Bound (17 page)

The fireplace was a working one, so Catherine placed the prisoner’s letters, all except the one addressed to the daughter, in the grate. And then she sat once more on the couch and looked at the pile. She didn’t have to decide now. She had time to see how she felt about it tomorrow. Or the next day. The one after that.

There had been an ice storm in Kansas, a snow that turned to rain, and then back to snow, and then, whimsically, finally, to sleet. Inadvertent perfect strata of disaster. The ground was treacherous, layered and slick, its surface deceptively benign seeming, snowy, with a thick scrim of ice beneath. Oliver slid as he headed for the newspaper at the curb, a swift flush of panic that he’d nearly fallen, then marveled at the tire tracks of the deliverer, who’d roved back and forth from side to side all down the block. Overhead, the trees were laden. They creaked ominously. Eventually, when the sun finally emerged, everything began to snap. All over town the branches crashed down—on cars, on houses, on power lines. Giant boughs. Devastating breaks. The streets were filled with broken limbs, electricity went out, windshields were shattered. What remained was a forest of strange topless trees, their severed appendages imploring the sky. Everyone stayed at home, built fires, used flashlights, listened to the radio.

Oliver looked forward to this odd day without obligations other than stoking a fire, opening and closing the back door for the dogs, relocating the refrigerated food from inside the dark refrigerator to outside in the bright hard light. On Saturday morning the Sweetheart trekked from her grandparents’ house to his, four miles, in snowshoes. Her cheeks were red as cherries when she finally arrived.

“Unbelievable!” she declared. “It’s like a war zone out there!”

As if she knew what a war zone was like. As if Oliver did, he scolded himself, he who’d been conveniently exempt, falling into a peaceful pause that made him too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. It would not do to transform into a churlish grump, the complaining curmudgeon, one of the malcontents in their row of loungers at Green Acres. He kissed the Sweetheart’s sweet cheeks, that flesh he felt like biting, it was so plump and ripe. Would he grow tired of her? Was she going to be his next, his last, love?

“She won’t come home unexpected?”

He shook his head. The weather alone would have prevented his wife’s return just yet. But Catherine was also settling an estate in Houston. She now owned a house, it seemed, one worth nearly a half million dollars. With it came a child who was at large, a delinquent who’d taken the opportunity of her mother’s death to flee her boarding school. “I might like a kid who’d do that,” Oliver had conceded. “I can sympathize with that.” The privilege and private clubbiness of the East Coast. He recalled his own prickling resentment of that place, that it was mocking him, that it would never take him seriously.

Catherine had said, “So you should know why I have to try to find her.”

“That part I’m not as confident about. That part I have some questions about.”

He’d worked hard not to sigh over the girl, young Catherine. Could his wife not recall Miriam’s complicated years? Or her own, for that matter? Teenage girls required the full attention of everyone in the house; they entered rooms as if strutting onto a stage, the eye-catching star with the biggest conflict in the production that was called All About Me.

The adults must have encouraged it, dressing them up, adoring their theatrics. First it was harmless, their favorite color pink, their preferred outfit the princess tutu and tiara, their venerated pet the kitten. They progressed through the rainbow, colors shifting from pink to purple to blue to green to, finally, black. From smiling affection and good humor and hugs and candy and fluffy kittens they moved to a sullen anger and ferocious affect that could sap the energy of an entire household. The piercings! The pet rats! The histrionics! Oliver shuddered. Teenage girls were graceless, moody, insecure, bad actors, annihilatingly melodramatic in the way of the suicide bomber: ready to claim collateral damage. What happened, he wondered, that allowed them to finally arrive at the lovely perfection of young womanhood? Something. A gentling. A dreamy distractedness, an unconscious maneuvering of their bodies, some stretch that came in their early twenties, the finishing touches. First love, perhaps, the initial inkling of a vast and untapped sex life. His daughter Miriam was an exception, her young womanhood somehow either truncated or pending; she’d gotten stuck in squalor and self-destruction. He hated to realize it, hated to know he could not cure it.

But the Sweetheart possessed that elusive young woman’s charm. At times she became aware of his watching her, and she would stiffen, or oversexualize her movements. Yet at other times she inhabited the world like a very beautiful animal, without audience, a jaguar, a racehorse, muscles flexing beneath the flesh in every common gesture or exertion, head tossed in restless eagerness for what came next, a quality of excited readiness, availability, game.

Over and over he’d fallen for a young woman.

“I love you,” he told the Sweetheart. Too often, perhaps.

“Me, too,” she would say in reply.

The dogs were attracted to the snowshoes she’d removed, and had settled themselves on the floor mat where she’d left them, one on either side, identically flayed out with their back legs in what Catherine called the chicken drumsticks position, faces resting on their front paws, eyelined eyes staring intently at the people. If they could speak, they’d make insinuating, passive-aggressive remarks about his behavior; as people, Oliver wouldn’t like them. They were busybodies, too clever, officious perky types who, anthropomorphized, would be beaming, freckled, bulky yet buff secretaries, gossiping and judging, fussy gay men or prissy spinsters.

But they made very fine dogs.

These days were a gift, an insular piece of stalled time. He and the Sweetheart had never spent more than a couple of hours together, never been capable of easy silence because they were accustomed to being rushed or being in public. The stories told after sex were not the same ones told after eating unheated English muffins. The banter in the kitchen of Wheatlands was not the same banter that evolved at the Scrabble board, where Oliver discovered that the Sweetheart was dyslexic and could not see the obvious words that practically made themselves on her slender rack of letters. The encouragement he offered was not the same as that he offered elsewhere.

Over the course of their strangely timeless interlude she grew more comfortable, or more weary of not being comfortable, or maybe she grew less in awe of his daunting gifts, those of experience and confidence, gender and power. She had, after all, the most powerful gifts of all: a long future and physical beauty; best of all, she also had no sense of how powerful those things were. Oliver had to be careful not to notify her of that.

In the afternoon they made love in Oliver’s study, on the leather sofa in there. They lay afterward beneath a blanket, watching night fall outside, every now and then a distant crash as another tree dropped its exhausted freighted limbs. They drowsed in this cave of chill and dark, a forgotten peaceful space in the middle of a city-wide shutdown.

The phone rang much later. The house felt unfamiliar to Oliver, as if it wasn’t his, as if he hadn’t navigated it thousands of times before, dark or not. He realized as he stumbled in alarm from the study to the hall that he’d wakened thinking he was in his upstairs bedroom instead of downstairs on the sofa. He’d imagined Catherine in his arms rather than the Sweetheart. He only fully understood this when he followed the noise of the telephone rather than his spatial sense of where it ought to be. When he heard Catherine’s voice there on it when he’d believed she was back in bed.

“Oliver, it’s crazy, but I just got this bizarre call from the police in Wichita.”

Now that he had oriented himself in the hallway, downstairs instead of up, Oliver had to reorient all over again: the police? Surely he wouldn’t have been caught by them.

“Little Catherine,” his wife was saying. “She’s been found. She was driving a car somewhere off I-35, some place I never heard of called Freedonia, out in the sticks. Anyway, she’s been found. She’s fine.”

The Sweetheart had made her way to him, silently. She stood with her head leaning against his shoulder, listening. Her face was bowed, as if to receive punishment, the cold light of the moon turning everything inside blue. Oliver had the urge to push the Sweetheart away, to shut a door between himself and her, to encounter this strange business on the telephone without distraction. He was having a hard time making sense of everything at once. An angry flare went up inside: this was age, his enemy, now disallowing him the ability to quickly adapt, to sync up one thing with another, to rise from a deep sleep into sudden chaos without suffering the slow machinery of mind and body refusing to fire at command. Napping synapses, sluggish muscles.

Catherine was still talking. Not all of what she was saying would adhere. He turned the phone slightly so that the Sweetheart could listen in. And it was she, when the call was over, who said back to him what he’d been told and not heard. Repeated to him his own part of the conversation, those things he’d agreed to do, those steps he would apparently be taking.

The girl was in El Dorado, twenty miles away, spending the night in a cell. “Your wife said they said Catherine was a flight risk,” said the Sweetheart. “She said they said Catherine might have been suicidal, the way she was driving. She said she didn’t tell them that Catherine probably just didn’t know how to drive, she’s only fifteen, and her mother died in a car crash not that long ago. She said she didn’t want to complicate things by piling up a lot of extraneous details. But which one is Catherine?” the Sweetheart asked. “I thought your wife was Catherine.”

“They’re both Catherine.”

“Well, no wonder there’s so much confusion. You don’t actually have to do anything until morning. Your wife said the forecast is for sunny and warm, and she said she thought the roads would be clear, so you could drive to El Dorado, to expedite. And she’s going to get here as soon as she can. Tomorrow.”

“Sunday?” he said.

“Today is Sunday. Tomorrow is Monday. And it’s already clear,” she pointed out. The resulting blue light contributed to the sensation of ice; the fire had completely burned out. The dogs stood by the back door, prepared to go outside, waving their stubby tails. Oliver held a flashlight and watched them tumble down the back steps like seals, seek purchase on the slick ground, quickly pee and then come skittering up once more. The moon shone relentlessly on everything, a cold gleaming landscape that looked as if it were all made of glass and could be shattered.

He asked Miriam to come with him because young Catherine was in possession of a car, and that car had to be driven away from the El Dorado dispatcher’s yard. It relieved him to think that he could volunteer to take the clunker, allow Miriam and the stranger the luxury of his Saab. He had no interest in sitting in a confined space with an orphaned runaway teenage girl.

Not that driving with Miriam was very different.

Teenage Catherine would be acne-ridden, angry, and would smell awful. She might throw open the car door and roll out. Her ugly despair would seem contagious, and Oliver felt susceptible.

The Sweetheart had strapped herself into her snowshoes at dawn, ready to trek the distance between Oliver’s home and Wheatlands. If the streets were going to melt, the restaurant would open. Brunch. And it would be packed, people sick with cabin fever, prepared to step back into the sunshine and spread their versions of their shared adversity. Already there’d been the slow spread of restored power; Oliver’s microwave and coffeemaker clocks were blinking unset time at them in the kitchen, heat rising from the grates once again, various beeps resounding from all over the house as the technology came to life. From the curb, the Sweetheart had tossed his newspaper to Oliver, and then she disappeared down the block, steady and swift, a healthy young animal in motion.

Sure enough, by noon everything was a cheerfully dripping mess. Crews went from street to street piling fallen branches into a wood-chipping machine. Oliver took a Valium to calm himself, and then aimed the car for Miriam and Leslie’s place. The roads were flowing with melt, patches of ice harmlessly slushing, people outside wandering and examining the strangely larger sky, all those pesky tree tops missing now.

“You’re welcome,” Miriam said, settling herself like a praying mantis in the leather seat. Her eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with last night’s mascara.

The preemptive
You’re welcome
; not an auspicious start. He willed himself not to bring up the man who’d been the last person to sit where she now sat, her naked friend, whose disposal, by the way, might have represented a favor Oliver had performed for her, his own unmentioned
You’re welcome
, the exchange of transporting stinking strangers that would make them even. Instead he sighed.

“Got any ibuprofen in here?” she asked.

“No,” he lied, unwilling to unlock the glove compartment for it.

She leaned her head back and used her palms to massage her bleary eyes. A few minutes later, she said, “No way you’re adopting a child.”

“Jury’s out,” he said. “Catherine’s thinking of it as a moral quandary.”

“But you don’t think of it as a moral quandary?”

“Well, she wasn’t bequeathed to me.”

Miriam snorted, head wagging wearily as if she’d expected no better response from him. She could have said, “You never acted as if I was bequeathed to you, either.” And she would have been sort of correct. Her mother was always trying to teach the lesson of kindness, not correctness, but Miriam would never be the proper audience for that. She was evidence, Oliver thought, of his and Leslie’s supreme incompatibility. A child of such a union could never be whole or done.