Before the Singing Could Begin

Our story starts with a phone call. 

The owner is out at the time, parsing her way through the decay of her garden, salvaging the remaining squash, cabbages and peppers. November has arrived. She hears the ringing, but doesn’t imagine it could be important, and she’s working against the weather. It feels like rain, the moistness all around her, the mist of the fog coming down the sound. Then the wind does pick up, shaking the leaves left in the trees and dancing to the tune of her wind chimes around the trailer. The first few drops fall.

The phone rings again, just as she is finishing up in the shower, washing the mud off her legs, arms, hands and feet. She’d forgotten to check her voice mail, again. Her niece and sister were always on her about this. 

They’ll call back if its important, she says to the old lady looking at her from the bathroom mirror. 

The third call comes at nine-thirty at night, just as she’s settled in bed with a blood-curdling mystery and shot of whiskey. 

“My god!”

Was this an emergency? Was her sister’s house on fire? Was a tsunami coming up the sound? Had she forgotten to check a box off on her Safeway sweepstakes entry? Damn.

 Repeating her curse, an expression she’d seldom used until she’d retired out here to the dark side of the moon, she willed herself to fumble for her phone on the table next to her small double bed. The bed and table took up most of the back of her trailer, and saved her from having to buy a couch for the place. 

Shit. That’s another good word, she thought, and said it twice before answering.

“Hello. Who is this?” She’d pitched her voice purposefully hostile. 

“Lora Townsend,” the caller offered, and Kay’s brain cursed again and again. 

No, no way, not after all this time and purposeful forgetting. But it was, it was that bitch’s smooth deep voice. 

“Hello? Is that you, Kay? Kay Fulucioi?” Her caller stumbled over the last name just as she had done twenty years ago. “It is still Fulucioi? Unless you’ve remarried.”

“No. No. In that order.”

“Well, it is you isn’t? It sounds like you.”

“It’s Blackburn, now. I’ve gone back to using my maiden name.”

“Well, I must say, that’s probably a lot easier, isn’t it.” 

At the silence that began to absorb the phone call, Lora Townsend jumped to her purpose.

“I thought you, of all people, would want to know that Marta’s dead.”

“What?”

“She’s dead. She died sometime last night.”

“Wait, just a second, before you say any more, I need to put in my hearing aides. I was asleep when you called.” 

“Already?” 

Kay slid her hearing aides off the table and into her ears, dragged off her nightgown and pulled on sweatpants and a thick sweater, slippers. Speaking with Lora Townsend required being fully clothed, not in a worn flannel nightgown, and not sitting on the edge of her bed. Stepping ten feet away, she sat down at her kitchen table and put the phone back to her ear. 

“You said she was dead. How? I mean, well, how?”

“Jennie Reynolds, the head librarian at the Wheaten branch called me this morning. I’ve tried you several times on the phone, left a couple of messages but didn’t hear back from you.” 

“I’ve been having trouble with this new phone, the voice mail doesn’t really record a message.” Kay found a distinct pleasure in lying in this case, even if Lora Townsend didn’t believe her.” “But why would the librarian call you? I didn’t think Marta was working at the library anymore.”

“She wasn’t, but she still goes there, or did go there.”

“So why did the Librarian call you?” 

“One of the volunteers told her that Marta had been close to me, and she’d hoped I knew a next of kin to contact.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“It is hard to grasp. But when the cleaning crew arrived at the library this morning around five a.m., their usual time, they stumbled across her body in the children’s section. The Coroner believed she died some time around midnight. But that’s all they’re telling anyone.”

Kay gasped. So dear sweet Marta had died at the library, where they had all first met in a book club, where Lora had been head librarian and Marta had been a shelving clerk.

Lora sounded frustrated. 

“I wish you’d answered your phone earlier, because I’ve told this story too many times, and I just want to get through it. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Obviously, the police are involved because it's being listed as a suspicious death. They are not yet sure of anything. They’ve taken fingerprints and are trying to figure out the last person to see her at the library the day before. The staff they’ve been able to reach say they were certain Marta, if she’d been in at all that day, had already left when they locked up at seven-thirty.”

“What could she have been doing there?” Kay was irrationally finding herself furious. How dare her old friend die in their library! 

“It’s a mystery. Really, Kay, I don’t know anything more than I’ve told you, told others. The police are holding back the details.”

“But how would she be there, it doesn’t make sense.”

“Kay, I don’t know, not yet anyway. We have to wait for the police to finish their investigation. And while I know this is terrible, we have to make some decisions for ourselves right now. I need to know what you want to do.” 

What “she” wanted to do? What the fuck, Kay was thinking, she wanted to hang up this damn phone and go back and hide under her covers. 

In the solitariness of her small kitchen, Kay began remembering hours in kitchens, not only Marta’s, but those of the other women, Jean, Lora, Rachel, Liz, Georgia, Marilyn and her own. But mostly in the beginning they’d been at Marta’s, all becoming enmeshed in the luminous rainbow of colors, voices, stories, music, noise, tears and laughter that had taken place at those gatherings. 

Their hostess had a story she wanted to share. Violence. Torture. Secret Police. Fleeing with only the shirts on their backs in the middle of the night. 

Seeking sanctuary.  

Just as I sought it, Kay mused. As I pretend I’ve found it here in my fog soaked town. In my parent’s old Airstream. On the back lot of the family home, owned and lived in by my sister and family. But I wasn’t fleeing from torture, police, violence. I fled from my own intimacy with failure. I couldn’t bring myself to continue living in Wheaten where everything had led to heartbreak. First my husband’s long illness and death, then eventually losing my job because of the strain of many years of his care, and finally being isolated, drifting away from friends. 

“As tragic as this is, we can’t put decisions off,” Lora called Kay to attention, “doing something for Marta.”

“Doing what? Aren’t the police in charge?” As soon as she’d said it, she wanted to take it back. Too late. Lora charged forward.

“After I couldn’t get hold of you this morning, I managed to get hold of most of the others, and came to a consensus. We can hold a memorial service, maybe in five or six days, hopefully by next Monday. They won’t release the body until a full autopsy has been completed. But really, Kay, we have to do something for Marta. You’ll want to fly out, there are five of us left.” 

Kay was wondering about the “we” Lora was referencing. All of us who as individuals had abandoned Marta over the years? While we’d gone on with our lives, had anyone recognized we were abandoning Marta? 

What had she been doing in the library? 

“It appears it might be just us, along with the library staff,” Lora continued, an unusual hesitancy in the normally smooth voice. She was relating facts that must feel as difficult to tell as they were to hear.  

“We don’t even know where she was living, Kay. They went to the address they had for her library card, and another family was living there. I haven’t had a Christmas card from Marta in years. Jean keeps the rest of us updated.”

Kay surprised herself. “I haven’t heard from anyone for years.”

“Well, you did disappear. I had to use my connections to find you. Luckily, you left a narrow but distinct swath through the inter-state library systems.”

How like Lora, the once-revered library director calling in a few favors. Kay was grudging in her admiration, strangely affected that someone went to such an effort to locate her. Lora continued. 

“When I called Jean earlier this morning, she said she’d seen Marta a few months ago, and Marta had told her things were fine. I wasn’t even aware Marta was still going to the library. We’d lost contact, as you probably know, after I retired and she left the staff.” 

Kay tried to think of how she might help, short of telling Lora to go fuck herself or buying a plane ticket she couldn’t afford. She made another suggestion, perhaps more helpful.

“There must be some record, something, of where she was living. They should try the social security office.” 

“Well, I am sure that is what the police are now doing. I’d hoped that one of us might have a newer address.”

I wish I did, how I wish I did, Kay thought. “She must have moved after her daughter died.” But she was only guessing at what happened after that. When she’d left Wheaton, Kay had divorced herself from everything in that life, everyone. 

But I should have made the effort. She felt disgust with herself; back then she’d felt she and Marta shared a special bond.

Then her temper, her worst characteristic as her husband had often reminded her, began to assert itself. At least mentally, considering just how this woman on the other end of the phone had been instrumental in harming Marta.

The cold bitch. The woman who had paid Marta minimum wage for ten years, who didn’t even attempt to save Marta’s job when part time staff were being eliminated, nor arrange a permanent position so Marta could have had retirement benefits, this bitch was the one “taking care” of Marta’s memorial. 

Fever flooded Kay’s face, her shoulders, shook her. Then she felt disgust with herself. She’d fled from a friend, not a former employee. 

“I’m just trying to let as many people know as possible,” Lora murmured after a moment of hearing nothing on the phone other than slight static and Kay’s distant breathing.  

Kay was grabbing at straws, but something told her it shouldn’t be just friends who decided what to do with Marta’s body. 

“Marta had family somewhere. Los Angeles? El Salvador?” Kay took a slow breath, spoke more clearly. “Marta could not have been completely cut off from her family.” 

“So what are you suggesting, Kay?”

 “I think we should wait a week, Lora, before we rush into anything.”

 “The library people want us to do something quickly. Everyone is distraught. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“Lora, if we’re putting together the memorial service, we’ve got to try harder to locate her relatives. Imagine them finding out afterwards that we’ve already buried Marta.”

“I hadn’t thought about burying her, just a service. The state sees to the burial for people who are homeless, without means.” 

“That is even a worse thought than anything else you’ve said, Lora,” Kay could not stop herself. “Certainly you can scrape together a few thousand dollars to take care of this; you might consider it some sort of death pension for a past employee.” 

The kitchen clock was ticking off the seconds, noticeable now to Kay. Her caller seemed to be counting them off as well, the silence hanging between them for what could have been minutes, before Lora Townsend acquiesced to Kay’s suggestion. 

“I’ll pass it along to the Director. Maybe there is contact information in her old personnel records. They’d be down in the basement somewhere.”

“Well, call me back when you know something more. In the morning, tomorrow or later.” Not a very graceful way to end a call after all these years. Kay made sure the screen had gone dead.

The fourth call came at noon, and this time Kay picked it up immediately. Lora’s news was worth her effort.

“They’ve found where she’d been living, in the library’s basement. It was my suggestion they see if the old personnel records were down there which led to finding it. They don’t know for how long she’d been staying there at night. There was a cot in a very narrow space behind the farthest shelves, along the wall. There was even an extension cord for a reading lamp and a small radio.”

In a way, as pathetic as this was, Kay found herself thinking there was some sort of justice here. Her former employer providing housing, if not a pension. 

“Did they find out about her social security?” Kay asked.

“Yes. She was receiving four hundred and twenty-three dollars a month, that was all. I don’t know how she could even cover her food and basic personal care items. I hate thinking of how I used to feel about all her little dinners, knowing now what she must have given up each time she took her turn, on her wages of twenty hours a week.” 

Lora’s remorse was not an acting job, Kay felt certain. Marta’s former boss had never seemed to grasp the breadth of difference between their wages. Now, long after it was too late to right wrongs she appeared to be struggling, as Kay was, in sorting out what may have been her role or roles in another’s less than story-book ending. But Lora had more news. 

"What about family, did it show any in her personnel records?" Kay wanted to know.

"The police have those now, so they'll contact anyone they can locate." Lora moved on with what she wanted to shared.

“They also found one of her mother’s paintings, a smaller one, and a few personal items. They suspect she may have kept a spare key from when she’d worked there, but no one knows how long she’d been sleeping in the basement.” 

“But how did they not notice?” 

“I don’t know, Kay. Does seem impossible to not have noticed at least something. You have to believe me that I never suspected she was homeless. Jean had said that Marta was fine and she was getting down to the library now and then.” 

Down to the library now and then, like every late afternoon, evening, night. 

“None of us knew, but none of us did anything,” Kay answered for both of them.

The fifth and final call came at 9:30 that night, as Kay was in bed staring at the ceiling, her memories of conversations with Marta ten, fifteen years ago, thick and confusing, filling her head and then her heart. 

After blowing her nose, Kay answered the phone. 

Lora was silent on the other end, but Kay could hear her breathing. It sounded like she was crying. The silence sat there, thoughtful, fearful, between them. 

“What else?” Kay had to ask.

The ragged breathing calmed, the normally controlled voice struggled to get out the answers. 

“The police are sharing the rest of the information as they have it, in hopes that someone will come forward who can help in the investigation.”

“So what do they have?” 

“Are you sitting down?” Lora asked. 

“I’m in bed.”

“Do you have your hearing aides in?

“Of course.”

“Okay, cause this is hard. Her purse and small backpack. You know, everyone remembered her carrying them. Remember. They weren’t found. The space, you know where she’d been sleeping. It had been ransacked, so there might have been some family jewelry. They’re also wondering if a staff member was helping her get in and out of the library, because she never set off the security alarm.” 

“Without the security system set, she was vulnerable, unsafe, wasn’t she?” Kay said it quietly, because she could understand whatever staff member or members had been involved had done so with the intent to help Marta survive. There could only be a dozen staff left at the library now, so narrowing it down wouldn’t be hard. If Lora knew this much, what else did she know? 

“Lora, are the police any closer to understanding what actually happened yesterday morning?”

“Okay. It’s straight out The Sopranos. It’s horrific, Kay.”

Lora swallowed a few times. Her voice was unsteady as she continued. 

“Marta was slashed multiple times across her back, rolled over and then down her face and chest. She’d bled out over several hours. The medical examiner is suggesting a machete, wielded as though an act of revenge.”

 The image of Marta, slashed and bloody. A haunted look on Marta’s face, as though the past had found her. Or more tragic, a look of acceptance, confirmation of decades of waiting.

Horrific. Horrific. Unable to be comprehend. Lora was repeating the same thing.

Kay was back there in Marta’s kitchen, caught in the grip of her now dead friend’s eyes, voice, hand.

“Much violence, like the Mafioso but not like The Sopranos.” Marta frightened, shaking, her fingers tightening as though Kay’s wrist was her life-line. The terror still stalking her, her face white as she’d explained the difference between television and terror. 

“No sopranos, Kay. No tenors, no bass. These people don’t sing Opera between killings.” 

Like The Sopranos, Lora had exclaimed.

No, Kay wanted to tell her, but didn’t. It’s not like The Sopranos at all. This Opera was over before the singing could begin.