Lamb

by Bonnie Nadzam

“What.”

  “Will you …” He looked down at his hands, and into her face, and down again. “Will you wear your nightgown?”

  She looked at her blue jeans and jacket. “You’ll have to keep me warm.”

  “I will.”

  Eventually our old guy would look to her like a fluke, a mistake, a weird time she survived when she was eleven. In his memory she would become more beautiful, more dear. In hers, he’d be a monster.

  All of eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska were hammered by ice and driving wind. The girl shivered in the passenger seat, her lips white, with Lamb sweating beside her, a giant bright orange bottle of cough medicine between them and Styrofoam cups of hot tea from gas stations. Every half hour or so Lamb reached sideways to touch her face and she’d open her eyes and try to smile.

  “You look awful,” she’d say.

  “You look worse.”

  In Grand Island he reached into the back and retrieved the filthy Cubs hat and put it on her head. They stopped for egg drop soup in Omaha and slept twelve hours in a Holiday Inn with the TV on where they were sick and feverish and both their bodies aching. Back in the truck he fed her Nyquil and ginger ale and she slept or spoke brokenly and deliriously until Council Bluffs. By the time they made Des Moines they were both coming out of the fog of medicine and sore throats and splitting temples. Lamb drove them back to the little green motel now bleak with dark wet leaves.

  “Did you like me when we stayed here the first time? I think you did.”

  “I think I did,” she said.

  “How did you know?”

  “Just knew.”

  “Do you still, Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though I’m a liar and a thief?”

  She reached out and punched him forcelessly in the shoulder.

  “Boy,” he said, “you were a lot stronger on the way out. We need to get you some spinach.”

  She grinned.

  “Your body has changed since September,” he said. “That part is true.”

  “I know.”

  He whispered. “Did I change it?”

  She whispered back. “I think it was going to happen anyway.”

  His eyes filled with tears, the world went all smeary on the other side of the windshield. “You know just what to say.” And suddenly he began sobbing. Really crying, really huffing tears. His whole chest seizing and his face twisted like a little boy’s. What would be left him when she was gone: a hole that she’d once filled with these consoling words. His doubt and his demons, the ones he’d taught her to keep at bay, they’d get him by the throat. And he knew it.

  “Promise me something, dear,” he said. Say she’d gotten used to these bursts of crying—say he’d had a few of them. Say even that he’d been having them for a while, in the afternoons and a little bit in the mornings by the fire. “If you discover one day that you hate me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Please don’t say that. You might. I have to say this, okay.”

  She waited. His voice was scratchy and high.

  “If you discover you hate me, that you’re angry with me, that I’ve ruined your life. When I’m ninety. Anytime.” He stopped. She nodded for him to go on. She’d become such a little woman. “You’ll come tell me, won’t you? You’ll buy a pair of steel-toed boots and come and find me all alone and dried up and sick in a nursing home and kick my fucking teeth in. Or whisper to me on my deathbed that I was d—”

  “Stop it!” Now she was crying.

  “Oh,” he said and wiped his nose with his sleeve then hers and turned her crying face to his. “It’s not true,” he said. “I’m sorry. Nothing I said was true. I’ve had too much medicine. Too much driving.” He took her hands and held them to his chest, to his neck, then his mouth. “Please forget everything I just said. Please promise me you will forget it. Tell me you promise, okay?”

  “I promise.”

  It was the fever that’d cracked him open. Lamb had wanted to return her to her mother shipshape, twelve on a ten scale. The plan had been to bring her home fast, three days on the road and no time for this kind of slippage, but there it was. Everything was off. He felt ash filling up his chest and throat from the inside, blocking his mouth and thickening his heart and filling up his head, he hoped, blocking it out like the heavy gray ceiling of winter settling in over the plains, so that he would not be able to see into it. Not after this day. Not after this.

  By the time they made Rockford he could see they needed to hold out there a day, maybe two days. Until she got well, until he was ready. He pulled into the registration parking space at a Red Roof off of I-90, just across the street from a shopping outlet. He held the steering wheel with both hands and stared hard through the windshield. “Do you want to know what it is? It’s that I can’t let you go.” The girl did not speak. “Does that make you sorry? Like some part of you is anxious to get home?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was very small.

  “You sound scared. Are you scared?”

  “No.”

  “Because you trust me, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what’s going to happen to me when you’re back in your life, swimming and going to movies and dances? Getting your first job and falling in love and cutting your hair short?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll do all those things. It’s okay. Tell me you will. Say it.”

  “I don’t know, Gary.”

  “You will. You’ll throw your tree book in the back of the closet and find it when you’re packing for college. You’ll throw it away. You should let me take that poisonous flower now. I’m the one who’s going to need it.”

  “I won’t throw the book away.”

  “Do you know how it will be for me?”

  The girl said nothing.

  “I’m going back to that shop and I’m going to sleep on the floor next to our bunk beds. I’m never going to sleep in them again. But I’m going to leave them up. I’ll be on the wool blanket on the concrete. Every night, all winter, if it kills me.”

  “You’ll freeze.”

  “It’ll be good for me to feel that cold.”

  “Gary.”

  “When it’s winter here and the wind bites your face and turns your fingers to glass inside your gloves, I want you to think of me alone out there.”

  “Gary, don’t.”

  “No. Don’t. Don’t touch me. It’s good for me to cry a little. A man can cry, can’t he?”

  She watched him holding the steering wheel.

  “You’ll outgrow me,” he said. “You’ll forget everything.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “I’m going to write it all down. Send it to you. Or no. You’d better just forget all about me. I’ll come back to the city and wander around looking for you, but you’ll be gone. There’ll be a woman in your place and I won’t know how to find you.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I know.” He was really crying.

  A businesswoman in a long beige raincoat and purple scarf passed before them and looked into the Ford. She opened the driver’s side door of a blue Chrysler beside the girl, and Lamb wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve.

  “Look at this old guy,” he said, “blubbering like a baby.”

  “You’ll be okay, Gary.”

  “Oh, you dear thing.”

  “I think we should take a nap,” the girl said, “in here.”

  “In the truck?”

  “In this motel.”

  “You don’t feel well, do you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “We’re going to stay here as long as we need to, okay? I’m bringing you back healthy. I’m delivering you to your mother hale and whole, right? Our story depends on it.”

  “Right.”

  In the cool and damp motel room Lamb folded down the bed for the girl and arranged all the pillows while she showered, and when she came out shivering in the tiny w
hite towel he scooped her up, naked and damp towel and all, and set her in the sheets and pulled the blankets over her.

  “Now,” he said and handed her the TV remote, “I’m going to be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to get us more nighttime meds and hot soup from the Jewel over there and we’ll just find an old movie or make fun of the news guys till we fill our bellies and fall asleep, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. What kind of soup?”

  “The hot kind.”

  “Like spicy?”

  “No, please.”

  “You want something with noodles in it, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Noodles and cold medicine and pillows and TV and sleep. Who doesn’t want that? And tomorrow, fried eggs and hot coffee.”

  “Gary?”

  “Yes, my dear.”

  “I don’t actually feel sick anymore.”

  “We just want to give you a little more soup and medicine and sleep so you’re really strong. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “We don’t want you having a relapse.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “When I get back”—he pointed to the bed—“can I lay there? In the space beside you?”

  “Duh.”

  “I didn’t want to make any assumptions.”

  She rolled her eyes and grinned. “I’ll find something on TV.”

  “Be right back, my dear.”

  • • • • •

  Imagine you’re in bed. That little old twin bed, back at home. The sheets wrinkled and soft and cool. Your legs clean and strong. Your shoulders sliding down your back, just melting away. Right? Say you’re reading a book. You let it fall a little, into your knees or upon the satin edging of a deep vanilla-colored plush. Cars shushing past outside. You’re just napping in there, just resting and reading, your body recharging. You can barely read the print on the page. The truth is you’ll feel a cold and empty sagging at the bottom of your heart. Everything outside is metal. Your body will feel a little blank. It wants my warm arms and legs beside it, right? It wants our old open sky outside our little bunk room windows. It wants the river and the soft purring of the nightjars perched in the trees, and it wants the wild grass seeds in your hair and in your little white socks. It wants the heat of our little breakfast fire in the mornings, how it warms your chest and the fronts of your arms and shoulders and opens all the pores in your face and repeats itself in your eyes. Fresh breeze cooling your back. The smell of sage and the smell of snow on the wind. Hands wrapped around your little metal cup of instant. You’ll be in your little gray city room, lost to me. A thousand miles away. The little bunks and the barbed wire and the withering bluebonnets gone. And you’ll turn into your pillow and wonder was I ever real? Was it all a dream?

  There will be such an awful beauty in your heart. A wound like a seal upon it. It will lie over all the cracked and hard city like a soft, bright-colored film. Your own face overlaid with the face you wore when you were with me in the mountains. A brighter face, a younger face, a soft one that mirrors the weather. You’ll read books—little paperbacks—looking for the kind of sentence that keeps the wound alive. And you must keep it alive. Don’t you ever forget this hurt. Don’t you ever forget what you’ve seen with me. It will save you. You’ll be like an apple tree among all the ash-colored buildings of that granite city. Close your eyes. Turn away from the book in your lap, turn away from the sounds of everyone around you. Take a slow deep breath. Listen. It’s the sound of the wind rushing through the box elder outside our window. It’s the sound of me whispering. I’ll be with you this way.

  • • • • •

  The two left the motel in the morning, before the sun was up. The frontage road was quiet, traffic lights still blinking red, gas stations bright in the bleary cold. Everything was over. The day was a shade cooler, a shade grayer than the day before.

  “Last day,” he said when they pulled out of a Chevron station. Little cold needles of rain turned to sleet. “And here comes winter.”

  “It’s only October.”

  “That’s ice,” he said, nodding at the windshield.

  When they came into Lombard the streets were black with rain and ice, the parking lots of grocery stores and strip malls nearly empty.

  “Nobody’s up,” Lamb said.

  “Lucky for us.”

  “Desolate as the field behind the cabin,” he said. “That stretch to the base of the mountains. See? You’ll find that same openness if you look for it.”

  She cried deep and shaking and coughing sobs, and he pulled over in front of an empty pharmacy so she could get it out. Snot ran down the girl’s face and he reached across to wipe the tears from her cheekbones and chin. He leaned in and caught them with his mouth, and kissed her with his eyes open, checking the parking lot around them.

  “Right?” he whispered, and she nodded. “This is how we said it would go, didn’t we?” She closed her eyes and opened them and closed them. “I never lied to you, did I?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t I let you stay longer with me?” Then he straightened her yellow sweater, brushing it down with an open palm. She watched him. “I’ll make you a promise, okay?” He leaned in and spoke with his face very close to hers. “Valentine’s Day,” he said. “I’ll come find you, right? We can be together for a little while. That’s less than four months.”

  “You will?”

  “Just over a hundred days. Can you carry this that long?”

  “You’ll come back to get me?”

  “I’ll come visit. I’ll be very careful, and I’ll protect you. Right?”

  She nodded.

  “We’ll go back to our white hotel. Or out to those little falls by the river. I’ll send you a sign. And when you see it you’ll wait there for me. And I’ll take you away in this wonderful old truck for an hour, or two or three, right? You’ll have to keep your eyes open all the time for the sign from me.”

  “What will it be?”

  “A ribbon tied some unlikely place. Or at Christmastime, a tiny blue lightbulb in a string of white lights. Or a broken window, like that little broken window in the cabin.”

  She was crying all over again.

  “Oh, sweetie,” he said. “Oh, sweetie, it’s your cabin. It will always be yours. I’m going to leave it for you. Didn’t I say I would? And you can live there forever when I’m gone.”

  “Maybe.” She was trying to say something.

  “I can’t understand you.”

  “Maybe in a few years?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe we could just tell everyone.”

  “I think you may be right,” he said and again wiped the tears from her face with the back of his sleeve. “I think it may have to be that way.”

  “I think. They. Would under. Stand.” Her chest heaving up and down and her words froggy.

  “Because it’s love, isn’t it?”

  She nodded and ran the inside of her hand up against her wet nose.

  He drove slowly out of the parking lot and onto the street. “You remember the plan, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, Tom. You have to collect yourself. You have to be brave. Remember all the things we said about keeping everyone safe.”

  “I know.”

  “Can you stop crying now?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “This is how it has to be for a little while.”

  “I know.”

  “You keep yourself well and strong so when I come back for you everyone will believe it was good for you, right? Doesn’t that make sense?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I come back for you, and you’ve been a hysterical mess, everyone will say I’m no good for you, won’t they?”

  Nod.

  “Good girl.”

  He drove out onto Butterfield Road, and there were the
tall rectangles of the girl’s triplet concrete apartment buildings off in the distance, less than a mile up the road, the ones they’d been picturing in all their conversations and dreams when they had been surrounded by trees and river and wind. Here they were, real and tall and solid and filled with sleeping people, the girl’s mother up there, and Jessie, half the window squares bright yellow, lit up like an unfinished game in the gloom.

  “Couldn’t we? We go somewhere?” Her face ugly and red. “You could have. Coffee.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, baby. This is the last chapter. We knew it was coming. We have to be strong. When you get to have a love like this you have to be strong enough to bear it. A love like ours is expensive. Think of it that way. And we pay for it with the next empty string of days. I know you’re good for it. I’ve always known.”

  She nodded and looked down at the backpack between her feet.

  “You know what to do if they’ve moved, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I tell the security guard I ran away in September but here I am and would he help me find my mother.”

  “And you’ll be strong and beautiful. Say it.”

  “I’ll be strong and beautiful.”

  “And you won’t cry when you say it. You’ll be just perfectly self-possessed.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know I can’t stop,” he said when they were a block away.

  “I know.”

  He pointed, then regripped her hand. “I’m going to slow down right up there. Twelve seconds and you hop out and take your backpack and go.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Ready?” It took less than ten seconds.

  “Wait.”

  “Here we are. I can’t kiss you here.”

  She took the ball cap off her own head and pushed it toward him. “You should keep it.”

  “Ready set go. Good-bye, Tommie.”

  She opened the door and hopped out shaking in her fleece, impossibly bright in all the gray around her, and she dragged the backpack after her and it was over. She stood on the corner watching David Lamb steer back into his lane and through the yellow light. A moment later she started running after him in her boots, dragging her backpack crookedly behind her, alone on the wet sidewalk. A few cars passed without slowing. He couldn’t hear her, could only see her shrinking pale white face twisted in anguish and bobbing unevenly behind him in the rearview mirror.