Do I wake her? I thought. Is that bad? Where does she think she’s going? What does she think she’s doing? Why now?
I caught up with her at the foyer, stepping around the masking-tape body I still imagined right there.
I put my hand to her shoulder.
She snapped her mouth over, bit me.
When I didn’t touch her again, when I was just a useless, crumpled ball of flesh sitting against the wall, holding his hand to his throat, she pulled herself around the corner, kept going, her dead feet the last thing to slip out of my sight.
I turned my head to the kitchen, to await her return.
•
The next morning, Stan was there. He’d forgotten to even take his tool belt off, must have driven the fifteen miles out here with all that weight jabbing into his lap, tool handles catching on the steering wheel, nails rattling in his pouch.
As for Kelly, after what the night had done to her, she was still asleep.
“Sleepwalking?” he said, squinting about the term.
“She wasn’t awake,” I told him, stepping out onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind us. “This ever happen, growing up?”
Stan turned his weathered face toward the city, as if tunneling his vision all the way to the house he’d raised her in, her mom dead in labor. As if looking in the window at her, sleeping at twelve years old, at fourteen, at eighteen.
Finally he shrugged one shoulder helplessly, came back to me.
“Listen,” he said. “You’ve—I’m proud of you, Mark. Kelly chose well, I’ve got to give her that. But this…it’s too much, out here alone like this. Nearest house is, what?”
I turned to show it to him, like he couldn’t already see it through the trees: maybe a hundred yards? The country, yeah. The realtor had said you could even get deer if you put out salt, or planted whatever it was that grew acorns.
“What are you saying?” I asked him.
What I was wearing was my robe, my slippers, my jaw rough, eyes bleary, hair its usual mess.
Stan looked like he’d stepped out of a cigarette ad from 1962.
“You need help, I’m saying,” he said, catching me in his steely blue eyes.
“I love her.”
“I’m not saying you don’t, now, don’t get your back hair up. Just hear me out.”
“About what, Stan? About Kelly?”
Stan squinted again in his leathery way, turned half away from me.
Across the highway by his truck, one of those promised deer was watching us, her tail switching back and forth.
He grumbled out a satisfied laugh about her.
“This isn’t just for you,” he said. “Or her either. But—you know me. I’ve been doing this for a long time, now, right? I know generally I’m the builder, not the investor, but this house, she’s…I believe in her, okay? I know every joist, have my initials under the paint on each interior wall. Made sure the wires were insulated and tied back, if you get my drift.”
“No, Stan. I don’t.”
“Let me buy this from you at a fair price. Just name it. Then you and Kel-Kel, you can move back to town, I can help you with that too, it’ll be…if she’s doing what you say, getting up at night, then you can’t be out here alone. That’s all there is to it.”
For that last part, he came around to face me. To challenge me to say no.
“It’s a generous offer,” I told him.
“Fuck you,” he said right back, suddenly a step closer, talking to me like I was somebody on his job site, trying to tell him about zoning or permits. “She’s your wife but she’s my little girl, and I’ll be goddamned if she’s going to go like her—”
He ate the rest of it, though.
We just stared at each other.
“Her mother?” I finally said.
He shook his head no, that that was all.
“One-time offer,” he said. “I’ll write the check right now, you’re back in town by the end of the week, she can get whatever care she needs, my ticket all the way.”
“She’s just sleep—”
I couldn’t say “walking,” though.
“Fair price,” Stan said. “Next house, it’ll be accessible all the way, I guarantee.”
“You’re trying to buy her back,” I told him, then didn’t look away either.
“It’s not like that. I’m in a position to help, and I’d like to.”
“I can take care of her.”
“Then why’d you call me?”
“Because I can’t call her mom.”
Stan just stared at me about this.
“But she’s okay now?” he said.
“Sleeping. Maybe up by now, I don’t know.”
He stared at the house, reached over, tried to shake one of the porch posts. It had no give, was going to be there long after we were all gone.
Satisfied, he nodded, stepped off the porch but, on the way, said, as if speaking out to the road, “Pantyhose.”
“Sir?”
“I used to have to tie her mother’s ankles with pantyhose, keep her from walking all over the damn house.”
Pantyhose.
Around her waist, keeping her in bed? Or just lock the door? Make her sleep in her chair?
For some reason I thought of those caltrops they put up in parking garages—shark teeth, my mom used to call them—to keep you from driving out the sneaky way.
I was going to have go around the first floor, check Stan’s work. Make sure every nail head was flush.
I reached across, shook the porch post he’d just tried.
Sawdust drifted down into my face.
I looked up into it, sputtered it off my lips, twisted the knob of the front door.
It was locked, had locked behind me.
I closed my eyes, prayed Stan wasn’t watching, knew I couldn’t push the doorbell in—I was either going to wake her or was going to make Stan (and myself) nervous when she didn’t wake—but then the door opened on its own.
Or, not on its own: Kelly, in her chair.
I smiled, told her good morning, sunshine.
“What are you doing?” she asked, not quite accusatory but definitely humorless.
She’d already looked out the window, seen us out here.
“Being your husband,” I shrugged, and lowered myself to kiss her, morning breath or no, and exactly when my lips touched hers, an arc of static sparking between us in spite of her rubber wheels—it was my slippers, I knew—right exactly then, we heard it happen behind us.
It was a series of sounds all jammed up into an instant: tires squealing, crunch of metal, then the undeniable scrape of flesh on asphalt.
I felt all the blood drain from my face and, for the first time, I put my foot on her chair, pushed her back into the house, taking advantage of her condition. So she wouldn’t have to see this.
I pulled the door shut, held it there, pressing my forehead into its cool wood.
A first drop of blood fell from my nose, went unimpeded all the way down to the threshold, and then the rest of the drops came. From tension, my mom used to tell me. From stress.
I brought the belt of my robe up to stopper it and turned around, made myself look.
Stan was standing up from the rocker panel of his truck, looking over the hood.
A heavy sedan had hit that deer, was pulled over now, up by our neighbors.
The deer, she was half in the ditch, half in the road, flopping, screaming.
Stan waved me away, shaking his head no, that this wasn’t for me.
He was right.
•
In the kitchen, Kelly had the windows open—extra long strings on the blinds—so it was bright, cheery. The complete opposite of last night.
“It probably happens all the time,” she was saying about the deer, pouring my coffee then hers, setting the pot on an oven mitt between us, her eyes fixed on the white pad of gauze on the back of my hand.
I’d let her boil it out with hydrogen peroxide. It was supposed to be from
some mystery nail—a cluster of them that were in that unlikely arc of human teeth—under the sink upstairs. I’d been looking for more toilet paper.
She bought it?
Who knows.
She didn’t recognize it, anyway. Didn’t match it up with her own teeth.
“Sleep well?” I said, hiding my mouth with my cup, using my good hand to hold it.
“What do you mean?” she said. “What was my father doing here? You called him about the nails?”
What was my father doing here. What was he doing here.
I was a character in a sit-com. One who had to cover. Now.
“Asking about your birthday,” I came up with faster than I would have guessed possible.
“My birthday?”
“Next month.”
I was hating myself so much.
“What you might want,” I said, taking her hand in mine. “You know, Daddy’s little princess. But don’t tell him I told you. I promised.”
She stared at me, said, “So? What am I getting?”
“I told him you wanted a twenty-four inch monitor,” I said, smiling, and, like she was supposed to, she slapped me on the forearm.
“Just what I want,” she said, heating her eyes up to punctuate it.
“Maybe two, side by side,” I added, holding my hands up to show how much better my desk would be with them sitting there like that.
“I hate you.”
“I’m hateable, yeah,” I told her, and in this way she never knew about pulling herself around and around the house.
Not from me, anyway.
And no, I couldn’t ask her about her mom.
I don’t think it would have changed anything, really.
Her mom sleepwalked, and she’d inherited it. To dig deeper would just uncover what was best left buried: if she really died in birth; why her father never said anything; where her mom had always been trying to go, and why.
The past is the past. Sometimes it should stay there.
I stood, looked around, something nagging at the edge of my thoughts.
“Probably does happen all the time,” I said, about the deer.
“Shave,” she said, handing my coffee up to me, “shower. Become human.”
I leaned down to kiss her—no jolt this time—but, when I didn’t close my eyes all the way this time, I saw past her, to the tile floor.
It was clean. No blood.
•
At my desk the following day, just spacing out over a spreadsheet that wasn’t supposed to be my concern—not the particulars, anyway—I dropped my bit hand down into the trashcan just behind my chair. It’s embarrassing, I guess, but it’s become something I can’t help, and I don’t even want to guess at the why of it. Just, where that trashcan is, when I’m leaning back—plop, my hands falls right into it, if I’m thinking too hard.
I call it my fortune trashcan. Whatever I’m stuck on, whatever’s got me leaning back like that in what I never want to call defeat, I usually try to deal with by reading the random, crumpled piece of paper I haul up.
It’s like the dreaming, I guess. There’s no real magic or science or meaning to it. All the old paperwork does is get me to come at the problem from a different angle, one I never would have tried without a trigger. And sometimes it works. I mean, all the problems, I figure them out eventually, right? Only trick is, I give credit to the fortune trashcan.
Sometimes it’s a page number, other times a name.
Either way, it’s my secret, is nothing I’d ever tell Kelly.
So, because I was stuck again—and because the upstairs trashcans are strictly off-limits for anything but office trash—I came up with a sheet of paper. When I usually crumpled everything, I mean, just because I liked the way it poured out into the big trashcan out back. Like tennis balls, or potatoes.
“Good one,” I said, getting the paper right-side up in front of me.
It was a duplicate of a back sheet of our tax return from six years ago.
I turned around slow in my chair, studied the loft.
Did the light even work up there anymore?
I stepped up onto the ladder bolted to the wall, peeked my head over.
It was the same as I’d left it.
“Not getting me,” I said then, and balled the sheet up, rolled it across the floor instead of trying to dig up whatever box it had blown out of.
If the house wanted me to go up there, then I was staying in my office.
Below, the sound channeling up, Kelly’s tires creaked from the kitchen to the living room.
Last night I’d shut the door, put a loafer behind it like a doorstop then chocked a belt buckle under the heel, so, if the door opened, the metal of the buckle would scrape me awake.
This morning, the belt had still been there.
A one-time thing, then, Kelly.
I wanted to look at her legs, too, to tend to them if I could, boil the memory of that night out, but there was no way to ask. I was going to have to see them on accident, which, since they’d shriveled and she was shy about them—unlikely. I wouldn’t let her lock the door when she bathed, but I wasn’t invited, either.
I didn’t like that she’d had to clean up that blood, either. Didn’t like to picture her leaning forward out of her chair, trying to reach, then rolling across to the trashcan, realizing there’s a spot of it on her tire, that she’s tracking it everywhere, that it’s following her.
Or maybe she slipped down to the floor, her legs to the side like Cinderella.
Making me the evil stepmother, yes.
I shook my head at how stupid this all was—me, my thinking—and came back down the ladder, half-expecting a bolt to dislodge, spilling me back into the desk.
Nothing.
“Not that kind of story,” I said aloud.
“Lunch!” Kelly called up, startling me.
I agreed with her about lunch, even shook my head yes yes yes all alone up there, and, in the shower later—when you work from home, your schedule’s jacked—I found something on my right hip, not on the bone but…I don’t know. Kind of right where the hinge is? Where the top of the thigh officially stops. Where I always figured I’d get a hernia, if I were going to get one, as it felt like a weak spot.
If it was just a brownish purple discoloration, a bruise almost, I wouldn’t have seen it, of course.
But it was coarse, too. Like a mole that was just suddenly and unaccountably there.
I bent over as far as I could, studied it.
Not a perfect circle. Obloid, colored unevenly. No hair.
The only thing I’d been pressed up against though, it had been the ladder, right?
Right.
A splinter? Some chemical that came through my pants?
For the rest of the day and all through dinner, each time I thought Kelly wasn’t looking—men don’t give women enough credit in these matters, I know—I’d slip my hand down the front of my pants, rub that patch of skin, interrogating it with my fingertips.
That night, then, after wine that was supposed to keep us both down, I woke to the bedroom door open.
My hand went immediately to the rough spot in my groin, and my breath shallowed out.
Instead of getting up, I counted seconds.
From before, I knew Kelly would take just shy of three minutes to make her sleep round, her mermaid trip, looking for what shore I couldn’t guess.
Two-hundred and twenty seconds later, I looked over to the bathroom door, even though the light was off in there, and then, from Kelly’s side of the bed, her wheelchair creaked.
Not the rubber-on-wood creak I knew so well, but the creak of something pushing on the frame, making the hinges that never moved move.
I pulled my right hand from my underwear, swallowed, and looked over.
The wheelchair was definitely moving.
I shook my head no, please, and then Kelly rose beside it, pulling herself back up onto the bed, her hair a black shroud, her left arm reaching all the way
across, almost to me.
And then her right.
She pulled herself up, wound herself into the sheets, and never woke up.
The blemish on my hip was throbbing, my fingertips slippery from touching it.
If I cried quietly down the back of my throat, it was a perfectly natural response.
The next morning, not even remotely aware I’d slept, there was another blotch of skin on my left hip. Like somebody had cut me down the middle in the night, licked my spot, and folded me over, pressing until the spot twinned itself.
•
“Your father wants to buy the house,” I told Kelly over breakfast. Mostly because this wasn’t a sit-com. Because the audience was yelling at me not to lie, that that always comes back on you.
She looked up to me, to be sure she’d heard right.
“For your birthday,” I added. “He says he can build another. You know, to suit.”
She studied me, studied me.
“‘To suit,’” she repeated.
I dug deeper, deeper.
“He says this one’ll be a good investment, he has somebody lined up. That another project will keep him busy. That he wants to do it.”
“But—but this is our house,” she said, finally. “Our home.”
“One half’s mine, one half’s yours,” I said, shrugging, slurping, doing everything I could to deflect attention. “Add it up, it’s ours. But it’s not…it’s not ours together, yeah?”
“You don’t like it?”
“I love it.”
She was staring at me now.
Our names were traced in a rough heart in the foundation at the northwest corner, under the living room.
Her spinal column was in the foyer.
“Happy birthday,” she said, just that.
I read it approximately six thousand different ways, up in my office hours later.
I was sitting in the upstairs wheelchair, too. For no reason I could explain. I think maybe because I wanted to be sure it stayed in place. That it wouldn’t sneak up behind me.
The back was too short for me, but my palms, they fell perfectly to the tops of the handrims.
It kept my hands out of the front of my pants, I mean.
The blotches, the moles, the guilt cancers, the whatever-they-weres, they were seeping, now. The rough skin cracking open.
I wanted to laugh, needed to cry.
According to my email and phone, I was out of the office.
After the People Lights Have Gone Off Page 18