The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 3

  The salon’s phone chittered, and the receptionist answered it in her silvery voice. Two women in rimless glasses and pinstriped suits, calves-deep in the burble and fizz of their foot baths, grumbled about someone’s wedding reception. A plummy-voiced man, speaking to a dumbstruck woman sitting beside him, told the endless, endless story of his divorce. Music—some kind of multiculti ambient chill Pure Moods mush, with sitar—played on a bookshelf stereo.

  Amid the general hubbub, a child sat at the edge of the rattan couch with her hands lying motionless in her lap and her gaze fixed on a point somewhere in the middle distance. She wore an orange T-shirt, green jeans, purple socks, and red Keds sneakers, like any kindergarten-aged girl who’d been given leave to dress herself—but she was so prim and silent and straight-backed that Corinne found herself staring in overt fascination. When the girl looked over and her black eyes locked on Corinne’s, and her small jaw clenched and flexed, Corinne flinched and turned away. She scanned the salon. Whose child was it, anyway?

  “Round or square?” Corinne’s manicurist had spread a cloth across the table, and now she arranged her instruments and touched everything lightly with the tips of her fingers. Her mask hung from one ear by its elastic strap and bobbled in the air. Her own fingernails, cut to the quick, were flecked with polish—red, black, purple, pink, blue.

  “Round, please,” Corinne said, laying her hands on the square field of white terry. She cut her eyes toward the couch, where the little girl had resumed her thousand-yard stare.

  “Same color?”

  Same color as Corinne’s toenails, she meant. You Don’t Know Jacques! It was a nonsensical name for a luscious color, a purplish gray that reminded Corinne of the wax bloom on the skin of a plum. She could almost feel it down there on her toes. She could see in her mind’s eye how it made her pale squarish feet look exotic and mysterious. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, and moved the bottle across the table.

  The manicurist turned Corinne’s hands side to side in the light. She laid them down again and opened the bottle of You Don’t Know Jacques! When the brush emerged from the bottle, suffused with the gray-violet polish, Corinne’s heart lurched in her chest. The color made her happy—so absurdly happy. It was the color of travertine, of wine-poached pears, of the ginger-jar lamp she’d had in her childhood bedroom, of the Chuck Taylors she’d worn a thousand days in a row in middle school.

  “It’s the little things,” she said. “Am I right?”

  A drop of polish splashed onto Corinne’s knuckle. The manicurist had stopped with the brush hanging in the air. Her eyes were fixed on a point beyond Corinne’s right shoulder. It must have something to do with that odd little girl. Perhaps, to no one’s surprise, the child’s head had begun to spin around, or her eyes had begun to glow like hot coals. But no. The girl had stood up, and by standing had taken on the aspect of an ordinary child, a frail-looking and rather startled child at that.

  As Corinne swung around in her chair, there was a resounding whump. The door trembled and squawked in its frame. Someone—the plummy-voiced man, Corinne thought—cried out in shock.

  Outside on the concrete, a bird lay dazed and quivering. The poor thing must have flown into the window. Corinne went and looked out, though she stopped short of opening the door. A strange creature, this bird—white feathers, pink beak, pink feet. An albino crow, perhaps—or no, a grackle, given the size. The bird rolled over and shook itself. It staggered toward the salon as if it meant to march right in. Gasping, then giggling at her own jumpiness, Corinne stepped back and turned from the door.

  All conversation had stopped. Everyone’s eyes were on her. The eyes of the suited women and the nail techs and the plummy-voiced divorcé and his dumbstruck girlfriend—all on Corinne, as if she were bound to deliver an explanation for the bird’s errant flight. The little girl appeared to be on the verge of tears.

  “Albino,” Corinne said, addressing the child’s clavicle, more or less. “I think— I think it’s a grackle.”

  Returning to her chair, she found her nail tech wearing a deeply bewildered expression. It was impossible to go on as if nothing had happened, wasn’t it? But what else were they supposed to do?

  Corinne thought she heard her phone buzzing in her purse. It was probably her mother. With five or six hours to go till the start of Daddy’s birthday party, there could be any number of tasks still undone—streamers and banners to be hung, ice buckets to be filled, napkins to be ironed, wine to be decanted. And perhaps Corinne had already pledged to do something and had since forgotten. Was she supposed to pick up the cake? Polish the silverware? Fill the tiki torches with citronella oil? Weed the flower beds? Make three hundred sliders, half with cheese and half without?

  She fished around in her purse until she found her phone. Not Mama, Andrei. Corinne turned to the manicurist. “It’s my husband. I’ll just—” She waved toward the lavatory. Grabbing her purse and tucking it under her arm, she got up and hurried across the room.

  Conversation had resumed, more quietly than before. Corinne went into the restroom and flipped on the light. The overhead fan came to life with some preliminary rattling and squeaking, as if it needed to clear its throat. She tapped the button to accept Andrei’s call.

  “Hello, my love,” she said. “Are you on your way?”

  “You don’t sound happy,” Andrei said.

  “I don’t?”

  “You sound lugubrious.”

  “I do?” Corinne stared up at the grate of the yattering fan. “I don’t think I do.”

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to argue.”

  Corinne sighed. Okay, so it was going to be like that. She said, again, “Are you on your way?”

  “This is— Look, this is a complete goat rodeo. The DBA thinks the database needs to be refactored. There’s this guy, this code monkey, who doesn’t understand the concept of a goddamn view—”

  “Andrei, sweetie. I don’t know what any of that means.”

  He sighed. “We’ll be here all weekend. I don’t think I can get back until Tuesday at the earliest.”

  “Oh my God, Andrei. Tuesday?”

  “I have to work if I’m the only one working. You know I’m not wrong.”

  How to answer that? Where to begin? She might say that a bachelor’s degree in economics was virtually useless, particularly in a state whose fiscal policy comprised the prayer of Jabez, the Gadsden flag, and the Laffer curve. She might say that he had talked her into quitting grad school. That he’d said to her, I don’t want to be my kids’ grandparents’ age. That he’d said, You don’t want your water breaking in the middle of your thesis defense. That she might not be earning a wage, but she volunteered four or five days a week at the public library. That yes, she loved getting her nails done, but it was essentially her only indulgence. That she was a careful steward of their finances.

  But she said none of that. She was not going to take the bait. She was not going to let him lead her into the same fight over and over. Instead, she stopped and took a breath. In a tight whisper, she said, “You can’t make me pregnant unless you’re here, Andrei.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “Is it that time again?”

  Corinne felt, all at once, as if she were going to weep. If the sudden downtick in her basal body temperature weren’t enough, if the tenderness in her breasts weren’t enough, if the twinge in her left flank weren’t enough, then put them all together and add in a big fat mood swing and there you had your answer: Yes. It was that time again.

  More gently than before, Andrei said, “I’ll come home, then. Or I’ll try. Maybe I can grab an early evening flight tonight and come back here in the morning. It’s a quick hop, ATL to CHS. It’s not that long a flight. Only an hour in the air, right?”

  Flattening her hand, Corinne looked at her unpainted nails. She still had that drop of polish on the first knuckle of her middle finger. “Daddy’s party’s tonight,” she said. “His birthday party.”<
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  She closed her eyes and waited. The silence on the other end of the phone was like a solid object—black, opaque, dense as granite. It was a silence that had its own gravitational force.

  At last, just as she’d begun to wonder if he’d disconnected the call, he said, “Tomorrow night, then. I can come home tomorrow night. That’s not too late, is it?”

  “I don’t think so, no,” she said, at once on the verge of both tears and laughter. “I don’t think that’s too late.”

  “All right,” he said. And then, “I love you.”

  “Moi aussi.”

  They said their goodbyes. She waited for him to disconnect, and he seemed to be waiting for her. At the sound of a knock on the door, Corinne quietly ended the call. She dropped her phone into her purse and went out. The receptionist scurried into the bathroom and banged the door shut.

  It was strangely quiet. The Pure Moods mush had ceased playing. The other customers had vanished, and the nail techs had gone outside to smoke cigarettes. That left Corinne alone with the little girl in green jeans and red Keds. The child sat in the same spot as before, only now the albino grackle lay in her lap, swaddled in a nest of hand towels. She stroked the creature’s narrow white head.

  “Okay,” Corinne said, mostly to herself, “this is unusual.”

  At the sound of her voice, the girl looked up. Her eyes were dark brown, flecked with gold—not nearly so black as Corinne had first thought. Holding the bird made her seem, if anything, rather tender and delicate. Corinne grabbed a wicker chair by the arm and dragged it over to the child and sat.

  “You made a friend.”

  The girl nodded.

  “Does he have a name?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “How about you? Do you have a name?”

  The girl nodded. It seemed she might leave it at that, until at length she said, “Lorelei.”

  Lorelei. A suicide-cum-siren who lured sailors to their deaths. Perfect. At least this particular Lorelei had an ordinary child’s voice—slightly nasal, slightly flat, and probably incapable of luring anyone to the nether reaches of anywhere.

  Corinne glanced down, and the grackle’s gleaming red eye seemed to hold her gaze. But then again—

  Tilting her head, she watched the bird. In all the many moments she studied it, it neither breathed nor blinked nor moved a feather.

  “Is your mother around, by chance?”

  “Why are you talking to me?” the girl said. Her brown eyes flashed. “Strangers aren’t supposed to talk to me.”

  The bathroom door opened, and the receptionist returned. She went to the front of the salon and rapped on the windows. The nail techs filed in again. The phone rang. Someone pressed a button on the stereo, and the sitar began to play.

  One of the manicurists sat on the couch next to Lorelei. They exchanged a few words in low voices. Neither of them spoke nearly long enough to take in the topic of death, impermanence, and the possibility of grackle heaven. Still, Lorelei nodded and sniffled a little and let herself be led outside, where she swaddled the grackle with towels. What she and her mother did after that looked a lot like prayer.

  Corinne’s manicurist approached. “Okay,” she said, motioning toward her station. It was, of course, just as they’d left it—the instruments laid out on the fresh white cloth, the bottle of nail polish standing to one side. “You ready?”

  You Don’t Know Jacques! no longer had the power to brighten Corinne’s mood. It no longer looked exotic and mysterious. It looked merely dull. The color of wine-poached pears, sure—but also the color of limp, used-up grape skins. And hadn’t her ginger-jar lamp and Chuck Taylors been a purer, prettier shade of violet? Maybe, as it turned out, she didn’t know Jacques at all—or didn’t want to.

  “You know,” she said, backing away, “thank you, but— I think that’s all for today. Y’all must get some crazy reviews on Yelp.”

  She plucked a wad of bills out of her wallet and handed them to the receptionist. Way too much—it was way too much money for a pedicure alone. The receptionist’s eyes widened. Just then, the salon’s phone rang, and when the receptionist reached to answer it, Corinne slipped away without another word.

  On the sidewalk, Lorelei and her mother were still giving the grackle its send-off to the great aviary in the sky. Corinne sat in her car and watched them until they went back inside. She couldn’t see them after that—the salon’s front windows reflected the parking lot and sky, and the glare across the glass admitted only the briefest glimpses of movement beyond—but she imagined Lorelei returning to the rattan couch. She’d be as starchy as before, in spite of her wet lashes and tear-dampened cheeks.

  It must be strange to have a child like that, a sentinel at the margins of any given room, watching with her unwavering eyes, judging any parental missteps. For that matter, it must be strange to have any child—an imp like Ben, say, or a naïf like John Carter. When Corinne thought at all about her future child—when she was driving and her mind wandered, or when she lay in bed in the morning, still in that liminal space between dreaming and waking—she pictured a tiny version of her father. Serious, handsome, bookish, affectionate, thoughtful. A little absentminded, but all the more endearing for it. But what if, instead, she got a duplicate Anna Grace? What if, as a mother, she became a duplicate Anna Grace?

  “I’m not ready,” she said aloud. “I’m not ready.”

  As soon as she said it, she waved it away. Cold feet, that was all. Parenthood would be the biggest step she’d yet taken in life. That was all.

  Her phone rang again. It was her mother, calling at last. She tapped the green button. “Hi, Mama. You’ll tell me if I sound lugubrious, won’t you?”

  “Don’t panic.”

  Corinne immediately began to panic. “What’s wrong?”

  “Your father’s in the hospital.” Somehow she seemed both to pause, as if letting the news sink in, and simultaneously to rush forward, as if hoping to thwart any kind of wild speculation. “It’s nothing serious. He just sort of collapsed, is all, and they want to keep him overnight.”

  “What do you mean, he collapsed?”

  On the other end of the line, there was a good deal of rustling, and then the dull clank of bottles. “Whatever it usually means when someone collapses. He just sort of fell over and, you know, collapsed.”

  “Mama,” she said, scrambling for her keys. “Where are you? Where’s Daddy? I’m coming. I’m on my way.”