How it Ends (27 page)

“Take all the time you need to compose yourself,” he said over his shoulder as he headed for the door. “Nurse?”

“Coming,” she said and, casting me a brief, sympathetic look, followed him out.

Looking back, it’s odd that I never equated those two small scars on my abdomen with my inability to get pregnant.

That terrifying, confusing time in the state hospital after my mother died was so hazy now that it seemed like it had happened to someone else, and although Peter had undoubtedly registered the existence of my scars, he never put two and two together, either.

Why should we have?

We’d never even heard of mandatory sterilization for the unfit and wouldn’t for years, until investigative journalists exposed the practice, and by then I had sworn off doctors so completely that not even the idea of a baby could induce me to see one.

“Wow,” I breathed, falling back against the chair and shaking my head. “They sterilized her when she was how old? Thirteen?” I sat there, foot tapping, scowling, scratching my eyebrow, and then
drumming my fingers on the arm of the chair until I couldn’t take it anymore. “What is it, exactly, about female reproductive organs that makes guys think they have a right to mess with them?”

Gran swallowed.

“I mean, where do they get off doing sh…er, stuff like that, anyway?” I jumped up and started pacing because first it had been Mrs. Boehm and now it was Louise. “Seriously, Gran, what the hell? I mean, I don’t go around trying to regulate the contents of
their
testicles—”

Grandpa, who had just opened the door to walk in, winced, turned, and walked right back out again.

“Or decide who should be castrated because they’re not worth
breeding,
so where do they get off being so obsessed with the contents of my uterus? I mean, just mind your own business already, and worry about your own organs instead of mine. I swear.”

I railed at home, too, driving my father from the room and trying not to tell too much of the book so my mother would still want to hear it, only it really aggravated me, so I called Crystal and told her, and then Sammi, too, who said her boyfriend had been sitting next to her but I’d yelled
uterus
so loud that he’d quickly gotten up and left the room.

Good.

They should
all
leave the room and leave the fates of uteruses (uteri?) up to their owners.

Sammi called and told me Teresa had gone to a party at Phil’s and Seth had been there.

“With anyone?” I said, sinking onto the edge of my bed because if he had brought someone, if he had, then we were officially over.

“No, but she said he got so messed up that he had to stay at Phil’s because there was no way he could drive,” Sammi said.

“I don’t suppose she asked him about me,” I said.

“Well, yeah, she said she went outside to get high with him and while they were smoking she asked if you guys were still together, and he just looked at her real cold and said,
Tell Hanna if she wants to know that she’ll have to ask me herself,”
Sammi said.

I sat silently for a minute, feeling the hot pain spark something less than anger but more than irritation and a weird stirring of excitement because he hadn’t said
No, we’ve broken up.
Instead he had sent me a message, and okay, it wasn’t exactly an apology on bended knee but he
had
broken the stalemate and that meant—

“Hanna?” Sammi said tentatively. “What’re you thinking?”

I told her and she sighed.

“What?” I said a little defensively.

“I wasn’t going to tell you this part but now I have to,” she said, sounding upset. “She said he also tried to come on to her.”

“What?” I said.

“She said—and don’t tell her I told you because she didn’t want to hurt you—when they were done getting high, he kind of backed her against the wall, and at first she thought he was kidding or she was imagining it, but then he put a hand up on each side of her and she was like,
Whoa, not gonna happen,
and slipped away. He laughed, but not in a good way, and then she went inside and he just hung out with Phil most of the night.” She fell silent. “Are you mad at me for telling you?”

“No,” I said, turning away from my reflection in the mirror. “It’s better that I know, although I bet I know why he did it.”

“Why?” Sammi said warily.

“Because he knew it would get back to me,” I said and was completely unprepared for her response.

“How about just because he’s an asshole and he doesn’t care how much he hurts you?” she snapped.

Yeah, that could be it, too.

I saw Seth today, not right up close but passing him in the hall. I don’t know how that happened, because I’ve been so careful to avoid all his routes, but I was walking and trying to find something in my notebook, and I just got this feeling and glanced up. He was coming toward me in the flow of traffic, and he quickly averted his gaze before our eyes met. I knew people were watching so I just looked back into my notebook, and we passed and I smelled his beautiful scent and my knees actually got weak.

How long is this stalemate going to last?

I haven’t worn my ankle bracelet since the night I walked away and he didn’t come after me. I wonder if he’s mad about that.

I laid on my bed, stared at the ceiling and listened to “Sweet Jane” over and over, trying to figure out whether or not I should make the first move toward getting back with him.

All it would take was wearing that bracelet.

Gran doesn’t look good at all today. She’s flailing all over the place and I’m afraid she’s going to fall right out of her wheelchair, even though she’s belted in.

Even worse, I think she might have peed herself, because I can smell it, but there is no way I can change her.

I just can’t.

It would be a major violation and I wouldn’t even know how to begin.

How It Ends

Peter, heartbroken that there would be no natural child, retreated into himself, and when I told him I was hurting, too, he held me briefly and said, “I know, Louise. Just…give me some time.” It was his way, to retreat into a place I couldn’t go, and, although it frustrated me sometimes because I never really knew what he was thinking or processing or had decided, trying to make him talk about it was like banging my head against a brick wall and only made things worse.

So we put our all into working and saving, but the times they were a-changing and our neighborhood fell to a never-ending wave of broke, stoned, braless, sometimes dirty and desperate, sometimes charming and cheerful, often earnest and always hungry,
free love, let it all hang out, don’t trust anyone over thirty, do your own thing
hippies.

The kids weren’t bad except for the occasional vomit on the lawn or porch, the casual appropriation of anything left outside that could be sold or bartered for pot, acid, or food and the nerve-wracking habit they had of just opening the door, flashing a peace sign, and wandering in whenever they felt like it.

Some of them were my age and a lot of the guys thought I should
quit being a tool of the man, fuck the establishment, and tune in, turn on, and drop out
with them, but I always told them that if I did that, then there wouldn’t be any food
here,
either, and then where would they eat for free?

“Bummer,” they’d mutter good-naturedly and, swiping a slice of cheese or an orange, wander back out to find the guy with the psychedelics.

Someone, I never found out who, decided the dogs, our beloved Sonny and Cher would be happier
free, man, not locked up in the backyard like prisoners,
so they opened the gate while Peter and I were at work, removed the dogs’ collars, and let them go.

We ran looking for them for hours, handing out hastily scrawled fliers, and posting
LOST DOGS
signs on the phone poles, asking everyone hanging out on the block if they’d seen the dogs and getting only slow, wide-eyed shaking of heads or vague memories of thinking they might have gone that way.

Or that way.

Or the other way.

It was awful.

I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop crying thinking of them out there in traffic, hungry, stolen, lost, maybe hurt and unable to find their way home. And what if they’d gotten split up? They did everything together—eat, slept, played, peed, dug holes, stole snacks—so how could they survive without each other? Oh,
why
hadn’t I locked them in the house instead of leaving them in the yard?
Why?

Exhausted, Peter hit me with that same question, and it salted the wound so keenly that I raged back, saying that it was
him
who hadn’t wanted the dogs sleeping on the couch while we were at work and it was
his
rule, not mine, and so if they were starving or dead out there somewhere, then he had no one to blame for it but himself…

“You know what?” he said. “You’re right. It’s my fault. Everything that goes wrong around here is my fault.”

“I didn’t say that,” I said, already regretting lashing out at him. “I didn’t mean it. I’m just…I can’t stand the thought of them lost out there all alone….” And I started crying all over again, and this time, instead of pushing him away, I leaned against him, and his arms came around me, not tightly this time but there all the same.

Sixteen days after replacing the
LOST DOGS
signs with
REWARD
signs, a pickup pulled up and a dark-haired, moon-faced girl in tie-dye got out and knocked at the door.

“Hey, man, I think I found your dogs,” she said, scratching the inside of her arm and avoiding my gaze. “They’re in the back of the truck, but—”

I pushed past her, running down the steps and to the back of the pickup. “Sonny? Cher? Son—” I went still, gazing at the dogs,
my
dogs, lying on their sides on the hot metal, fur stretched over bones, too weak even to lift their heads, filthy, sunken, and I gasped, “Oh,
no,
” and Sonny managed to twitch the tip of his stubby tail in a feeble wag.

I shouted for Peter and scaled the truck’s tailgate, crying, crouching in there with them, running my hands gently over their heads, babbling, “You’re home, you’re home, you’re going to be fine,” and gagging at their filthy, sun-baked smell.

Peter took one look at them and, swearing, jerked down the tailgate and lifted Cher in his arms. “Open the car,” he said, and I scrambled past him, past the girl who said, “There’s a reward, right?” and I flung open the back doors of our car, and while Peter was laying Cher across the seat, I ran for water and wet a paper towel and squeezed some into her mouth while the girl said, “You said there was a reward, right?” and Cher licked my hand once and exhaled and never inhaled again.

I stared at the dog in disbelief a moment and then backed out of the car. Turned on the girl and in cold rage said, “Where did you find these dogs?”

“There’s a rew—”

“Where?” I shouted, making her cringe back against the car. “Did you steal them?”

“No, man, I swear, they were chained up behind a pad down on Saxson,” she babbled, scratching and scratching her arm. “Some bony
dude brought ’em down there a couple of weeks ago, and then just, like, never came back—”

“Whose house?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said, trying to inch away. “A lot of people crash at that place—”

“But no one remembered to feed the dogs?” I said, breathing hard. “No one heard them barking or crying or begging for food and water, no one—”

“Hey, you know, you’re flipping out and I didn’t have to come here,” she said, flinging back her frizzy hair. “I could’ve just left them there—”

“But there was a reward,” I said as I caught sight of Peter, standing slumped and head bowed over a limp Sonny in his arms. “Can’t collect the reward if the dogs are dead, right?”

“Well, yeah,” she said, shrugging a shoulder and looking away. “I mean bread’s bread, and there’s never enough, you know? You gotta eat.”

I stared at her, incredulous. “Get out of here. Go, or I swear to Christ I’ll—”

“Peace,” she said and, scuttling past me, scrambled into the truck. It pulled a screeching U-turn, and as it blasted past, she stuck her arm out the window and gave me the finger.

We buried the dogs together next to the garden and I didn’t cry until I looked up and saw some of the kids on the block, girls mostly but a sprinkling of guys, too, standing there in line, each with a flower and waiting to pay their respects.

The neighborhood wasn’t good for us anymore, so we put our house on the market and sold it to a man of about forty wearing a terrible toupé, striped bells, and a crushed-velvet Nehru jacket. He came arm in arm with a skinny, gray-toothed woman who giggled and said, “Far out,” when she walked into each of my neat, freshly painted rooms.

I hated them both.

By the time the house changed hands, I was more than ready to go.

Instead of buying in a neighborhood where our future children would have plenty of playmates, we bought a wooded piece of land with a big old farmhouse and outbuildings, where we could shut out the world and live the way we wanted.

The new place—
our
new place—changed almost everything.

The house and the land embraced us.

The first moment I saw it, something inside my heart opened and whispered,
Yes, oh yes,
and kept on delighting as we explored the rooms, admired the giant hearth in the kitchen and the fireplaces scattered throughout, as we smiled at her white plaster walls, deep windowsills, and Dutch doors, as we stood under the towering catalpa tree in the back and gazed out across the gently rolling green lawn, the wild woods, and the little pond down the hill.

“It’ll be a bear to heat in the winter,” Peter said, eyeing the size of the place. “There’s a woodstove and fireplaces, but the rest is electric baseboard. We might have to close off the rooms we’re not using so we don’t go straight to the poorhouse.”

“Okay,” I said, dazzled by the sight of a towering sugar maple beginning to turn red and a giant tangled knot of wild roses and blackberry bushes spreading alongside it.