Charlie said, “I’m fifteen.”
“Listen,” the woman said. “I don’t really have a leg to stand on here, getting involved with him in the first place, and you’ve got no reason to take my word, but I’m telling you ... It was the strangest thing . . .” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “What happened.”
“What happened?”
“What happened is that he’d call me up and talk all big, all the things he wanted to do, and then he’d come over and he’d just lay down in my bed, get under the covers, and he’d sleep. Strangest thing. Sometimes just a few minutes, sometimes an hour or two. I’d lay next to him and read or watch TV or something. Sometimes we’d talk for a little bit, but once he was there, he’d never make a move on me, and to be honest he’d get sorta peeved if I tried to do anything. Strangest thing, how he’d just lay there and sleep. With his mouth sagged open and snoring up a storm, like it was the deepest sleep of his life.”
“Why would he do that?” Charlie said. He was trying to stay calm. He knew that if he lost his temper or called her a liar, she’d just hang up and likely never take his call again.
“That’s what I wanted to know too,” she said. “And he said ... isn’t that funny. I haven’t thought back on this in ages. He said because he was tired.”
“Tired?”
“I was so puzzled by it at first,” the woman said. “Didn’t know if I ought to be offended, or worried he was planning to steal my stuff or chop me up and put me in a freezer or something, so after a few times, I ask him what on earth his intentions were. And he says he can’t sleep at home. I’m like, so you meet a woman at a bar and use her for her bed? For naptime? What kind of a person does that?”
“What did he sayi?” Charlie cried. He had the receiver smashed to his ear hole. He didn’t want to miss a word. “What did he say?” he said again.
“I finally get this much out of him—he says he can’t sleep at home because he knows he’s no good. Not as good as his wife deserves, anyway. Not the kind of father his kid deserves. Says he’s on edge all the time, every second of the day and night, because he knows he’s not good enough for his family and it’s only a matter of time til his wife leaves him. Says he’s a shit husband and hasn’t really done nothing for himself, never gonna make much money or lose the weight, that it’s only a matter of time til she’s gone. So of course I’m like, ‘You’re out of your mind! What are you doing over here at another woman’s house, giving your wife a reason to leave you when that’s what’s got you so paranoid you’re losing sleep over it in the first place?’ You know? It made me mad, but I also felt bad for the guy. I’m like, ‘You’re so tired, why don’t you sleep in your car? Or a hotel?’”
“What did he say?” said Charlie.
“He says because he can’t sleep when he’s alone.” She was quiet for a moment. “Awful dreams, or something. I finally gathered that the guy was just real lonely. Had a lot of stuff swimming around in his head. Negative stuff...”
Charlie was quiet.
“Had too much swimming around up there and didn’t know what to do, but to climb into a stranger’s life and make himself at home there for a little while.”
Charlie couldn’t speak. His eyes were closed. He felt a frightening powerful sadness climbing inside him. Charlie was picturing his dumb old dad—that dumb old face that he barely even knew anymore. He was picturing that face saying these things. That face feeling these things.
He wondered what his father was doing for Christmas. Jim had left Charlie a voicemail several days earlier, asking if Charlie wanted to spend any time together on Christmas day, but Charlie hadn’t returned the call.
It was silent for a long while.
“For what it’s worth,” the woman finally said, “and I don’t know if it’s what you want to hear, but your dad didn’t seem like a bad guy to me.”
Charlie hung up the phone before erupting with a sob that sounded to his own ears like a huge gaping hole being ripped into the middle of a living thing.
CRUISING ALTITUDE
Laura pressed her forehead to the window of the airplane. Kevin was fast asleep beneath the fleecy airline throw blanket and his sleep mask. The flight attendants wore Santa hats and offered gingerbread snowmen for snacks. They seemed unfazed by the snow in the forecast. Laura absently reached into the pocket of her sweater and recovered a voucher for a free Pilates session with Duffy, one of the personal trainers at her gym. They had given Laura a handful of these when she renewed her membership, but she hadn’t set foot in the gym in months. Laura shoved the voucher back in her pocket and ran her fingers over her stomach, swallowing back a swell of nausea. She flipped through the airline brochure from the seat pocket in front of her. It contained an index of flight terms, trivia, and explanations. It said that at cruising altitude a jet reached a speed of six hundred miles an hour. Laura gazed out the window. The sky was still dark and the airplane seemed to be resting on the bed of clouds beneath them. She could hardly believe the thing was moving at that speed. In fact, she could hardly believe it was moving at all.
She would tell Kevin after the holidays. She was thirteen weeks now, so it would soon be very obvious anyway. Laura wondered if the new baby would be a boy or girl. She remembered now that not long after Charlie had been born, Jim was ready for another. He had always wanted a daughter.
Laura closed her eyes and considered the things she knew, the things that were certain in this moment: the weight of her own head on her own neck, the warmth of the muscles inside her, the length of each breath. In this moment, it felt to Laura as though these things were truly the only certainties in her life, and they comforted her.
Then, from here, she started to consider the things that she didn’t know, the things that were not certain. The particulars of a divorce. The future of her family, and that little pocket of pale fluid inside of her. She considered the way that her love for Jim had shifted and morphed over the years; the landmarks, exact coordinates, and size of this love changing every single day. She considered the fact that the next love they might share would barely even resemble their first love of fifteen years ago. And yet, something inside her suggested that even though this love would continue to change, even though it would sit a little bit differently on this earth from here on out and she could not be certain of its final destination, even so, this tired, sore, graceful old thing was love, and surely this was worth returning to.
The flight attendant came on and announced that they had reached cruising altitude. Laura looked out the window. The sky up above was still deep blue and winking with constellations, but over the horizon of thick, white cloud cover, there was gold in the distance, and soon the sun would rise and swell above the clouds.
The following month, Laura and Charlie would go to live with Jim in his second-floor apartment in the Southtowns. There was a fidelity clause in the prenuptial agreement with Kevin, and Laura would get nothing. Charlie would transfer back to public school and Laura would sell her jewelry, and some of the valuable scarves and articles of clothing, on eBay. She would get a job once the baby was born. She would learn the bus schedules.
Laura would never return to that cathedral that she so loved in Spain, or the pristine beaches of Antigua. She would never again drink a bottle of Cabernet Franc from the ’70s, or eat dinner at Alouette. She would never get to visit the Ryōan-ji gardens and see the little gray-haired gardener in his silk kimono. But, she thought, it was nice to know that those gardens would still be there, and perhaps even that same little gardener, even if she couldn’t see them for herself.
RED MOON
Tracy put the phone back in its receiver and stared at it for a moment. She really hoped that kid was going to be all right.
She hadn’t thought about Jim McNamara in ages. She had tucked him back into that faraway part of her memory reserved for the guilt, the disappointments, the humiliations. She considered now what might’ve happened to that family in the time since her involvement with hi
m. Was this her fault? The hollow heartache in that boy’s voice—had she been part of that? She let herself feel this for a moment.
Tracy decided to go outside for a smoke, and maybe a little walk too. She desperately needed to get out of the house, release some of these troubles into the early morning air. It was Christmas Day, after all. Besides, it always helped clear her head to walk these streets in the strange morning hours. She pulled on her boots, winter coat, gloves.
It was terribly cold outside so she lit a cigarette then got to walking briskly to warm her muscles. She felt rotten. She couldn’t get the pain of that caller’s voice out of her head. All these years of thinking she deserved a better life than the one she was given, all these years of blaming the people around her . . . Now, as she considered how thoughtlessly she’d set things in motion all those years ago . . . And there could be more, she thought; Jim was only one of a dozen married men she’d messed around with. Something ugly inside of her had always been driven to prove that she was as good as a woman who someone considered marriage material—that she was every bit as desirable. There were two truths here, it occurred to her. There was the one that she could easily tell to anyone who’d listen; the one that justified her behavior, quickly wiped away the wrongdoing. And beneath that truth, attached to its underbelly, was the cruelty of carelessness, the damage left in its wake.
She threw her cigarette butt into the snow and walked in the direction of the lake, past the Harts’ home and the Sullivans’ garage. There were no other signs of life on the streets or in the neighborhood homes. She reached the little public-access beach a block or two later, and this is when she noticed a figure out on the lake. A good ways out; a quarter mile or so. It had been a cold winter and Erie had frozen over early, back in November, so now was fit to walk on. The full moon illuminated the faraway figure, across the glaze of frozen snow. Tracy wished she had her binoculars. She wondered what someone was doing that far out on the ice at this time of night; if perhaps they were out to take pictures of the wintry nighttime skyline, or shoveling for hockey in the morning, or just wandering.
Tracy stepped over the crumbling seawall and crossed the narrow snow-covered beach. She approached the water’s edge. She was in her wedge-heeled boots, which weren’t ideal for a trek through snow and across ice. When she stepped out onto the ice, no give or crackle or groan rose from beneath her, so she started out across the lake. Unable to make out what the figure was doing and if they had noticed her, she thought it best to wave in a friendly manner every few steps. The full moon lit her path.
A very large man sat on an upside-down five-gallon bucket. He looked Native American. She guessed he was from the Seneca reservation just a few miles north, near Niagara. He wore a brown knit cap and many layers of clothing. He had a beautiful face with deep, sad, strong lines, a gambler-style cowboy hat, and a long black braid that reached two feet straight and thick down his back. The bucket looked tiny beneath him—he was as big as a bear. He seemed neither startled nor irritated by Tracy’s presence as she approached.
He was positioned over a hole in the ice, eight or ten inches across, and he bounced a fishing rod gently above the hole. A duffel bag sat at his side. One bloody fish lay across the ice next to his bucket. It was a good-sized fish, well over a foot long, nice and fatty in the middle. It had a spiny dorsal fin, which was still erect and shone iridescent against the ice. Its belly was gray, its wide, down-turned mouth bloody and ajar.
“Hola,” Tracy said. She pointed her toe down at the fish. “Walleye?”
The man nodded. He said, “Are you warm enough?” His voice was softer than she expected, coming from such a big frame. His teeth didn’t look so good.
“I’ll manage,” Tracy said.
The man used his free hand to pull a big blue windbreaker-type garment from the duffel bag at his side, and he spread it on the ground next to him, invited her with a gesture to sit down. Tracy sat herself and pulled her knees in to her chest, held them there with her hands clasped in front of her. She pulled her coat sleeves down so they met her gloves at her wrist bones. It was cold. The full moon was white and textured like a biscuit, as though it might crumble to pieces if disturbed. The man cast an enormous shadow across the ice behind them.
An auger and a chisel rested on the ice next to her. She pointed to a tool with a thin screen, like some oversized kitchen apparatus.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Skimmer,” the man said. “Scoops out the slush when you’re making your hole.”
“Ah-ha.” Tracy observed that the man was using an early-model jigging rod with what looked to Tracy like monofilament fishing line; fancy stuff she’d learned from her dad. The stars were bright now. She identified both Dippers, then Orion, in the cloudless sky and pointed them out to the man.
“What kind of a jig have you got on there?” she asked.
“Grub,” he said. He held up his fingers to indicate the length of it; about three inches.
“My dad used those,” Tracy said.
The man lifted the rod then released several more feet of line into the hole.
“You live around here?” Tracy said.
The man seemed confused by the question, and she thought maybe he’d misheard. She decided to drop it. Water lapped quietly deep inside the hole. The man absently reeled in a few inches of his line. Tracy watched him for a minute or two. The moon cast soft blue all across the frozen lake.
“Would you let me have a go at that?” she said. “I’ve got a pretty good touch.”
The man handed her the rod. The line felt taut and the pole was heavier than she expected. The grip was cork and had a nice softness in her left hand.
“Any secrets?” Tracy asked. “I know fishing but I’ve never done it in the ice.”
“Fishing’s fishing,” the man said. “Just bounce her around a little bit every minute or two.”
“You mind if I reel your jig in,” she said, “just to see what I’m working with?”
The handle ticked peacefully in her hands as she reeled in the jig. She examined the bait up close. It was a pink and black speckled soft plastic grub body, slippery and lifelike, a two-color contrast eyeball. A hefty two-pronged hook protruded from the thing’s chest.
Tracy admired the jig, then sent it back into the water, casting and releasing down what she imagined to be ten or twelve feet of line. It had been a while, but still she loved the weight of a fishing rod in her hands, her fingers trained and sensitive to every movement and vibration beneath the water. She wondered if the man was noticing how good her technique was.
“My dad had a good saying,” she said. “‘The fishing was good; it was the catching that was bad.’”
The man smiled.
“You know,” Tracy continued, “I wish we could’ve fished more, me and my dad. He knew so much about it. But he was pretty much outta the picture,” she explained, glancing at the man.
Tracy bounced the line and stared down into the hole for a moment.
Then she tipped her head back to look into the sky. “Hell of a moon tonight,” she said. She tried to remember back to her night, before it had been shaken by the phone call. Something had woken her—was it the light of this moon? Was it a dream?
“Tonight I dreamed . . .” Tracy said, staring across the glittering frozen lake all the way to the downtown skyline, where the lights were tall stacks of unblinking gold eyeballs. “I dreamed I lived a different life.”
Tracy pulled the line in and fingered the jig in her lap. She bent the two-pronged hook ever so slightly so that it was symmetrical, then sent it back into the hole.
The man pulled off his gloves and balanced them on his lap.
Then, he loosened the scarf around his neck, took one end in his hand, and he started to unwrap the scarf, circling it around his head.
“Why are you doing that?” she said.
The man didn’t answer, but continued to unwrap his long scarf and he did it rhythmically, dipping his
head, like this was a beautiful, slow dance that he had done many times before. Around and around he went with his left arm, gathering the long scarf in his right.
Tracy felt a pumping strangeness settle inside her, and her grip on the rod in her hands loosened; she let the line go slack.
The man reached the end of the scarf and pointed his chin up to the sky so that his whole neck was exposed. Tracy gasped. A grotesque tattoo of a snake circled his throat. Two inches thick and circling the whole way around his neck, scaled with blacks and deep greens. Tracy stared at the detailing at the front, directly over the man’s Adam’s apple. The serpent’s mouth open, fangs dripping, preparing to devour its own tail.
Tracy recoiled. It was hideous. “What on earth . . .” She whispered.
The wind swirled around them in frosty spinning cones.
Tracy leaned in for a closer look at his tattoo. “Did it hurt?”
“Yes,” he said.
Tracy continued to stare at the tattoo, the snake’s jaw open wide and dripping, ravenous to destroy its own tail.
Tracy said, “I feel afraid.”
“It’s OK.” The man nodded up into the sky and said, “Look there.”
Tracy looked upward and was startled to see that the moon had gone red, glowing rusty like a big chunk of brick up there.
“What’s happening?” she whispered.
“Lunar eclipse,” the man said.
Tracy had never seen one before, not even on TV or anything. It was really remarkable. There was a gold arc developing over the northernmost edge of the moon. It looked like it had a pulse.
Tracy glanced up at the man, who rotated his toothpick back and forth in his lips. She didn’t feel afraid anymore—just very peculiar.
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