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Sunday

Rain again.

It always rained when I was alone.

A summer storm gathered off-shore, and though I told myself it was still miles away, that didn’t stop the new French windows from rattling. They were beautiful in the Show House; opened wider, left less to the imagination than any windows I’d ever seen. Now I had them, and I couldn’t close them tightly enough. I kept checking the burnished latches in my daughters’ rooms upstairs. Re-locking, re-tucking, half-mother, half-warden. I was wearing a path on the new ivory wool carpet, but couldn’t see it yet. My footprints would appear later, with enough time and close attention, like the shape of things only visible from the sky.

In between bed-checks, window checks, gutter checks, I sat in my plaid den, biting my nails in front of movies I all ready knew the endings to. I let myself worry during the commercials. Every flash and boom in the sky was an assumption: that the lightning would find whatever was metallic and brittle in me.

When my nails were gone, I folded laundry, sorted mail. Distraction. The knitting of my life. In the background, Hugh Grant carried Sandra Bullock through traffic so she could go to the bathroom. I couldn’t find the scissors—art project? School poster?–so I opened the Neiman’s package with my teeth.

The white tissue unfurled: three floral bathing suits and the pink silk nightgown I’d ordered to surprise Sam. Or surprise myself. Something. I stood up, pulled off my tank top and shorts and pulled it on without bothering to close the shutters. The bodice was tight but the silk brushing against my legs was almost intoxicating after my cottony week. I fell into it like a hotel bed, allowing myself.

At three I woke up writhing on the sofa, clutching at the spaghetti straps. The nightmare again: someone sitting on me, hands at my throat, trapped screams. I stumbled into the bathroom, splashed water on my face. I lifted my head to the mirror, still dripping, and saw only the nightgown: wrinkled and knife-pleated, drenched in sweat. There was no possibility of returning it now.

In the kitchen I wrestled with the childproof cap on the bottle of Xanax while the wind picked up, flinging small branches on the new tin roof above me. Bronze with flashes of green, the roof was beautiful but noisy. The price you pay, I was told too late. The squirrels thought it was a slide; the rain, a timpani. The new skylights were even louder: a drum solo at the top of the stairs. I swallowed the pill and started to cry. I was not the kind of person who could live in a noisy house.

I should have been happy. The renovations were nearly complete. The shifting estimates, the money tussles, all behind us. They’d installed the new skylights the day before and all the dark corners of the house were flooded with light. Sam hadn’t seen it yet; he was off somewhere again, gone three or four days—I couldn’t remember which– to somewhere. Golf outing, conference, convention. They all involved sport masquerading as business. His clients’ names blurred together in my memory the same way the names of the hotels did. He told me, but I couldn’t absorb the information. Was that a true telling? I never really grasped where he was or who he was with. I knew all I needed to know: that someone was serving him steak and fetching him fresh towels, and I was home sorting his socks.

Now the contractors were gone, too. No men, no one to blame.

A hard noise made its way through my sniffling. I looked up, as if the answer was written on the ceiling. I heard it again. With each breath, I replaced negative thoughts with positive ones. I actually say them out loud. I stood at my farmhouse sink in the house that was never a farm and spoke into the new curved faucet. “People don’t break into houses on nights like this”, I stated calmly. “It’s the storm. It’s the wind. It’s squirrels on the new tin roof,” I said. Squirrels on the new tin roof. Something snapped, then shattered. Not squirrels, I knew in my bones. Not branches, not wood, tin or metal. Glass. Broken.

The portable phone blinked on the other side of the room. I tiptoed across the new hickory floor. The tongue and groove was silent, but my limbs rattled in their sockets. I had the phone, but not the scissors. They were not in their glass holder with the markers and pens. My eyes darted as I moved past the laundry room, the closets, the table in the hall. Later, I will kick myself remembering the weapons I walked by, the point of a pencil, heavy vase, bug spray. As I walked up the stairs, the broken glass sound stopped, and my body relaxed. One moment to last a week. I will have to dig back to remember it.

The room at the top of the stairs is filled with my oldest child’s stuffed animals. Like my husband, she can’t give anything away. Some of the fuzzy beasts could fit in a pocket, others are bigger than she is. That is why, when I first looked into the darkness, I think He is a giraffe. Or a bear, holding a cub. A cub dressed in my daughter’s nightgown.

My thumb squeezed the talk button on the phone, but there was no dial tone. The lack of it, the absence of sound filled the room. The plush zoo muffled our sharp breathing, my heart pounding. It was beyond intimate: past sharing a bathroom, past putting your child’s bloody finger in your mouth. He stared at me. I stare back, steady eyes, chattering teeth. Regret, meet fear. Fear, meet regret. My sleeping six-year-old daughter, I will think later, looks oddly comfortable draped in His arms.

I dropped to my knees and utter the only fearless words I have ever spoken:

“ Take me,” I say. “Take me instead.”

I am ashamed to admit I wasn’t completely relieved when He did.

“My purse is in the bedroom,” I whisper to Jamie. As He folds the blanket around her, she wakes up to see her mother taken away in lingerie. A picture worth a thousand hours in therapy. Those are my last words: My purse is in the bedroom. Not ‘take care of your sisters’ not ‘I love you.’ Does she even know how to use the cell phone in my purse? Is ‘send’ one of her vocabulary words?

I will question it all eventually. My motives, my judgment. Can you doubt the movement of a hand as it pulls away from the flame? But for now it is done. The decision has been made, the goodbyes spoken.

She does not scream. She does not speak, or follow. She is a solemn, thoughtful child who sleeps as deeply as she thinks. I learn later that the scissors were on her desk, next to her homework. Completed homework. It’s possible she just goes back to sleep. A dream, she will think until she wakes up and finds me gone. My youngest child, a small tiger of a girl, might have leapt on His back. My middle daughter could have split atoms with her scream. It seems He had chosen the right one.

I am heavier than Jamie, and I cannot be carried. I give enough resistance that He is dragging me, which seems to feel right to us both. We have determined who is in charge, and who is protesting. Down the steps, my own Berber carpets scratch my ankles, my own arrangements of roses choke me with their hopeful scent.

Had He taken one look at me in the nightgown, glistening with sweat, my breasts heaving with fear, and decided I was worth more than a six year old? If He thought in that moment, that split-second when we sized each other up, that I was sexy, shiny and precious, something of value, He was in for a surprise. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had an actual sexy thought. Purchasing the nightgown didn’t count—it was shopping. Later I would wonder if He’d simply heard something forceful in my tone. If I knew, maybe I could replicate it; then the children, the contractors, the world, would listen to me.

He duct-taped my mouth, pulled me up the long driveway to the street. I let Him. That seems impossible now. But I was half naked and wet and I’d bitten off the only weapons I had. The wind whipped my hair, wet slaps against my lips, cheeks. Debris dug into my bare feet: Shards of wood and tin, bent nails, fiberglass clippings, everything they intended to clean up tomorrow. It hurt, and I was suddenly furious. Not at the builders, not at Him, pulling on my arm. No. I was angry at my husband. For being gone. For insisting on the cheaper skylights that popped open like a compact, for decreeing that we did not need an alarm system on the second floor, just the first.

In all things, I blame the husband.

“ How can it be possible,” Sam says one morning, as my daughters sniffle over his burnt waffles, “that I am always the one who is wrong?” But he is. It is so clear to me, and so opaque to him.

If I had an affair, stole from the neighbors, bludgeoned my children for spilling juice, it would be his fault. He knows I have panic attacks; that I am always afraid. And still he travels, still he leaves me, still he pooh-poohs the alarm. I am so angry at my husband I could wrestle him to the ground. But this man at my side? No. Him, I have apparently been waiting for. All the fear and panic of my life was because I expected Him to come. And this, all this anger toward my keeper, and not my taker, is even before I know the truth. That our home was chosen because of my husband, and not because of my daughters.

That Jamie was selected not because she was Sam’s meekest, but because she was Sam’s favorite.

He will tell me this later, the why and the how and the where. I will know everything except when. The answers will satisfy me without pleasing me in the slightest. But in the moment, there is only long wet driveway, open car door. The streetlight above us is dark and so is the car’s interior. We are in shadow; part of the rain; we do not exist. He pushes me in. Gently, but still a push. This is it, the true crime, what all my obsession was preparation for. I was walking down the aisle of my fear. Graduating. The scars will be a diploma in my hand.

The seats are soft and warm against my wet legs. I am astonished by what I think: That it is not nearly as bad as I imagined. And that for the first time in fifteen years of marriage, the tables are turned: Sam will not know where I am.

In the car, He tells me I can peel off the duct tape. I wonder if He is too squeamish to do it, the same way I can’t bear to rip off the girls’ band-aids. Do we have that in common? I work the corners off gingerly, trying not to pull the small blond hairs around my lips. I tear the last section off and air floods my lungs, as if my nose couldn’t pull in enough. I picture my daughters in their beds, mouths open in their sleep. I try not to imagine anything crawling in.

He binds my hands and feet with rope, then asks if it’s too tight. Yes, I decide to say. He slides his finger between the rope and the softest part of my wrist. It reminds me of how I tested Rexie’s dog collar before she ran away. He pulls his finger out, does the same on my left wrist. Same outcome. He does not loosen the rope. There are tests for everything. Some of us shake formula onto the inside of our wrists, blow on hot pizza. Others pull on handcuffs, buy extra duct tape, put chairs under doors. He wants me to believe my comfort counts.

I am not shaking anymore; the Xanax, or something, is working. I am calm enough that my eyes consider escape. I look around the car for weapons. There is nothing on the seats, nothing but mud at my feet. I hope it is mud, and

not blood. I shiver, adding it up: dirty floorboards, cut feet. Metal. Puncture. Germs. My feet start to sting and my whole body shudders again. In my Land Cruiser there are baby wipes in the glove box, hand sanitizer in the seat pocket. He will not have these safety nets. My teeth rattle. If He doesn’t kill me, I am going to die of lockjaw.

Do you need a blanket? He asks. Of course he would have this in the trunk: blankets, garbage bags, tape, rope. There, is I shiver with certainty, a shovel and axe there too. I think of the trunk open, picture the contents. Still life of death.

Tears run down my cheeks. I need a tetanus shot, I whisper. He blinks slowly. His skin is darker than mine; his voice lightly tinged with accent. It is possible he will not understand words like tetanus. He inhales deeply, turns on the car, slides the heating control from blue to red. My feet start to warm.

He looks at me again. I am shaking. It is 80 degrees but I am shaking as I always shake when I have my panic attack. He takes off His button-down shirt, hands it to me. Underneath, his r t-shirt is thin and old, like the last t-shirt in the bottom of your drawer.

I lay his shirt across my lap; it smells familiar, of lime. I continue to cry, remembering being pregnant, always cold, my back hurting, and Sam oblivious, never offering a blanket.

I see that He is not a person without manners.

He pulls out into the street. I look back at the house. The nightlights glow pale blue inside three of the smallest windows. The large ones are dark. This is how my house looks when I am not in it.

Did I say a prayer as we left, ask God for what I was owed? I don’t remember. My head was filled with detail: an obsessive obligation to remember everything, to not disappoint the police, to be the best witness. The small picture has always taken my mind off the big picture. The car is a Cutlass, maroon velour interior, fifteen years old. He looks Latin, is about six feet tall. I stare at his hands and wrists, arms flexing on the wheel. No tattoos or distinguishing marks. Like me, He could be anybody. There have been hundreds of people in my house, muddy boots, crumpled work gloves, saw dust-y hair. Some arrive at dawn; the subcontractors, closer to ten. Each day I come home to their evidence: coffee cups, cigarette butts, sticky bakery papers from their donuts. Their DNA crumpled underfoot. They have held the keys to my front door, opened my refrigerator and my mailbox, leaving their Gatorade and their bills: handwritten, stained from the job. I remember some of them, not all. But none of them look like Him.

I think of Jamie still in her bed, the description I did not have to give: the freckle on her ring finger, the small scar on her chin. A framed school photo I could have handed the police: the clenched smile, a stranger’s version of her. Do my daughters know what I look like? Can a child know that I am tall? Can

they conjure a crayon word for my hair? There they go, to the box of 64, pulling out ‘Wheat’, drawing me: all arms and legs, no good head on my shoulders. They will find the phone, I tell myself. They must.

It is quiet on the turnpike. A few trucks, a few cars. A small parade of oddballs who travel in the middle of the night instead of sleeping. The broke, the desperate, the hopped up on caffeine. We join them.

As He passes a truck on a curve, He asks why I did not come upstairs sooner.

What? I ask, not understanding.

Didn’t you hear me walking on that damn roof?

I thought you were a squirrel, I say.

He turns back to the road. A car filled with teenagers passes us as if we were innocent. They assume husband/wife, brother/sister. There is no radar for what we are.

I am calm enough to be annoyed by His roof question. A hearing test, graded. I have failed to exhibit the proper amount of homeowner curiosity. Was there another taunt coming—why didn’t you go the knife drawer instead of the phone cradle? Don’t you keep mace in the house? I look at Him, driving, and want to start a fight. I want to say that good burglars scouted their territory, learned things: man gone, alarm disabled, tin underfoot. The moment of break-in, after all, was just a moment. A heat, a burst of decisive grace. All the long hard work went before; anyone knows that. Even I know that. Sam’s words suddenly ring in my ears: It isn’t a competition, he always says. But it is, Now, I have to prove myself better than a burglar.

The exits on the turnpike are numbered by the miles between them. If you are an adult who is not tied up, not on Xanax, not bleeding from rusty nail wounds in your feet, it is simple to do the math. But you have to know where you start to know where you are. I do not. It is one of the things Sam hates about me—I don’t ever have the numbers he needs. What time did you leave? How much rain did we get? His mind is like a newscast, fixed, while mine fills constantly, replenished with softer things: colors, textures, smells. I know the police will want the Sam things.

The exit sign marked ‘36’ is green and wet ahead of us. I have passed it dozens of times, never taken it. He turns on his blinker, and I imbue the act with meaning: He is civilized, considerate. A lesser criminal, surely, would just have swerved. The cloverleaf curves all the way around, counter-clockwise. I am leaning in his direction. The edges of the tires squeal. Something new to consume me: the possibility of a blow-out.

Your husband is gone a lot, He says.

My cheeks burn. Salt in wound. Why doesn’t He just say that I’m old, tired, ruined? I bite my tongue, wish for the duct tape back.

Four nights last week, He adds. Alcohol on the fire.

I sigh deeply, look down. Game over; he has done his homework. But how hard was it? Could anyone watching me know this? Maybe you didn’t have to count cars in the driveway, watch Sam’s newspapers and golf magazines pile up on the marble counter. There was me taking out the garbage, sweeping sidewalks, shoveling snow. There was my false cheerfulness at dinner time, the father-tickles, the father-roughhousing the girls needed at night. The detached father-words I sometimes said after working all day, ‘Girls, not now.’ How deep I had to dig to remember them, from my own father, gone so long now. And I wonder: Did my body, juggling the mail and my briefcase, wiping the dogs feet, doing the dishes, through the window, up the road, through the high-speed binoculars in his nondescript Cutlass look to any thief, kidnapper, murderer, like a woman’s whose husband was gone? I could feel the difference; was it possible that with enough insight, or a big enough zoom lens, you could see it? That was the kind of enhancement the FBI needed: look, there, go in tight, see that? Right there, on her shoulders, it’s not doctor appointments, parent/teacher conferences, deadlines at work no, blow it up more, Lieutenant, look, don’t you see? It’s the weight of the world.

I start to cry. I feel His eyes on my tears. He has given me something to cry about. Perhaps the other women He’s abducted have cried too. I lift my bound hands and wipe my nose and cheeks. He watches me, does nothing.

What can He do? This is not my car, with Kleenexes in the front visor and napkins in the back pocket. He has the things he needs, not the things crying women do.

He pulls to the shoulder, along a grove of trees. I should be afraid: Murderers always choose trees. But He just looks at me. It has been a long time, but I know what it means when a man watches you cry: He is waiting, afraid to ask, but wanting to be told. I tell.

My daughters are alone in the house, I sniffle. We are out of cereal and milk. That is what I unload: shopping worries, list thoughts.

They’re too young to use a gas stove, I continue. It’s new and complicated—even my husband can’t remember which knobs work which burners. And the new microwave has a lot more buttons than the old one. I pause and He blinks slowly. Can He sense what I didn’t say: The kitchen was designed for me. Not children. Not husbands. It is, finally, what I wanted. What I needed. The distraction of planning, buying, then having, using. Polishing, shining, admiring. It is my car. I also neglect to tell him this: That like a car, I cannot give away the keys. The combination of fire and heat and children terrifies me. That I fully imagine them going off to college without learning how to strike a match.

You have a pantry, he replies.

It is an odd word to hear on a man’s tongue. I wonder about the origin of it, the root.

I consider the pantry, the layout of food: The granola bars are on the highest shelf so is the cereal. I have laid out my own kitchen to ensure my children’s starvation. Was there anything they could they reach? Water bottles? Juice boxes under the sink? I imagine them downstairs, socks on wood floor, slipping, climbing, no parent, no phone, no food. The heavy silver doors of the Sub-Zero refrigerator taunting them. I think of the mushrooms sprouting on the bases of our oak trees out back, the wild onions growing near the creek, and am suddenly terrified that they will eat them.

They are babies, alone in a house, I cry. They don’t have a phone, they don’t know the neighbors, they don’t know how to cook. They can’t pour milk. You have to let me make a phone call, I sniffle. Please. Begging, already. No shame.

They’ll be fine.

Please call my mother-in-law and tell her to come get them, I say. Call from a pay phone.

I have to think for a moment: are my in-laws home? They live a few blocks away but travel constantly, offer to help, but don’t really want to. When I invite them to the kids’ birthday parties, they always have plans. Perhaps a kidnapper could break their reserve.

When I was a child, we packed our own lunches, He says to the window.

Not when you were six.

A six-year-old can make a sandwich.

I shake my head. I see the knives, the glass jars, the difficulty of packaging. No, I say. Our first argument. I am losing.

My husband won’t be home for three days. They’ll starve.

Your husband will be home in the morning.

What?

He’ll be home in the morning.

He says it with certainty. He knew Sam was gone, knew which daughter slept where. What else does He know? The question sends fingers of panic along my spine. He has been watching. The blueprint of our house is just a shell; He can’t know what it really holds. He hasn’t studied my architecture, the answers to my lost password questions, my mother’s hidden maiden name. No. There are some secrets Sam and I still trust to each other.

No, I have his itinerary, I say stupidly.

I have his wife, He says, and pulls back onto the slick highway, tires spinning, flying for a moment, before we reconnect with the road.

I have been married to Sam for one-third of my life. I consider this one of those facts you pull out of a drawer every New Year’s Eve when you take stock of your life, knowledge too frightening to contemplate more often, like spending 40% of your life sleeping, or that women over 30 have a better chance of being struck by lightning than romance. A marriage like ours creeps up on you, like middle age, like a beer belly, unnoticeable for a long time until one day, suddenly, there it is. An accomplishment, but not quite a monument.

The last five years have been a blur of soccer uniforms, Girl Scout cookies, unmatched socks. A messy collage of life, and now, I am torn out of it. I am leaving town alone for the first time since my youngest daughter was born. I can see the headline now: It took a kidnapping for me to realize how much I needed a vacation.

My life wasn’t always an assembly line. Sometimes, before I fall asleep, I remember the days when there were choices in front of me, instead of a long list. Some of the choices were agonizing, some of them frightening, but others

delightful. Decadent. There were lists at the office, perhaps, but none in my head, no going through the motions, no have-tos, just want-tos, and might-want-tos. It made the moments before sleep different. It made sleep optional. It made dreams definite. That feeling, I am fairly certain, is gone for good. That is the part you don’t want people to know when they ask you what it’s like to be married for so long. You can explain the miracle of children, the Christmas-card version of your life. But how do you explain the absence of possibility?

My children have a hard time understanding events that occurred before they were born, and so do I. I squint at the photos of my younger self like a detective. Who is she? What would she have done, where would she have gone? I can barely remember those days, let alone explain them. And yet there is much to explain. It will take two days deep into Exit 36 before I begin to focus on the larger worry, something beyond my children being unfed, or how it might feel to have a knife at my throat, or a bullet in my head. It would be okay if He knows, but what it They know?

I picture my children going through the house, searching closet by closet for food, phones, warm clothing. They will cuddle in my t-shirts, wear my perfume. They will ransack my closet before the police.

What if they find it first?

The Box underneath my shoeboxes is a can of worms, but they will open it like it was a gift. How can I undo the damage if I am not there to explain?

As if I know how to do it, where to begin.

I know I have to start practicing.

But how do you tell your daughters about the men you loved who weren’t their Daddy? When they say, ‘If I had been born to you then, would I still be me?’ How on earth do you tell them no?

No, you would be a different person, you would have a different life. We all would. And who is to say if it would be better or worse? But different is always worse to a child.

And always, always, better to an adult.

We drive for what feels like an hour, but could easily be less. Rain stretches things out. There is no clock in the car, no moon in the sky. I could ask, don’t. My feet are warm, the mud or blood has dried. Later I will ask him for more, not now. He has already said no to loosening my wrists and calling my mother-in-law, and I don’t want all the no’s at once.

I glance at the instrument panel, the blue flashes of information. 60 mph. The gas tank is full, the fluid levels and engine temperature, normal. The Cutlass, though old, has been recently serviced. But I still don’t trust the tires. The occasional spin and hydroplaning worries me. There isn’t that much water on the road; we haven’t been drenched by a single truck. The tires must be bald in places.

I have been the kind of person who had to drive on bald tires, and I don’t want to do it again. The velour seats after so many leather years take me back: I took out the window at the wet trees and remember being a young girl with an old car. Using the emergency flashers more often than the turn signals. Begging strangers for a jump, having only a dollar to put in the tank. The first responsibility, and it was too large.

Are we going much further? I finally ask. It is a child’s question. Because, I clear my throat, the tires are bald.

Don’t worry about the tires, He says. A response you would give to a child.

I hang my head. We go around a curve in the woods and a scene unspools: the car could spin, tires with no grip, leaving the ground. We fly down a gully, twisting in the air, and land against a boulder, upside down in a creek. Through the gash in the windshield, water seeps in. I am trapped: my hands and feet are bound. In my version He cannot save me; He has a gash in His head, and I have to watch us both die.

Tears again. I have no sleeves of my own, only skin to use. I bury my wet eyes in my bound hands.

The tires aren’t that old, He says. I hear the weary confusion in his voice. I am being taken to an undisclosed location, to await an uncertain fate. And I fret over the safety of the tires?

This isn’t your car, I sniff. You have no idea how old they are.

How do you know?

You drive it like someone else’s, I say.

It is true and we both know it. The tires squeal but not because of his tentative driving. He doesn’t know the car’s limitations, and I don’t know His.

Relax, He says quietly. Nothing will happen.

The words frightened people always hear from the non-frightened. They never give me comfort. Not when my father used them on his deathbed, not when my nurse used them during labor. They are not meant to comfort me, they are meant to shut me up.

If the tires blow out, only one of us will be able to open the door and walk away.

We’re almost there, He sighs. Five minutes.

I am quiet.

Here is something they don’t put on the label of the prescription bottle: you will need more than Xanax to get through a kidnapping. You will need words of comfort. You will need a warm blanket in the dark motel room, salt on the take-out fries, free cable TV.

And you will need company.

 

---

An area resident for fifteen years, Kelly has set nearly all of her fiction in Philadelphia and its suburbs. She balances her writing with her role as Chief Creative Officer of Tierney Communications, Philadelphia, and her role as mommy. She lives in Rosemont with one husband, three children, a dog, a cat, a hamster, and all the laundry that doesn’t get done because she’s always writing.

She may have been thirteen, fourteen at the most. Her hair was long and a light brown that might have been mousy on one whose skin was not so white. Hers was very white, actually blue-white, naturally, although something told me that she had always been pale. She was thin, which made her appear tall, even in that position. The nose was long but straight, and she had teeth in the front of her mouth that were prominent, a combination that distresses the young girl to see in the mirror, but promises future handsomeness. Her cheeks still had a wan touch of rose in them, though they were sunken, and her ears were delicate and angular. There was red around her lips, in contrast to the blueness of the face. It was coldly, indifferently pretty.

The thought was absurd, I know, misplaced, but it was pure. Like her. Maybe that’s what took hold of me. Her eyes were open, and kind, and seemed to be smiling at me, which was also absurd – why would she be smiling? Yet, that was my first thought when I found her. Her hair fanned out behind her head on the cold grass to make half of a halo, her coat was covering her, one of those quilted coats with a hood, and she was giving me a gentle smile, as if she knew that I would find her, and she didn’t want it to be too hard on me. So she welcomed me, you might say.

I walked up that steep path, feeling the chill, wind churning, the sea off to the left and down, a drop of a hundred feet, a harshly beautiful sky of shifting grey and white and black and orange that I seemed to walk into, the knoll ahead about to level off, the grass a brighter green than I expected. The last ten feet were difficult, almost vertical, but I had been there before, with Xan, and I knew the view was worth it, even though I wasn’t there solely for the view.

And there she was.

“Mr. Brown?” He is young, and African-American, and wears one of those Smokey the Bear hats with the wide brim. He never looks at my statement after he reads it; he looks only at me. I want my name to be something other than Brown. I want a long Greek name that he has to ask me to spell. His nameplate reads Upshaw.

“You’re the gentleman who found her?”

“Yes.”

“Do you come here often?” He must know there is a joke there. We choose not to know it, together. His face is round and neutral, and there are tiny black spots on his cheeks that I feel ashamed to have noticed at such a time.

“I was here once before, about a month ago.”

Xan said she was taking me to her favorite spot. My idea was to walk at the wildlife preserve, but she changed my plans all the time, countermanded them. So we hiked up the shore to the cliff. She clipped along ten feet ahead of me (one foot for every year’s difference in our ages); she was pretty rugged and liked showing off. She also liked being competitive with me. Her face was happy; it always was happy when we did something that she wanted to do. But she mixed the selfish side of her personality with the generous; she surprised me by pulling sandwiches and fruit out of her backpack, and a couple of those little airline blankets.

“Hiking? Picnicking? Mr. Brown?”

“Both, actually.”

He smiles. “Yeah, I guess you’d have to hike here to have a picnic. You’re alone today, sir?”

“Yes.”

I expect to have to defend myself. I am prepared to be magnanimous and tolerant of law enforcement as they do their job, prepared to feel like a preliminary, though unlikely, suspect. I anticipate the next question to be: Who was there with you?

But he doesn’t ask that, he focuses on my eyes in a benign way.

“ Detective Sergeant Fleck may want to ask you a few questions.” He touches the brim of his hat. He knows. Young as he is, he knows more than I do. He knows I’m not the one, that I couldn’t do it, that I’m not lying, not only that I’m not lying but that I have no lies to tell. At least, none that would be important to him, none about the girl. I am a perverse disappointment to myself.

“It’s warm today,” Xan said. She gushed when she enjoyed the weather, made the moment into a sensory, physical, athletic experience. She pulled off her top and sat there in the sun, bare-breasted, shook her golden curls, stretched her arms out and up to the heavens in a pagan thanks to the gods for the wondrous day, and grinned at my unsteady surprise.

“Ha, ha. Your provincial side is showing. Your turn.”

“My turn?”

“Take off your shirt. You won’t feel so out of it.”

I did. I was amusing to her. She took off her cross trainers and socks and flexed her toes. She forged ahead of me in these things; she embraced the freedom from physical restraints in a way that left me feeling like I was only along for the ride.

I took off my sneakers and socks and Xan, breasts bouncing and dimples beaming, very nearly laughing at what she knew to be my continued confusion about how to respond to her when she was walking the edges of social barriers, stood and removed her shorts. She wasn’t wearing underwear. She laughed hard, remained standing long enough to survey her realm and feel the air on her body, then enjoyed my regarding her nakedness (more pointedly, the mesmerizing profile of her sinewy rear end and thighs, her smooth pelvic skin and the top of the patch of hair that did match that on her head, and the welcome imperfection of her abdomen’s slight bulge), before she giggled and dropped onto one blanket while yanking the other out from under me and covering herself with it.

“You can take yours off under here if you want,” she invited, holding the top blanket above her.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Fleck.” His voice is from some neighborhood and has no reverence in it. “Mr. Brown?”

“Yes.” He is fast, too fast; I am sure he will miss something.

“I read your statement,” he nods his head at the clipboard in his hands, then he looks at me. Suddenly he is not fast, he is stuck, stuck looking at me. He will ask me for Xan’s number, he will ask about what we did here. I will have to tell him, for he knows I will only tell him the truth. I won’t be able not to, and then he will see me as depraved.

“ I may ask you to take a look at the scene again, go through exactly what you did, so I can see it first hand. This could be difficult, you’re probably upset already, but if you can handle it…” His hands go out to the sides. He has thin hair that gets combed over into a dark, shiny pool. “…it could be very helpful, obviously.”

I want to go there again. I cannot say it. That would be inexplicable, but I want to see her, that much I know.

“ Fine,” I say, and I worry for myself, and for what might be the deviant compulsion I am harboring so hospitably.

Stuck again, this time on me, he nods into my face. That’s what he does, he nods, he nods away the grey area in his brain and when it is satisfactory to him, he stops and looks at something else, looking for his next nod.

Her feet were twisted to her left, and her toes pointed straight at me when I first crested the hill. The shoes were brown with straps across the top of the foot with bulky socks of a dirty cream color stuffed into them. A short view of her legs could be seen under the edge of her coat. Her calves were unformed, yet about to assume some shape or character if they could get another year. But they wouldn’t, they would be stopped at the point of readiness, smooth and resilient, their only flaw a scrape under the right knee.

They regard me, Fleck and the African-American officer, Upshaw. The officer checks Fleck, Fleck checks me, nods. I don’t know whether to look away or not, if it would look more innocent, or more guilty. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t done anything. They are the cops and they are in control and I want to fit in. I don’t want to be wishy-washy, wacky, or weird.

“The Sergeant thinks that’s all we’ll need, for now.” The officer looms over me kindly. “He’d like to talk to you later, though, after we’ve had a chance to study things more thoroughly.”

“Do you want me to go to the station?”

“The Sergeant said we might even visit you at home. Are you sure you’re okay to drive? Is there someone at home who you could call to come for you?”

They don’t even want me to walk the scene with them. Fleck walks quickly toward us.

“Do you remember seeing anything, Sir?” he asks. “Any objects, food, toys, bags, anything at all around here, on the ground, even if it was far down the hill? Anything?”

“I don’t… I’m sorry.”

“Okay. We’re going to send you home, now but we’ll need to talk to you later, after we get more information and you get a chance to collect yourself. Okay?”

I won’t get to see her again.

“Okay?”

“Sure…Whatever you need.”

He sort of laughs like there is a bitter irony in my words.

“Okay, we’ll see you later.” He walks back to the crest, and the scene, and her, her bed. It is a bed, a final bed.

My first sight of it was uplifting. The grass was tall and soft, and invited rolling in it. Children would roll and play, teens would roll and joke and tease, young adults would roll and make love, old folks would be reminded about rolling in the grass when they were kids.

It was warm and calm that first time. Xan finished me off, that’s what it was like to make love to her. She grabbed hold of the moment and took what she could, and it was mostly good for me, too. Afterward, we lay and napped. Then we ate some grapes and cookies, naked under the blankets, until it was time to go. She wanted to stay longer, but we had tickets. She didn’t care about the tickets. We always had that kind of hitch; she would change plans on a whim.

I drive home very slowly. Maybe it is because I have brought myself to that image of her in her final bed. And I can’t see it again, won’t be permitted to see it again. I drive very slowly past streets that I know, but which seem suddenly quite unfamiliar. They are having their second first impression on me and, though I navigate my way home errorlessly, as if on automatic pilot, I go twenty-five miles per hour on twenty-five mile per hour streets for the first time ever. I am mourning, I realize. But it is not just her death, for I didn’t know her alive. I am mourning the distance that increases between us with each twenty-five mile an hour street. I park in front of my strange house feeling ill, and sour, and forlorn.

Her face was turned to greet her discoverer. It was a soft look, gentle, intended, I felt, I believed, to ease the shock for whoever arrived. The cops would posit later that it was part of her assailant’s sick profile, done on purpose, a demonstration of deviant ego and demented whimsy. I knew that she was thinking beyond that heinous moment, thinking about her people, about me; she knew that I, whoever I would be, would need her help to get through it. Perhaps they all know something like that.

The things in my house seem to be waiting for me, to see how I am. My couch doesn’t extend the usual invitation to flop and flick on the television. The coffee table seems neater than I left it. The lamps and books and photographs on the walls and in the remote areas of the room watch and wait.

I put the TV on anyway, lie on the couch, probably sleeping, a light semi-conscious miasma of daydream and rehash. Then it’s on the news. It’s the earliest of the evening broadcasts, and it’s there. Her name is being withheld, but the police think they have a suspect, and they have a shot of the spot, with the yellow tape tied to sticks, and the white outline of the victim’s last position. It is all too soon for me; the world knows now, and worse, they disrespect me, they hurt me, by running to the story faster than I can, by disregarding her specialness and calling her a victim. I shut the thing off.

She was contained on that grass. All the room in the world for a girl her age, yet her legs and arms were close to the rest of her in an unspectacular position. The outline of her hips could be discerned under the coat, wide-hipped for a slender kid. Sometimes, even young girls show their future potential for carrying children.

Sergeant Fleck is on the phone.

“Hey, Mr. Brown, how are you?”

“I’m, okay.”

“You sure? You were kind of shook up before.”

“ I’m fine.”

“Okay. I wanted to go over some things with you, if I may, take, maybe, half an hour.”

“That’s okay.”

“I can come over now, if it’s all right.”

“Sure.” He makes sure of the address, then repeats that it shouldn’t take more than half an hour.

He said ‘I’. ‘I’ will be over. I assumed it would be he and Upshaw, that they would come to look at me some more, to study me, the ‘sort of’ witness, the discoverer of horror, to judge me on my technique and originality. My ridiculous mind starts to worry over whether or not to put out a dish with nuts or some pretzels. Coffee comes to the rescue, coffee is more appropriate and, in fact, I have wanted coffee for hours.

I climbed those final twenty yards to the grassy overlook with coffee on my mind. It was the reward I would give myself for the hike, the boost I would turn to when it was time to move on, time to expunge the memory of Xan and claim that spot for myself. For a second, I had thought of bringing a cup with me, nice and hot and strong with three sugars and half and half. But I didn’t want it up there. It would bring too much complacency to the moment. I would sit for too long, and feel too comfortable. I only wanted to see it again and let it all go.

But there she was, with her fingers stopped in a position that resembled a hand in a painting, Michelangelo, slightly curled, poignant, open enough to see the palm, which still looked to have color in it, even though that made no sense. I didn’t see the other hand; her right arm was under the coat.

The coffee maker is still sputtering when the bell rings. Fleck enters, nodding. “Thanks for seeing me in your house,” and he moves to the living room, surveying as he goes.

Upshaw is not with him; he is alone.

Fleck sits without my offering. “When we have crimes of this nature,” he begins, “we try to provide some support for the folks who have come in contact with the scene. Before I go, I’ll give you the name of a counselor.”

I nod, not sure what to say. I can tell I will do everything during his visit with his regard of me in mind. I will be conscious of my walk, my waist, my breath, my voice, my stance – and he will be looking at me thinking of none of that. I won’t know what he is thinking, and I will care.

“You’re name is Doug, right?” he asks.

“Yes.” He remembered. “I made coffee.”

“That would be great,” says Fleck. I serve us both.

He has no papers in front of him. “I wanted to ask you something, I forgot before. When you were walking along that path, did you pick anything up?”

I hate him, now, because he has none of the romantic/heroic qualities I want to associate with brilliant police work, nor has he even one iota of the charming solidarity of the antihero with the one eye and the basset hound and the cigar and the car that always breaks down. But he has somehow figured out the one thing that I have omitted from my statement.

A piece of paper flew down at me in the wind. It was heavy, not crumpled, torn sprockets at one end, longer than letter size, and flying on the gusts, down from the direction in which I was headed, flat and right at me, stable and unwavering, as if it would decapitate me. I moved to my right and put up my hand. A corner of the thing struck my palm and traveled on, detained only for a second, but I saw that it was a drawing, in pencil, and it was the view of the ocean from somewhere nearby, and there were dolphins arching out of the water and splashing under again.

I tell him about the drawing. He smiles and nods a lot.

“Yeah, we found it. Forensics told us there was evidence of human contact — skin, body oils, as well as the victim’s prints. We found her sketchbook down by the water. Her family said she was an avid drawer. She wanted to be an art student. We were going to ask you to submit to a few tests, but since you remember touching the drawing…”

“I did touch it. I’m sorry I didn’t recall it before.”

He shrugs. “Very common.” He produces a notepad from his jacket pocket and scribbles something. He offers me a piece of gum. I refuse; he puts the pack back in his jacket pocket. “Okay, Mr. Brown. You’ll be hearing from the DA’s office and I’m afraid they’ll want to put you through this all over again, but it has to be.”

I want to ask about the suspect, I want to ask about the drawing, about the body, about the girl, but I will not compromise the desire that I have identified in myself as the strongest: I want to be the smartest, most prescient witness they have ever known, the least trouble, the most dependable.

“What am I allowed to know?” pops out of me. Fleck stops nodding and chewing.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

I hate him again. He’s supposed to know what I mean, supposed to be aware of my needs, but he’s stonewalling, making me explain what he understands perfectly well.

“Mr. Brown?”

“It’s okay. I don’t want to overstep my bounds, but… What was her name?”

Fleck starts nodding again. “Her name was Grace, Grace-” and he speaks her last name but I do not hear it. I hear the reverberation of “Grace”.

Of course. With the same sense of the inevitable like a box that falls from the top of a pile as you try to move the pile all at once, the name tumbles on to me. What more fitting name could she have than a word which describes my one and only view of her? It came to me just as he said it, as if the word and the name were waiting for the precise instant of their greatest impact on me, and it brought me back to the picture of her hair fanned out on the green, green grass, and her nose, straight and long and proud.

He goes to the door. Fleck turns and hands me a card. “Call this number; someone can help,” he says and then he is gone.

Xan drove the shore road all the time, and kept telling me that she would take me to “that spot right there,” and she’d turn in the driver’s seat, take her eyes off the road, and point out the back window, laughing like a hyena because she knew it made me nuts.

Everything makes me ill. I can’t eat, sleep, can’t drink. The phone rings.

“Doug?”

“Yeah?”

“Xan.”

“Jeez… Hi.”

“Did you watch the news?”

“Eh, some of it.”

“You were on, at least I‘m pretty sure it was you. There was a murder at that spot by the shore where we picnicked that time and they had a shot of the police talking to you but there was no sound; you didn’t say anything. You seemed kind of out of it. It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. It was.”

“The girl was stabbed and messed with, they said. You saw her?”

“What do you mean, messed with?” I have to sit down.

“Mutilated, like, he carved something in her stomach that looked like a whale or a dolphin or something.”

“Oh, God…”

“Yeah — and her right hand is missing-”

I want to wail, like I am having myself carved up, I want her pain, in me.

“Isn’t that sick? Did you see that stuff? They have a guy in custody, I think.” She can’t know how much I hate that these things I need to know most I must get from her.

“Hello?” she says.

“Jeez.”

“Doug?”

“Yeah, uh, I need to go out. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Oh, well, it’s okay, I just thought of you, so…”

“No, I’ll call you soon.”

“Okay. Hey, if you want to have a beer later, or something, Neil and I are just hangin’ out.”

“Thanks.”

Mutilated, that is one of the words I do not want to hear, do not want associated with her. Mutilated, molested, murdered, one by one they come for me, marching in single file to despoil the specter of Grace.

I walk. That afternoon, I went to a place to claim it for my own, to begin to loosen the grip of one woman, and I fell into the mortal lock of a girl. I wanted to replace the woman, but I didn’t ask for the girl. On a street called Sagamore Lane, not knowing how I got here, I think that I have been too willing to accept her, have given her too much room in my life, my soul, and that it is a fault in my character.

There was a sunken look to her nose and eyes that made me think of offering her a tissue, a congested look. This was puzzling to me after. Why would I think such a thing? The tangents that intersected the awful reality of the sight of her were innocuous and removed, Buddhist, almost, and I tagged myself selfish because of them.

“You found Grace.” The woman came all the way across the steps with two little girls, both under ten. It wasn’t easy, as the front of the Church of the Nativity was packed with hundreds of mourners. I saw her coming and waited, as if I knew.

“We saw you from over there and wanted to welcome you.” She shook my hand. Her face was fair and freckled and had too many wrinkles, her hair light, her eyes green.

“I’m Gracie’s Aunt Alice,” and she began to cry. So did I. So did the girls. “Thank you for coming.”

I almost said, ‘My pleasure’.

“ Of course,” I said.

She gives a tiny smile through a stream of tears, and she means both, the smile and the tears, and starts back to the other side of the steps, back to the rest of the family, and there, waiting for her, are a flock of green-eyed, light haired, weeping freckles, and they are all girls, or women who were once girls – I don’t see or look at the men – and there seem to be more and more of them.

That’s what the sunken, congested quality of her face was… crying. She had cried out all of her tears; her sinuses were a dried out wasteland.

Fleck walks over to me from across the back of the church. “You haven’t called the counselor.”

“No.” I can’t say more. He is lucky, I think at that moment, lucky to have a job title which allows him to stare at people, catalogue their behavior, and never be accountable for his own.

There are wonderful, beautiful tear-irrigated speeches about the talents and the intelligent sweetness and the endearing mixture of child and adult in the departed Grace, never mentioning the heinous acts which took her from us, an unbearably admirable restraint on the part of the speakers. I am no match for any of it. I break and flood with grief; I shake with the enormity of the release. I am way in the back of the church and no one is near, and it is so, so sad because I wouldn’t want them to see me, but I want more than anything to be in the midst of them all, her people, when I do this. Behind them, high overhead on the dome of the ceiling above the altar, is a mural of Jesus Christ ascending into heaven, ringed by cherubs, the white-headed, white-bearded father watching from the one side, and the mother, the woman in the prototypical nun’s garb, watching from the other. They all have their hands open, palms out, slightly curling in that same poignant way as did Gracie. With my eyes fixed on them, I utter a defiant prayer: “Where were you that day?” I demand. “Where else could you possibly have been?”

They file out of the church in even greater numbers, hundreds of them, now, blooming on the front steps of the Church of the Nativity, still weeping but smiling through it, still green-eyed and light-haired, and still freckled, unwilling to give each other up.

And I am unwilling to give her up, either. I drive to the shore road, stand at the bottom and look up at it. They have taken that place from me. He who did that, and the police, and the cameras; I can’t go there.

Until I saw those other girls on the church steps, I hadn’t remembered the freckles. She had them, but they were purple, and ever so small, they could have been anything, dirt, anything.

I can only stare up at the place. I can see it, and her, but I can’t go there.

“We’re going to do something up there, at the spot where she was killed,” Aunt Alice said to me after the Mass. “We’re not sure, probably a candle vigil, plant some things for her. If you’re interested, someone will call you.”

“Please.”

Of course. Then I will go back, with them, with the freckles and the green eyes and the light hair, for I never, ever, want to lose her, and if I go with them, the legion of the freckles and light hair, perhaps they will eventually come before her, eventually eclipse Gracie, giving her rest at last, and I won’t see her quite so much. I will have to wait, but I will go back.

The sofa or the bed?

Richard opens the door and finds Vickie on the sofa, watching TV. Disappointing.

“I aced the final,” he says.

He waits for her to say something. She doesn’t; she keeps both eyes on the TV. It’s a cable movie that she’s watching, one of those ones in which every five minutes the hero comes running toward the camera and then you see a big explosion behind him. Vickie hates them.

“Why are you watching this?” he asks.

“Why not?”

Vickie is cute, with long black hair, big green eyes, and nice hands. Since losing his position as King of England, Richard has learned many things, and one of them is that he is really very attracted to women with nice hands.

But Vickie’s best feature is her voice. It has a rich, warm, clear tone, deep and sexy. If she is standing behind him and speaks unexpectedly, he’ll shiver. Vickie doesn’t know it, but Richard once enjoyed a reputation as being hard-hearted—back in the old days he sent half of his extended family to their deaths so that he could be king—but one phrase from Vickie and he’s all tears, overwhelmed by beauty. On several occasions he has suggested that she exploit her gift by auditioning to narrate car commercials.

“ I think I aced the final,” he repeats.

“ Swell,” she says. She uses the remote to change channels.

“ Nineteenth-Century American Humor. Remember? Not that funny, actually. Lots of drinking and cruelty to animals.”

“ Uh huh.” She changes channels again.

He gives up, sits down next to her with his hands on his knees. In the past, he was mean and charming. Famous for it. He once dispatched several members of a woman’s family and then made a pass at her while she was tending to the coffins. Her name was Anne. Back then he had a hump, a limp, and a withered arm. He talked to Anne in such a crazy and insistent way that she agreed to meet him secretly. (Charming.) Later, he and Anne were married, but he soon found he needed to get rid of her for political reasons. Richard tried to let her down easy, giving her the “It’s not you, it’s me” speech, the “We’ve grown in different directions” talk, and promising they could still be friends. Then he executed her. (Mean.)

He looks at Vickie. She knows nothing about his past. She doesn’t even know he’s English—he’s worked hard to learn contemporary American diction and a flat, from-nowhere-in-particular kind of accent. His day job is selling paint and wallpaper. She’s a manicurist.

He takes the remote from her and mutes the sound on the TV.

“ Am I mean?” he asks.

She looks at him steadily. “No.”

“ How about charming?” He puts his head on her shoulder. “Am I charming?”

“ No.”

When he comes home from the final exam for his other class later in the week, Vickie is again on the sofa, watching TV. Vickie doesn’t live with Richard—she lives with her Mom—but she likes to be at his house when he comes home from night school. He gave her a key. Vickie says people Shouldn’t live together Before Marriage, that it represents a Half-Assed commitment to the relationship (Vickie tries to capitalize certain words when she’s talking, you can tell). She insists that he walk her home, no matter how late it is. It’s Only Two Blocks.

When Vickie started the habit of letting herself into his apartment, Richard didn’t mind—most of the time he’d find her naked on the bed when he returned. It has now been nineteen days since Richard has seen Vickie naked.

“ It’s been nineteen days since I’ve seen you naked,” he says. (Mean.)

“ You’ll Live.”

He throws down his textbook—The Experience of Poetry—near her feet. “Look. What’s wrong?”

She turns slowly towards the textbook. “I hope for your sake that that was not Aimed At Me.”

His immediate reaction is to apologize, but he hates it when she overdoes the capitalization, so he bites his tongue. Let her wonder.

She clicks off the TV. She stands. She puts her hands on her hips.

“ I’ve Decided,” she says.

“ Yes?”

“ I’ve decided I’m Not going to Waste My Life with someone who just works as a Clerk In A Paint Store.”

Time passes without anyone saying anything. Then Vickie turns and heads for the front door. She’ll walk home by herself.

Richard gets the last word: “It’s a Home Improvement Center.”

Mead. That’s the stuff. Hard to get nowadays, special order. The looks he gets at the liquor store. But he wants a sweet wine to get drunk on, and there’s nothing sweeter. Spiked honey.

His king days were long ago, but he hasn’t forgotten.

He takes another drink, this time straight from the bottle.

When you’re the King, even your enemies—men enemies, that is—treat you with respect. But not the women. No. Even the ones he charmed into bed ended up hating him. Possibly something to do with all the murders. Hey, he was God’s chosen representative, blah, blah, blah. Still, a propensity for the ruthless execution of innocents makes a guy hard to warm up to on a personal level.

What would he do without Vickie? The voice, the hands. He drinks a swig as a toast to Vickie’s hands, then changes his mind and drinks nine more swigs so that each of her fingers is honored separately.

When he stands to make his way to the bathroom, Richard wobbles and falls headfirst into the piano. The piano lid is up, and his head plays an ugly chord, which reverberates disagreeably in the air. Lying on his back beneath the keyboard, drunk and in pain, he feels an aside coming on:

Richard: At Bosworth I fell.

Laid at last upon the ground,

Undone, uncrowned, and unloved,

I bade Death drop her veil.

But even Hell would not have me;

Stabbed to death, I died not.

Mead hangover: not recommended. Richard awakes in the morning still under the piano, his head cradled by the sustain pedal. The underside of the keyboard when he opens his eyes looks to him like the dark wooden ceiling of the cell in which he slept for many decades, and for a minute he is fooled into thinking he’s back there, in the monastery, where he rose every morning to live his life happily unchanged while generations of monks around him aged and died.

He rolls over onto his face. The floor beneath him gyrates. He burps and tastes honey-flavored vomit.

“ Good morning, Your Majesty,” Richard says aloud.

After a minute, he manages to lift his head and survey the living room. It’s amazing how much damage one lovesick drunk can do. He should be careful—the furniture is not his. It came with the apartment. The piano, which Richard is learning to play now that his arms have become the same length, was included.

“ Richard of Gloucester shall rise again,” he says, and pulls himself to his feet using the piano for support. Then he runs to the bathroom and throws up.

After his stomach settles down, Richard checks the clock: five-thirty. Still plenty of time before he has to go to work, so he decides to take a bath. Although an innately adaptable creature, Richard is not yet able to warm up to a few modern inventions, including DVD’s, ball-point pens, and digital clocks, but he has grown to like the ease of simply turning a knob to run a bath—Americans clean themselves almost continuously, it seems, and Richard has taken up the habit.

Lying in the tub, he begins to feel the effects of the hangover lifting. He looks down at himself. His body is, well, beautiful. It’s still surprising to see it this way; he was misshapen for centuries. Not that he’s had any surgeries or anything—no, he couldn’t risk that. When Richard finally made it to America, it was his intention to keep a low profile, and simply live the exalted life of an average American citizen. Soon after landing here, however, almost from the first moment, he was wracked with various terrible pains in the ugly parts of himself—his withered arm, humped back, and spindly leg. An illegal immigrant, Richard lived on his savings for weeks in a cheap motel, writhing in agony, unsure what to do. Then he realized that his small, twisted arm was hurting so much because it was actually growing and untwisting. And his back was straightening, his weak leg getting stronger. From that moment, he welcomed the pain as a friend.

America was his cure.

His King of England days are long past, and his burning ambition to ruthlessly rule the entire civilized world ebbed away centuries ago. So the question now is: does he have enough drive left to achieve a more modest goal, say, becoming manager of the Home Improvement Center? And would that be enough to induce Vickie to stay with him?

Changing jobs is too risky to consider. As an illegal, Richard was fortunate to have been hired by Baron Paint and Wallpaper. The Human Resource Department (one semi-retired guy named Mel) just assumed Richard was American, and forgot to ask him for the paperwork required to prove it.

He thinks about how he got ahead in the old days. Back then, Richard had two brothers: Edward, who was king, and Clarence (called George—don’t ask why), who was next in line. What Richard did when he decided to usurp the throne was tell Edward, who was never, as they say, the sharpest knife in the drawer, that he, Richard, had had a dream, a dream in which Edward’s reign was to be ended by someone with the initial “G.” Technically, this was not a lie, since Richard was also called “Gloucester.” But Edward, superstitious, predictable Edward, made the leap Richard wanted him to, and had George drowned in a vat of wine. Richard moved one step closer to the throne.

The manager of the Home Improvement Center is named Paul Saddell. The assistant manager is named George (coincidence?) Krauth. When Richard arrives at work that morning, he immediately goes to Paul’s office and tells him he’s had an important dream.

“ What?” the manager says, blinking rapidly, looking at Richard as if he’s crazy.

The day has just started and Paul already seems exhausted. He’s a big old guy who doesn’t take wallpaper orders or mix paint colors or put away deliveries or wait on customers anymore. He just sits in his office and drinks coffee and talks on the telephone. At lunchtime, he opens one of the right-hand drawers of his desk and takes out takes a brown bag containing a tuna or peanut butter sandwich that his wife has made for him.

“ I said I had a dream last night, Paul. A dream in which your position is usurped by someone with the initial ‘G.’”

Paul stares, uncomprehendingly.

“ What does ‘surped” mean?”

“ Usurped. It means ‘taken away,’ you know, ‘stolen.’ I dreamt someone whose name begins with the letter ‘G’ is after your job.”

Richard lifts his eyebrows empathetically.

“ So?” Paul says. “I’m retiring next week anyway.”

Okay, the ouster of Paul was effected in an unintended way; that is, it wasn’t effected by Richard at all, but the result is the same—Paul is out, and Richard possibly one step closer to ascending the glorious throne of paint store—home improvement store—management. The logical person to replace Paul—provided no one is hired from outside the store—is, of course, George, the assistant manager. The remaining employees, Richard’s rivals for George’s soon-to-be-vacated assistant manager position, are Marshall, a jovial young man from the Cayman Islands, Vince, a college student more interested in flirting with the female customers than in selling them paint, and Sandra, a brassy lady who runs the wallpaper department.

Richard thinks he should be chosen over these other contenders, although they all, except for Vince, have about the same amount of experience. But Marshall is too laid-back, and Sandra too female—paint stores are one of the last places to hide if you’re a male chauvinist. The problem is that George will get to pick his new assistant, and George hates Richard.

George is a short, stout, doughy-looking man who suffers from that disease that makes people hairless. He has not one hair on his head, not even where his eyebrows should be. He’s in his late thirties, but still lives at home with his parents and older sister, and sleeps in the same bed he used as a kid. His resentment of Richard began the day six months ago when he returned to work after a family trip to Europe. George was showing the vacation pictures—twelve rolls worth—to his co-workers when Richard noticed that the photos were bereft of people. There were seventeen pictures of the outside of the gift shop at The Tower of London (Ah, memories!) but none showing a person going in or out. Richard made this observation out loud, meaning no harm, but everyone laughed, and George, deeply embarrassed, flushed a deep red and never forgave Richard, whom he seemed to half-like previously.

The following week, on his last day of employment, Paul is given a little party on the loading dock. Everyone sits around on five-gallon paint cans and drinks ginger ale out of Styrofoam cups. There’s a cake. There’s a picture of a paint can on the cake and the paint can has a little face and the little face has a speech balloon coming out of it that says, Good Luck, Paul!

The regional manager is there and he gives a speech. He talks about how Paul joined the company before he, the regional manager, was even born. He says that when he was first hired he used to see Paul throwing five-gallon cans of joint compound (62 pounds each) up on a loading dock one after another, for hours at a time.

Richard looks over at Paul, perched uncomfortably on a bulging plastic container of Latex Interior Primer, and tries to imagine him lifting something heavy. The regional manager has given Paul a gold watch, which he’s wearing; he took off the one he normally uses and put it in his pocket. In his right hand, pinched between two fat fingers, he holds the ornate crimson box the new watch came in. He doesn’t know what to do with it.

The regional manager continues his speech by pretending he wishes he could retire too, like Paul. He mentions golf. Richard looks at Paul again and tries to imagine him playing golf, and that picture seems even stranger than the one in which he lifts something heavy, and sad too.

At the very end of his speech, the regional manager announces that George will be the new store manager. Marshall will be the Assistant.

At the beginning of the following week, Paul is gone and George calls Richard into what is now his office. Richard does not feel well. Knowing Vickie’s mother was out of town—on a cruise—he tried to contact Vickie last night. He dialed her number repeatedly and listened to her shapely recorded voice tell him that she was currently Unable to Take his Call. The extravagant beauty of these vocalizations did not quite fully compensate for the ugliness of the fact they implied: Vickie was not, and continued not to be, at home. All night.

After Richard enters the office, George closes the door behind him. An awkward silence follows.

“Congratulations on your promotion,” Richard says at last.

“You’re fired,” George replies.

Richard knows he’s beaten. He rises, makes his way to the door, then stops when a thought occurs. Unlike most former kings of England, Richard of Gloucester is a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

“Wait a minute, George,” Richard says. “You can’t just fire me like that. You have to have provable cause for the union.”

George sighs. “You’re right. I’ll work on that.”

He puts his face close to Richard’s face. “In the meantime,” he says, “I want you to know you have no future here. I’ll get you out one way or another.”

Richard has spent centuries trying to eradicate every ounce of competitiveness and violence from his nature, partly to atone for the harm he caused earlier, and partly because it was a way to keep a low profile once he realized that—for whatever perverse reason—he was going to live an artificially long time. Now with George’s fat hairless face pressed within inches of his own, and the man’s hot yeasty breath fouling the air between them, Richard feels the return of his old impulses.

He looks around the office for a rapier.

Never one around when you need it.

“Get back to work, ” George says.

Richard knows he bought some time with his threat to go to the union, but also knows George will find a way to fire him if he really wants to; Richard will have to act quickly.

To achieve his kingly objective in the past (after Edward conveniently died), Richard and his pal Buckingham (his temporary pal—he had to kill Buckingham later) together engineered a stunt to have the Lord Mayor of London offer Richard the crown while behind the scenes Richard and Buckingham were discrediting some of the other candidates and beheading the rest. Well, in this case, Marshall was the next person in his way, but beheading Marshall wasn’t an option—it was too messy and hard to get away with in America’s “politically correct” climate. And he liked the fellow—liking the person you’re beheading, Richard found, always made it less fun. (Though it was true that Marshall had taken to his Assistant Manager duties with more crack-the-whip enthusiasm than Richard would have preferred or predicted.)

Lying in bed that night, unable to sleep because of back pain, Richard has an idea. Marshall speaks a suspicious amount of French for someone supposedly born in the Cayman Islands, which is, after all, a British colony. Speaking French is, or course, not uncommon in the Caribbean, but Richard has a feeling Marshall is not who he says he is. He’s probably another illegal hired by Mel.

Richard gets up, logs on his computer, and, after checking for E-mail from Vickie (without finding any), accesses the website for Homeland Security. There he gets an idea what the department’s letterhead looks like, and within a few hours he’s printed out a fairly persuasive-looking document addressed to the Baron Paint Store manager, containing such phrases as “Marshall Bodden, a person in your employ,” “investigation into illegal immigration,” “deportation,” and “prison sentence.” These phrases were meant for Marshall’s eyes alone; one of his new duties as Assistant Manager is to open the store mail.

Two days later, Richard looks up from mixing custom colors for a customer and sees the postman handing Marshall the mail. Richard thinks he spots the letter he sent—with its colorful stamp—in the stack.

“Oops,” Richard says. He was so intent on watching Marshall that he accidentally squirted four ounces of green colorant into the pink paint he was supposed to be making.

This gets the customer’s attention; people don’t like to hear the person making their expensive, non-returnable custom colors say “Oops.” Richard hammers the paint can lid closed, puts the can with the store’s other “Oops” paint, and starts over with a fresh can, the customer now hovering over his shoulder. After the cans are shaken, the customer insists that Richard open them and paint out samples to be certain all the colors match.

After the customer is finally satisfied and leaves, Richard goes over and peers into the store office to see if he can watch Marshall open the envelope he sent. But Marshall is not there. Richard enters and examines the stack of mail, which was left on the desk. About half the envelopes are opened; the one he sent is missing.

Richard surreptitiously searches the store premises. Marshall is not on the loading dock, not in the bathroom, not in the ladder room.

He’s gone.

*

Two days later, George approaches Richard as he is putting away stock and says, “I guess Marshall’s never coming back, so I’m making you my Assistant Manager. On an interim basis. Understood?” He walks away before Richard can reply.

That night, Richard dials Vickie’s number again. Normally, he just listens to her lovely, lovely recorded voice telling him I’m out screwing someone else (not literally—it’s implied) and then hangs up without saying a word. Tonight, at the tone, he speaks: “I got promoted,” Richard says.

The machine declines to respond.

Richard took pleasure in forcing George to promote him right after threatening to fire him, but knows he isn’t out of danger yet. His elevation was the result of there being no other credible candidate—Vincent was simply too young and Sandra wouldn’t have taken the job even if it were offered, as she liked being, as they called her, “The Queen of Wallpaper.”

Richard waits two days to hear Vickie’s reaction to his promotion. Then he waits one more day. Then he walks over to her house at night and peers through the blinds. No one is home.

As he walks slowly back to his apartment, Richard again tries to think of a way to get rid of George. It is enjoyable to have such a specific goal once more, to again revel in the ecstasy of good hate, but he is paying a price: within the last fortnight all of his famously bad parts began aching anew, his strong back bending, his flawless arm furling, his thick leg shriveling. He’d better eliminate George before it is too late. If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly, he tells himself, knowing well he is thinking of the wrong play.

Two nights later, Richard dials Vickie’s number and someone answers. It’s her mother, back from the cruise.

“Is Vickie home?” he asks.

“You know she isn’t.”

“Where is she?”

“On her honeymoon,” Vickie’s mother says, and hangs up.

Her honeymoon?

Richard looks for the mead.

An hour later, the ghosts appear. These are same ghosts who appeared to him before he fought at Bosworth, and periodically after that for the last five hundred years. They’ve pretty much lost their power to frighten over that span, but they haven’t given up.

Enter the ghost of Prince Edward.

Richard: Here we go.

Prince Edward: Let me sit heavy on thy soul!

Richard: Sez you.

Enter the ghost of Henry the Sixth.

Henry the Sixth: My anointed body by thee was punched full of deadly holes!

Richard: Yeah, and?

Enter the ghost of Clarence.

Clarence: Let me sit heavy on thy soul!

Richard: Can’t. Edward’s already sitting there.

Enter the ghosts of Rivers, Grey, and Vaughn.

Ghosts: Despair and die!

Richard: Who are you, the Three Stooges?

Enter the ghost of Lord Hastings.

Lord Hastings: Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake!

Richard: Not really. I was watching Conan O’Brien.

Enter the ghosts of the two young princes.

Ghosts: Let us be lead within thy bosom Richard, and weigh thee down to ruin, shame, and death!

Richard: You and what army?

Enter the ghost of Marshall.

Marshall: Yo, Rich! Why’d you do me like that?

Richard: Marshall?

Marshall: I never did you no harm.

Richard: But…you’re not dead.

Marshall: Yes, I am. I was fleeing ’cause of your phony letter and blew out a tire on I-95 while going eighty.

Richard reaches for the bottle.

*

Richard awakes under the piano again. This time he is not fooled into thinking he’s back at the monastery—no happy feeling asserts itself, even for a second. Marshall’s death, as Clarence would have it, sits heavy on his soul.

Five hundred years. Five hundred years he’s lived virtuously, hoping to redeem his place in heaven, but now he’s ruined it, fallen back into his old ways. For the love of a manicurist.

Richard sits up. He feels awful, and not just because of the sick, dehydrating mead hangover. His arm, his leg, his spine: all have reverted to their original twisted state.

The army surplus store.

“Do you have a rapier?”

“What? A rapier?” the man says.

“Yes. You know, a slender, two-edged sword with a cup-like hilt.”

“Well…we have some swords in the case over there. Look, you’re not planning to stab anybody, are you?”

“Just my boss,” Richard says. “Through the eye. Out the back of his fat skull.”

“Uh…”

“I’m kidding,” Richard says. “It’s for a play I’m performing. Richard the Third. Do you know it?”

In the end, Richard chooses not to purchase a sword. Too conspicuous to walk around with these days. Instead, he buys a more easily concealed blade called a tanto, a foot-long Japanese knife used—as the clerk cheerfully explains—in the disemboweling suicide ritual called seppuku. That’s the advantage of multiculturalism—weapons from all over the world.

Richard, blade secreted beneath his coat, limps into his workplace. Sandra is there.

“Rich. What happened? You’re all bent over.”

“I was sent before my time into this breathing world, scare half made up.”

“What?”

“Back spasms. I took an Advil. Is George in yet?”

“In the office.”

When Richard reaches the doorway of the office, he finds George on his knees, paying homage to the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, his precious fat hairless bulging neck rather obligingly displayed for beheading.

George is oblivious to the presence of Richard, who draws his knife, wishing he had gone for a full sword instead of the shorter blade. The tanto is for stabbing.

Richard raises the blade high, preparing to bring it down on George’s neck with all the force he can muster. He pictures the manager’s noggin severing cleanly, spinning for a moment in the air, then dropping—a surprised look still on the face—into the open cabinet drawer, which, impelled by the momentum of the head, slams shut with a satisfying thunk. Richard imagined leaving it there, filed under “W,” for “Who ain’t got no head?”

Richard’s brief reign as king of England ended when his army was defeated by Richmond’s at Bosworth. The main problem was motivation. Richmond’s army was willing to lay down their lives for what they saw as a just cause; Richard’s army was comprised largely of mercenaries. Money and glory are no match for righteousness.

Richard walked away from the office and hid the tanto, unused, behind a display of extension poles. His current quest for paint store power was over. There would be no beheadings, no poisonings, no drownings in vats of wine. His motivation was gone.

“Richard?”

That voice. Nearly a year has passed since he heard it.

Richard turns to find Vickie behind him in a movie line. She’s with her mother, who gives Richard a dirty look. No husband in sight.

“Vickie. How are you? I heard you got married.”

She says nothing, but waves a hand under his nose. The ring is nice; the hand is nicer. Richard nods.

“Here alone?” Vickie’s mother asks.

“No. She went back to get something from the car.” This is a lie. He is alone.

“You look well,” Vickie says. This is true—Richard’s body returned to its ideal shape once he let his ambition die.

“You too,” he says, and this is also true. In fact, Vickie is fairly glowing with health, beauty, and happiness.

When Richard’s turn comes, he buys two tickets, then steps aside as if waiting for his date to re-appear. Vickie and her mother take their turn and Vickie forces her mother to go inside without her so she can talk to Richard some more.

“I never properly explained,” she says. “Steve was someone I knew for a long time. When he came back into my life, I felt I had to make a choice.”

Richard nods.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“I’ll survive,” he says. “I always do.”

She kisses him on the cheek, then goes inside.

He watches her go, watches the door glimmer as it settles into place. Soon he feels another aside coming on:

Richard: Wed new to another, made beautiful by bliss,

Her voice singing his name, her hands entwined with his!

Was ever a woman in this humor wooed?

Was ever a woman in this humor won?

Nah.

---

James W. Morris was born in Philadelphia and attended Central High School and LaSalle University, where he was awarded a scholarship for creative writing. He has published numerous short stories in literary magazines, and for a time worked as a joke writer for Jay Leno. Lately, he has turned his hand to playwriting, and his first play, Rude Baby, was produced earlier this year by The City Theater Company of Wilmington, Delaware.

I look for Scottie’s cab when I turn the corner onto our block in West Philly. I see lots of cars, glossy brand-new drug dealer cars, old rusty sedans that never move. I see the two big white vans that drive the crazy guys to and from the halfway house across the street. I see cars and the gas truck and bags of trash and a couple of surly teenagers sitting on a stoop, but I don’t see Scottie’s green and white cab anywhere.

My stomach drops. I’m just coming home from working at the restaurant to change and eat before my next job, and Scottie’s been out driving since dawn. The odds of us both stopping at home at the same time are ridiculously low. But sometimes it happens. On the days I turn the corner and see his cab, I feel a little thrill.

But I need to stop. I’m going to leave Scottie. I need to stop doing everything that keeps us a couple. My plan is not to force it. My plan is to let things between us get to such an empty and vague place that my leaving won’t hurt either of us. It’s like when I was a kid and had a loose tooth and I didn’t want my dad or anyone pulling on it. I’d just leave it alone and jiggle it every now and then and soon it fell out on its own.

I try to stop thinking about Scottie and park my lousy little Chevette and think about what I’m having for lunch. I’m wondering whether there’s mustard in the refrigerator for a grilled cheese.

There’s this guy standing at the front doors of our building. He’s wearing a blue gas company uniform. He looks down from the top of the stairs and he squints. “You live here?” he asks.

“Uh, huh” I reply. He looks so tall from where I stand, and he’s got his hands on his hips like there’s some problem.

“Gas leak?” he says. “Someone called in a gas leak?” he says in a deep voice. He has super short hair and a tiny silver hoop in each ear. I look him up and down. His gasman uniform fits him loose and sexy, and I like his boots. They’re dark green and scuffed like he’s been wearing them forever.

He waves his hand in front of me as if to rouse me from a trance. “Hello?” he asks, a thread of annoyance marring his sexy voice. “Can’t you smell it? There’s gas out here all over the sidewalk.”

Yes, I think, and what else? This block smells like garbage and cats and city slime. On Sunday mornings it smells like piss and spilt beer from these Spanish guys who party in their cars.

Today I smell all of it and yes, on top I smell something sweet. “Yeah,” I say, “I guess there’s gas. But how do you know it’s coming from upstairs?”

“Lady,” the gasman says, squinting harder. I dig the way his thick dark eyelashes fan over his narrow brown eyes like a web. “I said somebody called it in. It’s definitely coming from this building. Do you have keys to the basement? I have to get in the basement and shut the gas off.”

“OK, OK,” I say and straighten up. This isn’t the right time to flirt. “No, I don’t have keys to the basement. And my landlord’s away, in Boston. Where’s the leak coming from anyway?”

The gasman shakes his head. “I don’t know. I need to get inside though. I need to check all the apartments.”

I nod and we head upstairs to my place. The gasman climbs the stairs in front of me. I watch his butt—I can see a ripple through his loose pants, the muscles flexing all the way down to the back of his knee. Checking out another man is a good sign that I’m ready to be free of Scottie.

I open the door to the apartment and it’s a mess. On the kitchen floor are two piles of dirty laundry that I started to separate days ago. The cat box hasn’t been changed in weeks. There’s an unopened bag of potato chips on the kitchen counter next to the sink. I want to rip it open and devour the whole thing.

The gasman goes nuts as soon as he walks in the door. “Shit!” he shouts. “This place is loaded!” He runs behind the kitchen table and opens the window.

He’s right. The sweet gas smell is heavy up here. I hurry into the bathroom and open the little window, then head to the living room.

“I need to get into the apartments downstairs!” he shouts from the bedroom. “Do you have keys to any of them?”

I yell back that I don’t, but maybe Scottie does. He’s out driving his cab, but I can call his cell and get him home right away.

I go back to the kitchen and dial Scottie’s number, cleaning a pile of CDs off a chair at the kitchen table so I can sit down. Scottie’s got a bunch of cords and music stuff all over the other chairs. He hasn’t played in a band in almost a year and I get so sick of looking at everything. Scottie doesn’t answer, so I leave a quick message telling him to get his butt back to the apartment.

The gasman storms out into the kitchen and heads out the door down to my neighbors’. Shit. I don’t have time to get all sunk into this. In forty-five minutes I have to be at my afternoon job on the other side of town. I’m starving and I need to get out of my stinking restaurant uniform and into something halfway decent. I guess I could grab something to eat on the way, even though I can’t spend any extra money since our phone’s going to get shut off next week if I don’t pay the bill.

The gasman comes back up to my kitchen and says we have to go back outside now. There’s a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead, which I find pretty hot. It wouldn’t be on many men, like Scottie for instance, but it is on this guy. I cross my legs and lean over the table, knowing my white waitressing shirt is hanging open a little.

“I guess a cigarette is out of the question,” I say.

“Funny,” the gasman says and smiles weakly.

I like being up here with him. I liked opening the windows with him and I want to keep him up here with me. I want to make him a grilled cheese with mustard and ask him questions about his job.

But he’s in no mood, I can tell. He’s trying to do his job. Smell gas—get outside.

“OK,” I say, standing up. “Outside it is. My boyfriend won’t call back anyway. He’ll just come straight home.” I say the word boyfriend with as little enthusiasm as possible, coolly, as though it’s a business arrangement.

Scottie is already pulling up to the curb when we get downstairs. He was probably coming home anyway, which means we could have had lunch together. Too bad.

I notice how dirty his cab is, big smears of mud all up the side and gray sludge on the windows. I’m always bugging him about it. He’d get more fares if he just

ran it through a car wash every few days. But Scottie says it doesn’t matter—a cab’s a cab. Besides, the car wash would mean a good forty bucks a month from his take-home.

Scottie crosses the street and heads right for the gas man, ignoring me. I can tell by the way he’s walking that he’s not too high. His body doesn’t have that caved in look it sometimes gets. But I won‘t know for sure until I see his eyes up close. They’re usually a medium green, but the dope makes them pale and speckled, like a marble.

“I used to have keys,” he’s telling the gasman. “I gave them back to our landlord though. Sorry. Just break in the basement. It doesn’t matter.”

Scottie comes over to me finally and puts his arm around me. “Hey, babe,” he says, and kisses me on the mouth. I can see that while he’s not high, he’s definitely done his stupid heroin today. Just like every day. He says he can’t drive the cab if he’s dope-sick.

The gasman is heading off to the side of the house. I give his ass another look. I like how solid his body is. How healthy. I like the fleshiness of his long thighs.

Scottie doesn’t notice me looking. I think about how when he first started shooting up again, I called him all the time and told him it was an emergency and made him come home so I could see him high. He’d come right away. I’d hear him stumble up the stairs, and I’d open the door and he’d just stand there, eyes half closed, slowly scratching his face. There was no emergency though. Scottie would come inside and sit down, smoke a cigarette and leave. He never asked why I called him. But after a few weeks he’d ignore me. He’d tell me later his cell’s batteries were low.

Scottie had been off heroin four months when we met. I figured he wasn’t a risk anymore, that he’d keep going to his Narcotics Anonymous meetings and he’d be OK. Life with me was too good to mess up.

But more and more that’s a bunch of shit. Our relationship began on a shaky premise and it’s only gotten worse. I should have left months ago. The fact that I didn’t is making me mean. When I’m not trying to figure out how to leave, I’m trying to figure out why I’ve stayed so long.

Getting Scottie was a challenge and keeping him’s been a challenge, and the truth is, he never was mine anyway. I met Scottie when he was still with Gayle, this fucked up sculptor girl I worked with. She had a body like Barbie and a really annoying laugh and she did way too many drugs, but we were stuck working the lunch shift together so we got to be friends. She’d tell me all about Scottie, how sweet he was, how good to her he was, but how she just wasn’t crazy about him. She’d dragged him into her drug mess and now he had a habit too and it kind of made her sick.

Scottie was in this awesome band called Catgut back then, and Gayle would get me on the guest list sometimes. I thought he was cute, but I was more interested in the drummer, this tall half-black guy with red dreadlocks down to his waist. Then one day Gayle and I stayed at the restaurant after work and sat at the bar getting smashed at happy hour. Gayle told me I’d be a better girlfriend for Scottie. I wasn’t a junkie and maybe I could appreciate him more than she could. She didn’t deserve him. I just laughed and told her she was drunk. But I started looking at Scottie. He definitely was sweet. I noticed how closely he listened when anyone talked to him, his head cocked and his eyes focused. He never got distracted. And I noticed how he treated Gayle, always bragging about her sculpture and always helping her on with her coat, like they’d just stepped out of some old fashioned movie. Gayle was right. She didn’t deserve him. Who knows—maybe she’d leave him and not care if he started dating me.

I didn’t have to wonder long because one night Gayle shot up too much coke and had a heart attack right there in the front seat of Scottie’s cab. I went to her funeral and saw Scottie standing in the back of the church. He left before it was over. People said all kinds of things about him after that—like he could have tried to save her life, he could have taken her to a hospital sooner. Scottie quit Catgut and disappeared. Someone said he was homeless, living out of his cab and shooting drugs around the clock.

Then in the spring I saw him in the magazine aisle of Tower Records. He said he had forty days clean and still missed Gayle like crazy. But he was getting better. We went down the street for coffee and I listened carefully as he told me all about rehab, all about recovery. When he talked about Gayle his eyes filled up.

It seemed like I ran into him all the time after that. I got his number and started calling him to meet me in the park. We’d sit side by side on a bench and eventually our knees were touching. Scottie’s hand was quivering when he put it on top of mine, and I remembered reading somewhere that grief made some people long for sexual release.

The thing was, I knew Scottie was confused at first, not sure whether it was me or Gayle he wanted, but I also knew he’d want me in the end. I’d make sure of that. And Gayle approved, right? Maybe she’d had a sixth sense that day we got drunk. Maybe she knew somehow that she was going to die and that her boyfriend should end up with me. So I got Scottie and he seemed to like me, to love me even, but I kept a close eye. I knew his past was always there.

In our early days I’d watch Scottie sleep. I’d watch him squeeze his eyes tightly and grind his teeth. I had to win him from the abrasions of his dreams. He had to want only me, not a needle or a corpse. I got attached. I knew then that I loved him, even though I wished I didn’t. It made me cruel. I’d pick on Scottie, at first in a teasing way, then seriously. His clothes, his band, his bathing habits. I couldn’t seem to stop, even though I could see how it hurt him. I moved in with him anyway.

The apartment was my prison. All our things existed together, and in the kitchen I could no longer remember which utensils belong to me and which belonged to Scottie’s dead girlfriend.

I thought for awhile that if I was happy with our apartment, I wouldn’t mind everything else. So I decided to redo the living room. I painted three walls cobalt blue with a sponge. I liked the way it looked, but I never painted the fourth because I went back to thinking I had to leave. I spray painted the refrigerator red and left a splash of bloody dots on the wall behind it.

Then Scottie’s sleep changed. He moved less and breathed more slowly. At first I thought I’d won. He’d forgotten about Gayle and heroin and was living only with me. But something told me that was too easy. Something else was going on.

I had a feeling about his backpack. I went right for it one morning, unzipped the outside pocket and there it all was, wrapped in toilet paper, syringe, bloody Wet-Naps and my spoon, my own fucking spoon, all nestled in as if they’d always belonged there.

I went nuts. I cried and then I told Scottie he was a piece of shit. It was something he was doing just to hurt me. I thought maybe I deserved it, for loving him for the wrong reasons. I begged him to quit. I knelt on the floor at his feet and he just sat there, looked at me through eyes half-closed and nodded away from me.

Then I just got used to it. It went from being this alarming, life-threatening thing—junkie boyfriend—to just a drag. I’m embarrassed by it much the way I’d be embarrassed if he were into NASCAR or bowling. It’s been months now, with him in the bathroom searching and poking at veins long gone and me standing in the doorway watching without feeling much. He is humiliated. He sits there on the toilet seat with an old belt between his teeth, his stubby fingers gripping the long thin syringe, poking and struggling. Time doesn’t move then, for either of us. I feel like he will always get high and I will always stand there.

Today I’m glad he’s at least sort of straight. I want him to get in the driver’s seat with this gas thing so I can get lunch and go to work.

“ The guy has to get in,” I say to him, nodding nonchalantly in the direction of the gasman. “I called ‘cause you have keys to Sharon’s.”

Scottie shrugs. He takes his baseball cap off and pulls his red and blonde curls forward, combing them with his fingers. His hair is greasy. “I did have keys,” he says, “but Sharon made me give them to Harry.” Our building is a revolving door of everyone’s new boyfriends and girlfriends. I’ve been here the longest, eight months, so I no longer feel like a visitor. It’s my building too.

“It’s cool anyway,” Scottie continues. “I’m glad you called me. You shouldn’t have to handle this alone. Besides,” he smiles, “I like getting to see you.” I smile back and it feels like shit.

We walk back across the street to lean against the cab and smoke cigarettes. In a minute, the gasman comes out of our building and runs towards us, flailing his arms.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he yells.

Scottie and I both fling our cigarettes.

“No, not that,” the gasman says. “I mean the basement.” He’s standing there out of breath, and he’s got that sexy sweat again. “Somebody’s made a fucking bomb in the basement of your building—the whole thing could have gone any second! The whole block! Fuckin’ A—that’s the closest I’ve come to biting it since I took this job. I just hope I turned it off all the way. Everything down there is so mangled I could hardly see.”

A bomb. This makes me want to giggle, but I don’t. I sweat a kind of prickly sweat. Scottie stiffens—it’s like the heroin leaves his body all at once and now he’s totally straight.

The gasman goes to his truck to call the fire marshal. Scottie follows him to get the whole story, leaving me standing by the cab. He’s walking on the balls of his feet now, alive and alert. He stands at the door to the gas truck, his arms crossed above his head, leaning on the truck’s door. I can only see the back of him, how his body is tensing and shifting as he hears the gasman talk about what he saw in the basement.

“It’s true,” Scottie says, coming back to fill me in. “Somebody made a fine little bomb down there, cut open a gas pipe next to the hot water heater, busted the little door that holds the flame. It was all set up. It would have exploded.”

He holds me close and cups the back of my head with his hand. In a movie I would rest my cheek on his chest, but because we’re the same height, I can’t. I hang my chin over his shoulder for a minute. I can tell he’s trying to be protective. Part of me wants to like it. Part of me wants to be really scared about all this and just stay pressed against Scottie and let him take over.

But I’m not scared. A bigger part of me wants to just laugh. The whole bomb thing sounds too ridiculous. Nothing that dramatic ever really happens. It’s more likely that Sharon just let everything go to shit in the basement, let it all fall apart until by chance it resembled a bomb. There’s no bomb. There’s no intrigue, no reason for Scottie to save me.

But Scottie believes it. He’s hyped now, pacing the sidewalk in his giant black sneakers. “It was fucking Andrew,” he says, and I can tell he’s working up a good macho mood.

Andrew is Sharon’s ex-boyfriend, and he still owns half our building. He wants to buy her out but she refuses. So he does shitty things like getting the lights in the hallway shut off and having Sharon’s car towed.

Scottie hates Andrew. He’s sinking his jaws into Andrew as the bomber, and he’s not letting go.

“Fucking asshole,” Scottie says, whipping his baseball cap out of his back pocket and sliding it backwards on his head. “That’s it, that’s the last straw. We’re out of here.”

Scottie says “we” and I get that same prickly sweat as when I heard the word “bomb”. It clicks in my head that this is it. My big chance to be free. All I have to do is interrupt and say I don’t want to move in somewhere else together. I want to leave. I never thought it would be this easy.

I look around the street, big old buildings that used to be beautiful but are now half abandoned, bags of trash put out three days too early. It’s spring already, but you can hardly tell here because nobody on this block plants flowers. There isn’t even grass in most yards, just a muddy square. Except for the few trees with little leaves sprouting, it could still be winter.

Suddenly this whoosh of faintly warm air moves past me. It reminds me that it will soon be summer. I feel buoyant. I see how possible anything is in my life, any change, and I know I will soon be moving. I want to smile. But I know I need to stay cool and not let Scottie see how giddy I am.

So I am still. I watch Scottie pace some more and cuss about Andrew. I want to catch his eye. I want him to stop a second and take notice of me, see that something’s different and it will never be the same.

But he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t notice. The gasman comes back from his truck and says the fire marshal is on his way to make a report about tampering with the gas line, which he thinks is a felony. He and Scottie are talking, legal stuff, pressing charges, police reports, and I’m just standing there.

I should open my mouth, even though Scottie wasn’t looking at me, and just say it. But I don’t. This will be a summer just like last summer, Scottie and me sweating to death up on the third floor and me dreaming of a way to fly. It was childish of me to think I could get away without a struggle.

I’m hungrier now than ever. I go over and look in the front of Scottie’s cab for a bag of chips or something. There are a lot of empty Mountain Dew cans. On the floor by the gas petal are a few empty dope bags. If I open the covered coffee cup sitting in the empty cup holder it will have water in it, not coffee, so Scottie can shoot up while he’s driving.

I look at my watch. I’m going to be late for work soon. Maybe I should call and say I’m not coming. I’ll tell them I’m having car trouble. I look over at Scottie. My fate. He’s standing next to the gasman. He’s a part of me, like my flesh, but I don’t know how that happened. I think of washing the clothes he’s wearing: the gray sweatpants with the drawstring that kept getting lost until I tied three knots in the end, the black T-shirt with the name of some cheesy nightclub written in flaking red paint. I always wash his clothes. He never washes mine. His clothes are always of soft cotton, often frayed. They are loose, especially now that he’s back on drugs. They smell like Downy and cigarette smoke, and when he’s pressed against me on the couch I can feel his bones through the softness. He’s always warm. When I hold him I get sleepy and sometimes I want to take a long nap with him and never be apart.

“Hey Scottie!” I shout. “I’ve got to get to work! I’m late!”

“Huh?” Scottie yells back. “No. No way, you can’t go.” He looks at me like I’m crazy. “The cops are coming and you have to give a statement and all that.”

Scottie doesn’t know about anything. He doesn’t know about the whoosh of warm air that almost set me free and left him alone. He’s just standing there waiting with the gas man, waiting for the cops, waiting for his regular life to start back up so he can move to a new shitty apartment on another filthy block, so he can keep shooting dope and be with me.

Scottie comes over and cups my face with his hands. His eyes are level with mine. “Aw’ babe,” he says. “You’re scared. I know you’re thinking how you could have come home a few minutes earlier and gone upstairs and blown up.”

I chuckle and a little snot comes out my nose. I never for a second thought I’d blow up. This block and this life will always be the same. I move my face out of Scottie’s hand and wipe my nose on my sleeve.

“We’re going to get through this,” he says. He hugs me and I realize he thought from the snot that I was starting to cry. I pull back and look at him.

I can’t deny that I love Scottie. In the almost year we’ve been together, I’ve become so used to him, all his ways. Even though I know I’m not meant to spend my life with him, leaving him will be hard.

I decide I should call the store and tell them I’m not coming in this afternoon. I’ll take Scottie’s cell and go around the corner to call. That way I can get something to eat. When I tell Scottie, he peels a twenty off a thick roll of bills in his pocket.

“Here babe,” he says and kisses me on the lips. “Get whatever you want.” I know he likes the gasman seeing him give me money, even though in reality he owes me because lately I pay all the bills. His money goes to heroin. I wave goodbye and Scottie goes back to talk to the gasman. I start walking away and turn back to look at them. Scottie looks so young next to the gasman, like a high school kid with his low-slung sneakers attached like big erasers. He doesn’t look like the boyfriend I thought I’d have at twenty-seven.

As I walk down the street to the 7-11, I smell cat piss and rotten meat. Maybe Scottie and I could work it out if we lived someplace better. This neighborhood is dragging us down. Maybe these smells and this garbage made Scottie start getting high again.

I know I’m pathetic. I’m selling out. I guess it’s the way I am. I take a lousy situation and make the best of it. I kind of hate myself when I see a picture of Scottie and me with a little house outside the city where I have a garden, of all things, and a hose outside so Scottie can wash the cab himself.

When I turn the corner away from my building, away from Scottie, there’s a deep rumble in the ground, and the sound of the explosion makes my heart thump wild and hard. I feel it in my stomach and out through my arms and legs. I stop right there on the sidewalk and listen for something else: Scottie yelling for me, my cat screaming as he flies through the window, the sound of car alarms going off for blocks. I hear none of these things, just my own heart beating in my ears, and I’m thinking there’s no apartment. I don’t live with Scottie anymore. Something has changed, really and finally, and even though I did nothing to deserve it, I am free. It was easy.

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Julie Odell is an assistant professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia, where she is a member of the creative writing faculty. She is the faculty advisor of the award-winning student magazine Limited Editions. She has published short stories in the Berkeley Fiction Review and the Crab Creek Review, and is the recipient of a 2004 MacDowell Colony fellowship.

Alberta likes to walk the Italian Market and look at the fish. She thinks they watch as the people pass, awareness lingering in the black marbles of their eyes, kept cool and alive by the boxes of ice in which they sleep. She smiles at the sturgeon and stickleback to let them know she knows.

When we get back to Catherine Street, the Vietnamese couple are having sex in the apartment under ours. Their passion increases as the temperature rises, and with the sun blazing hard at 92-degrees, they can’t seem to keep their hands off of each other. The woman’s moans echo up the chimney and pour out of our fireplace.

Alberta lies across the bed and watches me undress. Her gaze follows as I shed my underwear and stand next to her, breathing deeply. I fall forward, into her smell of limes and grass.
When I wake, Alberta is crying, fingering the glass fox on our night stand. I lean close and push the hair off the curl of her ear.
“I dreamt I left you,” she says.
“You are leaving me,” I answer.
She nods.

Alone, I make coffee and stand next to the fire escape, slick with sweat in the twilight. A little girl sits on her step as an old man walks his dachshund along the curb. From the roofs and telephone wires, the birds sing their last songs.

The next morning, I stroll the market until I see Alberta coming toward me.
“How was Susan’s?” I say.
She palms the back of her neck. “Her couch gave me a crick.” In a brown bag she carries rhubarb and wine. “You knew I’d be walking here?”
“Of course.”

In the heat of the afternoon, the Vietnamese couple fights, their curses rattling in my fireplace. Then there’s the clap of a hand on damp skin. “Don’t hit me,” he says, and she answers, “Why shouldn’t I?”

Alberta comes over later that week and we have sex in the shower. It’s tremendously hot as the steam creeps around our legs and over the wings of her shoulders. When we’re finished, we look at each other and blink.

“I found your bracelet under the couch,” I say to her on the phone. I pretend to admire it on my wrist, the cherry garnets and opal.

Alberta breathes into the receiver. “So that’s where it was.”

By August, the last of her clothes are gone and all of her records—except for the one I hide from her. Time takes a cigarette, says Bowie. The old man walks his dog, the little girl sits, as the street lights fill the street with light.

 

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Joseph lives in Baltimore. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, both online and in print. For links to more of his work, his image and word pieces, and other features, click here.