Late in the Standoff

by Tracy Daugherty

  They stood there, she on her porch, he on the grass, staring at each other—as if watching an accident, Libbie thought. Down the block, a garbage truck’s air brakes sighed. She turned and twisted her key in the door. Stale air. She opened a kitchen window.

  “Got any wine?” Hugh asked. “A wicked indulgence in the middle of the day?” He grinned. An uncorked bottle of semillon blanc sat in the fridge, next to a soggy cabbage.

  The cabbage had been on the edge two days ago. Libbie had figured she’d eat it in time—then life changed. Fury swelled in her now. This is so you, Anna Lia, she thought, forcing me to drop everything and solve your latest ordeal. Goddam you. You’re dead, but it’s my life that’s spoiling.

  “Sorry,” Libbie said. She threw the cabbage into a trash bag, then ran hot water over her hands, relishing the thrill of the scald. She held her fingers in the spray, convincing herself she could feel something, anything.

  “I’ve told you, honey, not to throw the corks away,” Hugh said, sipping the wine. “Tastes a little flat.”

  “I know—”

  “It’s not a criticism. So. How’s Danny holding up?”

  “You saw him.”

  This was a painful subject for them, so they dropped it. Hugh took her hand and led her upstairs. She didn’t have the will to resist. In the bedroom she opened another window. Hugh set their wine glasses on a night table and began to unbutton her blouse. “I need to wash up,” she said. “It’s been two days since I’ve had a decent bath.”

  He kissed her ear. “Don’t take long.”

  In the bathroom she ran some more hot water. She slumped on the toilet seat. Who would she be with Hugh? Surely not the woman he’d known.

  Wearily, she slid a washcloth under her arms. Her flesh seemed thin. Thirty more years—forty? fifty?—tending this poor, unstable skin? She glimpsed herself in the mirror and startled. Even after three days, she didn’t recognize herself with this haircut.

  Hugh was already naked, perched on the foot of the bed. He sipped some wine; his face wrinkled at the bad taste. He set his glass next to hers.

  He stood to remove her bra. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered.

  Through the window screen she caught a whiff of smoke, the drug lords’ poison. Hugh began a quick rhythm. Absurdly—and just for an instant—she thought of her ex, who also always started fast. Last she’d heard, he’d moved to Memphis with his third wife. What did he look like now? Would he recognize her, with her fragile skin, the gray in her hair?

  Now Hugh was bucking violently against her, groaning, a strange, painful-sounding struggle. She flattened her palms against his back. The muscles in her thighs began to ache. She concentrated on the wine glasses. They trembled on the night table. Normally, Hugh was the gentlest man Libbie had ever known, but now he was seized by a frenzy—as if violence were a nervous, restless force in the world, searching for hosts.

  He came a second time, turning his body left, then right, tangling his legs in the sheet. He appeared to be in agony. Then his head nestled in the stinging warmth between her thighs. His tongue burrowed deeper, and amazingly, despite her self-consciousness, she began to undulate, open and swell. An eruption of light.

  She turned her head so Hugh couldn’t see the contorted stranger she’d become.

  He curled up beside her, his mouth on her ear. “I’ve missed you so much.” She rubbed the small of his back. “I’m glad to see you relax,” he said. “I know it’s been a nightmare for you.”

  “You should have seen the funeral home.” Her voice was faint. “I swear, the cost—”

  “Try to forget it, okay? Saturday night? I’ve got tickets to a blues show—”

  “Hugh—”

  “I insist, honey. You need to take a break, get out and enjoy the city, all right?”

  “Danny’s still not—”

  “Libbie, Danny has other friends. Marie, right? She can take care of Danny for a while. Now. We should call Father Caskin again—”

  “I can’t, Hugh.”

  “Honey, he’s expecting us. Anyway, Saturday? What say I get some sandwich stuff at the deli, some roast beef or—”

  “I mean it. Don’t count on me Saturday. I just can’t do it, Hugh. And Father Caskin can wait.”

  He turned his back on her.

  “I’m sorry. But I can’t concentrate on anything else right now.”

  “This isn’t just ‘anything else.’ This is our wedding, Libbie.”

  She pulled the covers to her chin.

  “Or have you changed your mind about that too?”

  She regretted the hurt in his voice. But she was hurting too. “Hugh—”

  He stood, stepped into his undershorts and pants. “When’s the funeral?”

  “Probably Monday or Tuesday.”

  “So I’ve lost you until then. At least.”

  “Please try to understand. I’m having to rethink my whole relationship with Anna Lia, reimagine who I even thought she was. That, on top of all the arrangements, Danny’s pain, the schoolwork I’ve ignored—”

  “I do understand, honey. I know you’re grieving. It’s not the plans we’ve made, so much as … I think you need to step away for a day or two. For your own sake.”

  “Thanks for being concerned.” She knew she sounded distant. Why was she punishing Hugh? Because, like Anna Lia, he might hold secrets? Because she feared her own changes?

  He buttoned his shirt. “I’ve got the girls Sunday, so …”

  She nodded.

  “Call me.”

  “I will.”

  His step was heavy, shaking the floor. She heard him close the front door. Standing naked at her bedroom window, she watched through tears as Hugh pulled away in his car, fiddling with his damned old radio.

  8

  The Slumber Room burbled with slushy trumpets—a New Age music tape. Mr. Crespi wore a tight blue coat. “Good afternoon, Ms. Schwinn, lovely to see you again. Ms. Clark looks beautiful. She’s waiting for you. This way.”

  Anna Lia’s coffin glowed in the light of six candles, each the size of a brick. The lid was open. The room smelled of roses and of dirty water from a leaking air conditioner.

  Mr. Crespi withdrew, leaving Libbie alone with the Memory Picture. Slowly, she approached the coffin. The face was waxy, hard. The dress was unfamiliar, pressed and proper, a tasteful dark brown, nothing Anna Lia would have worn … though maybe it did belong to her. Maybe Libbie had simply never seen it.

  Anna Lia’s hands lay crossed on her chest. Two stiff roots. Rouge on her chin and neck failed to hide black bruises. Libbie had a wild impulse to unbutton the dress and touch the wound in the skin above her heart. What would it look like? A butterfly? The rings of a tree? What marks would the autopsy have left—and what did the examination reveal? She assumed Danny had received the report by now, but she didn’t know where Danny was. In the last two days, he’d become as secretive as he had been needy at first.

  Libbie shut her eyes. “What did you do?” she whispered. “What the hell did you do?” She felt a draft in the room, opened her eyes to see the candles gutter, the flames like feathers in a light wind, and realized that Anna Lia was still with her, not in the bones and their chilly wrapping, but in the air-conditioned air, the wiring in the walls, her own grieving lungs. This is what she’d tried to tell Hugh—every step she had taken this week, she tripped over Anna Lia. To move ahead, make plans, start a new life, required a removal, a finality, the timing of which felt entirely beyond her control.

  Right now I’m a mourner. I can’t be a teacher, a wife.

  It was the same when Emily succumbed to the cancer. Libbie was in her midtwenties then and had been too frightened to view the body in the funeral home. It didn’t matter, though. She knew where Emily’s spirit had gone: to the rivers and ponds, the Thicket’s moss-warmed vines, north of Houston.

  In the late sixties, Austin was a magical town, lazy, fragrant with honeysuckle and incense. After classes, she and Emily would
catch a bus to Sixth Street and listen to jazz, country, rhythm and blues. They’d talk for hours, Libbie about the pleasure she took in the foreign students she was learning to teach or about the qualities she thought a perfect man should have. For Emily, the only subject was home: Paley, a little town in the woods filled with bluebonnets and mockingbirds. Even when Emily talked about losing her cats to owls, she called the woods sacred and longed to return once she’d earned her medical degrees. Libbie meant to visit her there one summer (rural life, away from ethnic restaurants, movie theaters, and frozen foods in giant supermarket bins was unimaginable to her), but Emily had gotten sick. The Thicket remained a fantasy land—marmalade skies—and, in Libbie’s mind, Emily lived on there, in floods of pollen, cottonwood fuzz, changing yellow light on the grass.

  The day of the memorial service (Emily’s family wanted their own private ceremony in Paley), a huge protest against the U.S. bombing in Cambodia had been staged in the streets of Austin, near the university. Libbie had ignored the angry chants and sat in the sunshine outside the church, dreaming of her friend.

  Now, standing here in Crespi’s funeral home, Libbie understood that, like Emily, her parents were merely spirits to her now. They’d been frail for so many years—and disagreeable, furious in their pain. She preferred to picture them beyond life’s troubles.

  She glanced again at Anna Lia. Without its animating spark, a human body was clumsy and heavy, a storage problem, a puzzle. We sneak into the world between our mother’s legs, she thought. And this is the result of our trespass.

  “Libbie?”

  She turned to see Roberto Capriati standing by the entry’s scarlet curtains. He wore a sport coat the deep sea-green of a sushi roll.

  They hugged. Roberto flinched when he saw Anna Lia. His eyes dampened, but he didn’t shake or weep. “I’ve been meaning to call you, to see how you were,” he said. “But I didn’t know what to say, or what to think of all this.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought you might hold me responsible …”

  “No. No. But I wish I knew what brought her to this point.”

  “So do I, Libbie. Honestly. All I can tell you is, she wouldn’t let me go. Christ. Couples break up all the time, right? I just needed space.” He pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket, wiped his nose.

  “Danny thinks Nicholas Smitts—”

  “No. Smitts is a gyrene,” Roberto said. “Danny’s right about that. But he didn’t do this. I saw them together one night over at Star Pizza—Smitts and Anna Lia—and I swear, Libbie, I recognized the pattern. Same as me. Anna Lia was calling all the shots. Get me this, get me that. Take me to a movie. Take me to a play. You know how she was. She’d worn him to a nubbin, in just a matter of weeks. I don’t know. I’m sure she never thought of bombs, for god’s sakes, before meeting this creep. But I can’t imagine him—or anyone—making her do something she didn’t want to do. We all knew she was impulsive—”

  “You make her sound like a schemer.”

  “She was, Libbie. At least with her boyfriends. Maybe you didn’t see it.”

  Libbie didn’t like this talk, though of course she had seen Anna Lia’s schemes. She turned to the body for an answer. The hairs on its head wiggled in the stale, recycled air.

  “Anyway, the cops have closed their investigation, right? Smitts is off the hook,” Roberto said.

  “Whether he deserves to be or not.”

  “It’s Danny I’m worried about now.”

  “Why?”

  “He came by the station Thursday afternoon. Looked like hell—”

  “I know. I saw him here Thursday morning.”

  “Libbie, he had a gun.”

  Anna Lia could have reached up and pinched her, and she wouldn’t have felt it. “What do you mean?”

  “A pistol. Tucked in his pants.”

  “I don’t … did he threaten—?”

  “No. But he was wired. And sick. I was so relieved when he left. Have you seen him since Thursday?”

  “No, the last couple of nights I’ve been back at my place.” Hugh had warned her. She’d been so unfair to him. “He may have been with Carla when she finalized the funeral arrangements.”

  “If he comes around again, watch yourself, Libbie. This thing has knocked him wide open.” He bowed his head above the coffin.

  Libbie caught a trace of White Shoulders from the creases in Anna Lia’s dress. Water dripped inside the air conditioner.

  Mr. Crespi peered around the doorway’s dusty curtains. “I trust you’re having a pleasant visit?” he asked.

  Libbie nodded.

  “If there’s anything I can do …”

  “We’re fine,” Roberto said.

  In our comfy satin box. Our tasteful brown dress.

  How many cars, on how many roads, hid a gun? How many walls concealed the makings of bombs? Hell, this was Texas. Whiskey and ammo held pride of place here, in family lockboxes next to the wedding photos and the deed to the house.

  Danny still didn’t buy the cops’ Movie of the Week about the pipe bomb; didn’t believe Anna Lia capable of harming anyone, even a weasel like the Love Stud. But now Houston seemed to him a maze of secret desires.

  The pistol lay on his passenger seat under a Burger King bag. Danny’s temples throbbed. He remembered his father saying, the morning of their hunt, “Friend of mine told me how this goes. It’s not just your shoulder that supports the stock, but your cheek, son—that’s it, hold it up against your face, like that—now there’s going to be some ree-coil …”

  He sped through a blinking yellow light, cut through an Exxon station to avoid another intersection. Where was he going in such a hurry, risking a pullover and discovery of the weapon? The country, he supposed. Where else do you head for target practice? Was he really going to do this thing? Godalmighty, what the hell was he thinking? Libbie and Carla always calmed him down. He hadn’t spoken to them since the funeral home. Maybe he should find them now.

  Last night he’d wanted to talk to Marie, to apologize for his forwardness, but Ricky had been nuzzling her there in the restaurant.

  His life was a busted seesaw.

  A pair of motorcycle cops sat beneath a billboard—FREE VASECTOMY CONSULTATIONS! CALL TODAY! Danny pumped his brakes.

  What frightened him the most was the ease with which he’d bought the gun, how natural it felt to follow a crazy impulse. The pistol on his seat made it simpler to believe what he didn’t want to accept: that it wasn’t impossible for Anna Lia to have indulged a nutty whim.

  He tugged on the Burger King bag, covering the gun.

  Yes. Libbie and Carla. Find them. Now.

  It occurred to him he didn’t know where Libbie lived. He’d never been to her home. Carla, on the other hand, loved to throw parties, and he’d danced many nights at her place. He didn’t remember the number, but he knew the neighborhood, and he’d recognize the house when he saw it.

  Sure enough: a two-story box beneath a spooky old oak. The driveway was empty, but he stopped anyway. He rang the bell three times and was about to walk away when the door opened a crack. “Yes?” said an unfamiliar voice.

  “Hi. I’m looking for Carla.”

  “She’s not here right now. Who are you?”

  “My name is Danny Clark.”

  “Anna Lia’s husband?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “I’ve got her cats.” The woman tapped her foot. “Have you come for them?”

  My god. The critters. He’d forgotten all about them.

  “They’ve made a mess in the kitchen. Sissy won’t be happy.”

  “Sissy?”

  “It was so sad about Anna Lia.”

  Danny remembered Carla mentioning—and avoiding questions about—an older sister. “You knew Anna Lia?”

  The door opened wider. The woman wore a purple muumuu and tarnished silver bracelets. A rubber band held her hair in a knot. Her face was pudgy and worn, but not unattractive, Danny thought—open, with
a vivid curiosity. “She used to come by sometimes, after school with Carla. I liked her. She always made me laugh.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Betty.”

  “How come I never met you, Betty? I’ve been to lots of parties here.”

  “Oh, I hate Carla’s parties. It’s hard for me to think when there’s so many people around. I stay in my room.”

  “I used to choose the music with Anna Lia. We’d bring our best salsa tapes over, and Carla would put them on.” He smiled at her. “We could’ve cut a rug, Betty, if you’d stepped out of your room.”

  She frowned and moved behind the door.

  “Of course you’re right, you’re right, parties are awfully noisy,” he said, hoping not to lose her. “Sometimes I’m not in the mood for them myself. Betty, do you think I could see Suzi and Robi? Are they okay?”

  She tapped her foot some more, then shrugged and let him in. “They’re probably hiding,” she said. “Mostly that’s what they do. They like to hide.”

  The house smelled of mustard and dishwashing soap, old magazines, Lemon Pledge. Danny recognized Carla’s fastidiousness—pillows stacked neatly on either end of the couch, curtains evenly drawn. She’d been just as orderly last week, in his apartment.

  Yellow light streamed through ivy-covered windows in the living room. On the dining room table, a wad of blue construction paper. Betty punched it to the floor, a swift, petulant gesture. “I hate tulips, don’t you?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I had this idea about flowers, but it didn’t work. Nobody was interested. I even called Hallmark.”

  Danny nodded, searching for the cats.

  “Now I have a new idea. Houston Bayou Water. Nicely bottled. Carbonated, maybe. Like 7-Up? I’ve written the local supermarkets, testing their interest.”

  Danny couldn’t tell if she was joking. He started to tell her that the bayou was full of shoes and toasters, car parts, condoms. He saw a gray blur beneath a chair. “Robi?” he whispered. “Kitty kitty kitty?” Pink nose, whiskers, muzzy breath. Suzi crouched behind him. Anna Lia’s babies. They’d never been friendly to him.