I parked and stood looking up at it. There were neat blue-and-white curtains, a flagstone walk. This couldn’t be the place, I thought. But a truck cab, shining as if recently washed, was parked on the grass beside me.
The door opened. John emerged, thumbs in his belt loops, smiling.
“Good thing you got four-wheel drive,” he called. “I was worried you wouldn’t make it. Driveway’s hell on smaller cars, that’s for sure.”
“Naw, I made it.” I found myself echoing his drawl.
“Yeah, I can see that. I’m glad.” He was still smiling. “Come on in.”
Awkwardly, I drew nearer. Was I supposed to shake his hand? Let him embrace me? Do nothing? But he solved my dilemma by turning and walking into the house.
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting; probably something like the inside of just about every other house I’d seen, with the old, mismatched furniture, the chipped mementos on the shelves, the blankets with twelve-point bucks and leaping bass on them, maybe a wind chime dangling from the ceiling. But the inside of John’s house was much like the outside, simple but somehow appealing, with heavy carved furniture he must have gotten from the Mennonites. A large black dog that had been stretched out in front of the fireplace stood up and walked toward us, stopping at a distance and sniffing idly in my direction. Everything looked warm and solid.
I found myself wondering if his wife had ever lived there, had maybe given the place its atmosphere. But no, I thought; he’d said they’d gotten divorced down south somewhere. He must have done all this himself.
He turned to me, reaching out.
“Can I take your coat?” he said.
5
The next morning, I sat behind the counter shooting rubber bands at the wall. There was a calendar over the sink, one with pictures of rivers and sunsets and the address of Martin’s church printed at the bottom. I took aim at the photo for February, a red barn in the snow, sending my projectiles smacking crisply against the paper. When I ran out, I walked over to the sink and gathered them up again, returning to my seat for another round. The empty squares seemed to taunt me; all I ever did was cross them out, marking them off like a prisoner in a cell or a castaway on an island. I hooked the rubber bands on my forefinger, stretching them back as far as they would go. Smack, smack, smack. After striking the photo, they scattered lifelessly onto the floor.
I was thinking about John, about John’s house. The man who had sat across the table from me, lifting salad onto my plate, both was and wasn’t the man I’d been expecting. The voice was the same, and the scruffy look, the slow grin, but he was, somehow, a settled person, one who was at ease with himself and moved through his home as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The divorce hadn’t exactly been amicable, he’d told me—“She was a real spitfire,” he’d said, with more than a hint of admiration—but it seemed to have made him thoughtful, given him a depth I hadn’t suspected. There was a light in his eyes, an awareness, that made me think he noticed more than he remarked on.
The dinner had lulled me, almost. I had been wary at first; it had felt like a setup, somehow. There were candles, pork roast, pie for dessert: he was overdoing it, I thought, almost embarrassingly so. Yet, as the evening wore on, I had found it difficult to stay on my guard. It was the depth of the house, I thought, the warmth of it, the satisfaction it seemed to take in itself. It was as if it had created a space for me, was waiting for me to join it, to complete it, to sink into it.
Collecting the rubber bands again, I took aim at the stark row of empty days. Smack, smack, smack.
The conversation hadn’t been bad; in fact, I had to admit, it had even been good. Thanks to a fondness for radio news programs, he knew more about what was going on in the outside world than I did; he’d had a lot of time to listen, driving up and down the coast, all the way from Maine to the Florida swamps. “Yep,” he’d said, spearing a piece of meat with his fork, “been all over. It’s true what they say, though—no place like home. That’s why I bought the house.” He chewed and swallowed, his stubble glinting in the candlelight. “Figured it was time to settle down, start making shorter runs, get back to all the stuff I’ve been missing. Sit down at the end of the day in my own chair, in front of my own fireplace. Put down some roots. Being out on the road is great and all, but it gets old.” He’d patted the stomach that hung over his belt, smiling. “You get to an age where you don’t roll along quite so easy anymore.”
“Yeah,” I’d said, knowing it was the right thing to say even though I wasn’t sure exactly what I was agreeing with.
He’d asked me about myself, nodding and letting it drop when I gave short answers. Then we’d moved on to horses: he was thinking about getting a pair, and the people who had previously owned the property had, incredibly, left behind most of their tack, which was still out in the barn. He was thinking about going to school, too, trying out some classes at the community college in Harrisburg, although he didn’t know how keen he was on the idea. Classes were a lot cheaper than a horse, he joked, but at the end of the day, he wasn’t sure which he’d be able to ride farther.
Horses, I thought as I perched on my stool, gazing at the calendar and the mess I was making. When I was a child, my grandfather had once bought a horse, a racehorse that ran on the local track. It was sleek and brown and, no longer young, would give me long, wise looks when I fed it carrots and apples. When my grandmother had found out that that was what my grandfather had done with their savings, she’d refused to speak to him for nearly a month. My grandfather had kept it for a year and then sold it, but it had stayed where it was, running on the same track week after week and standing patiently in the same stall. I had visited it once or twice, and it had continued to look at me serenely, its face noble and untroubled. For all I knew, it was still there, older and stiffer now but still eyeing everything around it with the same expression, its passage from owner to owner momentous to everyone but itself, just pieces of paper changing hands while its life remained precisely the same.
Restlessly, I scooped up the rubber bands and dumped them into a drawer. Then I poured two cups of coffee and went out.
The cups steamed as I climbed the hill, taking pains not to slip in the mud. I must look like some sort of magician, I thought, moving slowly toward the hostel, plumes of white vapor rising from my hands. There was a sound, and I looked up to see the stranger standing in front of the building, his hand still on the door he had just pulled shut. He came toward me.
“I’m so sorry,” he began. “I’ve been thinking about what I said. Somehow I always seem—that is, I really didn’t mean to—”
I thrust a coffee toward him.
“Tell me,” I said, “about Paris.”
The hot drink spilled onto my bare hand, burning the skin, but I pretended not to notice.
“Paris?” he repeated.
“Yes. Tell me about it. What it looks like, what it smells like, what the people do there. I want to know everything.”
He took the cup from my hands, and we stood looking at each other, his eyes seeming to search mine.
“It was a long time ago,” he said at last.
“I don’t care,” I said. “Just humor me. If you don’t mind.”
“You’re not angry about the other thing? Because—”
I waved a hand. “We can talk about the other thing later.”
“Well, all right.” He shivered in the cold. “Where should we go?”
“I don’t know.” I glanced around us. “I could stand to get out of that stupid box for an hour or two. How about the game room?”
“Sure,” he said, and the word had such an unexpected American ring to it that for a moment I had to hide a faint smile. He was a mimic at heart, I thought, even if he wasn’t an especially gifted one.
“We can play chess while we talk,” he was saying. “I can teach you some new openings.”
I was already passing him, climbing the hill, digging my feet into the mud. “Whatever
you want,” I replied.
* * *
—
That night, for what I had to admit to myself was the first time in weeks, I didn’t take the pills. I’d put more wood in the stove before going to bed, but the house was drafty, and gusts of cold reached me from the window. There was an ice storm coming, the radio had said.
I lay on my back on the mattress, looking up at the ceiling I couldn’t see. Unlike in Carlisle, the darkness out here was absolutely dark, the silence absolutely silent. After a time, I felt as if I were floating, hovering a foot or two above the ground, spinning lightly in the void. I didn’t mind, and sometimes, on nights like this, I even sought out the sensation. My mind would come untethered, voyaging through the unknown, the things only I could see. Most of the time, they were benign, just shapes and colors and fragments of memory. Sometimes, though, they were sharper, words and scenes I preferred to forget. One of the many benefits of the pills was that they took away the odds this would happen by eliminating the game altogether.
Tonight, however, I had decided to play.
The house I’d shared with Amos had nearly always been silent, except during the few hours when he was both home and awake, when the main sounds had been the voices from the TV and our own forks scraping against our plates. His job exhausted him, and over time, I had learned to be careful not to do things that disturbed his peace—so careful, in fact, that when he was in the room I barely stirred. I learned to listen without responding, except for a nod or a sympathetic shake of the head, and to sit on the edges of things. In books, I remembered—especially those for children—characters would sometimes pinch themselves to make sure they were real, that they weren’t dreaming. I would look into mirrors, touch my own face or the corner of a table, reassuring myself of my own solidity. Of course, it wasn’t really as bad as that; I never truly had any doubt that I still existed. It was just that the quiet seemed to press in on me somehow, to wrap me in a layer of something I couldn’t see, slowing my movements, making me wonder whether I’d said things aloud.
I didn’t leave the small set of rooms very often—Amos brought us everything we needed, and anyway we only had one car—but when I did, I found that I was increasingly unsure of what to do or say. A checkout girl would say hello as she swiped my gallon of milk, and I would hesitate before answering. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, because I had learned that I often said the wrong thing; on the other hand, I didn’t want to seem unfriendly either. I would look down into my purse, smiling shyly, pushing my hair behind my ears as I waited for the transaction to be over. Not long after they opened the Walmart in Carlisle, I overheard a cashier there say she thought I was deaf.
“I’m not surprised,” Amos said when I told him. “Everybody always said you weren’t quite right. That’s what they used to tell me, when I first started seeing you.”
He had looked up from his dinner and smiled, so I wasn’t sure if he was joking, but maybe he wasn’t. Maybe I had always been strange. Or maybe, as he sometimes suggested, I was starting to lose my mind.
“Crazy Kathleen,” he would say, stroking my cheek with his thumb. “Crazy, crazy Kathleen. You know I’ve started hearing about you from other people? Maybe you should just stay inside.”
Soon, the things Amos heard began to change. “Somebody told me they saw you at the café in Boiling Springs. What were you doing there?”
“Nothing,” I answered, taken aback by his obvious displeasure. “I went there after I picked up the groceries. You know, just for fun.”
“Boiling Springs is fifteen minutes away from the grocery store. You drove half an hour round trip just to have fun?”
“I’m sorry. I just always thought it was pretty—you know, with the lake and everything.”
“Did you meet anybody there?”
“Anybody? Like who?”
“Like your boyfriend.”
“What?” I nearly dropped the glass I was drying. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
I gaped at him.
He laughed then. “Come on, I’m just pulling your leg.” Even so, there was an edge in his tone, or so I thought. Things weren’t going well at his job. It had become hard to tell when he was actually angry and when he wasn’t. Each day, I wondered which one of him would walk in through the front door: the one who kissed me on the head and rubbed my elbow affectionately as I cooked dinner, or the one who sat sullenly on the couch for hours, seeming to watch my every move. Eventually, I came to understand that it would be better if I didn’t leave the house.
So I didn’t.
I never knew what it was that made me give in, really. He was stronger than I was—thanks to the masonry job, he was stronger than just about anyone around—but that wasn’t it. He wasn’t violent, at least not in the way most people think of violence. He was still Amos, the same man I had always known, but I began to discover that there was something deeper in him, deeper than I had ever suspected, like the water at the bottom of a marsh, dark and lurking, rushing in to fill my footprints before I even realized it was there.
This quiet and reflective person, I discovered, the one who noticed everything and kept his thoughts to himself, was someone who knew—instinctively, uncannily—how to make other people feel small. He knew how to say the thing you least wanted to hear, the thing you always suspected might be true about yourself but prayed wasn’t. He would say the thing so softly, with such an absence of anger or expression, that you knew it must be right.
“You look like a boy,” he told me one night, as we were falling asleep. “It’s like fucking a boy, every time I fuck you.”
I had turned to look at him, but he was facing the window, settling his head into the pillows, pulling the blanket over his shoulders. I curled on my side and said nothing, but later that night I got up and silently crept to the bathroom, looking in the mirror, taking in the angle of my jaw, the shape of my nose and eyes. I didn’t cry. I simply returned to bed and curled on my side again, drawing my knees to my chest, staring at the wall until the sun began to rise.
Increasingly, he would brood, sitting in an armchair in a darkened corner of the living room, the light from the TV flickering over his face. I could sometimes feel him giving me sidelong glances as I read.
“You make me feel wretched,” he said one day, fixing me with a hard, peculiar stare from his armchair as I looked down at the book in my lap. There was a hostility in his tone, an accusation, that caught me off-guard. He kept his eyes on me until I closed the book.
The moment was unnerving enough that the next day, I picked up the phone. My pride wouldn’t let me call Beth, so after some hesitation—I realized I was no longer in touch with very many people—I dialed the dentist’s office where my high-school friend Melanie was working as a receptionist.
“Wretched?” she repeated. A child was shouting in the background, and I thought I could hear the sound of her chewing something. “Is that some kind of slang, like ‘wicked’? Like, maybe he means it in a good way?”
I looked out through the window, at the sun playing over the empty fields where, as I had been made to understand, I had no reason to go walking alone.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
One day, when I was washing the dishes, he crept up behind me, pinning my arms to my sides and holding a paring knife to my throat, a sharp, silvery blade with a short handle. I was silent, motionless, stunned. For some reason, as the edge of the blade touched my skin, I kept looking at the cans of baked beans on the counter, the ones that were waiting for me to put them away. Later, that was what I remembered: cans of beans. Everything else around me seemed blurred, dark.
I could feel him breathing behind me.
After a moment, he put the knife down. He seemed to think it was funny.
“You weren’t really scared, were you?” he asked.
I reached for the dishrag, which had fallen into the water. “No,” I said softly, beginnin
g to rub hardened lumps of tomato sauce from a plate. The water turned a pale pink.
Looking back, it would be tempting to think of that moment as the beginning of the bad things. But of course, by then the bad things had long since taken root and begun to push their hard, blind way up to the surface. Years later, I would ask myself what I could have done differently, what I could have done to prevent the disasters. The question would come to me even when I knew enough to try to force it out of my mind, when I understood that there was, in fact, nothing I could have done. People are who they are, and he was who he was. There was no point in being angry with him—no point even in thinking about it.
But the thing about moments like that, as I was to learn, was that they were never truly over. Instead, they lingered just out of sight in the forgotten spaces of our own minds, wreaking havoc invisibly no matter how long or how determinedly we put them away.
6
“Oh, honey, he sounds lovely,” Beth said a few days after I saw John, hugging my shoulders as we sat on the couch. Leaning forward, she handed a cup of bright red fruit punch to Dylan, who was kneeling by the TV, idly running a toy truck back and forth over the carpet while keeping his eyes fixed on the cartoon children who sang in front of him. His lips were open in an O, as if he were hypnotized.
“It was okay,” I admitted grudgingly.
Beth was watching the back of the boy’s head, her expression momentarily pensive, but turned her attention back to me. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying you should marry the guy. But you should definitely let him spoil you a little. And if it turns into something more, then great.” She sat back and crossed her legs on the cushions. “You could use something to cheer you up. You know, get you out of that rut.” I frowned at her. “What rut?”
“Don’t look at me like that. You know what I mean.” She propped her head on her hand. “Not that relationships are a magic bullet, God knows. But still—I just want to see you happy.”
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