Thirst

by Benjamin Warner

  In his kitchen, he soaked another washcloth with the rest of the vinegar and brought it down to Laura. She was still lying down with her eyes closed. The washcloth was almost cool. When it touched her forehead, she squeezed her eyes tighter.

  “It’s a breeze,” she said.

  “Just a washcloth.”

  “It feels good, though, Eddie. Thanks.”

  “It’s daytime.”

  “I have a really bad headache.”

  “I know.”

  “You have one, too?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and then wished he hadn’t told her. She would worry about his headache on top of suffering from her own.

  “What else can we drink? Let’s really think about it.”

  “What else? Can you think of anything? Our own pee, I guess.”

  “Yeah. That’s what we should do.”

  “I think we’re a long way off from that.”

  “How long do we wait?”

  “It’ll come back on soon.”

  “What were you doing outside?”

  “I was helping out at the Davises’. Mike Jr.’s still not feeling good.”

  “Are you hungry? Everything we eat has water in it. We should be eating. You should tell the Davises to eat. No. I’ll do it.”

  She pressed up to her elbow and took the washcloth in her hand, blinking her eyes as if the lights had just come on.

  “You stay here,” Eddie said. “Rest.”

  “I’m feeling better. That washcloth did the trick. It was smart of you to think of that.”

  “There are still some hot dogs in the fridge.”

  “I’ll give them to the Davises.”

  “The Davises probably have their own hot dogs.”

  “I’ll check, then.”

  “It’s hotter out there than it is down here. A lot hotter.”

  She stood up and Eddie watched her climb the stairs very slowly. Then he lay down and stared up at the drop ceiling. The house was silent. If he could fall asleep, even for a few minutes, he might escape the pain in his head. But he couldn’t fall asleep.

  Bill Peters’s bloated face filled the space behind his eyes. It was too thick to push away. He stared at the ceiling again, but even there, he could see it.

  The handrail creaked on its screws where Laura leaned into it. He thought it was the sound of her leaving, but she was already coming back.

  Her skin was pale—Eddie could tell even in the bad light. The thirst had changed her summer tan. She’d taken two hamburger buns and spread mustard on them and put a slice of American cheese on top of each.

  “Eat this,” she said.

  “You saw Mike Jr.?”

  “I gave them the rest of our hot dogs. Patty says they’re still okay.”

  “Laur …”

  “It was only two of them.”

  “You need to eat, too.”

  “We have this. Okay?” she said. “Eat it.” She looked at him kindly, and he took the hamburger bun and ate it. It stuck in his mouth and he had to chew for a long time to get it to go down.

  They rested on the mattress, and with Laura there beside him, Eddie could fall asleep. It was a shallow, crackling sleep, though, and his dreams stung and spat at him like drops of water in a hot oiled pan.

  When he woke, his breath was shallow. Laura was awake and sitting above him.

  “I want to tell you something important,” she said.

  “What?” The word tore through the smoke in his mind like a rock, leaving a patch of clarity. He saw her eyes; they were only panels. Behind them was a sadness.

  “When I was fifteen,” she said, “I was really wild.”

  “I know,” he said. “You told me. The drugs and stuff.”

  “But it’s more than you know. I shouldn’t have kept it from you.”

  “What?”

  “I was pregnant.”

  He could feel her breath on his face—yes—he could reach out and squeeze her wrist, her arm, her thigh—but it was as if she existed, truly, at a greater distance and had left her body behind to fool him.

  He tried to feel her breath again, but it wasn’t there, and he reached to touch her arm, tightening his fingers on her skin. It seemed impossible that she’d lived a life that could contain all this—to have once been wild and fifteen, and now be sitting in this basement here with him.

  “Like a teen-pregnancy kind of thing?” he asked.

  “It didn’t feel like that to me. I was pregnant like anybody else.”

  “You got an abortion?” he said.

  “I had her.”

  He tried very hard to concentrate—to keep his mind from wandering. He could see her standing over Bill Peters’s body. She was carrying a child.

  “I was ashamed to tell you.”

  He waited for his voice to come. But it was like waiting for someone else to speak, and so all that came was silence.

  “I wasn’t ashamed of having her,” she said. “I was ashamed of something else.”

  “What’s her name?” The words left bluntly, loudly—beyond his control.

  “Her name was Sophie. She’s not alive anymore.”

  He wanted to say I’m sorry, but he wasn’t sorry for this life of hers he knew nothing about. He was interested. And then he was sad. He was sad that this was happening now. His thirst only deepened the sadness.

  “How did she die?” he asked.

  “It was when we lived in Philadelphia. My parents were raising her. She was going to be like my little sister. That’s what we agreed on. I was just a kid, too. She was two and a half already, and she was out in the garden. I was babysitting. I was supposed to be watching her, but I was inside watching the end of a TV show.”

  “Who was the dad?”

  “A boyfriend.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He was nobody. A kid in my class.”

  “You were having sex already. You were fifteen?”

  “Eddie …” He heard her crying, and it welled up inside him, too, but he experienced the tears as joy. That they could cry. That they were still in this together.

  “She was in the garden?” he said.

  “My dad used to try to teach her how to find purslane. It’s a weed you can eat. It was on the edges of the driveway. She didn’t really eat it, though. He’d hand it to her, and she’d put it in her mouth and chew, and the leaves would get stuck between her teeth and stick to her lips. She’d make these faces.”

  She stopped talking and looked at the ceiling.

  “I guess there was some on the sidewalk, too,” she said. “And across the street. I should have been watching her. The car never stopped.”

  Eddie could see the car. He could see the fragile bones and all the precious life contained around them.

  “I’m crying,” he said.

  “It happened a long time ago.”

  “I’m sad for your family—for everything.”

  “She was an angel. That’s what my parents say.”

  “You kept it a secret. Your life.”

  “But it doesn’t feel like my life, anymore. This is my life. You and me.”

  “Was it on the news?” he asked.

  She turned away from him. “Let’s pretend I’m two different people. Okay? Can you pretend you never knew about it? I needed to tell you, but now it’s done.”

  Eddie sat very still. “Why are you telling me, then?”

  She was quiet for a while. Then she laid her head down on the mattress.

  “Because …” she said. Her cheek was pressed so that it scrunched up against her mouth. She opened and closed her eyes. “I think I am again.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Pregnant.” She kept her eyes closed as she said the word.

  “What?” he said, again.

  “I took a test.”

  “A test.”

  “A couple of days ago.”

  “But you didn’t tell me.”

  She was quiet again.

  She whispe
red something he couldn’t hear.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “It’s okay. This is good. God, Laura. We’ll be okay.” He took her hand and squeezed it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She rolled onto her back and hugged her belly. “I don’t know if I still am,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know.”

  When she looked up, her eyes were red. It brought color to the rest of her face. She nuzzled her head into his thigh and shook like she was crying.

  Eddie watched the back of her head—how with the gentlest movement, strands of her hair would collapse to the side of her face.

  “You don’t know,” he said. “Only a doctor would know if you’ve lost it.”

  She shook her head and pushed herself flat out on the mattress.

  “Everything is just slowing down,” he said, “because we’re tired. We’re dehydrated. It’s natural.”

  He felt he had to go somewhere—to get someone to help her.

  “Stay here,” he said. “Don’t do anything.”

  He walked upstairs with a spike of pain in his head, and when he opened the door, the heat draped around him like a blanket. The street was empty, and he ran to the end of it. Then he ran back in the other direction. He ran on past the bigger homes, closer to Route 29—the homes of lawyers and doctors, maybe. He went up walkways and pounded on doors, which no one answered.

  Finally, a woman opened up. She blinked at the light. Her hair was unbrushed and twisted.

  “I need a doctor,” Eddie said. “It’s for my wife.”

  She lifted her hands to express their emptiness. She said, “The phones are still no good.”

  “Who lives here who could help?”

  “There aren’t any doctors here.”

  “In this whole neighborhood?”

  “Snyder on the corner’s a podiatrist.”

  “What number?”

  “What’s wrong with your wife?”

  “She needs medical attention.”

  “I have some supplies.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “Oh,” the woman said. “How far along?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Not very.”

  “She’s uncomfortable?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Try to keep her comfortable. She’s resilient. You’d be surprised. The human body is amazing. Especially a woman’s.”

  “Have you heard anything?”

  “From who?”

  “From the power people.”

  “I’m just waiting like everyone else. It can’t go on forever. People live here.”

  Eddie went to the podiatrist’s address and knocked. Then he pressed through the dead bushes and held his face up to a window. He kicked at a basement door until he had to sit on the concrete steps to keep his head from spinning. His arms and legs felt numb. He couldn’t make a fist anymore, and when he tried to stand up, the ground beneath him pitched.

  His vision was acting funny; he could see his fingers in a way that made his fingers seem to be the only part of his body that remained. There was writing on his palm. He breathed in and out slowly and a vision eclipsed the world around him. He was working, sitting in his office, and it was spring. He knew it was spring because the sky outside his window was as clear as a glass of water. From his office window, there was no horizon; there was nothing, until maybe, once a day, a plane would plunge through it. The sun lit up the room in bright white squares.

  He held his hand out into one of those illuminated patches, and looked again at the writing on his palm. It was faint and smudged from where he’d tried to wash it off that morning, and still too indelible to erase the memory of the night before. He and Laura had discovered a website enumerating the benefits of writing out an argument before allowing it to explode. Like passing notes in high school, the site had said. This defuses the building tension. But the previous night, he hadn’t been able to find a scrap of paper. He could still make out the word Who? underlined just below his thumb. He’d held it up to Laura like proof of his commitment to communicate the obviousness of it with her. But by then, it was too late. They’d already had their blowup.

  It had been a Thursday night, and she’d been on him again about going out.

  “We have work in the morning,” he’d told her. “I have zero interest in slogging through a day on no sleep.”

  “Going out is how we’ll meet people,” she’d said.

  “What people?” He’d widened his eyes and raised his hands in exasperation. They’d had this argument before, and still, this fundamental counterpoint remained unanswered. “Who are they? Who is it that you want to meet?”

  “Anyone.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “It’s just the two of us, Eddie.”

  “Isn’t that the point?” he’d asked.

  “Where are all our friends? We used to have friends.”

  “We grew up, I guess. We don’t need friends anymore—we have each other. Look at your parents.”

  “Eddie …”

  “You’re my friend. We don’t need anyone else.”

  “We do, though. It can’t just be us. It’s like we’re floating.”

  Eddie sat in his office, staring at his palm and remembering it. He closed his eyes, but the brightness of the day turned his vision red against his eyelids. When he opened them, Scott from fund-raising was leaning on his door.

  “Some hot chick here to see you,” Scott said.

  “What?”

  “Says she’s your wife, but no way that’s true.”

  Eddie walked through the cubicles at the center of the office and felt the eyes of his coworkers on him. Some of them smiled openly. Laura was standing by reception, holding a brown paper bag. She was in her work clothes: a blue skirt and black top. She wore a necklace with a wooden pendant that Eddie had bought her for their anniversary.

  “Hey, there,” she said, trying to be playful as she did when she was trying to apologize. She leaned against the receptionist’s desk. “Jenny says you won’t mind being hijacked. She says you’re never busy anyway.” She looked at Jenny in a way that allowed her to be part of the ribbing.

  Eddie’s voice was sharper than he intended. “What are you doing here?” he said.

  Jenny dropped her head down to her papers, and Laura looked at him with hurt in her eyes.

  He reached around her waist to guide her through the heavy door into the stairwell. He didn’t want her apology. He didn’t want her martyring herself so close to his lunch hour.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” he whispered.

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  “Well, good,” she said. “That was the point.”

  Her voice echoed thinly against the cement walls of the stairwell.

  “What’d you bring?” he said.

  “Do you actually want to know?”

  “Yeah. Of course I do.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Sorry, Laur. I do.”

  “You embarrassed me out there. I was doing something nice.”

  “I know … I was being stupid.”

  “Cheesecake,” she said. “Not enough for everyone, though. I thought we could eat it in your office.”

  “It will be strange if you go back there with me.”

  She shook her head and smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “Do you realize I don’t know any of the people you work with?”

  “They’re just people.”

  “Are they nice? Are they your friends?”

  “They’re nice.”

  “I don’t get it, then.”

  Eddie brushed the edge of her cheek the way he might a delicate fabric.

  He said, “Maybe we should have a baby.”

  Laura flinched, as if startled by a loud noise outside, though the stairwell was soundproof.

  “Are you ready?” he asked. “I think I’m ready.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

&nbs
p; “It would be another person.”

  “That’s not the solution. That’s a different problem.”

  “It’s a problem?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She put her hand on her forehead as if to judge the temperature the discussion had taken her to. “I have to sit down,” she said.

  She sat on the step, her skirt hugging up and exposing the tight skin at the bend of her knee. The stairs were lipped with crosshatched edgings that looked like graphite. Something about it made him sad—that brutal edge so close to Laura’s knee. There was nothing in either one of their bodies as permanent as those emergency stairs.

  When he looked down into her face, it was gone.

  It was Wemmick’s face, instead.

  Eddie stared, overcome.

  His hair! His shirt! His post-office mouth! He could see every bit of it.

  “Wemmick,” he said.

  Wemmick squinted at him, his arms behind his back, as if holding a surprise. His mouth remained rectangular as he spoke.

  “Hey, pal,” Wemmick said.

  But the voice was coming from somewhere else.

  Eddie was kneeling on the cement walkway. It took him a moment. He saw the dead shrubs at his sides. It was the podiatrist’s house. His face was six inches from the front door. He was staring at the mail slot.

  “You locked out?” the voice said.

  “Who are you?” Eddie asked.

  “Station Sixteen, what’s left of us.”

  Eddie raised his face into the sun. It was a man in a tight blue T-shirt with a firehouse insignia on the breast. Two other men stood behind him.

  “You have water?” Eddie said.

  “You’re okay,” the man said. “Get inside. This your place?”

  “No.”

  “Go back to your place, then. It’s too hot to be outside.”

  One of them leaned over and held out a long plastic nozzle that reached to the pack on his back. Eddie put it between his teeth and sucked. The water stung his tongue and tore at the skin down his throat.

  “My wife …” he said.

  “We’re coming back. Don’t worry. There’s all kinds of madness in the city. It’s safe up here. You’re lucky to be in the burbs.”

  “What should we do?”

  “We’ll be back.”

  “The stream back there is burnt.”

  “It’s everywhere. They told us the reflecting pool was in flames. The Anacostia, too.”