Stranger Will (9 page)

“Get me to the van,” she yells.

She stretches along the ground now, alters her breath in submission to her heavy frame. The breathing pattern mimics what she’s seen on TV. They never went to meetings or checkups. William told her they couldn’t afford the expense. “Insurance,” he said, “is a scam.”

The battle continues with Julie nearly dragging William to the van. She has a bag he’s never before noticed, full of stuff he assumes to be like that of a campout: toaster pastries, canned food, chocolate bars. The roughing it stuff. When the bag spills after a fierce toss into the van, William sees diapers, blankets, all stuff that hospitals should be counted on for, so “why all of it?” he asks.

She doesn’t reply. She instead heaves herself into the passenger seat, slams the door, and reclines the backrest to a bed. William stuffs the baby supplies back into the bag and swells with animosity. He wonders why she couldn’t have tossed in a granola bar or a baggie full of cereal for the dad.

He climbs into the driver ’s seat and can feel Julie’s heat against the side of his neck as he situates himself atop the cushion. Sweat drips from her forehead. He fumbles for the ignition key well aware that it’s the biggest and most oddly shaped of the three keys on his ring. He pretends the engine won’t turn—though it does the first try, but he kills it. He makes a point to tie his shoes, claiming fear of an accident and the resulting inability to search for help with loose laces. He adjusts the mirrors. He positions his hair just right. He turns to Julie, asking multiple times before backing up if there is anything he can do.

“Go.”

William emphasizes the importance of her being quiet. “It’s dangerous out there. A lot of bad drivers.” All of this because of the patience he has for Mrs. Rose and the plan she promises.

“The last thing I want, honey,” he says, “is to hinder this child’s chances for survival.”

“Put your foot on the fucking pedal,” Julie yells.

Then she punches him. She tightens her fist, sweat oozing through her fingers, and hits William in the neck. “Fuck,” he screams and decides at that moment, rubbing his throbbing neck, that Mrs. Rose will know where they are should she arrive and not see the van. The world around him numbs to a whisper.

He backs the van out of the driveway, slow, the way careful drivers do. He remains angry though, and will not forget his fiancée’s fist.

Julie continues screaming without a wasted breath otherwise, filling the van with a mix of William’s growing anger and her rising temperature.

The control he has over the situation, his ability to slow at intersections, to use a blinker, to stop for pedestrians and dogs keeps William calm. He pats his pockets for a cigarette but finds nothing.

Julie’s self-taught Lamaze turns into angry words matching its pattern. “Fuck-you-William. I’ll-kill-you.”

Her pitch rises. The van darkens. William thinks at first that it’s only through his eyes that everything grows black, that maybe Mrs. Rose has arrived with a plan and everything will be fine, and this darkness is simply a soothing shade pulled loose over his head, but then drops of rain attack the windshield, so fat the world blurs. He blinks and allows the road to guide him, but underneath this quiet desperation of a single blink, Julie still screams. The baby still belongs to them. He opens his eyes, takes in the rain. William imagines it is Mrs. Rose who has opened the skies, who has slickened the ground, and he tries to feel the car hydroplane.

“It’s coming,” Julie yells.

William doesn’t even glance for fear that he might miss a pothole.

“Move.”

Passing cars blur. Headlights magnify in the rain. William steadies his eyes on the road, but the screaming compromises concentration. Horns start in next, and it takes four long blasts before William realizes that he had been claiming the center of the road as his own for miles.

Julie kicks at his knees. “I can’t hold it,” she says and lowers her pants to her ankles. William settles deep into the windshield drops. He counts them, watches them stretch slowly up the glass, and listens for something they might say. Julie’s words mix with the rain; they have settled to ambience.

Another car swerves, stretching a honk until the horizon in the rearview mirror claims the vehicle. William reaches to the glove compartment for a hidden cigarette stash, but Julie bites his arm. He pulls away, cracks the door panel with his elbow.

“Enough,” he yells. She quiets to a whimper. “Try something else. You made me take all those library books. Count something. Do visual imagery.” Outside, the world drowns.

Visual imagery was a technique Julie had made William read about when first filling their closet with pregnancy and parenting books. The idea is to focus on the future. Think about something entirely dissociated from the present. Birthday parties, Christmas, picnics, beaches, anything distracting that might lessen the pain. William capitalizes on her distraction and tries again for the stashed cigarette. He lights one, keeping as much smoke as he can inside the van.

Julie slows her breathing. “It’s first birthday,” she says, swallowing plumes of smoke.

William stops mid-drag. Another car thunders by, another honk.

“Teaching it to ride a bike.”

“Think non-baby related,” he says. “It’s first haircut.”

No
.

“When it says, Mommy…”

Stop there
. “…or Daddy.”
Not a chance
.

“Teaching it how the world works.” A tiny scream. “Helping it cross the street.”

William pulls more smoke, exhales quickly to fill the van with his dirty lungs.
This is not the way it is supposed to be
.

“Taking it to church.”

They’ve never been to church. “Having a living responsibility.”

Everything becomes now or never. Julie doesn’t realize, but the child’s head is visible, poking over her lowered pants. William reaches under the seat…

“Telling it not to go near strangers.”

…and pulls out his shotgun, his father ’s shotgun.

Then a long honk and tires screeching under the pressure of a fast approaching car. William pulls the wheel hard and with the gun held just over the center console something hits, something large, and the van dashboard collapses into the gun, throwing its mahogany butt into Julie’s lap.

Julie’s screaming stops. The child’s screaming never starts. William looks up and a tree, standing innocent and strong, kisses him at the nose.

Chapter Ten

The gun rests warm yet still loaded in his hand. The barrel sizzles as raindrops boil to steam. William welcomes the wood breech in his palm. Only grass and a sporadic tree populate the blurry horizon for miles in every direction.

“Quiet,” he hears, and only then realizes the screams tearing from his throat.

A shadowed figure splashes through muddy puddles. William takes their vibrations in through his skin, as the echo of “quiet” claims his ears. The figure pulls William aside by the waist and cradles his head for a moment. Its lap is hard like black asphalt, its hold robust with everywhere arms. A smile reveals cloud-grey teeth. William raises his head to meet the figure’s deep ocean eyes, but he cannot move.
This
, he thinks,
must be what a cell feels like
.

When William was younger, his father, F. Lowson, taught discipline by bringing him along to his job as a prison guard. From behind locked solitary confinement doors, F. Lowson allowed his son glimpses through small, reinforced slits. To the prisoners, F. Lowson was an undeserving god. This blurred figure hovers over William with the same omniscience.

The face appears scarred by brutal years. William struggles to reach the aged trenches, but he is paralyzed within the figure’s arms, crushed beneath heated steel and hard asphalt muscles. The figure speaks with heavy thunder from its throat. “Don’t try,” William hears. He tries harder.

The figure tightens its grip and shakes. “Don’t try,” it repeats; William can feel the world move through him. The clouds smell of smoke, heat coats his throat and lungs. He becomes the air from the inside out, falling into its graceful fill, knowing the world around him even as it begins to know itself.

“You can’t move,” the figure says again and releases its grip. “Don’t try.”

But William has learned over his few months with Mrs. Rose that no move is lateral. He has been taught to believe in the infinite rationale behind every move. He has learned of the vast digression that proceeds every present moment, and he knows that should he move, he will have both contributed to an existing series and begun his own. He believes in these lessons, so grows angry at the figure’s voice. “I have to move,” William says.

“Stop,” the figure says. “I’ll move around you.”

But William lifts anyway. He trembles, now realizing the warm blood slickening his arm. When he screams the air fills with exhaled smoke, his clammy breath escaping to be inhaled somewhere else by someone else who knows nothing of his burning lungs.

The figure shoves William down to the black earth, delivering with it an entire history. Birth, death, the life in between, and the lives around it fill William’s body with modified existence. He fights against the circumstance, not knowing why, but understanding that a fight is all he can provide.
Resistance
. Mrs. Rose says that resistance is just a way of falling into something else, but still William feels compelled. His skin still melts; his body feels like the fuel to an all-consuming fire. Exhausted though, he obeys the shove and eventually falls still. He tracks the figure’s movement only as much as his own eyes pivot in their sockets.

The figure fades in, heaving a package over William’s face. It drips blood into his eyes. The figure fades out, back into silence.

William remembers the first meeting, an incident Mrs. Rose described not as fate, but as “part of something fate belongs to.” On that day in the clearing, he had shot three birds, a record despite the rain and late afternoon heat. Mrs. Rose understood and remained calm, a reaction William credited to her age. He’d learn later over coffee that her relaxed demeanor was due to years of teaching, years of directing and influencing the lives of children toward a goal she referred to as “beautiful lives.” This was a term William never understood.
Beautiful lives
, she said,
is what happens when things happen
.

“Beautiful lives,” William says and the figure comes back saying, “quiet,” again. Louder. Commanding. William obeys, falls back into his own history.

Children
, he hears Mrs. Rose say,
are the only things humans can create without intervention. They exist only as another attempt. To believe in them means to believe in finality—the possibility of perfection.

William tastes the rough ground. He lets his tongue bathe the dirt and grass as he is pulled across the wet earth.
But to forget them
, he says taking her cue.
To forget them…

“…means to accept that they can be forgotten,” the figure says. William fades back into the smoky air and feels the figure’s tight grip around his wrists. His shoulders fail like flaccid chain, releasing deeper screams. “Just get through this first,” the figure says.

Threads of skin peel from his ribs. Tiny cuts penetrate deep, grass blades reaching out to hold him back as he is dragged across the ground. The air cools. The sky brightens. William feels miles from the smoky air. The figure drops its arms to the soft ground and runs. “Don’t move,” it says as its footsteps diminish.

William doesn’t feel like William. He breathes the clean air and tries to forget where he is in favor of where he was, but he knows nothing. The figure is a small blurry dot behind a tree, moving, up, down, up, down. “What are you doing?” he yells barely recognizing his own voice when it isn’t crafting a scream.

“Stay still,” the figure says. Up, down, up, down. Digging. “What are you looking for?” he yells.

“You’ve got to be quiet,” the figure says. “Someone might hear.”

But William has too many questions. He turns to his stomach and pushes slowly to his knees, walks with a limp. “What are you looking for?” he asks, whisper quiet, when close enough to see a large empty hole.

The figure turns from the pit and drops the shovel. “Hell, William,” he says. “You shouldn’t be walking.”

But he is. He is walking and talking and curious enough to ask why his body is covered in blood and why the father figure is digging a hole. “There’s nothing in that hole,” he says.

The father turns away and lifts the shovel from its pillow of fresh turned dirt. “Just stay close. We’ve got to get some stories straight,” and before William can speak the figure connects with a second shove, to his face, through his neck. The sky grows black and William is again surrounded by wet grass.

“Sorry,” the figure says. “But you can’t scream. People aren’t far away.” The voice is different. Softer, but aged still. “I’m not looking for anything,” it says. “I’m hiding it.” The shovel moves up, down, up, down.

William hovers close enough to the pit to judge its depth, endless the way it bottoms at deep black. “What are you hiding?” The figure tosses the shovel, drops to its knees and reaches behind a tree. “I’m so proud,” it says holding a small, blanketed package.

William’s lungs burn again. They boil up through his throat, to his mouth and nose. His tongue, his nostrils, fill with fire and everything from inside comes flowing out.

“Watch the DNA,” the figure says. “They can get samples from that.”

William knows this voice. He pieces together the arms and the hands. If only he could stay conscious. If only he could stay awake long enough to remove the blur.

“What is that?” William asks, nodding to the blanket, but everything is black before the father gives him an answer. This is what death must feel like: blurred temptation.

Mrs. Rose taught William that children are a second chance and that second chances are exactly what keep us from believing that we need only one. Second chances imply regret.
Children
, William says. The word echoes, bounces off trees and the ground and fills the pit at the figure’s knees. He hears the sound pass through the air, over the grass and twigs, off to absorb into someone else’s life.