The Atomic Weight of Love (26 page)

“I need you,” I said when he answered. That was it—just that.

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“You want me to come to your house?”

“Yes. Now. Fast.” I was panting. I leaned against the kitchen wall. “My address is—”

“I know. I know where you live. Five minutes, Meridian. Five minutes or less.”

I hung up and slid to the floor. I should stand up, get another towel, check the burners on the stove. But I didn’t; I just sat there, numb. The TV was still on in the living room, and I could hear David Brinkley reading body counts. Killed. Wounded. Captured. And the competing counts for North Vietnam. Were we winning or losing today?

I cushioned my wounded hand in my lap and could feel the blood beginning to seep into my dress. It was a light linen dress, a pale celery green. Soon, I could feel the blood on my thighs, beneath the fabric.

I heard Clay’s truck door slam, his footsteps as he ran up the sidewalk. He rang the bell. Jesus, he rang the bell.

“Here!” I yelled as best I could. “Clay!”

I heard him open the door. “Clay!” I said again, and I could hear him follow my voice.

He stood for a moment, taking in the situation—the smell of ham, the blood and glass. And me, faint against the wall, my hands limp in my lap, my eyes pleading, frightened.

“Baby, what the fuck?” he said and knelt. “Let me see.” He looked around the kitchen. “Where are your towels?”

“Third drawer. By the stove. And the stove.”

“I’ll check it.” I heard the click of a knob and then heard him slide open the drawer. He picked up half a dozen towels, came back and gently unwrapped the blood-soaked one.

“Tell me.”

“Later,” I breathed more than said. I wanted to sleep. To fall asleep. I felt my body sliding to one side, headed for the floor.

“No, Meridian.” He pushed me back upright. “I have to get you up, get you to the hospital.” He got the towel wrapped very tightly, and the pressure took away the pain. “Can you stand?”

I tried, but I was too weak. I wanted to sleep, still and always. Just to rest, to close my eyes.

“Baby, stay awake.” He reached one arm beneath my knees, the other across my back, and I felt him lift me.

“Purse,” I said.

“You don’t need your purse.” He got to the door, struggled to get it open wide enough to accommodate my legs, and then was down the steps of the front porch and to his truck in a surprisingly short amount of time. Next, he struggled to get the passenger door open. I knew I should help, but I couldn’t. I thought about the towel and squeezed it.

“Ow!”

“Did I hurt you?”

“I hurt me.” It was true, so true, and so I said it again. “I hurt me.”

When he started the engine, the radio blared to life, a lilting pop song melody.

They were kind to me at the emergency room. The only painful part was the shots the doctor spaced about the wound to numb my hand so that it could be stitched closed. My hand felt puffy, bloated, as if it were no longer a part of me.

I didn’t cry—not until the nurse brought me a set of scrubs to change into and I remembered Belle, all of those years ago, helping me with my clothes. That’s when I cried, as softly as I could.

THE NURSE SAID MY
“friend” had gone out to his truck to clean up the blood, and she offered to go get him. I thanked her, but I wanted to walk, to prove to myself that I could.

The soft island of light from his cab led me to his truck, a refuge in a sea of asphalt. They’d put my arm in a sling to keep my hand from jiggling, and it felt secure, protected, as I held it against me. For the time being, I was going to have to learn to do a number of things left handed, although the doctor said he thought there was no nerve damage.

We sat silently in the dark. I leaned against the door, exhausted. The doctor wanted to give me codeine for the pain, but I’d declined. Besides, I still rather wanted the pain. It seemed appropriate somehow, a lesson—the ramifications of which I needed to sort out, maybe over a long time. My whole arm ached, as if not just the palm but my entire limb had been traumatized. I wondered if the pain would travel farther into my body, if it would scrape out a hollow in the dirt of my heart until it made itself a bed, a dog’s burrow beneath a bush.

“Did he do that to you?”

“Not really.”

“Please do better than that.”

I could see his profile in the muted silver glow of a distant parking lot lamp. He was angry with me. He let out an exasperated sigh. “What happened in that kitchen?”

“My side or his?”

“Why would you even ask me that?”

“Why are you angry with me?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Meridian, don’t be ridiculous!” He turned to face me, but I couldn’t see his expression, just a halo of light behind him that lit up curly pieces of hair that had escaped his braid. “I’m not angry with you! I’m angry that you were hurt, that your husband was not there to take care of you.” He paused. “I’m angry because I’m afraid for you—can’t you see that?”

I waited a few seconds before responding. “We had a fight about a trip he’s going on. He won’t take me.” I smelled antiseptic wafting from my hand.

“And so
what happened
?”

“He knocked the glass out of my hand. It broke, and I was cleaning up the pieces—that’s how it happened.”

“And where was he?”

“He’d left.”

“That’s mature.”

“I think he did that rather than hit me. I think that’s how he stopped himself from hurting me.”

“Jesus
fucking
Christ.”

I heard the siren of an approaching ambulance and then saw Clay’s face awash in flashing red lights, a lurid Christmas display. It made me think of the blood that waited for me at home.

“What happens next time?”

“Next time?”

“The next time he says you’ve pissed him off. The next time, when he’s unable to stop himself from hurting you.”

“Alden would never . . .”

“You’re going to defend him?”

“No. It’s not that. I’m just saying he won’t hurt me.”

“He’s escalating, and you’re changing, whether you realize it or not. He sees it, and it threatens him.” He gripped the steering wheel with both hands, so hard that I thought I saw the wheel flex. “A man threatened is not something to minimize. You can’t close your eyes to this.” He paused. “
I
can’t close my eyes to this.”

What could I say? I didn’t believe that Alden would ever contemplate hurting me. At the same time, the Alden I’d seen wasn’t contemplating anything. He wasn’t thinking—he was raging, a hair’s breadth away from losing control. Tonight, I’d completed his work for him. That’s how efficiently, after such a long marriage, we worked in tandem.

Clay reached across the seat, picked up my left hand, and kissed the back of it. “Come home with me.”

“I can’t.” It was reflexive—I didn’t even think about it. I could not go home with Clay. “It’s the wrong way.”

“The right way being . . . ?”

“I don’t know yet. I don’t know yet, Clay.”

The ambulance driver turned off his lights, submerging us in shadow once more. I just wanted to go home, get into bed, sleep, forget. I was tired of thinking. My hand hurt.

“I hate this,” he said and sat for a minute, clearly struggling with whether or not to say what he said next: “I hate thinking of you lying next to him. He’s a fucking bully.”

“I’ll ask him to sleep on the couch.”

Clay let go of my hand and struck his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Perfect! That’ll solve everything! Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Don’t be insulting.”

“Don’t you be naïve. Don’t be purposefully blind and stupid. You’re far too bright to believe a word you just said.”

He started the truck, let it idle, and then said: “I’ll come inside, let him know that I’m looking out for you.”

“You’ll only make things worse.”

“Then tell me what the FUCK I’m supposed to do!” he yelled.

“Don’t, please,” I said. “I’ve had enough yelling for one night.”

He sat there, shaking his head, looking down into his lap. When he turned to face me, the dashboard lights revealed his face. He was crying.

“How can I love you and take you back there? How am I supposed to reconcile those two things?”

I laid my head in his lap, moved my arm in the sling until it didn’t hurt and bent my legs so that they fit on the seat. He turned off the truck engine, turned off the headlights. He bent over me, kissed the cartilage bump of my funky ear. He brushed my hair gently back from my forehead, my temples.

There was no good solution. No clear way out, no approach that would earn the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
Why
, I wondered, had I even chosen to challenge Alden about Niagara Falls? Wouldn’t I rather stay home, spend more time with Clay—a man who’d just told me he loved me? I’d fought Alden at the wrong time, over the wrong thing. Or maybe the fight was inevitable, the context irrelevant—as unstoppable as a rockslide that requires only the slightest amount of rainfall before it loses its grip on a hillside and tumbles.

ALDEN KNELT ON THE
linoleum, the plastic bucket I used to mop floors next to him, an old bath mat cushioning his knees. He looked up at me when I stood in the entryway. Splashes of water darkened his khakis like a weak abstract painting. I sat on the kitchen stool and saw that the suds in the bucket had turned pink with my blood.

“You cut yourself on the glass,” he said, matter of fact.

I didn’t think his statement necessitated a response.

“How bad is it?”

“Twelve stitches.”

“I wondered. It’s a lot of blood,” he said, surveying the kitchen. “It’s on the walls, the living room carpet, just about everywhere,” he said, suddenly a perturbed housekeeper.

“Sorry.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He moved a few feet and started working on another section of the floor. “I was thinking about how hard it must be to clean up all of the evidence after a murder. The blood goes everywhere.” He grunted, leaning over to reach beneath the kitchen cabinets. “It must be impossible to get it all.”

“Out, out damned spot.”

“I’m sorry you cut yourself,” he said, and I thought about how neatly he had circumvented even a hint of his own responsibility.

As I watched him, I wondered how many times a heart can heal. Are we allotted a specific number of comebacks from heartbreak? Or is that what really kills us, in the end—not strokes or cancer or pneumonia—but instead just one too many blows to the heart? Doctors talk of “cardiac insults”—such a perfect turn of phrase—but they know nothing of the heart, not truly.

In bed, I listened to the sound of Alden emptying the pail and refilling it, to the slop and swoosh of the rag as he mopped the remainder of the floor. As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered if Alden realized my cut was more than a cut, my wound much deeper than twelve stitches could remedy. He’d failed to ask me how I managed to get to the emergency room. Did he even care?

I’D FINISHED MY SHOWER
the next morning and was standing, staring out the front window, numb. I realized I should call Clay, let him know I was all right. I had looked everywhere, but I could not find the bloody slip of paper with his phone number. I doubted that in those moments of chaos I’d had the wherewithal to put it back in my wallet, but I searched there anyway, finding nothing but a few dollar bills. I looked under tables and furniture, hoping that it had somehow escaped Alden’s notice. But it was gone.

I felt sick. Maybe he hadn’t read it; maybe he’d simply seen the state of it, the blood, and thrown it in the trash. I opened the cupboard beneath the sink and pulled out the trash can, began digging through it with my good hand. I couldn’t find it; it wasn’t there.

The phone rang at close to eleven. I’d dozed off on the couch, reading Puzo’s
The Godfather.

“Good, you answered.” It was Clay. “I wasn’t sure about calling, but I hadn’t heard from you.”

“I can’t find your number. I think Alden must have found it when he cleaned up.”

“Well, nothin’ we can do about it now. Tell me how you are. Talk to me.”

“We’re doing what we always do.”

“Which is?”

“Ignore it and hope it goes away.”

“Sounds productive.”

I laughed humorlessly. “He’s sixty-seven, Clay. He’s not about to change. Not much, anyway, and certainly not in the realm of personal relations.”

“And you find that fulfilling?”

I ignored him, rubbed my forehead with my one good hand.

“I want to see you,” he said.

“I can’t drive.”

“Duh. Look, I’ll park further up the loop, walk to your house.”

“Well . . .”

“I won’t stay long. I just need to lay eyes on you.” His voice deepened into a broad baritone. “Let me have this, Meridian. I’ll leave out the back door if I have to. I’ll be your backdoor man.”

I smiled. I had a backdoor man. Well.

HE CAME IN THROUGH
the kitchen door and held me, gingerly.

“I’m resisting the reflexive hostess offer of a cup of coffee,” I said, and sat on the kitchen stool. I don’t know if Clay heard me; he was staring at the bulletin board over my shoulder, and he raised his hand, pointed.

“It’s right there,” he said.

I spun on the seat. In the center of the bulletin board, stabbed through the middle with a silver tack, was the bloodied chit of paper with Clay’s phone number.

Clay reached to remove it, but I put my hand to stop him. “Leave it,” I said.

“But why?”

“Because he wants for me to see it. If I take it down, I’m admitting something.”

Clay should have known then to run, fast and far—from me, from Alden, from us. We were toxic, worse than any radioactive dump. We were sick together, so long sick together.

I told him the dates several weeks from then, when Alden would be in New York, and Clay decided to take the week off of work. He began to plan things for us to do together. He called it “Liberation Week.”

“We’ll go on liberty!” I shouted.

“That’s the navy, Meridian. The Marines don’t go on liberty.”

I looked at him, standing awkwardly in my kitchen, realizing with sudden clarity how much he hated being there. Being in my home made my marriage palpable, unavoidable. I swore then that I wouldn’t ever again have Clay in my home. It was as dangerous and wrong as mixing ammonia and bleach to create a wildly toxic domestic gas.