The Hollow Places Read online

  Uncle Earl came out to meet me, despite the rain. He’s not a terribly physically demonstrative man, but he hugged me and said, “It’ll be okay, Carrot,” while I snuffled on his shoulder.

  I didn’t have that many boxes. Most of them were books. I have always been one of those who rhapsodized about the book as a physical object, but having to pack and carry the boxes was enough to make me want to throw over physical books altogether and just live on an e-reader.

  I’d left Mark the furniture. I had no place to put it. I had my clothes, a couple of pictures I’d taken off the walls, my laptop, and a couple of coffee mugs. And refrigerator magnets. I had been collecting refrigerator magnets whenever I traveled anywhere, and damn if I was leaving my ex souvenirs of cities he hadn’t visited.

  Uncle Earl wanted to help, but his gout was bad and he kept having to stop and rest his foot, so I pretended I was too tired to unload and just grabbed a couple essentials.

  “Your room’s through here,” he said, once I’d gotten those out of the car. He limped through the back hall, which was hung with posters announcing the anniversary of the Mothman sightings—“Fifty Years of Terror!”—and a random assortment of small-animal skulls wired to a kayak paddle. (Why a kayak paddle? you ask. Look, if I could explain this stuff, it wouldn’t be the Wonder Museum, okay?)

  My uncle may well have cleared out the room last year, but the coat of warm-yellow paint on the walls was brand-new. The room still smelled of it, even though a fan was in the doorway to blow some of the fumes out. The bed was an antique with elaborately lathed corner posts higher than my head, ridiculously imposing and faintly absurd, given that it was only a twin bed and had a green comforter decorated with little pineapples.

  On the wall opposite the bed was the mounted head of a Roosevelt elk. Roosevelt elk are massive animals, nearly the size of horses, and this one had a rack of antlers like tree limbs. I took one look and started laughing in recognition.

  “Oh my God! Uncle Earl, is that Prince?”

  “You always were fond of him.” Uncle Earl sounded a trifle embarrassed. “Thought you might appreciate the company.”

  I laughed again, walking up to my old friend.

  When I was five or six, I saw Bambi, because this is a baffling thing that parents still do to their children. I had not cried, but I had stared huge eyed at the screen while Bambi’s mother died. But the figure that really impressed me was Bambi’s father, the Prince of the Forest.

  (Incidentally, if you haven’t read the book, by Felix Salten, there is an incredibly weird scene where the Prince shows Bambi the body of a dead poacher to explain to him that humans can die, too. Everybody goes on about how disturbing Watership Down is as an animal book for kids, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Bambi.)

  The next time I went to the Wonder Museum, I walked up to the mounted elk head and shouted, “Prince!”

  My deer-identification skills were not strong at six. My mother, being that sort of person, explained that elk and deer were different species and this wasn’t the Prince.

  Uncle Earl, being the sort of person he was, waited until my mother had gone next door and told me that elk were even greater princes of the forest than deer, and that this elk would be honored to be called Prince.

  The next time I came back, the plaque next to the elk had been changed, and it now read:

  “PRINCE”

  Cervus canadensis roosevelti

  Even at a young age, I was aware that he was doing this partly to be kind and partly to make sure both my mother and I could be right. At a much later age, it would occur to me that my mother had been Uncle Earl’s sister first, and he probably had a lot of experience in working around her inexhaustible need to be correct in the face of adversity.

  It was good to see Prince again. I hugged Uncle Earl. “You didn’t have to do this. Thank you.”

  “It’s what family’s for, Carrot. Anyway, I’ll work you hard while you’re here. Don’t you worry about that.”

  He tried to look stern and failed miserably. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and only cried a little while I was in there, mostly because of the kindness, and a little out of sheer relief.

  * * *

  I went to bed early, exhausted from the drive and the emotions, and slept like the drugged dead. I didn’t even get up to use the bathroom.

  I woke up and did not have even a moment of confusion about where I was. The last few weeks, sleeping in the living room, I would wake up and stare at the ceiling and wonder why I wasn’t in the bedroom, and then the divorce would come crashing back down on me all over again. But here I woke up, and even though it was dark, I smelled paint and I saw Prince’s antlers in the thin sliver of light from the door and I knew exactly where I was.

  I had to fumble for my cell phone to see what time it was. Eight fifteen. Early for me, but if I was going to help run the museum, I had to get used to getting up early. We opened at nine. I got up, showered, threw on clothes, and padded out to the front, where Uncle Earl was setting up the point-of-sale system.

  “Morning, Carrot,” he said. “I brought doughnuts.”

  I looked over at the box of Krispy Kreme and reminded myself that I was back in the South, where our cultural food is deep-fried. Sure, great wars are fought over the proper sort of barbecue, but everybody finds common ground on the hush puppies. And Krispy Kreme. It’s as close to a religious pilgrimage as you can make in this part of the country. (Go a bit farther south and Graceland fills this ecological niche, but not in the Carolinas.)

  I took a doughnut and bit into it. It was made of air and glory.

  “You want to run next door and get us some coffee?” asked Uncle Earl. “I’d go, but…”

  I took note of the way he was sitting on the stool and got a suspicion that it wasn’t just gout bothering him. His back was straight, and I could see a brace under his clothes.

  “Back bugging you, Uncle Earl?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Fine like it’s fine, or fine like it hurts like hell but you don’t want to complain?”

  His lips twitched. “Well, more like the second one. Went out on me a few weeks back. Still twinges sometimes.”

  “Jeez. Didn’t they give you meds?”

  He shrugged carefully. “The ones that work make me foggy. Always afraid I’ll fall asleep in front of the customers.”

  I paused on my way out the door to get coffee. “Well, if you want to take one tomorrow, I’ll be here and make sure you don’t.”

  I almost expected him to turn me down—Uncle Earl would let you cut his leg off rather than complain—but he said, “I’d like that, hon,” and I had a sinking feeling that he was in a lot more pain than I thought.

  * * *

  The Black Hen coffee shop next door was ostensibly owned by a woman named Martha, but her brother Simon was the barista. I assume he got off shift at some point, but I never saw him leave. Simon was interesting. He dressed like a thrift-store Mad Hatter, with fingerless gloves and strange hats. He looked exactly the same now as he had the last time I had been here, five years ago, and exactly the same as he had when I’d first met him, nearly a decade ago. Simon had to be nearly forty, if not older, but he looked about eighteen. Somewhere, a portrait was probably aging for him.

  Uncle Earl and I drank free at the Black Hen because Uncle Earl owned the whole building, and I think he took at least half his rent in caffeine. Simon loved the Wonder Museum and came over sometimes with interesting skulls, also in lieu of rent.

  “How’ve you been, Simon?” I asked, flopping down in one of the chairs while he filled up a carafe for me to take back.

  “I’m good,” he said. “I hear you’re not so good.”

  “Divorce.”

  “Ugh. Do I need to kill him?”

  Simon was approximately half the size of my ex, but it was an arresting mental image. “No, but you’re sweet to offer. I’ll manage.” (I’ll manage, I said, as if I weren’t still bursting into tears at
inconvenient moments once or twice a day.)

  “Aww. You’re better off. Men suck.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Sorry, it’s the eye talking.” He put my coffee on the counter.

  “…the eye,” I said.

  “Oh, you haven’t been around for a while! Yeah. Turns out my left eye’s got some rare form of color blindness that only women get. So they think I’m probably a chimera and ate my twin in the womb and it’s actually her left eye.”

  I sipped the coffee. It was extremely good coffee. “Huh.”

  “The optometrist got very excited.”

  “I bet.”

  “Sometimes I see weird shit with it.”

  Knowing Simon, weird shit could encompass anything from ghosts to auras to invisible aliens performing in a barbershop quartet. I thought about asking if he’d seen anything in the Wonder Museum, but given that it was wall-to-wall weird shit, how would he even tell?

  After a minute, because I am incapable of leaving things alone, I said, “Is it just the left eye?”

  “Well, it’s hard to tell. I’d have to get everything tested individually, wouldn’t I? I mean, my pancreas could be female. How would I even know?”

  I had never before contemplated the gender of my pancreas. I gazed into my coffee.

  “How’s the museum?” he asked.

  “Seems to be doing okay. I’d like to try and catalog some of the things, maybe update the website while I’m staying here.”

  “Hoo, good luck.” Simon shook his head. “Better you than me.”

  A man who had devoured his twin in the womb and was now carrying her eye around in his head was pitying me. That seemed as if it should be a good metaphor for my life, although I’d be damned if I could make sense of it. I took the carafe of coffee, clutched my own cup, and headed back to the museum.

  * * *

  A couple of early tourists showed up to tour the museum, promptly at nine. I unlocked the door and waved them in. “Welcome to the Wonder Museum!”

  “I love this place,” one of them confessed, a shaggy-haired woman with a bull ring in her nose and a T-shirt that said I ♥ CHICKENS. “It’s the best. I bring all my friends here when we’re in town.”

  “Glad you think so!” I said cheerfully.

  The little knot of tourists vanished up the stairs, their voices drifting after them. “Wait until you see the taxidermy….”

  I swept my eyes over the displays, packed to bursting with… stuff. Contemplating the cataloging job ahead of me was like standing at the bottom of Everest and looking up. “Do you have any kind of inventory system?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Uncle Earl. “For the T-shirts and the bumper stickers and the mugs.”

  “But the museum exhibits?”

  He frowned. “Well, I know what they all are… mostly…”

  There is probably a phrase that strikes more fear and terror into the heart of someone attempting to take an inventory, but I do not know it. But looking at Uncle Earl’s hopeful, slightly worried face, I could not say it aloud.

  “Spreadsheets,” I said. “We will do this with spreadsheets. And stickers.”

  I pulled up a fresh one and wrote #00001 in the first box, then wrote Prince—mounted Roosevelt elk head. I went into the back, took a photo with my cell phone, then plugged it into the spreadsheet. Uncle Earl had a bunch of tiny price-tag stickers, for putting on the coffee mugs. I wrote #1 on one and affixed it to the back of Prince’s plaque.

  “One down,” I muttered, looking around me. “Another couple million to go.”

  I got to work.

  CHAPTER 3

  A week later, we were settling into a routine. I got up just before the museum opened. I ate whatever Uncle Earl brought in—muffins or doughnuts or whatever. I went next door, got coffee for both of us, and then Uncle Earl sat at the till and I did all the jobs that required mobility—fetching mail, putting out the signboard, restocking the stickers and the coffee mugs. Somewhere around lunch, he’d send me out for sandwiches at the diner, and I’d spend the rest of the afternoon cataloging.

  When we closed up at six, he’d say, “Good job today, Carrot. Don’t know what I did without you.” Then he would go home and I would go next door to the coffee shop and leech on the Wi-Fi. If I could think of something fun to say, I’d update the museum’s social media. I had grandiose visions of overhauling the web page and doing more with it than the occasional blog post about the history of Feejee Mermaids, but I hadn’t quite gotten there yet. And you had to be careful when you posted pictures of skulls and taxidermy because there were always people who wanted to tell you that this made you a murderer and the moral equivalent of Ed Gein. My internet armor had been built up in the fanfic battlegrounds and was thus impenetrable, but Uncle Earl was a gentle soul, and I was afraid that someone might hurt his feelings.

  Most of my time was spent designing people’s logos and wedding invitations and sending them off to clients, while Simon slung coffee and told me rambling stories about his childhood in Florida. This sounds boring. It was not. I would be head down in a project, letting the words flow over me, and Simon would casually throw out that his parents had been religious-party clowns on weekends, or that he had nearly been eaten by an alligator on two separate occasions. I would jerk upright, startled, and say “Wait, what?” and then Simon would explain how his sister had fought the alligator off with a lawn dart, and I would stare at him and wonder how he had survived to adulthood. (I asked him about this once. He said he’d never expected to live this long and now he was just happy to be here. Possibly that explains why he seemed so absolutely content to be a barista and live over the coffee shop. I think he genuinely expected to keel over on the espresso machine one day and be buried with a steamer in his hand.)

  At some point, the coffee shop would close. Simon never kicked me out, but when he’d turned the sign to CLOSED, I’d finish up what I was doing and head back next door. If I sat in a particular spot against the wall downstairs—directly under the kudu head, next to the portrait of Pope John Paul done entirely in sunflower seeds, I could still get Wi-Fi, so I’d check various forums, eat the other half of my sandwich from lunch, then congratulate myself on not stalking my ex-husband on social media to see if he was appropriately miserable.

  (Mark was not appropriately miserable. He was posting platitudes about life being full of possibility and moving bravely into the unknown. Dammit, I can’t believe I spent so much of my life on a man who would unironically post the line “Today is a gift, that’s why we call it the present.” And in Papyrus, too.)

  Sitting alone in a darkened building full of dead animals, fake shrunken heads, and, of course, His Sunflower Holiness might have been creepy if I wasn’t used to it, but it didn’t feel that way. Even when a passing car would splash its headlights through the window and the glass eyes of the animals would catch the light, it didn’t bother me. Sure, they briefly looked alive, but so what? They had a kind of benevolence, like stuffed and mounted guardian angels. Uncle Earl’s basic kindness infused every corner of his beloved museum.

  It was a kind place. It was beginning to feel like home. I could feel it working its way into my bones, and that worried me a little, because a few months ago I had been a graphic designer with a house and a husband, safe and stable, building up a career a little bit at a time. My life had stretched out in front of me, not terribly exciting but comprehensible.

  Now I was on a completely different track. I had barely any money, my job prospects were awfully thin, and stability was starting to look like a room with a stuffed elk head and a portrait of Elvis over the bed.

  It’s only been a week, I told myself. You get at least a month to recover from your marriage before you have to start worrying that you’re a slacker. Which was all the excuse I needed to pull up some suitably smutty fanfic and go to bed.

  * * *

  The UPS guy came in with a box the next morning, shoving the door open with his shoulder. Uncle Earl started
to get up, winced, and I hurried to grab the pad and sign for it so that he wouldn’t have to.

  “Got a new helper, I see.”

  Uncle Earl nodded. “This is my niece, Car— Kara.”

  The UPS guy tapped the brim of his hat. “I’m sure we’ll see each other plenty.” He headed back toward the door. “At least until your donors slow down a bit!”

  “Not much chance of that,” I muttered, glaring at the box. I’d been working all week, including most of the day we were closed, and I felt as if I’d barely made a dent. And here was more stuff coming in.

  Oh, well. I took the job on myself, after all.

  “Let me photograph these,” I said, getting out my phone, while Uncle Earl unpacked the box. “For the catalog.”

  “Okay, Carrot.”

  He pulled newspaper-wrapped bundles out of the box and laid them on the counter. “From my old friend Woody,” he said. “He haunts estate sales and sends me things. I like his because he always includes the provenance when he can find it.”

  Woody’s gifts were eclectic, to say the least. The first bundle was a bag of leg bones from Soay sheep, barely as long as my hand. “Soays are tiny,” said Uncle Earl. “Up to your knee, maybe.” The next two were modern primitive carvings of birds with their beaks gaping open and strange, flopping fish in their mouths. Then a lynx skull—“We can always use more skulls”—a blank book made of banana leaves, and a woman’s face molded out of fish-skin leather.

  “Oh, fish leather,” said Uncle Earl wearily. “You have to keep it in the cases or Beauregard gets it.” Beauregard is the latest of the Wonder Museum cats, an immense tabby with a skull like a fist. He had come up briefly when I was unpacking, headbutted me in the shin, and slouched off. Beau is excellent at catching the mice that might gnaw on the edges of the taxidermy and has a personality like a benevolent feline Genghis Khan.