He’s an all-right guy, I think, sliding into one of the back pews. He was nice enough to Angus the other day. And there’s something to be said for sticking by Ma all these years—even if it’s just because he’s as crazy a Catholic as she is. Of course, he probably has no idea that it was him, more than anyone or anything else, who turned me away from this place. How, when he said at Dad’s funeral mass that Jesus was right there with him in the car when he died, I almost leaned over and threw up. It was an insult, really. A slap in the face, trying to comfort us with some bullshit line like that. I mean, think about it: Catholics believe that Jesus is God. And God is all-powerful, all-knowing, the creator of the universe. He can do anything. Anything. And this guy is going to stand up in front of a church full of people and tell me that this being, this deity who created atoms out of dust, who breathed life into the stars, sat by and watched as my father got his skull crushed against the dashboard of his car?
After that, I wanted nothing more to do with the whole crazy business about God. Besides, when I really sat down and thought about it rationally, who was to say there even was one at all? There were a million stories out there about Him, but no one had proof of His existence. No one had ever seen Him, had ever sat down and had an actual conversation with Him. There was no telling that we went up to some puffy-clouded heaven after we took our last breath here on Earth, or that some white-bearded divinity was going to meet us there when we did. If anything, it seemed it was people who had created their own version of God, stories that fit their lives somehow, gave meaning to their desperate, unanswerable questions. I was pretty sure that when all was said and done, the real truth was that no one really knew anything about any of it at all.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Father Delaney walk up the opposite side of the church. I watch his dark head move under the stained-glass windows—a moving comma against a sheet of color—until he disappears through a back door.
Then I stand up.
James is waiting.
Chapter 26
Somewhere in the distance a clock chimes once, alerting the quarter hour. Six-fifteen already. I told Ma that I’d be home by ten, but maybe it will be even later. I might even be late getting to Jane’s. There’s no telling how long any of this is going to take. Will James need help changing into the new pants? And if so, will it take long to do, the way it did to extract him from inside the organ? I’ll definitely have to untie the wood around his leg so he can redress, which means it will need to be set again afterward.
I don’t feel as frightened creeping up the stairs this time, but I’m not sure why. Yes, there are still things to worry about—James being found, me getting into trouble—but maybe now that I’m involved, now that I’ve decided to go down this road, it’s taken some of the edge off. It’s kind of like when I first found out I was pregnant. Aside from the way it happened, everything else about it scared the shit out of me, too: being too young, the inevitability of pushing something the size of a watermelon out of a hole the size of a lemon, having another human being around that I was going to be responsible for. I’d thought about having an abortion, sat with the possibility of it for two whole days. It was easiest when I thought about that night, when I let myself dwell on the reality that half of the baby’s genes would belong to Charlie, and that even if we never crossed paths again, this tiny new life would create an inextricable link between us. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the other set of genes, the part that belonged to me, that I had somehow gone and created despite the horror of the situation. I couldn’t bear to erase what might turn out to be the best part of me. The funny thing was that once I realized I was going to keep the baby, that this was going to be the next real step in my life, some of the fear dissipated. It was almost as if making the choice itself had lifted some of the burden.
James is in his usual spot behind the organ, clutching the gun. When I appear, the vein cords in his neck relax again, his wide eyes soften. “Sorry,” he whispers softly. “I just never know.”
“Still just me.” I settle in a little against the wall and dig inside my pocket. The smell of urine is stronger now; the front of his pants saturated. Every few seconds, his body shivers around the edges, and then settles again. “Listen, I brought you something.” I take out the pills, hand him two of them. “It’s Vicodin. I thought it might help the pain in your leg.”
“You take Vicodin?” James looks at me curiously.
“No.”
“Where’d you get it, then?”
“It’s my mother’s. She has a bad back.”
James tosses both pills into his mouth, grabs the water I hand him, and gulps. “Thanks. To your mother, too, I guess.”
I grab my knapsack, pull out a handful of the lavender-scented wipes that Jane gave me, and set them in a little pile. Then I take Dad’s pants, shake them out, smooth the wrinkles along the creases in the legs. “These pants’ll probably be too big on you, but at least they’ll be dry. And I brought some wipes so you could . . . you know . . . clean yourself off.” The air is charged with embarrassment, but it has to be said. “Unless you . . .” I pause. “Do you want me to . . .”
“No.” He cuts me off quickly. “I’ll do it.”
“Can you? With your leg and everything?”
“I’ll figure it out. Besides, now that you’ve given me the Vicodin, maybe the pain won’t be so bad.”
“Okay.” I point to the other side of the choir loft. “I’ll wait over there until you’re finished. Just tap on the side of the organ to let me know you’re done.”
I can feel him watching as I crawl away, and for some reason just then, I remember that he almost killed someone in a bar. It’s not that I’ve forgotten this fact exactly; more like stored it away, I guess, in the back of my head somewhere. But now it’s front and center again. Blaring, like some kind of neon sign: HE PUT SOMEONE IN INTENSIVE CARE. I turn around, sit up. “James.”
He jumps a little, hands at his waistband, where he has been working the button on his pants. “What?”
“The guy. That you hurt? He isn’t dead.”
Even from this distance, I can see the color drain out of his face, a twitch in his left eye. “He isn’t?”
“No.”
“Is he in the hospital?”
“Yeah. I don’t know all the details, but I think he’s in critical care. And he might need surgery.”
James nods, his eyes moving across the floor in between us, as if following a mouse. “Okay. Thanks.”
I settle myself at the top of the steps, stare down at the gaping mouth of it below. It’s impossible to read James’s reaction just now. Is he disappointed? Relieved? Or just numb? I wonder if he really meant to kill the person. He couldn’t have. For as little as I’ve actually spoken with James, I would still bet my life that he did not mean to kill anyone. Maybe he just got drunk and then went crazy. But if so, why? What could anyone in a bar have possibly done to drive him to such a state?
A faint tapping sounds behind the organ. I lean back, catch sight of James’s hand knocking lightly against the side of it, and crawl back over. The rubber ties and pieces of wood are lying next to him. His dirty pants are crumpled down around his knees, and he is covering the front of his underwear with Dad’s clean pants. “I just need help getting the pants all the way off,” he whispers, motioning with his hands. “I can’t reach. Will you pull the legs?”
I arrange myself at his feet, pull gently until the pants slide off. He bites down hard on his bottom lip when his right leg is exposed; an awkward bulge is visible just beneath the hair and the skin, a horrific, misaligned bone under the thin layers. “James.” I shake my head, lean forward to examine it more closely. “You have to go to a doctor. You’re never going to be able to walk on this leg again if you don’t get it fixed the right way.”
He squints, as if my words are causing him pain, and not his leg. “I will. Eventually. Listen, I’m going to need help with”—he pauses, clears his throat�
��“with my underwear, too. Will you go back over to where you were? I’ll call you when I’m decent.”
I sit just behind the organ this time, listening to the series of barely audible gasps that come from the other side as James struggles to remove his underwear. I try not to think of the surreal aspect of the situation, how gruesomely bizarre the whole thing has gotten. And yet I feel so tenderly toward him that he is embarrassed. That night when I rose up on my knees and screamed at him, not caring that the blankets had fallen around me, or that he could see my naked lower half, it was an act of defiance. An I dare you to come any closer; I dare you to hurt me, too kind of scream. But of course, that is not the situation now. James is struggling just to move his legs a few inches. Just to retain a little bit of dignity while moving without crying out. I will be as respectful and impassive as possible, maybe even pretend that I am a nurse. Nurses see it all, don’t they? Penises, blood, shit, urine, vaginas. All of it. They can’t afford to be squeamish, can’t let their emotions get the best of them. Well, neither will I.
A tap sounds on the organ once more.
James’s breathing is visibly labored, his soiled underwear in a wilted clutch around his knees, his hands cupped around his groin. We avoid each other’s eyes as I remove the underwear, working around the obvious humiliation of the situation. I move as quickly as possible, angling the hole around his right leg without touching it until they are all the way off. Wrapping the soiled clothing into a ball, I stuff it into the bottom of my backpack, and push a handful of the wipes in his direction. “Here. Use these. Just clean off as best you can. I’ll wait behind the organ again until you’re done.”
“I can’t.” His head tips back, and he sags backward, exhausted. “It’s fine. Just leave it.”
“You’ll feel so much better if you just . . .”
“Can you?” He lifts his head an inch or two. “I mean, if you don’t mind?” He leans all the way back slowly, so that he is stretched out on the floor. “I just . . . I just can’t.”
I move toward him, extricating one of the lavender wipes out of the package. The scent, bracingly clean and woodsy, drifts up between us as I move the cloth carefully over the tops of his thighs, in between his legs, and then down around the sides of his buttocks. His hands do not move from the cupped position they are still in, but his eyes are closed, his breathing has slowed. I use three more wipes, moving them as softly as possible over his skin, marveling at the little whorls of hair above his belly button, the smooth slope of his hip bones, the slick band of muscle above each one like a cord. I’ve never looked at a man’s body in such a way, not once. Who knew it could be so beautiful?
“Does that feel any better?” I ask, finishing up.
James nods, but doesn’t answer.
“Okay, now pants.”
He lies still as I move the pants over his legs, gasping once when I brush against the injured one, only to fall silent once more. It takes me over ten minutes, literally moving inch by inch, until my father’s pants are finally around his waist. They are much too big, bagging and slouching against James’s narrow frame, but I safety pin them on one side and roll the band over twice so that they sit comfortably along his hips.
“Okay, I think we’re done.”
He raises himself onto one elbow and looks down at himself, regarding my work. “Wow,” he says. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I glance down quickly at my watch: 6:25. It will take me at least eight minutes to get to Jane’s, which means I have to get out of here in a little under nine minutes.
“I think the Vicodin is kicking in,” he says. “It didn’t hurt nearly as much to pull the pants on.”
“That was fast.” I grab a handful of wipes, move over to the spot he was sitting in, and start rubbing the floor.
“Don’t do that,” he says, stretching one arm out. “Please.”
“Do what?”
“Clean up after me. You’ve already done so much. Please. I’ll do it later, after you go.” He smiles wryly. “It’ll give me something to look forward to.”
But I continue to rub the cloth over the floor. “It’s nothing. Really. My God, I do this kind of thing in my sleep.”
“Stop.” His voice has changed; it has an edge, a vague bitterness to it that I haven’t heard before. “I mean it, Bird. Don’t do any more.”
“Fine.” I sit back then, uneasy, embarrassed. “Whatever.”
He watches me for a moment without saying anything. Then: “Why’re you doing all this anyway?”
I don’t answer right away. So much has happened in the past twenty-four hours that I can’t even remember anymore what made me come back in the first place. Until I do again. “You helped me once,” I answer finally.
James’s eyes rove over the floor, my hands, the rag, but do not meet mine. I wonder if he is thinking about that night, too. About the terrible things I said to him after he pulled Charlie off me. What must he have thought when I threatened to accuse him? He had to have known I didn’t mean it. Didn’t he?
“So if I was just some stranger up here stuck in the same situation, you wouldn’t’ve come back?” he asks.
“I don’t think so.”
James nods, as if deliberating my answer. “It’s kind of nuts, isn’t it? You being here the same day that I dragged myself up these steps? I mean, what are the odds?”
“Yeah.” I think about this all the way through, maybe for the first time. I’d been so annoyed about it earlier, but what if Ma hadn’t asked me to go back for her sweater? Or someone else had heard James that day and come up to the loft to investigate? What then?
Who’s to say what course a life takes, how it steers one way and then another? Ma would say it’s all part of God’s plan, that the things that happen are directed by His hand, but I like to think of happenstance as some kind of ship at sea, leaning this way into the wind and then in the opposite direction when the wind blows again. You get lucky sometimes, is all. Or you don’t.
I stuff the dirty wipes into my backpack and sit back on my heels. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why’d you shave your head?”
James squints at the question, and for a moment, I wonder if I’ve overstepped my bounds, if maybe I’ve gotten too personal. “You just used to have all that hair,” I say. “It was so . . .” Beautiful, is what I want to say. Beautiful and lovely, like him. “I mean, there was just so much of it.”
He runs a hand over the top of his head, as if to remind himself that he is indeed still bald. Then he shrugs. “It was just something I wanted to do. I needed a change. Something different.”
Something about his answer doesn’t sit right, but I let it go. It’s not important anyway. “Okay,” I say. “How about otherwise, then? I mean, how’ve things been going for you?” James grins at the absurdity of the question. I can feel my face flush. “I mean, aside from the obvious. You said you still live in New Haven, right?”
“Yeah. Still here. I have a place over on the east side. Machell Avenue.”
Machell Avenue. That’s less than two miles from where Ma and I are. Surreal that he’s been there all this time, without me knowing. A ship on a parallel course, perhaps. Or maybe just one completely lost at sea. “What do you do? For work, I mean?”
“Carpentry, mostly,” James says. “Or at least I did.”
“Oh, that’s right. My mother said that you had worked on her house a few summers ago. Something with the roof.”
“You told your mother?” James’s left eye twitches.
“She saw you on the news, James.” I reach out, touch the tip of his foot gently. “It was on the news. I haven’t told anyone. I promise.”
“Okay.” Beneath his shirt, I can see his rib cage rise and then fall again. “Yeah. All right. I keep forgetting.” He smiles faintly at me, blinks a few times. “Where’s your mom’s house again?”
“Andover Street. Right on the corner. The one with the little metal
shed out back?”
“That was your mother, huh?”
I nod. It occurs to me suddenly that he must not have known my last name back then. I don’t think I ever got around to telling him. Actually, if he hadn’t been on the news for the last three days, I might not have remembered that his last name was Rittenhouse.
“Yeah, I think I remember that one,” he says. “It wasn’t a big job. Just a patch-up around the chimney, mostly, where it was starting to get thin. I was only there for a day, maybe even just an afternoon. Your mother brought me a glass of lemonade, just before I finished. Left it right at the foot of the ladder, so I could get it when I came back down. Paid in cash, too, if I remember.” He shakes his head. “Still, that was a while ago. She remembered me, just from the TV report?”
“My mother has a memory like an elephant. She can recognize anyone from anywhere, no matter how long ago they first met.”
“That’s amazing.” James stares at his boots sitting off to one side. The laces are loose, the soles caked with dried mud. “You know, I’ll never climb up on a roof again,” he says softly. For a second, I think he is referring to his leg injury. And then I realize that he is talking about the possibility of spending the best years of his life in prison. That maybe the only work he’ll ever do in the future will be in the laundry room of a heavily locked basement, with other orange-suited men like him.
“You never know.” My voice is faint.
He shakes his head. “I know.”
“God, James, what happened? What . . . what did you do?”
James’s eyes change when I ask him that, almost like a shade has been pulled down over them. He stares at me for so long without blinking that I wonder where he’s gone inside his head. Suddenly, in the background, the clock chimes six forty-five. “Never mind.” I grab my backpack, slide it in between my shoulder blades. “It’s none of my business anyway. I’m sorry. I have to go.”
“Where do you have to go?” James asks.
The Odds of You and Me Page 20
