by Hadley Dyer
I couldn’t tell if that was a compliment.
“Keep an eye on him tonight, George. Call me if you need to.”
After throwing another log on the fire, I lay on the old red chesterfield under an afghan. I was just starting to doze off when I heard the creak of the floorboards. Francis was in the doorway, holding a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. “There’s a pig on my bed.”
I patted the arm of the green bong sofa that was kitty-cornered to the red chesterfield. He placed the bottle on the steamer trunk that served as a coffee table, sat on the sofa, and pulled a throw over himself. We didn’t speak for a long while. I could hear every breath he was taking, and was conscious of my breathing too, which suddenly seemed mannered and excessive.
“A life-and-death experience makes you think about hard truths,” he said, pouring whiskey into the glasses. He handed one to me.
“I can imagine.”
“Like how outdoor swimming pool water is always slightly too cold, except in the rare instance when it is unsettlingly pee warm.”
“That is a hard truth,” I said after a moment.
So this is what shock looks like, I thought. Maybe he shouldn’t be drinking.
“You go,” he said.
My mind was blank and I said so.
“What were you saying to Rupert the other day about corn?”
“Just that baby corn shouldn’t be considered a vegetable.”
“Because . . .”
“Because, scientifically speaking, it’s Satan’s tiny, floppy penis.”
He sort of half laughed, took a swig. “My turn. George, you are crippled by your horror of earnestness.”
Under different circumstances, I might have gotten a little yelly. He made me sound like the Elevens. But this conversation was taking turns that I couldn’t follow, and I didn’t dare try to lead.
“You don’t like ballads,” he said. “You think ‘The Fish’ is cheesy.”
“I changed my mind about ‘The Fish.’ Anyway, I think it’s more that I don’t like cheap emotion. I don’t care if someone is enthusiastic about something.”
“So you wouldn’t mind if I got up and started dancing earnestly?”
“What does that even mean, ‘dancing earnestly’?”
He was up in an instant. There was some lip-biting, a lot of punching the air.
“Stop! Oh god, please stop. What was that?”
“I call it ‘Serbian disco.’”
He flopped down on the sofa again. Then he began to cry. He pressed his face into the crook of his arm and his whole body shuddered, and I didn’t know what to do. I let my hand drop to his head and stroked his hair. It had grown in a bit, and as it dried from his shower it was settling into soft black curls. If I reached a little farther, I could rest my hand on his neck, slide it down to the top of his back.
I said, “My dad says you have stupid courage.”
“That means I don’t think before I act.”
“You make it sound like it wasn’t brave.”
He sat up, stared at the last few drops of liquid in his glass. “He was screaming for his wife. In the water, in the ambulance, at the hospital. Kate, Kate, Kate . . .”
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
“Your voice is the only thing drowning it out. So to speak.”
I moved over to the green sofa, refilled his glass, and took a long sip from mine. The whiskey felt both sharp and warm going down. We leaned back and watched the fire. “Now I can’t think of anything to say,” I admitted. “I’m scared I’ll make it worse.”
“You don’t seem to be scared of much.”
“I’m a good faker.”
“What are you most afraid of?”
Of making a fool of myself. That some people are nice to me only because they’re intimidated by me. That I’ll never get out of here and I’ll turn into my parents.
“Bears.”
“Come on, Frances. . . .”
“What reasonable person isn’t scared of bears, Francis?”
“That’s not what you’re most afraid of.” He smiled. “Do you know that when you’re not sure how to answer a question, you look up at the top corner of the room? And if you’re really unsure, your eyes travel down to the bottom corner. And if you’re really, really unsure, they go all the way around the room and back up to that first corner.”
“I’m thinking. I can’t look at someone while I think.”
“And what are you thinking?”
That I’m afraid I’m not smart enough for you. That I’m okay at a bunch of things but not exceptional at any of them. And for a couple of hours there, and probably from now on, that something will happen to someone I care about.
“I’m thinking that I might be most afraid of hurting someone’s feelings,” I said. “Someone who can’t take it, and not being able to undo it.”
“Have you?”
“Yes. Oh, I heard it that time, the Elizabeth Bishop yes.”
“That’s from a poem called ‘The Moose.’ I reread it the other day.”
“How’s it go?”
“Life’s like that. We know it (also death).”
We were not lingering on that. “What about you?” I said. “What are you most afraid of?”
“Bears.”
I swatted him.
“Alright, my thing is I’m scared I’ll make a small mistake, the kind people make every day—forgetting to unplug the iron or to do a shoulder check before I switch lanes, hitting the brakes instead of steering out of a skid—and it’ll ruin someone’s life. That’s my biggest fear.”
“You don’t think you did that tonight, do you?”
“I’m not sure.”
I thought of what my father had said: That guy ain’t police. “Is this what you want to be when you grow up?”
“It has to be. I don’t want to fail at this. Too. I don’t want to fail at this too.”
“You’re not failing.”
“Would you tell me if I was?”
No. Maybe. I don’t know.
“Yes.”
I moved back to the red chesterfield and we stretched out under our afghans and talked into the night about the stupid-hard F chord, the different accents on the north mountain and south mountain (not different at all, to my ear, but I went along with it), where the fictional George and Francis would go on their third adventure after they’d conquered New York and the Serengeti, and other easy things. When I opened my eyes in the morning, Shaggy’s snout was rifling around my armpit, looking for who knows what, and the green sofa was empty.
Twenty
A couple of weeks later, I went to fetch Dad’s cigarettes from his bedroom and came back to find him missing from his recliner. He was on the floor, writhing in pain.
“Oh my god, what is it? What is it?” I started grabbing at him, lifting his arms, patting his legs, checking behind his shoulders.
“My foot,” he gasped. “I need you to massage my foot.”
When I reached for it, he gripped my arm. “The other one.”
There was no other one. Just his stump in a compression sock that helped keep the swelling down.
“I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know how.”
“Please!”
I faked it as best I could. It was ridiculous, like I was pretending to be a baker kneading dough, and somehow the pretending was weirder and more uncomfortable than actually touching him.
Whether it worked or the pain began to subside on its own, I couldn’t tell. I helped him to his chair, which was crazy hard. It was only then that I saw how much weight he’d gained, how soft he’d gotten. He was soaked with sweat and didn’t fight me when I brought over a cloth and gave him a wipe down. Face, shoulders, arms. He leaned forward so I could do his neck. I worked as quickly as I could. All business. The cloth made a scraping sound against his three-day-old beard.
He was now completely without emotion, like his pilot light was blown out. “What were they thinking?” he muttered.
/> “Who were what . . . ?”
He waved off the question.
I placed a pack of cigarettes on the side table with his painkillers and a glass of water. “Where’s Mum?” I asked.
“Store.”
Right. I’d heard him ragging on her about running out of artificial sweetener for his tea—the tea he drank to wash down his new afternoon cookie habit—and she was so quick out the door, you had to think she was grateful to have a break from him. “Do you need anything else? Where’s your prosthetic?”
He shook his head, not looking at me.
“Alright, well. I have to go to work.”
Matty was sitting outside the family room, his arms wrapped around his knees. I gave him a hand up and we went to the kitchen.
“I think it’s something called phantom pain,” he said as I poured him a glass of juice. “I read about it at the library. It happens a lot, feeling pain where the limb used to be. Like, probably most of them have it. Sometimes right away, sometimes later. Sometimes for a while, sometimes forever.”
“You’d think they’d have warned him.”
“They must have; it’s in all the pamphlets. I don’t know why he’s trying to hide it.”
“Because he won’t cop to psychological problems.”
“I don’t think it is psychological. I think it’s really real.”
“He won’t get the difference.” I wasn’t sure I did either. If you felt a pain in a limb that wasn’t there anymore, how could it not be psychological?
“Do you think Mum knows what’s going on?”
Mum wasn’t exactly savvy about health issues. Like how she would give Dad insulin in the morning and then serve him dessert at lunch, as if that were the solution. Her whole side of the family was like that. I remember Nan telling Mum that she was depriving us of vegetables because she wouldn’t let us eat potato chips for lunch, and my great-aunt Hester rasping, “Screw the doctor. Any fool can hear my asthma gets better when I smoke.”
“Wouldn’t matter if she did,” I said. “Not when he’s ordering her around like he’s King Louis of France.”
“What should we do?”
I tipped a little more orange juice into his glass. “I will go to the farm. Dad will snooze in his chair. Mum will make him tea when she gets home and let him eat cookies. And you will practice the tuba and do your homework and save us all.”
Francis’s room usually looked like a monk’s quarters, every surface clear, few signs of modern life, so it was strange to see his bed unmade, his clothes piled up on the desk chair. I sniffed one of the shirts. Under the scents of soap and fabric softener was something warmer, muskier.
“What are you doing, honey?”
Rupert.
“I was wondering if I should add this to the wash.”
“If it suits you.”
“I think I won’t. He might not want me touching his stuff.” I put down the shirt and started collecting tea mugs from the windowsill. “Except I’ll take these.”
“He’s not sleeping,” Rupert said. “He thinks I don’t know, but I’m an old man. I get up to pee. I spend a lot of time considering whether I will get up to pee before I do it. As I’m considering, I listen to him pacing in his room.” He picked up a stray mug from the desk. “I’m hoping this woman will take his mind off things.”
My breakfast rolled over in my stomach.
“That same woman he was going out with before?”
“He’s started seeing a new gal from town. Lorissa something.”
Lorissa. Of course her name was kind of foreign.
“Oh. That’s nice.”
“Yes, he needs some fun. More time with people his own age.”
Maybe that was why I’d hardly seen him over the past couple of weeks. I’d thought he’d just been hiding at work.
They’d found the wife’s body in the morning, which was awful, but no one blamed Francis. He had been transformed from a Come From Away rookie cop into a local hero overnight. The farmhouse filled up with houseplants and baked goods that people hand-delivered from up and down the valley. A third-grade class had written individual letters to thank him for protecting the community. Rupert said he returned to work after only a couple of days’ leave, but the acting sergeant was sending him on the easier calls when he could. He was finding it less stressful sitting in his car off the highway with his speed radar than waiting for the next knock on the door.
Francis came home as I was pulling on my boots. He’d cut off his curls again, which brought out the hardness in his face, made his expression that much more severe. “You’re still here,” he said.
Something about the way he said it suggested he’d put off returning until he was sure I was gone.
“I was just leaving. How’re you doing?”
“You should be going out with your friends, not spending all your time out in the boonies. You do have friends, don’t you? Know a few boys your own age?”
I felt as though I’d been slapped.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said, reaching around him to snatch my coat out of the closet. “I’m the most fuckable girl at school.”
It was stupid and it was juvenile and I didn’t stick around for him to tell me so.
A light, floating. A dingy in the night water.
I rubbed my eyes.
I was looking through a window, the lighthouse window. The dot of light was on the ridge above.
Slowly, I reoriented myself. I’d been so pissed when I left Francis, stomping to my car like a brat only to remember that I had nowhere to go. Not home, not before I had to, and Bill was out with Nat. So I went down to the lighthouse, turned on a reproduction oil lamp and brought it over to the desk, where there was an old black rotary phone with a too-short cord. I sat with my hand on the phone for a very long time.
Chances were, Lisa wouldn’t even take my call. But if she did, and we got through whatever needed getting through to set things right again, she might have something to say about how to deal with a hopeless crush. She might say the thing that would make Francis melt into a puddle of wax. What would that cost me? An apology? It’s not like I’d have to tell her everything.
“Bullshite,” I said aloud.
I fell asleep in the old rocking chair by the potbelly stove, and when I woke up, my hands had gone numb from sitting on them.
The floating light, was it Francis? Now that the sun set so early, I sometimes watched him from the lighthouse walking the fields with his flashlight. But this light on the hillside wasn’t bobbing along as usual; it was swirling, spinning.
I threw on my coat and ran outside.
I covered my eyes as the flashlight beam hit my face. Francis moved it off, and I blinked to readjust to the darkness. He was sitting on the ground, old meadow grass in his hair.
“Found the hooch,” he said, holding up a glass jar. “And a big rock found my foot.”
I didn’t laugh.
“I know Rupert couldn’t have done this without your help. What I want to know is, why would you help him run a still under my nose? Why would you put me in a position like that? Why would you do that again?”
“You decided to drink the evidence?”
“Well, you know, fuck it. Not going to make things worse, is it?”
“It’s not that I blame you for feeling sorry for yourself, but you don’t get to get drunk and yell at me about it.”
“Why, George?”
“Man, I dunno. We were just having some fun, and it was only one batch. I got rid of all the equipment afterward.”
“It’s good. Peachy. No wonder Rupert tore the house apart trying to find it.”
“What do you mean, tore the house apart?”
“He said he was looking for stamps, but the stamp drawer was full of them. Didn’t you know he used to have a real problem? Why do you think he used to make it himself?”
“Because he’s cheap?”
“More likely he didn’t want the boys at the liquor store to kn
ow how much he was going through. That’s why his wife left, you know.”
“His wife died.”
“She left with their daughter and then she died.”
No wonder it had been so easy to talk him into reviving the still. “Jesus. Did he drink the shine?”
“No, I poured it all out—at least, what I could find. Except this one. Poured out the rest of that whiskey we were drinking too.”
“Well, maybe you should go home and sleep it off.”
“I can’t sleep.”
Francis lay back in the grass. He flicked the flashlight off. On. Off. “You know what?” he said in the dark. “He told me to let go of him.”
“Who, Rupert?”
“The Come From Away. James. He said he was the stronger swimmer. And I could see her—I thought I could see her, in the water. But I was so scared. Seems I can be brave only when I don’t have to think about it.”
On. Off.
“That doesn’t make what you did any less—it makes it more heroic. What if you had listened to him and you couldn’t get to her? You could have all drowned.”
“I’m not handling this so well.”
“Who would?”
“Your father, for one. Hell, you’d handle it better than this.”
Leaving the flashlight on the ground, he got himself to his feet and staggered over and grasped me by the shoulders. Then he pushed me away, a bit roughly. “I think I hate this place, and everyone in it.”
“You like Rupert. And whoever this woman is you’re seeing.”
“She’s . . . It’s nothing. I like Rupert. And I like you. I really like you. And you’re a fucking teenager.”
“I get it, okay? I’m months away from being someone you feel comfortable having a conversation with.”
“The thing is, the sick, sick thing that ties me up every time I see you, is that’s possibly what I like best about you. I don’t just mean because you’re young. I’m not—I’m not a perv. I don’t chase girls. My father spent his whole life with women who were too young for him—he died of a stroke with one of them under him, for Christ’s sake—and I swore I’d never be that guy.”
“So switch to margarine.”
“No, I’m not letting you do that. Make a joke. Deflect. You have to stand there and hear it. For a long time I told myself that this, that it’s in spite of your age, and it’s all some cosmic cruelty of bad timing. That’s not true. Yes, you’re smart and you’re funny—”