Hot Springs

by Geoffrey Becker

  “The house is my dad’s, and he is not rich. When he bought this place, it was dirt cheap. Everything in this neighborhood was. As for money, I got some insurance money when my mother died, all right? Not much, but some.”

  “I thought the whole thing with giving up Emily was because you needed money.”

  “Well, that just shows how little you know, doesn’t it? You think I sold my own baby? Is that what you think?”

  “No, but you said they bought her. You said it, not me.”

  “This is none of your business,” she said. “We are none of your business.”

  He finished his sandwich, chewing slowly. “You won’t leave with me, and you won’t let me stay with you.” The lower halves of the big dining-room windows were pebbled glass, but through the upper part he could see the fire escapes on the next building, black against the painted red brick. Dust motes hung in the air, and there were cobwebs up against the crown molding in the corner. “Is that what I’m hearing?”

  “That’s the size of it. I’m sorry you came all this way.”

  He closed his eyes. “Goddamn it,” he said. He brought his fist down on the table hard, the contact rattling everything on it, his plate, his glass, the tarnished brass candelabra.

  “Don’t,” she said. “You made it happen. You weren’t reliable. I need reliable.”

  “You can’t do this alone. I know you. You don’t even want to do this alone.”

  “I’m putting on my mask,” she said. “You should see about yours.”

  FIFTEEN

  A little after midnight, Landis drained his fifth beer, asked the bartender to change a five for quarters, pushed back from the bar, and headed out to the street. If he was going to sleep another night in the truck, he figured he might as well do it drunk. But he wasn’t tired yet, so he went walking around the neighborhood, peering at his reflection in the window of the dry cleaner’s, reading the lost-dog and yard-sale notices taped to the streetlight outside Neon, the coffee bar. There was a pay phone across the street, and he went over to it.

  Robin picked up on the second ring. “Hey,” he said. “Remember me?”

  “I was just thinking about you,” she said.

  “Yeah? Anything interesting?”

  “Very. Where are you?”

  He looked around. At the bus stop at the end of the block, a big, Nordic-looking man in a stained tracksuit was muttering to himself angrily. Seventies rock rasped out into the street through a tinny speaker above the door of a burgers-and-beer place. The night air felt like something pressed out of a steam iron. “Hard to say. Between a rock and a hard place, maybe.”

  “I quit the dentist’s office.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Yeah. I’m going back to school, I’ve decided. This way, I get to buy school supplies. I love that, you know? Getting pens and notebooks and stuff—you just feel this sense of possibility. Of course, it never lasts. But I’m looking forward, I really am.”

  “School for what?”

  “Nothing in particular. Just school.”

  A bus pulled up, but the Nordic-looking man did not get on. Moths swam and fluttered in the light of the streetlamp above him. “I’m in Baltimore,” he said. “First time.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Not so great. Like it went a few rounds with a much bigger, meaner city. Like it could use a vacation someplace nicer. But I guess it’ll do.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. He listened to a saxophone tracing a thin, vertical melody into the air. “I have to go,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. But I’m glad you called. I hope you will again. You take care of yourself, and you take care of them, too.”

  “I don’t know. How do you take care of someone who doesn’t want it? Who won’t let you?”

  “Just go ahead and do it anyway,” she said. “Don’t be so damn polite.”

  He awoke early the next morning to the sound of birds. His back felt like someone had kicked it with a steel-toed boot, and he badly needed to piss. He kept some foam in the back of the truck, but it hardly constituted a mattress, and he’d had to sleep tucked awkwardly in among his belongings, aware the whole time of the odor of gasoline. Clearly, he was getting too old for this. After climbing out, he took his toothbrush and walked back to the little commercial district to get some breakfast and clean up. There were plenty of signs posted in the neighborhood, and he figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find himself a cheap flop for the short term. The long term, well, he’d have to see.

  At a place called Joe Mama’s, just off the main drag, he met a college girl who let him use her cell phone. “Go ahead,” she said. “I never get near to using up my minutes.” She was typing things into a computer. He told her thanks and tried some numbers from the City Paper, but it was still early and no one was picking up.

  “You’ll find something,” the girl told him. “This neighborhood is full of ratholes. I lived in one last year. I woke up one night and there was a kid in the next room walking around talking to himself. I screamed and he went back out the window he’d come in. This year I found someplace a lot nicer. Anyhow, you just have to look around a bit.”

  The linoleum-covered stairs sagged noticeably to the right, and as Landis followed the fat man up them, he imagined the whole thing giving way, and the two of them in free fall toward the cat-piss-covered floor. It was going to happen to someone, someday. The row houses in this neighborhood were like old teeth—you’d get a couple of strong healthy ones, but then one like this, decayed and rotten and stinking and soft. The fat man wheezed with the effort, the back of his white nylon shirt soaked through with sweat. On the third floor, in the back, was apartment five. The number was glued on and crooked. Some previous tenant had left stickers with the names of what Landis figured were local bands plastered on the cheap door: Skull Divers, Rainbow Pest, Enigma. He could imagine these bands and the bars you’d have to go in to hear them, and it made him feel old. And yet, if he wanted eventually to work sound here, these were some of the people he’d be getting to know.

  “No drugs,” the fat man said, as Landis handed over the cash. “Got me?”

  “OK,” said Landis. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m serious about that.”

  “So am I.”

  “Refrigerator’s new. I hadda throw the old one out.”

  “Nice,” Landis said, admiring it. It was so undersized he doubted you could stand a carton of milk inside.

  “I ordinarily wouldn’t do this, you understand, but my last tenant died. Usually, I like a commitment of at least nine months. You are paying well below market rates.”

  Landis nodded. “I appreciate that.”

  “That’s a new mattress on that bed, too.”

  “Excellent.”

  “You’re not a student?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not a talker, either, huh? That’s all right. I respect a person’s privacy. Just make sure you respect my building and we’ll get along fine.” He summoned something like a smile. “Know what was in that refrigerator?”

  “Do I want to?”

  “Eggs. The guy kept buying eggs, then not throwing them out when they expired. Must have been two hundred of them in there.” He put out a hand. Landis counted two hundred and fifty dollars and gave it to him. He handed Landis a key and heaved himself back out the door.

  When Landis was alone, he used the tiny bathroom, which looked clean enough, though he detected a hint of old urine smell. He hated to think about what was under the layers of cracked linoleum. The apartment had been a bedroom at some point in the building’s past, before someone started carving it up. Wood paneling hid what were probably crumbling plaster walls, the laths showing through like ribs. The paneling was warped and bulged oddly in places, and Landis thought you’d want to avoid staring too hard at it if you were drunk.

  He sat on the bed and looked out the window. He was surprised to discover that he could just
see the back of Bernice’s father’s house across the alley and a few houses up—the wooden balcony that was built on to the second floor, the broken shutter that hung askew at one side of the back window beside it. The guy was letting the place go to shit. Houses needed to be lived in. Getting down onto the floor, he did a couple of push-ups, holding his breath as he did so against the foreign, slightly sick aroma of the gray carpeting. He wasn’t used to this weather, not after nearly twenty years in the West. His skin felt clammy and he was aware of a ripe smell rising out of his work boots. It had taken all day to find this place, and he was tired, tired.

  After two trips to the truck, he’d moved in what he needed. For now, this would do. He’d never cared much about his surroundings, really, and he figured if you took actual square feet, this place probably wasn’t much worse than his old trailer. But there he’d had the outside. Many evenings he’d sat out staring down on the lights of the sprawling city, drinking a beer, pretending he owned the world. It hadn’t been happiness, exactly, not in the sense that he’d always assumed people were supposed to be happy, either with a lot of money or a big loving family, or maybe pursuing some dream like photographing bears at the South Pole or having sex with movie stars, which he assumed was probably the ultimate happiness, judging from magazine covers. But there had been a stillness, the sky over him a great inverted bowl full of stars, and some nights that was exactly what he wanted.

  He had a quick nap, then took a shower and put on clean clothes, walked to the same bar he’d been in last night and ordered a burger and fries, ate in the smoke and friendly noise of the place. When he stepped back out into the early evening an hour later, it was with the pleasant sensation of a full stomach and of having had a couple of beers among men. He could get along here. He could get along anywhere. He walked to the big house and rang the bell.

  This time Bernice answered. She had on tight jeans and a shiny blue top that exposed her shoulders and emphasized her breasts. She looked good, going-out good, and he hoped it was for him.

  “It isn’t the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” he said. “And I’m not running for office. I’m just letting you know I’m still here.”

  “Where did you stay?” She bit at her thumbnail nervously.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I worried about you.”

  “I slept in the truck. I’ve done it before. But today I rented a room, one street over, on Frederick.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I just walked around. There are signs all over advertising rooms. I saw one of these old houses with eight mailboxes out front. How the hell do they get eight apartments out of three floors?” He leaned his hand up against the door frame. “Do I have to stand out here all night?”

  She let him in. They sat again in the parlor. “Don’t you think this is all a little ridiculous?” he said. “We love each other. Let’s move on from there.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Not even close. A few beers. Should have seen me last night, though.” He could see there was something wrong. “What?”

  “They called today.”

  “Who did?”

  “They did.”

  “Bernice, you have to say things in a way that makes sense. Who called?”

  She pointed up toward the ceiling. Her face seemed pale to him, and her eyes, though bright, looked tired and shadowed.

  “Emily? Is she OK?”

  “She’s upstairs talking to Jesus. Listen, they know where we are. Worse, they know who we are. I don’t know why I ever thought they wouldn’t.”

  “Tell me exactly what happened, all right? Who called?”

  “Tessa Harding.”

  “And how did she get the number?” But even as he said it, he was pretty sure he knew. “What did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t tell her anything. When I heard her voice, I hung up the phone.”

  He stood and went to the front window, peering out over the top of the shutters. There was nothing unusual, just parked cars and the green exuberance of the trees, a stylish-looking woman in a short skirt and heels walking a small, brown dog.

  “This is bad, right?”

  “Let’s get Emily,” he said. “We bring her downstairs and we talk to her. Ask her what she wants. That’s what they did with me when my parents split. My old man had this woman he used to see a couple times a week, and then my mom started up with the neighbor. So Dad moved out and rented this dump on Route 1 that came with a broken-down MG in the yard. Told me if I came with him, he’d teach me about cars and we’d fix it up together. That was going to be the big prize.”

  “And?” she asked. “What did you choose?”

  “I picked her.”

  “Because you already knew he was a liar, and that stuff about the MG wasn’t true?”

  “No, he did give me the MG. We got it running, just like he said. I crashed it a couple of years later, wrapped it right around a phone pole. Lucky again—I just walked away. I chose her because I thought that of the two of them, she was the one who was going to need the most help.” He belched, tasted onions, pictured the small house in West Windsor, the green living room with the RCA color TV on its wheelable metal stand, the neat rows of Reader’s Digest and Condensed Books by the mantel. “A lady came, with a briefcase and greasy brown hair pulled back. She said she was from the court, and I figured I was going to jail—that someone had found out about the LSD I kept hidden in the toe of my old basketball sneaker. Then I realized it wasn’t about me at all, it was about my parents.”

  “You were how old?”

  “Fifteen, I guess. It didn’t stick, though. They got back together two years later.”

  “Well, Emily is five. She can’t make a decision.”

  “Even so,” he said. “I think we should find out. What if she wants to go home? It makes a difference.”

  “I’m her real mother,” said Bernice.

  “What do you think that even means to her? She doesn’t know about sex, does she? She probably thinks when God wants there to be another person on earth, he just beams them down with a big laser transporter.”

  “It’s not your problem what she does or doesn’t know.”

  But then she materialized in the doorway. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi, honey,” said Bernice. “You surprised us. What’s going on upstairs?”

  “We’re having a tea party.” She came in and sat beside Bernice, leaning her head against her shoulder.

  “Oh, good. Tea.”

  “Emily,” said Landis, trying to sound upbeat. “Do you ever miss your other house?”

  “Hey,” said Bernice.

  “I’m just asking.”

  Emily looked right at him. “Where do you go when you’re not here?”

  “I go around the corner. Just one street away. I’m renting a very nice room. You can come see it sometime, if you want.”

  “Can I have a Fig Newton?” she asked Bernice.

  Bernice touched the side of Emily’s face. “Still a little warm. Anyway, of course you can. But first, answer Mr. Landis’s question. Do you sometimes, ever, even a tiny bit, wish you were back at your other house, your Colorado house?”

  She nodded.

  “But you like it here, too, right?”

  “Uh huh,” she said.

  “See?” said Bernice. “She knows what’s what.” She stared down at her hands for a moment. Outside, a light rain had begun, the tapping on the roof over the front porch reminding Landis of the way rain had sounded from inside his trailer. “OK,” she said. “Let’s get cookies. Then in about a half hour or so, we’ll have dinner.”

  All three of them went into the kitchen, and Bernice found the package and handed two cookies to Emily, who ran off with them, back toward the entrance hall and the front stairs. The kitchen counters were a mess, with plates and pots left out, and blue plastic Safeway bags strewn around from where Bern
ice had unpacked groceries and simply left them.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m getting around to it. Stop judging me.”

  “The way I see it,” said Landis, “we have two choices. We can either run, or we can stay here and get a lawyer. Because that’s where this is going, eventually.”

  “You mean I have choices. You are just some person who followed me from Colorado.”

  The phone rang and they both looked at it. “It’s her,” said Bernice. “I know it.” When she made no move to answer, Landis picked it up.

  “Hello?” said a woman’s voice.

  “Hello,” he replied.

  “Oh,” said the voice. “I didn’t expect—please, can I just talk to her?”

  “Depends,” said Landis. “Talk to who?”

  “Emily.”

  “Hold on.” He held his hand over the receiver. “She wants to talk to Emily.”

  “She can’t.” Bernice spoke in a hot whisper. “I told you not to answer.”

  “No, you didn’t. You just said it was her.”

  “Well, now what?”

  “I don’t know. What’s the difference, really?”

  “Are you serious? What’s the difference?”

  Landis put the phone to his ear again. “Listen,” he said, politely, “do you think you could call back? This isn’t the best time.” Then he hung up.

  They stood staring at each other. Outside, the rain was picking up, as was the wind, and the old glass rattled in the window frames. The phone rang again, and they let it go for a while, but after the sixth ring, Landis picked up again. “Yes?” he said.

  “When?” asked the voice. “When should I call back?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “How about later on? Around nine?”

  “She goes to bed at eight thirty. Do you put her to bed at eight thirty?”

  “I don’t know. Right around then.”

  “And give her a bath?”

  “Of course. All right, 8:30.”

  “Can I read her something?”