“You can tell me,” Anna said. She glanced at her boys, then turned back smiling. She looked young and lovely and strong.
He said, “I hope it never happens to you.”
“What?” Anna smiled and squinted, as if given a compliment she hadn’t understood. The bellhop opened the exit door from inside the movie theater, wedged a doorstop under it. The mall noise sounded like a waterfall. Anna said, “You what?”
“To Robert or Franklin,” he said. “I hope they get a fair shake in things. I hope they never get sick, and I hope they grow up to have grand lives like their father.”
“Oh.” Anna sucked in her cheeks. Her eyes hardened. She said, “Oh. Okay, then. Is that why you followed us? Is that what you wanted to say?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know. There’s a lot I want to say.”
“Maybe next time, then,” Anna said. “Right now I need to stand with my children while they meet the Easter Bunny. You do whatever you want. Leave or sit here or do anything except come near me. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
She took her purse from the bench, but the bag gaped open and some of its contents spilled onto the bricks. She closed her eyes and exhaled loudly. And when she didn’t move, Wes suddenly regretted approaching her. He despised everyone who saw her purse dangling from her hand, and he crouched to begin collecting what she had dropped.
“This has nothing to do with you,” Anna said. On her knees, she started jamming items into the bag. She reached for a lipstick that had rolled under the bench, but only knocked it farther away. Again, he thought they would look like a husband and wife.
She stood and brushed off the front of her coat. She said, “And I wish I hadn’t told you about the twins sleeping. God, that makes me feel so gullible.”
It sounded as if she wanted to add something, maybe that her marriage with Gordon Eichhardt was splendid or that he had divorced her or that over the years she had called Wes and been too afraid or ashamed to speak. Or maybe she would say that in her worst moments she had imagined losing the boys, but God forgive her, she had seen a life for herself on the other side. She could have said anything. Though finally she said nothing at all, but just turned her back to Wes and left him alone on the bench.
The mall had become crowded with the audience from the theater, a rush of people that momentarily impeded Anna’s path, and he watched her wait for them to pass. She checked the time, then looked at the marbled sky and ran her fingers through her hair, her beautiful hair. On her first opportunity, she cut through the crowd and disappeared. Only then could Wes stand and leave. The wind was colder on the street—it made his clothes feel heavy and wet—so he raised his collar and started toward the strip club. Already the encounter seemed far behind him. His life felt unchanged. In fact, the idea of change hardly seemed a possibility anymore. Maybe that was why he’d approached her at all, to incite a drama that could open a new door, or an old one, but the effort had failed. Such impotence, however, didn’t bother him; he’d lived through worse. Walking with his face turned down from the wind, he wondered if Anna had remembered the day she met Rae. Probably she had. And some of that memory probably stayed with her as she found her boys in line. While they spoke with the Easter Bunny, Anna’s sister would ask what Wes had said, and Anna would efface the question to deny him even the distant satisfaction of riling her again. She would smile. She would reduce everything to a short, insignificant encounter—or perhaps, even worse, a pleasant encounter—with someone she used to know, someone she had not at first recognized.
Corpus Christi
DRIVING TO BAYVIEW BEHAVIORAL HOSPITAL took Charlie Banks half an hour. The sand-colored facility stood ten miles outside Corpus Christi, among wheat fields and grazing pastures. He drove a leased Lexus and liked shifting into fifth on Rodd Field Road, an abandoned straightaway where he could open up the engine. His top speed was 120 miles per hour. He’d bragged about this at the office, though he didn’t say where he was going. Edie had called the car pretentious, but Charlie viewed it as evidence that they were finally hitting their stride.
Bayview was nowhere near the bay. The surrounding area was staked with sun-bleached signs advertising acreage for sale; besides the hospital, there was only one gas station, a Kum and Go. (“Why not call it Kneel and Blow?” Edie had said the week before. “Why not Ejaculate and Evacuate?”) Four shaggy-trunked palm trees anchored the hospital’s empty parking lot; the place resembled a deserted country club. A man in fatigues stood outside the automatic doors, swigging from a leather flask. Military men always seemed to be at Bayview, loitering with wheelchair patients, littering the entrance with cigarette butts. Nurses and orderlies smoked with them, too. Charlie made quick, kindly eye contact, then went inside, registered, and took a seat across from a woman holding a motorcycle helmet. His stomach grumbled; he’d forgotten to eat lunch. Soon the soldier entered, trailing a cloud of viscous June heat into the air-conditioning. Charlie flipped through a magazine, the same one he had looked at yesterday, and tried to quiet the fear that some calamity had befallen Edie since they’d spoken that afternoon. Maybe she’d cribbed some tranquilizers or carved her wrists with a shard of broken mirror. He opened his eyes wide and considered hustling out for a candy bar, maybe a tabloid and pack of cigarettes for Edie. But anything he brought in would have to be x-rayed and quarantined before she received it, so he stayed put.
The woman hugged the helmet, swinging her leg like a pendulum. The soldier sat beside her. He said, “Another five minutes.”
“None of this makes sense to me,” she said.
The soldier crossed his arms; his biceps bulged. He said, “Plenty of people in that boat.”
“When we were young, a plane crashed behind our house,” she said. “Donnie and I were outside and got covered in soot. Mother always worried it traumatized us. Maybe she was right.”
“I doubt this has much to do with a plane.”
The woman shrugged, as if there was still a chance that whatever had happened could be explained away. Charlie suspected someone close to her had died. She was young, with fleshy arms and a faded dolphin tattoo on her calf. Keeping quiet seemed a chore for her. Edie had been that way for a while. The woman looked forlorn, which he also understood.
What Dwana Miller was thinking was that she needed to pull herself together. She’d been frazzled all day. First she’d gone to trade shifts at the Yellow Rose, in Southport, but once there she realized this was her weekend off. Then she sped from Southport to the naval base, parked at the infirmary and rushed in, remembering too late her brother’s message about being transferred to a civilian hospital. Outside, her keys hung in the ignition of her locked car. Her purse was there, too, with the cookies and comic books she’d brought for Donnie. You stupid shit, she’d said in the parking lot. You stupid little shit.
Now, in the waiting room, she said to the soldier, “I guess they’ll make him quit the Army.”
“Discharge.”
“Doesn’t that sound too hard, like he’s a spy?”
Just as he realized he was staring, Charlie found himself fixed in the soldier’s gaze. He smiled apologetically, then glanced through the window. A chain of seagulls was flying back to the beach from the landfill. The Lexus sat alone in a row of parking spaces. The car still thrilled him. Before the Lexus, they’d owned a little Ford that Edie called Fido because the old landlord had forbidden pets. That was in Dallas. She was thirty-four, two years younger than Charlie. When the law firm in Corpus called to offer him their network support position (the salary so high he thought they were joshing him), Edie flat refused to move. She liked her job (fund-raising for nonprofits) and liked living close to the nursing home that her mother’s dementia had transformed into a grand hotel. He argued that they could buy a house and travel, perhaps find a hospital for her mother down south, but she stonewalled him and he began resenting her. Then, after two years of trying, Edie was pregnant, and he saw an opening and let reason shine through. He said, �
��Corpus would be a great place to raise children.”
That was hardly a year earlier, but in Bayview, and after the miscarriage, that life seemed as far off and turbid as the floor of the muddy, olive-tinted bay, which you couldn’t see.
DWANA WISHED SHE’D TAKEN A CAB FROM THE naval base. But because unauthorized vehicles were prohibited past security, and because some documents (Donnie’s, no doubt) needed to be delivered to Bayview, the infirmary attendant had suggested that Omar escort her to the hospital. She hadn’t known he rode a motorcycle, nor that he’d feel compelled to wait while she saw Donnie. Nor had she figured how, later, she would get into her locked-up car or, for that matter, home. One disaster at a time, she thought.
They sat alone in the waiting room, twenty minutes before it would be time for visitation. Whiskey on Omar’s breath, a wet-smelling musk. Maybe she’d seen him at the Yellow Rose; Army boys ferried over on weekends, and after working there two years, she recognized them everywhere. She wanted a change. She’d considered beauty college in San Antonio, but more recently she’d entertained notions of a clown school in Houston. An advertisement had promised work at parties, hospitals, schools, even rodeos. How easily she pictured herself painting on heart-shaped eyes, tying balloons into wiener dog hats. She would run the idea past Donnie, amuse him. And she’d tell him she was sleeping with her boss’s wife—“What else is new?” he’d say—a woman who two nights before had asked Dwana if she’d ever done a taj mahal; she’d meant ménage à trois.
“Me and my boys are shooting pool later,” Omar Delgado said in the waiting room. “Always room for one more.”
“You have children?”
He squinted, smirked as if being fooled. “Oh, no. Buddies, fellows from the base.”
She forced a smile, feeling stupid. She wanted to check the time, but resisted. “A lot of fun I’d be.”
“Might feel good to relax.” He’d been at her since they’d arrived, angling his thick neck so he could meet her eyes. He said, “And you don’t have to worry about driving home.”
“It looks like I’ve already handed over my keys.”
He laughed, then a silence settled. With the quiet came the memory that had resurfaced since Dwana heard that Donnie had been arrested. She is eight, he is six, playing in the sorghum field behind Mema’s house. He wears a plastic fireman’s helmet, carries a kite that refuses to fly. He sees the plane first, a crop duster wobbling in the air, tendrils of smoke billowing from its tail. We should be on the ground, she thinks; our heads should be between our knees. But they stand, she behind him, touching his shoulder. The plane flies low enough for her to see the pilot’s goggles, his mouth moving. No. No goggles, a backward baseball cap, and he’s wiping his eyes furiously. Then the ground buckles like a sheet snapped taut, and she runs into Donnie in a haze of smoke and pesticide.
“You don’t look much alike,” Omar said. “You and Don.”
“I usually hear the opposite.” Not true; no one ever compared them. She had dingy hair and blue eyes, her father’s; Donnie’s eyes and hair were black, shiny. For years she’d dreamed about the plane; he had, too. Their dreams were never nightmares, which seemed odd.
“Southport’s a peach of a town,” Omar said.
“It’s where you’re either drunk or fishing. They say that at the bar.”
“Like I said.”
She imagined serving longnecks in a rainbow wig and red squeak-ball nose.
He asked, “You got a sweetheart over there?”
“No, just a husband,” she lied.
Omar’d had enough of this flaky woman. He went into the parking lot for a smoke and a pull from his flask. The sky was hard, heat shimmering on the baking asphalt. A broken line of seagulls flew east from the dump; their shrieking sounded like a baby crying. Soon the line would fill in, hundreds of birds weaving their way back to the island. He picked a piece of tobacco from his tongue. A flash of a memory: Papa spitting tobacco juice into the sand. Maybe he would call the boys tonight. He’d drop the cook’s sister at the base, shower and change clothes. Or maybe he’d swing by Sandra’s first, let her wonder about this white woman behind him on the bike. A Lexus turned into the parking lot. A doctor’s car, he thought, but the driver was too nervous-looking, a jittery man who had trouble activating the alarm. Probably a banker or a salesman, someone you met once and never saw again.
DONNIE MILLER DISLIKED CARD GAMES, BUT THE monotony of poker in a psychiatric hospital was oddly relaxing. And the other patient, Edie Banks, was enjoying herself, so he didn’t mind spending the afternoon this way.
He’d arrived at Bayview after two weeks in the naval correctional facility—the Army had no such facility on base—to undergo tests and counseling before the arraignment. He had arrived in handcuffs, escorted by MPs; he’d just turned twenty-four. Everything had started because of a comic book; no, everything had ended because of it—Incredible Hulk, No. 181, near-mint condition, worth two hundred dollars. A birthday present from his sister. He’d shown it to everybody and explained its value—the first cameo appearance of Wolverine, a haunted mutant who forever changed comics— but they’d been hoping for a girly mag. Most were Donnie’s age, lascivious, spring-loaded men who wore dress khakis to the Fox’s Den on weekends. They called him queer and knocked over the water bucket whenever he mopped; on the soda machine someone had scrawled, DM sucks sloppy cock.
Watching Edie Banks put down two pair, he recognized a tenderness that made him want to please her. She reminded him of an old woman for whom he should open doors and speak loudly. She was in her thirties, sun-freckled, rusty-haired; she wore dental braces. She resembled Dwana’s childhood friend Joanie Mahurin, a dewy-eyed girl who’d paraded around their house in panties. A tan line on Edie’s ring finger, perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps her husband had stepped out on her, as Donnie’s own father had. Maybe not. None of it mattered. Already he understood that none of it mattered.
He hadn’t been looking for the comic book, but noticed it missing. He looked in places he would never leave it, under his bed, in his duffel, behind the lockers. Of course they’d taken it, probably Buford, the wiry, fawn-skinned ringleader. Yet upon finding Buford in the rec room, the comic’s cover folded as if he was enthralled by the story, Donnie felt briefly relieved. Two others played darts in the room, but they paused when he entered. Buford said, “Found your book.”
Then they were behind him, holding his elbows, while Buford tore pages. The deliberate, excruciating noise of paper ripping. Donnie yelled. The screaming scorched his throat—he tasted the gritty texture of his own windpipe—and he was five years old again, grabbing a dogwood branch with a mud dauber on it. Instantly pain shot from his palm through his body, like broken glass in his veins, and he surrendered to it. He woke swaddled in crocheted afghans; his mother and Dwana worried that he was going into shock. The memory came and went in less than a beat, then the rec room returned and he broke free as simply as slipping from a shirt. He stomped one of the men’s feet, felt the metatarsals snap; he elbowed the other in his solar plexus, heard him heave and collapse. And now Buford was pinned against the paneled wall and Donnie pushed a dart to his jugular. The soda machine droned beside them—DM sucks sloppy cock. The smell of menthol, Buford’s recent shave; under his jaw, a swatch of missed whiskers. Blood dripped from his mouth, and although Donnie didn’t remember striking him, he knew he must have, so he did it again. Cracked his forehead against the bridge of Buford’s nose.
Then the not unfamiliar thought: Maybe he was queer. Maybe only queers would notice the curiously beautiful light in Buford’s eyes, the hazel-flecked green, or the pleasing woodsy scent of his hair. He felt every inch where their bodies touched, pressed his weight harder against him, pushed his groin against Buford’s thigh. The contact neither aroused nor disgusted him. Buford was mumbling, whispering because his throat was blocked, but Donnie made no sense of the words. He raised the dart to Buford’s mouth, parted his plump, tight lips; he heard them uns
tick. Blood-smeared teeth, pink-white gums, bubbles of thick crimson saliva. He pressed the dart’s gold point to the corner of one of those gorgeous eyes, caressed the skin, grazed the edge over his lashes. “You like that, don’t you?” Donnie heard himself say. He slid the dart into one of Buford’s nostrils, pushed it against his septum. A needle into a stubborn cushion. A stake into wet ground.
“I’m kicking your butt,” Edie said in the hospital. “Full house.”
“You’re a card shark,” he said. “I’m, like, a perch.”
“My mother used to play on Sundays. Maybe I got it from her. She lives in Dallas. She thinks she’s a grandmother.”
Confused, he arranged the cards.
“She has Alzheimer’s. I’ve never told her I miscarried.”
He shuffled the deck, wishing he could do it more quietly. A flyer on the wall advertised a seminar called “Preparing for the Unexpected”; another invited patients to join the Bible study/weight loss group. Are you thin enough to fit through the pearly gates?
“I send her framed pictures of babies from magazines. Does that sound calculating or cruel?”
“No,” he said, though maybe it did.
“Those were my husband’s words. He’s a stickler for the literal truth, for facts.”
He dealt the cards. By the patio door, a retarded man named Lester Riggs rested his forehead against the window. Probably he was watching the one-eyed cat that some people called Lucky. Others called him Jack.
“I decided to have a girl. I named her Esther, after my mother.” Edie studied her cards. “Are jokers wild?”
“Yes, I think so.”
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