Later that same week a second postcard arrives in the mailbox. She’s been waiting for another card ever since she left the hospital. Two years have passed, so she’d just about given up. Now here it is. It’s a photo-graph of Shelby’s house that has been laminated onto a blank card. The message on the back is Do something. Her mom brings it down to the basement. It’s addressed to Shelby, but there’s no stamp, no return address. “Who would send this?” her mother asks. Shelby shrugs. She acts like she’s not excited to have gotten mail, but she is. She feels a little chill of expectation down her spine. There is someone, somewhere, who knows she’s alive. “Somebody writes to me, Mom,” Shelby tries to explain. “They think they know me. Maybe they read about me in the paper.”
Sue fetches the magnifying glass she uses to read ingredients on food labels and make certain there’s no red dye or MSG involved. “I think that’s you sitting there inside the house.” Sue taps on the card. “Look in the basement window. There’s definitely a little person on the couch.”
Shelby keeps the postcards in a jewelry box her mother bought her when they went on their trip to Chincoteague Island. There’s a horse painted on the box; the inside lining is blue velvet. Maybe the most recent card is a message from the great beyond. Shelby can’t stop thinking it might have been sent by Helene. She knows this is impossible; all the same, soon afterward she finds herself headed to Lewiston Street, where the Boyds live. She stands on the corner, but she can’t bring herself to go any closer than that. She looks through the dark. She recognizes Mrs. Harrington, who is leaving. Shelby went to school with her daughter, Kelsey, a pretty redhead who excelled at everything and is currently a junior at Brown University.
“Mrs. Harrington,” Shelby calls. “Hi.”
It takes a while for Mrs. Harrington to recognize the odd person approaching her. When she does she visibly relaxes. “Oh, Shelby, it’s you.”
“Yeah, it’s me.” Shelby walks alongside Mrs. Harrington. “You help out with Helene, right?”
“There’s a whole bunch of us who are regulars. She’s a darling girl.” Mrs. Harrington has her keys in her hands. Shelby doesn’t tell this nice woman that Helene always hated Kelsey Harrington. She’d thought Kelsey was a snob.
“Does she ever come to consciousness?” Shelby’s voice sounds shaky and thin. Mrs. Harrington throws her a look, clearly confused. “Helene,” Shelby says. “Does she ever say something or dictate something? Like a postcard?”
“Shelby.” Mrs. Harrington reaches for her hand, but Shelby backs away before she can touch her. “No, honey.” Mrs. Harrington shakes her head sadly. “She never does anything like that.”
Shelby has secretly been harboring the hope that Helene has been pretending, that she isn’t really brain-injured and in fact rises from her bed each night to walk through her house, pilfering snacks from the cupboards, watching TV, gazing into the mirror as she brushes her long hair.
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t miracles,” Mrs. Harrington says.
“Yeah. I’ll bet.” Shelby runs off without another word. She must seem crazy to ask if a person who has no brain activity could be writing postcards.
Shelby calls Ben Mink to ask that he meet her in the park. Her hope that Helene will come back has faded into ash. Helene is gone. Shelby’s old life is gone with her. Shelby is so jittery she can barely sit still. She despises winter and herself. All she wants to do is get stoned and check out, and Ben can provide her with her ticket to do so. Or so she thinks.
“No weed,” he says sadly. “There’s some FBI activity in the Bahamas. Dealers are getting busted and it’s filtering up to the States. My go-to guys in Huntington and in Northport both got busted. Call me back at the end of the week.”
“How can you be out?” Shelby is beside herself. “I depend on you.”
“Yeah, right.” He actually laughs. He thinks she’s kidding.
“You’re my go-to guy,” she insists. “I need you.”
“That’s a mistake, Shelby,” Ben says. “I let people down.”
“Don’t make me sit through reality,” Shelby moans. The tremor in her hand is already worsening. “I don’t know if I can do it. People with their petty desires and their TV shows. Everyone wants to be famous.”
She was famous for a while, at least in the local Pennysaver and in Newsday. There was even an article in The New York Times about teenagers and car accidents and she was referred to twice. They got it wrong, as usual, and printed that she was currently under psychiatric care, when she was already out of the nuthouse, ensconced in her parents’ basement.