He is approaching his regular turn into Morningside, but he doesn’t take it. Shandi will be there, helping Natty refill the bird feeders while something bubbles on the stove. He doesn’t want her as a witness when Bialys calls to tell him Stevie’s fate. She was present when he introduced air and light to the previously closed environment of Stevie’s skull cavity, and she has a vested interest in Stevie being dead. She’ll feel relieved. Perhaps even pleased, and he’s not sure what his face will do.
This road takes him into Decatur, and once he’s there, he finds himself following a familiar path. It’s not a good idea. He knows this, even as he comes to a stop in front of the painted brick cottage where Bridget’s parents moved after their youngest started college.
There are lights on inside, and multiple cars are parked in the driveway. Bridget’s parents’ old Volvo is blocked in by her brother Michael’s van and a couple of Toyotas that he doesn’t recognize. The dented Honda Civic on the street belongs to her youngest sister, Maggie. Pieces of the Sullivan clan are gathering for dinner.
William is excellent at compartmentalization, but coming to this place is a mistake. It isn’t good for him. He hadn’t so much as thought the syllables of her name for months, until the Circle K. Now her memories rise thicker every day. He will not think of her. He thinks, instead, of Baxter. Baxter is inside, no doubt milling around the crowded kitchen, hoping someone will get clumsy and drop a slice of cheese or some chicken. He feels a tightening in his chest. He should put his foot down on the gas. Speed away. Go home.
He is not welcome. This is not acceptable behavior. But he pulls to the curb, letting the car idle. His breathing has accelerated, as if he sprinted all the way here. As if he is still sprinting.
William wants to get out of the car, go up the walk, and bang his fist against their silly purple door. When Bridget’s father opens the door, William can say, “I want my damn dog.”
William can’t imagine what would happen next. Nothing pleasant. The Sullivans are mostly redheaded, and they all have quick tempers. He is not thinking of his wife, of what she called “the flash-fire angries.” He will not. He thinks instead of her youngest sister, Maggie, who combines that same temper with poor impulse control. One day last year, she drove over to his house, rang the doorbell, and then hit him. She slapped her open hand hard up against the side of his head, making an angry face so like Bridget’s angry face that he simply nodded in response. She looked instantly sorry, with Bridget’s own instant-sorry face, and he stopped being willing to look at her at that point. When he finally opened his eyes again, his porch was empty.
He can’t picture anything specific past demanding Baxter. Whatever happens, it won’t be clean or kind or simple. He did not behave well after the accident.
His lips twist up then, because he is sitting in his car across the street from their house, like a stalker. He’s still not behaving well.
But he leaves the car in park, trying to get air all the way down into his constricted lungs. Bialys’s call is not the only reason he doesn’t want to go home to Shandi.
Yesterday, dozing in his old familiar place on the rug, smelling fresh flowers and roasting meat, he heard a woman humming and the sound of small, bare feet slapping earnestly against the hardwoods. He fell into a strange peace. He forgot when he was. It was a nine-second sink into before.
He jerked awake in a belly-dropping swoop of vertigo.
The child running up and down the hall was only Natty, but Natty was no threat to Twyla’s place. That’s not how families are structured. In families, he realized, children are added to, not superseded. The addition of a child is not a betrayal of previous or current children.
Wives are structured differently.
His body is rocking itself forward and back from his hands, squeezing the wheel at ten and two. He can’t have Shandi in his kitchen. He can’t go home, risk taking pleasure in her approximation. He has come instead deliberately to this house, though he knows he shouldn’t—
The headset at his ear chirps, and his whole body jumps and shudders out of rhythm. His hands are strangling the steering wheel, and he loosens them. He must not sit churning outside this house, thinking about procreation and the replaceable nature of wives.
Caller ID tells him it is Bialys.
William puts the car in drive, pulls away from the curb, pointing toward Morningside. He taps the earpiece and says, “Hello?” He has a practiced phone voice, pleasant and well modulated, but it fails him. It shakes and lacks volume.
“Dr. Ashe? That you?” It is Bialys. William focuses, thinks only of the detective. Bialys is a large, crumpled individual, soon to retire. The last time they met, Bialys had food on his tie.
“Yes,” William says.
“Steven Parch is being taken off the ventilator. His uncle made the call this morning. I’m sorry. I only heard it now.”
Now Bialys has his whole attention with no effort. A silence stretches out between them, very long, but Bialys doesn’t seem to mind it. The uncle is Stevie’s closest living relative, so Stevie breathes or stops breathing at his sole discretion. Stevie is not brain-dead, but he is in a “vegetative state.” When Bialys first said this phrase, William thought, immediately, The carrot feels nothing. The longer it continues, the less likely it becomes that it will resolve itself favorably.
“He said he had a child,” William insists. He remembers it perfectly, Stevie saying, I’m a daddy myself. I ain’t gonna shoot no little kids . . .
“Not that we can find. Even if, Parch’s kid would be a minor, and Parch wasn’t married to the mother,” Bialys says, as kindly as he can in his gruff, barking voice.
“When will it happen?” William asks.
“Not long. A day or two? It would be immediate, but the uncle’s doing ten in Alabama. Prison complicates the paperwork. It doesn’t help he’s in another state.”
William is turning into Morningside now. On one side of the car, the well-watered lawns of his neighbors are deep green. On his other side is Holy Shit Park. Asters bloom in the beds, and behind them, tall copper sneezeweed daisies are surrounded by butterflies. They flutter and pause, preening on the blooms. A hummingbird feeder hangs on a wrought-iron post, bright red and yellow, and north of here, a machine is breathing for Stevie. The machine is keeping him alive.
A day from now, or maybe two, William will have killed a man.
Into this second long silence, Detective Bialys says. “You understand, William, you’re not in any legal trouble.”
“I know,” William says. He is on his street now. Paula’s BMW is in front of his house. Shandi’s yellow beetle isn’t. So there’s that. He pulls into the drive and stops. “This is the only possible outcome?”
“Just have to dot some i’s.” There is another long pause, and then Bialys says, fast and low, “This is lucky. You have time to get right in your head. That’s not how this works, most times. He had a gun, okay? A bunch of citizens lined up. It wasn’t going anywhere good. You did the right thing.” This is the most words William has ever heard him say in a row.
“I understand.” William says. “Please call me. After.”
“I will,” Bialys promises. They hang up.
Perhaps there is no child.
But then why say it? It’s an odd lie for a nineteen-year-old armed robber to tell. William has never been good at nuance, but when Stevie told Natty he was a daddy, it didn’t sound like comfort. He didn’t say to Natty, I promise I won’t shoot you. He was boasting: I made something. I am a father.
With the engine off, William’s car is quickly turning into an oven. He should go inside, but instead he hits the button, and the driver’s-side window scrolls down. The July air outside is not much of an improvement.
So somewhere in the world, a child will grow up with no father instead of a drug-addled, criminal one. Six of one, as his
own father used to say to indicate equivalence. But after Monday, there will not be a possible outcome where Stevie opens his eyes and stands up and says, I’m better now. You didn’t hit me all that hard.
He wants this, though it is not rational. He doesn’t care what happens to Stevie then. Stevie can go straight from the hospital to jail. In jail, William could forget him very quickly. Dead, he is an absence in the world that William has created.
Perhaps Stevie was lying, and there is no child. Perhaps when he dies, no one will care. Paula says that’s pathetically sad, but it seems preferable to William. A dead person, wholly unconnected from other humans, is only so much meat.
Paula is standing in his open front door now, waving him in.
He gets out, and as he comes up the walk she says, “I managed to run Shandi off, for tonight, anyway. You’re welcome. Did Bialys call you back?”
“They’re taking him off the ventilator.” He spreads his hands wide. There isn’t any more to say about that.
“I figured they would,” she says. “We could get truly, deeply drunk?” William shakes his head. “We could comfort-eat a vat of Mr. Feung’s?”
“It’s about half MSG,” William says, going inside, walking with her toward the kitchen. “Might as well eat cat food.”
“I like it,” she says.
“Liking shit don’t make it smell good,” William says, and then he and Paula stop dead and look at each other.
It is a Bridget line, a colloquialism she learned from her mountain granny, Twyla Grace, up in North Carolina. She often quoted this earthy bit of wisdom when assessing Paula’s latest boyfriend.
“Wow,” Paula says.
“I don’t know,” William says, answering a question she hasn’t asked.
Paula boosts herself up to sit on the kitchen counter. “You should get at least a little drunk. Grab us both a beer?”
He gets two from the fridge and tries to hand her one, but instead of taking it she grabs his wrist. She pulls him toward her until he is up against her knees on the counter. She wraps one ankle around his leg, pinning him, then stretches her spine up to put her face closer to his face than he likes. She has set all her features to be stern, pulling her eyebrows very far down, her mouth also down at the corners, to indicate that she is very, very serious.
“You better not be hoping to luck into another way to kill yourself. Even after Parch dies. I won’t allow it.”
William is much stronger than Paula; he could pull away. But Paula knows his definition of destiny. She knows he said that word in the Circle K, to Shandi, right after he took the bullet. Shandi told her, at the hospital. Paula is saying now, quite plainly, that she guessed the destiny he chose there. She is angry with him for it.
“You’re very smart about people,” William tells her. “It makes you good at your job, but I’m finding it a little inconvenient.”
She refuses to be joked out of this. Her face stays stern, and she doesn’t release him. “I’m a damn good lawyer, but I planned on being a clinically depressed, alcoholic, part-time barmaid. Just like Mom,” she tells him. “You’re the reason I’m not. You expected better of me. So don’t be a glib little turd when I’m saving your sorry ass back.”
Had Stevie been remotely competent, Paula would possess a large piece of the absence he left in the world. He owes her this.
“I won’t do it again,” he says. He holds his body still and lets her keep her face uncomfortably close to his as she continues.
“I don’t believe you.” Her voice is hard and low. “Why wouldn’t you kill yourself? I’ve seen your style of grieving, and it flat sucks. For everyone. You shove comfort sideways. No one is allowed to be comforted. So now what? Should we all jump in front of bullets with you? Try something else, because you’re rotting from the inside out. Stop rotting.”
“I’m not rotting,” William says.
Paula lets him go, taking one of the beers from him as he backs up.
“You’re pretty much rotting, Bubba,” Paula says. She twists off the cap and drinks. “Don’t front like you’re moving forward, either. You’ve got this pretty little object sublimating sex into nine thousand quarts of soup, and you stand there like you’ve misplaced your dick.” She sounds like herself again. “Not that I think putting it to Shandi is the answer. God, please, spare us all that fresh-faced hell. But you have to do something with the rest of your dumb life. What are you going to do?”
“Work,” William says. His work is valuable. In ten years, maybe less, his team could well end Parkinson’s. Maybe he should go back full-time on Monday, six weeks off be damned. He can’t sit through long days in the house after Stevie dies.
“You’ve been working,” Paula says. “It’s not enough.”
“I need to start lifting. I’m going soft. I need to run.”
“Brilliant. That sounds like the quickest way to tear your stitches open and drop your guts onto the pavement. Chicks dig scars, dumbass. Not gaping wounds,” she says. “Do you want Shandi to dig your scars, William?”
He chuckles in spite of himself. Paula has a gift for making sentences have two meanings, and one of them is often dirty. “Quit it. Shandi isn’t—” He has to stop there because the only word that ends the sentence properly is Bridget. Shandi isn’t Bridget. Seven months ago, he told Paula she had to wipe that name from her vocabulary. They both did. He himself stopped thinking of his wife entirely. In the Circle K, she got back into his head; now she is threatening to become a sound in the room, an actual presence. Paula has only promised that she will not talk about Bridget until he does. He can’t hand the name back to her.
“Shandi isn’t correct,” he finally says.
She chugs more beer, then smiles as she sets the bottle aside. “You like her, though. I know you like that kid she’s got. Even though she isn’t correct.” Paula makes air quotes around the word as she speaks, to signal to William that she knows the name he almost said. The name that she is not allowed to say. “Or do you really think you two are just friends?”
She gives the last two words air quotes as well, indicating they are not meant literally, but he examines them in that light anyway. Making friends is not part of his skill set. Bridget made their couple friends, and most were affiliated with the parish or Bridget’s work at the women’s shelter. They don’t come to this house now. He likes many of the people who work for him, but he likes them as a unit, the way he likes his football teams.
He knows things about Shandi as an individual. She has a sweet tooth and a running feud with her stepmother. She has an aversion to even the most interesting vermin and is attracted to primary colors. She prefers to eat things with her fingers, including salad. She’ll pick up a dry lettuce leaf and roll it around a mushroom or an olive, then dip it into a dish of dressing on the side. It’s likely he has made a friend.
But what Paula is suggesting is a blank place in his head, like trying to see a color that isn’t on the spectrum. When he pictures Shandi, she is all the way across a room. Holding a spoon.
Does he want to keep her there? He isn’t sure. As a child, William did not like being touched by people who were not his parents. He’d fall down flailing and screaming if he was put into a crowd of jostling children. Later, during adolescence, he came to like the jarring slam of his body into other bodies during sports, and puberty made sex an active interest. But outside these specific realms, his body preferred to stay untouched inside a perimeter that extended well beyond its skin.
He knew this was not socially appropriate. He’d discussed herd-animal behavior with his therapist, who asked him to observe these behaviors in the people and animals around him. Once he started looking, he realized social touch was happening almost constantly, among his parents, his peers, even among his gerbils.
The gerbils were sisters, and they hadn’t been complicated enough to require indi
vidual names. He called them Mice Ladies, collectively. William enjoyed their soothing, repetitive wheel sounds, and they enjoyed one another. Mice Ladies slept in a united ball, ate with their sides pressed against each other, and took turns grooming one another’s ears.
After a couple of years, the average gerbil life span, two of them died. William didn’t like to watch the remaining ancient Mice Lady, huddling up against only herself in the corner. He thought about distilling ether and fixing the problem, but she died before it came to that.
Then he married Bridget and gained the pleasure of her consistent, close proximity. The herb-and-orange-blossom smell of her. Her legs twined in his and her hair spilled across his arm every morning. Later, Twyla, lying on her back across his legs, kicking and smiling in her toothless, charming way. He would sit still, experiencing the feel of his hand spanning his daughter’s chest, the rapid, light tattooing of her baby heart, his other arm wrapped around Bridget, who liked to read tucked up against his side. He thought then, We are being Mice Ladies. For all my higher functions, I am only Mice Ladies, after all.
Now he thinks, I should have named them, and then he is disgusted with himself. Waiting for Stevie to die has put him off. Quoting Bridget’s least-educated grandmother. Mooning over dead pets. Haunting the Sullivan house in Decatur. He should get drunk.
“Don’t do anything you can’t take back, is all I’m saying,” Paula tells him now. “Not with bullets or Shandi.”
William says, “I finished her lab work today.”
It’s an excellent segue. His new topic is both related to the current topic and of interest to Paula. It hits her politics correctly. She dislikes rapists considerably more than she dislikes Shandi.