by Reed Karaim
I thought I might start by admitting I’d been a coward. I’d had a week to talk to Anna and I hadn’t because I had no idea what to say and I didn’t want to know the reason why she couldn’t face Christina’s wedding. I was no better than the rest. I didn’t want to know and I was mad she hadn’t told me. Wasn’t I her friend? Her good friend? I turned the key, slipped the gearshift into neutral, and raced the engine, letting the whole world know I was here, and drove up the hill to Anna’s house.
The lights were still on. She opened the door in her robe, and for a moment her smallness, the vulnerability and the sensuality of her half-undressed self, stopped me, but I was heedless. I asked if I could come in. Anna looked disconcerted and told me to wait a moment. When she opened the door again she had pulled on jeans and a denim work shirt.
“I found out the truth about Hartness,” I said. “His wife’s got cancer. They’re leaving town so she can get treatment.”
Anna was still unsettled, running a hand through her bedroom hair. Her voice was even softer than usual.
“Is it bad?”
“She’s going to die. They’re going to Arizona so she can try some alternative medicine bullshit.”
“God.”
“She asked me not to tell people the details. I have no idea what I’m going to write.”
Anna walked to a small chest of drawers in the corner. She fished around and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, held one in her hand, set it down, picked it up, and brought it back to the couch unlit, avoiding my eyes.
“Why wouldn’t you help with the story?”
“Eric. What?”
“Why wouldn’t you help? Every time I asked, you made some excuse and disappeared. We could have used the help.”
Anna stared at the cigarette, halfway to her mouth. “I don’t smoke in the house.”
“And why won’t you be Christina’s best maid?”
She set the cigarette down with a small, pained smile. “Maid of honor.”
“Whatever. Why not? And don’t tell me you don’t do weddings. She’s your friend.”
Anna looked at me then, an odd desperation in her eyes.
“You come to my house, get me out of bed, to ask me this? Eric . . . please . . .”
“I told Christina I’d talk to you. Just tell me why.”
She closed her eyes. Water trickled in a pipe somewhere in the back of the house.
“I’ll do it.”
“I don’t care. Just tell me why.”
“I’ll do it, Eric.”
“I don’t care. I just want to know why. Tell me why you said no the first time. Tell me why this is such a hard thing to do.”
“I’ve told you,” Anna said. “I’ve even shown you.”
And I knew she had and I had known she had and I didn’t understand why I was sitting in her living room near midnight so angry I could hardly speak. And I didn’t understand how that anger could so suddenly dissipate, leaving only this faint taste of ash in the back of my throat.
“It’s just standing in the front of a church,” I said, “for a friend.”
Anna stared into a corner as if waiting for something or someone to appear. The house was quiet all around us.
“You better go. We’ll wake up the kids.”
“Listen—”
“It’s late, Eric.”
She led me to the door.
“The reason I didn’t help with the story,” she said, “is because I didn’t want to know if the things they were saying were true. I think people should be allowed to keep some things to themselves.”
And she shut the door quietly, but firmly, in my face.
Chapter 24
THAT WAS THE BEGINNING of the winter in Anna. Autumn stretched into November with no snow, the days cold and clear, but she had been stolen from the season, the woman who didn’t do well in snow buried in some private whiteout I only half understood. We worked together as before, but on Thursday nights we only talked about work or small, inessential things. Afterward I lay in bed alone and in my head I played over what I said or could have said to her, as if different words might have made a difference, as if there were magic words that could change whatever had happened between us.
During the day she appeared to be struggling, for the first time, to finish her articles, disappearing longer than she should have on assignments, reworking short pieces laboriously. She developed a sinus infection that lingered for days, and the weather seemed to worsen her arthritis. She looked no different and yet there was this sense each hour was taking ten out of her. Out of the corner of my eye I would watch her set down her coffee cup, pick up a pencil, hold it above a page, set it down again, close her eyes with the effort, and it all seemed hard, as if every object had been transformed into lead.
Late one afternoon I couldn’t find the print of a photo she had taken that I planned for the front page. I knew Anna would know where it was, but she wasn’t in the back shop or the darkroom. Edith thought maybe she’d walked to the drugstore.
“I need that photo,” I said, grabbing my jacket off the coat-rack, as Edith, working at the desk next to Anna’s deserted one, raised a skeptical eyebrow.
A fall chill hung in the air as I walked downtown. The street was quiet, damp leaves scattered like smears of paint on the sidewalk. The missing photograph was beautiful, a wooden railroad bridge to the east of town at the end of day, the pilings and leafless trees silhouetted against a flattened sun hovering just above the river’s bank. I didn’t really need the print until Thursday, as Edith knew, but a growing impatience had overtaken me. I thought maybe I would meet Anna coming back from Main Street and we could walk back to the paper together. It would be good to be out of the office, outside, and maybe we would talk. I had a vision of the two of us walking back slowly, appreciating Shannon in the hushed silence while the day turned a dreamlike blue-gray around us. Whatever it was that had happened to Anna, happened between us, dissolving in the same gentle light.
Instead I met Louise marching down the middle of the sidewalk before I reached the business district.
“Heading home, Ricky?”
“I was looking for Anna,” I said, realizing it sounded slightly odd as I said it.
But Louise nodded. “Well.” She pivoted slowly, hands on hips, looking back down the sidewalk as if an army of Annas might be sneaking up on us. “I believe she has gone home. She wasn’t feeling well.”
“Oh, okay.”
We stood there. She filled up the sidewalk so there was no graceful way to step around her, yet I didn’t really want to walk back to the office together. She’d never mentioned the day I found her in the back of her paper forest, never said another word about Art’s friends. I wasn’t even sure she remembered talking to me, but I dreaded the possibility of further confidences, and I’d been avoiding being alone with her ever since. Now here we were, together on the quietest afternoon in the last hundred years.
“Seasonal affective disorder,” Louise said firmly.
“What?”
“It’s a well-known medical condition, Ricky. It’s hard to get enough sunlight when the days get shorter. It affects your mood.”
I knew what it was, and I knew it wasn’t Anna’s problem. But I couldn’t think of what to say. We stared at each other awkwardly, seeing each other a little too well.
“It’s not so easy to live in this climate,” Louise said, taking a deep noisy breath and looking around. “Or in this small town. People have to learn to deal with it. I think you’re going to have to exercise a little patience. A good editor knows when to give his people some space.”
I had never thought of Anna as “my people,” but if I had people, she was it.
“I just had a question to ask her. It’s no big deal.”
Louise nodded. “Well. Good.” She pounded her fists together as if waiting for me to join her on her energetic march back to the office.
“Yeah, I think I’ll just grab something uptown before coming back.”
When Louise was half a block away I stopped and watched her. The light was falling fast and she cast an oversized shadow that stretched across the dead grass—an impressive figure, even in retreat. We were never going to talk about that night, but she remembered.
• • •
THE WEDDING CAME UP in this twilight like an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Suddenly I was rushing home to get my one and only dark suit, finding it fit loosely, and realizing I had lost weight in the last year. My mother stood in the doorway while I slipped the jacket on and in her quietly startled sadness I knew she was seeing the ghost of her young husband, perhaps even on his wedding day, and I wished that could be true for her, that for one last day I could be replaced by the man she had known. I’d have happily stepped out of existence for that.
Instead, I was just some schmo of a best man who had to come up with a toast and not lose the ring and attend to a dozen small acts of patience and false cheer with a bride who grew only slightly more hysterical and a groom who grew quite a bit more baffled as the Big Day slid up to our little ship and then slammed hard into the side.
On his wedding day Todd somehow managed to lose the black dress shoes he had bought especially for the occasion. He called in a panic while I was drinking my morning coffee. It was Sunday, of course. The only clothing store in Shannon was closed, and the nearest city was too far away, and after searching every corner of every closet in his house I found the shoes in a kitchen drawer sitting in the middle of his frying pan and handed them to him without asking.
“They need to be polished,” he said, sounding as if he had just realized he had to disassemble a jet engine.
“Jesus Christ, I’ll do it.”
“Thanks, man. Thanks.”
“Where’s the polish?”
“Oh, shit, I have no idea!”
“It’s okay. I have some . . . I think. I’ll get it.” I took the shoes carefully out of his hands. “Listen. It’s ten a.m. You’ve got to calm down a bit.”
Christina had made him get a haircut, but it hadn’t turned out that well. His wiry hair stuck out here and there like a badly mowed pasture. He scratched nervously at the back of his head and then ran both hands through his hair until it had come to full alert.
“I hate being all in front of people and everything.”
“Everybody does”—I shook my head—“. . . except maybe politicians.”
He stared at me blankly.
“Politicians,” I said, “they like being up in front of people.”
“I’m not a politician! I don’t want to be a politician! Oh, shit, Ricky, what am I doing getting married?”
“Wait. Hold it. It’s not just politicians who get married.”
“Right.”
“People get married.”
“Right. Right.”
It dawned on me that he had been looking for his shoes in his dress shirt and slacks, with his tie badly knotted at his neck.
“What are you doing getting dressed at ten a.m., anyway?”
“I don’t want to be late.”
“The wedding’s at two.”
“Right. Right. Lots of time.”
“Yeah.”
We stared at each other. I was still holding the shoes.
“I’m going to go get some polish. You should take off the tie. You’ll just get it dirty.”
When I got back Todd was sprawled on the couch in his boxer shorts, drinking a Budweiser and watching the Minnesota Vikings on television.
“Thanks, man.” He took a long swig. “Bit of a panic attack. It’s cool. You’re right. We’re just people.”
• • •
WE WERE STANDING in a tiny room in the front of the church, waiting to go on with the preacher, who looked about my age. The silence had started to wear thin, so I asked him how he could counsel people on marriage when he was single himself, which was maybe not the wisest right-before-wedding query.
“I don’t need to jump off a cliff to tell people not to commit suicide,” he said, looking vaguely self-satisfied.
Todd turned two shades whiter, which I would not have believed possible.
“She’s a wonderful young woman,” the preacher said. “You’ve made a great choice.”
I suddenly couldn’t breathe all that well. I stepped to the door, open just a crack, and watched the church fill up. Edith marched down the aisle, ignoring the usher, studying the pastel-blue program instead. I could imagine her already composing the social note she would type up for the paper. Paul was next, his wife and two kids following along. I’d never seen him in a suit before and he looked as sober and responsible as a banker, no sign of ink beneath his fingernails. Someday, I realized, Art would sell him the print shop and everybody there would be working for him. A vaguely strangled sound came from behind me and I glanced back to see Todd and the preacher staring at each other like a pair of cats that had stumbled into each other in an alley. When I looked back into the church Art and Louise were being led to a pew, Louise in a hat that seemed to have a peacock feather with a bright purple eye rising a foot into the air and swooping back over her square shoulders. It made her look like the grandmother of one of the Three Musketeers. Art was wearing a seersucker suit, although the day was chilly, and bright red suspenders that had been attached a little too close to his belly button, lending him the air of a slightly disheveled Austrian flügelhorn player. They were holding hands, and as they settled into a pew near the front, an unexpected wave of affection surged over me. There they all were: Edith, Paul, everyone from the café, the bar, the entire court of the strange little kingdom to which I had pledged my fealty, led by our puttering count and his fierce countess, who now had one blue, one red, and one purple eye.
I felt Todd’s presence at my shoulder.
“Oh, God. People.”
“You’re people, remember?”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him nod without conviction. He was too scared, and I was his best man.
“You want to make a break for it?” I said.
A slightly-too-long silence.
“What?”
“Run for it. Flee. Canada’s only a couple of hours away.”
“I don’t know Canadian.”
“You can pick it up. I’ll hold them off.”
I heard him release a long, unsteady breath.
“Naah.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah.”
The organist hit the first notes in the back of the church.
“Good,” I said. “Because we’re on.”
Standing up front beside the altar, I felt strangely light and very nearly invisible. It struck me that the best man could wear a purple wig and a clown’s nose and it was unlikely anyone would notice; the groom himself could probably get away with the nose. Instead we stood in our dark suits like a pair of cheerful apprentice undertakers. I looked through the arched window across from me at a pine tree, solitary and still in its frame of gray sky and dead grass, and realized it had started to snow. The organist turned to the magisterial opening of the processional. We squared our shoulders and faced the aisle.
The flower girl came first, a previously unknown niece of Christina’s. Then Anna. You see people anew in circumstances like that and I was struck by the odd contrasts in her beauty, the delicacy of her features and frame, the coarse thickness of her hair, and the earthy tint of her skin, the solidity in the way she carried herself, a farm girl, still, and yet how small she really was. She floated inside the frills of her chiffon, pastel-peach dress, which was no worse than any bridesmaid’s dress I have seen since, but seemed particularly mismatched with this woman I had never seen wear anything but dark colors. She held her eyes in front of her, not even glancing at her children, who I saw now were sitting in the same pew as Edith, but keeping her gaze fixed a few feet over our heads. She wore a small, set smile, and I wondered if anyone else saw the pain in her eyes.
Anna reached the other side of the altar and turned to wait for
the bride. She managed a brief, meant-to-be-reassuring smile for Todd, but looked past me as if I were invisible. The wedding march started and we all came to attention.
• • •
ANNA FLED HER MARRIAGE sometime in the winter. I don’t know the details. I only know she ran away to Bismarck, which is the state capital and the closest thing to a city for three hundred miles in any direction if you live in western North Dakota. She took their child and she moved into the spare bedroom in the apartment of a high school classmate, who had taken a job in an insurance office.
She left and she came back and her parents tried to convince her to stay and she ended up pounding her own blood into a sink full of raw meat and she left again, but her parents drove to Bismarck to talk to her, and so did he, and she came back again. The same trailer. The same valley in the middle of nowhere. She stood in the kitchen in the late afternoon dark, amazed at how little time had really passed. Still winter. The welt on her husband’s shoulder from a chain that had snapped loose on a rig still a bright red.
He came straight home at the end of the working day and sat at the small kitchen table like a child who has been told to be still. He watched her making dinner with a carefully attentive gaze, as if there might be a test later. When their child tugged at the door to the outdoors, ready to take off on an adventure in the winter countryside, he swept the baby up in his arms, hiding a plastic cow in one hand or the other as a distraction. He finally shooed the child away with an overly gentle pat on the bottom and resumed following her cooking. His attention made her nervous. She could feel his restlessness like a hunger, and she could feel how hard he was trying to be present, how hard he was trying to be good. She sensed this was part of some last, frightened attempt to locate a better self, and it scared her so badly she tipped over the macaroni box, spilling pieces across the stove and into the burner, where they flared and curled up to die.