Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  She clutches a handful of silk at her leg. Embers pop, extinguish themselves. Cold air sifts through the flue.

  He’d wanted children from the beginning. They’d gone in circles over this, and every time Annie was left feeling wronged in a way she had no words for, as if she herself had been cheated out of some essential piece that every other woman took for granted. We should wait, was all she could ever think to say. But then something shifted. Maybe it was the success of the CD or the fact that time was truly running out for her or maybe it was some kind of intuition that time was running out for them. All she knew was that after one of the last times they made love she heard herself say, “We need to get started on a family.”

  She can’t remember the last time they made love. She might have done something different had she known, paid more attention, gone slower, breathed in the smell of his hair, traced the thin lines on the side of his neck. She might have told him she would never, could never love anyone else the way she loved him. But he knew that. Certainly he knew that. Even so, she might have had a chance to change what was about to come.

  We need to get started on a family. “Roger that!” he’d said and kissed her on the mouth. This she remembers exactly. She remembers the feel of his hair between her fingers. Remembers the small kiss he gave the top of her head.

  Not long after that he was gone, and she never got the chance to tell him that the family they’d planned on starting had already begun.

  NINE

  Nothing good can possibly come from this. Owen jumped into Tess’s Miata this morning with the intention of going to work, and before he knew it he was on the freeway heading south with a knot the size of a walnut lodged in his throat.

  Take me with you, babe. Take me, from here on out.

  Gull on a Steeple has been playing for hours now. Annie’s thick, sensual voice causes a whole pillow’s worth of raw emotion to jam against his breastbone. His veins pulse with caffeine and tattered nerves, his cramped body feeling encapsulated inside the gunmetal Miata like a bullet about to discharge. The suck and pull of wind causes the canvas roof to thump somewhere behind his head, and he thinks of early fall when he and Tess kept the top down, her cords of blond hair swirling above her head, the seatbelt tucked beneath her small bump, their cheeks sun-kissed and freshly scrubbed as they made their way down the Emerald Coast Parkway, past the golf course and into town for dinner. It is an image that should make him turn around, her hand resting across her belly, the shy smile she gave when she noticed him looking. He doesn’t turn around. Just eases off the gas.

  In the beginning it wasn’t clear what was wrong between him and Tess because they tore each other’s clothes off every time they were alone. He now believes that’s just the nature of affairs. To be filled with a kind of heightened desperation. It has its own appeal. Its own sense of purpose. But here’s the thing. Deep down, the essence, and that is the word, the essence of what was quickly becoming them seemed to be missing a soul. Every time he tried to picture a future with Tess his mind cut to black and his chest filled with a range of buzzing, stinging, prodding discomforts. The only person he’d ever been able to see out there in the distance with him was Annie. Annie in the garden picking daylilies. Annie playing sweetly for a crowd. Annie planting kisses down the side of his neck. Annie making love to him in a hammock, flopping and swinging and laughing till she cried.

  The thing with Tess had needed to end. He knew this. In fact, he’d asked Tess to meet him for lunch six months ago so he could explain himself in a public place and avoid a scene. A coward’s way out, yes, but a way out of what felt like a miniature room with a hidden door. Not a lot of choices. Least none that he could see. But then the bell to the diner jangled and he glanced up as she breezed past the tables toward him with an expectant smile and he said, “What?” and she slipped into the booth next to him saying, “I have something to tell you, too,” and he said, “Well go on,” and she said, “You go first,” and he said, “No, you,” and all the while he was getting this feeling that his life had just turned into a second-rate script. A second-rate script, he thought again, only seconds before the grand finale. “I’m nearly three months pregnant,” she said. “Now you go.”

  A mind can think a lot of things in the short amount of time it takes to open a mouth. His raced in circles, snagging along the reasons why this was a good thing, which, he later realized was a lot like self-hypnosis or the power of suggestion toward the things a man his age ought to want and have, and anyway, what came out of his mouth was laughter. The thing that made up who they were was now literally a soul. If he had done the wrong thing by having an affair, he was going to do the right thing now by…“Wow,” he said. “Wow-wee.” And if that sounded stupid, “I wanted to ask you to marry me,” certainly took the prize. After that the train that seemed to be driving their lives barreled on down the track.

  Almost. That night, his last night with Annie, he had planned to pack his things and leave, but he’d come down with a fever so unreasonable, so impervious to aspirin that he was sure the God he’d only half-believed in earlier in the day was not only certain but vengeful. He lay half-conscious, shivering beneath a stack of blankets Annie had drawn to his shoulders. He dreamed of being chased by a phoenix, his legs stuck no matter how he tried to run. He woke at intervals to Annie placing an icy cloth on his head. He woke to her watching over him while he shivered. “I love you,” he told her more than once. Or at least he thought he had. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he was even less sure of having said this.

  He catches himself doing ninety and lets up on the gas.

  The photo of Annie on the front of today’s newspaper has dropped him into an icy crevasse from which he cannot seem to claw his way out. Her face had him holed up in the bathroom, sitting on the closed toilet seat beneath the halogen light, gripping the paper until it stained his fingers black. His eyes absorbed her in pieces. The hair he had stroked and lost his face into on so many nights. The curve of her neck and shoulders, her breasts in the ANARCHY! T-shirt he had bought for her as a joke when she refused to relinquish certain rights to her songs. There was the hand that had touched him everywhere for years. Her body so familiar, so much a part of who he was that he became confused, lost in time and space. He was sure he was going mad. He staggered out and slipped the paper in his desk drawer and then skulked around the cold kitchen, shivering, as a way of setting himself straight.

  But it was no use.

  There is still Calder to think of. He has always loved that man like a brother.

  Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. This is all Owen’s fault. He didn’t stop the two of them when he had the chance. He tried to tell Calder to stay away from Sidsel. She was married, he’d said. “You’re as good as married yourself,” Calder replied, and well, touché, buddy, what could Owen say to that? Calder had insisted that Sidsel was the only woman for him. Insisted with a fist to his chest. So Owen had gone into Sidsel’s café with the intention of finding fault with her. He ordered a raspberry Kringle after watching a woman’s eyes bug out when she bit into one. He ordered coffee because it smelled so fine and strong and at the price she was charging he expected it to be spectacular. It was. And he could see that, yes, Sidsel was indeed the kind of beauty that alarmed a man. A foreign kind, the kind you had to stare at to figure out how it was done.

  But that didn’t mean Calder had to be like every other idiot and fall in love with her. Owen studied her, checking off a list in his head. The way she moved: a graceful kind of dance. The way she talked: sexy, pouty lips, foreign accent. The way she dressed: all he really saw was her long, tan neck coming out of her white, open collared blouse like a calla lily. A calla lily? He swallowed the sweet, sticky pastry, thinking the sugar was going to his head. He had to look away before he fell in love with the woman himself. Not really, but part of him felt this way. The part of him that was his best friend Calder. More than anything it was the way she seemed to connect to people through her eyes
. Calder did the very same thing. Staring a split-second too long, searching a face until he drew out whoever was behind it. Owen watched as Sidsel spoke to her customers with lightness and ease, the soft touch of her long fingers to an arm, offering her smile like a box of Kringles, something they could carry with them out the door and enjoy at a later time. Owen gulped his coffee down and pushed his way outside thinking, Sonofabitch if Calder isn’t screwed.

  Still. He should have insisted Calder wait to see if Sidsel would leave her husband. Who knew? Calder might have listened if he’d pressured him. A big brother kind of pressure. But instead, Owen sneaked around with Tess while Calder sneaked around with Sidsel, and on some level they became even closer than they’d been before. Partners in the same crime hidden from the other woman they both loved. Annie.

  His sweaty hands feel tacky around the leather steering wheel. He feels worse than when he got into the car. He’s been fighting off something, a cough that started small but now burns his chest as if the sticky phlegm is pulling loose from his lungs.

  He passes a woman in a silver Mercedes convertible. Her big sunglasses and silky orange scarf seem more suited to the top being down. The whole picture of her seems more suited to a cliffy, Grace Kelly California highway. It’s not until he passes her that he looks in his rearview mirror and sees that her license plate reads, LAST LAF. She can afford to look like Grace Kelly on any highway any day of the week. She’s walked away from a divorce with everything.

  His business. Everything’s he’s worked for. Everything he learned from Annie. Everything she helped him make.

  He can’t think about that now. Calder. There’s just no way Calder could have killed Magnus. Owen saw Magnus once in Sidsel’s café. He was twice as thick as Calder with fists the size of melons and an ornery look in his eye that said he’d made more enemies in his lifetime than friends. The evidence this prosecutor claims to have stacked up against Calder is purely circumstantial. So what if Magnus was beaten with a blunt object and Calder just happens to own a truck full of gardening tools? Owen hasn’t come across any mention of a weapon or prints or even an eyewitness who could claim they saw Calder at Hal’s that night. The only thing they have on him is motive. OK. It looks bad. Having an affair with a man’s wife is number one on the list of motives. He’ll give the prosecutor that.

  But Calder is such an innocent. Owen can still see the look on his face when he first found out about Tess. Calder caught him and Tess parking like teenagers in the State Park off Route 41. What was Owen thinking? It was too close to the job Calder was doing for the Park Service down the road. He’d thought about this but decided to throw caution to the wind when it turned out to be the most convenient place for Tess to meet him before an interview she had. Calder recognized Owen’s truck and walked up on them groping in the front seat. When he saw what was happening he stepped back and grabbed his shirt across his heart and ran back to his truck. Owen only managed to pound once on the tailgate before Calder sped away.

  It was later that same day that Calder had demanded Owen either break it off with Tess or he was going to tell Annie. “You’re a rotten bastard,” he said. “You have any idea what this is going to do to my sister?” But then Calder must have realized the agony in Owen’s face matched the agony in his own heart because that’s when he backed off and confessed everything to Owen about Sidsel. The two men sat in silence after that. And then they called one another sonsabitches, and came this close to crying.

  The air squeezes from his chest. He turns the stereo up. “Let’s go back a year or two,” Annie sings. “Back to knowing how it feels being right with you.”

  He and Tess made love last night. He needed so badly to feel some warmth. He needed so badly to feel some release. Afterwards he drifted in and out of sleep, his mind humming with thoughts of Annie. In the morning when he finally opened his eyes for good he rolled over, absorbed in his guilt, and placed his hand on Tess’s hip, partly on the curve of her belly. When she placed her own hand on top of his it felt as if his heart was being prodded with a sharp, hot stick.

  He isn’t far now. Sixty miles at most.

  In the days that followed him leaving Annie, in the months after that, even recently while watching Tess laugh with a circle of friends, he has burned to go back. The urge used to come on when he least expected until he realized it was seeing his wife happy that filled him with a nagging unease. He’s not who she thinks he is. She has no idea that her happiness, which includes him, doesn’t fully exist.

  He should arrive in less than an hour. Tess will be calling any minute to see when he’ll be home for dinner.

  Early this morning he was listening to music while paying bills at his desk, and Tess walked in and asked, “Who’s this on the stereo?”

  One silly little phrase, who’s this, crawled into his chest and gnawed away at the strings that bound him to his wife.

  “The Kinks,” he said without looking at her. He was ashamed of his feelings and wished they would go away. But how could she not recognize Ray Davies when she heard him? There was no one else who sounded anything like Ray Davies.

  “Are you all right? You don’t look like you feel well,” Tess said.

  “A chest cold. Something. My eyes feel tired. Maybe I need glasses.”

  “They say it happens in your early forties,” she said.

  Owen clicked his tongue. He tapped his pen on the desk.

  Tess stopped on her way out of the room. “What song is it?”

  ‘“Misfits.’” A simple answer to a simple question, but he couldn’t help but think that not only would Annie know the song and who wrote it, but she’d know when it was written and could play it for you.

  He stood, rubbed his eyes, coughed, and left the house early.

  TEN

  Annie wakes with far less pain in her back than she expects. Coffee brews itself in the kitchen, and the rich smell draws her from the bed. She checks outside. Dark and gray, but dry.

  Half an hour later she’s heading out the door in what has become her harvest uniform of stiff jeans and boots, a dirty orange jacket and gloves, when the phone rings.

  “Annie?” An old voice takes her by surprise. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind coming to see me.”

  “Uncle Calder.”

  “Just for a minute. I know you’re probably busy.”

  “Well, in fact—”

  “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”

  “I don’t think I can. The weather is turning—”

  “I know—”

  “Can’t we just talk over the phone?”

  “I don’t think that would have the same effect.”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

  “Squirt. Please.”

  And with that she has no choice.

  It’s early. Maybe she can make her way out there and back within a couple of hours and still have time for the grove.

  She changes into jeans and a black sweater, twists her mess of wavy hair into a barrette at the back of her head—careful not to pull too tight and walk out the door looking like her mother. This is the first time she’s left home since Calder’s arrest last week.

  The air is charged, expectant, buzzing with some kind of energy when she opens the door. She’s never seen this kind of light. Never seen such silvery white clouds. Driftwood in the sky. Her eyes water from the bitter wind, and now the lake, the whole pastoral scene is distorted, as if looking through a fisheye lens. She blinks away tears. The frosty air hums like an E flat. Maybe this is how it feels before a snowfall.

  She yanks open the sticky door of the Land Cruiser. The feel of cold metal seeps through her gloves. Mrs. Lanie waves from her kitchen window now framed in multicolored lights, reminding Annie that Christmas is only days away. The curtain drops in a hurry, and Annie knows her front door is about to open.

  “Annie?” Mrs. Lanie appears on her porch between birdhouses fashioned from gourds. The wreath on her door flops in the wind. Sh
e wraps her white cardigan across her chest. “I can’t thank you enough. I was out in the barn this morning and brought in few. They’re a beautiful crop. Even coming early like they did.” The wind throws her voice behind her.

  “I’ll try to get back here shortly and bring in the rest.”

  “Are you headed out to see Calder?”

  “No.”

  “Have you seen him yet?”

  “No. I haven’t. Not yet.”

  “It’s not from having to pick the tangelos, is it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well?”

  “Go back inside. You’ll catch pneumonia out here.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  Annie shakes her head.

  “I can’t believe he’s still in there.” Mrs. Lanie comes down several steps without holding the rail. “This is all nonsense,” she says. “They must know that.”

  Ever since Owen left, Mrs. Lanie has dropped off canned jellies and baskets of corn and fresh berries and dense, home-baked bread on Annie’s doorstep. These quiet, thoughtful gestures keep Annie from telling Mrs. Lanie how uneasy she feels about her brother.

  “It’ll all be over soon,” Annie says.

  Mrs. Lanie flattens the top of her hair back with her hand. She looks troubled by Annie’s vague reply.

  “I’m sorry. I’m in a hurry,” Annie says. “I’m sorry about all them, too.” She points at the press, now a constant gathering on the other side of the gate.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Mrs. Lanie commands, and tosses her kissed fingers toward Annie before heading inside and closing the door.

  Annie starts the engine, turns the heat on high, and sits shivering in the blast of cold air. For the first time she imagines Calder in jail. The white cement-block buildings, giant chain-linked fences with looped barbed wire, dirty concrete floors, and armed guards in towers, all flash inside her mind like every cliché, every prison film she’s ever seen. She remembers watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with Calder when they were young. It wasn’t a prison in the film. It was an institution for the criminally insane, but this is where she imagines Calder, wandering some hall, ticking himself crazy, being strapped down when he won’t quit. Annie holds the steering wheel inside her fists for a stiff, breathless moment, remembering something else about the movie—Calder reaching for her hand, fumbling softly, and then squeezing tightly in the moments leading up to Chief suffocating McMurphy with a pillow. Then bam! Chief tosses a marble fountain through a barred window and escapes into hills of mist. He is free at last, the soundtrack rising with a haunting dulcimer and the thick beat of rawhide drums. The story ends, but it takes a little while before Calder lets go.