Someone Else's Love Story (22 page)

“Liking shit don’t make it smell good,” William says, and then he and Paula stop dead and look at each other.

It is a Bridget line, a colloquialism she learned from her mountain granny, Twyla Grace, up in North Carolina. She often quoted this earthy bit of wisdom when assessing Paula’s latest boyfriend.

“Wow,” Paula says.

“I don’t know,” William says, answering a question she hasn’t asked.

Paula boosts herself up to sit on the kitchen counter. “You should get at least a little drunk. Grab us both a beer?”

He gets two from the fridge and tries to hand her one, but instead of taking it she grabs his wrist. She pulls him toward her until he is up against her knees on the counter. She wraps one ankle around his leg, pinning him, then stretches her spine up to put her face closer to his face than he likes. She has set all her features to be stern, pulling her eyebrows very far down, her mouth also down at the corners, to indicate that she is very, very serious.

“You better not be hoping to luck into another way to kill yourself. Even after Parch dies. I won’t allow it.”

William is much stronger than Paula; he could pull away. But Paula knows his definition of destiny. She knows he said that word in the Circle K, to Shandi, right after he took the bullet. Shandi told her, at the hospital. Paula is saying now, quite plainly, that she guessed the destiny he chose there. She is angry with him for it.

“You’re very smart about people,” William tells her. “It makes you good at your job, but I’m finding it a little inconvenient.”

She refuses to be joked out of this. Her face stays stern, and she doesn’t release him. “I’m a damn good lawyer, but I
planned
on being a clinically depressed, alcoholic, part-time barmaid. Just like Mom,” she tells him. “You’re the reason I’m not. You expected better of me. So don’t be a glib little turd when I’m saving your sorry ass back.”

Had Stevie been remotely competent, Paula would possess a large piece of the absence
he
left in the world. He owes her this.

“I won’t do it again,” he says. He holds his body still and lets her keep her face uncomfortably close to his as she continues.

“I don’t believe you.” Her voice is hard and low. “Why wouldn’t you kill yourself? I’ve seen your style of grieving, and it flat sucks. For everyone. You shove comfort sideways.
No one
is allowed to be comforted. So now what? Should we all jump in front of bullets with you? Try something else, because you’re rotting from the inside out. Stop rotting.”

“I’m not rotting,” William says.

Paula lets him go, taking one of the beers from him as he backs up.

“You’re pretty much rotting, Bubba,” Paula says. She twists off the cap and drinks. “Don’t front like you’re moving forward, either. You’ve got this pretty little object sublimating sex into nine thousand quarts of soup, and you stand there like you’ve misplaced your dick.” She sounds like herself again. “Not that I think putting it to Shandi is the answer. God, please, spare us all
that
fresh-faced hell. But you have to do something with the rest of your dumb life. What are you going to do?”

“Work,” William says. His work is valuable. In ten years, maybe less, his team could well end Parkinson’s. Maybe he should go back full-time on Monday, six weeks off be damned. He can’t sit through long days in the house after Stevie dies.

“You’ve been working,” Paula says. “It’s not enough.”

“I need to start lifting. I’m going soft. I need to run.”

“Brilliant. That sounds like the quickest way to tear your stitches open and drop your guts onto the pavement. Chicks dig scars, dumbass. Not gaping wounds,” she says. “Do you want Shandi to dig your scars, William?”

He chuckles in spite of himself. Paula has a gift for making sentences have two meanings, and one of them is often dirty. “Quit it. Shandi isn’t—” He has to stop there because the only word that ends the sentence properly is
Bridget
. Shandi isn’t Bridget. Seven months ago, he told Paula she had to wipe that name from her vocabulary. They both did. He himself stopped thinking of his wife entirely. In the Circle K, she got back into his head; now she is threatening to become a sound in the room, an actual presence. Paula has only promised that she will not talk about Bridget until he does. He can’t hand the name back to her.

“Shandi isn’t correct,” he finally says.

She chugs more beer, then smiles as she sets the bottle aside. “You like her, though. I know you like that kid she’s got. Even though she isn’t
correct
.” Paula makes air quotes around the word as she speaks, to signal to William that she knows the name he almost said. The name that she is not allowed to say. “Or do you really think you two are
just friends
?”

She gives the last two words air quotes as well, indicating they are not meant literally, but he examines them in that light anyway. Making friends is not part of his skill set. Bridget made their couple friends, and most were affiliated with the parish or Bridget’s work at the women’s shelter. They don’t come to this house now. He likes many of the people who work for him, but he likes them as a unit, the way he likes his football teams.

He knows things about Shandi as an individual. She has a sweet tooth and a running feud with her stepmother. She has an aversion to even the most interesting vermin and is attracted to primary colors. She prefers to eat things with her fingers, including salad. She’ll pick up a dry lettuce leaf and roll it around a mushroom or an olive, then dip it into a dish of dressing on the side. It’s likely he has made a friend.

But what Paula is suggesting is a blank place in his head, like trying to see a color that isn’t on the spectrum. When he pictures Shandi, she is all the way across a room. Holding a spoon.

Does he want to keep her there? He isn’t sure. As a child, William did not like being touched by people who were not his parents. He’d fall down flailing and screaming if he was put into a crowd of jostling children. Later, during adolescence, he came to like the jarring slam of his body into other bodies during sports, and puberty made sex an active interest. But outside these specific realms, his body preferred to stay untouched inside a perimeter that extended well beyond its skin.

He knew this was not socially appropriate. He’d discussed herd-animal behavior with his therapist, who asked him to observe these behaviors in the people and animals around him. Once he started looking, he realized social touch was happening almost constantly, among his parents, his peers, even among his gerbils.

The gerbils were sisters, and they hadn’t been complicated enough to require individual names. He called them Mice Ladies, collectively. William enjoyed their soothing, repetitive wheel sounds, and they enjoyed one another. Mice Ladies slept in a united ball, ate with their sides pressed against each other, and took turns grooming one another’s ears.

After a couple of years, the average gerbil life span, two of them died. William didn’t like to watch the remaining ancient Mice Lady, huddling up against only herself in the corner. He thought about distilling ether and fixing the problem, but she died before it came to that.

Then he married Bridget and gained the pleasure of her consistent, close proximity. The herb-and-orange-blossom smell of her. Her legs twined in his and her hair spilled across his arm every morning. Later, Twyla, lying on her back across his legs, kicking and smiling in her toothless, charming way. He would sit still, experiencing the feel of his hand spanning his daughter’s chest, the rapid, light tattooing of her baby heart, his other arm wrapped around Bridget, who liked to read tucked up against his side. He thought then,
We are being Mice Ladies. For all my higher functions, I am only Mice Ladies, after all.

Now he thinks,
I should have named them
, and then he is disgusted with himself. Waiting for Stevie to die has put him off. Quoting Bridget’s least-educated grandmother. Mooning over dead pets. Haunting the Sullivan house in Decatur. He
should
get drunk.

“Don’t do anything you can’t take back, is all I’m saying,” Paula tells him now. “Not with bullets or Shandi.”

William says, “I finished her lab work today.”

It’s an excellent segue. His new topic is both related to the current topic and of interest to Paula. It hits her politics correctly. She dislikes rapists considerably more than she dislikes Shandi.

“Oh good. Did you learn something useful? I promised her I’d check up on it, if she’d GTFO for the evening.”

“I think so. There were eleven separate blue or gold polyester strands, probably from our guy. Those are Emory colors, so you could posit her attacker was affiliated with the school.” This is good. A good, absorbing topic. He doesn’t enjoy excessive drinking, but he doesn’t want to think about Steven Parch. “Moreover, it’s likely he was older. I’d look for an alum or even a professor.”

Paula nods and helps herself to a second beer. “That’s really helpful, because if some old fart crashed a frat party, people would remember him, you know?”

William doesn’t know. When he went to Notre Dame, he stopped seeing the Atlanta therapist who made peer events mandatory. His parents wanted him to live at home and go to Emory, but William accepted a football scholarship at Bridget’s first-choice school instead. His father was excited about the football, but both parents knew he could not tolerate dorm life. They worried his college experience would not be successful in spite of his intellect. In the end they let him go, but they rented a house for him and found him a new behaviorist in Indiana.

The new doc absolved him of parties, deciding it was fine for William to hang out with only Bridget and Paula after games. Dr. Bennett didn’t know the three of them spent those hours driving William’s SUV deep into the country to blow up thrift-store furniture in a fallow cornfield. William, cannier at nineteen, played up the fact that he had successfully formed two interpersonal relationships and kept his mouth shut about handcrafting explosives.

Paula asks, “Why couldn’t it have been a student, though?”

“The jersey he was wearing was probably more than a decade old. That’s why the fabric shed so much.”

Paula sits up very straight then, setting down her beer. “The guy was wearing a blue and gold sports jersey? And it was weirdly old?”

William nods. “Weird for a college kid. Not an adult. I’ve got shirts that old.”

Paula jams both hands into her hair, her voice rising in both pitch and volume. “No, shut up. This was Kappu Nu? That house?”

“Yes?” he says.

“Holy crap, William! Shandi’s looking for a guy on the Emory Football Team!” Paula is spinning and heading out of the kitchen at a fast clip.

“Emory doesn’t have a football team,” William says, following her. He should know.

“Kappa Nu has one, though,” Paula says over her shoulder. She is practically running into his office. “They’ve had one for years. It’s a joke, like an old joke, or a ritual. Emory doesn’t have a football team, and Kappa Nu doesn’t have virgins. Like, virgins and a football team are mythological. Pledges have to prove that they aren’t virgins before initiation.” She sits down in the desk chair and starts swishing the mouse around to put his screen saver to sleep.

“Prove how?” William asks. Paula’s sexual-knowledge base is vast, another reason she is such a good divorce attorney.

Paula clicks his browser and it opens into Google. “Not really prove. It’s all bullshit, for hazing. They’ll call a couple of the guys cherries to yank chains, and stick ’em on the Emory Football Team. They’ve got the original jerseys in a box in the attic, with all these superstitions built in around them. Each jersey has a history. Some have lucky numbers, some are duds.” Paula is typing in search terms now while she talks. “The cherries have to wear their assigned jerseys to every social, every party, until they can, you know, get off the team. You get off by banging someone, ’scuse the pun, like, say, at a Kappa Nu party. Like, say, at the party Shandi visited, you savvy?”

The overhead light is putting a glare on the screen so William flips the office light off and leans down beside her so that he can see. She has typed in: Kappu Nu, Rush, Emory Football Team.

“They have a website?”

If Paula is correct, she and William could be solving Shandi’s puzzle definitively, when William is only supposed to give her lab reports and options. He is not prepared to deliver a specific human male. There is an uncomfortable dissonance in saying,
Thank you for the soup and the post-op care you have administered. As a token of my appreciation, I have found the man who assaulted you
.

Paula is grinning, the blue light of the monitor shining off her teeth. “Oh, hell yeah, they do. They take a team picture every year. It went digi maybe ten years ago? Before that they used to put Polaroids on the house bulletin board.”

“How do you know all this?” William asks.

“Please,” Paula says, with a sideways glance that tells him clearly that he is being a dumbass.

He
is
being a dumbass. Paula knows because ten years ago, she no doubt peeled a few jerseys off aspiring Kappa Nus herself.