Tide King

by Jen Michalski

  “Hurry.” Ms. Webster nudged her into the passenger seat of the Squareback and hurried around to the other side. She missed the slot for the key. When she tried again, pinching the key tightly between her fingers, Heidi could see her hands shaking.

  “He won’t hurt you,” Heidi said. “He didn’t hurt me.”

  The engine roared, and Ms. Webster yanked the clutch into gear, shooting down the road in reverse until they were out of view of the house before turning. Heidi hoped Calvin would get to the truck on time to follow them. The orange dragon was no match for the calibrated purr of the Volkswagen, which Ms. Webster eased up to 75 on the highway.

  “Why didn’t you say anything to me earlier, Heidi?” Ms. Webster lifted her hand off the clutch and patted Heidi’s palm. “You knew you could come talk to me.”

  “I don’t know…it happened so fast. I don’t want foster parents and to go to college in some strange city and it’ll be just like high school except I won’t even have you or my father.”

  “Oh, Heidi, I know it feels like that. It feels like that to everyone—don’t you think it’ll feel like that to Oliver and Shauna and any other kid at school? And for them, it will be even worse. They’re used to having status. Then, all of the sudden, they’ll be lowly freshman, and no sophomore or junior or senior will care about their social status at their old school. But, for you, that will be a blessing. You can make a new home, a new history.”

  Ms. Webster pulled into a two-story apartment complex. The brick and siding structure looked grimy and old. The siding was weathered gray, and the bricks, crumbling. Tricycles and toys and garbage paraded in the grass. Ms. Webster guided Heidi to an apartment on the second floor. Inside, it was small, a layer of exotic oils and perfume almost covering the sourness of tenants past. Heidi sat on the couch, and Ms. Webster locked the door and looked out the peephole.

  “We have to figure out what we’re going to do.” She walked into the living room and sat at the other end of the couch. “Even if I take your story as true, the truth is you didn’t alert the authorities when your father died. And you could be charged with social security fraud if you don’t. I don’t know whether you’d go to jail, but this could keep you from going to college for a little bit.”

  “I know…which is why you should let me go home and not get involved.” Heidi wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Oh, Heidi, no—I would never do that.” Ms. Webster curled her feet up and fished a cigarette out of her purse. “We can figure this out without implicating Calvin in any of it. He can go home and no one would be any the wiser.”

  Heidi looked at the bookshelves at the other end of the apartment, filled with the books she had imagined. No cat. She wondered what Ms. Webster did on the weekends, aside from inviting lonely girls like herself out to the movies.

  “Do you have a boyfriend, Ms. Webster?”

  “No.” She exhaled. “I haven’t really met anyone here. But I have friends. I travel. I know that you don’t want to hear this, Heidi, particularly since you struggle with it so much yourself, but people are lonely a lot. Even if there is someone. There’s always a loneliness that people can’t fill, that pets can’t fill. And you have to make peace with it because you come into the world alone and you go out the same way.”

  “Have you made peace with it?”

  “Sometimes.” She stubbed out the cigarette. “I’ve been in long-term relationships, and I’ve been alone. I’m just saying that I don’t want you to think Calvin can save you from it.”

  “But why be with anyone at all, then?”

  “Because it’s fun and we procreate and that’s what we do. But it doesn’t mean anything unless you’re comfortable with yourself. And you can go with Calvin or you can go to college, or you could go into the Peace Corps, but you have to find the home in yourself because everything else is so much window dressing.”

  “Calvin isn’t attracted to me,” Heidi blurted. “I’m sure it’s obvious. I have something…of his father’s. He came here for it. That’s all. He didn’t have anything to do with my father dying. We can go to the police tomorrow and tell them everything.”

  “I think the truth is the best way to do it. I’m so sorry about your father, honey. I’m so sorry you had to go through that all alone.”

  Ms. Webster reached over and touched her knee. Heidi felt rocks in her chest, in her stomach, begin to break away, a raw, soft loam beneath them. The grief would come now, she knew. Ms. Webster boiled water in the kitchen as Heidi dug her chin into her chest, trying to blink away the memory of her father’s body, the dirt brushing his eyelids, mixing in his hair, his nostrils, as she heaved it from the pile into the hole.

  “Ms. Webster, do you think they’ll let me stay with you?” she asked when Ms. Webster returned with two steaming mugs of chamomile tea.

  “I don’t know, honey.” Ms. Webster sat back on the couch. “I don’t think it’s appropriate, being your teacher. But I’m sure we can hang out. We could go the movies, dinner.”

  Heidi sipped the tea. This seemed the right thing to do. It would seem foolish otherwise. Even her father, she reasoned, would advise her against going with Johnson, the man with whom he shared his foxhole.

  Ms. Webster folded a sheet and blanket over the couch, brought her out a pillow. Heidi took off her sneakers and slid under the sheets, thankful that they smelled like detergent and not bar soap, that they were soft and cool and that Ms. Webster’s apartment, although smelling faintly of mold, the memory of residents past, felt homey. Perhaps, even if she could not stay with Ms. Webster, she would stay with a family who would make sure she was clothed and fed and loved. Even if she wound up in jail, she reasoned, she would be fed three times a day, and the shower water would be hot.

  “Heidi, I’m not going to call the police now,” Ms. Webster said. “But I can’t stay up all night. So I trust you that you’ll still be here in the morning. We’ll go to the police and what happens will happen, but I will be here for you every step. It’ll only be worse if you decide to go with Calvin.”

  “I know.”

  Ms. Webster bent over and hugged her. Heidi’s life receded into the thick waves of Ms. Webster’s apple-scented hair. If she could be Ms. Webster’s conditioner, she reasoned, she would be content.

  In the dark, she thought of Calvin, smelled his sharp, earthy musk, felt the pistons on his fingers pressing against her waist, her back, her shoulders. He had kissed her earlier that evening. Perhaps he hadn’t been faking all of it. Their lips had fit together like skin on bone. Because of his relationship to her father, he was almost family.

  And he was not human. She had seen it with her own eyes. But she was, awkward and frail and bumbling. She imagined him going to New York, perhaps saving Kate, and they would march, superhuman, divine, in the sunset ever after. And Heidi would curl up in the library of some large university on the East Coast, anonymous and destined to inherit the earth after they tired of it.

  She slipped out of bed and tiptoed across the room with her shoes in her hands. As she got to the door, she listened for Ms. Webster. She wondered whether she was letting her leave, make her own decision. Maybe the secret of the farmhouse grave would die between them. She slipped out of the door and padded down the concrete stairs to the parking lot, wondering how she would find her way home, to Calvin. But she did not need to wonder long, for she saw the rusted orange truck at the end of the parking lot, the dark shape of Calvin’s body behind the wheel. She pulled on her shoes and ran over.

  “How long have you been out here?” She climbed into the passenger side of the truck.

  “Since you’ve been inside.” He flicked the butt of his cigarette out the open window. “Where’s Teach?”

  “Asleep, I think. Look, I just wanted to find you so that I could give you this.” She crouched between her legs and felt along the seat of the truck, pulling out the sandwich bag with the herb in it. “You’re free to go back to New York.”

  He took the bag from her
outstretched hand and looked at it, turning the fragile skeleton around and around in its plastic casing.

  He was silent, still holding the herb, and she could not tell what he was thinking.

  “I’m going to stay with Ms. Webster tonight,” Heidi continued. She took the straps of her backpack in one hand and placed the other on the door. “Why don’t you come upstairs? Maybe I can call you a cab or we can get you to the bus station tomorrow.”

  “You’re not coming?” He asked suddenly, looking at her.

  “Um…no.” She let go of the handle and looked back at him. “I need to get everything straightened out with my father. But you should have the herb. My father would have wanted you to have it. I hope you can save Kate.”

  “Your father also wouldn’t have wanted you to be alone,” he said. “It’s my responsibility as your father’s friend to make sure you’re taken care of.”

  “I’m fine,” she answered, although she was not really sure. She’d already, under panic, botched her father’s ascent into the afterlife in epic proportions. Who knew what else she would screw up, given the chance? “Really. You have the herb—don’t worry about me.”

  “Heidi, I can’t leave you like this.” He slipped the palm of his hand underneath the straps of her backpack and tugged it gently from her.

  “I was planning to go with you.” She explained as he zipped open the top, exposing a crush of clothes now expanding into the open space. “I put everything in the truck while you dug up my father.”

  He put the backpack on the seat and thought, his eyes piercing the air that hung stale between them. She watched his eyelids blink.

  “Is there anything you need from Ms. Webster, up there in the apartment?” he asked finally.

  “No.”

  “Good.” He turned the key in the ignition. “Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  “To go.” He threw the lever into drive. She felt her stomach tumble. Perhaps he did care for her. “I already found the herb in your things, while I was waiting here in the parking lot. I could have already left without you.”

  “It’s all right Calvin—I’m not in trouble. At least, I hope not very much trouble. I don’t think running away is going to help my case.”

  “I don’t care about any of that, Heidi. I just want you to come. Will you please come with me?”

  “I don’t know, Calvin.” She paused, looking through the windshield at the darkened bedroom window of Ms. Webster’s apartment. “I just…everything is happening so fast.”

  “You’re right.” He pulled the key out of the ignition and handed it to her. “You’re going to be okay, Heidi. You’re going to have a great life.”

  “You too.” She sighed, took the key from him and put it in her pocket. She felt it dig into her skin. “I hope you are able to get help for yourself.”

  He nodded, and they stood in front of the apartment complex.

  “You should give me an address.” He zipped up his jacket, the collar up, grazing his chin. “So I can let you know how things are.”

  “You can come back and visit.” She shrugged, moving toward the steps. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to him. She thought of Oliver and Shauna and the other kids in her classes, saw them in varying degrees of transparency. Perhaps they were always that way, even herself, and it took someone as solid as Calvin Johnson for her to feel the weight of other things. She pulled away, and the air between them seemed to dissipate into him.

  “Well, okay, kid.” He nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  “Okay.” She nodded back, feeling a weight in her throat. She watched him walk away, out of the complex, out of her life. She had been given what she wanted, and she let him walk away. She sat on the steps, cracked and bubble-gummed, in front of Ms. Webster’s apartment building. Two apartments up and over, a couple’s argument escalated from angry murmurs to full-throated screams. She thought of Ms. Webster in the bed upstairs and wondered whether she slept on one side or sprawled across. She did not know why it mattered. She slipped upstairs, back into the apartment and opened the bedroom door. Ms. Webster lay on the left side of the bed, close to the alarm clock, her limbs folded carefully on the sheet. For a moment, she thought to crawl in next to her, to fill the space. To wake up and know she was not alone, that someone cared for her. To be Heidi Polensky again. She shook her head. She was no longer Heidi Polensky. But who she was, she didn’t know yet. She ran back to the parking lot, got in the truck, and gunned it up the street, not stopping until she saw him walking on the side of the highway. Pulling in front of him, she idled and blew the horn.

  Johnson

  He left Heidi at the American Museum of Natural History with twenty dollars spending money and took a cab to the east nineties. Inside, the help led him to a sunroom in the back of the brownstone. Kate lay bundled in a chaise lounge, a coffee table book of Japanese wood block prints open on the floor. He had not been gone long, but so much had changed.

  “Your secretary told me you’d been home the past few days,” he explained. Pictures of Kate and her husband, her sons, made a daisy chain around the room’s perimeter. It was not a space for them, her private sanctuary, fortress, and he wished he had thought to leave a message with her assistant instead. “She said to visit you between 1 and 5, to miss your husband, but I can leave. I understand.”

  “It’s okay.” She waved her hand, dismissively, carelessly, he could not decipher. The help appeared behind him. “Marjorie, could you bring me some hot tea? And please bring Calvin whatever he’d like. We have a rather extensive scotch collection, courtesy of my husband.”

  “No, that’s okay.” Calvin shook his head as Marjorie stepped out.

  “Why?” She laughed dryly. “Do you feel it’s improper to drink another man’s scotch without his permission? What about sleeping with his wife?”

  “You’re right—I was completely out of line.”

  “Calvin, I’m just joking.”

  “I meant I should probably have taken the scotch.”

  “See?” She patted the Chippendale across from her. It looked like a museum piece. Johnson sat on the edge, careful that the caulks of his boots did not catch the Persian rug. “We still have fun together.”

  “Did we stop?”

  “Well, I started to die, and you stopped dying.” She took the tea off the silver service that Marjorie brought in. “That always puts a damper on a party.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “A bit terrible. I had my radiation treatments on Monday.”

  “Can you stop them?”

  “Part of the protocol.” She sipped her tea. “Palmer got me into a trial a couple of months ago. An experimental drug and radiation. But now, I’m thinking of dropping out.”

  “Don’t.” He reached over and touched her foot through the afghan. “I have some news for you. I have the herb.”

  “Yes? Congratulations.”

  “I was hoping for a little more enthusiasm.”

  “I’m so tired, Calvin.” She closed her eyes.

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything. Even if I could get up, I don’t know if I’d want to go out, see the park, the city. I just don’t know the point of it anymore.”

  “I was hoping…” he looked toward the window, thinking of his shoes, tissues, anything but her, and forced the tears back into his eyes. “I was hoping we could spend some time together. Now that I have the herb, that maybe, after all this time, there’d be time for us.”

  “That’s right.” She smiled at him, although it was not happiness she communicated. “You have all the time in the world. There’s no urgency ever, is there?”

  He sat back on the Chippendale. His chest burned, his hands shook. “The only good thing about having time is that I can wait forever for you.”

  “Even if I’m running out of it?” She looked toward the window. The light caught her eyes, coffee brown, and time had not mottled them.

  “It doesn’t have to b
e like that.” He watched her hand sweep the floor for a pill bottle, the pills that replaced her vitality, drowned her quietly in amorphia.

  “What do you propose, Mr. Johnson?” Her hand knocked over the bottle, and he squatted beside her, retrieving it, putting the large yellow capsule in her palm.

  “Don’t push me out.” He put his face near hers, felt her breath, light and uneven, in his ear. “Don’t push me away. I’m not going to listen to you anymore. I’m not going to go away.”

  “You’re going to stay here and watch me die?” She laughed.

  “I’m not leaving.” He kissed her neck, felt her spine through the flesh. He lingered on her skin, cold and dry, searching for the thrill that had surged through it so many years before, in plump, pulsing veins. He felt her hands touch his back, rest there, he felt the weight of them and he fought the urge to weave his arms under her, draw her to him, lift her from the chaise lounge and take her somewhere, somewhere away from this life and these memories and fill her full of him, full of them. He felt the wet on her neck, salty roads that traveled from her cheeks to her collarbone, and he followed them with his lips up to her eyes and kissed her lids, buoyant with tears, closed.

  “Don’t leave,” she murmured, and he kissed her cheeks, her forehead, her eyelids, her lips, but she did not kiss him back. She moved her hands up his back and through his hair.

  He sat while she struggled with air, with breathing, while she coughed. He wiped the saliva that formed on the corner of her lips. She slumped, the drugs pressing down on her like a thumb. He wondered what was happening deep in her skin, what was happening in his own.

  “I didn’t ask for this.” He clenched his fists. “You try being the last person to die, always. To know that everyone you meet, you’ll watch die. To wonder what the point of it all is.”

  “I’m sorry.” She put her hand to her face. The light dimmed, and rain drew on the windows, long blemished shapes. They symbolized nothing but seemed to mock them all the same. “I am selfish not to think of your pain. Me, I should be happy to die. At least it is possible for me.”