Corpus Christi

by Bret Anthony Johnston

  “It might have been Omar’s fault,” she heard herself say. “He was speeding. And drinking. We’d seen my brother at Bayview.”

  “Did you go somewhere after—”

  “They’ll expel him, the Army will. I never wanted him to enlist.”

  “My wife is there, too. He lets her win at cards.”

  In the lifeguard stand surrounded by coyotes—a pungent yet not unpleasant odor of wet fur all around—Billy and the man were both present. No ocean, though. The water had evaporated. She thought to scream this news, but the men seemed unalarmed, so no need to worry. She said, “He’s just a baby. He used to be afraid of water. I don’t know what he’s afraid of now.”

  “That’s okay,” the man said. “He’s safe there.”

  Billy and the coyotes vanished, as if spooked. She thought to say Poof, but asked, “Why is your wife in the hospital? Is that rude?”

  “No,” he said. “We lost our son.”

  “Oh, Lord,” she said. “Lord, Lord.” Her inclination was to prattle on, but she knew to hush. This man’s wife had auburn hair and braces and a sad, dramatic jaw; she looked like Joanie Mahurin, Billy’s sister, the first woman to break Dwana’s heart. The man and his wife had sat near the soda fountain—who knew what they whispered? To know them, to understand who they essentially were, you only had to know what they’d lost. This was explicitly clear: Everyone could be seen that way.

  “How cold are you?” the man asked.

  So, he stayed afloat by changing the subject. Good for him.

  “We should find Omar,” she said. “I’ll help. I’ll sit up.”

  “Wait—”

  “I feel a little mixy. No. Woozy, that’s the word. I guess that’s normal. I don’t feel broken anywhere.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “I don’t want to see Omar,” she said. She’d thought they would return straight to the base, but he’d detoured behind Bayview; he slowed in front of an A-frame, revved the engine until curtains parted in a kitchen window, then he popped the clutch and rocketed into the darkness. She said, “I wouldn’t mind him being scared. Maybe his bike got crashed up.”

  The whine of sirens. Sirens coming to the field covered in glaucous green smoke, like fog; sirens coming to the lifeguard stand while she and Billy grope for clothes, she has his pants, he has her bra; sirens coming for Donnie as if he’d killed someone.

  “The cavalry,” she said. “Omar probably called them.”

  “Good,” the man said, turning away. “At least we know he’s all right.”

  THE MORNING BEFORE THE DOCTOR COMMITTED Edie, the stink of cigarette smoke woke Charlie. As his eyes adjusted to the sunlight splashing into their bedroom, he fantasized that they had guests—a wife from the firm or a neighbor. Edie had quit cigarettes for the baby, but he knew it was her, knew it as surely in bed as when he found her at the kitchen table in front of an overflowing ashtray. She said, “I’m smoking again.”

  She looked older than she was, a sullen, accelerated aging that he’d noticed other mornings, but today it seemed permanent, not nascent wrinkles that would smooth with a shower and coffee. A beat before he saw them, he remembered her new braces.

  She said, “I sneak out at night. I use mouthwash.”

  Their recent days flashed through his mind, a blur of filmy heat tinged with Listerine. She said, “Are you going to interrogate me, or can we just skip to my punishment?”

  “What happened?”

  “Interrogation it is.”

  “Honey, I just want to help.”

  She stayed quiet, a worrisome, irritating silence. He felt he’d been lured into dropping his guard when he should have seen this coming. He remembered that he only called her Honey when she bottomed out; he couldn’t stop himself.

  “I don’t see how you do it, Charlie-boy.”

  “Edie . . .”

  “You work, you socialize, you zip around in your hot little car.”

  “Honey, let’s not—”

  “When you were talking me into it, do you know what I kept waiting to hear?”

  He did know; she’d said it before.

  “‘It’s a great place to raise children.’ I thought you’d say that about the car.”

  “I got a car, you got braces. We’re not so different.” As he said this, he wished he hadn’t.

  She nodded, once. Her expression suggested he’d incriminated himself, though he couldn’t yet see it. Her cigarette had burned out. She had trouble lighting another one, as if aligning herself in a mirror where her movements were reversed. He reached to help, but she leaned back.

  “I took some pills last night. Or this morning, I can’t remember.”

  His heart went flat, his mind blanked. “How many?”

  A disgusted little laugh sent smoke sputtering from her lips. “Apparently not enough.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said, though he did. She had him cornered, and they both knew it. He noticed a bowl of pancake batter on the counter, cracked eggshells on a paper towel, the skillet on the unlit burner—a project that had proved too formidable. Those dishes, their air of defeated optimism, leveled him. There was nothing he could say now. He squeezed her hand, but it remained limp as raw steak. As cool, too. She lidded her eyes, then tears hung on her eyelashes, dropped to her cheeks, the table. Her mother, he thought. The phone had rung late last night, and even asleep, he’d understood Esther was asking about the baby. Maybe contriving details had finally sapped Edie. And at once he understood his role. He knew to speak calmly, blithely, to call the doctor. He knew she was in no condition to stop him.

  Hanging up, Charlie said, “He’ll see us right away.”

  “What does he want to see?”

  “Just a checkup. He’ll run tests, then tell us where to go from there.”

  “Us?” she said. “He’ll tell us to go to Bayview, then he’ll tell you to go home.”

  YEARS LATER, AFTER EDIE LEFT BECAUSE HE reminded her of all she’d lost, Charlie would see the night as nothing more than coincidence, a series of circumstances that made sense in dim, regrettable lights. He’d remember a feeling of buoyancy, a survivor’s euphoria, the subdued thrill of escape. Maybe such stability had been false at its core; that was not how life happened. Or maybe because it seemed so shatteringly absurd, it was exactly how life happened.

  An ambulance had arrived on Rodd Field Road, then a police cruiser. Paramedics fitted the woman with a neck brace and backboard, laid her on a gurney and hoisted her into the ambulance. When one of the men asked her about Omar, Charlie mouthed, “She doesn’t know,” and the subject was dropped. The medics worked with fluid, satisfying efficiency, passing Charlie’s shirt back to him while adjusting dials on monitors while discussing coyotes with the woman. Soon another medic—three now, though he’d first believed there were only two—directed him toward the police cruiser. His heart stuttered, his throat constricted; arrested, he thought. But he only needed to sign forms verifying that he’d declined their advice to go to the ER.

  During all of this, he worried he’d not done everything he could for Omar, that he’d not waited long enough for breath, that the young soldier still lay suffering, praying a more competent soul would realize a sliver of life hadn’t faded. Maybe all of this should have burned like hope, for if he were still breathing, maybe he could still be saved. Soon, though, a sheet covered the body like a mound of clumped snow. How strange to think: snow in Corpus. The sheet hovered in Charlie’s peripheral vision, regardless of where he turned. The officer asked questions, and though Charlie couldn’t admit to speeding, he answered as thoroughly as possible. He told about visiting Edie, about seeing the woman and Omar at Bayview. When he finally confided about Omar’s drinking, he went under a wave of relief. Perhaps the officer went under, too; perhaps he’d already found the flask. A wrecker came for the bike, another for the Lexus. The sounds of the night amplified— soughing wind, whispering fields, lines of far-off traffic. Another ambulance came for the
sheet glowing in the moonlight, and the officer drove Charlie home, Patsy Cline in the speakers.

  At home he drank bourbon; it seemed the thing to do. The whiskey relaxed him; was this how Omar felt, steering into the Lexus? Without realizing it, Charlie had turned on every light in the house. His hunger returned and a light-headedness set in, but he didn’t eat. He sat at the table for another hour, doing exactly nothing, while the desire—the need—to talk with someone manifested itself. He felt pieces of the need gravitating together until they formed a complete thought: Call someone. Of course Edie came to mind, but with her came the improbability of negotiating answering services and nurses, convincing someone to wake her. Wait, then; let her rest. The same hesitation with the woman. He’d have to persuade the hospital staff, but that would be complicated by not knowing her name, nor even to which hospital she’d been admitted. His mother or father, a partner from the firm? He dismissed everyone. The night moved around him like mist.

  The phone ringing. His mother-in-law, Esther, sneaked into the hall of the nursing home. When he told her Edie was in bed, she sounded affronted. A moment later, she asked, “How is Dallas this time of year?”

  “Corpus. We moved. You’re in Dallas.”

  “I can’t wait to see you,” Esther said, unfazed. She perpetually thought they were visiting the next weekend; Edie always told her they were. “I haven’t spoken with the girl lately. I get worried, I worry something’s happened.”

  “She’ll call soon.”

  “The ragamuffin’s wearing her out, I guess.” She laughed. This was a grandmother’s compliment.

  Charlie walked to the window, feeling dizzy. He pictured Esther huddled in the hall, her body folded over by osteoporosis but ready to bolt if an orderly rounded the corner. She wheezed. When he’d first met her, she’d been a member of a power-walking group, five widows who pumped around shopping malls before the stores opened. That she would never spend a morning that way again felled him. She’d toiled for two decades in a dry-cleaning plant, then hawked Tupperware, then she started getting lost in parking lots, wandering off in her nightgowns; she had told him that Edie learned to roller-skate behind a Catholic church. Suddenly the last thing Charlie wanted—it seemed the one abuse he couldn’t endure—was for Esther to hang up.

  The window was beaded and streaked with condensation. He said, “I’m looking at little Esther right now. She’s sleeping. I have to whisper.”

  “Yes, don’t disturb her.” Esther had lowered her voice, too. Outside, June bugs batted off a streetlamp.

  “Do you know what we’ve started calling her?” His voice surprised him. Then before she could answer, he said, “The little bug.”

  “Oh, she’s a beautiful bug. I show her pictures to the nurses.”

  He knew her eyes were wide, her hands jittering with local tremors. When he’d signed the forms for the medic, he couldn’t stop his fingers from shaking. His name came out spidery, illegible.

  “Esther, I want you to hear her.”

  “Oh, Charles, would you?”

  “Listen. Listen to your granddaughter,” he said and extended the phone into the air.

  He’d always expected a rift to divide his life, a meridian by which he would measure before and after. Now he realized that no such divisions existed, just a steady letting go until you found yourself in a place you never thought you’d be. In an ambulance or nursing home, in a psychiatric ward, alone. More than ever he wanted to call Edie. He’d wanted to call since the morning they found blood on the sheets, for her to pull him to her breasts and console him. She had invited this, but he’d never been able to oblige, never would be able to. He thought to take one of her sleeping pills, but remembered they were all gone.

  He raised the phone. The line stayed quiet. He thought Esther had left the receiver dangling to hide from an orderly. Again it seemed he’d concocted the whole ordeal, that he only needed to dislodge this waking dream before it gained purchase in his mind. The veneer was thinning, though, like the night, and soon everything would be visible, undeniable.

  “Esther?”

  “Isn’t that something?” she said after a moment. “The little bug snores.”

  IN LESS THAN A MINUTE, THE NEW NURSE—JASPAL Janecki, two weeks on the job, left momentarily alone and more afraid of her patients than her superiors—would knock urgently on Edith Banks’s door and take an unprecedented, probably job-endangering chance to ask her to sit with Donald Miller; his sister was unconscious at Spohn and he’d asked for Edie. A strangely clarifying swirl of pride and despair would spread through her, a bracing call to arms that tingled in her cheeks and scalp. But the nurse hadn’t yet knocked, and Edie lay in bed, Ambien-drowsy and about to remember the crabs.

  She had loved Corpus, loved it. The house, too. A two-story Victorian on Brawner Parkway, hardwood floors and a porch in a quiet neighborhood half a mile from the marina. Four bedrooms, theirs and a spare, one for Charlie’s office and one to convert into a nursery. She visited the city’s few museums—small, but lovely places to pass time, to bring children—and she drove over the causeway and watched men fish. She started a diary. A satin-covered notebook filled with details of the pregnancy—she had become farsighted and her sense of smell had intensified; she could no longer abide grilled food—that she would eventually present to her daughter; though they had decided against an amnio, she always considered the child a girl. She wrote that eventually she wanted to volunteer at a library or day care, get involved with PTA. She wrote of driving around in Fido: Fido is our car. Or she wrote about staying home. How she opened the windows and let the balmy breeze ventilate the rooms; how she sat on the porch—I’d always wanted a porch and now we have one!—with headphones on her stomach, playing Mozart.

  She had always known she’d be a mother, had known it more surely than she’d known she would ever marry. Fear had vanished. There was anxiety, but not doubt, not melancholy. She hoped the girl got her eyes, but not her rusty hair or bunched-up teeth. She wanted her to have Charlie’s confidence, his bounding, resilient verve. He was like a boy, really, industrious and easily dazzled, deadly serious and short-sighted; how many nights had she reminded him to eat, to stop picking his nose while he read? Years before, she’d filled out a survey that asked how your partner would react if stranded on a deserted island; she’d answered that he would build sand castles. But he’d become a stand-up father. In the mornings he slipped her feet into socks before they touched the floor; he handed her scissors handle first; whenever she was going to the beach, he set out sunblock, shades, a floppy hat.

  The beaches—Mustang Island, Padre Island, Malachite— were often deserted in the late mornings, her favorite time to go. An occasional surfer or fisherman, a boy riding a horse or an older couple combing the shore, but usually she was alone, listening to the waves roll and slosh. She hunted for sea glass and shells among the dried kelp, the barnacled driftwood. Once, she’d carted home a bag full of small rose-and-mahogany-striped conchs and soaked them in bleach overnight. When she woke the next morning—her body still craving its first cigarette but settling for water and a grapefruit—a dozen alien-looking hermit crabs were scuttling around the table and floor, down the ladder-backs. Wake Charlie? No. She gathered the crabs in a shoe box and left him a note: Gone to fabric store. Love, E.

  Why lie? Because he would worry.

  The island was abandoned. The sky, like the water, was mother-of-pearl gray, the air unseasonably brisk, poised. She set the box halfway between the scruffy dunes and played-out waves, unsure which would be best. The crabs stayed so still she feared they’d suffocated. Whoops, she thought. Finally one stirred, then another and another; then they all came alive. Some were spindly and slow, some so swift and graceful they seemed to swim in the air. Maybe this gave her the idea, or maybe she remembered having always wanted to, or maybe no idea formed at all and she acted on perfect compulsion, instinct. She undressed. She waded out, holding her newly swelling belly. Her nipples tightened, the w
ater cut into her calves, thighs. Elegant waves formed and broke beyond the outer bar, sand slipped and shifted and collapsed beneath her heels. She’d read about a child who’d misunderstood undertow as undertoad, and feeling the riptide’s far-off, indifferent tug, she wondered if all children misunderstood this, if hers would. She pictured an amicable cartoon frog, fat with as many good swimmers as bad ones, setting up a picnic in the deep. Her teeth chattered; she couldn’t stop smiling. Then she ran, bounded into the breakers and screamed and giggled in a widespread, beautiful lightness, a maternal ecstasy. She turned and surveyed the sweeping, sinuous shore beyond the heaving waves. The sea oats feathering the slope of the sand, a rickety lifeguard tower in the distance, the mouth of a trail leading into the tawny dunes and the limitless mystery they promised lovers, children. Mystery? Yes, mystery. There was a shadowed life here—the sand dollars inching just under the mud flats; a pocket gopher nibbling the roots of magenta morning glories; the diamondback basking in the sun; the coyotes still damp-coated from slinking in the tide; the crabs claiming new shells; the scissortails prancing among the laughing gulls just about to take flight. Who knew where they’d land in an hour, next year? She only knew where they were now, with her, only knew her life was becoming more than it had been. Here we are, she thought. Here we are.

  The Widow

  HER HUSBAND KISSING HER CHEEK, THEN STEPPING outside and scooping the dog into his arms. How tenderly he lowered him to the truck seat, how nonchalantly he set the pistol on the floorboards before driving away into the night. The dog was a miniature black poodle named Peppy, and Richard had owned him since before they were married. Peppy’s muzzle was silver, like his paws. He had cataracts and he’d not eaten in days.

  She lay in bed when her husband returned. She heard him wash with the garden hose, then enter the house and creep into their bedroom to unload his pockets onto the dresser.

  “Where’s your shirt?” she asked, then before he could answer, “Oh.”