Everything (13 page)

There’s nothing stupid about that.

Maybe not, she said. But then I ended up in therapy, I just couldn’t shake it. Couldn’t stop thinking about it, you know? A year and a half at seventy-five dollars an hour and we didn’t even have insurance. It turns out I’m a complicated person.

I could have told you that for free.

That’s what everybody says.

She reassembled herself out of bits of tissue paper and solemn expression, wiping the sorrow from her face.

Don’t get me started, she said.

He could save her from this, he thought. He could save both of them. The great escape, out of the disaster of her life, the endless sameness of his own. They would not have forever, he knew that. They might not have long. But they would not need forever, just a moment. He could touch her. She could make him happy. It seemed so simple, just for a moment. No more dead goats and ex-wives. He felt a part of something holy. Something larger than himself. He felt quite suddenly light, rising out of his body. He was smiling at her, at the sheer pleasure of her presence, which was not right.

* * *

What is it? Betsy asked.

But for the moment he was too wrought up to answer, too tangled and pure. A happiness not his own and not hers but arising out of the air between them. The idea of her. The possibility of escape.

Escape:
he didn’t know he needed to, not until that moment. Didn’t know he wanted it. Then suddenly the getaway was everything to him, every waking thought and fancy. They could not exist here, in the daylight world. They could not be together. But somewhere under palm trees, or in the Spanish sun—he always connected happiness and daylight, someplace warm and bright and not here. Food and wine, laughter. Winter was coming. But maybe not for them.

An act of violence. Cut the knot. He had it in him. Did she?

He dreamed that she did. Dreamed it before this moment, but it was just now coming true, a thing that had been growing in him, there in the dark, ready to burst out. He knew her. He knew what was next.

Midnight, whiskey
. They were side by side on the sofa, neither one of them talking. RL was thinking about last times, and about airports.

The way you never knew it was the last time until it had already happened, and then it was too late.

The way the air itself in airports must wear out from all the coming and going, all the love and loss and parting and greeting, embracing, tearful kisses.

He misses his daughter, yes, he does. Some fearful premonition. Or maybe just death herself sitting on the couch next to him, sipping her Bushmills and thinking about whatever she was thinking
about. Her hands were thin and rough, skeletal where they wrapped around the icy glass. It happened to everybody, worse when you worked as much as she did. His own hands—RL looked at them in the air in front of him—were honorably messed up, he felt. Work, adventure, injury. He knuckles were scarred as a boxer’s.

It was those fucking trailers is what it was. Every time he got within ten feet of a trailer hitch.

Something about the public place, the expected thing. Everyone was coming and going, saying hello and saying good-bye to the people they loved. The rough edges of the individual person got sanded away and all that was left was the smooth impersonal outline of a feeling. All these emotions and we’re all having them. Like you knew what you were supposed to do. RL wanted that, wanted to be emptied out, wanted to watch television and listen to soothing music from high, invisible speakers. He just didn’t know what he was supposed to do here. Give me a script, he thought, a line to walk. Don’t make me improvise.

She said, When did everything get so grim?

Like what?

I don’t know, she said, and sipped her whiskey—Bushmills neat, a glass of water by her side. Between the whiskey and the wine, she had already had more than she should have. The next morning would start at five thirty.

Good-bye, good-bye.

* * *

She said, I feel like I went up on my mountaintop and everything was OK, you know? Not OK—things were bad, but people were out there trying. I just feel like people aren’t trying anymore, they won’t look for anything different. It’s just like, take your place in line, you know? Get a job, watch TV.

RL was thinking about that half-finished basement, the faces of the children peering out from the unlit garage into the rain.

OK, she said, reading his mind. Nobody’s life is perfect.

This seemed like an understatement. He kept his trap shut.

Don’t, she said.

What?

Don’t judge me.

I’m not trying to.

No, I know, she said. I’m doing the same, you know? or at least I’m trying. That’s what I do, you know. Judge, judge, judge. That’s what I’m good at.

It was strange to hear her be so completely right about herself. He was used to hearing her wrong, telling him all about how she was completely some way, when really she wasn’t at all.

I haven’t said a word about your pickup truck.

* * *

It’s true.

Despite the fact that it gets like, what? twelve miles to the gallon. You use it to drive yourself around. One person.

You’re falling off the wagon here a little.

Indulge me, she said. Maybe I feel like it. Maybe it all just looks a little stupid to me. It feels good once in a while, you know, just to sit back and rant.

My house.

It’s awfully big for just one person. What does it cost you to heat?

There are two of us here, he said.

Now.

Now is all I’m talking about.

What?

By way of answer, he reached across the kitchen table and drew her to him and she came, surprised at first, a moment’s reluctance but then willingly, sat across his lap and let herself be kissed on the mouth. Did not let herself. Gave herself. Kissed him then and held him and RL felt the kitchen loosen and drift, a small boat on big water.

* * *

This is not a good idea, she whispered into his neck.

I know.

I have children.

I know, I know, I know, he said.

June was awake for some reason
but she didn’t know why. Quarter to one in the morning by the bedside clock. Something.

She had lived alone for many years and was not afraid of the small noises of a house at night, an old house like this one that creaked and grumbled in the wind and the cold and the summer heat. This was something else. What? Howard was in Portland, drinking. June was alone in her house and the world was far away and shrinking.

There it went again. A sound out of the kitchen maybe.

* * *

Rosco puking blood on the kitchen floor.

She was out the door with the dog in her arms in one continuous movement, clothes to car keys to glasses to blanket, a good wool blanket that would be spoiled now with blood and dog shit. Blind with pain, Rosco tried to bite her hand. She settled him into the backseat and tucked the blanket around his thin legs.

Do not die, she said to him.

He looked at her with big sorrowful eyes. He would live if she made him. He didn’t necessarily want it for himself. A dog’s life.

Don’t, she said.

What she meant was don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop breathing, but he was just a dog, he wouldn’t understand, and so she pushed her old Subaru up to seventy on the curves by the cemetery and prayed there was no ice on the road. Found herself
praying
. All her life, she had preached calm to the dying, she’d tried to bring them to peace, and now when it was her turn—not even a father or a sister but a
dog
—she found that calm had deserted her and a clockwork panic going off in her chest, hurry! Down the icy deserted Walmart parking lot, the rendering plant, the police station and the plumbing supply, all the filth and ugliness, the secondhand cars parked in crusts of black snow. I flunk, she thought. I suck. Wondered for a moment if she was dreaming this.

Rosco bit her again as she gathered him in his blanket from the backseat of the car, drew blood this time so his blood and hers stained the blanket together. Stood ringing the emergency bell of the vet hospital, willing them to hurry. A sleep-stained tech let her in and took the dog from her, blanket and all, into the mystery
rooms at the back. June was left alone and bleeding on the linoleum of the waiting room floor.

A pot of coffee sat among magazines at one end of the waiting room. She tried a cup, but the coffee had been sitting on the warmer all day and night and it was bitter, black and concentrated. She spat her sip back into the paper cup and then threw the cup away.

Golf Digest. Cat Fancy. Business Week
.

She took her cell phone from her coat pocket and looked at it and wondered why there was nobody to call. Nobody who knew the dog enough to care. She thought of Layla, out in Seattle. Howard in his motel room, if he was even back to his motel by this time of night. Once every month or two he would drive or fly to Portland, where he once lived, and he would get drunk there, and stay drunk for the weekend. He didn’t touch a drop otherwise, and he didn’t drive while he was there. This all seemed reasonable in a way that creeped June out, but she kept her mouth shut about it. Really, it wasn’t any of her business.

I was not meant for this life, she thought. She could do it, she could make it through alone, take the little hand grenades life threw at her. She was a strong person. But it was not the life she was meant for.

She dialed RL’s number and listened to it ring unanswered in the empty room. The loneliest sound she knew.

RL stood in the guest room doorway
and watched the slow rise and slow fall of her sleeping back in the tiny light of the moon. Slim, white, pretty shoulders, the curve down to her hip, it could have been a girl’s body. The rot and death inside.

Heard his telephone ringing in the kitchen.

It was strange how much of her was still good, how much remained of the girl. She went from waking to sleep instantly, without worry or sweat, the way Layla would run till she dropped on a summer night …. Her breath was sweet and slow, and she moved, gentle underwater movements. RL felt something big and cumbersome moving around inside him. She was not going to make it, were the odds. She was not going to live. And all this unlived life, all the years stuck in Purgatory with her knitting needles and her garden,
the faces of the children in the rain … This longing to undo, untangle, revisit, reset. This
futility
.

He closed the door again as silently as he could and went back to his chair in the living room, his little glass of Johnnie Walker on the rocks, his empty nest. He missed his daughter, yes, he did.

The little pagan children spent eternity in Purgatory because they were without sin but they had not been baptized. This seemed like an argument against God. When he was a boy, he had cried for these children. When he was a boy, he had never cried at all. How long had it been? Motherless, abandoned. Who was that on the telephone? 2:13.

He would save her. Out of the alcohol, stupor and half sleep came certainty. Not save her from the big thing but from the futility. He felt himself dive down into the blackness, under the surface, down where Betsy was. He would bring her back up into the light, if only for a moment. Down in the foul black brown sticky place where she was. Down and back up again. He would do it. He would. Alive and in the sunshine, somewhere warm, somewhere pleasure, somewhere drinks and ease and water to swim in. Things were hard for her and RL himself was a hard man and life felt hard all the time and just a minute of soft, just a minute. A little breather. He finished his drink and went off to bed, a man with a mission.

The ferry pulled away
from Anacortes, slowly at first, with a big diesel groan and much white water laced and boiled against the steel barriers of the dock. It was raining, three thirty, fading toward nightfall. Green shaggy forest islands slipped past them, slowly at first, in and out of the mist and cloud. Every lit building looked like home, warm and yellow.

Homeless, Layla thought. She turned to Edgar.

What am I supposed to be? she asked.

A friend, I guess, he said. A model. A supermodel.

They know you, though, right? The people who run the gallery?

* * *

A friend of my parents, Edgar said. He gave me my first show.

I shouldn’t be here, she said. I really shouldn’t.

They watched the water for a moment without talking, watching the town ease away, the lonely departure. The lights of town were bright already in the fading afternoon and it was just the two of them out on the deck, a cold damp wind that only got colder as the boat picked up speed and left the land behind. Going, going, gone, she thought.

I wanted to see you, Edgar said.

I’m cold, she said. Let’s go inside.

The passenger deck was warmer than the outside and neon-lit with island hippies and business types and wives in Polarfleece and Gore-Tex, everybody with money, nobody sick or poor. Even the tattoos on the punk girls look expensive, sharp and fresh. As opposed to Montana barfly tattoos, the blue smear that once said Charlene … It smelled like rainwater on linoleum, cafeteria grease, elementary school in the rain. Some hot chocolate, maybe, a doughnut might be good. The stuffy heat in here and the cold wind outside. Salmon swimming somewhere deep under the ferry, she could feel them. The child swimming inside her. She had not told Edgar yet. She wasn’t sure she was going to.

Do you want something to drink? he asked. They have beer, I think.

No, she thought, but she said yes. Took a seat in a booth by the window and looked out at the darkening water, looking for seal
heads and seeing only gulls and distant tankers. A white sail in the gray afternoon, far off. It was the time of day when she could see the water outside and the reflection of the lit-up passenger deck behind her at the same time in the glass and it was hard to say which one was real. Confession, she thought, penance. Her mother, in one of her occasional bursts of motherhood, had stopped drinking and stopped taking drugs except for smoking pot and started going to different churches. She even had a job for a while. Layla would have been eight or nine. She spent some weekends and then even weeknights with Dawn in her little house by the railroad tracks. An improvised quality to their lives, a sense that neither one of them knew where they were going, what they were doing—it made life exciting. Layla missed it sometimes, the feeling when she woke up that she never knew where the day would take her. One day she was dancing with the Sufis, the next day she was praying the rosary. But it was 6 a.m. Mass that Layla remembered, the women in damp wool, the lingering incense in the shadows, midwinter dark that was still not quite daylight when the Mass let out … and the smell of wet on linoleum, melted snow.