Midnight found me breaking and entering the Pataki house again to steal every letter I could pass through the window to Gerald and Phoebe. We waited with bated breath for a police car to roll by my Grandpa's old, green Packard. Though he had gifted it to me, I had made sure the license plate still read HEAP when I had gone to re-register it the day before yesterday. The old green Packard would forever be for me an emblem of my fonder early childhood, and my grandparents.
I needed that comfort now as I stowed away Helga's unsent letters to me in the car's back. Then, as though Gerald, Phoebe, and me were in on a kidnapping or a murder, I rolled myself into the small bit of uncluttered space and cried, "Punch it Gerald!" much like I had to my grandmother so many years ago when she was still alive and I was still nine.
Gerald revved the Packard's engine into gear and we pulled away with grins that turned grim. We could get into trouble for this- real trouble- only I didn't think so. The house had been disused for years and it did not seem as if anyone cared about it. No one would notice the deed. Still, reflecting on the house as we sped away, I thought it odd that no for sale sign sat in front of it.
Gerald and Phoebe unpacked the loot in my house. I locked the papers up in Ernie's old room because it was in the best shape and nearest to my room. I could renovate the boarding house someday, I mused. I had been working since I was fourteen and I had kept practically every cent I had ever earned in hopes of leaving my parent's wings as rapidly as possible. But there was a much bigger concern to wrestle now. I had to find Helga before I went mad with despair. Instead of sleep I played with the ring I had bought for her the very hour she had vanished. I had cursed myself a thousand times for leaving her side for even a moment to buy that ring. Instead I should have kept my eyes on her until it was months too late for her to have second doubts about our misadventure. For countless nights since I have both hoped for and hoped against all hope that I had got her with child.
We had both been fifteen on that reckless night that Helga had run away to me. There were tears in her eyes and she had told me that her parents were likely to divorce. But then she had kissed me, hard, and I had wanted -no needed- to kiss her back. When my cellphone rang I turned it off and removed its card. I had taken Helga's hand in mine and fled.
That night, no one was going to take the girl, the fledgling woman I loved, away from me. We found the sandy shore along a brook called Palouse. I wrapped her in my arms and rained kisses down her neck, her throat. I gave in to the dreams I had been dreaming with her for the last three years.
I took several hundred dollars of cash out of my bank account in the morning and stubbornly I refused to go home for five days straight. Instead we lived on take-out food and lived on love until that moment I had walked into a jewelry store without her to buy that damnable ring. Helga had bolted on me the moment I turned my back.
Helga was always a realist. I had been the romantic... the dreamer. The hard edge of reality came crashing in when I went home only to be grounded and chaperoned ruthlessly day in, day out by my overprotective parents. It was as if they were making up for the lost time of their absence during my childhood by leaving me no room to grow. No place to feel or think or act as a man. My time with them became more suffocating than ever before. But I knew for certain they would never let me keep Helga. No more than her father would have let me keep her. In fleeing, Helga had been the more reasonable of the two of us. But I was still angry and hurt and… curious. What had happened to my blue-eyed siren?
When I woke again it was as though I had been drinking all night. My head pounded and I could hardly see straight. Yet I threw on my jacket and paced as fast as I could toward bus stop. I meant to spend the day in the library again. The date of Helga's mother's car crash was startling. Exactly one week and two days had passed since Helga and I had parted from one another. Helga must have returned home only to a broiling just as bad or even worse than the one I had received from my parents. Perhaps we, in some sense, had been the final rift.
"Miriam Pataki. Dead at age 53," I read out loud from the obituary column. After the nearest, wizened librarian look scoldingly at me for my outburst, I bent my head to the historical record again. These were the days when not all newspapers had been scanned into a computer. They were copied onto a roll of film instead and scrolled through the machine, so it was critical that I not be kicked out of the library for misbehavior. This was certainly not research I could do at home. My mouth was bitter so I washed it out with another cup of coffee. Then I called Gerald.
"It's true," I said. "Miriam is dead. Why did no one tell me?"
"Ease up there, man," said Gerald confronted by my anger. "Remember how I told you Helga dropped out of school and stopped talking to us? Well, she did it five weeks before she went running away to you, man. There was some sort of trouble brewing at home. Right Phoebe?"
"Right," said Phoebe adjusting her glasses. "During one of our, sorrowfully last conversations as good friends Helga mentioned that her older sister, Olga, had moved back home."
"Wouldn't that be a good thing?" I said. "Her parents loved having Olga around. And I believe that Helga was really making peace with her sister!" But Phoebe became increasingly nervous. She adjusted her glasses again for a good long while.
"Well, Helga said that in Big Bob's words, she was "one great big screw up." I got the impression that instead of being the bond that had kept the Pataki's together, she was now it's wedge."
"So to find out what happened to the Patakis, we have to find out what happened with Olga first?" said Gerald with an eyebrow quirked high. "This is getting COMPLICATED."
"I know," I sighed kicking my feet up. There was one thorn it was taboo to touch, but I did it anyway. "So why did you guys LET Helga stop talking to you? Why didn't you knock on her door and make her see sense?"
"Why didn't you, man?" Gerald snapped. "Look, forget I said that, man. Helga was pushing us away on purpose. She was just plain jealous of Phoebe and me. She told us flat out one time that it made her bitter to talk to us. That we reminded her of you. And when we tried to make peace all she did was quit attending the same school as us so she could avoid us."
"Gerald. You should have told me," I said forcing myself to be calmer. Even though I was almost angry enough with my best friend to beat him. They had been hiding things from me. All this time.
"Look, man, I know you were suffering enough as it was. You didn't need to shoulder other people's burdens." But it would have meant the world to me if I had. I wanted all of Helga's burdens and the woman who went with it. Instead, all I could do was glower and growl angrily.
"I'm going home," I said slapping a five dollar bill down on the table. "I have letters to read."
"Arnold," Phoebe said with desperate bravery. Though she spoke as loud as she could her plaintiff still came out weak and reedy. "I know that it's hard for you to forgive us but we're your friends. I promise to do all I can to look up Olga Pataki. And Helga. I'll be taking time off starting tomorrow. I've informed all my professors that I have a… family crisis," Phoebe said looking away suddenly. It was the guilt she always felt after she realized she had done wrong. Like the time she had faked a broken leg in front of Helga. I suddenly felt more forgiving to my old schoolmates.
"Then tomorrow we do this," I said offering Phoebe Heyerdahl a firm, business like handshake across the table. The years I had spent growing up bereaved of the joy of childhood had left a hard edge in me and in that handshake they understood it. I was giving them a second chance. Not a blank check.
"You should go home and rest," said Gerald, concerned. "Don't worry, man. We won't let you down."
"Good," I said feeling that even if I never saw Helga in this world again, at least she had left with my soul a part of her business savvy.
What Phoebe found next was not at all what I had expected. But neither had Phoebe or myself expected me, Arnold Shortman, to surround myself in a shrine of Helga's letters. I nearly buried myself in them day in, day out for half a week as I read them. Her notes were as holy as church candles to me and the comfort of having them near me was like a glow near my heart. But it was a madness also.
I hardly ate. Mostly I drank whatever sodas Gerald brought for me when he visited. I could tell by his eyes he was growing concerned for me. I had never looked worse. At last, because my best friend's eyes were pleading I changed my clothes and ran my old ones through the washer. Then I broke down and cooked a real meal for all of us. My first real meal for days.
"How goes the letter reading?" Phoebe warily, afraid I would break. But I did not. Instead I shook my head slowly from side to side.
"No clues where she might be- yet. So far she's talked about life in the public high school. How she hated it. Helga has mentioned very little that her parents were fighting. Expect that one letter," I said thinking back painfully on the most rumpled note I had found yet. It had been visibly stained with tears and I had nearly added tears of my own. Helga had, for one weak moment, cried out to me, before deciding that this note, too, like the others, must not be sent. Such stubbornness is a trait of Helga's that makes me gnash my teeth. But I love her even with this anguish-inflicting nature.
So far, the letters had not told me where Helga was now. But early on they began to answer WHY. Helga had chosen to NOT send these letters to me out of pride. She had been determined to prove she could make it on her own. Without using me as an emotional crutch. As her sole inspiration for art and poetry. Helga wanted to prove to herself and to the world she could live without love. She could live without me. But something had changed as she had written to me, in spirit if not person. As her home life had worsened she had needed the real me more.
But when Phoebe started up a film in Gerald's living room, it was not a girl with a heart of despair that I saw. Instead it was a swan, rising, stretching, filling the Hillwood screen with a face that had been groomed to flawless beauty. The camera lingered on the strong curve of her neck. The earlobes that tilted back. Helga's unibrow was gone. Instead, it had been carefully sculpted into two neat, but still dramatic brows.
"WHAT. IS. THIS," I stuttered looking at the paper box the movie had come in. Gerald looked at Phoebe for a long minute. I could feel their criticism of my recent poor temper before I got an explanation.
"I was just as surprised as you are," said Phoebe gazing toward the slender silhouette on screen. "Apparently, when Olga Pataki came home to stay she took a job in the local TV station. She was.. let's say peculiarly obsessed.. with becoming famous so that her former fiance would find her again. I have tapes of a soap opera she was part of but it's.. in all honesty… just terrible. She must be the worst actress I have ever seen."
"BUT," said Phoebe changing direction of the conversation. "Helga's name came up in the credits for one of the supporting roles. From there, I was able to find that she essayed parts in a number of films. Mostly as extras, really. Like the girl who walks a dog across the street at exactly the wrong time. Or the waitress in a restaurant scene. But then, I was surprised that she began to play villains. In this one, exceptional film, Helga features prominently. She is a girl who is tragically killed in a horrifying accident, then comes back as a ghost to haunt her former classmates. First, she keeps appearing on school buses all over the city. Then, on a dark, stormy afternoon, she enters the school holding her skull and tells the boy she loved that he must find her missing necklace and return it to her skull before she turns into an evil wraith for all eternity. It's a terrifying movie, really, but in the end, the spirit finds inner peace and is able to move on. For a film made in Hillwood, it was quite good. But a little scary."
I watched the film in silence. It moved me with a sickeningly sweet nostalgia to see Helga so close I could gaze into her sparkling blue eyes. I would have liked to sweep back that long, gold hair. But it shocked and numbed me to see her die onscreen (if even in pretense). My chest was colder than ice to see Helga, with makeup, act out being a ghost when for all I knew the reason she had vanished along with the other Patakis was that she had become one.
"So what next?" I asked, eager for more answers. Gerald coughed once to get my attention. "Well, while Phoebe was down at the tv station I helped her… ya know… ask around for anyone who knew her. There was one little scandal still going round the rumor mill about Olga Pataki. Apparently Helga introduced her to Ronnie Matthews while he was in town doing concerts and soon Olga had a thing going for him. Olga dropped out of acting because she was making an even bigger mess out of her personal life than ever. Plus she was depressed. Have you read anything about Olga so far in Helga's letters?"
"No," I answered dully. I was ashamed of myself for having gotten so little far into the vast collection of unsent letters Helga had left behind.
"Perhaps if I were to organize them," said Phoebe.
"They're already organized," I said. "They're dated. But they stop four months after she visited me that one time."
"Visited who? You?" said Gerald quirking his brow in that way of his. I realized it was the first time I had ever mentioned that part of my life to him. Instead, when on the telephone, I had always asked him, "How's Helga?" and he would answer that their family business, Big Bob's Beeper's, was skyrocketing. Over the years it had become a chain store. I came to the realization with joy, Big Bob's Beepers was exactly the place to try next.
"Yeah, yeah. She visited me once," I said suddenly distracted. "Now where's your phone book Gerald. I need to call Big Bob's Beepers."
"Oh wow. I hadn't thought of that," said Phoebe stating the obvious.
If it had been the old days I would have been able to connect with Big Bob Pataki automatically. Back then, he had staffed his own store. But now, it seemed, he had moved into a corporate office somewhere and they weren't about to let me speak to him. I cursed the telephone operator after I had hung up.
"Go make us a fresh pot of coffee, Arnold, said Gerald pointing in my direction. "And some fried eggs. Heck, order us some takeout. Here's my credit card. I'm about to pull an all-nighter."
"Well, I don't know if I can stay up all night," said Phoebe. "But I am eager to begin research on the Big Bob's Beepers Corporation. Gerald, I'll need to borrow your computer."
"Sure thing, baby," Gerald spoke suavely to Phoebe in the way she had always liked. I retreated to the kitchen as fast as I was able.