It was true enough.
I rolled back and forth, the carpet absorbing the sound.
What I couldn’t get away from in my head, it was Kelly’s legs. The tops of her knees.
After breakfast, I’d faked a coffee spill (waiting until it was definitely not hot), had finally seen them.
The skin was pink, fresh, unmarred.
Had I just dreamed the other night, then?
Was that why the blood was gone from the kitchen floor? Because it had never been there?
The blood from my nose, on the threshold, I understood what had happened to it: raccoons, coyotes, whatever will lap up that kind of taste after the people lights have gone off.
But the kitchen, the mess there, it being gone only made sense if I’d dreamed it. Even though dreams are stupid.
Guilt, though: could that kickstart some indictment of a movie while I slept, maybe? If I thought about something long enough, wouldn’t it eventually bubble up to the surface in the night? Was I wrong about how dreams worked? Was this my punishment for not respecting them?
Except—except Kelly’s mom, whatever the story was there. And her rising on her side of the bed the night before, rising so steadily I thought at first it was by her own leg power, or that there was a Peter Pan hook in the meat of her back, drawing her up, up.
“The house,” I said to myself, rolling back and forth in the chair, faster and faster, the loft never quite leaving my sight.
It had…I don’t know. It was doing something. To me. Just by being there.
There was a reason nobody had built here, right? Like, like that same way when the big bridge finally collapses on the weekday morning, there’s fewer cars on it than usual? Because people know, down at some level they don’t acknowledge, are too sophisticated to acknowledge.
We should have stayed in town. We aren’t country people.
Or—what if I could trade, right?
The thought calmed me.
Maybe this was just a negotiation.
I looked up to the loft, directly into its slithery, tax-form darkness, and pictured myself ducking the roof, stepping over that stout railing. Plummeting down like should have happened in the first place, my back cracking into the finial at the end of the banister.
I’d be making up, I’d be evening things out.
Except I’m not that stupid, am I?
I rolled over to the top of the stairs, dangled my feet over that crashing fall then nudged forward and back, coming closer to the lip each time. The deal I was making, and not leaving myself time to back away from, or think myself out of, was, if this was what the house wanted, then all it had to do was tell me. All it had to do was let me misjudge once. I wouldn’t fight it, would just let gravity have me, would go peaceful to my hall in the hospital, then do my physical therapy like I was supposed to.
A negotiation, yes.
I rocked forward, back, came closer, and just when I felt my right wheel going past that point of no return, somebody grabbed me from behind, hauled me back.
Just going on instinct, I both let myself be saved and leaned out, away from the stomach of whoever this was, or wasn’t.
This was the message, though: don’t.
I breathed in, nodded, and threw up down the front of my shirt, didn’t turn my head when the ladder behind me creaked with the weight of some body climbing it.
•
Another shower, this one longer, hotter, steamier. Like there’s another world on the other side of it all. Kelly calling to me from the bedroom but I still can’t make words, am still unpacking what happened upstairs.
The more I think about it, the more it was like I was seeing myself from the side when it happened: me, normal, just normal, in a wheelchair, my elbows cocked back against the handrims, and, behind me, clothed in darkness, a standing-up version of Kelly. Kelly as she should have been. Kelly as she’d been trapped. Like the impact with that concrete floor under the foyer tile, it had split her in two, like her former self had stood up from it in the swirling sawdust, looked around, and come back upstairs.
To me.
“Okay,” Kelly tells me over our late lunch, my hair still wet, skin puckered. “My dad, the deal. The gift.”
I look up to her, and all around her.
“Really?” I say. “Why? We don’t have to. I don’t want to make you.”
“Just one more night,” she says. “We’ll call him in the morning. Together.”
I smile, take a bite, say it in my head: Oh.
We’re talking in code, then.
One more night.
Of course. Yes. Naturally.
One more night.
I can find out that Kelly hasn’t been sleepwalking at all, that I’ve been dragging her around and around the house by her hair. I can go out back, find some dilapidated old burial site, some clear indication that this was the wrong property. There can be shades of hanged men from the big tree. I can call her father, let him whisper things to me about his dead wife, and how she was just declared dead, how she found a way through. I can take a pickaxe, find our names in the concrete, and spit blood into that fingerwide heart framing them, wait for the night animals to come apply their tongues to it.
I can go hand over hand up into the loft one last time.
I can punch the ancient buttons on my hips in the perfect sequence, the secret order, so that wet new legs fold out, giving me four legs now, so I can carry Kelly safely up and down the stairs, however many times she wants. Forever and ever, please.
That’s all I ask. All I need.
“What?” Kelly says to me, her fork of grilled cheese—that’s how she eats it—halfway to her mouth, the fork not even trembling.
“I love you,” I tell her.
She appraises me. Regards me.
“You’re just saying that because I’m so beautiful. So athletic.”
“I do.”
She grins into her plate, completes the bite, runs the dishes under the water and I’m sitting there after she’s wheeled out.
One more night.
Maybe we should order chicken. Enough for three. You, me, and this house.
Or maybe we are the chicken.
•
I lose the rest of the day. Like I’m asleep, but not.
What I’m doing is maintenance. Re-seating this flange behind the toilet in her bathroom, and packing steel wool behind it against the mice. Tightening the screws in the top hinge of the heavy door between the living room and the kitchen, that I never think to close. Testing the float on the sump pump, then testing it again, giving it a hair trigger.
Instead of retreating up to my aerie to cap off the day’s work, I take a position on the couch by Kelly. It doesn’t make her nervous—I have done this before—but I can sense a hesitation in her fingers, on the remote. Like she wants to pick the perfect show. Not scare me away.
When she has to get up, she uses her chair, and I insist on pausing the show until she’s back.
Above us, probably standing in my darkened study, her hands gripping the railing of the loft, is the other. She’s watching us with deer eyes.
I don’t even have to look up there. I know. But I’m no actor. Each time I lick my lips, each time I reposition the throw pillow I always hug to my chest while watching television, it feels mechanical.
By bedtime, I’m exhausted.
“What’s with you tonight?” Kelly says, rolling in from the bathroom in her old nightgown, a touch of toothpaste at the left corner of her mouth.
The oval mirrors above our sinks, they’re too tall for her. I keep thinking that those fancy chains they hang on, I could just lengthen the chain on her side, so that the mirror would lean out from the wall more, like looking down at her. So she could look back up into it.
Because of stray toothpaste on her lip, though?
Does that really matter?
And what if it fell over onto her? What if she fell up into it?
What’s with me, she’s asking.
“You,” I tell her, then brave the kitchen in the dark, return with my back so straight, nearly a whole bottle of wine split between two oversize glasses. The priest with the sacrament.
We toast each other. This life. Us.
I picture carrying her waifish form upstairs. Never looking back. Her arms circling my neck. I go back to that Friday I smuggled her out of work a lifetime ago, and, stepping over the threshold of the elevator with her, I look down this time, into that crack between worlds, into that empty chute, that blackness. All the open space.
Something looks back.
Maybe that’s where it started. Maybe it’s been starting forever.
I still don’t have a lighter in my car.
Earlier, still trying to force a trade, trying to make this into a business transaction, I sat out in my car longer than I had to, the engine idling, and finally licked my finger, slipped it into that perfect hole in the dash.
Nothing.
I opened my eyes on the same world. To the face of the house.
“Mark?” Kelly asks, doing her awkward dismount up into the bed. I know not to help.
“Should we go upstairs?” I say, my voice thready.
“Upstairs?” she says, settling into the sheets.
“Like before.”
“You’re different,” she says.
“You’re different,” I say back, our call and response from the old days, but it comes out all wrong. I see it flicker across her face.
She tilts her glass back, sips just to hide the new vulnerability in her eyes.
“Remember that first night?” I ask.
“The kitchen,” she says, an impish grin creeping in. “The breakfast nook.”
“The future,” I say.
“Not this one,” she corrects.
“Exactly this one,” I tell her. “Any future with you, you know that.”
“I don’t want to sell.”
“I know.”
We smile in different directions. I study the walls and the corners, the furniture and the shadows.
“You’re scared,” she tells me.
“Just something I saw on tv earlier.”
“The cooking thing?”
“A lot earlier. When I was a kid.”
“But—you’re okay, here? Tell me.”
“I’m with you, yeah. That’s pretty okay in my book.”
“I want to be in your book too,” she says, and we draw close but it doesn’t go anywhere, and I think to myself that this is good, that this is right. That this is what I always wanted.
Twenty minutes later her side of the bed relaxes, steadies out, and I change my mind about this “one more night” charade. About this passive suicide I’m consenting to, just by pretending that everything will be all right in the morning.
I rise as silently as I can, go to the open bedroom door, grit my teeth to ignore the draft at my back, wanting to pull me through.
We will sell, we will get out of here. Earlier, before, when Kelly’s other half touched my shoulder at the top of the stairs, that physical contact between worlds—it put Novocaine in my brain all afternoon. It made me suggestible, made me easy, dimmed me like a bulb. Gave me a toolbelt to show my allegiance with. Made me too thankful for not falling down all those steps. Made me feel like I owed something back, like I was part of some circle, some cycle, some secret, timeless dynamic.
“Tomorrow,” I promise out loud.
Tomorrow.
Standing at the door, though, something splashes into the sawdust on the cement of the foyer. One drop, then another.
Tea, lemonade. Racing to the bottom.
From above, giggles.
I don’t want to, but I reach out, catch one of those drops. Lick it from the skin of my palm. It tastes like—
But no, no.
I wipe my tongue on the sleeve of my robe, ease the door shut, lock it.
Because Stan measures twice and cuts once, the brass tongue snicks into place.
I nod yes, that this is good, and walk backwards to bed, feeling my way under the covers, my eyes never leaving that slit of light under the door. It’s from the porch light, bleeding in through the stained glass around the door. There’s no reason for it to waver, no reason for it to waver.
It doesn’t, it doesn’t, and then at some point in the night, it does.
Not a solid shadow like a person would make, even a person made of shadow, a person pulling herself around and around the first floor by hand, but…something lighter, even more insubstantial.
It chatters a noise from its cheek and I open my mouth to scream, can’t even begin to.
A squirrel.
There’s a squirrel out there, its nose to the base of the door, its black marble eyes judging me.
I slither my hand under the sheets, find Kelly’s arm and hold on, keep watching, keep watching, and finally that line of light, it burns into my retinas, I think. I can’t see it anymore in any kind of real way, can only see it as afterimage, and, because it’s still there like that, I can shut my eyes, rest them for a moment.
Sleep.
There’s no clear space I step over to get there, either. Just, at some point, I realize that that yellow line I’m watching, it’s the blurred together stripes on the highway, that I’m whipping down some interstate at night, my head out the window, hair stinging my neck, and the only way I’m keeping straight, it’s by staying fixed on that line.
“Careful,” Kelly says from the passenger seat, and I reach over for her hand, find the top of her thigh instead.
Not wormy and mushy, but firm, young.
It’s how I know I’m asleep. It’s how I know I’ve been tricked, that I’ve been tricked by my other self, that I was setting myself up. Bringing syrupy red wine to bed. Working my muscles all afternoon. Spiking my adrenaline at the top of the stairs, then at regular intervals throughout the day, every time I’d look upstairs. Of course I had to crash eventually.
When I come to, instead of a jolt, it’s slow, like I’m floating up to the surface, like I’m a corpse, the gases of my decomposition giving me lift, the birds singing me up into the moonlight, to feast.
The whirring sound of radial steel on blacktop dies away, the yellow line chunking itself up into hashes, into one single hash, one line of light below the door. It’s unbroken, and the door, it’s still shut, surely still locked.
I nod too fast in desperate thanks—only a few hours to go, right?—and part of my little celebration, I guess, my private little ceremony of gratitude, my way of evening the world out, it’s to rub that rough knob on my left hip, that external, infected hernia, that new sphincter trying to push its way to the surface, my pointy fingertip just feeling through for the way in, pushing hard enough to crack the knotty surface, reach through, touch my bones.
But—no.
I take inventory of both of my hands, all my fingers.
They’re not in my underwear this time.
I turn from the line of light and—
It’s Kelly.
She’s asleep, has her face in my crotch, her lips sucked onto that mole, that patch of skin, that…that hickey.
I hook her thick hair loosely between my thumb and forefinger, smooth it onto her back, and when her eyes look up to me like they have to they’re black, they’re all pupil.
They don’t see me, but they don’t look away either.
I rub my hand along the side of her head.
Her legs, they’re run up alongside me, I can see that now. And my own, they’re tingling, a numb kind of emptiness, like something’s being steadily drawn from them. Something deeper than blood. Something more important, more basic.
For an instant her lips break the suction, slurp up, and I see a sticky line of wet shadow string up from my hip to her mouth. And then that string, the marrow of my dreams or whatever it is, it pulls her back, colors her throat on the way down, branching away for dark pulses, and in this way I know that I’m hers, that she’s mine, that we’
re together as we should be. As together as any two people could possibly ever be.
Beside me, just to prove it, her left foot, it curls up against her pillow in the cutest way, those muscles remembering what they’re for, and my face warms into a smile.
Of course.
My wife says she woke falling.
What she doesn’t know, though, it’s that I was already down here, waiting for her. That I was going to catch her all along. That I would never in a thousand years let her hit the ground.
That one of these nights we’re going to walk upstairs together, hand in hand.
That, in some houses, love really can last forever.
in a Western when the camera’s focused down alongside the thigh of a quick-draw artist.
I figured it was the last thing she ordered because it didn’t show up until two weeks after the funeral. On some slow boat from Malaysia, probably. Meaning sending it back was going to be a headache, especially since she’d used her credit card.
Returning it, too—I don’t know. I guess it would have felt like a betrayal, sort of. Like I was passing judgment on this one last thing that was supposed to have somehow made everything better. Like I was telling her it was going to take more than something she saw in an infomercial to fix our marriage.
Before she died, we’d been sleeping in separate rooms for three months already. Keeping our take-out on different shelves in the refrigerator. Only using the ketchup at different times, using our cells instead of the landline, all that.
Neither of us wanted to say it out loud, but it was over, me and her. Not because of any particular revelation or event, though I could name a few if pushed—her too, I’m sure—but, stupid as sounds, it was more like we’d just started going through different drive-throughs. Our tastes had changed. I mean, you need difference, you need friction in a marriage, sure, this is talk show gospel, but what it came down to was that I was perfectly content to let her keep on with her chicken tacos with sour cream thing, and felt zero need to convert over to the goodness of Caesar salads with a small bowl of chili. I didn’t care what she was eating, and I don’t think she felt particularly sorry for the heartburn the chili kept leaving me with.
Soon we were watching different shows in different rooms, changing our own batteries in our separate remotes, then falling asleep apart, waking up on our own.
After the People Lights Have Gone Off Page 19