by Sandi Tan
When he was done, Arik stole sheepish glances at her, still panting. His face was red. There were a couple of white Pollocky splats on the wall and she could tell these would quickly get dry and crusted in the sun. He tucked his cock back into his pants and buttoned up. The bulge was still there, but modest.
“God . . . I hope you’re not totally grossed out.”
She kissed him tenderly on the lips and put her head on his chest so he couldn’t see her face. Listening to his pounding heart, she stole glances at his placid, sated face and then down at his pants. The bulge was gone.
Mira sat at the wheel of the sweltering car, mime-driving. From the handbook, she now knew where every control was, from the hazard lights to the wiper, and in theory could back the car out of the driveway without running anyone over. In theory, she could zoom off, if only Rosie would tell her where she’d hidden the keys. She’d drive to San Francisco, then on to Portland and across the border to be a fugitive in Canada, where she’d trade in the Camry for a hybrid and live amongst the multiethnic street punks of British Columbia.
In the rearview mirror, she glimpsed a man in a hooded sweater standing on the porch of the darkened house across the street, the Ireland house, peering through its windows. He was nobody she recognized and from where she was, it was hard to describe him beyond adult male, darkly Caucasian. The lack of details frustrated her: she made a ritual of memorizing faces in case she was ever invited to point someone out in a lineup. At dusk, everything and everyone looked as hazy as a gas station surveillance tape.
The man looked at his watch, rapped on the door, rang the bell several times, waited for a response and got none. That solitary Kate woman clearly wasn’t in. Her car wasn’t in the driveway and none of the house lights were even on. The man walked down the front steps and disappeared around the side of the house. He was probably one of those hoodie burglars! Mira kept a close watch through the rearview mirror, expecting him to reappear at any second with a sack of jewelry or a flat-screen TV. Then she’d bust him.
Her foot pumped the accelerator anxiously, and in her mind she plotted out the quickest route to the phone and what she would say to the cops. Where were those stupid police choppers now that she needed them?
RAT-a-tat! Knuckles on the passenger window.
It was him! Her mind went blank, her amazing improv abilities lost to panic. He started walking over to the driver’s side, her side. She shut her door and locked it.
“Hi there?” the man said. He sounded muffled on the other side of the glass. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
She said nothing and just stared at his face, which seemed so ordinary that it defied description. Brownish hair. Gray hoodie. The big arms of somebody who owned a gym membership. He knocked on her window again, more softly this time.
“Do you speak English?”
She nodded, keenly insulted.
“Mind rolling down your window? I want to talk to you.”
She thought it over. He looked harmless enough, and besides, if he tried anything, she could sound the horn and her mother or Rosie would come running. She lowered the window. He casually reached in, unlocked her door and pulled it open. Now he saw her legs; she saw his.
“What were you doing in there?” The man seemed to find her very amusing.
“I’m a ghost.”
“That’s right. You really scare me.”
He leaned into the car and she steadied her palm on the horn, ready to hit it if he came any closer.
“Listen, I need to ask you a favor. You know that lady across the street?”
She shrugged.
“You know when she’ll be home?”
She shrugged.
“Hey, I thought you were a ghost. Shouldn’t you know everything?”
She shrugged.
“Well, would you pass her a message from me?”
Again, she shrugged.
“Now come on, Ghost. This is real important. I’m an old, old friend of hers. Would you tell her Bluto was here and that I’ll be back soon? Could you do that for me?”
She wavered, then nodded slowly.
“Thanks a million, Ghost. I owe you one.”
“Wait.” She frowned. “Bluto’s the name of her dog though.”
“Is that what she told you?” He smirked to himself and started to walk away. Suddenly, he whipped back, and she returned her hand to the horn.
“Is she out a lot?”
“I dunno. For a pregnant lady, maybe.”
Her words brought a perplexed expression to his face. Slowly this morphed into the delighted smile of a man who’d just won some bet. He gazed up at the full moon and for a moment Mira thought he was going to bay.
“I’ll be seeing ya, my pretty little Ghost.”
The man retreated. The term pretty gave her goosebumps. What did he mean by that? Was he being sarcastic or what? Mira watched him disappear into a safe distance before she climbed out of the car and dashed into the house.
The moment Kate pulled into her driveway, she saw in her rearview mirror the figure of a girl running madly toward her out of the dark. She froze and locked her doors. When the girl came closer, she rolled down her window.
It was just one of the Park girls. “Hi there?”
A chill shot down Mira’s spine. Kate and the man who was looking for her said those exact words with the exact same questioning lilt.
“A man came for you,” Mira said. “He says his name’s Bluto, like your dog. He says he’ll be back.”
“Oh? Thank you.” Kate conjured up a pained smile. She was reacting so stiffly that Mira half expected her to reach into her purse for a tip. Then came a look of barely concealed anxiety. “If that man ever tries to approach you again, you should run.”
“Run?”
“Yes, the act of departing quickly. He’s not someone you want to get mixed up with . . . He’s got a history.”
“History?”
“Yes, things that happened in the past.”
Unlocking the front door, Kate’s hands rattled. Bluto had stepped into her flower bed and brought topsoil to her welcome mat. What did he want?
A chopper rumbled its approach overhead. They made her jumpy, these airborne invaders. They were so loud, yet seemed so passive-aggressive. Couldn’t they just come out and say what they wanted instead of all this noisy intimation? She slipped into her house and shut the door. A second later, she popped her head out, scanned the street, and with a swift tug, pulled the welcome mat inside.
The full, late-August moon shone on Arik like a spotlight, and he was paranoid someone might see him standing outside Rosemary’s house and take him for a burglar. All those choppers were still flying by randomly, looking for Al Qaeda operatives.
“I can’t get this thing off,” he whispered, tugging at the bug screen in her window. “It’s nailed to the freakin’ frame. What should we do?” He swiveled around nervously for police cruisers. “I feel really exposed out here.”
Abruptly her room light went off. Now Arik couldn’t see her at all. He cupped his hands on the sides of his eyes and pressed them against the screen.
“Rose? You there? What’re you doing?”
Then slowly, as his eyes got used to the darkness, he got his answer. She was undressing, methodically and completely. Her shirt came off first, then her shorts. She did a 360-degree spin before she removed her bra and finally her panties. She did this simply and without Mata Hari flair, but it was plenty.
“Oh God, Rose, please don’t do that!”
She came to the window and pressed her body against the screen to let him feel her breasts through the mesh.
“Your nipples are hard,” he gasped. “God, you’re so hot!”
He pressed his face on the screen so his cheek rubbed against her chest, but the mesh in between scratched and scraped a
t both of them. When he pulled away, Rosemary saw pink crosshatches on his flesh. He lunged back to kiss her breast almost immediately, glistening wet tongue lashing at the screen.
“You taste like metal.” He laughed, frustrated. “God, I want to be inside . . .”
“I want you in here, too.”
She lowered her hand to her inner thigh and started touching herself. They both heard the moist, sucking sounds this made and Arik sighed with increasing torment. Her flesh looked so grabbable, so bitable.
“Christ, Rose, I need to be inside you!”
“I have to get back to my bed, okay? I can’t come standing up.” She moved onto her bed a few feet away, and switched on her Jesus night-light so he could see her.
“You’re driving me crazy, Rose! I am so hard right now. I want to”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“plunge my cock deep inside you and fuck you so hard.”
Rosemary was deep in her own universe, her eyes half-open and looking at him with a dreamy expression. Her fingers were glistening with her own juice, juice produced for him, just for him. He had to know what she tasted like, God! He rubbed his face on the screen, the smell and taste of rust and dust suddenly sexy.
“Rose,” he moaned, unzipping his fly. “I want to hold you down and push my tongue inside you. I want to tongue-fuck you till you come and come . . .”
His incantation worked. She closed her eyes and arched her back. Her legs began to thrash. From the Internet porn he’d seen, he knew this to be a good thing; yet live, right in front of him, it was a different matter. He was terrified by Rosemary’s private epileptic trance. He was completely cut out of it.
Rosemary stifled her scream with her free hand. She bit into her fingers and her face scrunched up. Her torso trembled in waves—intense, protracted quakes as she curved her back some more, her fingers still thrusting, then she writhed with shorter, shallower aftershocks. Her eyes popped open and she gasped jaggedly for air, like someone dying. In seconds, her body went limp and she smiled at Arik like a docile doe.
“That’s just my first one,” she murmured. “I can go on and on and on . . .”
Out of nowhere came the grumbling buzz of a chopper. The ferocity of its approach suggested it had found its target.
In the racket, she thought she heard Arik say “I love you,” but couldn’t be sure. Whatever he said, Arik was gone. She listened as the chopper whipped over her roof and up the hill toward the mountains.
First thing next morning, she slipped outdoors. The crusty, yellowish streaks she found below her window made her feel warm and fuzzy, and yes, loved.
– 10 –
THE SICK ROSE
Mary-Sue had come a long way since the days she dreamt of outrunning the world on a pogo stick and flipping off her legions of doubters. She knew people still flung adjectives like “kooky,” “screwy” and “desperate” behind her back—but she learned to put her fists away. Over the years, this tolerance evolved into indifference, and as she stopped fighting back, she stopped hurting.
She grew to like her own company. It wasn’t the kind of loneliness she had experienced among the ascetics in Humboldt long ago, but the solitude of voluntary singlehood. Any non-asshole who entered into her orbit was gravy. After all, you could buy single-serving frozen pizzas these days, with all kinds of toppings. If she wanted to dine out, there was no dread in it; no longer did waiters throw pitiful looks at lone women. She always tipped well. There were also things called DVDs if she didn’t feel like going to an R-rated movie by herself.
Florida suited her. She was glad she had the opportunity to discover this for herself. It wasn’t only the immigrants and migrants, she realized, who roamed around America looking for a place to call home, it was everybody. And it was this restless wandering, this endless self-creation, that made this country dynamite. The alternative, she supposed, was to calcify into some kind of stupefied Amish tree stump, doomed to have happiness motor right by.
At sixty-six, after the end of what had admittedly been an abnormally long adolescence, Mary-Sue emerged a confident, independent woman. She might have been alone but she was no longer lonely. Her dear Kate still meant the world to her, of course, but as hard as it was at first to accept, it was healthier for them to be apart—Kate was probably happier, too, without her hanging around. Whoever said no man was an island obviously wasn’t speaking about women. Women were superb at being by themselves . . .
Forgetting to return a phone call wouldn’t have been strange for most people, but this was Mary-Sue, who, whenever Kate called, always sounded like she’d leapt for the phone from a hundred yards away.
Scenarios ran through Kate’s head, all unpleasant: Mary-Sue, her hip broken on those slippery back porch steps, writhing in pain as raccoons came by and mauled her; rifle-toting Cuban bandits making her compound the base camp for their drug-smuggling empire; migrant-worker thieves who, when caught climbing in the window by Mary-Sue, hacked her head off in cold blood. The world being what it was, even the prosaic worries were wearisome—coyotes, whiplash, twisters, aneurysms. Could she have been planning an expedition, an elopement or a suicide?
It wouldn’t have been out of character for Mary-Sue to slip, unannounced, out of this world. Kate was well acquainted with the cussed, childish way her mother insisted on crafting her own fate and woe betide anyone who got in the way of her narrative. She’d never consulted Kate on the move to Florida—she said she was going off on a vacation, then came back announcing she’d bought a house—as if this secrecy proved what a great captain of her own destiny she was. As if Kate was the jailer she’d been patiently plotting to escape for years.
Kate hadn’t slept in days—she’d lie like a beached whale watching Conan, waiting with clenched jaws for the Lunesta to kick in. Two hours later, still quite alert and surfing the movie channels for anything that wasn’t vile or stupid, she’d pop an Ambien. She was lucky if, at five, she’d catch an hour or two of dreamless Zs.
And then there was Bluto’s return. Why couldn’t he just leave a message on her voicemail, like any other regular person? Had he come back to kiss her or kill her?
She was keeping the baby. Somewhere along the way, she’d made her decision without even fully registering that she’d done it. By not doing anything about it, she supposed. Having the baby would be a turning point in her life. It would reorient her after all those years of feeling out of whack. It would be, in a word, redemption. She’d guard this redemption fiercely—Bluto would have nothing to do with it.
But she had yet to break the news to Mary-Sue.
After a full week with no word from her mother, Kate felt it was time to take action. She tried to recall the name of Mary-Sue’s Bible-nut neighbor whose backyard was sinking into the Everglades. Larry something. Or was it even Larry? She should have paid closer attention; even a lousy parent would have casually noted the name of her child’s playmate. Now there was absolutely nobody she could call to drive by her mother’s house to see if things were all right. She tried the local sheriff’s department but was put on hold for so long that both times the line went dead.
The next morning, she was on a plane to Miami. In the air, with nothing else she could do, she kicked off her shoes and took a nap against the window—her first unfettered sleep in days. She woke up when the plane touched down at Miami International, a low-key airport that made her think of the shopping malls built in the eighties, when land was infinite. She bought herself a shot of Cuban coffee from a cart strung with plastic bananas, and roused herself. The West Indian coffee lady gave her a genuine smile, full of Caribbean hospitality, a far cry from the resentful scowls of the vendors at LAX who made her feel bad when all she wanted to do was overpay for bottled water.
“Take care, sweetie,” the lady said as Kate tottered away.
The rental car clerk gave her a complimentary upgrade and handed her the keys to a Lincoln Town Car for n
o apparent reason. It was only when she got out to the car and saw her own reflection in its polished black doors that she realized why everybody had been so nice. It wasn’t that Florida loved its tourists better, it was that she was a woman with a five-month baby bump who was traveling unassisted and looking completely exhausted, overwhelmed, lost. Those fanny packs under her eyes. She was supposed to be radiant.
Within an hour, Kate found herself effortlessly steering through the flat grids of avocado groves in Mary-Sue’s neck of Homestead. The sultry, subtropical air flooded the car’s interior as soon as she rolled down her window, and condensation bloomed on every surface. The steering wheel instantly went damp. This was air so loafy it would prop her up if she fell asleep standing. And she did very much feel like sleeping.
She drove up Mary-Sue’s long driveway and parked beneath the palm-lined porte cochere. With the right owner, this plantation-style villa could have been the kind of Southern colony where crazy old widows lived with their hundred cats and washed their woes down with moonshine. It was no place for any civilized woman to be living by her lonesome. She got out of the Town Car just as a symphony of insects was starting up.
Mary-Sue’s car wasn’t there. But there were no stacks of mail or newspapers piled at her door either, and those were the things Kate had been most afraid of finding, ahead of the decomposing body. From the doorstep, she smelled no scent of rot from within; through the windows, the rooms looked undisturbed. A couple of lamps had been left on; perhaps her mother had simply gone to the store and would return anytime.
As she walked back to her car, she saw the outline of someone lumbering up the driveway with a Quasimodo limp. He was short, with a wide barrel-chest and arms that hung low on his sides; this was either an orangutan or a backwoods boogeyman come to gnaw at her flesh.
“Howdy!” he thundered. He carried a flashlight and beamed it up at his own face, ghost-story style. The shadows didn’t do his features any favors—with his beaky nose and slab of a forehead, he was a gargoyle prized off the Haunted Mansion at Disney.