“It’s a kind of grief. A kind of terror.” She stopped and looked at Trevor who sat at ease on the couch examining the inner workings of an old alarm clock that had no hands. “It’s the kind of dread you feel when you know someone is about to die.”
“What should I tell her?” Trevor asked.
“Keep pushing her toward Dallas. You have to be relentless. You have to really batter her.”
“Are you sure that’s healthy?”
“I don’t know. But I know what’s unhealthy. Dirk is unhealthy. Dirk is poison. This fog would never be so black if he hadn’t poisoned her all these years with doubt and fear.”
“So you want me to push her into the arms of another man?”
“He’s the only thing she’s got right now. And he does care about her. And she knows it.”
“I don’t think she has any passion for him.”
“She doesn’t need any more passion right now. She just needs to get out. That’s the first step. From there, the world opens up. And you know what, Trevor? I trust her to do the right thing. Just keep pushing. If you can get her to drop Dirk, it’ll be like cutting the anchor chain.”
Trevor noticed the clock ticked when he wound it. He thought about fashioning hands for it from the wood in the basement. They would have to be small. The work would be delicate. Not the kind he was suited to.
“Will do,” Trevor said.
15
“Hey, babe, run to the store and get some A1, will you?”
“Stay out of my office when I’m working, Dirk.”
“Why? Do you need brainpower to write that stuff?”
“Why do we need A1?”
“Think about it for a second.” His tone was condescending. “Why do people need A1? Who’s that woman?” Dirk picked up the drawing that Wanda had taken from Austin’s house.
She calmly took it back. “There’s a bottle of A1 in the pantry.”
“Aren’t you supposed to refrigerate that stuff?”
“After it’s open,” Wanda said, putting the drawing back on her desk.
Dirk picked it up again. “Who is this?”
“I don’t know, Dirk. Just leave it alone.” When she tried to snatch it away from him, he pulled back, and they ripped the drawing in two.
“Damnit!” Wanda exclaimed. “Get out of here!” She hit his chest with the side of her fist and he laughed.
On his way out of the office he said, “I invited Austin.”
“For what?” Wanda asked.
“For steaks and counselling,” Dirk said from the hallway.
“What kind of counselling does Austin need?”
Dirk returned to the doorway. “He lost his job, remember?”
“He already has a new one.”
“Where?”
“California.”
“No, which university?”
“No university. It’s a startup.”
“Well there you go.” There was something snide in his tone. Something smug and self-satisfied.
Wanda stood and faced him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s kind of an admission of defeat, isn’t it? He couldn’t cut it in the university, so now he has to go out into the real world.”
Wanda stood thinking long after Dirk left. As she listened to him rummage through the pantry—and, by the way, the A1 sauce is right in front, she thought, so why the hell are you rummaging—she considered his words. She “unpacked” them, as his professorship liked to say, to expose the underlying assumptions.
The real world and the university were two different things. Actually, two different universes, Wanda thought, each with its own set of rules. The university revered people like Dirk. They built auditoriums for him and his ilk to broadcast their pomposity to audiences of impressionable young people who paid so much money for the privilege of listening that they would be in debt for the rest of their lives.
They gave the professors power over these people. The students knew who they had to please.
Whom they had to please, Wanda corrected. Or was that the internalized voice of the Distinguished Professor of Faultless Grammar correcting her? The one who couldn’t find the bottle of A1 sauce that sat front and center on the pantry shelf?
“Wandaaa!” he shouted.
When he yelled like that, she could measure the depth of his frustration by how far he stretched out the last syllable of her name. That was only three A’s, she thought. He’s just ramping up.
She went back to unpacking Dirk’s assumptions. Now if leaving the university for the real world was an admission of defeat, something you do only if you can’t cut it in the university, then the real world must be a step down from the university. In the real world, people don’t get auditoriums and podiums and the forced attention of crowds of young people, crowds of inexperienced young women with firm breasts and naive ideas of love. No, the real world isn’t built to glorify you, Dirk Jaworski, and it would be a real step down, wouldn’t it, to have to show up to a job each day where you were expected to make a meaningful contribution.
“Wandaaaaa!”
Where you’re a member of a team instead of the master of a realm, Wanda continued. Where the glory, if there is any, goes to all rather than to one. Oh, that would be a giant demotion for you now, wouldn’t it, Dirk?
The rummaging sounds from the pantry had grown to a violent thrashing.
Dirk yelled “WAAAAAN…”
Uh oh, she thought. There’s the pause.
“DAAAAAAAA!”
His scream had the throaty rasp of an outraged four-year-old. She closed her eyes to calm herself.
“Where the hell is the goddamn A1?”
“It’s in your hand, Dirk.”
“What?” He sounded surprised. “No it’s not.”
“Your other hand.”
“Oh yeah.”
It was the same story every time he looked in the pantry. If he didn’t think what he was looking for was in there, he’d blindly grab the first thing on the shelf with his left hand and start digging through everything else with his right.
Now he was whistling happily as he opened the fridge. The whistling, more than the screaming, made her want to strangle him. The stupid, mindless happiness of it…
She knew how the rest of the evening would go. Dirk would put on a performance for Austin, an evening-long monologue showing off how smart he was, and Austin would sit quietly, listening now and then for the pauses during which Dirk expected to be praised or acknowledged or challenged to show even deeper erudition.
Wanda would talk to him when Dirk was out of the room. When Dirk was tending the grill or washing his hands, she and Austin would have moments of real conversation. But it wouldn’t be deep or satisfying because there wouldn’t be enough time during Dirk’s absences, and he would always shatter their rapport when he returned. She and Austin would skim across the surface as they always did when Dirk was in the house. But it would be something. For some brief moment of the evening, another human being would see her and hear her, and she would feel through his reactions a different sense of who she was.
And if Dirk drank too much wine, they would fight before bed. And if they fought… There was only ever one ending to that story, one path to the mutual release of hostility. It was what made her hate herself and think she loved him.
She looked again at the torn drawing, smoothed it out with her palm.
Hannah Sharpe, where are you, she wondered.
16
Hannah started.
“What?” asked Trevor. “Why’d you jump?”
“She sees me.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.” She turned from the window, letting go of the velvet curtain she’d been holding back to peer out at the fog. The roiling black smoke had faded to a dense light gray. Though only a little bit of light filtered down through the clouds, the fact that there was any at all told Hann
ah that somewhere up above was sunshine.
“Try talking to her,” Trevor said. “Maybe she can hear you.”
Hannah closed her eyes and thought, Wanda, you need to get out. He sucks the life out of you and you know it. You need to break away, and it has to be a violent, decisive break.
Hannah felt the shudder before Trevor heard the windows rattle.
“Whatever you said, she didn’t like it.”
“She knows what’s going on,” Hannah said. “She knows who she is and what she’s doing. But it’s not a question of knowing anymore, it’s a question of doing. How can a person be so stuck? And why won’t she listen to me?”
“I don’t know,” Trevor said. “My author gave me zero understanding of women. I can only undress them.”
“Are you learning anything here?”
“Yeah, actually.” Hannah saw a depth of knowledge in his eyes as he turned over the alarm clock in his hands. “Yeah…” He looked up at her. “To be honest, it’s not very comfortable. It’s not an awareness I would have asked for, to know that I’ve made people feel the way he makes her feel.”
“But you have to learn some time.”
Trevor shook his head. “Not in the world I was living in. Hey, check this out.” He stood from the couch and showed her the clock. “You see these hands? You see how thin and delicate the wood is? I carved them with a penknife in the basement.”
“That’s nice. But what good do they do us in a world that has no time? In a world where nothing changes?”
She lifted the curtain again and looked outside. The churning fog dredged up a fragment of memory from Wanda’s subconscious into Hannah’s direct view: the steam from the witch’s cauldron in the university theater’s production of Macbeth. The lines came back to her at once, and Hannah repeated them under her breath.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Trevor hadn’t read Shakespeare. He thought the words were her own, and they moved him. How eloquent, he thought. The spirit of this neglected woman.
“Wanda,” said Trevor. “What time is it?”
He sat quietly and listened as he wound the key on the back of the alarm clock.
“Wanda,” he repeated patiently. “I need you to look at the clock and tell me what time it is.”
Tick tick tick, went the clock. What does she feel, he wondered. Hannah in her timeless desolation?
“Five forty-two,” said the voice.
He watched Hannah to see if she had heard it, but no. She didn’t react.
“Five forty-two,” he repeated. As he turned the hands, he remembered how in book three of the Trevor Dunwoody series he had blown up the terrorist’s munitions factory. Trevor on a suicide mission, sneaking past dozens of guards in the dark of night. Past the infrared sensors to set the detonator. Once the bomb went, it set off all the other explosives and the whole facility, sixty thousand square feet, went up in a billowing tower of smoke and flame.
He had achieved his task, had even made it out alive, surviving the blast with only a few scrapes and burns.
But somehow, this small act of creation was more satisfying than the most spectacular acts of destruction. The tiny wooden hands he had built. The setting of the hour. Bringing time back to a place that had none.
From here, he told himself, there would be change. Time would move forward, and tomorrow would not be the same as yesterday.
He had never sat still long enough to see the Hannahs of the world.
“Wanda,” he said aloud as he set the ticking clock on the end table. “Kiss the dweebus.”
17
“What was that?” Dirk asked as he twisted a corkscrew into a bottle of red wine at the kitchen counter.
“What was what?”
“You just said five forty-two.”
“That’s what time it is.”
“And?” He popped the cork and poured a glass for himself.
“Didn’t you just ask me the time?”
“No.” Dirk tasted the wine and approved. “How much pot did you smoke today?”
“None, actually.”
“And you’re still hearing things?”
“Don’t try to gaslight me, Dirk. You asked me clear as day what time it was, and I told you.”
“Get yourself a glass,” Dirk said as he walked toward the back door to light the grill.
“You could have poured one for me.” Wanda opened the cabinet.
The doorbell rang and Dirk said, “Better yet, get the door.”
Wanda removed two glasses from the cabinet and left them on the counter beside the wine.
She smiled when she opened the door, and was surprised at how genuine her smile was.
“Come in.”
Austin handed her a package wrapped in gift paper. She could feel the frame inside the wrapping. A photo, perhaps? An eight-by-ten photo? Of what?
“Nice to see you, Wanda.”
When he crossed the threshold, she heard Dirk’s voice behind her.
“Kiss the dweebus!”
She turned angrily to snap at him, but he wasn’t there.
She turned back to Austin. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” He leaned in and smiled and whispered, “Have you been smoking Indica again?”
“No.” Why am I whispering, she wondered. Because he’s whispering. And I’m too close. Stay out of kissing range.
“No, I just thought I heard something. Is this for me?”
“More for Dirk.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t hide her disappointment. Austin is moving in two days, going away forever, and after all our conversations, all the walks and lingering over late morning coffee, he comes with a gift for Dirk.
He had a bag too. A paper grocery bag with a six-pack of beer.
“I brought you something to drink,” he said. He raised the bag to show her. Red Stripe. In the crumpling of the bag she heard a whisper. “Kiss the dweebus!”
God, I’ve been smoking way too much pot, she thought. I’m hearing things even when I’m not high. I wonder if it permanently alters the structure of your brain.
“I’ll put that in the fridge,” she said, taking the beer. “You want me to open one for you?”
She was already walking away when he responded. “What are you having?”
“I was going to have a glass of wine.” She hoped he wouldn’t say I’ll have one too.
“I’ll have one too.”
She opened the fridge and started clearing room for the beer. If I told Dirk I was having wine, she thought as she slid a bottle from the six-pack, he’d say he wanted beer. She got the opener from the drawer and popped the top off. Because it doesn’t matter to Dirk what I do or what anyone else does. He’s not susceptible to influence in that way. He’s not the kind who just caves in to the first suggestion and says, Oh I’ll have what you’re having.
You see, Austin, she thought, that’s part of what makes you such a dweeb. Where did that word come from? Dirk doesn’t use it. Neither does Louise. Or you. And who else do I talk to? Maybe I read it somewhere.
She held the beer out to Austin.
“I thought we were having wine.”
“Well—” Wanda was about to correct him before she remembered that they had indeed agreed on wine. But now the bottle was open, and Dirk wouldn’t drink it because he was out back at the grill with his own wine glass.
What the hell, she thought. She put the bottle to her lips and took a long swig.
“Actually, beer sounds good,” Austin said. “I’ll have one too.”
God, you dweeb!
At least he had the decency to open the fridge and get it himself. Dirk would have asked her to do it. Actually, no. Dirk wouldn’t have asked becaus
e he didn’t have to anymore. She would simply have done it, understanding that that was what he expected.
Funny what I notice when I’m not stoned.
She lingered on the thought for just a second, but it was long enough for him to kiss her with his cold lips, with his lips as cold as hers that had just come off the top of the beer bottle.
She pushed him away. “Jesus, Austin, what the fuck?”
“You know what, Wanda. I told you, even though I didn’t have to. You’ve known for years.”
“Dirk is right outside.”
“Dirk is a prick.”
“You come in here, come into Dirk’s house and kiss his girlfriend? What kind of friend are you?”
“I came into your house, Wanda. And I kissed you.”
“You better back the fuck off. In fact, why don’t you just leave? Just get out.”
“You’ll never see me again,” Austin said.
“I’ll come and say goodbye before you leave town,” she said. The words stung her more deeply than they stung him.
“No you won’t.”
“I will, Austin. I do care about you. I do.”
“But you’re going to the beach in the morning.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“How do you know?”
“Dirk posted it on Facebook.”
“What?” She picked up her phone from beside the sink. “Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Because he doesn’t think of you.”
“Well…” She paused while she pulled up Dirk’s page. “Obviously he meant it as a surprise. He can be romantic.”
“A surprise?” Austin asked. “Posted on Facebook? Announced to all your friends but not to you?”
Wanda stared at the screen. “Huh. Louise Pennypacker says the water is surprisingly warm for spring. And she’s pretty sure Peter is the dad.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Wake Up, Wanda Wiley Page 8