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“Joel, there is someone… I mean, someone is… You have a… a… a visitor.”
Joel looked up from the latest edition of Science spread open on his pillow, just in time to see his mother’s left eye begin twitching. She glanced down and to the side, winced from the tips of her indoor pumps to the top of her carefully coiffed head, and fled without another word, so Joel was not really surprised when Wednesday stepped into his room.
Correction: he was not surprised that it was Wednesday who’d provoked such a strong reaction in his mother – he was surprised to see Wednesday in his home.
(She’d written to him, after she’d scared him half to death at her baby brother’s birthday party, but Joel had thrown the black-edged letter in the trash, unopened. Twelve hours later, he’d gone downstairs in the middle of the night and rummaged through the trashcan till he found it, then read and reread it several times. His mother had burned it in the fireplace, after it stank up his whole room, and Joel never did write a reply. He’d also eavesdropped from the upstairs landing when Wednesday had called his house. The first time, his mother had hung up without saying a word in reply, which she never did, not even to telemarketers. The second time, his mother had screeched “What do you want?” like a wailing banshee – Joel remembered thinking the Addamses would have approved of that comparison and deciding not to share this tidbit with his parents. The third time, his mother had managed to get out the words “No, Joel can’t come to the phone, now be a good girl and stop calling us!” before she’d needed to lie down in a quiet room with the curtains closed.)
Joel admitted to himself he was impressed rather than surprised to see Wednesday show up in person and intimidate his mother into letting her come upstairs: she was nothing if not consistent.
He was still also offended and a little angry with her. “What are you doing here?” he asked, as if he didn’t know.
Wednesday stood still just inside the door. “You haven’t replied to my letter and wouldn’t come to the phone,” she said.
“It’s not that I wouldn’t come to the phone,” Joel insisted. “I was busy. With school. And stuff.”
Wednesday stared at him, unblinking and expressionless, and Joel knew that she knew that he was full of piping hot hooey.
She walked up to Joel’s bed and sat down beside him, a good two feet of empty air between them. Joel pulled his knees up to his chest, his back to the wall for support. Wednesday sat with both feet on the floor, her back straight and her hands folded in her lap. Joel could see only a part of her profile, one pale ear, and the thick, glossy root of one dark braid.
“You were upset after Pubert’s birthday party,” she said without making eye contact.
Joel nearly scoffed. “Well, yeah,” he said softly instead, like they were confirming the result of a lab experiment.
In the silence which ensued, Joel could hear his father’s Buick pull into the driveway. Before the engine noise cut out, the front door slammed, then his parents’ urgent whispers rose up like buzzing bees. Finally the engine stopped running, the front door opened and closed very quietly, and two pairs of feet began to climb the stairs, stopped before they reached the creaky fifth step from the top, and shuffled back downstairs. Joel wondered idly whether they’d called the police yet. He had no doubt Wednesday could handle the cops.
“I wasn’t really trying to scare you to death.”
Wednesday’s flat voice interrupted Joel’s reverie, the uncustomary emphasis she placed on the word death – or any word, really – pricking his attention.
“What were you trying to do, then?” he demanded in what he hoped was an angry tone, but suspected was merely shrill.
“I’m not sure,” Wednesday said. “If you had died, I could have brought you back, mostly.” She hesitated for a moment before she continued. “I don’t have a lot of experience mixing with people who are not my family.”
And that, Joel realized, was as much apology as he could hope to get, and much more besides. He put his feet down on the floor and shifted on the bed till there was only one foot of empty air between them. Wednesday didn’t turn to look at him, and he too stared resolutely ahead, at the signed photos of Stephen Hawking and Charles Manson on the far wall, while he tried to think of something to say.
“Are you hungry?” was the best that he could come up with.
“Why?” Wednesday asked.
Joel dared to look at her at last. She faced him, placid as ever.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to poison you,” Joel said. “I just thought you could stay for dinner, practice mixing with people some more.”
Wednesday raised an eyebrow. Joel hadn’t known she could do that, and suspected this was now his new favorite thing about her.
“If you don’t poison me, your mother certainly will,” Wednesday pointed out with impeccable logic. “Or at least she’ll try.”
Joel shook his head. “She uses only non-toxic cleaning products and keeps nothing stronger than aspirin and Vaseline in the medicine cabinet. My allergies, remember? I doubt she’s well-versed in poisonous herbs or mushrooms. You’re safe, although we might need to talk to the cops before we eat.”
“That’s alright,” Wednesday replied. “No Addams was ever bothered by the police ever since several went missing while trying to arrest my granduncle Rot and his wife Viscera during the Prohibition.”
She stood up from the bed, so Joel stood up too.
“I would like to call home before dinner,” Wednesday said. “Father will want to know you agreed to speak to me, so consequently I was not compelled to burn your house down, nor will he need to challenge you to a duel.”
Joel blinked. He was fairly sure she was joking.
Wednesday was still talking: “Father thinks you’re too normal for me, but I disagree.”
It took Joel a moment to process that. Once he’d done so, he smiled. “I'll show you where the phone is.”
Joel opened his bedroom door and heard his parents scurry out of sight downstairs. He couldn’t hear any sirens. While he led the way downstairs and spotted in the hall mirror how Wednesday curled her lip at the brief glimpses of the pink-tiled guest toilet and the chintz-covered sofa in the front room, it occurred to Joel that, depending on how long dinner lasted, his parents might be too traumatized to remember they’d forbidden him to attend True Crime Con next week. It also occurred to him Wednesday might want to go too, just to see how many people cosplayed as her relatives.
Things were definitely looking up.