Red Light Run

by Baird Harper

  Neelish puts his palm on her back. “Hartley can handle one more day.”

  She moves across the room to the padded seat by the window and looks out over the front lawn. She wonders if he’ll stay for a while, for days or perhaps weeks. She’s planned the sandwiches, and she’s bought a large turkey for his first dinner, but beyond that his needs are unclear.

  “We’ll make new sandwiches in the morning,” Neelish whispers. He’s been whispering for months. If Hartley comes home tomorrow and isn’t totally broken, if he can eat or smile or laugh, Kate has promised herself that she’ll let Neelish take her to India this winter to visit his aging parents.

  “I need another shower,” Kate says and disappears from him without further explanation. Climbing the stairs, she feels selfish—this short temper of hers, these long showers—but there’s too much conditioner in her hair, from an old brand she doesn’t favor anymore, kept on hand to smell familiar for her visits, for when he comes home. She stands under scalding water for forty minutes, going over and over in her head the ways she might react if Hartley doesn’t want to stay at home, or if he comes home and doesn’t want to leave. She decides she’d like him to stay at the house for a few weeks and then restart his successful life, to make himself an example to others. Then the hot water gives out and she rushes into mismatched clothes.

  //

  At the bottom of the stairs, a set of matching luggage sits by the front door, as if someone is readying to leave. “Neelish . . . ?” she calls out timidly.

  “In here, dear.”

  She finds him in the dining room sitting at the table, mugs of coffee set out and an open box of cake, something jellied and laced with icing, the kind Kate often considers buying at the supermarket but never actually does. Across from him sits Kate’s daughter-in-law.

  “Glennis?” Kate asks. “I didn’t expect to—”

  The girl rises from her chair, one hand held loosely inside the other.

  Kate steps back and takes in her outfit. It wasn’t that Glennis hadn’t dressed herself up in the past, but in the years before Hartley went to jail, she’d been so drunk or hungover as to look limp inside her clothing, like a scarecrow rotting beneath its overalls. And before that, in the early years of their courtship, she’d been so casual with her appearance, her beauty squandered by an athletic, boyish style. But this version of her son’s wife wears a gray cashmere sweater with a white collar sticking out the neck, a wool skirt straight out of the fall catalogs.

  “I went to the prison,” Glennis says softly. “I’ve had it on my calendar for months. But the guard said it’s the wrong day.”

  “And then,” Kate says, shuffling closer, breathing the air coming off her daughter-in-law, “you drove all the way here.” The map in Kate’s head doesn’t add up. Wicklow, where Glennis has been living, is only a few miles from the prison in Triton, two outlying blips far beyond Chicagoland. How odd to have come all the way into the suburbs and not continue a little farther north and east to where she and Hartley had settled. Surely they still had some friends in Tower Hill.

  “I let my lease expire,” the girl explains. “The place I was renting in Wicklow was going to be too small for us. I’ve been in a hotel all week, waiting.”

  Neelish clears his throat. “I’ve suggested that Glennis stay the night, with us. Then we can all go over in the morning to pick up Hartley, together.”

  Kate seizes her husband’s mug, drinking for a long moment. It isn’t that she’d forgotten about her daughter-in-law, but she had quit considering the girl a part of her son’s future. A friend of Neelish’s who lives in Wicklow has kept them apprised of the rumors since Hartley went in—that Glennis was seen throwing up on the curb outside a bar in year one, that she spent a month of year two drying out in a clinic in Minnesota, that in year three her father died and she quickly lost his house to the bank, and that more recently she’d been seen retching, again, in the bathroom of a diner, at ten o’clock in the morning.

  “Yes, of course,” Kate says, pausing to wait for a rebuttal. “Of course you can stay the night. Where else would you stay if not here?”

  “It’s decided then,” Neelish agrees, ducking out to retrieve the girl’s luggage.

  Kate leads the way upstairs to her son’s teenage bedroom. Pennants on the walls, rotten basketball shoes in the closet, an old kink magazine hidden inside a sleeve of printer paper. Standing there with Glennis, Kate has the urge to show the girl some of the things she’s discovered over the years—the punched hole in the wall behind the Michael Jordan poster, the years-old package of Camel cigarettes (one missing), the page in the kink magazine where a bare-chested girl in a plaid skirt has a jump rope cinched around her neck. She wants to show Glennis exactly how well she knows her own boy.

  Instead Kate says, “You look well.”

  “I feel well,” Glennis agrees. “And I’m sober, if you’re wondering.”

  “I was wondering, actually. I do think I have a right to be curious.”

  Glennis looks away, to a photo on the dresser from the first time Hartley didn’t spend Christmas at home. Glennis’s father had just moved back to his house in Wicklow, and as Hartley had explained it then, he and Glennis wanted to be there to raise the man’s spirits. Kate hadn’t understood. Or, she’d understood that her boy was a kind young man who wanted to ingratiate himself with his girlfriend’s father. What mystified her was why Emmit had moved back to that wasted hamlet out in the cornfields in the first place.

  “You must miss your father,” Kate says.

  Glennis’s eyes hollow out and she lowers herself onto Hartley’s bed, photo against her chest. “I miss everybody.”

  //

  Back downstairs, Kate and Neelish wash the mugs and plates, trading glances and whispering to one another about their unexpected houseguest, until Neelish says, “Did you say ‘lesbian’ or ‘thespian’?” Kate hasn’t said anything close to either thing, and so leaves him to wipe down the counters on his own while she changes out of her mismatched clothes.

  On her way through the upstairs hallway she notices the girl’s suitcase has already been emptied, and that she’s moved the green lamp to a spot by Hartley’s bed.

  In the family room, Neelish reads the paper. Glennis, he says, has gone to the store to buy some ingredients for a brine.

  “A brine?”

  Neelish looks up. “I think it’s like a salt bath for the turkey.”

  Kate knows what a brine is. What she doesn’t know is where her daughter-in-law gets off dictating the terms of a dinner in someone else’s home. She heads into the kitchen, rifling through her cookbooks in search of side dishes that might upstage this brine. Or compliment it. She isn’t sure what the effect should be.

  “I think Glennis just wants to do something constructive,” Neelish explains from the other room.

  Kate rushes back into the family room. “But what is she up to, exactly?”

  “They’re still married,” he says.

  “I was still married to Hartley’s father for a long time after that was over.”

  “You don’t have to whisper, Kate. She’s at the store.” Neelish folds up the newspaper. “You used to like Glennis.”

  “When she was sober.”

  “She looks sober now,” he says.

  “I liked her before she became a drunk.”

  Neelish sets the newspaper aside and stands up across from his wife. “Kate,” he says in a voice she doesn’t want to hear, “their marriage is something you have no control over.”

  //

  At the organic market, Kate moves down the aisles with purpose, swiping cans off the shelves, chucking potatoes into the basket, artisanal cheeses, a box of crackers with silhouettes of royalty clinking chalices. She hits the florist on Lake Street for gourds, dry wheat bundles, a wicker cornucopia.

  When she returns home, she finds that the girl has cloistered herself in Neelish’s office. A low babble murmuring through the closed door, as if Glennis i
s on a very personal call or rehearsing some kind of speech. Her daughter-in-law has always been a mystery to Kate. Before Hartley’s incarceration, Kate often found herself in conversations with one person or another who knew of Glennis—of her gentle upstanding father; of her long dead mother, allegedly murdered by a serial killer—and when the gap in conversation arrived where Kate felt inclined to offer news about Glennis in return, she never had anything to say. Once, years ago, when pressed for an opinion on Glennis and Hartley’s plans after their wedding, Kate said her daughter-in-law was pregnant and intended to settle down as a homemaker. A total fabrication. She waited for this rumor to come back to her so that she could extinguish it, but nothing like it ever surfaced until years later when Glennis, drunk on Christmas Day, confided in Kate that a childhood fall from a motel room window had rendered her unable to conceive.

  At the stove, Kate stirs the melting butter, adds the onions. Potato gratin requires enough repeated motion—thin-slicing the russets, grating the cheese—that it lulls her into a state of mindlessness. Undercooked, overcooked, gratin always turns out. An investment of time with a virtually guaranteed outcome.

  Outside the kitchen window, Neelish is splinting tines on a broken rake. The leaves are still in everyone else’s trees, but the white oak out back fell bare a month ago, a reddish brown stain bleeding down its trunk. Oak slayer beetles. The parkways all over town are lined with hollow stumps. Neelish has been threatening to rake for weeks, and now of all days. These four years are ending soon, and in moments like this one, with a red sun crashing through the empty branches above her husband’s head, she worries that tomorrow will change nothing.

  In the fridge, the turkey sits in a large plastic bag full of salt water, a great shivering load bullying the orange juice and milk containers. She finds the cream, pours it over the potatoes, and puts the gratin into the oven. Behind her, the office murmur changes pitch to a man’s low crooning. She opens the door and steps in, turns off Neelish’s talk radio, looking around to make certain no one’s inside after all. Then she travels through the house, dusting manically, until she comes into the den to find Glennis on the couch, asleep.

  //

  “Neelish,” Kate calls from the back steps. “How can you be raking at a time like this?”

  He pauses in the corner of the yard, casting a despondent look at the neat little piles he’s constructed, as though he expects to be told to undo the work. Maybe he doesn’t mind the thought. Anything to keep busy while the girl dozes on their couch.

  “Has she been asleep in there all afternoon?” Kate asks as she approaches. “She’s occupying our house like some kind of mopey teenager.”

  Neelish inspects the plot of unraked leaves at his feet. “She’s just stressed.”

  “We’re all stressed, Neelish.”

  He pulls the butt of his rake up under his chin. “She told me something.”

  Kate waits.

  Neelish takes a breath. “She’s pregnant.”

  “How long ago?”

  “She’s three months along.”

  “No, when did she tell you that?”

  “This morning,” he says. “You were in the shower.”

  “Is it Hartley’s?”

  Neelish nods. “But he doesn’t know about it yet.”

  “When were you going to tell me this?”

  “I’m telling you now.” He waves at the house.

  Kate turns to see Glennis in the window smoothing her sweater against her chest.

  This is the problem with Neelish since Hartley went in. He’ll clear his throat at the dinner table and say things like “By the way, the Hollubs invited us to last night’s Bears game. I told them no thanks. All that traffic and rain. But what a comeback. Then overtime. A classic! Oh well.” They weren’t so different—Neelish and Hartley—driven to secrecy by some misguided effort to protect Kate from her worries. She thinks of how Hartley used to cover for his father after their Friday nights together, claiming they went to the batting cages when the truth was that her little boy had probably been riding shotgun from bar to bar all night long. And years later, Hartley didn’t even invite Kate to Glennis’s intervention. Shortly after it took place, Neelish just happened to call Glennis’s father for advice on purchasing new tires for the Camry. Emmit had said, “Don’t worry, you guys couldn’t have helped anyway, nobody could have,” and then he went on about how Kate had raised such a fine young man. By day’s end, Hartley was being arraigned on charges of DUI and vehicular manslaughter.

  Neelish drops his rake to the grass. “You’re not mad at me.”

  “I’m not?” says Kate. “Well that’s a surprise, because I could swear I’m incredibly pissed off at you right now.”

  “You’re mad at Hartley. You’ve stayed positive for four years, and now that he’s getting out you’re finally feeling some anger.”

  It does make some sense, Kate begins to admit, but then she catches Neelish eyeing his leaves, his excuse to let Kate deal with the girl all afternoon, and she discards this supposed anger, reminding herself, as she marches back across the yard and into the house, that Hartley is a fine young man who made one terrible mistake.

  “Just a mistake,” she tells the bathroom mirror. “Just one terrible, terrible mistake,” she chants as she bows to the sink to press water to her face.

  A knock raps the door. “Kate . . . ?” Glennis asks, her voice distorted by sleep. “Is everything all right?”

  Kate looks at her red eyes in the mirror. “Yes, dear, I’m fine. Go away now please.” She tiptoes to the door to make sure it’s locked. She can smell the girl’s cucumber lotion. She can feel the static off the cashmere sweater tuning the air just so.

  //

  By the time Kate’s eyes recover, the dining room table has been set for three, the fine china on autumn-print place mats, the wicker cornucopia spilling its gourd bounty across the buffet.

  “Neelish?” she calls out. “Did you do this?”

  But as her husband comes into the room tucking a fresh shirt into his slacks, a grin cracks his face, as if this neatly dressed table has proven him right somehow.

  “Sweetheart,” he says, grasping her shoulders, “you need to relax.”

  At this, Glennis appears in the kitchen doorway holding plates heaped with a motley, derivative salad. The ingredients atop the lettuce are familiar leftovers from the past week’s dinners, which strikes Kate as an intrusion, as if the girl has gone into the medicine cabinet and brought out the corn creams and fungal medications.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Glennis says. “I just threw together what I could.”

  “What about the gratin?” Neelish asks. “I thought I was smelling gratin.”

  Kate watches the girl absorb this comment.

  “I assumed that was for tomorrow,” Glennis says, turning to Kate. “Hartley loves gratin.”

  Kate takes a plate from the girl. “It is for tomorrow, dear.”

  Neelish’s disappointment is palpable, a grown man suffering quietly but not subtly the torture of smelling caramelized cheese while eating a salvage salad. He tries to recover over and over, arranging on his fork a different medley of scraps, in search of some aggregate flavor greater than its parts.

  Glennis must see this too, but she only smiles as she chews, winces, clears her throat to break the long silence. “So,” she says, “do you think Hartley’s going to make it?”

  Neelish’s mouth levers open.

  Kate feels the blood run from her fingers, a chill crossing the backs of her hands.

  Neelish says, “ ‘Make it’?”

  “Hartley’s father,” Glennis adds quickly. “I meant to say, will Hartley’s father make it, to the prison, I mean.”

  “Of course,” says Neelish, breathing again. “Yes. Of course. Yes.”

  Kate puts her fork down, her appetite now fully extinguished. “No,” she says. “I can’t imagine Billy will be there.”

  “Right,” says Neelish. “I was agree
ing that of course she meant ‘Will Billy make it?’ ”

  Glennis sniffles, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I just, with Hartley on my mind, I’m sorry, I can’t think straight.” She shoves her plate away. “Jesus, this salad, it’s terrible. Please, everyone stop eating it.”

  Neelish pushes his own plate away.

  “The dinner is fine, dear,” says Kate. “Neelish, honey, I made this food too, remember, the first time around. Let’s just finish up.”

  But her husband is already on his feet, hands squeezing the back of his chair. He peers into the kitchen, the smell of gratin having grown clangorous. “I need some fresh air.”

  When the front door closes, a draft washes in across the hardwood. Kate wants to say something decent to Glennis in this moment, something that might wind back the years to when the two of them could cooperate in adoring Hartley.

  They bus the plates, then wash them together in silence. Then Kate turns on the television, and together the two of them flip through channels, eventually settling on a show about a secret team of soldiers who pride themselves on their readiness. “We train every day for years,” one soldier says, his face blurred. “And then, when something is asked of us, we retrain ourselves to the specific task. In that way, we are always ready and never ready enough.”

  In the window, Neelish reappears under a streetlamp looking hobbled. He’s been jogging the block in his loafers again. Once, Kate followed him on one of these angry sojourns. It was wintertime, and she’d asked him not to go to Miami for a conference so that she wouldn’t have to attend the Muellers’ Super Bowl party by herself. He walked eight blocks in the snow, across a dormant ball field, and smashed tree branches against a concrete water fountain. Now, in the yellow glow of the garage floodlights, he doubles over with hands on knees, panting. Kate goes into the kitchen to see if there’s a dessert to put together for him, but everything is for tomorrow.