After the People Lights Have Gone Off (27 page)

If it was just a brownish purple discoloration, a bruise almost, I wouldn’t have seen it, of course.

But it was coarse, too. Like a mole that was just suddenly and unaccountably there.

I bent over as far as I could, studied it.

Not a perfect circle. Obloid, colored unevenly. No hair.

The only thing I’d been pressed up against though, it had been the ladder, right?

Right.

A splinter? Some chemical that came through my pants?

For the rest of the day and all through dinner, each time I thought Kelly wasn’t looking—men don’t give women enough credit in these matters, I know—I’d slip my hand down the front of my pants, rub that patch of skin, interrogating it with my fingertips.

That night, then, after wine that was supposed to keep us both down, I woke to the bedroom door open.

My hand went immediately to the rough spot in my groin, and my breath shallowed out.

Instead of getting up, I counted seconds.

From before, I knew Kelly would take just shy of three minutes to make her sleep round, her mermaid trip, looking for what shore I couldn’t guess.

Two-hundred and twenty seconds later, I looked over to the bathroom door, even though the light was off in there, and then, from Kelly’s side of the bed, her wheelchair creaked.

Not the rubber-on-wood creak I knew so well, but the creak of something pushing on the frame, making the hinges that never moved move.

I pulled my right hand from my underwear, swallowed, and looked over.

The wheelchair was definitely moving.

I shook my head no, please, and then Kelly rose beside it, pulling herself back up onto the bed, her hair a black shroud, her left arm reaching all the way across, almost to me.

And then her right.

She pulled herself up, wound herself into the sheets, and never woke up.

The blemish on my hip was throbbing, my fingertips slippery from touching it.

If I cried quietly down the back of my throat, it was a perfectly natural response.

The next morning, not even remotely aware I’d slept, there was another blotch of skin on my left hip. Like somebody had cut me down the middle in the night, licked my spot, and folded me over, pressing until the spot twinned itself.

•

“Your father wants to buy the house,” I told Kelly over breakfast. Mostly because this wasn’t a sit-com. Because the audience was yelling at me not to lie, that that always comes back on you.

She looked up to me, to be sure she’d heard right.

“For your birthday,” I added. “He says he can build another. You know, to suit.”

She studied me, studied me.

“‘To suit,’” she repeated.

I dug deeper, deeper.

“He says this one’ll be a good investment, he has somebody lined up. That another project will keep him busy. That he wants to do it.”

“But—but this is our house,” she said, finally. “Our home.”

“One half’s mine, one half’s yours,” I said, shrugging, slurping, doing everything I could to deflect attention. “Add it up, it’s ours. But it’s not…it’s not ours together, yeah?”

“You don’t like it?”

“I love it.”

She was staring at me now.

Our names were traced in a rough heart in the foundation at the northwest corner, under the living room.

Her spinal column was in the foyer.

“Happy birthday,” she said, just that.

I read it approximately six thousand different ways, up in my office hours later.

I was sitting in the upstairs wheelchair, too. For no reason I could explain. I think maybe because I wanted to be sure it stayed in place. That it wouldn’t sneak up behind me.

The back was too short for me, but my palms, they fell perfectly to the tops of the handrims.

It kept my hands out of the front of my pants, I mean.

The blotches, the moles, the guilt cancers, the whatever-they-weres, they were seeping, now. The rough skin cracking open.

I wanted to laugh, needed to cry.

According to my email and phone, I was out of the office.

It was true enough.

I rolled back and forth, the carpet absorbing the sound.

What I couldn’t get away from in my head, it was Kelly’s legs. The tops of her knees.

After breakfast, I’d faked a coffee spill (waiting until it was definitely not hot), had finally seen them.

The skin was pink, fresh, unmarred.

Had I just dreamed the other night, then?

Was that why the blood was gone from the kitchen floor? Because it had never been there?

The blood from my nose, on the threshold, I understood what had happened to it: raccoons, coyotes, whatever will lap up that kind of taste after the people lights have gone off.

But the kitchen, the mess there, it being gone only made sense if I’d dreamed it. Even though dreams are stupid.

Guilt, though: could that kickstart some indictment of a movie while I slept, maybe? If I thought about something long enough, wouldn’t it eventually bubble up to the surface in the night? Was I wrong about how dreams worked? Was this my punishment for not respecting them?

Except—except Kelly’s mom, whatever the story was there. And her rising on her side of the bed the night before, rising so steadily I thought at first it was by her own leg power, or that there was a Peter Pan hook in the meat of her back, drawing her up, up.

“The house,” I said to myself, rolling back and forth in the chair, faster and faster, the loft never quite leaving my sight.

It had…I don’t know. It was doing something. To me. Just by being there.

There was a reason nobody had built here, right? Like, like that same way when the big bridge finally collapses on the weekday morning, there’s fewer cars on it than usual? Because people know, down at some level they don’t acknowledge, are too sophisticated to acknowledge.

We should have stayed in town. We aren’t country people.

Or—what if I could trade, right?

The thought calmed me.

Maybe this was just a negotiation.

I looked up to the loft, directly into its slithery, tax-form darkness, and pictured myself ducking the roof, stepping over that stout railing. Plummeting down like should have happened in the first place, my back cracking into the finial at the end of the banister.

I’d be making up, I’d be evening things out.

Except I’m not that stupid, am I?

I rolled over to the top of the stairs, dangled my feet over that crashing fall then nudged forward and back, coming closer to the lip each time. The deal I was making, and not leaving myself time to back away from, or think myself out of, was, if this was what the house wanted, then all it had to do was tell me. All it had to do was let me misjudge once. I wouldn’t fight it, would just let gravity have me, would go peaceful to my hall in the hospital, then do my physical therapy like I was supposed to.

A negotiation, yes.

I rocked forward, back, came closer, and just when I felt my right wheel going past that point of no return, somebody grabbed me from behind, hauled me back.

Just going on instinct, I both let myself be saved and leaned out, away from the stomach of whoever this was, or wasn’t.

This was the message, though: don’t.

I breathed in, nodded, and threw up down the front of my shirt, didn’t turn my head when the ladder behind me creaked with the weight of some body climbing it.

•

Another shower, this one longer, hotter, steamier. Like there’s another world on the other side of it all. Kelly calling to me from the bedroom but I still can’t make words, am still unpacking what happened upstairs.

The more I think about it, the more it was like I was seeing myself from the side when it happened: me, normal, just normal, in a wheelchair, my elbows cocked back against the handrims, and, behind me, clothed in darkness, a standing-up version of Kelly. Kelly as she should have been. Kelly as she’d been trapped. Like the impact with that concrete floor under the foyer tile, it had split her in two, like her former self had stood up from it in the swirling sawdust, looked around, and come back upstairs.

To me.

“Okay,” Kelly tells me over our late lunch, my hair still wet, skin puckered. “My dad, the deal. The gift.”

I look up to her, and all around her.

“Really?” I say. “Why? We don’t have to. I don’t want to make you.”

“Just one more night,” she says. “We’ll call him in the morning. Together.”

I smile, take a bite, say it in my head: Oh.

We’re talking in code, then.

One more night.

Of course. Yes. Naturally.

One more night.

I can find out that Kelly hasn’t been sleepwalking at all, that I’ve been dragging her around and around the house by her hair. I can go out back, find some dilapidated old burial site, some clear indication that this was the wrong property. There can be shades of hanged men from the big tree. I can call her father, let him whisper things to me about his dead wife, and how she was just declared dead, how she found a way through. I can take a pickaxe, find our names in the concrete, and spit blood into that fingerwide heart framing them, wait for the night animals to come apply their tongues to it.

I can go hand over hand up into the loft one last time.

I can punch the ancient buttons on my hips in the perfect sequence, the secret order, so that wet new legs fold out, giving me four legs now, so I can carry Kelly safely up and down the stairs, however many times she wants. Forever and ever, please.

That’s all I ask. All I need.

“What?” Kelly says to me, her fork of grilled cheese—that’s how she eats it—halfway to her mouth, the fork not even trembling.

“I love you,” I tell her.

She appraises me. Regards me.

“You’re just saying that because I’m so beautiful. So athletic.”

“I do.”

She grins into her plate, completes the bite, runs the dishes under the water and I’m sitting there after she’s wheeled out.

One more night.

Maybe we should order chicken. Enough for three. You, me, and this house.

Or maybe we are the chicken.

•

I lose the rest of the day. Like I’m asleep, but not.

What I’m doing is maintenance. Re-seating this flange behind the toilet in her bathroom, and packing steel wool behind it against the mice. Tightening the screws in the top hinge of the heavy door between the living room and the kitchen, that I never think to close. Testing the float on the sump pump, then testing it again, giving it a hair trigger.

Instead of retreating up to my aerie to cap off the day’s work, I take a position on the couch by Kelly. It doesn’t make her nervous—I have done this before—but I can sense a hesitation in her fingers, on the remote. Like she wants to pick the perfect show. Not scare me away.

When she has to get up, she uses her chair, and I insist on pausing the show until she’s back.

Above us, probably standing in my darkened study, her hands gripping the railing of the loft, is the other. She’s watching us with deer eyes.

I don’t even have to look up there. I know. But I’m no actor. Each time I lick my lips, each time I reposition the throw pillow I always hug to my chest while watching television, it feels mechanical.

By bedtime, I’m exhausted.

“What’s with you tonight?” Kelly says, rolling in from the bathroom in her old nightgown, a touch of toothpaste at the left corner of her mouth.

The oval mirrors above our sinks, they’re too tall for her. I keep thinking that those fancy chains they hang on, I could just lengthen the chain on her side, so that the mirror would lean out from the wall more, like looking down at her. So she could look back up into it.

Because of stray toothpaste on her lip, though?

Does that really matter?

And what if it fell over onto her? What if she fell up into it?

What’s with me, she’s asking.

“You,” I tell her, then brave the kitchen in the dark, return with my back so straight, nearly a whole bottle of wine split between two oversize glasses. The priest with the sacrament.

We toast each other. This life. Us.

I picture carrying her waifish form upstairs. Never looking back. Her arms circling my neck. I go back to that Friday I smuggled her out of work a lifetime ago, and, stepping over the threshold of the elevator with her, I look down this time, into that crack between worlds, into that empty chute, that blackness. All the open space.

Something looks back.

Maybe that’s where it started. Maybe it’s been starting forever.

I still don’t have a lighter in my car.

Earlier, still trying to force a trade, trying to make this into a business transaction, I sat out in my car longer than I had to, the engine idling, and finally licked my finger, slipped it into that perfect hole in the dash.

Nothing.

I opened my eyes on the same world. To the face of the house.

“Mark?” Kelly asks, doing her awkward dismount up into the bed. I know not to help.

“Should we go upstairs?” I say, my voice thready.

“Upstairs?” she says, settling into the sheets.

“Like before.”

“You’re different,” she says.

“You’re different,” I say back, our call and response from the old days, but it comes out all wrong. I see it flicker across her face.

She tilts her glass back, sips just to hide the new vulnerability in her eyes.

“Remember that first night?” I ask.

“The kitchen,” she says, an impish grin creeping in. “The breakfast nook.”

“The future,” I say.

“Not this one,” she corrects.

“Exactly this one,” I tell her. “Any future with you, you know that.”

“I don’t want to sell.”

“I know.”

We smile in different directions. I study the walls and the corners, the furniture and the shadows.

“You’re scared,” she tells me.

“Just something I saw on tv earlier.”

“The cooking thing?”

“A lot earlier. When I was a kid.”

“But—you’re okay, here? Tell me.”