Jay stirred grumpily.
“I was only gone a minute,” Enrique repeated quietly.
“He was doing something to him,” Lina hissed.
“What?”
Lina was quiet, her eyes on Jay, watching him settle back into sleep. “I don’ know,” she whispered. “But that kid is weird. I don’ want him coming here no more.”
“You’re the one who agreed to feed him.”
Lina answered only with a shudder.
CONNIE AWOKE WITH a start and, from where she lay on this unusually firm bed, searched the walls unknowingly. The motel. She was in a motel in Utah. She sat up and looked at her watch. It was nearly midnight. Gene had certainly gone to bed already, but she would call anyway. Maybe he’d answer (a boy would take advantage of his mother’s absence to stay up late watching TV), and if he didn’t, she’d leave him a message. Connie picked up the phone’s heavy, old-fashioned receiver, and pulled at the tightly coiled cord. There was no dial tone. On the phone’s console was a sticker that said, “Dial 0 for Reception.” She didn’t dare wake up that man to ask him how to dial out.
She went and peeped out the door, thinking there might be a pay phone affixed to the motel’s sun-bleached, yellow exterior, but all she saw was a line of lamps between the doors, some burned out, the others weakly illuminating the dust that blew in the air. Across the highway was only blackness. A few parking spaces down, the wind caused a strip of duct tape that hung from a pickup truck’s side mirror to rattle, and coyotes barked in the distance. She closed the door again and locked it.
Quickly, quietly, as if someone were listening at the door, Connie washed up and put on her nightgown. She left the lamp over the sink on and closed the bathroom door, hoping the faint slice of light cast on the ceiling would be enough to keep her from being afraid. Then she slipped, shivering, into bed. What if Gene was waiting for her call, worried that she had been in an accident? He wasn’t the type to worry, but what did she know? She had never left him alone before. Connie couldn’t stop shivering, and although she knew it was from her nerves, she rose anyway, found the thermostat and turned it up, causing a ticking, springing kind of music to come from the electric heater that ran along the floor under the window. She got back in bed and began to cry. Was this how she would spend every night on this trip, alone and scared?
Why was she on this trip? What was the silly fantasy that had brought her here? In her giddy preparations, she had forgotten it, and now it brought her no joy. Why find Eugene? She had no one to marry.
Dear Lord, she prayed, help me. We can be saved in a moment, Lord, like the flicking of a switch. I believe it because Your word says it. Give me my moment. I’m in danger of losing my faith. Thomas doubted You, and You forgave him. You did more than forgive him, You showed Yourself to him, let him feel the holes in Your hands. You helped him put away his doubt forever. Reveal Yourself to me, Lord, or at least send me a sign. I’m lost. I need to know if I’m heading in the right direction. I believe in miracles, and I may be one of Your last followers who does. Don’t be angry at me for asking, Lord, just come to me as You did to Your disciples after You died on the cross. Put away my doubts, and I’ll follow You forever.
Connie drifted off, only briefly, then a rustling sound caused her to jump. The window curtain was shifting with intention—like a living being, it seemed. As she stared, it rippled and bulged in a way that could only be described as supernatural. She squeezed her eyes shut, so horrified she dared not even move, lest the sound she made cause the being behind the curtain, or the curtain itself, to awaken all the more. Then she remembered her prayer and opened her eyes. She breathed steadily to calm herself and watched the curtain as the shadows shifted, curled, and arranged themselves into shapes. The shapes came in and out of focus. Fascinated, Connie lost them as soon as she found them.
And then He appeared. Christ, life-size, watched her just as He had from the picture on her childhood bedroom’s wall. As soon as she saw Him, her heart leaped into her throat, and He was gone again. A shadow of His form returned, and she squinted to see Him better, and this caused Him to disappear. She continued to stare at the curtain—and there He was again, smiling that gentle smile. Relief washed over Connie. Jesus was with her, and she had nothing to fear. Then He faded. It seemed the force of her desire to see Him could just as easily make Him go, so she relaxed her eyes and her mind and let Him come. This time He stayed, and the two gazed at each other. He had always been here, close at hand. He was here to remind her of that now, to answer her prayer and restore Connie’s faith. “Thank you,” she whispered.
In answer, Christ closed his eyes reassuringly, then opened them again.
In her mind, Connie begged, Don’t go. She had never felt love for the Lord so intensely. Then Jesus moved, and Connie gasped. Now His arm was raised, the robe hanging from it in great folds. His finger pointed, but His gentle eyes remained on Connie. Home. He was pointing toward Eula. “Yes, my Lord,” Connie whispered.
She lost Him for some seconds, and when He came back into focus, He stood as before, arms at His side. Again, Connie feared that He would go and this would end. Should she speak to Him? Should she ask Him something?
As if in response to this thought, Christ raised His hand in blessing. In the center of His palm was a dark spot. Overwhelmed, Connie heaved a great sob. A painful shudder went through her body, and with that Christ sealed up the wound that Bill had left, and there was no more pain. It had hurt so badly for so long that Connie had forgotten it until now, when she felt marvelously healed, whole, and at peace.
Once, when Connie was small, she had gone to sleep-away camp with some of the girls from church. Exhausted from a fruitless day of fishing, she had fallen asleep in the drafty cabin with her sleeping bag unzipped and one arm fully exposed. The temperature dropped during the night. Connie was awakened by her teenage counselor placing her arm, which was chilled almost numb, into the sleeping bag, and zipping it up. No sooner had she felt the awful cold than it was soothed; she was awakened to the pain by the cure itself, so pain became pain’s opposite.
This was what Connie felt now. Christ himself had zipped her up and put everything right in a moment. With that, He was gone. It was only a window curtain now, moving slightly with the heat that rose from the electric heater.
Connie slept peacefully for a few hours, then rose before dawn and headed home.
Chapter 23
Wanda walked all through the night with the conviction that she was doing it for her health, which was the health of the baby. The town was at rest, and the odd car that passed her made a friendly sizzle against the pavement. At dawn, she realized why it was so much easier to carry the mobile in her left hand: her right shoulder, which had been jarred in that first swing of the pipe, ached. So did her side, where Hank had tackled her. Still, she walked. Homemade announcements on squares of cardboard, YARD SALE and FREE KITTENS, sandwiched signposts; dogs raced to the end of their chains to bark Wanda away.
Mid-morning she sat down at a graffiti-riddled picnic table in the park to rest. The lawn here was yellow at the corners where the sprinklers didn’t reach. In the wide parking lot, a few trucks and vans started to arrive, driven by potbellied old men who unloaded miniature scooters from them. The men shook hands, then stood at a distance from one another, resting the backs of their wrists on their hips, looking up at the sky, and chatting. Then they revved up their scooters, fifteen in all, and, after a puttering overture, practiced formations: rings, cloverleafs, and braids—up and down the lot. The Shriners, Wanda realized, were practicing for Eula’s Independence Day Parade, when they’d ride wearing fezzes and vests with tasseled trim.
While Wanda watched them, her legs seized up in cramps. She was suddenly hungry, ravenous with morning sickness. She hadn’t eaten for a day. She left the mobile on the table, limped around the back of a shed where a group of mourning doves took flight, creaking with every stroke as if their wings were attached on rusty hinges, and coughed a th
ick, white web into the bushes.
Crisscrossing the town in the night, she had had momentum, and only infrequently had her mood slipped into a bog of despair; now she returned to the table and sat entrenched in it. Moments of hope were the rarity now, and she struggled to gain purchase on them like stones in the quicksand, but it was no use. There were two possible cures: to return to Gideon’s and buy more of what she hated him for giving her, or to go someplace safe and beg sleep to come take her. But instead she stayed on the bench in the appalling sunlight and watched the Shriners practice.
It never came—whatever it was Wanda waited for, whoever it was that would save her—so she rose and, on aching legs, headed back to Coop’s. Now her shoulder throbbed, and her ribs . . . her attention shied away from the ache. Had Hank really hit her from the side? He had, and hot waves of pain replaced the euphoric heaving of last night. How could she have been so foolish as to put her baby—Melissa and Randy’s baby—in danger? Wanda put her hands to her belly to support him and keep him out of reach of the waves.
THE KIDS WERE in rare form that afternoon. Maybe it was the brilliance of the weather or the fact that summer vacation was just around the corner. More than once, objects—not just spitballs, but objects with weight—bounced off Coop’s head as he drove. It had been weeks since Enrique last rode the bus, and the back seats had again become a refuge for troublemakers. Today they leaped around, fighting, snapping training-bra straps, climbing and tumbling over seat backs, stealing Rubik’s Cubes and comic books and throwing them out windows; and their victims, girls with braces and fat third-grade boys, wept openly. If anyone other than Gene cared to look, he would have seen that for the first time Coop wasn’t smiling. That one piano-key tooth, the false incisor, was concealed behind a tight frown.
Only Gene noticed, and it made him so uneasy that he moved a couple of seats back.
Coop was ruminating on the fact that he had spent his life deceived. In his pity for Uncle Frank, he had lost many an opportunity. His only consolation now was that he hadn’t lost Maria; she had been patient enough to wait year after year. Well, he wouldn’t make her wait anymore. “Take it slow, old man.” That had been her only words of advice in bed this morning, after a day of grumbling and a night of shifting about sleeplessly. The woman was a saint.
How could Frank not have known? How does a man tell another man to keep his suicide a secret, and still not reveal his intent? “With Cooper men you gotta read between the lines,” Frank had said. Who was he to tell Coop about Cooper men?
A Cooper man.
“I’ll be movin’ along shortly,” Frank had said.
Coop’s heart froze, and he slammed on the brake.
They had reached the empty stretch, and the kids, having become used to the speeches given by Chicken Coop, barely took note.
He pulled the emergency brake and stood, but this time there was no speech. “Out!” he bellowed.
The din lowered a bit.
“Git the hell out, every one of you!”
Coop began to go down the aisle and grab kids—the good ones near the front—by the shoulder and fling them toward the door. “Out! Now!” The other kids began to leave of their own accord, rushing past Coop with frightened expressions, holding their backpacks over their hearts. They descended the three stairs and cowered in a group among the satiny milkweed at the roadside. “Out, God damn you!” they heard Coop yell, and the last of the boys stumbled out and fell on his knees in the gravel. They all watched the bus, growling and squealing like an angry monster, jerk back and forth in the awkward task of turning around on a road hardly wider than it was long. Then it was free and it roared away back toward town, leaving the children blinking in the sunlight. A few started to walk toward a silo, which, though distant, was the only structure visible over the corn.
Nothing in the world, no command or incentive, no promise of solitude and order, or unlimited access to all the scientific publications that existed or even a ride in a submarine, could have gotten Gene to do what those children now did, which was to walk down that open road under that yawning sky. That bright Idaho sunlight everyone else seemed to love was, to Gene, a searing radiation. In it, objects shone blindingly, then purpled, as his retinas—and his brain—roaringly burned. Gene heard sunlight, though he would never tell anyone this lest he receive the ten-thousandth blank look of his life. It sounded like a brushfire in the wind, a firestorm.
But he didn’t have to. Having seen before anyone else what Coop meant to do, he had crawled under the bus seat, and he cowered there now, his head hidden under his piled arms, his cheek pressed flush against the sticky floor. Gene was surprised but not frightened. He had ridden behind Coop for years, and felt between them a distant, quiet respect, which was all he wanted from anyone.
WANDA ENTERED THE house through the kitchen door, hoping not to rouse Uncle Frank if he was asleep. That way she could slip into the bedroom undisturbed. Yesterday’s breakfast dishes were still on the rack. Coop must have spent the night at Maria’s. Wanda went to the cupboard and found a box of graham crackers. She ate these greedily and washed them down with a glass of milk. Then, hoping to find Frank asleep, she eased the swinging door open and slipped into the living room.
The smell shocked and sickened her. It was that old smell that she knew so well, the caustic bile-smell of death. She put her hand over her face and passed quickly through the room. Despite her determination not to look, Uncle Frank appeared in the periphery of her vision, sitting among the cushions just as he had when he was asleep, his head rolled back. Wanda closed herself in the bedroom, went to the wastepaper basket by the desk, and coughed out a long, thick string festooned with lumps of cracker. She pinched it free from her mouth and turned. Frank, that poor old man. She had felt sweet toward him, a little, there at the end. But now she was in a race to get out of here, or else his death (or at least responsibility for the cleanup) would be pinned on her. She threw her things into her bag and placed the folded mobile, which had lost a couple of clowns without her noticing, on top. The toothbrush and creams she had left in the bathroom could stay here. Then she held her breath and charged through the living room and out the front door.
There was no other choice but to call Melissa. She’d make her understand. Wanda had enough money for a bus ticket; in fact, that was all the money she had. Randy and Melissa would give her another advance, and she would stay with them and be safe.
Wanda headed toward the bus station, heaving the heavy bag. It was a long way.
Halfway there, a pang of horror and ache rose in her side where Hank had hit her, and moved low in her abdomen, the baby’s seat. She froze there in the road, holding her bag with one hand and her baby with the other, and began to cry. “Don’t,” she whimpered. “Please forgive me. Please, don’t!” The wave passed and she walked on, as evenly and quickly as she could.
“YOU MIGHT AS well come out from under there,” Coop shouted as he entered Eula going faster than a bus should go. Back on the empty stretch, he had seen the boy drop quickly to the floor. He would have pulled him out and thrown him off if he didn’t know how the boy cowered from the sunlight under the bill of his baseball cap. Coop pitied him.
Now Gene popped back up, eyeing him grumpily. “I ain’t goin’ far,” Coop said. He stopped himself from adding, Just sit there, because what else did the boy ever do?
Coop drove down his narrow street, where he had never taken the bus before, and parked at an angle in front of his house. He killed the engine, yanked the lever sending the doors open, and jogged up the walk. The front door was ajar. He didn’t bother calling out Frank’s name as he entered—that’s how certain he was of what had passed. “I’ll be movin’ along shortly,” Frank had said. What else could he possibly have meant?
The rush was over now, and Coop, at somewhat of a loss, took his time. Walking quietly along the walls, he opened the windows to let the breeze clear the smell. Then he took his place on the couch, where he had sat yesterday, and,
again, turned off the television. A finch’s twitter outside was the only sound. Only now did Coop look at the man’s face. It was frozen in a look of horror, mouth agape—the face of one of the salted herrings Coop’s grandfather, Frank’s father, used to eat. Coop bowed his head. He rested his elbows on his knees and pressed his palms together, wishing for once that he was a praying man. “Ya coulda waited,” he whispered. Suddenly he was choked by sobs. “Ya coulda waited a couple days for me to cool off.”
Coop cried for all those he hadn’t cried for before—his father, his mother, Louis, and now Frank. He whimpered like a child, shaken physically as if punched by sobs, letting the tears and snot collect on his nose tip, then drip onto his sandwiched hands.
There was a sound behind him, and Coop turned to see the boy watching from the room’s dim corner. Coop ducked his head in shame and took a deep breath. “You better call 911, kid,” he said.
“They’re already here,” Gene replied.
Coop wiped his face, went to the door, and saw that two police cars—not an ambulance—had arrived, their flashing lights lost in the sunshine.
WANDA SAT FOR a long time in the blue plastic seat. Another pang had shot through her abdomen just as she reached the station, and she felt that she needed stillness now, to settle her body and think things through. Finally she rose, went to the phone booth, and called Melissa’s work number, collect.
“What is it?” Melissa asked in her work voice once the operator patched Wanda through.
The calm, rational explanation that Wanda had planned—that Hank was causing trouble and she feared for her safety—crumbled, and Wanda broke out in sobs.
“Wanda, what’s wrong?” Melissa said.
“I’ve got to come back. I can’t stay here. Please, just for a while.”
“Are you safe? Is the baby okay?”
“Yes, I—”
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