As the woman stepped level with the passenger-side window she paused and stared directly into Dr. Lucy’s face. Disapprovingly.
“Go away,” Dr. Lucy said, in a voice that left little margin for misunderstanding.
The woman raised her eyebrows in an overly dramatic fashion and hurried down the street, dragging her uncooperative little dog behind her.
Calvin came out after a time, carrying a paper grocery sack in his arms. He started down the walkway toward her car. Then he stopped. Turned back.
He walked around to the side yard of their little home.
He stood for several seconds, staring down at the dry dirt.
Then he walked again, this time all the way to where she sat parked.
“Give me just a minute, please,” he said through the open car window. He placed the grocery sack on the passenger seat. “I have to get something I can use to clean this up.”
He disappeared back into the house.
She stepped out of the car and walked to the side yard.
In the dirt was a heavy bottle, smashed. She touched the unbroken neck of it. Picked it up and turned it in her fingers. It was made of thick glass, and tapered out to square sides with rounded corners. She dropped it back into the dirt and, with the toe of her shoe, kicked over the piece that still held most of the label. It said “Jim Beam Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey.”
So it comes down to who drinks bourbon, she thought. But around here that won’t narrow it down much.
The dirt around the broken bottle was pocked with dark miniature puddles of dried blood.
Calvin came back with a broom and dustpan, startling her. She had been lost in thought.
“I think I’d like to hurt somebody, too,” she said as he swept up the glass.
“If I can resist the temptation,” he said, “so can you.”
“You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want,” she said to him on the drive home, “but has it been hard raising Justin by yourself?”
At first he just studied the side of her face, as if considering her. She could see his gaze in her peripheral vision.
After a time he said, “So you know I lost my wife.”
“It’s none of my business if you don’t care to talk about it.”
“Everything is hard without Rebecca.”
A long silence.
Then she said, “Tell me about her.” And immediately wished she hadn’t. She was gathering words to withdraw the statement when he spoke.
“Make a deal with you,” he said. “I’ll tell you about her if you’ll tell me about your ex-husband.”
“That seems fair enough.”
“Feel free to go first,” he said.
“Oh. Me. All right. Well. His name was Darren. He was handsome. Maybe too much so. Handsome can get in the way. It can become that thing you seek after, and then other failings seem to get justified away. And he was smart. College educated and smart. We met at the university, in fact.” She didn’t tell him which one because it was a prestigious university and she didn’t wish to appear to be bragging. “He gravitated toward the law and I went off toward medicine. He seemed fine with that. I wonder now if he assumed I wouldn’t succeed. Or if he just thought I was filling my time until motherhood came along to fulfill me in a whole different way. A more permanent way. Because when I graduated from medical school and started my internship, things started to go sour between us.”
“He didn’t like the feeling of being surpassed.”
“That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn after the fact, yes.”
“Then he didn’t deserve you.”
That sat in the air between them in utter, awkward silence. Dr. Lucy felt strangely aware of her hands on the steering wheel. And that sensation of being abnormally alive.
He broke the silence, causing her to jump.
“Rebecca was something of a force of nature,” he said. “Which was amusing in a way, because she was so tiny. I swear she weighed all of ninety-five pounds. But you would not want to cross that woman. I’m not suggesting she was mean. She was nothing of the sort. But she had this finely sharpened sense of justice. And when she saw anything she perceived as injustice it fairly made her see red. I could almost picture steam coming out of those wonderful, tiny little ears.”
He paused for a time, as if remembering.
“And she had no truck with any kind of killing. She wouldn’t even kill a spider. She would catch it in a cup and put it outside. She’d put it on the roses so it could eat the aphids. She said everything in this world had a purpose.”
A long silence. About a mile of it.
“You miss her a lot,” Dr. Lucy said. It was a statement, not a question.
“I do.”
“How long has she been gone?”
“She died in childbirth. So more than eleven years. But I still miss her. I’m used to living without her, but the missing never goes away. You think you’ll get over the loss of someone. Eventually. Because it seems we get over everything, given enough time. And I guess in a lot of ways I’ve partially gotten over the traumatic event of her passing. But what you don’t realize, until you have to live it, is that it’s the absence of the person that’s the trouble. The ongoing absence. And when you’re missing someone, a longer time without them doesn’t solve the problem. The longer you don’t see someone, the more you miss them.”
He went silent for a time. Dr. Lucy added nothing to the conversation, because she couldn’t imagine what to add.
“She was well-educated, too,” he said. “We both went to college. We were both the first and only person in our family to graduate from college. And now here I am on the assembly line with all the men who dropped out of high school.”
More silence.
“Do you miss your husband?” he asked as they pulled into her driveway.
“No. I thought I would. But I don’t.”
“I’m not sure which one of us is luckier, then.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not sure, either.”
He did not ask her if she missed her son. She was grateful for that.
“Maybe I should have left that bottle alone,” he said. “Think it would accomplish anything to report this to the police?”
“Honestly? Aside from the fact that it could make things worse, I’d say no. I’d say the police around here are more dedicated to protecting and serving the bourbon drinkers.”
“Right. That was a surprisingly naive question, wasn’t it? You would think I would know the answer to that question and you wouldn’t.”
They sat on their respective patio chairs in the late afternoon, hidden from the sun by the back porch awning, drinking iced tea and watching the boys. Which was a peculiar way to pass time, because the boys were doing exactly nothing. They were lying on their bellies in the grass outside the horse corral, their heads leaned together as if talking.
“Penny for their thoughts,” she said to Calvin after a time.
His left hand was dangling off the arm of his chair, just relaxing there in the air, and her right hand dangled just a few inches away. In that split second before he answered, she almost slid her hand inside his and held it. And the strangest aspect of that idea was the fact that it seemed quite natural. When she came to her senses and did no such thing, she was startled most by the fact that it hadn’t struck her as a startling thing to do. There was really no sense of thought behind it at all. It just would have been easy.
“I expect they’re talking about the horses,” he said.
She had to take a moment to remind herself what they’d been discussing.
“Could be,” she said, her voice calm. Or it sounded so, anyway. Inside she was surprisingly rattled at what could have happened, and how benign it had seemed at the time. How could such a big idea have disguised itself as harmless, everyday, and small?
“If I were a boy their age,” he said, “I’d be devising a strategy to get on one. Trying to figure out which was the most docile and where
to ride first with the best chance of my own survival. Do the horses ever get ridden?”
“There are two or three I used to ride regularly. But it’s been a while.”
They fell silent again.
Dr. Lucy felt herself preparing to go out on a limb. Surely it would be a much lower and stronger limb than the one she’d just avoided. Wouldn’t it? She found herself less sure than usual of what she could expect from herself next.
“This may sound odd,” she heard herself say, “because we’ve only been here together for . . . what? A little over twenty-four hours? But already it feels familiar in a strange way. It feels . . .”
She stalled there, knowing that her sentence had no acceptable ending. She had almost wanted to say it feels a little bit like a family. Like spending time with your family. But she couldn’t say a thing like that.
“Go on,” he said after a time.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m not sure what I was meaning to say.”
“Happy?”
She looked over at him, and felt her breath ease, her lungs fill more naturally.
“Yes. I guess that does sound right. Does that seem like a crazy thing to say?” But of course it helped that he had been the one to say it.
“Not sure why happiness should ever seem crazy.”
“Although I don’t know why it should be a familiar feeling,” she added, wanting to fill the world with words. “Because I haven’t had much experience being happy. Not in the family I came from originally and not the family I created. So here I am looking at this scene and feeling this feeling, and I seem to know somehow in some deep place that a family can be happy. Not that I’m calling us a family. Of course. I just . . . I hope you don’t think I’m sounding insane.” But she quickly talked over any chance he might have had to say. “But now I look at those two boys and I think, how can there be anything happy in this? They’ve both been recently beaten. One by the parent who’s entrusted to love him and keep him safe and the other by total strangers. So clearly this can’t be happiness.”
“But it’s happy from the inside,” he said.
She waited to see if he would go on. He didn’t for a time. She felt the urge to light a cigarette, but she resisted it.
“When I grew up,” he said, “we were a happy family. Except there were all these problems. But it was from outside of us. My father sometimes had trouble getting work. Food wasn’t absolutely guaranteed. We had to wear our pants until our ankles showed and our shoes until they pinched.” He paused, and she felt the weight of something deeper in his mood. Something of more gravity than too-short pants. “My uncle was killed because he was accused of stealing something we knew for a fact he didn’t steal. So there was no shortage of bad times. But they came from the outside. From the inside we were strong. I almost think that’s better. In some ways, anyway. I mean, as opposed to living a fairly uneventful life with no great tragedies but not being particularly loving or happy within the home. That seems almost sadder to me in the long run.”
“You know, it’s funny,” she said. “My father used to always say we were a happy family. Over and over he said that. And I always assumed it must be true, and that there must be something wrong with me for not feeling happy, but now I look back on that and it just sounds like whistling past the graveyard. It suddenly occurs to me that happy families probably don’t repeatedly say out loud how happy they are. They probably think it goes without saying. They probably figure they all already know.”
“Protesting too much,” he said. A brief silence fell. “Should Justin and I stay another night? Or should we go home and sleep in our own beds?”
“Give it the weekend,” she said. “A little extra patient care never hurts.”
She didn’t even make up an excuse why it was required. And he never asked questions nor objected in any way.
Chapter Twelve: Pete
Justin came down to the living room at bedtime to get him.
“My dad said to come down and tell you you’re sleeping upstairs in the twin bed next to me,” he said to Pete.
“I am?”
“Yeah. My dad’s going to take the couch.”
“Why?”
“Because of the lady.”
“What about her?”
“Well. You know. Because she sleeps upstairs. And she’s a lady.”
“Oh,” Pete said. “Okay.”
But he still wasn’t sure he understood.
It might only have been nine o’clock or it could have been midnight. Pete might have slept briefly, but he wasn’t sleeping now.
He lay on his belly—in his underwear, with just a sheet pulled up to his waist—feeling the barely cool breeze that blew through the window. Watching the way it lifted up the gauzy curtain and curled it out and around, then allowed it to drift back into place again.
Now and then when it blew aside he could see the moon low in the sky over the horse pasture, and the horses sleeping together in a huddle, their heads resting on each other’s backs. It looked peaceful.
Just for a moment Pete wished he could be a horse. Maybe an old unwanted racehorse with nowhere else to go, so Dr. Lucy would take him in. Then he could stay here forever. Then he could be peaceful, too.
“Pete,” Justin whispered. “Are you sleeping?”
“No,” Pete said. “Just lying here thinking.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“Oh. That might be kind of hard to say. I guess my mind was just wandering more than anything. And I was watching the horses sleep. I wish I could sleep standing up. That would solve a lot of problems right now. I sure am tired of sleeping on my belly.”
Justin sat up. Gingerly. Pete still couldn’t quite do that without an immense penalty of pain. Not even gingerly. So he just sprawled there on his belly. It made him feel as though he had given up on something somehow. Given up on everything.
“But where was your mind wandering?”
“Oh,” Pete said. “I’ll have to think about that.”
He didn’t think, exactly. More made a space inside himself for a thought or feeling to come up.
Justin waited patiently and didn’t speak.
“I guess I was wondering why it can’t always be like this.”
“Like what? You mean always at the doctor’s house?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. More like always okay where we are. And never needing to go home and be in trouble.”
Justin knocked the covers aside and swung into a sitting position on the edge of his bed facing Pete.
“I’m scared to go home, too,” he said, overly loudly.
They both waited and listened to see if they’d wakened the doctor. But nothing moved.
“What are you afraid of?” Pete asked. “Your home is great.”
“It used to be. But now they know where I live.”
“You think they’ll come back?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe I’ll just keep thinking they will. And then I’ll be scared to death whether they do or they don’t. But they might. What if they find out we were here together?”
“How could they find that out?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know how they found out we were together in the first place.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Pete said. “I know that. Boomer Leggett.”
“What’s a Boomer Leggett?”
“Remember that guy who pulled over in the tow truck while we were walking? That was Boomer Leggett. He’s a friend of my dad.”
“The guy you said you didn’t like.”
“Right.”
A long silence. Pete had gone back to watching the curtain blow, because he found it calming. But now and then it moved aside and offered him the view of the moon, with that man-face the moon wears when it’s close to full. And it felt to Pete like the moon was watching him be a coward. And noticing. And judging. Even though Pete knew in some part of himself that such a thing couldn’t be true. But it kept feeling that way. Maybe
because Pete was watching himself be a coward.
“So, listen,” he said. “I keep wanting to ask you this but then not asking it. Maybe because I don’t want to know. But anyway, here goes. Was Boomer one of the guys who did this?”
“I don’t know,” Justin said. “I didn’t get a good look at him.”
“You didn’t see the guys who did it?”
“Oh, no. I saw them all right. I’ll never forget their faces as long as I live. But I didn’t really see the guy in the tow truck. By the time I realized there was anything to look at he’d started to drive away again.”
“Oh.”
“The more I can’t forget their faces the more I’m afraid to go home,” Justin said.
It felt as though Justin was edging his way toward something, but Pete wasn’t sure what.
Pete said nothing. He was thinking about his own home situation. About the punishment he was postponing, and how unmanageably huge it was likely getting as he kept pushing it ahead of him down the road.
“I mean, not if my dad and I go home tomorrow,” Justin said. “That would be okay. But then it’ll be Monday and he’ll have to go in and work at the plant, and then I’ll be scared.”
“Yeah. I guess I see what you mean. I guess I would be, too. Maybe Dr. Lucy would let you stay here while your dad is at work. So nobody can find you.”
“You think she would?”
He asked it eagerly. As if he’d struck gold in Pete’s simple idea.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Will you ask her for me?”
The last thing in the world Pete wanted was to ask any more of the doctor than he already had. His sense of imposing on the better side of her nature seemed to have pushed their relationship to the edge of a treacherous cliff. The next push could be the end of everything.
Every cell in his body wanted to say no. That he was sorry, but that he couldn’t bring himself to do that. He could do many things. Almost anything, really. But not that.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”
They fell into silence.
Justin gathered the covers around himself and lay down again, as if he might be able to get back to sleep.
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