Outside the Ordinary World

by Dori Ostermiller

  “Weird, how this guy seems to be around when Emmie gets hurt,” Hannah whispers, and I look away, frightened of her uncanny ability to read me.

  “It’s lucky we ran into him,” I say, but find myself wondering if he is, in some karmic way, responsible for these mishaps.

  “Don’t you think we should call Daddy?” Hannah asks. “Shouldn’t we at least leave a message?”

  “You do it, honey. You’ve been waiting all day to use your cell.” The thought of calling Nathan at this precise moment catches my voice, pinning it mouselike somewhere behind my breastbone. “Tell him we couldn’t find him anywhere—tell him we waited at the site and Emmie needed help, and we ran into—”

  “I’ll just tell him what happened,” she shoots back. “I’m not gonna lie.”

  “Of course.” I clear my throat. “I wasn’t asking you to.”

  Tai drops us off at the emergency room door and I thank him perfunctorily, expecting not to see him again for days or weeks, swallowing the dry ache in my throat. So a few minutes later, as we’re behind the front window admitting Emmie, I’m surprised to spot him in the waiting room, rolling back and forth on the soles of his cowboy boots, hands shoved in his back pockets. Hannah spies him, as well.

  “Why is that dude still here, Mom?” she whispers as I’m filling out the paperwork with one hand, gripping the sleeping Emmie with the other. “Are you guys friends or something?”

  “Yes, well—sort of,” I answer. “Han, can I give you Emmie to hold? You need to keep this ice pack pressed to her forehead.” She nods and I situate Emmie on her lap, hoping this will provide sufficient distraction to shut her up.

  “How do you know him?” she insists.

  “His son Eli was in my printmaking workshop,” I say, relieved to have something tangible to offer. “Remember Eli Rosen, Isabel’s friend?”

  “Yeah, he’s kind of a loser, isn’t he?”

  “Hannah, that’s cruel.” I sign the last sheet of paper, hand it to the admitting nurse, who secures a wristband around Emmie’s inert arm. “And no, he’s not—”

  “Isn’t it kind of weird for some random dad of some random student to be hanging around like that, waiting for us?”

  “He’s just concerned,” I explain. “And he’s not ‘some random dad.’”

  “Right this way, please.” The nurse leads us into a narrow white room. I lay Emmie on the bed and peel off the bandage to inspect her gash. Though it’s no longer bleeding much, it grins up threateningly, flowering purple along the edges.

  “I’m still dampish,” Hannah complains as I cover Emmie with the thin hospital blanket. “No one thinks about the girl who’s slowly freezing to death. So long as there’s no blood.”

  “My poor baby. You want me to get you a hospital johnny?” I tease, gratified that we’re moving on to other topics. And then…

  “So, how come this Tai dude isn’t just a random dad?” I’m amazed by her tenacity, and I start to wonder if she suspects something, but how could she? What could she possibly know? Still, I decide to give her a meatier explanation.

  “He’s someone we know from Ashfield, Han. A landscape designer—okay? Lots of people know him up there. He might be helping us with the landscaping on our new place,” I add, regretting the lie at once.

  “He is?”

  “Well, maybe, yes, probably. I just said so, didn’t I?”

  I’m rescued by the E.R. doctor, who enters the room with a bit of a flourish, asking for details. He inspects Emmie’s wound and proclaims that she’ll need half a dozen stitches. “We might even be able to accomplish it while she’s napping.” He winks. “You must watch her for signs of concussion, although I don’t think it’s likely, from what you’ve said….”

  Hannah becomes so engrossed in watching the procedure, she forgets about the inquisition. I’ve never felt so relieved to see a doctor.

  Half an hour later, though, as we’re leaving the E.R., Emmie’s forehead stitched up with bright blue thread, we run smack into Nathan and Tai, chatting affably in the waiting room. The air squeezes from my lungs as I hoist Emmie up my torso. Hannah sprints to embrace Nathan, as if she’s missed him for days. Tai peeks around Nathan’s shoulder, cocking an ungainly brow. I try to breathe the way I’ve been taught in yoga classes—slow, deep breaths, all the way to my navel, one, then another—as if this can save me.

  “You’re done already?” Nathan pries himself from Hannah. “I was just coming back.”

  “And I was just about to go,” says Tai.

  “He was a fast sewer,” I say. “Must have taken home ec instead of shop.” Maybe my lame attempt at humor will relieve the crushing tension in my ribs. It is strange and horrible to see them standing here side by side. At six-two, lanky as a basketball player, Nathan towers five or six inches over Tai, whose more muscular arms are crossed over his chest. Nathan peers at the patient, who beams.

  “See my stitches, Daddy? Aren’t they pretty?”

  “They’re certainly blue.” He laughs. “No more goatherding for you, little girl.”

  “Doctor says I’m brave,” she announces, while Hannah clings to Nathan’s sleeve.

  “Did you get my cell phone message, Dad? Did it come through?”

  “Not right away. Got what I could from Roz—you know how she is—and then Eveline told me you’d been abducted by this character,” he gestures at Tai, who grins impishly.

  “I gather you two have met?” I ask, my ears starting to buzz.

  “The City Hall renovation—three years back, wasn’t it? Tai GC’d the landscaping.” Nathan shrugs, apparently nonplussed.

  “I didn’t realize—” Tai starts.

  “I’m brave, Daddy,” repeats Emmie, trying to recapture her moment of glory.

  “Of course you are, baby—”

  “Mom says Tai’s doing the landscaping on our new house,” Hannah interrupts, and now both men are staring at me—the dark almond eyes beside the pale green, the auburn eyebrows and the black all rising together. I open my mouth to explain, but my voice has fled the scene, deserting me. Instead, there’s a lump in my throat the size of a ripe plum.

  “Yeah, we did discuss it in the market one day,” Tai offers after two beats, delivering me with grace from this unwieldy pause. “It was my idea. You see, I created some of those original gardens, back when it belonged to John Kauffman.”

  Now it’s my turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “Is that so?” asks Nathan. “Well, now. Isn’t that something? Although I have to say, I’m not sure we can afford you, Tai.”

  “Ah—well, you know.” He glances at me, unsmiling. “You might be surprised.”

  Emmie falls asleep again on the way home. Hannah’s plugged into her electronics, and Nathan is brooding. He apologizes for not being there when we needed him most. He suggests having Tai to the property, getting an estimate on the work. Squirming, I question the practicality of hiring a landscaper. “We may as well find out what it would cost us,” he insists. Then we stumble into an archaic silence. I think again about the day we met—the day Nathan sat on my porch and told the story of his father’s heart attack. He’d been home from college for the summer, helping his parents, and was in the midst of staining the back deck when he heard his dad’s strangled call from the shower. For weeks after I heard the story, I’d pull out this image, turning it like a stone: Nathan, his coveralls spotted with deck stain, clutching his dying father in the shower, slipping on tiles. For weeks I’d picture him there—a compelling mix of strength and humanity, heroism and helplessness as he wrestled his dad’s spent body to the bathroom rug, struggled to press life back into him. Here, I’d thought, was a man with a clear outline, a knowable size and density. Here was a man you could count on.

  I remember how precisely I fit in his armpit, the first time he slung his clean, heavy limb across my shoulders. I thought I could live forever in that shallow cave, listening to the granite thud of his heart. For months I fell asleep without sleeping pills
or wine, just that constant clear pulse against my kidneys.

  Now I sleep on the opposite side of our king-sized bed, buttressed by pillows, front and back—a habit I picked up during my pregnancies and refused to shed—Nathan, a body-width away, warm as the endangered earth. Night after night, I curl into my solitude, reaching for some black-dream depth—unquenchable, gorgeous, immense.

  As the four of us are pulling into the driveway late that afternoon, hauling our things back into the little rented house, I decide the duplicity must stop. I have to stop it. Only one walk in the woods, one kiss and at least a dozen e-mails, and already I’m in over my head, struggling for light and clarity, dazzled by the complications, the implications, past and future. As I stew a pot of my mother’s red bean chili, I’m remembering how her affair snowballed, gathering heft and momentum, involving first one and then another—children, parents, spouses and ex-spouses, ending in fire and funerals. I hook up Emmie with a coloring book, nuzzle the top of her head, set the table for dinner, shoring up my will. As I kiss Nathan’s prickly cheek—he’s heading back up to the site for the evening, to finish the work left undone—I’m inwardly composing the e-mail I will send, carefully selecting the words that will discontinue this madness. Theresa will be pleased with my clearheadedness, my newfound resolve.

  A resolve that’s slipping as I settle into the boudoir chair at 9:45 p.m. The kids have been asleep for an hour, and Nathan is not home, still not back. I’ve been pacing the house in the chill night, staring out the blackened windows, struggling against the weighty pull of seduction.

  Finally I turn on the computer, sip my wine and am undone by the new message in my in-box.

  S: Night comes fast this time of year, rising like a blade. Today, watching the faces of your lovely daughters, your husband, I willed myself to let it go. Then sat with that for a while…. All afternoon, walking in the fall woods with the dog, chest aching, mind naked as a stone.

  There is no holding on to beauty, is there? But on my walk, a pileated woodpecker rapped and called and rapped again against an oak, wanting into that sacred darkness—the very heart of the tree, where history lives.

  I can’t deny this longing any more than I can willingly lose a fist, an eye.

  There is just no way to rise gracefully into the next day.

  Meanwhile, squirrels keep vigil outside my walls, scratching and gathering, fueled by hunger—they know winter’s coming, though they don’t understand from where. Sometimes, I’m stunned by the sorrows of this world, Sylvia, but then I think of you, your real skin beside me, heat rising into what only we can create, if we choose. There is just this one intersection in all of time—blue and deep as earth, wild as ocean.

  Don’t we want that? Isn’t it ours?

  1974

  I STARTED SNEAKING INTO MY FATHER’S STUDY THAT fall. The worst things had not yet happened, but I felt a heavy sense of foreboding, and it seemed to bear my father’s name. Every day after school, I’d creak open his oak door and stare at the wall of bookcases where Dad’s fishing and shooting trophies shimmered. The room felt dark despite sunlight spilling over the walnut desk, the deep red rug, the cupped leather chair where I tossed myself each day, like a baseball caught in a fat mitt. I’d sit there, blank as a sinking stone, staring at the strange, primitive trappings of my father’s world: the worn bindings of medical books, the sex books in the top left-hand corner (too high to reach), the sad eyes and musty forehead of an antelope he’d shot, the long shiny nose of his rifle.

  He was planning a hunting trip to Montana, and the packages had arrived all through September, carrying sleek L.L.Bean boots and flannel vests, hunting knives and shotgun shells, camouflage pants. On late summer evenings, I often stared at him as he polished his new guns during 60 Minutes, and I burned with a sullen protectiveness toward the pheasant or deer that my father was hoping to kill.

  A murderer—that’s what he was, I decided a few days before he left for Montana. I was sitting in my usual corner of the study, staring at the hunting gear and suitcases on the floor when it struck me and I stood up, filled with a thrilling new resolve. I went to his desk, took a pad of his prescription paper from the top drawer and wrote that word—murderer—on each of the creamy white squares with a red pen. I liked how the word looked as I wrote it again and again on those blank pages with his name printed at the top. I liked the righteous shrug of the r’s, the round, upside-down smile of the m.

  I was thinking about finally climbing up to have a look at those sex books, the day I wrote the murderer notes and placed them carefully in all the folds and creases of my father’s suitcase and hunting jacket. I tucked one underneath his briefs and another inside his black leather shaving kit. Then I moved his office chair against the bookshelf, so that I could reach The Joy of Sex, which I slipped under my shirt to take to Theresa’s.

  After all, my mother refused to answer any of my questions that fall. She wouldn’t tell me how boys got erections or what a diaphragm was. She wouldn’t explain about Roe v. Wade, or what Helen Reddy meant when she sang “’Cause I’ve heard it all before, and I’ve been down there on the floor. No one’s ever gonna keep me down again….” She wouldn’t tell me whether we were going to see Mr. Robert again, either, or what it meant that he’d served someone papers. (I kept picturing him in a waiter’s uniform, the mysterious papers hidden beneath a serving dish.) She wouldn’t explain about orgasms, or why she got that look on her face when I asked. So when I pressed myself against the Jacuzzi jets one August afternoon, when my body dissolved into itself, my toes curling up in the heat while the stars fell from their holdings, I thought maybe I was ill, or had damaged an organ. The southern California sky was overcast for once, the air heavy with coastal fog, the house eerily quiet. I sank farther into the warm water, checked my pulse, then decided to have another go.

  Theresa and I tried to answer our own questions. We lay on her white eyelet bedspread in the blank warmth of after school, The Joy of Sex spread open between us. We stripped down and compared bodies in her full-length mirror: Theresa’s looked like a woman’s, with kiwi-sized breasts and wisps of coppery hair in all the right places. Her torso curved in just below her rib cage, then swelled gently below her navel, while mine was all angles, my breasts nothing but little kumquats. I felt like an alien, an in-between thing. At my age, Ali had already had her period for a year.

  “You’re shaped like a boy,” Theresa appraised and I shot back, “Just because I don’t have a huge ass!” Then we mauled each other with pillows until we were giddy and flushed.

  “I’m going to die when my dad gets home from Montana,” I told her a few days after I’d planted the murderer notes.

  “He won’t kill you.” She stretched across her bed, brushing the wall with her fingertips. “At the very most, he’ll ground you and I can sneak through your window.”

  “We don’t get grounded in my house.” I imagined him opening his suitcase in the hotel suite, finding the notes, his features curdling with our old disappointment.

  “Well, if he kills you, can I have your skateboard and your Elton John records?”

  “Sure,” I said, “why not?” And we spent the rest of the afternoon making out a will. Theresa wrote and I dictated who should get my belongings when I was gone—the album collection, the Tolkien hardbacks, the skateboard…. Afterward, she appeared almost gleeful about the things she was going to inherit, and agreed to let me ride her horse. I trudged behind her up the path to the stables, wondering if people who are dead feel homesick for what they’ve left, or if they simply go to sleep while waiting for Jesus. I wondered if I would make it to heaven, or if all the evil things I’d done—the murderer notes, the Jacuzzi jets, the shoe-box letters—would keep me out.

  Touching the flanks of Theresa’s warm gelding, Georgie, was like touching the sun. It was better than prayer or my mother’s lemony cheek at night. Theresa made a stepladder with her fingers, so I could hoist myself onto Georgie’s back and ride the ring, no
where to go but in circles. But riding was soaring. I wanted to fly wild as a deer through some hushed forest. To be kissed by someone like Leslie Brown, my sister’s new crush—to caress the thick veins on his black forearms. I wanted to make out with John Riley from school, to make my father hit me because I had it coming. I could make him do things he’d regret, could plan the violence. I wanted to know that it was mine, coming to me, as deliberate as the dadada-da of the horse’s hoofs against hard, unyielding dirt.

  Two days after my father left for Montana, my mother came to my room at dawn, tugged back the curtains and announced we were taking a trip of our own. She stood before the window, allowing the yellowish light to frame her—a full-length halo. She held an armload of my underwear, washed and folded, and began stashing it in my dresser, ignoring for once that my clothes were rumpled and inside out, shoved in all the wrong places. Her cream-colored button-down shirt was cinched in a quick half knot above her jeans.

  “Where?” I rubbed my eyeballs and sat up. “Where are we going?” She perched on the corner of my bed, patted my leg briskly through the blankets.

  “Have you been warm enough in here, angel? It’s been awfully chilly.”

  “I’m fine.” I brushed the hair from my face. “What trip? What about school?”

  She spoke quickly now, as though she might run out of nerve to say all this: we were driving up the coast, to a bed-and-breakfast where they had little individual cabins, some horseback riding on the beach, maybe even Hearst Castle—had I heard of Hearst Castle? She smiled weakly, a plea in her gray eyes.

  “What about school?” I asked again. “What about CJ?”

  “You can miss a day or two, honey. I’ll take care of it. We’ll get the neighbor boys to feed the cat.” She picked at a loose thread on my quilt. “Mr. Robert is taking us,” she said, staring at me now with a steady, pointed gaze.