by Owen Egerton
We both still cried, but never in the same room.
The legal wheels were turning. But the whole thing moved slow and absurd. Requests for dismissals. Rescheduling. Submissions and papers and nothing concrete.
I retreated to the university, pointlessly filling an office. She had lunches. She started back at work. We sank into ourselves like butterflies reverting to pupa. She closed her wings about her body and disappeared from me, and me from her. We remerged changed and alien to one another. She was a mother. I was something else.
One afternoon I came home and heard her laughing. That sound in our house was gross, absurd. And another voice was with her. I found her and Manuel Cruz in Miles’s room. The floor was draped with a white dropcloth. Manuel held a dripping roller. Carrie stood in overalls, a smudge on her cheek like she was a Home Depot ad.
“Hey Oliver,” Manuel said, subduing his laughter.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Carrie smiled—that new untrue smile. That trying smile that I despised.
“It’s called Sunrise Yellow. They say it mellows when it dries. I hope to God it does.”
The room was grotesque and changed.
“What are you doing?” I asked again.
“I know it’s a little early. But I figured we’d get a jump on things.” She kept the smile there, but it was dying in the corners, rotting on her face like bad fruit.
“Now, Oliver,” Manuel said, his voice bloated with compassion. “I know you’re hurting. But—”
I walked from the room.
Carrie followed, grabbing my shoulder in the hallway, whispering angry, “Oliver, this doesn’t mean I love Miles any less.”
“Of course it does. Of course it does.”
I watch the water boil, the dry noodles in my hand. The water steams to nothing. I refill the pot from my shower and begin again. On the third pot, I drop the ramen in. The bubbles pause when the noodles hit, the heat trying to catch up.
From outside, a squeak on the steps. I pause.
A knock on the door.
Lyle wouldn’t knock. Miller would yell. No one else would visit.
“Oliver? Can I come in?”
Ashley inches the door open, holding a pumpkin in her arms and dangling a bottle of wine from between her fingers. “Is this an okay time?”
“You startled me.”
“I’m terrifying.” She hands me the pumpkin. “Corkscrew?”
“Sorry, no.” I place the pumpkin down on the table beside the boiling noodles. She looks flushed and beautiful.
“Hope it’s all right I hunted you down.” she says, opening my one kitchen-area drawer and rummaging for a corkscrew. “John Hendon. He pointed the way.”
In November the weather dropped to below freezing for a few nights, and I invited John Hendon and two others Agape regulars to share my shack. Mr. Miller was not pleased.
“Wait, it’s screw top. We’re saved!” She grabs two coffee cups and begins pouring from the bottle.
She puts the cup in my hand. She’s been drinking. That’s clear. She clinks her mug to mine and takes a long swallow. I don’t.
Now her eyes study the space and she hums a little. She picks up a fork and stirs the noodles. “Salt keeps the noodles from sticking, have any?”
“No.”
“Well, I never minded sticky noodles.” She looks at me, her eyes suddenly younger. “Is it okay that I’m here?”
I place the cup down. “You brought a pumpkin.”
“Yes!” she turns from the pot. “I saw it at the store and I thought, hell, pumpkins are hollow.” She knocks her knuckles against it. “Why not Earth?”
She grabs a knife from the drawer and stabs the pumpkin, cutting with quick jerks. “I say if it happens in the small, it can happen in the large. Right? So check it out.” She lifts a lid from the pumpkin and motions for me to look. I stare in.
“So the world is a pumpkin,” she says.
“It rings like a bell,” I say.
“What?”
“When a planet is hit by an asteroid or anything, the planet rings like a bell. The one that killed the dinosaurs must have echoed for decades.”
“And there’s holes, you said? Ways in.”
“Many. Some small and undiscovered. The biggest are at the poles.” I turn the burner off and the boiling ends. “Why are you here, Ashley?”
“I like talking to you,” she says. She stares for a long moment. “You never wrote me. Not a word. Not a phone call.”
“What would I have said?”
“Everyone thought I was lying. The police, my lawyer, my dad. Everyone thought I knew more than I was saying.” She sits on the cot. “My dad thought I was going to jail. I thought I was, too.”
“For what?”
“For helping to murder your son.”
“I didn’t—”
“I know.” She holds her mug in both hands. “Doesn’t matter much.”
“Whether I killed my son?”
She waits for a moment, her eyes down. “I was the one who found my mom,” she says into the mug. “I was going out for the night and she didn’t want me to leave. We argued. I was supposed to be home at midnight, but I stayed out till two, came home, and found her on the floor.”
“She didn’t kill herself because you went out.”
“The coroner said she took a bottle of pills at eleven forty-five.” She looked at me with desperate eyes, desperate for me to understand. “She was waiting for me. She thought I’d come home and find her alive, and I’d call an ambulance. She didn’t plan on dying. But I didn’t come home on time. She was waiting, and I didn’t come.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I feel like I killed her. I know that’s crazy, but I feel it. And then they tell me I helped kill your little boy.”
“You didn’t.”
“I know I didn’t. Jesus.” She stops. “But I did make you leave your house.” She looks back into her mug. “I did try . . .”
There’s a long quiet and I watch her sitting there. She’s still so young. I had never once, not even once, thought about how everything had hit her. Miles was mine and Carrie’s. It was our tragedy, but, of course, it was hers, too.
“Ashley,” I say. “It’s not your fault.”
She looks up at me, nodding, her eyes wet and dark. “You could have told me that.”
She wipes her eyes and exhales a long breath.
“So, this is funny,” she says. “In grad school I hooked up with this professor. Kind of looked like you.” She glances at me. “I think I had to get it out of my system, you know?” She stands, picks up the bottle and pours more wine. “I broke his heart. Never knew I had it in me. I mean, I was always the shy one. I could never even speak to you without shaking a little. But Roger, that was his name, Roger called me ten times a day for a month begging me to . . . well, I don’t even know what he wanted. Finally I threatened to tell his wife and I never heard from him again.”
“He was married?”
“With kids.” She smiles—it’s a mix of shame and pride. “Can you imagine? Really, I never knew I was the type. And you know what?”
“Tell me.”
“I was cruel to him.”
She looks at me for a long time. Maybe she’s waiting for me to forgive her this as well? Maybe I’m her confessor? Or maybe it’s a proposition and she’s waiting for my answer.
“It’s hollow. It’s not empty.”
“What?” she asks.
“The pumpkin,” I say. “And the Earth. It’s hollow. But it’s not empty. I want to know what’s in there.”
She moves to the pumpkin and looks in. I join her, our heads close, staring into the mass of orange webbing and seeds.
“What do you see?” I ask.
<
br /> “It’s like spiderwebs,” she says. “Or maybe a nervous system.”
“I see angels,” I say. “Yellow and orange wings.”
I watch her. Her skin is yogurt and rose. She raises her head and sees me looking. She leans across the pumpkin and kisses my neck just below the jawbone. I don’t move.
“I’m not a professor anymore,” I say.
“I’m not a student.”
She steps to me and lifts her hands to my face. She leaves them there until the heat comes through. How long? How long since I was touched?
“If I kiss you,” she says, “will you kiss me back?”
She moves close to me and her body brushes back and forth across mine, and though I’m wordless through and through, she hushes me. And I know I will kiss her. I will lose all I can in her.
She draws closer. “Poor thing,” she breathes. “Poor thing.”
I think back to my office, and a younger Ashley, and that injured grackle she cradled in. She has the same look now as she did then. That same thrilled pity. Only now it’s a shed, not a university office. Only now it’s me, not a dying bird. I’m flapping useless wings and it thrills her.
I step back. Her eyes narrow, considering me.
“I think I should have some more wine,” she says, picking up the bottle.
In an hour’s time the wine bottle is empty and Ashley lies, fully dressed, on my bed.
“It’s so bright,” she says with a yawn.
I switch off the lamp and sit on my chair. Squirrels chase and dance above us. I hear her breathing.
“I don’t want to steal your bed,” she says. “Do you want to lay down with me?”
For some reason I can smell her better in the dark. The cool smell of cut flowers and her red wine breath. I don’t move from my chair. I listen to her breathing. She must be asleep. But then she speaks.
“What do you think you’ll find in there? Angels?”
“Answers,” I say.
“Do you want to know a secret?” she asks, her voice sleepy and a little drunk. “Life is not fair and the universe doesn’t care.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But we want it to be fair. Don’t we all think it should be fair? I mean, is it possible that compassion is just something we made up?”
“Sure,” she says.
“And the universe has no justice, no real kindness, no soul?”
“Maybe we’re the soul,” she says. “Each of us a little a chunk of soul.”
I wait in the quiet, then begin.
“There was a man named Cyrus Teed,” I tell her. “He was a scientist and philosopher and claimed to have seen God as a woman robed in gold and purple. In the late 1800s he traveled America lecturing his ideas. He taught that God was both male and female, that matter and electricity were interchangeable, and that the Earth was hollow.”
“Ah ha,” she breathes a laugh.
“But he had a twist. We, all humanity, everything we see, is on the inside. On the concave surface. If we could fly straight up we’d reach the other side of the world. If we were to dig down a hundred miles, we’d reach the empty void of space.”
“Cool,” she says, and I can hear her smile.
“Can you imagine giving up everything to journey into the Earth‘s interior and discovering we’ve been here the whole time,” I say, laughing a little. “My God, I hope there’s something better than us at the center of all of this.”
“Oliver,” she says, her voice nearly a whisper. “Don’t go back to the Agape Center, okay?”
I don’t say a thing. I let her words float in the dark.
“You don’t belong and I don’t like seeing you there,” she says, her voice slurred with sleep. “Go back to teaching.”
“I’ve got nothing to teach.”
“Do something. Go somewhere,” she mumbles. “Go to the North Pole. Just do something.”
“I don’t have the money,” I say. But that’s not quite true.
Before long her breathing deepens and I know she’s asleep. I lay a sheet over her.
I stay awake with her smell, cut flowers, and her breathing, tiny waves breaking on a soft shore. She dreams, her body moving slightly under the sheet and I am again perplexed as to her presence.
Ashley sleeps. I stay awake and remember.
My lawyer had prepared us as best he could. This wasn’t a trial. Tom wasn’t even going to be in the room. Just the judge, prosecuting lawyer, and a jury of our peers—a grand jury. They weren’t deciding innocence or guilt, just whether there should be a trial.
We sat in the courtroom lobby—Tom, Carrie, and I—waiting to be called in.
“I’ll be so glad when this is over and we can get back to our lives,” Carrie said, her face round with new pregnant weight. Her eyes bright and terrified.
“Amen,” said Tom.
Carrie wore a navy-blue dress, her belly just beginning to bulge. She held my hand.
They called her first.
“This might take a while,” Tom said. “Want a coffee or something?”
“What are they asking her?”
“What happened that night. How’s your marriage. Are you stable.”
I sighed.
“Oliver, I’ve told you, they don’t have a case. You’re fine. Still no cause of death. They don’t even have a method. They’ve got a forensic toxicologist making guesses.” He paused for a beat. “They’re just shooting in the dark.”
“I understand.”
“I’m not wild about the prosecutor. The smarmy bastard wants to make a name for himself.” He said. “So you got a little tipsy. Spilled some scotch. It was Christmas Eve, for God’s sake.”
I nodded.
“You loved your son,” he said, nodding to himself. “That’s what counts.”
For thirty-five minutes I sat with Tom. I opened up a magazine, but I had already began my nonreading days. When I looked up, Tom would catch my eye and smile. So I stopped looking up.
Finally she came out. I should have known then. Her face was different—older and drawn.
“So,” Tom said, standing. “How’d it go?”
I stood, too. She glanced at me. Something had changed. Not tears, not grief. This was something new again. Her eyes never saw me that way before.
“I need to use the bathroom,” she said, and walked away.
Tom patted my back. “Your turn.”
In the witness booth, they swore me in. I looked over the jury, curious to see if I knew any of them. But as it turned out, my peers were all strangers.
The prosecuting lawyer was handsome, almost charming. He asked me to recount the events of Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. I described the evening walk, the neighborhood party, leaving for the grocery store. I had repeated it so many times, it no longer felt that I was leaving anything out.
“And at what time did you leave to buy milk?”
“I’m not sure. Eleven or twelve.”
“Odd time to make a run to the grocery store,” he said, pacing the courtroom before me, smiling at me.
“I wanted us to have ingredients to make—”
“Pancakes. Yes, you said that.” He paused, placing his palms together, an open-eyed prayer. “You say you left before twelve, yes?”
I nodded.
“But according to your credit card you didn’t purchase anything until two-sixteen a.m. on Christmas morning.” He stared at me, silent for a moment.
“I could be wrong about the time.”
His eyes brightened, as if the question was only now occurring to him. “Dr. Bonds, what were you doing for those two hours?”
I saw the faces of the jury, saw their muscles tense, foreheads crease.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Like I said, I may have had the time wrong.”
“You ha
d been drinking, correct?”
“Well, yes. Not much.” I said. “We’d been at a party and—”
“Dr. Bonds, did you plan on having a child?” he asked, turning from me as he spoke.
“Yes. We both wanted a family.”
“Wasn’t your wife on birth control when she became pregnant with your son?”
“She still had a prescription, but we had stopped using it.”
“Did you regret her pregnancy?”
“No,” I said, sand in my throat. “I wanted to have a child.”
“And you took life insurance for your baby. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” I said, looking to the jury. “I took it out for all of us. It was a package deal.”
“So you were prepared for the possibility of your baby dying?” he asked.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Were you happy as a married man, Dr. Bonds? As a father?”
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded slowly. Then pointed to a flat-screen television hanging on the wall of the courtroom.
“Can you tell me who this is?”
For a moment the screen buzzed black, then an image snapped into view—Ashley’s naked body on the green couch. The picture she’d sent me that night.
“Do you know this woman?”
The image glared from the screen.
“Dr. Bonds?”
“Did you show this to Carrie?” I asked, hearing the pitifulness of the words as I spoke them.
“Please answer the question. Who is this woman?”
“I’d . . . rather not say.”
“She’s a student of yours, isn’t she?”
“A former student,” I said.
“Were you or are you having an affair with this woman?”
“No.”
“You did not have sex with this woman?”
“I didn’t.”
“She just sent you a picture. Maybe for extra credit?”
A few snickers. Sick air in that room.
Now I looked at him. He was building a narrative. His story was better than mine. My version had no lesson, no moral. It made no sense and therefore floated like fluff. The handsome lawyer was offering a reason this had all happened. My God, how we wanted a reason.