Authors: Sarah Langan
He was a calm man. Meg, on the other hand, was restless. Even when happy, her fingers tap-tap-tapped against wooden surfaces, steering wheels, her own thighs. Unexpected things soothed her. Frozen Snickers bars, for instance, or rainy days, because she didn’t feel bad about not getting outside. Right now, though, she seemed relaxed. Her hair was a frizzy mess around her shoulders, the way he liked it. She was looking out at the road, daydreaming. Her posture was loose, as if the morning dew was a solvent for the glue that lately had locked all her joints in fixed positions. She looked ap- proachable. Sexy, even.
He was startled suddenly by the sound of a loud buzzer, which was quickly followed by a moan, and a slap, and then silence. Maddie’s alarm. When she was young he used to wake her. “Rise and shine,” he’d say, and then he’d open her blinds so that the sun shone across her bed. Now only Meg entered her room be- cause she slept in the nude. She spent at least an hour in the bathroom every morning, spraying herself with womanly scents and dabbing her eyes with blue shadow. She had a boyfriend, too. Enrique Vargas ate dinner at the house once a week, and Fenstad had to smile and make small talk with the kid who was probably screw- ing his daughter.
Fenstad shook his head. And then there was David. How had he managed to raise two kids who both dyed their hair like circus clowns?
Down below, Meg tossed something onto the walk. It sprayed out like pebbles. He thought about joining her
on the steps. He could surprise her with a kiss on the back of her neck. But she was snappish in the mornings. It was best to keep a distance.
He remembered now that he’d had a nightmare last night. In his dream the house had been cavernously huge. Scores of rooms had led to more rooms, all con- verging, mazelike, onto the front hall. The rules of Eu- clidean geometry had not been obeyed: Floors had been slanted, corners were greater or less than ninety de- grees, and ceilings were high and occasionally rounded. The rooms had converged on the front door, which a large, growling dog had guarded. It had looked like his neighbor’s German shepherd, only its eyes had been wild. He’d seen them clearly; green irises that had di- lated in wavelike motions irrespective of the light. He’d known just by sight that the wretch was either rabid or insane. A sign on the front door had read “Hazmat,” and outside, men in white plastic suits had loaded his neighbors into black sedans. That’s when Meg and his daughter, in mid-conversation, had entered the room. He’d shouted for them to stop, but he was a phantom in his own house, and the women didn’t hear.
The dog went after Meg first. It was about 180 pounds, and its open jaws had looked like a steel- toothed bear trap. Before she had the chance to run, it sank its teeth into her calf. She fell, and blood pooled all over the Persian rug. Maddie pulled her mother’s arms to free her. Fenstad flinched at the memory, even now. Flinched that his mind had produced such a thing. Maddie had pulled, and the dog had pulled back, like two animals fighting over a bone.
That’s all he remembered. But it wasn’t so surprising to him now that he felt lousy this morning. The dream lingered in his mind. He felt guilty for having dreamed it, and frightened for her, too.
Just then, the bedroom door flew open, and Meg burst into the room like something was chasing her. Immediately he thought about the dog. Her eyes were red like she’d been crying, and her feet were bare.
He furrowed his brows. “What?”
She put her head on his shoulder. He led her to the bed, where they sat.
“What is it?”
She shrugged. There were dark circles under her eyes. The belt on her robe had come loose, and he could see her small, pert breasts. She’d left the house without un- derwear or pajamas, and he wondered, with a snap of fury, if any of the neighbors had spied her shaven crotch.
“Graham Nero? Has he been bothering you again?” Fenstad asked.
She sniffled and shook her head. “A bird,” she said.
Did she want a bird? Had a bird attacked her out there? Was this the first sign of a brain tumor? He waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. Instead she leaned over his hips and peeled back his wet towel. He should have guessed, but the gesture was so unexpected that even after he felt her tongue, her lips, it took him a moment to be sure.
He closed his eyes and moaned. It had been years since she’d done this. He’d forgotten how much he liked it. He decided that if he looked at her or petted the back of her head, he would ruin the moment. She’d feel ex- posed. So he smiled, and thought how wonderful it was that after all these years she could still surprise him. A woman who hated mornings. In their entire married life he could count on two hands the number of times they’d made love before breakfast.
She smelled like sweat and salt, scents she would bury after her shower with two spritzes of White Linen
perfume. Her robe was open. She never believed him when he told her he liked her best in shorts and T-shirts. The things she didn’t understand about him. He loved her because she was comfortable in her own skin, be- cause she let him watch when she pleasured herself, which she’d only learned to do after Maddie was born. Because she’d carried his children in her womb.
She worked faster, and a bubble of pleasure caught in his throat. He wanted to cry out but did not. He tried to still his lips, to keep quiet, to watch her. She worked, faster and faster. When he reached his limit, he pushed her back against the bed. They made love. He didn’t hold out for as long as he wanted. He was too close. There were sparks, and release. Maddie was just down the hall, and neither of them made a sound.
Afterward, they lay down next to each other.
“Not bad,” he said, and by that he meant
fantastic
. Her breath was heavy. The exertion had made the dark green vein along her forehead visible. He thought about the dog in his dream, and put his arm around her as if to protect her from it. Tonight, there would be flowers. Tonight, he’d take her to dinner.
She wiped her mouth and leaned on his chest. She was a small woman, but the joints of her elbows were sharp against his ribs. “A bird died outside. It died in my hands.”
He waited for her to say more. What was she talking about? He hadn’t seen any birds.
“There’s poison ivy under the house and I picked the berries and threw them on the walk. A bird ate them. It died in my hands.”
Her normally unflappable voice cracked. He thought she was trying to tell him something. Was this about Graham Nero? Some elaborate way of explaining what she’d done? Birds didn’t die from eating berries.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” she asked. The rankle in her tone surprised him.
He blinked and tried to think. “Sounds like a dumb bird.”
Her eyes narrowed into slits of fury. Should he have said,
Thank you
or
Great blow job, babe! You’re aces with me
? This was ridiculous. She was his wife. Why did he need to say the right thing?
“So cold, Fenstad,” she said, and at first he thought she was talking about the temperature, and then, from the look on her face, he knew, and he felt himself sink. So disappointing. “You should have been born a trout,” she said. Then she turned and started into the bath- room. “You’d have been happier as a fish. We both would.”
The water started running, and he did not get up for some time. The sheets were wet, and he was suddenly ashamed, like he was a dog that had pissed the bed. Down the hall Maddie clopped across the hard wood floor. Skinny like her mother, but loud and graceless as an ox. “Nobody woke me up!” she hollered into the ether. “Why didn’t anybody wake me up?” Then she was off, down the stairs and in the kitchen, where she would suck the juice out of a sliver of grapefruit, toss the pulp, and declare herself full. Then she and Meg would fight until he left for work, and neither would notice that he was gone.
Don’t you know there are people out there with real problems?
he wanted to yell.
Don’t you understand how lucky we’ve been?
But the human psyche is the same as its immune system. When it has no enemies to fight, it invents them.
Fenstad waited for Meg to come out of the shower. The door opened in a cloud of steam. Her skin was bright red, like she’d been trying to scald his touch
from her body. She shrank from his hand as she passed him, as if his touch was repulsive.
He entered the bathroom and shut the door. It was so hazy with perfume that he sneezed. He closed his eyes and thought about how she had looked on the front lawn. So uncertain. Like she hadn’t known if she would go to work today, or how she’d found herself in Corpus Christi, or whether she’d go back inside at all. A pause, as if her person was a mask she wore every morning, but she’d left the house without it, and for an instant been free. He thought about that, and then he thought about the black German shepherd in his dream, and the satisfying sound its teeth had made when they’d crunched on her bones.
A
t the same time that Lois Larkin discovered she’d accidentally abandoned her least favorite pupil to
the desolate Bedford woods, Meg Wintrob was flipping through the pages of the double September issue of
Pub- lishers Weekly.
She circled in red marker the young adult books she planned to acquire. So far she’d picked JT Petty’s
Scrivener Bees
, and Stefan Petrucha and Thomas Pendleton’s
Wicked Dead
.
Corpus Christi’s library had been built in the 1970s, which explained why it was such a god-ugly heap of cinder blocks. Her office was a Plexiglas enclosure in the center of the main floor. One door opened onto the reference section, and the other led to the children’s li- brary. She had all the privacy of a goldfish.
The cheese and tomato sandwich she’d packed for lunch was wilting on her desk, but she didn’t feel like eating it. The Great Chickadee Fiasco had soured her stomach. It was less about the bird now than about Fen- stad. There are certain things you don’t insult, and a man’s performance in the sack is one of them. It had been cruel.
She
had been cruel. That was the problem: When it came to Fenstad, sometimes she couldn’t help
herself. He was so cold that she got tired of hugging him and started pinching him, just to be sure he still felt.
“Aheem. Aheem!” Albert Sanguine ticked at a library- volume whisper. Albert was sitting at the Internet termi- nal that faced Meg’s desk. She watched his head twitter, and then become still as he focused on the screen. He was wearing a strange getup, even for Albert. Wingtips, a black turtleneck, and camouflage army pants with pockets full of what looked like junked L. L. Bean catalogs.
Meg picked up her sandwich. She’d had the bright idea of going gourmet, and adding balsamic vinaigrette, which had made the bread soggy. Right now Fenstad and Maddie were probably cursing her.
“Aaaheem! Aaaheem!” Albert ticked again. She wasn’t sure if he was clearing his throat or having a spasm, but his voice was getting louder, so she struck her pen against the Plexiglas. He waved his acknowledg- ment with a shaking hand while his eyes remained fo- cused on the screen.
Years of booze had rotted out Albert’s nervous sys- tem, and he now had alcohol-induced Tourette’s. After state cutbacks, the mental institution in Bangor had booted all its nonviolent patients, no matter how se- vere their conditions. Four of them were Corpus Christi natives, and when they returned home Fenstad set up a mental health clinic at the hospital for them. When they weren’t at his group meetings, they were hanging out at the only other public place that would have them: the library. A few of them lived in subsidized housing near the Motel 6, the only part of Corpus Christi that wasn’t solidly upper middle class. They survived on disability benefits and charity. At the library they spent their time reading books, surfing the Internet, and napping on the leather reading chairs that the Walker
family had donated. People complained, but the way Meg saw it, the library existed for the public good. So long as they didn’t bother anybody, they had a right to be here, too.
Albert was her favorite. Like a connoisseur savoring a 2001 Burgundy, he smelled new books before open- ing them. More importantly, he returned them on time. He was a voracious reader, and over the years he’d re- searched subjects that ranged from thermodynamics, to hematology, to his current obsession, Civil War camps. This last month he’d been stuck on the blight in Ameri- can history that was Andersonville, Georgia. Thirteen thousand Union soldiers died there during its two years of operation. Nearby farmers had remained silent, even while mass graves began appearing like potholes along the camp’s periphery.
Meg wasn’t keen on supporting Albert’s more maca- bre interests, but when he got ideas in his head he was adamant, and there wasn’t much she could do to dis- suade him. “Why the Civil War?” she’d asked last week. Without looking up from
The Trials of an Anderson- ville Prison Guard
, his head and hands shaking, he’d told her, “It’s like an organism with immune disease. Aheem. AHEEM. It’s a body that attacks itself.”
That was the tragedy. Albert was no dope. He was thirty-three years old, but his breakdown happened when he left for college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become a city planning engineer. He was eerily quick with numbers, but the separation from his family, and the pressure of classes and making new friends, had overwhelmed him. He became delu- sional and insisted that something was calling him back to Maine. He dropped out of MIT and moved home with his parents. Fifteen years later he still hadn’t recovered. He refused to medicate the problem with
antipsychotics, and instead drank booze until he passed out practically every night. Years of hard living had turned him into an old man. He was missing his eye- teeth, and the sparse tufts of hair on his head were white. He couldn’t afford real booze, so he made home brew instead. He filtered Scope through white bread, and kept it in jars under his bed while it continued to ferment. Then he drank the juice, which he called bread pudding. She knew this because the smell was noxious and his landlord had cited him for six sanitation viola- tions, which his aging parents who lived across town, at a loss, had paid.