Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  She looks at the porch, now drenched in sun, the empty chair where she had planned to eat breakfast. Granola, fresh yogurt, and blackberries from the farmer’s market. More than enough for two, but she doesn’t offer, not that or anything else. Not even the chair.

  Detour drags himself onto the porch, lies down between the chairs, and sighs.

  It’s clear that the boy on the radio is being played by a man. He raises his voice in some kind of anguish and the switch gives him away.

  The sooner Calder says whatever he’s come to say, the sooner he’ll leave. Annie throws her arm out as a signal for him to head up the steps. “They’re slippery,” she says, and immediately regrets the impression that she cares.

  Calder steps onto the porch but doesn’t sit in a chair. He sits on the railing and grips it near his hips. He’s already talking a blue streak about work before she joins him on the porch. “So anyway, I’m pulling these thorny sonsabitches out while Jerry’s gone off somewhere with my gloves. You remember Jerry…”

  Annie shuts off the radio. She feels outside of herself, leaning against the doorframe, studying the two of them, the dailiness of their chitchat, the ordinary scene. He’s still so good at conversation, hard won from a childhood marked by tics. Blinking, jumping, swinging legs beneath a chair. He learned to switch conversations from one thing to the next, drawing attention from his jerky body to anything from a USDA Textural Triangle for measuring sandy loam to singing a Hank Williams tune to predicting sinkholes in parking lots. He’s doing it now, even though he hasn’t had tics in years—going from old houses to cutting back thorny scrub plums, from his third pickup in five years to their mother’s inability to grow anything aside from weeds, from Uncle Calder’s paid participation in medical studies to a woman Calder met downtown while landscaping the law office next door, “and well, I’ll get to her in a minute, but first,” he says, and the ebb and flow of his voice is so familiar that Annie begins to move with him, her nods, her half smiles, signaling him on.

  His laugh lines have deepened. Especially when he gets back to talking about the woman downtown.

  “She owns a Danish bakery on Church Street,” he says. “Got all these raspberry and pecan Kringles and bread pudding that sweetens the whole block by seven every morning. I swear she’s got eyes the color of limes. Her name’s Sidsel Jørgenson. A slash through the first O.” He slices the air diagonally with his finger. “That’s how you spell her last name in Danish.”

  Annie nods, just a little, in reply.

  “The only problem is, Sidsel has a husband named Magnus. A big ol’ Dane.” He opens his arms to the sides, and then he hesitates as if he’s thinking something else about the man that he’d rather not say. “And meaner than a skillet full of rattlesnakes.”

  This sounds funnier than he seems to have intended. He sounds like their father, and the soft, thrown-back cadence of his laughter is so familiar, so suddenly missed that she can’t help herself. She laughs with him, still conscious of her every move, every sound that comes from her mouth like a token she grudgingly hands him in exchange for another minute in her world.

  When the laughter runs its course, Calder shakes his head at the porch and smiles a taut, self-conscious smile she’s sure isn’t meant for her to see.

  It’s getting warm on the porch. Annie slips off her boots, unzips her fleece, and goes inside for something to drink. She comes back with two glasses of tangerine juice and finds Calder whistling a tune at the yard. She barely reaches his shoulders. Other than that, they look more alike than any siblings she knows. Heads full of dark wavy hair, light blue eyes, and a mess of summer freckles they inherited from Grandad Walsh. She follows the fine, curvy line of his brow down to the blotchy Irish red in his cheeks. He appears happy. Relaxed. Unquestionably sober.

  She takes a seat next to him on the railing and places the juice in his hand like a peace offering. Sandy soil smells drift from his skin. No alcohol. Not even the acrid kind that could seep from his pores and give away recent days of drinking. Six months ago she’d found him at Hal’s roadside bar, red-faced and yeasty, slung onto the counter with red-and yellow-tinged eyes. He could barely utter the sloppy, sour words in her ear. “You don’t want to know how young she is. I should have told you. I wanted to tell you.” Before he passed out he called Owen an asshole. Owen had been his best friend.

  Several days after that he stopped by to pick up his Bobcat loader still sitting in Annie’s backyard from the landscaping he’d done. He smelled like whiskey and days of unwashed skin.

  Then came the screaming, the cursing. “How could you do this to me!” She must have yelled that at least ten times. When he refused to answer, refused to even look her in the eye, she realized there was more. She thought of the times he and Owen had gone off to buy sound equipment, fish the St. John’s, and haul trees. She realized they hadn’t gone off at all. “You covered for him, didn’t you?” He shielded his eyes from the sun, and then massaged what must have been a nasty hangover in his forehead. “Answer me!” He didn’t know the half of all she’d been through in those three days after Owen left. She would have given anything to have the one saving grace be that her own brother, the one person she had counted on her whole life, hadn’t helped the man she loved cheat on her. But her brother flinched and stammered, and that was all the answer she needed. “Don’t you come back here again,” she’d said. “I mean it. Not ever.” The sickest kind of betrayal she’d ever felt, sicker even, than Owen’s betrayal days before, had wormed its way inside her.

  Now, here he is six months later, smelling fresh like the earth. Like strong coffee and cinnamon.

  The breeze is warm and moist. The birds have started up again in a sky that’s practically clear.

  “I’m in love with her, Annie,” Calder says. Then softer, “And she’s in love with me.” He swallows a gulp of air. His hands shake. He looks off to the side when he speaks. “I’ve never known in all my life what it is to love like this.”

  All she can do is stare. She almost laughs. Then she does laugh, but it’s awkward, too close to a cry. “What?” Her voice breaks. She looks down at her cracked hands, at the tiny lotus tattoo inside her wrist, remembering how Calder had gone first and told her it wasn’t so bad, no worse than a shot in the arm. But it was, it was much worse, and she thinks of the needle dipping in and out of the thin, tender skin of her wrist.

  “Tell me you didn’t come here to say how happy in love you are.”

  Calder knocks a rusty cowbell to the porch when he comes to his feet. Detour jerks his head at the clang.

  “It’s bad enough what you did. It’s bad enough,” she says, and catches herself before adding–that I was at the supermarket buying chicken, cheddar cheese, and a pregnancy test when he left me. “That for months,” she continues, “I’ve been waking up wondering if there’s something wrong with me for someone to leave me the way he did, but now you want to rub all your happiness—with a woman who belongs to someone else by the way—in my face?”

  Detour thumps his tail but doesn’t get up.

  Calder places a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about what happened between you and Owen. I can’t imagine being without Sidsel, and I just—”

  She knocks his hand off. “Are you kidding me? She’s married, Calder! I’m beginning to think the world is made up of nothing but liars and cheats.”

  “You don’t understand. I’ve known her for a long time.”

  “And just what is that supposed to mean? You two setting some kind of record? See how long you can go before someone finds out, or better yet, runs off and leaves a goddamn letter in his place?”

  “I’m sorry. This was such a bad idea.”

  “You think?”

  “Hold on.” He catches her eye and she quickly turns away. “What letter?”

  She holds her bottom lip between her teeth and focuses on a heron’s nest across the lake.

  “He left you a letter? You mean in place of saying good
-bye?”

  It’s too far away to tell if the heron is in there.

  “He didn’t explain things to you himself?”

  Annie meets his eyes. “What was there to explain?”

  Calder flexes his fists. He looks as if he means to say more, but instead shakes his head at the lake and turns and steps off the porch.

  “Explain what, Calder?”

  But he’s already started the truck and is pulling it around in the circular driveway with the shovels and rakes clanging at his back. His bumper sticker reads, POWERED BY VEGETABLE OIL. The smell of french fries fills the air again.

  From the stereo comes, “Say nightie-night and kiss me. Just hold me tight and tell me you’ll miss me.”

  He shuts the truck off and it rattles like before. He gets out and climbs into the bed where he slides out a piece of plywood for a ramp. He jumps down and pulls the mower to the ground.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “This here’s a lawn mower.”

  “Stop it, Calder.”

  “It’s your birthday,” he says.

  “Put it back. I don’t want you here. I don’t want you doing this. The grass is wet, asshole.”

  “I’m trying to do something nice. I’ll be the judge of wet grass.”

  “You’ll be the judge of bullshit,” she says.

  “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “You should have thought about that before you decided to cover for him.”

  “Annie, please.”

  “He might still be here if I’d known what was going on. Maybe I could have stopped it.”

  He pulls the mower to the edge of the lawn. The grass is higher than the wheels. He stares at her as if to say no one could have stopped it. “This whole thing has eaten me alive,” he says. “It’s a wonder I’m standing here sober.” He picks up the larger branches and tosses them into the driveway.

  “Well, thank goodness for that girlfriend of yours. It comes in handy to have someone around when you need them.”

  He walks back to the mower.

  “Where is he, Calder?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No one has heard from him. Where is he?”

  “Maybe they’re just not saying.” He reaches for the ripcord on the mower. He holds it between his fingers without looking at her. “I honestly don’t know.” He yanks the cord and the blade rips through the overgrown grass.

  Annie scoops up the scratched aviator sunglasses off the oak stump side-table. Were they hers or Owen’s? She snaps them against her eyes and lowers herself into the Adirondack chair. It could be spring for all this weather. Sunshine and cut grass, the buzz of a mower growing distant. Detour sprawls sideways in the sun at her feet. Within seconds his paws twitch in his sleep. He dreams of running, Owen used to say. With you, at the beach.

  TWO

  The ocean looks like a frothy cocktail out there. Owen pulls on his ear at the kitchen table and sighs, half expecting to see his breath turn white. It’s thirty-seven degrees outside and near impossible to heat the open plan of a mid-century modern with its concrete floor, high ceilings, and glass walls seeping with the windy outdoors.

  “What’s wrong?” Tess plugs in the Christmas lights across from him in the living room. She tucks the tangle of cords behind the scooped woven chair with the sheepskin. Her bare feet shuffle across the waxy concrete toward him. He knows if he touched them they’d feel as warm as sand in summertime. Ship, ship, they go, like the sound of brushing crumbs off paper. She plods into the kitchen in her pajamas—no robe—with the white lights flickering behind her.

  Owen drops his hand from his ear. “Good morning.” He’s been looking out the glass doors at the Gulf of Mexico for the last hour, the waves curling and smacking the sugar-white sand. The rhythmic trance has pulled him miles and years away, but now he’s looking at the curve of his wife’s belly as it reaches toward him, closer it seems, than yesterday. “Sleep well?” he asks. He finds her most beautiful in the morning. Maybe it’s just seeing her for the first time of the day. Her blond hair is thrown behind her shoulders. Thick lashes rim her sleepy brown eyes.

  She rubs her round belly and ship, ships toward the coffee pot on the counter. Her breasts have ballooned even more overnight. “I’m still tired,” she says. “Little Caroline played soccer with my spleen all night.”

  Caroline is the name Tess has picked out for the baby. Owen doesn’t have a problem with the name. In fact he likes the classic sound of it, the small pink face it conjures in his mind. He just can’t bring himself to call her Caroline. She’s hardly a real person yet. At least that’s how he feels. But he doesn’t say this to Tess. He doesn’t know if she’s noticed his references to baby, her, and she.

  Tess manages herself into the armless chair across from him. She glances outside toward the waves. “Something on your mind?” she asks.

  “Does the coffee taste all right? I made it over an hour ago.”

  She takes a sip. “It isn’t bad.”

  The blue strap of her top reminds him of the middle of the night when he watched her sleep. She never seemed to be aware of his eyes on her or the fact that he was wide awake, and this had made him think of Annie. The nights he’d done the very same thing with her, except Annie always woke, suddenly with a smile in the dark, and she would pull him close and say, “Doodle bug” or “Sweet baby” or “Give me that honey,” silly, mocking things she never said in the daytime. She’d laugh and within moments her breath was slow and steady against his shoulder. Her capacity to feel him next to her was unnatural, he knew that, and yet he craved the way it filled him with relief.

  “Is it the baby? Are you nervous?” Tess asks.

  “Of course not. A little.” He grins and touches her hand. Warm, always warm, an oven for the bun inside her.

  Tess tilts her head to the side and smiles the way she does when she thinks something is cute. A big-eyed kitten. A toddler in pigtails. She quickly moves on, taking a long, solid breath before pulling the morning paper from its plastic sheath. She picks through the folds and then settles back on the front page.

  She is twenty-eight years old. Smart and decent and painfully beautiful. Plenty to place her in a category by herself.

  He turns back to the water. Pelicans form a V above the waves. Several at the back switch and fall in line again. He wonders about their ability to do this, to know exactly where to go, and when.

  Tess yawns behind the paper. She moans softly toward the end and gently shakes her head of sleep.

  Annie turned forty a week ago. He still hasn’t recovered from thinking on her so hard that day. The clichés exhausted him. He couldn’t stop the vision of them hoisting into the air, message-filled balloons heading south until they popped and filled the sky above Annie’s house with all the tired expressions that could have been meant for anyone, everyone.

  I didn’t mean for this to happen.

  I never meant to hurt you.

  I still love you.

  Will you ever take me back?

  “It’s not going to get above thirty-eight degrees today,” Tess says from behind the paper.

  “Is that normal for this time of year up here?” he asks.

  “Not really. I don’t remember it being cold like this when I was growing up.”

  Owen can’t help but think that at twenty-eight “growing up” wasn’t really that long ago. But in just a few weeks their own little girl will begin growing up here, too. Within months she’ll be kicking her legs and squealing with excitement when she’s lifted into his arms like babies he’s seen in restaurants and parks and movies. He’ll breathe in layers of baby powder and her own sweet honey smell that’ll have a way of stirring the fibrous, primal love, which, according to the stories in the new edition of First Time Father that Tess gave him, is buried somewhere deep inside his chest.

  “We’ve got to get Caroline’s room ready,” Tess says. “I still don’t have a changing table figured out.”

  �
��Maybe this weekend.”

  “I thought you were working.”

  “I’ll make the time.”

  “Thank you, sweetie,” she says from behind the paper.

  There’s something duplicitous in the way she calls him sweetie. Maybe it is just the way he hears it. He needs to get more sleep. He still wakes from dreams of Annie laughing, her mouth close enough for him to touch her wet tongue, and he finds himself hard beneath the sheet where the real live flesh of his pregnant wife’s leg is pressing against him.

  “What were you thinking about when I came in?” The paper still hasn’t moved from her face.

  “What?”

  “It’s the pulling-on-the-earlobe thing. I can tell something was bothering you.”

  “Why do you keep asking me that?” He caresses the side of her arm and feels a rush of love and desire toward her for all the wrong reasons. He clears the small scratch in his throat.

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I worry about you.” She lays the paper down and keeps her gaze on it.

  “I don’t remember pulling on my ear,” he says with more emotion than is called for.

  “You were.”

  “Hmn.” He brings it down a notch. “I was just thinking about what I’ve got to do today. And that song I’ve been working on with Danny Williams.”

  Tess flips the page. “And what’s bothering you about all that?”

  “I wouldn’t really say it’s bothering me. Maybe my ear was itching or something. I don’t know. I’m not bothered by anything really.”

  He looks out at the stream of icy cold water flowing flatly over the limestone slab. Getty Images owns twenty stock photos of this house. Tess has included some in her articles for home and garden magazines—the supposedly serene view through the glass doors, the blinding white sand, the small Japanese garden complete with a slab stone water feature. The first time he saw Tess she stood alone taking notes in the lobby of the historic building that housed a studio he worked in. She was studying sconces on the fourteen-foot ceiling, her head thrown back as sun streamed the long windows and hit her bare neck like spotlight cones. The image hollowed his insides. Then it turned right around and filled him with a burning curiosity. A craving. A relentless itch. To this day clichés are all he has for an explanation.