Bystanders

by Tara Laskowski

  It was windy and hot. I made Craig pull over on the side of the road so we could get out. Dru felt like a space heater in my arms. He kept squinting his eyes to block out the sun, kicking his bare feet into my belly. “Down, down,” he wanted, and I imagined just watching him run for miles and still being able to see his little toddler trot.

  And that was it—that’s what was bothering me. The openness. Back in Seattle, where the buildings sprouted up all around you, a long flat landscape of nothing seemed exciting. But here now, it was all laid out in front of you. Predictable, like your life as a novel that you already peeked at and read the ending.

  Miles away—maybe twenty, thirty—we could see some clouds gathering. The rainstorm approached rapidly, like a massive swarm of bees, darkening the fields beneath it, heading our way.

  I thought about those cowboys. Those pioneer fools so many years ago, rocking across this place in their rickety wagons with their dysentery and their snake bites. What they would’ve thought of us here, me with my cup of coffee and Ray Ban sunglasses and Craig with his sleeping pills and digital recorder. I imagined us all those years ago, hunched over Craig’s desktop computer playing that game. Naming the kids in our family that died of snakebites, fell off cliffs, drowned in the rivers. Craig trying to tell me what move to make and me spitefully doing the opposite.

  The storm was getting closer. We could smell it now, the wet dirt smell where heat and cold mixed. We’d have to wait it out in the car, the only shelter in sight. There was nowhere else to go.

  “So is it all you thought?” Craig asked. His hair was tossing about and he looked thin, like the storm might just scoop him right up. It occurred to me that sometimes being a true pioneer meant protecting the ones with whom you were taking the journey.

  “Oh yeah,” I lied. “It’s exactly what I imagined.”

  Other People’s Houses

  Their real estate agent is so pleasant. She has boys of her own. Three boys! Imagine that. “Ha ha ha. You’ll never sleep again. Just get ready to have your world turn upside down,” she says. In a good way, of course. She hands Derek and Hannah each a shiny business card with edges sharp enough to draw blood. Mathilda Bee is her name, and her slogan on the business card reads: I’ll take the sting out of buying! She squeezes Hannah’s upper arm and sighs, then presses her thumbs to her temple. “My word, the beauty of a life I’m imagining for you two—you three. The beauty!” She calms down, leans forward again. “So are we thinking three or four bedrooms?”

  ***

  Derek knows nothing substantial about the guy Hannah fucked. He knows his name and his age and how she met him—the douche was renovating their apartment complex’s gym. He could do more research but his therapist frowns on this. On the way out of the real estate agent’s office he thinks, though, that perhaps once he and Hannah find a place he may make a bitter crack about how they can call Paul in to remodel the place and make it more “homey.” He thinks about saying this and it feels to him like unleashing a wild pack of lions on her bones. But he just keeps quiet. He’s supposed to be working on the anger.

  “Should we have waited for her?” Hannah asks him after the second house is not only difficult to find but also a bust—a two-story little dump that looks like it would topple over if the Big Bad Wolf blew on it too hard. Mathilda Bee had offered to take them out next week, show them some places, but Derek had not wanted to waste any time and just asked for a list.

  “What? And spoil this good time?” he says, laying on his horn as a car cuts in front of him. He knows he’s being a jerk. It’s like he can’t help himself.

  It’s the Christmas carols that have been bothering him the most, bringing it all up again. Have you ever noticed how many Christmas songs are about being alone? He punches off the songs—“Last Christmas,” “Blue Christmas,” “Please Come Home for Christmas,” even though he knows Hannah eats all that stuff up—the cookies and the music and the trees and all of it.

  Most of all he hates the holiday traffic. They have already traveled the boulevard four times today for these stupid houses out in the West Bridge neighborhood and are now heading back toward Salmonville. You can’t drive anywhere without going on the boulevard, which the city tries every year to spruce up by adding garlands and white lights in the bare trees. And of course the Santa—whose arm was broken off last year and who just hangs outside the hotel sort of lopsided—is supposed to add something nostalgic to the whole depressing picture.

  “They really ought to replace him, don’t you think?” Hannah says as if reading his mind.

  He doesn’t answer. He’s thinking about how it wasn’t always like this. When he was a kid, like every other kid, he loved the holidays, but now they were just there to torment him, to make him remember that you couldn’t trust anyone, that you never really knew anyone. Now they are here to remind him that his marriage was as big of a sham as Santa himself—just an imagined magic he was fooled into believing in for a few years. But now he knows.

  “How does a Santa lose an arm anyway?” Hannah says again, chewing on the skin around her index finger.

  Out of nowhere, it starts to snow, flecks of lace that melt immediately upon hitting the windshield. “We’ll call her when we get home,” he says. “She can take us next weekend. Show us her secrets.”

  ***

  Hannah takes to calling the real estate agent Honey Bee to Derek, which is sometimes shortened to Ms. Bee or just Honey. Honey, in Hannah’s mind, is the perfect family woman. She never makes mistakes, never strays. She is graying a little and gets her hair dyed professionally every six weeks, but her husband would adore her no matter how she looked. She is a little plump, but nothing to really gossip about, and she always wears clothes that look like blankets, big and sweeping in muted colors. Hannah thinks of her as one giant comfortable couch, and imagines that her boys slink up to her while watching TV and plant their heads between her breasts to fall asleep at night. She probably knows how to make jam.

  Hannah would bet Honey also loves the downtown Christmas decorations. She and her three rambunctious boys and her little-too-large but loveable husband make a trek down there for an annual tradition of seeing the lights and getting hot chocolate at Clennson’s. They wear matching sweaters, the boys, from the Gap or, if it is a tough year for real estate, Old Navy. She imagines the littlest of the boys, Ryan, likes his hot chocolate with extra marshmallows, and he asks the girl behind the counter for more more more, which is a little obnoxious but still cute if you like kids. They made a list for Santa. Most of them still believe in him, except the eldest is starting to have doubts. They have asked for boy technologies—Xboxes, iPhones, iPads, radio-controlled helicopters. They have not asked for guns or space aliens. They get Christmas pajamas to unwrap on Christmas Eve, and then Honey washes and dries them late that night so they can wear them on Christmas Day and not be itchy.

  ***

  Today’s first house sits in the middle of a cul de sac, and Hannah remembers an old co-worker of hers saying that living on a cul de sac is like being at the end of a fishing pole—shake shake shake all you want to, but you’re always on display, always the worm dangling off the hook. The house seems dreary—Hannah doesn’t even want to get out of the car. She wants to tell Honey Bee, who is already slamming the driver’s side door, checking her folder of endless notes notes notes, to just forget about it, to drive on, but Hannah senses Derek thinks she is being picky, and so she resists.

  There are not enough windows, which makes the house seem more like an old mom-and-pop store than a residence. Honey struggles with the lock box while Derek shakes the porch railings, testing for what? The front door squeaks and they enter, their eyes adjusting to the dimness, the smell of something old assaulting Hannah’s nostrils.

  She hates it more.

  “So you have the living area off to the side here, opening into a hallway with the kitchen in the back,” Honey Bee sta
rts her trail of words, moving, pressing forward.

  Death. Someone died here. Maybe right under Hannah’s feet. She feels nauseated, the way she feels these days at the thought of eating or smelling refried beans. The furniture from the previous owners looks saggy, like beanbags that have lost half of their stuffing. A heavy, tan blackout curtain dwarfs the one small window in the living room. As if Honey knows, she walks quickly over and pushes it aside. “Let’s get some light in here.”

  “Where are the light switches?” Derek asks quietly.

  “New carpeting!” Honey points out.

  Upstairs the smell gets worse but the features get better. Honey points out the marble bathroom countertops and claw-footed tub. “Newly remodeled,” she says. Hannah wonders if Paul did the work, imagines him here on the floor, his jeans stained with dirt and sweat. Sometimes when they were lying in bed after sex she would find traces of dust in the sheets or under her nails. Even after a shower he kept shedding it.

  Honey points out the walk-in closets and the built-in bookshelves. The rooms are small. On one wall is a painting of a duck in the middle of a pond. The trees surrounding the pond are bent inwards, threatening giant fingers trying to grasp something. The closet of the spare bedroom is filled with pastel suits, lace-collared button-down shirts, white nursing sneakers.

  Hannah looks out the window. Imagines an older woman looking out on this spot—where is she now? Dead? On the street below, a white truck with a ladder drives by and Hannah thinks again of Paul. What if she never sees him again? She is okay with that, right? This is what she wants, this here with Derek, how it should be. Before she screwed up.

  “You’re not happy, right?” Honey Bee’s voice, always so upbeat, startles Hannah.

  “What?”

  Honey, who apparently likes to touch Hannah, pats her shoulder, smiles. “Before you give up totally, you’ll want to see the basement.” She leads Hannah and Derek down a carpeted staircase where the stairs feel like they’re slipping away, eroding on the edges from years of use. Honey flips on a light switch to flood the dark room with florescent light. “Look! A man cave,” she says, smiling. “Imagine a pool table here. Or a bar. Or,” she adds, glancing at Hannah’s stomach, “a nice secluded play area for the little ones.”

  “I don’t think this is quite what we’re looking for.” Hannah breathes, her hands resting on her stomach as if to protect the baby from the awful thought of having to live here.

  “Yeah, it’s a little…claustrophobic,” Derek says, and Hannah is surprised at how good it feels for him to agree with her. On the way back up the stairs, she feels his hand on the small of her back.

  ***

  The theater out in Franklin is the only one showing the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. It isn’t supposed to snow until the next morning, so Derek drives out there. The theater is nearly empty except for a few college-aged couples, thin, stupid girls thrusting their made-up faces into their boyfriend’s North Face coats and pounding thick, fake-fur snowboots on the seat in front of them. It is, predictably, a terrible movie, though the one scene with the eyeballs is kind of cool.

  Derek has been going to horror movies since the separation last year and now he can’t stop. He goes mostly alone, though occasionally with a coworker Mindy. She is about eight years younger than him, and though nothing bad has happened, it feels kind of wrong and also deliciously dangerous. She calls him her “horror buddy,” and even that seems stupid and yet kind of cool. Mindy wears mostly black and has a nose stud that sparkles in the dark theater and she laughs a little too hard if there is ever a scene involving or suggesting castration. He suspects she is a lesbian and this both disappoints and relieves him greatly.

  He likes the classic B horror movies from the ‘80s, the slasher films that kill off hordes of teenagers. Mindy, back when he was still separated from Hannah, used to try to psychoanalyze him. “I get it, Derek. I totally get it. You like the morality, the code, of these movies. The ones that deserve it get killed. You’re dumb, you get killed. You have sex when you aren’t supposed to, you get hacked to pieces. The smart ones win. The moral ones win. They survive. They go home.”

  He lets her be right. He nods at the appropriate times. But it isn’t true. It isn’t why he likes those movies—it is much simpler than that. He likes them because he wants to watch stories about people whose lives are way more fucked up than his, whose luck is way worse. It makes him feel better to compare. It’s why he watches the evening news, too, to count all the families, the victims, the downtrodden people for whom things really sucked pot. He is that selfish.

  ***

  There is a senior center on the same block as Hannah’s physical therapy practice, so on the way to work Hannah finds herself dodging around elderly people, her sturdy rubber boots squishing the slush on the sidewalks. She passes the bus stop each morning, and if the timing is right—and it usually is—she’ll see the same people getting off the bus. The black lady with her small daughter, always holding hands, always in a hurry to school. The pear-shaped man with pink ear buds and a brown paper bag. The business suit. Occasionally she’ll see a blind lady walking past, her thin white walking stick constantly swishing swishing back and forth. Hannah makes an arc around her, too, careful to avoid the stick.

  The majority of the patients the practice serves are elderly. They also get construction workers with bad backs or knees and high school athletes who twisted something the wrong way.

  It is just Hannah and Frances today, and their patient load is steady. Hannah treats Bernie, an older woman with bursitis in both knees. She is wearing a Christmas sweater with cats. If Hannah doesn’t watch her constantly, the woman cheats, skipping leg lifts, and so Hannah stands with her, counting.

  “You must be excited about the holidays,” Hannah says to pass the time. “Are you traveling?”

  “No,” Bernie says. She has bad teeth and a hairstyle that makes her look ten years older than she really is. As she lays on her back on the table, the extra skin around her chin spreads out like putty. “It’s just me and my daughter these days, so we don’t really make a big deal out of it. You know how it is.”

  “That sounds nice,” Hannah says. She is picturing this woman and her grown daughter sitting in a cold dining room, eating take-out. It makes her want to cry.

  As if she knows, Frances catches Hannah’s eye and smiles. She says to the woman, “Oh Bernie, you know you’ll end up running all over town visiting all your friends, so don’t give me that.”

  Bernie smiles, does a half-lift with her leg. “We’ll see if they deserve my pumpkin roll this year.”

  When she gets a break, Hannah goes back to the kitchen and heats up a frozen pizza. Frances is already there, drinking a coke and flipping through a catalog.

  Frances manages the practice and she’s also Hannah’s best friend even though sometimes Hannah dislikes her overbearing nature, her tendency to be too blunt. Still, she was the only person Hannah was able to talk to about the affair.

  “You know Bernie is like the whore of her street.”

  “Frances!”

  “It’s true. I saw you getting all sad with her woe-is-me, but she’s got a new boyfriend like every month. She had ‘em lined up before her husband was even cold on the slab.”

  Frances never worries about saying shocking things. All the old men love her. She tells them lewd jokes, makes them laugh, gets them to do another round of weights before they even know enough to whine about it.

  “How’s the house hunting going?”

  “Fine.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just so overwhelming. Looking at all these places. How do you know which one’s the right one?”

  “Is this really what you want?”

  “What? A house? Of course. Why?”

  Frances shrugs. “Just making sure. You know, with all that’s happened.
”

  “Frances, I’m having his child. He’s my husband. Besides, you know all that other stuff is just, well, just stupid.”

  Hannah blames Frances for starting the whole thing, though she would never tell her that. But last fall, over a year ago, when Hannah told her that she thought the contractor in their apartment building was flirting with her, Frances had immediately gotten interested. Which had led to a discussion about just how many men Hannah had slept with (a low number, less than five if you really need to know), and Frances had laughed—Hannah can still remember that laugh, like a cracked whip between them—and said, “My word, you’re like a prude! No wonder you can’t tell when a man is flirting with you!”

  ***

  Hannah has taken up crocheting. She enjoys holding the needle, wrapping and twisting and stabbing the yarn. She’s trying to make baby booties that look like whales, but following the pattern while Derek’s watching his cold case TV shows makes her lose track, mess up her counting.

  She’s sure Honey Bee knows how to crochet and knit. She probably holds her own yarn classes, for free, in her rec room in the finished basement. She teaches the neighbors popcorn stitches and knitting in the round, and they all ooh and ahh at her techniques.

  She’s also probably wonderful at wrapping Christmas presents, a task that Hannah usually loves to do but hasn’t had the energy to take on yet. Honey has perfectly wrapped gifts with coordinating paper, large puffy gold bows and calligraphy-written gift tags, all tucked under the tree. Hannah’s gifts, what little she’s bought, are shoved in an Amazon box in the corner of her closet.

  They did get a tree. At first, Derek said he didn’t want to put up the tree that Hannah had for years, the one they stored in a giant yellow plastic bin and pulled up from the building’s basement storage space every year to put together. He said it reminded him too much of what happened, of the fights they’d had right there in the living room under the glow of those lights, of the “First Christmas Together” ceramic heart ornament that he’d flung across the room to break in a million pieces behind the couch.