Someone Else's Love Story

by Joshilyn Jackson

  He wants to hear Bridget talking.

  Not this girl. And not the Bridget he is angry with. He doesn’t want to hear the wife who could slough off her own body, the body he loved, and fly unthinking into a white light that her oxygen-­deprived brain cells told her she was seeing. She went fast, joyfully soaring with their daughter toward her God, handing Twyla, safe and giggling, into the arms of the nicest possible Jesus. A PBS Jesus, unwounded and clean. That Bridget nodded and smiled, accepted it, saying, “Yes. Let the little children go to Him.” Even William’s little child, who might well have grown up to be a rationalist.

  He doesn’t even want to hear his barely remembered wife, the one that Angel Bridget, hauling their baby cheerfully up to heaven, has superseded in his fury. His wife drinks small-­batch bourbon straight up, has a flash-­fire Irish temper, swarms under and around and over him in bed. Loves poetry and Stephen King novels equally. Plants a patchwork garden every spring, pansies in the carrots, crazy oregano trying to twine with shepherd’s needles. He knows these things, but they are like facts he read in a National Geographic in a waiting room one day, explicating the genus Bridget. She’s so distant she might as well be theoretical.

  The Bridget he wants is an earlier version. Ponytail Bridget in pink Converse high-­tops. Before there was a marriage or a Twyla or a Saturn wagon with no backseat.

  He closes his eyes, simply to not be looking at this girl who isn’t Bridget, wanting to hear Bridget’s young voice in a singleminded, desperate, impossible way. An echo of his old obsession, from when he was seventeen, and she was the new girl at school. When he followed her from class to lunch to class to bus.

  She read books—­novels, nothing interesting—­as she walked the halls, oblivious to him. She found a place at the brainiac girls’ lunch table; these were not the kinds of girls that football players noticed, so his stalking went uncharted. He was so invisible to Bridget that twice she passed by close enough for him to smell her lemony shampoo, and yet she never returned his gaze.

  No one had yet proved the existence of human pheromones, but William became certain of them. There was no other explanation for his reaction to her solitary joy as she destroyed the park to raise it, to the way the basic shape and smell and sound of her undid him; she was indefinably correct for him. He knew it on the cellular level.

  Weeks of this, sick with crazy, silent longing, and then Paula said it was starting to be “Unabomber creepy.” She made him skip class and took him up on the roof. She’d had a key, lifted off a janitor, since her freshman year, and often snuck up there to smoke.

  William lay flat on his back, squinting up at the sun, still warm though the air had a decided chill. Paula stripped down to bra and panties, shivering, to bask in it. She might as well have been wearing one of her mother’s voluminous caftans. His own body was attuned only to where Bridget sat, two floors below. She was a red laser dot on his mental map of the school. The sun was nothing. The real heat licked up at him from Bridget. His whole body warmed and flushed, burning at the idea of her under him, even with a building in between them.

  Meanwhile, on the roof, where his brain was, Paula said, “You have to make a move before you end up torturing puppies in a basement full of Bridget-­themed blow-­up dolls.”

  “I don’t have a move,” William said. “Tell me a move.”

  But instead Paula spent ten minutes cataloging all the ways in which William was not allowed to wreck it. “. . . and you’re forbidden to talk about how to make really stable explosives. Or poisons. That will scare the shit out of her. Don’t talk about any of the six boring-­ass books you are reading, or the fact that you’re reading six books concurrently, and God, don’t use the word concurrently, at all. Ever. I can’t believe I used it. I can’t believe I even know it. I probably caught it from you, and it’s the least sexy word on the planet.”

  William listened with his brain, while his body, an entirely separate animal, tried to melt shingles and brick and wood and plaster so it could plummet into Bridget.

  “So far, you’ve told me nineteen things not to do.”

  “Really? You counted?” Paula said, sitting up. She was making an expression at him.

  When William was little, he had a book called How Are You Peeling? It was full of pictures of vegetables with faces. The radish is happy. The eggplant is sad. His therapist wanted him to learn to recognize the same looks on the faces of his classmates or his parents. He’d outgrown the book, but he was still supposed to do the exercise. Right now, he should ask himself, What is she feeling, if Paula raises one eyebrow up and not the other? But Paula generally said exactly what she meant with him. It was one of his favorite things about her. He was free to take the question at face value.

  “Yes. Exactly nineteen. Do you want me to say them back to you?”

  “God, no.” In his peripheral vision, he saw Paula lean forward so that all her shaggy black hair dropped around her face. She said, “I have made myself a hair tent for thinking in.”

  They could hear the bell ring even through the roof. Bridget would be rising from her desk, moving toward her locker. He tracked her on his mental map, wishing he was on her level. He would like to look and look at Bridget’s face, try to guess what she meant when she lifted just one eyebrow.

  “Tell me three things to actually do,” William said to the hair tent.

  “You could go the secret admirer route?” Paula used both hands to part her hair and her up-­tilted eyes peered out. “Perfume and anonymous love notes. Girls eat that shit up.”

  Not a bad start, but too circular. “That ends with us back here, because I have to eventually talk to her.”

  “Yeah, there’s always a downside,” Paula said, then put her finger up in the air, making a hook.

  William grinned. Last year, after they’d had sex, he’d felt comfortable enough to ask if he could practice his assigned peer conversations with her. He’d been bad at picking up on jokes, sarcasm especially, which relied so wholly on inflection. He was much better at it now. At one point, early on, she’d suggested making the finger hook every time she was kidding. He had said it was a good idea, and she had rolled her eyes and made the finger hook, because she had been kidding.

  “I got it!” Paula said. “Make her talk. I’ll write you a list of questions. Then you listen and say all nineteen parts of her answers back to her. That way she knows you listened, and plus it makes her think that you guys have stuff in common. I read it in Cosmo.”

  “She’ll ask me questions back,” William said.

  “So, answer them. Maybe she’ll like you.” William made the finger hook, and Paula grabbed it and shoved it down. “I’m serious. She could like you. I like you, Bubba.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t want to be my girlfriend,” William said.

  “Please. I’m a senior.” Paula flopped down onto her back, her shoulder pressed companionably against his. He barely felt her, his whole physical self yearning itself ragingly down. William sat inside his overheated skin, trying to think and failing with a torrent of hormones clotting up what was generally an excellent brain. He could feel his body starting to rock itself.

  Paula curled toward him on her side and bit his shoulder. Hard, but friendly. It was Paula’s version of one of his therapist’s old tricks, like origami or football; give the body-­animal something to do so his mind could go about its business.

  When he looked at her, fully present on the roof at last, she let go with her teeth and said, “Sex ambush. You need to drop her down, but hard. Get her hooked on the bod and the crazy-­hot moves before she clocks how ever-­fuckin’ weird you are.”

  This might well work on Paula. She could be caught up and swept along, laughing, into any plan that pleased her in the moment. But it depended on Bridget being like Paula in this way. The Bridget he’d observed was wholly self-­contained and thinky. She made plans, and ­people fell i
nto them with her. She did not lie on rooftops in her underwear biting male friends. She changed parks with subversive tulips. She sat at the smart girls’ lunch table, observing more than participating, reserved. She seemed . . . not untouchable, not at all. But not something he could lay his hands on without express permission.

  “That plan will end with me in prison,” he said, but everything Paula had told him to do and not do was folding itself into a shape in his good brain.

  “Well, a kiss ambush then.” Paula was still talking. “It’s not like you can win the girl by doing chemistry.”

  “Yes, I can,” William said, a variation on her plan growing clearer and more detailed by the second. “You just said I could.”

  “Uh, no?” Paula said. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yeah, you did,” William told her. She simply hadn’t realized it, because like most ­people, Paula didn’t understand that the entire world was mostly chemistry, doing itself.

  He hears ringing again, so Bridget is in English class. But it is not the bell. It is a phone. William blinks and feels the room reload around him. Oh, right. He is having a robbery. He is having a robbery while all the carefully compartmentalized sections of his life jumble and collide and refuse to be contained.

  “Fuck!” screams Stevie, so shrill he sounds like a child. William’s paper-­bird spell has been broken.

  The girl in the poppy-­covered dress stares up at him. She is making the face that William recognizes as the far end of anxious, and her little boy’s body is trembling, pressed against William’s side. Yet here is William, wanting to re-­court his teenage pre-­wife, still so angry with her that the only Bridget he can stand to desire is two stories and sixteen years distant from him.

  He shakes his head to clear it. Bridget’s priest has failed, spectacularly. Anniversaries can open up old wounds, he’d said. What an asshole. William is not a fan of metaphors; they are so often inaccurate. William, the priest should have said, anniversaries are just like being vivisected.

  The phone rings again. William was better a week ago, watching Paula drink up all his beer inside his quiet house. He was better twenty minutes ago, even, when he was angry with laundry soap. He was best of all a few breaths previous, calmly making an origami bird in the peace of knowing that a bullet belonged to him. He should stick with that.

  But the desperate mother eyes of the girl with Bridget’s voice are telling him he needs to reprioritize. Young Bridget would agree. She’d say that what he wants doesn’t matter here. This girl and her child love each other. The little old ­couple, they love each other, too. Even the clerk with her disturbing front teeth must matter to someone, somewhere. He must get them all out of here, safely, and now teenage Bridget is more than a voice in his head. She is a presence. She is a haunting with an Irish temper, telling him to get up off his ass and fix it.

  Fine. William draws white lines on a blackboard in his head, mapping the play. He can’t go for Stevie directly. He has to cross to the opposite wall first. That way, when Stevie shoots at William, the bullets will move perpendicular to the other hostages. It also means Stevie will have time to pull the trigger, perhaps multiple times, as William turns at the wall and goes toward him.

  He is almost certain that the gun is a .32, and it is the perfect gun. Shoot a guy as big as William with a .22, and it’s only going to make him angry. A .38, however, could push him backward in midstride, and a good hit from a .45 would blast a huge hole in him and drop him instantly.

  But a .32? William has crashed through hosts of offensive linemen, barreled into massive blockers, bulling forward to get to the ball carrier and take him down. He has waded willfully toward pain a thousand times. He knows how to overbalance, tip his body forward and dig with his feet. The gun will tear him up, but he is stronger than it. He was practically built for running into gunfire from a .32. Unless Stevie gets lucky, hits his heart or brain, William’s big body can absorb the bullets long enough for him to sprint close. There is a large glass paperweight near him on the lowest shelf of the desk. He will smash this paperweight into Stevie’s head and lay him out.

  If he does it right, this girl and her little boy get to walk out hand in hand, and the old ­couple, too. The clerk can stop weeping and go back to work, save up some cash, and fix her teeth. Stevie can wake up in prison with a bad headache. Life will go on for all of them its inexorable way.

  Meanwhile, William can stop thinking. Stop remembering. He can lie down quietly and bleed. Hopefully, Stevie will shoot him enough times to be definitive. Everyone gets what they want.

  The phone rings again. It is close, sitting on the desk beside him. He looks from the phone to Stevie, who is standing in the sunlight under the windows. William can see a million dust motes floating in the yellow light.

  “You gonna answer that?” William asks, meeting Stevie’s eyes. Man to man. A dare. The same look he learned to use on guys on the opposing team at the ten-­yard line.

  Stevie pants and his eyes roll around. “You think I’m stupid, big guy? You want me to come over by you? Lean across you, get that phone, huh?”

  William shrugs. If Stevie comes close, William could take control of his gun hand and have Stevie pinned and helpless in seconds. He likes his first plan better, though, and Stevie doesn’t move toward him anyway. Stevie is stupid, and his limited synapses are misfiring because of the stimulant he ate or smoked or snorted, but he has a roach’s instinct for self-­preservation.

  “I could answer it,” William says. He reaches for the phone.

  Stevie panics, brings the gun to bear. “Hell, no!” William hears Shandi’s breath catch as the gun swings. He stills. Stevie wastes another ring puffing a short breath in and out. “No one needs to talk to the cops but me.” He eyeballs the phone, then William, wanting one, rightfully wary of the other.

  “I could slide it to you,” William says, impatient now.

  While Stevie is thinking it over, the phone stops.

  William says, “I’ll get it to you for next time. They will call back.”

  A phone call is a distraction. It could give William a tiny opening. It’s all he needs.

  Stevie stops looking for the trap in the offer and nods. William half rises and turns to the desk, on his knees now with his back to Stevie. His right hand reaches up for the phone, but his left hand reaches into the shelving and closes around the large glass paperweight. As he turns back, he keeps the paperweight behind him, setting it down easy with an almost silent click. Then he slides the phone across the floor. It comes to rest at Stevie’s feet. Stevie bends at the knee, watching them all as he fumbles around with his free hand, trying to find it.

  Finally, he gets it and rises. It hasn’t rung in a good thirty seconds, but he clicks the button anyway. “Hello?”

  William can hear the dial tone. Stevie says, “Hello?” again, louder and angrier. A red flush does a fast creep up the back of his neck and washes into his cheeks.

  “It went to voice mail,” the old man says. He sounds angry and aggrieved and at the same time patronizing, explaining the obvious to someone very stupid.

  Stevie stares at the phone, and then at the old man. He blows his breath out of his nostrils in a fast, loud snort. The old man will not look away. William smells ozone. Hormones—or something truthfully electric—crackle the air between them. Stevie is shocked into moving. He runs at the old man in a short, vicious charge, yelling as he moves, “Shut up! Shut up! This is your fault!”

  William starts to move, too, his right hand closing on the paperweight behind him, but at the same time the clerk lets out a short, sharp scream and Shandi clutches at his arm. The little boy grabs his shirt in two panicked handfuls, yelling a long, scared vowel sound.

  Stevie stops short and kicks wildly at the old man’s gut. The old guy falls sideways into the wall and folds, curling into a fetal shape. Stevie kicks his head, his shoulder,
arms flailing.

  William says, “Let me go,” pushing the words between his teeth and trying to peel them off him.

  Stevie’s arms pinwheel in crazy circles, gun in one hand, phone in the other. The old lady screams and puts one hand on each cheek, as Stevie kicks the old man a third time.

  Shandi yells, “Stop it, stop it!”

  She lets go of William to put both arms around her son, pulling his face into her so he can’t see. The boy lets go to push at his mother, trying to see anyway. His cap comes off and falls against William’s leg.

  Stevie is already dancing back to the wall with the row of high, slitted windows. The old man gasps and coughs, holding his kicked ribs. William puts his hand with the paperweight beside his thigh, on the floor, breathing hard, his body full of pent motion.

  “Your fault,” Stevie says to the old guy, loud. The sheer physical exertion should have calmed him, but instead he seems exhilarated. He is panting, so energized his arms twitch and his voice breaks.

  The old man’s wife is on her knees now, arms going around her gasping husband.

  “It’s not,” she says to Stevie, and her eyes are so cold. She would kill Stevie right now if she could. Kill him and never lose a minute’s sleep. William likes her.

  “Shut up, you old bitch,” Stevie says. His lips are twisting up into a feral, panting smile. “This is your fault.”

  William feels Shandi’s arm tighten around her child at the ugly word.

  The clerk’s head is back down. She is crying with her hands slack by her sides. She snorts and hitches, pulling Stevie’s gaze.

  “I want to go home,” the clerk says, tears streaming unchecked down her face.

  She has a cartoon bird tattooed on one breast. Another thing with feathers, bobbing up and down, yellow and cheerful, as her chest heaves from the weeping.

  “Don’t you even,” Stevie snaps at the clerk, furious. He looks at Shandi and her big-­eyed child, who has succeeded in getting his head up. He peeks out from his mother’s armpit. “It’s them, not me. Stupid rich shits.”