Adrienne shoved him, for real, then, and it was all he could do not to fall back on his ass. He saw her protecting her mouth with her hand and felt hollow and disappointed. Still, even in this disappointment, there was momentary peace: the cacophony of critics in his head fell silent.
CHAPTER 15
CALEB COULDN’T FIND HENRY, AND Sue couldn’t find her minivan. Sue didn’t seem too upset about it.
“Shoot, Caleb, I do this all the time. I just don’t remember where I parked,” she said. Her dogs were pulling at their leashes, always revved up after a performance, and Sue’s makeup was sliding off, her white hair springing in little ringlets from her French twist. “I’ll just wait till all the cars clear out. Right now I have to get the babies to bed. I’ll find it in the morning.”
Caleb tried not to jump to conclusions and went to bed, but when it became clear to him that he wasn’t going to fall asleep, he peeled back his sheet, slipped his sandals on, and left the trailer. The grounds were dark, all the campers in bed except a couple of tent crew members. Caleb shoved his hands in his pockets and walked. It was much cooler outside the trailer without all those bodies packaged in one room.
They had undersold the show tonight, the Chicago show, the biggest show they would do this season. He had no idea where, when, or how they were going to recover the loss.
Mentally, he prepared the speech he would make to fire all of Seamus’s employees—he imagined Jenifer and Vroni clinging to each other’s bony bodies, crying from the phlegmy dark place in the back of their throats, from the same place they kept their German and all their emotions. He imagined Azi, all straight-backed and unsmiling, thinking of having to return to Nigeria, where he was born, and where he once had to pay a nurse for a clean blanket when he was in the hospital for third-degree burns. He imagined Sue, so phobic about being separated from her dogs, that she once ate nothing but stale crackers and expired milk for a week to avoid leaving them while she went to the store. When Caleb fired her, she would bite her fingernails down to the nubs.
And now the circus was only a part of his worries. What would he do if Adrienne’s surgery went badly? What if she did not get better? The doctors said there was no reason to panic. They’d figure it out. But there were so many “ifs” when they spoke—when it came to his wife, even the smallest uncertainty made him panic.
They wanted to do the surgery the least risky way—go in through her nose, cut out a mere chip of bone, then cut the tumor out with the tiniest of blades—but if they couldn’t remove the whole tumor that way, they’d have to take off her forehead again and poke around in there with her skull open.
So what would he do if things went wrong? Would he yell at the doctors and drop out of his own life, as he had when his father died? When he really let himself think about Adrienne’s tumor, he couldn’t help but remember his father’s glassy eyes, the way he had stared at a fleur-de-lis on the wallpaper, with cancer all over, in his blood, his brain, his toe bones—everywhere. It was a daily agony for his father to swallow a handful of pills, but Caleb and his mother had made him do it. They’d forced him. Behind his stare, Caleb believed his father’s encyclopedic knowledge of baseball and the world wars still existed. He was still himself in there, his mind a museum that was closed but still full of everything Caleb treasured. Caleb was young and he had been studying and he knew that nearly anything could be preserved with the proper care. But he couldn’t figure out why taking care of his father, loving and preserving him, made him feel so terrible.
If he had to see Adrienne like this, tied to the world by a handful of pills and a wallpaper pattern, it would be so much worse than losing his father, so much worse than losing Feely and Feinstein. He could not rehearse for life without her, because there would be none.
Her surgery was scheduled for next Friday, a week from today, when the circus would be in Fort Wayne. She was panicking, too, he knew. He ought to be with her.
It was close to midnight by the time Caleb shook off the webs that had been spun between his calves and went back to their campsite. Lorne was awake, leading Ambrosia in slow, shuffling circles around the camp. When he saw Caleb, he waved, then dropped his hand as if he were embarrassed. Caleb hurried to wave back so he wouldn’t feel foolish.
“Late for a walk,” said Lorne.
“I wanted to get in my exercise.”
“Heh. Agreed,” said Lorne, pointing to the horse. Unlike Sue’s dogs, whose puffed-out chests and lolling tongues made them appear almost arrogant, Ambrosia always seemed lost to Caleb, like she was wandering around in a nonsensical dream.
“Sorry about the show,” Lorne said.
“Why is that?”
“Small crowd. Makes money tight. I know it has you under pressure.”
“Crowds are always small.”
Lorne nodded. “I know. Remember when Adrienne was still the Amazon Woman? Crowds was small then, but I can tell—they got smaller every year since.”
Caleb sighed. “We know how to get by on a shoe string.”
Lorne snorted at this. “An elephant can’t get by on a shoe string. Camels and horses can’t. They need pounds and pounds and pounds of shoe strings.”
“Sure,” said Caleb. He was tired now. He wanted to get some sleep, and maybe he could, now that Lorne was no longer snoring in his ear.
“I worry about the animals, Caleb. Money gets tight, they get skinny. Those ASPCA people don’t come until they got their ears cut off or something …”
“We won’t let them get skinny,” said Caleb. Lorne spent all his time with animals and circus people, so he was ignorant about the institutions of normal people. He filled in his ignorance with works of imagination: when an animal bled, the ASPCA arrived like Superman; banks, in his mind, looked like they did on the set of an old Western. It shocked Caleb, whenever Lorne revealed such beliefs, that a person could be so innocent. But what reason did Lorne have to go to a bank? Like the ex-cons that raised the tent every year, Caleb paid him in cash. And what experience would he have with the ASPCA, other than that tragic one so many years ago, when he performed with his foster parents? While Lorne’s way of seeing the world sometimes caught Caleb off guard, Caleb never tried to disabuse him of his beliefs. In a weird way, they seemed part of his aesthetic as a performer.
Lorne lifted his chin a little, and Caleb felt like he was being challenged. Caleb promised again that the animals would be well fed as long as they were at Feely and Feinstein. He said it with as much confidence as he could muster.
Lorne shook his head but left to take Ambrosia back to her stall.
On the way back to his trailer, Caleb saw Kylie sitting outside on the ground next to the porta-potties, with her chin propped on her fists, and knew that Henry had not yet been found.
CHAPTER 16
HENRY STILL HAD A RAGGED line of white makeup around his face when he arrived at Adrienne’s house. He looked like he was being chased and she’d thought that this was an extension of one of her nightmares. In the dreams where people came into her home uninvited, the intruder was either Curtis or Caleb, or sometimes Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk. Now, the intruder was Henry.
It was hard to figure out exactly how he’d gotten there but she could fill in the gaps of his story with her own memories of the better part of her twenties. At Henry’s age, Adrienne was also parentless, groping in the dark through medications and surgeries, clinging to Curtis like he was Jesus-come-again. So Adrienne knew that in life, there was chaos, and then there were bad choices, and then there was more chaos.
Henry’s sudden appearance wasn’t the surreal part. The thing that kept her wondering if she was dreaming was the way she had reacted to Henry’s intrusion. Instead of shutting him down, kicking him out, sending him back to Caleb with a cool good-bye, she’d let him intrude. She had been isolated, and she wanted to hear a story she could connect to, she wanted closeness. Even Jack’s giant had a harp to sing to him. She only had a TV and thick walls.
So sh
e let Henry in. She let him talk.
There had been no closeness in Caleb painting her nude, with those boxy, misshapen features. The idea that he might find her newly disfigured body somehow beautiful or exotic, or that he might feel obligated to find the beauty in it—this made her furious. This was the thought that drove her fist through the canvas that night.
Now Caleb’s painting was ripped, and Caleb himself was gone, and, just a few moments ago, Henry had kissed her.
He had driven many miles, in fact, to kiss her. If she could have designed her own antidote for sadness, she couldn’t have come up with a more potent cure than the kiss of a man as pretty and young as Henry. Still, it was not what she wanted. What she wanted was for Caleb to do the driving, for Caleb to do the late-night secret-shame sharing and the kissing.
When she pushed Henry away, his whole face went slack and pale, but he looked directly at her. She guarded her mouth for a moment, then felt ridiculous. She lowered her hands and clasped them to her chest. No matter what she did with her hands, she couldn’t seem to shake the pose of some sullied handmaiden on the front of a romance novel.
“Henry,” she said, hoping that if she said his name, more words would follow, and those words would express, without ambiguity, that she was a married woman, with no interest in him except friendship.
Richard jostled the perch in his cage and filled the silence with, “I love you … I love you … peanut butter sandwich.”
Henry sighed. He ran his fingers through his hair as if he’d like to have pulled it out. Adrienne thought about how other people might react in this situation, and none of those reactions felt right to her. To yell at him was hypocritical. To comfort him was confusing. To laugh was cruel.
“What do you want from me?” he said.
“What?”
He looked at her through his fingers. “I don’t get it. I just don’t get what it is you want.”
“I want to be friends,” she said.
“Ah, Christ. No, you don’t,” he mumbled.
“I do!”
He threw his hands in the air. “I lived in your guest room! You unwrapped my gum for me and did my laundry. And where’s your wedding ring?”
“Keep your voice down. Don’t you dare give me that you-led-me-on crap, Henry, just because you feel like an ass,” she said.
“I didn’t,” he hissed. “I didn’t say you led me on. I said you want something, and you fucking do.”
She was about to say again that she wanted his friendship, but she stopped herself. She considered he might be right. She might want something else from him.
When she first saw this scarecrow kid outside Caleb’s office, pulling tattered props from a trunk, she’d had a startling thought: Oh, it’s you. She’d entertained the notion of fates and gods and reasons for things like airplane crashes and tumors in brains and webbed toes and the crush of hunger and pain in the world and she’d begun to think there was no reason for anything—that these things were all accidents. And then she’d seen him, a stranger, and it felt so not-accidental, like something she’d been waiting for, planning for.
Oh, it’s you. Finally. It’s you.
What she wanted from Henry, she decided, was relief. He lifted a grief so old, that she no longer registered it as grief, but simply as part of who she was. She was this: a member of a family of two that would never grow any larger. That was the fact. She loved her parrot, and she loved Azi and Sue, and sometimes she even loved Seamus; but only Caleb felt like family. She knew that her family was supposed to be bigger than that, but if the circus didn’t feel like family, then she had been convinced only a baby would complete them. There, she was out of luck.
But the feeling that someone was missing had persisted. It was as if the babies who were supposed to join her family had gotten lost somewhere. It made her sad to think of them—they had wanted to come to her. But to call this sadness grief seemed strange, because she hadn’t lost anything. She only knew it was grief when it was gone. She only knew it was grief when she met Henry.
Now, here he was, waiting for her to say something, his forehead wrinkled, his hands balled into fists. If she said this, about reasons-for-things and wandering babies out loud, would that tell him what he needed to know?
She was so wrapped up in trying to make sense of everything, she did not hear the knocking.
The knob was turning, clicking. She had not bolted the door after letting Henry in.
“Anybody home?” A voice, and the top of a head, covered in a thin layer of blond fuzz, emerged from between the door and the frame. The tip of a black boot.
The boot could have belonged to anyone. But the blond fuzz was familiar. It was Curtis.
Richard threw his beak up, opened it, and began to screech.
“Who is it?” Henry asked. He reacted to her face, drawing himself up fast. She sprang up, hurdled the coffee table. She landed hard on the wood floor and ran back to her bedroom.
Under her bed, in the hatbox, was the gun, a Sig Sauer semi-automatic with a faux wood handle, cowboy-cool and shiny as the day she bought it. When she picked it up, it didn’t feel nearly as dangerous as it looked. It felt like a toy, a telephone, a toothbrush in her hand—like any other household object. She slid the magazine inside and it locked with a click.
HENRY WAS BETWEEN ADRIENNE’S GUN and her target, held in the grip of the man who’d just shown up—because Henry had frozen up, exactly as he’d done the first time someone had pointed a gun in his direction. The scar on the top of his head felt like someone had struck a match on it. He had a good hold on the man at first, but when Adrienne raised her gun, his grip went slack, and now the man had him by his collar, making the neck-hole of Henry’s shirt into a noose that gradually tightened by twisting his fist.
“Adrienne,” the blond man said, “look, you’re flippin’ out for no reason. I’m in town on business. For Southern Blue. I just wanted to say hi.”
“Hi, Curtis,” said Adrienne. “Get the hell out of my house.”
“Didn’t Nancy tell you I was coming?”
“Only forty times. I told her not to tell you where I lived. And here you are.”
“Well, don’t blame Nancy. She has a hard time saying no to me. Who’s this little fuck-rag?” the man said, slapping Henry on the side of his head.
Adrienne stepped closer. “That is absolutely none of your business.” Her voice became shrill. That animal voice. Henry remembered it, the same desperate pitch that had clawed its way out of his mother when she was angry and panicked—the voice she sent after their father to slash at him when she couldn’t stop him physically.
Move, Henry, move.
He felt the man’s body close to his. He was not much taller than Henry, and Henry was stronger. He knew he was. And faster. But he could not stop looking at Adrienne’s finger on the trigger, thinking it would be so easy for it to slip.
Henry’s collar cut into his neck as the man twisted it. “Adie, come on, girl. You can’t kill me. I was there when that wasp got in the house, and you carried it out in a Ball jar all careful, like it was baby Jesus.”
Adrienne shuddered—her hold on the gun seemed to weaken.
The hand on the back of Henry’s neck felt hot and sweaty, and the feel of this man’s skin against his own made the hair on Henry’s arms stand up. There was a reason that Adrienne wanted to shoot him. This man had done things that he should not have to her. Henry heard it in his voice, in the layers of bravado and guilt.
He saw her shoulders relax, and she dropped the arm that held the gun, sliding the clip out. She set the gun on the table next to the syringe and held the clip in her hand. Adrienne wouldn’t risk shooting Henry. Of course.
“See?” the man said. “What’d I say?”
“Shut up,” she said. Her eyes were still wet, but her voice had lost its scrape. “I’d still be happy to shoot your dick off.”
Finally, Henry’s mind reconnected with the rest of him, and he bent his knees, ripped his co
llar and slid out of his shirt to get away.
The man tried to reach out and whack Henry in the head again, but Henry had his genius back. He dodged the man’s swat, and the handful of empty air he caught humiliated him, forced him to take another swing. Henry jumped back onto the coffee table, his feet tearing the faces of the women on Adrienne’s beauty magazines. He didn’t hit the man. He wanted to let Adrienne take her swing. If she didn’t get her chance to, she’d be thinking about this a long time, thinking she should have stood up for herself.
Come on, Adrienne. You don’t need a gun. You’re seven feet tall! Just hit him.
Henry stepped back onto the couch and bounced, up and over the lamp on the end table. His feet tucked beneath him like a bird in flight. But he was used to landing on soft mats, and his feet hit the ground too hard, sending shock waves of pain up through his heels. He staggered, and in that instant the man clocked him, hard. Henry saw the floor rising up to meet him and tucked into a roll. His back slammed into Richard’s cage, and the parrot thrashed around, beating his wings, knocking his water bottle down. The cold water splashed across the back of Henry’s hair, rolling down into his eyes.
Okay, then. No more dodging. He wasn’t going to get beaten to death waiting for her to do something. The man lunged for him, and Henry prepared to go for the nose, the throat, the spots that make gentle blows painful, and hard blows lethal.
What he saw next was like something on pro-wrestling: Adrienne, the giantess, wearing a pair of fuzzy yellow slippers and no pants, grabbed the man by the collar, the same way the man had held Henry a moment ago. Instead of strangling him, she lifted the man by his shirt right off his feet, making it look as effortless as lifting a kitten by its scruff. The man’s eyes widened, and he writhed in her grip.
“You bitch,” he said, “you let me go, you fucking ugly sasquatch-looking bitch!”
And then she tossed him onto his face. He slid, stopping only a few feet from the open door. When he looked up there was a bright thread of blood hanging from his lip.
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