Everything You Came to See

by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  “I can’t believe you can’t take an apology after all this time,” he said, trying to sit up and wipe his mouth at once.

  “You called me a sasquatch. That’s the worst apology ever,” she said.

  Curtis was quiet for a moment. He seemed fascinated by the blood he wiped from his mouth and stared down at his hands, studying it. When he looked up, he spoke quietly. “I hadn’t gotten round to the apologizing yet. I’m moving up here. To work at the St. Louis warehouse. Nancy’s coming, too. We’re together. We’re getting married,” he said.

  Adrienne put her hand on her heart as if she were getting ready to say the pledge of allegiance.

  “I thought you would want to know. I’m going to be taking care of my family now—I’ve changed, and I hope we can be friends.”

  Adrienne’s lips moved, but nothing came out of them. Henry didn’t know who this Nancy was, but he had a pretty good guess about her. He had a pretty good guess about why Curtis talked so quiet, and his pupils were pinpricks in the middle of his blue eyes, like a dog’s after it’s finished off a rabbit.

  While Adrienne still held her palm to her chest, Curtis noticed the syringe on the table. His mouth puckered into an O shape, a look of mock horror.

  “You’re sick again?” he asked.

  Adrienne’s hand curled up into a fist, then, and she looked like she might march over and stomp on his skull. Henry was rapt, hoping she would.

  “Really? I pay all that money for surgery, and you got it again?” He laughed, and the hair on Henry’s arms and neck stood up. “I tried to tell you they were ripping us off.”

  The blond man squirmed to his feet.

  Adrienne moved in the man’s direction like she might toss him again, but he bolted out the door. Henry chased him, not to catch him, but to be sure he ran far enough away. The neighbors’ houses were lit, and he could see their silhouettes in the windows.

  At the end of the block, the man vaulted into the driver’s seat of a blue van and drove away.

  Southern Blue, it said on the side of the van, in cursive letters. He didn’t recognize the words, but he recognized the shape of them. He recognized the shade of blue.

  When he was back inside, Adrienne turned the dead bolt and put her arms around him. He pressed his face into her shirt. It didn’t matter what he did anymore. He felt as if he were dreaming—the gun pointed in his direction, that van. It was too surreal.

  “That was my ex-husband,” she said.

  Henry wasn’t surprised—the nature of their relationship was clear enough to him, after listening to them talk. But hearing her say it chilled him. She’d shared a house, a bed, with the man who’d just driven away. In that van. Why would her ex-husband have that van? The madness of the evening, the adrenaline that was still coursing through him, had scrambled his brain.

  “He abandoned me the first time I had to have this tumor removed. I didn’t want to have it removed, but—my size strains my heart. I can’t let it get out of control.”

  Henry swallowed. The tumor was what strained Adrienne’s heart, she had just said so. But it was his mother’s heart that he thought of then. The heart that his father made race, until it could not anymore, until it started skipping every other beat just to take a rest, just to get some peace.

  “You should’ve killed him,” Henry said. He clung to Adrienne. Now this desire to touch her had even more urgency and had little to do with anything but protecting her. Still, he felt her arms peeling away. She took the gun back to her bedroom, and he followed. He watched as she placed the gun in a hatbox, and put the hatbox on the high shelf of her closet.

  They returned to the living room, where Richard rattled his perch. “Poppa,” he said. “Peanut butter and jelly.”

  “I would have backed you up. I would have said it was self-defense,” he said.

  “Oh, Henry. He’s just an idiot. He isn’t worth all that,” she said. And Henry thought, what if it wasn’t his scrambled brains talking? What if Adrienne’s rotten ex had some connection to his mother’s lover?

  “I’ve seen a van like that before,” he said. “Saw it a long time ago when it was new enough to have perfect paint. A man who drove a van with that symbol was there the night my mother died.”

  It was the second time he’d said it tonight, but this time it was not so easy. In his head, the march began: mother of Batman, mother of Cinderella, mother of Conan the Barbarian and the lost boys and all those kids in the wilderness in Mad Max. When he got to Rylan, mother of Henry and Andre and Frankie, the features of her face were even more generic than the last time he imagined them. He had no pictures of her except this one, the one in his head, and it was fading.

  “It’s a Southern Blue van,” she said. “There are dozens like it. So I’m not surprised you’ve seen it before.”

  “Oh. Wait, you told me about them before.” He remembered the makeup party that she was supposed to throw before she got too ill. “That’s the cosmetics company you work for?”

  “I hate to say I share anything with Curtis, but yes. He worked for them when we were married, and now we both do.”

  “Is he like a … door-to-door salesman?”

  “He was, back when those existed. He works in the warehouse now. We don’t go door to door. We have parties. It’s a whole different company now.”

  “But it’s the same van.”

  “Yeah. Maybe Curtis bought it off them when they replaced their fleet. Who knows?”

  “Who knows,” Henry mumbled.

  “So … that guy. What did he do, anyway? That night,” she asked.

  “That night? He got shot at. He tried to talk to my mother, and my father chased him out with a shotgun.”

  “Oh,” she said. “The way you were talking it seemed like maybe—”

  “He didn’t kill her. I mean, the guy didn’t. She had a heart attack.”

  “A heart attack?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Awful young for that,” she said, quietly.

  “That’s what everybody said.” He explained how his father had grazed his head with a bullet that night, shooting at the man. He showed her the scar beneath his hair. “He was the sort of person who can’t stop themselves when they’re angry. And, yeah, anybody would be pissed about a strange guy in their house, but he could have lost it over a cold cup of coffee on the wrong day, and who knew when the wrong day was gonna be? And we think—I mean, me and Andre think—my mom just couldn’t handle it. Her body couldn’t keep it up.”

  Adrienne took a moment to put together what Henry was saying, that their father hadn’t shot their mother and neither had the man, but that his father was unquestionably responsible for her death. “I see,” she said, nodding apologetically. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  They sat together until the birds outside were singing full force. Richard mocked them, repeating the notes of their songs from his perch in the living room.

  When Adrienne insisted that Henry return to the circus, Henry groaned with dread. Caleb was probably going to kill him, and he was anxious about leaving Adrienne alone, even though she promised that if Curtis came back she’d call the police. But if he had to go, he didn’t want to look like he’d been up to no good when he returned. He asked Adrienne for a safety pin to doctor the rip in his shirt. She brought him one from her sewing box.

  He carefully pinned the rip, folding the fabric and hiding the pin on the inside of the shirt. “I’ll convince Caleb to come back,” he said.

  “Henry, you need to worry about convincing Caleb not to fire you.”

  He picked the keys to Sue’s van up off the floor, put them in his pocket. “Eh. I’ll get him to come back, I promise. Might not have any luck with the other thing, though.”

  “Be careful,” she said.

  Halfway back to Chicago, he realized that he’d forgotten to swap makeup bags with her. Hers was still sitting in the passenger seat. Oh well. Kylie would keep sharing with him,
if he asked, even though he hated asking.

  He reached over and opened the bag with one hand, keeping the other on the wheel, and took out the container of powder that smelled like flowers. It was awkward opening it with one hand, and he got a lapful of powder, but also a rush of her scent, which was the purpose of opening it. He’d asked her what she wanted with him, and as he smelled the powder spilled in his lap and thought of the inch of flesh pinched on her thigh when he gave her the injection, he got it: why she had picked up Curtis and flung him. Why she’d done Henry’s laundry and given him the stupid makeup bag. Why she told Caleb he’d better let Henry stay in their guest room, or else. The intimacy between them was not the intimacy of lovers, but the intimacy of walking into your house at night, of seeing a certain face, and knowing you were home. Oh, yes, he got it now, what she wanted with him, but he didn’t get it like a slow injection. He got it like a bullet through the skull.

  He was her favorite.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE BOY STEPPED OUT OF the minivan he’d stolen and he looked like hell, with his shirt pinned and a red ring around his neck. The first thing he did was return Sue’s keys to her. She asked why he’d done it, and Henry said something that Caleb couldn’t quite hear, because the boy had his hand near his mouth, half covering it.

  Sue took her keys. “Well. That’s not a reason. Caleb is beside himself. And here I thought we’d get along,” Sue said, shoving the keys in her denim purse. She turned and stalked away, calling her dogs to heel.

  Then Henry walked toward Caleb, his hands shoved into his pockets. And Caleb couldn’t help but picture Henry kissing his wife. He couldn’t help trying to imagine the things Henry had said and done that had led up to the moment where he caught her off guard and smashed his clumsy baby mouth into hers. It made Caleb want to tear himself apart, this imagining. If she found this kid attractive, then how did she also find Caleb attractive, who had to shave twice a day to keep his stubble down, who had more than an inch of gut sticking out past his belt, and who couldn’t boast, really, of any true talent but a good eye and a discerning taste? How could she love Caleb when it was this boy who had been there when Curtis turned up?

  On the phone this morning, she’d said she pushed Henry away. Caleb believed she had. But there was this sad quality to her voice like perhaps she regretted not letting him kiss her.

  Not only did Caleb want to tear himself apart, he wanted to do the same to Henry. He wanted to dismember him. Finger by finger. Tooth by tooth. All the parts that had touched his wife, he wanted to jerk from his body.

  When Henry stood in front of him, though, he found himself incapable of saying anything. He made an awkward gesture in the direction of the trailer they both rode in. Caleb stepped inside, and the boy followed him in and shut the door.

  Caleb opened a briefcase on one of the little benches in the trailer. He took out a form and fastened it to a clipboard. He sat on the bench and laid the clipboard in his lap, filling in the blank spaces with a mechanical pencil, keeping his eyes down and his mind focused on the page, the job, the procedure. It was not easy, because he had spent the last three weeks sharing a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom with the boy. He’d told Adrienne it was a bad idea, and she had thrown in his face that he was the only one wearing a suit. Well, that was true. But now the kid was tangled up, not just in the circus, but with everything that Caleb cared about, and Caleb still had to wear the damned suit.

  “I meant to get back before anyone missed me,” Henry said.

  Caleb looked down at his notes, written on the thick black lines of the form. The employee in question showed a lack of respect for his colleagues and his superiors. The employee in question misused the property of another employee. The employee is an excellent clown who will be impossible to replace on such short notice. It wasn’t even worth it to try. Why waste himself on this? Why waste himself firing and hiring and searching, why throw his energy into shaping this show while Adrienne was at home, sick, needing him?

  Caleb printed and signed his name, wrote the date out long form just to keep his hand busy. July second, 1990.

  “She wanted you,” Henry said. “She wants you to come back.”

  “Don’t talk,” said Caleb. Or I will kill you, thought Caleb. I’ll take you apart starting with your mouth. Henry had no family that Caleb knew of. The circus was Caleb’s family. In spite of the suit, in spite of the office, and the fact that he hadn’t been born particularly talented, beautiful, or freakish, he was one of them, and Henry was not. Better yet, Henry, talk a little louder and I won’t have to lift a finger.

  Caleb tore the yellow and pink carbon copies from the form. The white form he slipped into a folder, for his own files, and he folded the pink form into one of the briefcase pockets to give to Seamus. The yellow copy was Henry’s. Caleb stood and handed it to him.

  “We’ve just had a discussion about your conduct,” he said. “You can imagine the details of it. The broad strokes are on that paper.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t ever tell me again what my wife wants.”

  IN INDIANAPOLIS, CALEB MET SEAMUS in a hotel restaurant bar while the circus set up at the State Fairgrounds. Seamus occasionally came to see a tour show and check in with Caleb. It often happened that the show he saw was the Indianapolis show, and Caleb suspected that Seamus had a woman in this town that he liked to visit and felt like he was killing two birds with one stone. He was efficient like that. It was four in the afternoon, and when Caleb joined him, Seamus was watching highlights from a ball game on a large television above the bar. The bar was empty except for Seamus, Caleb, and a young man in a suit sitting at one of the tables. Seamus sipped a black beer and the sunglasses perched on his head held his black hair back, revealing shocks of gray that grew from his temples. He shook Caleb’s hand and went back to watching the television.

  When Caleb was a kid, he and Seamus Feely and the other boys in the neighborhood played baseball in backyards and alleys, a pretty elegant system, really, of home games on the west side of the neighborhood and away games on the east. They had about four even and regular teams, and a paramount sense of sportsmanship. No fights, no bloody noses, no trash talk about anybody’s mama, even if she was a hairy Italian, even if she was the gap-toothed Irish ringmaster’s wife.

  Caleb wasn’t the best athlete—he was the catcher, and not much of one to begin with. When he burnt his fingers trying to weld two pieces of old copper pipe together (he was sculpting a crucifix for his mother’s birthday), he was an even worse catcher, because the ball kept hitting his fingers, even through his glove, making the wound hot and fresh again, forcing the blister open. Seamus told him, with absolute professionalism, wearing his rolled-up jeans and ball cap, his violet eyes menacing even then, set in his plump little-boy’s face, that if he could not catch the ball, then there was no point in being on the team. Caleb had, also with professionalism, agreed and gone home for the day.

  That night, he stayed awake in his bed, anticipating the moment in which he let another easy-out slip over his mitt, and Seamus would tell him to leave and not come back. He decided on what to say: “I only hope you’ll have me back next summer, when my fingers have healed.” He mimed, in the dark, relinquishing his catcher’s mitt, which belonged to one of the other boys.

  The next morning, he told his mother and father about Seamus and what he had said. His mother said, “Oh, good grief, Caleb, don’t let the little mick kid bully you. Just wait till your hand heals and go out and thrash him, why don’t you? You don’t need to play ball every day.”

  His father bandaged his fingers together. He did it tight. To see that they were secure, he made Caleb wiggle them at the lowest knuckle. He flicked the bandaged fingers and asked if it hurt. When Caleb said no, his father had nodded, patted his cheek, told him to pretend like it was one big finger instead of two bound together, and he would catch just fine. And he did catch just fine, even though it was still a bit painful.

 
; While Seamus watched the game in the hotel bar, Caleb studied his fingers. There weren’t even any scars from that soldering accident, which almost left him friendless for a whole summer. “That Bonds is really something else, don’t you think?” said Seamus, indicating the TV.

  “Yeah,” said Caleb. “He’s a home run machine, I hear. Haven’t had much time to watch the games, though.”

  On the television, Bonds swung, hit, and zipped through the bases, all the movements seeming so familiar to him that he could have been brushing his teeth.

  “Oh, you should make time. It’s a great season. Cards don’t have a snowball’s chance, but that’s alright,” said Seamus.

  “Maybe with you.”

  The sports segment was over, and it was back to the anchors, on to the weather.

  Seamus turned to him and smiled. “He’s cheating, of course.”

  “That right?”

  “Bonds? Oh, yeah. He’s juiced. Don’t get me wrong. He’s talented. But talent is only a fire. Talent needs something to burn.”

  Caleb nodded. He ordered a Diet Coke from the bartender. The restaurant had dark furniture, dark carpeting, dim lighting, all designed to make the place feel restful. But the carpet was tacky and the furniture felt slightly sticky, covered in a film of nicotine and sugar from spilled cocktails. The place was more depressing than anything.

  Seamus waved a hand at the TV, indicating he was done talking about it. “Sorry. I get caught up in these things. How are you? How is the tour so far?”

  He wanted to tell him that he, Caleb Baratucci, had performed his life’s miracle, and things were starting to turn around. But it wasn’t true.

  “Well. To be honest. Not so good,” said Caleb. The bartender set the glass in front of him, and he took a sip.

  “Surprise, surprise.”

  Caleb pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’re in the red. Again. And it’s worse than it’s ever been.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Gas prices are obscene. It’s costing us a fortune to travel.”