Someone Else's Love Story

  Not until this moment, which makes sense, mathematically. He didn’t see it before because he’s not good at following the passage of time. When he’s in the lab, he’ll wind himself so deep into the helixes, unraveling the secret language of the viral RNA, then suddenly realize his body has become ravenous and desperate for a bathroom. But, seven months plus five months equals twelve, and twelve is a year.

  A year ago, today.

  Last night, Father Lewis came by the house again, for the first time in weeks. William wouldn’t let him in.

  He looked blandly at Father Lewis and said, “I am not up to having company,” even though Paula was there, sitting in plain sight on the sofa, reading case files.

  Paula told him to say it because these days, he is unable to tolerate ­people in the house that aren’t her. It is a social convention that should have driven the priest off, but Father Lewis only looked at William with his eyes all moist and said, “Anniversaries are hard, William. They can open up a wound that might feel closed, make it fresh again.”

  Now William connects this speech to the current date, and sees that Father Lewis was not making a random observation. He was being personal. But Father Lewis has shown up on the porch and said so many things over the last year, most of them not relevant.

  “You can always call me, if you want to talk,” the priest went on. “I understand your anger with God.” But William is no more angry with God than he is angry with unicorns. Neither was present at the accident.

  Policemen came to explain it to him, and the words they said were not words he could process. They were not words that he could hear. Eventually, he caught their meaning, and then William told it to himself this way: Bridget’s Saturn has no backseat anymore, and the backseat was where Twyla sat, strapped into her car seat. Therefore, now, there is no Twyla. Simple physics. There is no need to move past that bald fact, that way of stating it. When there was a backseat, there was a Twyla. Now, there isn’t.

  Most of the parts of his life have split themselves neatly into before and now, and it is this dividing line that kept William from opening the door wide enough to allow priests, not any kind of rage at Bridget’s deity. Before, his involvement with the church was important to his wife. Now, Father Lewis is not relevant.

  He closed the door and sat back down with Paula.

  “Need some space, Bubba?” she asked.

  “To do what in?” he said, deliberately overliteral.

  She chuckled and propped her long copper-­brown legs over his. “No space for you.”

  Paula, his best friend since high school, is one of the few things from before that has come with him into now. In the before, she was both his best man and Bridget’s maid of honor. The three of them played pool every Thursday, and Paula always came to Sunday brunch, usually with whatever man was following her about. Bridget learned the guys’ names, but William called them all “Buddy,” because month by month the guy might have a different job, a different skin color, a different car, but he was always pretty much the same guy.

  Now, Paula is what he has in lieu of family. He never minds her.

  He also doesn’t mind the maid ser­vice. She—­or maybe they—­refreshes the house while William is at work. With such limited company, the house stays clean, and the air inside feels cool and barely used, rich with oxygen. He is not angry with Bridget’s imaginary God inside his quiet house.

  I am only angry with Bridget, he thinks. He stares at the box of detergent, understanding that an anniversary, the one Father Lewis said could open up old wounds, is here upon him, now. It is hard, as he was warned. He is both in desperate pain and furious. He simply did not know it, because Bridget is not here to tell him.

  When he was a child, sometimes a thing would swell up inside him, a huge, unnamed, inflating thing, pressed hard and tight against the walls of his skin, thinning it. He would sob in hard, angry barks. He sounded like a circus seal, the other kids would say, and laugh. Then he would hit things, walls and trees and other children, his own thighs, anything to make the swelling pop or go down. He would end red-­faced and sweaty and suspended again. Now he knows it was always and only his old friend, chemistry, acting on his brain, making him have some kind of a feeling. It helps when he can name the feeling. Naming lets him own it, makes it finish faster.

  He tells it to himself again, so he can ride it instead of having it ride him. I am angry with Bridget.

  Not because she was driving. She was only taking their toddler to St. Thomas for Mother’s Morning Out. Bridget’s wagon was a solid object, existing in space and time, and a semi-­truck’s brakes failed, so that it slid until it was occupying the same space at the same time. Something had to give. He can’t fault Bridget because her car obeyed physics.

  He’s angry because of what Bridget did next.

  And he’s angry about the detergent. These days William sleeps alone in a bed that smells like the blankest kind of clean. He’s angry that he knows this box, remembers the green scent rising up in his memory from the sheets where they so many times lay tangled and replete, where they woke together every morning, where they once made Twyla. It’s wrong for Bridget to be a physical presence in his mind. He can’t unsee her body, pale and soft, the hip deep-­curved to fit his hand. The constellation Orion caught in the freckles of her left shoulder. The cord of muscle in her runner’s calf. He doesn’t want to think of that body, personal and perfect to him, twisted into the car’s body, both of them broken. They had to use the Jaws of Life to get her out.

  As they lifted her free, she saw. She saw the place where the backseat had been.

  William does not believe in an afterlife. ­People reproduce, preserving their genetic traits via their offspring, and then they die. Bridget saw the absence of Twyla as they lifted her, and Bridget believed in Christ, in resurrection, in a literal heaven. She couldn’t let Twyla go alone. She’d belonged wholly to God before she was ever William’s, and in that moment, she let God win her wholly back.

  That’s as far as he can get. Remembering washes swarms of chemicals into his red blood. It’s all he can do to stop his hands from tearing out his eyes, pulling the walls down. He hauls his thoughts backward, to thirty seconds before. There’s no reason to allow this. He has not allowed himself to so much as think her name for months now. He must stop looking at detergent and remembering. He must stop now, in his next breath, because there’s nothing that happened after Bridget’s heartbeat ceased that William can forgive. Not one damn minute of any piece of life.

  He hears Christmas bells then, a cheery tinkle of discordant, grating sound. It helps William look away from the detergent. He sees a young man has come into the minimart. He is twitchy and pale, and he’s holding a gun. He waves the gun back and forth, yelling for everyone to get on the floor. It’s surprising.

  It is purely out of habit that William looks around first, to see what the other ­people are doing. He does this because of Bridget, whose name cannot be so easily rebanished. She wanted William to be more interested in ­people, so in college he studied biology and genetics as well as chemistry. He knows that ­people are herd animals. They like to go wheeling in the same directions, and they feel more comfortable around William when he wheels with them.

  The gun makes it important to keep the ­people comfortable. So William looks, and no one is getting on the ground. Not the clerk, standing slack-­mouthed by the register. Not the dark-­haired girl in the flowered dress.

  He looks the other way and sees a little boy, a few feet behind him and to his right, shining bright in a yellow fireman’s slicker and a black cap. This child is about the age Twyla would be now. He is staring at the gun. Eyes wide. Breath short. William, who is both taller and broader than the robber, decides he should take the initiative and comply, so as to look less threatening.

  William steps sideways, slowly, hands up, and gets between the frightened child and the m
an with the gun before he sinks down.

  He checks himself over carefully for terror, but there isn’t any. It’s curious, because fear would be appropriate. This might simply be a dearth of proper chemicals. There cannot be a lot of adrenaline left to dump into his blood. He’s spent so much on his ridiculous, ongoing rage against the anniversary, the detergent, his wife.

  The robber has pink-­rimmed eyes and damp nostrils. His hands jerk the gun around and his finger is on the trigger. Every time he blinks, he squeezes his eyes shut hard, and his mouth works, too. His whole face clenches and unclenches. His gaze darts about, trying to look at all of them at once. He appears to be under the influence of a stimulant, likely illegal, and he is engaged in a stressful activity. He cannot be trusted to make good decisions.

  William hears a door opening behind him. It’s the door by the soda case with the Employees Only sign hanging on it; an old man comes stumping through it with his eyebrows beetled down. An old lady follows right behind him. They are different from each other, but clearly a set. She has pastel Bermuda shorts and a stiff bubble of lavender hair; he has plaid golf pants and a cap. The man is looking toward the register at the clerk, saying, “Carrie, what is—­”

  He stops so abruptly that the lady behind him bangs into him. The old man stares from William, sitting on the floor, to the man with the gun. He puts one arm out, herding the lady behind him, and in this simple gesture William understands that they have been married for a long time.

  The lady sees the gun then and puts her hands up, the way robbed ­people do in the movies. Her mouth drops open into a bright, uneven circle. She is wearing orange lipstick that has bled into all the wrinkles around her mouth.

  “Get on the floor!” the gunman yells again.

  Now the dark-­haired girl is sinking down to the ground, the poppy-­covered skirt of her dress belling around her, and then the old ­couple does, too. The herd animals are all doing the same thing. This is a stress reliever for all of them. Even the gunman’s next blink is less of a squeeze.

  “Not you,” he says to the clerk, gesturing with the gun. “Come on out from back there first.”

  The clerk comes around the counter and lies down beside the dark-­haired girl. It’s happening quickly. This is an efficient robbery, so far, but William doesn’t trust it to remain so. The person with all the power in the room is on drugs.

  William considers what to do next. The robber is a small man with a narrow chest, a potbelly, and skinny arms. He has a patch of thin brown beard on his chin that he keeps petting with his free hand. If William could get to him fast enough, he could twist him into separate pieces, easily. It would be a useful spending of the angry chemicals that he’s been riding.

  But he can feel the presence of the child sheltered behind him. He doesn’t want this boy, who, in a different universe might have gone to school with Twyla, might have been her friend, to be shot if William is not fast enough. He stays where he is.

  “Open the safe, you old piece a shit,” the gunman says, jerking the gun at the old man.

  “It’s on a timer!” the old man says.

  The robber uses his free hand to wipe at his damp nose. “You think I’m stupid? I been watching you, weeks now. You think I don’t know about when the safe’s timer goes off? I’mma start shooting all these ­people if you don’t get a bag and fill it up for me. And you”—­now the guy is talking to William—­“you can lay all the way down flat on your stomach on your own, or you can lay down flat because I’ve put one in your brain pan.”

  If William complies, he will lose some options. Still, the child is directly behind William. If William stands and the man fires toward him, the bullets will be moving in the direction of the child. William lies flat on his belly.

  He makes his arms into a pillow and rests his cheek on it. His face is now pointed directly at the dark-­haired girl in the poppy dress. She stares intently at William, communicating urgency, and then her gaze slides past him to the child. So they are a set, too, like the old ­couple is a set.

  He hears a scuffling sound behind him, then feels a small weight pressing into his side. The child has scooted along the floor to him, and now he fists his hands in William’s shirt. He is panting into William’s armpit.

  William scans the room. The old lady is looking at him. The clerk, down on the ground, glances his way, too. Even the old man shifts his gaze to William as he goes behind the counter with the gunman to empty the safe. The herd is following his lead, so he lies still and quiet and waits for it to be over.

  Now the gunman has the bag. He says, “That’s all?”

  The old man says, “We don’t keep much cash. Everyone has a bank card these days.” He sounds both defensive and apologetic.

  The gunman empties the register drawer, too, and directs the old man to lie down with the rest of them. He grabs two cartons of cigarettes, stuffs them into his plastic grocery bag on top of the money, then swings the gun around back and forth, sweeping his gaze across all of them in turn.

  “No one move for ten minutes, or I will surely come back here and shoot you,” he says, which is truly the stupidest threat William has ever heard.

  The gunman starts to turn away. In thirty seconds he will be gone. It seems the decision to lie quietly down will pay off.

  Then William hears the Christmas bells, chiming again.

  He thinks three words: Here we go.

  It’s a cop. A female state cop in her uniform, swinging cheerfully through the door with an environmentally sound travel mug for coffee in her hand.

  The gunman and the state cop see each other, both reacting with a whole-­body shock that reverberates through them and opens their faces up into circles, eyes and mouths widening at the same time. She halts directly in the doorway.

  She drops her mug and reaches for the gun at her hip, but the door swings shut and bangs her in the back. She fumbles it. William is faster than she is. He should have moved when he had the chance. Now he is flat on his belly with a little boy clutching his shirt. He can’t stand up and run toward gunplay with a child clinging and dangling down his side.

  The gunman pulls the trigger, and it seems to William that he smells the sulphur before he hears the bang. This isn’t possible, but this is how he experiences it, in spite of science. He barely clocks the blood that appears in a wash on the shoulder of her blue uniform shirt; he is noticing instead her face, how it stretches and thins, as if the entry of a bullet into the closed system of her body is fundamentally changing her already. The late-­coming sound feels loud in the small market. It starts a ringing in his ears. The child makes a noise and pushes his face into William. The face feels wet, and the wetness is absorbed by William’s shirt, coming through the cloth to touch his skin.

  The bullet shoves the state cop backward, against the door, which opens. It spills her onto the ground outside. She is already rolling to the side as the door swings shut behind her in a cheery jangle of bells.

  The clerk on the floor says, “Oh no. Oh no, no, no,” in a soft, conversational tone.

  William’s body has more adrenaline after all. It is dumping into his bloodstream, and he can feel his heartbeat pounding through all his limbs and in his spine, even in his eyes. He closes them against the rhythm, knowing now that the gun in the room is real and powerful. It can change and end things in an instant. William, of all ­people, should have understood this. An unaccountable longing rises up inside him, and what he feels for the cop in that moment is both beautiful and terrible. He has no name for it.

  He hears the gunman yelling, “Holy shit! Holy shit!”

  When he opens his eyes, he sees the gunman has his back to them all, scrabbling to lock the door, then wheeling back around to face them, all lying still and obedient on the ground.

  “This is not the plan,” the gunman says helplessly to the old ­couple, and William sees how young he is no
w, too. His nose is running; his upper lip shines with sweat and mucus. The clerk is young. The girl in the poppy-­covered dress is young. The room is full of children, and one of them has a gun. He brings his gun now to bear on William, then the dark-­haired girl, then the old ­couple. He swings it back and forth like this is still pretend, a television show. It isn’t. It is real.

  The gunman says it again, this time to the clerk. “This is not the fucking plan.”

  You are angry, William thinks at the gunman. The thought comes in the voice of a young Bridget, her high school voice. You are angry because your robbery has been thwarted. The gunshot, the real gun in the room, has banged her banished voice back into his aching head. He doesn’t know how he will ever shove it out again.

  “How can I get out of here?” the gunman asks.

  The old man opens his mouth and closes it, like a fish gulping its way through an air drowning.

  “Got’damn tell me!” the gunman hollers.

  It is the clerk who finally answers. “Go out the back. It’s not locked from inside, but can’t no one come in thattaway.”

  The th sound comes out airy and too soft as her tongue pushes against the empty place where most of her front teeth should be. William feels his tongue make an inadvertent checking gesture, running across his own front teeth, intact.

  Out in the lot, there is a shot cop. William wonders if there is anyone to help her, or if she is conscious and using her radio. Maybe she has her own gun out now, pointed at the door, waiting for the gunman to step through.

  The gunman must also be wondering all these things, only slower, through the cloud of drugs that have made him so glossy-­eyed and frantic.