Audrey’s Door

by Sarah Langan

  The driveway was marked with chalk. Numbered single upon double boxes. Hopscotch! She’d only ever seen this on television, but the rules looked simple enough. Audrey leaped inside a box, and coaxed the girl to do the same. One foot! Two foot! Three foot! Four! They hopped back and forth, laughing, while in the distance the boy shouted, “Higher, Daddy, higher. I want to fly!”

  Her family unborn. How she loved them.

  But dark storm clouds swallowed the puffy white cumulus. The sky opened, and black rain poured. The sticky little fingers holding her hand disappeared. The chalk washed away, and the empty tire swing creaked. Sadness carved a whole in her stomach: Saraub was gone, too.

  A gaunt woman with wiry white hair and pink plastic barrettes watched her from the window. Betty. Audrey’s blood went cold as it pumped.

  It’s a bad place where you live, Lamb, she’d said, and now Audrey thought: But I live with you, Mom. I’ve always lived with you.

  The woman receded from the window, and into darkness. Black rain fell. Something pricked her bare toes. Sharp pins and needles. The ground swelled with black water. Red ants seeking higher ground thrashed. They crawled up her legs in uneven clumps that looked like weeping scabs. She swiped, but not fast enough. Tiny mouths pinched. They chewed her insides until she was hollow and bleeding like a full-term miscarriage.

  Once inside, they met with the thing in her stomach and expanded. They took her over, mind and body. Her eyes went black. Against her will, she walked through the Victorian’s cardboard-box front door. At the end of a long, dark hall was a den: 14B. They were waiting for her there. Clara and her rosy-cheeked children, the man in the three-piece suit, Mrs. Parker and her tight dress, Marty Hearst and his shaking dukes, Evvie Waugh and his stolen cane, masked Mr. Galton. The rest of the tenants, too. All except Jayne. They parted like a splitting sea to reveal another door. It was built on a slant, and instead of cardboard, its frame was made of satinwood. She walked toward it like a bride meeting her groom, while on all sides, the tenants clapped.

  Her family, unborn. How she hated them.

  The door opened. Shining black eyes peered back at her, just as 14B’s ceiling buckled, and everything came crashing down.

  Bam!

  She jolted in her seat as the plane touched down into Eppley Airfield Tuesday evening. Rubbed her eyes. The dream fled from her, and she remembered only black rain, and a door.

  One row over, Saraub peeked out at her, and waved. “We’re here!” he said.

  She patted her thighs with corresponding hands at exactly the same time. Once, twice, three times, four. That wasn’t enough, so she went for five times, six times, lucky seven. “Yup,” she said. “We’re here.”

  18

  Sweet Air

  As soon as they got their bags, they rented a white Camry and started the short drive from Omaha to Betty’s hospital in Lincoln. Since it was after five, visiting hours had ended at the hospital, so they didn’t rush. They took the long way through downtown, then west along Cornhusker Road.

  After a few miles, they passed her old apartment building. She didn’t recognize it by sight, only by street address. Its white paint had chipped, and its tin cornices had rusted. The three-level boardinghouses that used to surround it had been converted into stucco efficiencies. Fold-out chairs with slashed leather seats and a broken red barbecue lay rusting in its front yard.

  She slowed as she passed. Funny, she’d missed this place a lot when she first moved to New York. She’d imagined its black walls, and the days that had passed there without expectation. Now, she remembered hash exhaustion, the constant phone calls, always from the same person—Betty—and the loneliness of wind against a drafty house on a dark night. She’d grown so comfortable with those things that she’d mistaken this dump for happiness. Next to her, Saraub dozed. She didn’t wake him up to point the place out as they passed, or even look back.

  The US 480 sign (which read “U 80”) directed her left, but habit guided her hand, and she turned right. The street looked like an empty strip mall: Appleby’s, Outback Steakhouse, Sizzler, IHOP. Between them were large tracts of land that couldn’t be traversed by foot, only car. Since she’d left, most of the dime stores and folksy diners serving cold cheese sandwiches had folded.

  Audrey pulled into one of the lots, then took a fast, nervous breath like she’d swallowed something cold.

  “Hey—Where are we?” Saraub yawned.

  She peered through the tall glass windows that ran the length of the restaurant. Waitresses in blue uniforms and black shoes scurried to and from the heat-lamp counter in the kitchen while out-of-shape truckers ate breakfast for dinner. In the back was that blasted convection oven that had burned her hands into claws. She remembered the smell of the place—grease, boysenberry-flavored syrup, coffee. She’d been afraid of germs back then and had used a rag instead of her hands to lift dirty dishes. Tips she’d placed in her apron pocket, then washed her hands once or three times, but never twice. Unless Billy Epps took her out back and smoked her up. Then she relaxed. Of course, getting high had been part of the reason she’d burned herself.

  “Is this your old job?” Saraub asked.

  She nodded. They looked for a while. She didn’t turn off the ignition, even though her stomach growled, and buttermilk pancakes sounded pretty good. Instead, she pointed her chin at the white-and-blue-painted IHOP sign. “It doesn’t spin anymore. I wonder why.”

  “Looks like its seen better days.”

  “It has.” Audrey looked down at her fingers. The right hand was scarred worse than the left, but both were oversized for her body, like oven mitts. The first and only time Saraub had brought her home to his family, Sheila Ramesh had run her thumb and index finger along Audrey’s scabs while they shook. You’re a working girl? she’d asked, and at first Audrey had thought she meant hooker.

  “Let’s go in. You can show everybody you’re a big shot now,” Saraub said. His hand was on the door.

  Audrey peered into the restaurant. Her old manager looked back at them through one of the cracked windows, like she was trapped inside a giant web. She wore exactly the same beehive Miss Breck hairdo she’d sported fifteen years ago. The same old ladies were waiting tables, too. Even the same hostess stood at the podium—she’d started the job as a high-school kid, and nobody’d died yet, so she hadn’t gotten her promotion.

  And then, oh, no. No way. Two cars over, Billy Epps leaned against his rust-bucket VW van, smoking a blunt. His hair was gone now, and his chest had gotten concave. Hard living. How old was he? Forty? And still a busboy. When she left, he’d only just started the switch from hash to crystal meth. Looked like he’d been smoking his product, because most of his teeth were gone.

  I’m proud to know you, Audrey Lucas, he’d told her on her last day of work. If only he’d known how often, during those first scary days in New York, she’d replayed that sentiment in her mind, and found courage. Sweet Billy.

  “I can’t go in there,” she said. “It’s the same people I used to work with. I’d feel uncomfortable, having them wait on us.”

  Saraub’s brows knit in confusion. “That’s their job. They don’t care.”

  She shook her head. Saraub had never been a waiter, only waited on. It was moments like this that reminded her of the difference. “Trust me, they’ll care. I don’t belong there anymore.” She pulled out of the lot and back onto the road.

  A few turns later, they were at the highway. The sky above was open and blue. In her mind she folded the grassland scenery on top of itself, to give it boundaries. “Think you can hold out for dinner until Lincoln?”

  He nodded, wincing as he turned his neck back and forth, like he’d gotten a crick. “Let me,” she said, then reached out and rubbed it with her thumb and index fingers. “Least I can do for your troubles.”

  He smiled in a way that meant nookie. “I’ve got all kinds of aches.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  “I’ll hold you to that…. Woul
d you change anything about this place?”

  “What?”

  “About growing up, I mean. Do you wish you’d gone to school in Chicago after college, or had a dad?”

  She let go of his neck. “I try not to think about it. There’s nothing I can do, you know?”

  “Yeah. That makes sense…. I miss my dad.”

  “Why don’t you ever talk about him?”

  He shrugged. “He’s dead. What’s there to say?” Then he changed the subject. “I didn’t expect Nebraska would be like this. There’s something about it that’s sad. Like it’s too raw. Exposed, you know?”

  “I’m sorry I never got to meet him. You’ll have to tell me about him sometime…” She left him some time to answer, and when he didn’t, she continued. “Nebraska is God’s Country. That’s what my mom called it, at least.”

  Just then, a sixteen-wheeler full of chickens packed as tight as jigsaw pieces passed them on the right. He lifted her hand and placed it on his neck. “Needy!” she said as she rubbed. “Since you asked, I thought of one thing I’d change: I wish I’d tried harder to make friends. I’d have been happier if I hadn’t been so lonely,” she said.

  “Did you get teased?” Saraub asked.

  She veered onto US 80 West toward Lincoln and Betty’s hospital. “Teased?”

  “Yeah. Who picked on you?”

  She shook her head. “We moved too often. I didn’t have a bully. It was more—I was invisible. I didn’t stay in any one school more than a few months. Sometimes girls wrote stuff on the bathroom walls, but nobody ever said anything to my face. I think they knew better. I was too weak to defend myself, and they just weren’t that mean. You’ve seen the scars on my wrists. They were a lot thicker then. I couldn’t cover them up with a little face makeup like I do now. Trying to kill yourself is a lot bigger than being a misfit, you know? They were decent people. They left me alone. My whole life, until I met you, I was invisible. Sometimes I’d be walking down 42nd Street after seeing a movie by myself in one of those big stadium seat theatres, and someone in the crowd would accidentally shove me and keep walking, and I’d have this moment, you know? Where I’d wonder if they saw me. If I was even alive.”

  “I see you,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why you’re scary.”

  He shrugged. “Thanks. I thought it was because I’m Indian. You know, I didn’t fit in, either.”

  “No?” she asked. Signs pointed for the open plains of Ashland. Another city where she and Betty had lived for a few months, hoping for a fresh start, and instead finding the same old mess. “But you were a lineman on the Choate football team. Who fits in better than that?”

  He adjusted his seat belt so that the harness wasn’t against his neck, and she dropped her hand, because it was tired. “I don’t know. The white kid at Choate?” He said “white kid” with a bitterness that surprised her. She’d never known him to hold a grudge. Mr. Laid Back People Pleaser. Once, he ate undercooked chicken at his second cousin’s restaurant in Queens, just because he hadn’t wanted to complain. He wound up in the hospital the next day with a bad case of salmonella.

  “It didn’t help that I was a day commuter, and my parents wouldn’t let me date.” He let out an audible breath. “Some of them, you know…”

  “What? I don’t know. People are like aliens to me. I can never guess what they’ll do.”

  Saraub smiled wide enough that she could see the tiny space between his incisors, but once he started talking, the smile turned stiff. “Well, you know me and cameras. I was always filming things, kind of a Peeping Tom.”

  “And then?”

  “So I took a camera into the locker room after a game. I was interviewing everybody. You know, stupid stuff: how does it feel to be division champs? I thought everybody liked it—I’d make copies so we could all remember the season. And then, I don’t know. I went to my locker the next day, and somebody had spray-painted ‘fag.’”

  She squeezed the wheel. “Who? Who did that?”

  “These puffy red letters, like subway graffiti. Andrew Lafferty.”

  “Andrew Lafferty is a stupid asshole and I hate him and I’m going to find him and punch him in the face.”

  “That helps, Audrey. You fixed that real good.”

  “Right now I’m scanning his brain until it explodes. You’ll see it on the news tonight.”

  Saraub nodded. “Take out my cameraman for me while you’re at it. He’s been drinking again.”

  “Oh, good, we’re being mean. I hope Jill Sidenschwandt gets explosive diarrhea. Truly. So what happened after that?”

  “Well, Andrew thought I’d been coming on to him. I, I guess I did like him. I wanted to be his friend. Mr. Captain America. When I was interviewing him, I didn’t punch him in the shoulder, you know? Instead”—he winced with shame—“I slapped his ass.”

  “So?” Audrey asked.

  “So, men don’t slap each other’s asses in locker rooms.”

  “I thought that was a thing. You were all into that.”

  He shook his head. “I thought so, too, because the Giants did it on Monday Night Football. But no. So Andrew didn’t say anything when I did it, but I guess he didn’t like it. After the graffiti, the rumors started. Everybody thought I was a fag. By the next season the team wouldn’t change in front of me. Maybe they really believed it, maybe it was just an excuse, because I was this Indian kid with a weird name, and I smelled like curry.”

  Throughout, his voice was level. Matter-of-fact. She marveled at how good he was at keeping his feelings tight as piano strings. “It’s embarrassing, when you have to explain to your coach that the reason the team makes you put your jock on in a corner is because they think you’re perving on them.”

  Audrey shook her head. “You have such a good personality. You could get along with Hitler. I always figured you’d fit in anywhere,” she told him.

  His smile was an empty grimace. She was surprised by it. “Thanks. It was just that year. Mostly, I did fine. But to be honest, I never tried very hard, either. I liked my movies and football, and until you came along, that was about it.”

  “Well fuck ’em. Fuck every one of them.” The anger in her voice came as a surprise to herself. “Why would you want to fit in with people like that?”

  He shook his head. “We’re just different. Both of us. We want stuff most people don’t care about. With the stuff we make, we want to change the world. We want to live forever. It’s a funny kind of vanity, and I can’t figure out if it makes us better, or worse.”

  “Whatever. That’s no excuse. I hope all those losers who teased you have tragic hair now. Middle parts and dandruff. I’d be gratified by that knowledge.”

  “No hair. Cue balls,” he said while combing his fingers through his own receding hairline. It was about a half inch higher than when she’d met him. It occurred to her that their backgrounds were different, but in one basic way, they were similar. They didn’t like themselves. Or more aptly put, they were never content with what they were but were always striving for something better. Which seemed pretty dumb, given the boys on the 59th Street team, who probably built shrines to their balls in their attics but couldn’t figure out how to unscrew a lightbulb without instructions.

  “Do you regret being Indian?” she asked.

  He looked up her, surprised. “Sometimes,” he said. “Not just my skin. The way I look, generally,” he said, with his hands on his belly. It wasn’t nearly as big as he imagined.

  “But I love you how you are,” she told him, then reached her hand across the seat and pulled the wool fabric of his trousers between her fingers. His voice was hoarse. “Thanks.”

  She veered off the highway at Lincoln but kept her hand in his lap. He picked it up and squeezed. The moment felt too good to ruin with words, so she didn’t.

  This was the first time they’d driven in a car together, and it felt more real than anything they’d ever done. Like the two of them had sloughed th
eir city shells, and the skin underneath, unaccustomed to exposure, was soft and easily bruised.

  Ten miles down, the road narrowed. Farmland stretched in every direction. There weren’t any cars anymore. Only the sound of wheels on cement.

  “What’s that smell?” Saraub asked.

  She smiled, because it had been a long time since she’d smelled air this sweet. “Corn. The combines do the threshing right there in the fields. Farmers, they’d get squirrelly in summer if a couple of weeks went by without rain. Whole towns would be on edge. You could practically hear them collectively grinding their teeth at night like crickets. They prayed for rain, then when it came, they prayed for it to stop. That’s why my mom called it God’s Country.”

  “God’s Country. I like that.”

  They were still holding hands. Warmth threaded through her stomach, and in this quiet car, on this dark road, on the way to visit her sick mother, she felt safe. She wondered if she’d lived for so long without happiness, that now that it had found her, she couldn’t recognize it. “Why do you punch walls?”

  He let go of her hand, then pressed his nose against the passenger window, so she couldn’t see him. “What do you mean?”

  “The walls in your study. You punched them. I saw the marks. There were holes.” It seemed important to her now to know. Maybe she’d driven him to it, with her endless bleaching and straightening. Maybe she’d driven Betty to her red ants, too.

  “I guess I get mad,” he said, still showing her the back of his head.

  “At me?” She was close to crying all over again. Surprising how hard this question had been to ask.

  He nodded. “Yeah.” The tears came fast to her cheeks. He didn’t notice them. “But not just you. A lot of things…I’ve always done that. Punched things when I’m alone. So no one knows when I’m mad. Did it scare you?”