The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

  Gigi opened the door for me. That was hardly a surprise but what was were the four new purplish patches I now saw on her left forearm, spaced as far apart as the last four fingers of a large hand could get from each other. “Sorry, Mrs Baker,” she said as a layer of white appeared over her person. “But I was told I’d lose my job if I let you in again.”

  “You won’t,” I replied, in that kind, dainty Marilyn Monroe voice I was starting to be able to do so effortlessly. “I promise. And here, just to prove to you I keep all of my promises.”

  I handed her the notebook I’d written in. “Thirty of my best recipes for you to use in whichever way you need.”

  Harps. The sound of a warplane flying overhead. Bach’s Prelude in C Major. Just as I thought.

  I winked at her and took the opportunity to squeeze between her and the door frame before she could protest.

  “Oh-lah!” The Marshmallow Man shouted the second I entered the living room. He was sitting in the middle of a mess of colourful toys all by himself, looking very harpy.

  “Where’s your mummy?” I asked as I passed him.

  “Esta durmiendo,” he replied, without even having to think.

  I thanked him in English, went up the stairs and pushed open the closed door of the bitch’s bedroom without knocking.

  “Jesus!” the bitch said, the second she saw me come in. “Get the hell out!”

  She was in bed, propped in a sitting position by two pillows, wearing crumpled pyjamas without a bra underneath, with bed hair and an unmade face, looking every bit like a crazy woman should. Tiny greyish-blueish specks of dust all over her forehead indicated sentiments of exhaustion while the whooshing of swaying wind I was hearing at the sight of her indicated nausea.

  In one hand, she had a cheery yellow tablet. In the other, a half-filled bottle of gin. The same bottle she had been drinking from in the living room the night before, I think. Next to her on the bedside table was a translucent orange prescription bottle with a white cap.

  “Valium?” I said after reading the label with the crazy bitch’s name on it. “That explains a lot.”

  “Who died and made you doctor?” She tossed the yellow tablet into her mouth and downed it with gin anyway. “Get out! You have no right to be in here! Gigi!”

  I walked over to her side of the bed and sat down. Close enough for our thighs to touch. “Let’s finish our conversation first. What do you know about the alien?”

  The bitch made a rude sound, set the bottle of gin on her bedside table and turned her back to me, removing her thigh from mine. She put one hand over her eyes and grabbed the top of her head with the other as the sound of whooshing in my ears got louder. “I’m not in the mood today,” she mumbled. “Go away before I make Gigi make you.”

  “Hank works at Area 51, doesn’t he?” I said, just to get her attention. “Just like Charlie.”

  The bitch lifted her hand from over her eyes and peeped out ever so slightly.

  “Hank talks in his sleep. He talks about working for the CIA and also about… the alien they found. The alien they now have in captivity at Area 51.”

  That made the bitch turn back around all right. She sat right up and looked every bit like a homeless bag lady who hadn’t showered in months. “What does it look like, do you know? What can it do?” A huge, translucent beige rectangle appeared over her body.

  “He doesn’t say.”

  She grabbed both my shoulders with a death grip and shook me somewhat violently, with eyes wide and somewhat wild. “What did it do to Violet? How did it do it?”

  I plucked her hands off my shoulders and observed her face and the sounds in my ears very carefully. “What happened to Violet, Ethel? What happened the night she… did it?”

  A screech of bad violin. All my goose pimples rose. The crazy bitch turned a deep blue at once, and said, “She did not do anything! She was not that sort of person!”

  “Are you sure?”

  Her dark eyes met mine then became partly shrouded by the few grey lines that ran down her face like the bars of a jail cell—lines that told me a human being was feeling defensive. “Can I trust you?” she whispered, in a tone that suggested she presently didn’t.

  “Yes.” I stuck out the baby finger of my right hand and offered it to her. ‘The universal declaration of alliance’, Lilly said it was. “I won’t tell anyone about you and Violet if you don’t tell anyone what I’ve been doing in my husband’s study. From this day on, we work together. Help each other.”

  She turned her eyes to my finger but did not move to take it. The inevitable consequence of having been blackmailed, I suppose.

  “Why,” she asked. Carefully.

  Fire truck sirens blared in my ears. “I need to know if my husband had anything to do with it.”

  She looked up from my finger and back into my eyes.

  “Or if yours did,” I added.

  That worked. The bitch curled her baby finger around mine and squeezed. Hard.

  Lilly was right. Scaring and confusing a person is a good way to get them to do what you need indeed.

  The bitch told Gigi to take Daniel to the playground for two hours then ordered me to close all curtains in her house while she locked herself in her bathroom to tidy up.

  When I finished all curtains, I found her back out in her bedroom dressed in another one of those leisure suits of hers, looking and smelling much fresher than she had before, with make up on, although she kept a towel up in her hair, possibly because it was still damp. She told me to close the door behind me and join her at the chest of drawers she stood in front of so I did.

  The third drawer from the bottom was full of washed towels that looked so crisp, they looked like they would be a delight to use. She sank her arms into its depths and pulled them back out when she had a slip of yellow note paper in one hand. The paper had been folded into half twice and was not very big. Its yellow was familiar—the yellow of the notepad Baker had on the desk in his study. She unfolded it and handed it to me.

  I saw a mass of grey on the inside—someone had shaded almost the entire paper with the side of a pencil. In between the shading were words that hadn’t or couldn’t have been shaded over. It was a handwritten body of text. Baker’s handwriting. It read: ‘E alien got out of its cell, killed her, then went back. Just outside Dreamland. Security found her. Bad. Real bad. Broke her neck. Tore her limbs apart.’ Around the text were tiny circular areas that looked as if they were sunken in, as if the paper dried in that shape after being wet by droplets of water. Tears, most likely.

  “Hank banged at our door at four in the morning and went right into Charlie’s study. He was crying. I’d never seen him cry before so I asked him what the matter was but he wouldn’t say and closed the door on me. I tried to listen in but they never said a word. A few minutes later, they both left and I found this.”

  The bitch turned a deep shade of dull blue as her eyes became a little bloodshot.

  “Twelve hours later, Charlie called home and told me Violet had jumped off a cliff along the Santa Susana Mountains. Baker told everyone she killed herself but I knew she never would have. She was not the sort of person who would have chosen to end her own life. She had never been.”

  The bitch sighed and made the dull blue about her person spread to the dresser she was standing next to. Bad notes of violin screamed in my ears as a tear fell down her cheek and dragged a streak of eyeliner down with it. She went for her bottle of gin and I didn’t stop her.

  More alcohol would depress her central nervous system, impair her memory and reduce her ability to judge situations and other people properly, I knew. Why not, if it would keep her talking in the most honest manner possible?

  “We used to do everything together. Everything you’ve been doing in Hank’s study, we did together. We found our husbands suspicious at the same time, found out where our husbands really worked, found out ‘Dreamland’ was code for Area 51 and so much mo
re. I knew every little thing about her and I know ‘not being able to have a son’ would never have crossed her mind. She used birth control in secret all her life for God’s sake! Ariel only happened because her diaphragm failed. We were so happy as we were and perfectly content until...”

  She stopped and became an even deeper shade of blue, turning the carpet blue too this time. Screechy violins went wild in my ears.

  I knew it would hurt her if I prodded further, so I prodded. “Until?”

  A deafening, misshapen screech ran down my spine.

  “Until Daniel happened. Everything between us went to hell after that.” She sighed. Or gasped for air. I couldn’t quite tell. “She...”

  She shook her head, tipped her bottle back with trembling blue hands and glugged more.

  I didn’t stop her. Why would I have? I might have even offered her the bottle myself if she hadn’t already gone for it.

  “She started going out a lot. Alone. Especially at night. The night she got murdered, she snuck out. I saw her go but I was feeding Daniel and couldn’t go after her. Maybe I should have. Maybe if I had, if I had just continued being there with her, for her, she wouldn’t be dead now. It’s partly my fault. Partly Charlie’s fault. Partly the fault of the pastor who convinced me abortions were a sin.”

  More black streaks appeared on her cheeks. The blue from her person spread until every object in the room was a dull, thick, heavy-looking coat of blue. The screeches I had been hearing got only louder and more painful to listen to. My ears began to smart, my skin began to crawl and only then did I decide it would be best if I got the bottle away from her and held it up in the air out of her reach.

  She fought me to get it back. Jumped and nearly smacked me a couple of times with her flailing hands in an attempt to reach it. To stop her from struggling, I grabbed her with my free arm, pulled her to my chest and held her there, tight. She struggled at first. Squirmed and tried to fight her way out like a captive prisoner would but couldn’t get away because I had one advantage over her—I was sober. My brain was in order, my judgement was clear, I could see properly and my muscles were all connected and coordinated as they should be. Hers weren’t. She could hardly even stand still.

  She fought me till the reality of the situation finally registered within her, till the towel in her hair came undone and she was looking somewhat like a feral human being who had only just climbed out of a river. When that happened, she decided to bang her head repeatedly against my shoulder instead, as if trying to give herself a concussion.

  That hurt me more than it hurt her. Her senses had been dulled by all that alcohol but mine were as alert as ever. I could feel every one of her bangs in every nerve, taste them too, and it made me wince so I grabbed the back of her head and pushed it down against my chest to stop her from attacking me with it. She fought against that too but I persisted. We were the same height but I had broader shoulders and thicker limbs so it wasn’t hard to do. She, skinny and frail, wobbly, drugged and drunk out of her mind, slurring and swaying like a reed in the wind, had no way of winning me.

  A minute later, the crazy bitch was all worn out and my chest was damp from her fluids. She went limp and dropped the full of her weight onto me, which made me stumble backwards and nearly fall along with her. She wasn’t particularly heavy but she wasn’t weightless either. I had to set her bottle down on the first surface I came upon just to hold on to her properly. She would have melted onto the ground otherwise because she had become without strength of her own, no different from a newborn or ragdoll who was also making crying noises, vibrating the way a person would when receiving electroshock therapy and flooding the hollow of my collarbone with trickles of warm fluids.

  I wasn’t used to holding a non-sedated human being so close for that many minutes at a go. It felt very odd, frankly, and had she been any other person, say any of the women who liked fashion or knitting, or even Lilly, I would have kept a safe distance from her the instant she began her theatrics, until she got over her emotions on her own. Lucky for her though, that morning, I realised I needed her.

  I needed her because she seemed to know Violet way better than Hank did. She had spent way more time around her than he did and likely knew things about her he did not.

  I pulled her closer to my chest and steadied myself so that we both could remain standing in a stable manner.

  That morning, I held on to her for as long as she wanted.

  When Gigi returned home with The Marshmallow Man soundly asleep on her shoulder, she found the bitch and I seated in front of the twenty-five inch TV in the living room eating the tinned stew I found in the kitchen and had heated up on the stove.

  “There’s some for you too,” I said when I saw her. “In the dining room.”

  It must have been years since anybody made Gigi lunch because that was enough to make her day. She thanked me fervently and marched upstairs to get Daniel all cleaned up to the rhythm of harps. He was all sweaty and red in the cheeks, but even in his sleep was sounding pretty harpy to me too.

  The bitch didn’t once turn her head to look at him or Gigi. She simply put spoonfuls of stew into her mouth at regular intervals and chewed like her jaws were automated by clockwork. Although her eyes were bloodshot and puffy, I didn’t hear any sound when looking at her. She sounded, to me, no different from a statue. A lifeless object with no feelings going on within whatsoever.

  “Feeling better?” I asked when Gigi had gone out of earshot, mainly because I knew it was what everybody expected a decent person to do at some point.

  “Yes. Thanks. And… thanks. For the hug. It’s been a while.”

  She was only a little blue when she said so. No longer blue enough to be staining the objects around her. The hug did that to her, I realised. It was way more efficient at decreasing sadness in a human being than alcohol was. Worked way faster than Valium too. I slotted the new piece of insight into my brain for future use then jumped right back into pretending to be friendly.

  “No problem. So, what do you want to do now? We have three hours before we need to get started with cooking dinner so how about tea with the girls? At the mall? I could phone them if you want. Or we could go shopping?”

  She didn’t reply. She didn’t hear me, I think. She was staring right at my eyes but I could tell she wasn’t even seeing me. There was the sound of a clock ticking in my ear, way louder than the ones in the physical environment usually were. It went tick, tick, tick, tick... endlessly. Ticking like a busy mind.

  “Ethel?”

  Tick, tick, tick, tick...

  “Ethel?”

  “I need to know everything our husbands aren’t telling us. I need to see the alien, know why it killed Violet, how it killed Violet and where it came from.”

  Oh, hey, what a coincidence. Me too. “How? Nobody ever gets into Area 51—”

  “But some have seen into it, haven’t they? A long time ago, Violet told me about a couple of trekkers who got a glimpse into it. They climbed a mountain and saw everything. We have to go do it too.”

  A warplane flew past my ears. In that moment, I noticed every time that happened, I wouldn’t be hearing violins, gunshots or static electricity at all.

  Chapter 13

  7 July 1975, Monday

  The bitch made up the plan to go see into Area 51 all by herself. She found the mountain, found the route, crafted the schedule and told me to tell my husband we were going to Los Angeles for four days to check out the malls there.

  I thought the excuse ridiculous. We had the biggest mall in California right where we were so I was pretty certain Baker would just know we were lying and up to something. Imagine my surprise when the bitch ignored my protests, asked him for permission on my behalf and got him saying yes within seconds.

  Because spending four days in a city just an hour away for the sole purpose of checking out malls is normal. Right. Understood and stored for future use too.

  We left in the
bitch’s car shortly after waving our husbands away on Monday morning. Gigi then went back to the porch with The Marshmallow Man in her arms to wave us off too. She made me hear harps, likely because she was being paid extra to stay with the baby while the bitch was away. The Marshmallow Man was as smiley as ever too. He didn’t seem to mind the sight of his mother driving away with suitcases in the back of her car. He even waved enthusiastically.

  The bitch got us on the road and picked up speed. Next to her in the front, I smelled gin again and began tasting sawdust with a tinge of sauerkraut when she blasted the radio and began singing in a loud sound-cylinder-inducing way while making sharp turns without slowing down. I offered to drive, even though the noise within the car was making it hard for me to see, but she insisted on doing it. She was feeling fine, she said. Better than fine, actually.

  She drove like a drunk all the way to Las Vegas and sounded like a ton of harps the whole way through. A multi-hour harp-estra with percussions of warplane.

  No screeching, no buzzing. Just harps and warplane. Just the way life should be.

  Four hours later, we were driving into the biggest car rental dealer in Las Vegas and swopping her Gremlin for a dusty Dispatcher Jeep with giant wheels, a giant spare tire mounted on the right rear and a waterproof canvas top that could be folded all the way down. We then stopped at the nearest diner for lunch, beers and bathrooms before popping into a mall to purchase the items we needed to survive our adventure—hiking boots; hiking jacket; hiker’s backpacks; MSR portable stove; grill plate; waterproof safety matches; cans of spam, baked beans, wieners and tuna; bread and cheese; can opener; paper plates; plastic forks; trash bags; flashlights; binoculars; sleeping bags; tent; compass; area map; Gatorade and bottled water.

  The bitch chose all the items, paid and kept time. I simply followed behind, counting the hairs on the back of her head to protect myself from sound cylinders when in the mall, and helped carry bags when needed.