Signs and Wonders

by Alix Ohlin

  “Hey,” she said, sitting down next to him.

  “Look who it is,” said Dilrod. His tone snaked with menace. She hadn’t realized, until this moment, that he probably hated her; that he probably thought she was responsible for making Stefan different, less fun, more into weird movies and guilted-out about strip clubs. The idea hardly surprised her; she’d just never bothered to consider things from his point of view before.

  She caught the bartender’s eye and ordered a vodka tonic.

  Dilrod said, “Mama’s stepping out.”

  “Everybody needs a break once in a while,” she said with careful neutrality.

  Dilrod smiled mirthlessly. “I’m sure Phoebe will understand.”

  “There’s frozen breast milk as a backup at home,” she said, and immediately knew she’d said the wrong thing; upright and defensive was the wrong tone. Then she added, “So how was it?”

  “How was what?”

  “Last night. With the girls.”

  “Oh, my God. I’m going to need another drink. Did you come here to attack me too? Pussy-whipping your husband isn’t enough?”

  She thought of Stefan at home, bent over the baby in his lap. He liked to sing her the ABC song. He read her Goodnight Moon every single evening. “That’s not it,” she said steadily. “I’m just … curious.” And into the pause left after this remark she said, “Don’t tell Stefan.” She was a fake too, but Dilrod didn’t know it.

  He lifted an eyebrow and turned toward her on his stool. “I don’t believe you,” he said, though she knew he wanted to. It was more interesting, more fun, to be drunk with his old friend’s wife in the bar of the Sheraton, and she’d come out after him because he represented something different and more exciting than what she had at home. This, she thought, was a story he’d live off for years.

  “Fine,” she said, carefully matching her tone to his. “Don’t believe me.”

  They finished their drinks and ordered seconds, or whatever number Dilrod was on. She felt wasted, and her cheeks were flaming; this was more alcohol than she’d had in ages. Dilrod was telling her about one of the girls from last night, her huge ass and her nipple rings—trying to shock her, as if she’d never heard of nipple rings before.

  “I just wanted to grab her ass, you know?” Dilrod was saying. “It’s like a primal thing that comes over a man. You see it, you want to touch it, and then you gotta pay for it. People who run those places are fucking geniuses. And the women—don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise, they’re in charge. The men are like little children, begging and pleading. The women have everything.”

  He went on like this, but she stopped listening. She was just staring at him and wondering how much longer she could stay. She loved Stefan, and Stefan—for whatever reason, it didn’t matter—loved Dilrod. Useless to explain these choices, their dark and permanent importance, the way they could rule you forever. You are what you like, she thought, and put her hand on his knee.

  Dilrod’s response was both sloppy and mechanical. He leaned over and kissed her, wetly, his lips grabbing at hers like some separate animal. She held the kiss long enough to confirm its reality. As they sat there, mouths attached, her breasts began to leak. At home, she knew, her baby was crying.

  She persuaded him to come back with her to make up with Stefan. It wasn’t hard. He was glad to have kissed her, but also guilty about it—the guilt inextricable from the gladness. He would never tell Stefan; not telling was his thing.

  She held his hand as she drew him through the doorway. Stefan stood up to greet them, and she saw him take it all in, everything she presented to him, as if on a tray: her smeared lipstick, her blouse stained with milk, Dilrod drunk and sloppy, with a secret smile.

  “Look who I found,” she said, her voice a little breathless.

  From the other room Phoebe, perhaps hearing her, let loose a demon wail. As she went to tend to the baby she could feel her husband’s eyes on her, following her every move.

  A Month of Sundays

  There were three of them in the car that night: Lauren, Samantha, and that boy he’d never liked, the one he’d pegged as a bad influence. The first time the kid showed up at the house, his eyes were bloodshot, his hair wet; clearly he was fresh from the shower, deodorant and shaving cream wafting off of him, and this made Mike wonder what smells he’d had to wash away. He was good-looking enough, square-jawed and blond, and Lauren sprinted out to him like a stone from a slingshot. Mike sauntered over, leaning heavily over the driver-side window, partly to get a look at him and partly to remind him that the pretty girl in his car had a father—not just any father, but a former college football player, a man who could cast a shadow, someone who’d come looking if anything went wrong.

  “I’ll have her home by eleven, sir,” the kid said, so polite that Mike wanted to reach in and shake him. Do you think I’m an idiot? That I was never seventeen? But Lauren had her seat belt on, her green eyes glowing with please-don’t-embarrass-me fury. So he patted the roof of the car and let them go. And he did have her back by eleven, Lauren smiling at him where he was watching TV, yawning as she headed safely up to bed.

  These were the scenes he replayed in his mind at night. The dentist had given him a mouth guard because he was grinding his teeth. He lay on his back with a mouth full of plastic, sweating into the sheets. The dentist said it would help with his headaches, and he supposed it did. But it also made a clacking noise that Diana couldn’t stand. She was sleeping in the spare room now.

  Sunday morning he woke and showered, the house quiet, Diana at church. He’d never gone with her except at Christmas, and once Lauren turned thirteen they didn’t make her go, either. Heading to the hospital he stopped, as had become his habit these past months, at Samantha’s house. She and Lauren had been friends since the second grade. They’d played on the same soccer team, slept at each other’s houses, spent hours on the phone talking through teenage melodramas. He’d taught them both in his middle-school science class, relieved they were good students. Eighteen, and starting at Drexel in the fall, Sam was a stocky blond girl with bright blue eyes obscured by too-long bangs. She slid in beside him, wearing a tank top and jean shorts, and buckled her seat belt without saying anything. Her nose and shoulders were sunburned. As usual, they didn’t talk.

  Lauren’s room was down a dim hallway that smelled musty no matter what the weather was like. The nurses nodded at them. Lauren’s skin was pale, her dark hair in a ponytail, her green eyes cloudy. Taking a seat, he read her a chapter of Harry Potter as Sam sat outside. After a while she came in, and he went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. When he came back, he saw that she’d fitted her iPod headphones over Lauren’s ears and was staring at her intently.

  Lauren had always liked music. Her favorite song was “Here Comes the Sun,” and every time he heard it his eyes filled with tears.

  If she liked what Sam played for her, she didn’t show it. The nurses nodded at them when they left.

  On the drive home, they chatted a little. Curiously, when he parked in front of Sam’s house, they sometimes talked for five minutes or more, the girl suddenly bubbly, as if the fact that she’d soon be getting out of the car, or that their errand was over, relaxed her.

  “So a couple summers ago Mr. Harad was giving out free passes to soccer teams?” she said today. “Like for ice cream cones or whatever? And these kids just started bringing in these old passes, saying they’d forgotten about them. So we had to give them all this free ice cream, tons and tons of it. But then he figured out the passes were fake.”

  “He must’ve been mad,” Mike said.

  “Steam was literally coming out of his ears,” Sam said. “He was screaming at these ten-year-olds, ‘You use computers to cheat! Computers are to learn!’ ”

  “I wish,” Mike said drily.

  “No kidding,” Sam said, then opened the door, got out, and waved at him exuberantly, even though they were only a few feet apart.

  At home Diana was
making Sunday brunch, which they ate while reading separate sections of the newspaper. She used to tell him about the day’s sermon, until she realized he wasn’t listening. He couldn’t help it; he just tuned out. She’d grown up in the Moravian church, whereas his childhood Sundays in Ohio were devoted to football games on TV. By now they had a truce on the subject. When he was finished clearing the plates and loading the dishwasher, he found Diana on the couch in the living room, not doing anything, just sitting. She was thin and dark haired, as was Lauren. She sewed quilts and gardened and coached Lauren’s old softball team—all that on top of working twenty hours a week in the school-board office.

  She glanced up and saw him in the doorway. “Come here,” she said.

  They sat together on the couch, Diana’s legs flung over his, her head against his shoulder. After a while he turned on the TV and they watched the end of a John Wayne movie. Diana fell asleep holding his hand.

  Summers he generally spent fixing up the house, lucky to have learned these skills from his dad, a contractor. This year he was redoing the bathroom on the first floor. One day he and Diana were at Home Depot picking out fixtures when suddenly she grabbed him and pulled him into the next aisle, flattening him against a rack of lamps, pressing against him.

  He could smell her shampoo and feel her hummingbird heartbeat against his chest. A chandelier dug into his back. “What are you doing?” he said, laughing.

  She shushed him, lowering her face, and he put his arms around her, wondering if she was upset about the bathroom. But they’d planned the renovation even when they thought Lauren would soon be off to college; they needed it for when family came to visit. When Diana finally released him, her eyes were dry, her cheeks flushed. “Sorry,” she said, “it’s the Kents.”

  Gazing over her shoulder, he saw Sam’s parents browsing through the lawn mowers. They were kind, smart people, both doctors. After the accident they’d come by regularly, bringing food and flowers, eyes soft with pity, but Diana had stopped returning their calls. “It just makes me feel worse,” she’d said. This was why he didn’t tell her that he took their daughter with him to the hospital every Sunday. It was the only secret he kept from her.

  They hid in the lighting aisle until the Kents were gone.

  The following Sunday, he picked Sam up again, read to Lauren, and drove Sam home. In front of her house, she said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “When I go away to college …” Her voice drifted off.

  She had a scab on her right knee, like a younger child, and she’d been picking at it; it looked angry and infected, blood oozing out. If she were Lauren, he’d be on her case about it. He waited for her to go on.

  She looked vacantly out the window and said, “Should I, like, write to Lauren?”

  Gripping the steering wheel, he turned away. They’d never once talked about the accident or how they felt about it. It was what had made their Sundays so comfortable. When he spoke, he was surprised by how unsteady his voice was. “It’s up to you,” he said. Carefully, then, he brought his voice under control, adopting his teacher’s tone. “If it would make you feel good, then I don’t see why not. I could read the letters to her.”

  She blew out a puff of air, spraying her bangs out to the side. “It’s just weird, like we said we’d keep in touch, so I feel like I should, but I don’t really think she can hear me. And even if she could, wouldn’t she be pissed? That I’m going to college and she’s not?”

  “I don’t think she would,” Mike said. The truth was in the car between them: that Lauren didn’t have the faculty for anger, that college meant nothing to her now. The thought sank him. It was like going down in an elevator into a dark, cool basement so deep beneath the earth that you might forget you could ever come back up. Forget that you’d ever seen the sun. When he was in that place, Diana said he was unreachable. Lost. So far away, in fact, that he didn’t notice at first that Samantha was crying, sniffling bubbles of snot that she wiped away with the back of her hand. He wished Diana were here; she’d have handed her a tissue and given her a hug. He patted the girl’s shoulder awkwardly. “It’s okay,” he said.

  “I feel like it’s all my fault,” the girl said.

  “It’s not,” he said, then paused. “Right?”

  The events leading up to the accident had always been mysterious. Sam, who’d been sitting in the back, was the only one who’d come out of it intact. The boy died at the scene. At first, the doctors said that Lauren would be all right, that they could relieve the pressure on her brain. Later, they’d changed their minds.

  And now Samantha was next to him, her eyes wild and red, her chin trembling spastically. After the accident, she’d been so upset that no one had been able to get anything out of her. Later, she said she didn’t remember any of it. Sometimes Mike had wanted to shake the memory out of her. But he’d tried to let it go; knowing what had happened wouldn’t undo it.

  “Hey,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  She took a deep breath, then hiccuped. Not knowing what else to do, he took a card from his wallet—it was from a plumber they’d used last year—and wrote his cell phone number on the back. “You can call me anytime,” he said.

  She took it gratefully, seeming relieved to have something to hold, and put it in her pocket, smiling at him through her sloppy bangs. “Thanks,” she said.

  That week he worked on the bathroom, stripping out the tile and removing the old toilet and sink, and ferrying it all to the landfill. The summer was densely humid, and his sweaty clothes stuck to him. At night, his muscles ached. He was deep asleep on the following Friday when his phone rang. It took him a while to understand what was happening, and then to remove the mouth guard so he could speak. When he finally flipped the phone open, he heard only music, some pulsing dance beat.

  “Who is this?” There was a scuffling sound, followed by jagged breathing. “Samantha?” he said. “Is that you?”

  “Can you come get me, please?” she said.

  He looked at the clock; it was past two. “Tell me where you are.”

  She gave him an address in South Bethlehem, not far from Lehigh. Maybe she was at some party with college kids. He got his keys, then paused by Diana’s closed door, wondering if he should tell her; but she wasn’t sleeping well lately, and he didn’t want to ruin her whole night.

  Though she’d called from what sounded like a party, the ramshackle duplex he pulled up in front of was quiet. He’d thought she’d be outside waiting for him, but she wasn’t. He sighed. Lauren had never done anything like this. Grudgingly he climbed the splintered wooden stairs and peered in the window. A couple of guys were lying on couches, watching TV, no one else in sight. He knocked, and when he got no reaction, he assumed they were stoned or something worse. Now worried, he opened the door and went in.

  “Don’t you knock?” one of them said. The other stayed riveted to the TV. They looked to be in their twenties, one white, one Hispanic, both skinny, slouched on their threadbare couches, their jeans riding down to expose their underwear, their arms sleeved in tattoos.

  “I did,” said Mike. “I’m looking for Samantha.”

  The guy who’d spoken shrugged, and the other still hadn’t moved.

  Giving up, Mike headed to the empty kitchen, then moved upstairs. If the first floor was unadorned, the second was battered, littered with beer cans overflowing with cigarette butts. In one room there was only a bare mattress on the floor. His pulse quick and angry, he opened the next door and saw a fat man in a white tank top ministering to a sick person in a bed. Then his eyes readjusted, and he understood the man was pulling up Sam’s dress. Her eyes were closed, her arms flopped out to the side. A strand of her long blond hair was caught in her mouth, foam flecked on her chin.

  “Get off,” Mike said. “Now.”

  The man ignored him, his face flushed as he pulled down her underwear.

  Mike stepped forward and pushed him off, and he landed hard
on the floor, his jeans unbuckled, sprawled there waving his arms and legs languidly, like a turtle on his back.

  Turning back to Samantha, Mike pulled her dress down—it barely reached her thighs—and picked her up, draping her arm across his shoulder. “Can you walk?” he said. She didn’t answer. She smelled of puke and beer.

  Downstairs, in the living room, there was now only one guy left, the one who’d spoken earlier. He was crouched over a bong, filling his lungs. When he saw them, he let out a stream of smoke and smiled. “Girl had a little too much fun, huh?”

  At the sound of his voice, Sam came around, gurgling a little. “Thank you for the party,” she said weakly.

  “You’re so welcome,” the guy said. “Dude, need help getting her to the car?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Mike said, propping Samantha against his leg as he opened the screen door.

  The guy smiled again. “Whatever,” he said.

  After Mike got her buckled up, he started the car. The fat man came running out of the house, shaking his fist. When Mike reached over the girl to lock the door, Sam woke up and smiled vaguely. “Bye,” she said.

  Pulling into the Kents’ house, he saw the driveway was empty. Sam was awake, staring listlessly at the window.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “They took my brother to visit colleges.”

  He turned off the ignition and rolled down the windows, a breeze carrying the smell of skunk into the car. Sam sat with her seat belt on, dazed or sick or simply pliant. He knew he should scold her, express concern, or both. Be parental. But it was three in the morning and he was wiped out. A headache pressed its angry iron grip upon him. Leaning back in the driver’s seat, he said the first thing that came to his mind. “Did Lauren know those guys?”

  She nodded. “Sure,” she said. “We partied with them sometimes.”