Carry Yourself Back to Me

by Deborah Reed

  Josh looked at Annie beneath a single thick lid. He smiled in a way that seemed shockingly tender. “You’re something else, Annie Walsh,” he said, his palms held up in surrender.

  SIX

  Annie’s hands are stiff and raw with blisters. The tips of her fingers pruned from having stood too long in the shower, listening to tiny hailstones tick the bathroom window. It wasn’t until the water turned cold on her back that she finally shut it down.

  It’s late. The sweet smell of burning maple and foggy windows give her living room the feel of a folksy country inn. Her hair hangs in wet ringlets around her face. She’s chilled, shivering beneath a wooly, red comforter on the leather sofa.

  “What if,” she would like to say to Calder. He’s the only person in the world who knows what it means.

  After their father died they used to play a game they called “What If?” What would their lives be like in that very moment if their father had lived? It began the summer after he was gone, and they were eating bologna sandwiches in the kitchen when their mother stumbled in at noon after having just woken up. She hadn’t showered in days. She’d stopped teaching. She’d stopped picking up around the house. She’d stopped everything except retreating from the outside world. “Why aren’t the dishes done?” she asked, drunk on meanness and misery.

  It was enough to blindside Annie with the grief. This happened from time to time when she least expected, like coming across her father’s Swiss Army knife in the junk drawer when she was looking for a rubber band or accidentally knocking a small sample of his cologne from the top shelf of the medicine cabinet and breaking it in the sink until the whole bathroom, even halfway down the hall, smelled like her father for days.

  Now her blood rose, bringing with it the words, “I wish you’d died instead of Daddy.”

  Her mother jerked her head up.

  “He wouldn’t have acted like such a coward.”

  Her mother slapped her face.

  It didn’t hurt nearly as much as one would think by the crack of it.

  But then her mother grabbed a knife from the drawer as half-crying moans leaked from her throat.

  “What are you doing!” Calder yelled, and Annie wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or her mother the way his head swung back and forth.

  Annie froze. Her hands leaden, useless. She’d crossed over into a hazy, unfamiliar place where she didn’t care if any of them lived or died.

  Her mother let loose a pathetic wail. She held the knife in the air like she intended to bring the blade down into her own chest. She screamed like a small child, her whole body trembling with frustration and pain. Calder leaped toward her and wrestled the knife away, but not before several teacups smashed to the floor and the two of them fell across the shards. Calder stood and tossed the knife into the sink while their mother wept into her bloody hands.

  Annie did nothing. Calder blinked at the scrapes on his own hands and arms. He peeled their mother’s fingers from her eyes. The cuts were only small abrasions. He wiped her face and hands with a wet dishcloth while she mumbled words no one understood. He lifted her from the floor. “Help me get her into the den,” he said.

  Annie glared at him.

  “Come on,” he said, and Annie flopped forward with exaggerated resentment.

  Her mother smelled faintly of vinegar. Dirty strings of hair rimmed her eyes. They settled her into the recliner and covered her with the prickly orange afghan their mother’s cousin had made, splashed with a pattern of poorly attempted blue stars and an uneven fringe. Their mother turned on her side and covered her whole face with it. Tiny drops of blood leaked like beads onto the watertight fabric.

  Annie and Calder returned to their half-eaten sandwiches in the kitchen. But the shatter of broken glass and screams, the heat from her cheek, the way they’d skirted along the margins of death—and they had, she thought, all come eerily close—still echoed off the table and cupboards and floor. Annie got up and opened the window above the sink. She rested her hands on the pane while the grimy hem of the once white curtain stroked her arms in the breeze.

  “What if Daddy had lived?” Calder asked from the table behind her.

  Outside the air cracked with stiff palms coarsening against one another. Annie stared at the muscadine tendrils that had crawled all the way from the trellis just to suffocate the window box that her mother once filled with red geraniums.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Calder said after the silence. “That ugly afghan would have never been allowed in this house.”

  Annie laughs, sadly, remembering. She tucks the comforter tighter around her cold feet. She thinks of a photograph that still hangs in the front hall of her childhood home. The first thing you see walking in is her mother in sandals on the red brick patio, holding a pitcher of iced tea, and she’s smiling her gorgeous, glamour-girl smile. A man’s blue sleeve lines the edge. Uncle Calder had stood beside her in the original, but someone had cut him away.

  Hard to believe her mother was once curvy and lively, full of warm kisses and unreasonable optimism. She’d read most anything to them—newspaper columns, magazine articles, novels, essays, the latest research on the brain, heart, orca whales, glass blowing, space, anything she got her hands on—always hugging and kissing and reading, filling them up in all ways that mattered.

  Annie feels the sting of tears when she thinks of the hole that separates the past from the present. She could fill a pool with all the poisonous things she has felt toward her mother, and now her brother, in between.

  She wishes her mother had never come by and told her what she did. She wishes Calder had never come to see her on her birthday, wishes he’d never mentioned Magnus, wishes she’d never heard him say how mean the man was, wishes he hadn’t sounded so much like their father when he said it. She might not have laughed and let him in so easily. She might not have learned about his love for Sidsel. What if he never showed up that day? Would he have done what they say he’s done? What a foolish, hopeless game.

  SEVEN

  It disturbs Calder to think of how happy Sidsel makes him. He does it anyway, imagining Mateo’s Mexican restaurant just as clearly as if he’s sitting in one of its booths. He pulls in a long breath, and instead of the cold concrete walls and musty prison blankets, he smells the restaurant’s lively mix of beans and spicy chicken, the linoleum floor and tables scrubbed clean with bleach. He sees the pale yellow walls, the sky-blue molding along the floor, ceiling, and windows where red and yellow striped curtains hang loose in the Florida sun. The air is chilled by a powerful air-conditioner, making the red Formica booths and vinyl seats especially cool to the touch. As a boy he used to come here with his father. He has come here his whole life.

  It was nine months ago that Sidsel walked into Mateo’s to have lunch with him. He thinks about that day as the turning point for everything. She entered the restaurant, and he stood from the booth and raised his hand to his heart as if he were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Her gaze shot around the dining room as she walked toward him, but Calder couldn’t turn away. Her husband Magnus could have been in the next booth for all he cared. It had been a full twenty-four hours since he’d last seen her white-blond hair glide across her bare shoulders. Twenty-four hours since he sang “Yankee Doodle Dandy”—a song she didn’t know—softly into her ear while tickling her ribs, making her squirm backwards across his sheets and laugh with little bursts of screaming in between. Twenty-four hours since he smelled sugar and flour on her long neck. Twenty-four hours since he felt her breasts between his fingers and on the tip of his tongue, felt the inside of her like a drug that thrust him into some other place he had no name for and not a single word to describe.

  Sidsel. She’d looked sideways once more as she slid into the booth across from him, and they situated themselves toward the center. Calder reached for her hand, and she looked across the room once more as she gave it to him. A flat, round freckle dotted the back of her hand, and he caressed it beneath his finger.


  “Sid.” He swallowed and looked at her closely. “We’re going to work this thing out. I promise you.”

  Sidsel pulled away and tucked her hands beneath her armpits like a child on a cold day. “I like it here,” she said, with what appeared to be a forced smile. “I like the colors of the walls.”

  He loved the soft trace of her accent. It was as if she were speaking with something hot in her mouth the way she sometimes pushed her lips toward a pout. When he first met her outside the red and white door of her Danish café, he’d had no idea how long she’d been standing there. He was planting a young magnolia in front of the law office next door when he heard a smooth voice say, “Hello?” His shovel had just chunked through the sandy soil, and he rested his hiking boot atop the turned edge of it and looked up. A freshly tanned face, big lime eyes, and all that white hair falling across a white, loosely fitted blouse. “Would you mind very much cutting this back?” She reached for a brittle branch of a small avocado tree in a planter on the sidewalk. She caressed its tip with her finger. “It’s not been looked after.”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all,” he said, and she stepped forward and handed him a raspberry Kringle he hadn’t noticed in her other hand. The need to touch her had been immediate.

  “It reminds me of home,” Sidsel said in Mateo’s. The green of her shirt caused the green in her eyes to flash above her white teeth. “The colors, on the walls. They’re like the houses back home.”

  She saw beauty in the cloudy skin of a blueberry, found pleasure in the weight of a spoon. Just being in the same room with her made him want to be a better man. She spoke French, English, German, and Danish, knew all about the constellations and other unlikely information, like the migrating patterns of Bean Geese and every joke the Marx brothers ever told. Her pastries left him satisfied and hungry all at once.

  It couldn’t have been more than sixty-five degrees in Mateo’s, but sweat rolled down the sides of his temples like tears. He needed to get a hold of himself. He wanted nothing more than to have her every minute of the day, every day of the week, every year of his life. He imagined lying on top of her in the booth. Babies sprang before his eyes, then grandkids branching off into great-grandkids. He was seeing the future with her.

  “You can file for a divorce,” he said. What was he thinking? They’d barely discussed Magnus before now. His right eye twitched once and stopped.

  Sidsel leaned back into her seat.

  “I mean, is that something you’d want?” Calder asked.

  She studied his face. “It’s not so simple as that,” she said.

  “What can I get for you two here?” Mateo stood at the side of the table with a notepad and pen. His hair was as thick and white as his moustache. He looked more like a South American diplomat than a waiter.

  Sidsel looked to Calder. “Anything is fine,” she said.

  “How are you, buddy?” Calder asked.

  “I’m very fine, thank you.” He bowed his head forward and smiled at Sidsel while rocking on the heels of his tennis shoes, pushing his protruding belly back and forth over the edge of the table.

  Calder asked him to double the usual, and Mateo turned for the kitchen.

  Calder leaned forward. “The way I hear it, more than half of everybody who’s married has gotten divorced.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You don’t know Magnus,” she said, whispering his name. “You have no idea how he can be.”

  “Hey, Calder!” A man’s voice called from across the room.

  Calder turned to see Gabe Pinckney, one of his landscapers, in dirty shorts and boots. He was wearing a purple Greenpeace T-shirt with a white whale on the front. It was Tuesday. Calder had completely forgotten that he’d be maintaining the Johnson house right around the corner.

  Son of a bitch. Both Gabe and the situation here. Gabe grinned as big and manly as possible. Calder lifted a hand. “One of my landscapers,” Calder whispered to Sidsel.

  What was she saying? Magnus. He didn’t know Magnus. No, he didn’t, and the thought of Sidsel knowing Magnus the way she did made him feel a little sick. It was Magnus she was going home to. Maybe he waited for her in a chair that faced the door. Maybe he kissed her every time she walked in, the way Calder would, given the chance.

  “Well. You’re right about that,” Calder said, leaning back in his own seat. “I don’t know him and I don’t care to know him but I sure as hell know that I’m not afraid of him and you shouldn’t be either.” He gave her a small smile and checked for a reaction. Her eyes seemed doubtful, maybe wistful, hard to gauge. “This is a free country. Somebody gets a notion to leave they just up and leave. That’s the way we do it here.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Sidsel said.

  Calder opened his mouth but she cut him off. “Listen to me,” she said. “Magnus has changed.”

  Calder let her go on.

  “We hadn’t been together long before we came here. I told you we only got married so I could come to the States with him when he took the job at Siemens.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I don’t love him. I never really loved him.”

  A rush of warm blood steamed from the pit of his stomach to the top of his head. Finally, she’d told him what he needed to hear.

  “It was just a practical decision. The marriage and coming here. I could open my café in all this sunshine. It’s so dark and rainy in Denmark. I know. It’s stupid that I married him to live in the sunshine.”

  “My grandfather left everything and everyone he ever knew and loved, all for the sake of sunshine. It’s not stupid. Hell, if it weren’t for sunshine I wouldn’t be sitting here with you right now.” The idea that he might have never known her set off a flurry of urges beneath his skin.

  “Your eye keeps jumping,” she said. “Have you noticed that?”

  “I have.”

  “And your shoulder.”

  “Just exactly how has he changed?” He rubbed the corner of his eyebrow with the tips of two fingers. When he tugged at his lid he saw Gabe shoveling pinto beans between his grin.

  She leaned forward and whispered. “He tells me about seeing other women. He doesn’t say who they are, he just says things like, ‘I fucked another woman today,’ and then he rolls over and goes to sleep.”

  “Good God.”

  “At first I thought he was joking. I asked him if he was serious because, I mean, he never said such a thing before, and then he held my arm up here like this and said, ‘I’m capable of anything, don’t you know that?’” Small green bruises poked from beneath her sleeve.

  Calder started to come around and sit next to her, but she stopped him with her hand and the fear in her eyes that someone might see them together, and so he sat back down and bobbed his knee and felt his throat tighten along with his fist beneath the table.

  “I don’t know the word in English. Ildevarslende. It’s like something threatening but not so clear. It’s the way he stares at me. I’m afraid of him, Calder. You should be, too.”

  Calder examined his broken fingernails and small cuts from bristling palm trees. He looked up. “We’re going to fix this,” he said. “And don’t you worry about me.”

  Sidsel dropped her gaze to the side and brushed her lap clean of something Calder couldn’t see. She brought her head back up and sighed with closed eyes.

  Then she stared at Calder for so long that Mateo had set two root beers on the table and walked away before either of them noticed. Her bottom lip quivered and she brought her fingers to rest there. “I’m sorry. I can’t stop thinking about you.” She covered her whole mouth with her hand. Tears spilled down her face.

  A prickling heat stung Calder’s feet. It shot up and tickled the roots of his lashes. He stretched his neck long to the side as if his collar were too tight, but it was no use. His eyelids fluttered until he finally squeezed them shut and opened them again, taking the edge off some of the urge. His fist opened and closed beneath the table. “
I’ve got to tell you. I’ve never known anything like what’s happening here,” he said, and as quickly as he said it he realized that she might not know which thing he was referring to, their love or his tics or the threat of Magnus, but he didn’t feel like explaining, and anyway she smiled and never asked.

  The word she’d been looking for that day was ominous.

  They had nine months of one another before Sidsel called with the news. She dialed the minute she heard from the police. That might have been the problem, calling her lover first thing. It was on record and it looked bad. He sees this now. So does she. But it was too late for all that. She went and called him again and again in fact, especially after having to identify the body. He didn’t know what she was saying. She’d lost control of her English. It was all Danish in between the choking and sobbing and the single shrill scream she let out before he hung up and ran to her. Even now he has no idea what she said. By the time he got to her she couldn’t speak at all so he held her and let her cry, and he didn’t feel the least bit jealous about her weeping over her dead husband. He hated seeing her this way. He needed to do something for her, and he was trying, but at the same time his mind was flopping back and forth between worrying about her and jumping in a kind of floundering revelry over Magnus being dead. He had to help her. He would help her. He wiped her tears and held her and stroked her hair until she was quiet and thirsty for a glass of water.

  After that she told him how the police had asked her all kinds of questions. She’d answered no to every one until they asked if she was seeing someone on the side. She told them the truth. Why shouldn’t she? It had nothing to do with Magnus being dead.

  Sidsel’s face appears on Calder’s screen in the Video Visitation Center and he forgets about the steel bolts and barbed wire. He forgets about the body odor, the smell of urine mixed with commercial-strength cleaners and cigarette smoke, the sickening taste of burned potatoes and watery coffee. All he sees is the splintered red of her swollen green eyes.