by Paul Pen
“Clothing optional?” Grace put the question to Frank.
“Carl said something like that,” he recalled. “I thought it was a joke.”
“Well, the thing is, we’re not nudists, so you need to get dressed.”
“I left your pajamas in the bathroom. I don’t have any other clothes.”
“You don’t have anything? Of course, you have it in the car. For which you don’t have the key.”
Mara held a hand to her belly.
“It doesn’t matter,” Grace went on. “I’ll lend you something.”
“She does have clothes,” Frank intervened. “She can put the ones she was wearing yesterday back on.”
“All torn and covered in blood and dirt?” Mara asked.
The two women looked at him. Grace, berating him for his tactlessness with the supposed victim. Mara, enjoying the chance he had given her to remind them of the accident.
“I’ll bring you something comfortable, jeans and a T-shirt,” Grace concluded. “Get in the tent, go on. I’ll be right back with the clothes.”
It enraged Frank to see Mara taking advantage of his wife’s kindness. She didn’t deserve to be lied to. Or deceived. Or for . . . or for her husband to sleep with another woman. When Mara walked off toward the tent, the air was filled with the smell of shampoo. The motor home rocked again under Grace’s footsteps, but it was a gentler sway, less wild than the one Mara had caused. Frank fought not to draw parallels with the way each of them moved in bed.
Turning around, he found Simon standing at the back of the vehicle. He was looking at the tent with his mouth open. Frank remembered the not entirely sexual curiosity that a woman’s body arouses in a nine-year-old boy. He had experienced it himself at his son’s age. The poor kid would be wanting to see more flesh but, unfortunately for him, Mara had taken refuge in the tent. Then Frank looked in that direction. The door was wide open, so that the inside was visible. Mara was moving around in there without the towel on, showing herself.
“Simon!” he yelled. “Turn around, go with your sister!”
The boy obeyed, running the way he did through the hall at home when they sent him to bed because Santa Claus was about to arrive. Frank strode over to the tent and found the zipper pull without allowing his gaze to come to rest on Mara’s uncovered skin. Just before he finished closing it, their eyes met.
“Do you like seeing my naked body again?”
Mara pushed her breasts together with her hands, offering them to him.
Frank pulled on the zipper, which was stuck.
“Confess,” said Mara. “Tell her everything.”
His tugging shook the tent.
“You’re going to have to tell her.”
The zipper pull wouldn’t budge.
“Confess.”
The zipper buzzed shut. Frank turned around just as Grace was coming out of the motor home.
“You don’t have to stand guard over her, Frank.”
He took a step to one side with his hands raised, as if he needed to prove some kind of innocence. Among the folded clothes his wife was carrying, he recognized plain jeans with a flower embroidered on one pocket and a white-and-blue striped T-shirt. These basic combinations were Frank’s favorites, because they set off Grace’s simple beauty. She didn’t need to impress with complicated styling or elaborate makeup, all she had to do was exploit the radiance of her natural manner, a quality more valuable than any physical feature because naturalness is impossible to simulate.
“I’m a mess, huh?” she asked, feeling observed.
“No, honey, quite the opposite.”
Inside the tent, Mara feigned a coughing fit. Grace opened a section of the zipper, just enough to hand the folded clothes through it.
“I give up!”
It was Audrey yelling. Frank and Grace turned around.
“I’m done with this!” Amid the undergrowth, she separated sweaty hair from her shiny face. “They’re not here. The phones aren’t here. Period. Bye-bye Instagram, and bye-bye life. I’ll just have to deal with it.” Her fists clenched. “It’s not fair. Look at the mess I’m in!”
She had stalks tangled in her hair. Assorted plant remains—flowers, pine resin, spikes—were stuck to the skin on her arms and covered in milky sap.
“Clean yourself up and get in the shade, go on,” said Grace. “The sun’s beating down now.”
It was bright above their heads with noon approaching.
“It’s not fair!” Audrey repeated.
She jumped over bushes and ran to the motor home, brushing off her hair, her clothes.
“They’ll show up,” Grace told her.
She responded with a slam of the door.
“And then she tells us she’s a young adult,” her mother observed. “She’s being as maddening as she was with the ferrets.”
Frank blamed himself for the conflict between them. If only he could tell Audrey the truth, that the cell phones weren’t going to turn up because the woman he’d hit had thrown them into the forest in the night. The woman who sold them the motor home and who he’d been sleeping with for months. The same woman who was getting dressed right now in his wife’s clothes inside the tent he had bought with her, the two of them dreaming together about the family adventures of a perfect marriage. Frank took a deep breath to ease the knot that was tight in his chest.
“Relax.” Grace kissed him on the lips, the same lips that had sampled every part of Mara’s body, even the most hidden ones. “Everything’s fine. Someone who can help us will come.”
24.
A blanket of moist heat enveloped Audrey when she walked into the bathroom. The heel of her sneaker skidded on a little puddle on the floor. The mirror, the toilet—they were all splashed with water. Mara hadn’t bothered to dry them after her shower. Audrey opened the window, hoping a current of air would thin the atmosphere and ease the unpleasant feeling of heat from someone else’s shower. The condensation from another person’s filth.
Standing at the sink, she turned on the faucet, leaving a milky residue on the handle. She rubbed her hands together under the water, without managing to dissolve the paste of sap, grass, and pollen. She searched for soap in the sink unit but didn’t find any. She turned toward the shower. Toward the sexist segregation of the bathroom products her mother had established. His. Hers. Reducing everything to last century’s binary conception of gender. A classmate during the school year had identified as nonbinary and had informed Audrey about the sliding scale between man and woman. The classmate even taught her the neutral pronoun that their community preferred to use: they. Purely out of solidarity for them, Audrey opted for her father’s dark-brown bar of soap. She would use his masculine product on her female skin to demonstrate that all skins are the same, regardless of sex, color, or age. She held her hand near that corner caddy, but then she remembered the powerful campfire smell Dad gave off after showering.
“Just this once,” she whispered as an apology as she picked up the lilac soap.
She wet it and rubbed it against her arms. The plant remains clung to the soap bar, which barely produced a lather. It smelled good, sure, but it was ineffective at dissolving the dirt. And the third time she wet it, a corner crumbled off as if it were a sponge cake.
Audrey returned the lilac soap to the female shelf and picked up the brown bar.
The aroma of pine tar, a burned-wood smell, came off the soap as soon as she wet it. She knew right away that this soap, made from more natural ingredients than the ones that formed the forced, perfumed delicacy of her mother’s soap, would get the filth off her skin in no time.
She slid the bar over her forearms, pressing the soap against the dust stuck down with sap. A blob of pine resin resisted the friction. She rubbed harder.
Looking at herself in the mirror, she discovered that her cheeks were sticky, too, her lips dirty from her wiping the sweat from under her nose so much.
She held the soap to her face.
She scrubbed
her features with the black bar, her eyes closed, enjoying the relief she felt from washing away the sweat, the heat, the effort. She rubbed her forehead, her cheeks. And her lips, pressing them together to keep the lather out of her mouth.
The fresh feeling was so pleasant that she moved to her neck, not caring when drops rolled down her chest, under her vest. She was even grateful for the shivers they gave her.
She scrubbed under her jaw.
First one side.
Then the other.
And she left the bar of soap beside the faucet.
She rinsed the lather from her face. The bonfire smell was energizing. In the mirror she saw her face rosy, clean.
But her arms still felt sticky.
She wet them from above the elbow before rubbing them with the soap again. She scrubbed the dirt with intense bursts of friction, as she’d seen her mother do on grass stains on the knees of Simon’s pants. Her shoulders ached from the effort.
The pine resin wouldn’t come off.
So she scrubbed again, harder, with the soap.
A sharp, unexpected pain ran down her left arm, from her thumb to her elbow.
Audrey stifled a scream.
Her face paled in the mirror.
She dropped the bar of soap in the sink, the impact flattening one of the corners.
With her other hand she covered the source of the throbbing on her arm, afraid to peek at whatever had caused the flash of pain. As if by not looking at the wound, she could keep it from existing. When she dared to take her hand away, she discovered a red spot near the wrist. A thorn was sticking out from the center of the throb. It must have been stuck to her skin and driven in with all the scrubbing. She pinched the protruding part and pulled it out with a tug. It was a prickle from a thistle, the length of a fingernail. No wonder it had hurt so much. She threw it in the toilet.
She would have to keep scrubbing.
She picked up the soap.
She was about to wet it under the faucet when Simon yelled.
“Dad!” Excitement crackled in his throat. “Dad! Dad!”
Audrey poked her head out the window to see what was happening, but her brother was shouting from somewhere outside her field of vision. She couldn’t see her parents, either.
“Dad!” Simon shrieked. “Someone’s coming!”
Audrey turned off the water. She set aside the soap. She didn’t even bother to dry herself.
“Finally,” she murmured before running out of the bathroom.
25.
A pickup was descending the elevation that was visible in the distance. It was moving in the opposite direction from the one they had been traveling in, as if returning from the hot springs. The relief Frank felt when he heard Simon’s announcement quickly turned to worry.
“Someone’s coming!” Audrey leapt down from the RV.
Her arms were wet, her vest dotted with water. She formed a visor with her hands, as Grace and Simon had. They all watched the dust cloud the truck kicked up among the trees on its way toward them. They could already hear the engine’s rattle, the metallic clanging of beat-up bodywork. Frank saw Mara come out of the tent, doing up the zipper on Grace’s jeans, the laces on her Converse shoes still untied. The outfit looked much better on his wife—his wife was much better in every way.
“Someone’s coming?” Mara’s voice conveyed disappointment.
Frank gave her the smile of someone deciding the battle was his, but he had to fight to hide his fear that she could yet win the war.
“Thank goodness, Mara.” Grace took her hand. “Thank goodness. Help’s coming at last.”
“Problem’s over,” added Frank. “All of them are.”
“Well, let’s see if it stops,” said Mara.
Frank rejected the comment with a snort. He gestured at their surroundings with open arms, highlighting how absurd it would be for someone not to stop and help a family with children and a motor home with flat tires on a road like this. Then he walked toward the pickup, which was about to reach them. He waved with his hand held high at whoever was driving, the patches of sun and shade on the windshield still obscuring the figure behind the wheel. Melodic eighties music was emerging from the cab. When the truck stopped in front of them, Frank recognized an REO Speedwagon chorus. A man was driving, senior enough to have a face covered in the brown marks of old age. His chest and arms, too, bare under overalls. As thin as he was, the shoulder straps almost covered his shoulders.
“Problems?” he asked, with a pointed elbow resting on the open window.
“And then some,” Frank answered.
“The good thing about problems is, there’s always a solution. If there isn’t one, it’s called death,” the man said, with such conviction that it was impossible not to believe him. “What solution do we need here?”
His friendly manner seemed to turn the most complex difficulties into a triviality. His use of the inclusive plural “we” underlined his willingness to help.
“Most of all, help this young woman, take her somewhere,” said Frank. “Her car broke down last night and, trying to get help, she suddenly appeared in front of us.”
He finished by explaining how they’d almost run her over, the cut on her eyebrow, the motor home’s flat tires, and their lost cell phones.
“A red car?” asked the man. “I saw it back there, by the side of the road, like a dead squirrel. I thought someone must be taking a bath in a hot spring somewhere around there.”
“That’s mine, it’s dead,” Mara confirmed. “No way to fix it or get it to start.”
“Some serious problems you’ve had, yessir. You can thank God I came along. You could grow potatoes on his road in the time between one car passing and the next.”
“Idaho’s best-kept secret,” said Grace. “Don’t we know it.”
“And that’s why we’ll thank God and whoever else we need to thank that you’re here,” said Frank. “Can we use your cell phone?”
He looked at Mara to see her reaction now that everything was about to be over. Now that a call would put an end to the prison in which she’d confined them.
Then the man showed his arms. They ended in two stumps a few inches below the elbow.
“Hard to press such tiny buttons with these hooves.” He made a movement equivalent to waving two hands, though there were no hands or fingers to wave. “Not to mention those new screens you have to go about tapping.”
“New?” Audrey whispered into Simon’s ear.
Frank was shocked by the revelation, by the irregular form of the mutilated flesh, but Grace responded with her usual natural manner.
“Veteran?” She held out a hand. “Thank you for your service, sir. I’m Grace.”
She shook the stump he offered her with confidence.
“Earl,” he replied as an introduction. “Yes, ma’am, I’m a veteran, but I came home from Vietnam in one piece. This was from an accident in one of those darned holes full of hot water and rotten eggs. My dog jumped in one—one of the bad ones—and this old fool was stupid enough to try to save him. Thirteen years he spent with me, that flea-ridden mutt. But if you look at my hands—or if you can’t look at them, I should say—you can just imagine how Chuck wound up.”
With a finger on her lips, Grace asked him not to provide any more details in front of the children.
“Been a long time since I complained. I can do just about everything now, thank God. I can drive this truck better than a sixteen-year-old boy, I can kill every fly my wife asks me to kill in the kitchen. And when Halloween comes around, I can dress up as a pirate for a dime.”
The joke earned a guffaw from Simon.
“So what if I can’t use one of those ungodly telephones? I wouldn’t want one even if I had three hands and fifteen fingers. Who the hell would I call from my car? This isn’t Manhattan, it’s just Idaho. If I need to speak to someone, I drive the two hundred miles to the next house and start bellowing like a moose.”
Simon’s laughter gre
w louder. Emboldened, he went up to the truck and showed the man his eyepatch.
“I’ve got things missing, too. I’ve got an eye missing, look.” He lifted the material, uncovering his scarred skin. “And I can do everything, too.”
“Sure you can, kid, that’s the spirit. Who the hell wants a whole body, anyway? That’s what everyone has, you get it when you’re born—even a goat gets one. I’d rather be different.” He showed his incomplete arms. “I lost my hands to a sulfuric acid soup. Who stole your eye?”
“A gun.”
Frank thought he’d misheard.
“Psst,” Grace quickly went.
Relaxed from laughing so much, or perhaps because of the instant connection he’d made with the old man, Simon had said the truth.
“Simon, don’t tell—”
“It wasn’t a gun, no—”
“Not a real gun—”
“And it wasn’t anyone’s fault—”
“It’s all really complicated—”
“But it was an unfortunate acci—”
“—dent.”
Grace and Frank spoke over each other, stumbling, treading on one another’s sentences.
“That patch looks great on you, kid. What pretty butterflies,” Earl said to Simon. “We’d make a good team dressing up as pirates next Halloween. What do you think?”
With a nod, Frank thanked him for changing the subject.
“Yeah!” replied Simon.
“So, I may not have a phone, but I’d certainly like to give you a hand.” Earl arched his eyebrows to call attention to the joke. “What shall we do? I can change tires with these stumps. We can get that RV purring in half an hour.”
“Turns out these vehicles don’t carry spares,” said Grace, as if she still hadn’t fully accepted Frank’s explanation.
“Seriously? I can believe it—that thing’s a beast,” Earl concluded. “With what it must weigh, it’d be dangerous to start fiddling with its belly, and I’d rather not lose any more limbs. Shall we take the young lady to her car? Let’s see if we can fix it.”