Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (18 page)

Panic had set into Rourke’s face—a wild, grasping, searching look. He held Arlen’s wrists in his two hands. “I said, let go—somebody—”

Will picked up the edge of the table and dropped it so it slammed the tile floor, and Arlen came to. He had the odd feeling of just having been woken up from a vivid dream. Will was looking at him. His eyes were harder than Arlen had ever seen.

“Let him go,” Will said.

Arlen didn’t move. He felt like he was shrinking.

“Let him go.”

Reluctantly, he released the other man, giving him a slight jerk for good measure. “Letting me win. Jeez.”

“I think you’d better let me drive you home,” Will said.

“Call me a cab.” Arlen straightened his shirt. He still had some money. “I’ll be outside.”

He managed to hold his head high as he walked toward the door. He tried not to let himself hear Rourke’s complaining, the brothers asking if he was okay, the peeved murmurs as he left the room. He tried not to care that he’d been looking forward to playing poker
tonight, to meeting Will’s friends, to having a normal evening with a bunch of guys who weren’t convicts and didn’t care that he’d done hard time. He let himself out. And then, when he was at the far, dark edge of the lawn, he let himself cry.

For a long time after he left her—after she told him,
Go
—Lauren thought of Edward. She thought of him when she was at the grocery store, because he’d loved cashews and she’d fed them to him one by one on a rainy afternoon. She thought of him when the evening news came on, because he’d once insisted that she not put her clothes on for the rest of the day so that when he called he would know she was naked. She thought of him when she opened a bottle of wine, when the torque and twist of pulling the cork made her think of the way he’d made love to her on the ice-cold tile of her kitchen floor.

They’d made love so often. Lauren should have realized that was
all
they did, all they were doing, even when they weren’t engaged in the act. When they went to dinner it was a precursor to making love. When Edward called her in the afternoon, whispering words that burned with audacity, it was to tempt her toward making love. When they watched a movie on her couch, never his, his hand inevitably found its way to the drawstring of her pajamas.
She’d thought he was romantic. That sex was bringing them closer and closer. And yet, it was all smoke and mirrors—an illusion of intimacy that disguised a gap a mile wide.

As the summer slogged on, thoughts of him were being squeezed into oblivion—she had other things to occupy her. But she’d yet to shake him completely. In the morning light on Friday, she sat up in bed and realized how late she’d slept; it was almost seven. She knew from the soreness of her body, the hypersensitivity of her hot skin, that she’d dreamed of Edward. The feeling of his presence was as strong as if he’d just gotten up for a glass of water and would at any moment come back to her bed. She leaned over her bent knees and ran a hand through her loose hair. Already, the blurred memories of the dream were leaving, swiftly carried off by the current of consciousness. She could no more grasp the details—the mathematics of a bent elbow, the music of a gasp—than if she were to try to catch a ghost with her bare hands.

She padded down to the kitchen in bare feet, still reeling with the aches and pains of longing. It irritated her, how a dream she could not remember could be so troublesome. There had been heat, of course. Skin. Sweat. Sex that was not like some race to the finish line, that was not the athletic coupling of two competitive people, each striving for perfection. Instead, in the dream, sex was a path she and he walked together, and now the memory of that tenderness—so unusual that she wondered if she’d ever felt it at all—was a wish of her heart as bitter as it was sweet.

She grasped at the edges of fading images as she pulled a tin of coffee from Maisie’s cabinet. She fished out the requisite grinds, then ladled them into the filter. The smell perked her up. She filled the coffeepot with cool white tap water, willing the ache of need to subside like water swirling down the drain.

It wasn’t until midmorning, when Maisie called and asked where she was headed and Lauren heard herself say Will’s name,
that the shock came. The dream—skin and sweat, heat and greed. Lauren closed her eyes. It hadn’t been about Edward at all.

Arlen sat in Will’s office on a ripped green leather chair that might have been from the fifties and that made his back cramp. Will’s office was as cluttered as his store—knickknacks, an old-fashioned radio that didn’t work piled up on a heap of old-fashioned other things—stoplights, fans, typewriters—that also didn’t work. Will picked among and moved around his treasures like a kid on a jungle gym, easy and free. But Arlen wasn’t so comfortable. He sat among the stuff, thinking, and waiting, swiveling the chair from side to side.

The computer beeped, and he spun to face a monitor the size and shape of a small fish tank. His experience with the Internet was little more than anecdotal. From other inmates, the ones who came and went, he heard about screens that let you look at the person you were talking to, like a videophone. And from television shows, he heard new words and acronyms that made no sense and might have been an alien language:
emoticon, gravatar, jpeg
 . . . Even innocent words, like
window
and
wall
, had turned slick in his grasp.

Now that he was out, he saw that everyone was caught in the Web, whether they liked it or not. Only recently was he beginning to understand how dramatically the world had leapt forward into the future while he’d been made to stand still.

He watched the computer turning on—the shimmery graphics and friendly little beeps and chimes. Will had given him a crash course in Web surfing, and now he worked the mouse with the awkward concentration of a child learning to use a fork for the first time. With two fingers he typed G-O-O-G-L-E, a stupid name for a company, and waited until the page came up. There was
nothing but a rectangle, waiting like a slit in a door that had the universe on the other side.

He clicked. The cursor blinked.

Eula . . . 

His skin prickled as if he were about to hack into the FBI or rob a bank. Did he even know his ex-wife’s name anymore? Had she remarried? He felt something deep within him trembling, though his hands seemed steady as ever. Here he was, an ex-convict afraid to do something that wasn’t even breaking the law.

He cracked his knuckles, then typed her name, her name that was his too:
Eula Fieldstone.

When nothing familiar came up but some old articles about his trial, he tried not to feel defeated. And yet, to not find her on the first try had stung. It made him wonder if he wasn’t meant to find her. He didn’t know if he had it in him to try again, and he sat for a time, staring at the computer screen, waiting for courage.

His fingers had strength his heart did not.

He typed, this time using her maiden name. He plodded awkwardly and uncertainly through the maze of links and text that was the Web. And when she finally did turn up in a white pages listing, buried so far in his search results he nearly missed it, what he found made him feel as if someone had cinched a belt around his lungs.

The Internet told him everything. Her name, her age, her phone number. And the location of her house—the house they’d bought together, the house where she still lived.

She hadn’t moved.

She was still
there.

He leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, remembering. She hadn’t wanted to buy that house—the one she still lived in. She’d said it was too big for them. It had patchy grass, a little garden along the back fence for tomatoes and herbs, a birdbath in the
stamp-sized front yard, and five small bedrooms on the second floor.

“What on earth do we need five whole bedrooms for?” she’d asked.

Arlen’s answer had been fast. “For four kids.”

They’d bought the house with money Arlen, Eula, and his in-laws had scraped together. His mother had helped too, as best she could, though Arlen hadn’t wanted her to since cash was so tight. Their families had celebrated the closing with a big dinner of deep-dish pizza, and they ate it sitting on pillows and blankets on the dining room floor. That first night, when their families had left and the sun had set, Arlen made love to his new wife on the grass in the middle of the yard, with Eula whispering and laughing and saying,
Don’t you dare
, until she stopped saying any words at all.

They’d been in the house for only two weeks before Arlen left. “I’m going up to Albany to see Cousin Joe,” he’d said. He promised her: “A few days. That’s all.”

A few days . . . 

He put his elbows on Will’s beat-up desk, dropped his face into his hands.
Eula
. She was still there. What did it mean? Had she remarried and settled her family into that house—the family that should have been hers and his? Or was she alone?

His teeth hurt and he realized he’d been clenching them. Anger was such a constant companion that he noticed it no more than he might notice his own bones under his skin. But he never let himself be angry at Eula. Not in all this time. He didn’t hate her when she stopped coming to his trial after the eyewitness had said,
Him
, didn’t hate her when she never visited, didn’t hate her when the divorce papers arrived. In his heart, he’d had trouble accepting that Eula was not still his wife. Though the shape and nature of his love was quieter, more reserved and almost paternal now, how much he loved her had not changed.

“Hey.” Will poked his head into the office. Arlen tried to act as casual as possible as he closed down the Internet search before Will could see.

“Doing okay?” Will asked.

“Fine, just fine,” Arlen said. “You should see what they get women to do on this thing. Hoo, boy. Seriously hot stuff.”

Will laughed. “Just don’t get a virus.”

“Virus? I can’t even touch these girls.”

“I mean, my computer can get a virus,” Will said. “A bug—”

“I know what a virus is,” Arlen said, though in fact his idea of it was vague. “I was kidding around.”

“Ah,” Will said, but he seemed to be thinking of something else. Since Arlen had gone to jail, Will’s face had gotten older. Lines had formed around his eyes from too much time in the sun. His hair had thinned slightly. Despite his age, something boyish still tinged his smile now and again. But now, none of that joy was visible at all—only a serious and somber stare.

“Look, man,” Arlen said, “about the poker game—”

“Forget it,” Will said.

“Naw. I can’t forget it. I lost my temper. Wasn’t right.”

“Hey.” Will held out his hand, palm open, and Arlen took it with a firm clasp. “We’re cool? Right?”

“Are we?”

A funny smile snaked across Will’s face. “We’re cool.” He let Arlen’s hand go. “I had no idea Rourke could squeal like that.”

“Tell him I owe him a beer. Or something stronger.”

“Will do,” he said. And when he glanced down, Arlen did too. He saw that Will was holding something in his hand, paper pinched loosely between two straight fingers.

“That for me?” Arlen asked.

“Yeah.”

“What is it?”

Will held out the piece of paper.

Arlen took it, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

“I’ll just leave you to it,” Will said. Then he patted the doorjamb twice the way a person might pat a sick dog, before he ducked out of the office, leaving Arlen alone with a knot in his belly and the notion that he could not stand one more thing to go wrong.