by Rick Hautala
“He practically forced me and Abby apart so I’d go to college, said he didn’t want me to be end up like him.” John took a deep breath. “But I was talking about my goddamned job.”
“Or how you want to be a lobsterman,” Julia said with a half smile.
“Think about it. I could get a boat, and I know plenty of guys at the dock who will help me get started. I could set my traps where my father used to. I’d be out to work before dawn and back home by noon if I didn’t get too serious about it.”
“I don’t know, but I would guess the job’s a lot harder than you realize. You’re romanticizing it.”
“I did it enough, helping out my dad when I was a kid to know what I’m getting into.”
“Yeah, and you’d be working in all sorts of weather,” Julia said. “Listen to yourself. You’re making it sound like this is your idea of paradise. All I ever heard from you before was how much you always wanted to leave home because you wanted to be something more than a lobsterman.”
“Maybe that was my father talking more than me,” John said, shrugging as he took a drag on the cigarette and stared thoughtfully out the window. Evening was coming on fast, and the water had turned a deep purple against the indigo sky. Small black specks — either sea gulls or lobster buoys — rose and fell with the swells.
‘‘I’m just saying I don’t need this kind of pressure,” he said softly, his face close enough to the window to fog the glass. “I don’t need the hassles and the bullshit.”
Julia shifted uncomfortably on the couch.
“Well, I can agree to that.” She paused and took a sip of wine before continuing. “But I don’t think it’s your job that’s getting to you.”
John wheeled around and faced her.
Did I let something slip? he wondered, feeling a sudden jolt of panic.
“For one thing, you’ve got to stop acting like a —” Julia glanced in the direction of Frank’s closed bedroom door. Faintly, she could hear the muffled sounds of the TV. Lowering her voice, she finished, “Stop acting like a child around your father. Ever since we moved back here, you’ve been acting … different, somehow.”
John finally noticed that the cigarette in his hand had burned down to the filter. He dropped it into the whiskey remaining in his glass. Then, heaving a sigh, he turned to look out the window again.
“You have to admit you’ve been acting really uptight since we got here,” Julia said. She got up and walked over to him. Standing behind him, she encircled his waist with her arms and pressed herself tightly against his back.
“If I’ve been uptight lately, it’s with goddamned good reason,” John muttered.
“And what — exactly — is the reason?” Julia demanded. She spun him around so they were face to face and looked him squarely in the eyes.
“I ... “ he started to say, but his voice trailed off, and his gaze went blank. Then, shaking his head, he looked at her. “Everything. My job, my father, living here — all of it is eating away at me.”
“Including me?” Julia said, her voice husky as she pulled him close.
John was silent for several heartbeats, but before he could reply, Julia pushed herself away from him.
“It’s me, too. Isn’t it?” A dull hollowness began to expand in the pit of her stomach. “I’m getting on your nerves, aren’t I? Is it because I want to have a baby?”
Slowly, barely perceptively, John lowered his head in a nod.
“You’ve got to admit that you have been a little bit pushy about it.”
His words sliced her like a razor. Julia’s first impulse was to lash our at him. She wanted to shove him away and run upstairs, leave him to wallow in his own depression and self-pity.
Christ! she thought angrily. Let him fume if he wants to …What’s he got to be so damned upset about, anyway?
But because she didn’t act out of reflex, her second — and better — response was to ignore her own hurt and try to see what he meant by what he’d said, try to understand what he was going through. Even she had to admit that she might have been pushing too hard on the baby issue. But it was more than slightly painful to hear him put it so bluntly.
“The way you’ve been going at it,” John said, “it’s more like a job than any romance. I mean — what? We can’t screw for fun anymore? It always has to be trying for a baby?” He clenched his fists in frustration and stared at her, not seeing how much his words were hurting. “No wonder you haven’t gotten pregnant in the year we’ve been trying. You put so goddamned much pressure on me, my fucking sperm is probably fried.”
Julia’s eyes were stinging as she looked at her husband, wondering if this really was the man she had married five years ago. How well did she know him? A corner of her mind was whispering that, just like with her first husband, Sam — Bri’s father — she was doing it again — grabbing and holding on so tightly she was actually driving him away. But she knew in her soul that it wasn’t just her. It wasn’t about the job or the house or the baby she wanted. There was something … something deep ... something that was stripping his nerves raw.
“I know —” she said, her breath catching in her throat. “I probably have been a little too pushy about it.”
“Pushy? Christ! You’ve been positively demanding. Come on … Let’s fuck … I want to have another baby. Jesus!” John’s face flushed red as he glared at her.
“Okay, okay,” Julia said, unable to control the trembling in her voice. Without another word, she turned and walked away. She stopped by the couch back and stared at him and wondering, Who the hell’s to blame here? …What the hell is going on?
Her anger was rising in swells, like the ocean when a storm is brewing.
“It’s just that Bri —”
“Come on, now,” John said. “You know I love Bri as much as — hell, more than if she was my own daughter.”
“I know,” Julia said sullenly, “but I want a baby with you. So … okay — maybe I am a bit demanding, but I’m doing it because I love you.”
“You may not mean to come across as pushy, but that’s the way you come across. God, I’m lucky I can even get it up with that pressure.”
“We don’t have to have a baby,” Julia said as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I mean … I want one … I really do, but if you’re dead set against it, we don’t have to. Maybe we can adopt instead. God knows there are enough kids in the world who need a chance.”
“It isn’t that!” John shouted, followed by a deep sigh. “It isn’t that at all! I don’t want to have a baby. Can I make myself any clearer? And even if I did, the way you’re pushing so hard takes all the fun out of it.”
“Fun?” Julia said, her face twisting with a lopsided smile. “I don’t think you can call having a baby ‘fun.’ You never had one of your own. You don’t know how much work a baby is, but it’s so worth it.”
“That’s not the point, either,” John said.
“Then what — exactly — is the point?”
Something in her tone finally got through to John. It broke down the wall they had so quickly thrown up between them. It hurt him to see how she cringed away from him when he started toward her, but he held his hands out. After a moment’s hesitation, she walked around the couch and collapsed into his arms, letting herself be nearly smothered by his crushing hug. She trembled with sobs as they stood there holding on to each other like they were desperately clinging to a life raft in the middle of a storm-tossed ocean.
Finally John reached down and gently prodded her under the chin. Raising her face to his, he gave her a kiss. At first her mouth was nothing more than a cold, hard line, but gradually the ice melted, and she playfully darted her tongue between his teeth.
The kiss was long and slow, and when they broke off, John put his mouth close to her ear and whispered, ‘‘I’m sorry.” His warm breath washed over her ear, and she ignored the aroma of whiskey.
“Me, too,” she rasped, unable to control the sobs that shook her body.
/> “And ... “ He paused, clearing his throat before continuing, “if it means that much to you, then … okay. We can give it another shot.”
“You mean it?” she asked, not wanting to hope he meant what she thought he meant.
“Yeah.” John said, stroking her back with the heels of his hands. “We’ll try to have a baby.”
She smiled at him, her eyes glistening with tears. She was incapable or letting him know how much this meant to her, but she was sure that, over the next few months, she would make him understand.
SEVEN
Frank and Julia
I
The small band of sunlight that wedged between the curtains cut across the foot of the bed. The room was muted with warm yellows and browns, dusty with age. Spinning motes of dust were caught for an instant in the bar of sunlight and then winked out, like burned-out stars. The only thing in the room that didn’t look old and used was the shiny chrome wheelchair beside the bed.
John watched the sleeping figure of his father, not sure the bed sheets were rising and falling with his father’s low, steady breathing. He experienced a moment of panic when he remembered how his mother, dead in her casket, had appeared to still be breathing.
“Umm, Dad?” he whispered.
He was holding a breakfast tray in both hands, so he bumped the door open with his hip. The air in the room was musty and stale and had a peculiar undercurrent of ... something …
What? John wondered, trying to place it.
When it came to him, he gasped softly, his hands involuntarily clenching on the edges of the tray.
It smelled like a barn in here. The air was thick with the smell of rotting hay … of dry, blackened tatters of cobwebs and dust … of a moldering dirt floor ...
When John looked at his father’s sleeping face, the smell of damp earth and the diffused glow of sunlight made it look as though Frank’s face had been sprinkled with dirt. John staggered backward a step as he imagined seeing his own hands scooping dirt over his father’s dead face, covering him with thick, black, mulchy soil.
Frank was lying on his back, his head cocked to the side, his face turned away from the door. His hands, looking frail and nearly bloodless, were flung out to his sides. He didn’t stir as John, heart hammering in his throat, took a few steps farther into the room. His eyes were riveted on his father’s hoary, yellowed fingernails, and he couldn’t help but wonder if that’s how his hands would look when he was this old.
“Hey, uh — Dad?” John whispered as he tiptoed closer to the bed. “I’ve got some breakfast for you.”
He was about to reach out and shake his father’s shoulder when he suddenly became convinced that his father was dead.
He wasn’t breathing.
There was no pulse in the neck, no flicker of the eyes beneath his eyelids.
John became convinced that, when he had imagined seeing his own hands dumping dirt onto his father’s face — had it even been his father’s face? — it had been a premonition, or maybe his subconscious mind registering the truth before he was consciously aware of it ...
He’s dead, John’s mind screamed.
He almost dropped the tray when he took three quick steps backward. The backs of his legs felt as if they were made of rubber that was fraying. Icy waves, centered in his stomach, rippled outward throughout his body.
That’s the smell … Not a barn smell … That’s the smell of death!
He looked frantically at the door as though help were going to charge into the room. He tried to form words, but the only sound that came out was a strangled aarggh. He backpedaled, and his foot caught on something. When he put out his hand to catch himself, he let go of the tray. With a loud clatter, it hit the floor. The impact sent the glass of juice, a cup with two soft-boiled eggs, silverware, and napkin flying. John hit the floor hard on his tailbone, sending an electric jolt of pain up his spine.
“What the hell?”
A surprised shout caught in his throat when his father sat bolt-upright in bed and saw him sprawled on the floor.
“Jesus H bald-headed Christ! What are you doing?” Frank shouted. His eyes were wide with fright, and his lower lip was thin and pale.
John looked down at his crotch, where the wet stain of orange juice made it look as if he’d pissed himself. Remains of the eggs were splattered everywhere. Shards of broken glass and porcelain littered the floor. John was grateful he hadn’t cut himself.
“I — uhh, I was bringing you breakfast in bed,” John stammered. He grabbed the paper napkin and, getting slowly to his feet, tried to wipe away the wet stain on his crotch.
“Hell of a way to wake a fella up!” Frank shifted around on his bed and then sat up, looking at John, gave a half smile. “What the hell you tryin’ t’do, give me a heart attack?”
John wondered if he looked more frightened or comical, but either way, he burned with embarrassment.
“Before I went to work, I thought I’d bring you breakfast,” he said as he knelt down and gingerly began picking up the largest of the broken pieces.
“What’s going on in here?” Julia asked, poking her head into the room. “I heard a crash.” She quickly assessed the situation and sadly shook her head. “Did you get hurt?”
John grimaced and shook his head.
“Just lost a glass and a couple of eggs.” He was still wiping the stain on his crotch. “Damn! I’m gonna have to change.”
“Let me help you with that,” Julia said, coming over and kneeling down beside him.
“What the hell is this, anyway?” Frank said, sounding nasty. “D’yah think I’m too damned feeble to get to the breakfast table myself?”
He awkwardly shifted his feet to the floor by grabbing the cloth of his pajama leg and pulling it to get his useless left leg to move. The motion made the cuff roll up, and John caught a glimpse of his father’s thin white leg, laced with blue veins that stood out like thin cords under his skin. The muscles looked flaccid … useless.
“I thought we could have a bit of a talk while you ate,” John said, looking down at the shattered remains of the breakfast, now piled up on the tray.
“Talk?” Frank said, frowning. “What the hell’ve we got to talk about?”
Julia gave John a sympathetic look when she realized what he had been trying to do — probably because of their discussion last night. John had taken what she had said to heart and decided to try to break down some of the barriers between him and his father. The attempteven though it failedtouched her and brought tears to her eyes.
“Go change for work,” she said as she waved a hand over her shoulder. “I’ll get this.”
John went to the door but hesitated, looking back at his father sitting on the edge of his bed. The old man’s face was perfectly neutral, as if he either couldn’t guess at what John had been trying to do or he simply didn’t care.
“I never cared for soft-boiled eggs,” he said, his mouth still twisted up into a crooked, smile.
II
After cleaning up the rest of the mess, Julia left Frank at the breakfast table, happily plowing through his usual bowl of Rice Krispies while she went upstairs to talk with John. She wanted him to know that she, at least, appreciated his gesture even if his father didn’t.
But when she came into the bedroom, it was almost like there was a different person knotting his tie in front of the mirror over his bureau. His mouth had a distinctive downturn, and his eyebrows looked like two dark shelves over his eyes as he stared at her in the reflection. Deep creases marked the corners of his eyes, but she couldn’t decide whether they were from hurt and embarrassment, or from a bottled-up rage he was struggling not to let out.
“Well,” Julia said, easing into the room and gently shutting the door behind her, “no one’s going to fault you on your intentions.”
John snorted, finished with the knot, and jerked it up tightly under his neck — too tightly, actually. He gagged and wiggled his finger under the knot to loosen it a bit.
“What a son of a bitch,” he said, sneering as he grabbed his sports coat and shrugged his shoulders into it. “He doesn’t appreciate anything. Never did, so I guess I was a fool to think he’d be any different.”
Julia’s mouth was set in a firm line, and she shook her head in denial.
“You can’t say that. You don’t know how he feels. “
Again, John snorted.
“How he feels? Who gives a sweet shit how he feels? If he never lets it show ... “
His eyes flashed in the mirror, glaring at her as he adjusted his lapels.
“He could feel like the frigging savior of the world inside, but if he doesn’t do something about it, what goddamned good is it? Fuck him!”
“Keep your voice down.”
John took a comb from his bureau, ran it quickly, savagely through his hair a few times, then slammed it back down.
“I guess I’m all set,” he said, turning to look directly at her for the first time.
“You look great,” Julia said, coming over and giving him a tight hug. “Maybe before you go, you can try to say something nice to him.”
John pushed her away and angrily shook his head.
“Honest to God, it’s like he’s ... shit!” He laughed and shook his head. “You say you want to have a baby so much. You don’t need one. You’ve already got one right here. Hell, in a year or two, he’ll get so bad he’ll start shitting himself and need diapers.”
“Come on, John. That’s not fair.”
“Fair? Who cares about fair?” John shouted. “I try to do something nice for him, and what do I get? He acts like I dropped the tray on purpose to wake him up. Maybe he thought I really was trying to scare him to death so I could get my goddamned inheritance, such as it is. And what’ll that be? This house and a mountain of overdue bills? No way. If I try to do something nice for him, does he say thanks? No way. Not Frank Carlson. He doesn’t even know the frigging word ‘thanks.’”
“Keep it downhe’ll hear you,” Julia said, waving her hand to shush him.
