Homefires (61 page)

Forces inside tore me asunder. How could he push me into this corner, demand I return to a place no longer accessible
, be
the tormented person I’d fled?

How could he dump the whole mess in my lap and insist that it’s all
mine?
How could he force me to say what I didn’t want to say?

“She’s dead,” I gazed at him through a wet, shimmery haze, “because you killed her, Kirk.”

“Mama!” Toby rushed through the small apartment den, lanky waist wrapped in a bath towel. “Help me,” he moaned as he flopped across my bed in the next room.

I rushed to him. He’d just come in from a neighborhood stroll with a pal and taken a bath.

“What’s wrong, honey?” I leaned over him and smoothed his wheat-colored hair from his cold forehead. “Sick?”

His head began to roll from side to side. “I won’t
ever
do it again, Mama.”

Alarm shot through me when I saw his pulse jostling him like he was hooked to a gigantic vibrator. “Toby, tell me what’s happened.” I sat down and took his icy fingers in mine. His eyes gazed unseeing at the ceiling.

“That man,” he swallowed and tried again. “That man in a downstairs apartment, he got me and Wayne to puff on a cigarette. Mama, I feel like I’m dying.” He jackknifed and arose in panic, pacing to the door and back, arms clutching midriff, trying to escape the demons tearing him apart.

“Drugs, right here in this building,” I muttered, heart in throat. “Kirk!” I cried.

Kirk rushed from the kitchen where he’d been having coffee and reading the paper. I relayed Toby’s quandary in angry tones as our son sprawled spread-eagled, prostrate on the floor, every hair on his head quivering from his young heart’s exertion.

I quickly called Heather at school, knowing she’d seen drugs’ effects at college parties.

“He’s gotten a laced weed, Mama. He’ll be all right in a few hours. Takes three to four hours to sleep it off.”

“You sure, honey?”

“Yeah. Chill out, Mama. He’ll be okay. I promise.”

“Love you, honey.” We rang off and I sat with Toby, holding his hand until, gradually, his heartbeat wound down from runaway to tranquil. Toby had, I knew, quietly prayed all during his ordeal. It tore at my heart that an adult had talked him, my innocent Toby, into inhaling something so terrible and potent.

“Where you going?” Kirk looked up from his television golf match as I marched through the den on my way out.

“To find that man who gave Toby drugs.”

“Whoa!” Kirk, instantly pale, was on his feet blocking my way before I could say scat. “No, Neecy,” he said gently. “You don’t tangle with drug people.”

“But Toby – ”

“No.” The command was soft but firm. “Toby’s learned his lesson, honey. That’s what’s important.”

The starch went out of me and I plopped onto the sofa. “I think it’s time we started house hunting.”

I inhaled the brisk, late September air as I grabbed my textbook from the car seat and dashed into Harborville Community Tech College. An early afternoon shower had left the world smelling of newly washed earth. Autumn is my favorite time of the year – well, it actually ties with early springtime. The freshness of both presses cerebral buttons that spin me back to courtship days when Kirk and I exulted in each other and in hopes of bright horizons.

I’d decided to wade through a self-paced evening math course required for my teacher’s certification. My mind needed more engagement than hairstyling gave it. Kirk’s subtle denouncement of our successful business nudged me to press on for my teaching credentials.

In one predawn moment, I’d faced the fact that my future was no more certain than it had been four years earlier. Kirk’s quicksilver moments of unpredictability kept me ever vigilant.

The class was just beginning when I slipped in and tried to unobtrusively claim a seat, managing to step on the toes of a good-looking dark-haired male student. I apologized profusely and took the seat beside him.

And as the professor divided us into self-help groups, I found myself paired with Johnny Revel, the hunky Stallone lookalike. That his gaze kept alighting on me and he chose the seat next to me rustled a certain excitement in me. Afterward, when he asked me to join him at the Campus Quick Shop for coffee, I decided it was a perfectly innocent thing between friends.

Perfectly innocent.

Another downpour had me sprinting into the house when I arrived home. We’d lived on Oak Street for nearly a year now. The hedge-wrapped, tri-level was roomy – my idea of Heaven after the tiny apartment stint – spread over a big lot with lovely crepe myrtles, dogwoods, azaleas, hostas and every imaginable seasonal blossom.

“Closets,” I’d badgered the realtor because our tiny cramped quarters left me ravenous for storage space. “Lots and
lots
of closets.” This house had them tucked away in every nook
and crevice. I could actually find my out-of-season clothing without crawling into an attic.

“How’d class go,” Kirk called from his La-Z-Boy in the sunken den, his hands tucked behind his head. Was the soft, underlying tension in his voice my imagination?

“Great. Looks like it will be fairly easy, what with the self-paced thing.” I commenced fixing myself a quick ham and cheese sandwich. “You eat yet?” I asked.

“No. I was waiting for you.”

I pulled two more bread slices from the loaf. “Where are the kids?”

“Gone to see a Disney movie.” He stood at my elbow, touching, gazing at me with an adoration that kept bouncing back even after our most vicious conflicts. “They won’t be back for a couple of hours.”

His quiet, simmering suggestion turned me into his embrace and we kissed as if our very survival depended on it. “Oh, Kirk, I love you so.” I wanted to crawl inside him and plaster myself there.

“Me, too,” he murmured. Soon, our sandwiches were things half-made, forgotten....

Christmas came and went and another year began, one that, in retrospect, blurs at times with its erratic emotional roller coaster. Kirk impulsively drove on campus one evening and discovered me having coffee with Johnny at the Quick Shop.

I introduced Kirk to Johnny. Kirk was his most cool self, embarrassing me. Johnny was unruffled, warmly shaking Kirk’s hand. I excused myself and Kirk and I left together.

“How long has this been going on?” he asked as soon as we were outside.

“All semester,” I answered truthfully. “We use that time to study for our weekly math tests. Johnny helps me understand the algebra and trig. You know how dense I am there.”

Later, in bed, he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

“Because – what was the point? Why make an issue of something so – so
piddly?”

“Piddly? I don’t think so.” His quiet voice took on an edge.

“Well, I do. Honestly? I didn’t think you’d mind.” The truth.

Kirk’s possessiveness of me, inch by inch, declaration by declaration, had moved me to a pinnacle of confidence that drove back my numbing lapses. Tonight, when he saw me with Johnny and I glimpsed the flash of green fire, it didn’t occur to me Kirk could feel fear. Through the years, Kirk had always been spontaneous with both positive and negative reactions. And if his love for me now encompassed, as he proclaimed, unconditional acceptance, could it not delight in the new honest me? After all, my self-talk insisted, I’d always tolerated his less than perfect philosophies.

Now, in bed, he wanted an explanation of my silence. “Because – I didn’t want you to be concerned about it, that’s all.”

I felt the shuttered gaze pierce the darkness. “Have you seen him off campus?”

The succinct probe stirred old, ingrained annoyances. It was so demanding. So – Kirk. He’d always placated his qualms with blunt forthrightness while denying me the same right. The reminder immediately tied my insides into pretzels.

“Why do you ask?” I turned my head to meet his gaze head-on, letting him know he crowded me. I’d never given him reason to doubt me.

His eyes, jade pools in his shaded, angular face, measured me for long moments. Then he sighed, as though harnessing something runaway. He locked hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Still as death. I remembered how this silent treatment once had sent fear careening through me and how I’d begged Kirk to talk it out, not insist on “sleeping on it,” holding it over my sleepless head until dawn drove back the night and I was so sick I could barely remember what had set him off. I recalled how he’d set all the rules with the cast of his features, the timber of his voice and the cutting off of his emotions.

Most of all, I remembered his sovereign refusal to explain himself, as though I didn’t require clarification. The double standard had peaked with the unfaithfulness. Now, he resented that I might be attractive to another man.

“Do you want to find out how –
exciting
it is?” he asked flatly.

My head swiveled on my pillow and I stared at his handsome profile, hating that I’d never, before or since his betrayal, looked at him without a jolt of sexual awareness. I knew what he spoke of. In some of our recent heart-to-hearts, when he’d encouraged the “little girl” in me to reveal herself, to tell him exactly how I felt, I’d begun to truly trust him as my friend. So, I told him I’d resented that he’d tasted of different fruit than ours and had wondered if I’d missed something by our exclusivity. The admission had been purely honest, without rancor.

Without prayer.

Tonight, I turned my face to the ceiling. “I only want the pain to go away.”

“Do you think having a fling with someone will help you?”

“I don’t know. All I know is I’ve lost something precious and you haven’t. And I know you can never understand my perspective.”

“No? I’ve lost your trust. You don’t think that hurts?”

I sighed and fidgeted with the bedspread. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just – ” I looked at him. “You know I’ve never slept with another. I know you
have.
You can compare. The feelings inside me are not any you can imagine. I can’t even explain them except to say that if I could stop grieving for what isn’t, I could get on with life.”