by Alix Ohlin
When he pulled up, he saw a girl sitting on his front steps. It was Violet, or rather Jane. This time she was wearing jeans and a pink cardigan sweater and white running shoes. He stood in the driveway for a second, not knowing what to say.
“You’re in the phone book,” she said, before he could say anything. “I hope you don’t mind I just dropped by. Can I come in?”
“What are you doing here?”
“You’re in the book,” she said again. She was standing up now, with her hands plunged in the pockets of her jeans, and she looked innocent and vulnerable, or like a person who was trying to look innocent and vulnerable. The year he and Carol started going out, he remembered, she’d been obsessed with a hooker who was blackmailing an alderman in Ohio and had amassed thousands of dollars that his wife thought was safely gathering interest in their kid’s college fund. “What a scumbag,” Carol had said of the alderman. “He should have kept it in his pants.”
“I was just on my way out,” he told Jane. “Now’s not a good time.” Quickly he got back in the car, then drove to a theater and saw two movies back-to-back. When he got home again it was midnight and she was gone. She probably had to go to work, in the hotel bar. He breathed out a deep sigh. Inside, he checked his messages.
“This is Jane Eckman calling,” her voice said. “That’s my name. Jane Audrey Eckman. I really am from New Hampshire. I’m not a creep or a crazy person. I just wanted to call and tell you that. I’m sorry I freaked you out today. I just didn’t know if you’d remember my name. I mean, if I called you, I thought you might not know who I was, so I thought I’d just stop by. I thought you seemed like a nice person, and so I thought I would just stop by. I’m in the phone book too if you want to call me back. Or also you have my card. That’s all. Okay. Bye.”
Alone in his house, he exhaled. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding his breath. In the pocket of his pants, hanging in his closet, he found her card (Friends for all Occasions, it said, with a phone number, next to which she’d written, in blue ballpoint and bubbled letters, Violet/Jane) and tore it into small pieces, which he then flushed down the toilet.
The next night, she called again. He wasn’t picking up the phone, just in case, and she left another message. This time her voice trembled a little.
“Martin, this is Jane,” she said. “I know this is making me sound crazy, but I’m actually not crazy, I swear. I just—Listen. I don’t know a lot of people here. And I don’t meet a lot of people either, because where would I meet them? And if I did meet them and they asked me what I do, what would I say? So I guess I just thought, I mean, in your case, you already know from the start. I guess I just thought, I’m kind of lonely, and you seem kind of lonely too, so maybe it would be okay. Anyway, I just wanted to explain that. You have my card. That’s all. Okay. Bye.”
The next day she didn’t call. He’d expected her to, but of course he was glad she didn’t. He went out for a beer with Victor and Wayne, to a sports bar, not the hotel, and when he got home he was even a little disappointed not to find a message waiting, but not really disappointed, just a little let down. She was lonely, that was all, and he was glad she was leaving him alone now. He’d been through enough.
A few days passed. Life went back to its routine, such as it was. He cleaned his office, cleaned his house. No calls.
Then the verdict came down on the murderer of his wife and child. He was guilty. Absent the death penalty in Rhode Island, he’d probably get life in prison. Protesters outside the prison were demanding he should be killed. The parents of the dead woman were interviewed and declined to offer an opinion, saying only that no matter what happened, their daughter and grandson weren’t coming back, and given that, there could be no justice. Punishment, but not justice. Doug turned off the TV and sat by himself on the couch, his hands shaking.
· · ·
A week later, when he pulled up to the house after work, Jane Eckman was waiting on his front steps again. This time the weather was warm and she was wearing a pink flowered sundress, like a girl going to church. It looked like an outfit her mother would have bought her. For the first time he wondered how old she was. He almost reversed out of the driveway, but didn’t. He got out of the car and faced her.
“Hi, Martin,” Jane said, then swallowed visibly. “I’m sorry about those phone calls.”
“It’s okay,” he said.
“I came here to ask you out,” she said.
“What?”
“On a date,” she said.
To this he said nothing, and just looked at her.
“People say sometimes men are dense so you have to be clear. So I’m here, being clear. I like you. You seem like a nice man. You told me I should go ahead and try to be a teacher. It made me feel good, do you know what I mean? I meet a lot of men and most of them don’t seem very nice. So I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner with me tonight?”
“Jane,” he said.
“If you say no, I’ll leave now and I won’t ever bother you again.”
“No.”
“Okay, then,” she said. She pulled a cell phone out of her purse. “I’ll just have to call a cab. It’s okay if I wait out here, isn’t it? Sorry. This isn’t a very good exit.”
In the living room, he watched her stand in the driveway until the cab took her away. He couldn’t see, from where he was, whether she was crying or not.
· · ·
He thought that was the end of it, but she kept calling. She didn’t leave messages, though. She’d just call and hang up, every few days. It was ridiculous, like high school or something. After a couple weeks he made up his mind. He went to the bar in the hotel, but she wasn’t there. This went on for another few days, her calling and hanging up, his looking for her at the hotel bar at night after work. Finally he saw her, sitting there, nursing a cocktail. He had two thousand dollars in his pocket, in a small manila envelope. It was money he and Carol had saved for a down payment on a new car. Jane smiled when she saw him.
“Buy me a drink?” she said hopefully.
“I can’t stay,” he said. He looked around the bar, eyeing it as he thought she would, for prospective marks. Was that what she would call them, marks? He didn’t know. “I came to bring you something.”
Jane smiled again and he saw she was blushing. She thought he’d come around to ask her out. He put the envelope on the bar. “Be a teacher,” he said.
Her smile was gone, but the blush was still there. She didn’t touch the envelope. She curled both hands around her glass, holding it tightly.
“My wife and I were saving it,” he said, “but I don’t need it. Take it and go back to New Hampshire. Go back to school and be a teacher. Meet a nice man and have children.” His voice was cracking. The bartender was looking at him, but he didn’t care. “Start a new life.”
Jane pushed the envelope back at him and stood up. “Is that what you think I want from you? Fuck you.” Her voice rose to a shout. “Seriously, Martin. Fuck you.” She got up and rushed out, her high heels clicking spastically.
The bartender shrugged. “Women,” he said.
Doug picked up the envelope and went home. While he was taking a shower, the phone rang. Jane, he thought, I’ll never get away from her. After he got dressed, he saw there was a message, so he poured himself a drink and steeled himself to listen to it.
But it wasn’t Jane. It was Debbie, Carol’s best friend, the one who’d been driving on the night of the accident. She’d called him every few months since the crash, but he’d never called her back. It wasn’t that he hated her; he just couldn’t stand the sound of her voice.
“Douggie,” she said, in her high, squeaky voice, and immediately he was back in the hospital, back in the embrace of her awful bandaged paws. “I know we haven’t really talked since … Well, maybe you don’t want to hear from me. But I was watching the news about that guy and how he’s going to jail forever now, and I was thinking about you.” Her voice trailed off and he gues
sed she was drinking, or on the verge of crying, or both. “I was …” She hung up.
Debbie was divorced and lived by herself, ten minutes away, in a condo development called Lantern Hills. Every time she told people where she lived she’d say, “We do have some lanterns, but the land’s actually flat,” and laugh. He’d always found her annoying, but now, all of a sudden, he felt like he’d missed her.
He rang the doorbell and she answered the door in jeans and a college T-shirt—no bra it looked like—and bare feet. Her hair was down, uncombed.
“I got your message,” he told her.
“Come in,” she said.
She brought him a beer and they sat down on the couch. She looked strange holding the bottle, and two of her fingers didn’t bend. There were scars on the backs of her hands.
She waved her stiff hands at him, almost apologetically. “They’re full of pins,” she said.
“That guy,” Doug said, “the one who killed his wife and kids. Carol would have said, Too bad we don’t have the death penalty in Rhode Island.”
Debbie nodded. “That’s true, that’s so exactly what she would have said.”
There was a silence.
“I met this girl,” Doug told her. “She was a hooker. But she wanted to be a teacher.”
“What?”
He told her everything, from start to finish, though he left out the part at the very end where Jane said she didn’t want the money. He just talked about giving her the envelope and telling her to start over, and Debbie nodded and listened with her scarred hands awkwardly semifolded in her lap. With the ludicrous, almost lurid story hanging there between them, he felt closer to her than he had to anyone in a very long time. He felt a tenderness gurgle inside him and gasp for air, and as he spoke and gestured he let his hand brush over hers.
Vigo Park
There’s a gun at the beginning of this story, placed here so that you know it’s going to go off by the end. That’s just the way it is; you’ve been warned. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it the inevitable consequence of certain destructive but all-too-common human behaviors. There’s no changing the ending, however dramatic and/or ugly and/or contrived and/or sad it might seem to you. Better accept it now.
The gun (an ancient Walther looted from some German soldier in World War II, not that this ultimately matters) is in the coat pocket of a man on the 24 bus, which is heading to Vigo Park. It’s winter, and he’s hunched over, with his hands meeting across his lap, like someone protecting himself from the cold. Underneath his coat, though, he has taken off both his gloves and is touching the gun—which his father, a responsible man, kept unloaded and locked in a cabinet in his house until he died—with his bare fingers. The ring on his left hand makes a clinking sound against the barrel, but nobody on the bus hears it. Despite all that’s happened he hasn’t been able to bring himself to take it off. Whenever he starts to slide the ring off he sees his wife in his mind’s eye, crying on their wedding day when she put it on his finger, tears of pure, liquid happiness. To take it off would be to acknowledge all the ways he has hurt her, and that is more than he can stand to do.
A fat man in a sheepskin jacket sits down next to him at this point, and so he stops touching the gun, which has made him feel kind of masturbatory anyway, sliding his hands up and down the length of it beneath his coat. The bus begins the uphill chug toward the park. People get on; others get off. The day is gray. Earlier there was sleet and later there will be snow; but right now the sky holds itself in dark abeyance above the salt-streaked roads and cars of the city. Even the clothing seems to have darkened in the wintry light: brown and black and navy-blue wool coats trudge up and down the streets, relieved only occasionally by a patterned hat or scarf. Why, he wonders, does winter have to take all the color from the world? The bus turns a corner, and through the dirty window he can just make out his destination.
In the park a woman in a red coat sits watching a child play. It’s not her child. She has no child. This, to her, is a source of enormous grief. She had a chance, several years ago, but was talked out of keeping it. Sometimes, when she sees a child the age her own would be, she thinks about kidnapping it, or doing other, even crazier things.
“Life is what you make it,” her sister often tells her, and this is just one reason among many they seldom speak. Her sister, who is happy, believes this is of her own devising. She doesn’t believe in luck. She tells Rebecca to change the things in her life that make her unhappy, and then she’ll be happy. “It’s like making coffee,” she explains. “Is it too strong? Add more water next time. Learn from the mistakes of the past.” These words fall on Rebecca like wet snow: white and substantial one moment, dissolved by the next. “I drink tea,” she tells her sister, who sighs heavily and informs her that she’s missing the point.
This is where things might get a little hard to believe for some people. Basically the situation is that on the other side of the playground is another woman in a red coat. Like Rebecca, she has long blond hair in a ponytail, and like Rebecca, she is alone. In fact, it’s the same make and model of coat, bought from the same department store during the same January sale. It was even bought for the same reason, because most winter coats are dark blue or black or brown and both women thought they might cheer themselves up by relieving the gray color scheme of winter with a flash of red. This not-especially-brilliant bit of fashion psychology has infected hundreds, maybe thousands, of women, and the red coats are flying off the racks; it’s the one must-have item of the season—you know how women are, they get these ideas into their heads, these cravings that must be satisfied—and Tori has come to regret her purchase, since seeing it on so many other women has made her feel generic in her thoughts and emotions, frankly, the last thing she needs right about now. Looking across the park she thinks, Oh, great, another one. Why do I even bother? Which is a question she’s asking herself more and more often these days. This other woman seems to be waiting for someone, as she herself is. Automatically she compares the other woman’s looks to her own—maybe ten years older, and thinner, too thin, really, a stick—and decides, after some thought, that the coat looks better on her, Tori. Knowing this victory is shallow doesn’t mean she isn’t still satisfied. Frank always tells her, after sex, that she’s beautiful, in a tone of wonderment and joy she has to believe is genuine. In life you have to believe some things are real or you just die. You die, even if you stay alive.
In the playground children are chasing one another, swaddled in snowsuits that make their legs and arms look like sausages. Sometimes she used to daydream about the children she would have with Frank, give them names and choose outfits for them, but these were daydreams, nothing more. Tommy had wanted to have kids immediately, though he never considered the consequences, never thought about supporting them or not being able to stay out drinking until five in the morning whenever he felt like it. On the day they got married, in his parents’ backyard, he held the ring so solemnly before slipping it on her finger that she thought—with a sad, small shock of recognition—he looked less like a new husband than a child with a new toy in his hands. He was a child who wanted a child, and she had to be the adult for both of them, always arguing that it was too soon, that they should wait a little longer, that they had plenty of time, and it was too much for her, she was tired all the time, until she met Frank and saw a different vision of what life could be. There was the death of hope and then the beginning of it, and sometimes in her memory she could no longer separate the two.
She says his name out loud, just to say it. “Frank.” She misses him.
At the sound of her voice—and she thought she’d said it quietly—the other woman in the red coat turns around. There’s a nod, a chagrined, hey-you’ve-the-same-coat smile. They don’t see themselves as doppelgangers or anything like that. They’re just two women with the same coat, okay? It happens.
Tori wonders what Tommy is doing right now. It’s his second week of four in rehab, a period of maximum p
otential hostility, the therapist has said. He had vowed to put everything straight, and so had she, after she told him about Frank. It was a contest there for a while, who blamed who more. “That’s what marriage is,” Tori’s mom explained to her, “a blame game. You blame yourself, and then you blame the other person, and then you blame yourself for choosing the other person. That’s the cycle.” This is why she doesn’t usually confide in her mother, because she makes these depressing pronouncements about life that all too often turn out to be true.
A child runs past Rebecca chasing another—it’s hard to guess genders with all the coats and hats and scarves—who trips, and the first child falls on top, both of them laughing and then crying. Where are these children’s parents? No one runs to pick them up and reassure them and dry their tears. (In fact they are nominally under the charge of a day-care attendant, who is on her cell phone to her boyfriend in the warm confines of the rec center at the other end of the park. Later, weeks from now, she will be fired for having sex with this same boyfriend in the back of the day care while the children are napping, and she will have to move back home with her parents and endure hours and hours of lectures, none of which will influence her behavior in the slightest.) Without parents to help them, the children help themselves. They stare at each other, wide-eyed and crying, for a minute or so, then are distracted by something else going on a few feet away, and just like that, the crisis is over. Once they run away, though, Rebecca sees that one of them has dropped a mitten, striped, blue-red-yellow. The only other adult in sight is the woman in the matching coat, so Rebecca picks it up and brings it over to her.