Pictures of Houses with Water Damage: Stories (6 page)

“Cool,” her boyfriend said.

“Gagol,” her baby brother said.

H
e’s in the hospital with a lot of things stuck in his arms, nodes pasted to his chest, tubes going into his nostrils and mouth. He has been staring at the TV for hours.

“Daddy,” his daughter says, “Daddy,” she says, “I’m worried.”

He looks at her. She is nineteen. She is in college. She is really his step-daughter, not his blood, but he married her mother when she was two years old. He is the only father she has ever known.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says.

“I was never prepared for something like this,” she says.

“I wish Mom was still alive,” she says, “she would know what to do.”

He wants to tell her that his dead wife, her dead mother, would not know what to do. She would cry, cry and pray to the baby Jesus. “Give me guidance, O Baby Jesus,” she would say.

She has been up in Heaven with the baby Jesus for six years now.

His daughter starts to cry, just like her mother. He thinks how much she looks like her mother these days, especially with all those tears.

“You can’t die,” she says.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says.

“I don’t want to be all alone,” she says, “I’m scared of being alone.”

He looks at the TV.

“Daddy,” she says, “I’m pregnant.”

He looks at her and tries to say something.

“That’s a lie, I lied,” she says, “I just wanted to see if you’re paying attention, if you understand, if your mind is here with me, because all you do is stare at that stupid TV.”

The color on the TV is too bright. It needs to be adjusted. He wishes he could tell her this, so she would get up and fix the TV. The color hurts his eyeballs.

“But if you die,” she says, “I
will
get pregnant. I’ll go out and get knocked up so you can have a body to re-incarnate in,” she says.

“I’m serious about this,” she says.

“If you die,” she says, “I’ll have a baby and that baby will be you and we’ll be together. I won’t be alone. Then I’ll have another baby, so Mom’s soul can reincarnate in that one, and the three of us can be a family again.”

He looks at the TV.

“Daddy,” she says, “this is the perfect plan,” she says.

“I feel better now,” she says.

“I’m not as scared now,” she says. “I know I won’t be alone after all.”

I
n uniform, medals and all, I went to the hospital during visiting hours and bought flowers and went to her room where she was lying on the bed, her head bald from the chemotherapy, and said, Hello.

She said, What are you doing here?

She was weak but managed to toss a pillow at me and say, What the hell do you think you’re doing here?

She looked fifty years old, not thirty-eight.

Her daughter sat in a chair and said, I called him and asked him to.

What?
Why
? Why the
hell
would you do that?

I want you two to finally make peace, the daughter said.

The daughter is tall, maybe six feet, long blonde hair and small blue eyes.

I have not seen her in seven years, when she was much shorter.

You’ve grown, I said.

Thank you for coming, she said.

The daughter's mother said, I can’t believe you
did this
to me.

The daughter's mother finds a black woolen cap and puts it on her head.

I’m here for peace, I said.

The fuck you are, she said.

Mom, said the daughter,
look
at you, after all this, don’t you think it's time to make amends?

I have nothing to say I’m sorry about, the mother said; not to him, she said,
never to him
, she said.

A lot of it was your fault, the daughter said.

How dare you, the mother said.

And a lot of it was mine, I said.

Seven years of this, the daughter said. Enough already! What happened
happened
. Seven years, she said, is a long time to be angry.

An eternity, if it has to be, the mother said.

Mom, the daughter said, you’re dying.

Thanks for reminding me, the mother said.

Don’t leave this earth with bad mojo lingering, the daughter said.

If there's any mojo,
he
put it there, the mother said, and she pointed a weak finger at me.

I can put all that away, if you can, I said.

Ha! said the mother. Aren’t
you
the artist? she asked.

I brought the flowers to her, put them on the bed stand.

I said, This can be a start.

She swung her arm and knocked the flowers to the floor and said,
This
is what I think of your
starts
! Get out of here before I scream, get out of here before I call security, get out of here before I have you arrested!

Mom
! said the daughter.

Don’t
you
turn against me too! said the mother.

It's useless, I said, it's hopeless.

I know, the daughter said.

Get out, the mother said, just get
out
.

That night, in the motel room, we took a shower together after making love. We kissed like we had never kissed before—like it was seven years ago, before I was shipped off to the war in the desert and the artist inside me died.

She’ll never forgive us, the daughter said.

I said, It's the way she is, the way she always has been.

She has no peace in her heart, the daughter said.

She never understood, I said.

Would anyone? the daughter said.

S
he has his gun, she found it under the bed, and she says she is going to shoot herself, she is going to blow her brains out.

Why would you want to do that? he asks.

I want to die, she says.

Take your meds, he says, take your pills and you’ll feel better.

I feel awful, she says, and I want to die right now.

She waves the gun in front of her face, peering into the barrel.

Give me the gun, he says.

You love someone else, she says.

I don’t love her, he says.

You’re sleeping with her, she says.

That's not the issue, he says.

It's the subscription, she says.

She puts the gun to her head.

Please give me the gun, he says, please.

Stop seeing her and I will, she says.

That's not the point, he says.

Maybe I should shoot her, she says, maybe I should kill her. She can die instead of me.

I give up, he says, go ahead, shoot yourself.

What, she says.

Die, he says, now.

She hands him the gun.

You mean that, she says.

He holds the gun, looks at the gun. He points the gun at her forehead.

Okay, do it, she says. She closes her eyes and says, Just pull the trigger and go to her and you two can live happily ever after in bliss.

There are no bullets, he says.

She opens her eyes.

Bullets, she says.

This gun has no bullets in it, he says.

Goddammit, she says; I can’t do
anything
right.

He gets a box of bullets from under the bed and loads the gun and shoots her in the foot. She yells out in pain and her foot is bleeding all over the place.

See how it feels, he says.

That was a lie. That does not really happen. He thinks about doing it. He has the fantasy. It would teach her a lesson.

What really happens is this.

He takes the gun and leaves.

He takes the gun and leaves and never comes back.

He takes the gun and leaves and never comes back and never thinks about her except around 3 A.M. when he can’t sleep and he wonders what she is doing, if she has found a new boyfriend, if he made the right decision to be with the woman who sleeps soundly next to him while he has insomnia and replays events of his past inside his mind.

“
D
on’t touch me there,” she said, but I did, I touched her there, and Helen said again, “I don’t want you to touch me there,” and I said I did, I wanted to, wanted my hand there more than anything the moment could give. I wanted to feel the beginnings of life. She blushed—her pink skin—her blue eyes looking at the bedroom wall. “Okay,” she said. “If you really want to.” I put my hand softly, firmly, on her belly, just a slight protrusion, hardly noticeable, her stomach hard, an outie belly-button. Helen sighed, closed her eyes. I wondered what she was seeing behind those lids, wanted inside her dreams. She said, “It's funny to think something is actually growing inside me, there's a life in there.”

She was pregnant, twelve weeks pregnant, but it was not my baby, it could never be mine, I’d only known her for two weeks. It was her husband's child, she never let me forget this. The husband she lived with—I’ll be with him forever, she’d told me, but I’ll never be faithful because I love men too much.

“I want you,” I told her, my hand going down her stomach, down farther.

She still looked at the wall; she closed her legs together and said, “How could you want to make love to me?”

This had never been a problem before. She was here with me two days ago, and our love was frantic and fatal. Each time was like the last time we’d ever see each other, blah blah blah. She was the married woman, and everything was up to her.

I said, “I don’t understand.”

She said, “You never will.”

I kissed her and she smiled, and relaxed under me.

I thought what an odd scene this was. From the outside, there was nothing wrong with a man and woman, naked, lying on a bed. But when you got the details, the scene became distorted, if not grotesque.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, “and you still want me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“This won’t last,” she said. “I just want you to know.”

“I know.”

But it lasted longer than either of us probably thought. She came over at least once a week, sometimes twice. Helen told me she couldn’t stay away and she didn’t know why. I only smiled and kissed her. She would touch her belly and say, “Look at me, do you still want me?”

I said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and held her, and took her to the bed.

Her breasts got heavier, filled with milk. I liked to touch them, although I had to do it gently; she said they were quite sensitive.

She was six months pregnant and her belly was large and she lay on the bed, naked, and wouldn’t look at me.

“I’m ugly,” she said.

“You’re beautiful,” I said, playing with her long blonde hair.

She turned to me and said, “You’re very weird.”

Maybe I was weird. I put my head on her stomach and felt her baby kick. I heard sounds in there. “Life,” I said, because I didn’t know what the word meant. “The garden and the fruit.”

I didn’t know who Helen was. She didn’t want me to know. I didn’t know where she lived with her husband. I began to think she was making the husband up, that the ring on her finger meant nothing, but she showed me pictures of her with him. He was tall and had a beard, a nice smile. He looked like a nice guy and I said so.

“He's not all that nice,” Helen said. “Sometimes he can be an asshole.”

“Oh?”

“He's hit me,” she said, “and he says mean things sometimes.”

“Why don’t you leave him?”

She said, “I love him.”

“That's love?” I asked.

She said, “Yes.”

She touched my face with her hand and gently slapped me.

I said, “You could leave him and have the baby on your own, or with me. I’ll be with you; I always want to be with you.”

“Don’t say things like that,” she told me, taking her hand from my face. She said, “He's my husband, I’m married, I love him, I won’t leave him.”

“But you’re here,” I said.

“I’m here,” she said, “but you’re certainly not the first man I’ve had an affair with.”

She was taking a class at the university, a night class, for graduate credit, the same one I was in. I had noticed her in the class, long legs, all that hair, her clothes, which were businesslike but sexy: snappy skirts with high slits, and open-toed pumps that revealed small toenails colored with opaque polish. We talked one day while waiting outside the office of the professor of this class. I walked her to her car later, asked her if she wanted a drink.

“I’m married,” she’d said, showing me the ring.

“Oh.”

“But I’ll have a soda with you,” she’d said.

She stopped coming to see me some time in her seventh month. I didn’t hear from her except for a single message on my answering machine: I haven’t forgotten about you, but right now isn’t a good time.

I found another lover. There are always other lovers, but never the one you really want. I wanted Helen. I had dreams of Helen. I dreamt that we were sleeping in the same bed, that we actually had the chance to spend the night together and that we had made love, but I woke up late and she was gone, she had gone early, had left the bed without waking me, like an army secretly moving from its post in the night without the enemy's regard. In the dream she left a package, a wrapped package, a present; I opened it and inside were baby clothes for a little girl.

I tried to think what her life was, where it was, somewhere in this city, and I ached. I didn’t like how I felt, but I guess you’re not supposed to.

“Can I slap you?” I asked my new lover.

“If you want,” she said.

I slapped her when we made love, but gently. I wanted to hurt her like Helen's husband hurt Helen. I couldn’t. I wanted the soft things.

Months later Helen called and said she wanted to see me. “Come over,” I said. “I’m still at the same place.”

“I can’t come there,” she said. “I don’t want to.”