The End of Always: A Novel (21 page)

“I got some from my sister,” I said softly. “August. Please.”

“You got some money from your sister?”

“August,” I said.

“How did you get this money?” he said.

“She gave it to me.”

“She gave it to you? Just like that? You did not ask?” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Why would she do that?”

I wanted to explain but I could not. It seemed too complicated to tell him that I had earned money at the laundry, that my father had always taken that money from me, that I was hungry, that I wanted to eat, that I had walked all the way across town to see if my sister would give me some of that money back, that I did not think I should have to ask him for money, that he was my husband and he was supposed to know enough to take care of me.

“August,” I said. “It was just a little.”

“That is a lie.” He ran his hand through his hair. “That is a goddamn lie,” he said. He walked up and down in front of me. “You went begging to your family,” he said. “I have that right, don’t I?”

“August.”

“Did she get his permission?”

“Who?”

“Your sister. The one you went begging to. Did she get your father’s permission?”

“It was my money. From before.”

“But don’t you see what you have done to me?” he said. He tugged at his head as if he could wrench it from his shoulders. “My God,” he said. “My God.”

“I had to eat,” I said. I looked in his eyes. I could not understand how the act of asking my sister for some of my money back had humiliated him, but I could see that he thought it had.

“That is when you come to me,” he said. “I cannot read what is in your mind. How do I know anything if you do not tell me?”

My clothes hung on me like empty sacks. I could count every rib when I lay down next to him. He could have counted my ribs, too, had he ever stopped and looked. Instead, he had simply filled me and filled me again until the hunger turned into my longing for him.

“You have not given me any money for weeks,” I said.

“Do I know that?” He looked around the room as if he expected the furniture to answer him. “I do not believe I know that.”

I had no answer for him. It seemed ridiculous that I should have to tell him to feed me. But August did not think this was ridiculous. He made it seem like I had made a terrible mistake. He made it seem like I should have known what to do.

He bent down and picked up the floorboard he had pried up with the screwdriver. He threw the board on the bed next to the empty sack. He faced me. “What have you got to say for yourself?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said softly. Pleading. “August—”

“That’s right,” he said. “Nothing. There is nothing you can say for yourself.” He picked up the sack. “What else do you have in here?” he said. He held the sack upside down in the air before him and shook it up and down as if he expected treasure to drop out. “What else are you hiding from me?”

“Nothing,” I said. “There is nothing else.”

He kicked one of my apples and I thought that was a shame because the bruise would spread and I would not be able to eat the apple later.

He threw the sack at me. “You make me sick.”

“August,” I said. I stiffened my back. “What do you want me to do? You leave me here with no food, no money. What am I supposed to do?” I crossed the room and touched his forearm. “I have to eat.”

“Do not do that,” he said.

“This?” I said. I pressed myself against him. “Don’t do this?”

“Stop it,” he said. He stepped away. “You humiliated me in front of your family. I don’t want to be near you.”

“No?” I said. I followed him. “You don’t want this?” I pushed myself against him again. I looked up at him. His face had gone dire in the falling light. “August,” I said. “August.” I lay both of my hands on him. I leaned into him and felt his warm chest beneath my palms. I told him that I loved him. I tried to make him remember who I was. I tried to make him hold me the way he had held me before we were married. I wanted him to feel in his racing heart that we were the same and that he loved me, he loved me.

“Stop acting like a whore,” he said. He put his hands on my shoulders and tried to push me away. But I held on to his shirtsleeves.

He raised his hand and slapped me hard across the face. I fell to my knees. Sprays of sparkles stood out before me, white and green and blue, and then came a blow and there was darkness behind the sparkles. I lost sight of the table leg and the foot of the bed. A rushing filled my ears as if the swirling surge of a terrible river and then came another blow and even the river sound retreated. I lay in the blue-black darkness and felt my body move as if I had become a sack of lost and lumpy things. But I did not put my hand up before me. I did not crawl away. After a while I could hear someone far away screaming and then I heard men shouting and someone yelling, “Stop it! You’ll kill her!” After that August leaned down through the blank light and the gray shadow and the blue sparkles and the white sparkles. He put his face close to mine. He put his mouth next to my ear. “Understand me,” he said. “Next time I will use my gun.”

B
ertha’s husband, Frank, and some other men came through the door and pulled August off of me. They lifted me up and carried me across the wet grass to Bertha’s house. She covered me with a blanket. I turned my head and spit blood into the grass.

The men put me in a bedroom where there was flowered wallpaper on the walls and clean white woodwork and a lamp with a pastel blue glass shade on the nightstand next to the bed. Then the men were gone. Bertha opened the window and no breeze blew the curtains at the sill. I heard her soft footsteps on the stairs. The night was still and hot. Somewhere below me she chipped ice and put the chips in a clean towel and brought that to me and told me to hold it against my jaw. She set a shallow white basin with a rim of red on the nightstand and used both hands to loosen my clothes. She dipped a washcloth into the water in the basin and dabbed at my face. She put a pillow under my arm so I could hold the ice against my jaw. She sat with me for a long time but I was too ashamed to look her in the eye. Then she went away. I lay in the silence and wished I were dead.

When she came back she carried a vase of dark red dahlias, which she put on the dresser. She had changed from her dress into her nightclothes. She fingered the sash on her wrapper. Her face was weary and sad. I tried to sit up but fell back. Pain shot through my sides, my stomach, my face.

“Lie still,” she said. Her voice had a firm, commanding quality I had not heard from her before.

“Where,” I said. I stopped. Shattered stars flew up over me in a dazzling whirl and then darkness followed.

“Frank took him to get a drink.”

More stars flew up and faded.

“It’s bad,” she said. “I should get the doctor.” She touched my face. “You need stitches.”

“No.”

“But you could have something broken inside. You look very bad.”

Blackness rose and then dropped away and the room sparkled. If I had something broken inside, it was because August had broken it. I licked my lips. Blood. It ran down my neck and into my hair.

“Someone from your family, then,” she urged.

“No,” I said.

“Your mother?” Bertha smoothed back my hair. Her touch was gentle. “A sister?”

Tears ran out of my eyes into my ears. I stared at the ceiling.

She picked up the washcloth from its basin. She wiped the cloth against my skin. The cloth was cool and wet and she worked gently. Her hair was tied back in a blue ribbon, her robe and nightgown fresh and pressed, her slippers white wool, as if she were a being from a place I had only heard rumored. “Get some rest,” she murmured. The cool wet and the stars in my head. “We won’t let him in tonight.”

The first night I dreamt of my mother. She held her hand out to me but I could not reach her. In the morning I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. I thought about the day August and I got married. They all thought I was ruined already so what did it matter what he did with me? The judge had winked at August like a man will when he shares some secret with another. Kiss her, he’d said, as if he did not know what else had already gone on. Martha believed what my father believed, which made her no different from William Oliver or Inge or any of the rest of them. It was as if they had put their heads together about me and taken my measure and then they had marked that down someplace and my future was sealed. As if I had no say in this and no hand.

Bertha brought a bowl of oatmeal on a tray and set it down on the bedside table. She pulled up a chair. In a kind voice she told me that I should just stay where I was and she would help me eat. She sat there for a time with the spoon poised in midair, but when I would not take anything, she stood up and left. Pain all over my body razor sharp and my ribs hurt like they’d been broken. I lay there and told myself that it would get better. I lay there and cried. When I woke up it was the second day, and Bertha stood in front of me with a soup plate in her hand.

“You have to eat,” she said. “Let me help you.”

She had made some broth from beef bones. She sat on the chair and said she could feed me if I wanted but I said no. I dug my elbows into the mattress until I slowly came to a sitting position and stayed like that while white pain shot through me. But I smiled at her and took the bowl. I rested it on a tray she placed across my lap and slowly tasted the soup. Nausea lay below the pain, like a thin cloak that seemed ready to strangle me. But I smiled again and told Bertha that I liked her soup, that it was good.

She watched me. “It’s not the first time, is it?”

I set the spoon down on the tray.

“Marie.” She smiled at me. “These houses are so close together. I don’t know what they were thinking when they built them this way.”

“They are all right,” I said.

“You would think that,” she said. She smiled again. “You’re just a girl.”

“You are not?”

She laughed. “I’m an old married woman of twenty-six,” she said. “A great deal older than you. A great deal more experienced in the world, if you must know.” She smiled wearily. “Eat a little more. You need to eat if you want to get better.”

“I am fine.”

“Finish that. I can get you some more.”

“No, thank you.”

“Why not?”

I did not reply. The smell of the soup had begun to sicken me and I felt clammy and weak. I worried that I would vomit. My ribs throbbed.

“I suppose he wouldn’t like it,” she said.

“It is not like that.”

“No?”

“No.” I lifted the soup plate and she took it from me and I fell back on the pillows and knives cut through me. Bile rose in my throat and I coughed and swallowed.

“What’s it like, then?” she said in a very soft voice. “Tell me.”

“It is not what you are thinking.” Something I thought was solid had come unstuck in my head. “We are different.”

“All right.” She waited.

I thought of August’s hand on me, the way he touched me in the dark and in the daylight, under moon and star and sun. “We are so much in love,” I said.

She looked at me as if I were a child.

“I do not know how to explain,” I said, and I did not. I could not even explain it to myself, the way August could hurt me and still be my world, absolute and whole.

“Ordinarily it would be none of my business,” she said. “But all of this makes it my business.” She gestured around the room, at the clean coverlet that lay over my legs and the fresh curtains and the vase of dahlias and the half-eaten plate of soup. “Frank going over there when we heard screaming like someone was being killed. That makes it my business.”

“I am sorry.” I wiped at the tears that dropped off the end of my nose.

Her clean rooms and her kindness did nothing but make me feel ashamed. That August would do something that meant the neighbors would get involved made me feel ashamed. That now the whole neighborhood would know made me feel ashamed. All of this seemed even worse to me than when I learned that the whole town was talking about that girl who took men into the woods. This was the place I had come to start my life. I wanted it to be beyond reproach. But that was ruined now.

“Marie.” She put her hand on my arm. “I’m trying to help you.”

“I know.” I choked a little when I spoke.

She sighed. “He was here last night. Frank wouldn’t let him in.” She gave me the towel she’d carried under the soup plate to dab my tears. “You must understand. We’ve heard it before,” she said. “I know that there have been other times. Not as bad as this, of course, but certainly bad enough.” She stood up and walked over to the window and looked out at her yard where I imagined she saw roses and lavender and daisies massed in their orderly beds, laid out in perfect measure, blooming only when they were instructed to do so.

“He loves me so much,” I said. I heard my voice as if someone else said the words.

“I know that’s what he says.” She turned from the window. “Do you know who saved you night before last? Frank. And Otto Baum who lives behind us. And Carl Petroski, who came from across the street. And some lunatic boy we’ve all seen around the neighborhood. Even he came running. They all heard you. These are men who would give you the shirts off their backs. These are good men. And they don’t want to see this again.”

That lunatic boy. I knew she meant Edwin. I thought of the way he must have bent over me, lifted me, carried me. I sobbed.

Bertha sat down on the bed and laid her hand on my hip. “Can you tell me where your family is? Can I get your mother for you?”

I shook my head.

“This isn’t right,” she said. She sounded as if she was talking to herself. “You should not have to face this alone. I’m sure they would not want to see you like this.”

“Do not be so sure,” I said. I laughed bitterly. I thought of Martha, who would probably be glad to see me getting my just deserts. I thought of my father, who would not disagree. He might even wonder why August had failed to finish the job.

She sighed. “You are very tired,” she said. “Get some rest. But think about what I said. If I could bring someone here to help you, who would that be? That’s the first question we need to answer.” She picked up the soup plate. “I’ll check in on you later. For now, get some rest.”

He came to the front door at first. I could hear his voice down below. Darkness spread over the summer evening and fireflies rose outside my window. The room lit by a single bulb and ashen moths the size of gloves flattening themselves against the screens. August stood on the front porch, talking to Frank in a very polite voice. I could not make out what he was saying, but I felt his voice like a wave that came over me. I imagined him in that room and on the bed with me and the rich smell of him and the weight of his body. “August,” I said, my voice the voice of one in a trance or a dream. But Frank would not let him in. August’s voice rose in pitch and they argued on the front porch. After that, Frank said something I could not make out and things fell silent. I could hear the cicadas in the trees and then the front door opened and Frank called to Bertha. August stood on the front lawn and pinged pebbles at the upstairs windows without ever finding mine. The front door closed and I heard their voices together again as they moved off down the dark street. I knew they were headed down to the tearoom where at night the woman who owned the place served drinks.

I heard footsteps on the stairs but they stopped halfway to the top and there was a long silence. Then the footsteps descended. I lay on the bed and looked at the screen and felt my body ache. A green moth spread-eagled against the screen and I watched it, its tiny bobbing head shaped like a glassy bead, its long furry antennae rising and falling as if with breath, its lurching blindness in the bright light.