Stranger Will (22 page)

The similarity between the Turner ’s house and his own pre- ash home surprises, but more than the structure’s likeness is the woman’s physical similarity to pre-birth Julie; her gut intrudes. William steps around it when invited inside. Her husband, Mrs. Rose told William, is a quiet man so when William reaches out for a shake the man reluctantly agrees, a feeling William understands and if only he could tell him how much.

“Already a nuisance,” Mrs. Rose says acknowledging William’s detour around the woman, a seven- or eight-month pelvis he guesses considering not just the size, but the drag in her step as well. This is something hindsight allows him to realize about Julie and the simple image is enough to wet his eyes.

“My fiancée just gave birth,” he says to the woman, never parting gaze from her abdomen. She looks up with a half-smile. “And now the baby is somewhere in Wisconsin, I believe. Adopted by a beautiful couple.”

The husband, silent until this moment, is eager. “Any regrets?”

Mrs. Rose answers: “Of course not. Pregnancy is a gift often afforded to those who desire something different. But a gift it can remain nonetheless—for someone else.”

“It’s true,” William says. “Any number of people could use your child. Any couple, any family, any stranger would love to have your child and do with it whatever they want.”

Janice and Anthony—
Jan and Tony
, William thinks, but the comfort afforded by brevity is not a luxury he anticipates gaining—they hug each other a little tighter. “I’ve got to admit,” Janice says, “we were surprised when you called. We never expected adoption agencies to fight over our child.” She looks to her husband who forces a familiar smile, one hiding uncomfortable secrets. In another life, William and this man were the same.

“We care that much.” Mrs. Rose accepts an offered seat on the couch. Janice takes a large chair for herself leaving the two others to share what’s left of a single cushion. Anthony, Mrs. Rose, and William are tight, sides smashed and space for only whispers and shallow breath.

“Don’t,” she softly says.

William feigns comfort. “Don’t what?”

Janice has stood from her chair, lumbered to the kitchen with hardly a sound and through the empty doorway offers coffee. Coffee sounds great, the strangers say, a chirp to each voice.

“You’re not finished,” Mrs. Rose whispers. “Don’t try to change her mind now.”

William attempts to respond but is interrupted by a “thank you” as Mrs. Rose accepts a mug of what smells like coffee, but when William receives his own, decides tastes like mud.

Janice Turner sits again in her chair stressed enough over its lifetime to warrant several layers of grey tape. “I have to admit,” she says, “The idea of letting my own blood out there into the hands of a complete stranger scares me a bit.”

“It should,” William says chewing his coffee.

Mrs. Rose grinds her teeth behind a grin. “Eight and a half months will create some bonds,” she says. “The trick is to know what your body
thinks
it knows. Know what is best.”

William swallows. “But be aware of the finality of this. It’s not something you can undecide. Giving away your own flesh and blood—the decision will stick with you.”

Mrs. Rose sets her mug to the table, spilling coffee over its lip. “A decision I know both of you can handle,” she says.

William swallows more coffee and thinks strategy.

“But I will be able to keep in touch, right?” Janice asks. “Like letters and phone calls.”

“Unfortunately, dear,” Mrs. Rose says spinning the mug through its own mess, “that just isn’t possible. But believe me, once you have gone through with this, the world will be too bright to worry about someone else’s child.”

William considers the word “dear ” and how it conveys the exact nurture over nature line that Mrs. Rose forever straddles. There is nothing behind the word, no substance, no solid form, but she uses it with such poignant conviction that to distrust her at this moment would be to distrust a mother, a father, or any of the endless generations before.

“It may sound harsh now,” she continues, “but I promise you will understand. Looking back won’t even be a concern.”

The wife smiles and turns to her husband who hasn’t moved more than a face twitch and a few words since the round of handshakes. He remains still, nervous, as William, a qualified judge, determines by his tight knuckles and paling complexion. William reaches around Mrs. Rose and puts his hand to the man’s shoulder. “Sometimes the adopted parents have plans for your child. Plans they don’t want you to know about so communication is entirely out of the question.” He says this drifting from Anthony to Janice and finally to Mrs. Rose. “It’s rare, sure, but it happens often enough to justify a little suspicion.”

Mrs. Rose grabs the mug, turns hard, the cup swinging at the end of her arm. She catches William’s shoulder mid-sentence. Speaking: “this is true, but…” and the cup hits, drowning William’s chest in lukewarm coffee. The small meeting erupts, and Mrs. Rose, always the equilibrium, hushes the chatter and points William to a bathroom in the back. “He’ll come right back,” she says as he stands, and by the time she gets through “but until then…” William is in front of a noisy faucet blasting water loud enough to drown every remaining word.

After blotting the brown deeper into his shirt fills his hands with water. A sweaty pool drips through his fingers. He allows a moment to admire the endless ripples living in his cupped hands before splashing his face. The water works itself in through his nose, spills from his mouth, and hangs on the lip, and it is not until he pulls up from the sink, dabs his forehead with a towel that smells like skin, and looks into the mirror that the water falls in a few tiny splashes against the rusty drain. The living room voices muffle behind these tiny echoes.

Each minute splash carries with it a condensed version of himself. He lifts; the mirror proves his father ’s legacy. William has his tense cheekbones, his long ear lobes, and deep brown eyes—but protected by two thin lids. He thinks to consider this a weakness conquered, a defect one generation less, but…

What sounds like “…and we will have you sign some papers…” creeps under the door.

He would consider the eyelids a strength if he weren’t able to close them right now, to shut down the world around him with a simple squeeze. His father was the world’s observer, the world’s mentor, and William can’t even muster the courage to open his eyes and save…

“…because if you don’t want your child the chances of its happy life are reduced dramatically…”

He can’t even save one child.

“I’m not saying the child will be weak, just that if you leave it to us…”

Words he has heard before. Words he has latched onto and claimed as kindred logic. William has seen the world, its ugliness, its depravity, and he has agreed that it makes no sense to raise a child here.

“…the child will have a chance.”

Leave it to us and it’s not the child that has the chance, but the world around it.
So goes the doctrine of Mrs. Rose, and here William hides, a perpetuator, a middleman. A beginning. A middle. Far from an end.

“…the most important thing to me is an environment that promotes health…”

His stomach boils. He can taste fire in his throat. “…strength…”

His knees weaken. He falls below the mirror. “…intelligence…”

William thinks first to vomit in the sink, a pool of himself still standing in the clogged drain, but instead pulls himself to the toilet.

“…and courage.”

Embarrassment runs deep, even when alone. William settles on this idea for a few seconds, willing the world around him to accept the image of a man swimming in his own insides, but when two clients and a principal with motivations far outside the realm of compassion open a bathroom door, their faces contorted and noses pinched, embarrassment no longer satisfies as an appropriate condition. Try fear. Try cowardice.

Mrs. Rose moves in. “Why hide it?” she says. “You should have just come out and told us you weren’t feeling well.” She turns back to the Turners, grinning apology, the kind designed to cover the integrity of the parent over the deed of the child.

“I’ll clean him up,” she says already on her way down. The Turners leave as Mrs. Rose turns on the faucet, wetting a small length of toilet paper. “It smells like someone died.”

William considers the cliché. He wants to correct her, saying that what he is covered with does not in fact smell anything like the dead, but reconsiders when he realizes the possibility of her greater history. William has encountered mostly the results of the long-deceased, those with ripening time, but Mrs. Rose’s dealings come pushed by the burden of time.
Maybe this is the new smell of dead
, he thinks hard enough to moves his lips.

When the Turners are gone, their voices just hums behind the saturated wad of toilet paper squishing against William’s cheek, Mrs. Rose nods and says, “good news. They agreed to the adoption,” and “adoption” is hushed to a secret whisper.

After all of this, when Shelia has moved on, when the Turners are childless, when Mrs. Rose looks to her pupil and tells him with absolute conviction, “you’ve done well, dear,” only then will William be able to escape into something entirely his own. But until then, he simply nods.

“Now we wait,” she says.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The weekend toils like conscious breath into Monday morning. The sun outgrows the narrow horizon, shrunken by buildings and distant trees; the rays piercing clouds and mist, up the driveway and through the kitchen window, ending against a wall, with a table, chairs and the three of them—William, Shelia, Philip—collectively dealing with the same morning.

It has been days since they’ve shared a morning, twice as long since breakfast has been anything more than dry cereal and water, but here it is: Shelia, domesticity, and a breakfast nurtured for presentation. William has never had a reason to complain about sausage, blackberry pancakes, and scrambled eggs but something about the mechanics of this situation says that these three items will soon remind him of something he hates. Already the sausage tastes bitter and the eggs pasty.

From behind, Shelia slides up and fills William’s orange juice glass. “More?” she asks like it’s a dare, like his indulgence satisfies steps two and three in a four-part plan to bring whatever he may contribute to the world to a brick-wall halt. What it actually means, William doesn’t know. He declines the juice. Then she asks if he is still hungry, boasting that her eggs are great this morning. William is still hungry even after this second helping, but he senses a secret motive. Satisfying his hunger beyond strict sustenance is not a risk he needs to take.

“No,” he says and pours in the last bit of egg from his plate. This final bite goes down unlike the others. Harsh and sticky.

Philip stands and speaks, but the telephone interrupts. He leaves the room. The table now separates only Shelia and William; Shelia who hasn’t looked well for days, and this morning the sight still pleases him. Pieces of Philip’s phone conversation drip into the silence at the table, words like “dead for days” and Philip asking for numbers, street names but none of it is strong enough to pull William away from Shelia’s alter- nating nausea and happiness. William hears “horrific stink” and Shelia licks the dripping saliva from her lips. He hears “no, insurance probably won’t cover it,” and Shelia is swallowing slow and hard.

Philip hangs up the phone and disappears into the back bedroom. Ten minutes of silence between the two breaks when Philip returns dressed in stained clothes. They smell like he has been sweating phoraid and liquid sodium hypochlorite for days. He throws back a last gulp of coffee, takes a few forkfuls of egg into his mouth, and leans in to Shelia. He kisses her forehead, her cheek, her chest, her stomach. They share a moment without William. Then Philip is out the door. His car throws dust into the air.

William isn’t asked anymore if he wants to work, which doesn’t bother him. He would decline anyway. William no longer needs evidence supporting a dirty world. He is living it.

With Philip gone, William lights a cigarette. He notices Shelia watching him, drool in her eyes. “You want one,” he asks.

“Sure,” and she accepts the stick from William’s mouth as he lights another. “But I don’t smoke.” She crushes the fresh cigarette under her foot. “I shouldn’t, I mean,” and she kicks the flattened remnants under the oven, purposefully beyond the reach of a potentially desperate William, and takes a handful of dishes to the sink. She offers a ride to school.

“Why?”

“Just thought you’d need one. I know you’re going today.” William walks his own plate across the kitchen, the weight of the dishes invigorating dumb nerves in his dog-bitten arm. Just as the wound seems to mend, a simple chore tears it back open. He fills the plate with water and balances it atop two cups already settled into the sink. He tells her, his cigarette bouncing smoke as he speaks, what Mrs. Rose has planned for Eugene, that he isn’t going to live through next week so why bother with being a stranger. “And I hate you for it,” he adds.

“He’s been dead since well before you got there.” She wipes at a patch of butter on her shirt. “No harm in a final visit, right?”

“How do you know how long Eugene has been dead?” He inhales at “long” and exhales at “dead.”

“I told you,” she says wiping at her stomach, grinding the butter into the fabric. “I’m invested.”

With Eugene having only six days left, William has greater priorities than simple animosity with this woman. “Sure,” and the cigarette floats in a cup in the sink. “A ride sounds good.”

She stands—chewing, shoes, and coat all at once before William has the chance to initiate rescue plans for Eugene.

He settles into the car, realizing only when he reaches for the flaccid seatbelt that he’s sitting in Mrs. Rose’s car. He begins to ask, but Shelia, without even full feet of dust and trees behind them, is already speaking mid-thought. Her mouth opens and everything spills. “About the Turners,” she says drumming her fingers against the steering wheel. “I don’t know how she does it, but we are all thankful for it. You too. You’ve done your part, and those two will now be fine. Anthony, at least. Janice will come around.” Full inches separate her back and the seat. “Pretty exciting.”