Jed. For her own box of evidence: Vanessa’s dead cell phone. Three slim photo albums. She dropped them in by the corners as if they’d been dipped in poison.

Deep in the desk was a phone bill from 2012, with certain charges circled in green — the remnant of some battle with Verizon. Melanie rested her water glass (Vanessa’s water glass) on the counter and scanned the page. Between those circled charges, many calls to Michael’s cell and office. Eleven thirty at night. Three in a row on a Saturday afternoon. This was a year before she’d met Michael herself, before he stole her from her date at a rooftop party and took her for Korean barbecue and midnight bowling, before he put his hand on her wrist and told her his wife was dead.

What the hell. She said it aloud, to the walls and dead plants. She put her forehead on the carpet and screamed the same thing. What. The. Hell . Spoiled by movies, she wanted a video montage to fill her in. She wanted to find a diary with every sordid detail. She wanted the moral permission to call Vanessa’s mother and brother and friends. “Just the past twenty years,” she’d say. “Just give me the past two decades, more or less.”

On the other hand, there was very little of Michael in the apartment. The bottle of scotch could have been his, but who was to say? There was more than one toothbrush in the bathroom, but she had no DNA swabs. On the floor of Vanessa’s closet, behind a row of purses, was an XL T-shirt from the investment firm where Michael worked. She put it aside for Jed.

Then she sat on Vanessa’s couch, Evidence box in her lap. Like a train passenger with luggage on her knees. There were footsteps in the hall, and she flinched. But of course they passed. Who would have been looking for her? Part of her was still waiting for a second bunch of reporters to show up — the tabloids, perhaps — but a wave of tact had apparently washed over the city, as if kindness had leaked out with the gas.

Melanie almost wished there were some intrepid reporter snooping around, interviewing Michael’s cousins, asking what kind of lunatic could pull off so flagrant a lie. Her mother had offered to hire a PI, but really — what would one even find? That the man was a sociopath. Maybe that he and Vanessa had planned to run off with Melanie’s money. None of it would be useful. All of it would be humiliating. So here she was instead: gumshoe, archivist, bereaved.

She should have waited — for more distance, for a shot of whiskey — but sitting right there she opened the top photo album. Baby pictures from the early seventies. A sweet girl, growing, losing teeth, a Laura Ashley phase. The album ended with a shot of Vanessa and her brother at a picnic table, shooting sarcastic glares at the camera. Melanie pulled out the next album to see what havoc adolescence had wreaked, and was greeted instead with a wedding portrait: Vanessa and Michael, nose-to-nose. The same Michael but slimmer, a goatee, smiling so broadly that lines spread from his eyes where one day there would be permanent creases. Vanessa’s dress was simple, off the shoulder, still chic sixteen years after the fact. Melanie shoved the box from her lap and scooted down to the carpet to flip through the other pages. Michael’s late parents she’d seen before in his own photos. There they were, dancing. His sister, with whom he’d always said he had a falling out, would be that concave brunette posing wanly between Michael and his mother. But beyond that, she didn’t recognize a soul. Not the raucous men in tuxedos, arms around Michael, hands mussing his hair. Not the old woman kissing his cheek. Twenty faces around the cutting of the cake. She knew no one.

The last picture hurt her physically: Michael down on one knee, Vanessa’s hand in his, his mouth goofily open in what must have been song. Bridesmaids clapping and laughing. Vanessa’s eyes rolled back in embarrassment or ecstasy or both. Michael had never looked at Melanie with such silly abandon. She’d always found him hollow in a pleasant way, like a Greek urn. It was a silence and melancholy she’d attributed to his losing a wife.

Melanie resisted tearing the plastic sheeting from the photo and tearing the photo itself to shreds. Instead she rose and emptied Jed’s box into a library tote bag. In the box she put a tiny iPod. A pair of blue Cole Haan pumps, size seven and unscuffed. (She was glad they wouldn’t fit her, glad there was no temptation to keep them rather than sell. She could get fifty dollars for those, at least. A decent dinner out.) A full bottle of Chanel. A Cross pen. A green cut-glass vase. An armload of DVDs. She remembered some book she’d read as a child in which a girl had to wander the palace of the gnome king picking out the objects her friends had been transformed into. Here: an Hermès scarf.

She walked the box down the stairs and out the front door, and when she was halfway to her car someone called from the window. “Sad lady! Come inside to sit!” A woman’s voice with an accent. Melanie tried to see through the screen. “I make for you a sandwich.”

She unlocked her car and set the box on the passenger seat.

“I have for you some orange juice!”

Melanie was exhausted. Jed had said they should meet. And the compartmentalizing wasn’t going so well anyway. Plus, could you really say no to a holocaust survivor?

So she turned and went back in.

Zsuzsi looked younger than Melanie expected — the Trib had put her at ninety-four — but she was soft and round, which always hid the wrinkles. “Our young artist tells me about you. Come, come, come, come, come.” She was asking Melanie to follow her, to sit on the cracked blue vinyl of a kitchen chair. Melanie found herself eating a cheese and lettuce sandwich and being introduced to László, who passed the doorway on his tennis-ball-footed walker and nodded briefly. “He spoke once little bit, but after his stroke he knows just Hungarian. He remembers English only for songs he has known many years. He sings still all the Christmas carols. He sings the old commercials. I talked to Chicago Tribune by myself!”

The kitchen, cluttered with Post-its and magnets and pot holders and herbs, smelled like decades of cooking.