by Drew Perry
“Do what trick?” she says.
“I don’t know,” he says. “It seems like you could use something.”
She squares her body to him, and, holding her drink in her left hand, she slaps him full in the face with her right. Hendrick and Yul Brynner both turn around to look because of the noise. Jack’s face feels very much in the present moment. And it hurts. The woman on TV keeps talking. At nine o’clock, The History Channel turns its spotlight on Modern Marvels.
“How’s that?” she says. “Is that something? Does that do the trick?”
“You hit me,” he says.
“Yes,” she says.
“That’s what you wanted to get us all together for? So you could fucking hit me?”
“No,” she says.
“Why don’t you tell me what you did want? What grand scheme you had in mind?”
“Me?” she says. “My grand scheme?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“What is this, Jack?” she says. “What is all of this?”
“It turns out we should have charged them admission,” Jack says, looking from Canavan to Rena. “We didn’t need them at all. They’re getting the whole act for free.”
“What a complete bastard you are,” Beth says.
“Yeah,” Jack says. “That’s me.”
“A real piece of shit,” she says.
“You know what?” he says. “Fuck off, OK? You’re the one who walked in the door like this was some kind of a, what, I don’t know—”
“Like what? Go ahead. Tell me how I walked in here.”
“I don’t know how you walked in,” he says. “But since then you’ve been acting like a goddamn lunatic.”
They stare at each other, and it’s only right then that he really remembers Hen’s in the room, that he processes the fact that they probably shouldn’t do this right in front of him, but none of that much matters—he hears Canavan say Wait, and the room goes a little static, and there’s a moment where Beth still isn’t moving, but then there’s one where she definitely is, a sprung coil, and she’s coming at him, swinging again, closed fist this time. She hits him right in the eye, his left eye. He doesn’t even have time to flinch. His entire universe goes green and red and black. Her motion carries her fully forward, off balance and onto him, takes the two of them down through the Adirondack chairs and onto the floor. Jack’s trying to hold his head, his face. On his way down he kicks the coffee table box over, and Rena stands up just as the thing collapses, the gin and the tonic bottles and a couple of teacups falling off, rolling, breaking. One of the end tables falls over, too, and its lamp with it, the bulb exploding, glass everywhere. Everything everywhere. Plenty of noise. Beth’s kneeling over him—they’re on the floor, and she’s hitting him in the chest, the arms, and she’s screaming at him, and Rena’s trying to get hold of her, pulling her off, yelling at her to slow down, slow down. Not stop, Jack notices. Just slow down. Like it’s a critique of her form. Rena pulls her back further, harder, off him, but she swings at Rena, pushes her, gets free, and then somehow Canavan’s in it, pulling Rena away from Beth, and Jack’s thinking keep your weight off it, and Canavan’s saying leave them be, goddamnit, and by then Beth’s back at him, hard. They tumble up against the front door. He gets his leg tangled up in one of Canavan’s crutches, gets that wedged into the corner such that he can’t move, really, can’t get out of the way. She hits him again, but he manages to get up onto his knees, get himself turned away from her, and she works his back, still yelling, crying, now, too, and he curls away, trying to wait it out, trying to let her wear herself down. He’s in pain. He’s holding his eye. Yul Brynner thinks it’s all some game, is up and barking at them. Rena’s yelling at Canavan, at Beth. Canavan’s saying hang on, hang on a second. There’s a lot going on. His eye. Fucking Christ. Take a knee, Lang. She stops hitting him, finally, sits back on her knees. He can hear her trying to catch her breath. He puts a hand on the ground in front of him, holds onto his face with his other hand. He gets one eye open. Rena’s on the floor, leaning against the wall. Canavan’s in a different chair, holding his other crutch out at Rena like a sword. Jack touches his eye, looks at his hand. He’s bleeding. Not a lot, but some. Beth reaches for him, and he flinches, thinking she might be ready to start up again, but she’s got her hand on his shoulder now, her mouth right up in his ear saying I’m sorry, saying she was aiming for his chest.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asks her. “What the hell was that?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I am. I don’t know why I did that. I was aiming for your chest.”
“Which time?” he asks her. He presses the heel of his hand against his eye.
“One of the times,” she says. “The first time.”
“For fuck’s sake, Beth,” Rena says.
Jack sits up, gets his foot free of the crutch, and opens his good eye fully, the one that doesn’t feel like it’s been pushed back into his brain. Canavan picks up his X-rays, as if they might prove a point. The flipped-over Adirondack chairs look like something dead on the side of the road. At least one of them’s cracked. They’ve knocked a plant over, too, broken the pot, spilled the soil out across the floor. The only plant he had in here. Rena gets Yul Brynner by the collar, gets him out of the way of the mess. Jack wipes his mouth on his sleeve. More blood. Hen’s come over from the TV, is standing over the scene, presiding, a tiny pope. He says, “Only Coors Light is frost-brewed.”
Beth looks at him. “Mommy is very sorry,” she says. “She had an accident.”
“Fuck,” Rena says.
“It won’t happen again,” Beth says. She sounds like she believes it.
“The furniture has been knocked over,” says Hen.
“Yes,” Beth says. She’s breathing hard. They all are.
“We have some fabulous deals at American Furniture Warehouse,” Hen says. “Bedroom Suites for only $999.” He takes a breath. “$999? $999.”
Beth reaches for him, and he lets her take his hand. Her face is red. “That’s a good price,” she says.
Jack wills Hen to say it, wants him so fucking badly to say We’ve gone C-R-A-Z-Y here at American Furniture Warehouse. Instead, he touches his thumb to his pointer finger a few times. A dust. I have got a dust. Jack pulls his hand off his eye, blinks a few times, tries to get things to come into focus. Even moving his eyelid hurts, but he can see. He’s a little disappointed. What it would have been for her to blind him. Something he’d have had forever. A trump card. An eye patch. Now all he’s got is that she kicked his ass. “You OK?” he asks Rena.
“I bit my tongue,” she says. “I’m fine.”
“Are you bleeding?” Beth asks her.
“No,” she says. She touches her finger to the end of her tongue. “Maybe.”
Beth builds the lightbulb glass into a little pile. She pushes the potting soil and the pot shards into a different pile, then moves everything up against the wall. She’s moving slowly, deliberately. Rena lets Yul Brynner go once everything is out of the way, then helps Beth turn the chairs right-side-up again. Jack’s still down on the floor, his eye throbbing. He can feel the blood under his skin moving along in his veins and arteries. Beth takes his face in her hand. “Let me see you,” she says.
“I don’t think so,” he says, trying to push her away.
“Stop it and let me see you.”
“Are you planning on hitting me again?”
“I wasn’t planning on hitting you the first time.”
Canavan laughs, and Rena tells him to shut up.
“Maybe we should get some ice,” Beth says.
“I’ll get it,” Rena says.
“Thank you,” Beth says, so quietly only Jack can hear. She pushes at him with her thumb. “I think you’re OK,” she says.
“That’s your professional opinion?”
“I think you’re OK,” she says again.
“Maybe you should put a steak on it,” Canavan offers.
“Do you h
ave any steaks?” Beth asks Jack.
“No,” he says. “Not over here.”
“Across the street?”
“I can’t remember.”
Rena comes back with the ice, and then they’re both working on him, Beth looking down into his face and Rena holding a towel full of ice against his eye. He can feel the cubes shifting against each other. “Careful,” he says.
“I’m being careful,” Rena says.
“Can we sit back down?” Jack asks. “I’d like to sit down.”
“You are sitting down,” Beth says.
“In a chair,” he says, and takes the towel, picks his way across the room, takes over his own first aid. He sits down. This is us, he thinks. This is our family. He pats the dog, who still thinks there might be a game in this somewhere. Hen’s back down on his knees in front of one of the tipped-over boxes, lining up his peanuts. Yul Brynner stretches his neck out and eats one, very delicately. Rena touches her tongue again, wipes her finger on her leg.
“Everybody settled back down?” Canavan asks.
Rena says, “Terry, I’d hit you, too, if you weren’t crippled.”
He looks at her. “You can if you want,” he says. “It’s all the same to me.”
“It probably is,” she says.
“You’re welcome to it,” he says. “Do your worst.”
Rena shakes her head. She picks up a teacup that survived, pours gin in it. “What the hell just happened?” she asks.
“I got mad,” Beth says. “That’s all.”
“That’s all?” says Rena.
The air conditioner kicks on outside. It’s got a low grinding noise right as it starts up. He’s going to have to replace it eventually. “What is that?” Canavan says.
“It’s the air conditioner,” Jack says. “The compressor.”
“No,” Canavan says. “Not that.” He sniffs the air. “Do you smell that? Are you cooking something?”
“What are you talking about?” Jack asks.
“That,” he says. “You don’t smell that?”
“Yeah,” Rena says. “I smell it, too. In the kitchen.” She gets up, goes in. On the TV, a guy with a beard wants to know if they’ve been having problems with calcium deposits in their shower. “Oh, shit,” Rena says, and then it sounds like she’s moving things around.
“What?” Beth says.
“Somebody better come see this,” she says.
Jack goes to see what could possibly be happening now, and Beth does, too, and it’s that the kitchen is about half-filled with gray smoke. Rena’s pulling at the fridge, trying to move it away from the wall. The smoke’s coming from back there. She’s swatting at the space behind the fridge with a towel. “I think you have a fire,” she says.
“What kind of fire?” Beth says. Jack pushes the ice against his eye.
“An over here kind,” she says. There aren’t any flames. Just smoke. And the smell, a terrible, acrid smell, like a pile of hair on fire. Or bike tires. There’s more smoke than he thinks seems right, and it’s collecting up at the ceiling, and there is one last good long moment where everything’s still alright, where Rena’s on the job, and he and Beth are standing there watching her trying to move the refrigerator, a moment where Jack still thinks they might be able to paste everything back together and it all still might hold, but then the smoke detector in the hallway goes off, a shrill huge beeping that sends Yul Brynner fully into orbit, and the whole house erupts all over again. Hen gets up and comes in. Canavan’s limping around. The dog whines, barks, ears straight back. He hates smoke alarms. It’ll take all night to calm him back down. Hen should be berserk, too, but of course he’s not. He’s got his hands over his ears, and he’s marching in place. He shouts something Jack can’t hear. “What?” Jack asks him.
“We are having an emergency!” Hendrick yells.
“I know that!” Jack yells back, eye throbbing.
“Fix it, please!” Hen shouts. Rena’s shoving at the fridge. The smoke alarm’s going like it’s inside Jack’s own head. Yul Brynner’s barking. It’s all the noise in the world. Jack opens the sliding door to let the dog out the back of the house, and Yul Brynner goes through the screen before Jack can get that open, too, tears it off its runners, and he runs for the racetrack, runs through it, leaves paw prints all the way across one end of the eight. “Call the fire department!” Hendrick yells.
“No,” Jack says. “It’s OK. We don’t have to do that. There’s not a fire.”
Beth gets one of Canavan’s crutches, jabs at the smoke alarm until she knocks it down, and then she crushes it on the floor. It stops beeping. “What do you mean, there’s not a fire?” she asks. “Isn’t that a fire?”
“It’s an electrical fire,” Jack says. “Probably. The fridge’s been acting up. We just have to unplug it.”
“I think it’s a real fire,” Rena says, and they all look, and the back wall is on fire right around the socket.
“Holy shit,” Canavan says.
“Call the fire department!” Hen screams again, and Rena picks up the phone, looks at Jack, and he nods at her, yes, because that is what you do in an emergency. You call the fire department. Hen had it right all along. Rena dials.
“Do you have an extinguisher?” Canavan asks.
“Maybe in the garage,” says Jack. Canavan heads that way. Jack can’t remember if it’s baking soda for a grease fire or an electrical fire. It doesn’t matter, because he’s got no baking soda over here. He turns the faucet on, pulls the sprayer out, and sprays the wall, which makes it much worse. Now it’s certainly a fire department fire. The flames jump up higher on the wall, and there’s fire coming out from underneath the refrigerator now, too, like some obscene cartoon rocket. He can’t understand what would even be burning under there. Hendrick walks up to the fridge, transfixed, and before Beth can stop him, before Jack can, Hen reaches out—Jack can’t believe he’s watching him do it—he reaches out and tries to take hold of the flames, tries to grab one, to touch one. Jack knows he knows better than that, knows he does, but there he is doing it anyway, and there’s nothing he can do to stop him. Hen screams right away and pulls his hands back, but he loses his balance and falls forward onto the fridge, into the fire, and Canavan’s back now with an extinguisher, running, limping on his braced leg, and he puts the whole thing out immediately, so fast that Jack can’t even tell if Hendrick was ever on fire, or if his clothes were. The extinguisher sounds like radio static. You’re supposed to put butter on a burn. They don’t have any butter. Canavan covers Hen in powder, and Hen’s screaming, screaming, ash-white from the extinguisher, and Beth picks him up, runs him to the sink, tries to fit his whole body under the faucet, but he’s too big, so she carries him down the hall toward the bathroom. Jack follows her. Rena’s saying his address into the phone, is saying fire, is saying we may have an injury, we may have somebody burned. Beth’s got Hen in the shower by the time Jack gets in there, and she’s in under the water with him, asking him what hurts, what hurts. He’s still screaming, but now it’s a breathless, noiseless scream, no real sound coming out any more, just air. Where, Beth’s asking him, where, honey, and he’s not saying anything. His mouth’s wide open. No tears. Where, Beth’s saying, more and more insistently, and the water’s running out of the shower, pooling on the floor, seeping into the hall. She’s soaked. Hen gets a breath, starts again, a horrible, impossible sound, a sound that’s not any kind of sound at all. Jack does the only thing he can think to do, which is to get in there with them, to wrap his arms around Hendrick, around Bethany, to stand with them in the freezing water in his clothes and shoes with his eye throbbing and his house on fire and try to figure out what to do to get Hen to take another breath, to try to find out where he’s burned and how badly, to try to be there with him so that even if he can’t ever tell them anything at all, he’ll still know they were both of them in there, together, trying every way they could to hear him.
The night they first bring him home from the h
ospital, they set him in the center of the floor in his carrier, stare at him. The house is stone quiet. They’re afraid even to move. Beth’s in pain, exhausted. Jack isn’t sure what to do with himself. They’ve got a book on swaddling, on how to wrap him up so he doesn’t cut himself with his fingernails. He’s come equipped to do himself harm right from the start. Every now and then he moves, blinks, stretches. Mostly he stays still.
The room they’ve got set up as a nursery seems ridiculous, somehow. The dresser full of diapers. The crib. The changing table. The mobile hanging in the corner. Jack doesn’t know what they’re going to do with any of that. He sanded down the corners of the top of the dresser a couple of weeks back. Beth had asked him to. He won’t be tall enough to hit his head on the corner for years, he told her.
Even so, though, right? I mean, why not do it anyway?
So he did it. Sandpaper, sanding block. He repainted each rounder corner white. The dresser’s white. The mobile is cats, something Beth picked out, all these wildly colored cats, sitting, smiling. Pink. Yellow. Blue. Jack hangs a wind chime outside Hen’s window. Two weeks later, after it keeps waking him up, he takes it down, moves it to the back yard.
Jack sits there on the sofa with her looking down at him, feels like he’ll never be ready to be a father, never know what to say to this creature to solve the world for him. He already doesn’t know how to solve the world for Beth, keeps trying to even though she tells him he doesn’t need to, that she needs him to do other things, different things. What things? he’ll ask her. You’ll know, she’ll say. But he doesn’t know, or he hasn’t. They watch him. Maybe it’s nothing more than this, he thinks. Maybe it’s nothing more, after all of it, than sitting in some rented house on a thrift-store sofa with your infant son at your feet, his mother beside you, and it’s not, finally, that you’re supposed to try to survive each day until evening, but instead that you’re supposed to survive each night, looking all the time for ways to make it to the next day as whole as possible.