Sliding Past Vertical (24 page)

Chapter 41

Emerson parked Charlie’s
wheelchair next to the pond and sat on the flat top of the concrete barricade,
cold against the seat of his coveralls. He gazed out at the black water, mostly
still but ruffled now and then by a breeze. Feathers of fog drifted along the
surface. So many times he’d come out to the pond. In warmer weather, with other
patients, with Sarah, on his breaks, to throw bits of stale dinner rolls to the
ducks. But he’d never visited it at night before.
 

Something in the distance
howled. Emerson thought of coyotes. That was what a howl in the night meant at
his grandmother’s farm. But this was the city and again it had seduced him. The
noise was probably a drunken student on his way home or someone from the psych
ward agitated by the full moon.

Charlie tipped his head
toward the sound. “Hell of a night for a good howl.”

The sky was beginning to
clear, and for the first time that evening Emerson saw the full face of the
moon, ghostly and silvery pale, peek from a whisper of clouds. It painted
metallic ripples across the surface of the pond. It helped him explain the
silent desperation he felt clawing at the inside of his chest.

Full moons did that. So did
thinking of Sarah with other men.

“You doing any howling,
Emmie? Christ, makes me sick thinking about you wasting your youth in front of a
typewriter night after night.”

“I howl,” Emerson said.
“Sometimes.”

“Good man.” Charlie slapped
out toward Emerson with a paper-dry hand. “Good man.”

After a while, a car pulled
into the infirmary’s circular drive, about a hundred feet from the duck pond.
Emerson turned toward the squeal of brakes and saw a yellow cab. Cabs at night
only meant one thing: relatives flown in from out of town. A family member was
about to die.
Who now
, he thought.

The door opened; two
blue-jeaned legs with black ankle boots swung out. After what he surmised was
an exchange of money, a body followed. It was Sarah.

Emerson felt a stab of pain.

“Speaking of howling...”
Charlie tugged out the Lucky and let loose a phlegmy whistle. “Hey, gorgeous!
Over here!”

“Shut up, Charlie,” Emerson said
under his breath.

She turned, a little timidly,
eyes searching, until she found the two of them. A smile fluttered across her
face. She slowly walked through the grass toward them with her hands in her
pockets and her shoulders slumped forward.

“What are you guys doing out
here so late?”

A catch in her voice worried
Emerson.

“Causing trouble.” Charlie tapped
a finger on his cheek. “Come on, sweet pea. Plant one right here.”

She looked at him, unsure.
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to make any of the other ladies jealous.”

“You see any of ’em out
here?” Charlie said.

“Thought you wanted to get
away from all those hens?” Emerson cocked his head toward the infirmary.

“Yeah, but this one’s good
people. Cop a squat and stay a while.”

Again she hesitated.

Emerson nodded, watching her.
Something was definitely wrong.

She perched on the concrete
barricade in the space between Emerson and a lamppost, her back against its
column, arms tight around bent knees.

The lamp had been burned out
for as long as Emerson could remember, but it didn’t take much light to see
that she’d been crying.

“Everything okay?” Emerson asked.

She watched something on the
other side of the pond. She looked as small as a child and her voice was even
smaller. “Yeah. Fine.”

Charlie yawned. “’Bout time I
go take some of them happy pills and hit the sack.”

Sarah came back from wherever
she’d been. “Oh, Charlie, I didn’t mean to chase you off.”

“Gettin’ a little cold out
here anyway,” Charlie said. “Night like this is for you young people, still got
some blood in you and can give a good howl.”

He turned toward Emerson and winked.

“We’ll be right back,” he said,
and after securing Charlie in his room, Emerson told the night nurse he was
taking a short break and met Sarah back at the pond. She was pacing, her arms
wrapped around her waist.

“If you’re cold, we can go
inside.”

She bit at her lower lip.
“No, I…I don’t want to get you into trouble. Besides, it’s nice out here. With
the moon.”

That damned moon. The pale
light did wondrous things to her hair, her troubled eyes, her lips, the hollow
of her throat, the pink, clinging sweater visible through her open jacket.

“I haven’t seen you for a
while,” she said.

He thought it would be best
to avoid her, especially these last few days, although he had licked his
inability to get angry with Rashid. Every time he thought about the two of
them, he wanted to punch something.

“I’ve been busy,” he said.

She nodded and looked down at
her feet, one toe of her boot shuffling in the grass. “Yeah. Me, too.”

More silence. He wanted to
ask what was wrong and why she’d come to see him, but he feared the answer would
be something he didn’t want to hear.

Her eyes darted to his.
“How’s Daisy?”

“Back with her old boyfriend,
thanks for asking.”

Her mouth softened. “I’m
sorry. I didn’t know.”

He shrugged. “It just
happened tonight. I would have told you, but I knew you had company, so, you
know, I didn’t.”

Her silence was maddening.
His gaze shifted to the pond. He wished for a nice flat rock and imagined the
cool heft of it in his palm. He’d skip it across the water like his grandmother
had taught him. He’d skip it all the way to Dewitt.

“You’re sleeping with him,
aren’t you?” he said.

Her eyes filled with tears
and she turned away, huddling into the curl of her arms.

So it was true. The claws of
desperation sank stronger, deeper into his chest. He grasped at anything he could
think of to keep them from crushing him.

“He’s going back to India at
the end of the semester.” Emerson’s petulant, desperate tone disgusted himself.

“I know,” she snapped.

“He’s marrying someone else.”

“I know that, too.”

He realized then that his
anger with Rashid had been misdirected. His housemate had merely been an
innocent bystander. “What the hell were you thinking?” he said. “Was he some
kind of challenge for you? Or has it been too long since you destroyed
someone?”

Her voice trembled. “Shut up.
Just...shut up.”

“Or is he just safe? He’s
leaving the country, so there’s no way you can get emotionally involved and get
hurt?”

“That’s it,” Sarah said. “I’m
going home.”

She stormed off through the
grass. He followed. “Don’t like the truth, do you?”

“Why do you care who I sleep
with?” She spun toward him. “If you don’t want me anymore, why should it
matter?”

Tears sparkled in her lashes.
Color flamed into her cheeks. Her chest rose and fell with hard breaths, her
lips softly parted from the effort. She’d never looked more beautiful and never
had he wanted her more.

Yet he stood frozen, his synapses
a scramble of mixed messages.

There
is no God
,
he decided. Why would any benevolent deity put a woman in his life who he found
so powerfully attractive but could hurt him so deeply?

Disappointment filled her
eyes as she waited for him to answer, to do something.

As she started to turn away,
he imagined a heavy door sliding shut between them. If he let her go, it would
clang down and drive them apart forever.

He grabbed her arm.
“Sarah—”

“What?”

“Sarah,” he said, softer.

“What,” she answered, softer,
too.

He repeated her name again, a
breath, a whisper. His hands were on her face, in her hair. His lips found
hers. A sigh escaped her throat when their mouths touched, and she threw her
arms around him. She was heat and softness and everything fit together just
where it used to, just where it was supposed to.

Then she pushed him away.

“I can’t do this to you,” she
gasped.

“Why not?” His voice came out
in a pitiful whimper.
 

But she probably had done the
right thing. If he came to from this dream and realized she was sleeping with
both of them, it would be over. He would walk away for good.

“I’m too screwed up right
now. I don’t want to hurt you again. You’ll end up hating me. If you don’t
already.”

“I don’t hate you.”

She jammed her hands into her
pockets. “Not yet.”

The thing in the distance
howled.

When she spoke again her
voice was so small he strained to hear. “I felt like I took something from him
tonight. Something that didn’t belong to me. After he...when he... well, he
fell asleep and I looked over and just couldn’t stop crying. I got up, tried to
wash the whole horrible thing off me. But I could have taken a dozen showers
and it wouldn’t have helped.” She sniffed. “You’re right. What was I thinking?
The first person he slept with should have been someone who loves him...or his
wife...not me.”

“His first, that was
tonight?”

Sarah nodded without looking
at him.

“Not that time you came over
to talk to him?”

“No,” she said. “That’s when
he asked me to marry him.”

Emerson felt his legs go
hollow. “He...proposed to you?”

“I thought you knew,” Sarah said.

“No. I didn’t.”

“Well, I said no.”

“Apparently not to
everything.”

She huffed out a breath.

“He proposed to you?” No
wonder Rashid was returning to India. Sarah had turned him down.

“You find it so hard to
believe that a nice guy would want to marry me?”

“Well, no…” Emerson just
wasn’t prepared for it to have happened so soon. And for it not to have been him.

“I can’t go back there and
face him.” Her eyes dampened again. “Can I hang out here for a while? I won’t
get you into trouble. I’ll even help out. I can clean...something.”

“He’s still in your
apartment?”

Sarah nodded.

“Then you should go home.”

He couldn’t believe what he heard
coming out of his own mouth. That he was sending her back to Rashid once again.
He put a hand on each of her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Sarah. You
have to fix this. If you don’t want it to be happening, you have to tell him
it’s over. Believe me. It’s the kindest thing.”

* * * * *

Emerson called a cab for
Sarah. He watched until the taillights blended into the darkness, still unsure
if letting her go had been the right thing to do. Then he turned back to the
pond, knowing for certain it had been an insane move. He wished he had someone
who would lower him into the dirty water and hold him down.

He did the next best thing.
He tipped his face up to the moon and howled.

Chapter 42

Fully dressed except for his
shoes, Rashid waited for Sarah at the top of the stairs. His black socks had
gold stitching on the toes. She was glad he wore the kind of socks her father
owned. And that he was dressed. If she had to look at his bare, pudgy chest and
little white BVDs when she came through the door, there’d be no way she could
tell him it was over.

Then he opened his mouth and made
it so much easier.

“Where have you been?”

She’d expected worry and
concern, but the possessiveness in his tone frosted her. She glared at him.
“Out.”

He followed her into the
kitchen, still blustering. “This I could see with my own eyes that you have
been out. This I could see when I woke up and found that you were gone.”

She poked through the cartons
of leftover Chinese food in the refrigerator for a beer, hoping it would harden
her for what she had to do.

His voice was smaller, more
vulnerable. “I was a disappointment to you. This is why you left.”

There had to be another beer.
She couldn’t face him straight. Couldn’t reconcile what she’d done to him, and then
had almost done with Emerson, all in the space of a few hours.

“That’s not true.”

“Yes it is,” he said. “I know
it is.”

She settled for a Coke, took
a long gulp, and plopped the bottle on the counter. “No, it’s not. I couldn’t
sleep. I went for a walk.”

“This time of night? All by
yourself?”

She shrugged her shoulders.
“It’s a good neighborhood.”

He straightened himself
taller. “I forbid you to do this again.”

She stared at him. “Excuse
me?”

He backed down. “I forbid
you...” he trailed off, voice softening.

“Is this what it would have
been like if I married you? You going around forbidding me to do things?”

“No of course not. I just
don’t want to be worrying every time—”

“You don’t have to worry
about me. I can take care of myself.”

“But I would like to...after
tonight—” He gestured to the bedroom. “After this...I would like to take
care of you.”

His borrowed baby-chick
expression made Sarah cringe. “I don’t need tending, thank you. I’m not a
potted plant.”

He blinked in confusion and
cast his eyes downward. “If I was less of a disappointment, I don’t believe
you’d be saying these things to me.”

Sarah sucked in a steadying
breath. “For the last time, you weren’t—”

“It isn’t necessary to lie,
Sarah. I know it wasn’t pleasurable for you. Don’t forget I was in the next
room when you were with Emerson, I know what that should sound like.”

She stared at him, blood
rushing into her cheeks as her anger grew—with him for pretending not to
know, at herself for being so naive to think that he didn’t.

“Please let me try again,” he
said. “I will be better. I can learn to be good at this like him.”

“I don’t think it would be a
good idea,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry, but maybe you should just go home now.”

His expression sagged. “But...but
I thought you wanted—like you said. To be more than friends.”

“Well, like you said. You’re
marrying someone else.”

He made brave reattempts at a
smile. “If that’s the only obstacle, it could be changed. We could take some
time, get to know each other better, and perhaps by then you will be ready to
get married.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

A bead of sweat slid between
Sarah’s shoulder blades. “Because I just can’t.”

“Then it
is
because of this.” He again pointed to the bedroom. “You think it
will always be horrible for you, and you are being too polite to tell me.”

“No! That’s not it!”

“Then what?”

“Because I’m in love with
Emerson, that’s what.”

He went as dead as a statue.
Sarah squeezed her eyes shut. She hadn’t wanted to tell him this. Never wanted
to tell him. But he just couldn’t leave it alone.

For a long, horrible moment,
all she could hear was her own heartbeat until finally, he spoke. “And not me?”

She shook her head, waiting for
him to yell. Beg. Even cry. But he remained calm.

“Then I will be going home
now.”

She cataloged the sequence of
noises. Putting on his shoes. Picking up his keys. Crossing to the door. She
waited for the rest of it: the door closing, footsteps on the stairs, car
starting up and driving away.

But the knob turned, the door
opened, and then everything stopped.

“Tell me, Sarah.” His voice was
scratchy around the edges. “Did this mean anything to you? Or did you just get
impatient, waiting for him to change his mind?”

Startled, Sarah stared at him,
at his unwrinkled shirt and polished shoes, at his hurt, hopeful eyes. As if he
were still willing to trust her again if she said the right words.

A million responses went
through her mind, a million ways to lie.

“No,” Rashid said. “Don’t
answer. I don’t think I care to know.”