When she woke for the last time, the air was gray and there was a pale mist through the trees at the edge of the lot, mist draped like ragged bits of cloth over a black line of distant hills.
It was not logical for love to come to nothing, but she must have admitted then, for the first time, that it was certainly possible that it could, like grief, grow forgetful and weary and slowly wear away. She would get older. She would love someone else. She could not live her own life, live through all the coming years of school and friends and marriage and a job, live through the birth of this child she carried, without growing forgetful at times, weary of the pledge she had made. She could not both live and continue to keep them alive.
And yet she could not believe that all her love would come to nothing.
When she began walking that morning, she had only a vague idea of her destination, a vague sense of the challenge she was about to propose. She would choose a public place, but one where only a stroke of luck, a miracle of sorts, would save her.
She would either see him again, refusing all her long life, or she would learn something about the vigilance of the dead.
In the days that followed the fight, he was kept in the jail rooms behind the local police headquarters. It was a new building of orange brick, wide and low, much like a small grammar school, and the police who worked there and dealt mostly with hoods and drunks tended to treat all their guests as incorrigible students with after-school detention. They called Rick Lover Boy and said of him, well within his hearing, “He’s seen too many movies.”
He spent his days there lying on his cot, breathing through his mouth. His nose had been taped with a wide cross of white adhesive and stuffed with cotton, and his already fuzzy vision (the sunglasses were prescriptive and the police had failed to give him the small horn-rimmed pair his sister brought) was further distorted by the swelling and the pain.
That night, when the arresting officers had brought him to the hospital, the emergency-room nurse had pulled his fingers from his face with a provocative, sexual gentleness, all the while cooing softly, as if to a child. Back in the police station, his father had taken his chin between his thumb and forefinger and examined their work. Even half-blinded, both by the swelling and the station-house lights, Rick could see the way his father drew his lips together and, with his head back, peered at him from under his lids. It was his doctor’s face. Rick and his sisters used to imitate it—holding out a thumb at arm’s length, squinting at it. “Who am I?” “Daddy!”
His father carefully touched the adhesive and the cardboard splints and then ran his thumb down both sides of Rick’s face, lightly and quickly. In the bright station house, it was as close as he could come to a caress, and in the second it provided him to look into his child’s face he saw his own wild disbelief, lingering still after more time than should have been needed to accommodate it, that anything he had wanted with such passion could so easily slip through his hands.
Rick turned from his father toward the officers who had brought him in. The father turned from his daughter as she offered him her arm.
In his cell, a small high window let in only a blur of orange sky. There was a parking lot just outside, he knew, then the police garage, then a road and a supermarket. The sounds he heard that first night, an occasional car passing, an occasional car backfiring, burning rubber, were the same sounds he might have heard from his own bedroom at home. But lights were on all through the corridor, and although he could barely distinguish the source from the reflection, he could see the way the light spread itself over the linoleum beside his bed. It was the kind of light he had seen in the hospital, the loony bin, where his mother stayed. He wondered briefly if now he would be just like her.
There were low voices down the corridor. He heard someone say ninety-eight degrees. There were footsteps and a dry hot whisper that was his own breathing.
That night, he dreamed of public places, parking lots and school corridors, the emergency-room nurse leading him by the fingers he could not take from his face. Nothing of Sheryl, nor of the moment when he saw her mother appear behind the screen and knew for certain she was gone. That none of it was true.
The next morning, he asked the attorney they had sent him if he was as much a lawyer as his father was a doctor, but the man only said, “I certainly hope so,” unsure whether the chin-out, head-back stance was swagger or mere compensation for the two black eyes. “But you’ve got yourself quite a little mess.”
Rick saw a pink, bald face and a wide white shirt front slashed with a startling string of black. The man said, “First tell me what happened, from the beginning,” and as Rick began to speak, reluctantly, and in mumbled half sentences, he felt he had dreamed this too, that he had been in this room, talking like this before.
At one point, the lawyer leaned forward and eyes emerged from what had been two sockets of shadow. And what would he have done, the lawyer asked, his voice puckered with disdain, if she had been there? Elope? Kidnap? Kill her?
Rick shook his head. It occurred to him that he would not be treated this way if he had killed someone.
“Were you planning to hurt her in any way?”
“No,” he said. The man waited, seemed to study him. Rick became aware of the labored sound of his own breathing, the dryness of his mouth. It seemed a great advantage to be able to breathe silently, through your nose.
“What, then? Drag her into your car?”
“No.” Frowning, insulted, but uncertain if he should say, I wouldn’t hurt her, or I’m not that stupid. “It wasn’t even my car.
“Threaten her? Scare her?”
He said no again, impatiently, trying to get as much expression of disgust into his eyes as he could. “I just wanted to talk to her.”
He heard the man sigh, and his sigh, too, was tainted with dislike. “You drive three cars up onto her lawn,” the lawyer said slowly. “You bring all your friends armed with chains, you nearly break her mother’s neck, just ’cause you wanted to talk to her? You expect anybody to accept that? You want me to believe that?”
It was the voice, the eyes, the blurred, nearly glossy face of whoever had watched him: that day in the mall, that night in the bowling alley when the bowlers had turned, startled by his cry; the voice, the eyes, of whoever had seen his dream—the baby turned into a pig—who had known the foolish, unaccountable terror it filled him with. Who knew the high feminine sound that escaped from his throat when he made love, who had seen him bare-assed and grinning in the park, coming helplessly at her first touch. The voice, the eyes, the jellied, ill-defined face of whoever watched him, knowing the truth: that he would not escape his life, not even with love.
“Well, I couldn’t get her on the phone,” he said, and the lawyer put down his pen, ran his fuzzy pink hand down his face and then, holding the thin stripe of his black tie, began to laugh.
Rick bowed his head, breathed a single puff of air through his open mouth and then, closing it, crossing some gulf, slowly, wisely, began to grin.
“So I overreacted,” he said.
“Brother,” the lawyer said—and hadn’t some of the disdain left his voice, weren’t they laughing together now, fraternal. “Did you ever.”
Rick sat up, held out his hands. There was no doubt in the lawyer’s mind what the raised chin was meant to indicate now. The sudden swagger relieved him.
“So what are they going to do to me?” Rick said, as if he were prepared for an easy fistfight. “What are they going to charge me with?”
“Melodrama,” the lawyer said. Hoods he could handle. “Making a scene. Stupidity. The whole damn neighborhood saw you.”
Rick threw himself back in his chair, the grin giving way to a look of impatient dismissal. Of course she was gone, changed forever. And this was what his life would be like. “I’m sorry,” he said in his best sarcastic voice. “I apologize, all right?”
The man smiled, playing his own ace. “Don’t apologize to me,” he said. “She’s the one you
got in trouble.”
That night or not long after, he woke himself from another nightmare and found that the shame, the sense of embarrassment and profound regret that had broken through his sleep, was no longer at his failure to claim her, to set back the time, but at his attempt.
In the days that followed the fight, a woman pulled into a small gas station somewhere between here and Ohio and asked quickly for the ladies’ room. She headed for the back of the station at a run and in her hurry pushed into the door without knocking. She found Sheryl standing at the sink, her wrists held under the running water. She had leaned over and placed her chin on her forearm and at first the woman thought she was about to faint, but she had done it merely to keep his bracelet from the water and the blood.
The woman turned back into the sunlight and called for help. When she turned again, Sheryl was sitting on the floor, her wrists on her thighs, the blood making her black pants shiny and staining the dirty pink tiles. She looked up at the woman somewhat sadly. There was a dark line of blood up the side of her yellow blouse and over her shoulder, made when she had raised her arm to toss back her hair.
The woman took a sheaf of paper towels and nearly covered her with them. Behind her, one of the attendants appeared in the doorway and said, “Jesus Christ.”
The small white sink was full of blood. On the ledge between the faucets there was the photograph and a long thin shard of glass.
The woman, who had four children of her own, could not keep the anger from her voice as she wrapped Sheryl’s arms in the rough gray towels and asked her over and over, “What were you trying to do?” as if she, or Sheryl, had been somehow mistaken.
At the hospital, someone dialed the phone number Sheryl gave them and found it had been changed. They called the local police station instead. An officer there who had been to that address twice in the past year suggested that a police car would alarm the mother unnecessarily: the girl, after all, and by a sheer stroke of luck, would live. A plainclothes detective, just back from lunch, was asked to do the job instead.
The suburb where we lived, like most, I suppose, was only one in a continuous series of towns and developments that had grown out from the city in the years after the Second World War. They were bedroom communities, incubators, where the neat patterns of the streets, the fenced and leveled yards, the stop signs and traffic lights and soothing repetition of similar homes all helped to convey a sense of order and security and snug predictability. And yet it seems to me now that those of us who lived there then lived nevertheless with a vague and persistent notion, a premonition or memory of possible if not impending doom.
We had among us even then, for instance, families (the Meyers were one of them, I think, and the family that lived behind the Rossis) who had fled here from other, older, suburbs to our east and who spoke to us now like bitter, breathless exiles of what had occurred. Families who assured us that despite their best efforts, their love of the land they had owned there, of the solid brick house that had sat upon it, despite their determination to live out their lives in the very place where their eldest child had first smiled and tumbled, the neighborhood—and here they shook their heads, defeated, resigned—had changed.
We had parents who spoke to us and to each other of the city streets where they had spent their childhoods as lost forever, wiped from the face of the earth by change; who said of their old neighborhoods, “You can’t go there anymore,” as if change had made a place as inaccessible as a time. Parents who had come from “what used to be the country,” from farmhouses on dirt roads that we could still see (they told us) were it not for change. Who would point to a supermarket or a school or a highway overpass and say, “There, there, that’s where it used to be,” until it seemed to us that another world had once existed right beneath our feet, that another world had vanished from the very air we breathed.
We had grandparents, some of us, who remained in embattled city apartments or dilapidated houses buzzed by highways like flood victims clinging to chimneys and roofs, caught by the quick and devastating course of change. We could hear our parents shouting to them through telephones as if through time, “Mama, when are you going to get out of there?” “Dad, they want to tear it down!”
Enough, too much, has been said about the cowardly incompetence of memory, how it can be pushed around by time, bullied by desire, worked over by our intractable ability to see what we want to see. Even children know you cannot separate the tale from the teller. And yet it seems to me that even in those snug and orderly days the word carried a threat that seemed to boil and echo and slowly, inevitably, approach the street where we lived as surely as the sound of their engines had moved toward us that night.
And it seems to me that, just as we had done with the boys in their cars, we ignored it. No less than those stubborn and curious people who build and rebuild their homes on fault lines or slippery mountain slopes or at the edges of ever-eroding rivers and lakes, we seemed to live from day to day either resigned or indifferent to what we knew was coming. We lived from day to day as if the years were circular and the return of a summer or fall just like the last clear evidence that whatever was would last.
Sheryl’s father died on the way to work one morning and we shook our heads as if for that family alone things would never again be quite the same.
Just a few years ago, after sodium lights had been placed on the boulevard, giving the present that bright, unreal tinge that more properly belongs to nightmare or memory, and neighbors had begun to gather to form crime patrols (black and white now, although the change that had been spoken of had once meant integration as much as anything else), my parents retired and put their house on the market. I was at the end of my own marriage then, living unhappily in a similar town ten miles away, and when winter came and the house had not yet sold, I agreed to move in so my parents could go south. In the last few years, we had learned a Bible’s worth of wisdom regarding muggers and rapists and thieves and one of the tenets of this code was never to let any house, ever, give the appearance of being unoccupied. It was necessary, then, I explained to my fading husband, that I be there whenever a real estate agent brought someone through and that I keep my car in the driveway at night.
I was aware at the time that it was a retreat for me, not so much to the security of my past as away from the awkwardness of my future, but what was cowardly about it was well disguised by what seemed dutiful. My husband nodded as if he believed I would be back. We had by then reached that point in our marriage where we seemed to have lost our capacity for nostalgia, where what we’d shared, that part of our past together that had sustained us until now, had finally worn thin, and only an imagined history, or future, held any promise. We had begun to say we should have moved farther from our parents when we were younger, tried life in another city or state, switched jobs years ago. We should have married later. We said, “Of course, if we’d had children,” pretending to be grateful for the freedom our decision, our caution as we had called it, had earned us. If there were children, we could not so easily and amicably part.
I stood at the front door waiting for the real estate woman to arrive. It was February or March, one of those limp, colorless days of late winter. The lawns seemed threadbare, the hedges and trees tangled and pale white. The houses themselves, persistent in their bright colors and definite stripes of aluminum siding, were foolish-looking without an accompaniment of snow or flowers or leaves; they seemed somehow abandoned, washed up on a desolate shore of dry yellow earth and branches the color of driftwood. Across the street, in the driveway of what had been the Rossis’ house, the new people had a small boat propped up on cinderblocks and covered with pale green canvas. They had put black bars across their windows—foolishly, we said; things hadn’t gotten that bad. Next door, the Carpenters had brown burlap wrapped carefully around each of their small bushes and trees. In Sheryl’s old house, the windows were all covered with thick, clear plastic that occasionally caught the dull white sky and then lost
it with the next breeze, leaving only black glass.
As the woman pulled into our driveway in her shiny real estate salesman car, I saw that she had the usual couple squeezed into the front seat beside her and some children in the back as well. I took this as a good sign; the ad we’d run in the Sunday paper had been headed, “Bring the Kids!”
The man was the first to emerge and he got out of the car slowly, looking, as they always did, first up at the house and then to his left and right. It was a cold day, but he wore only a short leather jacket with wide lapels and designer blue jeans. There was a handknit muffler cast in various shades of brown and gold at his throat, and he had his fingers in his shallow pockets. He only nodded when I let him in, the real estate woman with her card and her clipboard leading the way, the children still behind them in the car. I put him in his mid-forties at first, but if I count the years more carefully, I would have to believe he was younger than that. He had dark hair and a moustache and pale, somewhat sallow skin. That abrupt, bent, furtive manner of an adult trying not to be shy.
Behind him, his small wife grinned as if she were entering a party where she knew neither the hosts nor the guests nor why she had been invited. She shook my hand when we were introduced and said, “This is nice.”
There are, of course, as many different ways for a prospective buyer to look at a house as there are prospective buyers and houses, but I don’t think I’d be compromising my belief in the infinite variety of human potential by saying there are, in general, three or four kinds of lookers. There are the studious ones, who begin in the basement, pace the dimensions of each room, try all the faucets and doors and poke their heads into the attic; the dreamy ones, who walk through each room like well-behaved tourists, noticing what they are told to notice and keeping their hands to themselves; the impatient or embarrassed ones, who seem to need only to confirm that there is, indeed, a house on the inside that more or less conforms to the house on the outside and will gladly take your word for it that there is a basement below and three bedrooms up; and my favorites, those creative, seemingly homeless types who make the imaginative leap to ownership as soon as they walk through the door and spend their entire inspection placing their furniture, setting their table and so thoroughly immersing themselves in their domestic life in this home that they will discuss whether the television in their bedroom will keep the children awake on school nights before they ask how the house is heated or even its price.
That Night Page 14