Strange but True (23 page)

Bill lowers the bone from his mouth so that he is holding it a foot or so above his plate. A stray bit of meat is stuck to the corner of his lip. Normally, Gail would point it out, but she says nothing. “Hey, hey, hey,” he tells her. “Where is this coming from all of a sudden? So I bought her some matches. They cost me a grand total of two dollars.”

“Yeah, well, her rent is a lot more than that, and her inability to pay it all these months is the reason we don't have any money.”

“Gail, we've talked about this before. Once she has her baby, she will be able to start working again and pay us back.”

“And who is going to watch this baby while she goes to work? Tell me that, huh?”

Bill shrugs. “I haven't thought about it. She's our tenant, not our daughter. There's only so much we can get involved.”

“You've said that hundreds of time over the years!” Gail raises her voice so that she is all but shouting, then deepens it in order to do a crude imitation of him: “She's not our daughter and we shouldn't get involved!” When she's done mimicking him, Gail stops circling and swoops swiftly toward the center of the discussion. “I think you know it's a little late for that. We are involved in her life whether we like it or not.”

Gail studies his face to gauge a reaction. Bill says nothing, and his expression does not change. It is as though her words washed right over him. As a result, Gail feels a moment of doubt, but she presses on nonetheless. “We are renting a cottage, not running a home for wayward girls. I mean, has she even mentioned the father of this baby to you?”

Bill drops the bone on his plate and wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Gail, you were there when she told us what happened. He was some guy she was dating. She got pregnant and he took off. It's no different than what happens to hundreds of young girls every year.”

This is different and you know it, Gail thinks but does not say, because she has decided to halt the conversation right there. Her head is spinning, and she needs to think. She doesn't want to say anything more until she can come up with a plan of action.

Bill pushes back from the table, stands, and comes around to her side. He puts his hands on her shoulders and begins rubbing. Usually, his touch makes all her tension melt away, but her body remains stiff, resistant. In a quiet voice, he says, “I'm sorry. I know it's been hard. But we've gone this far, and it's not like we can kick her out when she's so close to having the baby.”

That last word conjures the hideous thought in her mind more clearly than ever before—it is
his
baby she is carrying. Gail feels as though she might vomit. She moves her shoulders from side to side in a way that makes him stop touching her. As she stands to clear the dishes, she says in an unconvincing voice, “You're right. We'll get through this. It will all be fine. I'm sorry too.”

Bill lets the discussion go as well and even offers to help her clean up. Gail runs the faucet, scrapes the food she didn't eat off her plate into the trash can, and tells him she'll be fine. More than anything, she wants to be alone right now. To gather her thoughts. To figure out how this happened. To come up with a plan. But Bill sits at the table and reads out loud from the paper, the way he has every night after dinner for years.

“Listen to this one,” he says, quoting from his favorite column, “Strange but True.” “Utility workers in Montgomery, Alabama, mistakenly hooked up the water-supply lines of ten homes to the city's treated waste-water from toilets instead of the purified drinking system. ‘We regretfully admit that a mistake was made,' said the red-faced mayor. But the home-owners aren't so forgiving. ‘I'm furious,' roared Don Randel, who's been getting the dirty water since May.”

“Funny” is all Gail can say as she sponges the tines of his fork and submerges it in the sudsy water. Normally these stories help pass the time while she tidies up after dinner. Tonight, though, they slow everything down to an agonizing pace. They make her want to scream. They make her want to pull the fork from the water and plunge it into his chest.

“How about this one?” he says, then clears his throat and reads: “A Russian man claims to be in possession of Hitler's penis. Victor Vupodroz says his father was among the first troops to storm the evil dictator's Nazi command bunker. Vupodroz said his dad snatched up the penis as a souvenir after they stripped the body of clothing, then punched and kicked it before cutting it up. He said the penis is just over two inches long. Vupodroz plans to put it on the block for twenty-two thousand dollars.”

“Gruesome,” Gail says in a flat, emotionless voice.

Thankfully, Bill does not read any more to her tonight. As soon as she finishes drying the last dish and returns it to the cabinet, Bill closes the newspaper and they retire to the living room to watch television. This has been their ritual for years, though for obvious reasons, Gail cannot focus tonight on the evening news, or
The Odd Couple
rerun, or the TV movie about a mother sent to prison in a case of mistaken identity. As she sits in her rocking chair and Bill stretches out on the lumpy plaid sofa, she looks away from the TV and stares vacantly at those wicker baskets filled with magazines on the shelf.

After a long while of puzzling and contemplating the mess of her life, Gail finds herself thinking of a quiz she took years ago in one those magazines, How Well Do You Know Your Husband? She remembers answering every single question about Bill's favorite meals, his favorite television shows, his favorite books, as well as the way he might act in various hypothetical situations. When she checked her answers against his, it turned out she had scored in the top category. According to the magazine, she was a woman who knew her husband inside and out. At the time, Gail actually felt proud. All these years later, she feels stupid for allowing herself to be comforted by something so positively inane. After all, she thinks, you could know what a person likes to eat, to read, to watch on TV, you could accurately predict the way he might act at a formal party or a casual get-together, and still you could never really know the true him. Life had taught her that much at least. Though the lesson came at the expense of so many tears and regrets.

When the door to a prison cell clangs shut on the television and the movie cuts to a commercial, Gail glances over at Bill, who is sound asleep on the sofa. His lips are parted, his eyebrows raised, as though he is in the middle of a conversation. Normally, she'd wake him and they'd go off to bed. But the thought of lying next to him makes her hold back. She considers standing up, fetching her purse and car keys, walking out the door into the cold night, and driving away from all of this. She has done it before, and she can do it again. But this time someone else is involved. As much as Gail wants to simply flee, she cannot leave before figuring out Melissa Moody's place in all of this and without making sure she will be okay. So rather than making any sudden moves, or any moves at all for that matter, Gail sits motionless in the blue light of the living room as the prison movie comes back on. She watches a grim-faced guard lead a skinny actress down a hall to a visiting room, where an equally grim-faced lawyer awaits.

“I've got some bad news, Gina,” he says, his voice muffled through the glass. “Your appeal has been denied.”

Dramatic music rises up, and Gail looks away from those pretend people and their pretend problems to the bookshelf again. Though she cannot say why, she begins thinking of those odd deaths in the pages of
The Darwin Awards
that Bill has read to her over the years. His fascination with those sorts of strange stories used to seem peculiar to her in the early stages of their relationship, but like everything else, she had gotten used to it over time. She recalls one story he read to her about a sailor named Dudley something or other, who survived thirty-seven days lost at sea before being rescued, only to fall asleep in his bathtub at home a week later and drown. She recalls another about an elephant trainer in India who survived being trampled by a herd, only to get hit by a Vespa outside an open-air market and die instantly.

When she is done thinking about all those deaths, Gail rises from her chair and turns off the TV. The only light comes from the slow-burning log in the fireplace, which casts shifting shadows on the walls. The sudden absence of the TV, along with the squeak of her slippered feet on the floor, rouses Bill out of his sleep. He lifts his head from the crocheted throw pillow and squints at her. “Time for bed?”

Because there seems to be no other choice at the moment, Gail looks down at him and says, “Afraid so.”

He takes his time sitting up, yawning, stretching, scratching his belly. Meanwhile, Gail lifts the laundry basket from the floor and carries it to the bedroom. Before he can catch up with her, she turns on the lamp beside their bed, pulls out her nightgown, then goes to the bathroom. Beneath the vanity, there is an old TWA overnight kit that Gail got years ago when she missed a flight and was forced to sleep in an airport motel in Lexington, Kentucky. She pulls the foil pack from the pocket of her sweater and tucks it inside, where she plans to leave it until she can decide what to do. Once the pills are safely hidden away, she stands before the mirror and sees that old lady's face staring back at her.

How did it happen? Gail wonders. How did that girl from Lake Falls, Ohio, end up here?

“Did you drown in there?” Bill asks, rapping his fist against the thin door.

“I'll be out in a second,” Gail says as she quickly sets about brushing her teeth, washing and moisturizing her face.

When she opens the door, she finds him standing right outside in the flannel pajama bottoms and the pit-stained Fruit of the Loom T-shirt she washed for him today. If this were any other time, she might step up on her toes and give him a kiss or a playful squeeze on his butt. But Gail can't bring herself to do any such thing. And neither does he. Instead, the two walk silently past each other in the narrow hallway—Gail on the way to the bedroom, Bill on the way to the bathroom—as a chill crawls over her body, where it will remain for hours to come.

Back in the bedroom, Gail begins turning down the sheets but stops when she hears a car pull up out front. She goes to the window and peeks through the curtains to see Melissa Moody sitting outside in her Toyota. The snow that had been on her hood, roof, and trunk when she left this afternoon to visit that psychic in Philadelphia is gone. The longer Melissa sits there, the more questions come to Gail's mind. She has the urge to run outside and ask her if she really thinks this baby belongs to that boy she claimed to have been dating early last summer. She has the urge to run outside and ask her if she remembers anything about those nights Bill lingered at her cottage. She has the urge to run outside and tell her to drive away from this place and never come back.

But she does none of those things.

When Bill's footsteps come padding down the hall, Gail leaves the window and returns to the task of turning down the bed. As she folds the top sheet over the comforter, then fluffs the pillows, that pharmacist's voice rings in her head,
If you'd taken that pill by mistake, you wouldn't have known what happened to you, especially if you were drinking
. Once the sheets and comforter are in place and the pillows are fluffed against the oak headboard, Gail hears Melissa's car door creak open and close outside. Her footsteps move across the yard toward her house. If Bill hears her too, he doesn't mention it. They simply climb into bed together.

Before turning out the light, he leans over and kisses her. The touch of his thick, chapped lips against hers breaks her heart, because she senses—no, it is more than that, she knows somehow—that this will be the last time they kiss. And the tinge of sadness Gail feels makes her hate herself all the more for mourning someone capable of doing something so despicable.

“Sweet dreams, my dear,” Bill says.

Gail stares at the deep lines in his forehead to avoid looking in his eyes. “Good night.”

After he switches off the bedside lamp and the room falls into darkness, Gail listens to his breath slowing down and the sound of that plastic over the windows on the vacant house snap-snap-snapping in the wind. Soon, he falls into a fitful sleep beside her. She lies there with her hair fanned out on the pillow, thinking of the way she spent her day, doing laundry, then cleaning Bill's cluttered work area, only to turn up such an unexpected mess. Her mind moves over and under and around the details once more, touching on each and every one of them—the sock, the flashlight, the pills, the call from the pharmacy. She becomes something like a blind woman making her way around an unfamiliar room, trying to get an exact picture of it all.

The whole while she works toward this more clear understanding, the world moves quietly around Gail. Bill begins to snore. The refrigerator hums on and off in the kitchen, releasing the same pings and ticks as the engine of Melissa's car cooling in the makeshift driveway beside the road. Next door, Melissa stretches her body out on the ratty sofa and rests a picture of Ronnie facedown on her swollen stomach. As her eyes flutter shut, she talks to him the way she often does late at night to help herself fall asleep.

“Remember that day at the library? We went for diesel money. There was that woman at the front desk with the funny accent. I thought she was your mother, Ronnie, but then she pointed to the stacks…”

As her words wind down to an incomprehensible mumbling, outside the wind dies off, leaving the woods around the three small houses in a perfect hush.

Across town, five miles away in an apartment on Grant's Passing, Janet Pornack takes her last pill of the day and gulps it down with a glass of ginger ale. As it slides slowly, painfully, down her throat, Janet glances at the telephone by the bed and wonders why Gail Erwin did not call back today. No one ever calls her anymore, and the sight of the silent phone fills her with loneliness. Finally, she gives up thinking about it or waiting for it to ring, and she lies back on the mattress, closing her eyes for sleep.