by Deb Caletti
“Here it is.” He held up the key, stuck it in the knob and turned. Cold air hit my face. These people were not home. These people hadn’t been home for a while. Travis took off his shoes. “Will you get in here?”
“Travis, no. I don’t know what you’re doing, but these people are not home.” The ugly seed was building to panic. I felt the way I did that day in the water, when he held me under. I needed air. I heard the crickets chirping and nothing else; there was only silence and that cold, empty air. Suddenly my stomach felt sick with the fluttery wings of fear.
“I’m not going in there.”
“Shit, I didn’t think you of all people would be this skittish.” His voice softened. “Ruby, relax.” He held his hand out to me, and I took it. He pulled me gently inside. “I know they aren’t here. They’re on vacation, all right? I’m feeding their cats, for Christ’s sake.”
Cats. My heart was still pounding, questioning whether it was safe to slow down or not. “You said we were going to see your friends.”
“I did not. I said we were going to their house. Can we talk about this inside, please?” I took off my shoes, same as Travis, and went in.
I started to feel foolish. I actually did. And relieved, too. “I’m sorry, Travis,” I said. The tile floor was cold on my feet. The whole place felt refrigerated. It smelled unfamiliar—floral, old wood, some kind of lemony furniture polish. I followed him through the kitchen to an antique-filled living room dominated by a marble fireplace. The streetlights shining through the filmy drapes made everything glow an eerie yellow. There was a large Oriental rug, botanical prints hung by wide, satiny bows, dishes held face-out on display on the mantel.
“Maybe you’d better wait here,” he said. “Have a seat. Unless you want to try out one of the beds.” He passed his hand over the butt of my jeans.
“I’m sure they would really appreciate that,” I said. I sat down on the flowered couch strewn with embroidered pillows, looked over my shoulder as Travis climbed the staircase, with its wide, curved banister polished to a high shine. I kept my mouth shut, looked at the candy dish on the coffee table, which was filled with candies wrapped in pink and purple and gold foil, twisted on the ends. A tall statue of a heron was pointed toward the window, his view temporarily impaired by the closed drapes. You wondered where people who lived in houses like this kept their junk mail and spare shoelaces and batteries they were mostly sure worked.
Framed photos sat on a desk with thin, curved legs at the side of the room. I squinted at them in the dim yellow light—the studio shot with posed formal smiles, the woman who must have owned the tennis shoes, with her gray-blond hair and long skirt, her silver-headed husband, two stick-thin boys that looked close enough alike to be twins, and a little girl in a fancy dress that looked scratchy, all set against a velvety drape. There were several others too: the boys with their father and someone else, in ski attire, goggles on their heads; an elderly couple, the man stooped and frail, the woman sitting on a garden bench and holding a baby. I sat in these nice people’s house, these nice people with their candy dishes and ski vacations and tennis shoes dirty from the garden, wondering how they would feel knowing a stranger was sitting on their couch. And then something else occurred to me. That dimness that made it hard to see the pictures clearly . . . Travis had not turned on a light when he had come in.
I couldn’t hear Travis upstairs. Unlike my own house, where you could hear someone clearing their throat in the next room (actually, you could probably even hear someone thinking about clearing their throat), this house was so huge and solid that I could not hear his footsteps above me. The only thing I could hear was the ticking of the clock that sat on the mantle in front of me, a sound that made me uneasy in the silence and dark. Tock, tock, tock.
What had Travis said about coming here? My mind replayed bits of conversation, stopped at a memory. He had said something about surprising these people. If they knew he was coming, how would this be possible? I felt sick again, and I stood. I didn’t want to be sitting on these people’s couch, leaning my back against embroidered pillows that maybe the lady on the garden bench had lovingly stitched.
“Travis?” I called up the stairs. In the silence my voice sounded as if it could break something. I paced around in my socks, rubbed my hands together against the cold. Through the etched glass panes on either side of the front door, I could see the lights of the east side across the lake, though the glass had split the beams into fuzzy, abstract prisms. Five minutes later, according to the mantle clock—hours and hours, according to the feeling in my chest—Travis came downstairs.
“How are the cats?” I asked. Travis took my face in his hands and kissed me. He pulled me down until I was on top of him on the stairs.
“Did I ever tell you how beautiful you are?” he said. I wasn’t going to kiss him there, in that empty house with the creepy ticking clock. I struggled to stand. I wanted out of there.
“The cats,” I said.
“You know there are no cats.”
“God damn it, Travis.” Panic and fear, thundering now. “What are you talking about? What are you saying?”
Travis rose from his place on the stairs. He stood in the entryway, touched the top of a music box that was on a table. He turned it upside-down, twisted the tiny bar that turned it on. “Don’t touch that. What are you doing here? What are we doing here, Travis?”
Some song I didn’t know played sweetly from the music box. “You know what we’re doing here.” He stuck a hand into one of his jacket pockets and pulled out a clump of jewelry—gold, silver, pendants, and watches.
“Shit, Travis. Oh, shit.”
I couldn’t breathe. I knew what I was seeing, but my brain couldn’t even wrap itself around it. And then, an arc of headlights through the curtains filled the living room.
“Oh, God,” I said. I grabbed his arm. I had the urge to run, but my body had frozen. The music box was still playing.
“Just stay there,” Travis said calmly. “It’s probably just someone turning around.” But his face looked afraid. For the first time I saw the tight line of fear across his jawline.
We waited. No doorbell or footsteps. “See?” Travis said. “Just someone turning around. No big deal.”
I ran to the back door, the way we came, tried to put my shoes back on but my hands were shaking too badly. Travis went to the refrigerator, modern black and chrome, shiny. He opened the door. The light shined on his satisfied face; he took a can of Diet Coke, cracked the top, and took a drink.
I shivered the whole way back over the bridge. I trembled as if I were in the throes of a fever. All the way there I’d had to hold on to Travis Becker on that motorcycle. My hands felt guilty and disgusted, certainly not like my regular hands. These hands were too small to handle what had just happened.
I got in my mother’s car where I’d left it. Travis Becker walked to my window, knocked on the glass. I rolled it down and he ducked his head into the car. “I like the pissed-off act,” he said. Which was a good thing, because right then I started to roll up my window with his head still in it. He made a little squeak of surprise, then turned his head sideways and released himself before my furious rolling marred his beautiful, sleek neck. My own neck still wore that necklace he had given me; I was suddenly aware of its ugly weight. I grabbed it and yanked, and the gold cut across my skin but I didn’t care. I pulled it until it lay limp in my hand, and I drove off still clutching it. In the rearview mirror I could see Travis Becker standing in streetlight. His expression was so satisfied we might have just become lovers.
There is nothing that can make you feel quite as guilty as walking into a quiet house full of sleeping people, people who are dreaming gentle dreams and who don’t know enough to suspect you of wrongdoing. Even the buzz of the refrigerator was innocent enough to make me hate myself. I took off my shoes by the door, walked in bare feet across the floor. Maybe I was getting good at creeping around still houses.
On the way home
I had stopped by the side of Cummings Road on a weedy patch thick with blackberry brambles and thistles and wide, furry dandelion leaves. The necklace was limp as a dead body in my hands, and I looked around to make sure no one saw as I flung it deep into the prickly branches. It might have been a Valentine’s Day gift bought by a man who’d gotten off early from work one day and looked carefully through glass shelves, and a sick knot of disgust filled me at the thought that it would lie there in the dirt, eventually covered by rotted blackberries and dry leaves, snow, and mud. I was glad it was gone, though.
There was still a light on, shining under the door of my mother’s bedroom. I set my ear against the door, but there was no sound. I turned the knob slowly so as not to make any noise, and opened the door. My mother lay asleep on top of the bed, her glasses askew, giving one side of her forehead twenty-twenty vision. Her hand rested on the top of a book, which was facedown on her lap. It must have been a good one—it was open not quite halfway, and I knew that in the last few weeks she hadn’t been able to read anything, to me a more frightening sign of her depression than almost anything else. I turned my head sideways to read the title: Life Times Two by Charles Whitney. I eased it from her hand. My eyes caught on the words.
I saw her twice that day, the woman I will call Rose, because that’s what she was to me. Beautiful, perfect, eventually brutal in protecting her gentle self against my own destructive tendencies. It was on August 14, 1945, V.J. Day, amidst riotous celebration on the streets of New York City that I saw that flash of the crimson skirt that caught my eye in the crowd. It was a cinema moment—I saw the flash of the skirt, looked up. She turned and looked over her shoulder at me. With that look, something had been decided. My whole life, though I didn’t know it then. I dropped my cigarette, ground it into the street with the toe of my shoe. A definite action was called for, some final punctuation, and that was the most definite action I could think of. Then she turned and disappeared into the crowd.
I saved Mom’s place by folding in the book jacket flap inside the cover. I carefully removed her glasses from her head. If she woke right then, her eyes would only see the me she thought she knew, not the me I was.
My mother stirred. “Ruby?” she said sleepily.
“Shhh,” I said.
I pulled the quilt over my mother and then I turned out the light.
“Ruby, we don’t do that here,” Joe Davis said. He was wearing his shorts with all of the pockets again, and a Sea World T-shirt with a leaping whale on the front.
“What do you mean you don’t do that here? You don’t have one of those little boxes you go in and we can talk through the window?”
“Catholics do that.”
“Oh.” We sat in Joe Davis’s office, where I’d gone the next day after I’d finished work at Johnson’s Nursery. I’d never been there before. I’d expected his office to look, I don’t know, more churchlike. He had a desk that appeared to be used only to stack things on, as well as two worn chairs and a coffee table, an ugly gray filing cabinet with a fishbowl on top, with one fish swimming around a fake castle in water that should be changed. The place was full of books, not only stacked on the desk but also in shelves along the wall. All kinds of books, too. Not just religious-looking ones, but books on baseball and oceans and sea kayaking, slim books of poetry, mysteries. A mug of tea sat on the coffee table, with the tea bag still inside and the string draped over the edge, and there was a pencil cup with only one pencil and a large chunk of coral, white and wavy. The only evidence that I was in a minister’s office was the crucifix over the door and a picture of a sad-faced Jesus in a flowing white robe and sandals. Even this was hung with a picture of a desert and one of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset. Why there were never any cheerier pictures of Jesus I’ll never know. I realize he had a rough life, but it didn’t send the rest of us a very good message about the joys of living, if you ask me.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Joe Davis said. He really did look sorry, too. “You don’t have to confess, though. You could just tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I liked the idea of the box,” I said.
“I could hide behind my desk.” Joe Davis leaped up. He went behind his desk, ducked behind a particularly large stack of books. “How’s that?” His voice was a little muffled.
I laughed. “You’re going to knock those over.”
I saw a hand rise up, slap down on top of the books to hold them down. “Okay, shoot,” he said.
I laughed again. His head poked up over the books. “I’m waiting,” he sang in a pretend-annoyed fashion. “Actually, is it all right if I come back and sit down? My knees hurt with that crouching.”
“I suppose so,” I said. Joe Davis sat down again. He folded his hands over his chest as if he’d just eaten a good meal and was now waiting for the movie to start. It looked like he would wait there a long time, so I told him about Travis. I told him what had happened the night before. I told him that there were big pieces of me that thought I was in love with Travis Becker. Those pieces of me didn’t want to give up Travis. I avoided the eyes of the sad-faced Jesus. He looked very disappointed in me. I wished he had a Sea World T-shirt on too.
“Wow,” Joe Davis said when I finished. “That’s a lot to deal with, all right. I can see you are feeling pretty bad about it.”
His sympathy made a lump rise in my throat and my eyes grow hot with tears. “Aren’t you supposed to make me do something, like say a bunch of prayers?”
“I’m sorry, Ruby,” he said.
“Don’t tell me. Catholics again?”
“Yep. Anyways, I’m thinking the thing you should do is talk to your mom about this.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I knew he was in love with my mother. I didn’t want to betray her by giving him negative information. Explaining why I couldn’t talk to her right now would be like telling him that she laughed at the religious channels and couldn’t make a fried egg to save her life and always left it to someone else to put a new roll of toilet paper on. Something he should have to find out at least after a few dates.
I thought for a while. I remembered something I once heard about minister-patient confidentiality, or something like that.
“This stays between us, right?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
“She’s broken right now,” I said. “Everything is in pieces. Even the kitchen is in pieces. Our dog chewed a big hole in the wall.”
Joe Davis winced in empathy. He crossed one leg over the other. He wore sandals, too. Maybe good men could be found in sandal-like shoes.
“I can’t give her anything else in pieces,” I said.
“Things come apart before they can be put back together again.”
“What do you think I should do?”
Joe Davis leaned forward, elbow on one knee, and scratched his neck. “You know what I’ve learned in this job? The people who ask for advice are the ones who already know what they should do.”
“I should go to Sea World,” I said. He looked at me like I was crazy, so I pointed to his T-shirt. I was suddenly in the mood for a little humor after dropping that package at Joe Davis’s feet.
Joe lifted one fist in the air. “Shamu power,” he said.
“I’d have a whale of a good time,” I said.
Joe Davis groaned, threw his head back as if in pain. “I love Sea World,” he said. “But the one thing that bothers me is that they sell fish and chips there.”
“Eek,” I said.
Then Joe Davis got serious again. He looked at me. “Ruby? Here’s the thing. About this guy. Sometimes we are so convinced someone is throwing us a life preserver that we don’t notice that what they are actually doing is drowning us.”
I remembered that day at Marcy Lake, Travis’s hand clutching my wrist, my tight lungs, his crooked smile under that green, murky water. Joe Davis was more accurate than he even realized.
I tossed him some brave words. I owe
d him something, I guess, for being kind to me. “It’s a good thing I’m a strong swimmer,” I said. I didn’t believe it; I doubt he did either. You know when your own mind means business, and when it is only saying what it thinks it should.
When I left the church office I noticed the sign. DOG IS MAN’S BEST FRIEND. It looked like Joe Davis was having a little fun with the unknown sign changer.
On the way home, I stopped to watch the paragliders. I wanted to see their bravery and their rightness. And that day was a whale-themed day, because to my surprise, for the first time ever, I saw him. The I Love Potholes guy with the whale van. He wore shorts and sandals, a T-shirt emblazoned with a heart with wings, the logo of the paragliding club. He wasn’t much older than I was, and had rough, tumbled, curly hair, the start of a beard. He was taking his backpack from the van and caught me looking his way.
“You going up?” he asked.
“Just watching,” I said. I figured I owed him an explanation for my staring. “I’ve always liked your van.”
“Yeah?” He smiled. “Then you’ve got to see this.” He set his pack down, leaned inside the driver’s seat. “Keep watching,” he called.
I watched the whale. A spurt of water came from its spout. More like a dribble really. A drool, dripping down the side. The whale-van guy emerged again. “Isn’t that lame?” he said, his eyes happy.
“Oh, jeez. Pathetic,” I said. “That is so bad.”
“I know it. You ever been up?” He nodded his chin toward the mountain.
“No,” I said.
“Oh, you’ve got to. See that spot up there? The landing?” I nodded. “From up above it looks like the mountain has a bald spot.”
“Hair Club for Men,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said.
He picked up his pack and waved, and after a while I headed off. My mom was home early that day; when I got home she was already in the kitchen making dinner. She was walking around in her bare feet and cutoffs, with an open book in one hand that she was reading as she stirred a pot of spaghetti sauce. Chip Jr. had already come home from Oscar’s house. He was creating what looked like the Empire State Building on the kitchen table with sticks of spaghetti. Poe didn’t even say hello. His focus was on Mom and anything she might drop as she cooked; his eyes were glued to her hands as if he were under a hypnotic spell.
