Tiny Ladies

by Adam Klein

  ‘You were doing so good,’ he says.

  ‘How would you know how I was doing? You never visited.’ Not that he could.

  He turns around. ‘You’re going to have to slow down sometime, babe.’

  I stare into his face, incredulous. There’s a kind of listless condescension in his eyes. You’re going to tell me about slowing down? And then it occurs to me he is acting concerned, acting like someone who knows that a pregnant woman shouldn’t be shooting heroin. And from now on he’ll be measuring it out for me, wearing his conscience like a stolen suit. ‘Tell me you brought something for me,’ I say, looking away.

  He turns back around and sits still, as though he’s not going to give me anything. I’m supposed to hide my need from him, as though he were a doctor, too important to be treated as a mere dispensary. I’m supposed to plead for his approval, allow him to turn the spotlight on me, my pathetic, trembling needs. Not when I can see that his eyes are still pinned, see how he’s turned right back to his old associations, the guys he knows from the penitentiary, pool halls, and bars. I suppose this henchman in the front seat is offering him details on fathering. Daddy. No child could fall for that.

  ‘You make me laugh,’ I say. There’s something in my voice I brought back with me from the blond boy’s hotel room, something he can’t recognize. It’s a dead voice, a sacrifice.

  ‘I just came out of rehab and now you’re going to lecture me. Let me out and I’ll take care of myself. I don’t need you.’ I tighten my grip around the door handle. I’ll jump.

  ‘You know I’m just worried about you,’ Victor says. ‘I’m going to need to clean up too. I know that.’ I see him looking at me, fretful, in the rearview mirror. For a moment he resolves into the person I met in the office years before, repentant, earnest, too much of both. Sure, there’s a father in him. Someone with answers they can’t live by, a string of jobs with terminations he has justifications for, an open invitation to visit his parole officer anytime. Nothing so unusual.

  ‘Give her the shot,’ he says to Bobby. Bobby opens the glove compartment. It’s been set up all along. I don’t express any gratitude when he hands a syringe back between the two front seats. I take a belt he offers and slide my sleeve up and my body down, out of view of passing cars. And what I don’t get is how he plans to hold this over me. But I do get very, very high. Enough to make my absent body feel inhabited again, this time by something I know.

  They want to see Janine’s house. We are rushing up onto the bridge, and I think I owe them this information. They don’t have to press me for it. Right now I’d be sitting at St Mary’s in a group confessional while a group of lost souls turn piss-gold with new revelations about themselves. By giving Vic and Bobby directions, I pay for my freedom, my evasions. If I tell them where they can find Janine, I won’t have to tell Victor what I’ve done to the baby, his hope. Not yet. And the homes here are magnificent, the kinds of lives you want to see into, and can’t believe.

  Janine is far away, fortressed in these hills. We can’t touch her. Victor and his friend don’t recognize the prohibition, but I know I can’t touch her. And I think of Victor’s stepmother in her large house, turning in the doorway and wisely locking it.

  I feel exhausted by the time we carry King into the hospital. He’s quickly attended to while Joel and I sit in the waiting room, strange framed photographs of animals on all the walls: blurry, eight-by-ten close-ups of dogs and their dirt-streaked muzzles, the red eyes of skittish, squirming cats. The place is almost like someone’s home, and for a moment I wonder if the vet lives here, in the back of the shop, arranging his sleeping hours around pet emergencies. I wonder if these animals on the wall have all been treated here, satisfied customers.

  ‘I hope spending time with you isn’t always like this,’ Joel laughs, rubbing my arm, trying to bring me into the room with him, reminding me he hadn’t intended an evening of emergency rescue. The vet has assured us he can sew up the wound and King will be fine, though he’ll be sluggish from his loss of blood. I become morose under Joel’s kind but uninformed gaze. For him, the worst is over, tragedy neatly avoided.

  ‘No, it’s not always like this.’ I want to add: It’s been worse, much worse.

  ‘I know we probably have a bit of a wait here, so I thought now would be the right time to ask you to dinner. Maybe sometime next week, if you’re not busy? I expect you’re going to be preoccupied with all that’s gone on tonight.’ He shifts uncomfortably in his chair, trying to direct his comments more intimately by turning toward me. My mind lights on the word preoccupied, but he quickly attempts to make up for it. ‘I understand how traumatic this must be for you, so I don’t want to pressure you.’

  The gallery of animals, I notice, are only slightly less offensive than if their heads were cut off and hung there. I realize I haven’t taken my eyes off of them, and force myself to look at Joel. His persistence is flattering, but I’m not confused about who I am and what tonight will precipitate.

  ‘I can’t lead you on, Joel. It’s just not going to work out with me. I’ve got too much happening in my life right now, problems even the best shrink couldn’t change.’ I see him visibly recoil at the word shrink; I can’t tell him it’s his most attractive attribute. I might have run to him before, imagining he could carry me the way Bill had, before my life became impossible to share.

  He looks despondent for a moment, then stares at the door, thinking, slapping the gloves in his hand. He won’t humiliate himself, and I’m glad for that.

  ‘Well,’ he says after a while. ‘I guess I did a good deed tonight. I wrote my ticket to heaven.’

  ‘You’ll experience great rewards. Strangers’ pets will follow you wherever you go.’ We both laugh, though with reserve, maybe even discomfort.

  ‘I guess I’ll need to take you back,’ he offers.

  ‘I’d appreciate it.’

  I can see this will be awkward; waiting around with me and finding some neutral language between ourselves, some words unattached to the future, to his intentions or my past. He’d love to leave now, come to terms with the bloodstains on his shirt, a sacrifice I can see he’s regretting now. But I need him to drive me wherever I’m going next. I notice the payphone and excuse myself temporarily.

  For a moment, I consider calling Frances at home. I need to tell her I’m not coming in tomorrow. She’ll be angry with me, but perhaps I can get some sensible advice from her, maybe ask her if I can stay with her. She has managed that office for years, unaffected by the sordidness of clients. Their stories don’t penetrate her. Gina and Hannah have lived too close to chaos; it seems safer to confide in someone impervious to it. But after the first three digits of Frances’s number, I imagine her saying, Don’t get dark on me. Don’t tell me how you got here. And I think: I can’t bring this into her life, I can’t explain this. I call Hannah.

  My voice is very steady on the phone. I attempt to tell it simply, to talk as though this were the aftermath. I want to present it the way Joel perceives it, an ill-timed intrusion. But she knows it’s more than that. For Joel, this was the premature end of his seduction. In a more profound way, it will be the end of my relationship with Hannah too. She knows I’ll leave, that I’ll go back into hiding, and whatever we’ve come to count on in each other will also be abruptly terminated.

  Still, I find myself reluctant to tell her about running into Joel and his part in helping me, her irrational jealousy suddenly more weighted than the thought of us saying good-bye.

  ‘Can I stay with you?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course,’ she answers. ‘Any idea when you’ll be here?’

  ‘Soon, I hope.’ I look over at Joel, pacing the lobby and discreetly looking at his watch.

  When I arrive at Hannah’s, she has her bags laid out on the bed, half-packed.

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’ I ask.

  She cuts me a quick look and continues folding clothes. ‘I didn’t expect King. I thought he’d still be at the hospital.�
�� He moves tentatively to the foot of the bed, his bad paw still hanging limply, and lies down on the floor, nuzzling his bandage.

  ‘I had to bring him,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what I’m expecting, but I thought he should be safe as long as I am.’

  ‘What are you expecting?’ she asks gravely, moving my bags deeper into the apartment and locking the door. ‘I want to be prepared, Carrie. I don’t want any secrets.’

  ‘I expect he’d try to find me. I don’t think he’s come to wish me well,’ I say. I stand in the doorway, wondering if I’m welcome, if I shouldn’t just get a ride to my car and leave town.

  ‘What does he want?’ She seems to ask this of herself, as though he were pursuing her.

  ‘I took money from him, and I called the cops on him. There’s more to it than that.’ I feel almost like I owe it to her to tell her about the baby. It’s because I don’t want to have to confront him alone. I never wanted to confront him alone. ‘He thought I was pregnant when I left. I don’t even think he’s here for me. I think he’s here for the baby. But there is no baby. I never told him. I made the decision on my own.’ It’s like she senses how exposed I feel standing in the doorway, talking about this.

  ‘Carrie, I’m sorry. C’mon, sit down over here.’ She puts me into a big chair in the corner of her studio. I can watch her pack in the low light.

  ‘Can you bring me that bag? There’s a blanket in there that my grandmother gave me.’

  She carries over the blanket, looking at it but not commenting on it – that it’s a baby blanket. I put it over my legs and rest my hands under it. She stands looking at me for a long time, her head cocked as though she’s thinking.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  ‘I guess it’s too late to tell him,’ she says. ‘Even if he wants the baby, he also wants to hurt you. He must want to hurt you, or he wouldn’t be following you and breaking your windows. He doesn’t sound like he’s here to start a family.’ I notice she has a hard time keeping her voice level even as she tries to announce this with certainty.

  ‘But what if he is? I mean, what if he broke in because nobody was home and he wanted to make sure we hadn’t left town already? He didn’t damage anything. He didn’t steal anything.’

  ‘C’mon, Carrie. He stole your sense of well-being. He’s stolen mine. You don’t think we should stay here waiting for him, do you? I think we should go to Sioux City and stay at my parents’ house. I have some things I need to attend to, anyway.’ She begins to move around the apartment, picking up some papers from the phone table, a sketch pad. Last-minute items she puts in her purse.

  ‘I’ve really foisted this on you, haven’t I?’ King looks up, panting, then resettles. I continue talking in her direction, though I’m not sure she’s listening. ‘I can’t run from him indefinitely. I know that. I know what he’s capable of. I just can’t imagine him being so angry as to try and hurt me, though.’

  Even as I say it, I know I’m trying to forget the image of Janine, push her down.

  She stands in front of me, and I see she’s furious.

  ‘Obviously, I’m worried about this. You know I just went through this. I wish you’d told me what was going on, that you were being stalked. I mean, I just got out of the hospital. It’s too much.’ She turns back to the bed and continues packing.

  I want to ask her why she changed the terms of our relationship. She determined we were better off as friends. None of this would have come so close to her if she’d continued to see me at the office.

  She starts talking with her back to me. ‘Your dog could have died, bled to death, if you didn’t get him to the hospital in time. Don’t you see how little his intentions matter, how he could kill without meaning to? You really think you can negotiate these things?’

  ‘I don’t want to negotiate anything,’ I say testily. ‘I’m trying to figure this out.’

  ‘Listen, Carrie,’ she says carefully. ‘I didn’t finish telling you what went on between Stefan and Ellen, but you should know. It has something to do with what you’re going through now.’

  I sit there shaking. I can’t tell if she’s asking for permission to go on, but I don’t offer it.

  She faces me for a moment, then turns her attention toward King. She talks unemotionally, looking at my wounded half instead of me.

  ‘Stefan called me when it was too late. You see, Ellen returned to Iowa City, but she never called again after she’d called to ask me to apologize to her. That was it. I didn’t hear from her again. But I did hear from Stefan. He called to tell me that his studio was broken into. He thought it was Ellen. I told him it could have been anyone. But I knew it was her. We’d done it together. I knew how she could climb a tree and make her way into one of his upstairs windows. If she knew a building wasn’t alarmed, she’d work her way in, one way or another. About a week later, he called to tell me that it happened again. This time she’d destroyed a series of paintings he was about to show at his gallery in Chicago. They were portraits she’d modeled for, but he’d corrupted them in a way that I knew deeply affected her.

  ‘Her face was easily identifiable; no question it was Ellen. Had they just been portraits of her face, they might have been considered beautiful. Disturbing, but beautiful. Her expressions were troubled, affecting. Like they were drawn from his memory of her at the cemetery in Burlington. But they were done before that, as though he’d predicted her hurt, her confusion over his betrayal. Those expressions were haunted, devastated. But what he did was paint her head onto the naked bodies of young girls. There were these adult faces and expressions imposed on these thin, small-breasted figures, these tiny bird-like bodies. There was something pornographic about them, though I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They captured the impossibility of Ellen’s agenda, but they were also demeaning, heartless. I don’t think you could look at them and not feel compromised. Ellen blacked out the faces from each canvas. She hadn’t stood naked in his studio to have her psyche revealed in these paintings. It was brutal. Worse than anything her father had done to humiliate her.

  ‘Anyway, Stefan called me over to see the damage. He was angrier than I could tell on the phone. He didn’t say hello when I arrived, just swung the door open for me and guided me to the wall where the works were hanging, leaning against the wall, and sitting on easels. They were all exhibited: a whole show blacked out.

  ‘“I wanted you to see what that bitch did,” he said. “That fucking little cunt thinks she can destroy my work. I’ll kill her.” He repeated it, like it was an academic decision. Now I realize he brought me there to make me part of it, to punish me in place of her. But at the time I thought all he wanted was to find out how she broke in. That’s what he asked about, saying he’d bolt the windows if I knew how she got inside.

  ‘I told him I knew how she once did it – from a second-floor window in the adjoining studio. There was a tree she climbed. It was simple. She accessed his studio by an adjoining door.

  ‘I remember him sitting there, covering his face with paint-flecked hands, asking himself what he was going to do for this show. How could he ever get his work back? And I left him inconsolable, though I wanted to console him. I just walked out.

  ‘It wasn’t long before he called the last time, saying it was an accident. That she’d broken into his studio and he happened to be there. They were apparently yelling at each other on the top of the stairs, and he pushed her, but he hadn’t meant for it to happen. It was so strange, Carrie. I could have predicted it. I could sense it before he ever said a word. And when it went to trial, it was my testimony about that visit – the fact that I’d told him how she’d entered the building before – that sort of cinched the case against him. It was just too odd that their struggle occurred upstairs; it appeared to everyone that he’d been lying in wait, that he intended to break her neck when he pushed her. So you see how close accidents and intentions can come together. You don’t want to try to negotiate that.’

  She turns to her suitcas
es and closes the latches on them. She lifts both bags by their handles and begins to make her way over to the door, where she places them beside mine. She turns and looks at me, smiling uneasily. ‘I have to admit, Carrie, I look at you and wonder how you could not have known what to expect. I’m truly surprised you have nothing planned.’

  ‘How could I? I didn’t know he’d be released. I didn’t know he’d come after me. These were just possibilities.’ I feel defensive again, responsible. I want to ask her if I should have firearms, a map of the cottage with schemata for various confrontations all worked out.

  ‘I’m just surprised,’ she says evenly. ‘If someone came this far to fuck with me, I’d certainly consider killing them.’ I realize her warnings against negotiation have nothing to do with a desire to avoid conflict; I begin to wonder about her suggestion to leave town, whether she doesn’t have some other plan in mind.

  ‘How long do we go to Sioux City for? I need to call Frances and tell her I’ll be out of the office.’

  ‘That’s up to you. How long do you think he’ll wait around for you? Maybe we ought to leave something in the cottage that suggests you’ve left for good?’ She has filled her purse and is leaning against her sink, drinking a beer. She has taken on a challenging casualness; I’m ready for whatever you suggest.

  ‘The question is whether it’s worth going back there. It’s already getting dark, and I’m not sure what to leave that would suggest I’ve left town for good.’ I hope the dark will discourage her. There’s also a blizzard expected if the dark isn’t discouraging enough. I get the distinct feeling she wants to make this some kind of match of wits. Victor doesn’t use wits. He works from desperation; I don’t think it’s wise to leave signs and wait for him to uncover them. He doesn’t put things together.

  ‘Well,’ she considers, ‘you could leave some airline information on a slip of paper. You could mess the place up like you’d been looking for things. The dog’s gone. Maybe he’ll believe you’ve left for good. Let’s face it, you can’t afford to come back in a week if he’s still haunting the place.’