“Charlie’s a keeper, though. If we were stranded on an island, he’d fashion a raft out of twigs. That’s his character. I’d sit in the sand crying.”
Edie drew three cards. Donnie held a pair of sevens, and a flare of excitement bloomed in his chest, his fingertips. He thought he might win.
“When I got pregnant, he was so excited he couldn’t sleep for a week. I had to mix tranquilizers in milk. He never learned to swallow pills.”
Donnie laid down his cards, hopeful until Edie fanned out three jacks. He averted his eyes to Lester, who stood marching in place. Outside, a car alarm sounded, then chirped off, then started again.
“Charlie’s mother left his family for a nudist cult in Arizona,” she said. Then she cackled. “Listen to what I’ll tell a stranger. Maybe I am a nutso.”
The MPs had put him in a padded cell on base—he hadn’t known those really existed—and listed him on a suicide watch. He sat cross-legged in the middle of the room until morning, conjugating verbs in his head—Latin, Italian, Spanish, French. He never slept or spoke or moved, just to prove whoever was watching wrong.
THROUGH THE WINDOW THAT SEPARATED THE WARD from the common area, Charlie watched the nurse knock on a door. He felt suspended and vulnerable, as if life could unravel if she had to knock again or twist the knob herself. Then, release: Edie peered out and said, “Oh, it’s Charlie.” She padded down the corridor in her terry-cloth slippers, loosing her hair from a ponytail.
Charlie was surprised again to realize how she thrived here. The daily arts and craft classes—she made stained-glass (plastic) hearts—and the stray, one-eyed cat in the garden suited Edie as nothing had for a year. The same with the nightly bingo games, the book and cake-decorating clubs, the high school chorale that performed every Thursday. A juggling magician named Crazy Paul would visit over the weekend. Yesterday she had said, “We’re ecstatic. It’s like he’s one of our own.”
Brightly colored tables crowded the cafeteria, the long, light-filled room where visitations took place. Twelve-step posters lined the walls; reinforced windows overlooked a dry, blond pasture. The starchy smell of dinner—meat loaf? pizza?—lingered, and he considered sneaking a waxy roll from a tray to quell his hunger. The woman from the waiting room took a seat near the window; probably the soldier was outside again. Edie had staked herself at a yellow table near the far door, and approaching her, Charlie tried to gauge her spirits. Maybe sitting at a yellow table connoted more emotional stability than sitting at a blue one; he didn’t know. His only thought was: She’s here. When he reached her, she said, “Guess who’s coming home Monday.”
“Fantastic.” The word tasted hollow. He’d expected her stay to be prolonged, more therapy scheduled, more lithium prescribed. He said, “Everything’s waiting for you, right where you left it.”
She smiled—her braces stoked his guilt, made him want to apologize—then she waved as a nurse ushered another patient into the cafeteria. Heavy, fortyish, wearing thick lenses that clouded his eyes, the man had the pale, doughy features of Down syndrome. He stopped at the soda fountain and nudged the lever until an orange stream showered his hand.
“You need a cup, Lester,” Edie said.
Lester laughed, affecting a chagrined surprise for forgetting his cup again. Charlie hadn’t seen him before. Edie watched him fondly, as she watched children. Lester ambled to the window and pressed his fists to the glass, rocked to and fro. She whispered, “Lester the Molester. He points at women’s crotches and says, ‘I know what that is.’ ”
“Points at you?”
“Oh, my knight. No, not me, but I’ve seen him.”
Maybe she was lying, but he avoided pressing anything, especially here. He felt scrutinized by the nurses, cowed by what they understood of Edie that he didn’t. He worried about sending her over the edge again.
“How’s home? Is the nest still there?” Edie asked.
Earlier that year, a mother sparrow had nested inside the mailbox. Charlie had thrown out the dense, sod-smelling tangle of reeds and branches, and Edie called him a bastard and refused to eat for two days. When the nest reappeared, she slid bread crusts into it and made the mailman leave letters inside the screen door. How many times Charlie had caught her listening for hatchlings he didn’t know. Now he realized he’d forgotten to feed the bird as Edie had instructed. He said, “We’re all there, ready to roll out the red carpet.”
A young, acne-pocked man entered the cafeteria, and the woman from the waiting room ran to embrace him. Lester snapped his head toward them, then shifted back to the window. The woman started crying; the man rested his chin on her scalp.
“That’s Donnie,” Edie said. “He lets me win at cards.”
“Why is he here?” Immediately, Charlie regretted asking this. The question assumed people had to do something, or not do something, to be hospitalized. So far, he’d acted as though Edie’s stay was routine, precautionary. “Like an oil change,” he’d said that first night, trying to cheer her. He acted this way for both of their sakes.
“I think he beat someone up. Savagely.”
Donnie appeared incapable of causing damage, more like someone who’d been bullied all his life. He had a jittery manner that would invite cruelty. Charlie had pitied such boys in his youth, while he himself usually slipped under everyone’s radar, avoiding altercations and attention of every kind; most days he still felt invisible. What could people surmise from Edie’s appearance—a thirty-four-year-old woman in wrinkled pajamas and braces? Maybe she seemed a person who’d lost her footing but now, rested, was fit to leave. And maybe she was, but Edie excelled at showing people what they wanted to see. How many times had they gone to parties where she interacted famously, then at home collapsed on the bed, too distressed to say good night? Not to mention the business with her mother. Esther called from Dallas at all hours and Edie narrated a sunny, alternate life in Corpus. Charlie had refused to indulge the fictions, and when he overheard their late-night talks, his stomach roiled.
Now he tried to remember ever seeing another visitor get a soda. He thought anything in his stomach—a handful of cereal or a cold slice of pizza—would sharpen his wavering concentration. Edie fingered the salt shaker, then rested her palms on the table. She said, “We talked about it today. In my session.”
His muscles tensed, and he felt himself—not his arms or body, but everything inside—recoil. Edie wouldn’t look at him. She ran her tongue over her braces. He said, “How did it go?”
“Sometimes I imagine the weight without trying to. It’s like after swimming in the ocean, then a week later you still feel the waves.”
This didn’t sound like Edie, and he was trying to make sense of it when she said, “Let’s leave Corpus for a while. The doctor suggested I reacquaint myself with the world.”
“Sure,” he said, automatically. Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, he was eager, awash with a grateful, poised energy; his nerves tingled with the unmistakable electricity of hope. “We’ll start planning on Monday. I’ll talk to travel agents.”
“Maybe to a desert. We can bathe in sand like Hindus. The new nurse told me about that.”
“Anywhere at all.” He liked the tone in his voice, the tone of an actor in an important scene. Perhaps a week in Bayview had rejuvenated her, absolved her of that debilitating uncertainty. How easy, he thought, to underestimate the wounded. Donnie and his sister laughed behind her; this also pleased Charlie. Lester moved from the window and tapped the lever on the soda fountain again, but pulled his hand away before getting splashed. He did it twice more, then buzzed for the nurse. Edie waved again. Charlie did, too, confidently now, flaunting his wife’s renewed devotion.
Lester snickered, pointed at the nurse: “I know what that is.”
LEAVING THE HOSPITAL, CHARLIE FELT JAZZY. Hope and vigor always returned after a visit, and accelerating past the split-rail fences tonight, he vowed to harness his replenished optimism; X-ray or no X-ray, tomorrow he’d bring her a tabloid,
flowers. Stands of live oaks and bowed willows were silhouetted along the road; the Kneel and Blow’s sign flickered in the distance. He cranked up a Tejano version of “Brown-Eyed Girl” on the radio and gathered speed through the humid, heathered dusk. He imagined nights in the chilled desert and wondered how different the sand would feel from the beach. His stomach no longer ached; he would cook at home. The speedometer crested ninety. He floored the accelerator. He sang, though he knew no Spanish.
He recognized the helmet and caught a clear look at the woman’s face; she stared south, unaware. Yet the familiarity of the woman and the soldier and motorcycle relieved him; steel and glass and a solid deafening thud, but nothing like this could be happening with two people he’d just seen. He knew he could be killed but knew he wouldn’t be. I’m wearing my seat belt. Hindus bathe in sand. The hard-hitting noise became everything, he tumbled and flailed inside it. A peculiar softness to the collision, too, as of pressure released. The bike’s handlebars twisting like rubber; the passenger window breaking so quickly, so completely that thinking no window had ever existed made perfect sense. The Lexus slid. The seat belt constricted. The man said, “Agárrate! Agárrate bien!” The motorcycle flipped. Everything stopped.
Glass covered the seats, jewels in the moonlight; the showroom where he and Edie priced engagement rings. He didn’t remember steering off the road, but he was parked on the narrow, crushed-shell shoulder. Lightning bugs flashed, the memory of returning to the jewelry store the same afternoon, fearful that he would forget which setting she’d preferred. Now, moving terrified him, but moving seemed tantamount to surviving, the first in a series of actions that would reveal themselves necessarily. He lifted one arm, then the other. Bent his knees, rotated his ankles, swiveled his wrists; slowly he twisted his neck. No air bag had inflated. Why? Because the car had been broadsided? Smoke poured like liquid from the hood. The air reeked of scorched tread. Though the passenger side had suffered the impact, he expected his door to be jammed and was surprised when it opened easily; this seemed bolstering, promising. He’d slipped the ring on her finger while she slept, and when she woke the next morning, she said yes.
The night was hushed, darkening. Everything felt askew and surreal, as if he’d slipped through a gap in time’s weave and all he’d known about himself was unrelated to where he was now. As he walked in the glow of taillights and gauzy moon, his legs and mind were hollow. He expected his knees to give with each step. The oily air smelled of horses, cattle, manure. “You’ve had an accident,” he said aloud. Insects whirred and clicked in the leaves; electricity sizzled in power lines. He expected voices, figures clamoring to ask if he was hurt. He paced fifty yards with only errant glints of broken reflectors on the asphalt, shards of plastic that might have been there for months. Perhaps he’d hit a deer or coyote, had suffered a head injury that spawned hallucinations of bending handlebars.
Then, near a tangle of mesquite trees, his breath left him. Had he not been watching the ground, he would have tripped. The soldier lay on his stomach, feet pointed inward, arms splayed. Charlie felt in a vacuum; the noise of the night rushed back in waves; he could no longer discern individual sounds. There was a stop sign, he thought. They came from the west, they went somewhere after Bayview. Over his shoulder, he glimpsed the Lexus—he’d not closed his door and light spilled out. No sign of the motorcycle or the woman or anyone else at all.
“Hello,” Charlie said. “Hello?”
He surveyed the area. Trees, sky, moon, ground, the lone gas station two miles ahead; each where it should be, each becoming another affirmation. Something rustled in the leaves, then the sharp, resonant cracking of a single branch. His heart pounded. He waited for the woman to appear, but the rustling quieted. Whatever was there was gone. He placed two fingers on the man’s neck and waited for a pulse. He’d never done this or ever imagined doing it. A quick thumping under his fingers; no, in his fingers, his own heart deceiving him, beating throughout his body. Edie knew CPR, had campaigned unsuccessfully for him to take the course with her. The flesh was grated and pulpy. He worried he pressed too hard or too soft, pressed the wrong place. Nothing. He found his own pulse pumping under his jaw, then tried the soldier’s wrist. A raft of clouds moved across the moon, turned the skin a luminescent gray. The air became pungent, earthy. Closed eyes, open mouth, cracked-out teeth. Charlie had to shut a memory from his mind—Edie saying she wanted braces, wanted to laugh without covering her mouth. He choked back vomit. The pulse would not come. He waited another few minutes, afraid to stop waiting. Eventually, he stood and walked on.
PAPA AND MAMA AND THE NEW COLLIE, OBO, ON Malachite Beach. Only in Corpus half a year and already Papa’s located the best fishing spot—trout, sea bass, grouper, redfish. Aluminum lawn chairs; a Styrofoam cooler full of tamales and Fanta and Schlitz; Obo barking as Papa levers himself from his seat; the smell of Winstons and Hawaiian Tropics oil and the tonic in Papa’s black, black hair.
“Give some slack, Omar.”
He releases the line, though he wants to reel in. His arms tremble, his heels dig into the sand, granules between his clenched toes, and a sudden wind scours him. In school he’s learned that melted sand becomes glass, that mirrors are windows with one side painted black. Fourth grade, a bully has made him touch, with one outstretched, humiliated finger, his flaccid, brownish-purple penis.
“Now take him in, un poquito. Don’t fight.” Papa is excited, proud.
Omar reels. Two seagulls hover motionless overhead. Behind him the earsplitting roar of a motorcycle, his mother calling Obo, the dog scavenging in the washed-up detritus— sargassum, a dead Portuguese man-of-war and cabbagehead, mangrove pods. They bought Obo a month before. She was listed in the paper for $75.00, OBO; he’d believed it was the dog’s name, which made his mother laugh through her nose, so Papa coughed up forty dollars. Obo sleeps beside the door, but Omar hopes she’ll start jumping into his bed.
“Leave off, Junior.”
He will tell the whole school about the fish; Papa will tell his Thursday-night poker players; Mama will fry it; he will sneak Obo the skin; she will jump into his bed. The fish thrashes on the hook. Omar fears the line will snap and all will be lost, for suddenly existence itself depends on not bungling this. He offers more slack, this seems right, but Papa spits tobacco juice onto the sand and says, “Agárrate! Agárrate bien!”
EDIE WAS FOUR MONTHS ALONG WHEN THE NURSE called Charlie’s office. He’d been waiting for the security desk to buzz when she arrived, though he’d thought nothing when an hour passed. Probably she was dallying in a fabric store. They had only the one car, Fido.
He took a cab to Spohn Hospital, acted stoic and amenable toward the driver, as if a purposeful composure could improve the circumstances. His breathing tightened. What his mind latched on to was the nursery—the antique bassinet bought at an auction, Edie’s ongoing search for the perfect hanging mobile, the picture books she’d started collecting. That she spent most of her days working in the room while he’d barely set foot in it turned his stomach so quickly he feared he’d throw up. Last week she’d had paint in her bangs—did she still? He imagined Edie exiting the freeway and being rear-ended and sent into oncoming traffic. He imagined the doctor waiting until he arrived to break the news about the pregnancy. Streaks of sweat tracked down his arms. The cab seemed stalled in traffic, even speeding toward the hospital.
She was leaning against a soda machine, talking to a nurse. No wheelchair, no bandages, no hovering, grim-eyed doctor. She seemed a visitor. “Fido got run over,” she said, smiling. “I think we have to put him to sleep.”
In bed that night, he picked up the joke again. “I’ll miss the old boy.”
“He’s out of his misery.”
“He’d want us to move on, to stay strong.”
At first she seemed to be laughing, then he realized she’d started weeping into his shoulder. She said, “We’ve won the lottery, Charlie-boy.”
Two weeks later, they woke on s
heets soaked in blood. In his memory, Charlie always believed the thick, mealy smell roused them. An ambulance came, and within hours she’d bled so profusely that she had to have a hysterectomy to save her life.
DWANA HAD THE ILLUSION OF FLOATING. THE CROP duster, the pilot’s mouth moving; Donnie on his back, balancing her stomach on his raised feet, her arms extended like wings; the crystalline image of Omar Delgado’s hands, though not really his, but her first lover’s, a boy named Billy Mahurin; in a lifeguard stand, he predicted she’d eventually have perfect breasts; the moon coloring the beach cobalt, a pack of coyotes tussling in the water; she told Billy, “Donnie writes in four different languages. I never understand his letters.”
Billy crouched beside her in the dark. They had just finished and lethargy overwhelmed him. She felt gravely embarrassed, disappointed and mystified, worried he was judging her against other girls. She couldn’t stop blabbering. She said, “He waited a long time to say his first word. Then one day he just blurted, ‘I want a banana.’ ”
Billy said, “Are you okay there?”
“I’m wet.” What a wonderful answer! The prospect of hearing how he’d volley back after being inside her was exquisitely terrifying, like swimming after dark or riding a motorcycle.
“There’s been an accident,” Billy said.
Not Billy at all; though the voice sounded familiar. From the hospital—Donnie is in Bayview. Billy is married or a father or dead, so much more than her first lover now, and she is beside a road, a pewtery night in Corpus—she had ridden a motorcycle!—the high pitch of mosquitoes, the moist scent of cow shit.
“I know,” she told the man, but that was silly; she hardly knew anything. “Are people hurt?”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“I’m just a little cold.”
Billy again, suddenly and completely; he removed his shirt and tucked it around her arms. She lay on her stomach, his touch shamefully comforting. She said, “Perfect.”
“We’ll sit tight. We’ll catch our breath, then decide what to do.”
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