Hot Springs (18 page)

“Hey.” His voice was soft—flirty, even. “Let’s not go home. Let’s do Bear Canyon.”

“Why? Why would we do a thing like that?”

“Shhh,” he said. “I think we should go.” He touched her cheek. “I think we need to.”

“It’s late.” She heard how the word hung in the air. Late in lots of ways. Possibly too late.

“Please?” He had a plug of paper towel up one nostril. In spite of everything, she found herself listening to him.
Who are you?
she’d have said, if this were a romance, or a made-for-TV crime movie.
Who are you, David Harding?
But she knew. She knew exactly who he was. She’d watched him struggle into his socks in the morning. She’d prayed with him before morning coffee and Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and before take-out fried chicken. Even as the eye behind the camera that had taken those pictures of Robin, she knew him.

One of God’s children.

She followed his taillights through town, down Tejon, west on Boulder. Eventually they worked their way out of the densely populated areas, and the bungalows gave way to development housing, some of it military, and that gave way to rocky, open terrain as they headed up into the mountains. They finally parked just short of the trailhead, her car
nosed right up behind his bumper. Bear Canyon was a one-mile hike, nothing too strenuous, that culminated in a summit with good views and a few big rocks suitable for a picnic, something they’d done back in the days when they were still dating, before they’d bought the house.

“It’s kind of dark for this, don’t you think?” she said when they were both out of their cars.

He flicked on a small flashlight, then flicked it off. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “Just remember to pick up your feet.” Then he began hiking up the trail at a fast clip. Within moments, his white shirt disappeared ahead of her. He was an athlete—on weekends he ran the abandoned Incline Railway in Manitou, climbing the old ties like steps. She wasn’t wearing the right shoes for this sort of thing, but at least she hadn’t worn heels.

A couple of times she managed to catch up, but then she lost sight of him again. After a while, it was hopeless. She didn’t know where he was. She could no longer hear his breathing up ahead, and the path had a thick covering of dead leaves on it, so his footfalls were inaudible. It even occurred to her that he might be playing some sort of trick—that he had circled around and was now actually behind her and planning to sneak up and surprise her. For a moment she felt panicked and wondered why she was doing this. She could only see a few feet in front of her. And yet, she was closer to the top than the bottom at this point, and she’d certainly been up the trail enough times in the light, so it wasn’t particularly scary. Her own breathing sounded deep and labored as she hurried upward, sweat pooling on her brow and dampening her underarms. It was unusually humid out, and the chill air emanated from both sides of the path, as if the trees were refrigerated.

Finally, she emerged at the summit. David was seated on a rock, playing the beam of the flashlight around on the boulders and trees. “Come on,” he said, holding out his hand. She went to him and took
it. He stood and together they walked over to the edge. Tessa had never liked heights much. She didn’t even particularly like looking down a flight of stairs. Below and across from them, Seven Falls was lit by a series of colored floodlights. In the dark, it almost seemed like something she could reach out and touch with her hand, though she knew what was in front of her was a deep canyon.

“You haven’t been fair to me,” he said. “This hasn’t been right.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m the one in charge. I’m the head of the family, I make our decisions. You know that. Understand that we are always under his watchful eye.” He moved behind her and grasped both her arms tightly. “I’m going to do something now, all right?”

“What?” She tensed, suddenly afraid.

“A test. For both of us. You need to trust me. That’s your job. Even now, knowing that I’ve been unfaithful to you, you need to trust me. Can you do that?” His hands were squeezing her so hard that her arms hurt.

“What are you talking about?”

“Can you
do
that?”

“Yeah,” she whispered. “OK.”

She closed her eyes and waited for him to throw her off the cliff—she felt certain that that was what was coming. Trembling, she anticipated the weightlessness, the initial collision with something—would it be a tree first? a boulder?—the few moments of confusion mixed with pain, and then the surrender of thought. That part might be just the ticket. She was tired of thinking so hard. The past week had eaten away at her until she barely knew what she was anymore, or who. Perhaps the problem was her pride, her inability to surrender. If God was truly in charge, who was she to argue? She’d been keeping Emily in her mind constantly, feeling that somehow this gave her control, but wasn’t that just vanity? What control did she have over anything?

She should never have hit him in the nose.

She was being lifted up, and she took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and heard the crunching of gravel, felt the world turn, smelled piñon pine.
Every wise woman buildeth her house, but the foolish plucketh it down with her own hands.

“Here,” said her husband. He had lowered her to the ground, away from the precipice. She wasn’t falling, she wasn’t dead. This was the thing she’d needed to be reminded of, that only in giving herself completely to Jesus could she ever truly find salvation. She was on her knees, and David was in front of her. When she opened her eyes, she saw that he was pulling down his zipper. She shook her head. He took a handful of her hair and it was suddenly not her decision. “You want to,” he said. “Right here, where anyone could see us. Where
he
can see us. Say it.” He had his other hand in there, moving around. The one gripping her hair tightened.

She was silent.

“Say it,” he whispered.

“I want to.”

“I am your master,” he said. “You can never forget that.”

She felt as if she’d opened a broom closet only to find a desert inside. As hard as she’d been clutching the past, she now understood that there was no going back, no regaining the state of innocence they’d been living in for the past five years. It hadn’t been real anyway, at least she didn’t think so. It was a holographic garden, all smoke and mirrors and piped-in scents.

There was another insistent tug. She leaned forward and did as she was told.

T
hey had been talking about naked people.
You don’t see them like that
, she’d told him.
You look at lines and curves, light and dark
.

Not if you don’t let it be. Everything in the world isn’t about sex, dumbass
.

It was Christmas week, and Bernice had dropped in with her gift for her mother, a book of poems by the writer-in-residence at her school that she’d started to read, but found just made her squirmy. The school was private, in a northwest suburb, paid for by her grandmother. Bernice understood that she was seen as troubled—possibly even dangerous—by her classmates there, most of them rich kids who smoked and drank at least as much as she did, and this was fine with her because it meant that, for the most part, they left her alone.
She didn’t know how people wrote poems like that, ones that admitted to things like longing and loneliness. Plus, it seemed so easy to fake. The book had been a gift to her, and she didn’t want it because she didn’t like the way the poet had looked at her when he’d said,
Here, have this
, as if she were something good to eat, after she’d come to his office to talk about the paper she was supposed to be writing on
A Farewell to Arms
but wasn’t. She had in fact thought about cutting the book up into pieces to use in a collage.

Her mother was out—shopping, CC said. He’d only gotten up recently himself. His eyes were still puffy, and he needed a shave, and the denim shirt he wore was unbuttoned. He was feline, of the big-cat variety, mysterious, dark, sudden. Did she want coffee? He’d just made some. She said no, just some water. They sat at the kitchen table. She’d never been there before. When she and her mother got together, generally on weekends, and only about once a month, her mother always picked her up and took her out somewhere. It was dim inside the house, even though outside there was a cold, sunny day going on just a few feet away. Ballpoint-pen drawings of CC holding his guitar were tacked up on the wall and they made Bernice feel depressed—this was high-school-girl-crush stuff, not art. She saw cobwebs over the refrigerator, a blackened banana in a blue bowl next to the sink.
I’ll bet you’ve got some boyfriends
, he said.
I’ll bet they’re all over you at that school of yours
.

And then, somehow, they were kissing. She didn’t know for sure if she’d made it happen, or if he had. When she was nine, in Wyman Park ravine, a skinny Hampden boy had filled a paper cup with gasoline and put it in the stream, let her light it with a match. She’d fumbled, had to go through three before getting one to strike. The ignition came as she held it out toward the acrid cup, somewhere in the space between, as the vapors sucked in the tiny flame and exhaled a silent bloom of fire.
She felt about this something of what she had about that—and now that it was happening, there was nothing she could do but watch as the cup tipped over and spilled its contents onto the surface of the water, an island of fire floating downstream and away from them, where it would undoubtedly set fire to half the city.

They made out, but she wouldn’t do more. She wanted to, or at least she thought she did, but she wouldn’t.
Too weird
, she said to him.
Don’t you think?
He looked at her through eyes that were ridiculously pretty—all lashes and nearly black, like Greek olives—and she pushed him away and laughed, and then grabbed him and pulled him back to her, hard. This was similar to sex, only better, and she wouldn’t, no matter how much she wanted to, even though the ache was moving through her, hot as steam, making her want to burst out of herself, but still she wouldn’t, though his knee was between her legs and they were back on the sofa and his hands were under her blouse.

Uh-uh
, she said about her panties, after her jeans were off and on the floor, curled up like some stranger’s clothes. He was attempting to remove them with his mouth. How had this happened, how had they come this far? A blur of lips, and grabbing, urgent motions, though she’d certainly been complicit with the difficult bit when her pants had snagged at the ankles.
Why
? he wanted to know. She almost didn’t know how to answer that. Why? Why, indeed? Once you’ve stolen a car, what’s the difference if you then break the speed limit? From the couch, her view of the kitchen was limited, but she could just make out the spout of a teakettle. He climbed on top of her, sucked at her ear.
Tea!
she nearly shouted. He was unconvinced. But she insisted that tea was next. In her Jockey for Hers, if that was how it was going to happen, but definitely tea. And so, after some more fumbling, he’d grudgingly gotten up and made them cups of
Darjeeling, her mother’s favorite, and she’d thought better of the underwear and slipped clumsily back into her jeans.

Kiss me more
, she said, after she had some tea. They were back at the table.

You’re as nutty as she is,
he said.
I don’t think so.

You know.
She closed her eyes, and when he reached out for her hand, a shiver of longing ran the length of her body like a tremor down a saw blade.

You want to,
he said.
You know you do. We could just go upstairs. There’s a roof deck. I could show you that.

Too cold,
she said.
You got any cookies?

He brought out a bag of Chips Ahoy and tossed them onto the table. She saw for the first time that lust and hostility were within shouting distance of each other, at least in men. His arms were long and hard with muscle, his fingers thick at the knuckles. She took pride in being a person who noticed things.

You shouldn’t start what you don’t want to finish,
he said
.

But she wouldn’t. Instead, she just sat there, sipping tea, waiting for whatever was to happen next, trying to decide if she was a chickenshit for not going all the way. When it began to feel embarrassing, she stood up and left.

T
he Harborview was in Fell’s Point, a few blocks up from the water, just north of the gentrified part of the neighborhood, a converted row house staring out darkly through plate glass front windows, its immediate neighbors a tattoo parlor and an antiques store that was open only two afternoons a week. It didn’t have a view of much of anything. Bernice pushed open the door. Afternoon, and the place was empty. The front area contained the bar, and it didn’t look too bad: a chalkboard listing beer specials, and a large mirror behind the bar itself that created the illusion of a bigger space. The opposite wall was exposed brick, hung with dusty, black-and-white publicity photographs of blues performers, some of them signed. She examined one at random: Luther “Slideman” James. The picture was of a smiling older black man, seated with an impressive-looking guitar, squinting through the smoke from the cigarette in his mouth.