Everything (22 page)

* * *

A beer then. He opens it and regards the work on his drawing table, a pencil sketch of her face. He hasn’t seen her in a month but he can’t seem to stop himself. It’s a little obsessive, he knows it—poking the sore place, the absence, over and over again until it burns—but it’s also become a kind of meditation. Always the same face but never the same face twice. Like weather, the little currents of feeling that play over her features, a little happy, a little annoyed, the infinite fine gradations of feeling and all mixed together. This one, maybe, is a memory of the ferry ride to the island: happy and excited, the sea breeze stirring up her blood, but a little fearful, doubtful …. It was just easier to draw than to put into words, because the words made everything separate, like they were different things, but on her face they were just one complicated feeling all together. The face: where the inner person, the stranger, unknowable, surfaced a little into the world. It was all there, you just had to know how to look.

Maybe if he stands across the street, he might see her through the window.

Maybe she’s back in Seattle already.

Between the cell phone, the text message, the Internet and instant messaging, it’s almost harder to stay out of touch than it is to keep in contact. It requires an act of the will. Edgar’s will works only intermittently. She has already disappeared from Facebook. The last contact, a text message he sent her at three in the morning,
Where are you?
and her wan reply,
I’m here
.

He understands that he needs to see her.

* * *

He understands that he has no excuse. He’s just going. Somewhere. Out. The other side of the door. He’ll find a way to explain to Amy later, or he won’t.

Fortunately he’s wearing waterproof hiking boots already, his winter uniform, has his wool coat at the ready and his stocking cap. He leaves the beer on the bookcase by the door and starts off into the milky afternoon, the quiet, settled snow. He turns back, when he reaches the alley, and sees that the snow has almost erased his footprints. Erase, he thinks. Make it new again. Make it clean.

And so, when RL finally gets back home
, the last hard slog from Bonner through town, a dozen accidents on the snow-slick freeway and the flashing lights through the pelting snow—emergency, emergency—and then the crawl across the university district with insane hippie bicyclists invisible in the snow and up the long hill, he is expecting nothing, instead finds every window lit, a strange Prius in the driveway, or is it June’s? And who is that other head in the living room window?

All in dreams he takes his suitcase from behind the seat where it had warmed by the heater and smells the coconut aroma of sunblock. All in a day. The world seems a small and senseless place and RL has no place in it. But at least he is home, home at last.

* * *

The conversation just drops off the table when he walks through the door. And what the hell. Edgar.

June says, Welcome home, hello.

Layla says, How was Mexico?

Edgar doesn’t say anything at all.

RL looks from face to face in a dream. All in a circle without him.

What is it? RL asks. What’s happening?

They look from face to face, all at one another and none of them at him. Finally June turns to him.

You look exhausted, she says.

Please, RL says. Is someone dead? Who’s dead?

No one has died, June says. Nothing terrible has happened.

Please, RL says, and looks at Edgar, his employee, for Christ sake, he has to tell him, takes a step to take Edgar by the shirtfront and shake the fact out of him, whatever it is.

No one is in the hospital, June says.

Layla says, Sit down. Sit down before you fall down.

I’m all right.

* * *

You look like your own ghost, his daughter says. Sit down.

He doesn’t want to. But he does anyway, takes a place at the kitchen table. June takes a place there, too, and Layla brings him a glass of water, and then sits, too. Edgar says, I really have to go.

No, Layla says. Stay.

Edgar looks fearfully from her face to RL’s and back but he obeys. Takes a place at the table. Like poker, RL thinks, the four of them sitting around. Like Indian poker, he thinks, where everybody but you knows what you’ve got.

I’m going to have a baby, Layla says. That’s all.

The news hits him in his body, his belly, the same place Betsy hurt him. He has failed. The others are all looking at him and RL feels naked in their gaze, helpless. This was why he is here, the whole point of him is to take care of her, to protect her. In this he had failed. In all their eyes.

Now the women were taking care of him. They looked at him with kindness and concern. More than he could bear.

Then looked at Edgar, and understood why he was present. Edgar wouldn’t meet his eye.

The two of you, he said, aiming his head at Layla, Edgar, back to Layla.

For a while now, Layla said.

* * *

All this brisk feminine truth-telling. RL didn’t want any more of it. He longed for his illusions—that he was happy, that he was loved, that he was taking care of his people, that he even knew his people. He looked from face to face and knew that it was a lie. A lie that he loved. A series of lies.

And you, he thinks, turning to Edgar, who still won’t meet his eye: What about you, Edgar?

What have you got to say for yourself? RL asks him.

Not much.

What does your wife think?

That got a rise out of him. RL sees this with some small satisfaction.

Amy doesn’t know. I don’t think she knows.

Are you going to tell her?

I don’t know what I’m going to do, Robert. I really don’t. I’m going to go, I think.

He turns to June, who is clearly running the show. He asks, Is that all right? I was supposed to be home a while ago.

No, go.

RL watches him seek out Layla’s eyes but she won’t give them to him. He has hurt her, RL sees. Hurt his daughter.

Go, Layla tries to tell him
. Go now. She tries to stare him out the door, but something fatal lingers. Edgar! Her poor little heart is full of fear and pounding. Go!

This awful calm. Nothing is happening. Everything is about to.

I love you, she thinks. Then whispers it, not quite aloud, the way she used to say her prayers: I love you.

And June the restraining hand
on his forearm and he notices, she’s touching him, and for a moment it might work, he might stop but he doesn’t stop.

And Edgar, out in the flurrying
swirling snow full dark and fat individual flakes in the porch light, he is out and alone with a feeling of escape. Not just from RL but from the women, too, and from the impossibility. From himself, perhaps. A last backward glance before he steps into a run, toward home, that momentary hesitation …

And just then the door opens outward and RL through it in a rhino charge that carries him to Edgar in one motion and then both of them down and scrambling in the wet snow. Someone is hitting Edgar in the stomach. A taste of blood in his mouth and his mind a blank all confusion and the women watching from the porch and Edgar wants no part of this. He stands—he tries to stand—the snow slips from under his feet and RL hits him in the face. Blood and snot spatter across the white snow and enough, Edgar thinks, is enough.

* * *

RL is standing back to admire the effect of his punch, blood in the porch light, blood on the snow, when Edgar stands him up with a short chop punch to the Adam’s apple and then six punches to his big soft gut. RL goes down like a bag of shit. Edgar kicks him in the side of his head and he goes out. This last is extra. Edgar never meant to but his blood is up, he’s blind with it.

Layla cries out at the kick, animal, something short and sharp torn from her.

That’s enough, says June.

Then it’s over. Blood courses down the front of his shirt and RL lies still in the snow. Edgar stands there breathing. June comes and kneels next to RL in the snow.

Is he … says Edgar.

Get out of here, says Layla. Just go.

Sill he hesitates.

I’ll call the cops, Layla says. I will.

He looks at her but he’s just dead. He turns to go, turns back to see, but there is nothing here for him, no warmth, no light, no curiosity. Some things you don’t recover from, he thinks. Some things just end. He starts into the darkness, starts to run, because it’s too cold to walk, the blood still up in him, his face wet with it. The taste of blood in his mouth. This end of things, he thinks. Faster.

After: RL lying in his big empty bed
. He must have slept for a little while but now he’s wide awake. It’s dark outside the windows, a little light coming through under the closed door. The wind whistles in the eaves of the house. Sometimes he hears the women moving quietly on the floor below, trying not to bother him, not to wake him. Their low voices, soft movements.

Funereal, he thinks.

This end of things.

And where from here? He saw it in his daughter’s face, in June’s face: they were done with him. Disgusted. He wasn’t particularly fond of himself, either, not just at this moment. His windpipe was hot and sore, his gut. A big black eye. A white-light headache. No
more than he deserved, RL supposed. What next? But there was only endurance, a blank place, a series of days to get through.

Layla and her baby. What to even feel.

A hope and a light that fades quickly to nothing. She won’t keep it, she couldn’t. In the end it will just be another injury, a bad experience, keep it in a box to keep the smell down. The last years of his marriage to Dawn. Maybe Betsy, soon enough. The things that started out in love and light and hope and then became just nothing, or worse than nothing. He’s acted badly with Dawn, badly with Edgar. Ashes, rust, a taste of pennies in his mouth. Railroad dirt that smells like petroleum. Inside he feels like the edge of town that trails off into tank farms and trailer parks and switching yards, a wilderness of cold steel. Bits of broken glass shining in the gravel and low-hanging power lines overhead, not even hell but just abandoned, uncared for. What he’s made of himself. Nobody made this but himself. This would not kill him, he knew that, he was too stubborn and stupid for suicide and he wouldn’t drink himself to death, he was almost sure. He hadn’t at the end of things with Dawn. But he had Layla then, Layla to take care of, the love of a child to see him through. What would sustain him now?

RL is being dramatic. He still has Layla to look after.

Not the same, though, not the daily business of school and breakfast. She’s making her own mistakes now. And RL’s job is to let go, not to hold on. And she has seen him weak, and seen him stupid, and violent. He feels his face flush in the dark, though there is no one to be embarrassed in front of. He’s alone now, in a dark room, awake and burning with shame. Alone.

* * *

Alone; or so it seems.

It takes him a minute to realize that the door is open an inch, a crack of light dim but real in the dark bedroom, one of the women standing there, watching him. Which one? and how long? He thought for a moment that he might have been asleep, but no. Just tied up in his own self-pity and misery.

He raises himself on one elbow to see who it is.

June enters the bedroom, shuts the door behind her with a solid quiet click, comes to his bed and lies down next to him, not touching. The far side of the bed, and it’s a big bed, a California king. Each of them lies on their back, pillow under their head, eyes toward the ceiling, breathing.

I have certainly made a mess of things, June says.

RL considers this and says, Not more than me.

No, June says. Not more than you. But a mess anyway. All this money and nowhere to go.

RL stares at the dark ceiling, each of them alone, adrift. Nap time, he thinks, remembering afternoons in the dim recesses of his own childhood, the sound of blue jeans turning in the dryer downstairs, the smell of ironing.

You can stay here, he finally says. As long as you want to.

Thank you.

* * *

No, I mean it, RL says. Layla loves you. And God knows I could use the help.

I’ve been thinking about it, June says; and something in her voice surprises him, some new emotion or sound, he can’t put his finger on it.

She says, This has to stop, you know? I’ve been thinking about it. It’s just too much sadness, too much confusion. You can’t put one day on top of the next to save your life. And I’m no better. I’m used to thinking of myself as better off, but I’m not. Just this whirlwind. It has to stop.

The whirlwind
, RL thinks.
Stuck in the motherfucking vortex
.

He says, I know. But what can we do?

I’ve been thinking about this, June says. Then, to his great surprise, she laces her own small cold hand into his.

RL begins to weep. She doesn’t see.

We take care of each other, she says. We try.

RL holds onto her hand as he waits until his weakness passes and it is safe to talk again. A minute that stretches into three or four. Chicken and dumplings, says a voice in his head. Chicken and dumplings, chicken and dumplings, chicken and dumplings. Around and around and finally it slowly fades.

Can you just do that? he asks. Can you just try and then make something happen?

* * *

That I do not know, June says.

I can’t do worse, he says.

We’ve tried not trying, she said. We’ve tried to live with whatever chance brought us. That is how we got here.

Well, RL said. I guess we’ll find out.

I guess we will.

She gives his hand a little understated squeeze and RL finds this thrilling. More than he expected. So much more than he had any right to expect, He feels a tear gather in his chest.

Then the door bursts open and Layla comes in, not seeing them in the dark, not expecting them, their hands fly apart like independent wings as her eyes adjust to the dark and sees them there on the big bed.