Where Love Goes (38 page)

W
hat did you go and do that for?” Sally says to Travis when she is finally able to stop laughing. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of.”

He doesn’t know what to say. He has no words for how he feels about her. If there is a reason for why he got her name tattooed on his arm, in fact, that’s it. He couldn’t think of a single other way to tell Sally he will love her forever. The thought of her is seared into his brain like he’s been branded. He’s like one of those rats they train to run through the maze in biology lab. Open the door and all he knows to do is run for her. There is no move he can make on his skateboard, even, that is big enough, fast enough, dangerous enough, amazing enough for this feeling. In art class, when Miss Blanchette told about this painter that cut off his ear and sent it to a woman he was in love with, Travis could understand how a guy could do something like that. Only he didn’t want to do anything that would gross Sally out. He wanted to do something beautiful. Something that would make her know he doesn’t just want to get laid. Although he does want to get laid. But more than that, he wants to be with her always. He wants to marry her and be a father to their kid. This isn’t some dumb crush.

“Didn’t you ever think what it will be like having my name tattooed on your arm, someday after we’ve broken up and you’re going out with somebody else?” she says to him now. “Or were you planning to only have girlfriends named Sally for the rest of your life?”

What is she talking about? He is planning to only have one girlfriend his whole life. He is planning on it being her. Even though she tells him to go home now. Even though she has called him an idiot and told him she’s having an abortion. Even though she has slammed the door in his face and walked into the house, leaving him standing on the front porch with his shirt off and tears streaming down his face in the chilly October evening. Tonight he can’t ride his skateboard home, even. He leaves it on the porch and walks all the way home.

S
ally’s up in her room again. Claire has tried to talk to her, but she said she just wanted to fix herself a pot of tea and go to sleep and Claire didn’t push it. She’s about to call Tim and tell him she’s too tired to come over when the doorbell rings. It must be ten-thirty, quarter to eleven.

A woman stands on the front porch in the blue light of Pete’s Halloween display. She’s wearing a white fur jacket over blue jeans that are too big. Claire can see she could be beautiful if she weren’t so thin. Her hair is a wild auburn mane with dark roots showing. Even at a distance of a couple of feet Claire can smell that she’s been drinking. She’s holding some kind of a package and a set of car keys whose key ring Claire recognizes as the insignia of the Texas Rangers.

“Your address was in the book,” she says. Drunk, for sure. “I drove from Boston.”

Claire realizes she knows this face, although the woman has changed from how she looked in the only photograph she saw of her. On Mickey’s wall.

“You know who I am?” she says.

“Bev?” Claire says. She’s surprised the name comes to her; she hasn’t thought about this woman for years, but now she remembers Mickey’s stories about her.

Bev was an old girlfriend. The one right before Claire, in fact. A nurse. Claire remembers now she took it hard when Mickey told her he couldn’t see her anymore. In the first month or two after Claire started visiting Mickey, he used to tell Claire he had the feeling Bev was driving past his house at odd hours. There were a lot of phone hang-ups, too. Mickey didn’t like Claire picking up the phone at his house in case it was Gabe calling, he said. But she remembers Mickey standing there saying, “That’s you, isn’t it, Bev? If you have something to say to me, that’s one thing, but you can’t just call me up this way anymore.” Finally he changed his number.

One day Gabe got a package with no return address: an autographed picture of Nolan Ryan inscribed with his name. “Bev always had a way of getting into a locker room,” Mickey said. “Only woman I ever met who was crazier about baseball than me. Only woman I know who could calculate a batting average.”

Mickey adored her, as he adored them all. He had told Claire that. “She had the most amazing green eyes,” he said. Looking at them now, Claire can see this is true. “And the most perfect ribs.” That would be harder to determine.

Now she is extending her hand to Claire. “I know you may not believe this,” she says, “but I feel very close to you.” She floats past Claire into the hallway. Claire follows as if she is the guest.

“I heard all about you, naturally,” she says. “Mickey had a real thing about you. I have to hand it to you that the kid part didn’t stop him.”

Claire thinks about running away. The woman is in her house, there’s no changing that. But she could leave, herself. Only she is frozen
.

“He used to tell me there was something so wholesome about you. And of course your tits didn’t hurt, either.”

“Mickey and I—” Claire begins.
They what? What can she say? Where would she begin?

“Oh, I know, believe me,” says Bev, laughing.
“Mickey and I, too.”

“I think you should have a cup of coffee,” Claire says. “You shouldn’t be driving like this. You need to go to a motel.”

“I wouldn’t be so worried about some other person if I were you,” she says. “You have enough troubles.”

Claire tries to think what Mickey would say right now if he were here. Mickey or maybe Miles. Or Yogi Berra
.

“Did you know he continued to come see me all through that year you were visiting on weekends?” Bev says. “Wednesdays, usually. He probably told you that was his basketball night, right?”

She is lifting something out of the box she has been holding this whole time. It’s a tape recorder. Battery-operated, evidently, because now she turns it on. She has set the tape up carefully in advance so his voice is right there at the precise moment she pushes the button.

“Of course she’s cute,” he is saying. That soft Alabama voice she’d know anywhere. “Nice enough body, too, for a breeder. But she’ll never be you, baby. I never had a lover like you and I never will. Just like I know you’ll never have a lover like me now, will you, baby?”

“So why do you keep seeing her?” a woman’s voice asks him. Bev.

“Hey, baby, we’ve been through this. You want babies and I’m not going to give them to you. You’ve got to get on with your life. I’m just weaning myself gradually, that’s all. You think it’s easy giving you up?” Claire can actually hear an album she knows well playing in the background. Ella singing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

“Claire’s fresh out of the stable,” he says. “Neglected housewife syndrome. I’m just her transition person. We go to a few ball games. I made her a tape. She actually had me singing this cornball country number with her. What a hoot.”

“But you.” He sighs deeply. “You’re a whole different thing. You’re my drug. I’ll never get enough of you. You’re my true love. I’ll love you forever.”

She snaps the machine off. Claire has slid to the floor. From a place deep in her belly comes a sound that doesn’t seem recognizable. It’s a low moan first, then a wail—sounds that could have been made by an animal, wounded but not killed and left by the side of the road.

“Did he tell you I got pregnant by him one time?” Bev asks her. Although she’s clearly drunk, she speaks with surprising clarity.

“I actually believed we might have the baby, too,” she says. “Love is blind, right? He went with me for the abortion, naturally. That’s Mickey for you. Massaged my feet all that afternoon. When we got home he wrapped me in blankets, played me great music, fixed me a margarita. The works. A week later he called to say he’d met you. I didn’t hear from him for a while after that. He changed his number. But after two, three months he called me up, said he had to see me. That’s when the Wednesday nights started.”

Her tone of voice changes suddenly. “How many children is it you have again?” she asks. “Two or three?”

“Two,” says Claire.

“You’re lucky,” says Bev. “Even if it did, you know, mess you up.”

“Mess me up?” Claire says.

“Mickey told me he figured a pair of hooters like yours would be hitting your belt buckle before the next Democrat got elected,” she says. “I think that’s how he put it. And then there was the other matter.”

Claire doesn’t even ask. She knows whatever it is, Bev is about to tell her.

“The reason he raised the issue was, I work for a plastic surgeon. And he wanted to know if I thought somebody like him could help you. ‘No way a woman can birth a batch of babies and keep a nice tight nookie,’ he said. Or words to that effect.”

Finally Claire is able to speak. “You have to leave now,” she says. “I hope you won’t try and drive all the way back to Boston tonight.” She stands at the open door.

“I’ll be fine,” Bev says. “It was you I was worried about. That’s the whole reason I drove all this way to talk to you. You see, I finally started running my personals ad again after all these years of being so hung up on Mickey. The old biological clock, you know? I haven’t talked to Mickey in two, two and a half years, mind you. And what should I get in the mail the other day but an envelope addressed to my PO box, written in that familiar handwriting. It was that letter he sends out when he’s answering somebody’s ad, where this woman friend of his tells what a great guy he is. ‘Dear friend, and blah blah blah.’ I knew you must have written it, naturally. I may not be a fucking Girl Scout leader, but I just didn’t want to see you taking as long to figure him out as I did.”

Claire opens the door. Out on the front porch Travis has evidently left his skateboard lying directly in front of the steps. Bev picks it up and hands it to Claire. “Kids these days,” she says. “What can you do?” She takes a couple of steps toward her car, then turns around one more time and studies Claire up and down slowly.

“Let me guess,” she says. “I bet he called you Slim.”

M
r. Hogue, the school guidance counselor, wants to speak to Tim. Tim says he was meaning to give Mr. Hogue a call himself. He’s been wanting to know how Ursula’s been doing in the social skills group. It’s been a few weeks since they’ve spoken.

“I think we need to speak in person, Mr. Shepherd,” Mr. Hogue says. “Your daughter has raised some questions in our sessions which need serious evaluation.”

U
rsula has told the school guidance counselor her father abused her. She told him her sprained finger came from the time he threw her in her room and slammed the door on her finger. She told him her father called her a fucking idiot. She told him he locks her up in her room all the time. She said he told her she’s trashing his life and he wishes she was dead. She didn’t want to tell on him, but she heard on “Sally Jessy Raphael” that it isn’t healthy holding stuff in.

When the social worker from the Department of Youth Services was called in, Ursula told them some other things too. Her father smashes her toys. He makes her get up out of bed in the middle of the night and hang up her clothes. He killed their dog. She said her mother is always trying to call her, but he takes the phone off the hook. One night he picked up his scissors and cut off her hair. “And now look at me,” she said.

“My daddy doesn’t say no to drugs,” she said. “In the night he acts crazy.”

Sitting here in the guidance counselor’s office (the principal is here, also Miss Post, the social worker, and Ursula’s teacher, Mrs. Kennedy), Tim holds out his hands to them. Because they didn’t have enough chairs to go around, his is child-sized. He feels ridiculous, clumsy, out of place. “This is insane,” he says.

“You understand, Mr. Shepherd,” the social worker is saying, “we have a legal obligation to investigate charges of such a serious nature. We have had to report this to the DYS. I have met with your daughter several times now. We weren’t at liberty to inform you until we’d gone through the proper channels.”

“I don’t take drugs,” he says. He didn’t do the other things either, of course. This just seems like the most concrete place to begin.

“You can ask Claire Temple about me. You know Claire. She’s on the Parents’ Advisory Board here.”
A mom, he’s thinking. Someone they will respect and trust
.

“Actually,” says Mr. Bennett, the principal, “your daughter has raised questions about Mrs. Temple also. She says Mrs. Temple has been leaving her children in the night and coming over to your house. Ursula has made some very serious allegations as to the possibility that your daughter has been allowed to witness inappropriate sexual conduct between Mrs. Temple and yourself. All of which may well explain the difficulties Mrs. Temple’s own child has been experiencing lately.”

“What are you talking about?” Tim asks.

“We have a report of an incident involving a washing machine,” Miss Post says. “Something about handcuffs.”

Tim can no longer speak. He is sitting there with his head in his hands. He can only shake his head.
No no no no
.

“We will have to conduct a home visit. A series of them, actually. And you understand we have had to notify the child’s mother in—” Miss Post looks at her file.

“New Zealand,” says Tim.

“Correct,” she says. He has this silly feeling that he has finally given the right answer. The first time in this whole meeting.

“She said she was flying over. I understand she’ll be arriving tonight.”

J
oan stands in the doorway of Tim’s apartment carrying a suitcase and some kind of object made of feathers and mud with the unmistakable image of what Joan would insist on calling a vulva in the center. She is wearing black and her hair has been buzz-cut so you can see what her skull will look like someday when she’s dead. She’s very thin. Her skin is like milk with the fat content gone.

“I want to see my daughter,” she says. Ursula is up in her room, where she has been crying. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble, Daddy,” she said to him when he told her what happened. “I didn’t know it was going to turn out like this.” He could have been angry, but what Tim felt most strongly at that moment was something else. The need to hold and comfort her. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “I’ll make it better.” Though he can’t imagine how.