She Came From Beyond!

by Nadine Darling

  “Well. Fingers crossed.”

  “How did she look?”

  “Oh, the way they look. Pale. Dark circles. Very tired.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She was going on about how it wasn’t like Cuckoo’s Nest, and how she’d wanted it to be like Cuckoo’s Nest. And she made some jokes about Indians and drinking fountains. And she asked me not to tell Sab.”

  “Ouch.”

  “But I can’t imagine Sab doesn’t know. Her grandfather is not the most tactful.”

  “No.”

  “No. And let’s just say that he doesn’t have an inside voice. So that must’ve been interesting. Oh, yeah, and there was a knife involved.”

  “A knife?”

  “It was a Swiss Army knife for fuck’s sake. I guess she was going to give herself a tracheotomy with it.”

  I shivered a little but he didn’t notice, or if he noticed then he didn’t call me on it.

  “She didn’t hurt anybody, or herself, but Jamie was in the room, his grandmother was holding him.”

  “Oh, shit. Was he freaking out?”

  “No, he was just watching. At least that’s what she says. God. Perfect.”

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, a thing to say.

  “At least we get them.”

  “Who?”

  “The kids. At least we get them. I was afraid that she would want her folks to have them, and we’d have to go to court. Easy?”

  “Oh, I just didn’t know,” I said. I had met them for maybe a half hour. Harrison and I hadn’t touched the entire time. We went to Tastee Freeze and all three of them sat on one side of the booth. Sabrina stared at my belly and told me about the books she was reading. Later, Harrison told me that she asked about the babies’ father on the car ride back to Weed, and that he’d changed the subject.

  “But you’re fine with it?”

  “I don’t think that I have a choice.”

  “I GUESS I SHOULD HAVE SAID SOMETHING,” SAID HARRISON. HE WAS hurt; no one ever got hurt like Harrison, ever. He hurt at a twelfth grade level. If he hurt your feelings and you told him about it, it hurt his feelings. It defied logic, even gravity. It was his own language. It was his own solar system. You couldn’t go up against something like that, you let it wash over you, dissolving you like a lozenge.

  “It’s okay. I just have some concerns.”

  “You knew I was a father when we got together.”

  “Yeah, I actually didn’t, but that’s beside the point, anyway.”

  I put most of Sabrina’s room together by myself. There was some bookcase that was giving me issues so I got some help with construction from the guy who’d been going through my recycling bin in exchange for beer (I couldn’t drink it, so whatever) and ten bucks. I chose the bean bag chairs in deep colors like royal purple and red and emerald green, colors from Prince’s closet circa 1984, because I disliked the idea of pink, as it seemed pandering to a teenager. There was a carpet so lush it enveloped you to the ankles when you walked on it, and a desk and computer and a floor lamp and a queen-sized bed with a trundle pull-out in case she wanted to have more than one friend over, a shocking but intriguing notion to a woman such as myself, who’d only ever had one person sleep over at her house when she was a kid, a male cousin who was sequestered at our place until the bed bugs were gone from his bedroom.

  I bought a bunch of random books online, anything that seemed interesting. Winemaking for Dummies, that sort of thing. The Stephen King library. I arranged all of these books in her hobo-assembled bookcase in a fun, random sort of way like colorfully tilting buildings or teeth. And all the linens and shit were choice. Major thread counts, dust ruffles.

  The baby had a room, too, decorated with alternate Thomas the Tank Engine and Bob the Builder motifs. He had a toddler racecar bed, which I assumed would take the sting out of the whole divorce thing.

  “So, yeah,” said Harrison, still hurt, “her dad is dropping them off tomorrow.”

  “That’s really soon,” I said. “Like, super soon.”

  “You know, if you aren’t okay with this … I just ASSUMED …”

  “I am okay with it,” I said. I did not ask him to think about what everyone always says about the word ASSUME. I did not do that at all.

  “We have a boy and a girl,” he said, softening, and I nodded.

  “And a boy and a girl.”

  “I’m going to go home and write in my diary that Joan was committed today and that it was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I didn’t cry when my father died, did I tell you?”

  “You started to. Did you drive his ass crazy, too?”

  Thank Christ he laughed.

  “No. Colon cancer took care of that.”

  “Damn.”

  “It was not pretty. They sew your asshole up, did you know?”

  “Who sews my asshole up?”

  “The doctors, when you have colon cancer. You shit in a bag. You have no reason for an asshole anymore so they sew it up.”

  “No,” I said. “No, I did not know that.”

  “Yes. They do that. It seems barbaric in a way, but it’s just logic, closing an unneeded hole. It’s crazy the shit in this day and age that seems so strange and unexamined. Like seeing-eye dogs, that seems as though it could be updated.”

  “I’ve never thought about it in that way,” I said.

  “No one has. That’s the point. So, yes, I didn’t cry. I spent some time with his dead body and I didn’t cry. But when you left me, I flew back to Providence and walked into the garage and sat down and just started bawling. Just huge sobs. For about a half hour. I’d told Joan not long after we met that I had no emotions, and she believed me.”

  “That’s awful, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” I rubbed his arm up and down briskly, as though for warmth.

  “But I don’t want you to believe it, is the thing. I don’t want you to believe that I have no emotions. This thing, you and me and the babies and the kids, this is what matters to me, and it’s the only thing that ever mattered to me, and even though that’s probably what drove Joan crazy, it’s still true. It still happened and is happening and it’s important to me.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, I don’t think you know everything there is to know.”

  “What, do you have another wife, or something?”

  “I just don’t think you know what it’s like to be in a relationship for so long and just not give a fuck, and I hope you never do. It’s bad. It’s oppressive in the way that heat is oppressive. You can’t breathe but you get used to not breathing. I’m not this guy who just abandoned his family. I’m not this statistic …”

  “No one thinks you’re a statistic.”

  “Everyone thinks I’m a statistic. Men are pigs, men are dogs, men will look at anything, men will fuck anything …”

  “That was actually my thesis.”

  There was that screech, that overdone movie screech, of tires as Harrison pulled over to the side of the road and the babies kicked and punched in unison to the ‘what is happening, what is happening’ playing in my brain. Also, the ‘is this how it ends? Is this how it ends?’ I half expected to look down and see a Swiss Army knife sticking out of my chest, but then Harrison’s tongue was in my mouth and his hands were on my boobs.

  “I need you to know that nothing meant anything before,” he said when his tongue was securely back in his own mouth, his head so close to mine that his eyes were only visible as a wet glint in the darkness, “and I can’t help Joan, even though I feel bad. I am not what I do, at least not right now. I’m yours. I’m your husband, all of that.”

  And when I was able to answer, I said, “Okay.”

  I thought about telling him about my own father being carted away to the nuthatch, and I even know why I was going to tell him, which is probably why I didn’t end up telling him. Maybe you would never stop talking if you constantly said what was comparable to what. Y
ou would just be talking and talking until everyone in your life had died or walked away and then died, and you were this broken old corpse person, mouth still moving ever so slightly like a little bird wanting to be fed.

  13.

  JOAN’S DAD DROVE AN OLD MAN CAR, A BROWN CAR. IT MADE ME wonder when I’d last seen a brown car and I couldn’t remember, just like I can never remember the last time I ate an orange. The kids looked very small in the back seat. Later Sabrina would tell me that her grandfather made her sit in the back to tend to Jamie, even though Jamie ended up sleeping the entire trip.

  I’d wanted to stay inside the house until Joan’s dad was gone, but Harrison wouldn’t hear of it. He was big into defending my honor. He may have even just wanted the bastard to say something about me so he could spit in his face. Harrison told me I couldn’t hide, and I tried to explain to him that sitting in the house with the AC on watching television was technically not hiding, it was watching television with the AC on. No dice. I was standing there when the car pulled up, holding Harrison’s hand.

  Joan’s dad got out of the car so quickly I flinched, but then he shook my hand with three big pumping shakes, and told me he was Bill Hutt and I must be Easy and asked me how the hell I was. He was wearing one of those types of hats that only old men and kids on Halloween can get away with, a Panama, I think, with a big tropical print band. I don’t know what it is about old people and the tropics, I never have. Maybe it’s just to rub the retirement thing in even further; maybe if you work long enough you never want a single person to forget the fact that you could be in Barbados at a moment’s notice. And then you’d get to talk about the economy for four hours, so win-win for you, old person.

  It was another one of those times when the surrealness of the moment just brought up so many shameful feelings. There were many things that happened during that period that I took a pass on, morality-wise, but even I was pretty sure that the father of the woman whose husband I’d made babies with shouldn’t be standing there giving my belly luck-rubs. I stood there mourning a bit for Joan and her traitor pirate of a dad with his tropical ways and obsolete car. It should not have been that way. Anger would have been something I could have understood, even welcomed. Sabby got out of the car more slowly, with Jamie on her hip. She was wearing a tank top and cut-offs and she was taller than her grandfather was. I watched her watching him interact with me. She sniffed a little editorially, and looked away.

  “Sab,” said Harrison, waving her over. He kissed her cheek and the baby grabbed for him, and the easy transfer from Sabrina’s arms to his made me part misty, part envious. The envy was something that I acknowledged but tried to ignore, as it seemed ugly, an ugly, selfish thing, the sorry feelings of a girl irritated about not getting to plant a flag somewhere first, of someone for whom love alone would never be enough. In unison, the babies tumbled inside me. It made me think about the song where the old lady swallows a bunch of animals to kill a fly she swallowed in the first place. The babies had grown so quickly from spiders to birds to cats, their uprisings were so sudden, so adamant.

  Bill Hutt wanted me to know that I had such a glow. It was hot out there, standing in the driveway. That was where the glow was coming from, if there was a glow at all, but I kept my mouth shut the way one does when they want a conversation to end. He seemed like a guy who had a ‘great story’ about whatever topic came up, from the weather to bear hunting. I did not like being the excuse for an old man to talk, so all I said was thank you but then he wanted me to know about his sister, who was pregnant with twins for forty-eight weeks. That was when I noticed that the baby was looking at me in a fairly hateful way. He was also really congested for some reason, so his glaring was broken apart by short huffs making him sound and look not unlike a cross baby boar. In a cute way, I mean. Cute, but not kidding.

  Before he drove off, Joan’s dad wanted me to know that I could call if I needed anything. It dawned on me in a vague way that he had not addressed Harrison or the kids at all in this conversation, nor had he mentioned his institutionalized daughter, even in passing. I blurted out some question about whether or not he was going to visit Joan while he was in Troubadour. I may have been possessed, I’m not sure. That’s certainly the way that most everyone there reacted to me.

  Bill Hutt shook his head low and looked like he wanted to spit sorrowfully, but he did not take his hat off.

  “Naw,” he said, just like that. He said, “Easy, I learned a long time ago that there’s only so much you can help a person that don’t want to be helped. In the end, you have to know that the good Lord will provide. You can raise your kiddies the right way, the way you see fit, but He knows all and He sees all. You don’t get to know more than Him. You have to trust that He don’t make mistakes.”

  I nodded. It was weird in the way it’s always weird when a basically malevolent person starts talking about religion to you, the way you expect their shadows to show horns and a triangle-y tail. Like that movie Night of the Hunter where Robert Mitchum’s evil reverend quotes Bible verses to his stepkids when what he really wants is to slit their little throats. We had a copy of the Night of the Hunter book, an old paperback with yellowed pages and an original price tag of thirty cents, in our bookcase back in the old house on Castro street when my dads were still together. I opened it once and flipped through the stiff, bad-smelling pages and found two small pictures cut down into squares from larger pictures. One was of a woman’s round ass as she bent over, the other of a woman’s massive breasts. These were from actual photos, not a magazine. In the ass-shot I recognized our living room sofa as the sofa the woman was bending over. It was this weird, corduroy but not quite corduroy material, gold-colored with white and brown swirling flowers—we’d had it for years. I remember thinking maybe whoever owned the sofa before us had also owned the book, and that’s when you know your denial is pretty bad, when there’s a part of your brain that thinks the other parts of your brain are idiots.

  Bill Hutt offered me the flat of cans of soup in his trunk, the idea of which made my stomach turn. Old man soup, possibly navy bean, in the trunk of a blazing hot old man car for maybe hundreds of years. The cats inside me revolted.

  “No, thanks,” I said, waving, and when he was far enough down the road, I looked at Harrison and the kids and said, “what the eff was that?”

  “He talked about offering you that soup the whole ride down,” said Sabrina, almost sadly. “The. Whole. Damn. Ride.”

  That was around the time when I figured out that she and I would be friends.

  JOAN STAYED IN THE HATCH FOR TWO WEEKS, AND THEN SHE WAS OUT FOR about twenty minutes and went back in for two weeks. In that time I drove Sabrina to see her three times, and was the one that picked her up when she was discharged for twenty minutes. I signed for her, got her outside and into the car, and before my belt was buckled she was asking for water. I went back into the hospital to fill a plastic cup at the bubbler and when I turned around she was right there, clutching her handbag.

  “I think they didn’t leave me in long enough,” she said, like she was a pan of brownies or something, still unset in the middle.

  THE TIMES I BROUGHT SABBY TO SEE HER MOTHER WERE THE HARDEST, because she didn’t want to go and I’d have to sweeten the deal in some way. Starbucks and Hot Topic, all the sorts of places we had to leave Troubadour to visit. Bright, paint-colored tight pants cut close to the leg with hanging silver chains. And of course a phone, cutting edge to the point of being instantly obsolete. We met in the middle when it came to food, me being a woman pregnant with twins and she being a teenager. We ate things of all manner, sloppily anointed with cheese. Melty, highly questionable foods. Crispy things that stained their wrappers with spots of clarity.

  “Mom says I’ll never get rid of my muffin top this way,” she said once, with equal parts self-deprecation and irritation.

  “You don’t have a fucking muffin top,” I said.

  “That’s not how she sees it. Muffin top is her favorit
e thing to say, that and baby-fat. I was like, ‘mom this is how girls get eating disorders,’ and she was like, ‘oh, ha-ha, el-oh-el! You know I love you!’”

  “Well, she does love you,” I said, because it felt like I was supposed to say it. It was pretty awkward, still, like when your mail carrier tries to talk to you about anything other than mail.

  “Well, yeah, obviously, I guess.” I admired that about her, her ability to get several thoughts into one breath. It seemed super time-effective. She was a teen; she didn’t have a moment to spare.

  Generally, the number of gifts or places we’d go was in direct correlation with how much time Sabrina would agree to spend with her mother. And I’m no fancy big-time lawyer, but I believe that’s what is known as bribery. At first it seemed uncouth to mention, but finally I said, “Yeah, so, you’re angry with your mom, or whatever,” and her face and hands and shoulders did a million things before she finally answered.

  “I’m not … mad. It’s just the whole drama of it that I can’t deal with. It’s just … okay, there’s nothing fun about being a kid, there is so little that is fun when you are a kid, and I can’t even have that. The goofing off. The laying around and hanging out with my friends and whatever. There’s never any time where I can just do nothing. I love Jamie … I love him so much, don’t get me wrong, but if I wanted a kid when I was fifteen, I would have just gone out and gotten pregnant.” Then she pulled down the visor mirror and smudged the liner under her eyes with her finger.

  “I should probably say some stuff about how hard it’s been for your mother over the past few months.” Actually, this was a thing that her father should have been saying to her. I understood that, Sab understood that, Sally understood that. Everyone understood it but Harrison, who could not be around Joan for more than two minutes without going off on some tangent. It was better this way, he explained, for me to take the lead. He explained that it was better for everyone.

  “Right, of course,” said Sabrina. “But even before that. Just disarray. Just everyone else is the victim.”