Once upon a time, I could ease into a house of mourning as inconspicuously as a neighbor dropping off a coffee cake. An obit writer should not, by nature, be a memorable visitor. But when my crooked shadow falls across the doorstep, people likely think I’ve come grim-reaping. My hair is snow-white, and I’m quite tall, my head only just clearing some of the shorter of the doorjambs, even with an old-lady slouch I’ve had since girlhood. As a gangly teen, I thought it made me lady-like to curl in on myself. I thought it demure to lean forward into invisibility. All the admonishment I took from my concerned aunties for letting my hair fall in my face (flirty-like, one aunt said with disdain) failed to get me to straighten up, but I did take to wrenching it all back into a tight ponytail with silk ribbons, and I do still twist my knotted braids atop my head and riddle them with combs and clips and, my favorite, an ostentatious dragonfly hairpin bejeweled with colored glass. It’s how people know me, for better or worse.
· 5 ·
The January afternoon I was summoned to Daisy’s farm, on the pretense of writing Lenore’s obit, Daisy welcomed me in and brushed the snow off my disgraceful fur coat, a mink that had long been on its last legs. She helped me to unravel the wool scarf I’d wrapped around my head, fussing with it when it caught on the wings of my dragonfly hairpin. She stuffed the scarf into a sleeve of my coat and hung the coat on the corner of the open closet door.
We sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee, and after she told me stories of Lenore’s childhood, all stories I’d heard before, she poured more coffee into my cup, though I’d yet to drink a sip. The coffee smelt burnt somehow, and it spilled over the brim. I held my hand above the rising steam in hopes of nursing my stiff joints.
Daisy pulled a thin cardigan tight over her shoulders. She wore a wispy blue dress meant for summer. She had a craggy, haggard beauty, all her troubles having taken their toll. Even sitting still and shivering, she had a bitter edge, a low-level fierceness. Middle age had rendered Daisy wasted and lovely both.
Daisy bit at the dry skin of her lip.
“Your lip’s bleeding, sweetie,” I said.
Daisy took the tissue tucked into the cuff of her sweater and dabbed at her lip. She pulled the tissue away to check the spot of blood, then dabbed again, then checked again. She kept dabbing and checking until the spots of blood shrank away.
“I know you’re not going to print what I’ve told you,” Daisy said, gesturing toward my notes in my steno pad, making a little scribbling motion in the air.
I removed my reading spectacles, partly for effect—like a doctor pained by the diagnosis he’s delivering—and partly because of the glasses’ weight on the bridge of my nose. I set them atop my notebook. “No,” I said, “we won’t print it.” I took off my watch, heavy on my wrist. How many more winters until my bones simply shattered beneath the weight of my skin? I lifted the dragonfly hairpin from the knotted braid atop my head. The insect’s hooked legs had felt snagged in my hair, yanking at my scalp with my every nod. “I won’t be writing an obituary for Lenore.”
“Then what’d you come here for?” Daisy said, looking up at me with genuine interest.
“I thought it might help you,” I said. “I want to help you.” Help her, I thought, sneering to myself, even then. We were the ones who’d done all the damage, every last one of us. How could any of us help? I unclasped the cluster of rhinestones clipped to my left earlobe, a cumbersome piece of costume jewelry, and placed it among my other things. I hear best with that ear. “Daisy, I think you’re hurt, is what I think. I think your heart is broken. Do you think my heart’s never been broken? I know what such a thing does. If there’s anything I know from this life, I know what heartbreak does.”
Daisy said nothing, only stared at my undrunk cup of coffee. I then felt compelled to drink it. I leaned over to sip off the excess before lifting the cup. The coffee tasted humid, like the smell of a dishcloth left in the sink.
“Okay, I’ll tell you the truth, Mrs. Myles,” Daisy said.
“Please,” I said, putting my chin in my hand and leaning forward, my good ear out.
“I lied,” she said. “I don’t really think Lenore is dead. I wanted you to write her obituary, and to print it, to wake everybody up. People would be disgusted by it, an obit for Lenore; I know they would. And they’d care about her again. Because, Mrs. Myles, I know he didn’t kill her. He loved her. That’s why he took her. She’s somewhere alive, and afraid.”
Finally a tear rolled down her cheek and over the pout of her lower lip. I was unmoved. Maybe I didn’t want to help her at all. Maybe I just wanted to hear a confession, and I wanted to be the one to tell the truth to others. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll still have this infantile need to know everything before everyone else.
None of this was an effort toward closure. It seemed just another beginning in a story that was all beginnings. And that was probably why my little town couldn’t get enough of it. We were so tired of endings.
· 6 ·
But if we were to begin at the beginning, we would need to begin, strangely enough, with a book, the eleventh book in an eleven-book series. Many of you have read it at least once by now, whether aloud to a child at bedtime or simply to yourself. The eleven-book saga took years to unfold, invoking nightmares among generations of children. Many otherwise stable men and women well into their forties still feel struck with the heebie-jeebies when they recall the gothic predicaments of the two sisters, Miranda and Desiree, the innocent wards of Rothgutt’s Asylum for Misguided Girls.
The eleventh book was long anticipated. We were finally to learn the fate of Miranda and Desiree, who’d spent the first ten books longing for their mother to come and collect them from the dank, infested halls of Rothgutt’s. Even if you had never read a word of the Miranda-and-Desirees, it was impossible not to be versed in the language of the books, and their characters and places, and to be curious about how it all might end.
The first Miranda-and-Desiree books were morbid curiosities with small print runs, but eventually mad housewives in Middle America challenged the books at their local libraries. The books worked their way up the national banned books lists; they went up in smoke in bonfires fueled by zealots. When one First Lady took as her cause a campaign against violence in children’s entertainment and censured the Miranda-and-Desirees for their inappropriate carnival of calamities, it was as if the publisher had rigged the lottery.
And that was how my family’s newspaper, the County Paragraph, came to use its press to print a portion of the Miranda-and-Desiree novels. The series’ publisher was a company in New York called Henceforth Books, and it was seeking presses in obscure parts of the country where it could covertly print the novels, avoiding the security breaches that had led to thieved copies, details leaked, plots spoiled. Executives of Henceforth consulted a Washington Post article called “The Last Gasps of the Small-Town Chronicle,” in which the Paragraph was profiled among several little-town Tribunes, Republics, Heralds, Independents, Sentinels, and Optimists.
Doc, my grandson, was unhappy with the article—he’d been painted with a broad brush as a tad hapless, having built, in the country, a massive new state-of-the-art press, anticipating contracts with other area publications—a miscalculation, as newspapers decades old, some of them more than a century old, toppled all around us with minimal fanfare.
Though Doc foolishly underbid in his determination to become one of the several small-town publishers printing the books,