I followed him. Not trying to be creepy. Not at first. A sunshine yellow VW is about the least stealthy car on the planet. I kept thinking he’d have to notice me and pull over. I would drive up beside him, and we would both roll down our windows.
I wasn’t sure what I would say. Maybe leap right to I love you. Or maybe I’d get stage fright and only squeak, Hello. Maybe I would say, Hey, William, have you got time to make hot love to me in the road here, or are you off to someplace vital with that ax?
He didn’t notice me, though. He drove more than five miles, all the way into Decatur, squeaking through yellow lights so that I shamelessly ran red ones, barely pausing at the stop signs. Now I was officially creepy stalkering, because he was obviously blind to the ball of yellow car in his rearview.
He turned off into a web of tiny, residential streets, not slowing for the wide speed bumps. His big car had better shocks than mine, and he got a couple of blocks ahead of me.
I rounded a corner and thought I’d lost him. I randomly picked to go right at the next turn, then came to a T intersection. I saw his SUV stopped half a block up on my left, in front of a painted brick bungalow with a cheery purple door.
He was already out of the car, striding across the lawn with such purpose that I was glad he didn’t have the ax. As he walked, he pulled a square of white out of his pocket. A folded piece of paper, I thought. He walked to door and pressed the note against it, and it stuck. He must have had a tack or tape. I wasn’t close enough to see.
He turned around, but still he didn’t see me, though his face pointed briefly at me as he spun. He walked back to his SUV, got in, and drove away, the SUV bouncing high over the first speed bump. He was heading in the wrong direction to be going home, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up. I stayed where I was, looking at that house.
No one came out to get the note. I hadn’t seen him knock or ring the bell. I pulled forward and stopped in front of the buttercream house. It was low and sweet-looking, with a lot of flower beds and a postage stamp of rich green lawn. On one side, a wrought-iron arch stood, covered in wisteria vine, with a pretty garden bench in front of it. I couldn’t imagine who might live there. It wasn’t Paula. She had a loft downtown. Who else could it be? I couldn’t think of anyone who would matter enough to rate notes and all this purposeful stomping, much less the ax.
I turned the engine off and got out, walking up across the lawn toward that purple door. It wasn’t gaudy. It was a rich, plummy color, and the paper—I saw now it was an envelope—looked very white taped to it.
There was a single word printed on it in William’s economical handwriting. I went closer still, to read the word: Bridget.
William had left a note for a dead woman, taped to a purple door.
The hand on the end of my arm reached out and pressed the bell.
I waited, looking at that impossible word, hearing footsteps. The purple door swung open.
She was a few pounds heavier than she had been in the picture on the news. She wasn’t grinning all happy, either, as she had then, sitting with her husband and her child on a cheery picnic blanket. She had only a polite smile for me, her eyebrows raised in inquiry.
The envelope, so white against the door’s deep color, caught her eye. She turned to it, already reaching, and then she paused. William’s dead wife paused, looking at her own name in his writing, looking at it with her dead-wife eyes.
“You’re Bridget,” I said to her.
“Yes,” she said. She took the envelope down, running her fingers across the way he wrote her name. “Did you bring this? Did William send you?”
“You’re Bridget,” I told her. “You died.”
She tilted her head to one side. “Oh! I see. I’m sorry. Yes, I did. Did you come to ask me about that? About where I went when I was dead?” She glanced at the envelope again, then put it away in her jeans pocket. When she looked back up, her eyes on me were so warm and so kind. “Usually Father Lewis talks to me before he sends someone, but I haven’t checked my messages since yesterday.” I stepped away, blindly moving backward, and she followed me out, putting out a hand to me like I was a skittish, homeless kitten. “No, no, it’s fine. I have some time.”
From the house behind her, I heard a man’s voice call, “Honey?”
She called back, “It’s someone from the church to talk to me, Dad. I’ll be in in a minute.” She closed the front door behind her. She took my arm in her warm, alive hand, drawing me across the lawn. I went with her like a thing with no weight, a balloon tugged on a string. “Did you lose someone recently?”
I nodded, because I had. Very recently. I’d just lost William.
“How long were you dead?” I asked her.
“Not quite three minutes,” she said. She’d led me to the garden bench and sat down, pulling me to sit beside her. The bench was small, so that our knees touched. “It’s subjective, though. To me it seemed much longer. Who did you lose?”
I couldn’t think of a good answer. It was hard to look at her, my living rival, strange and estranged, and still think.
“I’m not here about that. I came because—” I had no way to finish that sentence. “I followed William.”
“Oh,” she said. Her hand went to her pocket, resting over the note for a second, digesting that. She was trying to change gears again. “How do you know William?”
“I was in the robbery. We were in a robbery.”
“Ohhh,” she said, and this time it was a dawning sound. “You’re Shandi.”
I blinked, but before I could ask, I had the answer. Paula. No wonder Paula was so set against me. I saw myself as she must see me, a pushy little girl in a Marilyn dress, moving in on a lonely man who was separated from his wife. A wife he’d once loved so much he’d stormed a convent for her. In Paula’s eyes, I’d tried to slip myself between a broken couple who had lost their child. My face burned as I remembered myself saying awful, callous things about shoes and Columbus and fresh starts. Paula could have saved everyone so much trouble if she’d just said, Hey, dummy, Bridget is alive. I suppose it hadn’t occurred to her that I thought Bridget was dead.
After the robbery, I’d heard the talking heads tutting about a tragedy, and I’d looked at that picture of his wife and child up on the screen. I’d picked the tragedy that suited me, and I’d ignored all other possibilities. I was good at that, ignoring truer possibilities, once I found a narrative that pleased me.
This, like many, many things, was partly due to Bethany. God, but that woman had an endless tab of shit she owed me! Bethany’d screamed at me all through that newscast. But it was my fault, too. I’d willfully chosen the tragedy that meant he could be mine. I’d safely buried her, mentally moving her out of my way. But William was married.
“How is he?” Bridget asked. “I came to the hospital, after he was shot. He didn’t want to see me then.”
She touched her pocket with the envelope again, and in that moment we were both together thinking the same thing. I knew it. We were wondering if he wanted to see her now.
“He acts like you stayed dead,” I told her. “Anyone would think it, if they saw his house. I’ve never even heard him say your name.”
It hurt her, when I said these things. I was glad and horrified to hurt her. She looked at her alive bare feet in the grass. I looked at them, too, and they were calloused, serviceable feet, wide and bony, without a pedicure.
“Are you in love with him?” she asked, and then she changed it, asking the thing she really wanted to know. “Are you in love?” She meant both of us. She was asking if William and I were in love with each other.
“What does Paula say?” I asked.
“Oh, well, Paula. She says he isn’t, but she’s my oldest friend. What else would Paula say?” Bridget told me, and it hurt even though she qualified it. Her eyes on me were still so unreasonably kind.
“Well, she’s right.”
I was happy that she’d hurt me back, though of course it didn’t make us even. We would never be even, and that was something else Paula had right. I wasn’t Bridget. I wasn’t even half a Bridget, yet. She leaned toward me, being gracious and so gentle, while I sat, a raging, red-faced child, viciously thinking that my feet were prettier than hers.
“Do you want to come inside?” Bridget asked me, touching my leg with one hand. A gardener’s hand, also calloused, with short, neat nails.
I realized I was crying.
“You’re so stupid. You’re so stupid,” I said, though it was hard to push words through my cloggy throat, and my nose was snotting up. I’d been stupid, too, with all my different kinds of patty-pans. Pretend wife, pretend hot mistress. Running first after him and then away, like I was being Pepé Le Pew and then the stupid cat with its accidental stripe in turn. Even this, following him like some romantically imprinted duckling to declare my love. It was all little-girl tricks. Little-girl games. I should have known better. I lost my little-girl card when I got Natty.
This was another pretend, and here in a yard on a bench was his real wife, with sad, kind, tired eyes. The lesson of Mimmy and my dad was not for me. It was for her. It was for them. I was so sick with understanding that I was practically yelling at her.
“Why didn’t you just stay dead, if you are going to be so stupid? Why did you even live? So you could sit in your yard and talk about some dumb afterlife experience with messed-up, mourning strangers? You love him. You think I don’t know what that looks like? I don’t care if he sent you away at the hospital. He was shot. He couldn’t make you leave. Now, for all you know, I’ll go right straight to him to beg him to love me and forget you. And still you sit here, being stupid.”
The compassion on her face as I raged on made me simply want to kill her. I wrenched myself up and away and stomped back to my car. She called my name, but I ignored her and got in, slamming my door. I drove myself in circles, crying and crying.
Screw her, if she didn’t want him. I headed for William’s house to wait for him, turning toward Morningside even as I was saying every bad word that I knew. I wasn’t halfway there before I turned the car around. I drove away from him, and even got onto 85 to head up north to Mimmy’s, because what was I in love with, really? William?
He was beautiful and closed so shut that I could dress him up in any kind of superhero suit I wanted. Captain Animal, rising and smiting Stevie down. Dr. Genius, finding all my answers inside the microscopic mystery of cells.
He had actually done these things, though. He was actually brave and good. I got off after a single exit, driving back toward Morningside, but I was wondering. In the Circle K, did I really fall in love with him? Or was it just the idea of him, something big and strong and smart enough to get in between me and every bad thing in the world? A silent, strong protector. He’d let me hit at evil with my tiny fist in the safety of knowing it was not allowed to hit me back. He’d been a white knight wise enough to kill even my son’s nightmares, taping up all the holes where the bad, bad things came in.
What frightened child wouldn’t want that? Maybe my body felt free with him only because I felt safe with him. Maybe loving him was nothing more than wanting to be safe. If so, then it was crap. No one could make the world safe. No one on this blue ball was ever safe for even a second. I knew that. I knew that better than most girls my age.
He was so beautiful. He wasn’t mine. I should run to the mountains now, and hide. I should run right into his arms and demand that he close them around me. I should run home to my mother and cry into her lap.
I stopped dead on Ponce de Leon Avenue, not turning toward Morningside and facing the wrong way to get back on the highway. Behind me four or five enraged people began squashing on their horns. I hit my flashers and sat there with other cars streaming around me, honking for me to go, go, go, but I couldn’t go until I knew which way to turn.
I didn’t want to choose. Both options sucked, and I was tired of every kind of running that there was. So in the end, I didn’t go to either place.
In the end, I drove myself to Piedmont Park.
Chapter 14
He drove directly to Paula’s office after he left the Sullivans’ house in Decatur, unable to stomach the idea of returning to his house alone. Paula took him to shoot pool, and for hours he thought of very little beyond the angles and the English. They went back to her loft around midnight, where he slept on her sofa for a couple of hours.
Now, dawn is close, and Paula is still hacking at the last wooden bench with her hatchet. They have Holy Shit Park to themselves in this dead hour before early morning. He’s dragged the benches to the center of the green space, hoping the sound of breaking them down to kindling won’t call anyone. It’s the last thing.
The sidewalk is littered with shards of glass. Paula, who long ago wanted to put rocks through all the streetlights, has had her chance now. They’ve ripped the late summer flowers out in handfuls and strewn them across the grass with their roots torn and exposed. After that, William used the ax to smash most of the birdhouses, scattering this season’s used-up nests, dry and empty here in late July. He hacked down all of the four Japanese maples he himself put in years ago, as a wedding present.
“You have to do this bench, Bubba. It’s defeating me,” Paula says. She is panting, but her eyes are bright and she is grinning. He isn’t sure if it is because he took the note to Bridget, or if she is simply happy to be breaking things. Probably both. “Hatchets are stupid. Why do you get the ax?”
She backs out of the way, and William swings, bringing the ax down in a long, fast arc that feels good, a good stretching release of force from the muscles of his back and shoulders, though his abdomen protests. The splintered bench snaps, all the slats caving down at once, and the blade bites deep into the dirt.
“Oh. That’s why,” Paula says as he wrestles the ax back out.
They stand with their heads tilted to equal angles, listening for the sounds of feet or yelling or sirens, in case the smashing of the bench has notified a neighborly insomniac that crime is happening.
Nothing.
Paula cocks the hatchet to a jaunty angle on her shoulder and heads toward the final birdhouse. It is covered in hand-painted flowers that look like they’ve been done by a child or an adult with little aptitude for art. It is hung too low on a trunk to be a good birdhouse. Any cat who happens by could easily get to it. Anyone over six feet tall can peer inside it.
William says, “Not that one,” and she leaves it be.
The rest of the small park is a jagged wreck of torn-up, dying plants, shards of glass, and wooden benches hacked into kindling. They sit down on the ground, side by side, as they have destroyed all the other places to sit. Paula’s shoulder presses companionably into his.
“This is actually what I’m good at. Isn’t that sad?” She doesn’t sound sad. “I’m completely great at tearing shit right the hell up. Taking things apart is all I do. It’s even my job.”
“You do other things,” William says.
“Yeah, but I don’t build. I think you and Bridget, as a couple, are the only thing I’ve worked to build in my whole life.”
William nods. This sounds accurate. “Do you think she’ll come?”
The note he left taped to the Sullivans’ house in Decatur said, Meet me at your old tulip bed tomorrow, just before sunrise. This note didn’t promise something good would happen, as the first one had. He isn’t sure Bridget will think this is good, what he’s doing.
It’s one thing to decide what you want. It’s quite another to know how to get it. William doesn’t know how, but he is trying.
“I hope so, Bubba, because you’ve certainly put some effort in.” She waves her hand at the chaos around them.
Paula could have come up wit
h a better plan, more romantic, perhaps, and put it together for him very quickly. She tried while they were playing pool, and he told her to get her head in the game before he ran the table. He didn’t want Paula’s ideas. He decided this all on his own before he went to get her. No chemistry or tricks. No catalyst, no puzzle. He wrote the note in plain blue ink. Then he worried that Bridget wouldn’t understand, so at the bottom, he wrote, This is a love note. He wanted to be clear. He wanted full disclosure, so she could decide to come, or not.
If she comes, he has things to show her. The park, restored to its original shit, is only one.
At home, on the mantel, is the second thing. He took down three pictures of Twyla that were still in the attic. There could never be enough pictures to capture all the ways that Twyla was, so he chose them by year. Twyla the newborn. Twyla at one. Twyla at two.
Bridget wanted pictures out because, for her, some celestial Twyla still existed. For William, Twyla stopped when the backseat stopped. It made physical objects that were closely associated with her very hard to look at. He put them all up in the attic, quite soon after the accident, one Saturday while Bridget worked at the shelter. He thought it would be easier, but Bridget hadn’t responded well.
Now, William wants them back out, too. They are a testament that Twyla was, and that her short existence mattered. It was wrong to put all trace of her away. There was no justice in it.
His reasons are different from Bridget’s, but the result is the same. This was always true, in the before, inside their marriage. They would often follow separate chains of reasoning, and yet come to the same conclusion. Bridget acknowledged this herself, though she spoke of it in terms of paths and destinations.
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