Suspicious River (18 page)

“Well, I’ll tell you why,” Gary sighs. He moves his hand from my chin, drops it to his lap, and looks out the windshield ahead of him. He takes a deep breath and says, “I was mad at you, Leila, that you went home last night to your husband, dammit. I wanted you to stay at the Swan Motel with me.”

When I inhale, I’m still drowning in my body’s water—tears and snot, and I’m trying to bury my face in my own hands now, thinking
he wanted me
.

He wanted me.

He wanted me all to himself.

It’s why he’s been so cruel.

Gary reaches into his breast pocket for a cigarette and offers one to me, lights them both with a single match between us, and the little flame moves from my face to his like a tiny, blazing ladybug before he snaps it out quick with a movement of his wrist. The car windows are rolled up now, and the air around us fills with smoke, which dries my eyes.

Gary inhales and turns to look at me. “Isn’t that stupid, Leila?” He swallows, looks away, “I guess I felt like you didn’t trust me or something, you know? I felt like you should trust me, ‘cause I kicked that guy’s ass for you in 31. You know? But now I realize how dumb that was. Why the hell should you trust me? You don’t know me from Adam.”

He looks at my face again, more closely. He says, “But, Leila, I feel like I know you. I feel like I know your heart.”

When he says that, he puts his right hand over his own heart and blows a gray stripe of smoke into my hair. “Leila, do you forgive me? Do you forgive me for being—I don’t know—
distant
with you this afternoon?”

I nod my head, which feels weighted with the smoke. I remember how he came back to the office flushed, how he buttoned his own sweater up over my ruined blouse. Like a father, he’d proven his love. I whisper, “Yes.”

He seems relieved, then, and says, “Let’s get out of the car a minute before we get goin’ again, O.K.? I just want to talk to you and hold you where I can look at your pretty face. It’s so damn beautiful out. But not long, O.K.? I got to take you to Ottawa City this afternoon and show you off to my friends. O.K., beautiful? O.K.?”

I smile and wipe my eyes with my wrist. There are tangled veins like thin blue yarn just beneath the skin, also thin, the color of skim milk. The veins are so close to the surface, so nearly exposed, that I can barely stand to look at them. Sometimes I can’t bear to feel my own pulse under that skin, at the crook of my neck, that blood throbbing under gauze, sickened by the thought of my own fragile membranes, my blue sap bubbling. Seeing that fork of veins, I know someday I’ll die, as everyone does, but next to Gary I feel warmer, and alive. I step outside, and Gary takes my cool wrist in his hand.

It’s a canopy of red in the branches over our heads, gold. The light is hennaed. The color of my hair. I feel pretty when he looks through a cool burnish of leaves at me. Two squirrels chase each other through high branches, chattering, and the sun pours lavish onto their copper fur. Like my hair, which he touches with the tips of his fingers. I feel beautiful because he wants me, and the river shivers and ripples like a black sheet, a wet velvet dress.

Gary lies on his back, and I crawl on top of his body, put my arms around his neck, lay myself out flat on him, pushing my hips into his. His brass belt buckle sticks soft and dull into my stomach. A rush of blood, a runnel of wetness, warm fluid and desire between my thighs. He closes his eyes, hands at my waist, and I put my head under his chin. He’s warm and solid as earth beneath me, and the sun is warm on my back. The slow rise and fall of his breathing lulls me, as though I’m on the deck of a ship in still, calm water. The blue work shirt smells like him. His heart under there, inside a cage of bone. His thin ribs. His hands on my back, no larger than my own. His arms around me, no wider or longer. Even his hips fit against me. He’s my height, my length, and my body feels safe with his, as if I am desiring myself, as if there’s only one of us to please. I say, “I’ll stay with you tonight if you want me to,” and I lift my head to look into his eyes.

Gary pats my hair, easing my head back down to his chest. “We’ll see what happens,” he says. “Tonight’s a long way away.”

Now, I feel naked, ashamed. I feel he’s seen the muscular redness under my skin, the yellow fat, draped with that chaos of veins. I whisper, “I just thought it’s what you wanted.” There’s shame in my stomach, too—shame expanding my bladder. Shame in the surging river. I say, “It’s what I want, too,” apologizing for my shame.

He clears his throat and says, “Tell me something about you, baby. I don’t know nothin’.”

I close my eyes and the light behind them is white as a slide-projector screen, a white slide projected. I can’t think of anything to say about myself. It seems to me he knows it all, whatever there is worth knowing. He’s licked my breasts. He’s held my hair in both his fists. Although I’m lying down, I shrug. I say, “I don’t know what to tell.” He waits. I offer, “I was born in Suspicious River.”

“What do your parents do?” he asks.

Again, the white slide, the white slide, another white slide. I don’t want to talk about this today, there’s so little to say, but he slips his hand under the waist of my skirt and pulls out my shirt. His palms smooth the flesh there, hard. At first it’s cold, the flesh, exposed—the air coming cool off the river. But then his skin warms mine, and I say, “They’re dead.” The naked skin feels almost hot beneath his hands.

“How’d they die?”

I shrug again. I say, “My dad had a heart attack five years ago January. He was shoveling snow.”

“Shit,” Gary says, shaking his head back and forth against the ground. “That sure happens a lot. I had two uncles who went that way. Damndest thing.”

The way he says this makes it simple. A bald fact: a routine. I gain courage from this. I say, “And my mother died when I was seven.”

“Oh baby, that’s sad,” he says and puts one hand in my hair, kisses it.

I close my eyes tight. For these kisses, I’ll tell him whatever he wants to know. I’ll remember details, specifics, names, places, dates, if he’ll just slip his hand into my shirt. If he’ll tell me he’s in love with me, I’ll show him the bed where my mother died. What difference would it make? She’s dead, and I’m alive. “How old was she?” he asks.

“Twenty-four,” I say, “same age I am now.”

When I say that, my mother’s face flashes on the screen. Her mouth is open, as if she might say something, or sing, but I open my eyes, and Gary’s beard is what I see. Getting darker every day. Spreading down his neck. It hides the long white scar that divides his face like a seam—the dark side from the other, brighter side.

He says, “So she was real young when she had you. Seventeen?”

“Yeah,” I say. He makes tiny circles with his fingers on my shoulder. I go on. My voice is a little louder. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters. Just me and my dad after that.”

“Oh, Leila.” His voice is muted in my hair. He slides my body off his body into the grass at his side, eases me onto my back. I feel the earth come up cool and damp through my clothes. He says, “I want to take care of you, precious. I want to take care of you for the rest of your life. I don’t want you to ever be alone again.”

I close my eyes.

With each of his words there’s the click of the slide projector. I think I’ve never been in love; am I in love? With Rick, there was never this physical undertow, this dredging of the bottom of my stomach like a lake. With Rick there was only a kind of lull like sleep when I was in his arms. And with the others, just the body—and the body like teeth set on edge, a hiss and a sigh and a scream at the exact same time.

But with Gary Jensen on my body, there is flash after flash of empty brightness. White air. A square ceiling light. Sun/nothing/sun. Photo after photo snapped of no one.

I know I am in love.

He rolls on top of me, and even his thin body is heavy. His weight pushes my weight into the ground. Pure gravity. His tongue pushes into my mouth. His hands are cool, and he pulls my shirt up, my skirt down, without lifting his body from mine, until I’m nearly naked against the earth, shivering, just his body keeping my body warm. He doesn’t even unzip his pants, just pushes up against me for what seems like a long time. He spreads my legs under him, presses against me hard. I can see the muscle working in his jaw like a piece of the machine, but he is blank-eyed as someone in a trance, until I think I can’t keep breathing. The bone of my pelvis bruising under the brass belt buckle. He thrusts against me as if I were not there—violent, but quiet, and then he’s done.

Saying nothing, he stands up over my body, which is shaking, splayed beneath him on the ground like something shot out of the sky and fallen naked at his feet. My face is full of tears, and my thighs are numb. I am a meal, I think, a picnic. I feel pretty and close my eyes, and when Gary goes back to the car, I open them. I hurry, scramble to put my clothes back on, fingers trembling at the snaps and buttons, afraid he’ll leave without me, and then what would I do? I’d have to follow the river home, and maybe I’d never see him again.

But when I get back to it, he’s just waiting in the car with the radio on. A guitar screams steel against steel—music like a car wreck or a riot. He has his pants unzipped and he’s cleaning himself off with a red bandanna. “Look at the mess you made, Leila,” he says. He shakes his head. “Man.” He smiles. “You could make a million bucks with that ass of yours, baby.”

I cannot breathe quietly enough. I am afraid the sound of my breathing will make him angry, will make him sick of the sound of my breathing, so I try to hold it for him.

Then he snaps the sun visor on the passenger’s side down so I can see myself in the narrow mirror—brown scraps of leaves in my hair. I look scratched, ragged as some animal a hunter has chased out of the woods and into the street. Gary says, “Clean yourself, woman, would you? You’re a fucking mess.” He laughs.

I feel lucky that he laughs, looking at the mess I am. Lucky to be here, to be alive, to hear him laugh.

In the middle of the third night after the abortion I woke up burning and soaked, stripped off my nightgown, which was ruined with blood, and lay down on the floor of the bathroom, holding my knees against my chest. I woke up again to my father pounding on the door, and by then I was cold, drenched in sweat. “I’m O.K.,” I mumbled to him over and over, but my teeth chattered. I put my hands over my face when he turned on the bathroom light, and I could see that my fingers were blue.

At the Ottawa County Hospital, my father sat at the edge of my bed.

The doctor cleared his throat, and his voice was watery. He wouldn’t look at me. He spoke to my father as if I weren’t in the room, as if I weren’t worth speaking to—so vague to him, a cup of melted sherbet—and his back was wide and white. His hair was wet and white. Speaking to my father, it was as if he were reciting something he knew already by heart: “Your daughter has a perforated uterus, Mr. Murray. It’s not the fault of the abortion as you were thinking. It was the IUD. It was inserted incorrectly, and instead of rejecting it, as it should have, her body pulled it up, into the abdominal cavity.”

“Is she going to be all right?” my father asked weakly, like a TV with its sound being slowly turned down.

“She’ll be fine, now that it’s out. But of course there’s a lot of scar tissue. Which might be just as well. She won’t be getting pregnant again at least.”

My father looked up as if he’d been punched. He put his head in his hands and gasped for breath.

But I exhaled my life, lying back utterly into the starched white hospital pillows.

I imagined that IUD like a fishhook—I’d never seen it—caught in my belly, bloodying me like my mother, snagging me out of the cold river water and reeling me up. But someone had decided to toss me back after all.

F
OR A MONTH
after my mother died, I woke up every morning on the floor. Cold, a cotton sack of bones.

I must have fallen out of bed, but I never woke. Just dreamt I was slipping through dark space, naked, a hundred hands touching me as I fell.

I wasn’t afraid. The noises I heard at night were still familiar: my mother crying, my Uncle Andy humming. Only now it was just the furnace humming, or my father’s radio in the basement weeping with my mother’s voice.

“This is just a small town,” the
Detroit Free Press
quoted our neighbor, an old lady I’d never seen before. On the front page of the paper, she waved her hands in gray, photographed air. She said, “What a way to get on the map.”

Our house looked ordinary behind her, empty, though it wasn’t. And next to our house, a map of Michigan—bloated hand, an arrow pointing north, pointing out the black circle of Suspicious River in it, on the fat pinkie of that mitten.

No one told me where Uncle Andy had gone.

Lake of Fire?

Halloween came and went with the smell of burning leaves in human-sized piles. Though no one came to trick-or-treat at our door, I could hear them shuffling through the neighborhood in costumes. The voices of other children, muffled under masks and sheets, passing our haunted house by: