Someone Else's Love Story

  Stevie waves his free hand at the old ­couple, huddled together. The clerk keeps sobbing. Stevie turns to the ­couple, and spit flecks come out as he speaks. “How many of these you got, these gas stations. Like ten? How many you got?” It doesn’t sound rhetorical. He takes a stamping step toward them again, as if he might go kick an answer out of the old man. William shifts his legs, readying, his grip firm and easy on the paperweight. It is heavy and hard, larger than a softball, built for his big hand. The orange daisy is cradled facedown in his palm.

  “Six.” The old lady’s nostrils flare as she speaks.

  “Yeah, so, six,” Stevie says, almost a growl. “You make a crap ton of money, and you don’t even work. You got her for that, right?” He jerks his thumb at the weeping clerk. “Her and a bunch more like her. They get, what? Minimum wage? Maybe a free slushie come Christmas? You swing by to get your big piles of scratch in your Cadillac. You sit in your fat house, charging guys like me five dollars for a pack a smokes. You got everything. Guy like me, what have I got? Huh?”

  “A gun,” the old woman says, not backing down. “And no heart. You worthless trash.”

  The words make Stevie’s spine jerk straight. His arm swings up as he takes another stamping step toward them. His whole face is twisted now, his teeth bared in a display of dominance that the gun renders ridiculous.

  The sound of the gun cocking is huge. It is a sound that eats all the ambient noise in the room. William feels the earth slow in its rotation, his perception of time elongating to a single heartbeat. He can see the spunky old lady’s hand reach for her husband. Stevie brings the gun to bear with murder written so plainly on his face that William needs no help to read it. The old man is lying down with his head in his wife’s lap, but his hand reaches for hers at the same time. He is closing his eyes. Hers stay open.

  William is already moving, his big athlete’s body well ahead of his brain, his mouth saying, “Get down,” to Shandi as his body carries him away.

  He is at the wall before Stevie understands what is happening. William turns and overbalances forward, digging with his feet, hurtling toward Stevie. His hand holding the paperweight is also in motion, eating the momentum, loading it all into the swing.

  He is less than a third of the way there when he knows he has miscalculated. The paperweight, with all the force of his big body behind it, is moving too fast. But his body is committed, plunging forward. He cannot slow it or call it back.

  Stevie has turned, but now he is wasting all this luxurious slow time by making his eyebrows rise. His mouth drops open into an expression so exaggerated it is like a page out of William’s old vegetable book. The radish is happy. The eggplant is sad. The potato is surprised.

  Stevie is the potato.

  The gun is pointing at the floor now. His other hand opens and the phone hovers in midair, waiting for the next endless second to pass so it can obey gravity and clatter to the floor. The gun hand starts to move now, but it is not bringing the gun to bear. It is coming up defensively, as if Stevie’s pale, fleshy forearm can stop William, halt the raging force of his charge.

  William’s blow connects as the phone smashes on the floor, so that only William hears the shivery bone crunch as the paperweight meets the side of Stevie’s head. Stevie pauses, still making the same expression, and then time snaps into its regular track. Stevie thunks to the floor, faceup. Momentum from the swing spins William to the wall. He stops there. Stevie lies where he has fallen. He is still and his eyes are open, staring sightlessly up.

  There is a breathless pause. The cocked gun lies ready by his slack hand.

  William holds tight to the paperweight. He looks at Stevie, who has absolutely failed to shoot him. He hasn’t shot William even once.

  William shakes his head, back and forth. He was so sure. It was destiny, by his own definition, a thing you choose. A thing you follow relentlessly, no matter what stands between you and it. He leans against the wall, breathing hard from the adrenaline.

  The clerk has stopped crying. She has gone quiet, almost as still as Stevie.

  Shandi rises to her knees, staring at Stevie, but her child’s dark-­fringed eyes are fixed on William. His mouth is a solemn slash. William slides along the wall until the corner stops him. He is trying to understand the shape his own face is making.

  The tomato is relieved. The lime is disappointed.

  His brain feels stuck, remembering that as a child, it bothered him no end that many of what his therapist called “vegetable pictures” were actually fruits.

  Outside the Circle K, someone has brought a megaphone. A huge voice says, “This is the police. Please pick up the landline. We just want to talk.”

  A muffled ringing begins. Apparently, only the phone’s casing has broken. The hand piece is somewhere under Stevie.

  It is the little old lady who finally moves. She lets go of her husband, who is folded in a huddle around his own ribs. She clambers quickly to her feet. William thinks she is going to dig under Stevie and get the phone and answer, tell the police they can come in now. She doesn’t. Instead she runs at Stevie in a tottery five-­step sprint. She goes right to his hand and she kicks at it, his gun hand.

  This is what cops do on television, William realizes. When a suspect is down, they kick the gun away from him. She kicks and misses, and William is surprised to hear himself say, “Wait.” The second kick connects.

  The rusty silver gun goes spinning away, and she must have caught it exactly right, because as it spins there is a huge, unearthly boom.

  Interesting. He feels an inner tick, a soft, internal echo of the gun’s sound. He sits down suddenly and very hard.

  He feels his body shaking, and it is because it is laughing. His laughter feels unnatural, rasping in his throat. He realizes it has been a long time since he has laughed.

  “Oh my God,” Shandi says, and she is up and running to him now, her child in her arms. She sets the boy onto his feet as she drops to her knees beside William, yelling, “Give me your cardigan,” over her shoulder to the old man.

  William folds at the waist and tips sideways, lying on the floor by the wall. Perhaps she wants the cardigan to cover Stevie’s face. This is not funny, but William can’t stop convulsing with this endless laughter.

  He laughs so hard it hurts, a stitch in his side.

  Shandi leans close, peering down into his face, still demanding sweaters.

  Somehow William has rolled onto his back. Perhaps she rolled him?

  “Destiny,” he says to Shandi.

  Maybe he is laughing too hard for her to understand him. But maybe not. Maybe it is only that she doesn’t know it is a joke. He tried to hold his finger up, make a hook for her, but all at once he is too tired. William stops laughing and stares up at the ceiling, and it is only the plain ceiling. It has big square fluorescent pans of light set into its tiles. No holy beam of sentient gold glows down at him. No fiery chariot comes to ride him up to heaven.

  His eyes would like to close now. He allows it.

  Chapter 5

  Fifteen seconds ago, William was invincible. I’d never seen a person move like that. How foolish for me to tell him about the file cabinet. As if he needed a gun. He’d been like something on Discovery Channel, surging up out of long grass. Now he had a hole in his side, and his blood came out of the hole, just like it would do on anyone. It didn’t seem possible for him to be so humanly shot in his body.

  He pulled in a long, raspy draught of air, shunting it fast out. My own breath wouldn’t go all the way down into me. It stuck in my throat, so that I had to take little panting sips of oxygen.

  Then he said one word to me. He said, “Destiny,” and I felt my heartbeat and my breathing stop, everything in me pausing for a tick, because he was telling me he knew. He felt it, too, this thing between us.

  The old lady was trying to hand me her husband’s swea
ter. I stared at it blankly, then realized I had asked for it.

  “Go get help,” I told her. I took the cardigan, pressing it down hard onto the hole under his ribs. The startling cherry red of William’s bright blood soaked into the lemon-­colored cotton.

  My mother used to say Red and yellow catch a fellow, in warning tones when I wore this silly poppy-­covered dress. I thought, Now this sweater I am holding on him is the same colors. It’s like we’re already one of those awful ­couples who dress to match.

  Outside, the cop with the megaphone was saying a lot of things, but it all sounded like garbley-­goo, as if Charlie Brown’s teacher heard shooting and was now blatting and blaring, asking Snoopy what the hell was going on inside that doghouse. William’s slow blood, soaking through the sweater, was so very red. I didn’t want Natty to look at it. But Natty was looking away. I followed the line of his gaze and saw Stevie.

  Stevie was super, super upsetting to look at. He was so still. His head was dented in. His eyes were open. He wasn’t breathing.

  Good, I thought, savagely. I only wished I had been the one to put him down like that, down like a bad dog, instead of dangling stranded way up high on an imaginary seesaw, letting every awful thing happen.

  “Natty,” I said. “Natty!” Natty shook his head like he was waking up, and met my eyes and blinked at me. I made a smile shape out of my mouth. “We’re good, baby,” I said. “You and me, we are safe and good.”

  Someone needed to take Natty outside to all the real, solid things that belonged to us—­his basket full of Matchbox cars, my sunshine yellow VW, our Walcott. Someone needed to call in help for William. I hoped that someone was. Me, I had to press down hard on the hole, feeling William’s inhale pushing up, like an answer. His eyes were drifting closed.

  “William, look at me!” I said, but he didn’t. It felt important to not let him slip away into some kind of sleep or darkness. I put my face near his face and said, “Say things at me. What day is it?” It was a dumb question because I had no idea what the date was. I never did. I even sometimes got the year wrong on my checks.

  But he croaked out a word. “Friday.”

  His eyes opened and focused on my face. He was still with me.

  Outside, the cop with the megaphone had stopped talking, and the phone started ringing again, muffled under Stevie. I was so not digging that out.

  “Say more things,” I told him. “Where do you live?”

  “Morningside,” he said, talking fast in a gasp on his exhale, adding something that sounded like “Near Shit Park,” but that could not be right.

  “What do you do? For a job?”

  “Researcher,” he said.

  I blinked. “Like at a library?”

  “A lab. Gene therapy.”

  A scientist? He looked more like a lumberjack, or a forest ranger. “Where do you work?”

  “Geneti-­Tech,” William said. I knew the name. That company was huge in Atlanta; their disturbing logo was everywhere. It had the words Food-­Medicine-­Life wrapped around a winged tomato, like a visual admission of how creepy-­far they were willing to bend nature. Hard to imagine William, so tan with all that sun-­streaked hair, in some sterile room swathed in a lab coat, cloning sheep.

  “Are you dying?” Natty asked William. He was still holding his paper bird, and now he was looking at the bloody sweater. Red touch yellow, kill a fellow, I thought, but that was a different rhyme, meant to help Natty know which snakes were dangerous.

  William took another of those long, raspy inhales. “I’m just a little shot,” he said on the exhale.

  He seemed so calm. Was it shock? Or had the bullet hit something vital? I had no idea what kinds of organs he might be keeping in his shot place. Too low for lungs. Too high for intestines. Why had I made Walcott do all our dissections in high school? Typical.

  I realized I was five seconds from losing my complete shit, panic rising up in me like a gorge. Losing my shit sounded so wonderful, too, a delicious luxury. I wanted to fall into terrible screamy little chunks and weep and flop on the floor and let someone else press their hands hard into this yellow cardigan, saving William, getting their palms slick with his warm, red, living human blood. But Natty’s face was pinched and white. He was looking to me. I’d already sat like a lump through a whole robbery, not saving him. I had to be better. William had said the word destiny to me, and he’d taken a bullet for us. I had to become a whole ’nother better person, worthy of William, able to protect my son, right this second.

  The clerk, Carrie, stepped into my peripheral vision, her head moving, looking first at Stevie, then at William, then at Stevie, like there was some kind of invisible tennis ball bouncing back and forth between them.

  Stevie’s chest jerked. He inhaled. It was a bubbling, mucus-­y noise that I thought I would hear in every bad dream I had for the rest of my life.

  The paperweight lay nearby, daisy side up, wrongfully cheery. Stevie’s eyes were open, but not in a looking way or even an alive way, in spite of the breath he had just taken. They were like glass eyes someone had put into his head. He’d breathed in, but it was obvious that Stevie-­Our-­Robber-­Today would not be getting up and resuming his duties.

  But maybe it was only obvious to me. When Stevie took a second thick breath, chest hitching, Carrie’s mouth yawped open and the most ungodly howl came out. She galloped right to the door, scrabbling at the ridiculous flip lock Stevie had turned before his head was all stove in. She swung the door wide and sprinted away, her animal howl evolving into a human word: “Help, help, help!”

  I heard her pounding footsteps receding, then the jingle bells went off as she exploded out the front door. I waited for the police to shoot her by accident, but I didn’t hear anyone shoot her. Maybe she had thought to put her hands up, or they were just good, smart police.

  Natty asked William, “Does it hurt you to be shotted?” It sent a ting of worry up my spine, because Natty at three often spoke like a forty-­year-­old accountant. I had heard him say, “Let me compose myself,” and “This hill makes me exhausted.” He hadn’t added extra eds onto his verbs for more than a year.

  “It doesn’t feel great,” William said.

  Sweat was beading on his forehead and upper lip, though I was shivering myself half to death. I had no idea which of us was right, if it was hot or cold. I could feel the pulse of his heart in the heat of the wound. It felt good and strong. It felt unstoppable. But only the tiniest piece of time ago, he had surged across the room like some huge, unfolding beast of prey. He had seemed unshootable, and look how that turned out.

  I heard the jingle bells chiming like crazy, a lot footsteps pounding toward us. A whole crowd of ­people, coming to help.

  “They’re almost here. Hold on,” I told William.

  “No, thank you,” William said.

  Then they burst in the door, a huge, confusing wave of human noise and color. Policemen first, fast and cautious, then paramedics, and some other ­people in uniforms I did not recognize, and some in regular clothes.

  Paramedics swarmed around William. I got moved back, out of the way, by a guy in a kind of boxy jacket thing that made me think he was a fireman. He was tall and very calm. He wrapped us up in a blanket, asking me if we were hurt.

  “We’re good,” I said. “Please just help William.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said to me, and to Natty, “We’re taking good care of your dad, okay, buddy?”

  I blinked. The fireman thought we were together, me and Natty and William. We were three things that looked like one thing. Like a family.

  I thought Natty would correct him, but instead he turned and looked up at me, a wide-­eyed, questioning look.

  I looked back and thought, Destiny. Why shouldn’t me and Natty get to have him?

  Could a man like this belong to me? Today I’d sat on my ass, clutching my chi
ld and waiting my turn to be shot like a good little rabbit. How could I do otherwise? I had such practice being weak. I’d been practicing for about four years now, from the second I decided to take my lovely Natty as a gift, unconnected to the awful night I got him. No, even before that, when I’d made Walcott take me home and snuck inside and kept my mouth shut.

  Natty had a human father. When I tried to imagine him now, I saw a golem with a lumpy face of red Georgia clay, rising from the earth around the beanbag chair, leaving streaks of himself on my clothing. I’d let him stay faceless, stay anonymous and unaccountable. That was not okay. I should never have allowed that. I should have gone after him, found him, laid him out. But instead I had pretended that it didn’t happen at all, until Natty made that particular pretend more complicated.

  Even then, I did nothing. Didn’t call the cops, didn’t try to stop him from doing it again, if he wanted to in his clay heart. Didn’t grieve. Didn’t learn. Never made him pay. Hell, I never even had to tell anyone I was pregnant.

  Walcott did that for me. He came over with his momses, who looked at me with concern and reassuring love while Walcott spoke. They’d treated me like a favorite niece since I was five, when Walcott and I went running back and forth between their B and B and my house nine times an afternoon. Walcott sat between me and them on our toile sofa, telling Mimmy about finding me drugged and half-­naked behind a frat house on the Emory campus. He spoke all halting with his face the color of the reddest red Crayola.

  I didn’t even listen to him tell it. I couldn’t bear the kind gazes of his mothers, or watch my own mother’s face. Instead, I tried to stare right straight through Mimmy’s closed drapes. I pretended a meadow on the other side, full of all kinds of fairy-­tale things: talking squirrels and little fauns and tree nymphs. I imagined opening the drapes, stepping through them, going into the butterflies and sunshine while Walcott finished up my dirty work. I could lie down in the magic grass and call up some unicorns. Why not? I was ten weeks along, but I still had everything I needed to make them come to me.