by Lisa Tucker
“We’re in kind of a rush anyway,” he said.
“Yes, we’re going to the library,” Dorothea offered.
His mother said they’d never make it since the library closed early on Sunday. “So we have lots of time to talk,” she said, before asking Dorothea again how long she’d been in St. Louis.
When Dorothea answered with the truth, his mom said, “Did you say eleven months?”
“Oh, I wish,” Dorothea said. “It’s only eleven days, but it feels like much longer.” She smiled at Stephen.
“Isn’t that interesting, Bob?” his mom said, but her face fell.
“Eleven days?” his dad said, looking at Stephen. His voice was frankly mystified. “And you’re already living with her?”
“We’re not living together,” he said. “It’s a long story, but it’s not like that.”
“No, it’s not like that,” Dorothea echoed, though Stephen wondered what she thought she was saying.
His mom and dad acted like they both had to go to the bathroom, immediately, together, which could only make things worse—that bra hanging over the bathtub. In the few minutes they were gone, Stephen didn’t say anything and neither did Dorothea. When his parents returned, his father said to him, “Before we leave, come downstairs and take a look at the Chrysler. The engine is stalling out again.”
“It’s raining, Dad. I know next to nothing about engines.”
“Come on. It’ll just take a minute.”
He exhaled. “Mom, why don’t you and Dorothea come too?”
“In the rain?” His mother laughed. “We’re too sweet, we’ll melt.”
“All right,” he finally said, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair. “Let’s go.”
No surprise, they were barely out of the apartment when his father admitted that he just wanted a chance to talk to him. They stood in the hall by the window that faced the street, both men with their hands shoved in their pockets. Father-and-son chats weren’t normal in their family. In fact, Stephen couldn’t remember ever having one until after the accident, when his parents started worrying that he was throwing away his life.
“Dad, trust me, you don’t need to get involved in this,” Stephen began. “I know what I’m doing.”
He rubbed his beard. “Okay then, what are you doing?”
“She’s a nice person. Initially, I was trying to help her.” Stephen looked out at the rain. “Her brother’s in the psych ward at County. It’s a long story, like I told you. She won’t be here much longer, a few days, maybe another week, tops.”
“But she’s been staying with you in this little apartment for eleven days?”
“Yes.”
“Have you driven your cab at all? For fares, I mean.”
“Not much, but it’s up to me when I work. It’s not like I need the money.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. You two have been together solid for eleven days, morning, noon, night? You’re sleeping with this woman too?”
“What’s your point?”
“I’m just concerned.” His father peered into his face. “What’s going to happen to you when she leaves?”
“I’ll go back to driving. Watching TV, eating, walking. Same as before.” It sounded pretty lonely, even to him. He forced a smile. “Coming over to your house for dinner once a week, so you and Mom won’t worry so damned much.”
“Any chance she’ll be coming back to St. Louis?”
“I don’t know.” He turned to face his father. “Look, what do you want me to say?”
“Well, say you care about her, if you do. Maybe you could talk her into coming back.”
“I don’t know. I really can’t think about it.”
“Why not, son?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated. He took a deep breath. “I just can’t.”
His father didn’t say anything for a while. The rain was coming down harder, and it was getting dark. Stephen felt a gloom coming over him, and he decided he wasn’t up to going out to dinner tonight, after all.
“I think you do have feelings for her.” His father smiled a half smile. “Your mother told me so, and you know she’s never wrong.”
“I’ll take it under advisement.” He nodded in the direction of his apartment. “Can we go back inside?”
His father said yes, but before they made it to the door, he threw in that Dorothea seemed so nice. “It’s really too bad. We just want you to be happy.”
When they walked back into the apartment, Stephen could tell his mom had been having a heart-to-heart with Dorothea. They were sitting together on the couch, so close their arms were almost touching, but whatever his mother had said didn’t seem to have upset her. Both his parents hugged Dorothea goodbye and his mom hugged him, but his dad gave him the customary slap on the back. He tried to give them money for the groceries, but as usual, they protested. Normally, he would have kept pushing them, but this time he let it go.
And then they were gone, and he and Dorothea were alone, just like they’d been for eleven days—except it didn’t feel the same at all.
He told her he didn’t want to go out to eat, and she said fine. “But I’ll cook something,” he said. “We have lots of choices, thanks to my parents.”
“They’re lovely people,” she said, following him into the kitchen. “I’m very glad I had a chance to meet them.”
He opened the refrigerator. “What did you and my mom talk about?”
“Primarily, the thing we have in common,” Dorothea said.
“What’s that?” he said distractedly, as he looked around for something he felt like making. He wasn’t hungry, even though he knew he should be. They hadn’t eaten since this morning.
“Silly—you, of course.”
He pulled out ham and cheese and offered to make her a sandwich. “I’m going to wait,” he said. “I feel a little off.”
“I can make my own sandwich,” she said, and smiled. “I’m not completely helpless.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said slowly, and paused. “Is something wrong?”
“Let’s watch TV for a while,” he said, knowing he was probably disappointing her. They hadn’t watched any television since the first night they had sex. They were too busy talking and reading to each other and just having fun. But now he felt the old need for oblivion. “I’m sure I’ll be all right soon,” he added, though he wasn’t sure, since he didn’t know why he wasn’t all right now.
He went into the living room and left her making her sandwich. A few minutes later, she joined him and they watched one of the crime shows in Sunday night repeats. Then a movie came on and he told her he wanted to watch that too. She said fine, but she moved closer, and during the commercials, she talked, like they always had. He tried, but he couldn’t come up with much to say in response.
The movie was almost over when she said, “I told your mother about my angel moon. She agreed that it was not ‘new age hocuspocus.’”
“Not sure I follow,” he said, because he wasn’t really paying attention.
“Remember when we were watching that wonderful movie, and I told you that life is about what you believe as much as what seems to be reality?”
He knew the movie she was talking about: an old seventies flick called They Might Be Giants. He’d rented it because Dorothea had read the box and told him she’d love to see a movie about Sherlock Holmes. It was only when they started watching that he realized the main character wasn’t Sherlock Holmes, but a guy who only thought he was Sherlock Holmes after he went crazy when his wife died. The point of the movie was pretty similar to what Dorothea said: that beliefs can be real if only you believe hard enough—but of course Stephen noticed what Dorothea didn’t seem to, that no amount of believing could bring back the crazy man’s dead wife.
“I remember,” he said, still looking at the screen.
“I told your mother about the angel moon that I was planning to use for dem
onstration, and how it proved my theory. And she told me it was very true.” When he didn’t respond, Dorothea said, “Would you like to hear it?”
“All right.”
“You have to come to the window.”
“Why? There’s no moon at all. It’s too cloudy.”
“All the better,” Dorothea said, taking his hand.
Her hand was so soft in his, and yet he wanted to pull away. He didn’t want to stand this close to her. He didn’t want to smell her hair and the new perfume she’d bought; he didn’t want to think about touching her body, how much he always desired her.
“When my brother and I were children, I was very afraid of the dark. I slept with several night-lights and I would ask Father to replace the bulbs every few weeks, for fear that one of them would burn out.”
“A normal fear of small kids,” he said, giving in and putting his arm around her. The night was pitch-black; there was nothing to see, though Dorothea insisted he keep looking out the window.
“Thank you,” she said, “though I was still afraid when I wasn’t that small. I was nine when Jimmy finally cured me, as I’m about to tell you.” She leaned into him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Then he kissed her lips until she stepped back, smiling. “Don’t you want to hear the rest?”
“Okay,” he said, holding up his palms, smiling back. “Hands off until you’re finished.”
“As I said, when I was nine, there was a bad storm one afternoon that knocked the power out. By night, it still hadn’t returned. This had happened before many times, usually from the mountain winds, and Father had a generator, but it only lit part of the downstairs. Normally, Jimmy and I would sleep down there with Father, while Grandma used a candle to get to her room. But on that particular night, I wanted to sleep in my own bed because I had an elaborate pretend game in progress with my dolls and my stuffed animals, and it was very important that I be with them.”
“Couldn’t you move the dolls and animals downstairs?”
“They were carefully arranged for the game,” she said. “Also, as excessive as this must sound, I had over four hundred of them. With some things, Father was overly generous.”
“What the hell, he had the money.”
“True, but I think his motive was to make up for the many things we couldn’t have because he considered them too dangerous.” She paused. “But back to that night. When I told Jimmy of my problem, he insisted that I step out onto the porch with him. The storm had passed, and in its place was the unusual moon with the ring, the one we called the angel moon. He asked me to stare into that moon until I saw the angel herself as clearly as I saw her halo.”
“And you did,” he said. “And then you could go to your room and sleep because an angel was watching out for you.”
“No, not at all. I stared at the moon until I saw the angel, yes, but I found her quite frightening. Her face was as blank as death and her eyes seemed to be laughing at me. When I asked Jimmy if she looked this way to him too, he nodded and said the angel in the moon was absolutely hideous.”
“What?” Stephen burst out in a laugh. “So now you had the moon and the dark to fear?”
“No again, because Jimmy convinced me that the truly hideous thing about this angel was what he called her ‘blinding, boring, arrogant and most of all creepy light.’ ‘The dark isn’t frightening,’ Jimmy said, as he stood behind me, covering my eyes with his hands. ‘In the dark all you have are the pictures in your mind. And your mind is sweet and innocent, Thea, just like you.’”
She was quiet for a moment before she whispered, “Oh my poor brother.” Stephen heard her gulping like she was trying not to cry. “I still can’t believe what’s happened to him.”
“It’s okay,” he said, pulling her against his chest. He only meant to comfort her, but then she was kissing him. He put his arms around her and she was kissing him with an urgency that he didn’t understand, though, admittedly, he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Within a few minutes, they were stumbling into the bedroom, undressing as they went. She was so incredibly into everything he did to her, this moment, right now: he couldn’t remember ever being this excited from the excitement of the woman he was with. It was so intense, the way their bodies moved together, the way she touched him so freely, the way she kept her eyes open this time, those gorgeous eyes shining in the light from the hall, telling him how much she wanted him. It was the best sex they’d ever had, and afterward, he fell back on the bed feeling nothing but calm and satisfied.
They were lying on their backs, holding hands, still a little out of breath, when Dorothea laughed. “I just thought of something. I never finished my story.”
“Right,” he said. “Tell me the rest.”
“The reason we were at the window is that I was going to show you the dark, moonless sky, and ask you if it was a friendly dark or a frightening dark. The idea being that the essence of things is also in the way they appear. It’s even more true in life that what you believe is often as important as what’s real.”
“Maybe so,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything to disagree with. Nothing Dorothea said could be disagreeable to him now. “But how did this come up with my mom?”
“Of course I didn’t tell her the entire story. We were talking about the eleven days I’d been here. I think she was a bit shocked that it was such a short span of time, especially as she seemed to suspect the thing you advised me not to tell my father about. Which I would not have told your parents about either, and so I pretended not to notice her hints on the matter, remembering your point about parents being upset that their children are growing up.”
He laughed. “I don’t think that applies to my parents.”
“I don’t know,” Dorothea said seriously. “Your mother seemed very alive to the possibility that I would hurt you, considering I’d only known you eleven days. But I told her I believed it to be much longer, and in fact, I believed I’d known you for many years.” Dorothea’s voice became shy. “I only realized the reason for this as I was talking to your mother. I didn’t tell her this part, but when I was fourteen, I had a daydream about a Civil War soldier who came to my door to ask me to marry him. He was a man in one of my encyclopedias, a very attractive man. He had brown hair and a face very similar to yours. In the daydream, he smiled like you and even had a slight limp as you do.”
She squeezed his hand. “I realize how strange it must sound: that we met via one of my daydreams nine years ago. I don’t expect you to have shared that daydream. I would imagine you were far too busy in medical school to conjure up the Dorothea O’Brien of your future.”
The gloom was creeping back again, but he said something about medical school being difficult. Something that would have been unsatisfying if Dorothea hadn’t been chatting so happily she didn’t notice.
“Getting back to your mother. She told me she liked my idea about beliefs being as important as reality. She also said—” Dorothea was still talking, but he couldn’t concentrate. He was listening to the rain against the window, wondering why his after-sex good mood had already evaporated. It wasn’t just in his mind either: his whole body was starting to feel tense. He could feel it across his shoulders and down his arms and in his calves and hamstrings. He could feel it pushing inside his chest, like something had a hold of his heart muscle, even though he knew that was ridiculous.
“She was so intimate with me. It was really very unexpected.” Dorothea turned over and put her hands on his face. “She even asked if I would share my thoughts about the future with you. Want to know what I said?”
“Sure,” he said, but he was wondering how to get away for a minute without hurting her feelings. If only he could go out driving with the radio blasting or run around the block until he was too exhausted to think. Or just stare at the ceiling until his mind went blank. He knew he could handle whatever this was; he’d handled a hell of a lot worse.
“I couldn’t tell her the entire trut
h because, well, I hadn’t told you yet. But I told her I was very happy here and hoped there would be a future, and I think she suspected that I was in love with her son, because she seemed to feel much better then.” Dorothea laughed. “Oh, now I have told you. I hope you don’t feel you have to reciprocate, although I think you’d better or I may have to tickle you.”
“I do,” he said, though he honestly wasn’t sure what he was agreeing with. He had to get out of here, now, before he lost it.
“I’ll be right back,” he managed, before he went into the bathroom and crouched down on the floor, trying to calm down, think. But he couldn’t think because he kept feeling an incredible urge to break something. He was scared shitless he might cry.
Even her soft knock startled him. No wonder she was at the door. He’d already been in there for what felt like a very long time.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“Yes.”
She waited a minute. “Would you like to have some pickles together?”
They’d done this almost every night after sex: sit on the bed and eat from a plate of the several kinds of pickles she’d brought back to his house so far. It was a goofy kind of fun, but now it seemed as ludicrous as if she’d suggested eating pickles at a funeral.
“No thanks.”
“Are you sure? I’d be glad to get them ready.”
“I said no.” His voice was harsh. Shit, he didn’t mean for it to come out that way. He told her he was sorry. “It’s nothing you did,” he threw in, but his tone didn’t change.
She continued to wait at the door for a while before she said, “Stephen, please tell me what’s wrong. I want to try to help you.”
“You can’t.” He was banging his fist on his forehead because he finally got what was happening, though he didn’t understand it at all. It seemed so unfair that this was happening again. Jesus, why had that image of Lizzie’s car seat come back into his mind now?
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Dorothea said softly.
He couldn’t respond.
When the medics had lifted his daughter out, her pacifier was stuck at the bottom of the seat, covered in blood. She was too old for a pacifier, but Ellen had said not to push her, she’d give it up when she was ready. He tried to lunge back into the car to grab it. The police were holding him back, and he was shouting, “She needs that! She won’t be able to sleep!”
