by Amber Foxx
“She was the pig? Never know what people are like offstage, do you? Tough that they kicked her out, but—nah—Ruth could swing it. Probably doesn’t even care.”
“I guess she makes some good money off those clothes.”
“And her family. And her art. Which is pretty good, even if a pig made it. So ... Thursday night. I’ll take you.”
Mae wanted to protest being taken somewhere, or staying that long, but she did want to locate Muffie. Two more days would be worth it if she could accomplish that, though preferably without Jamie. “You sure she’ll be there?”
“There hasn’t been a Ruth Smyth show without Muffie for ages. So, how’d you discover Muffie?”
“My neighbors in T or C work in her restaurant. She up and left. Everybody’s worried what’s gonna happen to it.”
“She really has a Muffie restaurant? I thought that was all a story, y’know? Part of her act. Fuck me dead. She actually did it.”
“What act—like being a psychic?”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “Reading your food aura, all that.”
A crack of thunder made them both jump, and they hastened with their load, setting the second chair down carelessly and going back out for the bed. As they carried the box spring, Mae felt her calf muscles starting to cramp again, but she couldn’t stop. By the time they had brought the mattress in, dropped it on the floor, and returned for the last things, loud splats of rain struck on the leather seats of the kitchen chairs.
Mae and Jamie each carried one, and then dashed back for to the other two. As soon as they were in the living room, he shoved the rock aside and let the wind close the door. Rain pelted the garden, washing the statue, making it glint as lightning flashed.
“Best rain of the summer. Lovely.” Jamie remained at the back door watching the storm through the window while Mae stretched her legs. “River’ll have a little water in it. Hope this lasts.”
If it did, she’d have to keep him in the house. She couldn’t send him out in a thunderstorm on a bicycle. He turned to her with a radiant smile, as if he had thought the same thing.
Uncomfortable, Mae put him to work. “We need to get the mattress and spring onto the bed frame. Put the chairs in place.”
“You looked a little ... off ... or something. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
She started for the bedroom. She didn’t want to say, because you looked so happy to get stuck here. As soon as the storm was over, she’d pay him for his share of the work, get him to call Wendy, and somehow explain that he needed to leave her alone. She could go to Ruth Smyth’s opening without him. Even though he’d been kind enough to help her. All night. And right now.
Feeling guilty for imagining he wasn’t safe, but unable to totally dismiss the idea, she got her phone from her purse and carried it with her into the bedroom. Right now her only choice was to kick a seemingly kind and helpful man out into the rain, or keep a possible stalker in the house.
“Spider.” Jamie dropped his end of the box spring, sprang back, and scrambled up onto the wooden chair, where he crouched in a deep squat, arms wrapped around his shins. Mae wanted to laugh, a grown man climbing on the furniture to get away from a spider, but his wild-eyed terror was no joke.
“I’ll take care of it,” she said, and took a tissue from the box on the dresser. “It must have come in from the garden.”
“Don’t kill it.”
“But you’re scared to death of it.”
“Catch it in a cup and put it out. You can’t kill it for being ugly.”
“Fine. I’ll catch it.” She went to the kitchen for a glass and piece of junk mail from the recycling bin, captured the spider, and carried it out into the storm. Popcorn hail was falling now, balls of ice. The liberated spider scurried under a cedar shrub.
Mae found Jamie slumped in the chair rather than crouched in a ball. “It’s out,” she said.
“You didn’t get any of its legs stuck, did you? Under the edge of the glass? I hate it when that happens.”
“No. It went under a bush, all eight legs.”
With a long sigh, he closed his eyes. “Sorry to make you do that. They scare the crap out of me, anything with too many legs.”
“But you don’t want to hurt its legs.”
He shook his head. “Can’t stand to hurt anything.” He opened his eyes, exhaled a little laugh. “Mum thought it’d be great to make me and Haley—my sister—get some Aboriginal culture since we’re city kids. Had us spend a season in the bush with her relatives. Learn to eat bush tucker, be part of it all.” He pushed himself up straighter in the chair. “The men killed a goanna—”
“A what?”
“It’s a big lizard.” He held his arms out, measuring about two and half feet. “I cried. Couldn’t stand it. Cutting that poor thing up and cooking it. Supposed to get my hunter-gatherer cred, and I went vejjo instead.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve. Yeah, I know, you’d think I was five, wouldn’t you?”
“No. Twelve-year-olds can cry.” The story was sweet, in a way. He’d been a sensitive kid, and had quite a few unusual experiences. Maybe if she found out more of his history, she could get at what was wrong with him. “You’ve moved a lot. You said you were in India when you were thirteen.”
“We were. Twelve was one of our on years for Oz.” He stood and helped Mae lift the box spring onto the frame. “We were all over the place for Dad’s studies, home for a year or two and gone again somewhere else. Japan, India, Bali, Korea. I didn’t really have any sense of my culture, other than the didg. Didn’t fit. Anywhere, actually.”
They put the mattress on the bed. “Do you fit here? Santa Fe?”
“Y’know—I do.” He looked surprised, as if he’d never realized it. “Yeah.” He smiled. “It’s nice here.”
Mae took the sheets from the top of the dresser, and Jamie helped her make the bed. Somehow his spider terror had made her trust him more. He couldn’t stand the thought of a spider’s leg breaking when he also couldn’t stand the sight of a spider. He’d cried over the death of a big lizard. It made her doubt he could be violent or dangerous. What had he done with a knife, though? She still didn’t understand him. The more she learned, the more she realized she didn’t know.
“Why’d you move to Santa Fe?” she asked, leading him out of the bedroom.
Jamie helped her move one of the upholstered chairs back to its original spot. “Dad’s from here. Born and raised. He ... they ...” Jamie looked at the second chair, walked over to it, and Mae wondered at his pause in what ought to be a simple story. They moved the chair. Jamie, still delaying, drifted to one of the kitchen chairs, started to lift it, and then set it down, rubbing a hand along its rough basket weave frame. “Dad took a job at the tribal college, the Eight Northern Pueblos College. Their token Anglo. Time to settle.”
He lifted the chair again and Mae carried another to the kitchen. Sensing an incompleteness or evasion in the story, she asked, “Why then?”
At first, Jamie didn’t answer. They took the other two chairs in and set them at the table, and he leaned on the back of one and sighed. “All right, they did it for me, mostly. I wasn’t handling things well, all the moves. They thought I needed,” he looked around the room, “stability. Funny. This house is part of that. And your dad and Niall. First few years here. Living somewhere steady and safe.” He patted the chair’s back. “I liked it.”
“So you’ve lived here ever since you were fourteen?”
“We’d go back to Perth summers. Well, winter there. And I went to UNM in Albuquerque. But I’ve been here, yeah. It’s home now.” He walked to the window. “Love the weather here. Is that a work of art or what? Look at that. Perfectly round and white and in the middle of bloody hot August.”
Mae looked at the hail. It was, if you stopped to pay attention, a remarkable thing. Jamie seemed to feel everything at triple intensity—beauty, fear, joy, affection, humor. What else? Anger
? Time to start winding down with him. She went to the living room, got her wallet from her purse. Marty had given her a lot of cash for living expenses. Guessing at a probable fee, she took half of it and Wendy’s card to Jamie in the kitchen. He still stood at the window, drinking a glass of water, humming between sips and micro-dancing to the music in his head.
“Jamie.”
“Hm?”
“I’m gonna give you Wendy’s card again. She really wants to talk with you, and she wants a sound file.” He set his water down as he turned, and stopped short of taking the card, frowning at the handful of cash. Mae held it out to him. “This is your share for helping me clean the place.”
“Bloody hell. Money?” His jaw clenched, and he looked at her with wounded eyes. “What the fuck d’you think I’m— What? Money? Jeezus.”
“It’s not fair if I don’t—”
He strode past her through the house and out the front door into the storm. Hail pelted him as he grabbed his bicycle. Dropping the money, Mae ran after him. He jumped on his bike and rode skidding over the walkway. The ice balls piling up in the dirt of the yard and melting on the pavement were slick, and he had no helmet.
“Jamie—it’s not safe—”
Lightning cracked as he turned onto the street in front of an approaching car and rode blindly into its front bumper. The car braked and slid as Jamie fell to the pavement. Heart racing, Mae dashed across the hail-slicked walkway, while the driver got out and Jamie picked himself up off the street.
“I didn’t see you,” said the driver, a tourist-looking type in shorts and a T-shirt, speaking with a New York accent. “You came out so fast. Christ. Are you all right?”
“Yeah, if your bumper is. Sorry. My fault.” Jamie walked over to the car and stroked the bumper. “Little dent. Fuck, sorry. I ...” He looked at the driver. “I can’t pay.” His voice faded. “I’m sorry.”
“Just watch where you’re going.” The man shook his head, got back in his car, and pressed an electric window button. Through the rolled-down window, he said, “Lunatic.” And drove off, rolling the window back up.
Jamie stood in the street, holding his bicycle. Its front wheel was bent under. He knelt and touched it, sounding as if his heart would break. “Oh, fuck, hell, no, my bike.”
“Let’s get out of this,” Mae said. He didn’t move, so she took his arm and led him, startled by how ropy hard his arm felt, no give or softness at all, as if all the fat had been melted out of his body. Must be only two or three percent body fat. Way too low. When he’d been at a healthier weight, he used to worry about being fat. Strange. He knelt by his bike again at the door, and checked its damage with gentle prods as if it were a wounded animal.
“Come on in, Jamie, your bike won’t get cold. But we will.”
“I wrecked it, though.”
She opened the door. “I’m more worried about your head.”
“Jesus.” A flash of anger. “Do you think there’s something wrong with my head?”
“Did you hit it?”
“Yeah.” He softened, looking down. Barely any voice at all now. “Maybe.” He stepped inside, shaking hail off his hair like a wet dog. Mae scooped the ice balls, threw them out, and closed the door.
“Fucking idiot,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” He sank to the floor cross-legged and rested his elbows on his thighs, head in his hands.
“How hard?”
“Not hard enough.”
Had he done it on purpose? “Jamie?”
“To knock sense into me. It was a joke.” He looked up, but there was no laughter in the black wells of his eyes. “Sorry. I just ... The money ... Why the fuck did you try to give me money? I helped you from my heart. It was a gift. I thought we were friends, and that I could make you happy. And that you wouldn’t be lonely, doing this awful crappy work all by yourself. And then—fuck, did you think I wanted money? What d’you take me for?”
“I didn’t mean anything like that, sugar.” She sat beside him, and caught herself about to push the wet hair from his face. Don’t. She wanted to mother him. He would take it wrong. “I’m getting paid to clean the place, and it wasn’t fair not to share it if you did half the work, that’s all.”
He nodded slowly, and lay face down on the floor.
Mae placed the handful of money she had dropped on her way out the door close beside him, and then went into the kitchen to get him some water. When she came back, Pie was walking on Jamie’s back, purring. He hadn’t moved. He might have a concussion. She couldn’t send him off even when the storm cleared.
She set the glass of water beside him and watched the cat massage his back. When Jamie still didn’t reach around to pet Pie, much as he seemed fond of her, Mae asked, “Does your head hurt?”
“A little.”
She thought back to when she had knocked heads with another girl in a softball game and gotten concussed. She’d felt nauseous, seen double, had headaches. Had she been dizzy? She couldn’t remember other than that she’d felt bad for quite a few days. “Can you sit up and see if you feel all right? I want to know if I need to take you to a hospital.”
“No hospital.” He sat slowly, and caught up Pie with a graceful reach behind his back to gather her to his heart and hold her like a baby. Pie lay on her back, and Jamie rubbed her belly, stroked her legs as if pulling them longer. Mae had never seen anyone handle a cat that way. It seemed odd, yet Pie purred even louder. “I’ll be fine.”
“Are you light-headed?”
“Little.” He sipped the water. “Thanks. But I didn’t eat. Yet.”
“All day?”
“Been busy. Lot to do.” He glanced up. “We should shop. Soon as it’s clear. I’ll cook you dinner. Love to cook, and you don’t.” He offered a tentative version of The Smile. “How’s that sound?”
“What do you do all day that you don’t have time to eat?”
He scratched Pie under her chin, rubbed her cheeks with one finger, and her eyes closed in bliss. “Went outside and did some music practice. Went for a swim, did some dance practice.” His speech picked up speed and energy, accelerating as he went on. “You should see the Chavez center, you’re a fitness person. We’ve got a great community fitness place here. I love the pool, and they let me use the aerobics studio when there are no classes, so I can dance—part of my show, y’know, being a dancer. Come with me tomorrow—”
He struck her as running from one or all of her questions, the way he shifted the subject away from why he didn’t eat all day and turned it into a plan to spend more time with her.
“I can’t go everywhere with you,” Mae said. “You’re acting as if you’re dating me or something.”
“Nah, I know, you’re still sort of married. Not ready, all that. Just don’t want you to be lonely here, that’s all. I’ll be your tour guide, your chef, y’know? Make the time pass.”
The last thing she wanted was a tour guide or a chef. She wanted to be alone, not swamped with attention. But he had made the cleaning fly. When he wasn’t acting crazy, Jamie was good company. Last night, she’d even felt like he was a brother. It was the vision of him with his girlfriend that had thrown her off him, and his lingering in the neighborhood, still in the same clothes. The more she saw of him, the more she wondered about his well-being. He didn’t seem to want to tell her how he was.
“Why don’t you want to go the hospital? If you hit your head and you feel dizzy—”
“I owe them money for my hip.” He stood, putting Pie on his shoulder, and walked to the window. “No more hail. We should get a rainbow in a bit.”
“Don't you have health insurance?”
“Full-time musician.”
“But when you’re young and healthy, it’s not that expensive. I had to get my own when my first husband was out of work and I was working a bunch of part-time jobs. It was worth it, in case of accidents.”
He shook his head, carried Pie to the couch and sat down. She jumped free, and he watched her
walk off. “I’m not insurable ’til the new law kicks in. Just hanging in there for 2014, y’know? I have a history.” He looked at Mae. “Long story. But I’ve been in a hospital six times in the past ten years.”
“Six times?”
“Last one was the hip. Femoral neck fracture.”
“What happened?”
“There’s this thing you can do rock climbing, called bouldering, where you free climb, no harness or anything. Ideally you don’t go more than twenty feet, and you have this crash pad, but I ... fuck, I dunno. Bad judgment. Something. Went too high, missed the pad, bounced off a ledge, kept going. Broke the ball off in the socket.”
She cringed at the thought. That was a bad break. “And no insurance.”
“Well, I had insurance when I started climbing. I don’t mean that climb, not like they cancelled me up on the rock.” He shot her a quick grin. “I mean when I took it up. But I fell a couple of times, stupid stuff. Smashed up my left arm and collarbone, then a right tib-fib break a few years later.” He pulled up his jeans, showed her a long dark line on his lower leg. “I scar bad. It’s not pretty.” He lowered the pants leg. “Sorry. Shouldn’t show you stuff like that.”
“I’m not squeamish.” Mae sensed he’d detoured again. “But you still haven’t told me why you can’t get insurance. Falling off a rock isn’t a pre-existing condition. Being accident prone isn’t a disease.”
“For me it is.” He jumped to his feet, beaming and sparkling, and opened the front door as if nothing had ever been wrong, no raging departure to crash into a car, no lying face down on the floor. Like the weather, his sun was back out in full force. “Let’s look for the rainbow.”
Mae followed Jamie onto the walkway, and he turned, his eyes wide with delight, and pointed to the sky behind the house. “Look.”
A brilliant double rainbow arched over the mountains beyond the city. The mist of rain faded into a clear, dry heat, nothing left of the storm but its glowing echoes over the peaks. They gazed in silence for a while, and then Jamie said, “Can I tell you how happy I am?”