His hairy pincers pulled Wayne up and out and soon he was spinning, his eyes covered with white, woolly threads as thick as the rope he used to see in coils on the docks. Bill’s voice, tinged with a largeness Wayne had never heard before, whistled into his ears. “You want to fuck my daughter. I’ll destroy you.”
It was then that Wayne had woken up. Now, he stood, weeping in the shower, his face in his hands. He was a sick fuck. She was a child. He was her father’s best friend. He deserved no better than what he had. No, he deserved even less. He was a disgusting, short pervert. He knew it now.
He avoided Bill for a whole week, not answering the phone, telling his parents to take messages as he sat in the living room with the curtains drawn. Whenever he heard a car door slam outside, he ran out the back and down the alley, sometimes without a jacket, often without any money. When he returned, he crept from tree to lamp post to Dumpster and slipped in through the basement, where he could listen for the sounds of anyone other than his mother or father. He slept when he wasn’t smoking.
One day, Wayne walked through the alley to the corner store, just enough money in his pocket to buy a bag of dill pickle chips. It was risky, he knew, to be out in daylight like this, but he had managed to not see Bill for eight days, and he thought his luck would hold. After all, Bill could take a hint. He understood things. As he rounded the corner on to Dunlevy, he heard a sharp bark behind him.
“Wayne! That you?”
He looked to the right and left but there was nowhere to hide, not a rhododendron or a garbage can or anything. He stopped, fingering the coins in his front pocket. Then he turned around.
“I thought that was you. Where’ve you been?” Bill was leaning against his car, half-hidden behind a courier truck.
“I’ve been around. Just busy.”
“Yeah?” Bill squinted and pushed himself to a standing position. “Busy with what?”
Wayne paused, but then stood up straighter. “I’ve been looking for a job.”
“Any luck?”
“No, not really.”
Bill stepped forward and put his arm around Wayne’s shoulder. “I know, buddy. It’s not easy out there, is it?”
Together, they walked to a café a few doors down and ordered coffee and Danishes. “I’ll pay,” said Bill. Wayne sat as still as possible, worried that any movement might break the goodwill or betray what he had been thinking for the last week. For several minutes, Bill didn’t seem to notice. But then, after he had stirred another spoonful of sugar into his cup, he looked at Wayne’s eyes and sighed.
“What’s bugging you? You look like shit.”
Wayne didn’t know what to say. He stared at his hands on the table top, smoothing and smoothing his paper napkin until it was flat and limp. Could he say, I can’t stop thinking about your teenaged daughter because I’m a dirty old man? He glanced up at Bill’s hard face and the thickness of his neck. No, he couldn’t. It had to be a secret.
Bill leaned forward. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you for a while.”
Wayne jumped in his seat. He wondered if he could get up and run out.
“I know how hard it is to not have a job, and to be living in a situation that pretty much just sucks. I just want you to know that I’m here for you.”
Wayne thought he might cry. Instead, he blinked hard and drank some more coffee.
“We need to stick together, man. You and me.” Bill reached over and knuckled the top of Wayne’s head.
Finally, Wayne spoke. “You and me.”
Bill grinned. “I should swing by the house tonight to see the girls. Want to come?”
Every joint and sinew in his body screamed no, but Wayne thought of Casey’s innocent questions and the way she listened as if his answers really mattered. It couldn’t do any harm just to talk to the girl. He couldn’t touch her anyway, not with her father and sister there. They would be safe, spinning around each other in their own little conversation, insulated by family. He rubbed the back of his neck before saying anything.
“Sure. Why not?”
—
It was just like the last time. Casey greeted them at the door, they chatted quietly for an hour in the living room while Jamie and Bill played cards in the kitchen. At ten, the girls went to bed and the men sat out back, smoking, drinking and not saying much. The quiet of the night was light and perfect and neither wanted to break it with the weight of words that didn’t mean much anyway.
Wayne began watching the house lights. Next door, the kitchen remained lit until eleven. Across the alley, every room was dark until someone turned on a lamp for a minute and then turned it off again. Wayne imagined a man and woman, each dreaming peacefully until the man began to scream and swat the air with open hands. The woman sat up, turned on the lamp on her bedside table and shook her man awake. And then, he rolled over with a grunt and she fell back on the pillows, slipping away again into the swaddles of sleep. No words exchanged. Just breath.
When Wayne looked over, Bill was asleep, his head resting on the back of the nylon deck chair. For a while, Wayne thought he looked like a child, his mouth slack, his cheeks rounded by his quiet snoring. But then he turned and his jaw grew tight again and Wayne was reminded that Bill was a hard man, one who had never taken his failures in stride. Years ago, when they were in high school, a white kid with a greasy ducktail had snickered when Melanie McIvor had turned down Bill’s request for a dance on Valentine’s Day. That night, Bill had waited behind the trash cans in the schoolyard for that blond ducktail. He beat him quickly and efficiently, uttering no words so that the only sounds that echoed off the blacktop were the boy’s moans. Wayne had watched, as Bill expected him to, but felt himself shrinking inside, as if his guts were trying to make themselves invisible. Bill’s rage simmered constantly, even when he was simply chewing gum, even now. It was only a matter of time before it boiled and spit and burned. Wayne hoped he would never see it again.
As silently as he could, Wayne walked back through the kitchen and into the bathroom. There was no way to mask the sound of a grown man pissing in a short toilet, but he had to go, even if the noise was nuclear at midnight in a house full of sleeping people. When he was finished, he crept out into the hall, looking for his shoes. He would just walk home by himself.
In the doorway to the kitchen, Casey stood so still that Wayne might not have seen her at all if she hadn’t cleared her throat. She was wearing a white T-shirt and blue flannel pants, her hair long and falling straight over her shoulders. There were no lights on, just the weak glow of the street lamps through the uncovered window over the sink, yet Wayne knew exactly how beautiful and slight she looked. He knew the outline of her body under her clothes. He knew the way her eyes bored into his face and down into his belly that she could see everything he wanted. She wasn’t afraid. She wouldn’t be standing there, waiting, if she was.
“I heard you in the bathroom,” she said evenly. “Is Dad asleep?”
“Yes,” said Wayne, so softly that he wondered if he had even said it at all.
“He does that. Falls asleep outside or in my mom’s room. He always manages to wake up before she comes home, though. That’s how much they hate each other.”
Wayne ached for the sadness in her voice. He knew that Ginny and Bill didn’t hate each other; in fact, they loved each other with so much ferocity that Ginny could no longer watch Bill fail, and Bill could no longer stand the disappointment in her eyes. Casey needed to know that. It would make sense to her. He could be the one to tell her and make everything in her heart right again. He stepped forward and took her hand.
“They love each other,” he began, “they just can’t live together, that’s all.” This was a poor rendering of the complicated truth that he held in his head, but it was what he could do. “They’ll work it out, Casey. I know it.”
“What they have isn’t love. It’s bullshit.”
She looked down at the floor and Wayne thought she might cry, but she didn’t. Instead, she lifted up her chin to face him. “I want better than that.”
She tugged at his hand and he stepped into her, his body square and thick against hers. When they kissed, he felt the warmth from her lips in every last cell of his skin. He might have burst into flame. But he didn’t care.
He picked her up and carried her through the kitchen and down the basement steps. She clung to his neck, but she wasn’t shivering. Her grip was deliberate and steady. She knew what was happening and she sighed, a deep release that sounded like the wind off the ocean on a hot, hot day. When he laid her down on an old yellow sofa and pulled off her clothes, he gazed at her body—lean and tan, with perfect, triangular breasts. She stared at him in the night and smiled slightly, crookedly. He held her hips in his two hands and kissed her.
He watched her open her mouth and inhale sharply before sitting up and grasping his shoulders. “Yes,” she said.
Together they moved and he thought he might never be happier or more in love. He felt like melted chocolate coating the tongue of the girl he was fucking and he knew this moment might never come again but it didn’t matter. Because it was here and he held this shimmering creature in his arms while she breathed like she wanted this, like this was the man she had been waiting for and this was the love that she knew she deserved. He shivered against her cool skin and she bit his ear.
When they were done, she played her fingers down his back, running the tips against his skin. They might have laid there for five minutes or an hour. Wayne didn’t know. He didn’t count the seconds or her breath or the beat of his own, wildly skipping heart. After a while, she pushed at his chest and he raised himself on his elbows. That face. What kind of girl had a face as perfect as that?
“You should go,” she said quietly. “Before Dad wakes up.”
Quickly, Wayne dressed and gathered his shoes and went upstairs, still buttoning his jeans. Casey followed and held open the front door as he leaned back in to kiss her one more time.
“You’ll come again, right?”
Wayne knew the prudent answer, but the flush in her cheeks wanted another answer altogether. He pulled her in close and breathed into her ear, “As soon as I can.” And as he stepped backward on to the front porch, she shut the door. He stayed until he heard the lock click into place.
—
That was how they started, and how they went on for five more weeks. It became so easy that Wayne began to visit even when Bill didn’t, taking advantage of the long hours that Ginny spent away from the house. Eventually, Jamie figured it out, but kept her mouth shut and stayed in the bedroom with the door tightly closed. Wayne and Casey always chose the basement. It was neutral, a place that belonged to no one and was therefore only theirs.
They talked too. Long conversations about how they could be together. Wayne tried to convince Casey that they should wait to tell anyone until she had graduated high school, but she only laughed at this suggestion.
“That’s four years,” she said. “I might be dead by then.”
And so, they agreed to wait until she had finished grade nine before telling her parents. Wayne hoped she would reconsider before then, but he knew, deep down, she wouldn’t.
“I can still go to school and live with you. We’ll get an apartment. It doesn’t have to be fancy. We’ll just need to find jobs first, you know?”
It all seemed so easy when she talked like that, as if it was just one step that inevitably led to another that eventually led to happiness. Sometimes, at two in the morning, he started to believe her. Of course, it could be simple. Of course.
But then he remembered that she was fourteen. And that her parents would be furious. And that none of this would ever be easy. He tried to tell her that once, but she kissed him and he thought, I can love her right now and deal with the rest later. And so he did.
One night, as Wayne sat in the backyard with Casey’s head in his lap, she opened her eyes wide and smiled. “I have something to tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“I think I’m pregnant.”
He jumped up, shaking her off him. “What did you say?”
Casey stood up too and grabbed one of his hands in both of hers. “My period’s late. I think I’m pregnant. Are you happy?”
That question again. Wayne began to think that she didn’t even know what it meant. “But you’re a kid!”
“Excuse me?”
It was the wrong thing to say and Wayne knew it. But it had never occurred to him that a fourteen-year-old girl, even one that he believed was a woman, could get pregnant. He felt thickly, indisputably stupid. He breathed out and looked up at the night sky.
“I didn’t mean that. You just took me by surprise.”
Casey stood with her hands folded over her chest. “Is it so bad? To have a baby?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, then we can tell my parents about it tomorrow. I mean, they’ll be mad, but once they get that there’s going to be a baby, it’ll all be okay.”
No, Wayne screamed in his head. No, it won’t be okay. He said, “We don’t have to tell them.”
“What do you mean?”
“We don’t have to keep the baby.”
Casey stamped her feet on the hard ground. “Do you mean have an abortion?”
He winced, but there was no going back now. “Yes.”
“I’m going to have your baby! This isn’t a random baby with someone I just met on the street, Wayne.” And she sat down on the porch steps with a thud, hands covering her eyes.
She was right: this baby was his. This whole mess was his fault. He should have known better. But it was too late now. He stared at Casey’s small body hunched on the stairs. Her jacket pooled around her, baggy and red. As short and thin as she was, she was also solid, a densely packed ball of muscle and skin and unbreakable bones. She might have been an optimist who believed that Wayne was the perfect man, but she was also unwavering. Once she knew what she wanted, there was no convincing her otherwise.
He sat down beside her and put his arms around her narrow shoulders. “I’m sorry. This is our baby. I know.”
She looked up at him, eyes red and swollen. “We can tell my parents tomorrow?”
Wayne sighed. “Sure. There’s no point in waiting.”
Casey kissed his neck before whispering, “It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
Wayne didn’t see. But he let the warmth from her breath blow into his collar and wrap itself around his throat. If they stayed still like this, maybe nothing would ever change and it would be night in this yard forever and forever. No babies. No Bill. Wayne blinked. He couldn’t cry. Not now. Not until it was all over.
—
That evening, Wayne sat on his parents’ front step waiting for Bill to pick him up. The plan was to act as if everything was normal until Bill had drunk exactly two beers. Only one, and he’d still be sober. Three and he might be raging. After they talked to Bill, Wayne would wait until Ginny came home at five, and then they would tell her too, stressing that this would be her first grandchild. A baby. A beautiful, chubby baby. Wayne hoped it would work.
He also hoped they would see there was no way around it now. Casey was pregnant. He wanted to be with her. He could leave her or deny his involvement. Instead, he was going to tell them how much he loved her. Maybe they would respect that. Maybe they would see that it could be worse.
As Bill’s car turned the corner and pulled into the curb, Wayne bit down hard on his lower lip. The blood was warm and thick on his tongue. Still alive, he thought. Good.
It took only two minutes to drive to Ginny’s house. Bill drove with one hand on the wheel and another holding a lit cigarette. He winked at Wayne and said, “What’s got into you?”
Every muscle in his body strained w
ith the effort of smiling. “Just tired.”
“Yeah? Well, we won’t stay that long. Just long enough to have a couple of beers.”
The night progressed as it always did, except this time, Casey and Wayne watched Bill closely, checking for mood swings or bad news or fast drinking. But there was nothing out of the ordinary, just Bill sitting on the kitchen floor while Jamie tried to braid his collar-length hair. After his second beer, Bill got up and walked to the bathroom, humming “Great Balls of Fire.”
Casey said to Wayne, “We have to tell him when he comes back.”
He felt like he was crumpling from the outside in, one inch of skin at a time. He nodded at Casey and then closed his eyes. He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. Maybe he could just disappear.
Wayne felt a tap on his shoulder and heard Bill’s voice. “Are you okay? You look sick.”
When he opened his eyes, he saw Bill kneeling on the floor beside him and Casey standing behind. He thought he might throw up. “Yeah, maybe I’m not feeling so good,” he muttered.
“Dad, I have something I need to tell you.” Casey stood with her hands on her hips. Battle-ready, thought Wayne.
“Is it important? Because I think I should take Wayne home.”
“He’s not sick.” Casey sounded irritated, which made Wayne smile a little. “You have to listen to me right now.”
Bill shook his head and stood up, facing his daughter. “All right, spit it out.”
“I’m pregnant.”
For half a minute, Bill said nothing, only stood still, his eyes locked on Casey’s face. She didn’t move either. Wayne thought he saw a tremor of fear pass over her face, but then it was gone and all that was left was her defiance, which he had once fallen in love with but was now worried about.
Finally, Bill cleared his throat. “Pregnant. With whose baby?”
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