Someone Else's Love Story

  Sirens. I could hear them in the distance, wailing their way closer every second. We all froze then, listening to the cops coming. Lots of them. An ambulance for the downed Statie, too, I bet. Walcott was doing what he could for us, but why couldn’t the cops have been two minutes later?

  Stevie moved first, stamping his feet in a blurring frenzy of a rage dance, then hopping up and down like a redneck Rumpelstiltskin. He kicked backward, like a vicious mule, the sole of his boot banging at the wall behind him five or six times. It made flat slaps of ugly sound against the brick. He said a long chain of words, most ones that Natty had never heard before.

  I put my head down, made myself smaller, squeezing Natty close into my side. I had to make everything be different. I needed a gun. Stevie had one, and that meant Natty could be hurt, could be worse than hurt. I could not allow it.

  I had this crazy trapped-­on-­the-­playground-­seesaw feeling then, like I was jacked up in the air with my legs hanging down, clutching Natty close, and Stevie-­Our-­Robber-­Today was a mean kid on the other end, having a temper tantrum. He held us helpless in the air, and he was flailing around, not in control. He could drop us down hard, any second. I hated it. I hated it.

  He could kill me, and it was worse than not leaving a nice story behind for my son. I could die here, and I had never told myself the truth.

  I’d closed my eyes to it four years ago, when Natty stopped my period. When he made me puke up all my breakfasts and switched my sweet-­set mouth to loving onions and hot peppers. I had Walcott’s momses take me to a doctor, and I let the doctor tell them what I already knew: I was a virgin. I was pregnant.

  I decided that meant Natty was a gift. For more than nine months, he and I were one thing. After they took him out, I saw two tiny, pink-­toed versions of my father’s feet. I saw my small, round skull and face, the shape of my own jaw. I saw Mimmy’s outsize eyes, the long lashes crumpled up from the cramped quarters. I only saw the things that made him mine.

  I never let myself connect Natty to that dark, blue-­velvet night when I woke and found myself outside, sprawled in a beanbag chair, alone. I saw all the crazy stars swinging back and forth, like they were hanging down on strings. I heard Walcott’s frantic yells. Marco! Marco! and I knew that I’d been lost. I’d been afraid. I’d called Walcott, and here he was at last, come to find me.

  I was more than half an hour away from Dad’s house, on the Emory campus.

  Walcott drove me back to Dad’s in my VW, so it wouldn’t be missing in the morning. The road looked lined in light. It felt fake, like a movie I was watching from inside itself. I kept graying out, the whole ride home. I have no idea how Walcott got back to the Prius. A taxi? I never asked.

  Dad’s driveway shimmered and shifted as Walcott helped me up it, but I wouldn’t let him in the door. Inside, it was dark and quiet, my three little half brothers tucked into their beds upstairs, Dad and Bethany in their room with the door closed. They’d gone to sleep, thinking I was eating burgers and then heading to the midnight movie with some kids from synagogue. Thinking I’d come home straight after the film and slip quietly to bed, the way I often did on my every-­other weekends.

  I stumbled down to my room in the basement. I don’t remember changing, but I woke up hours later, tucked under my covers in a clean T-­shirt. The sun was up. Last night’s clothes were in a scatter on the floor. My top, streaked with dried red Georgia clay, had my bra inside it. I unfurled the skirt from its filthy twist. No underwear. No shoes.

  I went right to the bathroom to turn the shower on. I let the water work its way to scalding, then got in and stayed until I threw up. I only got out to brush my sour teeth.

  I picked up the clothes that were in a scatter on the floor. If I left them, in two weeks I’d find them hanging in my closet. They’d be clean and pressed, courtesy of Martha, Bethany’s three-­days-­a-­week housekeeper. I realized that I didn’t want to see these clothes again. I couldn’t put them in a trash can, though. Not in this house. Bethany would find them. She’d hold up this clay-­stained skirt with its dried crust of something white staining the back, asking me why I was throwing out the nice things my dad bought me.

  I stuffed them in a gym bag. I shoved the bag deep into my closet, behind a stack of shoe boxes.

  Later, when Natty happened, Walcott told my parents about coming to find me, as if Natty and the dark blue night were connected. I didn’t see how they could be, because I already loved him so. He floated and bobbed inside me, the two of us alone conspiring to invent his hands, his serious, wide brow, his knobby knees.

  Natty was real, and that night wasn’t. Even so, Mimmy made me see a pastoral counselor three counties over. He’s the only one I ever tried to tell, saying only that my son felt like a miracle. Some man of God he turned out to be; he actually made a pooh-­pooh noise, blowing out air in two fat, dismissive pops. So I sat on his flowered sofa and agreed with whatever words his mouth made until our time was up. At the end, he told me I’d have trust issues with men and gave me a book called Godly Wifehood. Dad sent me to a shrink, and it was much the same. Dr. Fleiss told me I’d have control issues with sex and gave me a scrip for the pill.

  I refused to go back to either one of them, ever, but I threw the book away and filled the prescription. Score one for Judaism.

  Now, with Natty tucked so close I didn’t know whose scared heartbeat I felt pounding through me, his or mine, I was filled with crazy regret. That night, this child—­they were connected. I looked at my lovely boy, and for the first time, I admitted I had no idea where he’d gotten that wide mouth, his stompy walk, his boxy little shoulders. I’d always thought of these things as purely his, afraid that if I didn’t, then I couldn’t love him. Oh but how foolish! How small-­minded! I loved him now, so hard, inside this Circle K, that I would die to keep him safe. I loved every single piece, no matter where it came from. That had always been true, but I had been too cowardly to know it.

  Now I understood exactly how a baby started knitting himself together inside me, how he got born a full year and seventeen days before Walcott finally popped my cherry, and nothing about the way I loved him changed.

  I couldn’t die here, though. I had no story in place to protect my son from the truth I’d just acknowledged. Unthinkable, that Natty could grow up without me there to tell him that I loved his every cell, always, no matter what.

  I had to get at that file cabinet. I had to get that gun. I would shoot Stevie a hundred times and end this, and then I would take Natty outside into the sunshine where Walcott was waiting to drive us to Atlanta. I could almost see an alternate version of me, some superhero girl, bold and unmerciful, fixing everything. But I kept on sitting on my ass, holding Natty, and not being her. Guns might be powerful, might be fearless, but I wasn’t.

  The sirens stopped. Whoever had been coming, they were here. Stevie stood by the wall, his tantrum spent, panting. His eyes looked wild and there was spit on his bottom lip, making it look glossy and girlish in spite of his soul-­patch beard.

  We all sat, me pickling myself sour in my own helplessness, waiting to see what the police would do. Waiting to see what Stevie would do. He chose pacing, close up under the windows, twitchy and jerky.

  “Shut up and let me think,” Stevie yelled, though none of us had spoken. He sounded angry and scared.

  Then the phone rang.

  It was a cordless phone in a wall charger hanging above the desk. It made Stevie jump and swing the gun toward it. I jumped, too, and Natty jumped, and the clerk made a gasping noise. It rang again.

  “Should I get that?” Stevie asked. He jammed his empty hand up under his cap and scratched savagely at his head.

  None of us answered. He asked again, this time looking directly at the clerk. She was the one who had answered his last question, but she sat weeping, fat tears plopping endlessly onto her jeans.

  It rang five ti
mes, and then I guess it went to voice mail.

  Stevie gave up on her and glared from one of us to another, spook-­eyed, like a panicked horse. An endless thirty seconds passed.

  The phone rang again.

  “Shit!” Stevie said, between the next two rings.

  Thor spoke then, and his voice was low and so calm I felt it like a soothing herbal wrap. “You should answer it.” He sounded very sure.

  Stevie started toward the phone, then stopped, uncertain. He waffled, and it rang for the fifth time. It stopped again.

  “Next time,” Thor said, calm. “They’ll call again.”

  Stevie looked at him, then nodded.

  We waited, but the phone didn’t ring again.

  We all sat there, breathing hard, staring at one another, not sure how to proceed. A solid minute passed.

  “Dammit all to hell!” Stevie yelled. He kicked backward at the wall again. “This is bullshit.” He looked at us, from one to another, like he was looking for backup. “Bullshit, right?”

  “They’ll call,” Thor said.

  Another minute, maybe two. It felt like ten.

  “Naw,” Stevie said. “I have to do something. I have to show them that I am some serious business. You know?” Now he was talking to himself, not Thor, like he was gearing himself up. I wanted to tell him that shooting the cop would have clued them in. The cops knew he was some serious business. We all knew. But I didn’t want to call his attention to us, so instead I looked at Thor. We all were looking at him, even Stevie.

  “Someone has to do something,” Stevie said. His voice was shaking. His hands were shaking.

  Thor nodded. “Soon. But not yet. They will call.” He sounded like he was soothing a collicky baby. But Stevie was munching at his own mouth and blinking too much, gearing himself up. He was going to do something awful, unless someone else did something first.

  I think Thor knew it, too. Because Thor did something.

  He started moving. Very slowly. So slowly. He twisted at the waist toward the desk, one long arm moving across his body, reaching for the shelves next to him. It was so slow, it was almost hypnotizing. Stevie stopped munching at himself and watched.

  Thor took hold of one piece of white printer paper, delicately, in a two-­finger pinch. Then he tugged on it, sliding it out from under the heavy glass paperweight.

  It was the only thing happening in the room. Natty leaned forward to see, hands wrapping his knees in a hug. Stevie watched, too, his gun hand lowering slightly, until it was pointing mostly at the floor.

  Thor set the paper flat on the floor between his jeans-­clad legs. He started folding it. He had big hands, both long and wide, with square-­tipped fingers that looked too large to be as deft as they were. They folded the paper precisely, one short nail running down a crease he’d made. He tore a strip off at the crease, and then he had a perfect paper square.

  He folded and refolded, crimping and shifting, making the paper square bloom into three dimensions. I could already see it was too complicated for an airplane.

  Natty watched with big, interested eyes, and I saw Stevie was watching with that same expression on his face. Mouth slack, all else forgotten. I realized then that he was younger than me. Seventeen or maybe eighteen, tops.

  The paper folded up even smaller and became more complicated in Thor’s deft hands. When he stopped, he was holding a paper bird. He set it in his palm. He showed Natty, turning it this way and that, and Stevie looked, too.

  Natty reached for it, but Thor lifted one finger in a wait-­and-­see gesture. He turned the bird in his fingers and gently grasped the tail. He pulled it, and the bird’s head dipped down, like it was bending to eat a seed.

  Natty smiled outright, and reached again. Thor surrendered the bird to him. ­People don’t really notice eye color, but we were so close, I noticed his as he looked at my son. A pale, plain blue, like chambray denim. Stevie was watching Natty, too, with envy, as my child pulled the bird’s tail and the head dipped up and down.

  I opened my mouth to thank Thor for the bird, for the slight calmness that had come into the room with it, but what came out was a piece of a Dickinson poem, one that Walcott had said for us in the car earlier.

  I said, “The thing with feathers.”

  Thor’s gaze flew back to my face, and what happened then was only between us. I can’t explain it. It didn’t happen to Stevie, still bird-­watching, or anyone else, even Natty. It happened in the air over Natty’s head.

  His pupils went wide, spiraling open into dense black holes, pulling me inexorably to him. He stared at me like he was seeing me for the first time. His breath came out. A current sparked and caught and flowed between us, opening us up to each other, and I felt like he saw all the way down into the bottom of me, saw how scared I was, how helpless, saw me at the top of that seesaw. He saw how perfectly unable I was to save me and Natty, but how some secret piece of me wished he could. How I wanted him to be magic and save us all. He nodded, faintly. Like he was saying I could have my way. He would save us. And then a great peaceful calm washed out of him and into me. I swear.

  “I’m William Ashe.” But he wasn’t saying his name so much as making me a promise.

  “Shandi,” I said, and my voice was steady.

  Because I knew then. William Ashe was going to save us. William Ashe was the brave one, the bold one. He was the great god Thor. I wanted to lean across my son’s head and press my mouth to his and taste him and let him suck all this certainty out of my mouth. I wanted to be his, or maybe just be him.

  I heard Stevie say, “Can you make anything else? That moves like that bird?”

  While he was speaking, under his question, I said three words to William Ashe, barely audible. Three perfect, beautiful words that left a taste in me like honey.

  “Gun. File cabinet,” I said.

  He nodded, like he was saying yes to Stevie, but I knew it was for me. He was telling me, message received. He knew where the other gun was. I felt myself easing. It was like he’d put his big hands on the seesaw. He couldn’t let it down slow until my feet touched ground. Not yet. But he had me held steady for now, and it was enough.

  “I can make a jumping frog,” he said to Stevie. “I can make a top.”

  When he turned, it broke our stare, and that was probably all that saved me from leaning in closer and actually kissing him, Stevie be damned. The electric connection was over, but my certainty remained. William Ashe was going to make this right or die trying.

  There was a concentrated pause. Stevie’s eyebrows knitted together, like his biggest decision now was which paper toy to choose for himself.

  The air conditioner went off. I hadn’t noticed it while it was running, but the sudden quiet startled me. I think I held my breath, and Stevie’s head went up like a dog who smells something bad coming on the wind.

  The phone rang again.

  Chapter 4

  The thing with feathers,” Bridget says. She changed Shit Park into a beautiful place full of birdhouses. ­People followed her lead, wanting a piece of that completeness that had let her do it. By summer the park had butterfly flowers and bird feeders and wind chimes strung in all the trees. Bridget had willed it into a reclaimed space.

  William’s heart catches, stops, and then bangs his paused blood forward again. The restart is so rapid that William feels it as a revving in his chest. He stares at the girl in the poppy-­covered dress. She has opened her mouth and pulled his wife’s voice out of his head and into the room.

  Of course, it isn’t Bridget speaking. It only sounds like her. Exactly.

  “I’m William Ashe,” he tells her. He wants her to say more words.

  She says her name, “Shandi,” banging down on the first syllable and almost swallowing the i, just as Bridget would.

  William has his own idea of destiny, separate from fate, or sig
ns and wonders. So for a moment he has no explanation for the way she’s lighting up the room with Bridget’s presence. Bridget’s high, clear voice is so very different from this girl’s scared, husky whisper. It isn’t the words themselves, either, though the first thing she said was one of Bridget’s go-­to quotes.

  Then it clicks for him; it is the accent.

  It’s not a common way of speaking. William, born and raised in Morningside, is a true Atlanta native. He talks like everyone on television.

  Bridget spent her first sixteen years in a small town across the Georgia border, in North Carolina. Years of Atlanta living shortened her stretched vowels and clipped her blurry consonants, but her voice retained a mountain flavor, a muddling in her a e i o u’s.

  “Atlanta straight up, with a twist of hick,” Bridget called her accent.

  Now this girl has said, “The thang with feathers,” just as Bridget would: flat, very Atlanta, but i gets away from her.

  Stevie is asking about the origami bird, but William can’t look away from the girl, trembling in her poppy dress. Her dark eyes are nothing like Bridget’s wide-­set, celery green gaze, but he looks anyway.

  As Stevie speaks, Shandi says more words. “Gun,” she says. “File cabinet.”

  William’s head dips in an involuntary nod at the way the i becomes an ah in her mouth. Fahle cabinet. Perfect.

  “I can make a jumping frog. I can make a top,” William says, to pacify the cranky infant with the pistol. So he will shut up and let this girl talk more. If the bullet is his destiny, what can it hurt him to think of his wife’s voice, a little, now?

  The girl doesn’t speak, though. She only leans in a little closer, as if she might stretch her neck over the head of the frightened child sheltered between them and kiss him. Her breath is warm. She smells clean, like Ivory soap and mint. He stills. He leans in, too, readying to put his lips on the mouth that makes sounds like Bridget’s mouth. But that isn’t what he wants.

  He wants something else. Fiercely, a pulse so centered in his body it could be his own heart beating. It is the first time he has wanted anything in months, and it is ridiculous.