Girls (35 page)

I wanted to be happy I was there, looking at Archie’s brilliant eyes in his ugly round face, but the heat was choking me and the smoke and lights made my eyes and forehead ache.

He said, “You look like a set of defective bowels.”

“It’s one of my favorite disguises.”

“At least you haven’t cut yourself shaving the last few days.”

“They took our razors away. Belts, shoelaces, you know the routine. Can you get out of here with me awhile?”

“I’m on my first pastry,” he said.

“I’m about on my last, Arch.”

He pointed a finger in the air. He performed a horror. He stabbed the horn into his coffee cup, brought up the dripping, shiny, melting cake, and, tipping his head back, stuffed it into his mouth. He didn’t swallow it, though. He did something like straining it, because although I saw him swallow, the cake clearly remained bunchy in his mouth. He got his coffee cup up and tipped the remaining coffee through his gritted teeth. It made the noise of a garbage-disposal unit in a sink.

Then he said, “Ah.” He put money on the table, slid sideways, and we went. I drove him out of town, past the frozen lake I’d gone to, and he didn’t talk. I didn’t look at him. We got to Johnnycake Hill and went up about a half a mile before I pulled off near a field where loggers deposited trimmed evergreen trunks for the local mill trucks to take with their huge oily grippers.

We walked. It used to be an empty road, and then, for years, an almost-empty road. Now there were new houses, all of them with those semicircular windows that look like winking eyes and don’t admit enough air to make a difference when it’s warm. The winds were gentle. I didn’t want to seem optimistic about anything, but it seemed possible that we might be approaching the end of winter.

He said, puffing a little, “Tell me.”

“You’ve been saying Fanny and I have to talk about our baby.”

“I’ve been saying so much, I decided not to tell you anything anymore. I can’t figure out whether you want to and can’t or you really just don’t give a flying fuck about it and you want something else out of this incredible analytic mind I keep serving you from for no additional charge.”

“You never charged me a penny.”

“You’re my friend. And you work for the school. I’m giving you the service you’re entitled to.”

“Sure.”

“And you’re my friend.”

I stopped. We were at a level part, where someone building a
house had been caught by winter. The framing was done but not the roof, and they’d have damage to contend with. It didn’t seem to me that anybody capable of building a house ought not to be capable of understanding a little about weather.

“I know I am,” I said. “You’ve been great.”

“You leaving town?”

“No.”

“Good. You sounded a little valedictory there for a minute.”

I shook my head.

“Like you were saying good-bye?”

“That,” I said.

“Tell me, Jack.”

I felt the same hesitation as when I’d asked Fanny to come back home. But I pushed through it. I said, “I didn’t kill our little girl.”

His hand came up on its own, it looked like. He seemed to me surprised to find it on my face, just touching my cheek and part of the side of my neck. If he had pulled, I’d have stepped closer and set my head on his shoulder. He just touched me like that and then he dropped his hand.

“I didn’t think you did.”

“She died.”

“Dying doesn’t mean killed.”

I walked ahead, and I heard him follow. We went on to where the hill climbs again, and I stopped because I heard him breathing harshly. I didn’t mind not moving because of how my ribs felt. He stopped and caught his breath a little. I heard him open his mouth, then close it. I turned to look at him.

“You can kill a kid, sometimes, by shaking her. You don’t mean to. Your life’s crazy, or you’re sick, or you haven’t slept in—forever. However many nights.”

“I know,” he said. “It happens a lot.”

“You can be half dying because you’re
worried
about the kid, but she’s going on with that sick little tired little nagging kind of crying, over and over, and nothing you do does her any good. Nothing. Hold her, put her down, try to feed her, sing to her, turn on the radio,
dance in the bedroom with her, sit and touch her so she knows you’re there.”

He said, “That’s right.”

I looked anyplace else. I couldn’t see. I felt the wind, I felt him very near, but I couldn’t see anymore.

He said, “Jack.”

I said, “That’s all right.”

“Fanny doesn’t remember?”

“She thinks she remembers me doing it. I went up. I heard something when they were up there. Then I went up. By the time I got there and got hold of Hannah because Fanny was crying and crying … by the time … by the time I got there, all I could do was breathe into her mouth. I held her and I breathed. I breathed and breathed. We drove to the hospital. They called it, I—”

“Sudden infant death syndrome,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Instead of shaken child syndrome.”

“Archie. She turned and found me. When she came out of it, or came to. Whatever happened. I think she went into this blackout so she wouldn’t see what had happened.”

“She saw you.”

“Holding her dead baby.”

“She thought you did it.”

“When she lets herself remember that much.”

“But nothing about herself.”

“Nothing.”

“That’s why you can’t talk to her about it,” he said. His hand came up again, and he put it again on my face. It wasn’t warm up there—the temperature was below freezing—but his face was running with sweat.

“I don’t
want
her remembering what happened.”

“So she remembers what didn’t happen.” He was very cold, I saw. I realized he’d been wearing sneakers, not boots, and they were soaked dark. Shifting his feet, he said, “God. She needs help, Jack.”

“Help? You think Fanny needs help? You think I do, Arch? You
think I didn’t stumble onto that insight by myself? Yeah. I think we need some help. The thing of it is, I can’t come up with any ideas about help that don’t have to do with locking us both up for murder or craziness, or shooting us full of drugs and killing whatever’s left of us, which isn’t a fucking whole hell of a lot right now to begin with.”

He brought his other hand up, and he stood there with me, shorter and fatter and smarter by a dozen lifetimes. He couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.

So I told him, “I didn’t expect you to come up with a, you know, a miracle cure for her. Or something that maybe would freeze my memory up so I could be the same as her. That’s what I want. To remember the same as she does. I know she doesn’t want to hurt me. She knows I don’t want to hurt her. The way it is now, I know what she knows, and she has no idea of what I know. If we can even stay that way, that fucked and fouled, I’ll take it.”

He said, “A marriage often dies when a child does.”

“You were good enough to share that insight with me before.”

“It’s why you pay me,” he said, squeezing my face and letting his hands drop.

“I wanted you to know,” I said. “You’ve been good, helping me. Talking to me the way you have.”

“I haven’t helped,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s help for this.”

I nodded.

“Something else,” I said.

“Jack, there can’t
be
anything else.”

I said, “Tell me one more time you were the one wanted me worrying at the Tanner girl thing.”

“You’re still pissed about that?”

“No. But you were the one, and because it might help me.”

He said, “Yeah. But of course that was when I thought all you were coping with was this unbearable, shattering loss. I didn’t know it was some kind of a Greek goddamned play.”

I made myself look at him again. “Whatever happens,” I said, “I want to thank you.”

“What’s that mean, Jack? The ‘whatever’ part?”

“Thank you,” I said.

“What’s that ‘whatever’ mean?”

“I think I’ll be in touch with you later, Archie. Maybe you can think of something you could do for Fanny?”

“When you get the boulder to the top of the hill, don’t let it roll back.”

“What boulder?”

“That’s about all I can think of,” he said. “Make sure I hear from you soon.”

I knew that I wasn’t going to work when I dropped him off at the Blue Bird. He got out without talking because I think we’d run out of words. Instead of driving onto the campus, I stopped across from the Blue Bird at the public phone and called the dispatcher. I didn’t tell her I was sick. I told her I wasn’t coming in and then I hung up. I drove out of town to the south and east and I went to the Tanners’.

She was in the same chair and wearing the same clothing and blanket. He was at the little woodstove, putting in a thick log that might smolder most of the morning. I liked the smell of the smoke but not the heat. My ribs and fingers were hurting and my headache was worse. The brightness of the sun behind the cloud cover moving in seemed to make my eyes throb.

I didn’t sit with her because I was afraid I’d end up with my head in her lap.

They said good morning, and I said it. They waited. The reverend, on his knees at the stove, sat on the three-inch brick fire floor like a little kid on the sidewalk, knees up near his face, his arms around his legs.

He finally said, “Oh dear.”

I said, “Did you know your daughter was having an affair? I don’t know if that’s the right word. I’m sorry for this. I think she was let’s say
seeing
someone. I figure she wouldn’t have bought expensive lacy underwear for a boy her age, right? They don’t do that. I figure the
boys are so grateful, they don’t require anything like what I saw upstairs. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m going on one fact, one nonfact, one guess, and one lie. I’m figuring, to start, that a perfect girl who isn’t like any of the other girls in America wouldn’t get involved with seductive underwear unless it was something to do with sex and an older man. I’m sorry.”

“Whose lie?” Mrs. Tanner said. She had the blanket around her now, so I could hardly see her face. Her voice came out of the shadows it made, hooding her.

“Don’t you want to know the fact?” I was angry at them for not knowing, and I must have sounded it. “Wouldn’t a mom and dad want the
fact
first?”

She said, “All right, Jack. Please.”

“The sexy underwear in her bureau. Why didn’t you know about it?”

“I don’t pry,” she said. “
We
don’t.”

I said, “Why not? I thought you took care of her. Couldn’t you have looked? And let’s one of these days ask someone in law enforcement why
they
could look, and see the underwear and not read the receipt and know she had two pairs of it. That meant she was seeing this person a lot, maybe. Or maybe thinking about it. Figuring, knowing her, she’d need to wash and dry the one while she wore the other. Right?”

Mrs. Tanner took the upper part of the blanket down. Her hair looked like it was made of something artificial. Her complexion was changing, from the orange with a darkness underneath it to something like the skin of a lemon going bad. Her husband had his face down on his knees.

“The nonfact,” I said, and I almost whispered it. My voice didn’t want to come. My throat didn’t want to let the air out. I said, “The nonfact is what you don’t know. Or the diary you saw and burned or hid or made yourselves forget about. Or the diary she didn’t write because she was too smart. Or the underwear you didn’t know about. It’s something like that. It’s what this family didn’t ever talk about. That could be a guess, too.

“Except I’m guessing about who the man is. So it can’t count as a guess and it has to be a nonfact.”

She said, “I know you’re as upset as we are, Jack.”

“Could be,” I said. “And just because I sound like I hate you, or me, or everybody, I don’t want you thinking that’s all of it that I feel. Understand? Can we have a deal on that?”

The reverend looked at her.

I said, “I want a
deal
on that.”

The reverend nodded. His wife said, very low, “Yes. Thank you, Jack.”

“You wanted to know the lie?”

They waited.

“I’m going to come back in here in a minute or two. Will you wait for me?”

I turned. I left the car where it was. I walked in the road because they didn’t have a sidewalk in that town, and I had the gun in my left hand. I couldn’t have held it in my right. I went up Strodemaster’s drive and I opened his back door. He was in the bathrobe, frying bacon. I smelled the sausage and onions from the night before. Under it, I smelled what had rotted in the room.

I put the pistol into my right hand, though it didn’t want to hold it. I didn’t feel very much about the power of it this time. I wasn’t howling inside about my primitive strength. I couldn’t have been happy for a price. Maybe if someone gave me back my life with Fanny and Hannah. But that wasn’t in the small, smelly kitchen that was crowded with two big men breathing like cross-country runners, one of them in unlaced boots and a bathrobe. I simply wanted to be sure I fired it with some accuracy. But I couldn’t. It seems I closed my eyes.

I stuck my hand out and cupped the bottom of my fist where it met with the bottom of the pistol grip. My eyes were shut. I squeezed the rounds off slowly. It felt like every shot was a word or as close as I could come to words.