It took me a while to stand. I settled for sponging at myself from a basin of soapy lukewarm water. I did brush my teeth, and not in the same water. I don’t remember what clothes I put on. It was dark and it was five in the morning, almost. When I was dressed, I let the dog out and then in and fed him. I figured on breakfast at the Blue Bird, coffee at least, so I filled his water jug and told him he could come in the car. Outside, he did his circling around himself, then got to the car ahead of me in case I needed reminding.
We were in town before quarter to six. I drove to the hospital, told him to stay, and went in. They were beginning to make noises in the hall outside the ER, just in case the patients in the adult ward were sleeping. In the emergency room, a woman who was not Virginia sat at the desk to the left of the door, typing at a word processor. In the little rooms down the small corridor from her, just off where they stopped the bleeding or set the bone, I heard the scrape of a chair against the linoleum floor. The bright lights bouncing their glare off aluminum equipment hurt my eyes the way the oncoming lights of a couple of trucks and some cars on Route 8 had hurt them. I wondered if I’d hit my head against the floor or bureau while running the stairway out of my dream.
The woman at the desk said, “Yes,” which sounded like No. I pointed past her and nodded, the way I would if I agreed with her. She made some wait-a-minute sounds, but I was past her and into the office I thought I’d heard her in.
I was right. She was sitting on a high table with paper stretched out from a roller at the top that covered it. Her face was down; her arms were holding the edge of the table at either side of her legs. She didn’t swing them. They hung straight down from the knee. I thought she was asleep sitting up.
I said, “Fanny.”
She jumped or winced, and she knew it was me by the time her face was level. Her eyes looked awful.
She said, “Since when don’t you shave?”
I asked if she could get away a little early. “Maybe we could have some breakfast at the Blue Bird,” I said.
She said, “Why?” She looked at my face and I guess she saw me looking at hers. I didn’t know how to walk closer to her. I wanted to. I hoped she would see that along with whatever else she was seeing. “Is something wrong? I mean—something else?”
I said, “Did any more posters go up that you noticed? Did you hear anything from any cops coming in about more girls missing?”
She shook her head.
“It isn’t a serial thing, I think. Mass killings or just a girl for every phase of the moon. I think it’s a guy—I’m talking about Janice Tanner—I think it’s a guy who snapped one time. The others—Christ, I don’t know. I don’t know. It isn’t fair. You’re a small person, a little girl person, and you go outside of your house but where it’s supposed to be safe. It’s supposed to be safe! And people come and they hunt you. They pull up next to you in a car and the back door opens and your nose is peeling off and they’re fucking you to death or making soup from your brains. It isn’t fair. Christ. Listen to it, huh? I don’t—I got involved here a little, I think. I shouldn’t have done it, but they knew I would. I was a natural to get into this up over my head and drown inside of it.”
She looked the way you do when someone talks to you in a foreign language but for a minute you thought it was English and you couldn’t figure out why you didn’t understand.
She said, “You’re crazy, Jack. I think you’re going crazy with this. Or us. Or the combination. Jack, what was that about you shouldn’t have done it? What were you telling me?”
“Shouldn’t have—is that something I told you?”
“Just now.”
“Shouldn’t … Oh. Oh. Shouldn’t have taken the job. Shouldn’t have let them talk me into, I don’t know, investigating, I guess you’d say. The Tanner girl. Janice Tanner? I didn’t need that, did I? Of course, Archie would say I did.”
Her head dropped. Then she got her chin level again. She shook her head very slowly. “I would say you didn’t.”
“I would, too, right now. It’s just, it didn’t seem fair. I couldn’t figure out why somebody couldn’t look after these kids a little. I know. It isn’t fair. It isn’t. Their parents didn’t want anything bad to happen. I sure know Mrs. Tanner’s hanging on to her pain just to find out something good so she can die. Damn thing is, there isn’t anything good for her to learn.”
“You know about it? I mean you know who?”
I nodded. I said, “Yeah. I do. I think I do.” Then I said, “Fanny.” I said it like a kid who was waiting to get his nerve up and ask for a date. “Could you come home again?”
All she said was “Jack.” I’d known her so long. But I couldn’t make out what she was telling me. “Jack,” she said again.
“Could you drive home from here instead of going to Virginia’s? I promise not to go there and bother you. Just go there and take a bath and go to sleep. Take the dog. I’m really boring for him, and he hasn’t seen you in a long time. Just go to the house. When I come in tonight, stay there. Don’t go to work. And we can talk. Or we don’t have to. We can hang around together. Or just be in the same place. Or you can go to work and you don’t need to see me.”
She said, “I gather you’re giving me a series of options here, Jack.”
I shrugged. I made sure not to wince, because the last thing I wanted was for Fanny to see me move strangely, and then for her to unbutton my shirt and run her hands along my skin and then undo the bandages around my chest. It was also what I wanted nearly the most. I confused myself by remembering how Rosalie had opened my shirt and put her hands and then her mouth on my skin. I put my left hand in my pocket and let the right hang by my thumb to my belt buckle, and I waited.
She said, “Did you leave any out?”
I waited.
She said, “I’m not really cracking jokes. I’m trying not to cry.” I would have bet a week’s gas money that the dog was slapping his tail against the seat of the station wagon. She asked me, “Do you think I did us any good by moving out?”
I said, “Not for me. Maybe you saw things clearer or something. Except I don’t think you were having any seeing problems. You said it when you left. You wanted to force me into understanding our situation differently. Something along those lines. Do you think it helped?”
She said, “No.”
“Do you want to stay away from me forever?”
“No.”
“Do you think it’s my fault she’s dead?”
She closed her eyes. The tears ran under her lids. Her voice sounded like she was trying not to cough. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to remember.”
“You remembered, though.”
“I can’t. I don’t want to anymore.”
I said her name. I said, “Hannah.”
It didn’t make her cry harder. I don’t think anything could.
I heard voices outside, near the entrance. She whispered, “Change of shift.”
“Come outside with me?”
She didn’t answer. She got down slowly, and she went down the hall to the right. After a few minutes, she came back with her coat on. She was wiping her face with a paper towel. She walked past me and past the people at the desk and out the big doors. I went after her. I felt them looking at me, and I knew they doubted I was human.
Outside, she was at the Torino wagon, opening the tailgate so the dog could get to her. He went up in the air, wriggling like a puppy. He went around her, then he took off. He went to the far edge of the parking lot, kicking up slush and snow, skidding on the ice, dragging his tail and rounding his hips when he turned. He was making the signal of playing a game. He looked like a ball carrier giving the dead-leg juke to a defensive back. I waited next to Fanny, not touching her.
When he stood next to her, panting, waving his tail, banging his head into her coat, I said, “Where to?”
She said, “I’m going to get into my car. I’m going to turn the engine on. When it’s warm enough, I’m going to
let it roll. At the entrance to the road, I’ll either turn left to Virginia’s or I won’t.”
“Turn right,” I said. “Take the dog with you. Make a right.”
I went to my car and I kept my mouth shut when I got in. I watched the dog jump into her car. I started the engine and shut the window so I wouldn’t hear her motor. I held on to the wheel and looked at my hands. I closed my eyes. I counted one Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi four Mississippi five Mississippi six Mississippi, but I couldn’t get myself to ten.
I opened my eyes. I looked for her car, but she had left. I thought I saw her gray-violet exhaust smoke in the air. It blew raggedly on the wind, like the smoke from the hospital’s heating plant. You can tell it’s the dead of winter when the smoke stands straight up, stiff. When it blows apart, you can think of warmer temperatures. I thought it made a lot of sense for me not to wonder why she’d hurried.
field
HE WAS IN THE BLUE BIRD and eating something I think is called a horn. It was large and crescent-shaped and it seemed to have a great deal of shiny material on top of it. He wore a dark blue chamois shirt with frayed broad collars. It was opened several buttons, showing the mesh of the long-sleeved thermal undershirt that also showed beneath his sleeves rolled to the forearm. He had a lot of hair on his arms and wrists and it sprouted around the undershirt. The heat was high and wet in the Blue Bird, and the smokers were laying down a screen. Verna screeched her jokes; senior citizens laughed in what was probably among the pleasantest times of their day, since now they weren’t alone.
I wanted to be happy I was there, looking at Archie’s brilliant eyes in his ugly round face, but the heat was choking me and the smoke and lights made my eyes and forehead ache.
He said, “You look like a set of defective bowels.”
“It’s one of my favorite disguises.”
“At least you haven’t cut yourself shaving the last few days.”
“They took our razors away. Belts, shoelaces, you know the routine. Can you get out of here with me awhile?”
“I’m on my first pastry,” he said.
“I’m about on my last, Arch.”
He pointed a finger in the air. He performed a horror. He stabbed the horn into his coffee cup, brought up the dripping, shiny, melting cake, and, tipping his head back, stuffed it into his mouth. He didn’t swallow it, though. He did something like straining it, because although I saw him swallow, the cake clearly remained bunchy in his mouth. He got his coffee cup up and tipped the remaining coffee through his gritted teeth. It made the noise of a garbage-disposal unit in a sink.
Then he said, “Ah.” He put money on the table, slid sideways, and we went. I drove him out of town, past the frozen lake I’d gone to, and he didn’t talk. I didn’t look at him. We got to Johnnycake Hill and went up about a half a mile before I pulled off near a field where loggers deposited trimmed evergreen trunks for the local mill trucks to take with their huge oily grippers.
We walked. It used to be an empty road, and then, for years, an almost-empty road. Now there were new houses, all of them with those semicircular windows that look like winking eyes and don’t admit enough air to make a difference when it’s warm. The winds were gentle. I didn’t want to seem optimistic about anything, but it seemed possible that we might be approaching the end of winter.
He said, puffing a little, “Tell me.”
“You’ve been saying Fanny and I have to talk about our baby.”
“I’ve been saying so much, I decided not to tell you anything anymore. I can’t figure out whether you want to and can’t or you really just don’t give a flying fuck about it and you want something else out of this incredible analytic mind I keep serving you from for no additional charge.”
“You never charged me a penny.”
“You’re my friend. And you work for the school. I’m giving you the service you’re entitled to.”
“Sure.”
“And you’re my friend.”
I stopped. We were at a level part, where someone building a house had been caught by winter. The framing was done but not the roof, and they’d have damage to contend with. It didn’t seem to me that anybody capable of building a house ought not to be capable of understanding a little about weather.
“I know I am,” I said. “You’ve been great.”
“You leaving town?”
“No.”
“Good. You sounded a little valedictory there for a minute.”
I shook my head.
“Like you were saying good-bye?”
“That,” I said.
“Tell me, Jack.”
I felt the same hesitation as when I’d asked Fanny to come back home. But I pushed through it. I said, “I didn’t kill our little girl.”
His hand came up on its own, it looked like. He seemed to me surprised to find it on my face, just touching my cheek and part of the side of my neck. If he had pulled, I’d have stepped closer and set my head on his shoulder. He just touched me like that and then he dropped his hand.
“I didn’t think you did.”
“She died.”
“Dying doesn’t mean killed.”
I walked ahead, and I heard him follow. We went on to where the hill climbs again, and I stopped because I heard him breathing harshly. I didn’t mind not moving because of how my ribs felt. He stopped and caught his breath a little. I heard him open his mouth, then close it. I turned to look at him.
“You can kill a kid, sometimes, by shaking her. You don’t mean to. Your life’s crazy, or you’re sick, or you haven’t slept in—forever. However many nights.”
“I know,” he said. “It happens a lot.”
“You can be half dying because you’re worried about the kid, but she’s going on with that sick little tired little nagging kind of crying, over and over, and nothing you do does her any good. Nothing. Hold her, put her down, try to feed her, sing to her, turn on the radio, dance in the bedroom with her, sit and touch her so she knows you’re there.”
He said, “That’s right.”
I looked anyplace else. I couldn’t see. I felt the wind, I felt him very near, but I couldn’t see anymore.
He said, “Jack.”
I said, “That’s all right.”
“Fanny doesn’t remember?”
“She thinks she remembers me doing it. I went up. I heard something when they were up there. Then I went up. By the time I got there and got hold of Hannah because Fanny was crying and crying … by the time … by the time I got there, all I could do was breathe into her mouth. I held her and I breathed. I breathed and breathed. We drove to the hospital. They called it, I—”
“Sudden infant death syndrome,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Instead of shaken child syndrome.”
“Archie. She turned and found me. When she came out of it, or came to. Whatever happened. I think she went into this blackout so she wouldn’t see what had happened.”
“She saw you.”
“Holding her dead baby.”
“She thought you did it.”
“When she lets herself remember that much.”
“But nothing about herself.”
“Nothing.”
“That’s why you can’t talk to her about it,” he said. His hand came up again, and he put it again on my face. It wasn’t warm up there—the temperature was below freezing—but his face was running with sweat.
“I don’t want her remembering what happened.”
“So she remembers what didn’t happen.” He was very cold, I saw. I realized he’d been wearing sneakers, not boots, and they were soaked dark. Shifting his feet, he said, “God. She needs help, Jack.”
“Help? You think Fanny needs help? You think I do, Arch? You think I didn’t stumble onto that insight by myself? Yeah. I think we need some help. The thing of it is, I can’t come up with any ideas about help that don’t have to do with locking us both up for murder or craziness, or shooting us full
of drugs and killing whatever’s left of us, which isn’t a fucking whole hell of a lot right now to begin with.”
He brought his other hand up, and he stood there with me, shorter and fatter and smarter by a dozen lifetimes. He couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.
So I told him, “I didn’t expect you to come up with a, you know, a miracle cure for her. Or something that maybe would freeze my memory up so I could be the same as her. That’s what I want. To remember the same as she does. I know she doesn’t want to hurt me. She knows I don’t want to hurt her. The way it is now, I know what she knows, and she has no idea of what I know. If we can even stay that way, that fucked and fouled, I’ll take it.”
He said, “A marriage often dies when a child does.”
“You were good enough to share that insight with me before.”
“It’s why you pay me,” he said, squeezing my face and letting his hands drop.
“I wanted you to know,” I said. “You’ve been good, helping me. Talking to me the way you have.”
“I haven’t helped,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s help for this.”
I nodded.
“Something else,” I said.
“Jack, there can’t be anything else.”
I said, “Tell me one more time you were the one wanted me worrying at the Tanner girl thing.”
“You’re still pissed about that?”
“No. But you were the one, and because it might help me.”
He said, “Yeah. But of course that was when I thought all you were coping with was this unbearable, shattering loss. I didn’t know it was some kind of a Greek goddamned play.”
I made myself look at him again. “Whatever happens,” I said, “I want to thank you.”
“What’s that mean, Jack? The ‘whatever’ part?”
“Thank you,” I said.
“What’s that ‘whatever’ mean?”
“I think I’ll be in touch with you later, Archie. Maybe you can think of something you could do for Fanny?”
“When you get the boulder to the top of the hill, don’t let it roll back.”
Girls Page 25
