Alice wound her fingers through her hair. She shrugged, and said, “I don't know. It seems like a long time ago.”
But she knew exactly what she had been thinking. She'd been thinking that she was in love with Robert Summers – and she had been. Still was, sometimes. On the good days. She was fifteen years old when she'd first laid eyes on him. He was so handsome she had hardly been able to breathe. She'd never thought that a person could be that good looking and still be actually real. He looked like he might wisp away in a puff of smoke if she reached out to touch him. You didn't see people like Robert Summers sitting on the couch in your trailer, you saw them on movie screens and in magazine pages. And yet there he was, big as life. She hadn't thought about what he might be doing there in the trailer then, and she didn't want to think about it now. She had her suspicions, and then Mom got pregnant with Sally. But Alice didn't ask questions. He said that he liked her and that was all she needed.
She went to the prom with Greg VanDerzee, and when he tried to kiss her she'd slapped him and run home. When she got to the park Robert was there in his car. He looked her up and down in her rumpled silky pink-ruffle dress with the low-cut top and bared arms and shoulders, and he opened the door and told her to get in. She got in, her face flushed and beaming and radiant. She couldn't have helped but to obey.
He drove her away from the park as the sun fell, sweeping down in a lazy arc across the blazing sky, peeling out a black velvet night behind it as still and perfect as any she'd ever known. They drove for a long time, and she was trembling with excitement when he pulled over on the shore of a rocky lake. He stopped the car and he turned in his seat to look at her and his beautiful brown eyes were so big and soft that they outshone the tender moonlight spilling around them. She sat there in his gaze just laughing and grinning and squirming like a bug on a pin.
He reached out to pull down the straps of her dress. She pushed his hands away so he grabbed her wrists and caught them both in one of his big hands and held them tight in her lap and tugged the flimsy little straps down with his other hand. She started shivering and not just because of the cold and she opened her mouth and he leaned across the car to close it with a firm kiss and she sank right into him.
She had her first orgasm that night, and as it passed through her he grabbed her hair and twisted it in his fingers and he looked deep into her eyes. He said: “You're never going to be this happy again, Alice. Every day from now on, every hour, every year, each one will be worse than the one before until you are old and weak and riddled with sickness and begging for death. You'll curse whatever God you have for every moment. When you're finally mewling on your deathbed you'll beg him for just one more pain-racked moment of existence, and you'll realize that everything you have ever done amounts to nothing. You mean nothing and the world will forget you when you're gone. You'll want to scream but you won't be able to, and then you will die. The children you thought would buy you immortality will bury you and they will forget you and it will be as if you never were. Only I can save you. It might hurt, but you'll be alive, I promise you. Really alive.”
Or maybe he hadn't said all that. Perhaps he hadn't said any of it. Maybe she'd just been thinking it.
He married her after she turned eighteen, just before her high school graduation, and they moved to Syracuse. They left before the graduation ceremony, so she'd had to have her diploma mailed to their new address. The apartment where they lived was only about ninety minutes from Verden, and he often traveled back that way, but she had never once asked to return with him. That world was gone, as far as she was concerned; all the old things had passed away.
He didn't hit her for a while, six months at least. And when it happened he was almost calm about it, like he'd been expecting to do it sooner of later. She broke a plate in the kitchen and the dinner she had made for him was ruined on the floor. He just stood there and looked at it for a few seconds, then he reached out and, quite casually, struck her across the jaw, hard enough to knock her down to the floor. She cut her hand on a shard of the plate when she fell and started bleeding at once. She'd looked up at him, bewildered, holding her bloody hand in her lap.
She'd lost count of the times since then. Scars over scars, bruises gone black with age, bones broken and set crooked. And now, after only twenty-one years of life, Alice Burke felt like an old woman, aching and flinching.
And yet, the truth was that she was more frightened of what was going to happen after Robert was dead than she was of killing him. There had never been many options for her. It wasn't just Robert's big brown eyes that lured her away from High Gorge Park. If she hadn't gone with Robert, than she surely would have ended up far worse off.
What was she going to do when he was gone? She'd never been all that good at taking care of herself. But she had to do something. She couldn't let her life simply continue like this, getting worse and worse as it went on. She knew that there was some way to change it all, to make it better. Killing him would fix everything somehow, she knew it would.
She looked at her brother. He was watching her strangely, like he was waiting for her to say something. She just shook her head and reached out to take the beer bottle from him. She lifted the cold bottle to her lips and tilted it back. There was no taste at first, and then, going down, it was bitter.
“So... we're really going to do this then?” her little brother asked.
Alice just nodded, and drank.
September Sixth
Roberta Perez looked out at the faces in her classroom, little faces trapped in themselves, and she tasted vomit in the back of her throat.
She held her belly. They said the first trimester would be the hardest. She hoped they were right.
Her mother would have had something to say about this. She was going to say something when Roberta finally told her that was for sure. Mrs. Perez wasn't the kind of lady who appreciated departure from tradition. Grow up, get job, find husband, quit job, have children, raise children, die.
Until the pregnancy, coming out to her mother had been the hardest experience of Roberta's adult life. There had been some phrases thrown around, Roberta couldn't imagine where her stern little mother had ever picked them up: butch, crew-cut softball dyke, turkey-baster lesbian. Would she even want to know her grandchild?
Roberta thought of the fertility clinic, laying there on the bed with Taylor's hand laced through her own, joking with the nurse that it would have been a lot cheaper just to hire that male prostitute.
She felt another wave of nausea rising in her chest. She cleared her throat and turned back to the chalk board. “Okay,” she said, “we're looking at multiplication and division of fractions today.” The chalk scraped softly on the board, and she let out a slow breath. She understood numbers. There was no uncertainty in math, nothing but right and wrong. The numbers emerged, as though she were uncovering them rather than writing them, and she spoke automatically, words from her lesson plan spilling effortlessly from her mouth.
“Alright, you with me?” she turned back to the class.
Freddy Wilcox in the back row had his fingers spread open in a wide V, like Mr. Spock from Star Trek. He pantomimed with his tongue. The children sitting around him are laughing noiselessly, their hands clamped over their mouths. Laughing at her, she realized. When he saw that she was watching he stuck his hands in his pockets and smirked, his grin tinged with nervousness but utterly without shame.
She stared, everything she'd wanted to say forgotten. She hated them so much, hated their sneering faces and dirty hands, their dull stares and open-mouthed gaping. She hated to be looked at by them, especially the boys. She knew what they said about her, had overheard them before. Fat ass. Lesbo. She hated to feel them staring at her backside, like she was a piece of meat into which they couldn't wait to sink in their gnawing little teeth.
She couldn't remember why she had ever wanted a child.
She finished her class in a daze and drove home at the end of the day, simmering with an
anger which turned slowly to despair.
The feeling only got worse when she got home. High Gorge Park, stuck there on the edge of town like a leper-colony, all those trailers like they'd stalled there on the run from some looming apocalypse. She fell into bed and didn't wake up until the sun was setting hot and red through the window, blistering light coming through the pine trees like there was a fire just over the horizon creeping slowly closer, a dull orange glow eating at the sky.
Taylor was pouring over a thick textbook. She chewed on the end of a pencil. “Hey Robbie,” she mumbled from the corner of her mouth. Taylor had cut her hair short last week, bobbed it and cut back her bangs, sometimes Roberta didn't recognize her right away.
Roberta fought back a yawn. “Is there anything to eat?”
“Leftover takeout in the fridge,” Taylor said absently.
Roberta closed her arms around her girlfriend, bent her face down sleepily on Taylor's shoulder. “What's up?”
“Studying. Jesus, were you sleeping?” Taylor turned away from the book just long enough to give her a skeptical glance.
Roberta nodded. “Rough day, kinda.”
Taylor whimpered sympathetically, “Poor baby.” She patted Roberta's cheek.
“I'm horny,” Roberta said. It was a lie, and she usually didn't like to talk about sex, but there something about what the kid in school had done that had gotten under her skin. She could do whatever she wanted! Who cared what the children thought of her?
Taylor laughed. “Are those your crazy pregnancy hormones talking?”
Roberta nuzzled Taylor's neck. “I'm serious.”
“And I'm seriously busy. I got a paper due in a week that I haven't even started.”
“You're worse than my students.”
Taylor snorted incredulously.
Roberta kissed Taylor just below the ear, where her hair curled in an adorable little wisp.
Taylor shrugged her off. “I mean it, Robbie, I can't!”
Roberta drew away. She touched her belly; she could feel the child-thing growing inside her, spreading in her body like a cancer. For an instant, a flash of a moment that was gone almost a quickly as it had appeared and left only shame behind, she wished that it would die. “Can't or won't?”
“Both.” Taylor said firmly. “Why don't you go back to bed?”
“I guess I will.” Roberta laughed bitterly.
“Good,” Taylor returned the pencil eraser to the corner of her mouth.
Roberta crossed the trailer in a half-a-dozen steps. She'd only just sat down on the edge of the bed when she felt the familiar heaving in her stomach. She sprawled on all fours, reaching for the little metal garbage can, vomiting noisily. She coughed. All the saliva in her mouth seemed to have turned to acid.
She turned on her side and lay there on the floor, sweating. She was crying, but could not remember when she had started.
September Seventh
Jessica Riley rubbed the crumpled piece of paper between her fingers. She turned it in her hand, folding and smoothing it unconsciously. She stared at the car window, not looking through at the street beyond but at the edge of the glass itself, how it seemed to trap and manipulate the light. She had never stopped being fascinated by automobiles.
She got out of the car and, after reading the address on the paper scrap once more, she went up the steel stairs to the heavy gray door. She knocked twice. The city was cold and colorless below her. A harsh light cut through the clouds, light from a sun devoid of any warmth as it washed across the decaying world.
She heard movement inside the apartment, footsteps coming towards the doorway, and she immediately regretted coming. What did she think was going to happen anyway? She shoved the crumpled slip of paper deep into her pocket. The door swung timidly open and her husband's face peered out.
“Hello, Nathan,” she said, immediately wishing that she hadn't come. It had been a mistake.
“Jessie...” He smiled; not a happy smile exactly, but the weary smile of a man who was very near to giving up hope. “Do you want to come in?”
She nodded. It was too late to turn back now. She followed him into the subdued gloom of the little apartment. It was tiny and dingy, so cramped it made the trailer look almost luxurious by comparison.
He shut the door and hugged her, warily. She returned his embrace, not without some reticence, and they broke slowly apart. They were like colliding planets spun gracefully out of their orbits and into the vacuity of space. They stood on opposite sides of the cramped little apartment and they looked at each other with their hands awkwardly at their sides.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“Alright.” He scratched the back of his neck and looked at the as-yet unpacked boxes scattered about the floor like he was only just noticing them. “Gena?”
“I don't know. She's working at least... Every time I bring up college she just... won't talk about it, just shuts down. You know how she is.”
“Give her time. She'll figure it out.”
Nathan cleared off a pile of newspapers from the sofa and the two of them sat down. She couldn't look at him. She almost thought she could feel his breath on her, and she itched to kiss him or hit him or most of all just to leap up and run out the door without looking back. “The place seems nice.”
Nathan looked around. “It's alright.”
He'd called her a couple of days ago to tell her that he'd found an apartment. She scribbled down the address on the paper and tried to forget about it. She carried the paper with her for three days, like a stone around her neck until finally she'd finally found herself driving, as though in a dream or hypnotized, driving towards him.
And now... She wanted nothing more than to take him back, drag him into the car and bring him home. But something stopped her, some small voice inside her that told her that she couldn't. Not if it was ever going to change, not if she was ever going to be herself again.
“Jessie...” Nathan touched her arm, his voice small and plaintive. She looked at him, and in his eyes she saw that familiar boy, frightened and alone. Save me, help me, love me, he said to her with those soft brown eyes.
She pushed him back against the couch and she bent over him and she kissed his soft lips and she slid her hand down into his pants and she touched him until he was whimpering and sighing for her and clinging tight with his hands around her, hanging like a weight, and she shut her eyes and drank in his need for her until he was spent and limp and his eyes filled with relieved tears.
“I love you so much,” he said, his throat closing around the words.
Jessica smiled. She ran her fingers tenderly over his balding head and she held him to her breast and she said, “I know you do, sweetie.”
“I need you,” he said.
“You don't,” she said, and he became once more afraid, clung desperately to her.
He said, a final attempt: “Robert Summers is having a thing... Do you want to go? Together, I mean?” He forced a laugh, like she couldn't see the tears spilling down his cheeks, “For old time's sake?”
She shook her head. The old times were over. Things had to have their end, they had to be allowed to die. You had to let go of things, she thought, and Nathan nodded reluctantly, like he was listening to her thoughts and could not but agree. He wrapped his arms around her and he held her and she let him for a time, until the sun went down beneath the city and there came in its wake a true darkness as deep and long as any that had been known in that place, and then she left him there.
September Eighth
Robert Summers counted out the bills one by one, setting them in a neat stack on the desk. The repetitive beats of seductive electronica throbbed dully on the other side of the office door. A puppy dog padded across the floor, snuffing at the door frame.
Kevin Peterson was staring at the ceiling, nursing a beer and chewing his lips. His hand left wet marks on the frosted glass, like finger-drawings on a car window. “What's with the dog?” He scratched one ear.
“It's for Alice.”
“She asked you for a dog?”
“No.” Robert straightened the small pile of bills.
Kevin screwed up his face, desperately confused. His forehead wrinkled and his eyebrows drew close together. The overall effect upon his features was decidedly simian. Then he shook his head, as though bowing in submission to a logical impossibility, and he took a swallow of beer. “Well, what kind is it, anyway?” he asked, pausing to wipe his mouth on his jacket sleeve.
“Golden retriever,” Robert answered absently, glaring down at the money like he could pin it to the table with the force of his gaze.
“No shit? I saw something in the paper not too long about about one of those. Some guy's house caught on fire and the fuckin' dog dragged his kid out. Didn't even wake the kid up. Un-fucking-believable shit, you know?” Kevin's eyes shone, wide open and filled in black, irises almost vanished.
Robert stared across the table. “Are you high, Kevin?”
He sniffed, scrubbing the back of his thumb against his nostril. “Uh... not, like, high high, but, uh, you know. Why?”
Robert sighed. “For God's sake, I told you not to use here, Kevin. Not where I do business. I don't care when or what, but not here.”
“Huh.” Kevin seemed to ponder that for a moment. Then he looked down at the tawny puppy sniffed at his shoe. “Do you think you could kill a dog, Bob?”
Robert set the money aside. “What?”
“No, I mean, like, with your bare hands, you know? If a dog was, like, coming at you and you had to defend yourself. Do you think you could kill a dog to keep it from killing you. To save yourself. Like a German Shepard or something like that.”
“Jesus Christ, Kevin, why would you even think of something like that?” Robert got up from from his chair and stepped around the desk to snatch up the puppy. He sat back down with the little creature in his arms. It smiled up at him, pink tongue hanging from its mouth.
Kevin shrugged. “I've been thinking about it a lot, actually. About, you know, what animals are capable of doing.”
Robert pushed the money aside. He stroked one of the dog's velvety ears between his thumb and forefinger. “Did I ever tell you about the dog I had when I was a kid?”