We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone

by Ronald Malfi

  “That was thoughtful.”

  “Will Lois and I be going to your home?”

  “Ask her,” Jack said. A sharp pain, needling and white-hot, jabbed at his belly.

  “Just the same to me,” Mark muttered, and stepped out of the restroom.

  Twenty minutes later, Jack stood pale and naked in the back of the Capshaws’ van, with Mark’s wife sitting cross-legged and shirtless on the floor in front of him. Unlike Jack’s wife, Miranda was all nipple and no breast.

  She stood, gathered his neck up in her arms, and pushed herself against him. Her body stank of weed and sweat and baby powder. Jack was certain he stank of vomit and cigar smoke.

  Miranda kissed him hard on the mouth. Then pulled away.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you…your…”

  “I’m fine,” he said, and kissed her back, much gentler than she had kissed him. His eyes closed, the dense heat of the van pressing against his bare skin, and he imagined himself tucked up in the high branches of a great tree, the walnut stock of a Winchester rifle pressing against his right thigh. Below him in the brush, sticky with fresh blood that still pumped from him, an injured and naked Mark Capshaw tried dragging himself through the blood-sodden thicket. Part of Mark’s head had been blown away, revealing a pulpy, spongy arrangement of brain and skull that glistened in the sun. At one point he imagined Mark Capshaw rising to his knees, righting himself with one hand—his expensive wristwatch hand—against the gray and peeling body of a tree, his tanned and muscled back streaked with blood. Then falling dead in the tall grass.

  “There we go,” Miranda cooed, now smiling and fondling him. “Now we’ve got it.”

  Jack opened his eyes, blinked, and smelled the pot-stink of the Capshaws’ van.

  “I want you to do the behind-me stuff tonight,” Miranda said.

  “All right.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “No.”

  “You feel cold.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Okay.”

  “Start with my nipples. I like when you start with my nipples.”

  “All right,” Jack said, and lowered Mark Capshaw’s wife to the floor.

  The Good Father

  “Was it because we were bad?” Tim asked, suddenly looking up from his plate. The boy had been quiet throughout all of dinner, and this sudden question came as sudden as a handclap.

  Michael set his fork down on his own plate. They hadn’t been talking about her, but Michael did not need his son to be more specific. “Of course not,” he said. “Why would you think such a thing?”

  “Sean Allington’s mom ran away last year, and Sean and his brothers are always getting into trouble,” Tim said, and now Gertrude was looking at him with rapt, wide-eyed attention.

  “Mom didn’t run away,” Gertrude chided her older brother. “She’s coming back.” She was six years old and spoke with a sibilant lisp.

  Tim, who had just turned ten last month, regarded his younger sister with a look that conveyed both pity and frustration—an eerily adult look, Michael thought as he watched the boy.

  “Let’s get something straight,” Michael said, sliding his plate to one side and folding his hands on the tabletop. “Your mother didn’t leave because of anything either of you did.”

  “Then why did she go?” Tim asked.

  “I don’t know, Tim. Because she wanted something different, I guess. Because she wanted to change her life.”

  “Sean Allington said she fell in love with some guy and wanted to live with him instead.”

  Michael smiled sourly.

  “Was it something you did, Daddy?” Gertrude asked.

  “Enough is enough,” Michael said, getting up from the table. “Finish your dinners.”

  * * *

  Marybeth had been gone over a month and the house still mourned her absence. The floors creaked and groaned even when no feet tread upon them, as if the house were sobbing in its grief. Similarly, the bedroom she had once shared with Michael had grown chamberlike and inhospitable. Memories of their early years of marriage in this house frequently accosted him since her disappearance—the children, then only babies, cradled between them in the big bed, or the way Marybeth would fall asleep on the sofa with a book tented across her chest on Sunday afternoons—but he knew he had to be strong for the children. He had cried only once, after the weight of it all had come down on him and he understood what her absence now meant for him and the children. The tears had come in the sanctuary of the cold and inhospitable bedroom, the bed suddenly too big, the room itself like some great damning proclamation in all its matrimonial furnishings. For his children’s sake, Michael did his best to keep his emotions well-guarded. Of course, he would never let the children see him cry over it.

  Gertrude had cried. It had been a constant—every night since Marybeth had gone—for the first week. Normally it was around the time she had to go to bed—ruminations were violent and unforgiving things at night, Michael knew—but just last week he had to pick her up from school when she had broken down into a flood of tears. In an effort to alleviate the girl’s grief, he had swung by the McDonald’s on Tamarack Street, and he was grateful that the box of chicken nuggets and the ice cream sundae worked their magic. Back home, he had wanted to talk to the girl about her feelings—ironically, something Marybeth had always been better at than he—but Gertrude had seemed contented enough by the time they had reached the house that he was disinclined to bring up the issue with her.

  Tim did not cry over his mother’s departure. Michael would have preferred crying to the strange blank-eyed fugues that seemed to overcome the boy from time to time, as if he were being channeled by some spiritual undercurrent Michael himself could not tap into. The boy asked very few questions of him, seeming satisfied with the half-truths and rumors dispatched to him from his friends at Robert F. Kennedy Elementary. Occasionally Tim would ask a question, though they always struck Michael as scheming and byzantine in nature. Did Mom have a lot of money in her pocketbook? What was her middle name? How many pairs of shoes did she own? Michael wondered about the basis for such questions, though he never asked the boy. He figured it was better the boy was asking something, that he was talking, regardless of how peculiar Michael may have found these questions.

  Michael Clement loved his children. Marybeth had loved her children, too. Michael knew this. Even when he questioned why she had done what she’d done, he knew that she loved her children. Which made the whole thing all the more perplexing.

  “It’s been a month,” Duane Sullivan said later that evening. They were both on the back porch, working through a six-pack of Natty Boh. Duane was the local sheriff’s deputy and one of Michael’s closest friends. They had gone to grade school together. “I’m worried about you and the kids.”

  “We’ll be okay,” Michael assured him.

  “Ran into Keith Dowry at the Crab Crawl two nights ago,” Duane said, staring out across the Clements’ rear field toward the distant trees. Stars blazed in the black heavens, speckled about a moon that looked like someone’s white face peeking through a partially-opened door. “He said you keep calling his place and hanging up.”

  Michael said nothing. His fingers worked with agitation at the beer can’s pull-tab.

  “You can’t keep doing that,” Duane finished.

  “Are you telling me as a cop?”

  “I’m telling you as your friend,” Duane said. “But, yeah, as a cop too, if necessary.”

  “I could kill the son of a bitch.”

  “What’s done is done,” Duane said. “Would that really fix anything now? Does that even matter anymore?”

  “It matters to me,” Michael said.

  “Does it?” Duane asked, turned half his face to him. Moonlight silvered his jowls. “Does it really?”

  Michael didn’t know.

  * * *

  Breakwater had a
lways been a friendly town, but since Marybeth’s departure, everyone seemed just a bit nicer to Michael. At first he was pleased and grateful. After a while, however, he began to feel as though he were being pandered to, or indulged like some petulant child. He believed he could see the falsity behind the smiles, the judgment behind their eyes. What were people saying about him? He must have done something wrong for her to just pick up and leave like that. What did they know? He had been a good husband. He had never strayed, had always worked hard and provided for his family. Soon, he began to despise going into town. Offers of support and kinship from the Breakwater locals had started to sound like derision to his ears. Lately, he had been sending Tim to the market whenever they needed things for the house.

  Yet he couldn’t always send Tim. On a Tuesday, while both kids were in school, Michael drove into town and ran a few errands. Like someone wanted by the police, he wore a baseball cap tugged down low over his eyes. He stopped over at the supermarket where he picked up a few three-ring binders, which Tim needed for school. As he hurried past bags of charcoal briquettes and tubs of lighter fluid on his way to the stationary aisle, he considered going home and setting a bonfire of all Marybeth’s belongings. There were closets filled with her clothes; there were her old yearbooks, college textbooks, and paperback novels squirreled away in the basement; there were her childhood toys packed away in one large steamer trunk hidden beneath the basement steps. All of it—one grand salutary conflagration. It would be a rite of passage, in a way. In his mind’s eye, he could clearly make out the newspaper headline—MAN FINDS COMFORT IN BLAZING INFERNO. This thought, at least, brought a smile to his lips.

  He hit the liquor store on Kaymore Avenue where he purchased a gallon of whiskey, another six-pack of National Bohemian, and two Slim Jims. Keith Dowry was in the wine aisle, bent over while reading the label on a bottle of merlot. Michael paused halfway down the aisle as he recognized Keith, a fine sweat suddenly prickling the hairs on the back of his neck. Before he could turn around and head toward the register down a different aisle, Keith looked up and saw him. Keith’s small mouth came tightly together. His eyes widened the slightest bit.

  Michael turned to move down the next aisle.

  “Please,” Keith said. “Wait.”

  He ignored Keith and went straight to the register. The man behind the counter, Melvin Jones, said, “Hey, Michael,” as Michael set the jug of whiskey and the six-pack on the counter.

  Michael felt a shadow fall against his back.

  “Michael.” It was Keith Dowry’s voice.

  “Don’t worry,” Michael said. “I won’t be calling your house anymore.”

  “I want to talk to you,” Keith said. “Please.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you,” Michael assured him, not turning around to look at the man. Behind the counter, Melvin Jones watched their interaction with something akin to distaste. Breakwater was a small town. Everybody sniffed around in everyone else’s business.

  “Need a bag?” Melvin asked.

  “No, thanks.” He tucked the six-pack under one arm then hefted the jug of whiskey off the counter, anxious to be out of the store and rid of Keith Dowry. Yet to his consternation, Keith followed him out onto the sidewalk.

  “Michael, please…”

  “Go to hell,” Michael told him.

  * * *

  That night at dinner, Tim said, “Did Mom dye her hair?”

  “No, Tim.”

  “She wasn’t getting all gray like you?”

  Michael closed his eyes, took a breath, then opened them again. “What is with all these questions?” he asked his son.

  Tim shrugged. “Was just curious.”

  “About whether or not your mom dyed her hair? How is that important?”

  “Don’t yell at him,” Gertrude said in a small voice.

  Michael looked at her and could see she was very close to tears. The suddenness of her change in emotion troubled him. “I wasn’t yelling, hon.”

  “You’re so mean,” Tim said.

  “Hey,” Michael said. “How am I being mean?”

  “You just are.”

  “You just are,” echoed Gertrude.

  This is wrong, Michael thought. This is all wrong. I’m a good father. I’m here. I didn’t do anything to hurt these children. I’m a good one.

  “I think you two should go to bed early tonight,” he told them.

  “No fair,” said Tim, though he looked down sourly at his plate, his tone void of genuine confrontation.

  “No fair,” Getrude repeated.

  After dinner, the kids took their baths then climbed into bed. Michael kissed them goodnight, and while Gertrude had warmed up a bit, Tim was still cold. He apologized to the boy and said he would answer any questions he might have about his mother in the future. Tim nodded, averted his eyes, then quickly rolled over in bed.

  It was around nine o’clock when Michael heard someone outside on the front porch. He flipped on the porch lights and watched a dark shape slide past one of the curtained front windows. When he opened the front door, he expected to find no one there—surely the passing silhouette had been only in his mind—but instead he found Keith Dowry standing there, his longish hair greased and neatly parted, curling just a bit behind his ears. He wore a chambray shirt tucked into a worn pair of dungarees and cowboy boots with crosshatched stitching.

  “I can’t believe you’re standing here,” Michael said.

  “It’s taken me some time to summon the courage,” Keith said. “I owe you an apology.”

  “You owe me more than that.”

  “You’re right,” Keith said. “I do. Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  “All right.” Keith stuffed his hands into the too-tight pockets of his dungarees, cleared his throat, and said, “I had no right to do what I did. She was your wife and I should have respected that.”

  “I thought we were friends.”

  “We were.” Something cracked toward the back of Keith’s throat. “I’d like us to be again someday, though I know that’s probably impossible.”

  Michael tried to laugh, but all that came out was a miserable croak.

  “If I knew where she was, I’d tell you,” Keith said. “I swear it. I didn’t even know she was…she was seeing someone else…”

  The phrase seeing someone else caused fireworks to go off in the center of Michael’s skull. It was all he could do to keep himself from taking a swing at the son of a bitch on his front porch.

  “I think you better leave,” he said through his teeth.

  Keith nodded, turned around, and sauntered down the porch steps. His pickup truck with the rusted quarter-panels had been left running in the driveway. Michael watched Keith climb behind the wheel, saw the reverse lights come on as he executed a three-point-turn. A moment later, all he could see were the taillights receding into the blackness of the trees.

  * * *

  Two nights later, over beers on the back porch of Duane Sullivan’s house, Duane said, “You gotta give the guy some credit.”

  Michael said nothing. He’d hired a babysitter for the evening and planned to drink himself into a coma.

  * * *

  One week later, when he heard more footsteps out on the front porch, Michael jerked open the door, expecting to see Keith Dowry standing there again. But this time it was not Keith Dowry. This time, Marybeth stood there. She was wearing a white blouse, dark jeans, sensible shoes. They were the clothes he had last seen her in—the clothes she had been wearing the night of the argument, after he had found out about her infidelity with Keith.

  “Can I come in?” she asked.

  He could only stare at her.

  “Michael,” she said, and though her dark eyes were pleading, questioning, there was no question in her voice. She spoke his name as a statement, a declaration.

  Footsteps thundered down the stairs. Michael turned and saw Tim and Gertrude spill down the staircase, rush through the foyer, and sho
ve him aside as they both quickly embraced their mother. Marybeth smiled warmly down at them, running her hands through their hair as they buried their faces into her. Yet her eyes never left Michael’s.

  “I knew you’d come back!” Gertrude cried. “I knew you wouldn’t leave us for good!”

  Michael stepped aside as Marybeth entered the house, the children still clinging to her. They all went into the family room, where Marybeth sat on the sofa and collected her children about her, still stroking them.

  I’m a good father, Michael thought angrily.

  “Are you back?” Tim asked her. The boy’s eyes were wet. “Are you staying?”

  “I am,” Marybeth said. Tenderly she touched the boy’s cheek.

  Michael wanted to scream at her to get out, that she couldn’t be here…but he knew that he could not say such things in front of the children. Instead, he went into the kitchen, knocked back a glass of scotch, then stabilized himself with both hands planted on either side of the kitchen sink. Out in the dark yard, an owl hooted.

  Fifteen minutes later, Michael reappeared in the family room. “Okay, guys,” he said to the children. “Time for bed.”

  “But Dad,” Tim moaned.

  “No buts,” he countered, unwaveringly. “There’ll be plenty of time to sit with your mother tomorrow. Now off to bed.”

  Both Tim and Gertrude planted a kiss on their mother’s cheek. Then they dropped down off the couch and, without uttering a word to their father, moved past him and out into the hall. He listened as their footfalls thumped up the stairs then moved swiftly across the ceiling.

  He looked at Marybeth.

  “You’re not here,” he said to her.

  Marybeth smiled. For one horrible instant, he could suddenly see the splotches of blood that had fallen across her white blouse, and the vertical lightning-bolt gash at the right side of her forehead where, in the heat of betrayal, he had smashed in her skull with a hammer and killed her. But then those things vanished just as quickly as they had appeared, and he was staring at her unmarred face again. She was suddenly, fearfully beautiful.