The Lonely Polygamist (61 page)

She stood up, gasping a little at the way the bones of her chest ached. She decided Nurse Pickless had a point: What
was
there to be afraid of? Why should the body be discouraged—Rusty’s or hers or anyone else’s? She dipped her washcloth in the basin and gave his chest some brisk business with it, moving to his stomach and then his groin, putting a thorough, workmanlike polish on the stiff penis as if it were the hood ornament of an expensive car. Just as she was about to move on to the thighs she sensed a deep rippling under the skin and Rusty’s hips twitched once, twice, and with only that much warning he ejaculated a thin, glistening string across the inside of his leg. Trish made a surprised noise in her throat—something like a laugh—but after the merest pause went right on soaping and rinsing as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, feeling with some pride the tension go out of boy’s legs like the air from a tire, the bones loosening, the muscles going soft, the whole body, with a single grateful exhale, pooling like spilled water in the hollows of the bed.

DON’T LOOK BACK

A few days later, she was sitting with Rose in the same hospital room in the late morning sunshine. There had been a lull at Big House, and as had become her custom lately she had driven over to keep Rose company for an hour or two. Sometimes they did nothing but read or do crossword puzzles, but mostly they talked. In the two years since they had become sister-wives they had not talked half as much as they had in the past weeks; with all the recent upheavals they had been released, somehow, to speak about their pasts, their doubts, pretty much anything at all—what did they have to lose? This morning they were discussing the possibility of Golden’s taking another wife, which in different times had never been a topic for open discussion, especially in a public place such as this. Last night he had gathered his current wives around the dining room table to get their approval on the blueprints of the new addition: three new bathrooms, a small kitchen, a large recreation room, and seven new bedrooms, three in the basement, four on the second floor. He explained the room configurations and sleeping arrangements, but by the time he was finished it was clear he had left two bedrooms unaccounted for, an oversight Nola immediately pointed out.

“This one,” Golden said, resting his fingertip on the smallest bedroom, a tiny ten-by-eleven tucked between a linen closet and Bathroom #3, “this one’s for me, I guess. You know, to have my own place once in a while. Or we could use it for something else, if you don’t think…”

He searched his wives’ faces for approval. No one, of course, had ever heard of a plural husband having his own bedroom—in theory it was ludicrous, almost sacrilegious; in a house full of clamoring children and demanding wives, how could a godly husband justifiably keep anything—even a night here or there—to himself? But this was a new time; the old rules didn’t apply. The wives looked at each other and seemed to agree:
Why not?

“And this one?” Beverly said, pointing to the last bedroom, the tone in her voice suggesting she already knew the answer, that she herself had scripted it.

Golden said, “This one is for, you know, future possibilities.”

It wasn’t hard for the other wives to guess the room’s purpose: in the next few months they would almost certainly be welcoming a new sister-wife to the family. Golden had already been under heavy pressure from Uncle Chick to take a fifth wife, and now that his recent indiscretions had become common knowledge, the pressure had only increased; if he wanted to maintain his standing in the church, prove his faithfulness and good intentions, he would be bringing another wife into the fold as quickly as possible. The only question now was who the lucky lady might be.

The obvious answer was Maureen Sinkfoyle, mostly because she had been available the longest, and because Beverly favored her. Though something had clearly happened to Beverly around the time of Rusty’s accident, and there were still days when she walked with a slight slump to her shoulders and a pallor to her skin, sometimes retreating to her bedroom to cough herself hoarse, she seemed to be regaining her old form. She had roused herself to begin taking on more responsibilities and dictating tasks, and lately had started to engage in milder sorts of Beverly-style maneuvering: agitating on behalf of her children for better sleeping arrangements, making sure each design element of the new addition met her approval. Until now, she and Nola had been coexisting in Big House under a stay of remarkable calm, but any fool could see that trouble was on its way.

Maureen Sinkfoyle was not the only candidate in the running. There was the recently widowed LaDonna Ence and the twenty-year-old, scared-of-her-own-shadow Tanya Belieu, who Nola and Rose favored. And now, rather amazingly, a dark horse seemed to have entered the race: the beautifully named Huila, of all people. Not long ago Golden had asked permission from his wives to pay her a visit; she had taken out a restraining order on her husband and was living temporarily in one of the rentals in Mexican Town. He promised there would be no funny business—he was long past that—he simply felt responsible for her plight and wanted only to make sure she was safe. Though Nola made a few comments under her breath and Beverly was clearly less than enthusiastic about it, they all relented. It seemed harmless, but Nola was convinced something was afoot. There’d been a rumor that Uncle Chick had gone out to Mexican Town to see Huila as well, which meant he might be testing her interest in joining the church. This kind of missionary work was an Uncle Chick specialty—bringing in the wayward and lost, extending the hand of fellowship to the last person anyone would expect. It was how Golden’s father had come into the church, and by extension Golden and Beverly as well.

“Do you think it’s possible?” Trish asked Rose. They had been chatting aimlessly for a half hour, Rose in the easy chair next to Rusty’s bed, skimming the final chapter of
A Gentleman in My Bedroom
, and Trish making a sorry attempt at knitting some wool booties for Rusty’s cold feet.

Rose shrugged. “Could be. Crazier things have happened.”

“I can’t see it, not if Beverly has a say.”

“Beverly’s not really in charge anymore, is she?”

“Then who is?”

Rose glanced up from her book, blinking. “I don’t have any idea.”

Here was the thing: though Golden was giving it all he had, nobody was really in charge. They were all in separate holding patterns, looking for guidance, waiting for the haze to clear.

For a while they said nothing. A cart with a squeaky wheel passed in the hall and Rusty’s heart monitor beeped with its stubborn regularity.

“If you had the chance,” Trish said, trying her best to affect an idle tone, “do you think you could just pick up and go away somewhere new, leave everything behind?” She glanced up to see if Rose had heard her, but Rose murmured something and kept her gaze on the pages of her book.

Until she’d asked it, Trish hadn’t realized how much she needed to air this question, to let it out into the open, even if nobody would hear it. “I mean, if you had somebody to go with, to be with, do you think you could just leave?”

Rose looked up at her then; obviously, she
had
been listening. Her eyes shone and her lips parted slightly to show her teeth. “Do it, Trish. You might never get another chance.”

“No, see…” Trish shook her head and tried to go back to her knitting, which now seemed like nothing more than a big mess of knots. “I’m just asking hypothetically—”

“Go,” Rose said. Her eyes were as sharp and clear as Trish had ever seen them, her voice an urgent whisper. “Don’t even think about it. Go, Trish. Go and don’t look back.”

T
HE BOY WAITS AT THE WINDOW. IT IS WIDE, UNCURTAINED, A SINGLE
pane of dusty glass that looks over a parking lot filled with cars. But when the boy’s good eye swivels spastically toward the block of light, a parking lot is not what he sees. On the other side of the glass are small still lifes and huge panoramas, all of them strangely familiar: alleyways and backyards and prehistoric swamps full of long-necked dinosaurs, the contents of a kitchen junk drawer, a wave taking shape on the horizon, a steaming garbage dump, the remains of a rabbit flattened in the middle of the road, a barbed-wire fence made soft with a fur of snow, the bleak red surface of Mars. Every time it has been something different, but lately, as he emerges from the grainy drift of unconsciousness, he is confronted with the same heavenly tableau: clouds stacked into towering ramparts packed with teeming masses of bodies, each one vaguely outlined and imbued with light, clamoring in voices the boy can barely hear, millions of them, billions, rank after rank of nameless souls, terrifying in their numbers, the great family of the dead.

The boy closes his eye and sinks back into himself, but there’s no escaping it: the dead are everywhere, and they are waiting for him.

But he’s not ready to go, not yet, especially now that he has everything he ever wanted: his own room, his own bed with sheets clean and crisp, his mother all to himself. His mother, who dotes on him, who sings to him while she swabs out his ears and brushes what’s left of his hair, who reads to him every day from
Johnny Tremain
or
I Was There at the Alamo
, who has come back to him, as he always knew she would. The details of his old life are sifting away like the finest powder, but he hasn’t yet forgotten how hard he planned and worked, how he suffered for this reward.

When his father comes to visit, he is quiet, but the boy can sense him there, a presence at the foot of the bed. He can hear the breath whistling through his nostrils, can smell the minty bite of his mouth-wash. Unlike the other visitors, his father doesn’t speak, doesn’t nervously chatter or coo over the boy, or stroke his arms. He stands at the foot of the bed or sits in the easy chair next to it, doing nothing, saying nothing, so quietly that the boy becomes charged with the silence as if it were an electrical current, his body poised and straining for some word or touch. And then one morning the boy wakes and his father is there, quiet as always, the light in the room gray and somber and cool. For a long time there is nothing but the wet sound of breathing, the creaking of work boots, and then the boy feels his father’s rough palm settle gently on his neck. He says the boy’s name,
Rusty
, and it is the first time in the boy’s fractured memory that his father has ever spoken it without at least a tinge of anger or bewilderment or exasperation, and if the boy could have he would have asked only one question:
Was that so hard? Was that really so hard?

Most of the boy’s other visitors, he can take or leave them. Sometimes he listens to what they have to say, sometimes prefers to tune them out and float through the warm and sparkling waters of his mind. So many people come, schoolmates and relatives and church members, most of them strangers. At first, when his siblings came, they were brought in bunches, which was a mistake: buttons were pushed, tubes yanked, dials turned, a stethoscope went missing, and the nurses threatened to ban all family visits until the children learned some manners. The mothers decided that each of the older children would be given five minutes alone with the boy, and though a few might have acted inappropriately (one brother pinched the boy’s arm just to make absolutely sure he wasn’t faking, and one sister threw herself weeping across the boy’s body as if she were Mary Magdalene and he the crucified Lord), most did exactly what was expected of them, which was to tell the boy they were praying for him, they were so very sorry for how they’d treated him, ignored him, ditched and mocked and teased him, how sorry they were for ganging up on him and hurting his feelings. They told him what a good person he was, what a wonderful brother. Like a thirsty sponge the boy absorbed every word, and if he could have he would have told them how wrong they were. He had been Wrong his whole life and he wanted them to know how Wrong they were, too, because he was not a good person or a wonderful brother, he was Wrong, he was the Bad Brother, he was Ree-Pul-Seevo!, the Weirdo and the Pervert. And who were they? They were liars and a-holes, all of them, to be treating him like this now, what a gyp, what a gyp to be saying such things now, to be touching him with such kindness and care.

But they have kept coming, saying nice things and praying over him and bringing him cards which they tape to the walls. Every day his mothers sit with him, massage his limbs and wash and powder his skin. And of course there is the special mother, his secret crush, the one who smells like oranges and glows with a warm light. Somehow he has forgotten her name—like so many other details it has been lost to the gaping crevasses in his head, but it doesn’t matter, she comes to visit every day. The moment she steps into the room he can sense her presence, can smell the citrusy conditioner she uses in her hair, which brings him back into his body so completely he feels the full pain of his broken head and shattered hand, the burns on his face and arms, the corporal poisons of anger and stifled lust seeping from his glands. When she is there next to him, when she rests her hand on his, his whole body aches with something like knowledge for all he has lost, the chances he will never have, to return such a touch, to fall off a horse or eat Chinese food or shoot a crossbow (which has always been one of his most dear wishes), to receive a letter in the mail, to be kissed with longing or punched in the jaw. And though none of this comes to him as conscious thought he brims with the injustice of it, with every unmet need and carefully savored resentment and thwarted desire, every dirty thought and dearest wish, the whole of his childish optimism and loneliness boiling to the surface until he is a straining vessel, ready to burst.

One night she puts her hands on him, as if she knows this, as if she alone can understand. She touches him just the right way, coaxing him along until the pressure is released with a rush of such pleasure and hurt that everything goes white and for a moment it all pours out of him, his past and future, his very soul, and still he comes back, not yet ready to go, and as he sinks into the dark, mica-specked depths of himself he calls out to her,
Thank you Thank you Thank you
.

Yes, they keep coming, his sisters and brothers and mothers, the nurses who call him
Hon
and
Baby Doll
, who rub lotion into his sweet-smelling feet. They keep coming, the church members and neighbor ladies who bring fresh-cut flowers from their gardens, the elders who anoint his ruined head with holy oil and sanctify him with their healing power; his seventh-grade class, which tromps into his room single file, sings one rousing chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and hangs a crooked banner above the window:

GETWELLSOONRUSTY!!! WELOVEYOU!!!

Is it any wonder the boy slowly loses all trace of himself, gradually becomes the person he never, in his most ardent imaginings, hoped he could be: a good boy, a special child, a beloved brother and son.

On a perfect late spring morning in May the boy suffers a massive stroke, which cleaves him neatly down the middle. During the following week, unbeknownst to the doctors, undetected by their machines, he suffers a series of smaller strokes, each further dividing him from himself until he is little more than a scattering of thoughts and impressions held together by filaments of will. He seems to have lost access to his own body, which lies twisted and strange on the bed, bathed in the copper light of late afternoon, but still he is unwilling to let go, he wants to stay just a little while longer, to smell the flowers and read the handmade cards, to look out the bright window where the dead, in their billions, wait for him, to watch his visitors come and go, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying and shaking their heads and whispering sweet, doubtful things only he can hear.

It is a warm day, the sky empty, the heat rippling over the surface of the parking lot like water. The boy waits at the window. He won’t be waiting long.