The Longest Night (6 page)

Jeannie tilted her head to the side and smiled. “You're too sweet to lie.”

“I'm not sure why he would do a thing like that.”

“Aren't you darling.”

“Maybe…maybe I saw him fiddle with them. I'm not sure. He might have knocked some over and needed to right them again.”

“Yes, I'm sure that's it. Mitch is always righting things.”

“I feel like I'm tattling,” Nat said. “Please don't tell your husband I said anything.”

“Of course I won't, dear. This is between us. I can promise you that Mitch will hear nothing about it.”

Nat looked relieved. “Thank you,” she said. “Here, let me start carrying these out.”

Jeannie waved her off with her giant injured finger. “No, no. You go sit down. I'll take everyone's orders first and then bring out what we need.”

Nat nodded, gave an uncertain smile, and returned to the dining room. Jeannie leaned against the countertop, peeking inside the layers of paper towel on her finger and noticing with relief that the red spread had slowed. She rewrapped her finger with tunneled, tipsy focus.
No more vodka for you, ma'am!

The blueberry juice on her bodice was driving her to distraction, so she fetched a small, pearl-trimmed bolero jacket from her bedroom and slid her arms into that, hurt finger first. Changing her whole dress would be far too noticeable, even among this group of clowns. Her mood was becoming quite foul. Gathering a small piece of notepaper and a dull golf pencil, she went into the dining room to take down the dessert orders.

Her guests chatted and lounged and readjusted their napkins. Brownie Franks looked at her brightly, as if Jeannie were about to lead them verbally through a long and elaborate procedure.

She forced her gaze to her husband and saw that, surprise, surprise, Mitch had turned his high beam of attention back onto Nat Collier posthaste. He was leaning against the poor woman, telling her that there was something on her shirt while he brushed imaginary lint from her collarbone. “That's better,” he said. Then he clucked, “Let's tuck this in here,” took the napkin on her lap by two corners and, like a perverted maître d', nestled it down on either side of her thigh as if her leg were a sleeping infant. Nat's face reddened; she glanced around and then in a quiet voice, preposterously, thanked him.

At the far end of the table, Paul Collier was watching this with an expression of strangled horror. He hopped, in a spasm, to his feet.

Thank God Jeannie was on top of things. She slipped around the table to stand behind Nat, putting one hand on each of her shoulders. Nat's clavicle jumped, and Jeannie petted her gently as she smiled at the other guests, her oversized, bundled finger pointing obscenely at the opposite wall. “Everyone,” she said in her most genteel voice, “we have two choices for dessert.”

The guests' eyes turned to her; they chortled, patted their engorged bellies, geared up for another round. Nat, under Jeannie's palms, sat silently and Paul Collier eased back down into his seat.

“We have angel food cake with blueberry filling, and key lime pie. Of course,” and she smiled down into Mitch's sleepy eyes, “you can always have both.”

I
t was nearly eleven when the Colliers got home from the Richardses' party, having walked the three blocks back in the brisk night air. Sam piggybacked on Paul's shoulders while Nat carried Liddie against her chest. She watched Paul; his silence made her anxious.

What a strange party that had been. The home, the setting, and the people (well, most of them) had been so attractive, but between Mitch and Jeannie, Nat felt she should have brought a small club to defend herself with, and the whole event seemed to have jammed all Paul's inner workings and left him speechless.

The girls, on the other hand, were elated. Sam couldn't stop babbling about the other children at the party, the nanny Martha, and the endless supply of Cracker Jack, which had left them blissfully wired and twitching. They clutched handfuls of flimsy plastic prizes: a chicken, an army soldier, a pistol, a ring.

When they reached the walkway in front of their house—which led pleasantly across a small lawn to three concrete steps and the front door—Nat's anxiety gave way for a moment to the coziness of recognition. They had come from someone else's place—unfamiliar, its objects and furnishings containing no memories—back to their own, and though this house was new it still felt more theirs than the one they'd just been in. So that was a start. But as Paul switched on the light and they found themselves standing in the entryway, her heart sank again. Their small living room was filled with the hulking shadows of cardboard boxes, here and there like grazing animals. Otherwise the house was mostly empty, the walls bare and showing off their occasional dents, paint scratches, light sockets, and mysterious dark streaks. They'd been in town a month and had still hardly unpacked. The whole place smacked of unsettled, continual limbo.

Nat knew she should have gotten the place in order by now, but it seemed impossible with the girls. She'd tackled a box the other day and, in her absorption, lost track of Liddie for only a minute; Liddie had pushed open the back door, toppled down a step, chipped a tooth, and cut her lip. How, Nat wondered, did the other housewives do it? Was she not capable of handling two things at once?

“It's very late, girls,” she said, “so no stories tonight. Let's go get your nightgowns on.” Her ankle wobbled for a minute as she crossed the living room, thanks to the two gin fizzes and glass of wine she'd drank over the course of the evening. She checked herself and made it without trouble to the girls' bedroom.

Sam's pupils had the eerie dilation of a late-night sugar high. She clambered up through her nightgown and out the top. “I'm not tired, Mama,” she said. “I could stay up forever.”

“I bet you could,” said Nat, tugging Sam's arms through the sleeves, “but we need to try to sleep.”

“Can we keep the light on?”

“No,” Nat said. “Lie down next to Liddie.”

“She took my airplane,” Sam said, scowling at her sister.

“We'll sort that out in the morning. Sam, keep your tongue in your mouth.”

“When will we get our
beds
?” Sam cried.

The movers had somehow lost Sam's and Liddie's beds on the way from Virginia to Idaho. Stupidly, Nat had signed the release before making sure the beds were among the dozens of brown boxes, and now they had to pay for replacements themselves. She and Paul didn't have a bed yet, either; they'd planned to buy one—probably from the Goodwill because full-size beds were expensive—but he'd been working so much in the month since they moved that they hadn't gotten around to it.

Nat patted the floor and Sam finally toppled next to her. “We'll go to the J.C. Penney's on Monday and find you something,” she said. “I know you're tired of sleeping on the floor.”

Of course, as soon as Nat got Sam to lay down, Liddie began wandering in the tipsy, lurching circles of an exhausted toddler. She roamed confusedly, shuffling in an increasingly tighter spiral until she tripped over her own feet and sat down crying. “Sweetheart,” Nat began, but the child was up again. She wanted to enjoy a night on the town in the new house, sticking her finger into sockets, tasting a dead fly off the windowsill, scaling the bathroom sink.

“Mama, I want you
in
my blankets,” Sam was saying. “In my blankets
with
me!”

Liddie finally stood still and began to hiccup. She stared at Nat with huge, accusatory eyes.

“Girls,” Nat cried, fighting her exasperation.

“What's going on in here?” asked Paul from the doorway, and they all went silent. He sounded irritated. They waited to see what he would say. But he sighed, and came in and settled next to Sam, tucking Liddie's pink crocheted blanket around her body and rubbing her small, hiccupping back. The carpet, pressed to Nat's nose, had a comfortingly new, mildly chemical smell. She closed her eyes as Paul patted their daughters' backs and hummed “Home on the Range” until they all dozed off to sleep.

I
T WAS STILL DARK
when Nat awoke. A piece of carpet fuzz tickled her mouth. She sat up, her eyes adjusting, and tried to judge the depth of the girls' sleep by their soft, mouthy breaths.

She wandered into the living room, taking small steps to avoid stumbling into boxes. Not finding Paul, she backtracked to look for him in their bedroom. Blankets were spread on the floor but he wasn't there. She had no idea what time it was. Outside, the toads trilled in cascades, each note strung like an identical pearl on the wave of sound.

She followed their song to the backyard where she spied Paul sitting on the small square of moonlit patio. He sat with his ankles crossed, looking into the distance.

The patio ended abruptly at his feet and the yard turned to dark grass, just enough to cross in three or four strides before they reached their neighbors' backyards. Waist-high brown picket fences ran between. All the neighbors' windows were dark, and as her eyes settled she could see between the houses into a far-off blank area unmarred by billboard or streetlight. Only the sloping forms of mountains were visible, darkness against darkness, a shadow of a dream.

Idaho Falls was no San Diego, but it wasn't the worst place, either. Just remote was all, a little outpost with an attention-getting namesake: the man-made waterfall that marked the entrance to town on the banks of the Snake River. Nat thought of the first day they'd driven into town, a few weeks earlier. Like the town itself, the falls were clean and tidy and gave no trouble. They zigzagged the river at well-planned right angles and spilled about twenty feet down to the rocks, the water pouring so neatly that it barely frothed—it seemed to be made of silk. Even the misty boulders at the bottom appeared to have been hand-arranged by fastidious town fathers.

Above the falls stood the Mormon temple, tiered up to the top in rectangular layers like a masculine interpretation of a wedding cake. A single golden archangel posed on top, holding a thin instrument to his lips as if he were blowing glass. The falls and the temple: You could hardly picture one without the other. They were so pristine, so lushly manufactured in contrast to the quiet, two-dog town and endless desert beyond, that they were almost startling to come upon.

Past the falls and the temple there was a tiny downtown, a strip of Main Street with a barbershop, a candy store, a diner, and a brand-spanking-new J.C. Penney. After that, a few tire rotations' worth of neighborhoods, and then the landscape went briefly back to fields again—Mormon farmland, mostly potatoes—and finally the endless-looking desert, as brown and rough as sandpaper. Fifty miles west of town, over more blank desert, was the National Reactor Testing Station where Paul worked.

She wondered how he liked his new job. When she asked him how it was going, he usually said “fine” or, occasionally, “decent.” He was not a complainer, which other wives had told her she should be grateful for, but she wouldn't have minded a few more details.

Watching him, apprehension hung in her chest like a swallowed chip of ice. The past month had been one trial after another. There was the dumb little number she'd pulled at the lake just before they reached Idaho Falls, diving into the water even though he had asked her not to. That seemed like ages ago. Before that argument had resolved itself he was off to his new job, and when he was at home he was either lost in the sleep of the dead or rummaging among their vaguely marked boxes in a futile, exhausting search for one item or another.
“Paul, where is the hand mixer? Have you seen the box with the spare linens? You didn't happen across my Dutch oven, did you?”
They had gone whole days without really looking one another in the eye, shouldering past each other in the kitchen, handing the girls back and forth like sandbags.

Then there was the day he'd come home eight hours late from work—eight hours!—claiming the bus had broken down. The more she thought about it the stranger that seemed, but the testing station
was
out there in the boondocks, fifty miles from home; it was possible they'd had no other transportation. He'd drunk more than a few beers that night and gone straight to bed, and Nat decided she was best off not prodding him about it.

Part of her was frustrated with him, with his passive stoicism even though he must have felt the distance between them, too. But she knew that he was tired, that he worried she and the girls wouldn't like Idaho. His care took subtle forms: A week ago, she'd taken her early rising daughters to the park so he could sleep in, and when they tiptoed back into the house she'd expected to find him still asleep. Instead he was sitting at the kitchen table, in his undershirt and slacks, making a button stringer for the girls to play with. Nat watched in surprise as he looped a string over either palm and pulled it tight, a large button from her sewing kit—which she'd brought on the drive to Idaho, as two little girls were liable to tear a hole in anything—spinning rapidly in the center. When he yanked the string with one hand, the button leaped, still turning. Nat couldn't help but watch, captivated; it seemed a trick from another place and time. The girls were delighted. They'd scampered out into the backyard with it and he watched them go, his face skimmed by a brief and satisfied smile.

“Hi,” she whispered now, stepping out onto the patio behind him.

He cleared his throat. “The girls asleep?”

“Yes, finally.” She settled onto the cool concrete, stretching her legs in front of her. She wanted to take his hand and feel its heaviness in her lap, but if he were angry with her she might be rebuffed. So she waited. She smoothed her cotton dress over her knees, idly wondering how women like Jeannie Richards kept up the curlers and high heels with children scampering around. A housewife could be a virtual shut-in, peering out through the blinds in fear of the milkman, but she still needed a good dress that nipped in at the waist and a nice pair of heels to lengthen her calf line.

She tried to follow his gaze: power lines, mountains. His face was unreadable, his hands folded in his lap. He looked like a statue of the young Abraham Lincoln.

“Well, we survived dinner at the Richardses',” she said.

“I guess so.”

“Did you have a good time?”

He turned to look at her. “Did
you
?” His mouth was set in a straight line, and she felt her heart start to clatter a bit.

“It was all right,” she said. “Their house was beautiful. Mrs. Richards has a knack for decorating.” She smiled. “That is, they
have
furniture, anyway.”

“We have furniture,” he said. “We just have to find it all.”

“I know. I know that.” She couldn't seem to stop talking about the darn furniture.

He nodded, and she saw his mind working with some unspoken thought. “My boss seems to like you,” he finally said.

“Oh, him.” Nat waved the notion away. “He had too much to drink.”

“Maybe
I
should have drunk more,” Paul muttered.