Chasing Windmills

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  It's not fair, she kept saying. I used to say that, too, to my dad. Life's not fair, he would say. Kind of self-satisfied, like it pleased him to disappoint me. So I don't say that to her. I don't say that to anybody. It's true enough, but let somebody else rub it in. I never like to be the bearer of bad news.

  Anyway, I finally got her down.

  Carl came home around midnight and I slipped out right away. Even though I had no work to go to anymore. Every night at just this time I go to work. Have for years, except for that time around when Natalie was born. I always leave just about when Carl gets home. I leave him to look after the kids. Natalie is always sleeping, and five days a week C.J. is, too, but if C.J. is up I leave him with Carl. Because Carl, he just loves C.J., especially right after work. Carl works with the public and when he gets home at night he needs a better opinion of humanity. Or so he says.

  Anyway, I've never tested the theory that it would be okay to tell Carl about how I lost my job. And I wasn't brave enough to test it that night.

  So for the last nine nights, at least the six of them that would have been my shift nights, I've walked out the door like nothing was wrong. Like nothing was different. I let him assume I'm going to work. But of course I never do. I always ride the subway. Because, really, I don't think I would be welcome there at my old job anymore. Not even for just a little friendly visit. Even though it's a place of business, and it's open to the public. I mean, anybody can go into a grocery store, right? But even so, I think I burned my bridges there, and there is no making it right.

  I also think that the longer I put off telling Carl, the harder it's going to be. He'll ask when I got fired. I could lie but he'll look at my pay stubs and see the truth anyway. Every day I tell myself I'm only making it worse. The longer I put off telling him. But then every day I think, Well, I've waited this long and one more day won't make so much of a difference. Since I'm in a world of trouble anyway.

  So I just walk out the door and ride the subway. One more night.

  What's one more night?

  He really only said one thing to me. He put a hand on my chin. Sort of turned my face so he could look at my cheek in a better light.

  “You wearing makeup on that?” he asked.

  “No. No makeup.”

  “Oh. That's not that bad, then.”

  I didn't say how bad I thought it was or wasn't. I didn't say anything at all.

  Just as I was slipping out the door I looked back and there they were on the couch, watching TV together.

  It's really spooky how much that boy is like a clone of Carl. The thin, baby-fine blond hair, and the sort of no-colored eyes. Well, not no color. I mean, they're not just white or anything. It's just that they're not blue and they're not gray and they're not green. They're all of the above and none of the above at the same time. Carl used to be the only one in the world who had them. That I know of. Until C.J. came along. And they both have those thin, narrow shoulders and the skinny chest that looks almost sunken.

  Wouldn't you know he would even have to end up with his father's name? And I fought hard against that. Not that Carl is a bad name, but Carl Jr.? That's just plain cruel. Why not name him Jack in the Box or White Castle or something? Jesus. But I guess C.J. will do.

  They didn't even notice when I slipped out the door. Those two are in a world of their own. They are a club of two, all right.

  All the way down to the subway station I walked in the street, brushing against parked cars. So I wouldn't have to deal with the whole thing about the sidewalk cracks. It's really humiliating to admit it. I mean, I'm a grown woman. I'm not saying I won't step on a crack. Just that it's easier for me, in some weird way, if I don't have to. If I don't even have to worry about it. I'm not a complete psycho. But I had a big thing with that when I was younger, and little bits of that stuff can hang on.

  I think it's because my mother died of a broken neck, which is really just a broken back higher up. I mean, if you want to look at it that way.

  Not that I think it was my fault or anything. We all knew who did it. Well, all except one. Everybody in the world knew my father did it, except my father. He was weird about stuff like that. It was like he thought he could make history disappear. And he could, in a way. He made it disappear from himself.

  I went to see him in jail twice, and both times he just talked nonstop about how much he loved that woman and how he would never do a thing to harm her. But he did a million things to harm her, usually right in front of me and my sister. So then I just didn't go see him anymore.

  He died in jail, or so I hear. I didn't think about it all that much. I still don't. I've got no opinion on any of that. Or, at least, none that matters worth a damn when all is said and done.

  I don't even know why I'm talking about that. I didn't set out to get into that. I'm just talking about that night because of what happened on the subway.

  Not that anything happened. It's very important that I stay clear on that. Nothing happened. I just looked at this kid. And he looked at me. And even Carl can't get upset about that. Right?

  Except he would have. He would have hit the ceiling if he'd been there.

  I don't guess it's right to call that subway guy a kid. He wasn't a kid. He was probably six feet tall. I just have this thing now where everybody used to be older than I was, and now anybody younger looks like a kid to me.

  Probably he was around nineteen.

  God, that's young enough. What I was thinking, I don't know.

  Except it wasn't really thinking. There was no real thinking to it. It was just one of those moments like when you're trying to change a lightbulb by feel, and you get a jolt. Shock yourself. It's not something you do on purpose and you sure as hell don't see it coming. Sometimes electricity just conducts.

  And the funny thing is, I don't even know what it was about him. He's not the sort of guy who would catch my eye for any special reason, and usually I don't even look at guys on the street or in the subway. I mean, I look. But not like that. What I guess I mean is, there was nothing about him I would really even notice, until that power ran along the invisible line between our eyes and zapped me.

  I liked his hair, though. Because it was so big. I'm not used to big hair, living with Carl and C.J. Natalie's hair is really fine and thin, too, even though she's dark like me. She got the color of my hair, but not its thickness. But this guy had hair that was really there. Really thick and curly. Some of it came forward onto his forehead, and you just got this sense that however it spilled, it was right. Like, no matter how it decided to fall, or not fall, or lie down, it looked just like it was supposed to. It must be nice to get to relax about something like that.

  Other than that, I just looked at him, like I would look at anybody. Not expecting anything at all. But I got something.

  That never happened to me before, not once. I swear. Not in the seven years I've been with Carl. Actually maybe closer to eight years. I mean, I see guys. Sometimes I think they look good, but it's just a thought in my head. Like I was seeing them on a page of a magazine. Ever since there's been Carl, which is like forever, since I was fifteen, there hasn't been anything with anybody else.

  Sometimes I wonder if that's because of his thoughts on what he would do if there ever was. Which he shares with me. Regularly. But deep down I don't think so. Because I think you can scare somebody out of doing something, but not out of feeling like they want to.

  I think it's because my loyalty to Carl is very real.

  Where that night fits in, I don't know.

  I purposely got off the train while the guy was sleeping. I don't want any trouble.

  When my father put on one of his opera records, I knew it was going to be a long night. I mean, the minute the needle hit the record. Yeah, I know what you're thinking: A needle on a phonograph record? What century is this, anyway? But that's my father for you.

  I loathe and despise opera.

  But it was worse than just that. My father loves opera; it soot
hes him. So he sits in his chair for an extra hour or two, and takes his sleeping pill late.

  I sat in my chair and tried to read, but my assigned reading for that week was Finnegans Wake. Which is like the literary equivalent of opera, if you ask me. The music was loud, and I guess I felt like I was being assaulted from every direction. But the main problem was that I wanted to get out of the house. I wanted him in bed asleep, so I could go.

  “What seems to be your problem tonight, Sebastian?”

  I looked up to see my father staring at me. Taking my emotional temperature.

  “I just don't like opera. And you know it, so I don't know why you keep asking.”

  “You'll develop an appreciation for good music in time. So I'm doing you a favor to expose you to it.”

  But he'd been exposing me to it all my life, and nothing was developing. Unless you count even more hatred.

  I tried to read again, but when I looked up, he was still staring at me.

  “Something you'd rather be doing tonight, Sebastian?”

  Anything, I thought. “I'm going to bed,” I said.

  I lay in my room in the dark for what seemed like forever, until I heard him turn off the music and go into his bathroom and run a glass of water to take his sleeping pill. Then it was only a matter of time.

  THE CLOSER WE GOT TO UNION SQUARE STATION, the more nervous I got. And of course I kept telling myself it was silly, because the chances of her getting on again tonight had to be pretty slim. But, see, that was just it. I was nervous about how I would feel if she didn't. Or when she didn't, as the case may be.

  And I wasn't sure how I would know if she got on some other car. I didn't want to walk up and down the train, one car to the next. That's what people do when they're looking for trouble. And you must know by now that I wasn't one of them.

  So when we pulled into the Union Square station, I plastered myself to the glass of one of the doors, scanning the whole platform. And the minute the door opened, I stuck my head out and tried to see everybody who was about to step on, before they did and it was too late to see them. My heart was pounding, and my face felt like it had no blood in it, and my head was going a little dizzy, so I'm thinking, This can't be normal, right? I mean, normal people don't feel like this at moments like this, do they? Do normal people even have moments like this? I had no frame of reference. I had no way to know.

  She wasn't there.

  But then I started thinking maybe it wasn't Union Square. Maybe it was the next stop. Astor Place. So I did the same weird series of things again, all the time knowing in my heart it was Union Square.

  Then I looked at my watch and reminded myself it was still early. Only about a quarter after midnight. And there'd be another train coming through Union Square again in the next few minutes, and I could get off and wait for that one.

  But I still knew the chances were pretty slim.

  And yet every train I got on, my heart and my face and my guts went into their dance, all on fire like it was actually happening, right then and there.

  And then, every time I didn't see her, there was a fall involved. I thought about dancing on the fifth-floor window ledge outside our apartment. Every train she wasn't on felt something like hitting the pavement from five floors up. So maybe my father was right about that. Maybe happiness and excitement really are dangerous things.

  THE NEXT DAY I VISITED DELILAH in her apartment for the first time. Before I even ran. She caught me in the hall and told me she couldn't go for our walk today because she'd promised to look after James McKinley, her baby grandson, but I was welcome to come by later and have some lemonade if I wanted.

  So I did. And then, amazingly, I forgot all about running. But I'm getting out of order.

  I sat at the kitchen table and watched this tiny, tiny little baby sleeping in a little soft crib sort of thing near the table. He was only a couple of weeks old, but he had hair. He was a darker black than Delilah, and I watched his lips move like he was sucking on a bottle in his sleep. He looked really peaceful. Delilah was making lemonade from scratch, squeezing lemons in one of those little glass juicers you have to use by hand.

  “Never seen a baby before?” she asked.

  “Not in person, I don't think.” Not close up, anyway.

  I got up and started looking around her apartment. She had a big-screen TV, which was something I'd only seen ads for, or seen in store windows. And a DVD player, which was unheard of at our house. My father thought movies were some kind of lower form of entertainment. Something you do to waste your time when you should be reading Moby-Dick or listening to opera or something. And she had hundreds of movies on DVD, all arranged on shelves like my father did with his books.

  It was hot in the apartment, even though a very tired old air conditioner strained and blew from its spot in the window. I looked out over Lexington Avenue and felt lost for reasons I couldn't entirely sort out.

  Then I looked at her CD player, and her stack of CDs. She had stuff like Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. The Spinners. Not an opera in the place.

  “You act like you never seen such stuff before in all your life,” she said.

  I didn't want to tell her that she was almost right. We didn't have a TV. Never had, at least since my mother died. And my father still had his old phonograph. I had a computer, because I convinced my father I needed it for educational research. As an aid to my homeschooling. At first he didn't like the idea, but after I started making so many trips to the library, he backed down. Now I regret losing the trips to the library.

  “I had a dog like you once,” she said. “No offense. Got him out of the pound. I guess he'd only just been in some backyard before. Had to pick him up and carry him into the house, ‘cause I guess he'd been hit or kicked for trying to come in. You shoulda seen him, in a house for the first time. Every time he saw a mirror, or heard a toilet flush, or saw the TV come on, he'd get this look on his face. Like, Where's all this stuff been all my life?”

  I looked up to see her pouring two glasses of lemonade out of the big jar she'd mixed it in. She set them down on the table and then hobbled over and stood near me, and looked out the window. The wind from the air conditioner blew her hair back just a little. Delilah had hair that I can only describe as being halfway between braids and dreadlocks. Every piece was kind of heavy, and you could see the wind had trouble lifting it, but it blew back a little all the same.

  “Such an ugly, ugly city,” she said. “I can't wait to get back to California.”

  I got a little stitch in my stomach when she said that. Delilah only moved into this sublet in our building because her daughter, who lives ten blocks away, was having a baby. She just came to help out. When her daughter was okay on her own with James McKinley, she'd be going home. But I had no idea when that would be.

  I didn't answer.

  “What?” she said. “You feeling sad today? You look sad today.”

  I still felt empty and hollow from the train the night before, but I didn't say so. I said something else that was true. “What will I do without you when you move home?”

  “Oh, child,” she said, and ruffled a hand through my hair. I loved it when she touched me. My hair or my shoulders, or sometimes she'd rub a hand around on my back for a second when she walked with me. I loved it more than I'd ever be okay admitting. “Is that what's getting you down? Well, you'll write letters to me. Or e-mails. And call me on the phone now and again. And make more friends. Come on, now. Drink your lemonade.”

  We sat at the table, and I sipped at it, and it was good. Cold and sugary, with a bite that felt good on this hot day. I watched little James McKinley sleeping. There was something sweet and peaceful about his face.

  “Do you think I'll ever see that woman again?” I was surprised to hear myself say it. I'd had no idea I was about to bring it up.

  “Well, now, child, I can't say as I know. You might or you might not. And here's what I think about that: If God or the Universe or Life or whatever-you-w
ant-to-call-it wants you to meet her again, then you will. If it wasn't meant to be, then you won't.”

  “And then what would I do?”

  “Feel that same way about somebody else.” I started to object, but she cut me off before I could even open my mouth. “Now, I know, I know, you think you won't. Every time you feel some way for somebody you think you'll never feel that way for anybody again. But you will. If you have to, you will. Take my word on this one. I been around.”

  We sat quietly for a while, and drank lemonade, and I just kept getting lower and lower inside, thinking about never seeing that woman again, and losing Delilah back to San Diego.

  I know she could tell I felt bad, because she ruffled my hair again.

  After a while I said, “Is that really true? About how things happen if they're meant to?”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess you can think what you want on that score. Everybody always does. But I believe it with every cell of every part of me. I've seen it with my own two eyes.”

  “My father is an atheist. He thinks the world is just a big accident.”

  “And what do you think?”

  I just looked at her for a minute. I wasn't used to being invited to give my opinion. I wasn't used to being treated like I was allowed to disagree.

  “I used to argue with him about it. I'd say, Well, then how did all this get here? You know, people and animals. How could nothing have made us? He'd say, There were these atoms bouncing around and they hit each other just right and then everything else happened.”

  Delilah raised one eyebrow. “But who made the atoms?”

  “I asked him that,” I said, getting all excited now. “Those were nearly my exact words. Know what he said?” She just waited. “He said they were just always there.”