Retribution

by John Fulton

  “Please don’t,” she said. Then her mother said, “Oh … oh,” and pointed to her pills on the bedside table.

  Rachel poured her water from a pitcher and her mother slowly swallowed three blue gel caps and closed her eyes, concentrating now on the terrible thing inside her. “Is the nurse coming soon?” Rachel asked. A nurse came now every day.

  “In an hour,” her mother said. Then she said, her eyes still closed and her head resting on her pillow, “Tell me about something.”

  “What?” Rachel hated herself for having nothing to say.

  “Anything,” her mother said. “Say anything.”

  “I have a boyfriend,” Rachel said. “My first boyfriend.”

  Her mother actually smiled. “You’ve been keeping secrets from me,” she said.

  “His name is Rand. It’s a funny name, I know, but it’s German. He’s German, from Germany. He speaks German and everything, and his father’s a diplomat, which is why they’re in Tucson instead of in Heidelberg. I guess I didn’t want to tell anybody right away. I thought he might drop me.”

  “Why would you think that?” her mother asked. “I bet he really likes you.”

  “Vielleicht,” Rachel said. “That’s German for ‘perhaps.’”

  “He’s teaching you German?”

  “I like him and everything,” Rachel said. “But he’s maybe a little pushy sometimes. He wants to do things that I don’t want to do yet.”

  “Things?” her mother said. She opened her eyes and kept them open. “What things?”

  Rachel looked outside at the snow, each flake about the size of a grain of rice, and hated the particular way the truth had worked itself into her lies. She didn’t want to hear this truth, but she said it anyway. “You know, sex things. But I’m not ready for that and I told him so, and he still seems to like me.”

  “Good,” her mother said. “Good for you. Do we need to have a talk? Would you like to ask me some questions?”

  “Not right now,” Rachel said.

  Her mother closed her eyes and smiled. “You’re a strong girl, Rachel. Very strong.”

  Rachel looked out the window again at the strange snow that disappeared as soon as it hit the red dirt ground, the desert, in which it shouldn’t have been snowing in the first place. “Lies have long legs,” her mother had always told her. “They run away from you; they chase after you.” But she’d never told Rachel how lonely lies were, how friendless and loveless they made you feel.

  Her mother said, “I’m sure he’ll be very nice once he calms down.” Then she said with mock disgust, “Boys.”

  “Boys,” Rachel said, agreeing.

  * * *

  On the last Wednesday before the semester break, Rachel put a small black tube of lipstick in her backpack and dressed in one of her mother’s blouses, which she’d borrowed without asking and which fit her more snugly than anything Rachel owned. Looking in the mirror, she saw that her smallish breasts took on shape and she could just make out the white straps of her bra, the fine lattice of which made her feel both interior and exposed. As she walked through the brown hallways of Our Lady and took in their familiar smells of stinky tennis-shoe leather and pencil erasure, she felt herself distinctly being seen as if the eyes of boys—glancing quickly toward her and just as quickly away—had coated her in a second skin, a sheath of light and uncertain thoughts.

  After school, she retreated to her stall in the basement rest room, peed, then wept as loudly as ever, after which she scrawled out an especially graphic message about the Our Lady principal and the director of religious studies. “Father Kelsh does Sister Mariam Anne doggy-style.” Does seemed to her even more offensive than the word fuck, and she was pleased with what Mr. Cummins, her English teacher, would have called her word choice. But neither her cry nor her message seemed to do much for her that day. She stood from the toilet, pulled her panties up and her skirt down. She had just finished her period and so felt more solid now and less self-conscious in that murky, confused way. In front of the mirror, Rachel took out the black tube of lipstick, the name of which—Secret Rose—had made her think of dew, mists, and light, grainy rainfall, of moister climates than Tucson’s. But there was nothing floral about this thick, substantial red, and as she stroked the color on, she seemed to be cutting into her own skin, exposing a soft, wounded depth that she had not guessed at. “Ouch,” she said to herself in the mirror.

  When she got into the backseat of the Taurus, Mr. Bobs, his sunglasses off, addressed her in the rearview mirror. “You’re first, Rachel.”

  She told him right off that she had forgotten her house key that day and that her parents wouldn’t return home till later. “They’re at the hospital.” How easily that lie had come to her. “I thought maybe I could drive last today,” she said to the slice of eyes and nose in the rearview mirror.

  The eyes looked at her, considered her. “Okay,” Mr. Bobs said, his face sliding out of the mirror, where instead she saw a slanted section of the backseat and of her own lap, where her hands, skinny and cut off at the wrists, lay. Then he readjusted the mirror.

  Stacy Wallright drove first. She was a little pudgy and drove fearfully, so that Mr. Bobs had to repeat the same stern advice he always reserved for Stacy. “Driving afraid can be just as dangerous as driving recklessly. At the end of the day, the old lady going thirty-five in her Buick on the interstate and the teenager jumping train tracks in his Camaro end up in the same place.” He cleared his throat. “Fear kills, too,” he said.

  Why did Mr. Bobs like to talk about death so often? Every time he mentioned it, he’d sit up straighter and puff with authority.

  After dropping Stacy off, Jason Brown got behind the wheel. Jason Brown was what Mr. Bobs called an “overconfident” driver. His manner was lax, and today he cruised with the fingers of one hand draped over the wheel, so that Mr. Bobs had to say, “Two hands, Jason. Always two hands on the wheel. If you think you can avoid an accident with a couple of fingers, you’re wrong.”

  Jason put his other hand on the wheel, though he was slow to do it and clearly felt that it clashed with his style.

  Finally, after Jason Brown got out, it was Rachel’s turn. Rachel had been labeled a “careless” driver by Mr. Bobs ever since she’d confused the brake for the gas that day, and as she eased into her first turn, she wanted to point out the care she’d just taken. “I followed the five-second rule this time,” Rachel said.

  “This is your last practice run,” Mr. Bobs said. “After this, you’re on your own.”

  “You ever been in an accident, Mr. Bobs?” Rachel asked. “I mean, with Our Lady students.”

  “No,” he said. “Never.”

  “Probably the closest you came is with me that time.” Mr. Bobs said nothing, and she felt herself achieving a nice hot contempt for this man who had been ignoring her now for weeks. “Guess what?”

  Mr. Bobs didn’t say anything to this, save for “Take a right turn on Mesa Drive.”

  “I took your picture a few weeks ago.”

  “My picture?” Mr. Bobs said. Rachel looked over at him, expecting him to engage her now, though he didn’t. He faced straight ahead, with his large shieldlike glasses on, as if it would be dangerous for him to turn and look at her.

  “On the football field last week,” she said. “I’m the school sports photographer. You’re going to be in the yearbook.”

  “All right,” he said, “we’ll take a few left-hand turns and then finish up.”

  “You seemed angry, the way you were shouting at those boys to hit one another. Are you angry, Mr. Bobs?” He took a deep, irritated breath. “Anyway, the way you were shouting made me think about something for some reason. I thought about Mrs. Bobs, about the way she left and everything, about how furious you must have been when she did that.”

  Mr. Bobs was looking at her now, though she couldn’t know what was in his eyes—rage, shock—behind those silly glasses. “We’re having a driving lesson,” he said. “Not a c
onversation.”

  She hated the coldness, the indifference in his voice. She wanted him to be angry or hurt, to yell or cry. “The other week,” she said, “we were having a conversation. We talked about what music I liked, about how lonely I seemed, about my mother.”

  “No,” Mr. Bobs said, his voice still calm and chilly. “We didn’t. I don’t remember any such conversation.”

  “You touched me,” Rachel said. “You put a hand on my shoulder.”

  “No,” Mr. Bobs said. “I didn’t.” Then he said, “Take a right at this light.”

  “Sure,” Rachel said, pulling into the left lane and taking a left turn onto a quiet residential street.

  “I said right,” Mr. Bobs said.

  “No you didn’t,” Rachel said. “You said left. You said to take a left turn at the light.”

  “Take a right here and turn around,” he said calmly, as if none of this were happening.

  Rachel turned left again and drove farther into the quiet neighborhood of rock yards and chain-link fences. “You used to look at me,” Rachel said. “And every time you did it behind your glasses, I knew it. I felt it.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Mr. Bobs asked. They drove past a Mormon church, where a man wearing a suit and tie and holding rolls of new toilet paper stacked in his arms struggled to enter the large front doors. One of the rolls toppled from the stack and sped over the sidewalk behind him. “Are you?”

  “In the pictures I took of you,” Rachel continued, “you’ve got your mouth open because you’re shouting at the boys in front of you to bash their helmets together. And even though you look mad and crazy with anger, you look sad, too, because it seems like you’re too angry, if you know what I mean. Angrier than a football coach should be. I’ve got a title,” Rachel said. “It’s called The General, or maybe The General’s Secret. It’s going to be the first photograph of the sports section.” Then she said, “I’m not threatening you. I don’t think I am, anyway.”

  “Jesus,” Mr. Bobs said, laughing, though it wasn’t a pleasant laugh. And when Rachel turned to look at him, he had taken his glasses off and was wiping the sweat from his forehead. “First of all, I never looked at you. Not once. And if you’re planning to tell people I did, you’d better think again.”

  He looked exhausted, run-down, and Rachel suddenly remembered what she’d wanted to know from him. “What did it feel like,” she asked, “when your wife left you? Afterward, I mean. When the house was empty. When you knew she was gone forever.”

  “Stop the car,” Mr. Bobs said in a fierce whisper. “Stop the stupid car.”

  “No,” Rachel said. Mr. Bobs was angry now. Thank God he was angry, furious. “We’re having a driving lesson, aren’t we?”

  “You have two seconds to stop the car.” When Rachel kept driving, Mr. Bobs slammed the brake pedal down on his side and they came to a screeching stop. He reached over and began wrestling Rachel for the keys, their hands interlocking.

  “You’re touching me. Stop touching me,” Rachel yelled. He withdrew then, jerking back as if stung, though somehow he’d ended up with the keys.

  “I’m going to give you bus money,” Mr. Bobs said, digging in his pocket. “And you’re going to get out right here.”

  “It must have hurt a lot,” Rachel said. “Or maybe you didn’t feel anything. Maybe you went around the house pulling all the empty drawers out, opening her closet and just looking into the space left by everything she took away, while you tried to feel something.”

  Mr. Bobs was holding money out to her, his hands shaking. “Get the hell out.”

  Rachel didn’t really hate him anymore, but she had planned to hate him and she had wanted to hate him. So she said it. “You’re an asshole, Mr. Bobs. You’re a dirty, messy asshole.” She pulled the Mace out of her front pocket, pointed it at him, and watched Mr. Bobs’s face grow puzzled, then frightened.

  “What?” he said.

  “Bang!” she said, spraying him. He exhaled, as if all at once deflating, and folded up into his lap. Rachel felt her throat clench from the fumes and put her hand to her mouth as she looked down at his back. “Mr. Bobs,” Rachel said through her hand. “Say something.” He made a sound, a deep sound that did not seem human and that prompted her to touch him softly on the shoulder, where she felt his muscles quivering, where she felt what must have been his suffering. She wanted to say his first name then, to call him out of his pain with something more familiar—Robert or Earl or Dennis. But she didn’t know it. She didn’t know anything about this man she’d just hurt. So she said again, “Mr. Bobs. Please.” He moved away from her touch and somehow let himself out of the car, dropping to the asphalt. She heard the noise of the keys he’d just snatched from her hit the ground and saw him roll over onto his back. His closed eyes streamed with tears. “Mr. Bobs,” she said, now standing above him. He had begun to breathe again and she wanted to call for help, but she was too afraid of what she’d done. It was then that she noticed the children staring at her from the rock garden of the house directly in front of her. “I didn’t do it,” she said. They said nothing in return and she saw then that they were lawn ornaments—a little boy with a corncob pipe in his mouth and a fishing rod in his hand and a little girl with a red smile on her face, wearing a heavy winter coat and supporting a satchel of schoolbooks on her back. “Oh,” she said to them. She looked at the house in front of her, a small adobe structure, and saw herself cut off at the waist and reflected in the sun-splashed glass of its single front window. No one had seen. No one had been looking. Not even a single car was driving along this road, though Rachel could hear the rushing traffic of Tucson like the sound of a river somewhere beyond the houses, the sound of the whole world, where people ate octopus, where Africans played in the dirt, where Arabs road off on camels into their strange, endless desert of sand dunes, where girls and their families picnicked on polar ice caps, the world at the quiet center of which Rachel now stood, only to see that it was dead. The world was dead. It didn’t seem to care if you were a terrible person who did terrible things. It didn’t seem to care about anything. It was just there, inexplicably there.

  Mr. Bobs had gotten to his knees, leaned his chest against the car’s front fender, fisting and unfisting one of his hands. Rachel knew she had better be gone by the time he got to his feet. She picked up Mr. Bobs’s silver whistle on its yellow nylon cord—it had fallen off his neck—and put it in her pocket. This small theft seemed to count for nothing now that she had done so much worse. And when she had walked a block and turned the corner and walked three or four more blocks, she put the whistle around her neck, held it between her lips, and blew on it long and hard. She blew on it until its shrill sound ripped across the sky. She blew on it until the houses in this dead, dead neighborhood came to life a little, until a small boy stepped out of a screen door in a pair of blue flip-flops and white underwear and stared at her, until an old man appeared behind the gray glass of his living room window and touched it with his hand, as if he were captive there and wanted out, until a housewife came out on her porch smoking a cigarette and drying a serving platter with a dishrag, looking unhappy, bored, and finally unimpressed by Rachel’s whistling, until a bare-chested Latino man with the word amigo tattooed in red letters across his chest stood up from the porch steps where he’d been sitting and gave her a military salute, and until the neighborhood dogs threw themselves against the chain-link fences of their backyards and howled because it must have hurt them to hear the long, senseless scream of her whistle. She blew on it until she grew light-headed and dark spots hovered in the air before her and she almost blacked out and fell into a soft oblivion that seemed to have opened at her shoulder, ready to receive her forever, and until, finally, she did not black out and oblivion did not swallow her and no one did anything except look, then look away, which was when she stopped, put the stupid whistle back in her pocket, and walked on.

  IV

  During the three-week Christmas break, Rachel w
aited for the police to come to her door with a warrant, or for the phone to ring, or for Father Kelsh to send a notice of her expulsion, or for Mr. Bobs himself to pound at their front door and scream out her name. But days passed and no one came, and Rachel woke in the dark mornings with a numb heart. The one time she had hurt another person, hurt him physically and without mercy, she hadn’t hated him. Now she was left feeling empty and abandoned, just as she might have felt had she had sex with a boy who’d meant nothing to her. Maybe love and hate were the same in this respect. Maybe both were difficult to achieve.

  Rachel’s mother was surprisingly alert and well on Christmas morning. Rachel received a red Lands’ End light winter coat and toothpaste, toothbrushes, Maxi hair gel, Mabeline mascara and blush, three different shades of lipstick, and, the one concession to her fading childhood, a Duncan glow-in-the-dark yo-yo that shone a milky white when they turned out the lights. Her father had done all the shopping, and the presents he gave and wrapped for himself were remarkably like the ones he’d received for years now: a necktie with red unicycles on it, a bar of Old Spice soap-on-a-rope, three boxes of Spalding Ace 1 golf balls (one of the few gifts he would actually use), and the last, a large and totally unexpected item, a “Build a ship in a bottle” kit. “I always thought ships in bottles were sort of neat and mysterious,” he said. “So I thought, What the hell.” The box showed an old sailing ship, the sort that Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims had used, held inside a large corked bottle. “Mysterious,” her father said again, looking at the box.

  Rachel’s mother opened presents last. She pulled almond Kisses and chocolate caramels from her stocking, though they all knew she had lost her appetite for sweets long ago. “Thank you,” she said. She pulled out barrettes and combs for her hair, which had been growing back thickly in the months since her chemo had stopped. Rachel’s father began crying very silently—the first time he’d cried openly in front of both Rachel and her mother. “Merry Christmas anyway.” He laughed as the tears came down. “Ho, ho, ho,” he said, trying to smile. Rachel’s mother pulled a huge feather pillow from a box. “Thank you,” she said, putting it in her lap and beginning to open another, which turned out to be a square of cloth with strange attachments and a pocket in it. “That’s a phone pocket,” he explained. “It attaches to the arm of your wheelchair and you put the cordless in the pocket. That way, the phone’s always at your side.” Rachel was appalled. Her mother was not yet in a wheelchair and these things—the pillow and the phone pocket—were meant to help her die. Her mother just smiled. “Thank you both,” she said.