“You’re from Winchester?” he asks.
I say that I am. Winchester, Massachusetts. I add in, “Go Red Sox,” because I don’t know a thing about Boston other than they have a decent baseball team. And they drink tea, supposedly.
“You don’t have that whole Boston accent like Kelsey did,” he says, and I tell him how I’m an army brat, how our stay in Massachusetts only lasted a short time.
“Fort Devens?” he asks, and I nod my head and say, “Yeah,” even though I’m not quite sure what I’m saying yes to. I tell him I went to fourth grade with Kelsey. “Fourth or...” I pause, feign thinking, “Fifth, maybe? I can’t remember for sure.”
My eyes take in the flat, a home that is all man. A bachelor pad. He tells me that they planned to move in here together after the wedding, he and Kelsey. They had purchased the unit, but were living apart in their separate sides of the city while it underwent renovation—she sharing an apartment with a roommate in Andersonville, he in a midrise in Bridgeport. The building was quite downtrodden the first time they laid eyes on it, a warehouse converted to loft apartments. But still, it had all the elements they were looking for in a new home: the expansive rooms, exposed pipes and ductwork, brick walls, wood cladding. And Kelsey had a vision, though she died before having a chance to see it through. Instead, what remained was a poorly furnished space with dirty dishes in the sink and laundry on the floor. And an inconsolable fiancé.
They were to be married within a year from her death. She’d purchased a dress already, and he showed it to me, a simple taffeta thing that hung in a spare closet all alone, light blue because, as Nicholas said, “She was too much of a nonconformist for white,” saying these words not in any sort of carping way, but in a romantic way, as if Kelsey’s nonconformity was one of the reasons he loved her. Talk about sad. They had booked a hall for the three-hundred-plus guests they hoped would attend. They were still undecided on where to go for their honeymoon, a toss-up between Romania and Botswana. “Kelsey had no need to lie on a beach in a bikini,” Nicholas says. “That wasn’t her thing,” he tells me, and I say that I know.
I don’t know. But I’ve seen the gothic photo, the head-to-toe black, the albino skin, and so I can assume.
“It’s been a long time, I know,” I tell him, “but I just heard about Kelsey. I’m so sorry. We’ve been out of touch for years. I knew I probably shouldn’t, but I had to stop by and express my condolences,” I say, and then he leads me to his glass-top kitchen table and tells me about her peanut allergy.
“How’d you find me?” he asks. It isn’t censorious in the least bit. He’s curious.
“A friend of a friend,” I say, knowing how vapid it sounds.
“Was it John? Johnny Acker,” he asks, and I say that it was. This couldn’t be easier.
“I thought so,” he says. “He’s the only one I remember from Kelsey’s grammar school days. Hard to imagine they still kept in touch after all those years.”
“You’re telling me.”
There are photos of Kelsey in the flat. The same jet-black hair and smoky eyes, the same ashen skin, but in these photos, the gothic look has been toned down a bit. There’s an edge to her still; that goes without saying. A whole lot of morbid black in her attire. And yet, no skulls and crossbones, no fashion corsets or creepy black Victorian boots. Nothing steampunk. Nothing emo. Just dark. In the photos, Kelsey and Nicholas stand side by side beside the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, on top of Pikes Peak. They look like opposites: he prim and proper, she anything but.
They also look to be in love.
“I got a call from her roommate,” he goes on to explain as tears fill his eyes. I almost ask, Esther? but stop myself in time. “‘Something is wrong,’ she said to me on the phone. ‘She’s not breathing. Kelsey’s not breathing.’ I knew right away what had happened. I said, ‘Find her EpiPen. She needs her EpiPen,’ but all she said was, ‘It’s too late. It’s too late, Nick,’ over and over again. Kelsey was already dead.”
And now it’s me who begins to cry. I’m not usually all weepy like this. I don’t get choked up. But I’m so overcome with emotion—anger, fear, sadness—that this time I do. I want to sit Esther down before me and demand of her: What have you done? How could you do this to Kelsey?
“I’m sorry,” Nicholas says with a pat to my hand. He rises from the table and finds me a tissue. “This is hard on you, too. I forget sometimes that I’m not the only one she left behind.”
“She’d eaten peanuts,” I infer when I finally gather myself well enough to speak, and Nicholas says, “Yes,” and then, “No,” settling finally on, “Peanut flour.”
He tells me about the recipe. The soy sauce. The rice vinegar. The peanut flour. A meal I’ve eaten so many times before. And I have this memory of Esther, coming home from night school, feeling all worn out. Tired. Her voice all Hannibal Lecter—like, saying, The dill weed goes here. And the peanut flour goes here, while banging those two items inside the kitchen cabinet, the buff-color flour dusting the countertops. She’d been upset that I had borrowed her dill weed. That’s what I thought at the time. There was no doubt about it in my mind, but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps it hadn’t been about the dill weed, after all.
“It was just a mistake, then. A horrible accident,” I say, and he says yes, with a hint of doubt in his tone, that it was. A mistake. A horrible accident.
But was it?
“They’d been drinking,” he says. “Margaritas. They’d both had too much. Kelsey’s roommate, she said she always swapped the peanut flour with all-purpose flour for Kelsey. Always. But not that night. That night she forgot,” and again he says, “They’d been drinking.”
He says the word mistake, but still, I get the sense that even he doesn’t believe it. Her EpiPen, he says, was always in her purse. Always. Except that that night it wasn’t. That night, the EpiPen was nowhere to be found.
Esther had added peanut flour to the recipe and for that reason Kelsey Bellamy was dead. There was no antidote to be found; the EpiPen had simply disappeared. “One mistake is one thing, but two mistakes...” His voice trails off. I know what he is thinking. He’s thinking Esther killed his fiancé, which is the same thing I’m thinking, too.
“Kelsey never went anywhere without her EpiPen,” he says.
“You never found it?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
He leaves me with this: “Her name,” he says, had they had the chance to get married, “would have been Kelsey Keller,” and he smiles sadly—evocatively—and says how she always thought that was hysterically funny. Kelsey Keller.
I smile. “That sounds just like Kelsey,” I say, citing her swell sense of humor, as if I actually know.
Alex
I spend the day at work, watching through the windows as Dr. Giles’s clients come and go. Each time the door squeals open, there he appears in the cottage door frame, happy as a lark, a droll little smile on that face of his as he shakes their hand or pats their back, and welcomes them inside.
And then he closes the door and pulls the blinds, and I’m left wondering what they’re up to on the inside.