by Amy Field
Laura wondered whether he really had left the past in the past. A twinge of queasiness in her stomach reminded her that doing so was not easy. She said, “I’ve never thought about it that way. What did you mean when you said you have to live on what other people I give you?”
He gestured behind him. The blonde woman with her book looked for a moment, then raised the book in front of her eyes. He said, “I’m staying at the mission up the road a piece. They got what you call a four-month program there. I had to go there on account of how nobody wants to hire a felon. Supposed to be, when you’re in the halfway house, you find a place to work, save up some money. It don’t really work that way. You can stay there forever, and you ain’t never gone find anything, not so long as you got branded as a criminal. Some people, alls they ever did was try to grow some plants in they garage. Poh-lice don’t care. They arrest people all the same. They merciless, girl. Really heartless bastids. I only ever survive by what other people give me. Sometimes clothes, most times food. I’m lucky if I get to drink some Gatorade. Usually, it’s bad coffee and undercooked chicken.”
“There’s no way you can get out of it?”
“Not without breaking the law, you can’t. I been circling the drain for a while, listenin' to people tell me this, that, and the third about God, Jesus, and whoever the fuck. If God is real, he’s a sadistic prick. I don’t like him none. But I gotta listen about him just the same. That’s the price of me staying there. It’s always the book of Matthew, the book of Corinthians, and the book of Genesis. Man gets tired of hearing the same message every day, all the time like that. I don’t need no message. I need a job where I can work and earn my own money. The way it looks like, I might end up selling loosies on the street.”
Laura was not particularly religious herself. She had trouble imagining a situation where a person had nothing better to do with their time than to bible study. If Nathaniel wasn’t intensely interested in the subject- and it did not appear that he was- he would gain neither enjoyment nor edification from it. She did not envy him his situation.
She said, “What are ‘loosies’?”
“Loosies, you know, cigarettes. Rolled cigarettes from pouch tobacco, mostly. Every now and then, might be you can sell store-bought stuff. Like Newports. People in prison and people on the street aren’t too different in how they each like their cigarettes. It’s like a kind of money. If you got cigarettes, you can go a long way- long as you can keep people from stealing it.”
“And they arrest you for doing that, selling loosies?”
“Course they do. Those blue pigs, man, they’re like an army of people who don’t want nobody to have any kind of success in this world. Especially black people. They don’t like it none at all when someone tries to get out of poverty. That’s when the sirens and flashing lights start up. That’s when the handcuffs come out. You ever run into them, you just answer yes sir, do what they say, and get out of there. Onliest thing you can do, that situation.”
As Laura listened to him talk, she found herself more enthralled than ever by his words. He peeled away the curtains for her to reveal a world that she had never dreamed about. It was a world of bad men with bad intentions. She wanted to learn more about that world. She wanted to keep learning more about him.
She said, “What do you want to do when you get out of the shelter?”
He shook his head. He said, “I don’t rightly know. I’d like to get me a place of my own, not with no roommates. Not one of them shared kitchen, shared bathroom jawns. Not none of that. Maybe- I don’t know.”
He had been on the point of saying something. She said, “Maybe what?”
“I don’t know. It’s stupid.”
“No, what is it? Tell me.”
He took a moment to collect himself. Then he said, “You seem like a friendly girl. I ain’t met a nice girl in a while. I was thinking, maybe you and I could get together sometime. You know, like do something together.”
Laura’s heart almost stopped. She had not expected him to say anything of the sort, even while she had hoped for it- hoped for it without even realizing. She crossed her legs, then put her hands on her lap. She said, “That would be all right, I think. We’re together now, aren’t we?”
“Sure we are. I just don’t know your name, mysterious girl. Don’t know how you managed that. You got me to say all that stuff, and here I don’t even know you name.”
She said, “It’s Laura Halliston. Pleased to meet you.”
He let out a derisive chuckle. “Laura and Nathaniel. Ain’t that some shit.”
Chapter 3
Most days, the secret that she kept from everyone she knew weighed down upon her. She experienced it as a headache and a burden upon her shoulders that caused her muscles to grow sore. After introducing herself, she knew that she ought to tell him. She could not think of a way to broach the subject. She would have to let people know eventually. She could not keep it hidden forever. For the present, however, she was at a loss as to what she was going to do.
He said, “Now that I told you so much, maybe you can tell me a little bit about yourself.”
She gripped her pants with her fingernails. She did not want to bite her nails in front of him. She did not like the part of herself that became so nervous to the point where she put her fingers just in front of her teeth so that she could chew off her nails. She never let her nails grow. She always bit them until they became uneven and raw. She kept her hands hidden under the table for fear that he would see them.
She decided to tell him then and there what her secret was. She braced herself internally for the blow-up that would follow. She said, “I’m... I’m pregnant.”
She expected him to become angry. She expected him to shout, to scream, to flip the table over, and to slap her in the face. He did nothing of the sort. He sat where he was and looked at her with a contemplative expression. She found herself glad that he let down the tough guy mask that he had been wearing even while she felt apprehensive about the silence that followed. That was worse than the worst tirade he could have made.
He said, “I see.”
She wanted to shout at him: that’s it? She could not believe that he had so little to say about such an important revelation. She said, “Don’t you have anything to say about that?”
“What do you want me to say? I don’t know anything about pregnancy. I ain’t got no vagina. Nobody never gonna put a baby in me. What am I supposed to say about that?”
She balled her hands into fists. Before she started biting her nails- before the kidnapping that was - she would have cut the skin of her palms with how tight she pushed her nails into her skin. Now, she only managed to form white half-moon shapes that faded away after a few moments. She wasn’t angry; she could not be angry with him. He was only acting how he had learned to act. No one had ever taught or showed him how to act any differently. But she was angry.
She said, “I don’t know what you’re supposed to say. Aren’t you going to be furious with me? You’re not going to tell me that I’m a stupid whore to get myself knocked up like that? That’s how it goes, doesn’t it? No matter what happened, it’s my fault.”
“Girl, you crazy. Watch you on about, saying it’s your fault? Like it’s your fault that some guy couldn’t keep his pants on at the right time. He didn’t even use a condom I bet. Just told you some sweet words to make you believe that he loved you. Turned it was all lies, am I right? Ain’t no way you’d be here talking me up like this if the man who made you pregnant cared about you. No way that would happen.”
She thought back to the man who had made her pregnant. That man was in Omaha by now, she thought. His name had been Raymond Astorte. She did not want to think about him. She associated him with the kidnapping. He had liked to put his hand over her mouth.
She said, “I was stupid. This guy, he didn’t seem right to me. But he said all the right things. It seemed like he honestly wanted to spend some time with me. Like he truly cared. All those hone
yed words that he spoke was just a trap to entice me into doing what he wanted. He wanted me to take my pants off. He didn’t like condoms. He said that a few times. He did like trying to make me suffocate. At first, I put up with it. I loved him very much. It wasn’t such a bad thing. He didn’t do it to be malicious. It was just his fetish.”
His eyebrows shot up. He said, “He did that? Put a bag over your head?”
“No, he just pinched my nose shut and put a hand over my mouth. Sometimes he liked to blindfold me while he did that. He always wore a watch on the wrist of his left arm. He would always look at that watch to see the seconds passing. He wanted to figure out how long I could go without air. It got to be that I was counting with him. I got up to forty-five seconds one time before I had pulled my face away. He was… it was…”
She closed her eyes, not wanting to thin or talk about it any longer. The memories were painful to recall. He had not only suffocated her. Now and then, if he couldn’t get what he wanted out of it, he would strike her across the face. That did it for him every time. She had tried not to focus on those few times. She had wanted to convince herself that they were isolated incidents. She had never quite managed it.
He said, “It’s okay. You can tell me. Hey, it's all right.”
It took an effort of will for her to avoid bursting into tears then. She did not want to cry in front of him. She did not care about crying in public. She had found crying to be therapeutic. She cried when she was happy and when she was sad with equal measure. She always felt better afterward. She suspected that, if she cried in front of him now, he would decide that he had better things to do with his time. That was the one result that she dreaded above all others.
She said, “It’s not okay. But, it’s over. I kicked him out of my house. I just couldn’t handle him. He was too rough. He didn’t want to take no for an answer. That was the one thing I never liked about him. He never had enough respect for me to listen to what I had to say. To him, I was just a bunch of sex organs with a life support system attached.”
Nathaniel laughed. “That’s a good one. Sex organs with a life support system. I like that. Some women I knew in my life, they were like that too.”
“Why are people like that? Why can’t people just be nice to each other? I don’t get it. Doesn’t it seem like everyone is making each other miserable in this world?”
“You done hit the head right on the nail, girl. Ain’t nobody is nice to anybody else except they looking to get somethin' out of it. If they ain’t nothin' to be had, then they’ll just do whatever they want. We all just floatin' out here all accidental-like, hurtin' each other while we go. Not many people know this. They just know about the minute everyday bullshit that’s in their lives. They know about appointments and trips to the fast food joint for five-piece chicken nuggets. They don’t know about the seventy-five-year-old man who’s out there sleeping on a park bench because his family abandoned him. They don’t know about the single mother with two kids who is pulling her hair out trying to make ends meet. Nobody knows about those things. If we did, we’d be a lot kinder to one another. But we don’t, so we ain’t.”
Laura unclenched her fists. She took deep breaths to force her mind away from the man who had almost ruined her life- a second time. She said, “You don’t know how right you are.”
“Yeah, I don’t? You got something else you wanna say?”
A single tear escaped from her eye. It trickled down the side of her cheek. She said, “I’m not whole. I guess.”
“Now what the pink blazes does that mean?”
She put her feet flat on one of the chair’s rungs. She had to steady herself before she spoke, or else she would lose her balance- mentally and physically. She said, “I haven’t been myself for years. I was kidnapped. It was horrible. I was in this place for three days and…”
She stopped, unable to say anything more. She did not want to relive any of those days in her mind. There was nothing but pain there. She had never learned how to decrease the pain, nor even how to live with it. For her, it was still a festering scab that throbbed throughout her whole life until she found herself at the mercy of any new circumstance she did not expect. It was not a good way to live, as far as she was concerned.
He said the only three words that could help her then. She had heard everyone try to comfort her. She lost track of how many people told her that it would be all right. On the contrary, it was never all right. Things would never be fine. She had gone through more days than she could count after the kidnapping during which she had just wanted all the negative feelings and traumatic memories just to disappear. They never did, not completely. At best, they faded into the background where she did not have to pay close attention to them. That was all she had ever hoped for. It was all she had ever managed.
He said, “It’s over now.”
She got down out of her seat. Nathaniel did the same. She rushed into his arms at once. He wrapped his arms around her in a warm embrace. She pressed her head against his chest, letting the tears fall out of her eyes. She lost track of where she was and what she was doing. She might have cried for a minute or a half hour. She had no sense of time while she let all the negative feelings out of her body. The experience was cathartic for her. She had never told anyone other than her therapists how she truly felt about the situation. Her mother only ever had harsh, critical words for her. Her father had always told her that she had brought it on herself. She never liked to hear either of her parents talk about her life as if they knew intimately the details of what had happened to her. They knew nothing; still they managed to have express their own opinions. She had stopped talking to them when she had figured out that they would never have anything good to say at all. They were the sorts of people who could look up into the sky, see the sun, and complain about how much it hurt their eyes.
When she pulled her face away from his chest, she found that she felt considerably better. It was as though she unloaded all her troubles. She felt refreshed in a way that she hadn’t felt for years. She looked up into his eyes. No trace of his stolid mask remained. His face was composed entirely of soft contours and gentleness. The faintest trace of moisture lay in his eyes. He was on the point of crying himself. That made up for everything she had gone through. Just to see one person concerned for her welfare was extraordinary. For her, it was almost a miracle.
She said, “Thank you. I needed that.”
He said, “You alright now? You need to cry more?”
She wiped the moisture off her cheeks and away from her eyes, then got up, a little embarrassed. She sniffled, and then said, “No, that’s all right. Do you want to go somewhere? Besides here, I mean?”
He looked around for a clock. When he found none, he asked, “What time is it?”
She pulled out her phone, then discovered she had been crying for about ten minutes. She didn’t know how it was that no one from the staff had come to separate them. She said, “3:07 in the afternoon.”
He said, “Two hours to supper. Where do you want to go?”
“I know this movie theater down the street. They make the most delicious strawberry smoothies. Do you like those?”
He smiled at her, and then said, “Man, strawberries. That’s my jawn right there. They got some good movies playing there too?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been there for a while. Why don’t we go and see?”
“Yeah, let’s go. Sounds good to me.”
He grabbed her hand with his own. She found that she did not mind. His hand was twice as large as hers. His fingers were wide and big. His hand engulfed hers. She pressed her fingertips into his skin. She led him down the terrace and past the blonde woman. She still had the same book in front of her face; it seemed to Laura that the woman had not read a single page of the book. The woman smiled up at Laura. She allowed herself to smile back. It felt strange to her, smiling naturally like that. She wasn’t used to it. She hoped that eventually, she would be.
They desc
ended one set of steps, and then another. They passed through the reading area then arrived in front of the cashier’s desk. One of the women behind the desk recognized her. The woman said, “Laura! Good afternoon! I didn’t see you there. Would you like a hot chocolate?”
Laura paused to give it some thought. She said, “No, I think I’ll pass this time.”
“Oh, are you sure? Do you need anything else?”
Then Laura found herself uttering a phrase that she never thought she would speak.
“I’m all right," she said.
Laura led Nathaniel out the front door. The air outside was cold though the sun shone in a clear sky. The faintest hint of warmth floated through the air. The snow of the past few days had begun to melt, leaving puddles of water everywhere. Passing cars splashed some of it onto the high piles of snow that had been stacked up in the street’s parking spaces.
Nathaniel said, “Lookit that, it’s getting warm again. Goes to show you never can tell, can you?”
“No, I suppose you never can,” Laura murmured.
She continued walking, hand-in-hand with Nathaniel towards the local movie theater. She treated him to two smoothies and a large bag of popcorn that cost as much as a full meal itself. She didn’t even know what movie it was they saw. People passed back and forth across the movie screen. Some people said a few words now and then. She was oblivious to all of it. She only knew that Nathaniel’s large hand was still clasped in her hand. They hadn't let go since the bookshop. That was all she needed, for it was far more than she ever dared to dream.
At some point in the middle of the movie, he whispered, “You okay?”
She nodded. A giddy sense of happiness flowed through her. She could only think about how good she felt. Compared to how she had been before, she found herself grateful to him. Even if their date never went anywhere else, even if they moved on from one another after a single day of speaking, he had changed her life for the better. She did not think she would ever be able to forget him for that reason.