The Rehearsal

by Sarah Willis

  Ben sneaks up close enough to peek out from behind a bush and catch a glimpse of Myra. What he sees bypasses his brain and heads straight to his heart.

  Her blond hair glows in the sun. Her arms wave about like wings. She is singing “White Coral Bells.” And she is naked. He watches her until he’s dizzy with longing, literally weak in the knees. Get a grip, he tells himself. Slowly he backs up, until he can’t see her anymore, then steps hard on a few dead branches, coughs loudly, hollers, “Myra! Myra!” and steps on a few more branches, making enough noise to frighten bears. After a few minutes of this, he stops and listens. It doesn’t take long.

  “Ben! Ben? Is that you?”

  “Myra!” he yells. “Are you all right? Where are you?”

  “Just stay there!” she yells. “I’m fine. Just give me a minute. I’ll find you!”

  After a short time (in which he imagines her putting on her clothes, which makes him crazy all over again), she appears from between two thick bushes. The clothes don’t matter one bit; he’s crazy, but he thinks he’s fallen in love with her. Ben feels like a teenager. He wants to ask her to the movies. He wants to walk her home and kiss her on the sidewalk in front of her house. He wants to touch her breast on the second date, ask her to marry him on the third. If he can’t touch her, his body will ache. “Myra,” he says.

  She does something he doesn’t expect. She walks toward him, calmly, almost lazily, with a tranquil, sweet look on her face. She stands right in front of him and grins. And then kisses him. Their lips don’t match up; her mouth presses against his bottom lip, mostly on the left side. She leans back and laughs. “Oops!” she says, then kisses him again, right on the mouth, quick but hard. Then it’s over, and she’s standing in front of him, looking at him.

  She’s a mess. Wet, tangled hair, scratches on her arms. Why did she kiss him? Has she been hit on the head? Is she delirious? He’s thinking these things as his hand reaches out and touches her tangled hair. “Are you hurt?” he asks.

  “No.” She doesn’t move back. She doesn’t even shake her head. His hand stays on her hair. “I’m just happy,” she says. “I’m happy you found me.”

  He wants to tell her he heard her singing, that she has a beautiful voice, that he’s suddenly crazy about her, even though it’s just about the stupidest thing in the world he could do, and the scariest. He’s more scared now than when he thought she was hurt. Because he knows this isn’t good. The way they are looking at each other tells him that. It’s not just him.

  “I was worried about you,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re wet,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “You have a scratch right here,” he says, moving his hand from her hair to touch a red mark near her right eye. As his hand touches her face, Myra closes her eyes, but not in pain. Her face is serene and peaceful. She leaves her eyes closed long enough to let Ben understand. He leans down and kisses her, on the lips. This time it is nothing like a short, quick, friendly kiss.

  At the marina, a man wearing a Pete’s Marina baseball cap paces back and forth along the edge of the water, swearing loudly. Against the cement wall built along the shore, docks are smashed to pieces by boats that are now piled together like dead fish. Lars tries to interrupt the obviously distracted owner of the marina. “Please, sir. Two men and a young boy rented one of your boats early this morning. Do you know—”

  “Gone!” the man says. “Gone to hell in a handbasket! Everything is shot to hell!”

  “All right,” Lars says. “Thank you.” He walks back to his car and leans against the hood. He can’t return to the farm without Will’s kid. He’d rather play the bearded lady in a freak show for the rest of his life than face Will with no Mac. So he’ll wait here. Jimmy’s yellow car is in the parking lot. Lars leans against his car and watches the lake. The sound of sirens fills the air.

  Myra just meant to kiss Ben out of sheer happiness; she swears she had no idea it would go farther than that. But it was more before she could even think about it. It was so easy to close her eyes and be kissed. It was so easy to kiss back. She knew it was wrong, but not while it was happening, only after. Then it was too late. She is surprised how little guilt she feels right now. How much she wants him. Her hand moves up and down his arm as she says, “We shouldn’t.”

  “I know,” Ben says. He begins to step back.

  “Please.” She doesn’t let go of his arm. She’s asking him to forgive how she feels, forgive how he feels, to stay right there. He understands. He moves toward her and touches her hair again, as if maybe this is safe. But it isn’t. They kiss gently, taking their time.

  When they stop kissing, Ben cradles her in his arms. They stand there hugging in the woods while leaves drip, soft seconds on a broken clock. She buries her head against his chest and thinks, There is no time but this, but knows she is wrong. She might be drunk, but she isn’t stupid.

  “That was quite a storm,” she says, just to say something besides We shouldn’t do this. “Is the barn still standing?”

  Ben tenses. Whatever he suddenly remembers is not good, and it can’t be about the barn. She wouldn’t care if the barn blew all the way to hell, and he knows that. She braces herself for what he will say.

  “Will had to take Greg Henry to the hospital. He got hit by a tree limb.”

  Myra begins to say, “Oh, no,” but Ben shakes his head, and the words stop in her throat. “What?”

  “Mac hasn’t come back from fishing.”

  She thought Mac would be back by now. She thought everyone would have been safe in the house, that she was the only one at risk. She turns to run, but Ben holds her hand and stops her. “Lars has gone to the marina. They were probably on land by the time the storm struck.” Now he lets her move but keeps hold of her hand. It’s hard going, mostly because she keeps seeing a boat capsized and a small body sinking to the bottom of the lake. They move quickly, and Myra knows if not for Ben’s grip, she would have tripped and fallen several times. She is glad for a hand to hold. His hand.

  Still, as they reach the opening to the field, they both let go at the same time.

  Melinda has whipped together three quiches, using all the eggs she can find, some milk, some presliced Swiss (it will have to do), an onion, the hot dogs sliced into small pieces, a bag of flour she found way back behind some canned soups, and a scoop of Crisco. Next she cut up ten pounds of potatoes (unpeeled; the peels contain the vitamins), four onions, and three cloves of garlic (from her van—she has developed a thing for garlic and likes to keep it around), and she is now frying the potatoes in three different-sized frying pans on top of the stove. (She’d bake them, but there’s no room in the oven because of the quiche.) An empty pie crust sits on the kitchen table. After turning the potatoes, Melinda begins to peel apples.

  She has even cleaned up all the blood off the floor. Everyone else had panicked, but she won’t believe anything awful has happened; it’s bad karma. She will put her energy into positive thoughts. It can only help. Either way, people will need the comfort of food. She erases that thought. She will not think about alternatives. Everyone will be fine. Everyone will be fine. Everyone will be fine. She sends her thoughts out like waves from a calm blue ocean.

  When she was ten, she wished her mother would drop dead. She was so mad about something, but she can’t remember what. “I hope you drop dead!” she had shouted. Her mother looked so sad. “I wish you hadn’t said that. If I get hit by a car, or get killed by a freak of nature, even years from now, you will blame yourself. Be careful what you say. Words can haunt you as strongly as your actions. Let’s pretend you never said it, okay?” Melinda had nodded, chagrined at the honest concern in her mother’s voice. Her mother had always thought the best of everyone and everything, and when she died, some ten years later from breast cancer, Melinda had vowed she would do the same. Thinking positive thoughts became a habit, and then became her. She carried around the spirit of her mother this way. M
elinda doesn’t believe in religion—look what horrors it has caused over the centuries—but she does believe that all the atoms are connected to each other, so that she is part of the sun and the stars, and the earth she walks on, and the air she breathes. Just exactly like Tillie’s speech in Gamma Rays. The fact that Melinda was cast as Tillie, whose very words Melinda believes with all her heart, is enough to convince Melinda that there is more to this world than meets the naked eye.

  If she has time, she wants to draw pictures on the white napkins. In her van she has a set of Magic Markers bought at an art store in the East Village. She’s really into drawing small intricate designs; then, like the Buddhist monks who make pictures with sand, she destroys her art. It is the process of art that excites and moves her, not the article itself, waiting to be judged, frozen, dead, done becoming what it is. Art should be held only in memory, as emotion, not material wealth. (She hates museums and thinks of them as tombs.) That’s why she loves theatre, because it’s live, and different each time if done right. True, theatre has begun to get stagnant, but there are people out there trying to change that, and Melinda plans to be one of them. Will Bartlett is one of those people. Even though he’s old enough to be her father, he has a young and vibrant heart. She loves his oddness, his visions, his devotion to art. She hopes he likes quiche.

  Beth is going crazy. People could be dying, and she’s stuck here with the Betty Crocker of hippies. She will just have to drive to the hospital. There are plenty of cars out there. Maybe someone left the keys in the ignition. Beth sneaks out the front door, closing it quietly behind her. In the kitchen Melinda is singing “Layla,” so badly that Beth actually appreciates her mother’s voice. Melinda doesn’t even know all the words and puts in “da da dee dee” wherever she feels like it. And Beth once thought Melinda was so cool. It’s amazing the mistakes you can make about people.

  The first car she checks is Ben Walton’s Camaro. The keys are right there on the seat. But it’s a fucking stick shift, which she can’t drive. She’s willing to bet anything that there aren’t keys in a single other car, because, as she has just figured out, life stinks!

  Beth turns away from the car and trips on something soft and furry. She lets out a scream, thinking rabid groundhog, because that would be her luck, but hears a pathetic whimper, high-pitched and miserable. Shakes. Lars has left his dog here while he’s off at the marina. The dog’s turning in tight little circles, trying to howl, which sounds like a baby crying. Beth isn’t big on babies, but it’s hard not to feel sorry for this dog. He looks like he’s a thousand years old; red weepy skin hangs from under his eyeballs, and there are places where fur is just missing. She really doesn’t want to touch him—she could just walk away and not feel too bad about it, but being ignored, that she understands, and it makes her almost cry. So using all her skills of imagination to pretend Shakes has plenty of soft fur, she sits down on the ground and lifts him into her lap. Cradling Shakes against her chest, she looks around at the damage from the storm. The big tree that used to be near the house is lying across the front lawn. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” Beth says. She thinks she has the line right. She’s not sure. She’s not sure of anything except that she’s sitting on wet grass, holding a moldy dog, and she wants her mother.

  “I just want my mommy,” she tells the dog.

  “What?” Victor Peters has just come around the corner of a car and looks down at Beth.

  Beth is so embarrassed that she wants to jump off a bridge. If there were a bridge anywhere around, she’d do it, holding the dog, just for dramatic effect.

  “I didn’t hear you, sweetheart,” Victor Peters says. “I’m half-deaf in my right ear. Did they find your mom yet?”

  Beth bursts into tears. She cries because she is the worst daughter in the world, the worst sister, doesn’t like babies or dogs, is all wet, can’t drive a stick shift, is so glad Victor Peters is almost deaf, will never kiss Greg Henry who is probably dead, and because the tree is lying on the lawn, broken, never again to be there, where she expects it. It was a really great tree. She pulls Shakes so tight to her chest, he nips her arm, and Beth jerks, throwing him two feet across the lawn. Now she just sits there, motherless, dogless, treeless, loveless, and cries.

  “Oh my god,” Beth hears her mother say. “Beth, are you hurt?”

  Beth looks up. Her mother and Ben are standing right there, and her mother doesn’t look hurt at all, just messy. But she does look scared. She must have been as worried about Beth as Beth was worried about her. Beth’s too far into crying to say much, but she shakes her head and manages to blurt out, “I’m fine.”

  Now a look of absolute horror crosses her mother’s face. “Is it Mac? Is he … ?” She turns away from Beth and looks to Ben for help and comfort. She doesn’t look back at Beth; she has already been completely forgotten. Beth’s fear that her mother was hurt turns around inside her chest and becomes something else hard and brittle.

  “No one’s back yet,” Victor Peters says. “And the phone’s not working.”

  “I’ll drive you to the marina,” Ben says. Myra looks at him gratefully, and they run to his car, without so much as a glance back at Beth.

  Beth decides she will sit here forever, or for a very long time, until her mother and Ben have driven away, until Melinda has baked every last thing she can find, until hell freezes over—or until Greg Henry comes back alive.

  Chip Stark has been driving around the block for an hour, hollering for Myra until he’s hoarse. He doesn’t know if it’s really a block per se, but it’s got four corners, so he figures it must be a block, although he bets Frank Tucker would know what it’s called, not that he’d ask him. That’s the kind of stupid thing he’s thinking while driving around, because there’s nothing to see but trees. Everybody keeps saying what a pretty place this is, and maybe he did think it was pretty for about ten minutes when he first drove up, but now he thinks he’s lived in the country for about as long as he ever wants to in his whole life.

  During the summer season, Chip usually stays in an apartment above the Fine Time, the bar in Mayville. He’s thinking of finding out if the room’s available now. That damn bunk’s killing his back, and Will’s wife’s habit of walking off is getting on his nerves. And now this damn storm. He’s still embarrassed that he was the first person in the house. By more than a few strides. The only thing stopping him from splitting is how to tell Will. Chip would give the finger to bikers, if there were a good reason, but he doesn’t want to tell Will he’d like to leave.

  Chip decides to drive back up the lane and see if Myra has shown up. He did this twice before, but both times Victor Peters told him she wasn’t there yet. This time, as he drives up the lane, he sees Beth sitting on the ground. He gets out of the car.

  “Hey, Beth, whatcha doing?”

  “Sitting,” she says.

  “All right.” He sticks his hands in his pockets. “Any news on your mom?”

  “Yeah. She’s fine.”

  “Really? She’s back?” Hell, why didn’t someone come find him, so he didn’t have to keep driving around like he lost a dog or something?

  “Yeah, really.”

  This girl’s got a problem. He can remember feeling like that, all full of anger and indignation. But she looks good, mad like that, her bottom lip sticking out, arms crossed under her chest. He grins. “You pissed at something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You look pretty wicked when you’re pissed. I wouldn’t want you pissed at me, that’s for sure.” This makes her look up. She might even have smiled for a second. “Anything I can do?” he asks, thinking he can think of a few things to cheer her up.

  “Not really,” she says. “But thanks anyway.”

  “All right then. Stay cool.” He goes to the house. Maybe he’ll stay here after all.

  It’s almost dusk as Will, coming home from the hospital with Greg and Norton, turns onto the lane and sees a boulder up near the end, on the grass. Jesus, he t
hinks. That was a hell of a storm. That wasn’t there before. Then the boulder stands up. Since he saw a boulder first, he can’t get that image out of his mind quickly enough, so what he sees is the boulder turn into his daughter, and for a minute he’s overwhelmed. He has told Beth that if she works hard enough, she can be whatever she wants, but for the first time, Will understands that his daughter is capable of miracles: not turning into or out of boulders but of simply growing up and becoming something wonderful. He left the house four hours ago, and she was just a child, whom he loves (he’s always loved her, it’s just hard to like her sometimes), and now, illuminated by his headlights, she’s a young woman who will be capable of love, understanding, and passion. Will’s used to finding analogies and metaphors in the scripts he reads; they come to him as easily as basic math to a mathematician. He knows Beth hasn’t changed, it’s simply that he sees her now, like that first star at night, distinct, hopeful, and very beautiful. He honks the car horn and waves.

  Beth runs to the car as soon as it stops and opens the passenger door. “Daddy! How is he?” She looks in the back of the car, where Greg and Norton sit. “Oh! You’re alive! They let you come back! Are you all right, Greg? Is he okay, Daddy? Oh! Look at your face! Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Greg says, slurring his words.

  “Does it hurt? Did they check you for a concussion? Are you sure you’re okay?” She helps Greg get out of the car. Norton rushes around the car to get Greg’s other arm. They look like they’re playing tug-of-war with the boy. Then it hits Will: Beth is stuck on Greg Henry. He can’t believe it. Myra will have to do some explaining to Beth, before she makes a fool of herself. Love is so blind, he thinks.

  “Beth,” Will says loudly enough to get her attention, “is your mother back? Is she all right?” She must be. It’s what he’s told himself so many times in the last few hours that he has come to believe it. He needs Myra, so he can ask about Mac. Lars’s car isn’t here. Or Jimmy’s. He is having trouble thinking about what that might mean. He’s having trouble just thinking. Everything’s so out of control, he feels helpless. He’d like to grab something solid—know he had a hold of it, then throw it hard against a brick wall.