Mean Season (25 page)

A couple afternoons later, Beau Ray and Joshua were out back, tossing around Beau Ray's football. Beau Ray could still throw high and fierce, but Joshua not so much. Theater geek that he'd been, I don't think Joshua ever played on a football team, and on one of his weaker tosses, I hustled out into the middle of the yard and intercepted the ball.

“Hey, give it,” Beau Ray said.

I said I wouldn't until he told me who he'd gotten it from.

“Secret,” Beau Ray said. So I held it from him and dodged away when he tried to grab it from me.

Joshua stood back, watching us. “Now, now, kids,” he said.

“We don't have secrets. We're not supposed to,” I told Beau Ray. “Like locks. Dad said.”

“Not with presents,” Beau Ray said. “Give it!”

“That's only
before
you give a present. It's not supposed to be a secret after.” I turned to Joshua. “Tell me the truth, did you give this to him?”

Joshua shook his head. “I didn't,” he said. “Should I have?”

“Give it back, Leanne!”

I could tell that Beau Ray was getting mad. “Why won't you tell me?” I yelled at him, but he'd started to shriek, so I tossed the football back and stomped inside.

Joshua came up to me a while later. “You should go a little easier on him,” he said.

I knew it, but it was hard to ease up.

“I asked him about it, after you left.”

“Did he tell you?” I asked.

“He told me someone.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?” Joshua asked.

I shook my head. “It's stupid. It'll sound stupid,” I said. “It can't be Vince, but I want to say Vince.”

“Then say it,” Joshua said.

“Maybe it's from Tommy,” I said. “That's the kind of thing he would do.”

“Or maybe it's not,” Joshua said.

Come Crashing Down

T
he next time I answered the phone, who was on the other end but Marcy Thompson, hostess of
Hollywood Express.

“Leanne, we met before,” she said. “This ought to be a cinch.”

Judy had granted Marcy another exclusive interview with Joshua, to coincide with the first days of the filming of
Musket Fire.
Joshua hadn't been to the set yet and wouldn't start commuting there for another week or so, but
Hollywood Express
still wanted his take on the mood of the project. Apparently, Marcy's first exclusive interview had earned them high ratings.

Marcy said she was calling to confirm that some of her technicians would arrive on Sunday to test out their equipment and signal.

“They'll stay in the driveway, out of your hair,” Marcy said. Marcy herself would arrive at eight on Monday morning.
They would interview Joshua out in our backyard, as before. “Hopefully it won't rain. Do you know if it's supposed to rain?” Marcy asked.

I said that I didn't think so, but that a lot could change in four days.

 

The vans showed up on Sunday around five. There were two of them, and it seemed like they were hardly in our driveway five minutes before Beau Ray was poking around at the equipment and listening through the sound guy's headphones. When Momma finally dragged Beau Ray inside for dinner, he wolfed his food and talked nonstop about putting up the antenna and how the technical team was headed to the movie set right after Marcy's interview ended. One of the technicians, Hank, remembered Beau Ray from earlier in the summer and had invited him along. Beau Ray asked Momma whether he could eat his dessert in the van, with Hank and the other guys. She just smiled and shushed him out.

I could hear the wind coming through when he opened the front door to go back outside. It smelled like a summer thunderstorm was headed for us, the smell of dirt and electricity. I was glad to see Beau Ray beside himself happy. I still felt a little guilty for having bugged him about his birthday football, though I'd dropped the subject by then. I wanted him to believe that Vince had sent it. I wanted one of us to believe he was still out there.

Beau Ray was still outside when I started to get ready for bed. Judge Weintraub was staying over, an occurrence that had become so regular, it seemed strange when he didn't, though Momma asked me to keep it to myself if Susan called. I went up to the bathroom that Momma and I normally shared and gathered my toothbrush and scrub. I was walking toward Joshua's bathroom when he came out of his bedroom, headed in the same direction.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“No, you go,” Joshua said. “I don't mind.”

“I just need to wash my face and brush my teeth,” I told him.

“I don't mind sharing,” he said.

“There's not very much room,” I said.

The bathroom was narrow, so I let him go in first and get his toothbrush and toothpaste started, and then I did the same. We stood on the tiles, brushing away. I watched him out of the corner of my eye and smiled through my toothbrush, because it felt like such a kid thing to be doing, like a slumber party, the two of us crammed in there. I remembered being a kid and jostling around with Beau Ray and Vince, the toothpaste stinging my mouth, and being forced to spit into the toilet, because there was no room at the sink.

Joshua started to nudge me out of the way of the sink, so I nudged him back and then we were both pushing into each other, each trying to own the tiles in front of the basin. He laughed and toothpaste flew which made me laugh. Another shove and my elbow hit the bathroom door, which slammed shut. It didn't hurt, but the bang was loud enough for Momma to call out, “Everything okay up there?” and finally I spit into the sink and yelled back through the door that it was.

I was laughing and leaned against the door, making just enough room for Joshua to spit out his toothpaste. He leaned over to rinse his toothbrush, mashing me farther into the corner, pretending like he didn't know I was there. He put his toothbrush on the counter and wiped his mouth, then he moved a few inches off, so that I was no longer smashed between him and the door.

“Bully,” I said to him. He still had a dot of toothpaste at the edge of his mouth.

“Brat,” Joshua said.

I reached out to poke him, but suddenly he took hold of
my hand and moved toward me at the same time, pushing me back up against the door and kissing me on the mouth. He moved so quick that I thought the kiss would be hard, but it wasn't. And it wasn't short either. I kissed him back. We were both minty.

He dropped my hand, and then his hands were everywhere and then my hands were everywhere and we were in that full-scale make-out phase that happens the first time, when you're practically trying to inhale the person and you only stop when you need to breathe.

I could hear the howling of the wind outside. I could hear Joshua fumbling for the light switch but hitting the wall, and then the bathroom went dark. We kept kissing and hands moved everywhere and I was thinking, “what am I doing?” and “I don't care” and “yes” all at the same time.

The bathroom was narrow, but long enough to lie down in, if you didn't mind resting your head against the bathtub, or the cold of the tiles where the bathmat didn't cover them, or the sound of feet bumping up against the wooden door. We were down on the floor, him on top of me, that comforting feeling of a warm body pressed close by gravity and mood.

“God, Leanne,” Joshua Reed whispered. His voice was low. “I want to. Are you sure?”

By then, my eyes had adjusted. In the strip of yellow light that bounced through the bottom of the door, I could see him, above me. I could feel him, on me, hard against my thigh. There was only cotton between us, which hardly seemed to matter, and my heart was racing. I wasn't sure of anything, except that I was lying down, him on top of me, and it was dark, and I wanted to be there, and I'd always wanted to be there. I reached up and started to take off his shirt, then let him finish until he was bare-chested. My fingertips brushed that beautiful chest of his, feeling the heat of it. He wadded his T-shirt into a ball,
then gently lifted my head and placed it under me, like a small, wrinkled pillow.

“Better?” he asked. “Can't have you hitting your head.” I put my palms flat against his chest and could feel his heart beating fast, and for that alone, I kissed him again, and we spun off, back into another round of kiss and press and rub. I ran my hands down his thighs, and he shivered and pulled away a little.

“Are you sure?” he asked again. “You know I want to. But you were right. All those things you said. You were right.”

“Don't you hate it when I'm right?” I asked him.

He pulled back and looked at me. There was just enough light to see him frown. “No,” he said. “I don't. I like it. It gives me something like faith.” He kissed my right shoulder, and then my left. “I like how you know why you do what you do.”

“You think I know what I'm doing right now?” I asked him. “I have no idea what I'm doing here with you.”

He kissed me again and I kissed him back and I felt his hands explore beneath my nightshirt and mine pulled back the elastic band of his shorts. He gave a little shudder.

“Oh, you know what you're doing,” he said.

There's a line, and then, there's no line at all. You step across it and it falls away, like an old cobweb, or fog, or even a cotton jersey T-shirt. The boundaries between us were gone, there was just skin on skin.

“Jesus, I want to do this,” he whispered. “God, you feel so good.”

I felt like I'd won something, after all that time. I felt like I'd won something I'd wanted so long, and suddenly it had been placed in my arms, and still I couldn't quite believe it was happening. I wanted to stay there, in that bathroom, the whole time. I didn't want to drift off for even a moment of it. I wanted to stay sharply aware of where I was and how my body moved and how his body moved.

And so we rocked together, nothing fancy, nothing too hurried or too slow either, the wind howling outside and the bathroom dark and the narrow space along the floor. We rocked and we rocked, trying to keep our feet from bumping against the door in a giveaway rhythm, listening to the click of his ankle sensor as it hit the tiles each now and again.

There was a huge whoop of wind, later, after, as he rested his head on my chest, heartbeat and breath slower now. There was a crack and a crash. I remember him giving a start at the sound, and feeling a brief burn from his day's end beard.

“That sounded close,” he said. He lifted himself up a little. “Quite a storm.”

It hadn't rattled me at all. I felt a deep calm.

Everything went quiet and darker in an instant. The yellow light beneath the door snapped off, and the air conditioner down the hall stopped humming.

“Electricity's out,” I said. Everything seemed cottony and quiet. I felt like I could lie there forever. Even the tiles didn't feel cold anymore.

But a few moments later came a scream. Not a yell or a holler, but a scream that hit me in the spine, and knocked my head hard against the bathtub.

Someone was screaming, “No!”

“Fuck!” Joshua yelled, and he jumped off of me.

“That sounded like Momma,” I said, and we bumped into each other as we both tried to stand and dress and turn on the light that didn't work and open the door at the same time. I felt under the sink for a flashlight I knew was there, and we found our clothes in the haunted beam of it. I handed Joshua his shirt, and he pulled it on as he followed me down the stairs.

“What, what, what is it?” I was yelling out as I ran. Through a window, I could see the dance of flashlight beams on the front lawn. I almost hit Judge Weintraub, who was rushing in the door when I got to the bottom of the steps.

“An accident. A tree came down on the power lines. They hit one of the vans. You brother was in it. And another man,” the judge said. He sounded panicked in a way I'd never seen. It scared me to my core. “I've got to call.” He rushed off into the kitchen.

“Momma?” I yelled, running out the front door. The gravel in the driveway dug into my bare feet. One of the vans was idling, its headlights illuminating our driveway. A dog barked, somewhere across the street.

“Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh God,” Momma was saying. “Hold on, angel. Just hold on.”

Beau Ray was lying in our driveway, unconscious. His eyes were clamped shut, and a thin line of blood trickled out the side of his mouth. There was a singed smell, like an iron had been left on. Two television people stood over the other man, who was curled in a fetal position, like Beau Ray, not moving. One of the television guys talked into a cell phone, nodding, saying yes and no and “I don't know, I didn't see,” in a hurried, high-pitched voice.

“What happened?” Joshua asked.

“That tree over there,” said the man who wasn't on the phone. He pointed toward the stand of moth-eaten oaks. “Maybe the wind. It just came down. And the wires hit the van. We could see sparks. There was this popping sound. Beau Ray and Hank were…Hank was showing Beau Ray…we pulled them out, but the line might still be live. Don't get too near.”

I couldn't have gone near the van if I'd wanted to. I felt frozen into place, Momma at my feet praying, even as the wind whipped circles around us.

“What can we do?” It was Joshua, right behind me. I could feel him there and straightened my shirt. I saw it then, one of the oaks from the craggy, hollow stand of them, now diagonal, held aloft by an electricity pole that pitched at a strange angle, like a broken bone.

The judge came back outside. “An ambulance is on the way. Joshua, I forgot, can you call the fire department?”

Joshua nodded and immediately headed inside.

“Any change?” the judge asked.

I remember thinking, yes, everything. From one moment past to the one I was suddenly stuck in, everything had shifted. I recognized it. I knew the feeling, like you're falling and wish you could rewind time, for a few seconds only, just enough for a chance to catch yourself. It seems like such a simple request, but it's never granted. Time is only forgiving in the long-term.

I don't remember getting to the hospital, although I know that Judge Weintraub must have driven me there. Momma rode in one of the ambulances with Beau Ray, and Joshua couldn't leave the house, of course, so he handed me his cell phone.

“Maybe it'll work at the hospital. Call me when you know anything, okay? Whatever time.”

I remember being in the hospital waiting room. I remember calling Susan and waking her up, but not what I said after that. I remember leaving a message on Tommy's pager and wondering where he was at that hour.

I remember thinking that I should call Max, but I hadn't brought his California number with me. Then I saw Sandy run into the waiting room, tears in her eyes, and we hugged for minutes. Sandy, looking pale through her tan, just crying. Not what you'd expect from a nurse in emergency.

Sometimes, I think how strange pregnancy is. One person goes into the hospital and two people come out. But with pregnancy, you know beforehand. You have time to get ready. There's a sense of life in your belly, the kicking and fussing of it. You have time to get it in your head that there's going to be more of you now.

It's not the same at the other end. You go into the hospital beside someone, maybe even holding their hand, and
they leave without you. They leave whether you're ready to say goodbye or not. There's the minute that they're with you, and the minute after, when the doctor says it's over now, he's gone. You think, this is a dream. I didn't mean to be here.

It seemed hard to believe but there was nothing to do. In a car accident, at least, you have a broken car. You have to get it fixed or get a new one or stock up on bus schedules. But when someone dies, they're just gone. People tell you to go home, get some sleep, like that can fix anything. You try but you dream of him, alive and doing something so everyday that it must be real. Then you wake and remember, and you would pay anything to crawl outside of your life for even an hour.