Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [7]
Mira died today. This morning. God … like eight hours ago. So I thought I’d finally start doing this. It’s as good a time as any.
I still can’t believe she’s dead. It was just eight hours ago, but it feels like the whole world has changed. Like everything has been tossed in the air and completely rearranged. I can’t believe that she’s gone, and that there’s no one to blame but me.
She had freckles spotting her cheeks. That was what Milo had noticed first. Not the round, defined freckles that marked Christine’s inner thighs, freckles that had once seemed mysterious and lusty to Milo but had since become just another part of the marital landscape. These were faint red blotches that climbed the heights of the young woman’s smile. And the woman on the tape was smiling, despite the topic of conversation. Someone named Mira was dead, and she was to blame. And though she was upset … angry, really, downright pissed off, with the trails of tears still visible on her face, she had managed to smile nonetheless. She looked like the kind of woman who could always muster a smile, no matter the circumstance.
Her round face filled almost the entire frame, her auburn hair framing the image. Nothing else to distinguish time or location. Just a pretty, freckle-faced girl and her pretty voice.
“Don’t forget to rake under the armchair,” Edith reminded him.
“I won’t,” Milo replied. “But I’ll never understand why I need to rake under a piece of furniture that never moves.”
“My husband, Ed Marchand, used to say that it isn’t what’s on the surface that matters. It’s what folks don’t see that counts the most.”
In truth, Milo had a difficult time understanding why Edith Marchand, a widow for more than two decades, saw the need to have any of her shag carpeting raked each week. Though he had to admit that the resulting effect, with the individual threads all leaning in one direction like the freshly cut grass on a professional baseball field, was strangely appealing, he wondered how she explained this oddity to the members of her weekly bridge game or her book club. Did she really tell these white-haired ladies that the nurse who was paid by her son to visit each week raked the carpet for her? Did they even notice?
“What exactly did the young lady say?” Edith asked, lifting her feet to allow Milo to rake beneath them. Edith Marchand was in a wheelchair, but she was still capable of walking short distances and raising her legs when the need demanded.
“Just what I told you. I only watched about fifteen minutes of tape before Christine called. And more than half of that was a kite. Like she was holding the camera with one hand and the string with the other.”
“So she only talked about her friend dying?”
“Pretty much.”
Though Milo had been tempted to fast-forward through the eight minutes of kite aerobatics, he refrained, hoping to catch a spat of unintentional dialogue during its dance in the sky. Other than a couple of gasps and a muttered “Fuck!” when the camera and the string nearly became entangled, Freckles hadn’t said a word. When her face once again filled the frame and she resumed speaking, she was lying in the grass, the camera just inches from her nose.
This sounds like the worst cliché ever, but I keep expecting to wake up and find out that it’s all a dream. That Mira is fine and I’m going to see her tomorrow like always. I was walking home tonight, past people who were talking and laughing, and I kept wishing that I could be them instead of me. Their lives looked so easy and good compared to mine. God, I was so happy yesterday. How can things change so quickly?
Finished with the carpet, Milo placed the rake back on its assigned hook in the linen closet and returned to the living room, grimacing in pain as conflagration resumed its persistent torment. With every minute that passed, the word grew in strength