by Gian Sardar
When she landed, there was no one around, and she’d looked up, relieved her fall had not been witnessed, yet also disturbed, like a child who needs a mother’s gaze for comfort and a release of tears. She was alone, and the palms of her hands stung, pricked red. Blood on her knee soaked and smudged right through her ruined nylons, and her mind instantly conjured Mrs. Pinkston, a prim lady who during the war painted her legs with tea and drew a seam with eyeliner on the backs of her calves, though everyone else in town simply accepted ankle socks and slacks. Mrs. Pinkston’s dresses were at least a decade old, the fabric worn and almost transparent in some places, yet she’d cared desperately about her nylons.
Eva was still thinking of Mrs. Pinkston when suddenly she saw the legs of a man squatted before her, and heard a deep, smooth voice asking if she was all right. She looked up slowly, so absorbed in Mrs. Pinkston she was confused as to where she was—the sidewalk was unfamiliar, the sounds different from those in Luven, the voice unfamiliar, a movie star’s voice. When she saw the man’s face, she was more confused. The man was striking.
He held her elbow to keep her steady as they walked. He’d studied to be a doctor, he said, and his house wasn’t far. She nodded and glanced at him a couple of times, still feeling as though she were walking in someone else’s life.
“I was across the street,” he said, “leaving the watch shop, when I saw you. Forgive me for asking, but was someone chasing you?”
A small laugh, one she tried to hold back. “Only the life I didn’t want.”
To that he’d smiled. “I know that chase well. Here, just down this street.”
When she saw the house he took her to, a feminine little place, she came back to herself. He had a wife. Of course he did. But there was no ring. And then he was dabbing a warm washcloth on her knee, slowly, delicately, gazing at her whole leg and not just the injury. If there was a wife or a girlfriend, the house was pretty silent and the husband’s gaze mighty liberal.
“You’ve got a nice house,” she said.
He laughed. “It came like this. Old-lady wallpaper and everything.”
A shot of relief spiked her pulse. Suddenly she was nervous, realizing there was possibility. “So is this the life you’re running from?”
He looked surprised but answered. “No. It might not look like it, but this is the one I’ve run to.” He poured hydrogen peroxide on a cotton ball. “My life is complicated. Brace yourself, this might sting.”
As he pressed the cotton ball to her knee she closed her eyes tight, trying to block the pain. “Everyone’s life is complicated,” she said. “If it’s not, you’re dead. So I can handle the complication. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never even crossed the Mississippi.”
When she opened her eyes, she saw he no longer had the cotton ball on her knee but was watching her. Normally she didn’t like brown eyes, but his were a lure. A warm, captivating lure. He wasn’t looking away either. He was staring into her eyes, and that’s when she saw it—all that was to happen with them. Not only did she see it but she felt it; it struck her with such force it knocked out her thoughts and left her wondering what was just said. She finally looked down, to his wrist, a tear on the cuff of his sleeve.
“You have a tear.”
He lifted his arm, examining the rip. “I caught my wrist on the gate. When I saw you falling, I reached out. Ridiculous, of course, you were so far away.”
“Instinct.” The press of his gaze was almost too much. “Do you have needle and thread?”
And so she sat at his kitchen table, mending the sleeve, while he stood at the stove in a different shirt, asking questions. She answered everything honestly, telling him about clothes she made and about Luven, how people could drive in and out of town with their breath held, it was that small. She told him about the trains that went through, always stopping even though no one ever boarded, no one thought to leave. And when she was done, she realized she had asked him nothing, yet there were so many questions, where to begin? “Did they fix your watch?”
He reached into his coat, which was hanging on the back of the chair, and handed her the most beautiful pocket watch she’d ever seen, with green, almost iridescent enamel. The back was inscribed: Time stands still when you are near. She looked up to find him still watching her.
“It was my grandfather’s,” he said. “Legend was it stopped working when my grandmother died. To the minute. But now it’s working. Hasn’t missed a beat yet.”
“Do you believe that?”
“That the watch knew when she’d died? No. But he did, and he never fixed it.”
“Well, the rest of his life would be about that time. Makes sense that the watch should be as well.”
“A romantic, I see.”
The heat in her cheeks must have entertained him, as his smile only grew. She looked out the window, to the long driveway. “Which hospital do you work at?”
“I don’t. I found the healthy people in construction much more to my liking. I have a company, actually, right by the park.”
In her mind a vague map of Rochester unfurled. His office had been much closer to where she’d fallen. Much closer, indeed. And yet he’d taken her to his house for a reason, she realized, and so when she handed him his shirt, she’d lifted her bare leg and pointed out a little scrape on her ankle. Do you mind?
She might have encouraged, but he initiated. And he, of course, was the one with the information, information he withheld until they’d had dinner and Eva was already caught in the warm snare of his brown eyes, was already rehearsing the stories he’d told so she could hear them again as she fell asleep. He knew what he was opening the door to, the labyrinth of his life. And though in the past she’s seen that as proof of their overwhelming connection, now she sees differently. Now she sees it as cruel.
You made me love you.
15
Now
DRIVING BACK FROM DINNER with her mother, Abby passes the grocery store, a gas station, the bank. Reporters are poised anywhere they might encounter someone scared, someone with a story—which is just about everywhere.
“Looks like we’re officially national news. Not that I think we need it,” Dorothy says, “but I have someone coming to install another lock.”
“Tonight?” Abby turns her phone on—it’s close to nine PM.
“Three places, I called,” Dorothy says. “All booked. This guy’s a friend of Tom’s; he’s fitting us in after hours. Not for a friendly price, but such is life.”
Though the media is a thick, undeniable force, the actual people of Makade are sparse, and their neighborhood is quiet, the lack of life a strange sort of presence itself. Noticeable. Curtains are drawn, windows shut tight. “You can see him still, you know,” Abby says about Tom. “You don’t have to stay home for me.”
“I want to stay home for you.” A pause, then a smile of admission. “That, and he’s at a conference in Milwaukee till Thursday.”
Back at the house, the sound of the drill, the whirring and shaking, the doorframe rattling the wall, only creates anxiety. Abby shuts the door to her room and calls Hannah.
“Okay, pizza,” Hannah says after a while. “‘Friends eating pizza. At a park.”
“I think this is trouble.”
“I know this is trouble.”
“Do you still love me even if I want someone who’s not my boyfriend? It feels weird to even say that.”
“My love for you has nothing to do with who you want. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“But by who? The one who keeps putting his career before our relationship and wouldn’t even come here? Or the guy I always felt I’d be with, for some crazy reason? The one who’s going out of his way at the worst time to not only see me but help me?”
Hannah gives a little laugh. “When you put it like that, I want to smack Robert.”
“Maybe t
his is all in my head. Maybe Aidan has a savior complex.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.”
“I feel guilty, even though nothing’s happened.”
“Abby, you feel guilty because everything’s happened. Listen, I don’t want to defend Robert too much, but this is a four-year relationship you’re talking about. And maybe it’s not that he’s putting his career ahead of you as much as it is that he’s dealing with some pretty heavy career stuff and figures you’ll be there. Maybe that’s why it feels like he’s taking you lightly, because he doesn’t question you in his life. He assumes you’ll always be there.”
“But that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
Still, what Hannah said about what Robert’s going through stays with her, and when she hangs up, she calls him. “We just had another lock installed,” she tells him when he answers.
“That’s good.” There’s a shadow in his voice, an edge of something. Bad news about the script? “I saw you on the news just now,” he continues. “At a house.”
“Me?”
“All those people who were there, they think he did it? That vet?”
“It was crazy. They were mostly his neighbors. All turned on him. A man who does surgeries for cheap for people who can’t pay. A good guy, they all liked him till now. I can’t imagine what happened when he came home.”
“You didn’t see it when he pulled in?”
“No, we’d left, why? What happened?”
There’s a silence, and then “We?”
In this moment Abby realizes it wasn’t the script that cast the shadow in his voice. What had he seen? Her standing with Aidan? Getting back in his car? That’s all it could’ve been. “My friend Aidan, a detective,” she says, and tells him about records he’s looking up, the help she’d never get otherwise.
But Robert doesn’t latch onto this, won’t let what he’d seen slip beneath the conversation. “Aidan? That’s the one you had a crush on, in high school.”
“He’s a detective,” she says again, wondering what she’d told him. If only she’d known it would be used against her. “You’d like him. I’m just happy he’s helping.”
And eventually he accepts this, he has to. She’s given him no reason not to.
Everything’s happened.
Now the night hangs before Abby like a rope bridge spanning an abyss. There’s a chance her sleep will again be dreamless, like last night, but nerves have already angled her toward a dark night. Once again, she’s sure the table will be set, the sky a roiling dark.
Think of something pleasant. The moment she’d crossed her arms and Aidan had seen. Are you cold? A thrill that he’d noticed. That he was watching.
In bed, she thinks of Aidan at work, thinks of Robert thinking of her, and then thinks of the safety of the morning, the soothing daylight hours. It’s too much. She could make coffee. Stay awake all night, plan on sleeping during the day. But last night was fine, she tells herself, there’s a chance tonight will be as well. Something pleasant, images, no thoughts. In her mind she sees Ireland, a place she’s always wanted to visit, and forces herself there, but still the dream is a presence behind her, staring at her back. Stop. Thatched cottages and red doors. A basket of flowers on a bike. Everything is fine. Soon she’s falling asleep as castles rise from green pastures and roses climb stone walls. The Cliffs of Moher, a majestic, soaring expanse of rocks. White waves burst upon its base like a line of frosting on a cake. But then the earth begins to crumble into the ocean.
The dream—an ominous shape at first—descends, forming, gathering, and is then there, sudden and fast. For the first time there’s a deer, a buck, scratching its antlers against the oak tree. She watches it, alone under the gray sky, and though it’s far away, the sound grows louder and louder until suddenly she’s tugging toward consciousness and then awake, the sound now a rustling by the fence on the side of the house. And though she doesn’t trust herself, her mind still caught in the paranoia of her dream, she thinks she hears it—their gate’s high-pitched squeal as it opens.
16
Then
THE DOOR SHUTS. William in the bathroom once more, sick. Claire feels bad, but she has her husband. Still with her, still in the house, still in her arms only. It feels like a holiday, like her childhood when her father was home for a few days because other people insisted on celebrating. Waking in a house where everyone was home, breathing beneath the same roof, set loose into the day with no expectations, no duties or obligations. A strange, delirious entrapment.
And like her father all those years ago, William, too, appears to be thinking of other things, her every word pulling him back in a reluctant return.
“I’ve missed work,” he tells her Friday when she dabs a washcloth on his brow. “We may have lost a bid because I was too sick to speak. Again, I feel better in the evening. It makes no sense.”
“You’ve spent an entire day getting everything out of your system. Of course you feel better in the evening. Ketty will be up with some soup. You don’t have to eat it now, but try. At least the tea, to settle your stomach.”
In the hall she runs into Ketty, who emerges from the staircase holding a tray, a bowl of soup crammed next to a cup and the silver teapot. Since Tuesday Ketty’s made soups and ginger tea, both mixed with an old family recipe, a tincture her mother taught her to make. Sip, you’ll feel better. Motherly, it would seem.
“It won’t get any worse,” Ketty says to Claire.
“I’d like it to stop. So we have a few healthy days before he leaves.”
Ketty nods, and the two women head off in opposite directions in the hall.
The only thing Claire’s not sure of is what they’re really accomplishing. She’s bought herself extra nights with her husband, one week in which he doesn’t go to Rochester. That’s all. At first she thought that by showing him she cares, nurturing him, dedicated and devoted, he’d remember that he loved her. Remember that this is his home.
But she can see it in his eyes—it’s not just work he’s missing.
For days, Claire has sat on the edge of his bed, relaying his words to employees, pressing a cool cloth to his forehead, holding a large bowl if he couldn’t make it to the bathroom—and yet all he’s thought of is Eva. On Thursday he managed to call her, a quick phone call when Claire disappeared down the hall, but she’d not been home and he left a message that the doctor was sick with the man who answered. The uncle? The thought made the nausea stronger than before. Briefly he’d wondered if she’d been in the background when he left the message, angry and insolent and refusing to come to the phone. He thought of the jutting points of her elbows when she crosses her arms tight. Her ears, the shapes of her toes. The blue vein on the inside of her pale arm—the whole of her makes him happy.
On Friday he called her house again. Two more times, the line unanswered. He’d told himself he wanted only to be sure she got the message, but the truth, he realized, was that he needed to hear her voice. Just that, the word hello.
—
On Saturday, William begins to feel better. He doesn’t understand, and figures his body has simply revolted and rebelled against his mind, the guilt of the affair he always justified and contained set loose by a mutinous physicality, legs that would not hold, arms too weak to function, and a stomach that refused to settle. This was just his body’s way of forcing him to face that from which he’d always turned away.
Eva. Claire. His two compartmentalized, justified worlds. If the guilt and the need to be a better man made him physically ill, his mind was telling him something. It was time to decide.
At the beginning, Eva was a reward. A treat. Dessert, a hot bath. He married the person his parents had encouraged him to, he lived in their house and kept up their friendships and charities and agendas. An entire life—he only now realizes—woven with the cords of his guilt over his father. How could he not have
seen that? At the time he thought everything logical. All his choices. And though early in his marriage to Claire he’d realized that what she felt for him trumped his feelings for her, it wasn’t until Eva that he grasped how much more there was to love—a whole other layer, an entire world of other layers. Still, in his mind what mattered was that he did right by his wife: provide, listen, attend holidays and birthdays and Sunday dinners. As long as he did that, who was he hurting with a few days a week that belonged to just him? A ridiculously naive supposition, he now sees. Selfish, too.
He loves a woman who’s not his wife, and that love has taken its toll. The ways in which he was good to his wife are no longer. He is not a good man. Claire is worthy of love. Worthy of an entirety of affection and devotion, not increments doled out on certain days. Really, he sees, he never gave his life with her a chance, had stacked the odds against her from the first day as a married man that he’d felt the road to Rochester beneath his tires, from the very moment he told himself that providing was the priority.
But he can’t not be with Eva. He can’t let another man’s hand skim her waist or the rise of her hipbone, or let someone else hear the tales of her childhood, stories of fishing and forts and fields that are told as the bathwater grows cold and the sound of her voice and the life in her eyes slips the evening to night. Time with her, he’s realized, obeys no clocks.
That night, Claire takes him to dinner at a restaurant they haven’t been to in months and the maître d’ spots them with a polite nod, knowing better than to comment on their absence, then leads them to the best table in the house, a corner by the window. The dark lake glitters in the distance. Candlelight and white linens. For a moment he pictures Eva sitting in Claire’s seat, hair dark, alluring folds like a curtain asking to be pulled back.