by Larry Crane
Back inside, they closed the bedroom door and lay down. It was still too warm in the room for covers. They peeled their outer clothes and settled in beside each other.
“Take these off,” he said, picking at her underwear.
“You,” she said.
He nudged her to roll, then pinched the bra clasp at her back, felt release, and drew the shoulder straps down. He crowded in behind her and moved his hand under her arm to her breast, and down along her ribs to her belly, down to her pubic hair and between her thighs. He pushed his face into the back of her head and breathed deeply at her neck. He arched his neck and rocked his head to ease the tightness he felt.
She reached back and found his thigh and followed it and closed her hand on him. She moved the inside of her fingers along him and squeezed, finding all of him.
They rolled together, he to his back, she atop and astride him. They locked their fingers together, and she used the purchase to rock forward and back, doing the work for them both. She stared into his eyes with a gaze that told him how much she missed this. It had been half a year. She leaned forward, and they opened their lips to kiss full and deep, sharing the touch of their tongues. A string of hot drool bridged the space between them. Their breathing rose from deep inside. She disengaged and lay face down beside him again.
“Shall I show you which part of you I like best?” he said.
“I think I may already know,” she said.
He got to his knees and moved the heel of his hand down along her spine to the small of her back and made circles with his palm.
“Right here is fine,” he said.
“Don’t stop,” she said.
“Here is very good,” he went on, running his fingers down along her bottom. He straddled her ankles and reached to run his hands down along her thighs to the backs of her knees, and he touched her there. “Here is excellent, truly,” he said. Then he ran his hands down over her calves, and grasped them tightly, and said: “But here is heaven. If you only knew how good these are, you’d parade them for me every chance you had.”
What has come over him? This moment is so rare as to actually not be happening. How did he become so open suddenly? Where did he find the courage or whatever it is, to say these so plainly adoring things, to take the risk that I won’t say in return that loving my body is not truly loving me? Is he afraid of that? Am I so unafraid of losing him that I could risk everything with Gus Breedlove? We never talk of these things.
“To be loved for your calves,” she said, rolling to her back.
He slid up beside her and ran the tips of his fingers along her jaw to her lips and traced them. He kissed them.
“I love all of you,” he said.
“I love you,” she said.
It’s so unlike him to go on like this, she thought. To prolong the moment, to so plainly reveal himself—our closest, most intimate moment ever. It’s fallout from Hannah and wouldn’t have happened without it—something so good out of something so bad. We need each other now in ways that never existed before—to find a way to go on from it. Isn’t it obvious? So why do I feel so guilty for the pleasure he’s given me? Why does he feel so weak?
He let himself go so genuinely and I pretended. He expected something to happen that didn’t. I didn’t participate. I made little of something that to him is so big. What was it I came up with? —‘to be loved for your calves.’ So terribly cold. With no explanation, that translates into a craving of mine that can never be completely satisfied—as if it’s not my fault because it’s as natural to me as my cycle. He was so immersed in the glow of it and it seemed as if I wished it would go away. Now, he thinks he understands—that to me, sex’s natural purpose is to kindle not to satisfy—and I will always naturally go toward whoever lit the fire. Is that true? No. It only seems so. It’s awful, but it’s the only way he can think of it. How little he knows me. After all this time.
They slept well and got up late. Gavin wanted to look around. He walked off into the sagebrush.
“Watch where you’re stepping,” she called to him. “There are lots of critters hiding out, rattlers and scorpions and who knows what all.”
He called back to her: “Be careful who you get wrapped up in. We’re strangers here.”
He thinks I’ll be homing in on the first person I see, to engage in conversation—as he puts it, to know more about them in two minutes than he could in an hour, she thought.
She followed the smell of bacon grease to the kitchen. She purposely scuffed her heels against the ceramic tile floor as she came up behind the cook standing in front of the kitchen stove.
“Good morning. Are all your mornings so glorious?” Marcella said.
The woman was short and clearly a native Indian. Strands of gray threaded her thick black head of hair. She spoke without turning from her work. “This time of year, it’s welcoming,” she said. “In winter, it gets very cold.”
“We’ve been driving around, keeping ourselves inconspicuous.”
“The Navaho way,” the woman said.
“I guess. We drove up on a mesa. A coyote watched us, maybe hoping for a handout.”
“A skin-walker, maybe. Maybe not. What did she do?”
“Just looked.”
“Do you believe?”
“I don’t know,” Marcella said. “Are spirits only what’s left of dead people?”
“No. Maybe it was somebody who wants to let you know she’s around. She didn’t seem to want to kill you, did she?”
“No. You said she. She’s around.”
“Yes. Someone who wants to let you know.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Be careful, missus. I see you have no defenses. Bad things happen to you. Skin-walkers are mean sometimes.”
They had a southwest omelet with toast and jelly, and good black coffee. They took off down Valley of the Gods Road leaving a wispy dust devil in their wake. The red rock buttes and mesas of The Valley of the Gods were closer to the road than they were in Monument Valley. The spires and rock formations were what remained of a massive eroded sea and dunes complex eons in the past. They swam in the soup of ghosts and legends. She saw it as a picture of the wreckage that remained of their life since Hannah disappeared. They pulled off the gravel at a turn that gave them an expansive view.
“It just goes on and on and on, the same flat nothing,” Marcella said. She gathered her skirt up over her knees and shook the hem of it to get air.
“It’s not nothing,” Gavin said. “It is what it is—saying take it or leave it—it’s all you’ve got.”
“Pretty bleak prospect,” she said. “A heartless, brutal world. I don’t like it.”
“Yesterday, I turned around and you were out on the edge, the whole world stretched out a thousand feet down, staring at nothing. I thought you were going to jump.”
“I don’t have the guts,” she said. “I’d rather sleep.”
Gavin turned to look behind them.
“I thought your coyote mama might have tracked us all the way out here. No way. But she’s out there somewhere foraging, come hell or damnation. Not a drop of water, not a field mouse in sight.”
Marcella knew Gavin would quickly discount any mention of Navaho beliefs. So, she went along with his version of things. “Tracking the first human beings she’s seen probably in weeks,” Marcella said. “Begging for help.”
“No way. That girl’s purposeful, Marce. Scratching out a living—up against it and knowing it, but taking care of business, thank you very much.”
“No time for tears?”
“She does her share of crying. But then, she goes on.”
“Is she a metaphor?” Marcella asked.
“You’re the writer.”
“She’s a sign.”
“Don’t start in on that stuff,” Gavin said.
“A skin-walker,” she said. Gavin had turned away and didn’t hear what she said, and she let it go.
“I’ve contacted a headhunter
, Marce, to look around for me—for us. I want to leave Chicago. I want to go someplace where nobody knows us. People at home don’t know what to say to us anymore. We’re objects of pity, and it can never ever change. We need to move.”
“I’ll never move,” Marcella said.
“We’ve become what has happened to us, not living people. We might as well be dead,” Gavin said.
“That’s abandoning her.”
“No it isn’t. We’ll still be in touch with all the experts.”
“What if she just steps out of some car someday and runs up to the door that used to be her front door but it’s not anymore?”
“What if she can’t do even that anymore, and we expend our lives hoping for the impossible?” Gavin said.
Marcella sank to her knees and closed her eyes. She thought she now knew the true reason for the business in bed at the B&B—just a show to soften her up for this. How could he even think of moving away? Despite the warmth of their closeness last night, and the heat of the desert now, she shivered in the chill of the moment.
Chapter 7
At O’Hare International Airport outgoing passenger terminal, Gavin left the engine running when he popped the trunk, slid out, and moved around to the back of the car. Marcella stood to the side as he lifted his carry-on bag and dropped it to the pavement. He took her hand and pulled her in to him and kissed her. He studied her face close up.
All right Marce, go ahead. Use the early morning hour as camouflage—the half-asleep business. Pretend last night’s peevish question and answer session between us about why I need to shop around for another job isn’t still scrambling your brain. Never mind. Let it go. Don’t fight about it, he thought.
“Should be a pretty short flight,” he said.
“I hate to fly,” she said, “but you know that. Let’s hope you don’t have a bratty kid kicking you in the back.”
“Careful going home,” Gavin said. “See you back here tomorrow morning at ten?”
She pecked him on the cheek. He reached for his bag and briefcase, and strode off through the revolving doors. Inside, he turned to look out at her.
Okay, don’t look back at me. Keep your eyes strictly straight to the front. You’re pissed. I get it. She joined a slow-moving line of traffic and disappeared.
They had heard nothing from Rathskeller. Nickerson came to the house a week before to report that somebody had called in with a tip that they’d seen an older woman with a young blonde girl on the street in Lafayette, Indiana. He characterized the tip as useless since there was no way to follow up on it, and that it was typical of the kind of tip they had been receiving all along. People want to help, but they’re often no help at all.
“We’re in the slogging phase,” Nickerson said. “It’s encouraging that we’re not getting any bogus information from the lowlifes of the world. Sometimes crimes sort of move down the rumor line with these guys. It’s good that there’s been no discovery of clothing or anything like that.”
Thank god the Chief didn’t mention that no remains had been discovered either, he thought. Nickerson’s relieved whenever he’s able to talk to me alone, as if he can’t be as forthcoming with the news, whatever it is, when Marcella’s around. Eh, that’s just wrong. She’s actually adopted a brutally honest persona—she paints ghoulish kidnap scenarios smack in the middle of suppers at home. Airing out her worst fears prevents them from happening.
The worst is what neither of us is ready to accept—that Hannah was not coming back. Our nine-year-old, the daughter I took for granted, the girl who looked up into my eyes and listened to every word I said, is probably already cold in the dirt or under some body of water. I can never be the first one to say that out loud, he thought.
Some things are better off left inside my head, such as the notion of moving away from Naperville. But just thinking about it gets me nowhere. Selling the idea to her is the hard part. She says she’ll never move away. Okay, that’s an emotional reaction to my ill-advised trial balloon announcement in the desert. The image of Hannah running up to the front door and bursting through it in a rush of joy is so embedded in her head. The chance of it happening is remote to say the least—even she acknowledges that. But forget reality when it comes to Hannah.
There are tons of good reasons to move. I’ve already aired out some—how the neighbors and everyone in town avoid talking to us because they don’t know what to say. A person can only express sadness a couple of times before it becomes impossible to say anything more. For all practical purposes we will forever be the unfortunate friends who lost their child to some unknown abductor.
Won’t it ease the transition back to normal life when Hannah does return to us if we’re in a completely different and safer place? Granted, it’ll be away from all her buddies and schoolmates and the familiarity of their hometown. But in a new home, Hannah will be miles away from the spot where she was grabbed. She’ll be rid of the trauma and the fear that the same abductor would be coming after her again. Moving to a place that looks and feels like Naperville, a smallish suburban town, in a similar house, would be a small step back to the life she knew before.
Our confidence that Hannah is ever coming back is straining to stay alive. Are we really going to go through with something as drastic as moving far away, with this as the reasoning? Yes! Yes. Absolutely. It’s dishonest plotting out this sales pitch for moving—more than just a little sick actually, like twisting Marcella’s arm behind her back and pushing her into it. But I can live with it—the revulsion. Especially when I factor Gus Breedlove into the equation.
He tried to keep that out of his mind, but his imagination would have none of it. He wasn’t even sure he remembered exactly what Breedlove looked like, but he saw him in his mind’s eye bucking against Marcella from behind in a sweaty room as clear as clear could be.
What was it I told myself about all of that—that I didn’t want to talk about it—that if I insisted on drilling into the actual details of it with her, I’d have to do something about it? Like what, exactly? Lots of things, the worst of which was accepting that she allowed—no, wanted Breedlove to happen, and I would just have to live with it. That was the hand-to-hand combat version, no quarter asked, none given. Never mind the other version, the truth, that the day after, I had to leave a meeting at work because I couldn’t hold back a torrent of emotion—that I’d retreated to the men’s room and to a stall where I stayed until I had myself under control again. I confessed to myself that I’m weak, unlike her, and that it wounded me to the core that she had not loved me enough to keep Breedlove from happening. No matter what she did, she would never be able recover what we had been before.
You are not going to acknowledge Breedlove, ever. She’s internalized that much. Now she will just have to internalize that moving to a new place is going to happen, even if it’s only me who moves. That’s it. That feels good.
In Pittsburgh, he slipped a folded five-dollar bill to the bellboy of the William Penn Hotel when he placed his bag on the bed. He checked himself in the mirror. It was a short walk to the US Steel Tower, a sixty-four story statement that the company was all the way back from the bad days. He went up to the CFO suite of offices. He felt confident, good about himself and how he’d been able to move up at the bank to this position of his.
Okay, I’m not exactly running the whole operation or anything remotely like that, but I’ve gotten myself into a power spot as an operator with real clout based on expertise and an executive presence in meetings with the financial people of clients all over the country. I know it and they know it. I represent the bank well. Clients respect me, trust me, and the topper: they also actually like me.
The meeting was short. He had plenty of time to saunter the three blocks to Mellon Bank. The interview with the Mellon Bank bigwig for an opening they had as head of Institutional Trust Investments went okay, but the position was not quite as good as it seemed when the headhunter trumpeted it. A quick cab ride whisked him back to the Willia
m Penn.
He shed his coat and tie and leaned back into the pile of pillows on the king-size bed with a couple of tiny bottles of Dewar’s Black Label. He splashed the two of them into a glass with ice and water from the small refrigerator.
I should be on my way back to the airport instead of whiling away the rest of the evening watching television, he thought. The meeting went well enough. No matter what they say though, what counts was what they think privately after I leave. He envisioned the secretary commenting on how sad he looked. He’d tried hard not to look sad.
He flicked on the TV and punched the buttons on the telephone. It was a National Geographic documentary about lions. On the screen, a pride of the big cats, a male, a female, and two cubs lounged in the tall grass. The sweltering heat pushed into the scene with wavering distortion. Swarms of flies buzzed around the massive head of the male of the pride.
Marcella picked up. “You’re finished early. Did something go wrong?”
“It all went okay. At least, I think it did,” he answered.
The male was old. He still ruled the territory and had sired the cubs. But, there were rivals about, younger and no doubt better looking or something.
“I hope my sour puss this morning didn’t foul up the works. You need your wits about you,” Marcella said.
“No sweat,” Gavin said.
The female of the pride put the cubs first. She was loyal to the old guy as long as he could keep her cubs from harm.
“It went the same way here as back home,” he said. “Within minutes, Copperthwaite, you know, the CFO, was tongue-tied. What topic is appropriate when your child has disappeared? It went better with the Mellon Bank people. They had no idea they were talking to a guy who everyone assumes must be a complete basket case by this time.”
