She Poured Out Her Heart

by Jean Thompson

  “How would the kids feel? Or what if she tried to take them with her? I don’t trust her. I don’t trust her to make good decisions. And this character she’s hooked up with, who the hell knows? That’s the kind of thing that’s driving me crazy.”

  She almost told him then. Told him not to worry about Patrick, he wasn’t anybody who would entertain thoughts of settling down with a wife and children, especially someone else’s wife and children, and then she would tell him how she knew. Get it said, get it out there. But she could not find a way to begin, and with any luck she wouldn’t need to.

  “I’m not going to let this go on indefinitely,” Eric said, and Bonnie shook off her worries for this new dread.

  “What do you mean, you won’t let it? What do you think you’re going to do, punch the guy out and wreck your million dollar hands?”

  Right away she was sorry she’d said it. Eric’s face closed down. He might have a surgeon’s borderline-arrogant pride in what he did, but he resented being reminded of the downsides. There was a kind of male vanity that Bonnie knew she should not underestimate. Although, punching out Patrick? You would not do that unless there were two or three of you. She said, “You have to think this through. You don’t want to make anything worse.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do. Tell her she has to cut it out. For the kids’ sake.”

  “And what do you suppose she’ll say to that?” Bonnie asked him, and that ended their conversation, but not her sense of time running down and down and down.

  Bonnie stretched herself along the length of him and rolled over so that one of her legs was between his. Her ear was against his chest and she heard his heart bumping along, and then she slid her hands down to his stomach and took hold of him. His heart seemed to beat, not faster, but louder. He rolled over so they faced each other. He pulled her clothes loose and then his own, though they did not bother to undress entirely. There was always a moment, or a series of moments, when one of them might ask, with or without speaking, Do you want? Like this? And the other would answer, yes. But on this night the questions went unasked, or unheard, and what they did felt uncomfortable, furtive, perfunctory, something they might have done while asleep or otherwise not entirely in their bodies, and when it was over Eric said, “Sorry.”

  “It’s OK.” She was disappointed in him. In the two of them.

  “It’s this thing with Jane. It feels like she’s taunting me. Like she wants to mess with me.”

  “I’d say it’s working.”

  “Let me make it up to you.” He reached for her but Bonnie said no, that was all right. She didn’t want to come in that lonely way, as an afterthought. She rolled away from him and after a moment he said he should be thinking about getting home.

  Neither of them wished to leave on an unhappy or unquiet note, so Bonnie dressed and walked out to the car with him. It was a warm night with a damp wind blowing through a sky of low clouds and bits of grit in the air. Bonnie wrapped her sweater around her. Her hair blew into her eyes and she pushed it back, then it blew and tangled itself again and she resigned herself to looking unkempt. Eric started his car and came around to the sidewalk to say good-bye. They kissed and he said, “I’m sorry I let this whole thing with Jane get to me.”

  “No, don’t be. I mean it. You’ll think this is weird but—”

  He waited. “What’s weird?”

  She shook her head. She wanted to say she was almost glad. That she loved him in spite of their disappointments, or maybe because of them. Normal people had disappointments, and disappointing sex, all the time. She so wanted to be normal, to lay down the sword and shield. Stop fighting the same losing fights, chasing after one or another dumbshit sensation, imagining herself in love when she was only desperate and needy and foolish. And he was her best and possibly last chance of something finer, more generous, a chance to be something other than what she had been. In spite of everything flawed and failed and sad between them.

  But since she could not say any of this, she told him that they were just tired and stressed, and who would not be, and what she meant by “weird” was, how weird to think that the three of them had known each other for so long, she and Jane even longer, and what a long strange trip it had been, right?

  She did not call Patrick again, nor did she call Jane. But the next night and the night after that she drove past Patrick’s apartment, circling the block, hoping to see him, or the two of them together. Which was more backsliding and hardly fit into any scenario of higher love, but left on her own she relapsed back into fever and impatience and worry. The streets and sidewalks jigged and jagged with lights, cars, motion, with everything urgent and dangerous that she could not keep away from unless Eric would claim her, come to her, save her from herself. What would she do if she found Jane and Patrick? She didn’t know. Her head hurt with not knowing, and with rehearsing all the things she might tell them, begging or threatening, whatever might get them to cease and desist, or else to run off together, if they really were each other’s own true love, which she found so, so hard to believe, in any case to get out of the way. Or there might be some daft scheme where she inveigled Patrick in a cocaine buying sting and then got him busted. Or maybe Jane could be arrested, or committed? There had to be some way to solve the four of them like a math problem so that Bonnie equaled Eric minus Jane minus Patrick, some way to nudge Eric into realizing the rightness of the two of them. Why could he not see it? Why would he not take that next step and cross over to her?

  And then she would think of his children, his and Jane’s, who were entirely innocent when it came to their mother’s and father’s unhappiness and who could not be made to fit into any mathematical formula. They deserved the parents they were born to, not some bogus arrangement with Aunt Bonnie or Uncle Patrick and why had she ever imagined otherwise?

  The next week was Hallowe’en, the season for loony crimes and costumed drunks, when everybody at the cop shop kept track and kept score: how many bar fights with Elvises, how many batshit Batmen, how many zombies urinating in public or OD’d witches? How many actual or fabricated reports of poisoned candy given out to trick-or-treaters?

  For a few nights it would be difficult to tell anyone with actual mental health issues from the rest of the population, and so Bonnie’s schedule had some slack in it. She had a lot of vacation days she’d saved up and needed to use. She could leave town, take the kind of trip she was always waiting to take with Eric. Hiking in the desert, fishing in Montana, renting a cottage on the Oregon coast. She supposed if she went by herself she could do the cheap version of these things. Then he would miss her and she would come back and everything would be better than before. But she did not entirely believe that and anyway she was too anxious about what Eric might do if he got mad enough in some idiotic way, and besides, she could never stand to be away from the scene of the action so she could insert herself into things at the absolutely worst time, yup, she was still that girl, no matter what elevated intentions she harbored.

  Hallowe’en was on an inconvenient Monday this year, and most of the parties and carrying on took place over the weekend. So that when Eric called Monday evening and started shouting about trick or treating, Jane screwing up the trick or treating, it took her a moment to sort it out.

  “Slow down,” she said. “What happened, what did she do?”

  “I was supposed to take the kids out, we had it all set up, and I’m going to be, not even a half hour late.” He was in the car, Bonnie could tell. The phone echoed and turned his anger shrill. “I just talked to her and she says she isn’t going to wait, she and Loverboy are taking them. Now he’s like, part of the family. She can’t even wait a few goddamn minutes. You believe it?”

  “Taking them where?” Bonnie asked, then realized he was talking about some organized suburban Hallowe’en ritual, the day and hours set aside for the procession of costumed children from door to door. “You’re
sure she said that? About Patrick?”

  “I’m on my way there now. I’ll see—”

  The phone cut out then, and the call was lost. Bonnie tried calling him back, got voice mail. Tried again, nothing. She called Jane’s cell phone. It rang and rang. She was not going to call Patrick, no matter what happened. Eric had not said where he was when he called, but if he’d just left work she might be able to get to Elmhurst ahead of him. Traffic would be bad for both of them.

  Go.

  It was not yet six and there was still some fading light in the sky. The weather had cleared and turned cold and the sky was wide open, cloudless, one of those times when driving west was, for some moments, to enter a kingdom of tarnished gold. Then the horizon dimmed and the light grayed and Bonnie stepped on it, cut people off, blasted cars out of her way in the passing lane. The trick-or-treat hours probably started at six so the littlest kids could get back home before dark. Not for the first time she wondered what Jane was thinking, if she really believed that Patrick would make a swell substitute daddy, or if she’d loaned him the car again, or if there was some other reason for Patrick to be hanging around the house, other than to piss Eric off mightily.

  It usually took her twenty-five minutes to get to Elmhurst but for once in her life she caught a break and was there in twenty. She slowed down to observe the posted village speed limit. At Eric and Jane’s house the porch light was dark, meaning No Sale to the trick-or-treaters, although there was a light on from somewhere inside. The minivan and the Toyota were in the driveway, but not Eric’s BMW, which was a good sign. Bonnie parked and rang the front bell, then went around to the back. The door was open, the kitchen lit, the children’s supper dishes in the sink. “Hello?” she said to the empty house. “Hello?”

  Back out on the sidewalk, she saw a group of trick-or-treaters being herded along by an adult with a flashlight, and another group farther down the block. She watched them until she was certain that none of them were Robbie and Grace, then got in the car and cruised around the block, and then around the next block and the next, in a widening circuit. Creeping along so she would have some chance of seeing them and so she wouldn’t hit and flatten any stray, sugar-crazed child. Where were they? She couldn’t imagine they’d go too far from the house. It was completely dark by now and she was afraid of missing them. The streetlights were on and some homeowners had decorated with strings of orange lights or cobwebs draping their hedges, wispy ghosts suspended from porches, jack-o’-lanterns, silhouetted black cats. The excited voices of children carried through the cold air as they ran from house to house, a pretty, festive scene that Bonnie could not appreciate since she was waiting for Eric to arrive in full meltdown mode.

  Finally she spotted them, or rather, spotted Patrick, who was never inconspicuous, passing under a streetlamp. Other, smaller figures trailed after him. Bonnie parked the car across the street and hurried to catch up.

  They had stopped outside the next house and Jane was adjusting the collar on Grace’s costume. Grace was dressed as some Disney figure in a puffy blue dress, while Robbie, in a head to toe costume with a hood and a tail and all-over spikes and splotches, resembled some particularly repulsive stuffed animal. Remarkably, Jane and Patrick wore costumes too, or at least some attempt at them: Patrick a green derby he was accustomed to wear for St. Patrick’s Day, and around his neck a kind of lei made of gold foil harps, of the same provenance. Jane wore a cat hat, that is, a fur hood that tied under her chin and had two pointed ears.

  Bonnie skidded up to them. “Hi guys.” It had not occurred to her what she would say.

  They all stared at her. “Where’s your costume?” Robbie asked.

  “I’m not going trick or treating. What are you supposed to be?”

  “I’m a dinosaur.”

  “Of course you are. I see that now.”

  “I’m a Tyrannosaurus rex!”

  “That’s the best kind of dinosaur to be. What are you, Gracie?”

  “Cinderella.” Grace looked down at her shoes, turning them this way and that to admire them. They weren’t glass slippers, but glitter-coated mary janes.

  “What are you doing here?” Jane asked Bonnie. Looking more closely at her, Bonnie saw that she’d drawn cat whiskers on her face and a small, triangular cat nose. “Kids, go on up and ring the doorbell. Grace, here, put your coat on, you’re getting cold.”

  They waited for Grace and Robbie to run up the front path. “So?” Jane asked.

  “Eric called me. He’s on his way home, he’s really mad.”

  Jane and Patrick looked at each other. Patrick’s green derby was at least two sizes too small. Perched on his head, it made him resemble the sort of cartoon character drawn to be a recognizable fool. “Well,” Jane said. “I don’t know what I can do about that at this point.”

  Patrick said, “Should I take off? You could pick me up somewhere, I don’t mind.”

  “Too late,” Jane remarked as the BMW pulled in behind Bonnie’s car. Jane turned her cat’s face to Bonnie. “Happy now? You’re such a drama queen. That should be your costume, really.”

  Eric got out of the car and strode up to them. “Where are the kids?” Jane pointed. “I told you I was heading home, you couldn’t wait?” He looked at Patrick in his ridiculous hat and shook his head. “Jesus.”

  “Hey, excuse you,” Patrick said. “You got a problem? Let’s discuss your problem.”

  “I can’t believe,” Eric said to Jane, “that this is who you choose to take up with. Have you lost your mind?”

  “Hey,” Patrick said.

  Jane said, “I can’t decide which is the worst thing about you, Eric. Being a hypocrite or being a snob.”

  “You guys, the kids will be back in a minute,” Bonnie said, and the other three looked at her.

  “What are you doing here?” Eric asked her.

  “I’m a U.N. observer.”

  He looked as if he would have liked to say something to that, but just then three little boys dressed as a skeleton, a pirate, and a football player raced past them, intent on loot. Jane walked a little ways down the sidewalk. Robbie and Grace were moving on to the next house. Patrick followed her. “You know,” he said to Eric, “I’m not real impressed with the looks of you either.”

  “Eric, come on,” Bonnie said, uselessly, as Eric took after them down the sidewalk. “Let it go.”

  What kind of a fight was he hoping to start, or finish? And why was she so unimportant in the whole stupid scene? It was too dark to see very far ahead. Her feet tangled on something, a branch or a stick, and she half-fell into a hedge, the scratchy kind. Got up again. Ow. “Eric, wait for me.”

  Going forward, she blundered into Patrick, or rather, the back of his leather jacket. “Uff.”

  He turned, raising his arms as if to shield himself. “Whoa there, darlin’. This isn’t the time or the place.”

  “You’re disgusting, Patrick.”

  “You didn’t used to think so.”

  “Why don’t you just leave Jane alone? She doesn’t need you screwing up her life.”

  “Oh, did I screw up yours? Didn’t think that was possible. Maybe you’re jealous? Want a little more screwing up, for old time’s sake? Sorry. Not into a threesome. Leastways, not with you.”

  “Disgusting.”

  “Bonnie?” Eric stepped out of the darkness. “What the hell?”

  “Oh, we were just . . .” Dead stop.

  “Who is this guy? Huh?”

  “It’s not important. Don’t pay any attention to him.”

  “Yeah, man,” Patrick said, tipping the derby. “What can I say? I get around.”

  “God,” Eric said. He looked around him, as if deciding where best to spit.

  “I told you I knew him,” Bonnie said miserably. “I really did.”

  “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand
any of this.”

  “Slow learner, isn’t he?” Patrick remarked.

  “Shut up, Patrick.”

  “He should take better care of his hens, you know?”

  “Eric, let’s get out of here. Let’s just be by ourselves.”

  “Hey Eric, buddy, she might find that a little dull. Just sayin’.”

  “Shut up, you big Irish clod, or I will buy a gun and shoot you.”

  Eric stepped into the street, fishing in his pocket for car keys. Bonnie called after him. At the same time, Jane came running up, dragging Grace by her wrist. “I can’t find Robbie, he took off somewhere. Eric!”

  He did turn around then. “Grace, where did Robbie go?”

  “With the boys.”

  “What boys? Where did the boys go?”

  “I don’t know.” Grace pressed her face into her mother’s legs.

  “Jane, why weren’t you watching him?”

  “Do not put this on me. Just don’t.”

  “Robbie!” Eric called out, but there was no answer from the dark street, and even the noise of the marauding children seemed to have vanished. “Robbie! Oh for Christ’s sake, Jane. Why didn’t you wait for me?”

  “Stop it, Eric. Wait for you to do what, exactly? Go look for him, I have to take Grace home, she’s freezing.”

  “I can help,” Bonnie said, and Eric looked her over, visibly trying to overcome his distaste.

  “All right, why don’t you drive around the block? He probably didn’t get very far.”

  Patrick said, “I can help too. Come on, man, it’s a kid.”

  The four of them separated and headed off in four different directions. Bonnie started her car and set off. She didn’t want to think about anything but Robbie now. The rest of the night’s disasters were ripening like a bruise, but they would have to wait their turn. Robbie was just the kind of kid to run off, oblivious, and need retrieval. He was probably trying to get his hands on all the candy in the world. The other little boys would peel off for home and he’d do the same. Then they could all put aside the nightmares of lost or stolen children, creeps out patrolling for the holiday, or a front door opening, inviting a child inside, someone you never would have suspected. Or a child in a bulky costume, not paying attention, not watching, stepping into the street at just the wrong moment. In fact Bonnie’s car windows were frosting over, making it hard to see the road. She ran the defroster and rolled down her window.