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Patricia Abbott has published short stories in crime fiction outlets such as Hardluck Stories, The Thrilling Detective, Spinetingler, Demolition, Murdaland, Pulp Pusher and Thuglit. She lives and works in Detroit, Michigan where she is finishing her first novel.

What’s Left Behind by Patricia Abbott

Stepping out into the drafty hallway, Marion Hopper retied the belt on her robe and edged nearer the stairs. The rattling timbre of Lyman's voice had aroused her wary interest, but the corresponding hum she initially took for a visitor might be nothing more than the aging motor on the fridge. Clearly, Lyman was standing in the solarium where his voice was somewhat muffled by the bromeliads and ferns. The doorbell hadn't rung so who in the world had he invited into their house at seven-thirty in the morning? Of course, Lyman might be entirely alone, addressing an imaginary audience, making his characteristic pronouncements to the impassive stall of snake plants in the corner. Or it might be more of that other thing; she shook her head, fervently hoping it wasn't that.

Lyman began talking to himself in earnest soon after his retirement from the dental school in Oxford four years ago. He had a thriving practice, but little opportunity for showmanship arose in a dental office. That part of him, the essential part she sometimes thought, went unfulfilled, and although he expressed relief that the bi-weekly commute between Columbus and Oxford was over, where was an audience to be got now? His only other interest was the War Between the States and she certainly did not want to encourage that pursuit. It often led to shouting sessions and actions better left undone.

This problem had been solved serendipitously when his assistant went off to beautician's school. Marion agreed to fill in, which placed her chairside the day Lyman launched his first running commentary on a scheduled procedure. Marion dropped whatever she was holding and the eyes of the patient bulged helplessly as Lyman, referring to himself alternately as "Dr. Hopper" and "our practitioner," launched into a detailed description of a root canal. Suddenly Lyman was throwing around terms like distal end cutter and interproximal stripper, holding his hand out in the most unfriendly way when she fumbled for the instrument. Lyman continued his lecture, delivered in the hushed tones of a TV golf commentator, until the root canal was complete, and despite some hoarseness, the extraction that followed at 11:45 and the filling of a cavity at 1:40 received similar treatment.

But Marion quickly grew accustomed to Lyman's "performance dentistry" and looked forward to some of the rarer procedures as her stint as a temporary assistant became permanent. Lyman was seldom at a loss for words, and, with an eye to the future, began videotaping visits in the hope that someone might be interested in purchasing his tapes for a distance-learning course. With a nod toward this, Marion began a surreptitious upgrade of their wardrobes, leaning to the softer blues and grays for him, with dusty rose and greens for herself.

No sooner had Lyman's peculiarity become tolerable than a new idiosyncrasy emerged during Spring Pilgrimage. Columbus, like many Mississippi towns, held a yearly pilgrimage where for a modest fee, visitors could inspect a roster of antebellum homes with the revenue going toward worthy civic causes. Three years ago, the Hoppers' 1848 home had been placed on the list after the president of the Pilgrimage Committee ran Marion down in the Piggly-Wiggly.

"You'll be doing Columbus a great service," the red-haired woman told Marion in the canned soup aisle, knowing instinctively what it would take to reel in the Hopper house.

It was Lyman, though, who found the Pilgrimage to be an exhilarating experience. An amateur historian, he was well-suited to taking groups through the house, discoursing on most subjects spontaneously. The unexpected applause at the end (something he had never received at the university in Oxford) pumped him up enormously, and when that year's pilgrimage was over, he sank into despair when the Committee would not commit to allowing the Hopper House a second year on the program. The Hopper House didn't make the cut the next year or the one after. But over time, Lyman solved the problem in his own way.

"Are you dressed yet?" Lyman demanded excitedly, interrupting Marion's woolgathering in the upstairs hallway. Although shirtless and wearing a musty pair of bedroom slippers, he had already been outside. Traces of mud and freshly mown grass dotted the carpet, his slippers and the cuffs of his pants. A line of perspiration mustached his upper lip. Had he always been this excitable, Marion wondered?

"It's not even eight o'clock," she told him. "Who's downstairs, Lyman?"

He disappeared into their bedroom. "Where's my shirt? That blue one I wore yesterday."

"And the day before that," she reminded him. "Put on a clean one. Who's down there? Are they Yankees?"

"I can get another day out of it. Sweat disappeared about the same time as the hair on my calves." He was searching frantically in the closet for his favorite shirt, his head concealed by the thick velour robe on the hook.

"It's in the laundry chute. Let it be." She reached into his dresser drawer and pulled out a fresh shirt. Shaking his head in exasperation, he scrambled into it, slicking his hair back in the process and casting a quick look in the mirror on his chiffonier.

"It's too early for guests! What kind of people call at this hour?" She stood with her hands on her hips, resisting the urge to button the shirt for him when his shaking fingers fumbled with the tabs. Visitors as this hour, let them get their just reward, she decided.

"Nobody called," he told her huffily. "The two of them were standing outside in the street, Marion. Reading the description in an old Pilgrimage pamphlet aloud." He gazed at her beatifically. "I had to invite them in."

"Had to? Do I need to remind you of the state of our house? We have a yard's worth of plaster sitting on the first floor for starters. Someone could put a foot through a floorboard!" She drew a needed breath. "Are they Yankees?" she asked again.

"I told them the house was ruined," he told her, ignoring her last question. "I asked, ‘Do you want to see a wrecked house for a change?'"

A storm in February had flattened all four of their chimneys. Huge craters marked the path of each chimney's descent through the three floors of the house. Also ruined were great swaths of plaster, numerous panels of wallpaper, and several sections of floor and carpet and many of their precious possessions. The roar of destruction still echoed in Marion's ears four months later.

Indeed, the storm cut a path across the middle of Mississippi, where over a thousand trees had been felled on the Trace alone. The Hopper house was on the list for repairs, but skilled craftsmen preferred to earn their paychecks from new home construction. There was scant hope the house would be restored before autumn now, and intimidated by the size of the job, the Hoppers made little progress.

Standing in the right place in the dining room, one could see straight into the attic three flights up. A series of photographs taken with Lyman's old Nikon documented the disaster. Blown up at no small cost, the snapshots were push-pinned to a poster board in the back hallway with catchy words and phrases providing an exciting account. She truly believed he preferred the house in its present state––it was more photogenic, more worthy of interest.

Her husband's voice grew louder as he explained the trajectory of the storm. He kept a large pair of binoculars on the sideboard, and more than once, she found visitors stretched out on the carpeted floor at Lyman's insistence. He was a hard man to refuse.

"Oh, and here's my wife," Lyman said, beaming as she reached the bottom of the stairs, having quickly substituted a more acceptable housecoat for her lemon peignoir.

The visitors, a couple in their early thirties holding the paraphernalia of Lyman's tour in their hands and looking embarrassed, produced the apologies for coming inside she now expected. Graciously sweeping their regrets aside, she picked up on her part of the tour, an introduction to the more feminine side of the house: wallpaper, furniture, pictures, and flower arrangements. During her segment, Lyman took a short break although he seldom kept quiet. Instead, he remained at her elbow, contradicting or correcting her whenever possible, pointing out her errors with élan. He was a quick study even at sixty-eight and had compiled a library of technical books to shore up the show.

She offered more than once to step aside completely, but he told her with regret, "Makes me seem like a fairy to know that stuff."

She rolled her eyes. "You contradict everything I say!"

"It still comes across better," he decided. "They forget who's told them what anyway."

The house looked even worse than usual this morning. Lyman had begun sleeping downstairs on the sofa, his grimy sheets slung over the sofa's back, creating a picture of housewifely neglect. The coffee table was a stockpile of the articles Lyman used to get himself through the night now that he seldom slept: coffee cups, books, plates with congealed food, games, crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, the remote to the television, a magnifying glass, reading glasses, and a Gameboy a visiting grandson left behind. Averting her eyes from the chaos, she pointed out the portraits of Lyman's ancestors: Sir Robert, Lady Agatha, Cousin Harold and so on. The questions were the same after a while, and she answered them with half her mind elsewhere.

Truthfully, she had never been convinced that the people hanging on their walls were related to her husband. Lyman might easily have bought the portraits at a garage sale. Certainly, their pinched noses and near-sighted squints, obvious family traits amongst them, were nothing like her husband's fleshy nose, his sharp-eyed mien. He was amazingly vague on their particulars too, leaving their histories to Marion's own invention. Unfortunately, she had little imagination and told a dull tale.

"I think you've said that already, dear," Lyman said, interrupting her. "It's Marion's favorite part of the tour," he joked, flashing a look of annoyance.

He took her arm then, guiding her to the back parlor where she was meant to tell her guests that what looked like wallpaper was actually a stencil, a faithfully executed copy of the original stencil from 1848. The roses, ten times their size in life and tiring in their redness, looked predatory.

When the stenciling had last needed replacement a few years back, she grew hopeful something new might take its place. She had in mind a sharp-edged stripe or something flocked. Returning from a visit with their daughter in Mobile, she had been about to mention it only to find the deed done and Lyman thinking the nearly perfect replication would please her.

Lyman handled the final rooms. The kitchen, she was ashamed to say, had been redecorated in the early seventies and ruined with dark paneling, gold shag carpeting and olive appliances. His interest here was in plumbing anyway, and he had removed the cabinet's back wall under the sink so much of it was on display.

The final destination on the tour was in the cellar. "Want to see where the slave owner that owned this house in the 1860s hid out when the Yankees finally arrived in town?" Both of the visitors nodded, if tiredly. "It's just down these steps," he told them, opening the cellar door. He led them down the steep rather warped steps, with Marion following. She hated this last part. You never knew when a railing would give way, breaking a hip. Or when some rodent would decide to make itself known. "Old Colonel Pelfrey hid just in there," Lyman said pointing toward an archway in the far wall. "He holed up there for weeks at a time when it was rumored that the Yankees were in the area." He put a hand on his hip. "I can't bend too well nowadays, so you'll have to take a peek yourself. You'll definitely want to see it because it's a secret chamber to this day. Hardly a soul on earth knows about it." He handed the young man a flashlight and stepped aside. The two tiptoed into the long, narrow passage, holding the light up in front of them. "That's right," Lyman coaxed. "That's right. Just a little farther. You'll see an old stove and a cot when you're in the right place. There you go." Marion watched silently as Lyman eased the door closed.

"Well, that's that," Lyman said, heading for the steps. She could hear the couple battering at the door, of course, but soon she would be back upstairs and the noise would fade. It always did. It would be like little mouse-scratchings within a couple hours and then nothing. The Colonel had fashioned himself a nearly airless room one hundred and fifty years ago. His had been the first body Lyman's grandfather had found, a skeleton by then with his face in an awful grimace. The nail marks on the door looked like they had been made by an iron claw. Others had followed, of course. The room was all too convenient a way to settle scores and even things out.

"They were a nice young couple," Marion said, a little fretfully.

"They did make an adequate audience," he agreed, giving her a hand as they reached the top. "But they were Yankees and I caught them smirking more than once." He shook his head. "You don't see me asking for tours of the Beecher or Lincoln manse. I keep well below the Line. So should they."

He was exhausted from the heat. She could see it in the slump of his shoulders, the slackness of his skin. He collapsed at the kitchen table, fingering the untouched plate of Pepperidge Farm cookies. She re-bagged the shortbread silently. His fingers crimped and re-crimped the plastic tablecloth as she placed a china plate over the iced tea pitcher, a habit from earlier days when houseflies went after the sugar. "I thought they were very polite, Lyman. I think you were looking for an excuse." She hated chastising him when he looked so fragile, but really today's action had been unnecessary. They had been a good audience and that was the supposed criteria for freedom. Fewer and fewer guests got away from them nowadays. Lyman knew his days of evening the score with the North were numbered and proceeded post haste.

The phone rang. The crackling voice on the line was saying something about rescheduling their job. She listened with half an ear, engrossed in the done-in look on Lyman's face.

"Is that all right then, Mrs. Hopper?" The man raised his voice in deference to her age. "Your husband said the later the better, but we'd like to wrap it up." The man was telling her that Lyman had purposely delayed the restoration of their house.

"There's been some mistake." Marion said, interrupting him.

"Your husband didn't seem to be in any hurry. I appreciate his sense of sacrifice, his community spir––"

"As soon as possible, sir," she interrupted. "We want it completed as soon as possible." The man hung up, reluctantly promising to reschedule the job for the next week. Marion put the phone down softly, contemplating this new piece of information.

"Lyman," she said, reentering the kitchen. "A Mr. Pike just told me that you've delayed scheduling the repairs on the house? Whatever can you be thinking?"

He looked up, a wary look on his face. "Mr. Pike?" His hand swept nonexistent hair back from his brow.

"The contractor."

"I was trying to be…agreeable," he told her, recovering his bearing. "It didn't hurt to let others go first. The ones with children…ill people."

"No, of course not. But the man said you actually put him off."

"Look, I really don't want to get into this. Not during this hot spell, at least."

"Into what?" she asked, helpless to let it go.

"We needed something right about then," he said, passing a hand across his face again. "You'd been acting so strange. Having all those strange men in the house seemed ill-advised."

"I'd been acting strange?" She sat down, realizing intuitively a seat would be needed.

"Oh, Marion! Surely you know that I've had to make—adjustments these last years." His hand swept across the table, missing a porcelain cup by inches.

"It has been hard," she began, lifting the cup out of harm's way. "But truly I haven't minded. I've rather liked working in the office."

He blinked twice––in that odd birdlike way he had now. "I'm glad to hear that. I didn't know if it would work out. But I had to think fast under the circumstances."

"Circumstances?"

"The series of phobias you were developing. Not leaving the house, not dressing," he gestured toward her and she glanced down at her housecoat. "Not eating properly. And your fanaticism about cleanliness. Then there's that strange concern you developed about people coming into the house."

Was this all true? Had she been about to go mad and Lyman saved her? Alternately, Lyman could easily have invented his concern to cover for his own faltering sanity, his own growing weaknesses. Compensation techniques, she remembered reading.

"What about your oral commentaries in the office?" she said. "Isn't that a bit strange? It's cost you many patients."

"But well worth it if I could keep your mind on the procedure," he countered. "You did tend to drift off. And refusing to learn the proper names of my instruments! It made me look bad."

Oh dear! Perhaps it was she. "But what about these tours of the house." She volleyed late but just in time. "It's quite mad the way you chase people down in the streets."

"You wouldn't let a soul inside," he returned. "I had to cancel several bridge club meetings. You even balked when my sister wanted to visit." Was that true? Had she kept that wretched woman away?

"Why won't you change your clothes?" she remembered after a long pause. "Last week you only put two shirts in the hamper. And not a single pair of pajamas!"

"Why can't I spend the night in the spare room instead of on the couch downstairs? I can't roll over properly on that narrow coffin, and the springs are deadly."

"Have you seen the state of the front room? Would it hurt you to pick up the paper?"

"I'm so tired of those housecoats. They look like you're getting ready to go out, yet you never go." They glared at each other over the space of a life.

"Well, what about the corpses in our basement? Don't they count for anything? Do you think I enjoy going in there and dusting them with lye."

And so it went on and on in the Hopper house, with Marion and Lyman enumerating the ways in which the other had gone mad, each weakly defending his/her own sanity, neither sure if the other was right in her/his assessment. Each trotted out past grievances, spun wildly for effect. Calendars, date books and diaries were consulted. Telephone calls were placed to people who hardly remembered their names.

It was a wearisome process and neither Hopper was able to sustain an advantage. At some point far into the night, Marion came upon a realization that seized her like the initial inklings for the invention of electricity must have seized Tom Edison. "Perhaps this is how it is from now on, Lyman."

He looked at her distrustfully. He clamped his mouth shut, probably waiting for elaboration.

"Maybe we'll have to save each other from now on." She was still working it out.

He thought about it for a minute. "You mean we both pick up the other's baton. Provide cover for the one racing blindly out into the open."

She nodded. "I don't know why it didn't occur to us before now. I'll bet half the people we know do it. We just hadn't noticed."

"When they arrive at a certain age, you mean?"

"As long as we're aware of it, there shouldn't be any harm," she said, beginning to prepare breakfast. She was awfully hungry suddenly. "We can tolerate a lot if we know what we're up against."

"It was getting awfully lonely," he admitted, looking for the toaster in the spot where his mother kept it sixty years ago. "But I can still look for my audience, right?" Marion nodded a tad reluctantly, but she never had the heart to refuse him much. "But maybe our trips to the basement should be curtailed. If we're not thinking that clearly…."

Lyman nodded. She motioned in the direction of the toaster and he plugged it in. Luckily, it was a four-slice one and nobody had to wait while the other ate. They were on terra nova now. No question about it.

THE END