He wants to take her hand, but she keeps them hidden in the sleeves of his sweater. They drive in silence now, Julian in prayer, Ada sinking deeper within herself.
When he turns into the parking lot of the Bennington Town Offices, she is half the size she was when they left her tree two hours ago. A dark sedan passes behind the Jeep, bass roaring, hip-hop squeezing through the closed windows. Two women walking by shout expletives at the driver for spraying puddled water unto their shoes. Ada bites the skin from her lip.
Julian’s romantic notions drain away, and he begins comprehending the effects of the way she’s lived for so long. She’s a hatchling, fallen from the nest to the rocks below. How can she not be injured?
“Ada, listen to me. We don’t have to do this today. You can stay with me anyway.”
“Not married?”
“Yes, but not like that. You’d have your own room.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I can find a place for you, then. I have friends who would let you live with them, for a while, until you were . . . ready.”
“You don’t want to marry me.”
“No, Ada. I do. Of course I do. What I don’t want is for you to feel pressured into it. Like you have to, and you don’t have any other choices. You do. No one is forcing you to go through with . . . well . . . anything.”
She pulls another piece of skin from her lips, with her fingers this time, a long, whitish flake. “I’m ready,” she whispers.
He opens the car door for her, and they go into the building, a columned New England home converted into the local government headquarters. The floors squeak as they walk down a musty hallway to the third room on the left. He holds her arm, just above the elbow, and feels her trembling.
They must look quite the pair, rumpled clothes stiff with dried thunderstorms, wind-tossed hair, muddy shoes. Her in a frumpy skirt and too-large sweater, despite it now being afternoon and warm enough for short sleeves. Him with field grass woven into the laces of his sneakers, a blob of ketchup on his pants, dripped from the Whopper he grabbed a half hour ago. Ada ate nothing, though he offered to take her anywhere she’d like for lunch.
The clerk records the necessary information—he learns Ada is twenty-five years old—and processes their marriage license, handing Julian a list of a dozen justices of the peace in town. Her eyes flicker between him and Ada, and when she asks, “Are you okay, miss?” Ada nods and steps closer to him. Back in the car Julian calls down the list until he finds someone to perform the ceremony. Fifteen minutes later they stand in the justice’s home office, their shoes left on the front doormat, their feet sinking into the plush pomegranate-colored carpet. The whole ordeal takes less time than a dental appointment. No exchange of rings. No “You may kiss the bride.” The justice seems unfazed, signing here and there, and wishing them well. “The Sox are playing,” he tells them as he ushers them from his house. “If they were winning, I wouldn’t have answered my phone when you called.”
And, like that, they’re married.
The drive home is another ninety minutes. Julian tries to engage Ada in conversation, and she answers his questions but not much more. Her posture tightens as the rural landscapes turn decidedly urban. He steers down the tight alleyway leading to his driveway, parks the Jeep, and says, “Well, this is it.”
They enter through the back door, and once into the living room Julian bumbles through a tour of the downstairs, pointing here and there while Ada makes no eye contact, hands clasped at her waist. Then the same upstairs, motioning toward rooms and closets while she twists the hem of his sweater. And then he’s done talking about the brownstone and they stand with their backs against opposite walls of the hallway, neither sure what comes next. Finally Julian offers to make her some food. “You have to be hungry. You haven’t eaten all day.”
She shakes her head and asks if she can bathe, and perhaps wash her clothes so she’ll have something clean to wear tomorrow.
“I’ll throw them in the laundry for you. Just leave them outside the door. I’ll get something for you to put on for tonight too.”
“I can take care of it.”
“I’ve lived alone for the past twenty years. I promise you, I can work a washer.”
Hesitating, she bobs her head up and down. Swallows. “Okay.”
He gives her towels. “I’ll be back for your clothes in a few minutes.”
She closes the bathroom door. He waits in the bedroom until the water has been running a good five minutes and then peeks into the hallway; her skirt, shirt, tights, and his sweater are folded and waiting for him on the floor. He exchanges the pile for a pair of flannel pajamas and takes them downstairs to the stackable washer and dryer hidden in the other bathroom’s closet. After adding a few of his own things to the mix, he pours in too much powdered detergent and sets the cycle to gentle. Then he rinses off in the small corner shower, runs through the house clutching a towel at his waist, and throws on clean jeans and a shirt, thinking Ada will be more comfortable with him fully dressed.
He doesn’t know what this evening will bring.
God, what have I gotten myself into?
More waiting. He reads. He prays. He lies on the bed with his forearms across his eyes, listening to the shower. Eventually, the water stops.
Ten minutes. Twenty. Still no Ada.
He knocks on the bathroom door. “Ada? You okay?”
When she doesn’t answer, he tries the knob. Unlocked. He opens it only enough to peer within and sees her, undressed, cutting her hair with his nail scissors. She notices him and drops to the tile floor, breasts against her knees, arms around her legs, her remaining hair fanning over her in cover.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—” He shuts the door.
He’s suddenly and completely overwhelmed. What can he do for this girl, this stranger, now his wife, cowering beneath the pedestal sink like a feral Lady Godiva? When imagining the possibilities, he’d never moved past the romantic, the love-at-first-sight fantasies, the tingling notion that what God has joined, no man can pull asunder. He never considered the years of spiritual abuse Ada suffered in Abram’s Covenant, and perhaps other abuses as well. He didn’t think about the difficulties she would have adjusting to life outside the only community she knew.
What does he do now?
Help her.
How?
Silence.
Julian can’t imagine anything helpful at the moment, except perhaps a different pair of scissors. He takes the pair from his studio table and knocks again at the bathroom door. Again, Ada says nothing so he goes in to her, drapes her in a towel, and helps her to her feet as she shudders with tears.
“Julian, I’m so sorry. I should have—”
“Shh,” he says, touching a finger to her lips. “You’ll never get the back straight. Let me help.”
Ada nods and gives him the scissors.
“These wouldn’t cut dental floss,” he tells her, dropping them in the tub. “I have better.”
When he was a child, his mother cut his hair to save money. His and Sophie’s, always the same day, Saturday after bath so they’d be presentable for mass the next morning. She made him sit on the toilet and he’d wiggle and fidget, and she’d smack him with whatever was handy—the tube of toothpaste, the paperback novel she was reading, sometimes the handle of the plunger—telling him he’d better keep still or else. One time the or else was her cutting the tip of his ear. He bled and sobbed, and his mother doused the wound with alcohol and said, “Stop being a baby.” On other occasions the or else was less painful—crooked bangs, pronounced cowlicks, a scratch at the back of his neck, not from the scissors but her fingernails; she kept them long and polished like Barbra Streisand.
He folds a towel on the closed toilet lid, easing Ada onto it. She crosses her legs; her feet are purple and goose bumps sprout on her skin. He turns on the hot tap in the tub and shuts the door.
In the medicine cabinet there’s a comb he never uses. He eases it
through Ada’s hair, teeth tangling in the snarls. With one hand he holds the hair above the knot, protecting her scalp from the tugging. With the other he hacks at the tangles until they loosen. “How short?” he asks.
“You decide.”
“No. This is all you.”
Shaking, she touches her shoulder. “Here?”
So Julian smoothes her hair and does his best to cut in a straight line, stretching the ends to be certain they are even, kneeling to see his handiwork up close. He finishes, dusting the stray stubble from her back and face, wiping the steam from the mirror so she can see.
“Do you like it?” he asks, standing behind her, cradling her thin frame against him. She’s all bones, her pointy places digging into his own. She doesn’t seem to notice, and he carries her to the dark bedroom. She hides beneath her towel while he finds more pajamas, the bottoms and top unmatched, and waits in the hallway for her to dress. “I’m done,” she calls, and she’s still on the bed, her skin as white as the plaster walls, toes curled under. He sits beside her.
“I don’t know what to do,” she tells him. “I wasn’t supposed to marry. My father told me my spirit was too rebellious, and that I was to stay with him and my mother because he was the only one who could ensure my obedience, and I would care for them when they got old. I had resigned myself to it.”
“Ada.”
“No one was allowed to talk about any of . . . it . . . with me. I mean, I heard a little here and there, listening to my sisters when they were being . . . too open. But I don’t—” She begins to cry.
He draws her into him, her head on his chest, and lies back on the pillows. Her body resists at first, and then follows, and he twines his fingers in freshly cut hair. Julian wakes in the night to find Ada has crept closer, her arm over his stomach, hand buried under his waist. He doesn’t want to move and risk waking her, but he’s cold, so he manages to hook his toes in the blanket folded at the bottom of his mattress. Bending his knee, he pulls it high enough to grab with the hand not pinned beneath her, unfolds it, and covers them both.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It’s more difficult than he thought, though he had no sense to think anything prior to stealing Ada away from her family. She’s been born into this new world naked and innocent, and like a newborn all the lights are too bright and the air too cold and the blankets too scratchy. She can do very little without him. Yes, she knows how to work the kitchen stove and count money and scrub the floor. But she can’t write a check or use an ATM machine. She doesn’t know how to pay for groceries at the store. She needs to be taught how to use a computer and cell phone. She can’t drive or use public transportation.
And she won’t leave the house without him. Ever.
He cancels almost all his jobs and appearances, rescheduling what he can for the new year, refunding deposits, issuing sincere apologies. He says his wife cannot be left alone, which is true, and leaves the reasons unspoken. The people on the other side of the phone fill in the blanks with terrible illnesses or a disfiguring accident and Julian lets them.
He had imagined them traveling together, her learning how to identify lenses or set props at photo shoots. He imagined a partner, but he’s a parent. He takes her shopping for clothes; she circles the racks, touching each garment, never pulling anything from the hanger. He plucks an armload of skirts and blouses and t-shirts, and encourages her toward the changing room. “I don’t need to try anything on,” she says. “You tell me what you like and I’ll take those things.” She’ll wear what he says, eat what he says, spend her time in the way he picks for them. He explains these are her decisions to make. She can’t function without someone granting her permission. She’s incapable of disagreeing with him, of saying no. He has to read every quiver, every flicker of the eyebrow, each swallow. He notes her response time. How many seconds between question and affirmative answer mean she doesn’t want to do what he’s suggested but she’s agreeing to it anyway? Even when he orchestrates situations for her to object, she cannot. She doesn’t eat tomatoes; she picked them from the first salad they ate together, and each one since. He makes them grilled cheese for lunch and asks, “Tomato on that?”
“If you want,” she says.
He leaves the tomato off hers, of course. She bites into the sandwich with trepidation. Tasting only cheese, bread, and butter, she looks up at him with confusion and relief. And delight. He sees it in her stooped-shoulder smile, the one she gives when she’s ashamed of her happiness because she thinks she doesn’t deserve it. “No tomato.”
“You don’t like it.”
“I never told you that.”
He kisses the tip of her nose. “You didn’t have to.”
By evening’s end, he’s exhausted from all the maneuvering, a constant chess game he needs to lose, but his opponent keeps stumbling her pieces into check.
The two things fueling his hope are the bitty glimpses of the Ada he met at the store that day—the clever, lively one who flustered him in the first moments they met—and his certainty of God’s hand in all of this. He remembers the story of the safe, Ada’s dreams, and holds onto them. He writes the combination on his arm in black Sharpie. 13-12-29-15. She notices, splays the fingers of her right hand and touches each number with one, applies pressure one tip at a time as if the ink marks are buttons.
“I love you,” he says, and he can only describe it as a supernatural love, sown in him by Christ himself because he has no other reason to feel so deeply for a woman he’s known so short a period of time.
Ada turns her head away. Julian has only a disoriented sense of her opinion of him. She doesn’t say she loves him, and that’s fine; she came because God called her, and he understands if it is too soon for her to love a stranger in this strange land. He lives with the certainty she will come to feel for him all the things a wife feels for her husband—good and bad. He has time.
What he lacks is patience.
He’s restless, not working, repeating the same routine each day. He swells with untaken photographs. Some days he goes from window to window, capturing the outside world on the camera’s memory card. He shoots random items in the house. He comes up behind Ada and takes pictures of the nape of her neck as she washes the breakfast plates.
“Don’t do that,” she tells him.
He touches her instead, in the identical place, where her up-pinned hair reveals a fuzzy point of stray strands.
“Julian.”
“We have a dishwasher.”
“I don’t like it.”
He doesn’t ask if she means the machine, or his touch, but goes and sits behind the closed door of his studio until she finishes, holding the silent camera in his hands.
It’s so easy to believe oneself sanctified when single.
Finally, selfishly, he calls Hortense. He hasn’t seen her or Mark since the day in the gallery when he told them about Ada—nearly two months ago—though they’ve incessantly asked when they can meet his new bride. He wants to have a barbeque. “Invite people,” he tells her. “But not too many. I don’t want Ada overwhelmed.” He needs the outside world to come to him, doesn’t care who it may be as long as Mark and Hortense are part of it. They are his only friends. He has hundreds, thousands perhaps, of acquaintances. Any of them he can call if he needs a favor—a ride to the airport, a couple weeks of collecting his mail, a few pulled strings for a dinner reservation. But only the two of them does he trust with his innermost workings. For as much as he confides to God, sometimes he needs to share with flesh and blood, not only Spirit.
He tells Ada about the cookout. She nods. Then he tells her about Hortense. “She’s the most beautiful woman you’ll ever see,” and he’s been watching his wife closely enough to recognize the twinge of jealousy she blinks from her vision. “And she has no hands.”
So they come, clamoring through the brownstone with twelve-packs and hot dogs and quinoa salad, the women drinking wine coolers on the patio while Mark pounds horseshoe posts into the gro
und. Ada watches from the picnic table, overwhelmed, body rigid. She answers questions with yes or no, or “Julian can tell you,” until the sparse conversation directed her way dries up completely. He lights the grill, and then goes to her, cups his hands around her upper arms, claiming her. She relaxes slightly.
“I’m going to get the burger meat from the kitchen,” he says into her ear. She nods, and he thinks she’ll follow him, but doesn’t, and once inside he realizes it’s because he didn’t instruct her to do so. Hortense, however, does follow him, tweezing a carrot stick from the vegetable platter on the counter. She swoops it through the ranch dressing and chomps. “It’s not what you thought,” she says, mouth full.
She’s pert and self-satisfied, drawn to her full height, breasts forward, smudge of dip at the corner of her mouth. Julian points to the identical spot on his own lip, and she licks the stain away, no embarrassment whatsoever.
“And you’re happy about that?” he asks.
“Happy? No. But come on, Julian. You can’t seriously be that blind.”
He can say nothing to make her understand. So he says, “I love her, okay?”
She closes her eyes. Nods. “Okay.” And with all the determination that has always been Hortense, she marches outside to the patio, parks herself on the picnic bench beside Ada, and says, “Hey, Julian said you grew up on an organic farm. I’m having the darndest time with my tomatoes. I have a couple of those ones you keep in pots, you know? The leaves are turning yellow and falling off. Any ideas?”
Ada hesitates. “Are you watering them?”
“It may not look like I have a green thumb,” Hortense says, laughing, “but since I don’t have any thumbs, period, that’s not a good indicator. Water, yes. I can handle that. Beyond water? You got me.”
Julian watches, leaning against the frame of the open sliding glass door, as Ada smiles, and then hides it behind her hand. “Without seeing them, I would have to guess they’re root bound.”
Still Life Page 12
