Hot Springs

by Geoffrey Becker

  She clicked anyway. At first, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. She stood up and took off her glasses to rub her eyes. She put them back on and sat down again.

  In front of her was a photo of a person hanging upside down from what appeared to be a clothes rack. She wore a blindfold and a black garter belt and nothing else. She was not particularly pretty or thin, and her makeup and heavily rouged lips added to the unreality of the scene.

  Tessa shut her eyes and held her hands together and tried to summon some of the casual ease with which her husband was able to converse with the Almighty. “God,” she said, “I just want to thank you so much for letting me find this picture, and giving me a window into what David is doing and thinking.” She hesitated, unsure what else to say. Should she pray for his soul? She was and always had been thoroughly convinced of the essential goodness in David, and even in light of this evidence that he had—what should she call them? tastes?—so antithetical to anything godly, she still didn’t think of him as tainted, particularly. She tried to imagine for a moment what it might feel like to be naked and suspended upside down from the ankles.

  On the other hand, if you believed in a cause-and-effect world—and she and David did—then perhaps this was the explanation, the key. Sin brought punishment, just as inevitably as too much pie led to porky thighs and smoking led to cancer. She thought again of the man she’d seen today. An unwitting angel of the Lord? This was not the first time it had crossed Tessa Harding’s mind that motherhood had never been her true destiny, but it was the first time she’d thought that the reason might be her husband.

  “Please watch out for Emily,” she said, “although I’m sure you are already. Keep her from harm and return her safely to us as soon as you possibly can.” She stood and closed the photograph, the screen returning to the Rush album cover David used as wallpaper, an image of men in red suits moving paintings up the steps of a stone building with arched doorways, one of the paintings apparently on fire.

  She walked down the carpeted stairs to the lower level, the second living room they’d more or less turned into Emily’s playroom. The fireplace was ready to be lit, with wood stacked carefully, the glass doors she cleaned every Saturday so perfectly you almost couldn’t tell they were there. Arranged on the stone ledge in front of it was the crèche scene from last Christmas that they’d left in place because Emily enjoyed playing with it, talking to the baby Jesus as if he were her own child, sometimes making up dialogue for the cow and the donkey. They had another nativity for the upstairs mantelpiece, but this one was Tessa’s favorite—she’d found it in a shop downtown. It had been made someplace in South America, and all the figures were brown-skinned and lumpy, their painted faces like something a child would make.

  Her baby was gone. Her husband was leading a secret life (or so it suddenly seemed to her—she had already moved on to imagining him in the strange scene, too, perhaps just off camera). She hadn’t eaten more than the occasional bite of food for days now, and she was weak and light headed. She’d planned to take Emily clothes shopping tomorrow, after church and Bible class. In a few weeks, school would be starting up—Emily’s first year at New Jerusalem, the school she and David had picked out for her. She felt helpless in just about every way—what was she supposed to tell those people? What was she supposed to tell anyone?

  She wandered down the hall, past the photos of David’s mother and father, of his grandparents and hers, of David with his long hair, playing his drums, and, of course, the ones of serious-faced Emily, those strange eyes that looked right at you and seemed to know so much more than she let on. As she had been doing nearly every day, Tessa went into the child’s room and lay down on her tiny bed, closed her eyes, and wept. Then, when there was nothing left in her, when she had once again returned to the state she spent most of her time in these days—a combination of uncertainty and exhaustion—she went back upstairs to look at the rest of the pictures on her husband’s computer.

  SEVEN

  Bernice found herself standing in her underwear on the balcony of Gillian’s apartment, with no idea how she’d arrived there. Moreover, she was smoking a cigarette, which, if she’d really lit it while asleep, seemed more than a little dangerous. It was early morning; her watch read 4:31. Below her, a car door slammed shut, the engine fired, and the car pulled out, its tires squealing on the asphalt. Some couple had been fighting, and the sound of their voices, she realized, was what had brought her to her senses. She had no memory of going to sleep, only of sitting in the living room flipping through channels on Gillian’s TV. It was quiet out now, although she was aware of a low hum, as if from a huge electric motor buried miles deep in the earth. She ground the cigarette out against the concrete wall. She had the sensation that it was she who had been arguing, with Landis, and she was full of anger. She paced, went inside and got herself a glass of water, considered, paced some more. Bastard. She hated him. He was an asshole, an abandoner, a person who strung together odd jobs, incapable of making a success of himself because he didn’t want to. He did everything slowly, even sex, to which he had the same methodical approach he had to setting up the sound equipment at that dive club. Tweak a knob here, push a button there. He’d taken an eight-week course at some school up in Denver four years ago. Loser. She’d never, never have done this thing about Emily, never in a million years, if she hadn’t thought she had his one-hundred-percent help on it. She was convinced that what she must do now was leave Gillian’s and head back east. It humiliated her to sit waiting for a phone call that might never come; it humiliated her to stay in this town where she’d thought they might have a future. Tucson was ruined, and when she imagined the mountains that surrounded it, she was simply reminded of the Springs, which didn’t help matters—if she and Emily were truly after a new life, they needed a new landscape.

  Emily was sound asleep, her body radiating heat, her faint breathing regular and just slightly wheezy, like a squeeze toy.

  “Pssst,” Bernice said to her. “Hey.”

  No reaction. What did Emily dream about? Her old life? Her future? Jesus doing party tricks for her next birthday? (Water into wine, or chocolate milk? Bernice pictured a bearded man dressed up sort of like Mr. Peanut doing amazing things with colorful handkerchiefs.)

  She took her jeans off the back of the chair where she’d draped them, stepped into the legs as quietly as she could. Emily’s breathing had changed and was now even quieter, though still very regular.

  Bernice packed her clothes into her duffel bag and put Emily’s back into the Macy’s bag they’d been using for them, then made her way as quietly as she could out the apartment door, down the concrete steps, and out to the parking lot and the car. The air was cool, but she knew what was coming—yesterday the temperature had reached 103. No wonder the plants around here looked like space creatures, hunkered down and covered in spikes. When the darkness faded, so would this pleasantness, and the heat would return.

  She went back in and picked Emily up. Her head smelled salty and warm, and Bernice was astonished that this body, or a version of it, had been inside her once. She took her into the bathroom and shut the door. “You need to pee,” she said, helping Emily onto the toilet. “Come on, now. We’re going on another trip.”

  Still more or less asleep, Emily did what she was told, Bernice turning away to give her privacy, listening to the sound of it, thinking,This is what it’s like—you’re so close to another person you might as well be them, and then one day they peel away from you, shuck you off like a snake does its old skin.

  “Where are we going now?” asked Emily.

  “Hush,” said Bernice. “You’ll see. Trust me—we’ll have fun.”

  She left no note, just shut the apartment door softly behind them. She didn’t want Gillian to have any responsibility here, should the police somehow find their way to her, which struck Bernice as completely possible, given Landis’s defection. Who knew what else he had done? She had to think of all the angles. She had to
not be stupid.

  They made their way to the car. The morning air smelled like flowers. With Emily securely fastened into the booster seat, Bernice turned the key in the ignition. The engine made a weak, hesitant noise, then coughed to life. Piece-of-crap car—she’d get rid of it as soon as she could. Another thing to hate about Landis—he’d ruined her car, then traded down for this embarrassing death trap. Nova. No-va. It had to be Spanish, she figured, for “won’t go.” This car was what he thought she was worth.

  Going cautiously over the speed bumps, she drove them through the six different parking areas that defined the perimeter of the complex and out to the main entrance, where the balloons were just visible against the advancing light of the sky. The eight bays of the U-Do-It car wash across the street were dark mouths. She made a right and felt a certain excitement, a sense that once again her life was starting afresh, and that this time was going to be the one that counted.

  After a few wrong turns she managed to get them onto I-10 heading east and was soon squinting into the direct sun, driving nearly blind. The car smelled old, and it was an unfamiliar kind of old—who knew who and what might have been in this thing over the years. Couples having sex, dogs licking the windows (she liked that idea), drug dealers transporting dope—maybe even murder victims—fast food from strange places that Bernice would never stop at. It should have felt like wearing someone else’s clothes, which she did all the time—she’d picked up her favorite T-shirt, the one that said “Beech Boys Tree Experts” on it, in the women’s locker room at the Y—but it didn’t, it was more like living in someone else’s house, and she’d done enough of that.

  At a gas station outside of Wilcox, she filled up even though she still had a quarter tank. Her head hurt. She bought herself a coffee that tasted like tar, and a Mountain Dew and Fritos for Emily, who had been drifting in and out of sleep. She laid out Landis’s Rand McNally road atlas on the hood and stared at the map of the United States, a medical diagram of a body in which they were a couple of insignificant cells floating in one extremity. It seemed to Bernice that the multiplicity of possible wrong choices she might make was overwhelming. Red roads or purple roads? Lubbock or Amarillo? Lubbock sounded stupid, and possibly full of cows. Amarillo might be worse—she pictured armored rodents wandering the highways stopping traffic.

  “What do you think?” she asked Emily, who was tracing the loose trim on the car door with her index finger. “Amarillo or Lubbock?”

  Emily said nothing.

  “Sodom or Gomorrah?”

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “Who, honey? Where is who?”

  She continued to poke at the trim. “Daddy.”

  Bernice tried to think about what to say to this. There were a number of answers, depending on what the child thought. Bernice didn’t even know what she thought anymore. “You’re going to have to be more specific,” she said. “Do you mean your Colorado Springs daddy, who you know was not your real daddy?”

  She shook her head. “The other one. Your one.”

  “Oh, him.” Of course—she meant Landis. She stared out across the highway, which was more or less deserted. The rising hills were sandy, harsh, seemingly devoid of life. “Gone,” she said.

  “I liked him,” she said. “He was nice.”

  Bernice wanted to tell her no, he was not nice, but then she thought about how she’d made her cry yesterday and thought better of it. What was the point? You lied to children, that’s just what you did. You lied to them, and at the same time you tried to teach them not to lie, and as they grew older they figured out that there was this whole double-standard thing with the world, and then they either grew hopelessly cynical or they stuck to their guns and believed what they believed, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

  “Sure, he was nice,” she said. “Maybe he’ll come see us when we’re back east.”

  “Are we going to your house?” she asked.

  It occurred to Bernice that Emily saw her less as a mother than as a friend, someone she might have met on the playground—hell, they had met on the playground—and that the reason the dislocation and transience hadn’t bothered her was that all along she’d figured there was something tangible and solid in her future: She’d be going over to Bernice’s house. They were on a kind of extended play date, and maybe when they got to her house, Bernice’s mother would be there with cookies and games to play and sleeping bags set out on the floor and videos rented.

  “Yup,” she said. “We’re going to my house.”

  At which news, Emily’s face lit up with a smile Bernice hadn’t known the girl had in her. She wanted to frame it.

  Bernice made the call from a truck stop, Emily standing a few feet away staring through the glass of a vending machine with the fascination a normal child would have for a video game. “Dad,” she said, “it’s me.”

  “Hello,” he said. He’d accepted the charges, which was a good sign, but now they were both silent, and she figured he was probably counting the seconds, watching them add up like taxi fare.

  “I’m coming there,” she said.

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. In a couple of days. I’m driving, and I don’t like to go too fast, or for too long.”

  “You should take regular rest stops and drink plenty of coffee,” he said.

  “Don’t you want to know where I am?”

  There was a fairly long silence before he spoke again. “I suppose you’re somewhere between Colorado and Maryland.”

  Emily was still staring at the vending machine, which had in it things like Alka Seltzer, a pocket comb, playing cards, and tiny bin-oculars. The air smelled of French fries, with an undercurrent of bathroom deodorizer. They were in the hallway between the store area, where you also paid for your gas, and the restaurant, which was full of men with hats and sideburns who reeked of cigarettes. Bernice wanted one badly, herself.

  “So, I want to stay at the house.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m afraid you can’t.”

  It was what she’d expected. The hell with him. But she took a breath and tried again. “Please?” she said. “You’re not there—someone ought to be around to keep an eye on it. And I need a place.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What do you mean? I didn’t do anything.”

  “I think you did. You need a place? Why? What happened to your place?”

  “I left. Personal reasons, OK? Look, I’ll pay you rent, if you want.”

  “The market rent for that house is considerable. I doubt you could afford it. And besides, I’m selling the house.”

  “I know you’re selling the house. But you’ve been selling the house for two years now. Couldn’t you just let me use it for a little while, at least until you really sell it? When that happens, I promise, I’ll get out.”

  “I told you my answer.”

  “Well, where should I stay?”

  There was a long pause. “You can stay on my sofa for a while. A couple of nights.”

  “You think I’m going to burn the house down?” When he didn’t answer, she just said, “How’s everything else?”

  “Everything is a mess. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “I meant with you.”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “You could if you wanted to. I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Is it raining there?”

  She looked over her shoulder through the exit door to the parking lot, where the asphalt was soft with the heat, the sunlight a relentless assault. “Not really,” she said. “Kind of the opposite. Everything is on fire.”

  “It is here.”

  She waited for something, anything, but she knew it wouldn’t come. He’d always been more interested in his art than in the people around him. “I’m bringing someone,” she said.

  “That’s good,” he told her. “You can share the driving. But two is too many for the sofa. You should probably stay with friends.”

  “OK
,” she said. “I’ll just call up some of my friends.”

  She’d bought Emily the comb, then showed her how to play it using a piece of paper between her lips and the plastic teeth, and now the girl wouldn’t shut up. Bernice had the radio on, but they’d entered an all-country zone, and she hated everything that came through the buzzing aftermarket speakers some former owner had set badly into the doors. The engine made a droning noise, too, the dashboard rattled like a loose window in a storm, and, in general, it was as if she were surrounded by bees. Turning the radio dial hard to the left—was it coincidence that the more radical stuff on FM radio was all on the left?—she found something that came in clearly and sounded interesting. It seemed to be Native American chanting, and it sounded exactly the way white people did when they made fun of Native American chanting, a kind of hey-ya, ho-ya, hey-ya, ho-ya refrain. She pictured Hollywood Indians parading around a campfire, rhythmically slapping their mouths. In the back, Emily was humming through her comb what seemed to be a kazoo version of “Angels We Have Heard on High.”

  “Hey,” Bernice said, “listen to this music. It’s Navajo or something.”

  Emily stopped making noise.

  “Do you know about Indians?” asked Bernice.

  “Not really,” she said. “Maybe.”

  “Well, before white people came to this country and discovered it, there were already people here, and those people were the Indians. They’d been here pretty much forever, and this was their country. Only we sort of took it from them.” She was starting to wish she hadn’t begun, since the truth was, she didn’t have much in the way of facts about Indians to offer, nor was there a way to make this a story a child would want to hear.