An Uncollected Death Read online

realistically keep. It will help to make it more tangible, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I do know, I do know. I went through that when I sold my own house. Obviously, I couldn’t take most of my things with me, and I had to allow room for two pianos on top of it. Not too many people can visualize space accurately.”

  “It’s going to be hard to make the choices, though. I really like a lot of the things I have.” She took another sip of tea, and asked, “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”

  Helene nodded slowly and thoughtfully. “I think,” and here she paused, as if still gathering the thoughts or finding the words, “I think I would travel light. In my experience, the people who survive are the ones who are willing to travel light. It’s the people who cannot part with their possessions that end up being trapped by them, and sometimes the cost can be very high.”

  “Sounds like being a refugee.”

  “More like a traveler to unknown parts. It’s good to have the right stuff, but not too much, so that you can move quickly when conditions change. Being independent is important. It’s also important to know that you don’t need to keep stuff in order to keep memories.”

  Helene’s phone rang, surprising her, and after answering it, spoke little but quietly, and then hung up.

  She turned to Charlotte. “Olivia’s dead.”

  Seven

  Monday, September 16th

   

  It was seven a.m. on a Monday morning, and Charlotte showed up for work with an everything bagel and the big red mug of coffee despite the fact there was no work to show up for. The email inbox held more junk than missives from colleagues and friends, so she browsed through her various social media accounts to find out what everybody was up to.

  The furor over the sudden loss of jobs when the magazines folded had died down only slightly, with many of her former colleagues still in shock or feeling outrage, some of it aimed at Charlotte herself under the assumption that she knew what was going to happen and didn’t warn anyone.  A key few, however, seemed absent from the discussion entirely. Where were they? Some said that the absentees had found work elsewhere, or had life-raft work lined up before their own ship sank. Could it be so? For that matter, were there any jobs out there in such a shrinking field?

  She thought of rival magazines and trade publications which would make a good fit for her, and checked their online editions and made various inquiries. With Olivia’s death, Charlotte felt it was likely the transcription and editing job would be canceled or delayed indefinitely, and if she needed to stay in the design field, she had best do so while she still had fresh credentials and contacts.

  The jobs boards showed little that was current, unless she wanted to jump fields and edit publications for gun aficionados, which was highly unlikely. Out of curiosity, she went back through the listings for the past several weeks to see which design-related publications had posted jobs, then to the publications themselves. And there they were, the colleagues missing from the forum discussions, already holding masthead or department positions. Charlotte contacted three of them, and learned that they had, indeed, known the end of the publications was coming, and were surprised that she hadn’t also known and acted on it. Charlotte looked through the backlog of messages and emails from the weeks before Ellis went to Paris, spotting cryptic messages from these very people, carefully worded invitations to lunch or drinks or online chat rooms. She had been too busy and too emotionally distracted by the prospect of Ellis leaving home to read between the lines, to make the time to join in.

  The realization that she had left herself professionally vulnerable and out of the loop manifested itself as heartburn before she could even put it into words in her mind, and as the words finally did form, it really was your own damned fault, her chest tightened and her heartbeat fluttered, the old signs of an incipient panic attack.

  Breathe, she told herself. Shallow at first, then deeper and slower as the seconds and minutes ticked by. It’s too late now, the damage is done, and maybe—just maybe—it was something her subconscious mind actually wanted, a change in her own life as large as Ellis’? As the hands of her inner control freak loosened their strangulating grip on her windpipe and stopped pouring acid into her stomach, she even managed a little smile as she saw the three “For Sale” signs up and down the street from the window in front of her desk. In a way, she’d been as vulnerable to suggestion as her intended magazine audience.

  It wasn’t as obvious as the words “For Sale” working on her mind in subliminal ways. Rather, it was the shift in what they meant. When this all started, she knew deep down that life wasn’t going to be the same without Ellis, nor were her relationships with her neighbors, and these things in turn changed the value of her house, the value of her lifestyle, and, by extension, the value of her job. Her line of work, the world of predicting, reporting on, and marketing design trends, meant constantly changing and updating the notion of what was desirable, and doing so in ways both obvious (the “new succulent plums” over last year’s “tired old teal”) and subliminal (an evocative photo of a chair draped with a soft, luxurious shawl in a deep purple cashmere).

  Changing and updating the notion of what was desirable was also an essential part of marketing in a capitalist economy, inspiring consumers to purchase new fashions or new cars, tying in an ability to display what was desirable to own with one’s sense of self-worth. It wasn’t something Charlotte took seriously in the days before writing about it regularly and moving to Lake Parkerton, and in fact at first it was fun, like getting paid to shop and compare purchases with other shoppers. But then it changed, becoming more serious the more she was drawn into the world of design and marketing, the more responsibilities she had as she moved from staff writer to the editorial teams, where the financial clout of the advertisers determined policy. The better she got at her job, the more she bought into the values it promoted, without ever fully realizing it.

  When the economy crumbled and people no longer spent money decorating their increasingly devalued homes, the advertisers in turn could no longer contribute their revenue to the magazines. The signs of the troubles to come, however, were in the neighborhoods and shops long before they were in the editorial offices. And she hadn’t been paying attention to those signs, either.

  The meaning of things could be changed deliberately by marketing, but they could also be changed inadvertently by time, place, or circumstance. Either way, she thought, humans can perceive these changes and change their actions and their own value systems accordingly. As Charlotte considered the changes that occurred over the past few weeks, the desire to step outside of the deliberate, marketed side of things became stronger and clearer. Independence was now the most beautiful and desirable thing in the world, principally financial independence, but of a kind that turned commonly held values on their head.

  It did not matter, she thought, if one was wealthy or not: the less you felt compelled to spend, the more less income sufficed. Diane suggested that downsizing and selling everything was a temporary move until Charlotte rebuilt her career and income, but the more she thought about it, the less she wanted to work in a field that depended on convincing people like herself to buy what they really didn’t need, to make them think that there was something better than what they already had. She logged out of the chat rooms and closed the tabs for the magazine websites.

  Every Monday for the past several years, Charlotte sat down in her office and wrote her editorials and blog posts for the magazines. It was a simple and gentle way to begin the work week, a routine that helped her to stay on track, often a problem for telecommuters. Once a post was written, the other routines seemed to fall into place. The sudden reality of not having a post to write, let alone two or three, made her restless. A writer, after all, has to write, just like a cat needs to stretch and sharpen its claws. She needed to write, just to be writing, to organize stray thoughts into coherent ones, to express herself, to feel a little more real now that there was no
longer a readership to provide feedback.

  Should I start a personal blog? She wondered if she should, to keep her byline, C. K. Anthony, out there and alive—and findable on the Internet. What would she blog about? What was fit for public consumption? Clearly, she couldn’t write publicly about what happened to Olivia. She also couldn’t write about the transcription project, assuming it would even continue with Olivia’s death. And she didn’t really know what to say about her own circumstances that wouldn’t make her look pathetic to her former co-workers and employers, or to prospective ones. As she thought about this, a pickup truck with the Bysell Realty logo pulled up in the front of her house. The muscular young driver pulled out a sturdy timber For Sale sign from the back and began to set it into the ground.

  She could write for herself for the time being, keep a journal of sorts. She kept one while going through the divorce and getting settled here, and on and off through the years, but nothing regular. There was a journal template in her writing software, so she opened it and set up something simple, a plain screen with a blank white rectangle page on which there was only a blinking cursor at the top left. A fresh start. She began to