“Kate?” I whispered, the same as I had the time she was passed out in the back of Lori’s car.
“Is that you?” I said.
She didn’t respond, just kept rocking. Kept humming.
So I reached my hand down to pull back the brown hair. I touched it, and pushed it back off her face. I held it that way until another car passed, and in the few seconds of light from the headlights I saw it was Kate Shepherd, the girl I’d thought about for so long. Alone, her eye black, sitting on a street curb talking to no one, a crack pipe by her side.
There wasn’t much thinking to do. I’d been through it a million times in my mind. I knelt down, put my arm under her knees, the other arm on her back, and lifted the girl off the ground, my book bag on my back. She didn’t flinch. She just put her face into my shoulder, and I could feel the low hum against my skin under the fabric of my shirt.
nine
It’s the nature of this round world, spinning around and around in circles, eventually everything comes back to you if you only wait. Kate came back to me, and I carried her across the campus that night. Her bones were light, but even so, by the time I reached my apartment the muscles in my arms were burning.
I put her down on my bed. Eddie was out for the night and his bedroom was dark. I sat down in the chair across the room from her and stretched out my arms on each side, feeling the burn slowly dissipate. It was dark in the room, and quiet, with the only light coming from the kitchen. Kate’s breathing was low and the mumbling had stopped. She was asleep like a child, completely, with no cares and no idea where she slept and who watched.
In my mind, like I said before, I’d rehearsed a million times the moment like the one on the street when I picked up Kate and took her away, but after that moment of gallantry I hadn’t really considered what would happen next. Now she was here, in my bed. The moment of gallantry was over. My arms didn’t burn anymore. This girl, a girl I really barely knew, would wake up in my room. She might not even remember my name. Should I take off her dress and put on a t-shirt and a pair of my shorts? Where should I be sitting when she opens her eyes?
I sat in the chair and just let my mind spin like the world. It was done. She was still pretty, thinner than I remembered, but with the same gentle face and presence. It didn’t matter where she’d gone the night of David Ansley’s party until I saw her sitting on the curb. We were together like I knew we’d be.
I heard the front door open and close around two-thirty in the morning. Eddie was home. I hadn’t slept all night. No part of me wanted to sleep. I saw him walk past my bedroom door on the way to the bathroom. He sounded like a racehorse pissing on a cookie sheet. It went on and on until I couldn’t believe any man’s bladder could hold so much beer. On the way back down the hall Eddie stopped at my open door. He craned his neck inside to see me sitting in the chair. He turned his head a click to see Kate in my bed. I could smell the burnt smell of cigarettes and spilled beer from ten feet away.
Eddie entered the room quietly. We still hadn’t spoken. He stood by the bed between me and Kate, looking down at her. I rose from the chair and stood next to him.
“She’s beautiful,” I whispered.
Eddie didn’t say anything. He looked at me, and I could see in his face he didn’t agree. I could tell he was confused about the situation, the girl in my bed, and the fact I’d gone and found Kate at the bar next to Nicky’s. He didn’t see her the way I did. Maybe nobody would. But for the first time, the very first time, it was clear to me I saw Kate Shepherd physically different than other people saw her.
Eddie went to his room and closed his door too hard, the way drunk people sometimes do. I sat back down in the chair. When I woke up and opened my eyes, Kate was looking at me from her place on the pillow. The morning light from the window was a deep yellow. Her eyes were brown like I remembered. A rich brown, the darkness of chocolate. We looked at each other for a few seconds, and then a few seconds longer. It lasted so long I wondered if one of us might be dead, but I was afraid to move. Afraid of what she might say, the first words that might come from her mouth. Finally, finally, she smiled. It wasn’t much, just a tiny upturn of the mouth, but it was a smile. No doubt about it.
And then she said in a voice I could barely hear, “Early Winwood.”
She remembered my name. To hear her speak it was the best possibility. It allowed the moment to float forward, the potential to remain unlimited. Maybe it was better than I’d imagined. Maybe she came looking for me. Maybe it was no natural coincidence her world crossed mine outside a bar on that certain night.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered, childlike.
“You’re in my apartment. You’re in my bed. I carried you here.”
The expression on her face didn’t change, and we were staring at each other again for impossible periods of time. But as the minutes passed, the discomfort of the silence left the room, steadily, until there was no discomfort at all. We just looked at each other, and I stopped trying to figure out what she was thinking, or what she might say next.
“Where are your parents?” she asked.
“My mom’s at home. My father is a writer in New York City,” I said.
For the life of me I don’t know why I lied. I’d never said such a thing to anyone before. As soon as it left my mouth I wished it was never said, but there didn’t seem to be a way to take it back or explain it. The lie hung between us. It occurred to me she thought we were at my house back home. She didn’t even know what town she was in.
“Where do you live now?” I asked.
Kate’s face on the pillow didn’t move. Her words were certain.
“Here,” she said.
More time passed. Maybe five minutes. Maybe more. I can’t be sure.
“Where’s your stuff?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
I reminded Kate where I’d found her the night before. Her eyes drifted from me to the window and then back to me like she was searching for a memory, found it, and brought the memory to her lips to speak it.
“There’s a house down the block from there, a yellow house. My suitcase is upstairs.”
I stood from the chair and left the room. The yellow house was where she said it would be. A girl from my business class passed me on the sidewalk. It would be the first class I’d missed all semester.
I knocked on the front door. There was no answer. I knocked again. Still nothing.
I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. The house was a wreck inside. A rolled up carpet rested upright against the far wall. Ratty clothes, towels, and trash were strewn across the floor. It wasn’t the remnants of a party the night before. It was old trash, the smell of neglect and decay. A house uncared for.
I didn’t call out. I turned up the stairs and walked slowly, listening for any sound. I stopped at the top of the staircase. Still no noise inside the house. The air was musty and stale, like an attic. I moved slowly into the first bedroom to the left. In the corner, on a thin, stained mattress, was a body. The body of a man asleep on his back, bare chested. He was unshaven, one sock on and one sock off. Next to the mattress was a bent aluminum can with the tell-tale black residue on top and a pack of open restaurant matches.
The room stunk of human odor. Clothes were scattered on the floor. There was a hole the size of a fist through the sheetrock near the man’s head and a splattered stain on the ceiling. I was disgusted at the idea of Kate inside a place such as that. Anywhere in the house. Anywhere near the man asleep on the piss-stained mattress.
“Where’s Kate’s stuff?” I said.
He didn’t move. He didn’t even twitch. He didn’t jump up, startled the way a normal person would be startled by a stranger standing in their bedroom. The man’s mouth was open, and I could hear his body sucking air inside him, despite everything.
I raised my voice, surprised by the angry edge, “Where’s Kate’s stuff?”
The man began to open his eyes, struggling against the glare from
the window. He lifted his hand to his face to shield the light and finally focused on me standing near the doorway.
All he said was, “Fuck you.” That’s all he had to say. That’s all that came out of his mouth, and it’s all it took for me to lose control of myself like I’d never done in my entire life.
The reaction was instant. There was no internal discussion. No weighing the options. The anger was overwhelming. I was over him, the first kick landing squarely in his rib cage. My fist came down against the side of his face with a force I’d never felt, bones crushed underneath. The second punch, and then the third, and I could feel spit flying against my face, his and mine. And I swear to God I wanted to kill the man. There was blood on the wall around the hole in the sheetrock, blood on my hands. It was violence I’d never imagined could come from me. Extreme and beyond control, with my fist down again against his teeth, caving inside, and I wanted to bite him, rip a piece of his flesh away in my mouth before I fell backwards from the force of my own rage and stood again over the man I’d brutally beaten in his bed, his face in his hands, curled into a fetal position, soundless and wet.
I said, “Where’s Kate’s stuff?”
One of his hands left his face, slowly and then upwards until the index finger separated from the ball of blood and pointed down the hall.
I left the man and went to the next room. There was a big blue suitcase open on the floor with clothes out and around. In the corner of the room was a pile of burnt things, looked like a newspaper and a child’s doll, with black streaks and soot up the wall nearly to the ceiling. I put the loose clothes in the suitcase, zipped the sides, and carried it down the stairs like it was a normal day in a normal house, a normal man carrying a suitcase, with blood beginning to dry on my right hand, beginning to feel stiff over the skin.
When I got back to the apartment Eddie was sitting at the old wooden dining room table, eating a bowl of cereal. He watched me carry the suitcase into my bedroom. Kate wasn’t in the bed, and I thought she’d gone. I thought he’d let her walk out the door. But then there was a sound from the bathroom. The sound of vomiting, retching.
I opened the bathroom door. Kate was on the floor, her head resting on the toilet seat. I wiped her mouth with a towel. Her eyes still closed, and I wondered if she knew it was me, or maybe thought it was the man in the yellow house. But when she opened her eyes there was no look of surprise.
“I got your things from the house,” I said.
She looked up at me, and again I was struck by the way she stared. I thought of Jeff Temple’s story of the time behind the concession stand during the baseball game, and I knew it couldn’t be true. I imagined the man on the mattress in the yellow house was Jeff Temple, his baseball cap on backwards, pants down to his knees, a smile on his bloody face.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
In hindsight, these many years later, it was the moment I could have let myself off the hook. It was the fork in the road. I probably should have been rattling off questions like, who’s the father? How can you get drunk and use drugs with a baby inside you? Did you plan to bring your child home to the room in the yellow house with the burnt doll and rancid smell and the man sleeping on a piss-stained mattress?
But those questions never entered my mind. Instead, I could see her clothes hanging in my closet, making room for her underwear in the chest of drawers, asking my boss for a few days off of work to get Kate settled, finding a doctor, being with her during the first days her body craved the drug, wiping the vomit from the side of her mouth.
And then, with the same uncharacteristic lack of thought I displayed in the violent attack earlier, I said out loud, “We can get married.”
For a moment I wasn’t actually sure I said the words loud enough to be heard. Kate’s face was unchanged. There was no reaction at all, and for some reason I thought of my father, and his hand in mine when we walked together one morning on a beach a long time ago, when I was maybe four or five years old.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked.
And I said, “I want to be with you.”
He squeezed my hand a little tighter and looked down at me as we walked. When he looked back up across the water there was a smile on his face not meant for anyone but him. A pride in me, his son, he never found anywhere else. And I wondered what he would think of me as I lowered the towel and wiped the glistening saliva from Kate’s chin where it rested on the toilet seat.
ten
We talked all day. I fixed Kate a sandwich for lunch. She told me about leaving the party that night, and getting a ride home, packing a bag and leaving her father sitting in the living room where I found him later.
“I went to Oklahoma to stay with my mother and her boyfriend, but she just had a new baby. It didn’t work out.”
“Where’d you go from there?”
Kate answered my questions with a tired indifference. She was worn out, surviving for the sake of survival when there was nothing else better to do.
“A boy in the trailer park, his name was Darren, offered me a ride to California. I had a friend who lived in Sacramento. We mostly slept in the car…”
Her eyes drifted past me again, and she seemed to remember something she’d forgotten.
“Let’s talk about something else,” she said. “Let’s talk about you.”
I told her about my job, and taking business classes. I told her about Eddie, and the time we got caught stealing. And then I told her about going to her house that night and talking to her father.
“He was sitting in the dark. There was a dog at the door. When’s the last time you talked to him?” I asked.
“That night.”
“You haven’t talked to your father since then?”
She didn’t answer right away. She didn’t even seem to hear my question. I waited.
Kate said, “Why did you go to my house that night?”
It was the question I knew would come eventually. The dilemma I expected to face. Should I tell her about my infatuation? Would she consider my dedication honorable or creepy?
Through the years, in anticipation of such a conversation, I’d changed my mind back and forth. Eventually, I’d settled on a middle ground, waiting to size up Kate’s reaction, waiting to actually get to know her before gauging her possibilities.
“I was just worried about you.”
I thought about Jeff Temple, the cigar in one hand and beer in the other, standing by the pool, laughing. I thought about the man on the mattress in the yellow house.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked.
She smiled, and even though I’d seen her smile earlier, I’d forgotten what it did to me.
“No,” she said, like she’d never been asked before.
I called in sick to work. Kate took a shower and we ordered pizza. My mind was a whirlwind of ideas and plans. In the mirror, accidentally, I caught a glimpse of Kate in her bra and panties. It was only a glimpse, maybe lasted one second, and I turned away, but it was a remarkable one second. I can still see her closely in my mind, wet hair, bent over slightly looking for something in the drawer, white panties, freckles on her back. She seemed not to recognize the value of her body, just moving around like nothing at all.
It was nighttime again. The whole day had passed and we’d never left the apartment, barely stepping foot outside my room. We sat down on the bed together. Kate smelled clean. I held a notepad and pen in my lap.
“Do you want to make your life better?” I asked sincerely.
Kate smiled. “Yeah,” she said.
“I mean really? Do you seriously want to make your life better? Because we can do it. We can sit here and list out every part of your life, and under each part list out how to solve the problems, how to make each part better.”
She seemed not to understand, so I moved forward.
“See, on this first page we’ll break down the sections of your life: education, employment, finances.”
I wrote a
s I spoke, making sure to pick the most general categories first.
She was hesitant. “Okay,” she finally said, and then asked, “What else?”
“Well, family relationships. Maybe substance abuse issues. The baby.”
Kate touched her hand to her belly, reminding herself it was real. My categories had become more specific. She could see I’d thought about what I was saying. She seemed to be impressed I’d taken the time to break her life into identifiable pieces, something she’d never considered.
“What else?” she asked curiously.
“Maybe, spirituality. I don’t know. And long-term goals, like marriage, maybe.”
We both looked down at the list I’d made, top to bottom, in a column like a grocery list. Like we could go to the store and pick out each of the items and mark them off one by one.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Well, we turn over to the next page, and we write the first thing on the list at the top of the next page in big letters. Education. And then, underneath, we write down what kind of education you want and how to make it happen. Do you want to enroll in college here? What kind of classes do you want to take? Would you rather go to nursing school, or one of those places they teach you to be a court reporter, or what? What do you want to be when you grow up?”
We both laughed at the idea we weren’t already grown up.
After a moment, Kate said, “I don’t have any money.”
“Don’t worry about that part yet. Let’s just talk about what you want. Then we’ll talk about how to get it.”
I could tell she’d never even asked herself the question. Probably her mother and father had never asked her the question, because it wasn’t a possibility. It wasn’t something possible, and so there was no point. It wasn’t a subject avoided. It was no subject at all. The same as they probably never discussed how many light years it takes to reach the furthest star, or why our blood comes out red. I thought again about the man in the chair, beaten down by the day, a bullet hole through the top of his foot, in the dark.
The Wait Page 7
