Pins & Needles

by Karen Brown

  He gave her a look. “We can stop that now,” he said.

  He seemed uncomfortable. His eyes wouldn’t meet hers. She wondered again if there might have been a Katie Beauchamp, if he had admitted this foolishly, and then needed to hide his vulnerability. Men were like that, she knew. Her own husband had once told her he’d been in love with another girl. She was older than Annie, and had a child already from a previous boyfriend, and he’d been in love with the child, too, he’d said. They’d lived together in Marathon, and when the girl left him he was crazy for a while—he couldn’t work, or sleep. “Everything was flipped on end,” he said. He and Annie were sitting in his car with the heater on when he told her. It was fall, and the leaves blew across the windshield. She’d started her senior year. She had just kissed him, and he had broken away to tell her this story, as a kind of warning. He had been a machinist then, on his lunch break. He had a stutter, and a head of thick hair that curled over his work shirt’s collar. Annie didn’t know him very well, but she knew of him. He had been a few years ahead of her in high school, a boy who drank to erase his stutter, who tried to prove himself by driving along nighttime roads with his headlights off. His story about the girl had produced the opposite effect on Annie, who liked the idea of his passionate intensity. When she got pregnant, she was confident she had won it for herself. But she came to learn he had continued to love the other girl, and simply kept quiet about it. Annie had to deal with his frustration, his moody silences, his dreams about someone else. Some days, she thought she would tell him what she knew, but then she realized he might leave her, and she saw her future—alone and struggling with a child, working and paying bills, and she decided against it. Best to play the game the way they laid it out, she thought. She glanced at Joseph, standing by the glass doors.

  “My name is Annie,” she said. She moved over to the cabinets. “I know how to make hot cocoa.”

  The first cabinet she opened was filled with liquor. Joseph looked over his shoulder and chuckled. “That might be better.”

  Annie reached up and grabbed a bottle by the neck. “What about this?”

  Joseph stepped beside her and read the label: Pierre Ferrand 1962. “Perfect,” he said.

  She put the bottle on the counter. “But what is it?”

  Joseph found two bell-shaped glasses. He opened the bottle and sniffed it, and then shrugged, and filled each glass halfway. “Smells good. Like brandy.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty color,” she said. She held the glass he handed her up to the light. Joseph took a sip from his. He watched her, waiting.

  “You drink it, Annie,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes at him. “What’s it taste like?”

  “Try it and see.”

  She thought it would taste like its color—burnt sugar, and it did, at first. But then it was more like raisins, and sweet oranges. It reminded her of fall leaves, still wet and vivid and pliable, littering the ground after rain. She didn’t say any of this to him. Things didn’t taste like colors, her husband had told her once. Joseph asked if she wanted to sit in the living room, and so they carried their glasses in there and sat down on the couch. The living room was darker than the kitchen. There was a television, hidden away inside another set of cabinets, but neither of them wanted to turn it on. Annie asked him about the professor, and Joseph told a scandalous story about her.

  “I don’t blame the husband for giving her the boat,” she said. “So, are you her next conquest?”

  They drank their brandy in long swallows. He had already retrieved the bottle from the kitchen and refilled their glasses.

  “Oh, no,” he said. He laughed, quietly, shaking his head. He looked down at the carpet. The brandy swirled in his glass.

  “But you thought about it, didn’t you?”

  “I’m thinking about it now that you mention it,” he said. He looked back up at her. “No, no way.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “What would stop you?”

  Joseph took a large swallow of brandy. His smile faded. He picked up the bottle and held it up, assessing the level of the liquid. “We’re drinking a lot of this,” he said.

  It was hot in the room. His face was flushed.

  “You should take off your sweater,” she told him.

  She had not thought about her baby waking up, wanting her bottle, until just then. She had put it out of her mind to avoid the guilt. Her husband would have made some calls now, to her mother, a few of her friends, inquiring about her. He would be almost worried, but not quite. She had never left him with the baby before. She was the one who dabbed alcohol on the cord stump, changed her diapers, warm with shit. Only she knew how to wrap her in the blanket to contain her helpless flailing. Annie imagined her daughter’s awakening cry. Her husband would have to figure out how to warm the bottle in a pan on the stove. He’d seen her do it before. She felt assured that he would work it all out. But still, she felt the surge of silent disappointment in herself. She wondered if her daughter would notice she was gone. Would there be a time of waiting, and sadness, and then forgetting?

  When Annie was in high school her best friend disappeared. Susanna had been home alone, her parents and little brother gone on a ski vacation. Annie had stayed there with her the night before, and then Annie’s mother had picked her up for church the next morning. Susanna was a cheerleader. Since they’d been little they’d gone out into Susanna’s backyard and Annie would practice her twirling, and Susanna would do her backflips and aerial cartwheels. In the fall they’d wear their sweatpants with “Cheer” written on the butt. They’d rake paths in the leaves like runways, and there’d be sounds of wild turkeys in the woods behind the house. In spring, the mud oozed between Susanna’s fingers. The crocuses came up around the cellar door. Annie would wear Susanna’s brother’s boots. The baton would glimmer against the new sun and the pale sky. Summers they’d spend more time in the pool in their bikinis, or sunbathing with their tops’ ties undone. It was winter when Susanna was kidnapped. The night before, she and Annie had taken her father’s beer from the cellar refrigerator and gotten drunk. They’d gone out into the snow in the backyard and done their tricks—falling and laughing, the snow cushioning their mistakes. Annie had thrown the baton up and dented the house’s siding. They’d laughed so hard they wet their pants. They’d lain in the snow under the house’s floodlights, making angels.

  Joseph slipped the sweater over his head. It left his hair ruffled. The high color remained on his cheeks. He wore a long-sleeved shirt underneath. He was slighter than Annie had believed him to be under the layers of his clothes. She smiled at him. She wondered if he would lean over and try to kiss her.

  “Well, what about her lover?” Joseph asked. He was still talking about the professor and the student she had living with her. He held his glass up and gestured with it while he talked.

  Annie shrugged. “Oh, what about him?”

  “I think he’s a good guy. It would be ungentlemanly of me.”

  Annie gave him a look. She’d left her ring in the little dish by her sink. Before she’d gone to Wegman’s she’d washed out bottles, and her ring always caught in the bottle’s mouth and slipped off. Joseph looked back at her with his red cheeks, and his glassy eyes.

  “What?” he said. “I’m serious.”

  And she believed he was. “I thought maybe you were being true to Katie Beauchamp.”

  Joseph stilled. She heard him breathe in slowly and exhale. He set the glass down on the coffee table, leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees and did not look at her. Annie wondered if this was a tactic to arouse her pity. But then he turned and shook his head at her, slowly, his eyes quizzical.

  “You’re still on that,” he said, laughing. She saw that she confused him. His gaze settled on the bell-shaped glass of brandy.

  “Maybe we’ve had too much to drink,” she said.

  Joseph held the bottle eye-level again. Annie rose from the couch and almost toppled back. She banged her s
hin against the coffee table. He reached up and grabbed her arm. “Steady now,” he said.

  “Let’s go outside,” she said.

  Joseph nodded, considering. “A walk, sure.”

  They went into the kitchen and put on their coats. Joseph struggled to open the sliding glass door. The snow lay against it, a good eight inches, but finally it slid on its runner, and they stepped out into the snow on the porch. Annie noticed he’d kept the bottle of brandy. He saw her glance and grinned. “It’s bitter cold out here,” he said. He tried to stuff the bottle in his peacoat pocket, but it wouldn’t fit. Annie took it from him and put it in hers. Joseph slid the door shut behind them. Inside, the house looked like a photograph of a warm, safe place. Outside, the wind had picked up, and the snow fell sharper on her face. They tromped down the deck steps and into the backyard.

  “Now, right here,” Joseph said, gesturing with his arm, “is a long hedge of peonies.”

  “Peonies?” Annie felt the weight of the brandy bottle against her hip.

  “You know, those flowers with the big heads, lots of petals? They’re all pink, these.”

  Annie heard the words slur beneath the southern drawl. She thought of flowers with heavy, nodding heads weighing down their stems.

  “This lawn is green, and rolling. It’s like a damn golf course, I tell you.”

  Annie looked out. Her face stung with cold. “I see that,” she said.

  They walked across the lawn, and Joseph told her about the games of croquet.

  “We’d play until dark,” he said. “Until we couldn’t see the balls in the grass anymore. One night the lightning bugs swarmed and we were surrounded by little flying lights.”

  They had walked a distance from the house, up onto a rise, and were looking down into someone else’s wide backyard. The neighbor’s house sat at the bottom of the hill, the lights glowing from one or two rooms.

  “So who were you with last summer?” Annie asked him.

  In the house below them she could see two people moving around in the kitchen, a woman and a man, talking. Joseph didn’t look at her.

  “Oh, just a friend,” he said.

  She thought how the man and the woman might be Joseph and herself. She tried to imagine what the two people might have to talk about. She and her husband discussed bills, and the people who came into Clark’s, and the baby’s needs. Her husband talked about television shows, and movies, and the lives of the actors who played in them. Sometimes, they went a whole day and didn’t talk at all. Beside her, Joseph stilled, watching the scene below them, too. She didn’t know what he thought as he looked.

  “A woman friend, right?” Annie said.

  “It’s getting late,” was all he said.

  They walked back through the snow to the professor’s house, and up onto the deck. Joseph could not get the sliding door open.

  “It’s frozen shut maybe,” he said. He would go around to try the front, but he didn’t have the key, and he doubted he left it open. Annie watched him disappear around the house. In a moment he was back to try the sliding door again. The warm kitchen mocked them through the glass. One of the cats came up and rubbed against the door. They could hear her meowing. Annie began to laugh. Joseph leaned all of his weight against the handle and collapsed, laughing, too, into the snow.

  “It won’t budge,” he said.

  Annie stepped off the porch. The snow was still falling, but under the stand of pine the ground showed a knot of roots, and a bed of straw-colored needles. The boat rested serenely on its trailer. “We need some shelter,” she called to him. There was a ladder hung from the Bertram’s side. “What about the boat? Can we get in it?”

  Joseph shook his head at her in disbelief. “No, we can’t get in it.”

  But Annie was already trudging over. She took hold of the ladder and pulled herself up. She unclipped the tarp and drew it back. Underneath, the deck of the boat was as clean and white as the snow outside. She saw a doorway that led to a cabin. It was quiet, the sound from outside muffled, and she put a leg over and slid down. The brandy bottle made a clumping noise. In a moment, Joseph was there, too, and he pulled himself over the edge and sat down on the deck. He replaced the tarp as best he could. They smelled varnish, and a faint, salty scent.

  “It’s like being at sea,” Annie said, bracing herself against a rolling feeling.

  Joseph slit his eyes at her. “You’re drunk.”

  He stood up, bent at the waist, and walked over to the cabin door. Annie followed him down into the berth. There was a small counter and a sink, and a table with cushioned benches, and another door that Joseph opened that led to the sleeping quarters. Annie pulled the brandy out of her pocket. She set it down hard on the table. Joseph came over and sat on one of the benches.

  “I can’t believe this happened,” he said.

  Annie sat down across from him. She kept her hand on the neck of the bottle so she wouldn’t fall over. The cabin was dark and close and almost warm. Joseph leaned back against the seat and his legs bumped hers under the table.

  Joseph shook his head. “If I could get some heat on that door, I could melt the ice.”

  “It’s fine in here,” she said. She unzipped her coat. She uncorked the brandy and took a sip.

  “You’d better go easy on that,” Joseph said.

  She slid the bottle over to him. “Someone is sobering up.”

  Joseph shook his head at her. He took the bottle in his hands, but he didn’t drink from it. He hummed a song under his breath, a popular one her husband would know the name of, and Annie remembered the feeling she’d had in the Wegman’s parking lot—the sense of things dropping into place, like the coins in the sorter she’d had as a child. She remembered that on the day Susanna disappeared she’d gone home after church and called her later that afternoon and the phone had rung busy. She had thought, fleetingly, that she should go over, but then the feeling faded, and she did not. Susanna’s parents were returning that night. The next day Susanna didn’t come to school, and Annie thought she was sick, or skipping. Later, in the newspaper, it said that there were signs of struggle. Annie had tried to imagine what these might be—the hall table overturned, the plates on which they’d eaten breakfast shattered on the kitchen floor? It had been the neighbor who took her, a single man with thinning hair she and Susanna had always called Lonesome Ricky. He wore silk dress shirts and polyester slacks and aviator-style glasses. When he pulled his car into the driveway Annie used to peek out of Susanna’s bedroom window and say, “Lonesome Ricky’s brought home a lady,” or “Lonesome Ricky has his dancing shoes on,” and Susanna would shriek with laughter, and leap up to look out, half believing her. They hadn’t known that he was watching them in the yard the night before, that he had been watching them for years. But even now, Annie believed she’d always known it. Hadn’t they sensed someone watching? Hadn’t they desired it, even?

  “Your shirt is cute,” Joseph said.

  Susanna and Annie had always shared clothes. It had been perfectly normal while she was alive. But during those weeks when they waited for her to be found, after they knew she was dead, and who had done it, after the funeral, wearing her clothes had seemed, to everyone but Annie, an aberration.

  “It’s a dead girl’s shirt,” she told Joseph now. She watched him. He didn’t say anything. He took the cork from the brandy and tipped it back against his lips. He kept his eyes on her. Then he lowered the bottle.

  “There isn’t a dead girlfriend,” he said, his voice tight. “I promise I made that up.”

  He held up his hand, making the Boy Scout pledge. But Annie saw that his eyes flitted away from hers, briefly, hiding what they’d shown her before, in the parking lot, in the kitchen.

  “Well, I’m not making it up,” she said, slowly, mimicking his southern accent.

  He looked down at his hand on the tabletop. He didn’t laugh. “You got me,” he said. When he finally glanced up at her he looked as if he had tasted something awful.
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  He drank from the bottle again. His movements were clumsy, and Annie saw everything around her sharpen—the table’s edge, the folds of her jacket sleeve, the bottle’s lip. He tipped his chin toward her T-shirt.

  “How’d she die?”

  Annie felt her heart beat light and fast at the base of her throat. Joseph looked at her, waiting, his eyes sad, and remorseful. She wasn’t sure who he saw when he looked at her now, and she felt sorry she’d played along. She could not be Katie Beauchamp. After she’d learned the details of Susanna’s death Annie would imagine how it might have been if she’d gone over to her friend’s house that afternoon and been taken as well, the two of them bound with duct tape in the trunk of Lonesome Ricky’s rusted Grand Prix.

  Once, Annie had convinced Susanna to sneak into the drive-in with her, hiding in Annie’s boyfriend’s trunk. His car had been his father’s, a big sedan, and they’d fit easily curled alongside each other. They hadn’t been afraid, feeling the potholes of a familiar road, knowing that beyond the metal trunk lid lay the summer night sky, dotted with stars. They could hear their boyfriends’ voices, and they’d talked and laughed at themselves the entire ride, until the boys called out that they’d reached the drive-in entrance, and then they were quiet so they wouldn’t get caught.

  Joseph looked at her, his gaze steady. “You can’t talk about it,” he said. His knees pressed hers under the table. The snow tapped against the portholes.

  In Lonesome Ricky’s trunk Susanna’s hair would smell of her shampoo, and her skin like the lotion they bought that weekend at the mall, all of her plans waylaid for this unforeseen moment—the outfit left hanging on her closet doorknob, the biology book opened to the assigned page on her bed. Their mouths sealed, they could not speak. The trunk would have been cold, the exhaust leaking in through the rusted holes, and they might have pressed their bodies close for warmth, and heard the tires hum, and Lonesome Ricky’s radio playing old disco, his voice singing along. Annie would not imagine any further. From this point she was always, magically, outside of the car, watching it wind along a road through bare trees and white snow, and only the deer, poised on the edge of the woods, witnessed what came after.