The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  Not the toothbrushes, he thought.

  There was wind outside, but the storm was still far away and building, an old man muttering about ancient, unforgotten slights. Gusty, slapping wind, but the early morning light was all sunshine.

  Leo pulled back the curtains and let the light stream into their bedroom. Then he checked the closet. She must have been quiet at first, he decided. The sound of the hangers hadn’t woken him, but all the shirts were now together at one end of the closet, pants at the other. The shirts were facing the same direction, too, their buttons all done up and facing west. On the floor, the shoes were standing at attention in mute parade, toes lined up square.

  It was worse than he had thought.

  The trick, Leo knew, was not to respond with bewilderment, not to curl up or hide, because that wouldn’t do anything. Ignoring it was only postponing the inevitable. The trick was to do it right this time. To just do it right: to learn from past mistakes, to catch her while she was still falling, before she hit the ground hard.

  Atlantic storms roll in fast, the first warning a thin petticoat of high, light cloud that spreads across the sky, unstoppable. One moment, there is that thin sunlight – that white, bright hard sunlight through a scrim of high cloud – and the next, the long green robes of the spruce trees have gone dark with frightened anticipation. Storms jump at you quickly, ripping the tops off the waves and throwing them in your face as salty spume.

  The rain slashes down cold, almost horizontal, drenching you in an instant: the trees, large and small, sweep around together, branches moving as one, showing the wind direction like fast brushstrokes on loose canvas. Storms can be unexpected and dangerous, blasting you with snow and hail where moments before you had been revelling in the simple visceral pleasures of spring, and you have to take cover the best way you can. Sometimes the storms end quickly: other times, they seem to stall somehow, hung up on the shore and feeding on themselves.

  She was somewhere downstairs, probably violently cleaning by now. He knew he would hear her if she was still upstairs.

  It was a big house, two fat square storeys of dark green with white trim, large enough that two people could live at the tops of their voices and not disturb each other. Leo and Helen had bought the place for reasons that some of their friends found completely incomprehensible: the small coal fireplaces, the formal way the plaster was patterned around the ceiling fixtures, the banister that curved to the left, going up.

  It was one of a line of St. John’s rowhouses huddled on a narrow street. They had moved in six months before, throwing themselves into making the place their own, patching up the wreckage of their former lives as they patched plaster and poured paint into roller trays to cover up past mistakes. Past mistakes – they both had their own personal debris trails, memories blown apart and thrown willy-nilly on the ground by cyclones that had hit before they knew each other.

  He knew she loved him wildly – knew it, without a moment of doubt. Lying in the bathtub, the hot water cooling around him, he would hear her singing in another room, and know that she was singing just about the idea of him.

  She had picked up the pieces of his broken life, and had put them back together when he thought the very idea was a lost cause, swept the bits up and gently fit them back into a workable whole. She had taken such fine, delicate care that he had barely felt the touch of her fingertips – she had held him loose in her arms, knowing that she couldn’t hold tight, and had told him he would one day be all right. And she’d been right. To him, she had a breathless magic that came with the rest, a bright brilliant light that was also accompanied by dark.

  There was no way to tell when she had gone downstairs that morning. He already knew exactly what it would be like: guaranteed, she would be talking loudly – talking to no one.

  Helen talked to herself almost constantly when she was alone, but Leo knew by now that there was a tone to listen for.

  Down the stairs, walking alongside the high, white walls, trailing a fingernail along the plaster for balance: he was heading for the sound. That’s what he always did, although, even before he got there, he felt a small flutter of fear in his chest, so familiar that it was almost expected. Still, he kept walking.

  Then, he knew.

  She was smashing dishes in the kitchen – at least, that’s how he thought of it. Taking mugs out of the dish rack, banging them hard enough on the counter that he didn’t see how, occasionally, a weak one didn’t just surrender and fly apart into shards. Her back to him, she started stacking plates – smacking them together – while he watched. Making them pay for someone else’s sins, he thought. He had never lived with anyone for whom so many things exploded – drinking glasses sometimes seemed to surrender and shatter, unable to contain the internal stresses of their form. Dishes broke, pictures fell. He had the feeling that anything breakable was just waiting, poised.

  It was five o’clock in the morning, and she was already fully dressed for work – showered, her hair done, makeup on, dressed for an office that was still hours away. Outside, through the long kitchen windows, it was the kind of morning light that makes it seem as if the dawn is trying to make up its mind about breaking. The cloud thickening now, dense and solid, losing the delicate patterning it had when the cloud had been thinner. The big maples in the back yard were still black in shadow, leaning in like neigh-bours listening at the windows. Leaves starting to dance side to side in the freshening wind.

  She was talking in one long angry sentence, and he knew it could be addressed to anyone: “If I told you something like that, you’d look at me and tell me I was an idiot so it’s fair enough that I should call you an idiot, especially since I’m already doing all your work and you’re always taking the credit anyway…”

  Her voice had a low, angry undertone, a flatness, a sound that carried its own implied warning.

  “Sometimes,” Helen had told him once, “someone will pass me on the street on a bike while I’m walking and I’ll realize I’m talking out loud, because they’ll look back at me like I’m a crazy woman.”

  Helen had conversations with herself at full volume, sentences with full inflection and pointed edges.

  He could imagine the bicyclist tottering away slowly, looking back over his shoulder, perhaps alarmed, while Helen was throwing out a late and apologetic smile. Even Leo could be shocked out of reverie: more than once, reading a book in the living room, he had been brought to his feet by an exclamation – “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking!” – from the kitchen.

  Listen to the tone, Leo told himself as he reached the doorway to the kitchen. Listen to the tone. The subject doesn’t matter right now, because the subject will turn like the wind bending through the points of the compass. Inside a big storm, the wind can cycle and come at you from any direction: the sound in the trees is your only honest warning, the thrash and whip of the leaves, the low moan from the eavestrough. It was dangerous to try and work from the words she was saying – take your cue from the tone.

  She heard him then, sensed he was there and whirled around to face him, her shoulders square, her hands on her hips, by sheer reflex ready for an attack. Her arms were so very long that her elbows made perfect triangles pointing out away from her sides. Her feet were far apart, her balance solid.

  She was an awesome sight when she stood like that: Leo always thought it was like looking at one of the nine Valkyries – and that, like the Valkyries, she had appeared to warn him of a battle he would not survive. But he wasn’t afraid of how she looked.

  Whenever he thought of her arms, Leo would remember holding her in the dark of their bedroom – the smooth skin of the back of her forearm, the languorous way she would straighten and lay her arms back against the pillow after they had made love. God, she was beautiful. But he pushed that thought away as soon as it began to form in his mind – you can get into trouble that way, he reminded himself. Fast. This is no time for distraction. You have to be sharp, he thought.

&nb
sp; “When you said that you were thinking seriously about the Ottawa job, what did you mean?”

  Jesus. A sidewinder. He couldn’t even remember saying that – at least, not that way. But she was always quicker than he was, especially on the ground that he thought of as offhand memory, and he knew he had to be careful now. He had to finger his way, feeling for handholds. But it was like playing cards in the dark – you can’t even see your own cards. Her words were newly minted and precise, and they came out with each consonant clipped and neat. He knew that every word was carefully and deliberately chosen so that it could not be misunderstood or weaseled around.

  There were no trick questions – no traps here. This was no minefield. All of the explosives were lying there on the ground right out in front of you, big and bright and nasty, Leo thought. The difficult part was seeing them and then not blundering right onto them anyway.

  This was where they didn’t mesh, he thought, the place where they always collided. The most dangerous of places.

  He took too long thinking, he always took too long thinking, trying to find a complete answer. He started scrambling, knowing the silence just made things worse.

  If he had time, Leo knew what he would have said: inside his head, the thoughts whirled with the wind, that he had thought about the Ottawa job – they had come to him, offered a bigger salary but a move that was hundreds of miles away – the way you think about all kinds of things when just getting an offer can be an aphrodisiac. It’s not that you’ve chosen to do it, just that it’s an active consideration that makes you feel better, that you can try on like new clothes. It’s exquisite to roll around in the scent of being wanted. But that wasn’t getting any closer to answering the question.

  “Did you think about my job for even a minute in there? For a second? Did you think about me at all?”

  He noticed the way her voice rose with the end of the sentence, “at all” rising to a peak – it was just the kind of observation that was so risky. Don’t get distracted, he told himself. Don’t get distracted. Give her the decency of the fastest, clearest answer you can put together.

  “You don’t spend very much time thinking about me, do you? I’m just some kind of Leo ride-along. Is that what you think?”

  “No.” He knew enough to say that quickly, that the bare question needed a bare answer. But then he stalled, as if someone had yanked on a hidden gearshift and dumped his mind into neutral.

  “That’s not what I mean about the job,” Leo started lamely.

  “But it is what you said. You said it last Thursday, and again Sunday in the car,” Helen said. “We buy a house here finally, and you’re ready to rip it all up and head for Ottawa.”

  “I don’t remember saying it like that,” he said, speaking carefully. It’s a fantasy, he wanted to say, unsure of how to get that concept out. Five occasional minutes of empty dreaming. A fantasy where everything’s new, and all your problems just disappear. But he didn’t have a chance to speak the words. Outside it was raining – scattered rain.

  “Do you think so little of me that you can just throw stuff like that out, without ever thinking about how it would affect me? About how it would affect us?” she said. Leo saw the argument hooking, saw the delicate bend, knew the curve it was taking would only mean trouble for him.

  And promptly ran out of words.

  Helen didn’t.

  “You’re not really thinking about us in this, are you? What would you call it? Leo’s Ottawa escape? I stay here, good wifey, while you go to Ottawa and find someone new to fuck?” Spoiling for a fight, now.

  That’s the problem when you know someone as well as lovers know each other – you know the soft bits, the spots where the damage can really be done. You know where teeth will leave a mark with the least effort.

  And suddenly, it wasn’t about answering her questions anymore – it was about running for cover.

  Duck and weave, he thought, like a boxer. Guard your head and take the other punches wherever they land. He was taking cover on familiar ground, in a place he had been before. He had known it could happen this way from the moment he had woken up and found the bed empty.

  In a real storm, a serious, violent northeaster, there is no shelter from the wind and rain. The trees whip flat and branches slap, and the wind and rain finds your face again every time you think you finally have it at your back. It curls and twists and buffets, and shingles start to flap, and then fly. On the ocean, streaks of angry white foam become solid ripping waves – waves without quarter, coming from all around. You’re going to get marked up: the only thing you can really do is to leave as little of yourself exposed as you can.

  And all at once, Helen was coming at him.

  She halved the distance between them, and then halved it again. Shoved him with both hands.

  “Or are you fucking someone else already? Is that it?”

  There was no point saying anything now: she wouldn’t hear it anyway. He knew she would only hear what was going on inside her own head.

  That was it: how quickly everything changed, the way a switch flicked from light to dark. She was tall and strong and determined, but most of all, single-minded, caught fast and helpless in seething anger.

  Brace yourself, he thought. He didn’t know he had done it, but his hands came up and his back straightened. Her hands were low, and he couldn’t guess how close she was going to come this time, whether she would stop inches away, pointing her finger in his face for punctuation, or whether she would keep coming, slapping or hitting. He turned his hip, protecting his crotch.

  He wanted to hold her, to wrap her in his arms and tell her it would be all right, but he knew from experience that would be like holding bundles of reinforcing bar – that he was stronger, but that she would resist, focusing on the physical struggle until she had forced herself out of his embrace. And that would only make things worse.

  His hands were out in front of him now, palms turned up, fingers splayed. He reached for her arm – she knocked his hand away.

  With horses, you can see the whites of their eyes when there’s thunder or when the wind rips whistling around their stables, heads switching back and forth, and their noses pointing high, nostrils flared. When they are right on the edge, just before they start kicking their stalls apart in an uncontrollable panic.

  She had beautiful eyes, beautiful and hazel and set high over full cheekbones, but just then, he could see the whites all around her irises. And he was afraid that she’d gone too far this time, that she wasn’t coming back, or that, worse, there would be no stopping her. He knew that he would not be able to hit back. And now, suddenly, he was afraid.

  He would have been embarrassed to explain what happened next, even to her. How calculating he was: how deliberately he moved to the edge of the counter, so he could keep one hip against the cabinets to keep the cutlery drawer tightly shut. How, this first time, he kept his left arm only a short arc away from the kitchen knives, blocking her reach. How he kept that left hand out even as she started punching his chest – short, sharp-knuckled rabbit punches that would leave rows of small blue bruises – because it was truly the lesser of two evils.

  Sometimes, storms end all at once. At their height, they suddenly pass, as if they wind up inside themselves and tuck their fury away out of sight, lightning darting inside the clouds.

  His hands were tangled in her hair, her body was tight in against him and she was crying now. Her rage shattered like a fever breaks. It wouldn’t be the way he would have described it to her, but it seemed to Leo that he could feel Helen deflating, could feel the fight draining from her.

  Sometimes friends who knew, especially those who had seen her in full fury, would ask him why he put up with it. It would have been an easy question, one that took no time or thought to answer. He’d shrug, because it wasn’t anyone’s business. But the answer would roll around inside him like the echoes of thunder anyway.

  “Because she burns like the sun,” he would have said. Beca
use every single thing, about her, good or bad, ripped through him like wonder and shook him by the neck. Because it was like living with the volume control up full and the roof down for every drive.

  Leo held on every day for dear life. He waited for – and dreaded – every storm, and it engulfed him and amazed him every single time.

  Sometimes, you can watch a storm pass, inch by noisy inch. You can watch its trailing edge scud away to the horizon, watch the blue appear, watch the confused whitecaps flatten as the wind fades.

  The rain moves away and the wind slackens, an old man mollified now, only complaining for show. Behind the trailing edge of his coat, you can see sun, and it looks brighter than the sun has ever been before. The trees glisten with glasswater beads, and the air is full of the smell of bruised spruce and salt.

  Leo knew quite simply that she was magic, and that magic can be both wonderful and terrifying. He knew it scared her as much as it scared him, that she was unable to explain it or stop it once started, and that she would eventually be left limp and exhausted, her muscles held taut for so long that they sometimes pulled and tore. And she would be sorry. Most of all, she would be sorry.

  And she said it then, again and again, her words muffled so that he couldn’t hear them clearly, but he felt her lips moving against his neck, and immediately understood that gentle Braille.

  Nothing to be sorry about, he thought, stroking the back of her head while she cried. He knew without looking that every bottle inside the fridge would be turned label-outwards, that the lint filter in the dryer would be spotless, that every dead leaf on every houseplant would have been nipped cleanly away and thrown in the trash. That the trash bag would be tightly tied and put outside the back door, a new one in its place. He knew, too, that later, maybe tonight or even tomorrow, there might be thin, long parallel cuts on her forearms under her long sleeves.