And now Samantha was next to him, her eyes wild and red, her chin trembling spastically. After the accident, she’d been so upset that no one had been able to get anything out of her. Later, she said she didn’t remember any of it. Sometimes Mike had wanted to shake the memory out of her. But he’d tried to let it go; knowing what had happened wouldn’t undo it.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s all right.”
She took a deep breath, then hiccuped. Not knowing what else to do, he took a card from his wallet—it was from a plumber
they’d used last year—and wrote his cell phone number on the back. “You can call me anytime,” he said.
She took it gratefully, seeming relieved to have something to hold, and put it in her pocket, smiling at him through her sloppy bangs. “Thanks,” she said.
That week he worked on the bathroom, stripping out the tile and removing the old toilet and sink, and ferrying it all to the landfill. The summer was densely humid, and his sweaty clothes stuck to him. At night, his muscles ached. He was deep asleep on the following Friday when his phone rang. It took him a while to understand what was happening, and then to remove the mouth guard so he could speak. When he finally flipped the phone open, he heard only music, some pulsing dance beat.
“Who is this?” There was a scuffling sound, followed by jagged breathing. “Samantha?” he said. “Is that you?”
“Can you come get me, please?” she said.
He looked at the clock; it was past two. “Tell me where you are.”
She gave him an address in South Bethlehem, not far from Lehigh. Maybe she was at some party with college kids. He got his keys, then paused by Diana’s closed door, wondering if he should tell her; but she wasn’t sleeping well lately, and he didn’t want to ruin her whole night.
Though she’d called from what sounded like a party, the ramshackle duplex he pulled up in front of was quiet. He’d thought she’d be outside waiting for him, but she wasn’t. He sighed. Lauren had never done anything like this. Grudgingly he climbed the splintered wooden stairs and peered in the window. A couple of guys were lying on couches, watching TV, no one else in sight.
He knocked, and when he got no reaction, he assumed they were stoned or something worse. Now worried, he opened the door and went in.
“Don’t you knock?” one of them said. The other stayed riveted to the TV. They looked to be in their twenties, one white, one Hispanic, both skinny, slouched on their threadbare couches, their jeans riding down to expose their underwear, their arms sleeved in tattoos.
“I did,” said Mike. “I’m looking for Samantha.”
The guy who’d spoken shrugged, and the other still hadn’t moved.
Giving up, Mike headed to the empty kitchen, then moved upstairs. If the first floor was unadorned, the second was battered, littered with beer cans overflowing with cigarette butts. In one room there was only a bare mattress on the floor. His pulse quick and angry, he opened the next door and saw a fat man in a white tank top ministering to a sick person in a bed. Then his eyes readjusted, and he understood the man was pulling up Sam’s dress. Her eyes were closed, her arms flopped out to the side. A strand of her long blond hair was caught in her mouth, foam flecked on her chin.
“Get off,” Mike said. “Now.”
The man ignored him, his face flushed as he pulled down her underwear.
Mike stepped forward and pushed him off, and he landed hard on the floor, his jeans unbuckled, sprawled there waving his arms and legs languidly, like a turtle on his back.
Turning back to Samantha, Mike pulled her dress down—it barely reached her thighs—and picked her up, draping her arm across his shoulder. “Can you walk?” he said. She didn’t answer. She smelled of puke and beer.
Downstairs, in the living room, there was now only one guy left, the one who’d spoken earlier. He was crouched over a bong, filling his lungs. When he saw them, he let out a stream of smoke and smiled. “Girl had a little too much fun, huh?”
At the sound of his voice, Sam came around, gurgling a little. “Thank you for the party,” she said weakly.
“You’re so welcome,” the guy said. “Dude, need help getting her to the car?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Mike said, propping Samantha against his leg as he opened the screen door.
The guy smiled again. “Whatever,” he said.
After Mike got her buckled up, he started the car. The fat man came running out of the house, shaking his fist. When Mike reached over the girl to lock the door, Sam woke up and smiled vaguely. “Bye,” she said.
Pulling into the Kents’ house, he saw the driveway was empty. Sam was awake, staring listlessly at the window.
“Where are your parents?”
“They took my brother to visit colleges.”
He turned off the ignition and rolled down the windows, a breeze carrying the smell of skunk into the car. Sam sat with her seat belt on, dazed or sick or simply pliant. He knew he should scold her, express concern, or both. Be parental. But it was three in the morning and he was wiped out. A headache pressed its angry iron grip upon him. Leaning back in the driver’s seat, he said the first thing that came to his mind. “Did Lauren know those guys?”
She nodded. “Sure,” she said. “We partied with them sometimes.”
His skin prickled with revulsion. “The night of the accident, were you partying with them?”
She squinted at him. “We never got there,” she said simply.
Nights when Lauren was out, he and Diana told themselves not to wait up, that they knew her friends and where she was. Every time they called her cell she’d answer promptly. She was allergic to hazelnuts and they’d trained her to ask about the food in every restaurant or home, even if it was something that didn’t seem like it would have nuts in it. Once when she was eleven she ate some chocolate cake at a party and went into anaphylactic shock, her throat swelling, and he’d plunged the EpiPen into her skinny thigh as she stared mutely at him, terrified … These memories skittered like marbles across the flat planes of his brain.
“Thanks for picking me up,” her friend said.
The fake politeness of teenagers drove him crazy. He looked at her, not knowing if she remembered what had just happened to her, or if he should remind her. “Are you okay?”
“Absolutely,” she said, then got out and walked slowly, carefully, up to the door. Only when she got to the front door, framed beneath the yellow porch light, did he notice she wasn’t wearing any shoes.
Back home he slid into bed next to Diana, needing her body beside him. He put his palm on her hip, and she nestled back against him. Lying still, he tried to time his breathing with hers. When they were first married, her hair was long, well below her shoulders, and it would get into his eyes and mouth while they were wrapped together in bed. And when she was pregnant, it grew thick and silky, with a
heft and shine they both loved; he used to run his hands through it, feeling it slip around his fingers like ribbon. After Lauren was born, she cut it short, because the baby kept pulling on it, and she’d kept it like that. Now the black was spiked with gray. He reached his arm over her stomach and in her sleep she took his hand and put it between her legs, warming it there.
He thought back to when her hair was long. He was twenty-five, waiting for friends in a bar after work, when he noticed this pretty girl sitting alone in a corner. Her friend had flaked out on her; he never met his. They’d been dating three weeks when she invited him over to her parents’ house for Sunday supper. She went to church with her parents every week, and they spent the rest of the day together. At the time he thought she went along just because she was a good daughter, not realizing how tenaciously she believed. It had taken him a while to come to grips with that, but he had. On that first night, he was greeted by her father, a portly, jowly man with skin so saggy it was as if gravity were tugging it downward.
He looked at Mike and said, “You must be the young man I’ve heard so much about.”
“I hope so,” Mike said, and held out his hand, but the other man didn’t take it, just stood there staring at him, his eyes half-hidden by his fleshy lids. Mike heard Diana and her mother talking, and the mysterious clatter of kitchen work. Almost reluctantly, her father gestured for Mike to come into the living room. It was clearly a place they spent little time in, with an uncomfortable-looking, straight-backed couch and side tables riotous with doilies and knickknacks.
“What is it you do for a living?”
“I’m in sales,” Mike said. He had a job at a medical supply company, and hated it, how he had to inflict himself on people, the associations with illness and death.
Diana’s father grunted, his expression impossible to interpret. “You like it?”
“Not very much.”
He lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer one to Mike, who didn’t smoke and maintained his college habit of running ten miles a week but nonetheless thought it rude.
“Diana says you’re from Ohio.”
“Columbus. Sir.”
“What church does your family go to?”
Mike took a breath. His hands were sweating. The two women were chatting away in the kitchen, their voices too low for him to make out what they were saying. Whatever they were cooking smelled good—pot roast, maybe—but why was Diana leaving him stranded out here?
“We don’t go to church,” he said. “My parents were raised Lutheran, but they didn’t much care for it.”
“Ha!” Diana’s father barked. “Didn’t care for it!” Mirthlessly he shook his belly, exhaling smoke at the same time.
At this, Diana finally came out of the kitchen, her eyes dancing as she took in Mike’s discomfort. “Are you tormenting him, Daddy?” she said.
“Not too much,” he told her. “I got to make sure he’s all right for you, sugar.”
“He’s just fine,” Diana said, and Mike flushed as if she’d said much more.
After Diana’s mother brought out plate after plate of food, her father said grace. They all held hands. As they unclasped, her
father turned to her and said, “Mike says he’s thinking of being a teacher.”
Diana and Mike exchanged puzzled glances; her father went on imperturbably. “Knowledge is the thing. It will last a lifetime. Better than material goods.” He was a deacon at the church and his voice rolled from him in waves, inexorable as his thick sagging flesh, a deep, rich river of words. “To mold young minds,” he said to Mike, “is to better the world. It is itself a kind of religion.”
That evening, he and Diana slept together for the first time back at his little apartment, and afterward he said, “What do you think your dad meant about me being a teacher? I didn’t say anything like that.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. He gets ideas like that sometimes. He calls them inspirations.”
Mike ran a strand of her hair through his fingers. “I think I might give it a try,” he said.
Seeming unsurprised, she smiled at him. As they held hands, he saw the path his life was going to take: he knew he would marry this girl, that they’d live close to her parents, that he was going to be a teacher. There was a certainty to it all that he would have said, if he were a religious man, felt like a state of grace.
The following weekend he went to see Lauren alone, then came back and changed into his work clothes. He was hanging sheetrock when the doorbell rang. Sam was standing on the front porch wearing shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops. “Hey, come in,” he said, stepping back. The girl stood in front of the couch uncertainly until he said, “Sit down. Do you want some lemonade or something?”
“Um, okay.”
He brought her a glass and she sipped it tentatively before putting it on a coaster. He sat down next to her on the couch. She was slouching, her head nodding as if in agreement to something he’d said.
“So anyway,” she said, and laughed awkwardly. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders. She was sweating a little. “I came to, you know … about the other night.”
“Listen, I’m glad you called,” Mike said. “I’m glad we got you out of there.”
She glanced up. “No, I—” She reached out her hand, as if to touch him, then stopped.
Mike was confused. Why was she here? For a recounting of that horrible night? She shook her head and didn’t speak. He waited her out but nothing came.
Finally, she said, “So what are you up to today?”
He gestured at his sweaty clothes, the plaster dust coating his shorts. “I’m redoing the bathroom.”
Her eyes lit up. “Can I see?”
It wasn’t what he was expecting, but he nodded and led her back there. He showed her where he was installing the new toilet and sink, the tiles and paint colors they’d selected. Nothing a teenage girl should be remotely interested in, but she was acting like it was the most exciting thing she’d ever seen in her life.
“Can I help you?” she said.
“Oh come on,” he said. “You must have better things to do with your time.”
“I don’t.” Through her bangs, tears were visible in her eyes. She blinked and sniffled. Without thinking he took her in his arms, and they hugged. She came just up to his shoulders, and she nestled
her head almost into his armpit, like some animal burrowing there. She put her arms around him. He could feel the heat coming off her body, and her breasts squishing against him. He didn’t move. She reached up and palmed his neck, then leaned her head back and stared at him intently. He felt logy, sedated, as if viewing all this from a great distance. Then she stepped up on her toes and kissed him, slipping her tongue inside his mouth. She was none too adept, but his body responded and he let his hands drop down to the small of her back.
She broke the kiss and took a step backward, smiling at him triumphantly. “I always wanted to do that,” she said.
“Sam.”
“Look, don’t worry about it, okay? I just always wanted to.”
Always?
He almost said it out loud. How long can
always
be to an eighteen-year-old? Since you were fourteen, sixteen? Since last week?
“I’m going to go,” she said. “Thanks for getting me. I owe you.”
“No you don’t,” he said.
She let herself out. After she’d gone, he sat on the box of tiles, wondering if he ought to feel guilty. Was he as bad as that fat man in South Bethlehem, preying on his daughter’s friend? She’d seemed so happy, as if she’d proved something to herself, passed a test that only she knew the contents of. That she was grown-up, he guessed. That she was allowed to make mistakes.