by Jack Ketchum
“Well, tell her we’ve got everything covered here. Tell her not to worry. It’s been a slow week for axe murders and floaters. Chloe and Bill say hi. You take good care of her, now.”
“I will.”
“Give her our best.”
“I will. ‘Bye, Miriam.”
I let out a big sigh of relief. We lucked out. She really did figure the first call was a wrong number and not that I’m holding some little girl hostage here out in the boonies.
“Patrick? Whatchu doin’ in there anyway? You’re quiet.”
“Drawing. Want to see?”
Jog the memory.
“Okay.”
She follows me into the study. Stands off to one side of the drawing board. But her attention’s drawn immediately to the shelves. We keep a lot of books in here, mostly art books and Sam’s medical texts. But I’ve been collecting comic-book and horror action figures for years. I’ve got Superman, Batman and Robin, Green Hornet, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Godzilla, Rodan -- there’s probably two dozen or more. Hell, I’ve even got a plastic Jesus.
“You have toys!” she says.
Wide-eyed, like she’s never seen them before. So much for memory-jogging in this room.
“Yeah. I guess I do.”
“Can I play with them?” “They’re not really for play. More just to look at.”
“Oh.”
I can tell she’s disappointed. Like it or not, right now she’s just a kid. And all she’s got are some Barbies and Teddy to play with. I point to the drawing board.
“Here, check this out.”
I lay out the Samantha pages one by one on the board.
“This is what I do in here.”
These are pretty good, I think. Some of the best work I’ve done. Moody, and with lots of action.
“You do this?”
“Yes. You like it?”
“Yeah. There’s no color, though.”
“Color comes later.”
I keep turning the pages and I can see she’s interested.
“If would be better if they moved,” she says, “like on TV.”
And then she’s looking back at the shelves again. Distracted. I’m only halfway through the pages.
I can’t help it, I feel a flash of irritation, maybe even anger. And yeah, it’s anger, all right. Anger at Sam. Not at Lily but at Sam. Sam for doing this. Sam for leaving me. And then anger at myself for feeling that way. It’s not her fault.
Is it?
I put the pages down and cover them over.
“Let’s go see about dinner. What do you say?”
Dinner is hot dogs and French fries. Her choice. What did I expect? I zap some beans and sauerkraut in the microwave too but she doesn’t touch either one, just slathers her dog and fries with ketchup. I’ve never seen her use ketchup on a hot dog before. Hitherto she’s always been a Gulden’s mustard girl.
Around a mouthful of fries she says, “it’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair?”
“You’ve got toys.”
“They’re not really toys. They’re just for show.”
She’s pouting. “They’re toys,” she says. “And all I’ve got is Teddy and some stupid dolls.”
“I thought you liked those dolls.”
“They’re okay, I guess…”
But. I’m not stupid. I get it.
“You want some other stuff, right? Some of the stuff you saw on TV, maybe?”
She brightens right away.
“Yeah!”
“Okay. After we eat we’ll go on the net and see what we can find. How’s that?”
“The net?”
No memory of the net either. Sam has sites and files saved by the dozens.
“You’ll see.”
She’s fascinated by the computer. I remember reading somewhere that all kids are. At least at first.
We hit the merchandise sites. She’s standing behind me pointing out what she likes while I’m punching in the site addresses and clicking on the items. During the next half hour we purchase an Abby Cadabby Bendable Plush Doll, a Once Upon a Monster video game, a knot-a-quilt package, a Teeny Medley bead set, a Stablemate Deluxe Animal Hospital -- complete with quarter horse, foal, donkey, goat, resident cat and border collie, operating table and bandage box -- and a pair of Curious George pajamas. The pajamas come in kids’ and moms’ sizes so I’ve bought the latter. By the time we get to the Easy Bake Oven and Super Pack, she’s leaning on my shoulders.
She smells of fresh soap and traces of hot dog.
The Oven and Super Pack alone set me back a hundred dollars but who’s counting.
The plush Clifford the Big Red Dog another forty-five. I buy them all and arrange for overnight express delivery.
She yawns. She’s having fun of course but for her, maybe, it’s getting near bedtime.
She’s tired. So she walks around and proceeds to sit on my lap.
“Uh, not a good idea, Lily.”
“Why not?” She points at the screen. “I want that,” she says.
And I’m not sure I like either of these developments.
What she’s pointing to is a Baby Alive Doll. At forty bucks a Baby Alive Doll speaks thirty phrases and comes complete with a dress, a bib, a bowl, a spoon, a bottle, diapers, doll-food products -- whatever the hell they might be -- and instructions.
I imagine the instructions are useful.
The doll says, “I love you, Mommy,” and “kiss me, Mommy,” among other things. Eats, drinks, and wets its diaper.
I’m not sure I like that. I’m also not sure it’s wise to have her on my lap. I might have been better off when she distrusted me. Because right now this warm woman’s body, my wife’s body, is in serious danger of giving me a hard-on.
And this body thinks it’s about five or six years old.
“You’re too heavy,” I tell her.
“Am not.”
“Are so.”
“Am not.”
To prove it, I guess, she wriggles on me. Bumps gently up and down.
“Off,” I tell her. “You want me to buy this or not?”
“Oh, okay.” I’m a grouch. A spoil-sport.
She gets up. I buy the fucking doll.
I’m sitting in the chair in our guestroom watching her sleep. The moon is nearly full and through the window behind me it bathes her face in slants of milky white. The night’s unseasonably warm so she’s pulled the covers down to just below her waist and I can see her belly between her pajama top and bottom, her navel like a tiny pale button pressing up and down against the mattress cover.
My wife’s an outie.
I’m thinking about how we met, eight and half years ago. I’d just landed my first job in the publishing business, as a colorist for Arriveste Ventures -- garish, primary-color-only work on their Blazeman line. Nights I was brushing up on my anatomy at the adult ed department at Tulsa Community College and Sam, who already had four years under her belt in the coroner’s office, was guest lecturer. Her subject that night, the integumentary system. Skin.
A lot was familiar to me. That skin was the largest organ in the body. That skin was waterproofing, insulation, protection, temperature control, guard against pathogens, all rolled up into one. That skin was the organ of sensation. But there was something she said that I’d never considered before, at least not in the way she put it.
She said that skin permits us access to the outside world.
“All the orifices in our bodies,” she said, “our eyes, noses, ear canals, mouths, anuses, penises, vaginas, nipples -- they’re all there and function as they do because skin, by not covering them, allows them free communication with the world which is not us. Even our pores exist where they do and where they don’t, solely by permission of our skin. Pretty smart stuff, skin is.”
That got a laugh. But I thought that this Samantha Martin person was pretty smart stuff too.
And I was already thinking about her own skin,
It had been a year and a half since Linda had e-mailed me from New York saying -- apologetically but baldly -- that she’d fallen out of love with me. She didn’t know why.
Was there another man? No. Something I did or said? No. It just happened. She’d been meaning to tell me for a while now but hadn’t gotten up the courage. I was twenty-four years old and we’d been lovers for four of those years. I was still completely crazy over her. Those seven stages of grief they talk about? I went through all seven at once I think, rattling from one to the other like a game of bumper-pool gone berserk. At the end of it, I more or less vowed that love and even sex could wait. Until I was thirty, maybe.
But then here was Sam’s skin. The complexion of her face, her bare arms in the sleeveless blouse, her long graceful neck.
It’s always been one of her loveliest features. Arguably her best. Winter-pale or summer-tan, it’s always seemed to smolder with some warm inner glow, an even interior lighting. There are tiny dances of freckles across her shoulders, hands and forearms. And one beautiful dark mole just to the left of the small of her back.
I didn’t get to see the mole that day. But from my desk in the second row of our classroom the rest was pretty clear to me. That she was smart and she was lovely. Neither fact was lost on anybody in the classroom. Especially the guys.
So while I listened carefully to what she had to say about parting epidermis, dermis and hypodermis, about scalpels, about where and how to cut in order to get at all that good stuff inside, I was doing some fantasizing too. About what it would be like to touch her.
I hadn’t done that in a long time. Touch a woman.
And when her lecture and the Q&A were over I did.
It’s always amazed me to hear beautiful women -- actresses or models -- say that they hardly ever get asked out, that most men are intimidated by them, tongue-tied by their beauty. Me, I just don’t get it. That’s never been my problem. Maybe it’s this artist’s eye of mine that just can’t help being drawn to beauty, to want to be in its presence as much as humanly possible. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a pretty secure family.
Maybe I just don’t know any better. Fools do rush in.
But as the class filed out Sam was talking with our teacher, Mrs. Senner. She stood with her back to me, and that gave me all the excuse I needed. I touched her lightly just beneath the shoulder and said excuse me? and the smooth warm softness of her skin and firmness within hurtled straight to my brain like a flaming trail of gasoline.
She turned and smiled.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “But I’ve got a couple of questions. Could I maybe buy you two ladies a cup of coffee?”
I was being disingenuous in the extreme. I knew perfectly well that Mrs. Senner always raced home after class to fix supper for her husband, who was just getting off his shift at Tartan Industries. We all did.
She introduced us, said I was one of her better students, and then gracefully declined.
But Sam accepted.
I don’t remember much of what we talked about over coffee first and then two glasses of wine each, and the walk back to our respective cars, except that she seemed as interested in the business of making graphic novels as I was in what went on in the autopsy room. More importantly, the current was there. The connection loud and clear.
Later, after our third date and first night in bed, she would tell me that my hand below her shoulder that evening had startled her, gone through her like a shot. She called herself a workaholic and said that after an affair gone south with an older married man it had been a very long time between drinks for her too and that my touch felt to her like a wake-up call from a long dry dreamless sleep.
It was and still is the loveliest thing anyone has ever said to me.
And now I watch her sleep.
I won’t cry. Not yet.
I wake up like somebody’s hit me with a cattle prod.
I wake up horrified.
Zoey’s climbed through an open window which should have a screen in it but doesn’t and she’s out on the ledge of a tenth-floor apartment, looking fascinated by what she sees below and then frightened and finally bewildered and as I’m crossing the room to get to her, carefully, afraid to startle her she tries to turn on the narrow ledge when she should just be backing up the way she came and falls out of sight into space.
I’m instantly awake, stunned, my arms outstretched in front of me, reaching hopelessly for my cat. Inside the dream and right here in my bedroom I’ve been shouting, both worlds melded into one. Now they break apart. Zoey stares at me from the foot of the bed.
She gets up and meanders over. I scratch her neck and chin and she tilts her head back and closes her eyes, content. When I stop she steps onto my lap and nuzzles my chin. Breakfast time.
“In a minute, baby. Got to piss.” I step into my jeans. Tuck in my tee shirt. Habit. It slightly amazes me that I still have habits.
On the way to the bathroom I can hear the TV. Cartoon voices. Lily’s already awake.
The guy I see in the mirror disturbs me so I don’t dwell on him. I just finish my business and get out of there.
In the living room Lily’s kneeling in front of the TV set, watching a commercial for Sid the Science Kid.
She’s also naked to the waist.
There’s that mole.
She hears me behind her and turns and smiles.
“’Morning, Patrick.”
Even after all these years it is wholly impossible not to take in her breasts.
Sam’s breasts are small. You can cup one in each hand and not get much overflow. They’re quite pale. So pale that in a few places you can see the dim blue traces of vein beneath the flesh, traces of vulnerability I always thought. Her areolae are a very light brown, almost perfectly round and about an inch wide. Her nipples are pink and a quarter-inch long at all times, permanently erect.
And her nipples have a direct phone line to her cunt. I’ve made her come dozens and dozens of times without ever going below her waist.
If she notices me looking at them she doesn’t show it.
“Something wrong?” she says.
“Where’s your pajama top, Lily?”
“On the bed. It got hot.”
“Why don’t you go get it for me, okay?”
“I’m still hot!”
“Girls are not supposed to run around with their tops off, Lily.”
“Who says?”
“I say. Trust me.”
She sighs again. I’m getting used to that sigh. But she gets off her knees and stomps past me toward the bedroom and as she goes by she brushes my bare left arm with her right breast.
I could practically swear she’s done this on purpose.
Like she’s flouting her body, flirting with me.
But that’s impossible. How can she know how this makes me feel? If this were Sam she’d damn well know of course. Sam’s very self-aware. But Lily?
The answer is, she can’t. She hasn’t got a clue. Kneeling there in front of the TV she was the picture of innocence. Brushing against me’s just the sullen, pouty thing any kid might do who isn’t getting her way.
Forget about it, I tell myself.
Sure.
I’ve showered and shaved and dressed and as I’m cleaning up the dishes she appears in the kitchen doorway.
“What are we doing today, Patrick? Can we go on the ’puter some more?”
“Actually, I need you to get in the shower for me and then get dressed, okay?”
“Ugh! I hate the shower!”
No she doesn’t.
“Water gets all in my eyes. Can’t I do a bath instead?”
It’s all the same to me. “Okay. You want to run the water or should I?”
“You do it.”
I finish up the dishes and run her a tub, bend over and test the water with my hand.
“Ready,” I tell her.
I stand and turn and there she is in front of me, naked, naturally, clueless again, her pajamas
in a heap on the floor. Jesus wept. I avert my eyes. I pick up her pajamas and get the hell out of there.
Sam is a neat-freak but Lily obviously isn’t. Her clothes from the day before lie on the floor of her bedroom where she dropped them in a more-or-less straight line from the door to the bed. Shoes, tee shirt, jeans, panties, socks.
I make her bed and fold her pajamas and put them in a drawer. But for them, the drawer’s empty. If this goes on much longer, if Sam’s going to be Lily for a while, I should probably move more of her stuff from our room to this one but I’m damned if I’m going to do that right now. We’ve got this MRI coming up at noon. Nothing changes any more than it has to until I get the results on that.
I pick up her clothes. I lay her jeans out on the bed, the Avia running shoes beneath the bed. The socks and panties go in the laundry basket but that’s in the bathroom and I can hear her splashing around in there. I’m not going in. I carry them into our room and select a fresh pair of each, go back to her room and lay them out beside her jeans.
I realize I’m not thinking quite straight. I’m carrying her used socks and panties around instead of just tossing them on my bed until she gets out of there. So that’s what I do. Go back to our room and drop them on my unmade bed.
Something catches my eye.
The panties.
Sam says she has little time to shop and she’s not like most women anyhow, she doesn’t really like shopping. So the panties arrived via UPS from Victoria’s Secret along with a half dozen other pairs a few weeks ago. They’re ivory. And ivory shows up stains.
There are skid-marks on Sam’s panties. Or should I say Lily’s.
She hasn’t wiped sufficiently.
So now I’ve got a problem. Do I call her on this or no? If I do it’ll likely embarrass her. I don’t want to embarrass her. I figure maybe it’s a one-shot. I figure I’ll spray the damn things with some of our eco-friendly stain remover and leave it at that.
In my red Sierra 4x4 the radio’s tuned to our classic rock station -- the Band doing THE WEIGHT -- and wonder of wonders, Lily’s singing along.
“You remember that song?”