Presumption Of Death

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  And Ben Cervantes, saving for his house and his bride, which his parents, who had returned to Mexico, no doubt would pick out for him. A conservative from a minority group, grateful to have any job at all. His nephew, Danny, had fallen into the underclass due to his lack of education.

  Ben had such fine eyes. He spoke well. Elizabeth wondered if he already had a fiancée.

  Again she had to suppress a thought that didn’t fit into the descriptive paradigm: Ben was ambitious. He might move out and away from his origins.

  Elizabeth had observed a subset among the locals: One group wanted no change, period, but the other group looked at the change going on all around them and said, get me some of that. Ben, who worked for anyone that would hire him, and George Hill, with his attempt to subdivide his property, adopting a newbie stratagem, belonged in this interesting subset.

  The newbie population on Siesta Court was small but powerful. It hadn’t felt so small because she herself had been a part of the ongoing interactions over the years, but of course she could not insert herself into the thesis.

  So: Take the Cowans and the Ballards.

  David Cowan, inherited wealth, graduate education, rootless, moved every couple of years, unconventional outlooks. He had no interest in conservation per se but wanted to preserve the status quo now that he had built his palace on Siesta Court. His money made it happen, without consideration for the environmental impact or the impact on the neighborhood.

  Britta Cowan, another flouter of the mores, only her area of impact was societal. Her dysfunctional relationship with her husband, her seductive attitudes, her negative attitudes toward her occupation, and her wild acting out made her a kind of relief valve.

  The Ballards had to be considered en bloc. Ted and Megan shared the Cowans’ rootlessness and lack of interest in conventional societal mores. They also welcomed change and had disrupted the local environment with their building projects, but wanted no more change to the environment now that they had their own homes. However, Ted and Megan were different from the Cowans in that…

  … in that they smile and flex all the time, Elizabeth thought to herself, tired. Quarter past eleven, and she had nowhere to go and nobody and nothing to do but think about these stupid people… She opened the curtains. Down the hill she could see through the mist a thin thread of river. Down there on Siesta Court, the Bunch carried on their pathetic… yes, she was losing it. She ought to knock off for the night.

  She took off her headphones and turned the tape on again, loud, letting the noise of the party fill the room. The material wasn’t very useful. The newbies and locals alike had been so disturbed by Britta’s outrageous behavior that…

  Elizabeth remembered how Ben had lightly, but with emphasis, pushed that slut Britta away from him. She liked that.

  She heard loud talking on the tape. Right here, Britta had gone up to the group of men and now Elizabeth heard her say again:

  “What’re you guys talking about, hmm?”

  And that was Sam’s voice, boisterous from whiskey, answering:

  “Danny. We’re toasting Danny.”

  Then she heard some confused, alcohol-fueled laughter from the group of men, and one of them said:

  “Good riddance.”

  She hadn’t heard that line before. How could he speak so coldly about Danny? Who was that? She pressed rewind and went back and heard again: “Good riddance.”

  Then she heard faintly, in the background, “Yeah.” It sounded like a chorus. Perplexed, she shrugged and turned the tape off.

  Her mood changed. She sat for a moment staring at the screensaver. Then she opened the file that had her journal in it. She wondered if there would ever be hope for her, and wrote:

  Our children are our happiness

  But they are gone tomorrow

  Like meteors they fly

  Brilliant in our sky

  She was losing it. The rain no longer pleased her. At the stove, she lit a long brown Sherman’s cigarette on the burner, the heat of the gas fire hot on her lips. Crazy, she could set her hair on fire. Midnight. She should go to the gym in the morning. She could call Debbie in the morning to see if she wanted to have lunch.

  Debbie never had any doubts about anything. She was immersed, local to the bone. Once Elizabeth had been a local. Now she was just-outside. Outside all of it. Outside life.

  Turning to leave the kitchen, Elizabeth saw the snapshot on the refrigerator freshly, as if it hadn’t been there for a year. One moment May had been with her, a small warm companion who would share her time on the planet, then she had… been removed from the study. Yes. The mother-daughter study had been terminated for unknown reasons. And Jake. No time to work out their problems, just a disappearance, abrupt, irrevocable.

  Viciously, she yanked open the door of the cabinet above the refrigerator, searching for the Courvoisier.

  20

  M IDNIGHT ON THIS SAME MAGNIFICENT TUESDAY night on Chews Ridge, ambient light low, skies crystalline. David Cowan saw the Trifid Nebula materialize on his screen as the thirty-six-inch reflector followed its computerized instructions. The light in the control room had been set as dimly as possible to see the detail. “Ray, you have to see this,” he said.

  Ray, at the next table full of computer equipment, grunted and came over. A small astrophysicist with a beard, he worked at MIRA full-time.

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  “More than beautiful.” Rose, it was, shading from pale to brilliant pink and deepening to red on its three petals, shedding light below it, a rose. One new star seemed to shine from its center, though David knew that was a trick of the galaxy, the star was actually much closer.

  He was peering forty-five hundred light years into space, and the grandness of it, the spectacularness of it, the knowledge of the vast energies roiling and twisting all around this pitiful planet where he existed, were so good for forgetting. He typed in the commands that would photograph the nebula but continued to stare at it.

  “Sometimes, looking into it, always bright, always superb, I feel like I’m falling forward, leaving forever. There’s vertigo, movement as I leave my body,” he told Ray.

  Ray didn’t answer. Beauty wasn’t visual to him, it was mathematical. His screen, showing window piled upon window of moving graphs, gave him the same kind of pleasure.

  “Rain’s coming in from the coast,” David said. “I’d say an hour or so.”

  “You ought to get back to work,” Ray said. “We have to get this mapping done by next Thursday or we lose the grant.”

  “So what?” David said.

  “We can’t keep volunteers who don’t care.”

  “I’m thinking about building my own observatory.” But even Ray knew he wouldn’t. That would take an independent, motivated person, unlike David, who didn’t like doing things on his own.

  David also knew that Ray didn’t like telling him what to do, because David had given MIRA over a hundred thousand dollars. All David asked for was access to the scopes.

  For two years now he had watched the stars, bolstered by his connection to the universe, pretending to participate in the work. David didn’t care about the work. He just liked watching through the scope, falling into that endless blackness. They wouldn’t kick him out. He knew it and so did Ray.

  David’s money had bought him salvation here, as it had brought him Britta at home.

  The affairs she heaped on him didn’t matter. He understood and accepted her as you should accept a force of nature. Audacious, untamable, reckless, she burst into his life, a hot star-forming nursery at the center of his desolate universe. She threw her colorful clothes on the floor, onto the living-room chairs; she smelled of B.O. and perfume. She kept the air ionized with her angry chatter. She was very angry that he had made her move to Carmel Valley, land of hicks, but she did what he told her. He had the money, it was that simple.

  He viewed her behavior with dispassion, because he viewed all natural things that way. That didn’t
mean he didn’t have feelings. It didn’t mean he didn’t have passion for her and didn’t get jealous. He just recognized his emotions for what they were, impulses of the organism, and rejected them because he chose to tap into detachment.

  After Sam had come Danny; perhaps Sam would come again-so what?

  What mattered, the one thing he demanded of her, was that Britta had to sleep with him every night. Sleep, lay her head next to his and breathe next to him and dream. She had to allow him to grasp her hot body in the night, allow him to hold her by her solid hips, let him press his face against her backbone. Because without her, all that would be left would be the void.

  His eye caressed the nebula. Pink, pulsing, living light came to him. Closing his eyes, he opened his mouth slightly and relaxed his face, as if the computer screen could allow him to bask in the heat he saw.

  “Phone,” Ray said, yanking him back. He handed it to David.

  “Britta?”

  But it wasn’t Britta on the phone.

  Ted came in from putting away the bicycles in the garage as Megan finished spritzing the salad with balsamic vinegar. They both still wore the black spandex shorts and tight shirts from the long bicycle tour they had taken that day-fifty miles along the foggy coast, dodging cars, pouring it on on the uphills, letting it all go on the downhills. They had had a long leg-stiffening trip home and she couldn’t believe the clock-after midnight! Oh, well, tomorrow was Wednesday. They could sleep and sleep. Neither of them was a rat-racer anymore.

  “Pont Neuf,” she said, pointing to the glass of wine awaiting him. “For our fashionably late supper.”

  “Good choice.” He took off his shoes and socks. Even his veins were carved; his legs looked like they had wires wound around them. Massaging his calf with one hand, Ted went on, “We were so fast at the Point Sur curve I thought we’d fly off the road.”

  “Incredibly cool,” Megan agreed. She set cold shrimp on ice and shrimp sauce in front of him and sat down at the table, lit by candlelight. They both dug in and in five minutes the meal was over. Following the habit they had built up over their six years together, they went out in back to the hot tub, stripped, and stretched out in the hot water for a few minutes.

  Then they went back inside. Megan lay down on the massage table in the bedroom. Ted dribbled warm oil on her, all down her back and the glutes and the thighs, and began stroking her with his long strokes, his strong arms smoothing her muscles. She relaxed fully, knowing he appreciated the tight muscles along the back of her thighs, where his hands moved now. He moved down to her ankles and feet, rubbing her big toes with his fingers, while she gave out low appreciative noises, started getting drowsy.

  “Now you,” she said.

  “Such a good day.” He lay down on his stomach on a fresh towel and she leaned over him, slick with oil, and rubbed him into as close as Ted could ever get to relaxation.

  “Ted?”

  “Mmm-hmm?” he said sleepily.

  “Did you set those fires?”

  His eyes didn’t open.

  “I wouldn’t tell,” Megan said. “Remember a long time ago when we were talking in bed and you told me about-”

  “I was a kid. It was hormones. Nobody died.”

  “But you said you got off on the fires.”

  “So?”

  “I’ve been wondering. How come you’re not interested in me lately.” His back went stiff again.

  He said, “I don’t want to talk about this. I was enjoying myself. You think I would be part of anything that caused someone to die?”

  “Ted, that’s such an interesting way not to answer me. You know, I saw you looking at Danny one time, and I thought maybe… I thought maybe you might be bi. It’s perfectly fine to be bi, you know? I’m an accepting person.”

  “So I’m bi and set fires and I killed Danny?” Ted’s muscles had hardened even more under her hand. He sat up and put his hand around her slippery neck. “What is this crap?”

  She was suffocating. His hand was a vise.

  “S-sorry,” she said.

  “Get this, Megan. I am not bi.”

  “Okay. I was wrong.” He took his hand away.

  “What crap,” he said. “Ruining such a nice day. Hey. Listen. It’s my cell phone in the kitchen.”

  He ran for it. When he came back into the bedroom, he got dressed again.

  “I have to go out, one of the neighbors thinks she saw a prowler.” He hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that to you.”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Megan said from the bed, but he was already gone.

  On the corner of Siesta Court nearest Rosie’s Bridge, George and Jolene had been in bed for hours, but George couldn’t get to sleep. His feet didn’t hurt.

  That was the problem. His feet didn’t hurt because he couldn’t feel them anymore.

  He had knocked his left foot against the bathtub that morning and in spite of Jolene taking him to the doctor, it was going to ulcerate, he knew it. He opened one eye and looked at the clock on the bedstand. Midnight.

  Not everybody gets to know what their death will be before it happens. His death was going to blind him and kill him off piece by piece. His dad had died of diabetes at forty-eight. They could keep you alive pretty near to a normal life span now. How old am I, sixty-three or sixty-four, he thought, and didn’t want to remember.

  The main thing was how to leave Jolene enough money to raise the little girls properly, like ladies. Jolene never had asked for anything else but she wanted this, did she ever. They had some money in a bank account George had never told Jolene about, but it wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t keep them for a year. It wasn’t nothing the way prices of gas and clothes and food kept going up and up. Might as well just throw that money out the window.

  Throw it out the window and let it catch on fire in the night and burn something that needed burning.

  Out back, all that useless land covered with live oak, and he couldn’t even sell it because these damn yuppies came in and got theirs and then fought to keep him from getting his. It stung like fury. Here they were developing across the river, wanting to rip down the trees, stealing his views along with his peace of mind.

  Had the fire stopped them? Maybe it was too early to tell. He had walked up there, in the meadowy area between the river and the handicapped place, before supper. They didn’t seem to be rebuilding the model home that burnt, not yet, and the land sure looked ugly where it burned.

  And after that walk, he couldn’t feel his goddamn feet. He’d have to see the doc again in the morning.

  Jolene might go twenty years with the four hundred thousand, which the realtor said he could have gotten on the Back Acre, had he been able to do what he wanted with his own damn property.

  Too late now, he’d never get that ordinance changed. He’d done everything he could for the family, right up to things he couldn’t ever tell Jolene about. All he could do now was try to live a little while longer.

  He heard the phone ring at the bedstand. Jolene beat him to it. “Oh, hi, Sam,” she said. “Everything all right?”

  She handed it to him and he listened. Then he reached down for his slippers. “What is it?” she said.

  “Sam thought he saw a prowler. I’m gonna meet him outside.”

  She sat straight up in bed, her nightie slipping down her shoulder, pretty as a postcard. “I’ll go too.”

  “You stay put. I mean it. It’s probably nothing. I’ll be right back.”

  Tory was vomiting in the bathroom again. Darryl heard her wash her mouth out. She crawled back into bed, pulling the covers off him.

  One thing after another.

  “You’ll forget all about this in a couple of months,” he said. “Remember, you had all that trouble the first trimester with Mikey.”

  Tory just rolled over to her side of the bed and gave him her back. She was mad at him for trying to talk to Elizabeth at the party, and he could make no explanation. He didn’t know what had p
ossessed him. He’d only had a couple of Coronas.

  Lately, he’d done several things he’d never dreamed he’d do. He’d been lucky, and here he was now, ready to push his luck again.

  Tory had no idea that he’d gone to see Elizabeth. Fine, let her sleep, he just wanted to go to sleep too. Darryl rolled over in the opposite direction.

  A song was running through his head, a song George sang, a cowboy ballad, and Darryl kept thinking about some of the words:

  I’ve got a good life, and a good wife,

  Too much to throw away…

  They had an appointment with Pastor Sobczek next Thursday, and Darryl was afraid all his fantasizing was going to have to end at that point, because God would be involved, and God would come down, when it came to Tory and his soon-to-be-five kids and his commitment to love and honor forever, on the side of his marriage. That his love for Tory had turned to a mild, fond kind of feeling didn’t matter to God. That he wanted Elizabeth so bad he was breathing harder just thinking about it now didn’t matter.

  God’s God. He doesn’t indulge these crazy emotions.

  Elizabeth was beautiful and tragic. Debbie had whispered the whole story to Tory and Tory had told him, all about the car crash and the husband and daughter who died.

  He couldn’t believe he’d actually gone to Elizabeth’s house. He’d talked with her, had the chance to drink her in. That’s what he had done, drunk her into his soul and made her part of him.

  But he hadn’t expressed himself right. Words didn’t come easy to him. She’d thrown him out.

  I could make her smile, he thought. I’d go to France with her if she wanted. She’d probably do something like that, go live in Paris. She had money and freedom. Wouldn’t life be fabulous with Elizabeth in Paris, free and rich?

  A man had a right to do one thing before God intervened. He had a right to make his feelings fully known to the woman he loved, privately and without humiliating his wife. If he didn’t have that, well, he’d explode. And he’d hate his wife, because he’d blame her for not letting him at least say it once to the woman.