The doorknob turns and the door opens. Half of her face is luminous and golden, the other half a shadow.
“What do you want?”
As soon as I sit up, as I have understood her offer, heard her voice in my head, she backs away from the door. Seconds later, I hear the mattress take back her weight.
Already weary, I get up. I cross the carpet to the bed, stand over her a moment longer with her watching me before doubling the pillow and lying down with my back to her. The smell is there, but as soon as I close my eyes it doesn’t matter, and my dream is like the others. Moving a few inches above the ground like a dog or a rabbit, I follow the path around the side of the house, under the clothesline to the brush at the back of the yard where the incline and the evergreens start. I dig until I find the cigar box wrapped in cellophane. Behind me, the kitchen light shines, casting my shadow on the grass, along with the shadows of the clothesline and the bush beside the basement steps. I unwrap the cellophane, open the box, and examine its contents, a coil of dry skin like a snake’s shedding tied around a yellow-stained handkerchief. Hot, I remove my coat. Cold, I slip it back on.
Waking, I can still feel the weight and heat of the heavy coat. It’s dark when I sit up in bed, but I hear her breathing deeply beside me.
What if my home is gone, like she said? What if the house is gone?
It seems unlikely that it would all still be the same after so many years.
I see again the way she moved her hand in front of my face outside the arcade, casting a spell or planting a thought or a doubt. Watching her sleep, I get out of bed. In the dark, I feel for my shoes. I find the door, undo the lock, and slip out of the room. I hike up the driveway to Route 11.
Before crossing the bridge, I look back. A car passes the motel, and in the fuzzy edges of the headlights, I glimpse a figure stepping between the motel and the crest of the driveway. I keep going, faster, and when the next car passes, when I turn and look back, I see no one.
The wind abates, replaced by a breeze that smells like the sweet olive in Aunt Augusta’s yard. By the time I make it downtown, I’m starting to get hungry. The 24-hour Hardee’s is empty except for the man working behind the counter. Everything about the place is bright orange.
First thing, I go into the men’s room. I go to the sink, the mirror. The person looking back is pale enough to be the boy in the picture with the flat chest fading to nothing, head bent back, mouth open.
I can still smell her. Sleeping beside her was like sleeping beside something dead, and now I wear the smell on my clothes, on my skin. I run my finger along my receding hairline, touch the wrinkles on my face, the thick pouches under my eyes. I take off my shirt and examine my skin under the bright lights before I put my shirt back on and go out. When I order, the man working behind the counter smells me and makes a sour face. I wait for my coffee and my biscuit, carry my tray to a booth by the front windows and sit down.
It is before six, still dark, but I can see plenty of Route 11 by the streetlights. I lift the Styrofoam cup to my lips, and the coffee burns my tongue.
This time I’m sure I see her walking under streetlights just this side of the bridge. Her face is bent forward like she’s able to read my footprints on the sidewalk.
I stand and step away from the table, the biscuit, and the hot coffee. The man behind the counter watches me.
Outside, the predawn clouds show bright gray above the streetlights. The sweet morning breeze is gone, replaced by the smells of the railroad yard and the Exxon station.
Glancing back, I see her shadow passing a storefront, head bent down, watching the sidewalk, the scuffed record of so many journeys they would be impossible for anyone to untangle, but she somehow can untangle them.
Beyond the town limits, I follow the train tracks around a bend, away from the highway. The sky is lightening up, and the lights along the track flicker and click off, the land and the sky familiar like I’d never left, like they never left me. The air is thick with awakening birds, with their shrill hungry voices. Stumbling over the crushed granite, I bend to pick up a big, sharp rock before I veer away from the tracks. I duck behind some brush and crouch where I can see her when she comes.
THE OTHER LIFE
When she awoke, the reading light was on and her husband was leaning over her. She sat up on her elbows. The book she had been reading was still in bed with her, its spine pressed against her thigh.
“I think I hit somebody,” he said. “Goddamn it, I didn’t mean to.”
“You think you did? Jesus, with the car? Did you hit somebody or not?”
The room smelled of beer, all coming from him. It was enough to make her feel like she’d fallen asleep drunk. If this was a joke, or a stunt to punish her or to get her sympathy, it was the sickest thing she could imagine. But she hoped, she was almost sure, it was something like that.
Almost sure.
Sweaty and pale, he was walking back and forth, clutching his arms at the elbows and letting them go. He was still drunk, and he looked scared, like he at least believed, or he’d convinced himself, he’d done something terrible.
“I was on Barger Road,” he said, “not far from here. I was nodding off. I woke up and there was somebody, something, flashing in front of me.”
“Flashing—a light?”
“Not really flashing. More like a figure.”
“My God, did you see a person? Did you get out and look?”
He stopped pacing and eased down on the bed. He covered his face with his hands. She threw back the covers and sat forward.
“Listen. Think. Did you hit someone?”
He seemed to be listening, but to what? The house was dead quiet, and pictures came into her mind: glimpses of Barger Road, desolate, fields on either side, and houses belonging to farm families who went to bed early. Who would be out there this time of night?
She shook his shoulder and said his name. “You’ve got to get it together and think.”
After a moment he said, “I looked, but it was too goddamn dark. I didn’t see anything. I got back in the truck, but I kept seeing it again, that flash—okay, not a flash—but that blip or whatever in front of me. I left the truck there and ran here.”
She could see all these things happening, but why hadn’t he been able to find the person he’d hit, if he’d hit someone?
“Wasn’t there blood?” she said. “Think.”
Did he see blood on the truck? God damn it, you’re supposed to feel it when you hit somebody. A bump. How could he not be sure?
She was on the verge of crying, and looking at him, she couldn’t help thinking this might be exactly what he wanted. Punishment, yes, of a sick kind.
He pointed to his forehead.
“I think I hit my head,” he said. “Do you see anything there, like blood or a cut? I might have blacked out.”
“If you really hit somebody, you should have called the police,” she said. “Now it’ll be a hit and run. And think of that person lying there, dead or dying.”
He shook his head. He nodded and shook his head again.
“What if it’s nobody?” he said. “What if it was nothing? I’m starting to think it wasn’t a person.”
“Well, was it?” she said. “Was it?”
He didn’t answer, and then he cut his eyes away. She got out of bed, got him standing and pushed him along to the garage.
She drove toward the crossroads. She was in her robe. It was the only time in years she could remember driving barefoot, and the brake pedal felt rough and rubbery. He sat bolt upright clutching the dashboard, his sweaty face close to the windshield, his eyes wide open. Not even a mile from the house they came across flashing police car lights.
“Oh fuck,” he said, “goddamn it to hell.” He punched the dash, cursed, and shook out his hand.
“Take it easy,” she said. “Please.”
The Chevy truck was at an angle in the shallow ditch beside the shoulder. Beyond the ditch, a barbed wire fence, the dark fields and the m
ountains. No ambulance, no siren. Did that mean no body? Did that mean he’d hit nothing? She pulled over as the blue lights flashed in the rearview, on their faces. Two county deputies with flashlights approached her open window.
“That’s our truck,” she said.
“Okay,” one of the deputies said, “only how’d it get there?”
The deputy shined his flashlight into the Honda, and her husband squinted and put his hands in front of his eyes.
“I left it,” she said. She hadn’t planned on saying this, but she was willing to bet he hadn’t hit anyone, that this was some kind of stunt that was blowing up in his face. He hadn’t expected the police to be there. That much was clear. Now things would go better if the police thought she had been driving. And for once, when he heard what she was doing, he kept his big mouth shut.
“I lost power,” she said. “I left the truck and went home to get my husband. It’s not far to our house, just over there. Only he’s not much help, not in the shape he’s in.”
It had been almost a year since they’d moved into the house on Barger Road. She was still waiting to feel settled, to go more than a week without her husband reminding her of her life away from him, with the other man. Her life away had always been a problem for them, but it seemed to her that in the last few months their troubles had been gaining intensity and frequency. There were more fights and more drinking, and when there was no fighting and drinking, there was a distance that disturbed her more. Earlier that evening he’d blown up after he came home from work, saying he couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t go into town with him, why they couldn’t meet friends for a pitcher of beer at the Cellar and watch the game on TV.
“When are you going to get over him?” he’d said. “When are you going to quit dwelling on him, making yourself and everyone else suffer?”
He was standing by the kitchen door, fading afternoon light all around him.
“You know, his killing himself was an act of mercy,” he said.
He nodded at this, totally in agreement with himself, and added, “It was the goddamn best thing he ever did.”
“Don’t ever let me hear you say that,” she said. “Never again.”
“How can you hold him so high when he did nothing for you?” he said. “That bastard cared nothing for you.”
He looked away from her, out the kitchen window at the ridge.
“I wish you understood how much I love you,” he said. “What do I have to do?”
“How many times do I have to tell you I’m not thinking of him?” she said. “But maybe we need to face the fact that we don’t always want to do the same things.”
He rolled his eyes and said she was avoiding the real issue. He reminded her of the times when she first came back from Atlanta, when she was living with her parents, right after the other man’s death, how he’d visited her almost daily, fighting to get her out of her depression, even when she was belligerent or cruel to him. Even her father, who’d hated him all during their high school years, said it was his blind devotion that had saved her. Why wouldn’t she just listen to him now?
The deputies eyed her robe and bare feet, unconvinced, she was sure, and made both of them get out and do breathalyzers. She wondered if they could bust her husband for being drunk in public. Could they arrest him? If they did, they’d probably keep him until the morning.
The cops sat in one of their cars and talked, then one came back and said, “We’ve got another call, ma’am. We’re going to let you two go on home, as long as you promise to leave the other vehicle where it is tonight.” He pointed at her husband and said, “Any arguments and we’ll take him now.”
“No arguments here,” she said.
“Thank you,” her husband said.
When the cops were gone, they sat still in the Honda catching their breath. She was still shaking a little.
“It was a goddamn dog,” her husband said suddenly. “I can see it now. The stupid dog ran right out in front of me.”
“Great,” she said, “Why couldn’t you remember that before?”
She opened the door and got out. Her legs were still shaking, but she made herself walk behind the car and look around the Chevy for the dog.
He opened his door and got out.
“Why don’t we look tomorrow?” he said. “Come on. Let’s go, before those cops change their minds and come back.”
A car full of teenagers with music blaring from their opened windows passed, and she saw the dog in a gulley on the other side of the road.
She knew the dog, a big retriever with creamy fur. They stood looking down at it. The wind was blowing, moving through the fur and making soft waves. She squatted beside the dog and removed its collar. She stood and pressed the collar into her husband’s palm.
“It’s Josey,” she said, “The Coopers’ dog. They live through the woods, across the ridge.”
“I’ll call them tomorrow,” he said. “Or I’ll go to see them. I promise I will.”
She often thought about the other man, although she could see nothing to gain by admitting it. The other man had been different, not better, and she had loved him no less than she loved her husband now. And no more, despite the fact that she was sure now it had been a mistake to get married. A bad decision when she had been at a weak point, vulnerable. Her husband had to have known that. Tall with thinning red hair, he was easy to read and predict, quick to get emotional, careful to remind everyone of what he thought was right and what ought to be done, and to rationalize later if he was wrong. She and the other man had laughed at her stories about her high school boyfriend, who later became her husband—the boy who was steadfast and earnest to a fault.
And this other man, she doubted he had ever revealed his true feelings about anything. He’d looked down on, despised even, certainly made fun of, anyone outspokenly sensitive or sincere like those traits were a weakness. And hadn’t she once been the same, laughing along with him? It was a side of herself that she found hard to excuse, and through all of this, she had decided her goal was to distance herself from her earlier, cruel self.
Finally, she owed the other man little; many of the things her husband said about him were undeniable, but when she thought of that one thing her husband had said, about the other man’s suicide being an act of mercy, she felt her breath go away, felt herself drawn closer to a place she didn’t like to go.
Why had the other man killed himself? There was no simple answer except that he was very unhappy, very unimpressed by everything, by people especially; it was the way he was. They’d met in Atlanta, she’d gone to college there. Although they had lived together for more than two years in an apartment in a Victorian house near the Botanical Garden, there were countless mysteries she’d never unraveled about his personality quirks and strange, obscure references. He had been older, thirty-four, and was a carpenter by trade. He had a lover, another woman who was a friend of both of them. She found out about the affair after he was dead, when she went to the other woman’s apartment in the middle of the night, torn apart by what he had done, and her friend had broken down too and admitted the truth.
The night he killed himself, she woke up to pounding rain and lightning expecting to find him in the living room. The TV was on, a black and white monster movie from the fifties. It wasn’t unusual for him to get up on sleepless nights. Even if it was raining, he would go out to a bar if one was open, or just go through the neighborhood talking to homeless people if it was too late to get a drink. But he wouldn’t have left the TV on, which left her thinking he was someplace close by, in her drowsy half sleep.
She went into the bathroom, still wondering. The bathroom light was on, and there he was. She could see his skin and his dark blond hair through the shower curtain. He was naked, and she could see all of him. His clothes were in a pile beside the tub like he’d stepped right out of them and climbed up there.
His face looked blurry and swollen through the plastic. She kept thinking it had to be a joke. How
did he stay up there without the least bit of sway?
There had been no sway, no breathing, and now it seemed to her that part of herself had been up there staring back. Even now she could feel the plastic liner she’d grabbed and bunched in her hands, and his skin, cold and damp through the plastic.
She’d pulled the curtain with her weight. Some of the hooks popped loose, but the curtain, and the man, stayed up there. She was gagging when she stumbled to the phone in the bedroom. While the police carried him out, her bladder was killing her, but she couldn’t make herself go in there again. She packed a few things and made the police car wait while she peed in the restroom of an all-night diner.
She could only remember bits and pieces of the weeks that followed. She called it the goodbye time: a fling with a guy who lived in their building, a payback of sorts that came back on her later as a case of gonorrhea, and guilt so bad her stomach tightened up until she couldn’t hold anything down. She attended the funeral, she started passing out and waking up in strange places, she stayed in the hospital in Atlanta for a week. She packed up, and her parents came down and drove her back home to Virginia to live with them, she took an overdose of her mom’s sleeping pills, she stayed at a hospital, she went home, she chain smoked and wasted away until the calls that wouldn’t stop: the old boyfriend from high school, emotionally soft, dependable, stable, at least compared to the other man. He visited her almost daily, showered her with flowers, books he thought she might like, songs he’d tried to learn on the guitar. Even then, she noticed his unspoken, fearful reactions to the distant events and people that filled her stories, and the way his eyes followed her, fixed on her thinness, as though she had come home in the body of a stranger.
During the short drive home, her husband stared out the window at the dark fields and the road, and she held out hope that an apology and some thanks might be forthcoming. Maybe they would talk about their real differences and troubles, and come to an understanding.
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