by K. L. Cook
Laura was sick of thinking about it. She was sick of thinking altogether. She got back on her bike and rode hard around the square in the cool evening breeze, until she broke a good sweat, and then practically coasted over to the Letigs’ house, where she stood by a tree across the street and stared into their dark windows. It was late, past midnight now. She pedaled to the alley, the dogs barking shrilly at her. But she kept on, making one pass and then another, fast as she could, the rocks on the unpaved alley road crunching under her tires. The Letigs’ lights were off in the back windows, too.
She set her bike down in the alley against a trash can. She breathed hard, but from the riding, not from fear. She opened the back gate of their yard. Across the alley, a dog barked once, twice. She turned to it and put her finger up to her mouth, stared at it fiercely.
“Hush,” she whispered. The dog shut up.
She walked into the yard, not secretly, but quiet and calm. She didn’t fear being caught, and she felt liberated by her lack of fear. She went to the bedroom window and could see those sheer blue curtains she’d admired from inside when she was nosing around in their bedroom. The window was open. The curtains swayed gently in the light breeze. She pressed her face up close, tried to peer in, but she could see nothing at first. She held her breath and listened, could hear the hum of John’s breathing as he slept. A light wheezing noise, too—Mrs. Letig. Anne. Anne Letig. Everything else was quiet. She stayed there for several minutes, barely breathing now, just listening to them. They were so still in this house, everybody sleeping and dreaming whatever it was they were dreaming.
She pressed her face against the screen, but all she could see were two lumps in the bed. Not close together. A space between them. Her eyes adjusted, and she could make out Anne Letig, with her thick stomach and her nice fashionable dresses and her cash and her store-bought vegetables and her pinochle games and her hatboxes and perfume and silver fish barrettes and her well-behaved boys and her whining about her apron strings stretching to Dallas and her beef and chicken enchiladas and all those confusing references to her mother, telling Laura that her mother loved…no, loves you children. What the hell did she know? Who elected her substitute parent? Always sticking her stupid foot in her mouth, acting like she cared, patting poor sick Laura in her bed. Oh, we love you so much, Laura. You are so special to us! When what she really cared about was having a dependable baby-sitter so she could drive off to Aspen or Dallas or to the Brewers’ for pinochle or wherever else she wanted to go. If she didn’t have the money, didn’t have the frills, would Laura even be in her life? Would John even be in her life? Wasn’t that the real thing holding him back now? He couldn’t stand to part with the frills. What would Mrs. Letig have done back in May had she known that the baby-sitter was so sick because John had taken her out in the woods and screwed her? Would Mrs. Letig have been so sweet and comforting then?
Laura had the impulse to scream at them through their window. Scare the hell out of them both, cackle like a raving maniac. Another crazy Tate woman.
The dog across the alley barked again. Enough, she thought. Enough. She walked away, out the gate, and to her bike. She started off but circled back down the alley, slowing for one final look. Enough! And then off she sped, down the middle of the dark, empty streets, coasting down another alley of barking dogs to her own yard, to Fay, panting by the fence, waiting for her return, glad to see her, licking her hand and then, when Laura bent down, licking her face with that nasty old breath of hers.
The poor dog was starved for love. Laura let her into the house, even though she didn’t smell very good, and into her room, where her brothers all slept soundly. It was odd how when you didn’t care if you were caught, you wouldn’t be, but if you did care, you were always on the verge of detection. Or so you thought. She slipped back into her pajamas and into bed, Fay licking her dangling fingers and then wheezing into sleep. Laura made the hummingbird wings on the sculpture flap one more time but was mad at herself for doing it. It seemed sentimental, stupid even. Then finally she slept.
She didn’t go to the warehouse at all that week. But her rage had given way to something more vulnerable and painful. She wanted to see him but felt queasy about it. What would she say? What was there left between them? Throughout the day she would think about John—about his catlike swagger, the way he seemed sometimes to glide when he walked, about his long, angular face and how angry he had been the last time they’d been together, how they’d screamed at each other and he’d thrown that rock toward her and then roared past her, wheeling dust into her face. Everything between them came back to her in vivid detail. The memories that she had struggled to coax to the surface before, when she had wanted them, now came unbidden. She would be working through a complicated trigonometry problem, and she’d inexplicably smell sea salt and was suddenly back at the beach, in the cabin, caught in the crook of his arm, listening to the sound of the waves. Or in English class Mr. Sparling called on her to read aloud from “Young Goodman Brown”—a dumb tale, she thought, about a boy, a girl, and what appeared to be the devil—and in the middle of the paragraph, the words before her were gone. All she could see was a page of dust, John’s truck disappearing in the distance.
“Miss Tate,” Mr. Sparling had said, “please continue.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, but she didn’t know where she was. Debbie had to reach over and put her finger on the line where she had stopped.
She wanted to talk to him, but it was impossible. She called once. His wife answered the phone, so Laura hung up the receiver. She didn’t like this neediness in herself. She had to fight the urge to go to the warehouse in the afternoon to watch from a distance to see if he would show up. She waited in the school library after the last bell rang or walked to the Charnelle Library or downtown to the courthouse lawn and into 4-D’s, where she listened to Dean chatter, refilling her cherry soda for free, and she watched the clock until five-fifteen passed. At five-thirty, she would head home, taking back alleys rather than the sidewalks so that he wouldn’t drive by and see her, though she also knew that even that was a form of self-flattery. He must be glad to be rid of her, she thought. Glad it was finally over. She had pushed too hard.
But still, she missed him, and at night she would lie awake, unable to sleep, staring at the sculpture, moving her eyelashes so the bird’s wings would flap, and in the evenings she would take her diary into the bathroom and read back through the entries, never with his name, never with any details, coded so that only she would know what it meant. One afternoon she found, tucked between the pages, the drawing of Yankee Doodle Gal, and she began to cry. She ran the water in the sink and then the tub to drown out the sound of her sobbing. She took off her clothes. The water was up as hot as she could stand it, and then even hotter, so that the steam choked her, and she stood in front of the foggy mirror and looked at her figure and thought of him, of the ways his hands and body had moved over hers. The sight of her body made her feel even more wretched. She was disgusting. She could never tell anyone about John. She had wanted to believe that it was okay, that there was beauty in what they had done, and that the heat of flesh on flesh was a worthy thing, and sometimes pure, so pure, the closest she had ever come to that invisible life she sensed was on the other side of this life. But now she knew that she had just been deceiving herself.
She let the hot water run. She wanted it to burn. She wanted it to scald her flesh. It took a while before she could even slip into the water, inching her toe, her foot and ankle and calf, the other foot and ankle and calf, and she stood, watching her legs pinkening from the heat, the steam smoking above the water. She bent down and then went deeper, until her knees touched the bottom of the tub, her thighs almost completely submerged. It burned. She covered her mouth, bit her palm. She closed her eyes and readied herself to drop her hips quickly into the painful water. She was afraid she might scream.
But she could not make herself do it. She was a coward. She reached out to the faucet and t
urned on the cold water, let it run in the tub until the bath was tolerable. She turned it off and sank easily down on her back. She had failed to do what she intended. She closed her eyes, and her thoughts drifted to John and her together. It was vivid and close, and that angered her. She had no control over herself—over her body, over her memory, over anything.
She slipped down in the water to wet her hair, and then down even more until her face was under the surface. She opened her eyes and stared through the refraction at the cracked plaster ceiling, the rusted corners of the pipes. She held her breath for as long as she could, letting the bubbles stream out of her mouth in intervals, and then she held it even longer until her chest started to burn and her eyes bulged. She could see her hair floating like seaweed above and to the sides of her face. Just one swallow. It was easy. The easiest way to go, her mother had said. You wouldn’t even know it. One large gulp in the lungs and that’s it. She heard her heart thudding loudly in her chest and temples. She held on for another few seconds, and then she exploded through the surface of the water, spitting and coughing.
Someone was beating on the door. “Are you all right in there?” her father barked.
She spit and coughed and couldn’t answer.
“Laura, are you all right?”
“Yes,” she stammered.
“Your water must be awful hot. The whole house is steamed over.” He sounded gruff. “Open the window.”
“Yes, sir,” she called.
“And get out soon. You need to make supper.”
“Yes, sir.”
She reached for a towel to cover her mouth. She kept coughing and coughing until tears streaked down her face. Finally she got control. She let the water out and lifted herself, dripping, from the tub and dried off. Her diary pages were bloated. Droplets of water were on the drawing he’d made. The water hadn’t ruined the picture, though, hadn’t streaked or blotched the image. Her face and body still recognizably there—cartoonish, mouth open, a flag—the water just beading on the surface without penetrating.
That night, for the first time since they had argued, she slept well—like the dead, in fact, without dreaming, which is what she wanted. The water had purged the obsession. Temporarily at least.
The next evening, when the phone rang after supper, her father answered. “Hello,” he said. “Hello.” He hung up and returned to the set of papers he was studying—more loan applications for his welding workshop. He wanted to make some extra money, maybe eventually go out on his own. He was tired of working for Charnelle Steel.
A few minutes later the phone rang again.
“Hello…. Hey, Letig.” There was a long pause. Her father smiled, and then he laughed hard, as if at a punch line. “That’s pretty good.” Another long pause, her father listening, and then looking at her. “I don’t know what she’s got planned. Hold on.” He held out the phone. “Laura, it’s Letig. He wants to know if you can keep his boys.”
“When?” she asked.
“Here, you work it out,” he said, handing her the phone.
She put the receiver to her ear but did not say anything.
“Laura, are you there?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
“I have to see you.”
“When?” she said, glancing at her father.
“Tell your dad Saturday for baby-sitting. Can you get out tonight?”
“No,” she said.
“I’ve got to see you.”
“Dad, can I watch the Letig boys on Saturday?”
“Fine with me.”
“Yes, sir,” she said in the phone. “Saturday would be fine.”
“What about tonight?”
“No, sir.”
“Then tomorrow?”
She glanced again at her father. His mind was on his papers. He wasn’t really paying any attention to her.
“Please, Laura. I’m going crazy here.” They were both silent for almost a minute. “I love you,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she said, barely able to control the excitement in her voice. “That would be fine.”
“I’ll be at the warehouse by four-thirty,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You don’t have to ‘yes, sir’ me,” he said gently, and she smiled. Their old joke.
At the barn the following evening, she was nervous. He looked wild. His shirt unloosened from his pants. His hair seemed greasy, unwashed and un-combed, his eyes bloodshot. His breath smelled of peppermints, and she wondered if he’d been drinking and then chewed candy to cover up the smell.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry, too.”
“No,” he said, “you don’t have to be sorry. You were right. We can’t keep on like this. It isn’t fair to anybody, not to you, not to me…to none of us,” he added more vaguely.
“Are you okay?” She was afraid to touch him.
He ignored her question. “You’re right,” he said. “We can do it. We have to do it.” He stepped toward her and stumbled. She jumped away. “Oops,” he said.
“Are you drunk?” she asked warily.
“No.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No. Did you hear what I said?”
“What?”
“We need to get away from here. This place is killing me.”
She wanted to remain skeptical, but she felt her own expectations rising, a renewed thrill. “Are you serious?” she asked cautiously.
“I am. I want to go…right now.” His voice rose strangely, as if he was asking a question rather than stating what he felt.
“You have been drinking,” she said.
“I want to leave now,” he said, moving to her, hugging her. “I mean it. Tonight.”
She pulled away. “We can’t do that.”
“Soon, then,” he said and plopped down on the pallet. He took a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and put it in his mouth but didn’t light it. “Soon.”
“What happened?” she asked, kneeling by the pallet.
“It doesn’t matter what happened,” he said too loudly. He tried to get his lighter to flare, but it wouldn’t work. He rapped it angrily against the end table.
“Did you have a fight with Anne?”
“This isn’t about her,” he said and then shook his head. His eyes were suddenly brimming. She was alarmed. “I’m going crazy,” he rasped.
“John, what happened?”
“We could go next week.”
“Next week?”
“That gives us plenty of time.”
He dropped the unlit cigarette and the lighter onto the end table and then grabbed her. She could have wriggled away, but she didn’t. She felt a little frightened, though. He pulled her close and kissed her sloppily. She had to wipe her face afterward. She smelled the liquor beneath the peppermint. It wasn’t just beer.
“A week from Friday,” he said, holding her tightly.
“I don’t know, John.”
“It’s what you wanted.”
She didn’t answer.
He released his hold on her, leaned away so he could see her face. “Are you backing out?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
“Good, then.” He kissed her more tenderly, then said, “A week from Friday.”
“Maybe,” she whispered.
“Not just maybe. Say yes.”
“I don’t know.”
“Say yes.”
She wanted to be thoughtful with whatever she said. She felt wary, but underneath she could feel her own joy swelling. “John, I’m not sure anymore.”
“Please,” he said. “I love you. Come away with me.”
Careful now, she thought, careful. She reached her hand up to his face, ran her index finger over his cheek and around his eyes and down his thin nose to his lips, those lips. She kissed him softly and then put her head against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her.
“Laura—”
“We’ll see,” she sai
d.
29
Leaving
Saturday night, after Laura baby-sat the Letig boys, John drove her home, and they worked out the details of their plan. It seemed simple. They would leave Friday morning. His wife was leaving with the boys on that same morning to visit her mother in Borger for the weekend, so Laura and John would have a three-day head start before his wife suspected anything. John would receive his paycheck on Thursday afternoon, so he would deposit it early Friday and withdraw two thousand dollars from his bank account, still leaving plenty for his wife, and she had access to more, he said, from her family. Much more. She would be okay. On Monday and Thursday, when they met, they would bring smaller bags and leave them at the barn, so all of their things would not have to be smuggled out on Friday. She would leave for school on Friday morning, as usual, but instead of going there, she would meet John behind the warehouse, and they would stop by the barn to retrieve the rest of their things and then head out. If they left by ten, they could arrive in Houston maybe by midnight.