Daddy's (3 page)
Authors: Lindsay Hunter
Over spaghetti, Tim pulled me onto his lap and rubbed himself against me and finished without even unzipping. He held me there, rocking me and kissing my chest and neck tenderly. I unzipped him and wiped him down with a napkin, wetting a corner with my tongue.
We watched television, his body cupping mine, his fingers in and out of my underwear, idly exploring. Marky was on the other couch, scratching his neck with his back paw.
“Fred called me today,” Tim said. “He said the sounds Marky makes when he runs into that fence are god-awful. He could hear him this afternoon all the way down by their place.”
“He’s just getting used to it,” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Look at him.” Marky was rubbing his neck on the arm of the couch. He’d scratched and rubbed the collar until it was up by his ears. “I think we should get rid of it. Marky doesn’t need it anymore. He knows where he lives.”
I reached into my pants and took Tim’s hand and brought it up to my mouth, taking in the two fingers that had been inside me.
“Oh my God,” Tim said, and grew hard. I guided him in from behind and in the middle of it all my arm landed on the remote and the TV turned off and then flickered on and Marky watched and I wondered if he was waiting to see if it would be Animal Planet.
Tim fell asleep with his legs entwined in mine and it took me many minutes to disentangle, but I finally did, making my way in the adjusted dark, closing the door silently behind me. I made sure to remove Marky’s collar before we went to bed, and it was on the turtle table where I’d left it, coiled awkwardly. The alarm we never seemed to turn on gave its three warning beeps—a door is opening—but it was loudest downstairs, and I knew Tim wouldn’t hear a thing.
The grass felt good under my feet, I couldn’t tell if it was wet or cold, or both. It was like walking on one of those massage pads at those gadget stores—a welcome, dull pain. At my corner I reached under my nightgown and pulled my underwear down and held the collar to the skin just above where my pubic hair stopped. I told myself I should be afraid, that this could really hurt, but then I leaned into that invisible boundary, and it was wonderful. For a moment I was convinced I could feel it in my fillings. I moved the collar down and leaned in, the feeling was so intense that a few drops of urine escaped and clung to my thighs.
On my back in the grass the night sky looked close enough to touch and then I had the strange feeling that I was floating, that I wasn’t lying in the grass, that I was rushing up too quickly into the night and that I would break through the layers of the earth to freefall through space forever. It was the loneliest feeling and I left my place in the grass and went back to the house and up the stairs to our bed. The room smelled like sleep—like deep breaths and sheets and the warm bitter musk of bodies—and when I lay down Tim turned over in sleep and molded his body to mine and Marky let out a long sigh. My underwear was wet and cold and I wished I had taken it off.
Just before lunch a man in a white hat and overalls came to disable the fence.
“Your husband called me?” he said.
The damp strap of Marky’s collar dangled from my finger behind my back; I’d run into the house from the fence when I’d seen the man’s truck pulling off the road onto our driveway. Beneath my skirt, my underwear was around my knees and I was sure the man could smell the sharpness of the urine.
“I’m here to turn off your fence?” He said it like, “ye fayuhnts?”
It was over in fifteen minutes. The man walked to the four corners of our property and aimed a large square remote at them and punched at the keypad, then came inside and took Marky’s collar to be recycled. When he was outside I’d pressed a wet cloth to it. “I washed it. That’s why it’s a little wet,” I told him.
Before he left he told me that the fence was disabled, but that if we ever wanted it turned back on to call him, that it was still there. “Everything’s as it was,” he said. “The only thing missing is the electricity. The spark,” he said, patting Marky’s head, “for Sparky here.”
Tim came home and when I was bending to take his potpie from the oven he pulled the sweatpants and underwear I’d changed into down to my knees and stuck his pinky in my anus. “Okay?” he whispered into my hair. I held onto the stove and watched myself in its flat surface, Tim’s face appearing suddenly, his eyes closed, mouth open, a lock of hair loose on his forehead. “Oh. Kay. Ohh. Kay,” he said.
He ate the potpie with his fingers, sucking them triumphantly when he was done, even, at one point, the pinky that had been in my ass.
At the door he kissed me, the flick of his tongue at my bottom lip. “God, I love you. I really do. I’m positively joyful,” he said, “giddy.”
I watched him back down the driveway, his hand in a flat wave. I let Marky lick the potpie dish, let him push it across the floor until it bumped against the baseboard. When I took the plate away Marky went to his water bowl and drank, his big tongue making sloppy, satisfying sounds. When he was done I let him out, collarless and free.
I filled the sink with soap and hot water—as hot as it would go—and plunked the potpie dish into the suds. From the window above the sink I watched Marky bounding from edge to edge. He believed the fence was still there and stopped just short of its boundaries, stopping to pee, shoulders hunched into it, a powerful yellow stream. Then he sauntered over to the edge and didn’t stop. He stepped through the fence and onto the driveway. My hands were red and swollen in the water, my fingers picking at a blob of crust on the dish, and Marky continued on down the driveway and turned right at the road and disappeared into the woods at the far corner of our property.
I put his water dish in the suds and cleaned that, too, and then I went upstairs and lay on our bed and wept until my ribs were sore. I went into our bathroom and straddled the edge of the tub, and it felt good to have something hard and cold there, but not nearly good enough.
UNPREPARING
My boyfriend and I have sex and when we’re finished he holds me close and whispers into my ear, I just date-raped you. What do you do now?
In the grocery store he throws an avocado at my head from 200 feet away. I duck at the last minute and he yells, That could have been a grenade.
It was an avocado, I tell him. Yes, he says, yes, but what if it wasn’t?
He asks me to stop at the drugstore on the way home from work and when I’m rounding the corner near our apartment he jumps out of the darkness in a ski mask, brandishing one of our Ginsu knives. Your purse, he hisses, hand it over. A woman comes up behind me and makes a noise, a startled Oh! and then runs the other way, her shoes slapping the pavement. Honey, I say, lifting up the mask. He’s snarling, baring his teeth, and I pull the mask back down.
My mother says, It’s a phase. All men go through phases, she says. Phases always end.
One day the little boy who lives above us finds my boyfriend at the bottom of the stairs with blood all over him. The paramedics come and haul my boyfriend to the hospital and on the way they discover the blood is fake—maybe colored corn syrup, though it smells like ketchup in places. The little boy had just learned 911 in his kindergarten class. I get a call from the hospital to come pick my boyfriend up.
He’s waiting for me in the lobby. I wanted you to find me, he says, his voice cracking. I wanted to see what you would do if someone murdered me. His face crumples.
I know, I tell him, putting my hand on his back, leading him to the door. One of the paramedics approaches us on our way out and says, Yo that was fucked up, what you did. Seriously. He has a wide smear of my boyfriend’s fake blood on his forearm. I pull my boyfriend out the sliding doors before he can try and explain himself.
The next morning I wake up to his hand on my shoulder. He says, Do you think I could fight off an alligator? What about a shark? Or a lion?
No, I tell him. That’d be the end of it for sure.
This makes him mad. I hear him in the shower, raking the soap across the tiles, lathering it up so that when I get in I’ll slip and fall. I decide not to shower, rolling on extra deodorant and putting my hair into a ponytail.
That evening he picks me up from work. The radio is on so loud that the seat underneath me is throbbing. Over it he yells, The unexpected is everywhere. Danger is our only real home. I just want you to be prepared. Then he accelerates, offroads it, drives us into a tree. I feel my ankle and wrist snap, almost at the exact same time. My neck starts to stiffen. When I look at my boyfriend he’s grinning at me, blood pouring from his mouth. My face hit the steering wheel, he says. I think I broke my nose. A sprain at the very least. I’ve never seen him so happy, so alive.
The paramedic from before picks us up. He swipes a finger at the blood on my boyfriend’s chin and tastes it. Just wanted to be sure this asshole wasn’t faking again. I love you, my boyfriend tells him. I really think we could be friends. The paramedic is enraged, spluttering, Fuck off. Kiss this. Shut the hell up.
At the hospital a cop with an ink stain on his shirt asks me if I want to file charges. I say Maybe? Later a nurse comes in and wakes me up, leaning so close I can smell the hazelnut coffee on her breath. You’re preggy preg pregs, she says, rubbing my arm. Did you know that? About eight weeks along. I wonder if it was the time my boyfriend pretended he was an HIV-positive man going around and infecting people or the time he pretended he was Jack the Ripper and I was a good-hearted prostitute.
I tell my boyfriend the news and his eyes light up. What if, he says, what if someone kidnapped the baby? For ransom, or to sell it on the black market? What if you tripped and fell and landed on your stomach?
I don’t know, I tell him. He turns on the news, says, Come on, get to the terrorist stuff.
When he leaves to get coffee I imagine him spilling the coffee on himself, getting third-degree burns that fuse his fingers together. I imagine him getting stuck in the elevator, the cables breaking and the elevator plummeting him to his death, though the hospital is only three floors high. I wonder if it’s possible that an air bubble got injected into his bloodstream in the crash somehow, that it will reach his heart and he’ll go down, his heart exploding like a firecracker in an apple.
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