Chris Bohjalian

by The Buffalo Soldier

  She had finished breading the pork chops, and so she rinsed what felt like plaster of Paris off her fingers. Maybe there’s a stable nearby where he could get some basic lessons, Laura continued. Do you think Paul’s feelings would be hurt?

  Paul? Lord, no. I’d encourage him to take them as well.

  Because I can’t lose Alfred, she said again. Really, I can’t.

  Of course you can’t. And you won’t. Why would you?

  She shook her head. Outside in the barn the horse stood contentedly inside her stall, only occasionally bothering to nuzzle the empty manger for the remaining oats or soaked sugar beets she might have missed earlier that day.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, she knew, she would open the door to his bedroom and she would watch him sleep in the bed that had once belonged to Megan. She would stand in the frame first for a long moment to make sure that he was indeed asleep, and then she would walk softly to the side of the bed and she would gaze for whole minutes at the gentle roundness of his cheek as he lay on his side, and the way he seemed to sleep with a half-smile on his face. His breathing would be even and slow and serene. He might wake at three or four in the morning—periodically she had heard him stirring in the middle of the night, sometimes turning on the lamp on the bureau before climbing back into bed—but he seemed to sleep deeply until then.

  She had watched both her girls this way. Sometimes she would begin in Hillary’s room, and sometimes in Megan’s. Sometimes Terry had been with her, but even then this had usually been a ritual that belonged only to her. She alone would tuck in the girls’ sheets and pull their quilts up to their chins. She alone would move out of the way the stuffed animals that were hogging the pillows and might interfere with her children’s sleep at some point in the night. She alone would close the book that might still be open atop Megan’s bed.

  In Alfred’s room there would be no stuffed animals to move, but there would still be blankets to pull tight and a second pillow to fluff. There would still be a shade to draw closed. There would always be something to do that would give her an extra moment to stand by his bed and simply smell the soap on his skin from his bath or watch the quilt rise an incremental quarter-inch with each silent inhalation.

  “Apparently, we were very close to the village. If the marauders had been even three-quarters of a mile upriver they would have crossed and we would have followed, and I hate to think of the surprise that would have greeted us in another few minutes of riding. Incidentally, we learned today that the older girl is actually the mother of the two young ones, and not their sister.”

  SERGEANT GEORGE ROWE,

  TENTH REGIMENT, UNITED STATES CAVALRY,

  LETTER TO HIS BROTHER IN PHILADELPHIA,

  MAY 17, 1876

  Terry

  He told her about the cans of Ensure, not surprised that this was the first memory he recalled when Phoebe asked him about his father’s death, but the first he was willing to offer in return for what she had shared about her own mother’s passing that summer.

  I used to play golf, he began, and Russell used to play softball. Still does, really. He’s good. But I haven’t picked up a golf club in over two years. The bag just sits in the far corner of the laundry room. Anyway, the night after the funeral, once Mom had gone up to bed, Russell and I were standing in her kitchen. We each had a beer, and we both saw the Ensure at the same time. Two cases on the floor beside the old refrigerator, and at least another ten or twelve cans on the counter. Leah—

  Your sister?

  My sister. She wasn’t married yet, and I don’t believe she had even met Rick back then. She was upstairs in bed, too.

  Where was Laura? And your girls? They must have been in, what, first grade?

  They’d just finished kindergarten. Young things. Laura took them home after the reception, and Russell and Leah and I stayed with Mom in Saint J. That was our plan. The three of us kids would spend the night at Mom’s house so we’d all be there when she went to bed, and we could all have breakfast together the next morning. Then we’d all go our own separate ways. Now it was pretty late. Somewhere between midnight and twelve-thirty, I guess, because Russell and I didn’t get to the golf course until quarter to one in the morning. We parked in the lot right by the pro shop and the old caddy shack, and then we each took a case and as many singles as we could carry and walked out to the second hole. Par five, four hundred and ninety yards. Nice long fairway—not that we needed it. We had my dad’s ancient clubs, and we’d slipped an old baseball bat we found in the basement into the bag. In truth, it was all a lot of effort for a couple moments of pleasure. But it was very satisfying.

  She leaned forward and punched him lightly on the arm. Kind of like sex, she said, smiling broadly. Lots of foreplay to get what you really want.

  It wasn’t that good. Trust me. But it was fun. We teed the little eight-ounce cans up one at a time, and found we could whack one, oh, forty yards with the driver, and maybe thirty with an iron.

  No tests with the putter?

  Absolutely not. This was good old-fashioned, testosterone violence. Tee ’em up and swing. Blast ’em. These were the cans of protein shakes our father used to vomit up, after all, and so nothing said cancer to us like Ensure. Nothing. I mean the stuff doesn’t taste half-bad—I actually like the chocolate—and it’s very smooth. But…well, we were angry.

  My mom used to drink strawberry, Phoebe said. Ensure Plus Strawberry. Extra calories, extra protein. Yum.

  The worst thing to watch was how much it hurt him when he threw up. The radiation had burned the living shit—pardon me—out of his esophagus, and so it was pure agony for him when the stuff would come back. We’d hear him gag, and then he’d spray this watery brown gruel into the toilet, or the lobster pot he kept by the couch. But some days that was the only thing he had even a prayer in hell of keeping down. The only thing.

  Anyone hear you?

  On the golf course? Oh, I doubt it. One time Russell screamed Fore! but I reminded him that people might frown on our little activity, and after that we weren’t quite so hysterical. We were laughing pretty good, but at least we weren’t screaming down the fairways.

  You stayed on the second hole?

  Yup. I tossed him a couple lobs from the ladies’ tee so he could get a few good rips in with the baseball bat. But mostly we used our dad’s golf clubs. It felt good. Juvenile, but worth every whack. Sometimes we’d hear the cans pop when we cracked ’em open, and the shake would spray like a Fizzie as it zoomed off the tee.

  Funny, I don’t recall what we did with the cans we never used. I guess we donated them somewhere. Maybe to the hospice or the local food shelf. Wallace took care of that sort of thing for Dad. He got rid of all the signs of Mom’s illness.

  We did that, too. Leah and me.

  On the street outside the coffee shop where they had met for a late lunch the crowds were starting to thin. Because it was Christmas Eve most of the stores would be closing soon—some had even locked their doors an hour earlier, at three P.M.—and most of the other people in the restaurant had left. There was another couple at another booth, great bags of presents in the aisle beside them, but otherwise the dining room was empty and quiet.

  What did your dad do? she asked him.

  He was the manager of the lamp factory in Saint J. It wasn’t glamorous but it was lucrative.

  The brass lamps?

  Right. He always wanted to buy it—or at least a piece of it—so he could own a business himself, but the Bowen family never wanted to sell. Over the years he worked himself up from an eighteen-year-old guy on the line to the man in charge of the whole operation. Even did a little selling—got the lamps into a couple of very big hotel chains. Owning the company seemed the natural next step. But it never happened.

  She sipped the last of her tea and then asked, Will you and Laura and Alfred be going to church tonight?

  In all likelihood.

  Me, too. My dad and I will eat dinner as soon as I walk in the door, and then
go to the early service so he can go to bed. He doesn’t sleep a whole lot, but he likes to be in his bed with the radio on by nine-thirty or ten.

  We used to go to the early service because there was always a pageant the girls would be in. They’d be sheep or angels. One year Megan was a shepherd. But after they died Laura couldn’t bear to see all their friends together like that in the church, so ever since we’ve gone to the late service. The thing is, I think she’d be okay with the pageant these days. After all, she teaches Sunday school. But now the late service is a habit.

  She nodded and he realized she was about to leave. He guessed her drive home was about ninety minutes. Maybe more. They could have had this whole conversation—the important part, anyway, the part where she told him that she’d decided she was definitely going to keep the baby—over the telephone. But they had both, it seemed, felt the need to see each other, and so they had tiptoed gingerly around the possibility of meeting in person and settled on the idea of coming back here to Montpelier: a city, albeit a small one, but still a place where they could be anonymous. They hadn’t seen each other since they met nine days earlier at the bakery barely a block from where they sat now, and then wandered in the brisk air around the edge of Hubbard Park—the hilly patch of forest preserved just west of the state’s gold-domed capitol building. He’d wrapped his arms around her when she cried and held her hand when the more dense clusters of hemlock and tamarack trees had shielded them from the nearby houses. They’d stayed on the sidewalk and never ventured inside the forest, and not simply because the inner paths would be slippery and cold: He feared they would kiss if they went there, and he did not want to repeat the mistake he had made at deer camp.

  I hope before too long we’ll see each other again, he said, surprised at the small current of neediness he’d detected in his voice. He hoped she hadn’t heard it. This was the third time they’d been together, and he realized that as he’d gotten to know her, he’d grown to enjoy her company—her odd sense of humor, the surprising number of things they’d discovered they had in common—more with each visit. He realized that he wanted them to remain friends (nothing more, that could not happen again, he reminded himself), and not simply because she carried within her his child—their child, the baby they’d made together—but because he liked her. It was really that simple. She made him happy.

  Oh, I’m sure we will, she said. After the New Year we should probably talk—but seriously, Terry, only if you want to.

  I understand.

  No pressure.

  None felt.

  Still, I have to ask. Why?

  Why do I want to see you?

  Uh-huh, she said. Is this just about being responsible?

  He saw that she was reaching for her purse and the wallet inside, and so he motioned for her to put it away. Let me get this, he insisted, happy to have something to do with his hands as he stood and thought about what he wanted to say.

  HE’D TOLD LAURA he wouldn’t be home until seven because he hadn’t known what would happen with Phoebe. How long they would be together. Where they might go. Laura knew he was using a few hours of personal leave time to take the afternoon off, but he had hinted strongly to her that he was planning to go Christmas shopping. In truth his shopping was done, and since Montpelier was only about an hour from Cornish, he could be home by five-thirty if he wanted.

  But he didn’t want that, and this reality disturbed him. He realized he didn’t know what he wanted, and for a long time he simply sat in his cruiser in the large parking lot behind the hotel on Main Street. At that moment he guessed Alfred was finishing up with the horse and Laura was leaving the shelter. Maybe helping to clean up the plastic cups and spilled punch from the party.

  The trouble was that once again that day he had imagined all too precisely what would have greeted him at his home if a season of rain and a single wave on a river hadn’t undone his life. In his mind he had projected the images, from the minute he pulled into his driveway and he heard—and sound, suddenly, was everything—his girls’ voices when he opened the front door of his house, to that moment a little later when he’d hear the whine of the bureau drawers and closet hinges (it was the bureau in Megan’s room that made so much noise, but it was Hillary’s closet that squeaked) as they picked out their clothing for the Christmas Eve service at the church. He saw the four of them eating dinner together, and he heard Megan’s high voice—higher than Hillary’s, anyway—making fun of his belt as he passed her the mashed potatoes. She always made fun of his uniform, especially his regulation belt, because it looked as black and wide as a strip of new highway, and that, in her opinion, was a very bad fashion statement.

  Nothing would be like that now, even though they had a child inside their house once again.

  Yet he reminded himself that the only changes that should trouble him—there was nothing, after all, to be done about the fact that his daughters were gone and would never be back—were the changes that were looming outside his house. If he was going to focus on anything, he should stew about what he had done (was doing, he told himself quickly, was doing) away from the world of his wife and the boy.

  He tried to consider a way out, but he didn’t like the shape of those words in his head, with their disturbing ring of culpability and guilt, and corrected himself quickly: He tried to imagine what would happen next. What he would decide. And surely something would happen now that Phoebe was committed to keeping the child, even if he himself did absolutely nothing. How could it not? In this case, doing nothing was doing something. Neglect. Desertion. Becoming, in essence if not in the literal-mindedness of the law, one of the deadbeat dads who drove him wild.

  But that was one of his options. He could ignore his real child—the one who would be born, he guessed, late the following summer—and, yes, this woman who was that real child’s mom. This other woman who wasn’t scarred like his wife, and who told jokes and made him laugh. He could do that, it was a legitimate choice. She’d made that clear.

  Or he could leave Alfred and Laura. He could abandon a boy who had already been abandoned who knew how many times in his life, and a woman who’d lost both her daughters. That, too, was an alternative.

  Or—and he shook his head at the absurdity of the thought—he could juggle two families. Never tell Laura about Phoebe, but continue to be an element in this other woman’s life. A part-time husband and father and, yes, breadwinner.

  Terry allowed his forehead to rest against his steering wheel. His salary—and Laura’s—supported their household nicely, but a sergeant with the state police certainly couldn’t afford to keep a second household in diapers and milk.

  It was a ridiculous notion, anyway. He knew the very last thing Phoebe wanted from him was money. The truth was, he wasn’t sure she wanted anything from him at all. Maybe that was why he’d never given serious credence to the idea that the baby might not really be his.

  Besides, he’d seen enough liars in his life to single them out, and he knew Phoebe wasn’t that kind of person.

  The words real child came back to him. It wasn’t lost on him that he was perceiving a microscopic blob of cells in Phoebe’s womb as a real child, while viewing the ten-year-old boy living under his roof as something else. Something impermanent. Something not his.

  He sat back in his seat and started the cruiser. It was Christmas Eve and he had a wife and a child—real or not, what did it matter now?—at his home, and still he didn’t have the slightest idea where he was going to drive. He knew only that he wasn’t yet ready to head back to Cornish.

  IF THERE HAD been a tack shop still open, he might have stopped and gotten another small gift for the boy. One of those horse combs or something. Maybe some special riding gloves. The child’s big Christmas present, of course, were the cowboy boots Laura had found at a leather store up in Burlington: They were a brownish red that reminded him a bit of his own leather wallet, and they looked nothing at all like Phoebe’s black-and-white boots. Even the toe was differ
ent—less pointed. Almost blunt. But, still, he couldn’t help but think of Phoebe’s boots when he saw what Laura wanted to buy for the boy, and then—therefore—of Phoebe herself.

  He considered driving to the mall in Berlin Corners, guessing even now there might be stores open there. He was no more than fifteen minutes away, and he figured the mall would stay open till five or five-thirty at least. He might even find something more for Laura as well. A new sweater vest, maybe. Or perhaps one of those bulky knit cardigans she was so fond of when it was cold.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to steer the cruiser onto the road that led south to Barre and Berlin, and turned instead up into the hills full of stately old homes just behind the capitol building. He drove down the white-pine- and maple-lined streets, reminded a bit of Saint Johnsbury and his mother’s house—his house, too, of course, because it would always be the house in which he’d grown up. These houses would be noisy tomorrow morning. Christmas. They’d be like his house had been when he was a child, and like his current home in the hills over the mountain when his girls were alive.

  He wondered what Alfred would be like tomorrow—just after he woke up. He couldn’t imagine the child getting up early to race downstairs to scope out the loot the way his daughters always had. It was so clear he was unfamiliar with the notion of generosity on any kind of scale—certainly not on the scale Terry’s daughters had known and, in fact, taken for granted.

  Still, the house would be noisier tomorrow than it had been in the recent past, and that would be a welcome change. Most mornings were eerily quiet. That was, perhaps, the most disconcerting of the myriad small ways their lives had changed since the girls died. The house had become almost too quiet to bear, and Alfred’s presence had done little to change that.

  He didn’t know how Laura stood the place when she came home from the shelter. There was no Hillary taking the steps two at a time, pounding up the stairs like a sprinter. There were no wooden clogs—Megan’s shoe of choice—scraping against the soft pine in the kitchen and the hall as she shuffled along in her own little world. There were no giggles, no fights, no squeals. No television. No CD player blaring the latest pop hit from that week’s teen queen sensation.