Equal Love

by Peter Ho Davies

  Henry looks past the colonel’s shoulder and out the picture window. He does not smile. It’s October, and the first snow is beginning to fall in the White Mountains.

  “Anyway, I snatched them up, and then the leader started in about why my teeth were different from Henry’s, so I had to explain all about dentures, about how people lose their teeth as they get older or, like Henry here, in accidents. I thought it was funny they were so flummoxed by dentures, but you know, now that I come to think about it, I don’t remember seeing their teeth. They had these thin little slits for mouths, like I said before, and when they talked it was as if they didn’t move their lips.”

  “Did they speak English?” the colonel asks. “Or was it more like telepathy?”

  “Maybe,” Helen says. “Like voices in my head, you mean? That certainly could explain it.”

  “And their fingers?” the colonel asks seriously. “Would you say they had suckers on them? Small pads maybe?”

  Helen pauses and looks at him hard. “No,” she says very clearly. “I would have remembered something like that.”

  There is an awkward pause before she goes on more brightly.

  “Anyway, to cut a long story short, I thought the whole thing about the dentures was funny and I remember laughing, but it must have been one of those nervous laughs, because afterward when I looked at my hand where I’d been gripping them, I’d been holding them so tight that the teeth had left bruises.” And here Helen holds out her hand to the colonel. He leans forward and takes it and turns it to the light. Henry can just see the crescent of purpling spots in the flesh of her palm.

  Helen nudges him. Henry doesn’t move for a moment, but then he decides. She’s his wife. He’ll try to help. He holds a handkerchief over his mouth and slips his plate out. He passes it to her, and with her free hand she places it in her palm so that the false teeth lie over the bruises. The denture glistens wetly, and Henry looks away in embarrassment.

  “See,” Helen says triumphantly. “Now that’s evidence, isn’t it?”

  “It’s something, ma’am,” the colonel says, peering at Henry’s teeth. “It’s really something.”

  …

  Henry has tried his damnedest to remember what Helen’s talking about. But he can’t do it. It’s the strangest thing, he thinks, because he recalls the rest of the trip—start to finish—vividly.

  They’d gotten up at five A.M., packed the car, and been on the road to Niagara by six. Henry wanted to get a good start on the day. It was September, peak foliage. “What impossible colors,” Helen breathed, sliding across the seat to lean against him. “Better than Cinerama,” he told her. He’d sung a few bars of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and made her laugh, and she’d done her best Dinah Shore: “Drive your Chev-ro-lay, through the U.S.A.” She’d got impatient with him the evening before for simonizing the car, bringing out the gloss in the two-tone paint job. Now, he saw, she was proud.

  But when they stopped for brunch at a diner in upstate New York, Henry felt uneasy. The din in the place died when they entered, and the waitress seemed short with them. He ordered coffee and a doughnut, but Helen had the short stack and took her time over her coffee. When he called for the check, she looked up and asked what his hurry was, and he said they still had a ways to go. Didn’t he know she had to let her coffee cool before she could drink it? “Have a refill or a cigarette,” she said, pushing the pack of Chesterfields across the table, but he told her a little sharply he didn’t want either. He felt people watching him. Helen finished her coffee and went to the bathroom, leaving him alone for five long terrible minutes. He could hear a child crying somewhere behind him, but he didn’t turn to look. When she came back he hurried her out before she could retie her scarf, leaving a big tip. He had to stop to urinate fifteen minutes later and she made fun of him for not going earlier. “You’re like a little boy,” she said, and so he told her how he had felt in the diner.

  “Oh, Henry,” she said. “You were imagining it.”

  It made him mad that she wouldn’t believe him, wouldn’t take his word for it, but he didn’t want to spoil the trip with a fight and he let her half convince him, because he knew it would make her feel better. He played with the radio, pushing buttons until he found some Harry Belafonte. Helen just didn’t notice things the way he did. He loved her for it, this innocence, cherished it, though he couldn’t share it (found his own sensitivity sharper than ever, in fact). That night when he stopped at two motels and was told that they were full, he didn’t make anything of it, and when she said as they left one parking lot, “You’d think they’d turn off their vacancy sign,” he just let it ride.

  “Must be a lot of lovers in town,” she added, and squeezed his thigh.

  When they finally found a room at a place called the Falls Inn, she pulled him to her and he started to respond, but when she told him she’d forgotten her diaphragm, he pulled away.

  “It’ll be okay,” she told him. “Just this once.” She clung to him for a moment, holding him against her, before he rolled off. They lay side by side staring at the ceiling as if it were the future. After the second miscarriage, Helen had been warned that she might not be able to carry a baby to term. “We can’t take the risk,” Henry told her softly, but she turned away. “You’re afraid,” she said, curled up with her face to the wall. The knobs of her spine reminded him of knuckles. “I’m afraid of losing you,” he said at last.

  He told her he’d go out and get prophylactics, but driving around in the car, he couldn’t. He stopped outside one store and sat for fifteen minutes, waiting for the other cars in the lot to leave, listening to the engine tick as it cooled. He was afraid of losing her, he knew, though the admission, so abject and ineffectual, shamed him. But behind that fear was another—a dim, formless dread of his own children and what they might mean for the precarious balance of his marriage, which made him shudder. There was one more car in the lot, but before it left a police cruiser pulled in, and Henry backed out and drove slowly back to the motel.

  When they were first married, Helen used to call him by a pet name, Big, burying the tight curls of her permanent against his chest. He would stroke her neck and answer in the same slightly plaintive baby talk, “Little” or “Little ’un.” It was how they had comforted themselves when they felt small and puny beside their love for each other, but remembering it now only made him feel hopeless before the childlessness that loomed over them. Helen was asleep when he got in, or pretending, and he lay down beside her as gently as possible, not touching but aware of her familiar warmth under the covers.

  The next day had started better. They’d gone to the falls and been overwhelmed by the thundering white wall of water. They bought tickets for the Maid of the Mist. Henry bounced on the springy gangway and made her scream. They laughed at themselves in the yellow sou’esters and rain hats the crew passed out and then joined the rest of the identically dressed crowd at the bow railings. “Oh look,” Helen said, pointing out children, like miniature adults in their slickers and hats, but Henry couldn’t hear her over the crash of the falls. “Incredible,” he yelled, leaning forward, squinting in the spray as if in bright light. He could taste the mist in his mouth, feel the gusts of air displaced as the water fell. Suddenly he wanted to hold his wife, but when he turned to Helen, she was gone. He stumbled from the railing looking for her, but it was impossible to identify her in the crowd of yellow slickers. He felt a moment of panic, like when she’d left him in the restaurant. He bent down to see under the hats and hoods of those around him, conscious that he was startling them but not caring. In the end he found her in the cabin, her head in her hands. She told him she’d thrown up. She didn’t like boats much in general, she reminded him, and looking at the falls had made her dizzy. “I didn’t want you to miss them, though,” she told him, and he could see she’d been crying. He put his arm around her, and they sat like that until the trip was over. The other passengers began to file into the cabin around them, taking off t
heir hats and jackets and hanging them on pegs until only Henry and Helen were left in theirs.

  They had planned to go on into Canada that afternoon, the first time they’d been out of the country since Korea, but instead they turned around, headed back the way they’d come. It was late afternoon, but Henry figured they could be home by midnight if he got a clear run and put his foot down.

  …

  The colonel has a few more questions, and he asks if they’d mind talking to him separately. Henry feels himself stiffen, but Helen says, “Of course.” He can tell she wants to go first, so he gets up and says he’ll take a walk. He’ll be back in about fifteen minutes. He steps out into the hall and finds his topcoat and hat and calls for Denny, Helen’s dog. He walks out back first, and from the yard he can see Helen inside with the colonel. He wonders what she’s saying as the dog strains at the leash. Probably talking more about her dreams. She thinks maybe the little gray men took one of her eggs. She thinks she remembers being shown strange children. They had agreed that she wouldn’t talk about this, but Henry realizes suddenly he doesn’t trust her. It makes him shudder to think of her telling these things to a stranger.

  When he takes Denny around the front of the house, he is startled to find a black man in his drive, smoking. The young man drops the cigarette quickly when Denny starts yapping. He is in an air force uniform, and Henry realizes that this must be the colonel’s driver. He feels suddenly shy. He tells him, “You startled me,” and the young airman says, “Sorry, sir.” And after a moment, that seems all there is to say. That sir. Henry lets Denny pull him up the drive, whining. The poor dog hasn’t been out for hours and as soon as they’re at the end of the drive squats and poops in full view of the house. Henry holds the leash slack and looks the other way. When they walk back a few minutes later, the airman is in the colonel’s car. The windows are fogged. Henry knocks on the driver’s-side glass.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  The airman hesitates, but his breath, even in the car, is steaming.

  “I could bring it out,” Henry offers, and the young man says, “Thank you.” And it’s the lack of a sir that makes Henry happy. He takes Denny inside and comes back out in a few minutes with two cups of coffee and climbs into the car with the boy. He sets them on the dash, where they make twin crescents of condensation on the windshield. When Henry sips his coffee, he realizes he’s left his teeth inside with Helen, and he’s suddenly self-conscious. He thinks he must look like an old fool, and he wants to be silent, keep his mouth shut, but it’s too late. The airman asks him how he lost them.

  “A fight,” Henry says. And he tells a story he’s never told Helen, how he got waylaid by a couple of crackers when he was just a boy. They wanted to know his mama’s name, but for some reason he refused to say. “I just call her Mama,” he said. “Other folks call her Mrs. Hull.” But the boys wanted to know her first name, “her Chrustian name.” Henry just kept on saying he didn’t know it and then he tried to push past them and leave, but they shoved him back and lit into him. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says now over his coffee, “but it was very important to me that those fellas not know my mama’s name. Mrs. Hull’s all I’d say. I knew it, of course, although I never called her by it or even rightly thought of her by it. But I’d be damned if I’d tell them, and they beat the tar out of me for keeping that secret.”

  “Yeah, but I bet those boys got their share,” the airman says, and Henry smiles and nods. He can’t be more than eighteen, this driver. They talk about the service. The boy is frustrated to be a driver in the air force. He wants to fly. Henry tells him how he was put in the signals corps: “They liked having me fetch and carry the messages.” The boy, Henry thinks, is a good soldier, and he feels a surge of pride in him. Bur then the coffee is finished and Helen is at the front door.

  “Henry!” She doesn’t see him in the car. “Henry!” He’s suddenly embarrassed and gets out of the car quickly. “There you are,” she says. “It’s your turn.”

  Henry ducks his head back into the car to take the empty mugs and sees the airman looking at him strangely. “Eunice,” he offers awkwardly. The young man’s face is blank. “My mother’s name. Eunice Euphonia Hull. In case you was wondering.” He closes the car door with his rear, moves toward the house. Inside, he hands Helen the two mugs, and she takes them to wash up.

  Back on the sofa, Henry sees that his dentures are lying beside the plate of sandwiches, but he feels uncomfortable about putting them in now.

  The colonel asks him to describe his experiences, and Henry repeats the whole story. They’d been making good time until the cop stopped them around ten-thirty, and even then Henry had still expected to make it home by one. He explains how they noticed the lights a little after that and about twenty minutes later how they began to sense that the object was following them, how he had sped up, how it had kept pace. Finally he describes it swooping low over the road in front of them and hovering a hundred yards to their right. He’d stopped, still thinking it could be a chopper, and got out with the binoculars, leaving Helen in the still running car. But after getting a closer look he’d become uneasy, run back, and they had left in a hurry. They couldn’t have been stopped more than ten minutes, but when they got home it was almost dawn, hours later than they expected.

  “Mrs. Hull,” the colonel says, “claims you were screaming when you came back to the car. About being captured.”

  Henry feels a moment of irritation at Helen.

  “I was yelling,” he says. “I was frightened. I felt that we were in danger, although I couldn’t tell you why. I just knew this wasn’t anything I understood.”

  He pauses, but the colonel seems to be waiting for him to go on.

  “I was in Korea. I mean, I’ve been under fire. I was never afraid like this.”

  “These dreams of your wife’s,” the colonel asks. “Can you explain them at all?”

  “She believes them,” Henry says quickly. “Says they’re more vivid than any dreams she remembers.”

  “Can you think of anything else that might explain them?”

  Henry pauses. He could end it all here, he thinks. He looks at his dentures on the coffee table, feels the flush of humiliation. He opens his mouth, closes it, slowly shakes his head.

  The colonel waits a moment, as if for something more. Then: “Any dreams yourself?”

  “No, sir,” Henry says quickly. “I don’t remember my dreams.”

  The colonel clicks his pen—closed, open, closed—calls Helen back in, thanks them both for their time. He declines another sandwich, puts his cap under his arm, says he must be going, and they follow him out to where his driver holds the door for him. The car backs out, and they watch its taillights follow the curve of the road for a minute. Henry wonders if the colonel and his driver will talk. If the colonel will make fun of their story. The thought of the young man laughing at him makes him tired. But then he thinks, no, the colonel and the airman won’t share a word. The boy will just drive, and in the back seat the colonel will watch him. Henry feels like he let the boy down, and is suddenly ashamed.

  They stand under the porch light until the car is out of sight. “Well,” Helen says, and he sees she’s glowing, almost incandescent with excitement. “I think we did the right thing, don’t you?” He feels his own mood like a shadow of hers. Bugs ping against the bulb and he flicks the switch off. In the darkness, they’re silent for a moment, and then he hears the squeal of the screen door as she goes inside.

  It’s not late, but Helen tells him she’s about done in. The interview went on for almost four hours. She goes up to bed, and Henry picks up in the living room, carries the cups and plates through to the kitchen, fills the sink to soak them. The untouched sandwiches he covers in Saran Wrap and slides into the refrigerator. He drops his dentures in a glass of water, watches them sink. Then he goes up and changes into his pajamas, lays himself down beside his already sleeping wife, listens to her steady breathing
, dreams about the future.

  A few weeks later they’ll receive an official letter thanking them for their cooperation but offering no explanation for what they’ve seen. Henry hopes Helen will let the matter drop there, but she won’t. She wants answers, and she feels it’s their duty to share these experiences. “What if other people have had them?” They’ll meet with psychiatrists. They’ll undergo therapy. Henry shows symptoms of nervous anxiety, the doctors will say, but they won’t know why. Eventually, almost a year later, under hypnosis, Henry will recall being inside the ship. He and Helen will listen to a tape of his flat voice describing his experiences. Tears will form in Helen’s eyes.

  “It’s as if I’m asleep,” he’ll say on the tape. “Or sleepwalking. Like I’m drugged or under some mind control.”

  Under hypnosis, Henry will remember pale figures stopping their car. He’ll recall the ship—a blinding wall of light—and being led to it, as if on an invisible rope, dragged and stumbling, his hands somehow tied behind him. He’ll remember being naked, surrounded, the aliens touching him, pinching his arms and legs, peeling his lips back to examine his gritted teeth, cupping and prodding his genitals. It’ll all come back to him: running through the woods, the breeze creaking in the branches, tripping and staring up at the moonlit trees. “Like great white sails,” he’ll hear himself say thickly as the spool runs out.

  Afterward, he’ll tell Helen in a rage he’s finished with shrinks, but in the months that follow she’ll call more doctors and scientists. She’ll say she wants to write a book. Something extraordinary has happened to them. They’ve been chosen for a purpose. She’ll talk to journalists. Henry will refuse to discuss it further. They’ll fight, go days without speaking.

  Tonight, in his dream, Henry wakes with a violent shudder, listens to his heart slow. He’s lying in bed with Helen, he tells himself. He can feel her warm breath on his back. She rolls over beside him, the familiar shifting and settling weight, but then he feels the strange sensation of the mattress stiffening, the springs releasing. He opens his eyes and sees his wife rising above the bed, inch by inexorable inch, in a thin blue light.