Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town Read online

  Martha surveyed the Slovenian ice cream guy and said, “Nah, neither one of us has a speech impediment.” She had no idea what that was, but it was a big word, so if they’d had one, they would have known.

  They were ten at the time. Jane was the one who had the Webster’s dictionary, another gift from the traveling librarian, so she looked it up and confirmed that Martha was right: he probably wasn’t their father.

  “So, get this,” Martha said, flopping herself down on Jane’s couch, making dust particles fly into the air.

  “Oops. Sorry, Huckleberry.”

  Jane’s dog sniffed close to Martha, smelled her breath, then backed away suspiciously.

  Jane laughed. “What kind of toothpaste is Zoe making now?”

  “Oh. Absinthe,” Martha said distractedly.

  Jane had tried Zoe’s toothpaste once, but it tasted like bird poop.

  “Zoe’s diary talks about how a guy built her an outhouse before he left,” said Martha.

  “An outhouse?”

  “Yeah, his last great token of love.”

  “Wouldn’t you have been considered a last great token of love, if he was your father? I mean, before an outhouse?”

  Martha seemed not to have heard her.

  Jane wondered then—and secretly not for the first time—if she and Martha could really have the same father. She knew her mother would not view an outhouse as a token of love.

  Martha had started to worry Jane. She seemed restless and edgy, and a few steps ahead, as if she was already moving on from the only life they’d ever known.

  And suddenly she was interested in outhouses? There were a few forgotten ones, tilting precariously along the bluffs, but the girls usually steered clear of them, for obvious reasons.

  “You’re on your own for this one,” Jane said. “Not my thing. Not anyone’s thing, actually.”

  The last person who had used the abandoned outhouses had been the Slovenian ice cream man.

  “Don’t you want to know?” Martha asked. “Maybe he carved his name in the wall or something.”

  So Jane begrudgingly trudged along behind Martha to the slanted building punctuating the hillside. There had been no directions in Zoe’s diary, and there were four other outhouses in various locations, but Jane didn’t mention this because she hoped they were only going to check out the one that Martha had her sights on and then go eat the picnic lunch they’d brought along. It was so old it didn’t even smell bad anymore. There were mouse turds along the wooden seat, and the blue Styrofoam was chewed all around the hole. An old license plate from Washington state dangled precariously by one nail. The date said 1980: fifteen years ago.

  “What if that was his?” Martha whispered as if they were in church, not a literal shithole.

  Both girls had been born in 1981, a few months apart. Of course their mothers couldn’t be friends, just do the math! Something live scurried around down in the hole, and Huckleberry barked like a maniac.

  “Can we go, please?” Jane said.

  “I spend hours with you and your stupid mollusks,” Martha said, which was true.

  “Okay, but what else is there to see?”

  Martha shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right. Let’s go have a picnic.”

  It was a beautiful day, but clouds were hugging the far horizon, and the girls knew they needed to get to the other side of the beach, where, if the wind changed direction and it did rain, they’d just barely be out of reach of it.

  Huckleberry got there first, spinning in circles and kicking up sand until the girls shooed him off so they could spread out their blanket and unpack their food: liverwurst sandwiches from Mama, barbecued tempeh from Zoe.

  “If you write the word ‘love’ on your water bottle, it makes the water taste better,” Martha told Jane as they sat hidden from view, out of the wind, sipping carefully because sand had crusted the rims of their bottles.

  “You mean I won’t notice the sand between my teeth if the bottle says ‘love’?” Jane asked.

  Martha laughed. “You’re so funny, Jane. But yes, it can even change the physical composition of the water.”

  “What do you mean, I’m so funny?”

  “I just mean, you know, provincial.”

  She said it as if she’d just looked it up and had been waiting for the right moment to use it. Which she probably had.

  Martha also cleared her throat and announced, “I’m going to remake myself into a totally different person.”

  “Like who?” Jane asked, her mouth full of liverwurst.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a hippie.”

  “Technically, I think you already are one,” said Jane, pointing at the tempeh sandwich.

  “Okay, maybe not a hippie. I just want a chance to start over somewhere and be a whole new person. I think I’m ready to be in a bigger place. And I’m dying to have sex.”

  Jane felt her face grow hot. So that was what Martha meant by “provincial.”

  “God, Jane, see what I mean? You can’t even talk about sex, which is the most natural thing in the world.”

  If it was the most natural thing in the world, why did both their mothers act as though they’d all just washed up here at high tide?

  But Zoe talked to Martha all the time about her body and the weird things it was doing, while Mama, of course, did not talk to Jane. And in this instance, Jane was relieved. But it was the first thing that had come between her and Martha, and it wasn’t like she could just go hang out with other girls who were late bloomers like herself. Jane hadn’t even gotten one zit yet. Martha had zits and armpit hair and boobs that had basically popped out of her chest one night while she slept.

  Martha had been begging Zoe for ages to take her to Vancouver to buy a bra, but of course, Zoe, who actually was a hippie, did not believe in bras.

  “They cause cancer,” she said.

  Jane thought Zoe was kidding. But she wasn’t.

  “All that underwire keeping your lymph nodes trapped. It’s not natural. Everyone’s waiting for the science to prove it, but by then, so many women will have died of cancer.”

  Jane knew better than to tell Mama things Zoe said. Bras causing cancer would go into the same category as the time she’d mentioned Zoe had communicated telepathically with a bag of chips.

  “Someone needs to take that woman’s wineglass away” was all Mama had had to say about that.

  Martha was still talking about remaking herself and Jane was busy tuning her out, when Huckleberry started barking his head off at something on the opposite side of where they were hidden, out of the weather. The clouds hadn’t lied: rain was suddenly beating down everywhere, except in their secret spot. Jane looked out and saw two kids struggling to pack up their buckets and shovels, caught totally off guard by the pelting rain.

  “We should help them,” said Jane, noticing that the girl was about their age. She figured Martha would want to try out being “a totally new person” on this stranger. Sure enough, while Jane was still thinking this, Martha was already off, with Huckleberry on her heels.

  The boy had gotten interested in something along the water’s edge and wandered off, leaving his sister (if it was his sister) to fill their netted beach bag with all the loose toys by herself, her drenched hair falling in her eyes, slowing her down.

  Suddenly, a scream wrenched the air. Jane thought maybe Martha had stepped on a piece of glass—that had happened more than once to both of them—but it wasn’t a Martha scream. Jane noticed there were more people on the beach than she’d realized, all caught off guard by the beautiful day that had turned on a dime. A wave of soaking-wet beachgoers began to move toward the boy, who was at the edge of the water staring into a rubber boot and screaming his head off.

  But what Jane was most impressed by was the speed with which the boy’s sister ran, as if h
er feet had wings. Not even Huckleberry could keep up with her, and he was faster than the arctic terns that spun and whipped in the wind, terrorizing him.

  When the girl reached her brother, she grabbed the boot out of his hands and covered his whole face with her body. One quick glance inside and she dropped the boot in the sand and dragged her brother backward, trying to get away from it.

  As adults arrived, it was scooped up and quickly hidden away, so Jane and Martha never got to see firsthand what had caused all the commotion. But word traveled quickly, and eventually the boot ended up in police custody. The thing that had caused all the screaming was a severed human foot.

  After just a week of police tape and investigations and everyone being treated as if someone had done something sinister, Martha and Zoe—both of whom Jane loved as much as she loved her own mother—up and moved to Colorado. Just like that, Martha got her wish to remake herself somewhere else.

  They packed up Zoe’s diaries and nailed the blue shutters closed, locking up the old secrets and the bath drains full of hair. Jane gave Martha her Webster’s dictionary; she figured Martha needed it more than she did. They drove off in a half-empty moving van because Zoe didn’t believe in material things. But she also said she didn’t believe in living in a place where random body parts just materialized and made everyone suddenly suspicious. It wasn’t good karma.

  Mama said that so many people were lost at sea, it was amazing body parts didn’t wash up more often. She and Jane were staying put.

  Now Martha wrote Jane letters about Zoe’s gazebo made of colorful liquor bottles (Mama had snorted at this but said nothing more) and how weird it was to not hear the ocean, but she still talked about it because this new life she had created meant pretending she was from California.

  Martha told Jane that California was much more interesting than being from what she called “the tiniest little isthmus on the edge of the Washington/Canada border where nothing ever happens.”

  “An isthmus would actually connect two pieces of land,” Jane had written back. “I think you’re using the wrong word.”

  Martha hadn’t mentioned it again. “I talk about you all the time,” she said. “I told someone that you’re the one who gave me the gardenia perfume.”

  When Martha wrote that the poor girls from Middle Earth, Colorado, didn’t even know what to do with gardenia perfume, Jane tried being facetious.

  “Oh my God, you poor thing, you have gone back to the 1940s.”

  IT. WAS. A. JOKE.

  Jane didn’t want to be part of Martha’s lies, as if she wasn’t interesting enough for real. And she had never smelled or seen gardenia perfume in her life.

  She tried to bring Martha back to reality. “The jig is up. Has anyone figured out that you’re not from California but actually from a tiny thumb (not an isthmus) that juts into the Pacific Ocean?”

  But Jane missed her friend terribly, and after the whole rubber-boot incident, Martha was right about one thing: nothing ever did happen here anymore. No couples strolling in the sunset. No kids building sandcastles. No more geeky-looking birders with long-lensed cameras and birding scopes and incredibly unattractive cargo shorts. Pretty much nobody came to the beach anymore except the last few locals who were too tired to leave, like Jane and Mama.

  Jane would have been happy even to talk about sex, if Martha would come back.

  And then one day, Huckleberry was nosing around looking for a lost ball when he startled and ran back to Jane, howling his head off.

  “What’s up, silly boy? Did you stir up the blue heron’s nest again? You know she doesn’t like that.”

  Deep in his throat, Huckleberry growled, then pawed the ground but wouldn’t go farther.

  “What is it?” Jane said again, stepping gingerly up to the dune, parting the long beach grass with her fingers.

  Oh no, she thought, seeing a pair of steel-toed boots lying side by side, noses up, as if they had bloomed out of the sand. She immediately thought of the other boot, the one with a human foot in it, and was slightly relieved that at least there were two of these and they were also attached to two long legs. It was a weird thing to notice, and she wished Martha were with her, especially when she realized that this was a whole person, intact but not looking very well.

  He was probably a few years older than Jane, and his breathing was very, very shallow.

  “Huckleberry, go get Mama!” Jane yelled, pointing to the house. But the dog just looked at her and cocked his head one way and then the other.

  Jane took off as fast as she could, but she knew she was not the girl who had run like lightning when her brother had screamed. Jane did the best she could, her mind working faster than her legs, replaying the images in her head: salt-crusted leather boots, wet faded jeans, messy bowl-cut hair surrounding a pale face. Much too pale, actually. Ashes from a fire. An old tin can. Clamshells scattered nearby.

  God, why do you always have to notice mollusks, even in an emergency? Martha was gone, but Jane could still hear her voice.

  It took a concerted effort on the part of the few people still left to get the boy into a bed, warm him up, figure out who he was and how he’d gotten here. This last bit was going to be the most difficult, because even he wouldn’t be able to tell them.

  His license said that his name was Conrad James, he was from Granville, Colorado, and he was nineteen years old. That was a real cowboy-sounding name, Jane thought, scanning the atlas she’d gotten from the mobile library. Granville was only about thirty miles from Pigeon Creek, where Martha now lived.

  Seeing those towns on the map so close together reminded Jane of all the ways she and Martha had forever tried to make their lives intersect. Except that this boy landing where he had really was just a coincidence.

  Conrad had planned to visit an uncle in Canada, one he barely knew but who he’d heard of often. His uncle had a PhD in physics, fixed up vintage cars, and lived with a man. Conrad had wanted to ask his advice: Was it really possible to live in this world and love whoever you wanted?

  But he hadn’t made it to Canada, because the beach had drawn him in, its beauty and mystery and the cacophony of waves hitting the rocks. And now Conrad had no idea that he even had an uncle. All of it was gone, just like that. He was a completely blank slate.

  The last thing he’d done was dig a few razor clams, make a small fire, and cook them in an old tin can filled with salt water. He was from landlocked Colorado, nowhere near the ocean, so he did not know that digging and eating clams was only done in months containing an “R.” As Martha’s mother used to say, You don’t know what you don’t know.

  But now he also didn’t know things he had known. How he’d angrily stormed out of a church sacristy after seeing a priest touch an altar boy who was barely ten years old. He would not remember wondering if he should have told someone—the boy’s mother? Most of all, he had no memory that that same priest had made him feel so much shame about a confessed kiss.

  Sadly, that kiss, one of the most beautiful things Conrad had experienced in his life up to that point, would also be forgotten.

  Jane knew none of these things about him either as she watched him sleeping in her bed, a warm washcloth on his forehead. But when he finally woke up and had no idea who he was or where he’d come from, she knew that her beloved bivalve mollusks were at the scene of the crime.

  She found all of her old Farmers’ Almanacs and the scientific journals that the librarian had brought her over the years. She remembered reading about a toxic substance called domoic acid that was thought to infect shellfish. Scientists were studying cases of people who had actually suffered amnesia after eating clams or mussels or even oysters contaminated by algae blooms. It had popped up a few times in these papers; there had even been outbreaks of amnesic shellfish poisoning on Prince Edward Island.

  Of course, she couldn’t test for it
, but when the paramedics arrived she handed them a bag full of clamshells that had been on the ground near where she’d found him and told them her theory.

  “Some people never recover, and others live their lives remembering only things that happened after they ate the shellfish; still others forget everything, even new things, over and over again. It’s a matter of time, how it plays out long-term. Everyone is different. But he does have many of the symptoms.”

  She couldn’t believe how intently they listened to her, as if she were a real scientist.

  They promised to send out health officials the next day to test live clams so that nobody else got sick. One of the paramedics smiled and said, “You’ve just saved us hours of work trying to nail this down. At least now we have a place to start. Thank you.”

  They had his ID and said they’d get in touch with his family, leaving Jane feeling like a real marine biologist and also sadder than she’d been in ages. She loved this beach, but maybe Zoe was right about its karma. And maybe there was a reason that the sea-shaken houses kept changing hands. Also, selfishly, she wished Martha could have seen firsthand that all those years of Jane studying bivalves had actually done some good.

  As the ambulance pulled away, Jane walked behind it for a while, watching the lights blink and then fade out of sight. She fingered the postcard she’d found in Conrad’s pants pocket when she’d taken his clothes to be washed. It was addressed to someone named Ben, also in Granville, Colorado. It was a picture of a brilliant sunset and a view of the ocean. It could have been from anywhere, even California.

  She’d read it a few times and felt an invisible hand twisting her stomach like wringing out a wet sock as she slid the postcard into her jacket before anyone else could see it.

  It was the same feeling she’d had whenever Martha read her Zoe’s diaries.

  She knew secrets were meant to stay secret, but if he didn’t remember anything or anyone, maybe she could help him connect with this part of his past, even if it was just a tiny gesture. She didn’t know that Conrad had never planned to mail that postcard, because once again, You don’t know what you don’t know.