We All Love the Beautiful Girls

by Joanne Proulx

  She splits open a potato. Melts butter into its soft, white flesh. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were true? Love powering the universe, dead centre of every chest. Ready to strike us open—the first piercing—setting loose what’s already inside. What she has with Michael is so much weightier. Love exposed to a steady light, stretched and thinned and emptied out, ignored, rejected, derided, and then maybe, maybe returned for another round.

  “Sometimes it’s hard, you know, to believe it,” he says. “When it feels like no one else does.”

  Mia adds a dash of salt to the potato, dips her knife in for another dab of butter. Finn. Alive. Lying on her chest, clay blue skin, slick with afterbirth. The weight of him, still the weight of her. Lying side by side on his bed, their little fingers knotted. No wall strong enough to break their grip. And she and Michael—they’ve had a good life together. She wants not to fuck that up.

  She pushes the plate toward Finn. “I think if anyone would know what love feels like it would be you,” she says. “Eat,” she says, and she hands her son a fork.

  It’s been a week and so far nothing. No police have shown up asking if Michael knows anything about a house with all of its back windows missing. No write-up in the papers, nothing on the radio, no articles popping up online about the risks of riverside living in beautiful Old Aberdeen. No irate phone call from Peter and no retaliatory acts of vandalism have banged upon his door—Michael’s beginning to believe he might just have gotten away with it.

  He and Dirk agreed to lie low, but tonight, he risks a trip to the river. He reaches the water only to find the old fishermen gone, the graffiti bridge abandoned, the baseball diamond dark. When he wipes away the dirt and peers through the shed’s back window, the pitching machine is right where they left it, a shadowy bulk of inert metal, like some decommissioned fighting machine left over from a long-ago war. Only the red extension cord he’d hung from the throwing arm, the one he once used to plug in Christmas lights, hints at more civilized times.

  Michael’s disappointed. He wanted to see the boy, ask him if there’d been any cops poking around. But mostly he wanted to talk about that night, laugh about it, the thrill of what they’d done. He still can’t quite believe how easily he and the kid pulled it off. Plan A perfectly executed, at least once they started launching the balls. Michael might not have accomplished much over the last five months, but shit, blasting every window out of that scumbag’s house with such skilful precision, now that had been a feat. At some point he and the kid had actually jumped around the deck arm in arm. Jacked on adrenaline, total He-Men, they’d hadn’t even broken a sweat getting the pitching machine back into the Jeep. Christ, they could take their show on the road, hire themselves out to anyone with a major league grudge and an appetite for destruction. And the thrill of revenge, Michael hadn’t properly anticipated the afterburn of that glory. Man, he’d felt good that night and would have given anything—anything—to see Peter’s face when he got an eyeful of his new river view, unencumbered by glass.

  But now, walking the path through the grass field alone, so still and so quiet, he feels left behind, the only person who didn’t get the doomsday news at which all the other citizens fled. Even the chicken wire and hockey sticks have packed it in. Michael saw the emptiness between the goalposts when he passed by. He has no idea if the hatchlings made it back to the river. He’d marched along the edge of the soccer pitch, practically every night this summer, bat in hand, and never once bothered to go take a proper look.

  And Michael doesn’t know if it was Dirk or him, but that night in the delirium of destruction, the laughter and the whooping, Frankie’s window got hit. He’d seen it when they were packing up the Arm. The sheer white curtains wafting from her room like twisted ghosts. High on adrenaline and a couple puffs of weed, he’d thought what the hell. I mean, who had he been kidding? The kid was right. Frankie was going to be impacted. Helen was going to be impacted. With all or most of the glass shattered, either way, they wouldn’t have the luxury of feeling safe in their own home.

  Under the bridge, he picks up a handful of gravel. Squats by the bank, between the main support columns, and one by one, throws the small stones into the rushing water. He imagines them spinning, mute and near weightless, rolled deep by current and gravity, bouncing off boulders and sunken tree trunks, their eventual landing soft, muddy, a puff of oyster ink where no light reaches, a hundred miles downstream.

  The river is real. The river is always. The river cuts and carves, sweeps and swallows—anything weak, poorly attached, unable to resist its current. The canal: tidy stone walls and gentle waters, designed by men, built by men, controlled by men. Maybe that’s what Mia didn’t like about that dance performance. The column of rain centre stage, the conceit of the natural world harnessed.

  Michael takes more time between throws. He tells himself he is a good man, that in his life he hasn’t caused much harm. That it was only glass he broke. He tells himself when this handful of stones is gone, he’ll go home. Let Mia know he’s ready to start seriously looking for work. Tell Finn he’s not mad anymore. They don’t have to know how his anger dissipated, how he released it out into the world. They don’t need to know anything about a back wall of broken windows or a diabetic street kid or an old pitching machine tucked away in a falling-down shed.

  He misses the baseball. The exercise. The dope. The Arm rocketing a ball across home plate. The hard swing of the bat, the crack, the flight, the randomness of the boy. His energy. His foul mouth. His cockiness, a mix of vulgar and vulnerable. It wasn’t always pretty, but Michael doesn’t think the kid ever lied to him, and, well, that’s something. Even the diabetes thing was real.

  He pulls back his arm to throw another stone when a bright speck comes rushing at him, riding the fast-moving water. A brilliant purple circle, and quick, without thinking, he plunges in his hand and scoops it from the river. He lets the cool water drip onto the gravel before he uncurls his fingers. On his palm, a flower, smaller than a dime. Five cloverleaves of wet, velvety purple fanning from a drop of white. Michael nudges a petal with his fingernail and exposes an inch of stem, transparent green, thin as dental floss.

  It’s not a wildflower—too bright, too cultured, too cared for. It must have blown from someone’s garden, carried by the wind, separated from a larger cluster. He doesn’t even think about tossing it away or floating it back onto the water. It might be nothing, it might be dumb, but he’s going to take it home. Tell Mia it’s a gift from the river.

  Can you pass me the toast? My dad smiling at me like he actually means it. I put my juice down and hand him the plate. I’m at my usual place at the table, facing her house, so when she walks into the backyard I’m in position. But it’s not her. It’s her mom. Carrying a basket. Both my parents turn to watch her hang laundry on the line as jazz plays in the kitchen.

  I barely ever see that woman, my father says as she snaps a pair of jeans from the basket.

  She works all the time, my mom says. Nights still, I think.

  She looks like Jess. But smaller, stiffer, still pretty though, and watching her—I can’t help it—I start wondering again about the goats. If that story was true or Jess was just playing around with our ignorance.

  She grabs a white T-shirt from the basket, gives it a shake, and pins it up beside the jeans. I don’t recognize any of it. Nothing of hers. Maybe she got something new. It’s possible. I haven’t seen her since my birthday.

  I ran into Jess the other day, my mom says, like it’s no big deal, like she didn’t just crawl into my head. At David’s building. Apparently, Don has a unit there. She and Eric have moved in.

  My bite of toast sticks in my throat. I breathe around it; there’s no way I can swallow.

  I wish her luck with that, my dad says. The radio song ends. Another one comes on.

  She says they’re getting married. Next spring. At a resort in Costa Rica. I think Don might own it. My mom takes a sip of coffee, while I die a little more. I
mean, I knew. But still, I die a little more.

  Christ, my father says. How old is she?

  Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Old enough, I guess.

  But Eric Kelly?

  At least it’s not some sixty-five-year-old with a potbelly and a yacht. My mom sets her cup back down. Jess is a survivor. She’ll figure it out.

  You know I saw her that night. My father raises his eyebrows at me. The night I went looking for you.

  I take a glug of OJ, swallow hard, work the soggy lump of toast and peanut butter down the narrow pipe of my throat.

  She was drunk, my father says, sick, half passed out on the bathroom floor. He starts buttering his toast, dragging the knife across the bread, making that dry, scraping sound, scraping it down to its core. It’s a relief when he sticks the knife back into the butter.

  She told me she loved you, he says.

  I stare at the table. At the shot glass in the middle. A miniature flower floating in it. Purple. Impossible. A bouquet for an elf.

  I was asking her if she knew where you were, if she’d seen you, my father keeps talking, buttering more toast, the knife gliding easy now, and she said, I just love Finn.

  Jess has always been crazy about you, my mother says. Right from the beginning, she was…Hey, honey? Finn? Finn!

  But I’m already gone. Out of the kitchen. Up to my room. So I can lie on my bed. And close my eyes. To be alone so I can feel the truth, like a miracle rushing in.

  —

  MIA FROWNS INTO her coffee. “That boy.”

  “He’s coming to grips with losing his hand. It’s got to be tough.” Michael picks Sunday’s New York Times off the chair beside him. He hands Mia the magazine and starts thumbing through the sections.

  She flips to the table of contents. “He’s been so quiet all week.”

  “He’s got an appointment with his psychologist tomorrow,” Michael says. “If you want, I can take him.”

  “It’s my turn. I’ll go. Maybe I can get him to open up in the car.”

  And Michael’s not exactly sure how to go about it, but he’s going to get him “to open up” about the hook he found under Frankie’s bed. He’ll think of something—the thing’s worth twenty-five hundred bucks. And he knows Mia would never agree, but he thinks shoving Finn’s hands into the sink that day might have done its job. Made him face up to the reality that the way he is now, he can’t even wash a wine glass. Sure, it was rough, but as a kid, Michael saw far worse. Maybe it did wake Finn up, might even be the trigger that has them all moving forward again, slowly, as a family. Sometimes softness works, sometimes you need a shakeup.

  Michael doesn’t really understand what happened between Finn and Eli, what their fight was about. A girl, apparently. Finn wouldn’t say more than that. He’s looking better, just a scab now, matting his one eyebrow. There are things about him, about Mia, that Michael will never know. That it’s probably better not to.

  Mia liked the flower. Laughed when she saw it lying bright on Michael’s palm. Tiny but tough, capable of surviving a fast river ride, a journey through the city in a loosely coiled fist, in two ounces of tap water, afloat on a kitchen table. Out the back windows, summer sunshine and freshly hung laundry. Today, even the shitty fire escape looks alright.

  In the kitchen, the Sunday-morning radio show breaks for the hourly news. Michael tunes it out. He opens the sports section, but only grazes the pages. Things are better. Easier between them. He and Mia are being kind to each other. They’ve both been sticking close to home. Last night, up in bed, it felt as if they reached for each other at the same moment, finally, after so many months. Their lovemaking like a return from exile. His body wrapped in her arms. Her body welcoming his. I know you. Bracing himself on his elbows, he slid lightly into her. I know you.

  “What did they say?” Michael lowers his paper. Watches Mia take the two steps from the back room into the kitchen, her eyes fixed on the radio, on the counter, beside the stove. “Something about Big Yirkie. A break and enter. A boat being set on fire.”

  “What?” Michael mouths the word.

  Forearms on the counter, Mia leans in and turns up the volume.

  “Four males, ages estimated between sixteen and twenty-five, are being sought by police on charges of breaking and entering, arson and the sexual assault of a minor. Police are asking for the public’s help. Please go to our website at—”

  Mia turns down the radio. “You don’t think…” Her hand floats to her throat. “No, it can’t be.”

  No. It can’t be. Of course it can’t.

  For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

  NEWTON’S THIRD LAW

  Mia takes the casserole from the oven, puts a bottle of Pérez Cruz in a canvas shopping bag along with a fresh baguette, and totes it all out to the car. On the drive over to Peter and Helen’s, she stalls the Jetta twice—once at the stop sign at the end of her street, once when she pops the clutch at the four-way pulling onto theirs.

  Despite Frankie’s age, bits of the story have trickled out—a minor whose name cannot be released sexually assaulted by four boys while her mother played bridge at a neighbour’s cottage and her father stood guard at the family’s recently vandalized home. The news moves in Mia like a poison. Her hands tremor, her stomach cramps. She wakes to her own cries, the sheets damp and Michael gone from the bed, the room hot with the aftershock of nightmares and humid summer air.

  In the car, Mia flogs herself with the memory of the day Frankie came looking for a birthday present for her father. Upset. Needing to talk. And Mia had upset her further. She hadn’t lowered her camera when Frankie asked her to stop. All for the sake of a photograph. Or was it a hit of power, having power in that moment over a vulnerable girl? Mia no longer gives herself the benefit of any doubt.

  And the rough sex she and Michael had when Finn was still in the hospital has shaded to a darker hue. The thrill and relief in that game of control and submission, the fight and the yielding, feeling she’d made some sort of escape. But an escape from what? Being a wife? A mother? A responsible, loving woman in a world written by men? When Michael strung her up in the closet, she’d had no desire for tenderness. She’d wanted him to be a harder, more powerful kind of man. Lying so still on the bathroom floor, with his full weight upon her, she’d thought not only danger but security. Which feels like nonsense now. An old fairy tale seeped under her skin: man as conqueror, protector, king. Fifty shades of bullshit. Delete the money, scratch out yes, and what’s left of the fantasy? All humanity diminished by what four boys did to a girl.

  Mia parks the car alongside the stand of birch trees, at the far edge of the Conrads’ driveway, a respectful distance from the door. When she sets the bag with the bread and the wine down on the front porch and waits for her knock to be answered, she remembers being this frightened only once in her life. When she and Michael followed a nurse down the hallway in the ICU before the doctors would say if Finn would live.

  Footsteps clack inside the house, grow louder, stop on the other side of the door. Mia senses she is being watched through the peephole, her head fish-eyed, her body warped to small. In her mind’s eye, only the red enamel casserole dish she holds in front of her maintains its proper proportions. Warm vapours waft up from the pot—creamed mushrooms, chicken juices, garlic fried in butter.

  The door cracks open. Helen’s face is slivered between it and the wall. And in that sliver, wreckage. Their eyes lock, Helen reaches through the narrow gap and seizes Mia’s arm, gripping, squeezing, my god, my god, Frankie…

  She steps onto the porch. Her hair is loose and unkempt, her long legs bare in a pair of navy shorts. She seems skittish. She seems to have lost inches of height. Behind her the hallway tunnels dark to the back of the house.

  She takes the casserole dish from Mia and sets it on the bench beside the door.

  “Chicken and mushroom,” Mia says, swiping at her eyes. “Your recipe. Your pot.”

  Helen remains hunched ov
er the bench, as if she’s forgotten the mechanics of straightening her spine. Mia places a hand lightly on her back. Like the aching apart of continents, a deep whimper escapes Helen before she turns and presses her face to Mia’s shoulder.

  In Mia’s arms, her frame is so much smaller than Michael’s or Finn’s. Holding Helen is like holding an elongated bird—the flightless wings of her shoulder blades, the light tremble of haunted bones.

  “Helen?” Peter calls from somewhere inside. “Helen!”

  With the front door open, Mia has a sightline straight to the back of the house. She can’t see Peter, but the living room is even darker than the hallway, as if every curtain has been drawn against the light. But it’s not the curtains. It takes a moment for Mia to realize the windows have been boarded over, as if braced for a storm that has already hit.

  Peter appears in profile at the far end of the hall, a tall silhouette. It’s been so long since Mia’s seen him. He stares into the living room and then swivelling his head he finds them, framed in the doorway in a bright rectangle of sunshine. Helen and Mia are no longer embracing but they are still entangled, their arms slung low across one another’s back.

  He strides toward them. Almost to the door, his leg knocks against a lumpy garbage bag slouched against the wall. With a plastic crinkle, its load shifts, and one, then two baseballs thud onto the floor. Mia blinks as each one falls. Baseballs. A whole bag full of baseballs.

  Helen steps away and lifts the casserole dish from the bench.

  Peter stares at Mia from just inside the doorway, the balls rolled up close behind him. White with red stitching; they could belong to anyone. Peter’s hair has been cut short. He looks older, balder, a new hollowness around his eyes.