If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories (11 page)

One Saturday morning while Buttons pissed on the impatiens, a beautiful emerald and blue butterfly rose out of the shrubbery under Karen’s bedroom window and began to make its way shakily on the breeze across her yard. It glowed as if it were bearing some sort of radioactive material on its wings, shimmering and powdery and dazzling. When Buttons saw it, he put down his leg, and tore after it, leaping into the air, snapping it off the breeze in one bite.

Karen looked over at Elizabeth, who was dragging on a cigarette now, looking, if anything, pleased with her pet.

“Buttons belonged to my daughter. My ex-husband hates animals. He made me take Buttons with me when I left, said he’d skin him in front of our daughter if I didn’t,” she told Karen, who was careful not to press the issue—any of the issues. “Kathy,” she said. “You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

Conrad had always brought her unusual presents when they had their trysts. A pomegranate. A branch of apple blossoms. A praying mantis. He was a very rich man. He could have given her diamonds, he said. But diamonds were dull. Diamonds were what any rich man
would have thought to give his mistress. Conrad was not just a businessman. He was creative.

In truth, Karen wouldn’t have minded diamonds. She
wasn’t
rich. The praying mantis refused to fly away when she opened her bedroom window and let it go free. It sat on her windowsill praying, creepy little heart-shaped head bowed, for days before it fell off, drifting the ten stories down to the street where Karen hoped it got run over. The only jewelry he ever gave her was a hemp bracelet he had braided himself. At the center of it he’d tied a toenail, one of his own, on which he’d painstakingly painted the silhouette of the summit of Mount Everest against a light blue sky.

“It’s one of a kind,” he said. “There’s not another bracelet like this in the world.”

She never asked him where the other four toenails had gone.

Maybe she didn’t want to know.

He told her about his wife, who had Irritable Bowel Syndrome and had been unwilling to make love to him for the last twenty-two years of their marriage. But also about his beautiful daughters. Blond, athletic, musical, academically-gifted girls. And also his one son, who caused Conrad so much grief he really didn’t want to get into it.

When Karen made the ultimatum every mistress eventually makes, Conrad blamed his inability to leave his wife on the son. “He’s been diagnosed with clinical depression.”

“So have I!” Karen said.

“Karen, darling,” Conrad said, holding up his hands as if to prove that he had all his digits.

“What is it?” Karen asked when she stepped into the office and saw them all there, standing around the coffee pot, staring into it as the black water dripped into it one scalding drop at a time.

Melissa looked up.

“It’s Jim,” she said.

“What about Jim?”

“You won’t believe it,” Melissa said.

“Try me,” Karen said.

“He went home to visit his parents for the weekend. He was driving back here on Sunday, along the river. A little girl on a bicycle rolled down her driveway into the street right in front of him. He swerved to miss her, and drove off the road, into the river, at the
exact spot
where his sister drove into the river
fifteen years ago to the day.
”

“No way,” Karen said.

Her other five office mates looked up, nodding their heads as if against unusually powerful gravity.

“I have great news!” Elizabeth shouted across their yards as Buttons, crouching among the impatiens, strained irritably to have a bowel movement. “My husband is letting me see my daughter this weekend!”

“Great!” Karen said.

“Kathy, do you know how much this means to me?”

Karen had never had any particular interest in having children, but she supposed she could imagine the excitement of seeing the daughter you’d thought you’d never see again if she tried. She was, however, distracted by Buttons, and Buttons’ business among her impatiens.

“Can you do me a favor?”

“I suppose,” Karen said. “What is it?”

“Can you watch Buttons this weekend? While I visit with my daughter?”

Conrad’s wife found a number on her husband’s cell phone statement, a number he’d dialed every weekday morning of that month, a call lasting, each time, one or two minutes.

Curious, Conrad’s wife dialed it herself.

After seventeen rings, a woman answered.

Conrad’s wife held the phone to her ear and listened to the very crisp space between them, frozen in her bare feet in the kitchen, staring out the French doors to the backyard where two squirrels
were chasing each other around in manic circles. The woman on the other end of the line sounded to Conrad’s wife as if she were, perhaps, applying makeup, or tidying up a bedroom. Some sort of animal was making a muffled whiny noise in the background, it seemed. After a minute or two passed, the woman on the other end of the line said, “Don’t call me anymore, Conrad. It’s over between us.”

Conrad’s wife called information after that, and was given the address of the house where the phone bill for the number she’d dialed was sent. She jotted it down on a piece of paper, but she was upset, distracted, a bit dyslexic, and reversed the last two digits of the house number when she did.

What choice did Karen have but to keep the little dog after Elizabeth never returned from the weekend with her daughter? It was months before they found the poor woman’s body cut into small pieces and stuffed into the toilet tank and the crawl space of her bungalow—which was only inspected some months after the new couple moved in and complained to the realtor who’d sold it to them about the plumbing and the stench—and a huge, protracted courtroom drama full of shouting and paparazzi and Special Reports interrupting every television show Karen tried to watch for many months before Elizabeth’s ex-husband, who happened to be the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, was convicted of her murder.

Buttons learned some tricks. Fetch. Sit. Beg. He slept for the first few weeks at the foot of Karen’s bed, but when she allowed it, he liked to make his way up to the pillow beside hers and curl against her face.

A kind of love blossomed between them, like the love between a mother and her child, perhaps—especially after the accident and the months of recuperation that followed, when Buttons was Karen’s only source of affection and companionship after her sister, who’d returned to Karen’s life to nurse her back to health had died when her cell phone exploded in her hand, killing her instantly in front of the elementary school where the children had just run out the front doors to be greeted by their parents, and the
ten million pieces of Karen’s sister’s carnage rained down on them as they screamed.

Now, every spring, Karen planted impatiens for Buttons just so he could dig them up.

It was difficult learning to adjust to life with only one arm after so many years of having two, but Buttons was a great help to Karen. Bringing the mail to her. Licking the tears from her cheeks. Somewhere, she knew, some other woman was driving for hundreds of miles with Karen’s arm embedded in the grill of her car. She’d find it someday, and never know whose it was, or where it had come from.

Probably, she was Conrad’s wife. Probably, Conrad would recognize the arm as Karen’s as soon as he saw the hemp bracelet he had braided for her and his own toenail at the center of it, and have a heart attack, dying in their driveway in front of their home, surrounded by his screaming daughters and his wife. His son would hang himself in the public park, but, it being Halloween weekend, he would be taken simply for a macabre decoration for several days.

It would not be until many years later that Karen would begin to realize how selfish she had been, having an affair with a married man. The chain of events it might have begun. How little she’d known then of love, she realized. And family. The humble, hopeful vows people took to get themselves through this life intact. How a betrayal, even of a stranger, was like a tiny spot of rust that eventually ate away everything. The vast lacy decay spreading its terrible veil clear across the country. She’d been a tourist back then, taking nothing in, giving nothing back. Who was left to whom she could confess? Who was left to offer forgiveness? Who would she be in the universe, when her soul was sucked back up into it, without this?

It wouldn’t be for another decade that Buttons, grown elderly on the pillow beside hers, would need to be taken to the veterinarian. By then, two new couples had come and gone from the bungalow next door. They’d moved out when pieces of Elizabeth continued to surface at random intervals in their toilet bowl. Her only friend
back at the office, Melissa, had been swallowed by a sink hole that no one but a few corrupt developers were aware lay just beneath the parking lot of the shopping mall, waiting to swallow someone.

“Buttons hasn’t eaten for days,” Karen said, handing him over to the veterinarian with her one arm. “Can you help him, Doctor? Buttons is a good little dog. He’s never hurt a soul.”

The veterinarian looked at Buttons for a few seconds, and then he looked up at Karen. He cleared his throat. He said, “Ma’am, I don’t know how to tell you this, but—Buttons—Buttons isn’t a dog.”

Outside the veternarian’s office, Karen heard the familiar, tinny music of the ice-cream truck, and then the squealing of brakes, and then a child’s shriek cut off abruptly, as if the shriek itself had been yanked out of the child’s mouth and stuffed into a pocket.

The child’s own father, as it happened, was driving that ice-cream truck when his only son dashed in front of it.

Karen nodded sadly, feeling the tears gather in the corners of her eyes, but also feeling swollen with wonder at this strange life and her own role in it, full of a kind of regret that was also a kind of genuine awe, before she said to the veterinarian, “I know.”

H
ey,” my dad said, tossing the keys onto the couch beside me, “why not take the old family convertible for a joyride, pal?”

He wasn’t joking, but it wasn’t what he wanted to say, either. What he really wanted to say was that it bothered him to see me sitting on the couch with a copy of
National Geographic
on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

When I was younger, he used to say, “Hey, pal, why don’t you go outside and throw rocks at birds, like all the other red-blooded American boys?”

And maybe he didn’t really mean
go throw rocks at birds,
but, instead,
I’m not sure I like you,
or,
I’m frightened that I don’t like you—
and still he would have been happy if I’d done it. Thrown rocks at birds. It would have proven something about me, and it would also have given him the excuse he’d been looking for all my life to spank me, or deck me. To teach me a lesson.

Mom walked through the room then with a smile that showed all her teeth, even the back molars. Sometimes she might smile that way and say, “Oh, Jim, leave the boy alone!” But today she was trying hard to have a Good Weekend, and didn’t want to provoke him, so she only smiled.

“Okay, Dad,” I said, and picked up the keys.

I put down the
National Geographic,
walked past him, across the living room, out the front door.

It was summer. Everything was green. The green that a shard of an old Coke bottle turns after a long time in the sea. Or something equally green. Maybe even something twice as green. My father had already taken the roof down. I pulled his convertible into the street.

Grandma was asleep when I got there. She was in her chair, but leaning forward, draped over the tray attached to her wheelchair like a rag doll. Her roommate was lying so still on the opposite bed that she looked completely dead. Her eyes were open. When I walked past her, she chuckled. Her name was Eve L. Mason, and it was like a cold trickle of pure evil, that laughter, and I was careful not to turn around and look at her. Once, when I was much younger and my grandmother was new to the nursing home, Eve L. had whispered something to me. My father had been wheeling my grandmother around in the hallway. I couldn’t hear what Eve L. was whispering. She indicated with a few bony fingers that I should come over to the side of the bed. She whispered again, and I still couldn’t hear her, so I leaned down, and she sprang up and grabbed me by the ears and pulled my face to hers, cackling. Her breath smelled like a trashcan full of old leaves that have gotten wet. Night after night after that I dreamed of Eve L. pulling me down, down, down into dead leaves. “Just ignore her,” my father had said.

“Grandma?”

I touched the back of her head. Her white hair was so tenuous and brittle, but long and floating about her head in wild wisps, that it was like air that had calcified. As if shallow breaths had risen and stiffened in frayed strands around my grandmother’s head.