by John Searles
So no thank you, I’d walk the rest of the way.
I reached the Holedo Motel, only a mile or so from Edie’s. Old Man Fowler, the guy who owned the place, had his office light off for the night. Officer Roget’s car was parked in the lot, probably waiting for a speeder to whip around the curve so he could write a whopping ticket. I crossed over the solid yellow line and walked along the edge of the woods, away from the buzzing streetlight where he couldn’t see me. In the summer, stock-car races at Hogway’s Racetrack drew a major crowd, and the dilapidated motel was packed every weekend. Fowler dragged out a two-dimensional wooden race car and set it up on the front lawn every year along with a sign: HOLEDO GOES HOGWILD! Summer after summer, tourists bunched up in front of that race car like it was the real thing, like it could take them somewhere fast. During the winter the place stayed empty, except for maybe the occasional truck driver like my father, who pulled in, paid for a room, slept, shaved, took a shit, maybe jerked off, then hit the road. Other than that, just Roget’s car waited silently under the streetlight.
At the top of the hill I spotted Edie’s house. When I arrived at night, the silhouetted roof and bare branches always made me think of Norman Bates’s house on the hill. A gust of wind lifted my overgrown bangs off my forehead and played with the arrangement, leaving me shivering. I couldn’t wait to get inside.
My feet crunched across the snow-covered lawn and up the porch steps. I turned the doorknob. Locked, so I banged the lion clanker and waited. A plastic bird—Edie’s or maybe her ex-husband’s lawn decoration stuck in the grass and long forgotten—swung one broken wing round and round. The sound made me think of creaking bedsprings.
Old parts. Plastic and metal.
Still no Edie.
I knocked again, this time harder. More silence. More wind. More shivers. Finally, from the deep belly of the house, I heard footsteps. A moment later the outside light clicked on, and Edie swung open the door. “Sorry,” she said. Her stomach between us like a basketball-under-the-shirt type of deal.
Edie had managed to stay beautiful during the course of her belly-busting pregnancy. No puffed-up face. No flabby arms. Right now, though, her eyes looked heavy, her shoulders slumped. Usually I got a “Hey, handsome” at the door. “Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Just tired of carrying this load,” she said, straightening up in the doorway. “But I’m better now that you’re here.”
I stepped inside, squeezing the grocery bag to my side and smiling despite my numb fingers.
“You must be freezing,” Edie said. “I would have picked you up somewhere.”
I had never come clean about being the ripe old age of fifteen, though sometimes I got the feeling Edie suspected. Just in case, I reminded her again and again that the only reason I never drove was that my mother needed the car every second of every day. I didn’t mention my father’s truck, but I’m sure she knew that would be off-limits. Since I didn’t want to settle for some hippie machine like a VW Bug or a lousy Pinto, I told her I was holding out for just the right ’70 ’Cuda. One with mag wheels and a supercharged Hemi. I didn’t have a clue what a Hemi was, but Leon always mentioned it when he spotted a hot car. A Barracuda was his dream machine. Tonight, since it was freezing and I was without my bike, I might have to let Edie drive me home. We could work it out later.
“This is nothing,” I said, sounding rugged and durable, like one of those baseball players from my old collection might sound. Wilbur Wood. Brooks Robinson. Billy Williams. “A little cold never hurt anyone.”
Edie smiled and gave me a peck, not really on my lips but not on my cheek either. I loved when she did that. It seemed to make my wind-whipped face warm. She took the food to the kitchen, and I went to the bedroom and stripped off my coat, sweatshirt, the same black shoes she had given me months ago, and lay back on her bed. All part of our routine.
One more thing.
I picked my sweatshirt off the floor and pulled out the money, including the change from Cumby’s, and set it on her nightstand where I always left it. It felt a little like paying a hooker, only without the good stuff. Whenever I slapped down the bills, I wondered about the sex thing with Edie. Strange the way those I-want-to-fuck-you feelings for her surfaced only when I pictured the woman I used to see at the Doghouse, back before I really knew her. When I thought about the Edie I knew now—pregnant, poor, my fish-stick-and-TV-dinner buddy—all I wanted was to take care of her.
While the food cooked, Edie popped in and out of the room making small talk. She liked to get going about newsy things some nights. And this was one of those times. “I can’t believe Nixon today,” she huffed, her oven-mitted hands on her round waist. A few minutes later she was back with “They still haven’t found out who killed those two women in Boston last week.” Since Edie and I had been together, I had taken to reading the newspaper to keep up. I didn’t admit this to her, but the more I read, the more botched-up and confusing the world became for me. Whenever I put the paper down, headlines like that one about Sharon Tate swirled in my head for the rest of the day.
MAO’S HEIR APPARENT LIN PIAO DIES
IN MYSTERIOUS PLANE CRASH
U.S. AND U.S.S.R. SIGN TREATY BANNING NUCLEAR WEAPONS
ON THE OCEAN FLOOR
CYCLONE AND TIDAL WAVE KILL 10,000 IN BENGAL
I didn’t even know where the hell Bengal was. I did my best to keep up anyway and acted like I cared about people like Lin Piao. Later I’d try repeating some of Edie’s opinions about the world to my mother as if they were thoughts all my own.
Me: “Lin Piao’s death must have had something to do with his unsuccessful coup attempt.”
My mother: “Lin who?”
Obviously she knew as much about world news as I did.
When Edie was gone for a while, I flipped channels and left it on Here’s Lucy for lack of a better choice. It was such a raging bore that I stared over at the stack of children’s books on Edie’s bedside table. She had picked up a pile of old fairy tales from a tag sale for only thirty-five cents apiece. Jack and the Beanstalk. Cinderella. Thumbelina. Some nights while she fussed with dinner in the kitchen, I read a story. My favorite thing about fairy tales—or at least the ones I had read so far at Edie’s—was that no matter how shitty these people’s lives got, things always seemed to work out. Cyclones never wiped out ten thousand people on the last page. Fathers didn’t disappear in the end. Mothers didn’t leave.
I slid Sleeping Beauty out from the bottom of the pile and flipped pages. The book practically had museum paintings for illustrations. Loads of bright colors. Tiny wrinkles drawn around the characters’ eyes. Dark forests that were more frightening and haunted than the real thing. On the first page Sleeping Beauty was set out in a sparkling glass coffin in the middle of the forest between two thick willow trees. I flipped some more and stopped on the page where the Prince awakens her with a kiss. When I looked up, Edie was standing with our TV dinners on a tray.
“Do you want to watch Here’s Lucy?” I asked, closing the book. “There’s nothing else on.”
Edie put the tray on the bed and waved her hand at the television. “She was only funny in black and white. The color makes her seem crazy instead of cute.”
I got up and clicked off the TV, then sat with my back at the headboard to eat my turkey dinner. I forked out my string beans and put them on Edie’s tray. “They’re good for the little guy.”
“Little girl,” she said and smirked.
Edie had all sorts of reasons for her it’s-a-girl hunch—a needle and string that swung in a circle over her stomach, a dream about an old woman holding a pink basket. But something told me it wasn’t a girl.
“If it is a boy, maybe I’ll name him after you,” she said.
I acted surprised, but really the thought had occurred to me more than once. After all, I wanted proof that I meant more to Edie than a loan and some company. “Dominick Kramer sounds pretty good to me,” I said.
Edie gulped dow
n half a glass of Dr Pepper, took a pill off her tray, and swallowed. I couldn’t tell if it was a vitamin or an aspirin. Probably a baby thing. She took them all the time. “So,” she said, “your dad called me today.”
I had skipped over the rectangle of white turkey and was already chowing on my chocolate cake. A ball of it stuck in my throat when she mentioned my father. We had what I thought was an unspoken, don’t-talk-about-him rule ever since that afternoon when Edie peeled back her shirt to show me her pregnant stomach. I had imagined that we both felt the same way: Bringing up my father made her pregnancy seem sad instead of exciting.
Ditto for our relationship.
I liked it better when Edie talked about the baby, filling me in on the position of the head, the extra pounds she had gained, the weird kicks, somersaults, and flutters. Some nights she’d stop me midconversation and press my hand to her stomach. “Feel her?” she’d say. Beneath my fingers the baby would make a sudden, watery motion that made me think of a fish swishing its tail. I’d smile wide like an expectant father who had just felt his child move for the very first time.
“What did he want?” I managed, though I should have asked his whereabouts for my mother’s sake.
“He wanted to make sure I ‘took care of things’ was the way he put it.” Edie stopped to eat a string bean with her fingers, then continued. “I told him the same thing I said months ago. I am keeping this baby. I mean, it’s a little late now anyway. I’m due in February.”
I pushed my potatoes around, then set the fork on the tray, my appetite gone. “And then what happened?”
“He got pissed off and said he’d like to run me over with his truck.”
We were quiet. I thought of Marnie’s dogs looking up at a set of headlights coming at them as they cut across 67. Her cat Milky, too.
Edie chewed and swallowed.
The wind rattled the glass of the bedroom window. The sound made me think of change jingling in someone’s pocket. A box of nails dropped on a cement floor. I waited for more.
“I really think he wants to kill me,” she said.
“People say things like that all the time when they’re ripped. He doesn’t mean it.”
“Your father’s dumb enough to pull something stupid.”
The more she talked about him, the more my mind retreated back to reality: My father was the baby’s father. I was just keeping Edie company until the pregnancy was over and she moved on. Our friendship meant a loan to her. Since she knew that the baby would be a girl, it was no big deal to talk about naming the baby after me. Questions I shooed away months ago formed in my mind: How could Edie expect something different from my father when she knew the way he treated his own family? Why wasn’t she more careful in the first place? What if she didn’t give me the money back? That last thought made me swallow. Hard. “Just forget about it.”
Edie reached across the bed and laced her fingers between mine. Sometimes at night she held my hand when we lay in bed. She said it made her feel less lonely, that my hands were soft but strong. The feeling of her skin against mine made my heart beat fast every time. “Dominick,” she said, “if something should happen to me, I want you to know that I appreciate all you’ve done.”
If something should happen to me. She sounded just like my mother.
“He’s not going to kill you,” I said and let out a nervous laugh. The prospect of my father as a murderer seemed ridiculous. He was a major pain in the ass. But a killer he was not.
“You don’t understand the way he gets,” Edie said. “You haven’t seen it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, because she was right. I had never seen my father get violent before.
“And it’s more than just him,” she said finally. “Sometimes I get scared thinking about labor.”
“Stop it,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”
“All right. But I want you to know that I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”
Edie let go. She stretched back on a pillow and let her hair fan out behind her. Her jaw tightened, and I could see the slightest bit of movement under her cheek from her teeth pressing against each other. Her blue eyes traveled up to the ceiling fan above the bed. The fan spun constantly, since Edie liked the air to circulate even in the winter. The constant whirring, like a helicopter’s blades, always reminded me of a story my mother once told me. She had been in a pottery shop when a man came in with his baby daughter on his shoulders. He simply walked toward the register, and the baby got caught in the metal blades of the fan. The thing pulled the girl right off her father’s shoulders, sliced the tender white skin of her neck, her face, her ears, and sent her sailing across the store, where she crashed into a bin of ceramic pots. Dead.
The bloody image made me reach out and put my arms around Edie, around the baby that was growing inside her. “There are so many things that can happen in life,” I said, sounding older and wiser than I really was. “But we’ll just be careful. We’ll pay attention to the signs around us. We’ll watch what we do.”
“Thanks,” Edie said. “You know, it’s hard to believe a nice guy like you could have such a prick for a father. If I was younger and things were different, I might have married you by now.”
I shook my head, still trying to get rid of the image of that ruined baby, the tortured look I imagined on her father’s face, on my mother’s as she stood in the shop. “I wish other girls felt that way,” I said, then instantly regretted it. I wanted to seem tough. As hard and unbendable as Leon’s back-pocket comb. Roget’s stiff pistol in his holster.
“Still no luck with girls?” she asked.
Embarrassed, I wanted to lie. I could have whipped out a big one, too: Oh, there’s this one chick who wants me to lick her crotch clean. But it seemed stupid and pointless. “You’re the only person I ever kissed. And that doesn’t count, because it wasn’t real.”
“Why wasn’t it real?” she asked.
I was testing, measuring her feelings for me. “It wasn’t mutual, I guess. And besides, our mouths were closed.”
“Oh, Dominick,” she said and let out a sigh as heavy and weighted as one of my mother’s. “This whole thing has been so complicated. I mean, I should have—” She stopped, then started again. “I mean, you—” She was quiet a moment, biting her lip, thinking. Then she turned to me. “Let me give you a real kiss. It will be my thank-you present to you.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had grown pretty comfortable with our routine. Her pregnancy made kissing seem off-limits somehow. “Really?” I said.
“Sure. I can spare one kiss. And it will make you feel in control the next time you’re test-driving a new girlfriend. It’s the least I can do.”
How could I tell her that I didn’t want to be with another girl, that all I wanted was to be with her, to stay as we were? Talking about the kiss first made the whole thing seem rehearsed. It didn’t matter, though, because this time Edie did all the work. She leaned toward me, curled her hair over her ear, and pressed her mouth to mine. Instantly her lips parted, and I could feel wet air from the back of her mouth. Edie’s fingery tongue pushed its way into me, against my lips, warm inside my mouth. I wanted to lean back, to enjoy it. I thought of Sleeping Beauty being brought to life with a kiss. Edie pressed her mouth harder against mine and touched her fingers to my chest.
She wanted me to remember this.
It worked, because the Sleeping Beauty watercolors blurred and my mind filled with centerfolds. A thin strip of hair between every girl’s legs. Pink folds of skin. Empty and waiting. And then that image of the slutty Edie at the Doghouse mixed with the woman who was kissing me now. My hips moved to press against her, against something, but her body was too far away. I rolled toward her and pressed myself against the mattress while I slid my tongue between her lips. Before I could help it, I felt myself let go in my pants. Breath from my mouth poured into her. My hand moved to her breast but brushed her belly.
Her baby.
My fath
er’s baby.
My brother. My sister.
I pulled away.
“How was it?” she asked, pulling a strand of hair from her eyes and smiling. The ceiling fan cut crooked shadows across her face.
“Great,” I said, though it wasn’t great at all. I could feel the dampness in my underwear. The chocolate cake and one or two bites of white turkey pushed their way to the surface through the tunnel from my stomach. I held my breath to stop it.
“Do you want another one?” Edie asked. Her mouth, ready and waiting.
My mind felt foggy. My body, drained. I prayed she didn’t catch on that I had come from just her kiss alone. “Maybe later,” I whispered, too tired and embarrassed to really talk. “Can we just rest awhile?”
“Sure,” she said, patting the spot where her breast, arm, and shoulder met. I put my head in the warmth and coziness of that spot and closed my eyes. In a moment my stomach felt calm.
This was what I wanted from her, after all.
My mind closed door after door down a long, dark hallway, and before I knew it, I fell asleep.
When I opened my eyes, Edie was gone and I was stretched out on my stomach. I must have pulled off my shirt and pants the way I always did when I slept, because I was dressed only in my underwear. I hoped the sight of my body and come-stained drawers hadn’t scared Edie off. On the nightstand the money was gone. The bedside clock read one-thirty and I almost shit my Fruit of the Looms. My mother was probably freaking out, wondering where I was.
