Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 11



“Bedtime Story”

78 Durham Road

Emerson, New Hampshire

I sit outside my mother’s old house on a weekday, when no one’s home to feel creeped out to see the ghost of Shelly Brewer lingering on the side of the street in a Toyota. The little bungalow seems a bit prettier now than when Shelly rented it. The dark brown paint has been switched to a gentle blue. It still has thick white trim—brighter now, it seems to me. Gone, though, is the adorably lopsided window box where Shelly used to plant her marigolds.

My last visit to Shelly’s was in March 1985, a few days before she died. It was during a school vacation, and I went to see her before the weekend because I had a kiddie party that Saturday that I desperately wanted to go to. Shelly understood and accommodated.

If I’d been there on the weekend, I would’ve been there when she was killed. Maybe I would’ve been killed, too. Or she wouldn’t have been killed at all. There’s that to think about.

Anyway, there were a few things that were memorable about the visit. One was that I brought her a drawing I had done. I thought she might like it better than a ditto with a red “100” scrawled across the top.

So I drew her a picture of a crow. I loved crows, loved drawing them—pressing the crayon hard into the paper to make it dark and shiny, giving it the oily look of a real crow’s feathers. And birds were easy, if you did them from the side and didn’t try to make them too fancy.

When I was finished, I wasn’t sure if Shelly would like it. Maybe a crow was too dark and gloomy. I had a friend at home who said so when we drew together. So I put a pink bow on the crow’s neck and had it holding the string of a big, blue balloon in its claw.

When I presented it to Shelly, she said she loved it, and really seemed to mean it. She brought me to the drugstore and we picked out a plastic frame for it—black, to go with the crow. The pharmacist even admired it. When we got home, Shelly propped it up on her coffee table and said later she’d find a spot for it on the wall and hang it.

And then—I remember it being within minutes of her propping up the picture—Shelly decided to have a serious talk with me. She said she wanted to tell me that she’d made a decision about something. And I might hear people talking about it, and that it might upset me or my mom. But that she wanted me to know that she loved me, no matter what happened.

My first reaction was that she didn’t really like the crow so much, after all, but was just trying to be nice, knowing that a serious conversation was coming.

Shelly continued. She said that the most important thing she wanted me to remember was that if someone was ever hurting you, it was important to do something about it right away. To either hit back or tell someone who would help you. Whatever you decided to do, the important thing was to do something immediately. Not wait and see if it would happen again. That was what she wanted me to remember from this.

I told her that no one was hurting me. And she said that that was good, she was glad. It didn’t seem to me we understood each other, about her plans or about my crow. The conversation ended there, as Shelly suggested we make ourselves a little lunch.

That evening, though, I felt I understood a little better. There was a knock on the door, and my heart sank. Frank, I thought. He’d been completely absent this visit, allowing Shelly to focus all of her attention on me.

When Shelly opened the door, I heard her say, “My kid’s here. She’s asleep.”

She let the person in anyway, and as they started to talk, I was relieved to hear it was a woman. This wasn’t unusual. Shelly’s friends seemed to know my bedtime—occasionally they’d come and visit with her after I was in bed. And I continued to busy myself fashioning my stuffed monkey into funny contortions, as I sometimes did when I couldn’t sleep.

Then Shelly said something that made me sit up straight in my bed. She said, “It’s more complicated than money. I don’t really want money. And all the money in the world wouldn’t even get me Gretchen back, anyway.”

Get Gretchen back?! So it was true. Someday Shelly might bring me back here and be my mother. I couldn’t imagine it. Would she start pretending to care about my dittos, my 100s? Would she let me take ballet? Did the Emerson school cafeteria have chicken nuggets?

The TV was burbling loudly, so I couldn’t hear everything. Eventually, though, I heard the other lady say something loud enough for me to hear. Something like: “If you think you would hold up in a fight against him, you’re wrong, Shelly.”

This scared me. She was probably talking about Frank now. I could figure out that much, because I knew how much Shelly and Frank fought. She was warning Shelly about Frank. It seemed to me a lot of people didn’t really like Frank: me, Nantie Linda, Aunt Dorothy, Grandma, the neighbors.

And yes, it was a relief to know that others knew what I knew. That Shelly and Frank fought. It was not a relief to hear someone else sound like they were worried Shelly should be afraid of him—like I was.

It seemed to me, after a few minutes, that Shelly and her guest were getting angry at each other.

Shelly said, “If he doesn’t stop, I’ll go to the police.”

“You think the police will believe you?” her friend asked. And she told Shelly she should be careful.

A little while later, Shelly’s friend left, and the TV droned on into the night.

A few weeks after Shelly died, the framed picture showed up at my mom’s house in a box of things her mother sent her, for her and me to remember Shelly by.

I had seen that bird drawing. In college. I thought about it on my way up to see Gregor.

I didn’t remember what year it was now, but I came into her room one day after a holiday break and saw it sitting on her bookshelf. I asked who’d drawn it, thinking maybe a young cousin or babysitting charge. And she told me she had drawn it when she was a kid. I probably gave her a funny look. Displaying one’s own framed childhood drawing was, fittingly, a decidedly quirky thing to do—but a bit on the egotistical side for Gretchen. I believe the drawing disappeared within a week.