Something Wild

by Hanna Halperin

  “Nessa did.”

  “Oh, good. Do you need help with how to use them?”

  “Nessa helped me.”

  For a moment they were quiet, waiting for Nessa to say something from the top bunk, but Nessa was silent, didn’t even shift in her bed.

  “Do you have cramps?” Lorraine asked. “Does your stomach hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Honey, when did you get it?”

  “A few hours ago, I guess.”

  “Why didn’t you come tell me?”

  “Mom, stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Asking me so many questions. I don’t know. I’m telling you now.”

  “You know you can tell me anything,” her mother said in a low voice.

  Tanya felt something toughen in her chest. It was a sensation she was getting a lot those days. She couldn’t put a name to it or predict when it was going to come on—but when it did, it was impossible to ignore. For a while she thought she was having heartburn again, but this was different. It had something to do with her family. The simplest word for it might be anger, but it was a sickly, more tired feeling than just being angry.

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “It’s late. I love you, sweetie.” Lorraine leaned out from under the bottom bunk. “Love you, too, up there, sweetie.”

  “You too,” came Nessa’s voice, muffled against her pillow.

  When Lorraine left the bedroom she left the door open a crack so that a ribbon of light from the hallway slinked in, bisecting the room.

  Tanya waited for Nessa to say something. To make a joke or a sarcastic comment about their mother, or just to ask Tanya to get up and close the door—the light from the hallway was bothering her. But something had shifted from before; her sister was somewhere else.

  * * *

  —

  STRADDLING NESSA ON THE HOTEL BED, Tanya has not been this physically close to her sister in years, probably since that day in their mother’s bathroom fifteen years ago. When she feels on Nessa’s cheeks that her sister is crying, Tanya pretends that she doesn’t notice. The danger of getting this close, after all, is just this. People get vulnerable with touch. She no longer hugs clients for this reason; she avoids touching even shoulders and hands. For some people it’s like pressing a button. That’s what it’s like with her sister. Touch Nessa and she’ll open up, pour herself out to you. It’s probably a nightmare having sex with her, Tanya thinks. She’s probably the type of woman who cries afterward—or worse, during—wanting to be held and coddled.

  Sickened by the thought, Tanya climbs off her sister’s back. She remembers back to the diner—I went to Dan’s house today—and this time thinking about her sister saying his name repulses Tanya. It’s as if Nessa had whispered something dirty—a secret code word that only Tanya knows, only Tanya understands.

  Tanya lies down, putting as much space as she can between her and Nessa, even though she knows that Nessa will notice this and probably be hurt by it. Then she pretends to fall asleep.

  The first time Jesse hit Lorraine was on their honeymoon. They’d gotten married earlier that week at the town hall, just the two of them. Lorraine hadn’t seen the point of having a big wedding. She’d already had one of those, and the idea of doing it again embarrassed her. Besides, Nessa was on a cross-country road trip and Tanya was finishing her freshman year at Smith and she didn’t want to drag them away from their lives. Also, she and Jesse didn’t have many friends. They spent most of their time with each other. There was the additional fact that Lorraine’s closest friends, Wendy and Marcy, didn’t like Jesse. When she announced that she and Jesse had decided to get married, her friends had written her a joint letter outlining the reasons why they thought this was a mistake. Their biggest concern, they wrote, was that Jesse seemed controlling.

  And he was. Lorraine knew this; she was not blind. Jesse was hot-tempered, possessive, domineering. He was the opposite of Jonathan that way. With her first husband, he’d been present, it seemed, with everyone but her. She’d spent the second half of their marriage trying to get his attention, trying to ignite some sort of reaction in him; any reaction at all. And the reaction she eventually got was that he wanted a divorce.

  Jesse cared. He gave a shit. And he was never going to leave her. She was sure of this.

  To the ceremony, Lorraine wore a cream-colored dress that fell past her knees and Jesse wore dress pants and a dress shirt. He looked handsome as ever, his brown eyes sweet and full of feeling; his usually messy hair combed back. She loved the grooved lines framing his mouth, how they deepened when he smiled and laughed. He couldn’t stop smiling at her. As they stood across from each other in the dingy little room that smelled like ancient filing cabinets and wet paint, all she felt was grateful.

  They both took a week off from work and rented a cottage in Chatham with a view of the sound. It was May and winter was clinging to Cape Cod, colder and grayer than either one of them expected. Too cold to swim or to wear anything but jeans and windbreakers. On the first night it was pouring, and they went to a fish fry place for dinner, with paper napkins and a bar taking up half the restaurant. When Jesse announced to the waiter that they’d just gotten married, the waiter came back with shots of their best tequila, and she and Jesse drank and laughed so much, they didn’t even realize when they were the last ones in the restaurant.

  It couldn’t have been more different from her first honeymoon. Jonathan had taken Lorraine to Paris. It would have been romantic, she supposed, if she had known French or had better style. On their first dinner out she ordered something in French and Jonathan had corrected her pronunciation in front of the waiter. Her overarching memory from that trip was feeling clumsy and overheated, and wishing she was more interested in art than she was.

  The first full day on the Cape, she and Jesse walked by the ocean. It was something between a mist and a drizzle, the blank stretch of beach before them disappearing into fog. Above, seagulls wailed, drifting and diving through the stone-colored sky, and in the distance, they heard the bells of buoys, though it was too foggy to see very far past the shoreline. Lorraine insisted on walking barefoot—she liked the sand, wet and freezing beneath her feet, the romance of the cold beach. They had the entire thing to themselves.

  Jesse was hungover, though, and in a mood. When Lorraine pointed to the gulls overhead, when she picked up shells and rocks, holding them out in her palm, he rolled his eyes and kept walking. She stopped at one point and dragged her big toe through the sand. L + J, she wrote, in huge letters, and waited for him to look over his shoulder. When he didn’t, she called his name. “Look!” she said, and, begrudgingly, he turned around and walked toward her.

  For several moments he stared at the initials in the sand and then looked back up at her. “What?” he asked. “Do you want a medal or something?”

  “Don’t be a jerk,” she said hotly, right on that familiar edge of anger and playfulness, where they always seemed to be dancing. Then she pounced on him.

  They’d wrestled before, usually before or after sex, rolling around on the bed, tickling one another, laughing.

  They fell onto the sand and Lorraine mounted him. “Yes, I would like a medal, please,” she said, pushing her palms into his chest, and he grinned, grabbing her waist and squeezing. Before she knew it, he’d flipped her so that he was on top. He pinned her to the ground, holding her wrists down with his hands.

  “Get off,” she cried, laughing and struggling beneath him.

  “Not gonna happen,” he said, staring down at her as she thrashed beneath him.

  “You’re hurting me!”

  “Too bad.” He pushed down even harder so that her wrists started to ache beneath his hands.

  “Jesse, get off me,” she said, and when he didn’t let up: “Get the fuck off.”

  “Shut up, bitch,” he said, and before the
words even sank in, he hit her, square on the side of her head.

  Tears sprang to Lorraine’s eyes as pain radiated from her left cheek and ear. She looked up at him in shock.

  Jesse seemed not even to be looking at her. It was as though he was looking past her, through her head and down into the sand, lost in some hateful, faraway thought.

  It was then when she had the distinct thought: I made a mistake marrying him. She thought of Nessa and Tanya. As if by hitting her, he had somehow hit her daughters also. This was what made her furious.

  His hands were no longer pinning her down, and she scrambled out from underneath him, grabbing her shoes and running back in the direction they’d come from, holding her aching ear with her free hand.

  She was aware of Jesse following her, calling her name, but she didn’t turn back. When she got to the parking lot, theirs was the only car in the lot, and the doors were locked. Jesse had the key. Lorraine leaned against the door, pressing her ear, which pulsed against her palm. She had never been hit before and it was as though she’d walked from one world into another.

  Jesse appeared several minutes later. She didn’t look at him; she was too humiliated.

  There was the sound of Jesse unlocking the car.

  “I want to go home,” she said, when they both got in. When he didn’t respond, she looked over and said it again. “Jesse, I want to go back to Arlington. Today.”

  Jesse returned her gaze. She expected him to be mad, to protest, but his eyebrows were peaked with worry, his eyes glassy. “I understand,” he said softly, and then he put the car in reverse and pulled out of the parking spot.

  When they got back to the cottage, Lorraine went straight to the bedroom and began pulling clothes out of the drawers and closet, shoving them into her suitcase. She had brought far too much clothing, most of it absurdly summery for this drab, freezing week on the Cape. She had packed a teddy—a black lace thing that she’d gone and bought for herself especially for this trip. Sexy but not too sexy. It covered her upper thighs the way she wanted it to, while still showing off her cleavage.

  “Lorrie.”

  Lorraine looked up. Jesse was standing slumped in the doorway.

  “I’m almost finished packing,” she said, thrusting the teddy deep into the bag. “You should start.”

  “Wait, Lorrie. Can we talk first?” His voice was so soft she could barely hear him.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said. “You hit me.”

  “I don’t know what came over me,” Jesse whispered. “You have to believe me, I will never, ever do that again. Babe?”

  She walked over to the bedside table, gathering up the clutter that had already started to build; it was amazing how quickly you could move in somewhere and make it your own. Her glasses and hand cream, a box of matches from the restaurant last night, a glass of water with dust floating in it.

  “Lorrie, hold on a sec,” Jesse said, and this time his voice was a little louder, though gentle still. “Can we just stop and talk, just for five minutes? Can you just give me five minutes to talk to you and then I promise we can finish packing and leave?”

  She looked up at him. “Five minutes,” she conceded.

  “Thank you,” he said, visibly relieved. “Lorrie, thank you.”

  She sat on the bed and he came over and knelt in front of her. “Lorrie, sometimes I have these urges,” he said, his eyes huge. “It’s embarrassing to talk about, like I feel so ashamed. I haven’t even really been able to make sense of it in my own mind. But I get these cravings.” He looked down at the floor and then straight at her. “To dominate you. Not in a real way, of course. But sexually. It’s like a fantasy. There’s something about you that turns me on in this way I’ve never been turned on by anyone before. Like I’m almost scared about how attracted I am to you. I want to try all these things, things I’ve never done. When we were on the beach and I was on top of you, I got excited. I never meant to hit you like that. It was a complete accident. I got carried away. An urge gone wrong. I feel like a monster.” He gazed up at her.

  “You really hurt my ear,” she said. She could feel herself beginning to cry, and she knew, then, that crying would change things—this would be the beginning of her forgiving him. She felt relief. To be sad and not angry. That he was being soft.

  “Can I see it?” he asked.

  She shrugged and Jesse stood, leaning in to examine Lorraine’s ear. Gently, he touched the tender skin around it and then lightly kissed her earlobe. “Do you need to see a doctor?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Because if you do, I’ll take you there right now. We can go to the emergency room right this second if you want.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary, Jesse. And what would we even tell them?”

  “We would tell them the truth.”

  “The last thing I feel like doing on my honeymoon is sitting in an emergency waiting room.” She was really starting to cry now. She squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath.

  “I have an idea,” Jesse said. He sat down beside her on the edge of the bed. “Let’s take a bath. Let’s take a steaming hot bath in that gigantic bathtub until we’re wrinkled all over. And then I want to take you out to dinner. A really nice dinner. We’ll get dressed up and we’ll order the most expensive wine they have and, like, all the desserts on the menu. How does that sound, Lor?”

  She couldn’t bring herself to answer, but she put her head on his shoulder.

  “What was that you were holding a second ago?” Jesse asked, after several moments had gone by.

  She glanced up at him. “What?”

  “That black nightgown.”

  “Oh.” She shook her head. “It’s dumb.”

  “It didn’t look dumb.” He moved his leg slightly so that it pressed up against hers. “Can I see it?”

  “I don’t know, Jesse,” she said, but a quiet thrill had started to build inside her. The thrill was mixed up with the relief.

  Jesse leaned across the bed and reached into her bag, pulling out the teddy. He held it out in front of him, looking at it with such rapture that Lorraine could hardly breathe. Then he glanced at her. “Do I get to see you in this?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  He smiled and set the black lace lightly down on the bed. “I’m going to run the bath,” he said. “You rest. I’ll come get you when it’s ready.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN LORRAINE LOOKS BACK on this day, she wonders if this was the moment when she could have changed the course of things. If she had insisted they pack their bags and leave right that instant, if she’d put her foot down—maybe things would have turned out differently for her. But she was tired and hungry and upset, and it was her honeymoon. They’d paid for the rental for the entire week. They hadn’t used the Jacuzzi yet. A bath and a romantic dinner—it had sounded so nice. So in that moment, she’d leaned her head on Jesse’s shoulder. She’d allowed him to make things right.

  * * *

  —

  JESSE HAS BEEN TEXTING her endlessly since they left the house last night with Sally. Lorraine put her phone on silent so the girls wouldn’t hear the incoming chirps, but she’s been watching his text messages come through, a new one every twenty minutes or so, though she’s stopped herself from writing back.

  * * *

  —

  HIS LATEST: Lorrie, I made an appointment with a couples therapist. Dr. Louis Keller. He comes highly recommended. It’s for this Thursday at 6 p.m. You don’t have to come but I’m going to be there. I hope you decide to come. Don’t give up on us yet.

  * * *

  —

  SHE GLANCES OVER at her daughters. They’re both asleep, Tanya with the pillow curled under her, Nessa flat on her stomach. Their hair is splayed out, overlapping, and it’s impossible to t
ell whose is whose. For the first time since they left, Lorraine writes a response to Jesse.

  * * *

  —

  I’LL THINK ABOUT IT, she writes. Clicks send.

  * * *

  —

  THAT’S ALL I’M ASKING FOR, he writes back within seconds, and it’s as though he’s reached through the phone and touched her.

  They all wake up in the afternoon. The motel room has transformed into a bath of rose-gold light and shadows. The sun coming through the blinds is thick and warm as honey. Lorraine is propped up on her pillow reading something on her phone, and Tanya is curled on her side beside Nessa, a pillow tucked under her arm.

  “Hi,” Nessa says.

  “Hi,” Lorraine echoes.

  And Tanya. “Hi.”

  Nessa has the feeling then of never wanting to leave. How safe they are there, holed up together. Jesse and Henry and Eitan—their father and Simone and Ben—far away, in another world entirely, one that doesn’t exist inside this womb of light. They could live here in this sun-soaked room forever, eating complimentary breakfasts for the rest of their lives. Erica can be their gatekeeper, sleeping in that back room of the lobby every night, making sure no one dangerous is allowed to enter.

  Northampton is only ninety minutes away, but her world there—Janeski’s office, sporadic nights with Henry, long directionless walks through her neighborhood—all of it feels disjointed, a life that doesn’t really belong to her. But here, burrowed close with her mother and sister, Nessa feels right.

  They get up leisurely and change, then congregate in the bathroom to freshen up. They brush their teeth and Tanya has eyeliner in her purse, which she passes around. Lorraine’s bruises have changed from an angry red to a dotted plummy purple color. Lorraine pulls her hair over her shoulders, adjusting it just right to cover the bruises, like Nessa and Tanya used to do to cover up hickeys.