Suspicious River (21 page)

The sound of his voice—a wavelength of pale light through the dim room—I hear concern behind the accent, behind the anger. A kind of love, I think. I say “No,” and feel that we are partners in this now. I feel relieved to have someone share the burden of what I’ve been doing alone for what seems like a lifetime now, like finally showing the raw throat to a doctor, opening your mouth when he tells you to, saying, “Ah”—a revelation, or a lover’s sigh.

“Good,” Gary says. “He didn’t pay for that.”

Rick and I got married kneeling at the altar where, ten years earlier, my mother had been laid out like an arrangement of black flowers in her coffin. My father was wearing the same bright blue suit he’d worn to her funeral—the only suit he’d saved from his salesman days, out of fashion and brand-new.

Reverend Roberts asked us a string of questions, though he’d already told us how to answer, and Rick squeezed my hand hard when he said, “I do.” His shoulders shook. I felt naked in a white sundress in the church, all shadows and the cold sweat of marble settling on my own shoulders like a fever.
Infertile
, I thought, realizing I was, walking in front of my father and Rick’s parents back up the aisle we’d just walked down—a cold white ruined bride leading a silent procession.

The word hadn’t occurred to me until then, and then it seemed to hover over me. And other words—barren, sterile. Husk. I’d never wanted a baby, but now the world would be full of nothing but the babies I hadn’t wanted. Fresh and squirming flesh under the hospital nursery’s too-bright light. My father’s limp was an empty echo behind me as we passed the vacant pews and stepped out into a shock of bright green sky.

It was June, and the whole town seemed doused with light. I looked at it differently that day, stepping out of the church into the town where I’d spend the rest of my life. The sky was just a backdrop, flimsy—the illusion of depth and space—while a faceless scarecrow stared out of a vegetable garden bordering the church, sun burning dust off the scarecrow’s blank face. In the distance, a shotgun blast punctured the flimsy membrane of sky with a furious hush of gray wings everywhere at once. When I looked up I saw there was a thunderhead swimming toward the church, fast, like a sphinx. It seemed to paddle the air, grazing the trees, with its webbed feet.

Afterward we went back to the Schmidts’ house and ate white cake. Layer after light, white layer on plain paper plates. Two tiers of nothing but cake with a stiff plastic bride and groom up to their knees in frosting at the top. Rick’s mother poured black coffee for us into brittle cups, which clamored against their see-through saucers when we lifted them to our lips and set them back down again. She smiled at her only son over and over again across the table—a nudge of comfort, encouragement, consolation.

Rick smiled back, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. He ate no cake. Already, he was exchanging his body for a thinner one, slipping quietly out of the fleshy boy he’d been into a gradually descending suit of new bodies while we slept. As if no one would notice. Like the Russian dolls that have smaller, identical dolls tucked away in their hollow stomachs. Rick was working his way down to the smallest doll.

That night we slept in Rick’s childhood bed. It was narrow and the springs, when we shifted, squeaked like a small dog being beaten with a stick.

We had to be quiet because his parents were sleeping together on the other side of the wall, so I put my face in Rick’s pillow to cry. I thought about my father alone now in our house, sleeping alone in the bed where my mother had bled to death. I didn’t know if there was blood on that mattress. I’d never looked. But the smell of blood had never gone away. We’d grown used to it. Like the taste of well water. A red fox sneaking through the snow and a coop of ruined chickens: I missed the smell of that house.

Rick rubbed his hand up and down my spine. “It’s O.K.,” he said over and over, sounding far away or shrinking. “O.K.,” he kept saying, “O.K.”

When we woke up, it was still just June, and the lawns on the Schmidts’ block were scattered with shredded petals, smelling like newly cut hay—scratchy and sweet in the breeze that carried it in from the miles of farmland that circled the town. Daisies swayed under an impenetrable sky.

“Oh shit,” Gary says when we pull back into the parking lot of the Swan Motel.

I recognize her pickup.

He says, “My wife is here.”

“It’s O.K.,” I say. I want to make things easy for him. It’s been a long day. I say, “I’ll go home.” My head hurts from the whiskey anyway, and it’s past two in the morning. I’d planned to spend the night with him; I’d wanted to, but maybe this is just as well. I have no clothes with me to wear to work tomorrow afternoon. And Rick. Our apartment, with its white shelves.

“Look,” Gary says, putting his arm around me. “You did great tonight. I’m so proud of you. You made a lot of money for us, baby. Tomorrow we’ll split it up. Whatever you think is fair.” He leans over to kiss my hair. “You and me are gonna be so happy when we straighten everything out.” He nuzzles into my neck, groaning a little. “Leila, you were so hot. God, you don’t know how much that turns me on—all those men wanting you, and you’re all mine.”

He kisses me long and hard on the mouth. It’s warm. I hold on to his shirt loosely with my fist. I think, is there anything that belongs to me under my skin that couldn’t just as easily belong to him? Or am I empty? A gift box of tissue. I’ve even stopped thinking, dreaming. Just snow, now, smoke. When I close my eyes, I am alone.

Earlier, I’d even gone to the Ladies’ Room at the Big City Bar and
tried
to think. I’d looked at my hands, but they didn’t look like hands, and the bathroom tile was cold beneath my bare feet. I hadn’t bothered to put my shoes back on or button my blouse because it didn’t matter who saw. I was a white wall. I tried to think, but the thoughts were only bits of branches tugged along with river water as it rushed through a narrow tunnel. I couldn’t see anything separately or long enough to understand what it was, so I’d gone back to the room, pushed through a crowd of men who touched me as I passed. I left the door open behind me, took off my clothes again, and lay back naked on the couch in that room’s dull light, waiting. I imagined silver coins in my stomach, melting into mercury, pure liquid sterling, and I felt cold. I even spread my legs.

Let them see it all, I thought. Let them have it.

I don’t want to let go of Gary’s shirt, but I do when he says, “I got to take care of this now, Leila. I’ll see you tomorrow. O.K.?”

As I walk from his car back to my own, I see that she’s just sitting in her pickup alone, in the dark. Not even the light of the radio is on.

M
ISS
L
OVETTE
paced in the principal’s office, taking small hard steps in her wide black pumps between his desk and the chair I sat in across from the principal’s desk.

Miss Lovette was large, and her skin smelled sweet, doughy. Maybe she was only thirty years old, but she could have been any age—all smooth skin, earth mother, like a mown hill. Her hair was neither blond nor brown. She wore it short, and her ears were small as a baby’s, pink and smooth as shells.

There was a cold wind coming into the principal’s office through a crack under his window, even a little snow, a few flakes of it blowing across the room before disappearing into the air above the radiator’s thumping. He sat square behind his desk, chin rested on his fist, his hair oily and black. There was a photograph near his elbow of a thin blond woman and two dark-haired children sitting together on a sunny day at the edge of a pool. One of the children, a boy, was splashing the aqua water with his feet. In the photo, light and water frothed beneath the boy. The blond woman looked annoyed. I could tell that woman and the children belonged to the principal. They all resembled him.

Miss Lovette said, “It’s not a problem. Leila can stay with me until everything’s all settled. O.K., Leila?” She smiled, but she still looked worried. She knelt down at the side of my chair, squeezed my wrist with her hand. I looked down at that hand, noting the skin over the bones, how it was clammy and thick, how those bones seemed fragile and lost in flesh, though her fingernails were full of little rising moons.

She spoke quietly to me, “You understand that everything’s fine, don’t you? But your daddy had some trouble on his way home from Benton Harbor, and the doctors have to make sure he’s going to be fine before he leaves the hospital. He’ll just be gone for a little while. But he’ll be fine. Tonight we’ll call him from my house.”

Fine, I thought, and Miss Lovette said, “Won’t it be fun for you and me to spend some time together?”

I nodded and tried to smile, but the air coming up under the principal’s windows was like raw iron. It hurt my teeth, my shoulder bones. The windows seemed to bend with it, but eventually February would shatter those windows altogether. In a few weeks, an ice-heavy branch would be blown by wind into the plate glass, and then it would be as if the sky had fallen onto the principal’s desk and exploded into a million jagged pieces of blue light.

One minute the principal would be looking at the nice photo of his children splashing in a motel pool, and the next he would be sitting in the sky.

Snow in his hair, in his eyes.

A dust of frost on the dark sleeves of his suit.

Rick gets up and comes into the bathroom while I’m taking off my clothes in the dark. In the first flash after he flips on the light, I feel like something captured. And his image in my blindness is an x-ray. A negative. I see his bones blaze in the glare, his skeleton standing in the door. I’m naked in front of him—my own body doubled, but brighter, behind me in the mirror.

“Leila,” he says. His face is a blank. As he loses weight, his eyes seem to creep back in his face like animals retreating to their caves. “You’re having an affair again, aren’t you?” he asks.

I pick a limp T-shirt of his off the bathroom floor and slip it on over my arms, then look at him. I bite my lip, swallow, and say, “Yes”—feeling merciful, thinking it’s better than the truth.

“Is it Bill again?” He doesn’t look angry or afraid, just tired. He looks the way my father used to look when he had the first pains around his leg. As if a drink, a pill, a few hours sleep were all he wanted or needed on this earth.

“No,” I say fast.

“Someone else?”

“Yeah.” A whisper.

Rick exhales and steps back, shaking his head as if to shake something annoying out of his hair. A little bird. An insect building a web. “Jesus,” he says, “Leila.”

He goes back into the bedroom and sits at the edge of the bed. When I step into the room, he looks up at me. I must be featureless, framed in light from the bathroom behind me. A silhouette. The kind of tracing the TV policemen make around a body on the sidewalk where it’s found.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“You’re sorry,” he says.

I catch my breath. His voice has changed. It comes from a deeper part of him in this moment, as if it has echoed in his ribs awhile before rising from his throat.

I lace my fingers in front of my stomach and look down at my feet. They’re shiny, white, cool as two skinned doves.

Rick looks at my feet, too. “Leila,” he says, “I can’t keep on living this ridiculous life.”

I exhale, then, from my nose. Perhaps it’s a laugh. Rick looks at me, quick and angry.

“You think that’s funny.” He doesn’t raise his voice. “Well, it’s not funny, Leila. Not anymore. I’ve been taking care of you for years while you just drag your body around this town and screw every man who crosses your path. And everyone around here knows exactly what you are and what a dumb fuck your husband is for sticking around.”

Under the silence there’s an electric hum. For a moment I think it’s coming from Rick’s bones.

“Look,” he says, apologetic now. “I just want out. That’s all I want. I’m not jealous. I’m not angry. I’m just nothing. Maybe it’s not even your fault, but I’m done with it, Leila. I’m done feeding you and waiting for you. I’m done doing what other people tell me I should do.”