by Averil Dean
The next time I awaken, Jack is leaning into the truck—Put your arm around my neck, baby, there you go—and carrying me through the open door. Raindrops sting like BBs on my face, the top of my head, my eyelids. Then I am inside, still wrapped in my blankets. I know this clinic and the doctor. His drawl seems even deeper and more languid than I remember, as though his throat is full of oil. Hands at my neck, fingertips gently prodding, a swift professional touch, a wooden tongue depressor that makes me gag. The doctor asks questions and Jack answers. He shifts the blankets around my feet, takes off my socks, puts them back on. I am given a shot, something to swallow, then I am gathered up and we go back into the rain.
* * *
Bed. I bury my face in the pillow and recognize the scent of Jack and know he’s brought me home. His home.
* * *
It’s dark the next time I open my eyes. Jack is at the side of the bed again, with a mug in one hand and three pills in the other. I struggle to a sitting position. My muscles ache, and my head is buzzing as though several vital connections have been burned away.
He hands me the mug.
I take a tentative sip. It tastes like hot, hard lemonade. “What is it?”
“A concoction. Drink it up and take these.”
He puts the capsules on my tongue, presses the back of his fingers to my forehead.
“You have the flu,” he says.
I choke down the pills. “I feel like shit.”
He smiles. “You’ve looked better.”
He takes the empty mug from my hands. I collapse against the pillows and curl onto my side. He goes around the bed and climbs in with me, his big warm body fitted to mine at the hips and knees, his lips pressed to the back of my neck.
I fall asleep with his arm wrapped around me.
* * *
Over the next few days, he stays home with me. He helps me to the bath, washes my hair, feeds me broth and ice cream and pills. He buys a heating pad and tucks it around my feet. We play cards in bed, watch movies, listen to an unabridged version of The Stand. I urge him to go to work but he refuses.
“I never get sick,” he says, “so I’m going to take advantage of your flu and score a few days off for myself.”
When I remind him of the project he’s been worrying over, he silences me.
“I’m not leaving you.”
I remember previous illnesses, the social workers who made sure I saw the doctor, then redeposited me at whatever shelter or home I was living in at the time. No one has ever stayed with me this way, not since Michael.
A week before Christmas at Verity’s house, I went down with a bad cold, exacerbated by the fact that I refused to stay in my warm bed at night and instead spent the hours coughing and sniffling in the garage. The holidays had sent Verity into a binge of drinking and shopping, and all I wanted was to be out of earshot and alone with Michael, who took one look at me and left without saying a word. He returned a half hour later with a sack full of medicine and a new space heater.
“I should have thought of this earlier,” he said as he plugged it in and aimed the fan at me.
I rubbed my hands over the warm air.
“You don’t need to baby me,” I said. “I’m a big girl.”
But he had the bottles lined up, all the proper dosages measured out, and a big cup of soup to wash down the tablets.
“Thanks, Dad,” I joked.
He grinned and pulled my hat down over my eyes.
A couple of days later, he brought home a tree from the lot he’d been working in Burton. He hammered two slats of wood to the bottom and dragged it inside, and sat next to it all evening, stringing popcorn and cranberries for garland. He’d bought lights and a box of twelve ornaments at the drugstore, plus a white plastic angel for the top.
For a while, I watched him silently from the kitchen table. His fingers were stained red and he’d been a few days without a shave. But I liked the nimble way he used his hands. Like a musician, deft and sure. After a while, I set my pages aside and went to join him.
“I didn’t know people actually strung cranberries,” I said, threading a needle. “I thought it was just in books.”
“My mom did,” he said. “She did all that stuff. Presents, sugar cookies, big turkey dinner. She said Christmas was for kids, and she always made a big deal of it.”
I hesitated. “You’ve never said...”
“Car accident. I was twelve.”
I pushed a cranberry onto the needle. It made a small popping sound, and a drop of red juice swelled at the tip.
“You must remember her pretty well, then.”
He waggled his head. “I remember her, but I didn’t really know her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean I knew her from a kid’s point of view. That’s not the same as knowing her as a person.”
I frowned. “I think it is. Kids see more than adults give them credit for.”
“Maybe. But my mom was at twice the legal limit when she died, and she was driving. I wouldn’t have thought she’d do something like that when I was a kid. I didn’t think of her as a person. She was my mother. I always kind of thought she was infallible.”
Verity came downstairs then, in her stretch pants and sequined T-shirt. She laughed and said our tree wouldn’t make the cover of House Beautiful.
“Maybe not,” Michael said. “But Alice should have a Christmas.”
She raised her glass of red wine.
“Well, I ain’t her mother, so you go on ahead.”
On Christmas morning, I found a stocking by the fire and in it a small box wrapped in brown paper and trimmed with hemp string and tiny pinecones. Inside the box was a fine silver chain, with a sterling pendant shaped like a heart.
I looked up to see Verity’s face, sallow and puffy, the creases from the sofa cushion in a pattern across her cheek. She was looking at me as though she’d made a sudden and unpleasant discovery.
She had saved herself a couple of UPS boxes to open that morning. I found them in the garbage the next day, the seals still intact.
There was knowledge between the three of us after that.
Though I was quiet and stayed carefully out of the way, Verity must have known on some level that I was a threat. She tried to think of ways to keep me out of the house. She’d already gotten me a job as a bagger at the market and now found me another at a secondhand clothing store owned by a friend of hers. She collected the money I earned—for the household.
“I expect you to earn your keep, missy. We got no room for slackers around here. You don’t pull your weight, back you go. You remember that.”
I looked at her steadily.
“I’ll remember,” I said.
Verity went away, muttering under her breath.
Michael and I talked things over during the long, cold nights in Verity’s garage.
“Maybe you should leave,” he said.
“Go back to the Center?” I said. “What’s the point? And anyway, who are you to talk? You’re twenty years old, why are you even here?”
He looked at me across the backgammon board, the light threading through his eyelashes, laying shadows like spiders on his cheek.
“Why do you think?” he said.
But I didn’t know what to think. Michael had friends in Seattle; he could easily have found a place to stay while he got on his feet. Everyone liked him; it was impossible not to. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t leave. His reluctance made me impatient.
“I don’t get you,” I said. “You keep talking about saving for a place of your own, but you’re handing over almost your whole paycheck every week. How’s that going to help?”
“It’s not, I guess. But I feel sorry for her.”
“Why?”<
br />
He moved a checker. “Well, look at her. Married and divorced four times, living in a house that’s about to fall down around her head—”
“She’d have more money for repairs if she didn’t send it all to the Home Shopping Network.”
“Alice, come on. She’s grabbing at things because she’s fucking drowning, and all of this—” He waved his hand at the teetering stacks of half-finished cups and bowls on the tables around us. Verity had stopped taking a booth at the market weeks ago. She never said why, and I never asked. “The guys, the booze, the shopping. She’s drowning, and all she’s got to hold on to are a thousand rubber duckies.”
I had to smile. “And you think you’re a lifesaver?”
“No. But I can’t help—” He looked at me. “I want people to be happy.”
I reached across the table and put my hand on his. He turned it over, pulled off my glove, held my hand to his face. My fingers curved around his cool cheekbone. His beard tickled my palm.
“I want you to be happy,” he said.
“I know you do.”
He pressed his lips to the inside of my wrist. The skin there tingled with cold.
“You’re underage,” he said.
“Overexperienced.”
“I want to do the right thing. I don’t know—”
I laughed. “The right thing. Okay, Michael.”
He turned his chair and pulled me into his lap, and he swallowed up my laughter, already burrowing through my layers of clothes with fingers so cold they seemed to burn. He uncovered slivers of bare skin, his hand inside my jeans and the slippery warm center of me, two fingers reaching up and his lips like a brand on my neck.
“Stop me,” he said.
Michael was like a brother to me, the closest thing to family I would ever have. But I had no faith in brotherly love. I took off my jeans and opened myself over him. His breath rose in a cloud around my face, and through this haze I watched the house at the top of the yard, the bright yellow window in the corner.
* * *
The next morning, a quiet storm settled over the Sound. The sky thickened and sank into the trees. Snow bloomed in the air, floating as if through water to the ground. An eerie silence crept in. A breathless hush, and everything suspended, waiting.
I dressed and went into the gauzy stillness, past the garage and the small stand of trees to the field beyond, and I stood there alone, turning in slow circles to see my tracks like stitches behind me and the dark smudge of trees through the fog. I tilted my face to the sky to catch the snow on my lashes and the tip of my tongue, to watch my breath disappear into the mist.
Michael came out of the forest silent as a shadow, right to me without stopping. He slid his cold fingers under my cap, pressed them to my scalp, opened his chilled lips and pulled me inside to the warmth of his mouth. The silence was so complete that I could hear my own heartbeat and the soft fan of his breath on my cheek, and almost the snowflakes themselves as they drifted to the ground.
“I’m leaving,” he whispered. “Come with me.”
The untouched snow lay smooth and clean on the field before us. Beyond that, the small quiet road, the patient ferry. A whole world waiting for us to step into it. We could have kept walking across the snow. Maybe we’d be walking still.
Instead, we retraced our steps and went back to Verity’s house.
* * *
I shiver now in Jack’s bed, thinking of the enveloping cold, the empty stillness of that morning. Jack pulls the covers around me and his hand moves over my body without lingering, long firm strokes of friction to warm me. I turn to him gratefully, my head tucked under his chin. His hand moves over my back. His erection rises between us, then softens, unacknowledged.
After four days I am finally able to eat solid food. My body no longer aches, but I’m thinner and weak as a child. I look up as Jack comes out to the back porch, into the low morning light, his cheeks freshly shaved and a mug of coffee in each hand. The sunlight catches in his eyes, skates across the line of his jaw. His sweater is pushed up to his elbows and he has a book under his arm. I feel my body’s response, the slow warm stirring, heat moving down the tops of my thighs, and know the illness is over.
“Thank you,” I say.
He sets down the coffee next to my chair and kisses my forehead. He strokes my cheek with his cup-warmed hand.
* * *
Jack and I find the flower man in the farmers’ market two weeks later.
We’ve stopped for lunch after seeing an exhibit of the work of Julius Shulman, the photographer who immortalized the work of architects like Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright. Jack has several of Shulman’s books at home and has been looking forward to the exhibition for weeks.
“They thought they could change the world,” Jack says as we stroll through the market. Spring has melted into summer, and the city is fresh and sparkling under a flat blue sky. “It seems almost painfully naive, these days.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe not the world, but is it too much to think you could improve one corner of it?”
He smiles down at me, his cheek bulging over a bite of soft pretzel. “Sometimes I forget how young you are.”
“Why is it young to want to change things? Great men do that all their lives.”
“Great men think they have some insight the rest of us lack. They think they understand other people. Which is bullshit. And naive. No one has a fucking clue what other people are like.”
I accept this in silence, given how little Jack knows about me. Maybe he’s right, and the unknowing is a part of life. The architects Shulman photographed tried to dictate how their clients would live, down to the shape and placement of every chair and light fixture. But in the end, I suppose, people lived in those sternly designed homes the way they wanted to, sprawled this way and that across the hard-backed chairs, rearranging the sofas around the TV, dragging an old quilt in from the bedroom. It’s what I would have done.
“Do you miss it? Designing?”
He wobbles a hand back and forth. “Well, it wasn’t a calling or anything like that, not for me. It was a job I trained for, so it pisses me off to have wasted the education. I miss the life I thought I was building. I miss the money.” His voice sounds different, wistful under the breezy confidence. “I miss my mom.”
He rarely talks about his family. I know Jack was a wild teenager who fought almost constantly with his father, and I get the impression that his father was an abusive man. Jack has called him “hardhanded” and “pigheaded” and, with a little liquor in him, “an arrogant fuck.” His mother seems to retreat into the background, a gentle soul under her husband’s thumb.
“Can’t you call her?”
He shakes his head. “She won’t pick up. I sent a couple of letters. They both came back unopened. So that’s that.”
“Sounds pretty final.”
“Yeah. I think it is. But there are compensations. Fewer responsibilities means greater freedom. My dad was the one who insisted I study architecture. But actually I prefer carpentry. Being outside, working with my hands. I like assembly better than design, it’s more tangible.”
Ahead is a wooden cart inset with plastic buckets holding hundreds of flowers, a parade of color marching across our path. Daisies, roses, masses of tulips and frilled pink peonies. The scent draws me like a honeybee.
Jack crumples his napkin and brushes the salt from his hands.
“And I still have a couple bucks to buy flowers for a pretty girl.”
The vendor grins at us. He’s small, thick, with a fringe of dark hair and matching mustache. His smile is so sunny, so full of joie de vivre, that it’s almost a cliché.
I press my nose to a bouquet of lavender roses.
“Mmm... That’s what a rose is supposed to smell like.”
“Blue Moon,” the flower man says. “Nothing like it.”
Jack smiles, already reaching for his wallet, and the vendor takes the roses to his bench. With a wickedly sharp knife, he cuts a fresh end on each stem and wraps the bouquet in white paper. I like the quick precision of his blunt fingers, one firm strike through the fibrous stem. The sharpness of the blade seems like more than a respect for the tool and a wish to make the job easier; it’s a kindness to the flower.
“The lavender rose symbolizes mystery,” he says, waggling his eyebrows.
“Perfect,” Jack says. He’s looking at me with an expression I am coming to recognize.
Later, when I get out of the bath, I find that Jack has plucked the petals from the roses and strewn them over the bed. The room is heavy with fragrance.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” he says, and lays me down.
* * *
The flower man’s house is not as I imagined. The tan carpet is matted and stained, and the furniture is cheap laminated stuff, peeling around the edges. There’s not a lot on the walls, but in one corner of the living room is a beautiful antique clock, half-hidden behind the tweed drapes on the front window.
It’s not a place I would associate with the cheerful flower man at the fair. It hurts somehow, to imagine him here. It’s disorienting.
The house is in an older neighborhood on the south end of Seattle, where the houses are huddled together in clusters as if for protection. Safety in numbers. Jack couldn’t find a key in the front yard, but we discovered a warped window where the latch doesn’t hold. By pressing the glass and lifting the pane, Jack was able to get the window open, and hoisted me through ahead of him.
I walk up the staircase with Jack on my heels. The walls are lined with photographs of young people in old clothes. I recognize the flower man in some of them, with a full head of hair and a dark mustache. There is a woman with him, and a young girl with hair so long and straight it looks as though she’s been dipped in water. Her nose is covered with freckles. In most of the pictures she is laughing, her head tipped back.
