Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (5 page)

Arnie waited.

“Women don’t do nearly as much stupid risky shit as guys do.” The kid laughed at this, then sobered up and said, “Seriously.”

Arnie’s stomach turned over. It wasn’t as if everyone was here because of an accident. Sometimes it was medical—cancer or blood clots or diabetes—and sometimes people were just born this way. “Well, how did yours happen?” Arnie asked.

“Ah, stupidest thing ever. I’ve got ’em all beat I bet.”

“What happened?”

“Fireworks, you know, a cherry bomb, M-80, whatever you call it. I found it in my dad’s truck and lit the fuse, then I just sort of panicked and didn’t let go of it. Now that’s pretty stupid.” He put his hand back under the bar, between his legs.

“You must have been a little kid,” Arnie said.

The boy nodded. “It was a long time ago. Hopefully I’m smarter now.”

A new bartender came on shift, and when she walked over to get their next order she didn’t believe the boy was of age.

“I can vouch for him,” Arnie said, when the kid couldn’t produce a driver’s license. “Born in 1988, October tenth. My wife was in labor with him for forty-one hours.”

“Really,” the bartender said. “What sign would that make him?”

“Libra,” Arnie said. The bartender decided to concede defeat. It was a resort, after all; they were supposed to make people happy.

“Thanks,” the kid said once she’d left. “I’m not that far off, you know.”

Arnie nodded. “I heard of a guy today who lost his foot trying to jump his motorcycle over a pickup truck.”

“I met that guy,” the kid said. “I played a round with him last year. He’s got one of those weird tall putters.”

“You’d have to admit,” Arnie said. “That makes a firecracker not seem so bad.”

“Stupidity-wise?”

“Right.”

“I suppose,” the kid said. “But still.” There was another long silence, when Arnie could hear the boy’s teeth crunching down on the bar peanuts, and, in the background, the computerized songs of video games. Finally the boy stopped chewing and said, “So what happened to your wife?”

“Car accident,” Arnie said.

“That’s rough. You driving, or her?”

“Does it make a difference?” Arnie said. But of course it did.

The kid looked away, played with the label on his beer for a while. “What happened?”

It was time to follow the usual drill. Arnie shrugged. “Just, you know. Dark night, wet road. Somebody crossed over from the other side, straight at us, and before we knew it we were flipped over in the ditch. I jerked the wheel.”

The boy stared at him for what felt like a long time. He had eyes like a horse, weary and huge. “Were they drunk or something?”

“No.” A pocket of air escaped from Arnie’s lungs, burst up through his mouth. How he’d wished for that. “No. But they died.” He caught his hands making a quick jerking motion, and put them down. “It could happen to anyone, any night.”

A few seconds, a few degrees in an angle, a different brand of tires. A moment of distraction, a flash of panic could cost you this much in life.

Finally the kid looked away, turned back to the window. “That’s terrible.”

“Stupidity-wise, it’s up there,” Arnie said.

Sometimes in the middle of the night Arnie would wake up to find Marion twisted away from him and shuddering, her fingers wrapped tight around the iron bars of their headboard. There were no words for this. When he tried to touch her back, she reeled away. He just had to watch.

“There’s something I’ve always wanted to know,” Arnie said. “Do you mind if I ask?”

The kid stared at him, unwilling to make any promises. Kids could be cruel. Probably this boy had heard more than his fair share of vulgar questions. But Arnie went on anyway.

“Does it ever hurt there, in the hand, you know?”

“You mean like, what do they call it, phantom pain? Nah.”

“Really?”

“Nope. Not at all. I mean, maybe some people have that.” He shrugged. “Not me.”

“Do you ever have dreams about it, the accident?”

“I don’t think so, no.” He reflected for a minute. “Because in my dreams, it’s still there, all whole.” As he said this he spread out his bad hand next to his good one and studied them. “My mom said I slept almost constantly the whole year after it happened.” The kid smiled, as if this were another of his foolish acts. “Must’ve been trying to dream it back or something.” He laughed.

At last one of the water-skiers, a girl in a yellow life jacket with long dark hair that whipped through the air, went off the jump and landed without falling. She threw one fist up and shrieked, and the kids in the boat ahead of her applauded.

“It’s probably time for the dinner by now,” Arnie said. “Do you want to go?”

The kid swigged the last of his beer and tightened his jaw. “I’ve never really liked the banquet part. I mean, the golf is golf. The banquet is…No offense. It’s a lot of old people.”

Arnie smiled. “Of course.”

“You know what I was thinking?”

“What?”

The boy squinted through the window into the setting sun and pointed at the girl waterskiing. “I was thinking I’d go introduce myself.”

“Really?” Arnie said.

“Nah.” The kid threw down his good hand in a dismissive gesture. The girl leaned back against the rope to spray an arc of water through the air near the pier, then dropped the rope and sunk slowly into the lake.

W
hen he got back to the banquet the room was already full, the round tables crowded with so many happily chatting couples that Arnie felt he’d been dropped down into a wedding. He stood in the doorway kneading his back with one hand, scanning the room to see if by chance Marion had changed her mind. Cheryl and Bill waved him over to their table, which sent a pulse of relief through him, until he got closer and saw that their table was full.

“Where’s your wife?” Cheryl said, working her tongue against her molars. “What’s her name again?”

“Oh,” Arnie said. Behind him someone whooped with laughter, startling him into a blank state. “Oh…we’re over in the back.” He pointed vaguely at a corner.

Cheryl craned her neck. “I don’t see her.”

“Bathroom,” Arnie said. “I better get back to her.” He shook Bill’s hand and tried to hurry away but the room was too crowded, the aisles cluttered with canes and crutches, clogged with hobbled people. He wanted out. He was sick of them all, with their stupid afflictions. The beers were working on him. He doubled back, rerouted, waited behind an awful woman with a walker. Finally he made it to the side doors and shoved through, sucking at the air in the hallway like the room had been contaminated.

He started the long walk to their room, down the halls that were wide and muted and spooky. He tried to calm his hands, his shoulders. He mouthed out some words he could say to Marion, trying to memorize them. He always lost track. It was impossible to be angry with her, and impossible to go on.

When he reached their room an empty tray with used-up dishes was sitting in the hall. He picked up the metal cover to see what she had eaten. He was hungry, even to the point of swaying a little. When he found the remains of her cheeseburger under the cover he looked up and down the hallway and decided to eat it.

Inside, the room was already dark and quiet. He didn’t care. He turned on the lights.

Marion was curled up on the bed by the window, and she didn’t stir. She had turned down the blankets of the other bed as if to suggest that Arnie sleep over there. Well, he wouldn’t. He went around turning on all the lights, even the TV and the radio, then he stood over her for a long time, trying to maintain his focus until she woke up. But her chest just kept rising and falling peacefully. Finally he took off his shoes, his shirt and pants. Stripped down to his underwear, he put his hand on the sheets by her neck, started pulling them back.

It was a long lavender nightgown she was wearing, one that Lizzie had given her. It was soft. To make her cold he pulled the sheets and blankets down all the way past her foot, so it was just Marion there on the blank white sheets, all alone. Still she didn’t stir. Arnie took the bottom of the nightgown in his hand and pulled it up little by little, and when he got it to her thighs, he began to see. The stump was raw and chafed. There were red bumps and blisters all over, and a terrible inch-wide line rubbed raw just under her bottom, where the top of the fiberglass socket had rested all the hot day under her hip bone for support. He sucked his breath in. He turned the TV off.

Arnie went into the bathroom and washed his hands. He stared at himself in the mirror for a long time. Then he began rooting through her bag of toiletries. When he found the tube of ointment he read the pharmacist’s directions to be sure, and brought it back out into the other room. On his fingers it felt cool and sticky and man-made. He touched it to her thigh as delicately as he could, fearing the skin would peel away under the slightest pressure. He dabbed and rubbed, as softly as possible, moving his eyes from her thigh up to her face every few seconds, to see whether she was still sleeping up there, still walking around in her dream world without the need of him or any canes or props. Just her. But on his next glance up he saw her eyes beginning to flicker, and he pulled back, torn between two wishes. He lifted his hand, suspending it, knowing that soon he’d be caught, there’d be questions, but first there were only her eyes, opening green, dimly searching, until they found him there in the half light and settled on him, watching, as yet uncomprehending, sweeping him up and taking him back with her.

S
O MANY PEOPLE
had moved out of the neighborhood that the dogs had just about taken over. Mostly they were forlorn and peaceful, but every once in a while a frenzy of barking and low-level madness would erupt in the back alley and lurch through the side yard toward the street. At the window I’d catch their silhouettes, a group of them tussling over some piece of garbage. Then they’d settle the matter and drift apart down the middle of the wide street, where hardly any cars went anymore.

The day the girl showed up it was the odd sound of a big old car grumbling to a stop out front that drew me to the window. A dark and rusting Cadillac stood there, its back corner hanging so low I expected a huge fat man to emerge, but when the door popped and swung open it was just a scrawny girl in black jeans and several layers of sweatshirts. She had dark, bobbed hair that clung to her head damply. A little older than me, midtwenties maybe.

When she rang my doorbell I watched her for a while from the window, trying to decide if she had the jittery anxious look of a dangerous person. I’d already heard every kind of endless tall tale from the desperate types who get stranded here. They’ve got broken-down cars, they’ve been mugged or beaten, they’re lost, evicted, foreclosed, someone’s taken their kids. They park themselves on your porch, shivering, and break down until maybe you give them a few bucks or some leftover pizza or a ride to the bus station. You could threaten to call the cops but even they know the cops won’t come. As soon as you get rid of them and have time to comb over their story you discover its many impossibilities and know you’ve been had. It’s hard to know how to feel about yourself on such days. My dad’s old friend Lenny warned me, “Tommy, it’s folks like those that’ll get you.” Like I’ll head out to jump-start their car or something and their unseen partner will come in my back door and rob me.

I don’t have much to steal, I told Lenny. And his face twisted up and went sour, because he was thinking of all my dad’s old things in here.

I’m making the neighborhood sound like a dirtbag haven, but it isn’t. It’s no Brush Park; it’s not leaking mansions filled with squatters. Until the last couple of years it was pretty much normal like anyplace, rows of little two-bedroom brick houses built in the fifties. Sidewalks, alleys, normal working people. I came up fine.

When I opened the door she showed me a mealy grin and said she was here about the room for rent. Does it matter if she’s good-looking? Imagine her however you want: big eyes, high cheekbones, wet lips, whatever, then throw in some little flaw so you can believe she’d actually materialize before the likes of you. Her teeth in front were too short—stunted and gray. I said I didn’t have a room for rent. This was one I hadn’t heard before.

The Olsons’ former black lab, Dooley, came vulching toward us and the girl hugged herself closer toward my door. I shooed him away no problem, but he glanced back at me in an insulted way, as if to say there’d been some big misunderstanding and he belonged indoors. All of them gave you this look at first. Eventually they got over it, forgot about who they’d been.

The girl was pointing at her car along the curb for some reason, like that qualified her as nondesperate. Then she showed me her little notebook where she had my exact address written down and the word
ROOM
in big black letters, as if that verified everything.

“From an ad in the paper,” she said. As if anybody reads papers anymore.

“Maybe you got the address wrong?” I said.

At this point the average conniver would start asking for something, trying to touch my arm or call up some tears. But she just nodded, like she was used to getting things wrong. Her mouth moved into a funny cramped-up position and she couldn’t look at me. She turned and headed back to her car, which was filled to the ceiling with stuff.

“Shit. Hang on.” You never know. You never know about people. There might be one in three telling the truth now and then, and what kind of asshole do you want to be in the final tally? I grabbed my keys and my coat and we headed down the street a ways, looking for a
ROOM FOR RENT
sign on a block of empty houses. Before we turned the corner I glanced back, fearing some crew of guys with crowbars would pile out of her car. But nobody did.

“Was there a phone number in the ad?” I said.

“Just sunny and clean was all it said.” She said her name was Molly. She said she was a good roommate, clean and considerate, and then neither of us said anything for a while. She had pulled up the hood of one of her sweatshirts so it was hard to see her face as I walked alongside her. With her fists jammed into the pockets in front she looked more or less like any regular hood rat I’d known in high school.

Most of the houses had big posters in the windows with two huge eyeballs and the words,
THIS HOME IS BEING WATCHED
, but we all knew that wasn’t true. Folks had started scavenging them, breaking out the back windows and pulling out appliances and copper plumbing in the night.

“Why would you want to move here?” I said.

She made a noise I couldn’t decipher.

After a while, looking around at the houses, she said in an awed and mystified voice, “It’s like missing people.”

“Sure, like a fucking zombie movie,” I said, maybe too meanly, and she got quiet again.

Dusk came along and slipped in around us. We walked up to Old Aggie’s house over on Elm, and her holiday lights were on bright as a construction zone. “Maybe here?” I said. She compared Aggie’s address to the one in her notebook. “I don’t think so,” she said.

I could feel Aggie shuffling around behind the door, wondering about us. “It’s just me, Aunt Aggie. It’s Tommy.” She wasn’t my aunt but that’s what we called her. She opened the door bundled in a red robe over her regular clothes, like St. Nick. She knew everything about everyone in the neighborhood but she hadn’t heard about any room for rent.

By then it was fully dark out, though it was only 5:30 or so. Fucking December. We kept going, approaching every house with lights on, but no dice.

On our way back to Molly’s car I said, “Might be that somebody placed the ad and then had to move away sooner than they thought.”

“You stayed put. Why haven’t you moved?”

“Ours is paid off.”

“You live with your folks?”

I didn’t say anything, just shook my head in the dark, where she couldn’t see it. “I grew up here.”

There in my front yard I had a déjà vu to my first date, with Malgosza Gombrowicz, Old Aggie’s granddaughter. It was Christmastime, every house gaudy with reindeer lights, and I walked her home and we stood in the middle of her front yard, which was shaped just like mine. She was staring at me with her big bulbous blue eyes and leaning in with her lower lip hanging when her dad opened the front door and spooked me, but I went ahead and kissed her anyway. That was big courage, back then.

In this girl’s car there were sweaters in laundry baskets, grocery bags bulging with CDs. A bundle of crumpled sheets with a hairdryer on top.

“How much did the ad say the rent was?” I finally asked.

There’s one thing I didn’t mention before, because I didn’t want to come off as some creepy self-righteous douche. The truth is, before Molly showed up that day, the truth is I was praying. It’s not like I do it all the time or anything.

I
didn’t like the idea of putting her in my dad’s room. I hadn’t enshrined it or anything, but his stuff was still pretty much the way he left it. His shirts were hanging in the closet, his socks and underwear folded up in the top drawer, his workpants and t-shirts in the big drawers underneath. In the nightstand next to the bed, I knew, were stacks of
Playboys
arranged by date, unwrinkled. And pinned on the walls everywhere were his little quotation cards, things he’d made from scraps at his printshop on slow days.
HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE
, and
NEVER HURRY, NEVER REST
. That sort of thing, letterpressed into thick pastel paper left over from somebody’s wedding.

I got a couple of laundry baskets and started packing things out of my room, putting them into my dad’s closet. I stripped the sheets off my bed and stacked a fresh set on the desk for her. It was a small room, and I didn’t need everything in it. I hesitated about the stereo, then left it for her.

“OK,” I said. In the front room she was sitting in my dad’s reading chair, staring out the dark window to the yard, where the Jacksons’ dog, Mabel, was staring back.

She said, “You won’t hardly even know I’m here.”

The house was about nine hundred square feet. I was pretty sure I’d know exactly where she was.

She made her way to my bedroom, a little warily. I stepped back so as not to crowd her. She looked around, gave the mattress a squeeze. “OK then,” she said.

The stuff in her car wasn’t exactly what you’d call packed; it was more just thrown in there piece by piece, so we carried it into the house best we could, leaving a trail of items across the lawn and down the hall to her room—a Red Wings sock, a half-eaten Snickers, a Radiohead CD. When the car was about half empty she said, “OK, that’s probably enough stuff,” and she locked it up.

“You hungry?” I said as we walked inside.

She looked surprised by the question. “No. Just tired.” She went in my room and I waited, but she didn’t come out.

T
hat night in my dad’s bed I rode out my usual ambush of night fears, but now there were new ones related to this girl. I imagined her going from house to house each night, nestling in and then stripping your place clean and driving off at dawn in that packed-tight car. An anti-Santa, relieving you of your attachments. But then I heard a soft cough on the other side of the wall, and a while later there was a yawn and a creak of the mattress. My mattress. She was falling asleep like anyone, filling the house with her breath, her real life. I slept like the dead. I dreamed my mother came back. She came knocking at the window and I got up and pulled her in, scraping her stomach on the sill until we tumbled down in each other’s arms. It was eleven years since I last saw her but she hadn’t aged. Her hair was still the same black flapper’s mop. She said, “Your father has finally stopped harassing me with his phone calls. What happened?” And I gave her the rough outlines of his demise. She listened without much reaction. I screwed up my courage to ask, “So will you move back, now that he’s gone?” But I could see her retreating even before I finished the question. So I closed my eyes to stop seeing her that way and I dozed off in her arms and dreamed another dream of her, a better dream inside the first one. We were floating over the city in a hot air balloon looking down at the lights and the big dark holes where lights used to be, over the vast, abandoned central depot and down Michigan Avenue toward the old heart of town. She was a great explorer and I was her navigator. Her hair flew up around her face and she leaned over the edge of the balloon’s basket, giving me a look so bright and intense it was like she had just given birth, and I gasped and grinned back at her until she said, “Don’t you have anything bigger than this to dream of?”

So I did what I knew she wanted me to do: I climbed over the edge of the basket and jumped, and woke up. It was like I’d been infected by my dad’s pillows and taken on his fever dreams from the very end. And I felt pained for him all over again, if that was the kind of dream his last dreams had been.

The house was quiet and bright by then so I got up and stumbled toward the bathroom door, which was open, though it shouldn’t have been, because inside, there was Molly. Sprawled in the bathtub, naked and gone. The water was cold. Her mouth hung open. She was like something washed up on my shoreline.

There was no blood anywhere, just a few pill bottles floating in the water, with my dad’s name on the labels. I dropped to my knees and squeezed her wrist, waiting—fuckit, praying. In a way, every body is the same in the end, cool and lackluster, abandoned. “Goddamnit,” I said. “Too much, goddamnit.” And finally I felt it, like a worm swallowing something under the soil: a pulse. I put my cheek near her mouth and felt the faint sour whiff of her breath. OK, then. OK.

Step by step. I let out the water, threw some towels over her, and went to find the phone. The 911 lady let it ring a long time and then asked in a skeptical voice if this was an emergency. When she heard Molly was breathing, she lost even her meager reserves of urgency. She said, “If you can get her to throw up, that’d really help us out.”

On TV the operator stays on the line until the emergency crew shows up, but that didn’t happen. This woman seemed to have someplace to be.

I kneeled down next to Molly, waiting. Her skin was clammy and cool, blue gray. I lined up the empty prescription bottles and tried to remember which ones had been for the chemo, which ones for the pain.

Then finally a low, funny moan came from some great subterranean distance, and she moved.

“That’s right,” I said. I made all kinds of retarded cheerleading remarks. “Come on now, you can do it. Let’s go, Molly.”

“What’d you do to me?” She came to life. “Oh, fuck, it’s freezing in here.”

So I carried her into my dad’s room. She was piled in towels on top but still naked and wet underneath. It was like picking up a strange furry animal and discovering its slick, heavy underside. I set her in my dad’s bed and piled all our spare blankets over her. I brought over the garbage can and asked if she could find a way to throw up. “I’ll get right on it,” she said.

I gave her a t-shirt, sat down on the edge of the bed. “I called the paramedics.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll be fine.”

They probably wouldn’t come anyway. “What were you thinking?”

“What were
you
thinking?” She was still slurring her words from the drugs. “Who lets some stranger into their house? What exactly were you expecting?” She said it in a leering way that set me off.