Suspicious River (11 page)

“Give me an hour to get organized in the office,” I said, and he nodded, letting my hand slip out of his hand, slow.

Though it seemed impossible, a horrible, immaculate miracle, within only a few days after that first time with Rick, I knew I was pregnant. My father would be smoking in the kitchen, and the smell of cigarettes made my heart race, made me taste tar and tires on the roof of my mouth, weak enough to faint. I couldn’t drink coffee, and my breasts felt suddenly bruised and heavy as old fruit. At night I slept like someone underwater. This was only five, maybe six, days later.

I didn’t tell Rick because I knew what he’d say. His own family was so cozy, I was afraid he’d tell his mother and she’d start knitting booties or miniature pink sweaters. His father might light up a fat cigar and invite all the cousins over for a party.

My own father drove across town to the bank every third Thursday to deposit his disability check, dragging his dead leg behind him like a lame, stubborn, but loyal bloodhound. Naturally, it was spring. I’d had him call the school that morning and tell the secretary I had a bad case of the flu. Then, when he’d left for the bank, I went out to what there was of a garden in our back yard—a weak rosebush my mother had planted, which bloomed every June despite itself, red and sudden as a car wreck. It was the only thing my mother had ever planted, and I dug a shallow hole behind it with a teaspoon.

In that hole, I buried a small photo of my mother as a teenage girl. For years I’d kept it pressed like a petal in an old black hymnal with yellow pages, also hers. In the photo, my mother had a strand of pearls dangling in the suggestive V of a black dress, a little cleavage like a stab wound shadowed between her breasts.

That morning, the soil around the rosebush was muddy, sun warming it up. Old grass mixed in, smelling sweetly wet. And there was the smell of something else, something dead, pushing up out of the dirt—a smell that would last all spring, every spring. The rosebush itself didn’t look like anything more than the arm of a skeleton that day, its bony hand reaching up from the underworld, up for the sun.

Here and there, a few bald snowdrops glistened against the thawed black. Here and there, the shoot of a crocus reached up, too, struggling from the ground and wheezing as it did, struggling out of bulbs that had been planted by people who’d lived in our house years before we did.

And even a few fat robins already—wandering around, stunned.

When I pressed it into the muck with the tips of my fingers, my mother’s photograph curled up wet around the edges in its grave. I used the back of the teaspoon to push the earth back over her, then patted all around it with my palms, letting the darkness seep between my fingers:

It was a superstitious rite, I knew—though I felt natural, even ancient, enacting it—not silly or stiff at all, small-town, hokey, nakedly hopeful, the way I felt when I prayed. I just felt glad and relieved that she was there, buried, while I was here, a week pregnant and alive, the age she’d been when she’d given birth to me. Spring was getting ready to explode all around us like a homemade bomb.

This was the last false image of her I had, the only one I hadn’t buried beside the rosebush already.

Later, that afternoon, I called a clinic in Grand Rapids, and they told me I’d have to wait eight weeks for the fetus to grow large enough to scrape. By then, I thought, even the tulips would be blooming, smooth and black, or wagging their red tongues along the sides of houses on our block. By then, April would have come and gone. There would be sparrows darting across the church lawn under the shadow of a cross. Wet wings on Good Friday and a hazy yellow sky. Then another blizzard, though warmer and thick with slush, on Easter Sunday—burying the new color under a rattling cough.

Not surprisingly, nothing ever grew in the spot where I buried the photos of my mother.

What might I have expected?

Some kind of flower, or a dangerous weed? A poppy glaring up at the sun, or something half-human? An orange flower with a child’s face in the center of its petals?

That last photo—I even tried to dig it up in August, but it was nowhere to be found, and part of me was relieved that my own black magic always failed, that my bargains with the devil fell through each time.

He didn’t seem to want my soul at any price.

I smoked a cigarette in the office, and then I went to his room.

Gary Jensen opened the door before I could knock.

“Heard you coming up the stars,” he said, and it took me a moment to realize he’d said “stairs,” swimming through his thick accent. He slid his arms around my waist. I put my own around his neck. The kiss he offered was slippery and hot. Our tongues swam over and under each other like river snakes.

The week before my appointment, I said to my father at the kitchen table, “I have to have an abortion.”

He stared at me for what seemed a long time, then started to cry. He put his head in his hands and sobbed while his cigarette burned to nothing in an ashtray at his elbow. I watched the top of his head, the short stubble there, and I thought he’d become an old man fast but still had a marine recruit’s new hair. After a while his nose was running and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. I reached across the table and squeezed his wrist, which was thin and tangled with blue veins like yarn, something sewn up sloppily. He looked at me.

My father was a big man. Hands like catchers’ mitts. A man who might have been a soldier or a football player, who might’ve been able to beat another man to the ground with his bare hands in an old-fashioned war before weapons or after the big home game, behind the bleachers, over the honor of some girl. Instead, he’d been convinced to sell cleaning products for the rest of his life by a man in a blue suit who’d come to the door the day after his high school graduation: That day, my father had been feeling confused, hung-over, and bored, and his mother was fretting about his future as if it were a case of the flu, a can of tomato sauce in her fist in the kitchen, raised. His younger brother, Andy, already owned a car.

My father’s failure as a salesman left him rubbery and nervous in the presence of men. Even at church, he would stand back from the other ushers, who were not as tall as he was but who appeared much taller in their blue suits. Theirs was a kind of height my father never had, and it had nothing to do with height. They’d speak to him kindly, as if he were a much younger or much older man. My father let those other men make all the decisions that mattered—where to park the rich old ladies in their sterling silver wheelchairs, where to set the stack of extra pamphlets about God.

He could never even look the mechanic, with his dirty hands, in the eye. Failure had made my enormous father small and shy, and then his last sales trip had trapped him in the twisted wreckage of his Ford, crushed, finally, and for real—blood and bone meal under the dashboard, crying the whole time for my dead mother while they pried him out—the sound of pots and pans clattering in a restaurant kitchen as they did. The sound of a can opener cutting into dented tin.

“We have to stay over,” I said. “I have to be there Tuesday afternoon for tests, and then they do the abortion on Wednesday morning. I’ll make a reservation for us somewhere cheap. Somewhere like the Motel 6, O.K.?”

“This is my fault,” my father said in a high voice, a statement like a question, wiping his nose and eyes hard with a wadded paper towel. “You’re just a little girl. You needed a mama.”

He started to cry harder.

“No,” I said and shook my head. “It’s O.K., Dad. It will be fine. But you have to go with me to Grand Rapids on Tuesday. A guardian has to be with me.”

My father nodded his head. “Of course,” he said. “Of course, baby. I love you so much.”

Gary Jensen caught my tongue between his teeth, gentle, and undressed me without moving his mouth from mine. This time my heart beat hard against the cage of my ribs. I came with him inside me, which had never happened before, not with any man, and the coming fluttered improbably and like a bird dying between my legs. I hadn’t imagined it would be like that, and it made me open and close around him like the mouth of something underwater and warm, something not yet born.

Afterward he kissed my nipples again. My neck. My lips and the lids of my eyes, and then he seemed to start to cry.

“God,” he said, “Leila—I can’t believe, after what I done to you the other day that you’re so damn sweet to me. You come up here again like you’re not afraid of me at all, and you make the nicest love to me anybody’s ever made.”

He put his fingers in my hair, and they got tangled and lost in the copper of it.

I noticed a thin scar under the stubble of his beard, stretching thin and red from his neck to his ear. It was white at the edges, as if someone had sewn the skin together neatly with a needle of light. I put my hand, then, on his narrow chest. It was no wider than my own, and, while we’d made love, it had felt soft against me, gently crushing my breasts beneath its bones. I said, “I should get back down to the office. God, what if Mrs. Briggs has been trying to call or there’s a bunch of guests down there?”

Gary Jensen propped himself up on his elbow and said, “Don’t go yet, Leila, please. I got to look at you some more.” His eyes were brown and dry.

I let him look.

“God,” he said, touching the side of my face with two fingers, “I can’t believe I hit you, baby. I can’t believe I did. What the hell is the matter with a man like me?”

I looked hard at his face. His eyelashes were also dark. A scattering of faded freckles on the bridge of his nose was left behind by the agitated boy he used to be. Soft hair. I touched it where it curled behind his neck, and he kissed me again.

“Leila, I got to tell you why. Something about me, so you don’t hate me. Because I feel like I could fall in love with you,” he said, squeezing my nipple between his thumb and forefinger when he said it. He swallowed. “My daddy used to beat my mama bad.” He swallowed again. “And I used to see that all the time. Probably since I was only just born. I bet I never saw him do anything
but
beat her, I guess. And even though I swore I’d never, never treat a woman that way as long as I lived, there’s just this thing in me that’s him, that’s what I seen him do to her, and there I go. I done it again, Leila, before I even knew what I did.”

I didn’t want to cry, but it seemed like a true story, the way he told it, and I saw myself leaning over the seat of a car, some boy straining into my mouth, his hands in my hair, and I said in a whisper, looking away from him, “I know how that is.”

That sentence, as it scrolled out of my mouth, stunned me itself like a slap. I’d never thought of it like that before, and then I closed my eyes, saw myself suddenly in a bright flash against my eyelids at the kitchen table on my sixth birthday. My mother had baked a cake. A plastic Raggedy Ann was stuck in the middle, into the chocolate frosting like a birthday sacrifice. Six candles blazed around Raggedy Ann’s orange braids.

My father was on the road, and my uncle had come over with a jewelry box for me, a bottle of red wine for my mother. They’d played some slow jazz on the record player while they drank it and toasted my birthday, knocking their gory glasses together full of red, ringing like old bells. The saxophone sounded scratchy and full of breath, obscene.

I was wearing a petticoat, a velvet dress like a girl in a storybook. It scratched, too, and shuffled, prickling and stiff around my thighs. They both insisted that I laugh—my mother leaning into me with that purple sweetness on her breath like a spleen, clapping, singing,
Leila, Leila, Happy Birthday Leila
.

I wanted to smile to make her happy.

I blew the candles out in one deep gasp, one long forced breath, but I couldn’t eat the cake. My stomach hurt. They put me to bed when I started to cry, and my mother and uncle sat at the edge of the bed and smiled.

Make Leila smile
, my mother said, and my uncle did a magic trick then, waved his hands in the air, and then he pulled a long silk scarf from my ear. Red. I closed my eyes, and I heard red wind as it passed out of me into his hands. It spun my heart like a plastic top. My mother pretended to gasp, but I knew where he’d gotten it from, and my heart sparked loose and blurred against my ribs:

When Gary Jensen put his face next to mine and kissed my ear, I remembered that. Something deadly yanked out of my body for everyone to see, and now it was in his hands.

Something scarlet, secret, like the wish to die or kill.

His fingers circled my nipple. He moved down to kiss it, then he looked up at me again. “I know you know what I mean,” he said, “that you been damaged, too. I could tell that about you from ten miles away.”

He sat up in the bed and leaned over the side of it to pick his shirt up off the floor. He slipped his arms in, shrugged it to his shoulders, straightened the collar and started to button. My body felt soft and exhausted, like something left to soak too long in too-warm water. I couldn’t move, though I knew I needed to put on my clothes and go back to the office. I knew I should be in a hurry, but I couldn’t be anymore.

He stood up and put his pants on. We’d never even pulled the bedspread down. He was looking at the whole bare length of my body on the bed. “Clean yourself up,” he said, and left.

He hadn’t given me the money, and I knew I’d never ask.