Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  Crazy. It was crazy to think that way. She covered her face for a moment with her hands, whispering keep it together, keep it together, keep it together.

  She looked up. Tree branches, encased in ice, clicked in the wind; a woman tethered to an IV smoked outside the hospital doors. Above them hovered a seagull that looked like a child’s drawing of a seagull, a blunt V against the gray sky. Doing her best imitation of someone who knew how to live in the world as it was, she went to the bus stop to wait the driver out.

  She took the bus to the hospital every few days until the Galaxie was finally fixed; then she drove, almost every day. She asked whoever was volunteering at the front desk to call up to the sixth floor. One day, the volunteer (an older woman, with hair dyed the same beige as her cardigan) put down the phone. “All right.”

  “That’s okay,” said Angie, starting to turn away. But the volunteer was opening a desk drawer that held elevator key cards.

  Being on the other side of this process made her feel like an imposter as she took the elevator to the sixth floor, signed a visitor’s book, emptied her pockets. A nurse checked for sharps and took Angie’s cigarette lighter before buzzing her into the hall.

  Trevor sat in the dayroom. Her hands began to sweat. He wore hospital clothes. The runneled scar tissue of his arms and neck gleamed. Above him, the TV showed a woman beaming as she cleaned her kitchen counter.

  Trevor looked up at her and said in a spookily gentle tone, “Angie. It’s nice to see you.”

  She dropped onto the couch next to him. The vinyl squeaked. His gaze drifted to the television.

  “You look great,” she said.

  A nurse walked into the room, counted heads, walked out. What Angie remembered from living on this ward was that there was nowhere to go for quiet or privacy, the dayroom filled with the blare of bad television, bathroom trips with an aide waiting restless outside your stall so you didn’t hang yourself with the toilet seat. Every psych unit was different. At Beechman, they’d only let you use spoons to eat. At White Mountain General the lighter could only be used by a nurse; at Hillman-Stowe you could use the lighter yourself but it was leashed to the nursing counter like a pen at the DMV.

  This ward wasn’t segregated by gender. In an orange chair was a woman with paper napkins knotted around hanks of her hair. She said loudly, “I’ve got so many boyfriends it’s pathetic.”

  “How are you doing?” Angie asked Trevor. She remembered him naked that night at her house; the contrast of heavy hair on his legs to the pale scar tissue of his chest had made him look like a satyr.

  “No.” The woman addressed the spot that happened to contain Angie. “I said, no. Because I’ve got too many already, that’s why.”

  “So. What have you been doing?” Angie asked Trevor.

  Trevor glanced around the dayroom, then looked at Angie with the barest trace of his old irony.

  “Are they treating you pretty well?” Angie sounded to herself like all the people who had visited her and not known what to say. Sometimes, she had deliberately not made it easier for them. Let them be uncomfortable. Why shouldn’t they be uncomfortable? Trevor was either employing the same logic or just too miserable to make an effort.

  She asked how Group was, whether he knew people here from other places, and he gave brief, vague answers. Listening to him was like listening to a tape player with weak batteries, his voice slowed and a little slurred. His attention floated away; he laughed, and it took her a moment to realize he was laughing at something on the television, a commercial for bread. She scrubbed her sweating hands on the legs of her jeans.

  “Up the ass,” said Napkin Woman.

  “How’s the food?”

  His gaze was unsteady, like the flicker of a candle. “Do you have cigarettes?”

  She dug the pack from her jacket pocket and gave it to him. The nurse walked into the room, counted heads, walked out. Trevor leaned over to another patient, briefly bumming a cigarette to light his own. Then he handed his cigarette to Angie so she could light hers, a gesture so familiar she felt a moment of woozy disorientation.

  She blurted, “I might move to San Francisco.” Up until now, it hadn’t been something she thought she’d actually ever do, only an image, something to hold onto: I could always leave. I could go to San Francisco. As she said the words, they felt possible. People left; she could leave.

  “You what?”

  “I might be moving—”

  For the first time, he was looking right at her, stricken. “You can’t.”

  “I—”

  “You’re not leaving me here!” His voice rose, and he took a deep breath. She could feel his struggle to keep steady by biting off each word: “You. Are. Not. Leaving. Me. Here.”

  “Trevor, please.”

  Two orderlies jostled through the door, and for a moment, dislocated, she thought they’d come for her. One moved behind Trevor but didn’t touch him. The other said, “Calm down, man. C’mon. Calm down.”

  The napkin woman said, “Yeah, if the world was a giant twat. Which it’s not.”

  “Don’t leave me,” Trevor said quietly.

  She nodded. She did care about him: maybe not as a lover, but she did. And he needed her. She stood. Madness was as real a part of her as anything else. She had to embrace it, because to deny it would be annihilating—though she’d always thought the opposite.

  She took a step toward him and then stopped, heart banging.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  She bolted, passing the nurse without retrieving her things, saying loudly, “Buzz me out, buzz me out.” The elevator came; inside she leaned against the wall. There was a roaring in her head and she sagged against the wall, flooded with shame, face breaking out in prickly sweat. What had she done?

  The elevator bell dinged; the doors slid open. Half expecting someone to order her to halt, she walked through the lobby and out into the night, free. The tree branches glittered with ice. She gulped in air so cold she felt it might crack her open.

  Forty-two

  Wendy had noticed that Luke’s male friends, if they danced, always danced ironically. They would assume looks of false seriousness and do disco moves, pretending to respond to their own brilliance with expressions of awe. Or they’d hunch up their shoulders and move like robots. Luke wasn’t like that; he just jumped earnestly up and down.

  The party was down in Syria, at the apartment of four guys, semi-friends of Luke’s from high school. They’d decorated the place with stolen traffic signs: men working and be prepared to stop.

  The room was small and hot. They took a break—a decision reached by hand signals and lip-reading, the music too loud for words. Pushing through the crowd, Luke opened the sliding glass door to the patio. He closed it behind them, the noise suddenly muffled to a buzz.

  Wendy pushed sweaty tendrils of hair back from her forehead, gulping her drink. This was her third beer but, surprisingly, it didn’t seem to be affecting her much.

  “God,” Luke said. “Too much high school at once.” His voice was too loud, as though they were still inside. She was hearing a persistent growl, like holding a seashell to her ear.

  “Is, um, Khamisa here?”

  Luke shook his head. “I forget that you haven’t met.”

  She hoped she hadn’t let jealousy slip into her voice. He asked her something. Shaking her head, she said, “My ears are ringing.”

  “Water?”

  “Beer.”

  He raised his eyebrows: she didn’t usually drink so fast. “Not even buzzed,” she said, probably too loud. Her eardrums felt achy and plugged, like she was at the bottom of a swimming pool.

  Luke opening the sliding door released a quick burst of noise, cut off abruptly as he closed the door behind him. She might be a little drunk. Wendy turned and leaned over the balcony railing. She could see a little way over the town, but not very far. She wasn’t entirely used to the hills and thick trees in New Hampshire that meant you n
ever had a clear sight line.

  The door opened behind her and she said, “Hey,” and turned, smiling, to see a woman with dark magenta lipstick. “Oh, sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

  “You’re Luke’s wife.”

  The woman wore gray wool pants and a shimmery top, the kind of outfit magazines advised for the office Christmas party, too fancy here. Wendy glanced inside for Luke. He wasn’t looking at her; he had that expression he got around lots of people, anticipation and happiness. His mouth was a little open, his eyes bright.

  “You’re Luke’s wife,” the woman said again.

  Something about her intensity made Wendy not set her straight about being just Luke’s girlfriend. “Wendy. And you’re—”

  “Kristin Cannon. I knew Luke in high school.” Behind the casualness of her voice was a pressure that made the words come a little too fast. “We weren’t friends exactly. I just used to stand outside his house at night.” She laughed. “I was madly in love with him. I thought I was.”

  So this was the girl from the yard. After a moment, Wendy asked, “What do you do, Kristin?”

  Kristen laughed, as though she found the question absurdly square. “What do you do?”

  Wendy wished she had an answer other than the truth. “I wait,” she said. Kristin frowned and she added, “Tables.”

  “You look like a teacher.” Kristin laughed again. Then silence. Kristin nodded to the faint beat of the music from indoors, her face distant. In slight increments, she turned her body toward the party, the way people did when they were bored with a conversation. Drunkenness hit Wendy all at once, like something she’d been falling towards. She held the rail, forcing the world steady.

  Kristin turned back to her and said, quickly, “I’ll show you something. Here.”

  She handed Wendy her drink, took a step back, and undid the top button of her slacks. Pulling up her shirt a few inches, she bent to look at her own stomach. “It’s faded some,” she said, and then straightened, holding her waistband down with one hand and her shirt out of the way with the other.

  “What?”

  Kristin pinned the shirt to her side with her elbow, freeing her hand, and picked up a candle from the small table behind her. When she held the light near her belly, a crosshatching of white lines came into view. It took a moment for Wendy to put together that the lines were scars, that the scars were letters, that the letters made up the name luke voorster. They staggered across her skin, shrinking as they neared her side, the final ter so cramped it looked like a single letter.

  “God.” Without thinking, Wendy reached out. Under her fingers the marks felt shiny, thin and polished as fishing line. She jerked her hand back.

  “A letter a week. And then I’d pour vodka on it.” Kristin had her head tilted to the side, regarding the scars. “You let the cut start to close up and then a few days later you go over it again so it won’t heal over. I always thought I’d show them to Luke one day. I had this whole thing worked out where we finally got together, and when he saw them he started crying.” She pulled her pants up and took her drink back from Wendy. “I’m pretty drunk.”

  “I noticed.” She didn’t want to be feeling empathy, but she could imagine perfectly the fantasy of Luke crying over the scars, head pressed to Kristin’s thigh. It was odd, and oddly charming, that Kristin could tell the story.

  “He was—you should have known him then. It was like he had this shield around him. Not a shield, a glow or something. He wasn’t like other people. I didn’t think he’d get soft.”

  “He’s not soft.”

  “I don’t mean physically.” Kristin shrugged, letting her shirt drop. “I didn’t think he’d turn out so—like everybody else.”

  A ragged snow of heavy, slow flakes had begun. Luke steered down the slippery streets, glancing occasionally from the road to Wendy’s profile, sharp against the dark window. He asked if she’d liked the party. Sure. Was she tired? No. Was she okay? Yes. Was she sure? Yes!

  Just as he got onto the 91, which would take them back to Cort, Wendy said, “Pull over.”

  “We’re not near an exit—”

  “Pull over!”

  He steered them onto the shoulder. Wendy was already fumbling at the lock. She wrestled the door open before the car had completely stopped, stumbling out with her arm still caught in the seat belt. She leaned over and threw up, her arm held up behind her before she managed to jerk it free from the shoulder strap. She fell to her knees and threw up again in a series of long wrenching coughs. He got out of the car without looking and a tractor-trailer roared by, two feet from his body, a gust that blew his eyes closed.

  When he reached Wendy, she was on all fours on the road’s shoulder. He crouched and pulled her hair out of her face. The speeding headlights of cars slashed the patch of gravel where they knelt. Snow eddied around them. Wendy leaned forward, ratcheted with dry sobs.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Don’t be sorry.” He brushed the gravel off her hand and kissed the palm. He liked when Wendy let him take care of her.

  She said, “People don’t get over things.”

  He would never know what was going on inside her. A car passed. In the swell of headlights he could see her face for a moment, the careful features, a scattering of whiteheads up near her hairline. Snowflakes fell thickly, yellowish and greasy-looking.

  When the headlights passed, he and Wendy were in darkness, the snow invisible again. “I hate us. I hate how we are,” she said.

  She was breaking up with him again. “Wen, don’t. Just—just don’t.”

  Still on her hands and knees, she said, “We should get married.”

  Forty-three

  Wind bent the treetops toward each other as Pieter parked at the river. Snow blew against the car. It would be too cold to skate for very long, but he didn’t want to skip skating altogether.

  As he finished lacing his skates, he put his shoes onto the passenger seat and closed the car door, stumping awkwardly to the river’s edge, then bending cautiously to slip off his skate guards. River ice was lead gray close to the bank, then silver and, nearest the river’s center, chalk white.

  The blades hissed over the surface. Skating was the only part of the day when his thoughts didn’t tilt and clash, past and future locking and unlocking horns in his head. How had he come to be so alone?

  He had thought, because of the snow, that he’d skate to Lightstone, but when he got there he kept going. He felt faster than usual today. Skating under the bridge, he went all the way down into parkland. Firs lined both banks, dark spires against the porous gray of the sky.

  When finally he turned to go back, he realized that he’d felt so energized and fast because the wind had gotten much stronger. At his back, it had pushed him forward. Now the sparse snow felt suddenly like a blizzard. The wind whipped into his face. He bent his head, skating into the wind, but the skates meant he was too easily moved; he kept being blown backward. In ten minutes, he gained perhaps two hundred yards. He stopped to rest. At this speed, the car—eight miles away—would take hours to reach.

  He would have to zigzag, skating at a diagonal to the wind. Bowing again, he made for the river’s south shore. The wind hit him now at an oblique angle, and he was able to move—not freely, but with less of a struggle. When the ice became dark underneath him, he turned and skated for a point northwest on the north shore. Because he was skating perpendicular to his direction, he was not progressing quickly, but at least he wasn’t exhausting himself.

  With less exertion, though, the sweat on his body began to cool. He’d dressed warmly for a brisk skate, but the layers—long underwear, sweater, long wool overcoat, two pairs of cotton socks—weren’t enough in this kind of snow. Worse, his vision was narrowing, becoming rainbowed: his eyes were watering in the wind, freezing his eyelashes together.

  Scared, he put his gloved hand over his right eye, pressing as hard as he could. The vision in his other eye w
as slowly darkening, like a movie fade-out. When he could see nothing, he lifted his hand away from the right eye. The ice had melted; he could see. He felt a flare of gratitude that pushed back his growing panic. He moved his hand to the other eye. By the time vision shrank in his right eye again, his left eyelashes had thawed.

  His fingers in their glove were stiffening with cold. Switching hands, he put the right one under his clothes, into his left armpit. He wouldn’t make the eight miles to the car, not at this speed; already his legs shook with strain. He could actually die out here.

  In a little ways—a mile?—he’d reach Applefield. The general store wasn’t far from the river. He began talking to himself. For some reason, he was saying we. There, we’re almost to shore. Now, turn around. Good. We’re going to aim for the elm. He sang bits of symphonies. At Applefield, he’d have to take off his skates, climb a small hill in his socks.

  He went around a bend and the wind abated. He could skate more directly now, and he repeated this fact aloud to himself: We’re in good shape now. Another half mile. Another three-eighths. Saying this helped him block out the fact that, when he’d come around the bend, he’d expected to see a red boathouse near the bank. Was that the next bend? Or was he picturing something in Lightstone, not Applefield at all? It had shingles, a wide metal door, a sagging dock. He could see it so clearly that as he came around the next bend, he actually did see it for a second, shimmering like a sunspot.

  He tried to push up the sleeve of his coat to check his watch, but his hands were too clumsy. He didn’t know how long he’d been skating. If he missed Applefield there wasn’t another town for two miles. On the other hand, if he stopped too early, still in parkland, there wasn’t even the chance of a stray house. When he came around the next bend he would try hiking inland. He must have gone far enough.

  A dark tree overhung the river. Avoiding spots of weak ice at the river’s edge, he skated to shore. His body trembled from having pushed against the wind. He took a step on land, then fell. Too stiff with cold to push himself up, he rolled clumsily onto his back, then clutched at the branches of a scrubby bush, pulling himself up. Snow began to seep through the seat of his wool pants. He reached for the skate laces and found that they’d frozen.