The Used World (38 page)

But then there was her collarbone, the delicate cross-tie above her ribs, and the white hollow of her throat. They were pristine, the bones of the perfect girl she had been. Those were the things Hazel wanted to save, those hidden places that were still so fine they seemed
virtuous.
He had not destroyed them yet. Hazel believed—some part of her believed—that if he could be made gone, and oh more than once had she imagined putting a gun to
his
head, Finney would be reborn. She would shake the ash off her wings and begin anew.

“I’m pregnant.” Finney said it dispassionately, her eyes never leaving Hazel’s face.

Hazel slowly closed her eyes. “You said you were careful.”

“I was. I was careful.”

“So there’ll be a star in the east on the blessed day?”

“Don’t, Hazel, please—”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, it’s a shock. That’s all.”

“Imagine how it feels from where I’m sitting.”

“How far along?”

“Twelve weeks.”

“
Twelve weeks?
Finn, how long have you known? That’s barely enough time for an—”

“Shhh!” Finney looked around desperately. “If anyone here heard you say that, we’d end up in jail.”

“What, then? When do you want to—”

“He says I can’t.”

“You can’t. He tells you you can’t. This is what I’m hearing you say.”

Finney stared at the tabletop.

“I think I can imagine all the reasons why,” Hazel said, spitting out every word as if drawing toxins from a snakebite. “Don’t even tell me his ‘moral’ position. I’ll run screaming into traffic.”

“Actually, there’s a reason you don’t know.” Finney wiped her face with a shredded napkin. “He wants me to give the baby to him. And to her.”

For a moment Hazel couldn’t speak. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My mind just ceased functioning.”

“Yeah, well,” Finney sighed, “join the club.”

“Where is he going to say the baby came from?” Hazel whispered as an older couple walked past them to pay their bill. “A bulrush basket?”

“He’s already told her the truth. He told her last week, as soon as I found out.”

He had told her, his helpmate, the sinless one, but Finney had waited a week to tell Hazel.

“And what does she say?”

“He said at first she was suicidal and threatened to leave him. She threatened all sorts of things. He told her to do what she needed to do, he wouldn’t protect himself.”

“A bit late for protection, yes?”

Finney ignored her. “She gradually calmed down. She’s a very practical woman—”

“No kidding.”

“—and now she’s pleased. She’s looking forward to it. A baby is a baby, she said to him, and they will never have another chance.”

“Have you made up your mind?”

Finney’s face contorted as she tried to keep from sobbing, “I don’t know what to do. I am just completely lost.”

Hazel’s own eyes filled with tears, and all of her anger dissipated. This was Finn, after all. “What If,” she said, smiling across the table at her friend, “you found yourself pregnant and didn’t know what to do?”

Finney looked down at the table, shaking her head. “I guess I would protect what remained to me. I’d make a plan, and then I’d make a plan B.”

It only took one phone call, one conversation over coffee, and three days. Hazel and Finney met Jim Hank at the courthouse, Finn in a long flowered dress, Jim in his one good suit, Hazel in a green silk cocktail dress she’d found in the attic. Finney and Jim were married by a trollish little man who dressed like Elvis Presley and called them by the wrong names. Hazel had remembered flowers for both of them, and all the elements of the something old / something new business. Finney remembered nothing but the necessary papers. And as they walked out the front door of the courthouse, Hazel reached into her bag and showered them with confetti, all of the perfect little circles left behind by the three-hole punch on her desk. She’d been saving them for years without knowing why.

There were five bottles of champagne in the refrigerator at Jim Hank’s apartment, and there was a cake from the local bakery on his counter. While making the arrangements the three had been careful not to mention Finney’s parents, who were already heartsick by what felt like the loss of their only child. Finney would tell them she was married, she assured Hazel, as soon as she could figure out how.

She promised Hazel, too, that within the week she would decide about the baby, and Hazel had promised in return to honor her decision, regardless. All of those vows had been difficult to make but would be far harder to uphold, and both of them knew it.

In Jim Hank’s spotless, bright apartment, Hazel opened the champagne as Jim put on music. He had eclectic taste. They listened to Sarah Vaughan, followed by The Association, Duke Ellington, the Beatles, and the Bee Gees. Hazel and Jim got rip-roaring drunk, the drunkest by far Hazel had ever been. Finney drank just one glass of champagne, watching the other two with amusement. Hazel and Jim Hank cut the cake drunk, they danced drunk, for a bizarre thirty minutes they played charades drunk, until Hazel realized she simply couldn’t remember who or what she was supposed to pretend to be no matter how many times she looked at her little slip of paper with the words written on it.

Hours passed, or maybe no time at all, Jim and Hazel laughing until Hazel had to lie down, and suddenly Finney stood up and said she had to go home. Hazel and Jim looked at each other, neither able to focus well; both knew why she was leaving. But there would be no recrimination on this, their wedding day, so they kissed her on the cheek and let her go. She slipped out the door, and as intoxicated as they were, they could see she was relieved.

The arm of the record player dropped onto a new album: Julie London. “I love this record!” Hazel said, not quite certain it was true.

“So do I,” Jim said solemnly. “Hey, Hazey! Can I carry you across the threshold?”

“Yes, yes, what a splendid idea.”

They stumbled out into the hallway and Jim swept her up into his arms as if she weighed nothing. “I wouldn’t have been able to do this with Finney near so easily. That girl is tall.”

“Not near so easily,” Hazel agreed.

They hummed the bridal march as they stepped through the door, just as a song Hazel was sure she liked began to play. “I love this song!”

“So do I.” Jim smiled at her, bowed, lowering an imaginary hat. “Miss Hunnicutt, could I invite you to spend the night with me on my wedding night? As I am far too drunk to drive you home and your company is so welcome?”

Hazel curtsied in return, nearly lost her balance. “Yes, you may certainly invite me, Mr. Bellamy, and I would gladly accept.”

They collapsed on the couch, their shoes scattered, plates and glasses all over the table, and sang along with the song they both loved.
Two sleepy people by dawn’s early light, and too much in love to say good night.

I
F
P
ETER DIDN’T
get to Florida soon, Mandy intended to move in with a boy she’d met at her former boyfriend’s tattoo parlor. In her own peculiar parlance she described him as a sk8 rat. Rebekah found herself worrying over Peter and Mandy as if they were characters on a soap opera to which she was devoted.

It had been days since Mandy had made her threat, or at least it seemed to have been. Rebekah couldn’t tell one from another: the day Peter asked if she had a doctor’s appointment and she couldn’t remember; the day someone knocked at the door, then went away; the day Peter felt her head and asked her to take some Tylenol. Maybe they had all happened at once. She had been on the couch for a long time; she could feel that she hadn’t washed her hair or changed her nightgown since…and there was the problem of the baby, who was so big and moved so much. Sometimes it put the soles of its feet (or that’s what it felt like) against her rib cage and stretched out, pushing its head against her pelvic floor. She didn’t know why, but that maneuver flattened her lungs until she sometimes lost consciousness. It was too hard to get up, that was the problem; the second she stood, her heart rate tripled but the rest of her felt like a falling elevator, and twice she had come to back on the sofa, her feet on the floor. She dreamed constantly—or something like dreaming—of her cousins, Davy especially, and of her mother threading a needle or studying a patch of wild strawberries, her hands in the pocket of her apron. In desperation she took to telling herself,
This isn’t real,
and that would last until the baby thrust a knee into one of her vital organs, and even in her current state she could not deny that pain was real. Sometimes she would open her eyes and see Peter hunched over his computer screen and she would think there was something critical she had to say to him, there was a plea she had to make, for herself or for the baby. If for you the Church is the status quo, she might have said, you will do anything to uphold it. But when she opened her eyes again, he was gone, and just when she’d remembered the words: Mary and Elizabeth. John the Baptist. John whom Jesus loved. Cyrus and Penny Jester, never so blest. It stirred, the flickering self of Rebekah, and took calculated note: She hadn’t eaten. She couldn’t recall using the bathroom. When she opened her eyes, a field of stars burst at the circumference of her vision, and she was just able to turn her head long enough to look at the telephone, which was across the room on Peter’s desk, next to…next to the place his computer once sat. She needed to reach the telephone, but not Peter’s—she needed the black phone in the parlor of Hazel Hunnicutt’s Used World Emporium. She saw herself there, her right index finger poised over the green metal address book. All along she believed she’d call (if she called at all) a past so distant that the act of retrieving it would restore to her all she had lost. But when the moment came, she scrolled down to
M
for Modjeski, and dialed the number she already knew. The past fell through her fingers until she stood empty-handed in the present, waiting for Claudia to answer.

In his crib Oliver enacted his new naptime drama: shaking his head and saying nuh nuh nuh, napping was out of the question and he would appreciate it if Claudia would behave herself and set him on the floor. He shook his head, then rubbed his face and nose so hard she was surprised he didn’t hurt himself. He lay down on his back, pulling up his flannel blanket and rubbing his nose with that for a while, and reached for his favorite animal, which Hazel called a squeaky duck but which Claudia believed to be, oddly, a Canada goose. He sucked on its orange foot a moment, draped its long neck over his eyes, and within seconds was asleep.

She left her bedroom reluctantly and went downstairs to the big entryway closet; this was the place she should clean next. She had dreaded tackling it for so long the dread had assumed a life of its own. It was in here that she’d placed all the things Rebekah hadn’t come back to claim, and probably the hour had come round to box those things up and ship them to Peter’s. She got as far as grasping the doorknob, just as she had half a dozen times before, and then somehow the door was open and she was staring at Rebekah’s clothes. There was her green sweater, her green dress, her blue jeans draped lengthwise over a clothes hanger. Claudia took a step forward, reached out and lifted the sleeve of the sweater as if inviting it to dance. There was the smell of her, faint and vanishing, the sage soap, the buttermilk bath salts. Claudia breathed in, even though she knew with every breath she took she was eliminating the last traces of Rebekah in the air. She ran her hands over everything, as Ludie would have done in a fabric store, then took out the rusted flour sifter of Constance Ruth Harrison, studied it a long time, set to work. Outside, the rain began in earnest.

1971

Hazel could only imagine the road Finney had taken to reach her decision, as she refused to talk about it. Awake nearly all night, every night since the wedding reception, Hazel herself could have written a book about Finney’s choices, where
A
began and where it would lead; the loss inherent in
B.
She made up a
C
that didn’t exist, and for good measure a
D
wherein everyone was happy.

Jim Hank and Finn would arrive at seven, after Albert was safely out for the evening. Edie and Charlie had taken Charlie’s motorcycle to the newly opened StarLite Drive-In. Hazel and Caroline didn’t speak as they moved around the kitchen, making tea, cleaning surfaces that were already sterile. Their silence—the mother and daughter—had a vocabulary of its own; it expressed relative degrees of symbiosis or irritation.

Now, for instance, Hazel knew her mother was wrestling with a particular nameless angel. The angel wasn’t Hazel’s and she didn’t consider her mother’s conversation with it her business. But she wondered. If Caroline was afraid, there was something to be afraid of. If Caroline was nervous…Hazel felt a fluttering in her stomach. But neither said a word, so that when Jim and Finney rang the bell to the clinic, Hazel and her mother walked out with shoulders squared, completely confident, and comforting.

Hazel could hear Jim Hank pacing outside the closed door and she wanted to tell him to stop but didn’t.

“You know what happens, dear,” Caroline said, inclining her head toward Finney’s, rubbing one of her icy hands. “I’ve given you something to help you relax, and you can breathe through this mask if you feel any pain.” Caroline smiled at Finn, who was crying, crying as she always cried, her chin trembling. “I don’t want to frighten you, but this might be a little harder than usual; you are farther—”

“I know.”

“You’re absolutely certain it’s what you want to do? Because I’m happy to talk with you about the alternatives if…”

“No. Yes, I’m sure. No alternatives.”

“All right, then.”

Caroline began scrubbing her hands and arms at the sink in the corner.

“Hazey, I’m terrified.”

“I know you are.” Hazel sat on a stool at Finney’s waist, facing her. She would stay there until Caroline was finished.

“You don’t understand; I think he knows. I think he knows what I’m about to do.”

“Finn, he doesn’t know. He couldn’t. You didn’t even tell me or Jim until yesterday.”

“He said something last night on the phone, I hadn’t expected him to call.” Finney’s hands were shaking so hard they appeared to leap off the table. “If I wait for him to call he doesn’t and this one time, the one and only time I don’t want to hear from him—”

“You need to calm down.” Hazel pressed three tissues into Finney’s right hand, then took Finney’s left and held it between her palms, trying to warm it as she might a small animal.

“He asked me about my ‘young man.’ He asked if I would be seeing him again soon. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he wouldn’t say any more about Jim.”

“He does
not
know you’re married. There’s no reason for him to suspect it.”

“They publish the applications for licenses in the legal section of the paper, Hazel! Anyone could have seen it.”

“Does he strike you as the type who would look to see who was getting married?”

Caroline lifted Finney’s right foot, still in a white sock, and slipped it into the stirrup; then the left. “Scoot down, Finn. A little more—that’s better. Okay, one more time.”

“I can’t
stand
this, I am so humiliated.” Finney turned her face away from Hazel, who had never seen her look even half so miserable.

Caroline patted her on the knee. “All right. We’re going to begin by—”

“Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me anything.”

“That’s fine, then.”

“And now, Hazey, I don’t need to be married, because of…this. Jim Hank would have given me the ground to stand on if I’d decided to raise it myself, but now. He did that for nothing.”

“Jim didn’t do it for nothing. He did it for love, just like in the movies.”

“He”—Finn’s eyes widened and she winced, then relaxed—“he said to take care of his baby. He said he would be watching me. I asked him, ‘Why would you be watching me?’ and he said really smoothly that he’d said he’d be watching
out
for me.”

Hazel could see the drugs working—Finn’s hands had gone slack and her eyes were a little unfocused. “You feel all right?” Hazel asked.

“I’m fine, I can’t feel…much of anything at all. I’m not crying,” Finney said, sounding surprised. “I’ve stopped crying.”

“Well, look at that.” Hazel rubbed her arm. “And all it took was a tranquilizer. A bargain.”

“A bargain.”

Caroline whispered to Hazel, “Come here a moment.” Hazel rolled her stool over by her mother. “Place another pad under her, please. Do you know”—Caroline lowered her voice even more—“if she has any medical condition, a clotting disorder, for instance?”

Hazel’s heart jumped. “No. No, why?”

“She’s bleeding more than she should be. I think we should hurry.”

Hazel’s hands were shaking as she pulled out the drawer, grabbing three absorbent pads and slipping them under Finney. There was more blood than usual—not enough to be called an emergency, not unless it was Finney.

The clinic doorbell rang. Hazel and Caroline tried not to show their alarm, but Finney was saying, “Who is it, who could be here? Caroline?”

“Finney, you need to lie still. Do not move; it’s probably a patient. Jim can take care of it.”

Hazel looked toward the waiting area. “Does that door lock?” she whispered.

“Yes,” Caroline said, not looking at her. “It’s like the lock on Albert’s office door, you flip the anchor-shaped—”

She could hear Jim talking to someone, raised voices. I need to lock the door, she thought, but Finney wouldn’t let go of her hand.

“Hazel, don’t leave me!”

“Finn, let me go one second. Just a second.”

Jim shouted, “I said no. I said no you can’t, she’s
my wife.
”

There was a terrible sound, a blow textured with bone, audible even through the door. “Dear God,” Caroline said as someone fell to the waiting room floor.

Hazel looked at Finney for a split second before pulling her hand away roughly. Finn’s face was so white it seemed translucent, and her lips were pale blue. Hazel couldn’t stop, couldn’t think about what she was seeing, she had to lock—

—the door flew open, slamming against the wall behind it. Caroline and Hazel jumped, nearly screamed.

“Stop what you’re doing to her, stop!” And to Finney, who was hyperventilating now, “Get up. Get up, I said!”

Caroline was reaching behind her for a scalpel, as if that would save them from the crowbar, which bore, on its hooked end, a shock of Jim Hank’s hair. “You need to leave this room immediately. I’m calling the police. Hazel, get the phone, please.”

“Oh, you’re going to call the police? And tell them what? What you do here, what you’ve done to her?”

“Vernon,” Finney sobbed, reaching out to him, “please please, I’m afraid.” Her feet were still strapped in the stirrups, and even through the mayhem Hazel realized there was blood dripping on the floor.

“We need to ignore him,” Hazel said to her mother. “We have a problem here.”

“Ignore him?
Ignore
him?” Vernon swung the crowbar just shy of Caroline’s head, shattering the door of the cabinet beside her. Caroline and Finney both screamed, but Hazel felt very calm, felt time slowing down to a crawl. She reached out and, as quietly as possible, released the strap that held the left stirrup secure.

“This is
my
baby, this is a human life, you are the
worst
”—Vernon’s face was flushed nearly purple—“God-
damned
monsters who ever lived. Get up!” he screamed at Finney, who now was wailing. She lowered her legs and tried to sit up.

“No, Finney”—Caroline’s voice broke—“no, dear, you can’t possibly move, stay right there. Sir,” she said, turning to Vernon, “I understand you have a grievance, but if you move her she will die.”

“Then she deserves to die!” He was spitting with rage. “She is trying to kill my baby which the Lord has promised to me and she’s trying to kill it, it’s
mine.
”