On nights like that, I can’t help thinking about the past, wondering about it all. I remember something Bunny said last winter, after she’d bounced a check and they’d shut off our electricity. We came home to a dark and icy house, and I was furious. “How can you be so careless?” I demanded. “How can you live like this?” Bunny just smiled. “Because of you,” she said. “Everything’s possible because of you.” At the time, I didn’t really understand. She’d just started going out with Eddie, and I thought her new love was making her larky. But lately, thinking about it, I’ve begun to see what she meant. As long as we had each other, nothing else really mattered. The checks could bounce, the boyfriends could disappear, Tom could even go to jail—in the end, we always had each other.
Lying here in the darkened room, listening to the slow, snorting breaths of Crazy Mary on the bed a few feet away, I try to bring back that old feeling, to make things the way they were just a month ago. But it doesn’t work. I still love Bunny with all my heart, but I know now that love like hers is dangerous. It makes you a little crazy.
Sometimes, though, if I’m still awake when the midnight whistle blows over at the KTD, I play a little game with myself. I imagine that I’m free from here, and I’ve gone to pick up Bunny. As a present, I bring her the old shoes that I bought in Minniefield. They’re just right for her—as special and romantic as she is. She loves the shoes and tries them on right there in the hospital, parading around the ward, showing them off to the bewildered patients, coming back again and again to hold me in her arms. “A perfect child,” she tells everyone. “A perfect child.” And then I pick up the battered old suitcase in which she’s packed her things, and we walk down the marble stairs and out the heavy front door. The day is cloudless, and the air smells of mowed grass. Outside the hospital, across the street, a huge meadow spreads out, with low hills in the distance. Bunny and I walk toward them, talking the way we’ve always talked, touching occasionally, lost in each other, until, in my imagination, we’re two tiny dots disappearing into the perfect green horizon, and I drift off into a sweet sleep.
For Gioia
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Babcock, a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan Law School, is an editor at New York magazine. He grew up in Illinois, and now lives in New York City with his wife and son, Joe. This is his first novel.
Martha Calhoun Page 36
