A Parallel Life (7 page)

“What do you mean?” There was a sudden buzzing inside my skull as if he'd touched a switch. His voice seemed to be coming from a distant planet and yet I could smell his breath, the onions he'd had for lunch before the vodka.

“I wasn't sure. I don't think she was sure. She talked about me getting a gun for her—a pistol—or maybe a shotgun. She talked about how sometimes with a pistol you could miss, even if you held it in your mouth—miss and then be a vegetable but not dead. She talked about poison. I told her that I couldn't even listen to her talk this way, that I hoped she wasn't really serious. I begged her not to ask me to help her.”

I held onto the counter as he tightened his grip. His
right knee, the bad one, buckled, and he tilted like a toy. Using my arm, he pulled himself up. “She said that if I loved her, I'd put a pillow over her face. ‘I love you, Roxie,' I told her, ‘I'll be here for you. I'll try to see that you don't have any pain, but I can't help you die.' ” His fingers bit into my arm. He licked his lips.

His eyes were having a hard time focusing, shifting from the memory inside his head to me standing in front of him. A twitch on the left side of his face followed each shift. “She turned away from me and looked at the wallpaper. It's a print paper with roses all over the wall. Big fucking cabbage roses. We put the paper up together when we first moved into the house. She stared at the damn roses and wouldn't look at me anymore, as if I wasn't worth looking at. She just stared—all slumped over, and I knew I'd failed her again.”

“Don't Jack,” I whispered. “Don't tell me any more.”

“Shut up,” he said. His hand was a tourniquet on my arm. “I mean I've just failed her over and over and over. Finally, minutes later, she said, ‘It's okay, Jack.' The way she said it made my heart sink. ‘It's okay,' she said, dismissing me, you know, like one of the kids in her class who couldn't ever get things right. ‘You do what you have to, Jack.' ”

“I don't want to be here,” I said. I was sweating but beneath the sweat my skin was icy.

“I understand, Ellen. But I need company now. I don't want to be alone now.”

“Go back to her Jack. Go back to Roxie.”

“I can't. Not now. She won't have me now. I need to be with someone. You're in this, too.”

“No.” I shook my head and tore away from him and went to the living room and knelt by the broken glass.
Gingerly, I began picking up the bright slivers, the shards. “No. I'm on the outside, Jack. I'm not in that part of your life, Jack. Did you forget that?”

“She knows about you. You're involved.”

“If it hadn't been me it would have been someone else, and you know it.” I had the pieces of glass resting in the palm of my hand. I got up and went to the wastebasket but he grabbed my wrist.

“Do you know what she's doing at this very moment?” he asked, holding my wrist so I couldn't drop the glass. I swayed and shook my head. “She asked me to leave the house. She's been saving pills. All this time in the hospital, they've been bringing her two pills, she only takes one and saves the other.”

“Let me go.” I hadn't meant to scream but I heard my voice echo back from the hard gray walls. I twisted away and the glass spun from my hand. His face looking into mine was fierce. Fierce and without recognition. His odd, almost pupilless eyes swam in their whites. His tan was like a filthy mask. He seemed to grow taller, become attentuated, and in an odd way almost purified by his rage. I ran out into the hall and down the steps onto the sidewalk where the sudden May sunlight wiped out the world.

I forgot that I had a car. When I arrived at my mother's apartment, I was shivering and my teeth were chattering. She let me in without a word and I fell onto her couch. “I'm sick,” I said. “You have to take care of me.”

“What do you mean, you're sick?” She frowned and stayed by the door, leaving it open as if there was a chance that I'd need to bolt as quickly as I'd come in.

“I think I have some kind of flu. I just want to rest.”

“You have a home, you know. Why aren't you there?”

“I'm shivering, Mother. Let me stay here.”

She stayed by the door keeping her distance from me. “I just put fresh sheets on my bed. Go on in there.”

Her eyes had gone to my skirt. “You're bleeding,” she said.

I looked down and saw that there was a cut in the palm of my hand. Streaks of blood smeared across my skirt. “It's just a little cut,” I said. “Broken glass.”

I stayed in her bed sliding in and out of sleep. Perhaps I really did have a flu. From time to time outside of the door I heard voices. Bill came in and sat by me, and then a doctor, a friend he played tennis with, arrived to examine me. The girls whispered to me and left and came back with flowers they'd picked. My father came in and held my hand, which someone had bandaged. My mother was sitting beside me when I opened my eyes the next time. Then I slept.

My mother had a cup of tea on a tray on the bedside table. I pulled myself up and let her arrange pillows so I could sit. Her face looked different. There was an odd lopsided smile now. A single lamp on the nightstand lit the room. Beyond the curtains, a street light created a false moon. I was a little girl again. I'd returned home after a long time. I could remember another life in between then and now but it seemed blurred like a scene glimpsed through the window of a racing train.

“Your father and I are having lunch together tomorrow,” she said, bending over me with the tray.

“Oh, Mother,” I said. I must have wailed or moaned the words, because she stood up and gave me a disturbed,
frightened look. “Mother, don't get led into all of that stuff again. He's not going to change. Don't get your hopes up,” I said.

She continued to stand there with the tray in her hand but her face relaxed, and the smile—lopsided and guileless, amazingly guileless—returned. “I know that. I'm not expecting miracles. It will just be nice to talk to him again after all these years. We're not married anymore.”

“As long as you understand that,” I said. I let her place the tray on my lap. The tea was strong and bitter. There was a piece of toast too and I ate that with her standing beside the bed watching my every bite.

“Do you want me to roll the television in here and we could watch together?” she asked when I'd finished.

“No. I think I'll rest again.” I was as exhausted from eating as if I'd climbed a mountain. She left the door slightly open and I heard the sound of television voices and then the theme of the late news show and then voices again and finally the weather for the next day, then quiet. I must have slept again but I woke to the sound of my mother's voice—chanting, rhythmic, rising, and falling—and I recognized the words. She was saying the rosary.

“Are you still on the Sorrowful Mysteries?” I asked when she came in later.

“Yes,” she said, “but I see the possibility of moving on to the Joyful now.”

“And from there to the Glorious?”

“I don't believe in rushing things,” she said and closed the door.

My mother is a better person than I had believed. She has allowed my father to make peace with her. They've had lunch twice now, and although I know they will never
be together again, they appear to have rediscovered something in the other that had been mislaid. Some kinds of change, it seems, are possible after all.

On the morning I went back to work, I read the obituary for Roxanne Muller Duggan. She was forty-one years old. There would be no service. Donations could be made in her memory to the Walnut Grove Science Education Program.

That same morning, I talked to Ben Michaelson and we agreed to exchange shifts so that he could take classes in the afternoon. I would lunch from noon to one and be home when Bill returned. Then I went to Section 635—Gardening—and gathered a stack of books for my book sack.

On my lunch break I took a walk along the creek in a nearby park. It was one of those sun-choked late-May days, somnolent with a sense of spring fulfilled, that grants its own form of grace. I am sure that it had never occurred to Bill that I might have another life, and I have decided that he must not find out. I hope for the best. We don't need to know everything.

I
T WAS THE DAY
the Murphy's Shetland pony Fiesta broke down Tilly Worth's garden fence and ate all the Kentucky Wonders as well as the marijuana plants Tilly grew to supplement her Social Security, the day Walt Tarver found two women making love in his barn, and the day the Polonius brothers' compost pile caught fire and the fire truck broke an axle on the road up to put it out. It was the loveliest day of the year, the longest sweetest day, the day when summer is still a new idea, and it was the day Rita Tooley wound up with two lovers and couldn't make up her mind.

Neither of the men was perfect. But Rita wasn't the sort to mind. She bought her clothes in the flea market, and she fastened her ideas together with the happy glue of coincidence. She liked cups with chips, and men with flaws. Rita was beautiful but no beauty. She was small and a bit heavy. Her hair was abundant but wild, and her smile wide but off center. Her eyes were innocent of meaness and she cooked like an angel.

On solstice morning Rita woke in her bed with Joe beside her. She always woke with the first light and often envied Joe's ability to sleep until roused. But this morning she envied no one. A mockingbird had been rehearsing its arias for hours, and beside her Joe snored gently, breaking his own rhythms with little grunts and murmurs. She moved closer to him and put her face barely an inch from his and let his breath flow onto it. Joe was the only man
she had ever slept with whose breath was sweet in the morning.

It would be a perfect day. She would serve breakfast in her little cafe downstairs to the tourists who came through town on their way to the ocean and then she would serve lunch to others who were late going or early returning and then she would close and let those who wanted dinner go to one of the big places farther along. Then she would pack a basket and she and Joe would drive to a ridge and drink wine and eat cold chicken and salmon and fresh bread and summer tomatoes and watch the last light dissolve into the ocean.

This, however, was not to be.

For Beck was on his way, even at that moment, in the old silver Mercedes he'd won in a card game the day before in Reno. Beck had been away at a place with the resortlike name of Deer Lodge. It had been a mix-up, he'd said all along, a mix-up having something to do with a transportation problem and with finding that the truck he was driving had been filled with freezers and televisions acquired in irregular ways. And because he was Beck, he believed his own story and was on his way back to Rita, who he knew would believe it, too. He hadn't called her or written her in the last year because Rita wasn't the sort of person you called or wrote if things weren't perfectly fine. With Rita you needed a face-to-face. After this face-to-face he was sure things would be right once more.

“Would you like bacon or sausage with your eggs?” Rita asked Walt Tarver, though she knew that he always
took sausage. She also knew that he always wanted to order and never tolerated assumptions being made on his behalf. He owned almost everything in the area and he wasn't one of those to whom Rita could ask, “The regular this morning?” As she wrote down Walt's order, she looked up and smiled good-bye to Joe, who was leaving the kitchen with his lunch bag and Thermos for another day of nailing and sawing on a fancy house that some city people were building on the old Bernard place.

Then, not a minute later, she got to smile at Joe again as he came back in. “Can I use your car today?” he asked, flashing his two rows of peerless human porcelain. “I'm out of gas and too late to get some.”

“Yes, but be sure you leave me your keys.”

“You got it,” he said and bent to kiss her, letting her smell his mint toothpaste and lime shaving cream, the flowery soap and strawberry shampoo and a bit of Joe musk beneath it all—so much scent that she became dizzy with pleasure and wild with longing for him to return so she could bury her face in the presence of him.

And Beck was on his way, driving fast and eating an early apple he'd borrowed from a tree on the roadside. He was driving fast, but not so fast that he didn't notice, as he headed down the grade into the little valley called Tarver's Crossing that his own 1957 Volkswagen was coming up toward him. It was the car he'd been given by a friend in lieu of a small debt, the car he'd loaned to Rita over a year ago when her car threw a rod. And there it was, passing him on its way up as he was on the way down, driven not by Rita but by someone entirely different—driven by a man.

I wonder who that son-of-a-bitch is, Beck asked himself without rancor as he tossed the apple core out of the window—and for the first time it occurred to him that in the space of a year things might have changed. This idea disturbed him so much that when he got to town he decided to take time just to drive by the Mermaid Cafe—Rita's place—and then to drive around all six square blocks of Tarver's Crossing to satisfy himself that nothing had gone on without his knowledge.

After completing this loop to his satisfaction, he stopped in at the Manhood Tavern for a visit with Charlie Manhood—and a beer, though he normally didn't drink before evening.

“Beck, you're in town!” Charlie said.

“Give me something on tap,” Beck said. “I see that things have stayed the same—more or less.” And he raised the glass of beer that Charlie slid his way, toasting the morning regulars at the other end—the Polonius brothers and a Basque whose name Beck could never remember. All three, stiffened by age, seemed more like taxidermic exhibits than men, but they managed to raise their glasses, which glinted in the dusty shafts of morning light.