The Daylight Marriage (17 page)

Chapter 32

J
amie fished around inside his backpack. He pulled out a Swiss Army knife.

“Jesus,” she said.

“I'm not going to hurt you. Here, you take it,” he said, handing it to her. Better she have it than he, she supposed. “Open it,” he said. “Pick one of the knives or the saw and pull it open.”

She looked at him. Her mouth grew dry.

“Here,” he said. He stuffed his hands under himself. “See? No hands. You be in charge.”

She dug her fingernail into the groove of a long, thin blade and lifted it, but immediately pressed it back inside.

“Pull it out again,” he said. “You choose some part of me, my arm or leg or chest.”

“I don't think so,” she said.

“All right, I'll pick.” He looked down at his feet. “Here, my left leg.” He lifted himself off his hands and leaned his knee toward her. He took her hand and directed it toward his calf. “Now touch me with the blade. Just for a second.” Together, they tapped the flat of the knife to his skin.

“Again,” he said, “but this time, leave it there. See what you can do.”

He moved her hand toward him again, and she continued in this way, touching him with the knife, holding it against his skin for seconds longer each time. She had no idea what would happen, whether she would slip and cut him or whether he would grab her hand and turn the knife on her. There was, as he had promised, some horrible thrill to the weight of the knife in her hands, the warmth of his leg now against hers, and the way that he at once guided her hand and allowed her to choose the amount of pressure she exerted—this not knowing what she could or would do.

“Now turn it,” he said.

She twisted the blade and brought it back to his leg. He nodded her forward, and she hoped that her trembling was not visible to him as she tried, with as little force as possible, to touch his skin without nicking it. But a line of red appeared below his knee and formed a trickle that rushed down his leg.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and she set the knife on the sand. “No more.”

“I barely felt that.” He scooped up the drop with the pad of his thumb. “You sure you want to stop?”

“Yes,” she said. She wiped up the rest of the blood on his ankle with the back of her hand. “What is this? What are you doing?”

He reached for the knife. “I want you to try again, and this time, make it hurt.”

She tried not to show any emotion. She stood and carried the knife toward the water, but he raced to catch up with her. “That's not yours,” he said. He snatched the knife and he dropped it inside his backpack. “Don't be ungrateful,” he said. His face darkened. He was finally tired of her and tired of the back-and-forth between them.

“I'm going,” she said.

He dropped the backpack on the sand. He suddenly looked hideous, a feral thing let out of his cage.

A heaviness dropped from her head through her chest, a brick of nauseating recognition of all that faced her now—and all that had faced her from the moment she first saw him. Everything that she had chosen not to see.

He nodded at her as if he could read her thoughts. He was ready now.

She had made an enormous mistake. She wanted Ethan and Janine and Lovell—she wanted them, she missed her family for the first time in so long. She wanted her mother and father, her sister and friends and everyone she had ever known. She wanted everything about her life. Was driving here and meeting this person the only way that she could have come to this?

But maybe she could still leave. She knew that she had to at least try. Her bare feet planted at the edge of the bitter water, she measured herself against him. She was nearly his height, but slighter, of course. He had a compact strength like a runner's, a leanness and force that she did not. But she had to try to escape. She would trick him in some way—and she had thought to try, and this itself was progress, an agreement or a decision at least, one with herself. If she was able to leave now, she would forever think back to the decision she had made on this day and the fortitude that she was able to gather.

She would have to wait until he had turned around or was otherwise occupied and she could get a few seconds on him before she ran.

His leg had begun to bleed again, three discrete lines that ran from the side of his knee to just above his ankle. Her pulse thumping in her ears, she knelt before him and licked her thumb, trying to steady her hand. “Here,” she said, wiping away each line from the bottom toward the top, unsure of what she should do next, only that she had to keep on. “You should put pressure on those.” She looked around them for rope or even seaweed that could be used as a tourniquet.

“I'll be fine,” he said. “
You
try now.”

“Me?” And then she understood what he meant. “No.”

“You just start slow, like we did with me. You just barely touch your skin.”

She saw herself as if from above, recoiling and thereby allowing him to direct her every move again. She forced herself to lean down and take the knife away. “Fine. Me. Here we go.” She pulled out the blade. The blood in her arms and legs, her face and back, seemed to thicken and warm with the thought that she was here, she was in fact here on this beach. She was here with this person. He remained a few feet from her, watching with a new impatience as she tapped the blade against her forearm. He nodded her on—“Keep going, Hannah”—and she turned the knife, and it took the slightest pressure, barely any, the smallest sting, to produce a sprig of blood.

Three short lines, just as she had given him, and then he grabbed the knife back, folded it shut, and shoved it into his pocket. “All right, come on,” he said, and he yanked her upright. He pulled her forward by her wrist. Three men wearing paint-spattered clothes leaned against a black van in the lot, and Jamie nodded at them as if in some kind of complicity. They stamped out cigarettes with their work boots and stepped back inside the van and were gone. The only car left in the lot now was hers.

Jamie shoved her back toward her car, his hand crushing her wrist, and with his other hand he opened the door and fumbled around in her backseat. He grabbed the willow branch and kicked the door shut, his hand still clamped around her wrist.

“Stop. Don't. Please, don't,” she said, but he pushed her across the lot and over the curb and again toward the water.

She turned back to the parking lot. No cars drove on the road behind them, no one else walked along the beach. He knocked her down next to a rotted old pier where the water rumbled in low waves. She struggled upward but he held her against the rocky sand, and just before he kicked her down under the wood slats, she was able to say, “Good-bye,” to the sand, to her children and Lovell and her mother and father and sister. In her last moment, Hannah looked up and saw a faint pinkish-white cloud in the sky shaped like an orchid. Smog, maybe.

Chapter 33

L
ovell locked up the house and stepped outside. The March air was breezy but warm and he tilted his face to the sky for a moment and soaked in the sunlight. Across the street, a woman he didn't recognize held a baby to her shoulder and buried her face against its head. She lifted her eyes and looked over at Lovell once, then again. He tried not to hide his face. He managed to actually wave to her.

He wandered next door to find Janine and the neighbors in their driveway. Stephen and Janine leaned side by side against the bumper of a U-Haul truck and snapped bottle caps into an icy puddle. The men would leave the next day, and within a couple of weeks, apparently, another family would move into their house. Janine kept her eyes on the puddle. Last week, she had gone to get her tongue pierced, but she had gotten too nervous and backed out in the end. A few days ago, she had dyed her hair, the little that remained, a pale purple. In some strange way, it suited her.

Jeff appeared in a black T-shirt and jeans. “Hey there,” he said to Lovell, giving him a warm slap on the back. Stephen moved next to his partner and set his head on his shoulder. Here were two men in love, two people who unquestionably belonged together.

“You'll come meet Hannah?” Jeff asked Lovell.

He blinked.

“Janine didn't tell you? The name was her idea.”

“It's a girl?” Lovell managed.

“It is. She—will be.”

Janine said, “And Rose will be the middle name.”

“Hannah Rose,” Lovell said, glancing over at her. “Hannah Rose,” he said again. He was grateful that the men had given Janine at least this. “Of course we'll come meet her.”

Ethan wandered over and began to kick his soccer ball toward them. Lovell stopped the ball with his foot and reached down for it. He went to Janine and held her to his side before she pulled away. Ethan ran toward him and grabbed the ball from his hands.

Janine began to dance from side to side, and said to Jeff, “You promised you'd run through ‘Humoresque' and ‘The Swan' with me before you left.”

All this time, Lovell had forgotten that Jeff was a cellist.

Stephen said, “You want to come hear them play at our house? It's empty, but we could sit on the floor.”

Lovell looked at Janine, who only shrugged. “You go. Ethan and I will catch up with you later. Good luck with everything, guys.” He shook their hands and said good-bye.

He turned toward his son, and the two kicked the soccer ball back and forth, back and forth, as they made their way in the newly spring morning across the gulley between the houses, across his patchy front lawn, and forward to their home.

LOVELL POURED DETERGENT
into the machine in the basement, let the lid drop with a bang, and turned the knob. He listened while the machine filled with water and began to churn. It was late on the second night of April, nearly midnight, but he had awoken just now, remembering that Janine had a concert the next day. Her black skirt and white blouse had been sitting in the laundry basket in the basement for a week.

He would have to wait around until the washer cycle finished in order to dry the clothes in time for tomorrow morning. He paced the basement and considered getting his computer and doing some work. But he decided not to, decided instead to stay down here and see if he could find the box that he had tried but failed to find before, the cardboard box that contained the heavy glass tea set and hand-stitched djellaba that Hannah had bought him. He looked everywhere he could think but still could not locate it.

He stood in this place beneath his house. He was here still. The kids were too. Without those objects, that evidence, even without any remaining kindness or comfort or even love, a history would remain.

Their plane had landed at Carthage International, and they had taken a cab to their hotel in Tunis, where they collapsed, exhausted after the wedding and the flight, and slept for hours. When Lovell woke, Hannah was gone. He checked the bathroom and the front lobby, but could not find her. He went back to their room to take a shower, and when he came out, she sat on the bed with several bags of candies that she had bought. “Look, I found this sesame candy,
halwa chamia.
I got some wafers, some candied dates, and these candied chilies.”

“You went for a walk without me?” he asked, rubbing the towel through his hair.

“I couldn't just sit here and watch you sleep anymore.”

“I thought you were sleeping too.”

She shrugged. “I was, for a little while.”

They went back out together and wandered around the souks for a while. They stopped at a small café and had chickpea soup and octopus with
harissa
and couscous that had been made with orange-blossom water, and Lovell began to get his energy back. They made love that evening, and they lay in bed afterward, feeding each other candied dates, and admitted to each other being in awe of the fact that they had gotten married and were now on their
honeymoon.

The next morning she shook him awake. Something was wrong. “I feel awful,” she said. “Like I swallowed a knife or something.”

She vomited into the hole in the ground that served as the toilet in their bathroom. He stood behind her, holding her hair back. They wondered whether she had food poisoning. They had been warned not to drink tap water here and had taken the precaution so far of drinking only bottled water, but what about the food? What if some of it had been cooked in tainted water? He thought of the couscous and that orange-blossom water.

Lovell went down to the lobby to ask the location of the nearest pharmacy, but no one was at the front desk. When he returned to the room, he found Hannah on the floor in the bathroom, again vomiting into that filthy hole. He rubbed her back and kissed her head. And she continued to vomit until she passed out.

He splashed water on her face, paced the room, and went down to the lobby again, and again it was empty. Finally she came to and stumbled back to the bed. The next few hours continued on like this until Lovell said, “Come on, come on,” and cleaned her up and led her downstairs. He guided her across the street to another hotel and asked the concierge about the nearest hospital. The man told him that an ambulance could take all day, given the traffic in the city. He tried to give Lovell directions to walk there, but his English was only fair and the map in Arabic that he handed over was little help.

Still, Lovell slung one of Hannah's arms over his shoulder and set off, doing his best to get them headed in the right direction at least. When they passed through the souks, hands grabbed at them. Something slid inside his pocket, and a moment later his wallet was gone. He turned to see who or what had just made off with it, but the crowds were too dense. He pushed his way forward, on past the other souks, and set Hannah down across the sidewalk. She said, “Lovell?” and she looked up at him, maybe afraid for her life.

He said, “I've got you. I've got this,” although he was well aware that by now he did not. He lifted her again and carried her to a small restaurant nearby, where someone knew someone else whose cousin was a doctor. “But I have no money,” Lovell admitted, and the someone soon disappeared.

At this point, Hannah was draped over a table, her skin white.

Lovell rushed over to the host of the restaurant and told him, “You need to find me a doctor.”

The man went to talk to someone else who left and returned with an old man, supposedly a doctor, wearing a white T-shirt and old khakis. He ushered them toward his small car a few blocks away and drove them through the congested city, past the buildings and mosques, over a long bridge, and eventually toward smaller towns and finally past a squat village along a dusty road and into a driveway that led to a tiny stone structure.

He allowed Hannah to rest on a cot that he set up in his cramped basement. He told them he was going out to get medicine and would be back as soon as he could. He gave them a bottle of water and told them that the sounds coming from upstairs, the singing that “sounds like a sick bull”? “That is my wife and she rarely stops. I can do nothing to stop it,” he said as he left.

Hannah lay there, looking over at Lovell, blinking fast. “What is going on?” she said.

“I love you.”

“I love you too.” She closed her eyes. The woman continued to sing in Arabic upstairs. “Am I going to be OK?”

He reached over to touch her forehead. The cot was small, but he edged his way onto the mattress beside her. The basement was dark and smelled awful, like sewage and mold. The woman upstairs sang louder. A truck thundered by outside.

“I am going to die on our honeymoon,” she said.

“No, you're not.”

“I never should have married you,” she said, laughing and coughing at the same time.

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck.” She could hardly sustain a smile.

“Come here,” he said, sitting up now. “Come on. Give me your head,” he said, and he moved toward the top of the cot. He slid his hands beneath her head. He bent down and kissed her forehead. He kept his lips there against her damp skin. “We got married,” he whispered.

“I'm scared,” she said.

“I've got it. Don't be scared.”

“What if he doesn't come back?”

“I've got it.”

“What if I get sicker?”

“I've got it.”

She ran her tongue over her cracked lips. “What if he locked us down here?”

Lovell rose and walked up the stairs to check the door, relieved when the knob turned and the door opened.

“You're the only one that I have right now,” she said when he came back.

He nodded.

She looked over at him with something like amazement. “We got married, Love.”

“You're my wife now.”

“And you're my husband. My
husband.
”