by Michael West
“Actually, I’m divorced.”
His heart stumbled, then got up and raced again. Why did that matter to him? What bearing could it have on his life now? “I’m sorry to hear that,” he lied and tightened his grip on the telephone.
“Yeah,” she said. Then, after a pause, “Now you’ve got me doing it.”
“I’m sorry?” He stared at the wide gold band around the ring finger of his left hand.
A nervous snicker came across the line. “Nothing.”
Then came a long silence on Deidra’s end, and Paul had the urge to hang up.
“So, why’d you call?” he asked instead.
“Actually, I didn’t think you’d be there. Robby said you moved out of Harmony.”
Robby, he thought. Why didn’t you tell me she’d called you? Why didn’t you tell me –?
What? That she was divorced? What does it matter, Paul? What does it matter?
It didn’t matter. Not at all.
“Just visiting,” he told her.
“I was just calling to see if your mother knew if you were going to the reunion in August. Now I can just ask you.”
Paul’s head tilted toward the kitchen, his eyes found the field of growing corn out the back window. His heart worked so hard and so fast that he thought it might come apart beneath the strain. “Yeah. I’m going.”
Did he hear her draw in a breath?
“Great,” she said. “The three of us can talk.”
Paul thought that she meant both of them and Mary, then reconsidered. The third person was Robby, of course – the remnants of the old group. The survivors. Who else could they talk to at the reunion?
Remember when I hit that home run?
How could I forget! You remember when the demons made us kill each other in the corn?
Ahhh, yes. Good times. Good fucking times.
“Sounds great,” Paul said.
Another moment of silence, and he could not help but wonder what she looked like now, what she was thinking.
“Well,” she said at last, “I guess I’ll let you go.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you at the reunion then.”
“You will.”
He stood there and waited for the silence to become the buzz of a dead line, then he clunked the receiver back down on its base and took a seat in the living room.
“Who was that?” his mother asked without looking up from Megan.
“Someone wanting confirmation that we were going to the reunion.”
Mary did look up. “Are you okay? You’re white as a sheet.”
“Fine. My stomach’s just bothering me. I’ll ... uh ... be in the bathroom.”
She watched him get up with skeptical eyes.
“I’ll be fine. Really.”
Mary nodded, slowly returned her attention to Megan, and Paul headed for the stairs. He made his way up to his old room, crossed it to the closet, and retrieved the old Nike shoebox that contained his life with Deidra. He forced himself to open it, forced himself to find the blue envelope with no return address, the envelope that said “D.P.” The letter inside showed no signs of yellowing, no aging of any kind. It was now as it had been when he first read it.
Paul sat down on the bed he’d once called his own. He closed his eyes, steeled himself before he looked at her handwriting. He read the first few lines ...
I don’t know how to say this. This letter is so hard for me to write, and I’m so afraid you’re going to hate me no matter what I say ...
Then saw ...
God, this isn’t fair.
And then his eyes shot to ...
I hope you can forgive me.
He didn’t want to forgive her. He wanted to hate her. Why in the hell did she have to call him? Why now, when he’d tried to move on as she had done? Why did she pull at his brain ... at his heart?
He wished now he hadn’t decided to go to his ...
“... reunion.”
Paul blinked the dust from his eyes. How long had he been sitting there? Deidra’s old letter and his half of the golden charm clutched in his hands? He ran his fingers down his face and shoved the note back into the envelope.
“What was that?” he called out.
Mary’s voice drifted up the stairs and through the closed door of his old room. “I said, if you don’t hurry, we’ll be late for the reunion.”
No, he decided, I don’t want to be late.
He closed the shoebox and realized the necklace was still wrapped around his hand. He’d been squeezing it so hard that the imprint of the chain was tattooed into his palm. He slid it absently into his pants pocket and tried to imagine what it would be like to see Deidra again.
***
Mary Rice sat at the brass make-up table in the guest bedroom of her mother-in-law’s home, brushing her blonde hair. The repetitive motion of the strokes seemed to calm her nerves. Downstairs, she heard Paul and the children – her family, her life.
She’d talked her husband into going to this reunion. At the home where Mary worked, she looked into the eyes of children who’d seen their parents beaten, who’d seen them killed right in front of them, and she saw something hollow there, as if the flash of evil they’d witnessed had burned itself onto the negative of their souls. Sometimes, when she’d read the files of these same children, when she’d see the horrors they’d been through put into such neat and antiseptic print, it made her cry. It was the same with Paul.
He’d told her about this “Wide Game,” how he’d seen his friends – people he’d known his entire life – kill each other out there in the cornfields. His words were always strained, as if he had to force them from his lips, and when she looked into his eyes, she saw the same blemish on his soul, the same hollowness. He’d seen evil. He’d seen horrors she couldn’t even hope to understand. And, sometimes, she felt as if he were slipping away from her.
This reunion’ll be good for him, she told herself. It’ll help him to deal with what happened. It’ll help him move on.
Then another voice in her head spoke up, Move on with you or with Deidra?
She paused her brushing.
Something turned in Mary’s stomach. She sank into the seat cushion and her face tried on a strange, meditative look. She didn’t like the fit and quickly shook it off, set the brush back on the table. Nerves. Just nerves.
Over the years, they’d talked about Deidra, this woman who’d broken Paul’s heart, who still wrote to him, letters Paul pitched unread. A lot of emotion there, still raw despite the passage of time, and tonight, they would see one another again, face to face.
I trust my husband. Mary picked up her eyeliner, tried to maintain a steady hand as she mulled over these last six years with Paul. We share a life, a family. All he shares with her is a memory.
In the mirror, her face faded, gave way to her own memories, memories of Todd Denny. He’d been tall, ruggedly handsome, and auburn haired. She saw them dancing at their Senior Prom, Todd in a white tux with tails, Mary in a black gown with white trim, a corsage of tiny white orchid blossoms held to her wrist by elastic. She remembered taking that dress off, remembered Todd moving inside her darkness, remembered the pain of his entry melting into pleasurable friction.
We all have first loves, she told herself, her face swimming back into the mirror. And we can never forget them. We shouldn’t forget them. But they don’t have to be our last love ... or our deepest.
Mary applied a coat of red to her lips, kissed a Kleenex, and stood. She looked in the full-length mirror attached to the back of the bedroom door, hoped it was of the funhouse variety and knew it wasn’t. She was still too heavy in the gut and her breasts ... her breasts were huge. She put her hands to them and gave them a jiggle in disgust.
Got milk?
Mary sighed, then smoothed out the rosy fabric.
Oh well, she thought. It’s as good as it’s gonna get.
She walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. Paul leaned on the center isla
nd, watched Chris eat Oreos with a smile on his face. She brought a fist to her red lips and coughed noisily into it. Paul turned to her, a surprised expression softening to genuine affection.
“Wow.”
She did a twirl, her skirt pinwheeling. “I clean up good?”
“You clean up great.” He moved to kiss her, then mouthed, “I love you.”
Mary ran a hand through his still damp hair, feathering gray into what was left of the brown. “We’d better get going.”
“Yeah.”
She looked back at Chris eating cookies, his mouth somewhere in the chocolate debris on his face, and Megan rocking in her mother-in-law’s arms, taking in her bottle of breast milk as if she’d been rescued from a desert.
“There’s two more bottles in the fridge,” Mary said. “And there’s a can of ready-made formula in the diaper bag. If you’re getting low on the milk, mix it in with the formula. She doesn’t like to drink the ready-made straight.”
“Bye Mommy.” Chris waved. “Bye Daddy.”
Paul returned the wave. “Bye kiddo.”
“You be good for Grandma,” Mary said.
“We’ll be fine,” Paul’s mother told her. “You kids go and have fun.”
Mary nodded and they made their way out the door to their waiting Jeep. She hoped they would have fun. She really hoped this would be a night to remember.
Twenty-Seven
When he opened the door to Harmony High School’s gymnasium, Paul thought he’d stepped back into his senior prom. Columns of red and white balloons tethered floor to ceiling. Red shrouds draped round tables, turned the holy hardwood terrain of the basketball team into a huge dining room. The basketball goals themselves had been raised until their backs were flush against the rafters; nets hung limp from their rims. The overhead lights were dark. Instead, candles flickered from centerpieces like tiny campfires, and people huddled around them, swapping stories. Huge speaker towers had been erected on either side of a DJ table – blasting The Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin”– and small spotlights blossomed from metal trees, flashed primary colors to the beat. Dancers moved in this rainbow-tinted gloom; guys wore suits and polo shirts instead of tuxedos and cummerbunds, but the women were dressed to the nines in sleek dresses and lacy gowns. A large banner stretched across the far wall –”WELCOME BACK CLASS OF 1988!”– and, much to his surprise, the scene coaxed a smile to Paul’s lips.
“Hello!”
Paul turned his head toward the voice, saw a woman draped in a red satin dress with her hair pulled up into a braided sculpture on her head. She did not look familiar to him, and he wondered if he should know her. “Hi.”
She sat behind an official-looking table. He walked over to her, saw a white tag stuck to the satin swell of her left bosom, HELLO MY NAME IS ... printed in bold blue lettering, and beneath that, she’d written Shelly Parker in black ink. I don’t even recognize her name, Paul thought, and, for a moment, he wondered if this was the right reunion.
The woman smiled and pointed to the pre-made nametags that littered her table; all had the same blue HELLO MY NAME IS ... and names in black ink as the one she wore herself. “Can I get you to find your names, please?”
Paul snickered. “I didn’t realize there’d be tests.”
The woman’s smile remained constant. “Just this one.”
Paul scanned the tags, saw names he knew and names that were less familiar. He found their tags and handed one to Mary. “Here’s yours, dear,”
“Why, thank you,” she told him.
He continued looking at the table until he found what he’d really been searching for: HELLO MY NAME IS ... Deidra Shusett (Perkins). She wasn’t here. Not yet, anyway. Paul felt oddly relieved by that. He returned his attention to his wife, saw her use a pen to write something on her tag. “What are you doing?”
“Everyone who’s walked by since we’ve been standing here looks at me like they wonder if they should know me. I thought this would save any confusion.” She put down the pen, peeled off the backing, and pressed the tag to her breast. Beneath her name, she’d written: wife to Paul, mother to Paul’s children, and no we’ve never met.
Paul chuckled. “Wanna grab a seat?”
“Sure.”
There were plenty of empty seats scattered about, but the only truly empty table was near the far wall. They made their way to it, awkwardly snaking around the other tables.
Mary looked at Paul as he pulled the chair out for her. “Nothing like taking the scenic route.”
“I just wanted some privacy for us. It’s been a while since we were alone.”
He pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. Mary’s face caught the light of the candle and seemed to glow with warmth. He could tell she didn’t believe a word of it. Her glistening red lips curled into a grin. “You’re going to have to talk to somebody sometime.”
“I will,” he assured her. “There’s just nobody here yet that I really knew. As soon as Robby or someone else gets here, you won’t be able to shut us up.”
She examined his face for a moment, then said, “Okay.”
Paul looked around until he saw a bar. “Want something to drink?”
“Diet whatever. Breast feeding.”
“Right.” He nodded and his eyes drifted to her chest; the HELLO MY NAME IS ... sticker stared back at him. “Megan gets all the luck.”
She smacked his arm lightly with her fingers. “My drink, sir.”
Paul kissed her on the cheek, then rose from his chair. “Coming, Madame.”
He made his way to the bar on the opposite side of the gym, a far cry from the punch bowl of prom. Well, not really. Someone always ended up spiking it with vodka or a home-stilled vintage of some kind. The air conditioning was on, Paul saw it move the balloons and streamers near the vents, but the gymnasium still felt muggy and warm. He reached up to loosen his tie and undo the top button of his shirt.
The kid behind the bar looked barely old enough to consume what he was serving. “Help you, sir?”
“Bud Light and a Diet ...”
“Coke.”
“Diet Coke.”
“Comin’ right up.”
The kid reached under his bar and produced a short-necked bottle of beer. He opened it, let a wisp of cold mist drift up like smoke from a stack, then set it in front of Paul. Small glaciers melted down the sides of the brown glass. Before they were gone, Paul lifted the bottle to his head and rolled it across his sweaty brow. Why was it so hot?
“– the Wide Game.”
Paul’s heart iced up. His eyes jerked in the direction of the voice that had uttered those words, found two couples standing next to him at the bar. It took his mind a moment for recognition to kick in, but the men were Peter Sumners and Jimmy Grant. The women they were with were new to him.
“That’s right,” Peter laughed. He looked at his companion. “We all played this game senior year, a race through the cornfields. The rule was that you couldn’t be seen. If you were seen, you got stuck with the guy that saw you. I was so pissed Jimmy found me ’cause I couldn’t stand this guy.”
Jimmy nodded as he drank. “Then we come to find out we had a lot in common. We ended up rooming together at Purdue.”
“Ahh, the irony,” Robby said at Paul’s shoulder, making him jump.
Paul rolled his eyes. “Jesus.”
“Not quite, but thanks.” Robby held a finger up to catch the bartender’s attention. “Scotch on the rocks, barkeep.”
“What do you mean ‘Ahh, the irony’?”
“The game was the beginning of some friendships and the end of so many others.” He turned to look back at the dance floor, his elbows on the bar. He wore a blue suit coat, matching slacks, and a white dress shirt. The tie around his neck had Homer Simpson asleep at his console, a donut falling from his drooling mouth. “Bitch Queen here yet?”
Paul took another drink from his beer. It was empty. He’d finished it off without even realizing it. “She’s not th
e ‘Bitch Queen’.”
“However you wanna play it.” His eyes scanned the gym a moment. “Did you know she hates Springsteen? Called him a no-talent hack. I think it’s one reason I broke up with her. Anyone who worships Duran Duran over The Boss –”
Paul sang mockingly in a gravely voice, his neck straining.
“God, not you too.”
“All I know is that if they can give Springsteen an Oscar, I gotta get one before I die.”
Robby rolled his eyes. “I’m surrounded by idiots.”
Paul regarded him seriously. “Nervous about seeing her again?”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
“Not really.” He saw the skeptical look Paul gave him. “Hey, she loved you. I just got her off, and she could’ve been fakin’ that.”
Paul smirked. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“Hey, what are friends for? You just need to remember she walked out on you.”
“Thanks again.”
The bartender brought Robby’s scotch and he lifted the drink to his lips. “Just tryin’ to help.”
“You can stop any time.” He saw Mary’s Diet Coke behind him on the bar. The ice had all but melted. He held up his empty beer. “Can I get another one of these?”
The kid behind the bar fetched him another Bud Light.
Robby took a sip of his drink and winced. “Woah! I was expecting them to water down their booze.”
“We’re not students anymore,” Paul pointed out. “We can get drunk if we want to.”
Robby eyed him strangely. “This from The Keymaster – designated driver and friend to party drinkers everywhere?”
“I like to indulge from time to time.”
“The only time I’ve ever seen you touch the stuff was champagne at your own wedding.”
Paul picked up Mary’s Diet Coke without looking at him. “Wanna sit with us?”
“Who else would I sit with?”
They moved away from the bar, drinks in hand, weaving through a dozen tables and fragments of conversation.
“You look terrific—”
“—and I barely even recognized—”
