CONTENTS
THE RECLUSIVE GENIUS RESPONSIBLE
EXTRA, EXTRA! A HOLLYWOOD NEWS EXCLUSIVE!
A WOMAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
BRING ME THE HEAD OF PENELOPE HAYWARD
IMAGINE YOURSELF A CAMERA
DAY WITHOUT WATER
PROUD PARENT OF AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT
THE GLAZEN SHELVES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE RECLUSIVE GENIUS RESPONSIBLE
DECEMBER 2012
Remember Kelly? This city holds thousands of her ghosts.
As she drives into Portland today, Kelly sees them everywhere. Ghosts in the gas station parking lots where she drank cheap coffee and smoked cloves when young and flailing and moody. Ghosts outside the pubs where Mom inflated her stomach with beer and then called her daughter for a ride. Ghosts on the sidewalks Kelly paced stoned in the months after Mom died when she didn’t know how else to get the energy out. Even the snowbanks look like ghosts—the ghosts of storms she lived through as a teenager. Kelly left this town eleven years ago, but she remembers so much of it, so much of her life here.
And because of this, it kills her how little she remembers about her father.
Oh, there are some images, some feelings—sitting on his lap while he and Mom watched some artsy-fartsy black-and-white movie in which nothing happened, his fingers gliding across the underside of Kelly’s arm while she closed her eyes and her lungs deflated—but she was only three or so back then and not much stuck. She does remember the word though: Girly—what he used to call Mom, and what he used to call his daughter. Once, when Kelly was fifteen, long after her father had left for good, she asked Mom, “Do you know where he is?” Mom jingled ice cubes against the side of her glass as she swirled cranberry juice with vodka. There was music in the other room; she was having a party. “He could be anywhere,” she said.
Anywhere, indeed. Even years later, whenever Kelly jabbed her father’s name, Miles Bennett, into Google, information was scarce. Despite the prominence of the Bennetts in Portland, Miles rarely came up in news stories—according to Mom, he had always been reclusive and uninvolved in the family business, Oakhurst Dairy—and until a week ago, Kelly had no reason to believe he still lived in Maine. But there’s cash there, Kelly believes—no, knows, goddamn it: significant cash, a pregnant cloud of cash over his head, the sort of cash he drizzled from time to time on his estranged family after he’d scrammed. So a few days ago, Kelly scrounged online and scribbled down the names of every Bennett family member she could find involved with the dairy; then she scribbled down—seriously scribbled, her handwriting getting worse and worse, letters seeming to gather tangles of brambles on every curve—as many Bennett names as she could find in the White Pages that sounded even vaguely familiar to her, names that maybe Mom mentioned once or twice. She will visit these people—twenty-seven total—until one of them tells her where to find her father, who has to still live in Portland, has to. And when she finds him, what will he say? Maybe he will open his front door, maybe he will smile white teeth at her, maybe he’ll look at her with those black-ringed eyes—almost beaten looking—and maybe he will say, “Girly—finally.”
But first, Kelly needs her twin brother, Max, though she hates to admit it. Or, more bluntly, she needs a place to stay. So she takes a right, surprised to see a steep decline in front of her. Her wheels scrape rock salt. The car wobbles a bit. Eventually, the road flattens, and she takes a breath and wipes her eyes. Still crying. Cried the whole goddamned drive out here. She points herself toward the only place she knows to find Max: the crammed, beat-up apartment where Mom raised her two children amid faded movie posters and scuffed album covers and scratched records adorning the walls, bead curtains in every doorway, a kitchen filled not with food and plates and silverware but with empty Thai take-out containers. If her brother isn’t there, he shouldn’t be too hard to find, wandering the Old Port, visiting the movie theater or the video store—this, of course, assuming he still lives here at all. Kelly didn’t exactly call ahead to check.
But then, where else would Max have gone?
Turns out she spots him well before she reaches the apartment. A quick glance out her car window as she passes a man with hunched shoulders and a torn peacoat that shows off patches of white fuzz underneath, and hey, there he is, wandering the Old Port, just as she expected. She can make out something in his hand—a book, maybe, clutched there, with paper sticking out the top like a bookmark. She keeps her eyes on him as she passes. His face looks so thin, and his curly hair tangles atop his head with no clear order—probably ages since a haircut. His mouth moves; talking to himself? He walks down the street in the slush, not even on the sidewalk. Maybe somebody needs to stop him, point to the relatively dry cement, and say, Probably safer for you over there, sir.
This is Commercial Street, where the tourists come—the most public part of the city, lined with shops with names like Nautical Treasures and Mainely Goods, selling moose hats and lobster claws you can wear on your hands. At least it’s wintertime, and a particularly frigid day at that, so there aren’t tourists gawking at Max. Still, summer will come—hard to believe, with the city encased in ice.
Kelly finds parking out front a Yankee Candle store, where a teenager in skinny jeans smokes a cigarette. She thinks about bumming one off him, but before she gets out of the car, he steps out his filter on the ground and heads back inside. After checking her face in the mirror once more, she unbuckles her seat belt. The cold outside feels like something physical, a mass of wind chimes hanging in the air that she has to climb through. She positions herself near her trunk. Should she hop onto it? Sure, she decides, why not? But when she tries to jump, her foot skids off the slick bumper; she plummets onto her ass. She regains her footing and reaches into her hoodie pocket, deciding to stand. Casual. No, I’m not doing anything—just hanging out.
“Very interesting,” Max is muttering to himself as he approaches, eyes cast down. “A story of perseverance, you might say…”
“Hey there,” Kelly says in the most ridiculous rendition of a New England accent she can muster. Max looks up, his head snapping back as though yanked from behind by a mugger, eyes landing, terrified, on his sister, like she’s got a knife to his throat. “Sorry to interrupt,” she says, “but can you tell me how to get to Bean’s from here?”
Not an ideal opening line, she knows, this attempt at some good old-fashioned Maine humor—barf—but what else could she say after all these years? Something more meaningful? Give her a break—she has never done meaningful well.
“Oh,” Max says. “You.” And then nothing. Water streaks the lenses of his glasses, either from sweat or from passing beneath melting snow.
They stare at each other as if meeting for a blind date. She sees him completely for the first time in years, and he looks no different from before, still dressed like he used to in high school, in too-big dress slacks, sneakers, and an oversized button-down shirt and peacoat. All his clothes look like something a much fatter father handed down to his son.
“I can’t really talk now,” he says. “I’m busy.”
“You’re busy?”
“Yeah.” He looks down at his muddied sneakers.
Kelly throws up her arms. “Too busy for me, a Christmas miracle?”
“Christmas isn’t for another two weeks,” Max says.
“So? I’m moonlighting as Santa. I brought you presents.”
She expects at least a smirk—something.