The Odds of You and Me

by Cecilia Galante

  “I have another cleaning job I have to get to tonight. Across the river. It’ll take me about ten minutes to get over there, and I can’t be late.”

  “You work nights, too?”

  “Well, not usually. I’m just pulling some extra shifts now because I need the money. For that apartment I told you about. I still owe them the security deposit.”

  “Where’re you living now?”

  “With my mother.” I raise an eyebrow. “Which is another reason why I really, really need that money.”

  “Ah.” He nods, a flicker of recognition in his eyes. “When are you coming back?”

  “Well, I have to go home after work tonight. My little boy likes me to tuck him in. But I’ll be here tomorrow. We’ll drive up to the lake and then figure out what to do next.” I shift the backpack more comfortably along my shoulder, slide over against the wall.

  “Hey, Bird?”

  I stop. “Yeah?”

  “What’s your little boy’s name?”

  “Angus.”

  James grins. “Really? Like Angus Young of AC/DC?”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  A moment passes, filled with everything that’s been lost, and for this single, tiny thing that has been found again.

  “Don’t be late tomorrow.” James’s voice is soft. “And, Bird?”

  I look up.

  “Thanks for coming back.”

  Always. The word flits behind my eyes, a small glimmer of light.

  “No problem,” I say instead. “See you tomorrow.”

  Chapter 27

  Hi!” Jane says a few minutes later, opening the door for me. “Come on in!” I step inside cautiously, wondering where the borderline-hysterical Jane from this afternoon disappeared to. Dressed in a purple velour sweat suit, new sneakers, and no makeup, she looks much more rested now. Relaxed, even. Her hair has been twisted and anchored at the nape of her neck with a plastic clip; both earlobes are bare. Maybe she took a whole handful of those happy pills I brought back for her earlier.

  “Sorry I’m late.” I take off my shoes immediately, aligning them inside the front door. “I ran into a little traffic on the way over.”

  “Oh, please,” Jane says. “It was five minutes.” I follow her into the kitchen, stand uncomfortably at one corner of the butcher block as she opens a cupboard. “I was just about to have a glass of wine. Richard got back from Napa Valley last week, and he brought me two bottles of sauvignon blanc from a really terrific winery. It’s my favorite. Would you like some?”

  Here is another perfect example of why a relationship between Jane and I would never work. If I were to have a drink, it would never be wine. Not even remotely. I prefer something stronger, with a little guts: maybe a finger of single malt Scotch, or a highball, straight up. At the very least a very, very good vodka and soda. Wine is for sissies. “No thanks,” I say. “Not while I’m working.”

  “Working?” Jane sets two wineglasses on the butcher block. The stems are as thin as pens, the mouths wide as softballs. “We’re not working! We’re going to be putting together a play set! Come on, have a glass of wine with me!” She takes a green bottle out of the door of the refrigerator, twists the cork out. It’s already half-empty; the label on the front is a picture of a gold peacock. She pours the pale gold liquid into the glasses, filling each a little more than halfway, and then slides one over in my direction. Raising her glass to her lips, she pulls it away suddenly, and then lifts it into the air. “To motherhood!” she says.

  I lift my own glass, clink it against hers obligingly. “To motherhood.” I take a small sip. It’s not Jameson, but it’s not terrible either. “Where are the kids? Everyone asleep?”

  “All the girls are asleep,” Jane says. “Blake’s upstairs, playing video games. He tries to stay up every night until Richard comes home, but he always falls asleep, poor baby.” She stares into the mouth of her glass, runs a finger around the edge of it.

  “Richard works late?”

  “Oh, yes.” Jane sips again. “Partly because of the job, and partly because of Richard, who’s obsessed with everything that goes along with the job. He never gets in before midnight on weeknights. Ever.”

  I take another sip of wine. “Wow. That is late.”

  “It is.” Her voice is soft. “Well, should we get to work? I’ve got everything all set up in the back for us, including the directions. Now, let’s just hope you can understand them, because I don’t.”

  Jane turns on the lights, illuminating the yard in a pool of yellow. Off to the left, beneath an elm tree, she has laid out a blue tarp. The surface of it is covered with enormous puzzle-shaped pieces of thick plastic, each one stacked according to shape and size: the red ones are on the right, the blue on the left, the green and yellow in the middle. We walk over together, stand there for a moment, just looking at the flattened display. “Holy cow, Jane. How long did it take you to do all this?”

  “Oh, not long.” She looks pleased by my compliment. “I thought it might help if we had things in order before we started.”

  “You got that right.” Still holding the glass of wine, I sink down to my knees and pluck out the instructions, which have been tucked under a corner of one of the red pieces. “We’re going to need a screwdriver and a hammer. And a wrench, too.”

  Jane points to a red metal toolbox opposite the tarp. “That was one of Richard’s Christmas presents last year. I don’t know a hammer from a wrench, but I’m pretty sure it’s got everything inside.”

  I drag the toolbox over, open the lid. A thin film of plastic is still stretched across the top of it, the tools inside untouched. “Um . . .” I hesitate, closing the lid a little. “Do you have anything that’s not so . . . new?”

  “Oh, no, use it! Please!” Jane shakes her head, gulps her wine. “Just because Richard doesn’t have time to fiddle with it doesn’t mean we have to let it go to waste.” She pulls out a small key from the pocket of her purple sweat suit, and cuts a deep slit into the plastic covering. “There! Now dig in. Use whatever you want.”

  We work side by side for over an hour—Jane holding the necessary pieces upright while I screw them in and tighten the bolts. She works harder than I thought she would, pushing the sleeves of her sweat shirt up to her elbows, getting down on her hands and knees next to me to study the directions. She goes inside only once to refill her wineglass and check on Blake, and when she reappears, she is holding a plate of cheese and crackers. Around the edges, like a fan, are thin slices of green pear. “I don’t know about you,” she says, holding out the plate, “but I always get hungry at night.”

  I eat a piece of cheese and a slice of pear, and then excuse myself to use the bathroom. Afterward, I wash my hands with some sort of pink liquid soap, and use the tiny embroidered hand towel to dry off my hands. I lean in toward the mirror, examining the tiny lines around my eyes, and then open it and look inside. There are nose hair clippers, a box of Band-Aids, two bottles of Benadryl, and a thin orange bottle of medicine. I reach for the orange bottle automatically, turn it around until I see the word Vicodin. The other pills helped James so much. Dramatically. I slip two more inside my jeans, recap the bottle, and shut the mirror again.

  Later, Jane and I stand back and survey our progress. Only the roof needs to be attached; the rest of the structure, which is significantly larger than its initial appearance on the tarp, has been screwed and bolted into place. “Well, what do you think?”

  “It looks amazing,” Jane says. “But different somehow from the picture on the box, don’t you think?”

  I study the picture on the box: a boy in green shorts sitting atop the small red slide on the right, while a pigtailed girl wearing a blue sundress peeks out from the side window, her small hands resting on the plastic sill. I shift my gaze back and forth between the picture and the playhouse in front of me until suddenly, with a sinking feeling in my chest, I see the difference. “Oh, shit. We put the window and door in backward.”

  Jane’
s eyes bloom wide over her wineglass. “We did?” She giggles. “Are you sure?”

  I move closer to the playhouse, peer at the details of the smooth plastic pieces. The windowsill is on the inside of the house, the hole where the doorknob will be attached on the left instead of the right. It will take hours to disassemble the house again and put it back together correctly. “Shit,” I say again. “I can’t believe we just did that.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it.” Jane plops down on the grass, cradling her wineglass between her palms. “Nothing ever turns out exactly the way they say it will. Besides, we got the bulk of it done. We can fix it tomorrow. Or maybe we’ll just leave it. I doubt the kids’ll even notice.” She stretches out against the grass, balancing the stem of her glass against her breastbone.

  “Oh, I don’t want to leave it. You’re paying me to do this, Jane. And you said you wanted to surprise the kids. I want to do it the right way.”

  “All right.” She twists her head, looking up at me sideways. “But we’ll do it tomorrow, okay? Come sit down. Relax a little.” She repositions her head, looks up above her. “Do you ever come outside and just look up at the stars? I used to do that all the time, but I never think to do it anymore. I’m always so busy with the babies . . .” She sighs heavily, rearranges her fingers around the wider part of the glass. “They’re like little headlights up there, don’t you think? Or like eyes, glowing.”

  I sit down next to her, drawing my knees into my chest, and wrap my arms around them. A heavy impatience is growing inside my chest—a combination of screwing up the playhouse, and just wanting to get out of here. But Jane is still talking, and I don’t want to be rude. There is a chill in the air I hadn’t noticed before, probably because I was so immersed in the task at hand. Now, the tiny hairs on my arms prickle; my earlobes feel cold.

  “Did you know that stars are in constant conflict with themselves?” Jane asks.

  I look at her over my shoulder, wonder briefly if she is drunk. “What?”

  She sits up, pouring the rest of her wine into the grass, staring at the thin stream of it. “They’re constantly pushing and pulling against themselves. Technically, it’s because the gravity of all the mass of a star pulls it inward, while all the light photons, which are already inside the star, are pushing against it, trying to make it to the outer edges, but I like to think it’s because they’re kind of like little kids, not knowing what the hell to do with everything they’ve got. Push? No, pull! No, push!” She smiles. “It’s amazing though, isn’t it? How something in such a state of unrest can be in perfect balance like that at the same time?”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking that the really amazing thing is that Jane knows such a thing. “How do you know all that?”

  “Oh, I studied astronomy in college.” Jane plucks a blade of grass from the lawn, inserts it between her lips. “I love all that stuff. Always have.” Her voice has taken on a forlorn quality, the tone of someone remembering, wistfully.

  “So then are you a . . .” I stumble, not knowing what the exact word is. “Like a scientist?”

  Jane withdraws the blade of grass from her mouth, studies it for a moment. “No. I didn’t even graduate. I met Richard, got pregnant at the beginning of my senior year, and dropped out.”

  “Oh.”

  She lowers her head behind her arm; only her eyes peek out. “Maybe someday I’ll go back. Finish. Although there wouldn’t really be any reason to now.”

  “Why not?”

  She lifts one hand, encompasses her house and everything inside it with a flutter of her fingers. “Because this is my life now.”

  I don’t say any more, mostly because I don’t want to get into a long, extended conversation with Jane about her personal life. But the other part of it, I realize later, after I say goodbye and get back into the car, is that the ache in her voice sounds familiar. Like an echo of something I might have said—or at least thought—and then pushed away, deep down, so as not to remember again.

  Chapter 28

  I take a left on South Main Street after leaving Jane’s and drive for a while, just looking at the neighborhood houses with their half-shaded windows, dirty even beneath the harsh glare of the streetlights. The green digital clock in the car says nine-fifteen, but it is so dark as to be almost midnight. A multitude of stars, glittering haphazardly against an inverted bowl of black, look as though they’ve been scooped up and flung without forethought. What was it once that James had told me about stars? That when you looked at them, you were literally looking back in time? Something about the light from the star taking millions of years to reach the Earth, which meant that the star you glimpsed on any given night was not the present image you held in your mind’s eye, but literally how it appeared thousands of years ago. What if the same thing could be said of us? What would change if the images we held of one another weren’t actually the ones we saw, but fragments of ourselves from another time? How would I look at James if I knew the face he showed me tonight wasn’t really him, that it was, in fact, just a part of him from long ago? The child he used to be, perhaps, or the teenager whose mother had vanished suddenly from his life?

  I pull the car over and take out my phone.

  “Ma?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just want to stay a little while longer. Is that okay?”

  There is a pause. “You mean at the church?”

  “Yes. At the church. I ran into Father Delaney and—”

  “You did?” Ma breaks in excitedly. I close my eyes, hating the fact that I am lying to her again. “You’re talking, then? The two of you?”

  “Yeah. Sorta. Anyway, I’ll be home later. Can you put Angus on the phone?”

  “Of course.”

  “Mom?”

  “Hi, Boo. Listen, I’m calling to say good night, okay? I won’t be home to tuck you in tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have to stay at the church for a little while. Just to see about something.”

  “What do you have to see about?”

  “Oh, nothing important.”

  “The incense?” he asks.

  “No.” I draw a line around the steering wheel with my finger. I will not lie to him. “Not the incense.”

  “Then what?”

  “Just some big-people things. I’ll tell you about them later, okay?”

  “Okay,” Angus says.

  “I love you. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

  “Okay. Oh, and, Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can we go see our new house again tomorrow?”

  “Maybe.” I bite my lip, wondering if Ma is nearby, if she’s overheard him. Maybe Angus has taken it upon himself to tell her about our visit; he tells her everything anyway. A stab of guilt as I think about bringing James there tomorrow. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow, Boo, okay? See you in the morning. I love you.”

  “Love you, too. Night, Mom.”

  THIS TIME, WHEN I climb up the stairs, I hear a single, faint click behind the organ. And even though I have never even seen a gun up close until two days ago, I know for a fact that the click is the sound of a gun being cocked. James doesn’t know it’s me, I realize. He thinks I’ve gone for the night, that I won’t be back for him until tomorrow. And he’s ready to shoot whoever else comes up here. Again.

  I lean in close as I dare and hiss loudly. “It’s Bird.”

  James looks physically deflated when I finally get over to him, as if all the air has just rushed out of the top of his head. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “I’m gonna end up shooting your goddamned head off if we keep going like this. We need a signal or something.”

  “Okay.” I scoot in against the balcony and stare at the gun, which is still in his hand. It’s metal-black and shiny, darker along the handle, and eerily compact. I wonder how heavy it is, if a charred smell of some sort comes out of it after it fires. “How about a whistle?” I say. “Like three of them in a row or someth
ing?”

  “Too risky,” James says. “Someone’s bound to hear it. What else?”

  I think for a minute. “A couple taps? Maybe one, then a pause, then two more quick?”

  “Try it,” James says.

  I knock lightly against the linoleum, watching for James’s reaction. One. Pause. Twothree.

  James shrugs and then nods. “Okay.”

  I look back down at the weapon in his hands. “You wouldn’t really shoot anyone, would you? I mean, after everything that’s already happened?”

  James turns the gun to one side, examining the barrel. “I don’t think so. But you never know. I’m in pretty deep here. I wouldn’t really have anything left to lose.”

  I keep quiet when he says that, watch as he slides the gun back into his place against the wall. What would something like that feel like? I wonder. To not have anything left to lose? Is such a thing really possible?

  “I don’t want to shoot anyone.” He’s looking at me with a peculiar expression, searching my face, it seems, for some kind of approval. “You know that, right? Or do you think I’m already gone?”

  I look up. “Gone?”

  “You know. Past the point of no return. Finished.”

  I uncross my legs, shift uncomfortably against the balcony. “You mean because of what happened in the bar?”

  “Yeah, because of what happened in the bar. Because of what I did in the bar. And because I escaped on my way to prison and stole a sheriff’s gun, which I have no idea whether or not I would use if someone found me here just now and came to take me away. I’ve crossed a line in your world, haven’t I?”

  My world? As opposed to who else’s exactly? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Except that I do know what he’s talking about. I know exactly what he’s talking about. And the truth is that part of me does think he’s gone. There’s no arguing that what he’s done—first in the bar, and then in the police car—is pretty serious stuff. But I’ve done bad stuff, too, deliberately cheating the system the way I did. And not just once, but four times. Then, just a few hours ago, I stole pills from a client. For the second time in one day. And last but certainly not least, I am here, willingly aiding and abetting a criminal, which, even if I wasn’t on probation, could very well land me in jail. Who’s to say that my sins weigh less than James’s? And who gets to determine whether or not that weight classifies someone as gone?