Mendocino Fire (6 page)

“
Oh?
After I listen to the wonders of your love life for
six
years?
Oh?
That's not trying, David. That's not even—nice.
Oh?
That's cold.”

“I need to ask you about something.”

Such a transparent grab at her vanished attention: she grimaces, exaggerating the expression but truly pissed off. “Were you even listening?”

“You're in love. And it's, from your side of the conversation, kind of complicated.”

“When isn't it complicated?”

He
uh-huh
s prevaricatingly.

She says, “Oh, of course! Marrying somebody you barely know. That keeps everything nice and simple.”

“I'm in trouble, Suse.”

“You do know you are completely selfish.” But she's curious. “What kind of trouble?”

“This is a hypothetical. What if someone you were in love with turned out to be a Republican. How bad would that be? Would it be a thing you'd leave them over?”

“That couldn't happen.”

“Sure it could.”

“Nope. Because when you're talking to a Republican, you can't talk long before you hear something, some opinion, that makes your blood run cold. Like what Emily Dickinson said about poetry? It's poetry if it makes you feel like the top of your head's coming off? That's how you know it's a Republican.” As she's been talking, she's been processing. “
Jade's
a Republican. David? She would be! But you're an activist, you can't possibly—whoa. Whoa! This
changes
things.”

“Of course it changes things.” But he's confused. “What things?”

“How does she discipline, David? Are there bedtime prayers? I can't believe how trusting I've been. How naive. Intimidated! I was intimidated by her. I never really believed she liked the boys. She was probably pretending to be into them out of some kind of phony family-values baloney. Or to get you.”

“Hey, you've seen her with the boys, you know she's—” Well, wasn't Jade a little detached, really? Confident, but maybe too offhand? He'd chalked it up to her heavy workload and to never having spent much time with kids before. “Suse, Suse,
please. Come to the house. Because I don't know whether I'm crazy to think the rug might be—” He can't say
evil
twice in one conversation.

“It makes no sense to blame the
rug
. Blame Jade! That's what you're trying to avoid with this obsession. You're resisting taking a hard look at a relationship that was flawed from its very inception.”

“If you see it and say
There's nothing wrong with this rug
, that's all I need to hear.”

“Is that how obsessions work, really?” She snaps her fingers. “
Snap out of it, guy
? That works?”

In her twice-weekly trips to this house to retrieve or deliver the boys, she has waited, eyes averted, outside the front door, and now, entering this bedroom, his and Jade's, Susannah appears struck by emotions David could probably have predicted: jealousy, confusion, vengefulness. She gives the rug a perfunctory once-over, but the unmade bed gets her complete attention, and then, oh shit, an actual, daunting bra of Jade's, silky cups upturned, and Susannah sits down on the rug and begins to cry. David rubs at his ill-shaven chin, weathering the storm, riding it out on his end of the rug. At last her crying peters out in breath-catches and little cries. He tears a tissue from a box on the nightstand and offers it.

“Thanks.” She blows her nose and shudders.

“Want to tell me what's going on?”

“It wouldn't help.”

“Want to try?”

“You
tricked me
. You went ahead and made this other life, and
you're hopeful. I was used to you being more or less despairing. It wasn't like I wanted you to despair. But I was used to things going wrong for you. With women.”

He doesn't intend to sit down beside her. On his feet he has some distance from the rug's malign influence, which she's succumbed to. At the same time, it's kind of sexy, standing over Susannah like this, her head at crotch level. He quashes the thought.

“If you were your old self, you'd never trust her again. She lied! But I don't understand how she got you in the first place. She might be able to get you back. How would I know how much you can forgive?”

“Suse, can you just—”

“See, I always thought that in life there was one person you got to know everything about. You get your one person, and it doesn't really matter whether you end up living with them or not, because the way you know that person, nothing can undo or diminish it. There's one single person out of everyone on earth who is your own private safe person, who you can talk to in your head and know what they'll say. After we broke up, you were still my one safe person. You know? But if
you
can turn out to have a Republican wife and blame a run of bad luck on an evil rug, I guess I don't know anything about anyone, not really. I'm in love and now you've made it so I have to distrust him. Will you tell me something, David? Tell me. Did I
know
you? Was I your person?”

Because if he answered her honestly the answer would be
no
, because he can't bear to hurt her, from reckless solicitude, he rubs a palm down his fly. “Suse. Do you want to do something?”

“I want to do something,” she says, standing. “I want”—and, optimistically unzipping, he's staggered by her swift backhanded
blow, by the moan of protest that is neither his nor hers, causing them to turn, the ex-husband and -wife, to find their child standing in the doorway in his pajama bottoms. “Honey,” David says, “Shane,” but after a long and disbelieving gaze that pivots from mother to father and father to mother, Shane bolts. David touches his jaw and says, “He saw that. He was right there.”

“Did he see what was before? The zipper?”

“I don't think so.” But he's not sure.

“David. Let me take him home. I need to talk to him. Let me get this.”

He lets her get this. Edmund, discovered in the boys' room, turns piously cooperative, as if to preserve what's left of his family's sanity. Jackets are tugged on, backpacks snatched up, as if the house is on fire, and Susannah is hustling both boys out the front door when they encounter Jade. The women's voices spar in a little ecstasy of mutual dislike. David stands there, apprehensively feeling his jaw, holding his own, if barely, against an onslaught of guilt. Before it can drag him under, he sits down. Here is the rug. He straightens glasses knocked cockeyed by Susannah's blow and trails a hand over its nap. Threads ran one way, a warp, and another, a woof. Jade slams the front door. “Okay, what's going on?” she calls. “Why was Susannah so weird? She goes, ‘Make him put some ice on it.'” He closes his eyes to postpone her interrogation, meanwhile attending to the throbbing in his jaw.

“Shit!”

Jade does the instinctive hopping step that keeps one foot from touching down, and in the second before he understands she's in pain he thinks she is goofily performing her fear of radioactive contamination.

“What's wrong?”

“I stepped on something. Was there glass in this rug? Oh, why didn't we vacuum?”

The trash can: the toxic seethe of its debris. David is half sick with guilt, driving her to the emergency room, because some shard from that roiling cauldron has driven itself into her darling foot, because he brought the thing home in order to impress her, to prove he is not merely a dutiful soldier slogging through muddy depositions but a hero capable of wresting beauty from chaos. The doctor is a sleekly handsome Indian with a tranquilizing lilt, but Jade won't melt, and when the doctor leaves the cubicle and David explains in a low voice that the rug is behind everything that has happened, she shivers and commands, “Shut up.” The handsome doctor returns, bestowing on David a discreet frown of sympathy, an acknowledgment that Jade is not the only person suffering in this harshly illumined, far-from-soundproof cell. To explain that he's fine, David touches his swollen jaw with two fingers,
This?
, and shrugs,
This is nothing
, and now, when the doctor frowns, there is no sympathy in it:
Submit to spousal abuse if you will.
A blush creeps up Jade's throat and tints her ears, her shame exacerbated by the doctor's indifference, for he, assuming she is a highly troubled individual, ably ignores her, bending to his task. Extracted from her heel, brandished under the hooded medical lamp, is a sliver of rusted metal. No, she can't remember when she had her last tetanus shot. Hatred figures in the look she gives David when the needle goes in.

“We need to talk.”

“I have to get to the office.”

“With that foot?”

Left foot in a steep high heel, the injured right mummified in stretchy bandages and jammed into an old moccasin, she faces him asymmetrically. “Do you know why they do this? Make the bandages this sick
beige
? It's the shade of cadaverous Caucasian flesh. It's an intimation of mortality. It's so you wrap your rotting foot in your own future dead skin.” In frustration, she kicks off the high heel and tries a flat. “I did hear what you said, and yes of course we'll talk, but I seriously have no time, this morning's the Kelsis thing.”

“Kelsis?” he calls. “Kelsis?”

“The thing,” she calls over her shoulder. “The thing I told you about.”

The thing she didn't tell him about.

He needs to collect his wits, to shave skittishly around the swollen hinge of his jaw, to negotiate rush hour traffic with Zen serenity, to sit down at his desk and chart the decline of the black-footed ferret. He needs the escapism inherent in any ordinarily bad day. After lunch, he opens a fat packet that informs him he's been hit with a SLAPP suit. Nobody else in EPIC is named in the suit, only him. He is married to a lawyer, and would solicit her ultracompetent advice except that, this morning, she said Kelsis, and Kelsis is a small mining operation near the Arizona border whose radioactive runoff has been turning up in wells in the next county. Even worse, his records for the prospective Kelsis suit, like all the files on his computer, have vanished. He goes through his desk drawers hoping to find penciled notes or a backup disk holding some pertinent trace, but no, there's nothing, and in trying to reconstruct the basic outlines of the case, he loses track of time, and it's well after midnight when he turns the key in his front door. As was his habit on certain dire nights in his previous two marriages, he eats a bowl of children's cereal
over the kitchen sink, then swallows a couple of aspirin to mute the ache in his jaw and the pain in his back, which has bothered him more in the last twenty-four hours than it has since he fell. When he glances into their room, Jade is sitting up in bed, a legal pad against her knees, spectacles on her nose, and though she knows he's there, she doesn't stop writing. This means either that she's hot after an idea or that last night's grievance—the belief that he was responsible for the needle's piercing her foot—has festered during ten professionally hostile hours at her firm. The rug has disappeared from the floor, he notes, and notes, in himself, the absence of any reaction to the loss, for which Jade will manufacture some credible explanation, but why does she get to preside over what goes, what stays? The rug was
his
catastrophe,
he
should say how it ends. The door to the boys' room is ajar, their nightlight on, Shane's bed a mess, because Shane is a poor sleeper, rousing and turning at the slightest of sounds—the back of his mother's hand connecting with his father's jaw, say. Neither boy is there, of course. There's no telling when Susannah will entrust them to this household again. The nightlight is a nautilus shell shielding a miniature bulb, and by its glow, David sits in the corner, wishing he could get the boys back. If he only had his boys here, asleep in their beds, he would know how to begin to set the rest of his world right. He would start with the sleep of his children and work outward.

When he comes back into the bedroom, Jade continues to scrawl her legal pad with corporate-attorney trickery, reasons radioactive well water is good for you, maybe, and if not that, then some other bullshit David or someone like him will have to contest, and with nothing left to lose, he lets his anger show. “What did you do with it?”

She takes off her glasses, folds them, sets them on the night
stand. He might be some witness she's treating to this stilted performance whose essence is her offended disbelief. “How did we get here?” When he doesn't answer she says, “You wanted it gone. You told Susannah things started going wrong when it came into the house.”

“When did you talk to Susannah?”

“I called her to ask what was up last night. Why she rushed off. How your face got hurt.”

“What did she say?”

He's invested this question with telltale anxiety, and she frowns. “She said to ask you.”

“Tossing the ball around, and Shane threw a wild one. It looks worse than it is.”

She regards him gravely. “Also she wanted you to know Nina called. From Paris. She's flying home and she intends to take Edmund back with her. Evidently I'm not to be trusted with either child.”

“But the boys have never been apart.”

“It looks like they will be, now. Because I'll make them say bedtime prayers for the health of Dick Cheney. I'll knit them little American flag sweaters, and mock Darwin.” She shakes her head. “When you didn't come home, and you didn't call, and your cell went right to voicemail, I couldn't just sit here stewing, could I? I followed your map. That road is awful, it took me an hour each way, but I thought things would calm down if you knew the rug had gone back where it came from. ‘Evil.' Susannah said you said, ‘Evil.' You've been so irrational about the rug.”