Sarah's Window (11 page)

He had devoted his life to observing the invisible and constructing mathematical devices and inventing terms to describe the indescribable. The subjects of bis research could be neither touched nor measured, scarcely even imagined. And these things did not frighten him.

But what he was beginning to feel for Sarah frightened him. He had always been the observer, and now he was the phenomenon itself.

The last thing Sarah wanted that Saturday morning was a scene at the Cassoday Cafe. John Wilde had come in around eleven and taken a corner table. She brought him the menu and tried to keep her hand steady as she poured his coffee, tried to keep her voice just kind of quiet and neutral while they talked briefly about little Will, who had just come home from the hospital. She caught him watching her a few times, discreetly, nothing that drew attention, but she could feel the heat in his eyes and it made her go weak at the knees. Then Billy Moon came in with a couple of guys from his baseball team, and they took the table next to John. When she brought their order, Billy cracked a joke, hinting that Sarah had been over at his place the night before. The guys gave Billy a good ribbing, which embarrassed Sarah something awful since she knew John could hear every word of their conversation. Right after that the strangers walked in, and that's when the trouble started.

She tried to let off a little steam to Joy, but it wasn't enough, thought it best not to tell Joy how the beefy guy had pressed his elbow into her crotch while she was taking their order, and how he had stacked the menus on the far side of the table so she had to lean in front of him to retrieve them. Then he had made a move as though to pass them to her, timing his gesture just right so he brushed her breast with the back of his hand. It was so casual, one could easily believe it inadvertent. But Sarah knew better; she suspected he had perfected it over the years on many a waitress.

"They're sick!" She picked up an order of baked ham from the counter and stabbed the scalloped potatoes with a sprig of parsley. "And so crude! First all these vulgar jokes about women, now they're on to the Mexicans."

"Buncha slugs," Joy muttered as she ladled gravy over an order of meat loaf and handed it to Sarah. "Good dose of pesticide. That's what they need."

"They're so loud. Like they want everybody to hear. Millie got up and moved to another table. It really upset her."

"Calm down, honey. They're not from around here. Probably won't ever see 'em again."

"We'd better not."

"Just ignore 'em. Don't get all worked up. Spit in their coffee if it'll make you feel any better—that's what I do—but don't say anything."

She approached the table with plates balanced on both arms. They saw her coming and quit talking and sat back in their chairs. The big man tucked the edge of his napkin into his belt and laid his hands on the table and stared at his paper place mat like a dog waiting to be fed. At the sight of them something in Sarah snapped and she knew she was going to do something she'd probably regret.

When she hesitated they thought she couldn't remember their order and so the big guy looked up at her with a lewd grin and said, "I got the ham, honey."

"The ham," repeated Sarah, and he nodded. So she served the cheeseburger with extra fries and the meat loaf to the other two, then she smiled at him and set the ham plate down in front of him and said, "Gentlemen, this is on the house."

They looked up at her like they'd heard wrong. The big man leaned back in his chair and grinned at the other two, and the little man with plaster-splatterd arms sneered and said, "Why? You got cockroaches back there?"

"No," intoned Sarah, with her hands on her hips, "we've got roaches out here." She paused just a second before adding, "Three of them." Then she looked them all in the eye, rapidly, one after the other, and said very sweetly, "You gentlemen don't need to come back here. If you do, you won't be served. Now eat up, 'cause it's gettin' cold."

She turned away then and the room was dead still.

"You callin' us names, little bitch?"

It was the big man talking, and as he spoke he lunged forward and grabbed Sarah's arm, squeezing it tight like a vise so that she gave a startled cry of pain. He yanked her back around like a whip, and she lost her balance. There was a sudden crack that might have been her arm, or might have been the sound of her head as it hit the table.

Even before she fell, John was on his feet and knocking over chairs to clear a path toward the guy. Billy had his back to them and hadn't seen a thing. When he looked up from his scrambled eggs, John already had the beefy guy by the scruff of the neck and had slammed him facedown on the table. The plaster-splattered man had scrambled to his feet with a knife in his hand.

Randy, the county's undersheriff, was just coming out of the men's room, double-checking his fly, when he heard a commotion—dishes breaking and bodies rustling—and saw John Wilde wrestling the big guy and Sarah crumpled on the floor. On reflex he popped the snap on his holster and in three strides was there with his gun drawn in their faces, and then things got real still again. The plaster-splattered man dropped the knife and it fell, breaking one of Joy's dishes. That was the only sound they heard—that and the sound of John Wilde's breathing as he held his face right down on the beefy guy's ear. Randy ordered everybody to stay right where they were. He asked Sarah if she was all right. She was struggling to her knees, one hand pressed to her forehead, as Billy Moon bent over her and helped her to her feet. Randy was more worried about what John Wilde might do because he had the beefy guy in an armlock and his shirt twisted so tight around his neck that his eyes were bulging something awful. Randy thought the big guy had "heart attack" written all over his face, and then wouldn't that put them in a fine fix.

"It's okay...," Randy said in a low monotone, but he couldn't remember John Wilde's name. "It's okay. Just back off now."

John moved slowly, but finally he calmed down a little and let up on his bulldog grip, and the beefy guy stumbled to his feet.

Nobody got nasty, what with Randy's Smith & Wesson aimed steady at the big guy's back, and he was able to persuade them in but a few short words to kindly take their business elsewhere. The strangers responded swiftly, although not without some crude parting words, and in a minute they were out the door and gone.

Upon hearing Sarah's cry, Joy had burst out of the kitchen gripping a bottle of ketchup by the neck. Randy was holstering his weapon when he looked up and saw her standing there in her chef's apron smeared with raw meat loaf and the bottle poised in midair. He chuckled and said, "What the hell were you gonna do with that thing, Joy?"

That just sort of knocked the tension right out of them and the dining room exploded in laughter; then everybody started talking at once.

Billy lifted Sarah onto a chair, but she had a little blood on her forehead and scalloped potatoes all down the front of her apron. She looked up at Billy and Randy with tears in her eyes and mumbled how sorry she was, but she was still trembling.

Then Sarah turned to look at John, and even through her blurred vision she could see the way he was looking at her. His eyes no longer seemed blue and pale and distant, but angry and dark and pounding like the sea.

Billy dropped down into a squat beside her chair.

"You okay, kid?"

Tenderly, he cupped her chin in his hand and tilted it up so he could see her face.

John saw that gesture. It was a strange feeling, on top of the blood pumping through his temples, the adrenaline still on the rise, to feel this sudden plummeting sensation in his chest, a kind of free fall of the heart.

Joy was bending over Sarah. She swept the hair off Sarah's face and examined her forehead. There was a swelling already, a red knot just above her eyebrow.

"Let's get some ice on that."

"I'm okay," whispered Sarah.

"You'd better stay down for a minute," said Billy.

"I'm fine," she answered, pushing them away with a shade of annoyance.

Millie had the good sense to wrap up some crushed ice in a dish towel for Sarah's forehead. She, for one, was glad the jerks were gone, she said, and thought Sarah had done the right thing. Everybody voiced their agreement and pretty soon everything was back to normal.

Apart from her red eyes and the lump growing on her forehead, Sarah behaved as if nothing had happened. She took their orders and served their hotcakes and sausage and refilled their coffee and even took a minute to look at the photo of Millie's new grandbaby. But John left not long after that. When she cleared his table she noticed he had barely eaten a thing, had left most of his pancakes and a full cup of coffee. Next to his plate was a twenty-dollar bill to cover the four-dollar breakfast. When he walked out the door that morning without looking back, he took the sun out of the day, took the light right out of her heart. No amount of good-natured joking or laughter could bring it back, and Sarah had no smiles left for anyone.

Joy didn't say much to her about the incident, was oddly silent about the whole affair. That evening when everyone had gone and Sarah was upending the chairs on the tables so Joy could sweep the floor, Joy paused and turned to her and said, "Did you notice the way he was looking at you?"

Sarah gripped another chair and swung it up on the table and said calmly, "Who?"

"Oh, come on."

"You mean Billy?"

"No. John Wilde."

"I didn't see anything. I was down on the floor."

"I can't believe you didn't notice. Jeez, the way he dove in there."

"He probably just saw it happen before anybody else."

"I never imagined him that kind of guy."

Sarah shrugged and turned away and changed the subject, although she didn't miss the look on Joy's face, the look of one who suddenly sees things in a new light.

John was in Berkeley for the better part of that week. He returned home late Friday in an animated state, stood in the kitchen unzipping his leather jacket, his briefcase wedged between his feet and his eyes afire, telling Susan how well the research was going, that it required only a few more trips before he polished it up and sent it off for publication.

"Where's the little guy?" he asked as he hung bis jacket over the back of a chair.

"He's in his room."

"Asleep?"

"I suppose so."

He looked around the kitchen. "Where's the monitor?"

"It's up in the bedroom. I didn't turn it on." She saw the look on his face and turned away and went back to the pile of laundry she had been folding on the kitchen table. "I can hear him. I don't need it"

"It's a big house."

"And he's got a damn loud voice, John." She flung down the sleepers she had in her hand and turned back to face him squarely.

"You can't imagine what he was like these past few days while you were gone." Suddenly she was on the verge of tears, and waving her hands in the air. "And Mother! God, she's more trouble than help! She's always inviting people around, and I can never get any rest!"

"It wasn't such a good idea, was it?"

"Don't start coming down on me."

"I didn't mean it that way, I just meant your mother—"

"I know! I know she's useless."

"She means well."

"Everybody means well, but it still all falls on me! You lock yourself away in your office or run off to KU for the day and..." She stopped and her shoulders sagged. "I'm sorry. It's just that... for a while I thought he was getting better...."

"He's not eating, is he?"

"It's not only that, it's just, whatever I do it isn't enough. I can't make him happy. He's just totally listless or he cries, and when he does sleep it seems like I always have something I have to get done and so I don't sleep...."

She sank into a chair and took one of his hands in both of hers and looked up at him.

"John, tell me, how attached are you really to this child?"

"What are you suggesting?"

"Your mom says we should give him back. For re-adoption." She hurried on to say, "People do that. It can be done."

She caught the disturbed look on his face, and tried to hold onto his hand but he withdrew it.

"Is it worth our marriage?" Susan said.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm unhappy. He's making me unhappy." She went on, her voice cracking. "He's making our lives miserable and he's tearing apart our marriage."

A tear inched down her face and John felt his heart ache for her. But he could not bring himself to kiss her and so he touched her cheek and gently wiped away the tear.

"But I thought you wanted a baby."

"Not like this," she whispered. "Not at this expense."

"I knew it wouldn't be easy."

"We were so happy. Just the two of us." Her eyes were swimming in misery. "Am I so awful? Am I such an awful person?"

"Of course you're not," he said gently, touching her hair.

"Your mom said it could just get worse when he's older. If he doesn't bond with us now, imagine what he'll be like when he gets older."

"He will bond with us."

"But
when? How?"
she cried, and in a sudden outburst of frustration she grabbed an armload of laundry and flung it angrily onto the kitchen floor. "I don't want him in our lives anymore! I just don't!"

John stared at her mutely while she sobbed into her hands. Lightly, he stroked her hair, then, after a moment, he picked up his briefcase and took bis jacket from the back of the chair and walked out through the kitchen to the entry hall. He hung up his coat, then climbed the stairs to the top floor.

The door to the nursery was closed, and when he opened it he found Will sitting in his crib, clinging to the rail, his dark thatched head peering out between the white bars and his eyes full of unfriendly fire. His smooth, tawny cheeks were covered with red splotches and his frail little body shuddered with each breath. John knew he had been crying for a long time, had finally just worn himself down to these muffled sobs.

"Will, my boy," John said as he closed the door behind him, but he didn't in the slightest feel like Will was his boy. He stood at the side of the crib and reached down to take him, but the baby turned away, crawled into a corner and drew his scrawny little legs up under him and lay there with his white-diapered rump in the air like a hedgehog in the headlights.

John remembered how he had looked the first time he saw him, lying all wasted and frail in the clear Plexiglas crib with his chest still bandaged and plastic tubing up his nose and his tiny arms strapped to the aluminum rails. No one else had wanted him. He was so ugly, barely the size of a newborn although he was eight months old at the time.

He had been adopted by a South African diplomat, a woman working for the UN Assistance Mission in East Timor. She'd found him when she was on a visit to Sri Lanka with her American husband. He had needed heart surgery and she offered to send him back to the United States and pay for the procedure with the understanding that she would adopt him. They arranged to have him brought back to the KU Medical Center in Kansas City, where her husband had done his medical internship, but the woman was delayed in East Timor because of political
unrest in the region. A few weeks later the mission office was attacked and she was stoned to death, leaving Will recovering from his surgery in Kansas City with no family to return to.

The surgeon was a friend of John's brother, and John and Susan had flown out from Berkeley just to see the baby. John had never had much occasion to be around children, had no special affinity for kids in general, and certainly not for babies. But even before he saw him, he had felt there was some connection there, something beyond mere circumstance that had brought him into that hospital room.

Susan had been more cautious, but John won out in the end, and they brought him home, convinced they could pull him through.

But nothing was as they had hoped it would be, nothing was as they had planned. And now John stood in defeat looking down at his son.

"Oh, Will," John whispered again, and this time a wave of pity swept over him. He wanted to reach out and take him but he was afraid if he did he'd set him off. Gently, he placed his hand on the baby's back, and the size of his hand over the little being amazed him. He wondered, beyond the muteness and the helplessness, what kind of consciousness lay under his palm, if it was great or small, if it was full of powerful instinct or spirit If it had issued forth from elsewhere, drawn forth "from out the vast," as Tennyson liked to believe, or if it was a temporal consciousness only, and would, with time, cease to exist.

Will was still whimpering, but he was tolerating the touch of John's hand, and John wished he knew what more he could give him, what would soothe him and
lull him back to sleep. Once again Sarah stepped back into his thoughts, and he saw her face up close looking at him unsmilingly, with a knowledge that was somehow to Will's liking. But no, it was just the hair, the soporific effect of her hair clutched in his tiny fist.