Hot Springs (33 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. Come on, let’s talk about it.”

“Maybe I should be asking you that same question. You’re not that kid’s father—you don’t look anything like her.”

Landis stepped forward so he was fully in the man’s face. He sniffed something ugly in his breath. He stepped even closer, to the point where he could feel Charlie’s uncertainty—should he back away? Stand his ground? It had been a while since Landis had put himself in such a situation, and he wondered if he could still fight. “I want you to understand something, all right? You will never get within fifteen feet of that little girl ever again. If you see us coming out onto the porch, you will walk the other way, back toward the alley. If you’re out front, you will move along down the breezeway until you’re by your own front door. You won’t talk to her, you won’t wave to her, you won’t smile at her. And she will never, ever come into this apartment. Got all that?”

“She’s never been in this apartment.”

“I want to believe that. And until she tells me something different, I’ll try.”

“I know who you are,” Charlie said, his small, rodent eyes unblinking. “And I seen where you’re living. Don’t act like you’re better than me. You’re working some scam. Colorado plates. Coming into my house and threatening me. You’re worse than the niggers up the block—at least they don’t pretend to be what they’re not.”

“You think I’m pretending?”

“I know it.”

Landis noticed that one of the pieces of paper on the coffee table had ballpoint-pen drawings on it. He grabbed Charlie’s left arm and maneuvered it quickly up and behind his back, in the process spinning the man around and doubling him over.

“Ouch,” said Charlie. “What?”

“What is that?”Landis pushed him over to the coffee table. “You draw that?”

“Yeah.”

“Then tell me who it is.”

“What do you mean, who? It’s just a picture.”

“No, it’s not. It’s a specific person.”

“You’re fucking nuts. Let me go.”

“Thelonius Monk.” It was just a child’s drawing, and it looked more like a man driving a truck, but Landis knew the truck was supposed to be a piano. “It’s Thelonius Monk, from the
Underground
album.” Landis yanked harder on Charlie’s arm, felt some section of tendon stretch with a small pop. He was inches from breaking his arm. “What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“And my little girl was never in your apartment?” He increased the pressure even more.

“I wanted to teach you a lesson,” he gasped. “That’s all. I didn’t do anything to her. She was standing on the sidewalk. I gave her some chocolate milk. What do you think I am?”

“A lesson?” Landis pushed him to the floor and kicked him in the ribs. Not too hard, but hard enough. It would hurt for a week or two, definitely, probably make it painful to sleep. “Everything I just told you,” Landis said, quietly, and with menace

Charlie sat up, rubbing his arm, a sullen expression on his face. “You got lucky, man.”

“Tai chi, huh?”

“Don’t underestimate me.”

“You don’t even look at her.”

“You should be thanking me,” said Charlie. “She could have wandered out in traffic, gotten hit by a bus.”

“And every time you see me,” said Landis, “I want you to think about that arm. Because if I have to talk to you about this again, I’m going to break it.”

Landis walked around to the front and sat on the steps of Donald Click’s house, watching as a few cars slipped past in the humid dark before the street fell empty again. He didn’t feel particularly good about what he’d just done, and his back hurt now. Chocolate milk. Perhaps the guy was simply lonely. Maybe he was jealous. He was obviously a person with problems, but that didn’t make him evil, necessarily. He just stared at the world from his basement window and lived in his head and let his anger get the better of him.

After a while, he got up and let himself in the front door with the key Bernice had given him earlier in the evening and stretched out on the couch in the darkened parlor. He could hear the rain
starting to come down hard outside. The key had significance, he knew. He remembered a rainy afternoon he and Pam had spent together a month or so before her accident; she was the only woman he’d ever shared an address with. They’d spent that afternoon in an arcade at Seaside Heights where someone had gathered together orphan games from other arcades into a kind of old-age home for such amusements, moving from machine to machine. Many were so ancient, they operated for a dime. One, which looked to be a hundred years old, with cast-metal soccer players, only wanted a penny. They shot Old West rifles at tin bad guys, fed coins into pinball machines with numbers that clanked around on oversized odometers. Hugh Hefner and 007, Archie and the Green Lantern, the rain falling in dismal buckets.

“I can get rid of it,” she’d told him. She was pretty, young, Greek on her father’s side, Irish on her mother’s, a collector of stuffed animals who sewed her own dresses, talked about someday starting a clothing business. “I can make an appointment tomorrow.”

“No,” he’d told her. “Don’t do that.”

“Because of it, or because of me?”

He hadn’t answered. He hadn’t known. Instead, he’d put more coins into a machine. He’d thought he understood what the rest of his life was going to be like from that moment on. It turned out he hadn’t understood a thing.

Outside, an ambulance passed by on its way to the hospital a few blocks north. He stared up at the parlor chandelier, which was dimly visible above him, a cracked rosette inhabiting the shadows above it. Exhaustion overtook him and he closed his eyes.

T
essa watched television in the dark from her bed, hoping the infomercials would somehow drown out the noise in her head and let her go to sleep. She understood Landis’s suspicion about the neighbor. But the girl was unmarked, and when they’d bathed her, she hadn’t acted traumatized or scared, or even embarrassed. Just sleepy.
You’re OK, right
? Bernice had asked her over and over.
Yes
, Emily had replied, without elaboration.
Yes
.

On one channel, an Englishman was selling cookware to an enthusiastic airhead of an American woman. On another, a man with teeth that made her think of white tombstones wanted to explain the secrets of buying real estate with no money down. She was missing out, he told her. She didn’t know what everyone else knew. The train was leaving the station, and she was not going to be on it without her cookware, without her real estate DVDs. But it was not too late, not if she acted now.

They’d entered a strange isolation, she and David. Their cars, their house, their mortgage, all of them zipped up in a neat little Christian carryall. She’d never questioned this, never wondered if it might be dangerous. They would be good people and God would reward them for it with wealth, and children, and happiness. That was what she’d believed.

The last year of their trying, before it had become clear that she would never conceive, she’d gone with David to a conference of Christian business owners in Boise, where they’d stayed at a resort hotel. In the mornings, he went to sessions while she explored the town and lounged by the hotel pool. Then, at five, he’d return, looking handsome and rugged in his jacket and tie, and she’d meet him wearing nothing but the fluffy terrycloth robe the hotel provided. She’d felt like a kept woman. The sex they’d had on those sunny afternoons had felt dirty and wonderful, and as close to knowing God as she imagined possible.

But again, nothing. She had prayed, taken her temperature, monitored her ovulation cycle, prayed more. Then she went to the clinic for exploratory surgery and the removal of several fibroid tumors, which left her miserable for weeks. The doctor explained her extreme endometriosis to her as a simple matter of tissue growth outside the womb, but she couldn’t help seeing it as something worse—a dark matter inhabiting her that she was responsible for. Somehow, unwittingly, she had invited this unhappiness in, this inversion, made room for it, allowed it to grow. Then there was the matter of the womb itself, which was bicornuate, shaped, ironically, not like a pear, but like a heart. It was she who had taken out the ads in various papers around the country, after reading an article about this in the
Gazette
. “Why do you want to raise a stranger’s child?” David had asked her, and she’d told him it wouldn’t be that way, it would
be their child. Eventually, he’d come around on the subject, or had seemed to. They’d joked about it, made up funny names. Alphonse. Zirconia. But he’d stopped looking at her the same way, had retreated into himself, his work, his musical weekends with the band, and she knew that she’d failed him in the one thing he had counted on her for, and that there was no way to change this, ever.

Bernice had arrived carrying just a small wheeled bag, wearing a faded blue-jeans jacket. They’d met her at the airport, and the first thing Tessa noticed was the smell of alcohol—she’d clearly had a beer on the plane. She had a new pimple on her forehead, and Tessa felt bad for her about it.
Pleased to meet you
, she’d said, extending her hand in a businesslike way. She wasn’t showing yet, and she was flirting with them. Tessa hadn’t seen that then, but she did now.

The ancient air conditioner under the window cycled on again, and Tessa closed her eyes, telling herself she must sleep, though she couldn’t imagine how.

The phone rang at 6:00 AM, and she jumped out of bed to answer it, but it was only the wake-up call she’d requested. She turned off the television, then went into the bathroom and stepped into the cramped tub and fooled around with the faucet for a while before finally figuring out how to get the water to come out of the shower-head. She closed her eyes and felt the roar and the steam.

After toweling dry, she got dressed, drank water from the bathroom sink, and since it was still ridiculously early, decided to take a walk to the inner harbor. She brought her phone. The elevator that took her to the lobby shook and shuddered; everything about this building was decrepit. David made a living providing false smiles. The world was full of decay and rot, and what did people do to address that? They stuck a fancy new lobby on the front so you couldn’t tell. This one—the shuddering stopped and the doors heaved open—was
all marble and glass, with a couple of potted palms framing the desk and a huge American flag in the front window. What was it Bernice had said? Fat over lean. Otherwise, you could end up with a cracked surface. That was what had happened to Tessa. She’d gotten her layers mixed up, let the outer one dry before the inner one had a chance to.

Traffic was light, and she made her way across the wide streets toward the water. At one intersection, an alarming noise sounded in synchrony with the walk sign, which she figured must be for blind people, though the idea of a blind person navigating this particular stretch of streets seemed dangerous. She wasn’t blind, and this thought caused her to consider briefly all the other things she wasn’t: deaf, poor, stupid, limbless, crippled, or stricken with some terrible disease. Childless—she wasn’t even that. Not exactly.

To her left, an enormous industrial building with smokestacks wore a neon guitar like a joke bow tie. Other modern buildings poked and sprawled along the waterfront, sparkling gold off their windows. A tall ship was moored ahead of her, and as she approached she could read the lettering on its side: Cuauhtémoc. It was flying a Mexican flag.

She approached the foot of a huge hill, an oddly fake-looking rise of green that rose abruptly from the southwest corner of the harbor, its top so flat it looked as if someone had sliced it off with a knife. At the bottom of the steep stairway, Tessa noticed what she thought was only a pile of abandoned clothes, but then she saw a woman’s grimy face, eyes tight shut, skin sunburnt and cracked, a whiteness of dried spittle at the corners of her mouth.

We’re all doing God’s work, in our own way
, David liked to say.
Even sometimes when we don’t know it
.

She had to step over the woman to start up the stairs, and she did so, taking a deep breath first, because she was afraid there would be
a smell. After the third step, she exhaled and inhaled again, hurrying upward, imagining she was climbing a pyramid, which was what it looked like, or perhaps some kind of Aztec ruin.

At the top, out of breath, she looked out on the disorderly spread of the city, the stadiums and the water and the boats and rotting warehouses and more distantly the geometric lines of row houses and even, over to the east, the gold ice-cream-cone spires of an Eastern Orthodox church.

He answered on the third ring, his voice thick with sleep. “What time is it?”

“Why don’t you look at the clock?”

There was the sound of some muffled movements, and she imagined him turning on the light on his night table, getting up out of the bed. He paced when he spoke on the phone, as if communication somehow made him nervous.