by Anne Valente
“Oh, no,” he says softly, then louder as the tiny sparks keep moving. “Oh, no, no, no! Absolutely not!”
“Rufus!” the baby shouts.
Gerard looks at the baby, then back at the flower, then over his shoulder at the house. And before he can temper the impulse with reasoned thought, his hands grab the flower’s thick stem and he rips, pulls, he screams as he tears the bulb from the ground.
The force throws Gerard onto his back in the grass and then there is quiet, no sound, a calm breeze passing over Gerard’s face as he stares at the pale sky, the flower clenched in his fists like some weed. It’s so peaceful that for a second Gerard thinks it’s a dream, that maybe he didn’t pull the flower out by its roots, that maybe the baby is lying in the grass with him, asleep, that maybe they are napping to fight off his cold.
But then it starts, a low moan, which grows and swells until the baby is screaming like Gerard has never heard, like every travel mug and every ice cream cone and every stop sign in the world has been demolished. Gerard rolls onto his side and cradles the baby against his chest but the baby keeps screaming, until at last Gerard’s wife runs out to the yard and looks from Gerard to the baby, to the flower, and back to Gerard.
“What’s this?” she asks. She looks like she could cry.
Gerard looks away, then back up at her, knowing how pointless it would be to lie.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” she says, and though her voice is even and still, Gerard recognizes an undulating blaze beneath it, rolling water on the verge of boiling.
She picks the baby up and walks away, back into the house, his wails as deep and desolate as foghorn blasts, and Gerard understands the sound now as familiar, resurrected, as it will be when the baby sees their neighbor trip on the way to the mailbox, or when his wife accidentally drops an ornament as she carries it to their Christmas tree, or when their garage sale sends old dishes and broken appliances, discarded and unwanted, to other people’s homes far away.
“I did it for him!” Gerard shouts after her. “I did it for his own good!”
But when he looks down at the flower, lying askew in the grass like carnage, he wonders if this is true, if it were ever true, and if the baby will remember this at all once he’s grown, with no flower to recall and only a world of sadness before him, its sorrows to keep like gemstones, to enfold in the pockets of his small, vast heart.
MINIVAN
Jane hovers in front of the mirror sometimes, when she thinks I’m not looking. Tweezers in her left hand, a mat of hair raised in her right, she homes in on a single gray strand nobody can see, laid low against her scalp, a needle in the haystack of her dark, heavy waves. She plucks the colorless ones, releases them into the trash can below our bathroom curtains, sometimes with brown strays she’s carelessly removed. When she’s satisfied, she replaces the tweezers in our medicine cabinet, next to my razors and aftershave.
Two of her gray hairs stick to the curtains, silvery white against the muted green fabric, and I study them as I brush my teeth, something I used to do while walking around the apartment, making the bed or putting dishes away, but Jane tells me now that this makes her nervous. It’s annoying, she says, like pacing. So I hunch over our cramped bathroom sink, my mouth all foam in the tiny vanity mirror, and maintain perfect eye level with the hairs, two stragglers that floated the wrong way on their slow journey down.
In the bedroom Jane huddles against the headboard, knees pulled to her chest, a pair of noise-canceling headphones hugging her ears. They are mine, a set I bought just after college when we lived in a boxlike studio together, nearly three years ago. I used to plug them into the television when Jane wanted to read in silence. The headphone cord snakes from the sheets across the carpet to our stereo, and this trend of hers is also new, something I’d have noticed earlier if she let me pace around, brushing.
I curl up beside her, tap her shoulder. She turns, her cheek soft against my hand, and pulls a speaker back from her ear.
“These are nice, Jon,” she says. “They drown out the world.”
Before I can answer, she pulls them off and turns out the light.
“It’s like I’m not even here,” she says through the dark.
A month ago, when the early May sun at last banished all snow from Chicago, Jane started a garden. I found her standing with her cereal, scrutinizing our feeble patch of patio grass, and two days later she’d dug up a small square in the farthest corner of our already-small lot, her palms and knees black with loam, hiding scars that were just beginning to heal. Not a real garden—just two small cherry tomato plants, marked by stakes she hoped they’d climb. She nurtured them inside first, seating them in the living room as we watched old movies, then transplanted them outside, showered them with water. She gravitates that way now, nearly every day after we eat dinner. I’ve asked her if she wants help, but she always shakes her head no. And I don’t push this—I can’t—in case she thinks I see her as victim like everyone else does, as someone who can’t save herself.
When I come home late from school, after an exhibit to let the parents to see what their kids have been working on, Jane is sitting in the living room, feet propped on our ottoman, shins stained pink with calamine lotion.
“Poison ivy,” she says, reaching forward to scratch. “The tomatoes were a bad idea.”
I glance out the window, see her cherry tomatoes are just starting to appear, small globes like pale green gumballs, weeks from blooming to ripe.
“I don’t know about that.” I sit beside her, inspect the bright red bumps poking up from the lotion. “This will go away. You’ll have tomatoes all summer.”
She leans forward, like she doesn’t hear me. “I wish I could graft skin,” she says. “I wish I could scrape this rash right off me.” She looks at the bumps. “Motherfuckers.”
Her fingers clench, her nails extend. I nudge her hands aside before she can scratch the flaked pink away.
Jane asks about work, what parents said about this round of paintings. She even asks about Toby, her favorite student of mine, the smallest boy in the second grade with the biggest pair of glasses. She thought he was precious, so small he could fit in her pocket, the times she stopped by on her days off from the salon to see what I did all day. She hasn’t come by at all for summer session, hasn’t wanted to be around the kids, their collages, their colorful fingerprints smudged into the rough texture of the paper. She hasn’t asked about Toby in almost two months.
I haven’t brought this up, or anything else, and won’t until she is ready. But I’ve seen her look away when we pass strollers on the street, or when children stand before us in the grocery line, pulling Mars bars from the convenience shelf before their mothers can stop them. I’ve seen her watch them, her tongue moving across the chip in her left canine, the one she hides now with close-lipped smiles so no one will ask.
We haven’t gone to the movie theater for the past two months. We went only once, back in April, to take her mind off the wave of lineups the police put her through, after she decided to prosecute against their advice. But when the lights dimmed and the previews began, I heard her breath accelerate inside the dark. When I reached across the seat, I found her fingers gripping the armrest. She whispered that she might faint, and we left before she could. The darkness is what it was. So much dark, like so many sidewalks unlit by so few streetlamps.
I ask Jane how her day was, but she brushes off the question and watches her blossoming rash instead, says client flow has been slow lately. Summer vacationers, people letting their hair grow wild in the warmer months, though I wonder if her boss has lightened her load, a gradual ease back to work after taking last month off. Jane is the reason I haven’t paid for a haircut in over five years, but even this has gone by the wayside lately. My head feels overgrown, shaggy in the back by the ears, but to ask her now for this favor, it feels horribly frivolous. It can wait until August, when the new class of kids comes in, and by then enough time will have passed. B
y then, summer’s unbearable fluidity will have browned into the crisp edge of fall, and a new season will maybe feel like a new life.
After dinner, Jane spends most of the evening outside— not gardening, the patch is still too small, but reading, though each time I look out the window she’s watching the sky instead, a nightfall bereft of stars. She stares into the black, darkening heavily above a tinted horizon, and reaches forward every so often with fingers extended above the rash, like she wants to scratch her legs raw.
I mentioned last month that maybe she should see a therapist. I said it gently but meant it with resolution. Therapy seemed like a requirement. But she glared at me and turned away, and said over her shoulder, mouth muffled into skin, But I was just walking by. They should be in fucking therapy, if anyone is.
I am reading in bed when she finally comes in from the yard. I hear the screen door open and close, and then she is nestled into the sheets beside me, her head resting on my shoulder, the headphones discarded on the floor at least for tonight.
“Breastbone,” she says, her palm laid flat on my chest.
It’s something she said once after we’d just met, the first time she ever touched me in a way that wasn’t platonic. We were lying on my bed when she reached over, placed her hand on my sternum and said it, breastbone, and the shape of that word in her mouth felt like that spot had barely existed until she named it.
Her hand stays on my chest even after she falls asleep. And this, these glimmers, like stars falling through the dark until they disintegrate—this is what I cling to, to know the Jane I knew is there.
A week passes before she brings home a gun. It is there on the kitchen counter when I return from work, a Glock I look away from when I imagine her palms enclosing its rough grip. She mentioned this possibility just once, when we were walking home from the park last month after dusk and she slowed her pace along the sidewalk, looked off toward the lighted windows of apartments above the storefronts we passed. She wanted something reliable without intricate parts, something uncomplicated that would react immediately if the need arose. I told her then that it made me uncomfortable, that she didn’t need a gun, but the one word I should have said, the one suspended all these weeks above the permit fees, the background check, the paperwork she must have completed without telling me, is the one I can’t say to her now. No. That word has fallen from my mouth, like too many ice cubes, overcrowded by the implication of what it could mean inside the snail-shell chambers of her ears.
Jane walks in from the living room, and for just a moment she is an intruder and this is her gun, a disorientation that prickles down my arms. She’s never home from the salon before I return from school.
“I took the afternoon off,” she says. Her hands find the countertop, just inches from the grip, and I look away again. I don’t know what to say.
“Look, I know you disagree.” She sighs, as if I’m a parent who’s taken away her driving privileges. “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
A quiet cloud rolls into my brain when she says this, some muddled rage with no source, no culprit, not her or me though we are here, as if on the other side, a new world where we make decisions we never dreamed of and Jane buys a gun while I teach my class of second graders how to watercolor.
“So, what?” I try not to yell. “You’re going to carry this around with you? A gun-slinging straight shooter?”
She looks at me and her eyes burn the way they did when I first walked into the room at the hospital, a wind-whipped, bitter morning just past the official start of spring; when they finally let me see her, after the nurses gathered the kit, the samples and scrapings and swabs she still hasn’t talked about, and at last helped her shower.
I tell her I’m sorry, drop my workbag to the floor and move around the counter, place a hand between her shoulder blades. She leans into my chest, and over the top of her head I can see my hand, there on the fabric of her shirt—small-seeming, insignificant, no better protection than a wooden spoon, not then and not now.
Jane stays inside after dinner, resists the pull of the tomato garden, the firm bulbs crimsoning pea green to scarlet, and sits beside me on the couch, her hand skirting my stomach. These small affections, our shared convergences, they are enough for now because they must be. We haven’t made love much at all since April, only once or twice in cautious movements, and she softened into sobs each time, her broken tooth biting her lip, slow tears as if she didn’t want to hurt my feelings, to say this wasn’t right.
I want to tell her I’m not them. I want to tell her I am safe. But I hold my breath; those words seem useless, they are things she must already know, of course she knows. She knows more than I’ll ever know.
People have asked me how I feel, Oh you must be so angry, in moments when Jane isn’t around. And I nod, tell them yes, and change the subject with a different kind of anger, that they expect me to be anything at all. Because the truth is that I feel close to nothing. No anger, no impulse for revenge, no restless twinge of retribution, no baseball bats tucked into my trunk. What I feel instead is helpless, completely inert and static, like her motions and movements are things I should have guarded more carefully, and that negligence will blanket me forever like a fine, irremovable powder.
I also wonder sometimes, when I look at Jane across the dinner table or while she’s asleep and I’m not, if maybe I can’t believe this, that it actually happened. I knew of violence but not random, unchecked brutality, a violence that makes me sorry to inhabit this world, to know the impulse exists. She was just walking home, the three blocks from the blue line to our apartment. Eight at night, the late March sun gone, but the sky wasn’t even fully black when they screeched up in a minivan, the one grabbed her and shoved her in the backseat, the other held the wheel. It must have taken seconds, not long enough for anyone to notice, but they drove around for two hours, taking turns, and when they finally pushed her from the van, somewhere south in a residential neighborhood, a middle-aged man found her unconscious on his lawn and called the police.
That’s all I know. I don’t push it, not past this brief nutshell the cops gave me, after I called them when she never came home, never answered her phone, after they called back that she’d finally been found, that she was at the hospital and I might want to sit down before they told me what happened.
People have asked, Don’t you want to know? My colleague Tim, he said over lunch about his ex-girlfriend, When Susie fucked that guy from her gym, I wanted to know everything about it. How many times, whether he fucked better than me, what kind of mattress and where, or if they just tore their clothes off in the goddamn car. I’d thrown out my half-eaten lunch, the world he lived in so far apart from mine. I told him to go fuck himself, something I regretted later in case my students had overheard me.
Jane says she’ll keep the gun inside, that she won’t carry a concealed weapon in her purse. I wonder what the point is, if she never felt unsafe at home. But as we sit there watching television and Jane shoulders herself deeper against my side, I think I see it exactly from her eyes. I was the safety of home, a protection that failed. I was made of unreliable parts.
Jane pushes herself up from the couch, and I avoid her eyes, watch her shins instead. Her rash has died away to a visible redness without the itch, and for a moment there is comfort in this, that the passage of time can transform and remove.
“It’s late. I’m brushing my teeth.” She turns off the television. “I’ll be in bed in a minute.”
On my way to the bedroom, though the bathroom door is half-closed, I can see her inside hovered low and squinting deep into the mirror, her tweezers suspended above her head to purge what doesn’t belong, hulking unseen beneath the hairline.
At school, Toby asks where Miss Jane has been. He asks offhandedly, while dipping strips of newspaper in paste and cementing them to a balloon, but the feigned nonchalance of children lets me know he misses seeing her. For a moment I want to pick him up, to forget the rules of classroom
conduct and pull his small face to mine, tell him he is wise and how much we share. But I nod at his papier-mache instead, tell him he’s on the right track, and say Jane has been sick but she’ll hopefully come by soon. Toby looks up at me, and through his thick glasses I can see why Jane has stayed away. Toby knows I am lying.
This week we are making pinatas, and each student has blown up a balloon to paste with newspaper, to paint as clowns or planet earths or cartoonish self-portraits. So far two kids have whispered concerns to me about leaving a hole big enough for candy, once we pop the balloons. Sam worries he’ll forget to leave an opening entirely, and Caroline thinks that Snickers bars, her favorite, might be too large for her tiny gourd-shaped pinata.
While the kids color as they wait for their balloons to dry, Althea approaches my desk and asks if it will be hard to paste the hole shut, once the candy is safely inside. When I look up and see the anxiety creased between her eyebrows, I wish with every strand of my stretched-thin heart that I was her, if only for a moment. But when I see her knotted knuckles, clamped hard around her paintbrush, the feeling passes. I tell Althea we will seal the pinatas the same way we made them, once the papier-mache has dried, and that there is nothing to worry about.
On the subway home I think about Jane’s gun. She keeps it in her bedside drawer, claims she barely knows how to pull a trigger, but that she’d know if the need came, she’d be ready this time around. A flood of passengers enters the train, and when I move over a seat to let an older woman sit down near the aisle, I catch my reflection in the subway car’s panoramic windows. July is halfway gone, and the new students will be arriving in just a few more weeks. My hair is longer than I thought, unruly and disheveled.