by Wither
She laughed. “Fine. I’ll work on the local sidereal times.”
He watched as she flipped through the text, made quick notes in her notebook, plugged numbers into her scientific calculator, and jotted down her results. “I just love to watch you do that.”
“Oh, really?”
“Nothing sexier than a woman whipping out sidereal calculations.”
She stuck out her tongue at him.
“On second thought, that tongue thing definitely works for me.”
She laughed. “You know we’re never going to get through this at this rate.”
“You mean with me interrupting every five minutes?” He held up his hands. “I’ll be quiet.” Wendy nodded and went back to work, scribbling down some more figures.
Alex kept his head down for the next twenty minutes and methodically worked through his calculations. Despite his pretense at mathematical incompetence, he seemed to have no trouble doing the conversions. Wendy would have a hard time coming up with a less romantic study date topic than a laborious series of calculations. But she guessed you had to play the hand you were dealt….
“All done,” Alex said, looking up and around for her. “At least I think they’re all right. Wanna check?”
“You know what,” she said. “I think we need a break. Wait here a minute.” She ran off before he could ask a question. Down the hallway, up the ridiculously grand staircase, down the long upstairs hall to a linen closet. She rummaged around, finally found the bundle she was looking for, and returned to the kitchen.
“That’s a blanket,” Alex said. “You want to take a nap?”
“No, silly,” she said. “It’s an astronomy class. Let’s forget about all the numbers and foreign letters for a little while and look at some stars.”
“Now why didn’t I think of that?”
“You were too busy trying to be charming,” she said.
He stepped beside her as they walked by the door to the pantry. “Was I?”
“Occasionally.”
She flipped a switch by the back door. “What’s that?” he asked. “Sprinkler system,” she replied. She flipped a couple more switches. “Those?” he asked. “All the lights in back. It’s much darker back here than in front. Moon’s just a sliver, so we should be able to see some constellations.”
They walked ouot onto the spacious backyard where Wendy had already seen tents go up several times for various functions on the president’s lawn. She wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one day and find the Ringling Brothers Circus tents being pitched. Tonight the lawn was uncluttered and relaxing. They walked far enough out from under the long second-story balcony to get a clear view of the sky, the black velvet darkness and the twinkling of stars a wondrous canopy. She spread the blanket out with a snapping motion reminiscent of a magician about to make a costumed assistant disappear. “Welcome to the Gwendolyn A. Ward Observatory,” she said, indicting the blanket. “Please be seated. Our show is about to begin.”
When she returned home later in her Volvo, she saw with relief that Paul wasn’t there yet and she had the house to herself. The overturned cars that had greeted them this morning—the most ambitious act thus far of a particularly creative band of vandals— had all been towed away, and the street and sidewalks and driveways along Lore Avenue were sprinkled with chips of safety glass sparkling in the late afternoon sun. Karen piloted the Volvo carefully into the garage, which had spared it from the vandals, and entered the house through the laundry room.
She made herself a cup of tea and sat in the living room among the lengthening shadows. She turned the television on to the local news and lowered the volume to a whisper. Her eyes unfocused before the newscast, where a local reporter stood in a pasture describing the prior night’s livestock mutilations in a neighboring town.
The local news went to commercial, and the screen filled with the image of a baby sitting inside an all-weather radial tire. Karen looked away.
Some uncertain amount of time later, she heard the thump of a car door closing in the driveway. Paul entered in his work boots and flannel shirt. She listened to him, disappointed to have the silence she’d cultivated interrupted by this loud presence: the front door closed too brusquely, his humming, the jingle of keys and pocket change.
“Hey! I didn’t see you sitting there,” he said. “How was your day?”
Fine.
“You shouldVe seen it out there this morning. It took every tow truck in Essex County to clear the street. Did you see anything about it on the news ?”
No.
“I got a rental. It’s a pretty sweet ride, I’m thinking about talking to Dick Hollins about leasing one just like it. You wanna see it?”
Maybe later.
He watched her as she stared into her tea, which sat untouched between her cold hands. Suddenly he reached across the kitchen table for her hand. At his touch a tiny static electric spark leapt between them, and she startled. It was the first such shock of the season, and it reminded her that winter was coming on.
“Karen, I want to talk to you about something,” he began, giving her hand a squeeze until she lifted her eyes to his.
Please. Not now. (But she didn’t say the words.)
He showed her a gentle smile, and she tried to harden her heart against the look of open love and concern he gave her. “I’ve been really stupid lately,” he said.
Please, don’t.
“Just really dumb, like a teenager, like these stupid fucking kids I hire for seven bucks an hour. Thinking I can just stroll along and I take life as it comes to me. Make decisions about my life, about us, as if they’re no different from decisions about what grade of lumber I need for a job, or what kind of truck to buy.” He frowned as he struggled to put the words together, as if what he rehearsed wasn’t jibing with what was coming out of his mouth. She saw him back up mentally and come at it again from a different direction. “I guess what I’m saying is I’ve taken a lot for granted, important things. You. Our daughter. I’ve been sitting back and letting these—wonderful things—just happen to me. I realized that today, how lucky I am, and how little I’d done to deserve it.”
Now Karen spoke. “Paul, don’t talk like this. You’ve been perfect.”
“No. I’ve been complacent. Look at us. I pretend because we’re both almost forty I can leapfrog right over marriage, we should just move in together, it’s not about romance, just two grown-ups talking things through.” He smiled again, guilty and repentant. “But that’s not what I want. To back up into love.”
He began rooting in his shirt pocket. He held the engagement ring out to her with nicotine-stained fingers, and she looked at it blankly, as if it was an alien object.< /p>
“I’m asking, Will you marry me? And, Will you forgive me for not asking when I should’ve?”
When she began crying, at first he took her reaction for tears of joy, and grinned in relief. But then she looked up at him with such sadness in her reddened eyes that he felt something harden inside his chest, as if part of him had turned to clay.
“What? Karen, tell me—”
“The baby,” she said, and it became a wail. “Oh Paul, our baby…”
She began to sob.
When she calmed enough to tell him, he sat and listened expressionlessly, the life draining by degrees from his face. She told him about the amniocentesis, about the mysterious and profound birth defects detected within her womb; she told him between bouts of sobbing of the insidious growth of their gestating child, a growth unchecked by nature, speeded up like time-lapse photography by some fecund gene that lay coiled within their tainted chromosomes. And as she reached the end of her confession, she concluded with the same prophecy Maria Labajo had given her: “It will probably end in a spontaneous abortion, sometime before the end of term.”
She looked at Paul and saw him sitting like a statue. His eyes were fixed on the engagement ring resting on the table between them. He looked up to her, and she saw emotion building behind
his eyes, though he was a man and the tears wouldn’t come easily, even now. He came to her, shuffling forward awkwardly from his kitchen chair, wanting to hold her. She made it difficult for him by not rising, and he was forced to kneel on the cold linoleum before her. She kept her hands folded across her stomach as he took her in his arms. She felt a stab of guilty anger as he began to sob too, angry that he felt some claim on this sadness. She wanted to be alone, didn’t want to share her misery.
“I need to be alone,” she said, recognizing even as she said it that it was the most unreasonable thing she could possibly request. He pulled away from her, stunned and hurt, and searched her face for some sign of regret. But she had accepted herself as a villain, accepted her selfishness in her grief, and she did not blink.
“Karen, my god, you can’t be alone. Not now,” he said.
“I’m tired Paul. I need to be by myself. I need to think.”
“But I don’t understand…”
“I’m sorry,” she said flatly. He scowled, and she saw his own grief suddenly flare brighter.
“She’s my daughter too,” he said fiercely, the first hot tears coming now, freed by his anger. “I’m losing something, too.”
When she met this with more silence, he suddenly turned from her and swept the contents of the table across the kitchen floor—bills, a calculator, place mats, magazines. Somewhere in the debris that went flying was the engagement ring, antique, once his grandmother’s.
He stormed out then, slamming the front door hard enough that it shook the frame. She sat in the echoing aftermath of his rage and stared at her hands long into the night, while the house grew cold around her.
“Okay,” Alex said, lying beside Wendy on the blanket in the backyard of the college president’s mansion. “I was never good at finding constellations. But there’s no mistaking that one. It’s the Big Dipper right above us. Am I right?”
“Sorry,” Wendy said. “That’s the Great Square of Pegasus.”
“Come on,” he said. “That has to be the Big Dipper. See the han-|;dle, coming right off it.”
“That’s part of Andromeda, the chained lady,” Wendy said, pointing straight up into the sky. “Go two stars up the handle then turn right. That little fuzzy blob is the Andromeda Galaxy!”
“Not all that impressive for a galaxy,” Alex commented.
“It’s over two million light years away,” Wendy said, with a wistful air. “It’s actually bigger than the Milky Way.”
“So, if that’s the Great Square and Andromeda,” Alex said, “where’s the Big Dipper?”
“It’s too close to the northern horizon now for us to see,” Wendy said. “Out at sea, we might be able to see it.”
“No thanks,” Alex said, “I’m kind of comfortable right here.”
Wendy smiled. “Look over to the northwest from the Great Square…. That’s the Northern Cross.” She lowered her arm and her hand brushed Alex’s. She moved her arm away slightly, but he reached over and covered her hand with his.
“Tell me a fatal flaw,” she said quickly.
“Excuse me,” he said.
“Fatal flaw,” she said. “Something you don’t want anybody to know. A closely guarded secret about a personal shortcoming.”
“Well, that depends…”
“On what?”
“Is this to be used in a blackmail context?”
She laughed. “Secrets under the stars are never told.”
“Did you just make that up?” he asked, sitting beside her
“Yes,” she readily admitted. “But I promise not to tell.”
“Because this is a big thing you’re asking,” he said.
She sat up beside him. “Do you have something dark in your past, a felony perhaps? Oh, my God! Alex isn’t your real name. You really are in the witness protection program!”
“My true past as Vito Cortizone is exposed…” He shook his head, laughing. “A fatal flaw, huh?”
“I am sworn to secrecy,” she said. “Your secret dies with me.”
“Okay,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Here goes…I have webbed feet.”
“What?”
“A little webbing between the toes.” She burst out laughing. “Hey, it’s not like I’m the Man from Atlantis.”
Wendy wiped a tear from her eye. “Have you…have you tried out for the swim team?” She was still laughing.
“No,” he said. “I don’t swim.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, “isn’t Minnesota the state of a thousand lakes or something? How can you not know how to swim?”
“They wouldn’t let me wear my shoes in the wading pool,” he said, causing her to burst into another fit of giggles. He smiled and shook his head. “I thought the other kids would think I was different.”
“And you think wearing shoes in a swimming pool would make you look normal?”
Now he was laughing, too. “I didn’t think it through that far.”
“Let me see your feet,” she said, reaching for his shoelaces. He spun away from her, swinging his sneakers out of reach. In a moment she had her arms around him.
“No peeking until you tell me your fatal flaw,” he said.
She gave him a peck on the cheek then sat back on her heels. “I guess that’s only fair.” She sighed deeply. “Here goes. My fatal flaw is … I’m a wallflower.”
“A wallflower?” he said, incredulous, that’s your fatal flaw.“
“Uh-huh.”
“Musical arrhythmia?” he said. “I’d hardly call that a fatal flaw.”
“That’s because you’ve never seen me dance,” she said. “I look like somebody lit my socks on fire.”
He laughed then. “I’ll let you see my feet when you let me see you dance.”
“Argh!” she said. “Stalemate. Okay, then you have to answer a personal question,” she said.
“Am I missing a list of rules or something?”
“My yard, my rules,” she said, grinning. “Just answer the question.” He nodded. “What’s with the Hawaiian shirts?”
“Mind over matter,” he said.
“Come again?”
“Brutal winters break your spirit,” he said. “I wear Hawaiian shirts to change my state of mind. It can be ten below zip in January, but in my mind it’s always balmy”
She stared at him for a moment, impressed. “And that keeps you warm?”
“No, I freeze my ass off,” he said. “But I have to keep trying…. It’s all about self-improvement.” She gave him a good-natured shove. “Had you going, didn’t I.”
“Yes,” she said. “Mind over matter! I believe that shit.”
“Hey, so do I,” he said but couldn’t help laughing.
“Another personal question,” she said.
“When do I get to ask the questions?”
“In due time,” she said, her tone becoming serious. “Why did you come over here tonight?”
“Because those sunrise calculations looked like a real pain in the ass.”
She jabbed him in the arm with her fist. “I’m serious.”
“Well, that is part of the reason,” he said. “The other part is, I like spending time with you.”
“You don’t think I’m odd?”
“Well, you’re different…”
“Different.” She was sitting straighter
“Unique,” he said. “And that comes from a web-footed, fashion-impaired Minnesotan, so I wouldn’t put too much weight in it one way or the other.”
“I see,” she said.
“I think you’re, I don’t know, exotic,” he said. “I find that intriguing.”
Exotic, she thought. I can work with exotic.
“So, is it my turn?”
“Go ahead,” she said, leaning back on her palms. She smiled. “It’s about the tattoo isn’t it? You want to know where Bruno wanted to put that sun tattoo?”
He smiled, shook his head. “No, I was wondering about the…stuff you do.”
“Stuff?”
“You know, the white magic, the wicca stuff,” he said.
“What do you want to know about it?” she asked. “Go ahead, ask. My skin’s gotten thick over the years.” She clenched her fists, conscious of her black, hardened nails.
“Well… I, um, have a confession to make first….”
She sat forward, no longer leaning backward on her palms. That position seemed too vulnerable suddenly. “You don’t really have webbed feet?”
He smiled wryly. “It’s not that.” He looked her in the eye for a moment, then looked away, over her shoulder. “I’m not real proud of this. I don’t know what got into me actually.”
“What? You wrote my phone number in the men’s room? Tell me?” Her smile was forced.
“I followed you,” he said. “That Friday night…when you went into the woods.”
“Were you alone?” she asked, her jaw clenched so tightly it ached. She imagined Jack Carter, Jensen Hoyt, and Cyndy Sellers traipsing through the woods to watch the naked girl commune with nature and laugh about it later.
“Of course, I was alone,” he said. “What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” she said coldly. “What were you thinking? You were the one stalking me.”
“I wasn’t stalking you,” he said. “It’s just that Frankie told me about your ceremony and—”
“Frankie told you where I was!?”
“She said that if I was curious about the magic stuff I should follow you and see for myself—”
“If you were curious, you could have asked me! I can’t believe her!”
“Look,” he said. “I know it was way out of line. I really didn’t know what to expect, so when you took off your robe…”
Oh, Jesus, she thought, feeling her face start to crumble. She pressed her hand to her mouth and fought back tears. “I can’t believe you,” she said, “I trusted you. I thought you were different.”
“I’d give anything to take back those few moments…” He reached out for her arm, but she jerked away
Then a troubling thought crept up on her. Just how much had he seen, how much had he witnessed. “So…I suppose you waited around to get a good eyeful.”
