Finally she saw Craig. Sitting up in bed, his arm with its boxy white cast, wearing what looked like a button-down shirt. That was the first difference she noticed. Street clothes, and how he sat stiffly and as though he’d been waiting for her. He turned fully toward her as she entered the room and she saw immediately that the bandages on his eye were gone, exposing the raw, pale flesh of his brow, the bones of the socket surrounding an angry oval of orangey-red, rubbery flesh. The overhead light shone on his face in a manner that seemed almost improper, drawing out the degree of bruising and scarring and the precarious thinness of the remaining folds of skin around the socket where his eye had once been.
She didn’t know what to do. She made a little hello wave that seemed weak. She had to discipline herself not to look away. She had expected a gash, a hole, some great monstrous portrait of agony. She hadn’t known what to expect. Somehow she’d invented the idea that she would be present when they unwrapped his face. She’d imagined a doctor taking them through the experience. She had the idea that the doctor would speak of all the great improvements that would come with a prosthetic eye, and how the sagging skin that hung down was left there on purpose to be used later when the new eye was fitted. This was how she’d imagined it. But instead here was Craig’s face with its grotesque, bruised concavity, the absent window of the eye, the wattle of ruddy, hanging skin.
She felt a shortness of breath and a heat rising from within. She tried to walk toward Craig, but her legs had become uncoordinated, her balance all wrong. She knew she should not react like this. She should be matter-of-fact; supportive was the word that came to mind. She thought of all the weeks she had arrived diligently at the hospital, the long nights she’d sat quietly while he slept. She thought about the night he’d asked her to undress, and about other nights in which the same sort of thing had occurred. All of the progress she had made with Craig would be ruined now in an instant if she reacted wrongly to his face.
She could see his good eye—his only eye—tracking her response. The swimming-pool-blue cornea was large and full and clear.
He spoke slowly, loudly. “Don’t say a word,” he said. His arm, out of traction, lay across his body.
“You look fine—”
“Not a fucking word.”
She sat down. She didn’t know what to do. She looked out the window.
She wanted to answer all these concerns, explain how she could help him, how she wanted to help. That he would adjust to seeing with one eye, that his pelvis would mend—was already mending—and that if he hadn’t broken his arm, he’d already be on crutches. “You’re going to be fine,” she said.
“I can’t get to work.”
“I’ll drive you.”
He took in a long breath. “The station is still only offering me the midnight-to-five slot.”
“That’s okay.”
She thought about his voice with its smooth beauty. She imagined taking him to work, collecting him in the early hours of the day, perhaps having breakfast with him, escorting him through the process of healing. Did he not already understand that she expected to do as much, that she’d counted on it, in fact? “You can stay with me, with Bobbie and me. You can stay with us.”
There, it was out.
He pursed his lips, considering this. She rode through the long minutes wondering if he was appalled at the idea, wondering if he’d laugh in her face.
“Stay with you,” he said finally. “But why?”
“Why not?”
She thought briefly about the police, about the assault-and-battery accusation. But she told herself that celebrities were easy targets, and anyway no arrest had taken place. She wanted to protect him from the police, from all that wrongful inquiry. Perhaps it was because of that sense of wanting to protect him that she blurted out the next thing. “Because I love you,” she added. Craig seemed unmoved by her declaration and she felt a rope of panic weaving itself across her middle. She tried again with a slightly different tack. “We love you, Bobbie and me,” she said. “We think the world of you.”
He exhaled. “Huh,” he said. And then, as though he were suddenly awakened from a daydream, he said, “You’re special, you know that? You’re kind of special, June.”
She listened to her name said in his beautiful voice, and thought how he found her special, and that for that moment she was.
“I give you a hard time once in a while, but you still pull through,” he said.
She smiled. It had all been worth it. Every minute. “You’ll stay with us,” she said. “We’ll look after you.”
She promised him. She did not ask him how long this would be for, or think about Bobbie, whether or not her daughter would want him there. In fact, through some kind of magnificent oversight, she had forgotten to tell Bobbie at all.
—
BOBBIE HAD SUSPECTED her mother would arrange some complicated care scheme for Craig, maybe get a crowd of his friends on a rotation system to visit, arrange to bring him a few hot dinners. It hadn’t occurred to her until she opened the porch door and smelled the sweet, grassy scent of marijuana, then noticed the closed blind and the general presence of another person in the house, that he would come here, to them, to live with them. She was unprepared, so much so that at first she felt confused, as though she had walked through the wrong door. In her mind, he belonged in the hospital now; he was part of the low ceilings and buzzing fluorescent lights and the pale, flecked tiles of the ward where they kept him.
“Hi babe,” he called. “It’s been a long time.”
She’d nearly dropped the books she’d been carrying, had in fact begun to drop them but clutched them back. She wondered where he was in the house; she did not need to ask how he got here; she knew at once how. He had connived to persuade her mother to invite him. He’d used all his usual trickery. It was possible that it hadn’t taken much persuasion on his part. Women like her mother—who could not see what was before them, or had no experience, or no memory, or did not believe—required little effort. In all likelihood, June had offered for him to stay. All he’d had to do was say yes.
“Aren’t you gonna ask how I am?” he said.
She went into the living room, his voice following her like the pot smoke. “A bit goddamned lonely is how I am,” he said. “Why didn’t you come see me in the hospital? Every day, I waited for you.”
She wondered where her mother was. She moved back to the hall and began climbing the stairs, searching the house, looking for June. She wouldn’t leave him here and not tell her, surely.
“I still love you, Barbara,” she heard him call. “You still love me, babe?”
And with that sentence she knew her mother wasn’t home. She’d left her stranded with him; she’d gone to work. Through the window in the landing she saw the empty carport; June’s car was gone.
“You going to come say hi?” he called out, his voice snaking through the house. She told herself to be brave, hold on. She told herself to make an excuse and get the hell out.
“Not even going to answer me? Not even going to say hello?”
She imagined his mocking smile and could picture his face as though he were right there in front of her. A recess where the eye had been, a recess at the mouth.
“Hello,” she said, her chin angled over her shoulder, speaking into the empty hall.
“I can’t hear you! Really, babe, I just want to talk to you.” He sounded confused, as though her failing to come see him was genuinely hurtful and he couldn’t see why she was so cagey around him, couldn’t understand, no.
“Hello!” she said, louder this time.
“Barbara, get in here! What’s the matter with you anyway? You think this is contagious? How would you like it if I treated you this way?”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s not your—” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word eye. She walked slowly down the steps again. She knew where he was now, in the dining room. She came closer. She could hear him in there. She could s
ense his presence and there was another thing, too, a kind of animal smell coming from the room mixing with the grass.
“I’m a cripple,” she heard him say. “Cut me some slack, okay? I’ve been through hell. Can’t you see I’m being nice?”
The kitchen and dining room were divided by louvered saloon-style doors that snapped behind her as she pushed her way gently between them. She stopped on the other side, feeling the doors tap her bottom. What had been the dining room was now a bedroom, except it was filled with stagnant clouds of smoky haze, lit only by the bar of light coming through the top of the blind. In place of the dining-room table was Craig’s bed with a quilt and a number of fluffy white pillows. Next to the bed was a card table, a cloth covering the worn corners, a stick lamp with a frilly shade. June had put tissues in a china holder made to look like a lemon cake and positioned a phone so he could reach it.
Craig was sitting up, his face dipped, the good eye fastened on her. It seemed to pin her in place. She could feel her heart scratching her ribs, her throat filling with a weight that made it difficult to speak.
“Okay,” she said. The room had a toilet smell that she decided to ignore. “I’m here.”
He searched her face. “You’re looking good,” he said.
She tried not to look at the empty socket beside his remaining eye, the dark clouds of bruising below and above, the lid that hung heavy and red like a theater curtain.
He let his gaze lower and she felt him taking in the shape of her breasts. “All grown up. Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Say what, exactly? “Hi,” she said.
He waved. “Hi over there,” he said. “Waaay over there.”
He wore a pair of pajamas her mother had bought him, unbuttoned so that his stomach showed. A lavender-colored bong rested against his belly, a pack of matches balanced between his thumb and forefinger. Beside him, a can of Mountain Dew and an ashtray rested on a slab of encyclopedia. It was her encyclopedia, volume one, Aardvark to Amazon. If he’d opened it he’d have seen her name there on the bookplate and the date that she’d received it on her tenth birthday.
“I guess someone found you some drugs,” she said.
“Not drugs, pot. Jesus!”
“It wasn’t my mother, I hope.”
He shook his head. “Shit, no. Not June.”
“Well, you enjoy yourself, then,” she said, and made to leave.
“What do you think I’m going to do to you, anyway? I’m stuck in a damned bed, can’t hardly move. I don’t see why you have to act like this when you’re the one walking around. Two good legs, two good eyes—”
“I’m not acting like anything,” she said.
“Yes, you are. Like I’m going to bite your head off. That just pisses me off. I keep trying to be nice to you, Barbara, to fix all the shit that happened. And you’re the one who hurt me, remember? That was some driving.”
“That was a deer,” she said.
“A deer you could very well have steered around.”
She wanted to resist him, but part of her believed he was right, that she was to blame. And right, too, that she was afraid. Within his friendly tone she sensed a deeper craziness that she had not seen from him before. It was almost as though the accident had loosened something inside him. Anything could happen now.
“You’re still my Barbara,” he said.
She shook her head slowly. If ever he’d been able to make that statement, he no longer could. Sometime during the slow trawl through adolescence, in the shedding of old skin, she had changed, leaving him behind. He was summoning her back. But she could hold her ground now. “No, I’m not,” she said.
He put his finger to his temple, then flicked it away to indicate he didn’t understand her, that she must have grown stupid. His hair was longer now and pushed behind his ears in stiff, dirty planks that reminded her of the jutting-out feathers on the faces of certain owls. Unadorned by a patch or bandages, his absent eye appeared like scorched earth against the rest of his face. He no longer cared, it seemed, how ugly he’d become. Let him be ugly, it made no difference. He’d be ugly; she’d be stupid.
“Smell that?” he said.
There was the smell of marijuana that surrounded him, yes, but more overwhelming, the smell of human excrement. Somewhere in the room, she already knew, was his shit. She didn’t want to come upon it unexpectedly but she didn’t dare look for it, either. And now that he was talking about it, the smell embarrassed her even more. Her thoughts moved only to that smell, and the smell overwhelmed all thinking.
“What’s the matter, babe?” he said.
She couldn’t speak of it, just as she couldn’t speak of so much. And the fact that she was unable to mention the smell made her feel again those other things about which she was so ashamed. The things he had done to her over the past many months, or what he understood they had done together, had formed her, molded her, shaped her into who she was now. The specific sex acts—all the various ways—would float away from her readily when she wasn’t in his presence but always settled back onto her once again when he appeared. All the hiding and the lies she had to remember, the great burden of secrets like a garden that needed tending.
“You can’t shoo me out of your life,” he said.
She wanted to tell him she could do anything she liked. If only she could tell him once and for all that she did not love him, had never loved him, and in fact hated him (I hate you, she would say), she might feel his anger clench into one final, suffocating grip before releasing, possibly forever. But she could not. She was silent, and it was that silence that connected them now.
He said, “You can’t just dump me like that.”
What had she done to etch their union in stone, where had she signed?
From the heavy knot in her throat burst a sound, a kind of cry, and then the words, “My mother—”
“What about her?”
“What are you doing with her?”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s you, Barbara.”
“No, you’re lying. You’re…fuck—” She interrupted herself, clasping her palm over her mouth.
He laughed. “You can’t even say it. That’s what I love about you, Barbara. You’re sweet.”
“No—”
“And you’re the one I want. Always have been. It’s always just been you.”
“I don’t have to…I don’t have to put up with…with you…I don’t have—” The stutter of a statement that, itself, surprised her. She hadn’t thought she could speak and there was her voice suddenly high and loud around them.
He watched her. “I’m not done with you yet,” he said.
She nodded slowly, then with more force. She could see a little chink of light, a little hope. “Yes, you are,” she said.
He began to laugh. He laughed and seemed to enjoy it.
She felt her moment of power leave her, felt weaker for all her effort. He coughed, then angled the bong toward his face, filling it with a tangle of pot. “You must be high,” he said, and lifted his bong as though raising a wineglass to toast her.
“You’re not funny,” she said, finally. She saw in his face a shadow of disapproval. “And I’m not yours.”
His expression changed. He fastened his gaze upon her as though she had failed to follow a command, then set about arranging his bong hit, tamping the bowl lightly, pinching a slim match between the bulbs of his fingertips, his fingers moving expertly and with some urgency, as though loading a gun.
He swooped the match across the back of the book and held the flame at the base of the bowl. He sucked at the rim of the bong, drawing the fire down onto the leaves, his gaze never leaving her face. When finally he had a promising glow, he turned his head, exhaled audibly, then pressed his mouth against the plastic rim once more. His lips stretched inside the bong. Water bubbled in the bowl. He lit another match, the flame bowing into the leaves, an opaque cloud of smoke growin
g in the tube, and at last the smoke disappeared into his mouth all at once, like a ghost passing between walls.
He held the hit firmly in his lungs. “I hear you got a boyfriend,” he croaked. “What’s his name?”
She shook her head.
“You fucking him?” He exhaled, let out a little hiccup. “Of course you are,” he said, his voice scorched.
“No,” she said.
He looked at her. “He like it when you suck his dick?”
“Shut up,” she said. “Shut the hell—” She sounded like a little kid trying to cuss and getting it all wrong.
“What did you say? Did you just say shut up? Did you, babe? I find out you’re fucking someone behind my back and you tell me to shut up? That’s rich. That’s really rich.”
She took a step away, leaning into the swinging doors. The doors creaked on their hinges; he stared at her and she froze. She didn’t want to look at his face, but she could not turn away and it was as if she saw his brain moving inside his skull, applying his poisonous mathematics, working out a solution. How to deal with her, how to manage her, how to get her to do what he wanted.
“Stop,” he said. “Don’t move. Let me tell you something. You know why I’m here, don’t you? The only reason?” A little cough. “It’s not because of your damned mother, that’s for sure. I’m here because I don’t have any money to go anywhere else.”
That wasn’t it, of course. Not it at all. She wished her mother were home so she could ask her why he was here and when he was leaving.
“If you give me back my money, I could go.” He used the burned match to stir the bowl, then got a new one and lit it all over again. “You know the money I’m talking about. A thousand bucks, you’ll recall.”
She felt her heart pumping. “I never had a thousand,” she said.
“Yeah, you did. I finally figured it out. That five hundred we couldn’t find in the motel room was in your goddamned pocket, wasn’t it? Or somewhere. You had money hidden the whole time but you let me drive like a fucking lunatic anyway. You let me get in a fight trying to get it back.”
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