by Warren Read
They were outside of the motel room now, the two men only, and they stood on either side of Eugene’s car, each caught in his own strange moment. The smaller one held the purple bag over his shoulder like it was a huge purse. He was lizardlike, his crew-cut head looking from side to side in hard, short ticks. The lumberjack was more casual, the way he just leaned the weight of his body against the car, thick arm propped against the fender like it was a kickstand. It looked to Marcelle as though he were staring right at her, black eyes peering straight through the window into the store. A jacket that he did not have on before draped over him, a long, black thing falling almost to his knees.
Marcelle moved back from the window, retreating to where the sodas packed the refrigerator against the farthest wall. The motor behind the glass hummed and rattled, drowning whatever conversation might be happening at the register. The cashier was a sinewy woman, with yellow hair and dark roots, and she tore strips of lottery tickets like ripping fabric. A geezer in a fisherman’s hat stood clutching his wallet, his head shaking slowly. A wad of bills lay on the counter.
The car was still clearly visible from where she stood. Even with the rows of chips and canned food and cookies and magazines between her and the window, she could see the men. They stood like guards, or like hawks waiting on a fence rail for any bit of movement, any reason to pounce. Eugene was nowhere.
He might still be in the room, she thought, but what then? Maybe he was waiting for them to leave or wanted her to come in and get him. For a moment she imagined him dead, sprawled out on the bathroom floor or in the tub, like a clothed Trucker Otis waiting to be discovered. It wasn’t the first time she pictured him dead; now and then she found herself bringing certain snapshots to mind: him trapped under his car, or crumpled at the bottom of the basement steps. She hated that about herself. Wives didn’t think about their husbands having to die in order to set them free.
For a minute it looked like the bearded one might come to her. He broke from the car and walked a few steps toward the street, quick, with big, lumbering strides. But the skinny guy said something, something that made him stop and turn around. They were talking about something for sure, and then both looked to the office hut, almost in a synchronized motion. And then just like that, they broke loose and ran to the far end of the lot where they climbed into a gray-primered van and squealed out onto the road, disappearing up over the hill.
She waited some time before leaving. There were soda can labels to look at and bags of pepperoni and pretzels, and bean dip to pick up and put back in the same way. She wanted to be sure they weren’t playing a trick on her, just driving to the end of the block so they could turn around and come back to surprise her. There was a row of aspirin and vitamins and cough drops in packages smaller than she’d ever seen before.
“Something I can help you with, hon?” The cashier stood against the counter, her pencil fingers tapping the Formica. Lips stretched over marbled teeth, lips chalky and crackled. “Them guys got you scared over there?”
Marcelle pinched her lips together and shook her head.
“You want me to call the cops? I can get the cops here in five if you want.”
A small orange Japanese car pulled up to the window and a black woman got out, followed by a little boy in the brightest striped pants that Marcelle had ever seen. The woman took hold of his hand and they walked to the glass doors, the boy not even up to her hips, hips that were so full and round, and the woman walked in hard steps, as if she had a single purpose in life, a purpose to kick the ass of any man who might dare to tell her what to do.
As the doors swung open and the boy followed his mother in, Marcelle darted through them on the backswing. She stood under the awning and stared across the street at the motel, at the door, number 8. No matter what he’d done or why he’d dragged her there, no matter where she might run off to tomorrow or next week or whenever, Eugene was her husband. She owed it to Mrs. Henry at least to get into that room and see what had happened.
She ran at a full sprint across the street, darting between passing cars and through the parking lot, past Eugene’s car and straight to the motel door. She blocked her mind to what she might see when she opened the door; she just turned the knob and pushed her way inside.
He lay on the floor, still halfway dressed into his jacket. A sleeve stretched limply from his body, like he had been skinned part way and left to bleed out. All down the front of his t-shirt was an apron of red, and blood ran from his mouth and his nose, shining in the thin blade of light that spilled into the room. She stumbled toward him and he recoiled, creaking out a watery moan. He was alive.
Marcelle screamed, then turned and slammed the door closed behind her, locking it. She went to him, collapsing to her knees and taking his arm in her hands. “Oh god, Eugene. What did you do?”
“Jesus fucking Christ Marcelle,” he wailed. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Blood spattered from his mouth, peppering her face and her hair. He swore at her again and then he mumbled something else, something Marcelle couldn’t begin to make out.
“I’ll call 911.” She jumped up and went to the bedside phone. There were a half dozen peeling stickers framing the grid of buttons, complex directions for dialing out, the codes and the costs. For all the telephones Marcelle had swabbed at the Sleep Inn, she had never imagined she would actually have to use one.
Eugene pushed himself up on one elbow and yelled at her again. His face had begun to swell now, his blue eyes almost completely shut from bloated cheeks. A crescent-shaped slice stretched from his temple to his ear, ending in a dark purple smudge at the base of his jaw. “No cops,” he said. “Take me home.”
“I can’t drive, Eugene.” She held the earpiece out from her, as if it was a lifeline she was offering to him. She struggled to even imagine herself behind the wheel of a car, huddled over it like an old woman, hugging the centerline, cars and trucks flashing their lights at her and laying on horns as she careened down the highway out of control.
“Take me the fuck home, Marcelle. I need to get home.”
“You need a hospital.” She couldn’t begin fix him this time. He was probably dying; driving him all the way to Ash Falls would only guarantee it. She set the phone down and walked to him, stood over him as he lay back onto the rug and squinted at the ceiling. His chest was a giant red wave, rising and falling, bubbles popping at the edges of his mouth. He was as helpless as a beat up dog.
“Please,” he whispered. “Get me home.”
Marcelle
A thin whisper filled the room. Air seeped from the tank into coils of tubing, curls winding under a fleshy white arm up to his face, where it hissed out of prongs shoved into his nose. Now and then a passing nurse’s clipped voice or the elevator bell, or cry from somewhere far off, fell into the room.
Marcelle, Jonas and Lyla Henry sat in chairs far from one another, surrounded by white walls pocked with brass-framed devotionals, and shiny, mottled paintings of beaches with angry waves smashing into the shore. For the most part the women studied their fingernails or gazed out the window, stealing uncomfortable glances at one another now and then. Mr. Henry seemed content to gawk at the football game playing itself out on the television. Each of them looked to Eugene only occasionally. It was as if doing so were an obligation or a curiosity rather than concern, because what if his eyelids suddenly opened, Marcelle wondered, and he caught them paying attention to something other than him? She let her eyes linger on him a bit longer then, but he just lay still and almost completely noiseless, except for a rhythmic, wet clicking sound that was coming from somewhere down in the back of his throat.
Lyla had taken the chair closest to the bed as soon as they entered the room, perching herself on the edge of the seat, her back arched almost inward. For the longest time she stared with her forehead striped with worry, craning her head to the hallway anytime a pair of heels passed by. By now, though, she had settled into a kind of posture that could actually be sustained, slumped lo
w in her seat, her bony hand gripping the bed rail, owlish eyes riveted by something lingering in the dead air, Marcelle didn’t know what. Her heavy wool winter coat was buttoned halfway up, obscuring her familiar blue, checked shirt. These were different clothes than Marcelle had remembered from the morning. Lyla had changed out of whatever it was she had been wearing that morning, and the harder Marcelle tried to see the color of the particular shirt, or recall whether she had been wearing pants or a skirt, the more it pressed at her mind. Maybe Lyla had simply given up on seeing Marcelle again that morning, figuring she might as well just go on with the rest of her day. That would make sense. But what if it wasn’t like that at all? What if it wasn’t until the phone call from the hospital that she had gone to the bedroom and taken the time to lay out a new outfit, even though the nurse must have told her and Jonas to drop everything and get to the emergency room, because they didn’t know what might happen with Eugene yet? What did it matter if she wore a buttoned yellow blouse or a sweater to the hospital?
You made your bed, her mother had told her. Now lie in it. It must be what waited for all mothers, that moment when their son or daughter had gone one step too far, pushing things to the point where they just couldn’t do it anymore, not with any real desire anyway. Marcelle’s mother had left without so much as a goodbye, just closed the trunk of the car and put her hand out the window as she drove away, not even a real wave. And now even Mrs. Henry seemed to be just going through motions, as if a string had been pulled at her back and was slowly drawing itself back in.
Marcelle found a piece of gum in the bottom of her purse, under the thick envelope of money she had slipped from Eugene’s glove compartment, before the police brought her to the hospital. His balloon chest lifted and dropped, his lips barely kissing the clear plastic tubing, the crisp white strips holding it all in, holding his whole face together maybe. The tape traced up and over lips still stained with blood, cheeks big and blue like storm clouds hovering behind stark white, jet airplane tracks. What had only three hours earlier been a limp, bloody rag was now a body that looked pumped full of air, so full that the ears were almost sucked back into his head. Its eyeballs pressed forward from the skull, straining against the thick, crusty eyelids, skin purpling all the way to the temples. This wasn’t her husband; this was more of a monster.
And yet his lips curled a little at the edges, as they always did, and she couldn’t help seeing him in there, the boy who had held her hand when no one else would, who had told her, “I think you’re the one who can fix me, Marcelle.” The hissing went on almost silently, and his chest rose, but the plastic tube hardly moved, a tiny bubble perched on the thin surface of blackened lips.
The doctor had directed all that he had to say to Mr. and Mrs. Henry, looking at Marcelle only when Mrs. Henry did so first. There were things Marcelle didn’t quite get—white blood cells, protein count—but there was plenty she did understand. Eugene’s brain was damaged, and it was getting bigger inside of his not-very-big skull. The guys at the motel had broken some of his ribs. And a lung collapsed. Four of his teeth were gone completely, maybe he swallowed them, the doctor wasn’t sure. But he would live. He might not be the same man he was before, but he would at least be alive.
“He’ll need attention,” the doctor had said to Lyla. Lyla’s arms were folded over her chest, and even when Marcelle stepped to the side in order to catcher her attention, she would not look at her. “I can’t tell you how much or for how long, yet. Maybe we’ll know more tomorrow.”
Mr. Henry turned off the television, the gray and pallid outside light giving him a doughy silhouette as he stood from his chair. He ran a hand over what was left of his hair then walked around the foot of the bed, stopping in front of Marcelle.
“I’m going down for some coffee,” he said. “You want a sandwich?” He fished his wallet from his back pocket and opened the fold, leaning into his hands, into the shuffling stack of bills. “I don’t even know what they have down there.” He flipped the wallet closed and stuffed it into his front pocket.
“I’ll pick you up a sandwich.”
Marcelle looked past him over to Lyla, who sat with her chin dropped against the clasp of her jacket zipper, her glasses resting halfway down the bridge of her nose.
“Do you want anything, Mrs. Henry?” she asked.
“No.” She raised her head and pushed her glasses back up to her eyes.
Mr. Henry said, “We could be here awhile.”
“I said no,” she snapped. She waved a hand at him. He looked back at Marcelle, sighed, and shuffled from the room with a hundred extra pounds on his shoulders.
The women sat for a good five minutes without speaking. It was strange for Lyla to sit still so long, nothing for her hands to do, no lacework or crossword puzzle or coupon clipping from newspaper inserts. Marcelle found herself wondering more about what was going on in Lyla’s mind than what might not be going on in Eugene’s. Maybe she regretted not doing more to stop him from leaving that morning. Maybe she was thinking this was just one more burden she had on her lap, once again all thanks to Eugene. She had stopped even pretending to look over at him by now, sometimes glancing over the same ugly, framed paintings whose every brushstroke Marcelle had memorized.
“So,” she said, sitting up straight and looking at Marcelle. “What now?” One lens of her glasses was opaque, reflecting the pale sky.
Marcelle started. She hadn’t expected to be pulled into this, not as someone who was expected to know what to do next, to say what she thought about anything.
“We need a plan, Marcelle.” Lyla ran her eyes over the four walls of the room again, nodding her chin as if she was taking inventory. The IV bag, dangling, dripping as it hung from the gleaming pole. The towering, green-painted oxygen tank with its hissing, coiled tubes. The heavy wood door that opened out into an impossibly waxed hallway. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“It’ll work out, Mrs. Henry.” The words dropped from Marcelle’s mouth to the floor without a moment’s thought. The truth was, she hadn’t a clue what was next. One minute she pictured herself away, anyplace that wasn’t Ash Falls, alone. No baby to worry about, that was for sure. And then she would look at Eugene swaddled in that blanket, hands curled at his chest and her heart would just sink. If someone as old as Lyla didn’t know what to do, how could she ever hope to figure it out?
Lyla closed her eyes. She pounded her fist on the metal bed railing, and Eugene’s fleshy face rocked slightly from side to side, the lines from the heart monitor jumping with him.
“Good Lord,” she said. “What have I done to earn this?”
Marcelle sat with her hands folded on her lap, the blood moving through her body, warming her arms and legs and working through her middle, through the tiny thing that still grew inside her, that thing that was still part her and part Eugene, not yet taken out but still holding on tight. She could go from that room, right then and there if she wanted to. She wondered if Eugene would even remember he had a wife, and that the two of them slept together in that big bed in the basement, that they had loud fights over things like too much food and not enough sex and dirty socks always left on the floor. She wondered if he would remember hitting her, then waking her the next morning, on his knees, holding a cookie over her face, or a dahlia he’d snatched from the neighbor’s garden. And if not—if the memory of all of that was erased—could it be that it never happened? Maybe they could start over again, she being the wise one this time, knowing exactly which things to do differently. And then it could be the way it was supposed to have been all along.
Lyla was snapping through the pages of a magazine now, too fast to really be reading. Mr. Henry came in without saying a word and handed Marcelle a plastic-wrapped tuna sandwich. She took it and unwrapped it, picking at the crusts to be polite.
“For goodness sakes, take her home so she can get some decent food and a bath,” Lyla said. “She can’t do anything here, anyway.”
“You as w
ell,” he said. “There isn’t anything going to come of you sitting in that chair all night except a sore back. We’ll pack you a bag and you can come back tomorrow if you want.”
They drove in the same silence that Marcelle had come to expect from the Henrys. Other than a few unintelligible words from Jonas, followed by the cooing response of Lyla, all dialogue flushed from the crackling radio station. Home was sixty miles away, sixty miles of snaking, climbing roadway to remember when Eugene had sworn that his mother would love Marcelle, that they would be close even, smooth words spoken through tobacco breath in the darkness of a canvas tent, lumpy blankets under her body as his scratchy fingertips circled her bare back. Weekend nights lowered carefully from her bedroom window, his buddies sometimes in the car, often not, moonlit roadway reaching deep into the thickness of trees as they drove too fast up the mountainside to the quarry. Sometimes a bonfire would already be lit, and he would hold her by her waist while he tipped the bottle to his lips and swung the empty over his shoulder to send it smashing into the granite wall, yelling and whooping as shards rained on boulders. And she belonged to him then, and his friends saw this, and those girls who would not talk to her in town called her by her name and passed the joint through her hands, and pretended she was one of them.
She had an hour to think about all of this, this plus the first time she’d made him mad enough to hit her, and the tenderness in the apology, the warm, tight grip as he took hold of her in the backseat of the car, and the hot breath on her neck and declarations of just how much he loved her then, right then, and promises that there was so much still waiting for the two of them. She had all the time in the world, staring at the backs of Mr. and Mrs. Henry’s heads, to flip the scene over and over in her head, the set teeth and the backhanded swing, the tears and the firm hold on her waist, over and over with only the seasons and the daylight changing in the memories, and the growing coolness of what had once been electric between them. And she had a lifetime to feel the sharpness that seeing those other girls in his car brought her, and the dead, limp stare he gave when she asked him, What’s the matter, Eugene? I’m not good enough for you no more?
