Signs and Wonders

by Alix Ohlin

  His skin prickled with revulsion. “The night of the accident, were you partying with them?”

  She squinted at him. “We never got there,” she said simply.

  Nights when Lauren was out, he and Diana told themselves not to wait up, that they knew her friends and where she was. Every time they called her cell she’d answer promptly. She was allergic to hazelnuts and they’d trained her to ask about the food in every restaurant or home, even if it was something that didn’t seem like it would have nuts in it. Once when she was eleven she ate some chocolate cake at a party and went into anaphylactic shock, her throat swelling, and he’d plunged the EpiPen into her skinny thigh as she stared mutely at him, terrified … These memories skittered like marbles across the flat planes of his brain.

  “Thanks for picking me up,” her friend said.

  The fake politeness of teenagers drove him crazy. He looked at her, not knowing if she remembered what had just happened to her, or if he should remind her. “Are you okay?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, then got out and walked slowly, carefully, up to the door. Only when she got to the front door, framed beneath the yellow porch light, did he notice she wasn’t wearing any shoes.

  Back home he slid into bed next to Diana, needing her body beside him. He put his palm on her hip, and she nestled back against him. Lying still, he tried to time his breathing with hers. When they were first married, her hair was long, well below her shoulders, and it would get into his eyes and mouth while they were wrapped together in bed. And when she was pregnant, it grew thick and silky, with a heft and shine they both loved; he used to run his hands through it, feeling it slip around his fingers like ribbon. After Lauren was born, she cut it short, because the baby kept pulling on it, and she’d kept it like that. Now the black was spiked with gray. He reached his arm over her stomach and in her sleep she took his hand and put it between her legs, warming it there.

  He thought back to when her hair was long. He was twenty-five, waiting for friends in a bar after work, when he noticed this pretty girl sitting alone in a corner. Her friend had flaked out on her; he never met his. They’d been dating three weeks when she invited him over to her parents’ house for Sunday supper. She went to church with her parents every week, and they spent the rest of the day together. At the time he thought she went along just because she was a good daughter, not realizing how tenaciously she believed. It had taken him a while to come to grips with that, but he had. On that first night, he was greeted by her father, a portly, jowly man with skin so saggy it was as if gravity were tugging it downward.

  He looked at Mike and said, “You must be the young man I’ve heard so much about.”

  “I hope so,” Mike said, and held out his hand, but the other man didn’t take it, just stood there staring at him, his eyes half-hidden by his fleshy lids. Mike heard Diana and her mother talking, and the mysterious clatter of kitchen work. Almost reluctantly, her father gestured for Mike to come into the living room. It was clearly a place they spent little time in, with an uncomfortable-looking, straight-backed couch and side tables riotous with doilies and knickknacks.

  “What is it you do for a living?”

  “I’m in sales,” Mike said. He had a job at a medical supply company, and hated it, how he had to inflict himself on people, the associations with illness and death.

  Diana’s father grunted, his expression impossible to interpret. “You like it?”

  “Not very much.”

  He lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer one to Mike, who didn’t smoke and maintained his college habit of running ten miles a week but nonetheless thought it rude.

  “Diana says you’re from Ohio.”

  “Columbus. Sir.”

  “What church does your family go to?”

  Mike took a breath. His hands were sweating. The two women were chatting away in the kitchen, their voices too low for him to make out what they were saying. Whatever they were cooking smelled good—pot roast, maybe—but why was Diana leaving him stranded out here?

  “We don’t go to church,” he said. “My parents were raised Lutheran, but they didn’t much care for it.”

  “Ha!” Diana’s father barked. “Didn’t care for it!” Mirthlessly he shook his belly, exhaling smoke at the same time.

  At this, Diana finally came out of the kitchen, her eyes dancing as she took in Mike’s discomfort. “Are you tormenting him, Daddy?” she said.

  “Not too much,” he told her. “I got to make sure he’s all right for you, sugar.”

  “He’s just fine,” Diana said, and Mike flushed as if she’d said much more.

  After Diana’s mother brought out plate after plate of food, her father said grace. They all held hands. As they unclasped, her father turned to her and said, “Mike says he’s thinking of being a teacher.”

  Diana and Mike exchanged puzzled glances; her father went on imperturbably. “Knowledge is the thing. It will last a lifetime. Better than material goods.” He was a deacon at the church and his voice rolled from him in waves, inexorable as his thick sagging flesh, a deep, rich river of words. “To mold young minds,” he said to Mike, “is to better the world. It is itself a kind of religion.”

  That evening, he and Diana slept together for the first time back at his little apartment, and afterward he said, “What do you think your dad meant about me being a teacher? I didn’t say anything like that.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. He gets ideas like that sometimes. He calls them inspirations.”

  Mike ran a strand of her hair through his fingers. “I think I might give it a try,” he said.

  Seeming unsurprised, she smiled at him. As they held hands, he saw the path his life was going to take: he knew he would marry this girl, that they’d live close to her parents, that he was going to be a teacher. There was a certainty to it all that he would have said, if he were a religious man, felt like a state of grace.

  The following weekend he went to see Lauren alone, then came back and changed into his work clothes. He was hanging sheetrock when the doorbell rang. Sam was standing on the front porch wearing shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops. “Hey, come in,” he said, stepping back. The girl stood in front of the couch uncertainly until he said, “Sit down. Do you want some lemonade or something?”

  “Um, okay.”

  He brought her a glass and she sipped it tentatively before putting it on a coaster. He sat down next to her on the couch. She was slouching, her head nodding as if in agreement to something he’d said.

  “So anyway,” she said, and laughed awkwardly. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders. She was sweating a little. “I came to, you know … about the other night.”

  “Listen, I’m glad you called,” Mike said. “I’m glad we got you out of there.”

  She glanced up. “No, I—” She reached out her hand, as if to touch him, then stopped.

  Mike was confused. Why was she here? For a recounting of that horrible night? She shook her head and didn’t speak. He waited her out but nothing came.

  Finally, she said, “So what are you up to today?”

  He gestured at his sweaty clothes, the plaster dust coating his shorts. “I’m redoing the bathroom.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Can I see?”

  It wasn’t what he was expecting, but he nodded and led her back there. He showed her where he was installing the new toilet and sink, the tiles and paint colors they’d selected. Nothing a teenage girl should be remotely interested in, but she was acting like it was the most exciting thing she’d ever seen in her life.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “Oh come on,” he said. “You must have better things to do with your time.”

  “I don’t.” Through her bangs, tears were visible in her eyes. She blinked and sniffled. Without thinking he took her in his arms, and they hugged. She came just up to his shoulders, and she nestled her head almost into his armpit, like some animal burrowing there. She put her arms around him. He could feel t
he heat coming off her body, and her breasts squishing against him. He didn’t move. She reached up and palmed his neck, then leaned her head back and stared at him intently. He felt logy, sedated, as if viewing all this from a great distance. Then she stepped up on her toes and kissed him, slipping her tongue inside his mouth. She was none too adept, but his body responded and he let his hands drop down to the small of her back.

  She broke the kiss and took a step backward, smiling at him triumphantly. “I always wanted to do that,” she said.

  “Sam.”

  “Look, don’t worry about it, okay? I just always wanted to.”

  Always? He almost said it out loud. How long can always be to an eighteen-year-old? Since you were fourteen, sixteen? Since last week?

  “I’m going to go,” she said. “Thanks for getting me. I owe you.”

  “No you don’t,” he said.

  She let herself out. After she’d gone, he sat on the box of tiles, wondering if he ought to feel guilty. Was he as bad as that fat man in South Bethlehem, preying on his daughter’s friend? She’d seemed so happy, as if she’d proved something to herself, passed a test that only she knew the contents of. That she was grown-up, he guessed. That she was allowed to make mistakes.

  On the next Sunday he didn’t pick her up. Instead he offered to go to church with Diana, who was taken aback. “How come?”

  “I want to be with you,” he said, which was the truth. They attended the service together, and then went to see Lauren. They fed her some soup and washed her hair, Mike supporting her neck while Diana shampooed and rinsed it. When clean, it gleamed darkly with health. Lauren seemed to enjoy it, making soft, snuffling noises that sounded contented. He noticed that someone had taken out her earrings, and wondered who’d done it, and when. They’d argued for months about her getting her ears pierced, Lauren wanting to at eleven, he and Diana insisting she wait until thirteen—an arbitrary number in all honesty—before finally giving in. Diana drove Lauren and Sam to the mall, and the girls returned full of pride, constantly fingering their ears …

  The night of the accident it was the Kents who called them, the police for some reason having dialed the wrong number, and they all met at the hospital, including the parents of the dead boy, whose name, he now remembered, was Evan. The Kents rushed in to see Sam, who was crying in a room down the hall. He and Diana were taken in to see Lauren, who was lying in bed with her eyes closed, breathing quietly. There were lacerations on her face and arms but otherwise she looked fine. Diana touched her forehead gently, speaking softly all the while, letting her know they were there, that everything would be okay.

  Now she folded Lauren’s hands in her lap, squeezed them, kissed her forehead. She was worn and tired but her strength was remarkable; it nourished him, kept him from falling into the darkness.

  Mike stood up and kissed his daughter’s cheek. She made a small bleating sound; the doctors had cautioned them not to read too much into the noises she made, but it was hard not to think that she was saying something, that she knew they were there. She was still so pretty. He thought of her on the night of the accident, running out to the car. Sam in the back, her oldest friend. The good-looking boy in the driver’s seat, gazing at her with hunger in his eyes. It was a crisp fall evening in the November of their senior year, a clear night with millions of stars speckling the sky. He hoped his daughter had seen that. He prayed she’d felt, getting into the car, a happiness too pure and rare to dwell on, a fleeting but immeasurable sense of the rightness of the world.

  The Cruise

  Because her aunt was both wealthy and caring, because people seemed to believe that divorce required a period of mourning accompanied and defined by homemade ritual, because Laureen (the aunt) was also kind of bossy and wouldn’t take no for an answer, because she (Reena) had been named for Laureen and they were therefore considered by the family and, eventually, themselves to be specially affiliated, because the same people who spoke of post-divorce rituals also said that travel broadened the mind, because the world’s wild creatures were disappearing and it was imperative to see them before it was too late, two women went on a cruise to the Galápagos.

  “This is going to cheer you up,” Laureen said as they boarded the flight to Quito. She had for decades been a highly paid executive secretary who wore black cashmere turtlenecks and tasteful gold jewelry. Now, in retirement, she’d ditched all sobriety, in clothes and otherwise. She was wearing fuchsia pants and a pink striped blouse and had already downed two alcoholic smoothies at the airport bar. She squeezed Reena’s hand, and her breath smelled of rum and chips.

  Reena’s eyes watered, not from the squeeze or the breath. How long had it been since anyone held her hand? She was touched by it. She was touched by everything these days, not hardened by the divorce so much as scraped raw. This year’s holiday cards, even the generic ones from the bank and the dentist, had brought tears to her eyes. It’s so nice people care, she’d tell herself as she put the cards on the otherwise bare mantel in her new apartment. The cruise hadn’t been her idea, but she was grateful for it. It was two weeks of something to do every day and night, the hours portioned into particulars. Two weeks in which she wouldn’t have to be alone for more than a few minutes, or contend with those terrible, scurrying creatures, her thoughts.

  As they settled into first class, Laureen ordered more drinks. She had been widowed young and raised her son, Jasper, by herself. She was briskly competent, always cheerful and independent and brave and Reena didn’t want to be like her, she didn’t ever want to have Laureen’s life. But for now they were cruising, and she was grateful. When the plane lifted off, she felt better already.

  The first part of the trip was a blur: two days in Quito of heat, dehydration, bland hotel food, and a dizzying trip up to the Virgen del Panecillo. Sometime after thirty she’d gone from mediocre traveler to complete wimp. Laureen kept after her, cheerleading her through the days. It was infantilizing and Reena liked it. She would have liked to be tucked into bed and read a story at night. She wouldn’t have minded a kiss on the forehead. Her mother would never do such a thing, would never have taken her on a trip to get her mind off her troubles, in fact had told her that the divorce was her fault (a belief Reena shared). Laureen’s curt dismissal of this opinion—saying of her sister, in front of Reena, “she’s very narrow-minded”—typified her general auntly excellence. And now Laureen seemed most intent on getting Reena drunk, which was largely why the first two days passed in such a blur. A brief flirtation with stomach flu or food poisoning, on the day they boarded the cruise ship, came as a relief, giving her some respite from rum.

  When she emerged on the second morning of the cruise, the social dynamics of the ship had already been established. And she had been abandoned: Laureen had a boyfriend. His name was Benjamin Moore, like the paint. A sixty-year-old civil engineer from Toronto, he was sensibly dressed in pressed Dockers and a light blue shirt and the equatorial sun had already played havoc with his ruddy face. He and Laureen had had dinner together the first night on board and watched the stars, and were now, her aunt said, “thick as thieves.”

  “I know all about you,” Benjamin Moore said when introduced.

  Reena’s nervous laugh came out as a squawk. “I’ll have to catch up.”

  “You don’t have to do anything at all,” he said kindly, by which Reena understood that he did know everything about her frailty and unfortunate life circumstances, and again her eyes watered, which she knew was pathetic and tried to hide by putting her sunglasses on, muttering something about the light.

  Besides Benjamin Moore, her aunt had befriended a Japanese couple who spoke excellent, if slow-paced, English and knew everything there was to know about the wildlife photography opportunities to come. And also a German man, taking the cruise by himself and slightly younger than Reena. “He’s really into movies,” her aunt said. “His name is Hans.”

  “Yo, what’s up?” he said, shaking Reena’s hand and smiling broadly. H
e looked like a younger, pastier, doughier version of Benjamin Moore. She understood that Laureen intended for him to be Reena’s cruise-boyfriend, a distraction to enjoy and practice on for her eventual return to the world, a boyfriend from camp whom you missed terribly the first day back home and then forgot about, remembering only the thrill of kisses in the woods.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Reena.”

  “Reena,” said Hans. “We’re going bird-watching today!” He seemed very pleased about it, and punched his fist in the air. “It’s going to be motherfucking awesome, I think.”

  Reena looked at Laureen.

  “Movies,” her aunt mouthed.

  Reena could only imagine that Hans had no idea how little the word motherfucker was generally used by middle-aged people on package vacations.

  They were in open water and the sun was brutal. Reena looked around, suddenly disoriented. It was so hot and she was so far from home.

  “Well,” Laureen said brightly, “let’s go!”

  A young white-clad officer named Stavros led them, obedient as schoolchildren, onto one of the islands, where they would begin their wildlife tour. The Galápagos were bare and brilliant. Back in the distance their ship waited, hulking and white and patient. Reena looked at it longingly. Although seeing the wildlife was the whole point of the trip, she found the ship’s rituals comforting, the constant availability of food, the orchestrated social events, even their tiny cabin. Everything outside was too big, too bright. We’re at the end of the world, she thought, and understood why people used to think the earth was flat. Glancing fearfully at the horizon, she felt as if they might sail right over the edge. She started to cry again and hated herself for it. When would this stop? It wasn’t even localized pain anymore. Her tear ducts were just in the habit. She set off after the tour guide, hot tears coursing freely down her cheeks. Hans sprang to her side, loping energetically, like a dog. Behind her, Laureen’s happy laugh harmonized with Benjamin Moore’s lower, rhythmic music.