I think about Couper’s leg against mine at the motel pool. Bobbing in the water at the deep end.
Please? I say and he swings into the first lot.
Goddammit, Rayelle, he says. I’m working on it.
I just thought it would be nice, I say, to sleep on a bed that is not also a table. Just tonight, I say.
He turns the car off under the overhang at La Quinta, where water pours in parallel lines off either end of the roof, drumming on the Scamp.
I thought you had a bed at home, Couper says.
You watched my mother throw it out, I say.
I didn’t make you go with me, he says.
I didn’t say you did.
Don’t revise this someday into how I forced you to come along.
You don’t even know where you’re going, I shout. All I asked for was a room.
Well, he says. Shall I book the honeymoon suite?
At La Quinta? I say. Then, to make things worse, I add, I don’t know. You probably have to file divorce papers first. Before you move in with wife number five.
He huffs a little, beginning to laugh. Wow, he says.
I don’t need to be anybody’s wife that goddamn bad, I say, but he covers me up.
Shhh, he says, and leans over.
Don’t you dare kiss me, I say, but all he does is hold my face. He holds it still by the chin, with his thumb and forefinger, the way you’d inspect a kid.
Settle down, he says.
When he comes back from the office, he tosses me a room key, which would be more dramatic if it were an actual key, flopping on a chain, a big plastic key ring shaped like a diamond, but it’s a card. It kind of flutters into my lap.
You’re not coming? I say.
You wanted a room, he says. I got you a room.
I say it again. You’re not coming.
He waits. I think he’s going to wait for me to get out, but if I do, I don’t know where he’ll go. And I don’t have a thing on me. Not a phone, not a dollar. Nothing. If he goes, I don’t know if he’ll come back, or where the fuck we even are. I’ll sit in that room by myself for as long as he’s paid for it, which is maybe only till tomorrow, and then I’ll have to scrounge for quarters, or call home collect, to see if Chuck will drive to the middle of nowhere to get me.
The sun comes out from behind heavy, dark clouds. The sky, so much bigger here, the clouds like towers, the light, electric. It comes out like gold, and shines on the parking lot in one bright spot that blinds me. I have to lay my hand over my eyes. The water, still dripping from the roof like drops of light raining down.
Come with me, I say. Couper. I don’t know what you want me to say.
I’m afraid of where we’re going, he says.
I thought you didn’t know where we’re going.
I don’t, he says. He starts the car up and takes it around the fronts of all the rooms, all of them with doors facing out to a sidewalk, and a fenced-in pool in the middle. It’s a real problem, he adds.
I look at the pool. The fence is laced with plastic so you can’t see through it, but no one is in it anyway, not in the storm.
Are you coming in? I say.
I have things to do, he says. He waits next to the car with the door open while I key in and then starts to get back in the car.
Like what? I say from the threshold.
Phone calls, he says.
To? I ask. It’s dark and cool in the room, and the light in the parking lot is blinding, the sun coming from behind his head.
Rayelle, he says, but won’t answer.
Fine, I say. Get yourself fucking divorced while you’re at it.
Why do you care? he says.
That you’re not divorced? I say.
Yeah, he says. What’s it to you? Why do you care?
I laugh, annoyed, standing in the open doorway and letting in flies and letting out the cool air. What are you trying to get me to say? I ask.
I’m trying to get you to admit that you give a shit about something, he says.
You want me to say I give a shit about you? That’s real romantic, Couper. Thanks for the swayback queen bed, too.
I do, he says, before he gets in the car. I give a shit about you, he says.
I’d like to know how he proposed to all those women.
The shower is weak, but hot. There’s cheap and strong smelling pink soap, and little plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner that I have to use all of just to get through my hair. The soap dries my skin out, on my face, my elbows, even on my shins, where there’s now a fine coat of blond hair. I rub my hands down the fronts of my legs. I don’t mind it.
When he goes, Couper takes just the car. He leaves the Scamp unhitched, detached in the parking lot. It looks ridiculously small beside the building. When he returns, he’s had his hair cut. He comes in with his own key, and goes right to the sink, where he gets out a shaving kit I’ve somehow never seen, a leather bag with a real razor, not a plastic disposable. I watch him lather with a brush, and pull the blade over his cheeks. When he’s done, he doesn’t talk to me, he just gets in the shower.
I leave the towel and wait, naked. The air in the room still drying out, the AC going full blast, cold and damp at the same time. I lie belly down on the bed, my legs bent at the knee and my feet up in the air. The bedspread, that slick chintz that water rolls off of. It has mauve flowers in a pattern that hides dirt, and who knows what else.
I kind of thought he would drop everything to fuck me. Instead, he doesn’t even talk, just shaves, and gets in the shower for fifteen minutes, while I lie there thinking, Why didn’t he drop everything to fuck me?
I’ve gone full speed from twenty-three to fifty-three.
I grab the remote. I’m not sure what day it is, and when I think to look on Couper’s phone for the date, I realize he brought it into the bathroom with him, perched, I imagine, on the back of the toilet, or on the windowsill that looks out on the trees behind the motel. In case what? In case Amanda calls? Kaplan? I don’t know if he’s hiding me from them, or them from me.
I find the weather channel. Ninety-two degrees. Ninety percent humidity, which makes it feel like 105. I might have argued 150. It’s oppressive. Scattered thunderstorms. Asheville. July 3.
They switch to some stock photos of fireworks, of families in the park, sitting on blankets. Fireworks over a river.
I have always hated them. I don’t remember the time before, when I guess maybe I didn’t hate them.
Last summer, the one time we did something as a family, me, Eli, Summer, she just bounced on her daddy’s lap, unafraid. We had our camp chairs by the lake, waiting for the colors to boom over the horizon. Other families around us, other kids, running with glow necklaces. A barbecue going, the air like lighter fuel and smoke. We had a cooler of beers between us. I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned my head down on my lap, and shook.
What the hell is wrong with you? Eli asked. We were new at this, at the family outing. Out without his parents, without a safety net. No one to come whisk Summer away when we couldn’t calm her down. He held her loose under her arms, her arms bare, and her tiny armpits silky soft. She was in that phase when all she wanted was to stand on your lap while you held her, and she jumped. Eli had a tallboy tucked in the cup holder of his chair. His face, sunburned from an afternoon at the lake, his brow, furrowed at me.
The sound of fireworks, the heavy boom and sparkle, makes an ashy taste in my mouth. Sometimes, you think you don’t remember a thing that happened, a car accident, a bad fall on a bike, because it’s just that thing in your head. Just the word, accident, without detail. But lying there, naked on a motel bed in the middle of a strange state, I see that old Fourth of July like it’s happening right in front of me again. Nudie, sitting in the grass with a paper bag of firecrackers. He’d light a whole line of them, strung together, holding them in his hand while they went off one by one, and shaking them out like a match when it got too close to his fingers. All the men, Doe, Chuck, eve
n, were stupid like that, pulling stunts in front of the girls, Look, watch how long I can hold this before it blows off my thumb. The crackle-sulfur smell of sparklers. The gun-barrel smell of snakes. The big red waxy barrel of a cherry bomb.
He held it so close to my face I could taste it. The paper, the singe of the lighter. But he laid it on his own lip like a cigarette. His hair, dirty brown and too long, limp on his neck.
Watch this, Ray, he said. His hands shook.
The blast lit up the inside of my eyelids like my brain was on fire.
It tasted like the flat chalk of ash and the salt of skin. I saw Chuck’s mouth moving, open and wet, the look of his teeth, the front two yellowed from smoking cigarettes, his lips. There was a string of spit connecting his lips while he yelled. At me. I couldn’t hear him though. I couldn’t hear anything but the fuzz of the explosion. The trees, everything around me, silent and still. Chuck put me in the back of the car, deaf and stuck to the hot seat. I don’t remember where we went from there. There was a hospital parking lot where I waited in the car, but that was later. Chuck in the front seat, smoking, waiting. That hospital is gone now, changed over to a medical center, just nurses and a clinic and offices. Not a place where anyone goes to die.
Couper comes out toweled off and undressed. I lie with my head on my arm, my face turned toward him, and the TV still going on the weather channel, the weekend outlook, the UV index, and firework safety. It’s almost like I’ve never seen him naked, him standing there. I’ve never had a look from that far away. We’re always so up close.
He’s more athletic than I’ve given him credit for. Has less of a belly than I’d thought. If I had to describe him to someone, I’d say he was big in the middle, middle-aged, with two different colored eyes, but it doesn’t do him justice at all. He’s muscular in his arms and thighs, his calves, thin at the ankle, blooming with strength below the cup of his knee. His cock, just a few degrees off high noon, and completely out of sync with what he says.
I’m out of condoms.
You were out, I say, holding out my arm. Why didn’t you get them?
He shrugs. Other things on my mind.
I’ve been having unprotected sex for years, I say.
Yeah? he says. How has that worked out for you?
Not great, I say.
Why aren’t you on the pill? he says.
I’ve tried it, I say. I don’t like it. It makes me feel fat and cranky and tired.
So does pregnancy, he says. He chuckles at his own joke.
What do you know about it? I say.
I said I didn’t have kids, he says then. I didn’t say I never had a pregnant wife.
When his face darkens, I feel a nervous flutter, high, in between my ribs, like a bird is trapped there. I prop up to my elbows.
Come here, I say, and it takes him a minute, but he does. He sits close and I sit up, and lay my hands on the sides of his face. Tell me.
That’s when he decides he wants to fuck me. It takes me forever to get into it, because I can’t stop thinking about what he means, and he keeps grabbing, not my ass, but my hands, he holds them above my head, and presses his face, his baby-smooth and sweet-smelling face, against my collarbone.
Even after, he doesn’t say much.
What is there to say?
My first wife’s name was Debra, he says. We were young. We lost a baby at five months, he says. A boy.
Five months old? I say.
Five months into the pregnancy, he says.
Jesus, I say, because I can picture it. A roughly formed baby with fingers and a heartbeat, so small you could hold him in your hand. Then, Do you know why?
No, he says. There wasn’t the same technology back then. I mean, he says, and rolls his eyes to the ceiling, this kid would be older than you. Maybe it’s better, he says then. That’s what the doctor told us. It was for the best.
People say shitty things, I say. I try to sit up, but he holds me down, half underneath him. All kinds of things might be better, I say. It might be better if we died in a car crash tomorrow.
I know.
It might be better if you never met me.
No, he says. But I know.
What did you do? I say. With the baby? I’m afraid to ask, because I’m afraid the answer is, they just dispose of it, like it’s waste. Human garbage.
After sex, he has an emptiness that makes me not want to look at him. The mask of confidence gone, his face, flushed but sunken. He kisses my forehead and moves off and we lie on our backs, in that cheap, clean room. The bed, softer than it should be in the middle, so your butt is lower than your shoulders.
It was born, he says. I mean, she had to deliver it, even though it was already dead. We had to bury him.
Did you name him? I say. I think of the graves in the cemetery in town, the old graves in the cemetery where Summer is buried with her whole name, Summer Rose Jenkins, that say only Baby.
Yeah, he says, but nothing further.
What? I say.
I named him Couper, he says.
Why? I blurt out. We left the heavy, light-blocking curtains open a crack and a strip of light wiggles across the bed when the curtains move above the air conditioner.
I felt like part of me died, he says.
What did she think of that? I say.
She divorced me.
We eat at the Sizzler. Beforehand, we go to Walmart and buy cheap bathing suits for the pool later, and Couper gets an atlas for when his phone doesn’t work, and lays it on the table between us at the Sizzler. We’ve been eating fast food and gas station snacks for so long that this feels like Sunday dinner.
I can’t remember the last time my mother cooked anything. She used to. Real stuff like pork chops and meatloaf. Cube steaks dredged in flour and deep-fried in a cast-iron skillet.
How long have you been on the road? I ask him. What I wonder is what Amanda cooked, or Debra, or the ones in between. I wonder how I will ever learn to cook anything in a borrowed house, in a camper.
All my life, he says. He smiles, still looking down at the map, but he reaches for my hand.
For real, I say. Before you came to South Lake.
He scratches his head. A few weeks, he says.
Where were you?
Down here.
The chill inside the Sizzler is too much contrast from the heat outside, and I shiver. When the waitress comes, I ask for hot tea.
Doing the same thing? I ask Couper.
Somewhat.
I watch his finger trace a line up roads on the map, toward the seam.
Are you just going in circles? I say and I’m kidding, and not, and I don’t know how he’ll take it.
I hope not, he says. He takes his finger off the road map. What happened, he says, with Summer?
After? I say. It just kind of fell apart.
I mean, is she buried?
Oh. Yeah. What else? I say.
I knew someone whose baby was cremated, he says. Human remains are small. Even an adult. When they give you back the urn, he says, most of what’s in there is the wooden casket they use. The actual body, small. A baby, he says, even smaller. A Dixie cup.
No one has ever talked to me this way. With this frank, open clarity about what has happened. About the body disintegrating. I want to bust open. I want to hug him. I want to not be in the Sizzler anymore.
Eli’s parents were really mad, I say.
At you? he says.
At all of it.
We stood on opposite sides of the gravesite, neither side talking to the other. Eli with his parents, the Reverend and Mrs. Charles Jenkins, and Eli’s older sister, Naomi, who’d never even met me or Summer. Naomi was one of those rabid homeschooling fundamentalists, living in Virginia. Her husband worked for the government. She had all these boys, like a year apart, seven, six, five, four, all of them with her, but not the husband, and she kept crying into Eli’s shoulder, and calling him Elijah, the way his mother did. June Carol was immaculate in deep purple
. On our side, just me and Chuck, who held my elbow, and kept stepping away to cough, to clear his throat, from nerves, I didn’t know.
My mother didn’t come. She was going to, but they had the service early. It was supposed to be at nine, and they waited until nine thirty, nine forty-five even, the little boys still at first, but then bumping into each other and the littlest one started to cry so that Reverend had to shove him over to June Carol for sympathy. My mother didn’t get up. Chuck had tried to get her going, but she wouldn’t budge. She was coherent enough to swear at him though. Said she’d had bad dreams. Fucking spiders in my bed, she said, but that was all. So it was just me and Chuck, who’s my uncle but not my dad, and not even my mother’s husband. He wore his best shirt, which is striped and blue, and blue jeans that were clean, and boots. He rolled up the sleeves because it was August, and hot. I had a dress that was brown with flowers, sleeveless and long. Pretty. Not for a funeral. Not for the mother of a dead baby to wear.
Eli’s father said the Lord’s Prayer. He said the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. He said the Lord sees fit to gift us with children, and relies on us to shepherd them through life, to return them to Him, as faithful children of God, but that only the Lord knows when that return is coming. Stay awake, he said, and watch. For you know not the hour.
June Carol put a little paper picture of Jesus with the children and lambs on top of the casket, but then covered it with dirt.
The rest of us are buried in Huntington, a town away. All the Reeds in a row: RayJohn, my dad, Buddy, the youngest Reed brother, who was only twenty-six when he died four-wheeling. Newton, which was Nudie’s real name. Theodora, Khaki’s mother. Donald, who we called Doe. Aubrey, the baby who was only a few days old.
I don’t know what they did with the miscarriages or the stillborn.
There are more of us dead than there are alive.
When Teddy died, they left the casket closed. We sat in the front row and my mother just folded in half, her face down on her knees. Khaki was late. When she did come, she showed up in her mother’s own dress, a little big for her, but not by much. She filled it out better than anyone might have thought she would, looking at her in her regular clothes, her T-shirt and shorts. The dress was discoey and short, diagonal burgundy and gray stripes, off one shoulder, with an uneven hem, the side without a sleeve hanging lower than the other, and all the stripes slanting that way too. Khaki sashayed up to the front in stockings that were too big, sagging at the knee and ankle, and more opaque than sheer, and a pair of strappy sandals.
The Scamp Page 19