The View from Here (18 page)

I looked around. There was no sign of a carcass. Whatever it was had escaped.

“There's nothing here,” I said.

Mason was lifting his wife carefully from the vehicle. One of the women from the houses offered to help. “Ayee. La pobre,” she said, seeing Sally, shaky at the car side.

Sally leaned on her husband for support, dropping her head to his shoulder. Mason, looking down at her, reached up and stroked the back of her neck.

“It's all right,” he crooned. “It's all right.”

Bee Bee was fine. Ned, his arms around her, called out, “Nothing broken.”

“Are you okay?” I asked Patsy. She was bent over rubbing her shin.

“Yes,” she answered, “I just scraped it jumping out.” Richard, joining us, said, “I must have fallen asleep. I didn't see what happened.”

Patsy, looking over at Mason and Sally standing still entwined at the car side, said nothing.

“Me neither,” I said.

“Do you think we should take Sally to a hospital? Is there a hospital?” Richard asked.

“There is, a small one, on the other side of town. You would have passed the road where it is on the way back from the airstrip.”

“Right,” he said. “What do you think, then? Should we go?”

“I don't know.”

Mason looked up. “I'm worried about concussion,” he said, tipping Sally away from him to look at her.

She raised her head like a doll. “I'm all right. I think.”

“Really?” Mason took her face in both of his hands.

“Yes.” She pulled herself upright.

“What about the car?” Ned asked.

“Could someone get me a cigarette before we start fussing about the wretched car?” Bee Bee muttered.

Patsy fetched cigarettes from the jeep and lit one each for her and Bee Bee. Ned left them smoking together and wandered around the car. It had attracted quite an audience of locals by then. One of them, a man with a belly protruding appleish over the sagging elastic of his shorts, spoke to Ned.

“Sorry, bud,” Ned said, shrugging, and gestured to me.

“The police will impound the car,” I translated.

“Sí,” the man said, nodding knowingly, running a thumb inside his waistband, “policia.” He gave me a shrewd look.

“If a car has been in an accident,” I explained to Ned and Richard, who had come up behind me, “the police can impound it. Plus they can fine you or jail you,” I said. “Things can get complicated, especially for foreigners.”

Ned nodded. “I don't want to mess with any Mexican jail,” he said.

It crossed my mind that this was the sort of situation that Arturo Rodriguez could fix, but it was very late, and, anyway, the police could arrive at any moment.

“No,” I answered. “The smartest thing might be to just ditch the car.”

“What do you think?” Ned called to Mason. “Do we care about the car?”

“We don't give a damn about the car,” he said. His arm was around Sally's waist. “I just want to get Sally home.”

She gave him a wan smile.

“And Bee Bee,” Bee Bee said, dropping her cigarette and grinding it out. “Bee Bee might be in need of a little lovin' care too, doncha think?”

“Come on.” Patsy took Bee Bee's elbow and helped her into the Buick.

Ned said to me, “What do you think?”

“I we don't care about the car, we can leave it to these guys. My guess is they'll have it off the road pretty quickly.”

“And the plates changed pretty quickly after that,” Ned said, grinning a bit.

“Probably.”

“Come on then. Let's go.”

I explained to the local men that we were in a hurry and worried about the ladies.

“Sí,” the fat man agreed gravely. He was worried about the ladies too.

So they ought to just do whatever was necessary with the car. We all understood each other. The fat man took his hand from his shorts and shook mine.

“Buenas noches.”

“Buenas noches.”

Patsy did not want to drive anymore. Richard took over at the wheel of the jeep and I got in with them, leaving the others the comfort of the Buick. As we drove around the wrecked Chevrolet, four men were heaving the front of it back from the pole.

“I don't think it's too badly damaged, actually,” Richard said. “Jus' the hood and the grill. Prob'ly looks worse than it is.”

He was, I realized, still pretty unsteady. He drove cautiously, bending his arms unnaturally and concentrating his attention on the five yards of road directly ahead of us.

“Did you say you didn't see what happened?” Patsy asked. It wasn't clear who she was speaking to. Richard answered.

“No…nodded off I think.”

“Right,” she said, taking a cigarette and lighting it with her head dipped and her hand cupped over the flame. Her eyes narrowed against the flare.

“Did you?” I asked. “See anything? Sally said something ran out.”

Patsy turned to face the front again. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the back of Richard's seat. In profile she shook her head.

EIGHT

C
HRISTINA HAD BEEN
in bed. Her hair was coming slightly loose from a long thick plait and the high neckline of a white nightdress showed above her dressing gown. Mason had shouted her name once when we arrived and she had materialized instantly from wherever it was that she slept. Tightening the dressing gown around her now, she attended to Sally.

“Really, Christina,” Sally said, “go back to bed.”

But Christina would have none of it. Mason, kneeling at Sally's side, looked up at her. “What do you think, Christina? About Madam's arm. Should she see a doctor?”

“Yes, sir. I think so.”

“Now, now, you two.” Sally turned her head from her husband to her housekeeper and back again. “I won't have you conspiring. I've said I'm fine and I am. No more fuss.” She frowned prettily and then flinched as Christina made one more nimble inspection of her right arm. “I mean it,” she insisted. “I just need some sleep.”

Ned had poured brandies. Mason took Sally's and held it to his lips. As if, I thought, she were dying.

“Please, Christina, we've disturbed you enough. Do go back to bed.”

Christina, reluctant, finally turned away.

When she'd gone, Sally pulled herself up a little and said to Mason, “We'll have to arrange something about another car for her, I suppose.”

“Don't you worry about that,” Mason replied, consoling.

“All right,” she said, looking into his eyes.

He reached forward and lay a hand on her knee.

He did not come to my room and I suppose I had not expected him to, but I was disappointed nonetheless. Not immediately, because I fell asleep quickly, worn out by the evening and lulled by the brandy, but later, when I woke up and twisted the little clock on my chest of drawers to see what time it was. I flicked the lamp on and blinked. Five a.m. I knew he would not come.

I switched the lamp off again and lay back in the dark. Thinking. I had been surprised by the way Mason had acted toward Sally after the accident. I probably shouldn't have been. She might, after all, have been seriously hurt. But I was. He had been so…affectionate. I punched a light depression in a downy pillow, knowing that this was a petty kind of jealousy. I felt it nevertheless, needling.

• • •

Is it acceptable to demand love? To be angry with those who withhold it from us? We behave as if it were, don't we? We rear up on righteous hind legs and howl when our loved ones do not love us back. Like infants squalling for survival. I think that is what I would have done if the drama that was playing out in our home had been set only a year earlier. I would have demanded and then, in that hideous progression that so often comes when demanding is the start point, fallen to asking and then to begging. I'd have bayed for my husband's affections, and my husband would probably have left me.

Phillip waited three days to pick up again on our short conversation about his affair, and I knew when he was about to do it, saw, in the seconds before he spoke, a slow readjustment of his features. Saw him summon the words and the courage he needed.

“I love you, Frances,” he said.

And then, as if exhausted by this declaration, he said nothing more for a moment and I thought, in that distant way I am capable of now, watching the actress in the movie of my life, what an ill-defined term
love
is.

My parents, I am sure, loved me and certainly would have said so. They would have cited, I suspect, concern for my welfare, their desire to pass on to me the tools that they thought life called for, as evidence. And yet for many years I felt no such emotion from them, did not consider, even after I had married Phillip and found myself relying on the things my mother, in her tutorly way, had taught me—how to cook chickens, how to hang curtains, how to hem skirts—that this connection represented love. I did not realize through those years I spent packing lunches for Chloe that the skills that had gained me the life I wanted were the legacy of a childhood I had considered barren. And I am not sure that, even when we took Chloe to Singapore after my father's retirement and watched them with her, formal, but kind and proud, too, of their sweet proxy grandchild and my role as wife and mother, I understood the kind of love they were offering.

Phillip finally lifted his head and looked at me, presenting his version of love, but I did not feel the need to say I know, or I love you too, not out loud. We were sitting in my dayroom, though it was evening, and Phillip was wearing a green sweater that accentuated the color of his eyes and a pair of faded corduroys. He had a tumbler of whiskey in his hand. He looked so comfortable, so husbandly.

“I did not stop loving you, no matter what you might think.”

Again I had no desire or energy for response, and anyway, none was sought. He seemed to need to speak, to unroll all before me, and I understood that, that craving for confession.

“But even when it began, with Josee”—he had hesitated, I felt, over her name, but he went on—“it seemed like something very different. I can't explain it exactly. It was something that I didn't expect and God knows wasn't looking for. It was not like anything I had experienced before.”

He looked up suddenly, pained, guilty, conscious perhaps that he had said too much. It must have struck him that he was telling these things, things that he had probably wanted to tell somebody for quite some time, to his wife, his wronged, betrayed wife.

“What I mean is,” he said, steadying himself, his composure only slightly off-kilter, “it's not like I met somebody and replaced you. It wasn't like that at all. I really did try to make sense of it, and I know that I have hurt you, and I know that that is unforgivable, and I also know that it is trite and unreasonable to say that none of this is what I wanted, but really,
really
, it is true. I just wish you hadn't ever…” He trailed off then, because we both knew that what was implied here was that it would have been better if I had died without knowing.

I looked at him, feeling like I was weeping, but in fact I was not.

“I need to make sense of it too,” I said.

“I'm so sorry—”

“Look,” I cut him off, “I can't explain very clearly how I feel about this. I just know it's different from the way I felt a while ago. There are other things now that seem much more important.” Briefly, in that confessional air I did consider telling him what these things were, but I did not. “I think I want to feel that I have some sort of control over the future. Chloe's future, really.”

He looked stung at the mention of Chloe's name, as if it had never occurred to him before that she might be affected by all of this, and I was angry with him for that.

“If you and Josee are going to be a couple, Phillip, I want to meet her again.” He made no denials at this point, but looked, simply, crushed. “I want to have a party, and I want Josee to come.”

“I'll ask her,” he said, resigned, but with no promise in his voice.

• • •

No one was eating breakfast when I came down, though the table was laid, and next to it Hudson, in a wooden playpen, was squealing with a toy in each hand. I had slept badly and woken grumpy, and there was no sign of Mason. I had a headache.

“Leave him,” I said to Christina as she went to take Hudson away.

She righted herself slowly. It was not my place to instruct her, and especially not in so brusque a manner. We both knew it. I regretted the exchange immediately.

“As you like,” she replied as a small metal train engine flew from the playpen and crashed at my feet. I winced, bending to pick it up.

“Sorry,” Patsy said, appearing suddenly. “Is he being a pest?” She looked at the child and sighed.

I was relieved to see her. “No. It's not him. I just have a headache.”

“Hold on,” she said.

She was back a few minutes later with two red and white caplets.

“Thanks.”

“That's okay. I never leave home without a well-rounded supply of the miracles of modern pharmacology.”

I swallowed the pills.

She raised her eyebrows cheerfully over the coffee Christina had brought. “After all, if you've got to leave your shrink behind…”

She was talking about a life I didn't know. Her life. She laughed. Then, abruptly, sobered.

“Did you say you hadn't seen what happened? Last night.”

“You mean the accident?”

“Uh-huh.”

“No. We were behind you. We didn't see anything. The first I knew was when Mason braked.”

She lifted her cup again. There was a faint trace of pink on the rim of it. “You don't drive, do you?”

“No,” I answered, dropping my voice a little. I couldn't drive then and it was something I was embarrassed about. Especially around people like Patsy, who could do everything.

“Still,” she said, contemplating, “if something ran in front of you—imagine you're driving.” She put her cup back down without drinking from it and lifted both hands, as if to a steering wheel. “Something runs in front of you. What do you do?”

“Brake, I suppose. I don't know. Swerve. Isn't that what happened?”

“Maybe,” she said. She looked like someone who hasn't completely figured out an equation, but is working on it.

The trip to the hospital was Mason's idea. Sally'sarm, he said, had swollen in the night and looked rather bruised in daylight. He was concerned. Patsy and I, quitting our talk, stared at him for a moment over the remains of our coffee. Mason did not seem to notice the abrupt cut in our conversation.

“Would you come with us, Frankie?”

“Well, yes, but I could call Arturo if you like. He could certainly arrange for a doctor to come here, to the house.”

“I think we may as well go to the hospital. She's going to need an X-ray, and it will save time to go straight there.” A deep, sincere crease distorted his brow.

“All right.”

The hospital was a low whitewashed building with a flat roof just out of town. It was less than a year old and had been opened, officially, by Maria. I had watched the ceremony, standing with the doctor's wives and a small assembly of other town dignitaries on the gray pavement while Maria cut the blue ribbon with a pair of plastic-handled scissors. The scattery applause, as the severed ends fluttered, had been swallowed quickly by the cloudless morning. I had only been back once since then, not long afterward, with Adam. He had dislocated a finger tugging out a chest of drawers to get at a pen that had fallen behind. I noticed that the bougainvillea in the front had grown since then.

The hospital was always busy, and that day it was bedlam. People were sitting on the floor. Babies were crying. A receptionist peered at us from behind a sliding glass panel before opening it tentatively and passing over a form on a clipboard. She indicated, with a beleaguered look, that we would have to wait. Like everybody else. We waited for an hour before Ned and Bee Bee, who had come with us on Ned's insistence that Bee Bee ought to get looked over too, decided to give up.

“A body could keel over just sitting in this place,” Ned said. They took the car into town, fixing a time to come back for us.

Mason was fidgety, pacing. “Find out how much longer, would you?”

It was a bark, and I stared, shocked.

“Please,” he said, softening.

I got up, sighed, and glanced at Sally, sitting serenely on the orange plastic chair that a smiling man in a farmer's hat had graciously given up for her. A child had been whisked from the one next to it for me. Sally had sat ever since, calm and uncomplaining, with her hurt wrist nestled tenderly against her breasts. I wanted to slap her.

“Please,” Mason said again.

The receptionist slid her protective screen back again reluctantly at my tap. We both knew what I was going to ask, and we both knew what she was going to answer.

“Dios sabe,” I said a moment later, repeating her reply verbatim, with a slight edge of spite, to Mason.

He looked at me. Lost, I thought, like a child separated from its mother.

“God knows,” I translated wearily.

A sad-looking woman, with a baby on her lap and a toddler at her knee, had taken my chair.

“I'm going outside for a bit. They'll call you.”

The automatic doors slid back on their trundling mechanism and released me to the sunshine. I went down the steps and wandered vaguely left, glad to be outside, away. Away from Sally and Mason and their disturbing double act. I had become convinced during the course of the morning that Sally's wrist was not at all seriously injured, and yet Mason had persisted with his panicky reaction. I couldn't understand it. I closed my eyes for a moment and breathed in and out, slowly. When I opened them again, he was standing beside me.

“Don't be cross. I just feel bad, about Sally.” He reached out a hand and held the side of my neck.

I saw, in his tired eyes, love and guilt. Love for me, and guilt for Sally. It was guilt, I rationalized, that was motivating this unusual behavior of his.

“Go on back,” I said, smiling at him. “I'll be there in a minute.”

He lifted my fingers and kissed them swiftly, reassuringly, before taking the steps two at a time.

I waited for a moment, plucking a leaf from a bush, before turning to follow him. At the curb Bee Bee was leaning against the car, while Ned, still inside, bent over, putting something in the glove box. I had not, through the stream of people arriving and leaving, heard them pull up. Bee Bee looked in my direction but offered no greeting. She seemed to stare for a moment before twisting toward Ned, who had spoken to her as he pushed his door open, getting out too. I assumed that she had not seen me.

A man in a doctor's white coat was bent over Sally. He turned and shook my hand. I knew him a little. His son had been a student of Adam's. I asked after the boy. Then, sensing Mason's impatience rising again, I explained about the arm without going into too much detail about the accident. A bump, I said, a bang, in the car. The doctor, though, was not interested in the car. He motioned for Sally to follow him and for me to come too. Mason he discouraged.