Someone Else's Love Story

by Joshilyn Jackson

  He spread his hands and half smiled. “Be in love with me back.”

  He didn’t say it pleading or pathetic. He said it like I had asked what to do with a hungry baby or a burning house, and the answer was plain common sense.

  But I couldn’t. How could I even think of trying, when my whole body became something electric whenever William walked into a room or smiled or I remembered resting my hand on the sleek, polished oak of his chest?

  I stood there, not being in love with Walcott back, with ridiculous numbers of tears falling down helpless out of my eyes.

  After half a minute, he smiled, but not a happy smile. He nodded.

  “So, I guess that’s that,” he said. “You have to give me some room, Shandi, if you want me to get over this.” And then he left.

  Chapter 10

  William is down in the basement, elbows braced on his weight bench and eighty pounds on the bar, sweating so hard he’s in danger of losing his Bluetooth. He started at fifty pounds, and he’s been doing sets all morning. He is working his triceps now. Eighty is not hard on his arms, but he can feel his heartbeat in his side, a painful second throbbing.

  Waiting for Bialys to call and tell him that Stevie has completed the business of being killed, he has stretched his body to the limit of what his healing abdomen will allow. Perhaps beyond it. His side burns and pulses with the rhythm of the lifting and his heart.

  Today Steven Parch is being taken off the ventilator. His respiration will cease, and that will shortly end all of his body’s other functions. A sheet will be pulled over his face, and he will be taken to the morgue. If the uncle does not claim the body and its attendant expenses, the state will pay for a cremation. Parch will be reduced to gray dust, and even the dust will not be saved or set aside.

  This isn’t wholly William’s doing. He can see multiple causes, high among them, Parch’s own poor decisions. But it is not separate from him, either. William’s causal relationship to this specific reduction of a complex living system into dust cannot be negated.

  William’s Bluetooth chirps. His arms set down the eighty pounds, while his abdomen feels as if he’s set down more than double that. He walks over to the phone and looks at the screen, to be sure. It’s Bialys. He taps the Bluetooth, leaning on the sideboard.

  “Is it finished?” William says, instead of hello. His manners and his phone voice have abandoned him. He sounds raspy and too loud.

  Bialys clears his throat. “No. I’m sorry.”

  The red pulse in his side becomes less interesting. “The uncle changed his mind?”

  “No, they took him off at nine,” Bialys says. “Parch started breathing on his own. I waited around, but he’s still breathing.”

  William digests this, feeling the pain in his abdomen receding in small, lapping surges. “What’s the prognosis?”

  “Doctors say so much shit, who knows,” Bialys says. “The uncle signed a do not resuscitate, but he won’t end feeding or hydration. Says he wouldn’t do that to a dog. For now? Parch is stable.”

  “Thank you,” William says. “Keep me in the loop?”

  “Will do,” Bialys says, and closes the connection.

  William likes this about him, how his conversations begin with what matters and end precisely when they end. More ­people should learn to skip the how-­are-­yous and see-­you-­soons. He wants to call Paula, disseminate this information with no preamble, and hang up. Perhaps he can start a trend. He likes this idea so much, he’s a little giddy.

  Why is he grinning? It is foolish. Stevie could still die. In fact, his death is probable. Were he to wake up, William wouldn’t mind if he spontaneously combusted five minutes later. But in this moment, all that matters is that William has not killed him. He doesn’t want to be the catalyst for loss, even though Stevie’s child is a probable fiction, and if real, could be better parented by wolves.

  He goes up the stairs, out of the weight room. On the hearth is a Lego Death Star, the figurines frozen in the middle of the last scenario he helped Natty reenact from a movie he has never seen. The secret hatch is open and three of Natty’s favorites are imperiled in a trash compactor. Natty will be anxious to rescue them.

  Also, Shandi’s folder is lying on the coffee table. It contains William’s lab reports, as well a dossier on Clayton Lilli, courtesy of Paula. Paula wanted to drive it over to her house, but William retained it. Shandi came to him for help, and he wants to see it through. Shandi hasn’t come back to claim it, though. While he was waiting on Steven Parch’s death, he was glad to be alone. Now, it seems odd. She hasn’t come since Paula chased her out on Wednesday. Meanwhile, he sat on her information, absorbed in his own waiting.

  He has been what Paula calls “a monstrous ass.” He sometimes chooses to be an ass, at work. It can yield results when repetition and good manners fail. But in his personal life, it can happen without him noticing.

  He should deliver this to her, now.

  He takes a quick shower and changes, but it isn’t until he is walking out the front door that he remembers that the driver’s seat of his car is a charred twist of melted foam gnarled around the frame. Dammit. He forgot to tell Bialys about the car, too. Dammit cubed.

  He goes back inside and gets the cushions off the armchair in his office. After a moment’s thought, he gathers duct tape, wire, and towels. He finds an old pink can of Lysol in the laundry room.

  He opens the car door and the smell hits him, harsh and chemical, almost like scorched microwave popcorn. The driver’s-­side seat is destroyed and the ceiling is streaked in black, but the car is sound, mechanically.

  This is all the damage the pint liquor bottle with a rum-­soaked rag stuffed in its top could do. William could have made a more effective bomb in his sleep. This one sailed into the car’s open window and landed on its base, or more likely, the bomber walked up and simply set it down inside. Either way, the bottle did not break.

  A Molotov mocktail, Paula called it, thrown by a poor man’s carsonist.

  It would have guttered out entirely if the flaming rag hadn’t come to rest against the upholstery. William had put the fire out with the kitchen extinguisher, but Paula dialed 911 while he was running to get it.

  Lights and sirens followed. William’s neighbors gathered and milled in the street like spooked cattle, breaking and re-­forming into small shocked pods, asking one another what happened. Herd animals often cluster up for comfort, but William wished they’d all go home. Two cops in uniform took a report, asking William in a perfunctory manner if he knew who might have done this.

  William told them he had no idea.

  He didn’t say that when he first looked out the window and saw the burning car, his mouth silently formed the syllables of his wife’s name. He also didn’t tell them he’d been lurking outside her parents’ house earlier, or that he is not welcome there. He kept his mouth shut because no one in that middle-­class, deeply Catholic family would so violently break laws and social conventions. Not even Maggie. Also, they’d never own a bottle of such cheap rum.

  Steven Parch’s uncle is a more likely suspect. He’s currently in prison, but probably has a pool of criminal friends at large.

  The older cop said something about teenagers, and William nodded, as if accepting this. Paula gave him a sharp look. She’d thought about the uncle, too. But William couldn’t stand on his curb, surrounded by his neighbors, explaining his part in Stevie’s impending death. All he needed from those cops was a report for his insurance ­people.

  Paula took her cue from him. She slipped her business card into the hand of the taller cop, touching her hair and smiling. “Kids today, right? But feel free to call me, Officer, if you want to interrogate me just a little more.”

  He meant to tell Bialys, since Bialys already has the context. He can’t allow a person who would deploy even this ill-­made bomb to roam his family neighborhood.
If the gas tank had blown, shards of burning car would have peppered the baby-­and-­beagle-­filled houses around him.

  He’s been so preoccupied, though, waiting for Stevie to be finished. The bomb fell out of his mind. He’ll call Bialys back, but one thing at a time. Shandi first.

  Binding the chair cushions and towels to the frame with a liberal use of wire and duct tape, William approximates a place to sit that will place his body in a reasonable spatial relationship with the steering wheel and pedals. He sprays the interior down with Lysol until the antiseptic Summer Breeze overpowers the burned chemical undersmell. His eyes are watering as he drapes a final cheerful beach towel on top of the whole mess. He has to drive with all the windows down, but it rained earlier, and the heat wave has broken. It’s nice out, for July.

  By the time he finds Shandi’s condo, it’s past two, which means Natty is likely down for his nap. Good. It seems best to take Clayton Lilli’s information inside while his possible offspring is sleeping.

  He rings the bell. He hears Natty crying before Shandi swings open the door. She’s holding Natty on her hip, and she’s been crying, too. When she sees him standing on her step, she smiles hugely and then breaks into a fresh gusset.

  “Oh, William, yay,” she says, and pulls him inside.

  Natty, red-­faced and runny-­nosed, scrubs at his eyes. He looks younger when he cries, more like a toddler than a preschooler.

  “Oh, William, yay,” he parrots, and scrambles across the air between them, into William’s arms. William shifts Natty to his unshot side. He holds the file on Clayton Lilli in his other hand, a strange dissonance.

  Natty is gabbling at him through wails, his words falling onto each other so quickly, William can barely follow. The gist is, something awful was in his room.

  Shandi keeps pulling William along into the chaos he has interrupted, while Natty weeps and snuffles. He tucks his face into the crook of William’s neck, talking and talking, but now William can’t understand him at all. They go into the living room.

  “Don’t look, it’s a mess,” Shandi says.

  That’s an understatement. The room is a shambles. Toys and books are scattered all over the dirty floor, and used dishes stand on every surface. Great piles and drifts of laundry lie in various stages of indecipherable cleanliness or filth.

  His own house is pristine. While Shandi has been monitoring his life, her own has fallen into disarray. The disorder makes his skin itch, all of it, but Natty is soaking William’s shoulder in tears. William sets the folder down on the coffee table so he can peel Natty’s face up.

  “Was it the ninja?” William asks.

  “No!” Natty says, hitching, and the corners of his mouth both point straight down. “Stevie camed my room wiff gun hands, shoot and shoot me.” William can barely understand him. He looks to Shandi, standing with her arms in an angry crisscross, her face crumpling.

  “I just got off the phone with the effing stupid crap crap doctor, and she says this is progress. Isn’t that so super? He’s screaming himself out of his nap now, but hey! At least he isn’t sublimating Stevie into spiders, and—­” Her voice rises to a wail. “Walcott let me go to voice mail. Does that sound like anything like progress?”

  It doesn’t. The change in imagery sounds irrelevant, though admittedly he has little patience with psychology. Still, an increase in a nightmare’s frequency and intensity is an escalation.

  To Natty, he says, “It’s okay. I can fix this.” He makes his voice sound cheerful and authoritative. “Is Stevie still up there?”

  He is prepared to go upstairs and beat imaginary Stevie dead, even as the real one struggles to not die of the same cause. It is a hideous juxtaposition, but this is what needs to be done.

  Natty shakes his head. He’s calmed enough for William to understand him. “He ranned in the closet and got away into a hole. Mommy couldn’t find it. But he might come back in that hole, William.”

  “I’m going to close it,” William says, very serious. “I know how to plug up holes, and I brought duct tape. You can help me.”

  Natty nods and puts his face back down on William’s shoulder. William joggles him by rote. His body remembers how to properly jounce a tiny, distraught human into peace. More than that, his body is good at it. He has missed it. It is an absent range of movement that is present in his body, every day.

  To Shandi, he says, “You’ve left the front door open.” He can feel the air-­conditioning whooshing out past him. As she goes to close it, he adds, “Take a minute. Catch your breath. I got this.”

  She looks at her son, quiet now in his arms and mouths, Thank you.

  As she goes, he gets his phone out, one-­handedly thumbing at the touch screen to find the number of his maid ser­vice. He turns to the wall, joggling and patting Natty while he speaks in a calm, low voice through his earpiece to a dispatcher, promising time-­and-­a-­half and exorbitant tips if she will deploy a maid team to this address immediately. All the while he feels Natty growing heavier in the way of all small, soothed children. The relaxing muscles create the illusion of increasing mass.

  He hangs up, but he stays facing the wall, swaying back and forth and patting, until Natty is so deeply under that he’s drooling onto William’s shoulder.

  William doesn’t stop, though. His body keeps on doing the job it was trained for long ago. It’s fine, if he loves Natty a little bit. Children are added to, not replaced. And subtracted from, of course. He knows that, too, and perhaps this is why he keeps patting Natty, though Natty is asleep. He lets his own body have the simple, soothing movement.

  When he finally turns back, Shandi is in the room. He’s not sure how long she’s been there, sitting on one of the angular chairs. The folder he brought is in her lap. It is closed. One of her hands presses down firmly on the top.

  “I know what this is,” she says to him, “But I didn’t look. I don’t want lab reports. I want you to tell me that he’s in here. I want you to say you found him.”

  William takes his cue from Bialys, earlier, laying out the information she’s waited for with blunt economy. “I can’t be certain without DNA, but it’s likely. His name is Clayton Lilli. He graduated Emory last year, economics, and took an entry-­level job with an investment bank downtown.”

  She draws her breath in, sharp. “He’s still local?”

  “Yes. He lives in an apartment complex right by Piedmont Park,” he says.

  “So he’s practically my neighbor. That’s . . . fun.” She puts one hand over her mouth, and her eyes over it are very round. She speaks through her fingers. “I knew you’d find him. Walcott said it wasn’t possible, but I knew you would.” She puts her hand down from her face and she is smiling with her mouth. “If Walcott was speaking to me I would put this so far up his nose. Is there a picture?”

  “Several,” William says.

  “Does he look like . . .” Her gaze shifts to her sleeping son.

  “I don’t know,” William says. “His earlobes are correct.”

  This time Shandi covers her eyes with her hand, and then drops it. She is still looking at Natty. “Could you excuse me? I can’t open this in here, with him.”

  “Sure,” he says. “I called a maid ser­vice, though. They’ll be here soon.”

  “Oh. Thank you. That’s so kind.” She stands up. “I won’t be long.” She takes the folder upstairs.

  William looks around. It’s hard to wait in this filthy place, smelling dried-­up egg. Is he allowed to clean it? It might be insulting. Paula, who grew up in an apartment so abhorrent it makes this condo look like a surgical theater, would think so. Paula keeps her loft immaculate, and if he so much as straightens a magazine she literally snaps her teeth at him in a double click.

  But Shandi’s been cleaning his house; that makes it quid pro quo. He flips Natty and lays him on the sofa in a move too quick and smooth to st
ir him, then blocks him with a cushion, so he can’t roll off onto the floor.

  He starts picking up the dishes, carrying them through the open doorway into the kitchen. The sink is full, too, so he stays there, rinsing and loading them into the machine. He finds that he enjoys the reversal. It’s been so long since he’s been even mildly useful to a person with whom he has an interpersonal relationship. Until he got shot, he lived in a fog of work, run, lift, sleep for months now. Paula picked up all the slack, even going online and paying his bills.

  He tried to thank her, but she shrugged it off, saying, “I’m saving you back, Bubba. Whether you want me to or not.”

  She was referencing their move to Indiana, but William doesn’t see the debt or the parallel. Taking Paula when he left for college was not solely for her benefit. It was necessary for him as well.

  And for Bridget, he thinks, his wife’s name rising in his mind yet again, unbidden. Almost easy now. Before the Circle K, those syllables were not allowed to form in breath or thought, for seven months. He believed it was necessary for survival.

  But then he tried to walk into a bullet. Paula is right. It might be time to reassess the policy.

  Bridget is still easier to think of in her earliest incarnations, when she was her simplest self. Not yet a woman, or a wife, or a mother. Just a girl, like Shandi. He sees Bridget with her ponytail set high, shoulders braced, invading the filthy basement apartment where Paula still lived with her mother, though she graduated the year before.

  Paula was watching television when they arrived. Or maybe not. William had never been to her house when the TV wasn’t on, even when no one was in the room to watch it.

  Paula said, “Did we have plans?”

  William waited for Bridget to begin, but she only bobbed her head at him, encouraging. He shook his head. Getting Paula to move to Indiana would require more than relentlessness and logic. Bridget could do tact. She compressed her lips and only bobbed her head again, wanting him to start.