by Drew Perry
“Sure,” he says.
“You know what?” she says. “We heard you out front before you even did it. We heard the truck, Jack. We got up and came and stood in the window and we watched you do it.” She sits up straighter. “I didn’t think you’d do it. I told him you wouldn’t. But then you did.” She doesn’t sound all that impressed.
Jack reels Yul Brynner back in, hand over hand on the lead. The dog’s still staring out into the dark. A car horn goes off a couple of times out on the larger road. “I think the first time I saw a possum was in kindergarten,” he says. “They found it in one of the trash cans outside. Stevens Kindergarten. I was a Cardinal. Or a Bluebird.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They had us grouped off, named for birds. Maybe I was a Robin. We had Robins one year.”
“Was Hen still asleep when you went in there?”
“Of course.” He gets the dog the rest of the way back up on the porch. “They took us all out there to see it. Lined us up and brought us out there. I don’t know what they were thinking. That thing could have come up out of there and bitten somebody.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
It’s a fair question. Maybe because he’s supposed to be telling her something, and this is what’s coming out. “Because of the possum,” he says. “It was a mother possum, in the trash can. With babies. I remember we looked in there and saw she had babies. She could have given everybody rabies.” Beth’s shaking her head. “Rabies babies,” he says.
“Jack.”
“What?”
“Are you drunk?” she says.
“I don’t think so.”
“Where’ve you been?”
“What?”
“Where were you? What is it that made you think you could just leave him here?”
“Because I could just leave him here. I didn’t think it. I did it. He’s fine. He was fine, right, when you got here?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“He was fine. You know he was.”
“That’s not the point—”
“Nobody could figure out how she’d gotten them in there,” he says.
“Gotten what in where?”
“The possum babies. They got the county extension or the nature preserve or something to come out and get them. They pulled up in the truck and we all watched. The guy got them out of there with this metal pole with a noose or something on the end of it.”
“The nature preserve came out to get possums?”
“Maybe it was just an exterminator, and they lied to us,” he says. “I don’t remember.” The idea that it could have been an exterminator brings a sadness down on him. Maybe he is drunk.
“Maybe it was one of those catch-and-release places,” she says.
“I’ve never believed those places actually do that. I always imagine them clubbing everything to death once they’re back at the shop. Like baby seals.”
“Jesus, Jack.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They don’t do that. They don’t club them to death.”
“They might.”
“They don’t,” she says. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter.” She slides a little away from him, stares at her feet. “Are you done?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“With your possum story. Are you done?”
“Yes.”
“Then is it my turn?”
“Sure,” he says.
“OK.” She leans against the railing. “Listen to me,” she says. “I’ve been here an hour and a half. What I’d like to know is, where have you been?” The dog rolls over on his side, offers up his belly. She says, “I mean, after you tore up Terry’s yard. I know that part of it. I want to know what it is you did after that.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“No, you’re not,” she says.
“OK,” he says. “You’re right.”
“You know what he’s doing right now?”
“Not you, I’m guessing.”
She ignores that. “He’s out there with all the lights turned on, with his car parked in the street with the headlights on, and he’s trying to see if there’s anything you didn’t destroy, trying to see if there’s anything he can salvage.”
“I didn’t plan it,” he says. “Really. It just sort of happened.”
“Why don’t you try that with the police? I tried to talk him into calling the police, but he wouldn’t do it.”
“What a stand-up guy your boyfriend turns out to be.”
“Jack, you want to know what’s going on? With me? With us? It’s this. This right here. The way you do things, the way you walk through the world and don’t pay attention to anybody else, ever. The things you’re capable of—”
“Wait,” he says. He’ll take some of this from her, but he’s got to draw a line somewhere. “You wait. How about let’s maybe not talk about what I’m capable of. Because between the two of us, you’re the one who looks a little bit more capable of something right now—”
“Not to mention that you left him here alone, Jack, alone, for what, two hours? Three hours? What if something happened? He’s six years old!”
“I don’t need you to tell me how old he is, OK? I know how old he is.”
“Do you?”
He can feel the both of them starting to lose hold of the conversation. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“What if something had happened to him?” she says again. “What if—”
“What is it you think could have happened?”
She looks straight at him. “Do you want me to make you a fucking list?”
“Yes, I do,” he says. “Go right ahead. You tell me what it is you’ve got in your head that could have happened to him.”
“Anything, you imbecile! Anything! He could have turned the stove on. He could have electrocuted himself when he decided he needed to touch the dryer outlet seventeen times. He could have crushed his head in the garage door.”
“He could have drowned in a teaspoon of water.”
“Oh, fuck you, Jack, alright? You know what I mean.” She says it again: “You know what I mean.”
“But that’s what I’m telling you. He didn’t do any of that. That’s what I’m always trying to tell you. None of that happened, because he was already down. Because I got him down. Because we went through the whole fucking thing, the whole song and dance. Just the two of us. We’ve done it every night. Every night. The faucets. The nightlight. The catalog. And he’s doing the windows in the French doors now, by the way. He has to run his finger around the inside of every single pane, which takes half a goddamned hour by itself. Here’s what we did tonight: We lined up the shoes. We read the stories. We did the doors. We did all that, and then he went to sleep, and that was it.” He reaches back, gets himself a new beer. “He was down.”
“You left him alone.” She says it slowly, quietly.
“To sit at the Brightwood for an hour and have a beer and think. That’s all.” He stands up. “He. Was. Down.”
“The Brightwood,” she says.
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t think here?”
“Who the hell are you to ask me that? You can’t do whatever it is you’re doing here, either, right? Right. Because Canavan’s not here to do, is he?”
“Do you think I wanted this?” she says. “Do you think this is the way I wanted my life to be?”
“Well, what do you want me to say, Bethany? I mean, Canavan? Fucking Canavan?”
“That’s not what this is about,” she says. “How many times are we going to do this? You know it’s not about that. You know it.”
“How is it not about that? In what way is any part of this possibly not about that? I swear to fucking hell,” he says, tensing, feeling like his head is about to come off his body, and without thinking it through, without thinking about it at all, he turns around, and from the bottom of the steps—he’s ended up out in th
e yard, somehow—he throws his beer through the living room window.
She’s up then for sure, coming at him, wild. She throws her mug at him, misses. It lands behind him in the yard. Lights come on next door. Something very definite is happening between them right here. Here is a discrete moment. He thinks she might try to tackle him, but she stops right in front of him, stands facing him, breathing hard. They stare at each other. After the crash of the window, things suddenly feel very quiet. Very still. She says, right into his face, “What in the hell is the matter with you?”
He doesn’t know. His arm hurts from the throw. He can’t really believe the can went through. He stands there in his front yard at whatever time it is, midnight. His window’s broken. He’ll have to fix it, have to tape something over it tonight. Cardboard. He picks her mug up, hands it back to her. “I’m sorry,” he says. Then he says, “I love you.” It just comes up out of him.
“Oh, shit, Jack, I love you, too,” she says. “But—” She stops, her voice catching.
“But what?”
“But nothing,” she says, backing up. She sits down on the bottom step.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” he says.
She pulls at her hair, looks out at the street. “I don’t think you ever mean to do anything,” she says.
“That’s not fair,” he tells her.
“I don’t care,” she says. “I don’t care. I don’t have to be fair.” She sounds quiet now, small.
“I mean to do things,” he says.
“Like the house?” she says. “Did you mean to do that? Have you done anything to it?”
“No. Not much.”
She runs her finger around the inside of her mug. “Are we broke yet?”
“We’re not broke.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Great,” she says. “Superb.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“Jack,” she says, “maybe it’d be better—”
“You can’t have him,” he says, cutting her off. He saw this part of it coming when he parked the truck, found her on the porch. There’s no way he’s letting her pack him up and take him out of here.
“What?”
“If that’s what you’re doing here. You can’t have him. You can’t take him.”
“I miss him, Jack, OK? I miss him. And if this is the way you’re planning on taking care of him—”
“I’ll take you to court,” he says. “You left. You’re the one who left. I’ll take you to court, and I’ll find some way to win. If you want him, you come back here. You come back home.”
“I think you’d do just beautifully in court.”
“I think maybe we both would,” he says. “In fact, why don’t we just take this shit on the road? Sell tickets? Bring Canavan along? We can parade all of this in front of a judge and let him—”
Yul Brynner gets up to greet Hendrick, who’s all at once standing there in the screen door, naked except for a T-shirt, which he’s wearing on his head like a veil. He’s marching in place, very carefully picking up one foot and then the other, very carefully putting each back down again. He’ll be great in marching band, Jack suddenly thinks, picturing him wearing a xylophone in a chest harness, playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” And all the fight goes out of him. Beth too, he can see. A little truce drops down on them. Hendrick, the great and powerful common denominator.
The streetlight flicks off, then on again, and Hen starts breathing heavily through his nose, which is never good. What tends to come next is the unarticulated screaming, something that can go on for hours. A few months after he’d started it—long openmouthed wails, no tears, only stopping to breathe, and even then going on for what seemed impossibly long stretches, so long that at first they worried that he might suffocate himself—once they’d gotten used to it, or as used to it as they could get, they started betting on how long he’d go. A dark little game that helped them last it out. He’d start in screaming, and they’d each put a dollar on the counter, write a number of minutes on the face of it. 15. 40. 70. The kind of thing they wouldn’t share with regular parents in line at the checkout, but the kind of thing that eventually helped them survive. Hen’s breathing harder now, and Beth’s at the bottom of the stairs, pushing on her forehead. Jack gets a dollar out of his pocket, writes 0 on it, hands it to Beth. He’s got one trick left, this last trick, something new, something she hasn’t seen yet. She takes the dollar, looks at him like she’d like to know what it is he’s got in mind.
He walks up to Hendrick, opens the door. “Arizona,” Jack says.
Hen grunts a little, still trying to decide.
“Arizona,” Jack says again, eyeing Beth. They both know he should be at full blast by now.
Hendrick looks up at him, marching, planetary green eyes, little pot belly. “Tempe,” Hen says, measuring the syllables. “Phoenix.”
“New York,” Jack says, squatting down to his level.
Now he answers right away. “Binghamton Albany Bridgeport Buffalo Cooperstown.”
“Georgia,” Jack says.
“Macon Albany Valdosta Augusta,” Hen says. “Atlanta Kennesaw.” He’s calm.
Beth walks up the steps. “How did you figure this out?” She hands him his dollar back.
“He’s been in the road atlas some this week. At work. He likes to do the cities. Butner quizzes him.”
“What, like he’s some kind of toy?”
“No. Like he’s some kind of kid who likes place names. Montana.”
Hen wipes his nose. “Missoula,” he says. “Helena.”
“It works,” Beth says.
“Yeah.”
“I can’t believe that really works.”
“Yeah.”
“Bozeman,” says Hendrick.
“I’m not coming back yet,” she says. “Just so you know.”
He stands back up. “That’s what you came over here to tell me?”
“No. I came over here hoping I could bring fucking Child & Family Services down on your head.”
“OK.”
“I’m not coming back yet.”
“That’s fine. But you still can’t have him.”
“Jack—”
“What?”
“Jesus. I don’t know.” She gives the porch railing a shake, rocks it back and forth. “I tried to get him to call the police. He wouldn’t do it.”
“Cut Bank,” Hendrick says, almost whispering.
“I’ll replace it all,” he tells her. He’s not sorry, but he can help put it back together. “Tell him to come by the lot tomorrow and take whatever he wants. I’ll even send some guys over to replant it for him. I can find a crew. We’ve got better shrubs on the yard than what he had in, anyway.”
“It’s not like that fixes anything,” she says.
“It fixes some of it, doesn’t it?”
“He had tomatoes by the mailbox. Tomatoes and basil. When I left he was out there trying to get the vines back upright. He was wrapping electrical tape around the places where you broke them.”
“I’ve got tomatoes going in the greenhouse. Butner does. They’re huge. He can have as many as he wants.”
“I’ll tell him that, I guess,” she says, going to retrieve Hendrick, who’s walked down into the flowerbed. He’s drawing lines in the dirt with his finger. She shepherds him back up onto the porch. “Don’t do that,” she tells him. “Daddy’s having a hard enough time keeping track of you as it is.”
“How about I put him to bed,” Jack says, trying for something. “We can have another beer. We can sit out here a while.”
“No,” she says. “No way. I’m leaving.” She watches Hen. “I’m going to go ahead and leave.”
He can’t tell what he wants here—whether he’d like her to change her mind, to stay, to drink beer out of her coffee mug for a while and then maybe go to bed with him, or whether he might actually want her gone, away again, the house back to its quiet awful rhythms of m
en. Regardless, he realizes, it worked. He trenched Canavan’s lawn, and it worked. She’s here. Whatever he meant it to mean, it did.
“I could put him to bed,” he says again, “and we could sit up. We could sit right here.”
“I have to go,” she says. She looks at Hen. “Maine,” she says. “Have you done that one yet?”
“Have you done that one yet?” Hen repeats.
“Maine,” she says.
“Maine.”
She tries one more time. “Maine.”
“Bangor,” says Hen, slowly, squatting down, his penis hanging like a comma. “Portland. Bar Harbor. Bar Harbor, Maine.”
“That’s terrific, honey,” she says. She might be crying. He can’t quite tell.
“Get him to come by tomorrow,” says Jack. “Tell him to come take whatever the hell he wants.”
“Bar Harbor, Maine,” says Hendrick.
“I’m going,” Beth says. “I’m sorry.” She says it to Hen, too. She leans down, holds his face to hers. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Mommy’s really sorry.” She tries to hug him, but he backs up, starts marching again.
“Maine,” he says.
She’s definitely crying now, and Jack’s pretty sure he wants to do something to hold her here, but he can’t think of what that would be. She stares at Hen a while longer, and then she turns around and walks to the car, gets in, backs it down the drive. Like that, she’s gone again. He wonders whether or not she’d stop if he chased her down. If he got in the truck and chased her to the next traffic light. But what would he say? He’d pull up next to her, roll the window down, and he’d have to have something to tell her. He watches her headlights sweep across each front yard until she turns at the end of the block. He thinks about those possums down in the bottom of that metal trash can. He opens the last beer, takes Hen back inside, runs him once more on his loop around the house, toothbrush to each faucet head, gets him down again. Then he sits outside with Yul Brynner, listens to the night birds and the crickets. Across the street the porch light has timed off, or burned out, or something—he’s not sure—but the house over there is so dark it’s like no one has ever lived there. He gets a starkly clear picture of Beth sleeping not in Canavan’s bed tonight, but on his blue sofa, downstairs, bath towels for blankets. Bar Harbor, Maine. Except for it being in Maine, Jack has no real idea where that is.