Signs and Wonders

by Alix Ohlin

  By the time Das Boot came on, the crowd had shifted and was now almost all women. Adam was a heartthrob. He came onstage bare chested and his hair was tied up in tiny pigtails all over his head. A kind of collective sigh blew through the audience. A line from an old, nonfake band went through my head: Baby you’re adorable. Handle me with care.

  His smile swept across the room and then he started to sing, or fake-sing, or whatever it was that he did, and all those girls loved it. Loved him. He didn’t know I was there. My heart gave a sickly meow, and I went home.

  It was past one by the time I got back to my apartment. I felt as alone as I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I called my husband, just to hear a familiar voice.

  “I’m dating someone,” he said. “FYI.”

  “That’s great,” I told him, sincerely. “I want you to be happy.”

  “What about you?”

  “I was, but it didn’t work out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Or at least it will be.”

  We talked for a few more minutes, exchanging news, and then we hung up.

  What happened afterward? If I were to assess my life like a corporate organization, examining its climate and function, I would summarize my findings as follows. I never saw Adam again. In the days to come, I cried and cried and cried, like the heartsick teenager who still lived inside me. I cried so much that I grew comfortable with it, and with the pain that gave rise to it. I knew that night, without a doubt, that I loved Adam. And I still, in certain moods and lights, loved my husband, a love that was like a ghost of itself. There was no future for either of these loves, but it wasn’t the same thing, I thought, as failure. Because of this: I no longer felt like a showroom car, static and shining with lack of use. Because of this: I was a person whose heart could still move.

  The Teacher

  On Doug and Carol’s wedding day, murder was committed in their small town, which they steadfastly refused to take as a bad sign. They were that much in love. They spent their first married night in the Newport hotel wrapped in each other’s arms, gazing into each other’s eyes, and so on, but after they’d had sex twice there was only so much more gazing that could be done, and Carol turned on CNN while Doug took a shower.

  “Oh, my God,” he heard her say as he toweled off. She was sitting at the foot of the king-sized bed, the coverlet loosely bunched around her skinny frame, exposing the delicate bumps of her spine. She was transfixed. A young man had killed his wife and child and was now on the run; cameras were holding steady on a blue SUV going down a strangely empty freeway, headed for the coast.

  “I don’t know why you watch this stuff,” Doug said. He sat down beside her and kissed her bare shoulder. She smelled like candy.

  “She went to my high school,” Carol said, her eyes wide. “Younger though. So young. And the baby. Did you know them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  On the screen now was a photograph of the young couple on their own wedding day, red-eyed from camera flash and booze.

  Carol was a preschool teacher and spent all day long singing songs about bunnies and cows. Sometimes they bumped into her students in the grocery store, and the kids were so freaked-out to see her outside of school that they ran away. Other times, to be fair, they got excited and seemed like they were going to pee in their pants. In any case, she came home from being with the kids all day, from playing with their brightly colored blocks and vocabulary-building cards, and she liked, by contrast, to watch violent crime dramas or breaking news about murders, kidnappings, disappearances. An expert on bullets and DNA evidence, she supported the death penalty and often, just before falling asleep, would shake her head and say things like, “He should rot in hell for what he’s done.”

  In Jamaica, he’d booked the “Serenity Suite,” which didn’t have a TV and was more expensive than a standard room. Once the honeymoon began, as he’d hoped, she mellowed. For three days they ate conch fritters and took naps on the beach, their skin burnishing. They held hands as they walked on the sand at sunset and were lulled to sleep by the sound of waves crashing on the beach, a gentle soundtrack piping through the suite’s wall-mounted speakers. But Carol hadn’t forgotten the story.

  “We probably saw them at the mall,” she said one day over lunch. “Or at the movie theater. Do you think they got married at the same church?”

  All day long she kept this up, and her fascination started to get on Doug’s nerves. When she asked if they could find a TV that night, he snapped at her, she pouted, and they ate dinner separately—he on the beach, she in their room—until he came back and they made up and had sex again and gazed into each other’s eyes. By the sixth day of conches and tanning, he’d gone over to her side. At a bar they persuaded some people from Chicago to let go of the Cubs game they were watching by buying them drinks. As they sat there, CNN cycled through world disasters and weather forecasts before turning to the case they were waiting for. And in fact, the young woman and her baby were being memorialized in the very church where Doug and Carol’s wedding had taken place. “Oh, my God,” she said.

  The camera lingered on the familiar steps of St. Anthony’s as the mourners emerged sadly, single file, hunched in their black suits and dresses.

  “That’s where we had our pictures taken,” Carol said. “That’s where I tripped on my hem and almost fell. That’s where the car pulled up.”

  The young man had been apprehended. His parents gave a press conference in which they expressed their sympathy for the wife’s family and, of course, the loss of the baby. It seemed as if they’d already given up on him.

  “Let’s stop watching this,” Doug said, but Carol didn’t hear him, and he didn’t bother to repeat it, because they were showing the main street of town; they were interviewing the guy who worked at the hardware store, where Doug himself bought nails and plywood, about the murders.

  “They were just like any other couple,” the hardware guy said. “They had grout issues in their bathroom.”

  Doug wrapped his arms around Carol and told her that he loved her.

  · · ·

  On the plane back to Rhode Island, burnt skin peeling off their noses and backs, they held hands. They landed in a dense, chilly New England downpour. Debbie, Carol’s best friend and maid of honor, met them at the airport. Doug could tell just by looking at her that she was dying to share the news about the murders, and she did a poor job of hiding her disappointment when Carol brought it up first. As Debbie drove them home, erratically, in her SUV—she had adult ADD, Carol had always said—they chattered back and forth about it, not discussing the honeymoon at all. Debbie wasn’t so much a bad driver as a bad multitasker; she’d light cigarettes or rummage around the front seat for stuff and only look up at the last second, swerving or braking with sudden jerks.

  “And my little brother’s ex-girlfriend’s sister was in the Girl Scouts with her,” she said.

  “Really,” Carol said.

  “She said she was just the sweetest person. I mean like seriously the sweetest person you ever met in your life.”

  “Oh, my God,” Carol said.

  In the backseat, Doug, having had two Jack and Cokes on the plane, dozed as the women’s bright, excited voices filled the air. He was glad for the rain; there was such a thing as too much sun. Debbie’s voice squeaked higher, and suddenly was joined by an extra squeak and the squeal of tires, and he jolted awake in time to see the road rise up, like a wave, to meet the side windows, and the last thing he heard before impact was Carol’s voice screaming his name.

  In the hospital he woke up alone, and that was the scariest thing. There was only the sound of machines beeping, not a single voice. The door to his room was closed. After a while, Debbie came in. She was wearing a hospital gown and had bandages on her face and arms and hands. “Oh, Douggie,” she said, as if he were her child, then tried to stroke his arm with one of her bandaged, pawlike hands. She was an animal, and he hated her. He tried to
scream, but nothing came out. Then he went under again. This happened over and over, it felt like. A week passed, maybe more; he was never sure. They waited until he was out of the hospital to have the funeral, again at St. Anthony’s.

  The year that followed held pain like he’d never known existed. He didn’t have words to describe it, not to other people, not even inside his own head. It was a lot more like physical pain than he ever would have expected, the ache and stab of it. It was like a broken leg, but no medicine or cast could mend it. Sometimes he drank a lot and that helped, but only barely and for a couple of hours at a time, and he’d wake up in the middle of the night, sobbing.

  He had this house full of wedding gifts. Appliances. Wineglasses. Monogrammed napkin holders, with their initials intertwined.

  For a year he went to work and came home, went to work and came home. As he began to come out of his haze he understood what a totally crappy job he’d been doing for months and apologized to his boss, Victor.

  “It’s okay, man,” Victor said, wincing, the expression he used to convey understanding. “What you’ve been through, nobody should have to survive.”

  “I think I’m doing better,” Doug said.

  “Hey, man, that’s awesome. That is so great,” Victor said, wincing harder. “You know what? Let’s go out. Let’s get some of the guys together and celebrate your return to the world.”

  It didn’t sound bad to Doug. He’d let his friendships slide over the past year, ignoring phone calls from his best man, from couples they’d socialized with, and repeated ones from Debbie. He preferred the company of his TV, watching all the shows Carol liked. After months of investigation, the guy who’d murdered his wife and child was finally on trial. The continuing news story kept him connected to her, to her lust for punishment and retribution. The murderer had cut his hair and lost weight. He looked younger and sickly and therefore more innocent. Who cares? he could hear Carol saying, her voice vibrant with anger. He deserves whatever he gets.

  “What you deserve, buddy,” Victor said, as if eavesdropping inside Doug’s mind, “is a little bit of distraction. That’s what you deserve.”

  That night, they went out with a couple other guys to a martini bar in a hotel around the corner from the office. He’d never been there before—they used to go a brewpub, since closed—and for this he was glad. They settled into a black leather booth in the corner. A couple of people were drinking alone at the bar. The waitress, a sweet-looking blond woman in her twenties, dropped off the bar menu. There were seventeen kinds of martinis.

  In the past year his tolerance for liquor had ballooned, so it took a few rounds for him to feel any effect, and only after the third could he relax and pay attention to the conversation. His workmates were talking about the waitress’s ass. It was a nice-looking ass. She caught them looking at it and gave it a wiggle. There was another woman they were discussing, also pretty, sitting at the bar. She was wearing a pink blouse and matching skirt and had long, dark brown hair. She noticed the waitress giving them a show and rolled her eyes, but nicely, as if she saw the humor of it. Doug’s friends noticed him checking her out.

  “Go talk to her, man,” Victor said. “She’s hot.”

  “Smokin’,” said Wayne from Technology Services.

  “Who says smokin’ anymore?” Victor said.

  “I’m just saying she’s hot.”

  “Smokin’,” Victor said, wincing for real. “Give me a break.”

  Doug was starting to feel drunk, and grateful for it, nodding vacantly through all of this. He hardly noticed when Victor and Wayne went to the bar to chat up the dark-haired woman, gales of laughter soon pealing from their little group. He ordered another martini from the blond waitress, who brought it and said, “This one is compliments of the girl at the bar.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I think she likes you,” the waitress said.

  From the bar, Victor gave him a thumbs-up. Doug tried to grin, but it looked more like a grimace, he knew. His smiling muscles were stiff from lack of use. He drank down half the martini and ate his olives, and by the time he finished chewing the guys were trailing back to the table.

  “You’re never going to believe this, man,” Victor said, “but she gave me this for you.” He opened his palm and showed Doug a keycard envelope on which the room number was written in blue pen.

  “She thinks you’re hot,” Wayne said.

  “Maybe even smokin’,” Victor said. He elbowed Wayne good-naturedly, and they both laughed.

  Doug could feel the vodka now. “That’s crazy,” he said, not very distinctly, “we haven’t exchanged a single word.”

  “So what?” Victor said. “She likes the look of you.”

  He drained his martini. When he looked over at the bar again, the woman was gone. Victor and the other guys walked him to the elevator, pressed the button for him, and then left. He could see his face reflected drunkenly in the elevator’s mirror. Leering at himself, he couldn’t feel the muscles move, like after a shot at the dentist’s. The elevator stopped.

  He found her room and inserted the key. Nothing happened. He tried again. Was she in there listening to him fumble? Not a very good advertisement for anything that might happen later. On the third try, the light flashed green and he turned the handle and stepped inside.

  She was sitting on the bed, wearing a black negligee and watching CNN, a sound so profoundly reassuring to him that his knees felt weak. She was thin and olive skinned, with pointy shoulders. Her clothes were folded on the chair in a neat pink pile. Only when he saw her with her clothes already off did he understand that his friends had paid for her company.

  “Hi, Doug,” she said, and turned off the TV.

  “You can leave it on,” he said.

  She pressed the remote again and a man said, “Next up, the story of a lost dog traveling hundreds of miles all by itself to find its way home.”

  He sat down next to her, unsure of what to say or do. He’d never been in this situation before. “I had some trouble getting in.”

  “Well, you’re here now,” she said, and patted his hand. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m a little dizzy,” he admitted.

  Patting his hand again, she stood up and fetched him some water from the bathroom, then turned down the volume on the TV.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “My name’s Violet.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “New Hampshire.”

  “I don’t know why I’m here,” he said. He felt close to tears. This wasn’t his thing, and it wasn’t going to help.

  “Your friends thought you needed some company.”

  “I do need company,” he confessed. “I do.”

  “Okay, then,” Violet said.

  He put his head in her lap. But she was bony and her negligee was slippery—Carol always wore cotton—and the whole setup wasn’t very comfortable, so he lay next to her in bed instead, his heavy head resting on the pillows.

  “My wife died,” he said. “She was a teacher.”

  “I wanted to be a teacher,” Violet said. They were holding hands. Her hair smelled good, not quite like candy, more like flowers. “I always liked reading.”

  “You should do it,” he said. “You should be a teacher.”

  “It’s kind of late,” Violet said.

  “It’s not even midnight,” he said, and passed out to the sound of her laugh.

  When he woke up, the room was dark and silent. It reminded him of waking in the hospital, and he was scared and sad, and his head hurt. “Violet?” he said, his voice sounding like a child’s.

  “I’m here, honey,” she said, from the other side of the room. In the darkness, he could make out that she was dressed in her pink outfit again.

  “Please don’t leave.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  In the morning she was still there, and they ordered breakfast from room service. Violet ate a waffle, licking syrup off her fingers. W
ithout her makeup and in a sober light she looked less pretty than she had and even younger, actually, but somehow more tired.

  “You had a nightmare,” she said. “You were talking but I couldn’t understand what you said.”

  “I dreamed I was back in fifth grade and the other kids tried to kill me,” he said, and they both laughed. “Pretty weird, huh.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be a teacher, if kids are that violent,” she said. “Maybe what I’m doing now is safer.” She smiled at him, then bit her lip. “You seem like a nice guy,” she said. “I’m sorry about your wife.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “My real name is Jane.”

  “My real name’s Martin. Martin Douglas Robinson. I thought Martin was a sissy name when I was a kid, so I use my middle name instead.”

  They shook hands formally, politely. He thought about kissing her, but he wasn’t really attracted to her. That part of him was dead or at least dormant; he took care of its occasional needs by himself in the shower, a quick and efficient system that worked fine in his opinion.

  “I guess I better go,” he said.

  She shrugged, sweetly. In that moment he liked her about as well as he could like anyone, and he leaned over and kissed her cheek. She touched his shoulder, a faint, barely-there caress, like the first drop before you’re sure it’s raining. She put a card into his palm and folded his fingers over it.

  “Call me,” she said.

  At work that day, Victor and Wayne grinned with accomplishment. They kept walking around slapping him on the back and announcing loudly that they knew something other people didn’t. Hungover, Doug didn’t say much, a silence taken for gentlemanly discretion. A lot of women came around to check on him, stopping by his office with lame excuses about confirming meeting times or having run out of toner and needing to use his printer. Suddenly there was an aura around him; he was back on the market. He wasn’t sure how to feel about this, and he left the office early, looking forward to a night at home in front of the TV.