Consumption

by Heather Herrman

  “Well, if you change your mind,” said Bunny. “Anyway, Riley just called. Said he’d be by in an hour with your dog. I guess Uncle Bob’s buddies have kind of taken over the project of fixing your car. They called Riley from the garage and said they should have it ready by this afternoon and will bring it by. So if you want to, that gives you time to take a walk, and at least see the Festival getting set up and maybe catch yourself sight of a black squirrel.”

  Erma waited for John to protest, to make up some excuse, but to her surprise, he didn’t. “Sounds like a plan,” he agreed.

  After breakfast, they went outside. John took Erma’s hand, and they walked together, fingers interlaced. She couldn’t remember the last time they had held hands, and it felt good.

  Next door to Bunny’s house, a man emerged carrying a briefcase. John lifted his free hand to wave and the man waved back as he got into his car. “Poor bastard. From the way Bunny talks, he must be the only man in all of Cavus going to work today instead of to the Festival.”

  Erma laughed. “Maybe he’s afraid of squirrels.”

  As they walked on, Erma couldn’t help but admire the town. On every lawn the grass grew a lush, vibrant green. Trees—some fruit, others cottonwoods and ash—shaded the streets. Some of the trees were foreign, a few cherry trees, for instance, and a very few were native to the hills, but whatever was planted here grew, and grew well. It was small-town life just as she’d always wanted John to see it. She smiled and squeezed his hand more tightly. All of the darkness from last night seemed to wash away in the morning sun. They were really going to make it. She knew this as suddenly and surely as the sun breaking through the clouds overhead.

  When they hit Main Street, the pre-Festival activity was already in full force, people hustling back and forth setting up tents and tables, a steady hum of conversation buzzing excitedly amongst them. The buildings on either side of the street, in front of which the tents were being erected, displayed the old false storefronts popular at the turn of the century. Erma and John walked past the all-purpose drugstore, where, no doubt, community members picked up last-minute groceries as well as their prescriptions. Probably there was even a soda fountain inside, if it was anything like Erma’s hometown.

  In the distance Erma could make out the outlines of a larger building beyond the town, resting in the hills, and she guessed this was the new factory, where Bunny’s husband worked. Tendrils of smoke trailed lazily from the factory’s two chimneys, forming snakelike tentacles in the sky.

  Erma had to leap out of the way as a little girl, six or seven, came hurtling by on her bike, and then leap aside again as a pursuant, this one a boy the same age, came careening after her. Both children were laughing madly. “Sorry!” the little girl called over her shoulder. The girl only just turned back in time to avoid the large pothole in the middle of the street, but as soon as she saw it she maneuvered the bike expertly around it.

  “Could give Mr. Knievel a run for his money, I bet,” said John.

  “Cute, though,” said Erma. She took John’s other hand and pulled him to her.

  A grin flashed across his face. “And almost as wild as you were when I met you.”

  “I was not.”

  “No? Asking strange men to sleep with you?”

  “It was a hypothetical question. In the name of science.”

  “Didn’t end up being so hypothetical, though, did it?”

  He bent down and scooped Erma up into a cradle, tickling her hard under her rib cage.

  She kicked at him, but she was laughing so hard that the kicks were mostly ineffectual. “Put me down!”

  John bounced her up, and then acted like he was going to drop her. “Are you sure?” He bounced her again, threateningly.

  “I’m serious. I’m going to pee my pants!” Tears streamed down her cheeks as John set her down and then pulled her roughly to him, kissing her in the middle of the street.

  And there, in the foreign street in a town she’d never been in and yet was, she knew, as familiar as breathing, she understood a new truth. She wanted to try again. Was willing to try. Despite all her fears of what could be, she could find a way to want to have this man’s child. She could take the risk.

  Gently, he pulled away from her, leaving her feeling a little dizzy. She wanted to tell him, needed to…

  Erma caught a movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turned to see what it was. “John,” she said. “Don’t look now, but I think we’ve got an audience.” A group of kids stood on the street, just outside of the drugstore, staring at them, grinning. Two of the kids were holding ice-cream cones, and one of them grinned, pointing at her.

  “He kisseded her!” the little girl said, ice cream from the cone dribbling down her cheeks as she squealed again in delight. “That man kisseded her!”

  “A little early for ice cream, isn’t it?” John called back playfully.

  It could wait. Erma wanted to stretch this moment, stretch this unexpectedly beautiful morning into a sweet prelude of the revelation. Make this a day that they would both remember forever.

  “I’m going to go do some investigative reporting concerning where those kids got their goodies,” Erma said. “Think you could handle an A.M. purple cow?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what that is,” said John, “but whatever you bring to me, oh, madam, I shall consume.”

  “Be right back,” she told him. “Then we really should get to Bunny’s before Riley brings Maxie over. With our luck, Bunny will feed her some table scraps and that will be that. Maxie will insist on staying here permanently.”

  “If Bunny feeds me any more, I might decide to do the same.”

  “Oh, no, mister. You’re coming with me. Till death do us part and all that jazz.” Erma kissed him once more, wiggling her eyebrows at the kids as she did so, much to their amusement. They obliged by providing a soundtrack of ooooews to the kiss. She pushed John toward a bench shaded by a large tree on the side of the street, and pointed at it.

  “Sit right there, and don’t move until I get back.” John sat, and Erma, her feet feeling like they had wings on them, crossed the street to the promised land of the drugstore.

  2

  John watched his wife walk across the street, and a moment of nausea shot through him. It was guilt, pure and simple. He’d never told his wife about the affair, and he didn’t intend to. Not now.

  He watched as Erma parted the crowd of kids, and saw her bend down to ruffle the hair of the little girl, a cute thing with cherublike curls. He had to swallow the lump in his throat. He could see now that everything was coming to an end, that the affair had been wrong. No matter how he had justified it at the time, he had betrayed her.

  But then, she’d betrayed him, too. When Erma had gotten pregnant, at first she’d suggested getting an abortion. It had been evident from the beginning that she didn’t want the child, even when she knew how badly he did. It was all he’d ever wanted. She pretended, later, after the miscarriage, that she was upset. That she had wanted it, but he knew better.

  He could understand her hesitancy, really he could. After all those battered women she saw at work, the terrible life she saw their kids being forced into, it must be hard to imagine this world as a place worthy of bringing anyone into. But she also knew that ever since he could remember, John had wanted to be a father.

  There were several ways, he was sure, a psychologist would try to explain his need for kids. John’s own lack of a father figure when he was little, for one. His dad had always been away on business, flying to one meeting or another for his company, and his mother substituted food for that missed affection, deeding John a thoroughly miserable childhood. So, yeah, he probably wanted a kid so he could make sure its life was different, that it had the love and normal childhood he’d always wanted but never had. But it was more than that. He wanted a kid because he wanted to be a father, pure and simple. Always had. He couldn’t understand why it was so easy for people to believe that wome
n could have the urge, the biological desire to have a child, but when a man said the same was true for him, they looked at him strangely.

  Whatever the case, when he met Erma, he knew that not only did he want a child, he wanted one with her. And she’d said that she wanted the same. Until it actually happened, and she found herself pregnant. Then things grew so cold between them that they might as well have been living in a meat locker. He still didn’t know if she would have gotten the abortion against his wishes if the miscarriage hadn’t happened, but he thought she probably would have. Then, though, he’d convinced himself of its certainty. So he’d had the affair.

  It was easy. Far easier than he’d ever considered an affair might be. The woman had been a student of his. She’d had a crush on him from the beginning, he could tell, but hadn’t thought anything of it. Many of his students had crushes on him—harmless things, those crushes. But Mary Jamison was different. For one thing, she was beautiful. Not just cute and bubbly pretty, but magazine gorgeous. She was a transplant from Seneca, South Carolina, and she spoke with a purr-like accent, thick with honey.

  “Why, hell-oooo, Mr. Scott,” she’d say, sitting across his desk from him during office hours. Then she’d run one leg over the other, crossing then uncrossing them while he watched. She was making sure that he watched. When she took her paper out to show him she would always move her chair around the desk next to him. From there, she reached a hand out to pat his leg, lightly. “Thank you again for helping me,” she’d say. “You’re so nice.”

  The first few times, he’d ignored her advances, pushed her hand away. But then one day, the day Erma came home crying about a pregnant woman who’d just been beaten to a pulp by her husband, saying that she didn’t plan on bringing a baby into a world like this, all the while the bump in her belly growing just a little bit more pronounced, and he’d had, finally, enough.

  The next day, when Mary came in for help on another paper, and patted his leg with her soft hand, he didn’t push her away. Instead, he surprised them both by standing up, going around his desk, and locking his door. Then he picked Mary Jamison up, sat her light, birdlike frame on the desk, and fucked her. The whole incident lasted no more than five minutes.

  Now, across the street, the door to the drugstore opened, and Erma emerged, two paper cups in her hand, spoons sticking out. She looked up, saw him watching her, and waved, the paper cup still clutched in her fist. He saw something white dribbling from it, and watched as his wife grinned like a little kid, and licked it off her knuckles.

  A pain as real and physical as a punch gripped his gut. They were beyond fixing, he knew that. He himself had put the wheels of their official separation into motion, but he could, at least, give her today. Give it to them both.

  “Let’s do it,” he said, when she came over. “Let’s stay here for another night and go to the damned Festival.”

  “Are you sure?” She handed him his cup, full, he saw, of a purple-and-white sludge of ice cream and something else.

  He took the cup from her and spooned a bite into his mouth. The ice cream was cold and delicious, tasting something like grape juice and cream. Standing there, with the ice cream trailing down his throat and his wife looking, to him, more beautiful than he’d ever seen her, with the sunlight bouncing off the warm brown of her hair, making her outline fuzzy, he thought he would remember the taste of that grape ice cream for the rest of his life. “I’m sure,” he said. “There’s no hurry. Besides, I think we deserve it, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what we deserve,” said Erma, lapping happily at her own ice cream. “But I’ll take what we can get.”

  As they walked away, the sound of the children jumping rope and singing followed them. John tried to pick out the words, but could only catch a few:

  I’m hun-gry, I’m thirs-ty.

  Lucy, Lucy, what did you say?

  I’m hun-gry, I’m thirs-ty.

  He wondered, briefly, who Lucy was, but then the voices faded completely, and he concentrated instead on his wife. Only the name Lucy stayed with him from the song. It was a pretty name. One that, once upon a time, he might have considered for their child.

  3

  In her kitchen, Bunny wiped away the mess from breakfast. It was nice to have visitors. Nice to see someone besides her own reflection. Even when Bob had still been around it had been lonely, but now that he was…Well, now that he wasn’t around, it was lonelier still. There was a sticky spot in the center of the table where someone had spilled a big drop of peach preserves. Bunny pressed the sponge down hard against it and rubbed until the sugar dissolved and the spot disappeared.

  It was lonely, yes, but she wasn’t really alone. The name, like a song, or a single line from a prayer, rang out in her mind. Over and over it played itself, the name that had given her life meaning these past few weeks.

  Today was a special day. Today, for the first time, Bunny might actually be able to see this person from somewhere other than out her front window. She might, finally, be able to see him up close, at the Festival.

  Bunny found a new spot on the table and rubbed at it so hard that the sponge tore. She’d waited so long. Too long, dammit. Waited and slaved and been a fool to society’s stupid rules. But no more. No one was going to tell Bunny what she could do but herself. And today she was going to talk to him. Do more, maybe. A lot more…

  There. The table was clean. Bunny whisked the last of the dishes into the sink and began to hum a tune as she ran the water. Like a jewel fitting into a crown, the name fit itself neatly inside the song. Bunny ran the water, scrubbed a plate, ran the water, dried it. Over and over, the tune and name creating a rhythm to her movements. Two words. Two beautiful words, repeated.

  Javier Martinez.

  Javier Martinez.

  Javier Martinez.

  Bunny scrubbed the dishes to the most beautiful sound in the world—the name of her paper boy, Javier Martinez.

  Today was going to be a glorious day.

  In just a few short hours, her life would change forever.

  Chapter 9

  1

  Riley entered the police station at eight A.M. to find Anita sitting primly at her desk, the Scotts’ dog tucked under her feet like it owned the place.

  Riley had been at the Williams’ house until three o’clock last night, and he was beyond exhausted. There had been a body, all right, one nearly beyond identification. They could only tell it was a woman by the body, and that it was not a teenager by the gray hairs that sprouted between the dye job in the scalp. But the face…

  Christ.

  What little sleep he’d had was spiked through with nightmares of that face.

  Riley took a swig of the gas station coffee he’d laced with enough sugar to cover the burn and tried to focus on the here and now. He’d have plenty of time to fret about the Williams case just as soon as he got through with his one pleasant task of the day. The state police from Billings were already back at the house with Sam. They had basically taken the case away from him, though they hadn’t said it outright. “A murder of this scale, Sheriff Riley, it becomes a state matter.”

  The Billings boys had even suggested Riley take today off. “Come back fresh tomorrow. Monday, even.”

  They’d been respectful. Even flattering, saying that they’d heard a lot about the good work he’d done back in the day. But the respect had only gone so far. What they really wanted, Riley knew, was to get on about their business working this case without the interference of an overweight and quickly aging man whose best days were past. And he didn’t blame them. As a younger cop in homicide he’d have done the same.

  Anita, who’d taken the Scotts’ dog in for the night, was already in her Festival finery. Her silver curls were newly washed and rinsed blue, and she wore a crisp, red T-shirt with enough rhinestone pins of various shapes and colors—including an American flag and a pink poodle—to decorate a float. Around her neck hung a pair of cat-eye glasses, also covered in rhinestones.r />
  “Morning,” Riley said.

  On a normal day, he loved coming to the station. It was an old, 1920s house that had been converted into the Cavus police station, but its beautiful built-in wood cupboards and pretty wood trim remained. Someone had even put gingham curtains up. It felt like home to Riley, had felt like it ever since he’d come in here as a kid when his dad was sheriff.

  Anita looked up. “Watch yourself. I’ve had a lot of coffee this morning and it’s making me go twitchy.”

  “I see you’ve got the dog all clean and pretty,” Riley said. Maxie scooted herself under his hand as he bent to pet her. Perched on her head was a ridiculous pink bow, roughly the size of a football.

  “I did what I could,” Anita said. “Poor thing looked like she’d never seen the inside of a groomer’s before.”

  “Any news from the Billings boys?” asked Riley, pulling out the leash Erma’d given him back at Bunny’s and snapping it onto what, he did not doubt, was a new collar. It was white with pink hearts on it.

  “Nothing,” said Anita.

  “All right. Guess I’ll be going, then. Thanks, Anita.” He stepped toward the door, trying not to look like he was rushing.

  From behind him, Anita cleared her throat. “The woman, though…there sure was something funny about her.”

  Riley stopped, but did not turn around. “What woman, Anita?”

  “The woman. Thad’s wife, Holly Williams. Sam told me this morning you put in orders to have her dug up. Which, I might add, sure don’t seem a Christianly thing to do. The Lord our God said—”

  “What about her?”

  Silence. Behind Anita, a big box fan churned steadily. Cavus hadn’t ever found it in their budget to put in an air conditioner.

  “Did they exhume her body already?” Riley asked, though he knew it wasn’t possible. There was no way, short of a miracle, that the court would have even gotten the order across, let alone someone out there to dig the body up and run tests.