A Peculiar Grace (26 page)

He pulled the Volvo off into the breakdown lane and stopped. He twisted in the seat so his back was against the door and he was facing her, his right boot flat over his left knee. She looked straight out the windshield. Again he said, “What?”

She said, “It happened when I came to your father’s funeral. At Thanksgiving I was pretty sure but not certain although I’d already talked to Barb. I was just waiting for the test results. And the rabbit died. We already had everything all worked out. Although it was a lot harder than I’d expected. I felt really crummy for a few days. I don’t know if Mom suspected or not—she seemed to buy the flu thing but still, she’s no idiot.”

“Wait a minute,” said Hewitt. “Wait a minute.”

She turned to face him. She was pale, blanched, her upper lip trembling but her eyes steady as the frozen wetlands around them. A raft of ducks lifted in the distance and circled, a low blot against the horizon. “What?” Her voice as dreadfully flat as the land spreading around
them, as the road ahead and sky dome. Hewitt knew she was steps, miles ahead of him.

He said, “Why didn’t you call me?”

She looked out her side window and, her hands wound together began to pick with fingernails at a cuticle, stripping slips of dried skin away.

He said, not a question, “It was my baby. Yours and mine.”

Low she said, “Don’t you think I know that?”

He sat a moment, his heart a clamor. Then he said, “You should’ve told me, Emily. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She looked at him and said, “What would you have done, Hewitt? How would you have helped?”

“Well, you should have told me because it was my baby too. And then we would’ve figured out what to do and I would’ve helped you anyway I could. I mean, shit. I could’ve slipped over here and driven you to Syracuse and been with you afterwards. I could’ve done anything. But I would’ve been with you. You left me out, Emily.”

She said, “I did the best I could.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How’s that, Hewitt?”

“I should’ve been a part of it. Of all of it.”

She leaned back and said, “All right. How about this? All what I just said, all that was only a test. I’m pregnant, Hewitt. Knocked up. What should we do?”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“That’s how it all started, that’s for sure.”

“Are you serious?”

She was silent, waiting for him, her face perched upon an undecipherable edge. Tilted, he thought, toward hope. He said, “If you’re pregnant then you should have the baby. What a fucking trip! Did you think I’d say no, is that what this was all about? Emily. A baby. Oh God Em I can’t believe it.”

“So I drop out of school and we get married and have a baby?”

His chest hurt.

She opened the door and got out of the car and began to walk down the edge of the breakdown lane, going away from him. There was a strong wind and she leaned into it and her clothes seemed to pull away from her body as she went. A semi went by and slowed, brake lights lit as it passed her and then went on. And Hewitt was angry she’d backed him into the corner of his own construction and knew why she’d done it and so dropped the car into gear, popped the clutch and went up the breakdown lane after her. When he pulled up beside her she got back in as if she’d never been gone.

He said, “I want to pay for it.”

Face dead ahead she said, “Don’t worry about it.”

He drove on. After a while they passed the Syracuse exits and still neither spoke. If there was any exit in particular that mattered to her she didn’t so much as glance but kept her eyes on the road.

After a while he said, “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t anything I wanted to do you know.”

His brain still screaming he calmly said, “Emily, I love you very much. There’s time to talk it out. We’ve got a week.”

They rode silent several miles and then he said, “Em? Are you all right?”

She slid over the seat and he lifted an arm and let her tuck in close against him, holding her shoulders. She said, “I’m okay. Hewitt, I’m okay.”

Then she began to cry.

H
E WAS ELONGATING
the third egg, an exact swift striking as he turned it on the anvil and now the rod and growing globe were back in the fire when he heard the car come into the yard, Hewitt standing patient waiting for the heat to come back into the metal, the color to come Halloween orange again when the door above opened. It was still raining, the windows steamed over; the forge homely warmth. He knew it was Walter. He reached and took a small swallow
from the diminished bottle but left it right there on the bench. Then stood at the hearth, eyes on the heat of the coal, his right foot pumping slow thrusts of air into the fire from the big bellows below. Knowing Walter wouldn’t speak until Hewitt paused his work. So he lifted the rod and moved the reddening bulb to the side of the fire, where it would remain warm. Then turned to his friend.

Walter had his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He said, “Quick trip.”

“Yup.”

“A dead fire?”

Hewitt considered this approach. “I suppose.” He shrugged. “She’s got a whole life, kids, job, a husband dead about three weeks. I would say I was most likely the last person she wanted to see.”

Walter scuffed the toe of a boot against the hard-packed dirt. “It went that bad?”

“I’ll tell you, brother. I would definitely not be looking for her to pull in here anytime in the next fifty or sixty years. It was stupid of me, that’s what it comes down to.”

“Holding on to something you believe in isn’t necessarily stupid.”

“No? I’ll tell you what. I wasted a good chunk of my life holding on to her and man it might seem noble or something from the outside but from where I stand right now I’m pretty much an idiot.”

“Ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Do you regret those years?”

“Regret? Regret losing my mind for several years and pretty much fucking up my life? Regret the plodding to patch back together what I could? Regret? Shit man I’m the guy they put a little picture of in the dictionary next to the definition of regret.”

Walter ran a hand through his hair. He said, “That’s not regret, that’s feeling sorry for yourself. Let me tell you something.”

“Sure. Tell me something.”

“There’s plenty men. And women too. Who’ve been together so long and been in holes so deep they’ve decided it’s how life is. How it has to be, how one way or another the way it turns out to be. Who can’t even begin to imagine the sort of freedom you’ve known.”

“I think it’s pretty sad and doesn’t have much to do with me. Seeing her, talking to her, I learned I still am all fucked-up. That’s not feeling sorry for myself. That’s looking the big dragon eye to eye.”

Walter had not changed position, hands still in pockets, upright. But now with his feet planted hard rocking back and forth. As if taking something in and plucking toward the truth through the feathers of camouflage. Finally he pulled his hands free, and Hewitt felt that gesture and knew he wasn’t going to like what was coming. Walter said, “You waited twenty years and then you went and screwed it up. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what happened? You poured yourself out to her. Probably the first time you saw her. The only big dragon around here is you.”

Hewitt said, “Fuck you asshole. You know I couldn’t go and play Mr. Cool. Then you stroll down in here and sum it all up. Well, listen. Thanks for the use of your car. Thanks for taking care of things while I was gone. And thank you for making clear that whichever way I twisted on this one I was bound to lose. Fuck you. And if you’re screwing Jessica just take her back to your house and get both your shit out of my life because I don’t need it right now. I’m sure she’d fit right in. I’d bet anything she’d approve of the idea of gluing aluminum foil to the walls to keep people from listening in or beaming thoughts into your head or whatever it is that makes you so fucking sane and me so fucking crazy. So why don’t you just get out of here. You moron sonofabitch.”

Walter glanced now at the bottle of Jameson on the bench. A slow sweep of his head, a gesture intentional and planned. He said, “My, my. I had no idea I was such a pain in the ass. And sorry, bro, but Jessica’s your deal. I’m just helping her paint her car. No worries. We
can move it to my place and do it there. If you recall, I’ve
never
lingered where I’m not wanted. And I see you’ve got your old buddy back. A much better fit, I’m sure. A load you can hump right along. Although of course it won’t be that long and the load will be humping you but hey, I’m not telling you anything you haven’t forgotten, right? You down with that bro? But what the fuck, why settle for that old shit? You can haul ass over to Rutland or White River and score top quality smack easy as pie now. Yup, all the high school kids are into that shit. So why not? Oh, that’s right. You don’t really want to pull down the veil. You just want heap big pain medicine. Hey, but who knows? Maybe this time’ll be different. Maybe this time you can suck down the booze and let it all out and it’ll be different because you’ll have a full-time audience. Maybe you can work yourself right down into such a sad needy pathetic little mess of a man that Jessica will get her own power back. Taking care of you. It’s what you need. Isn’t it? Somebody to take care of you. While you and John Jameson there waltz around the room, falling over furniture and giving yourself psychic black eyes. Or how bout this? Maybe seeing you do all that shit will give her the boost—roust her right out of here. I mean, listen man—you never saw yourself sucked down into the bottle but I have and I can tell you it’s ugly. And you can bet she’s seen it too. Yup, I’d bet a dime she’ll watch you maybe a week and decide there’s sunny skies somewhere, hell most anywhere but right here. No, no, I’m going. But tell me one thing man? I’m just curious. Just one thing.”

Hewitt was blazing, silent.

Walter leaned close without moving his feet. “How does it taste, man? As lovely as you remembered? Or better?”

Hewitt still had the tapered hammer in his hand although he’d forgotten it. But then it was there and he wanted to step forward and plant it in Walter’s forehead. At the last moment he backhanded it against the far wall and heard the thud even as he stepped hard and fast toward Walter who was still rocking back and forth. Hewitt drew
back his fist and never even saw the mean uppercut that dropped him to the floor.

W
HEN HE WOKE
it was near dusk and the rain had quit. Outside his bedroom window was a patchy sky where light bled through so faint gold and blue colored the clouds, almost a winter sunset. His jaw a thumping lump and his whole head hurt. But there was no confusion except for having no idea how he got to the bed. He was in pain and humiliated, not for what had occurred but why. There was a bad moment when he turned his bruised face into the pillow wanting it all just to go away. But the weight of his head against the pillow was a red streak of pain and he rolled away, on to his back.

Goddamn, he thought. Walter clocked me.

He was some time getting upright from the bed. Still dressed, thank those who had no desire or inclination to remove his clothes. He held on to a bedpost with one hand as he sought balance against the swimming of his head. As if his brain had come undone and was sloshing side to side within his cranium. And then saw the tall glass of water on the bedside table and three aspirin in a neat row. Enough to make a better man weep but for this man at the moment just what he needed. He went to the bathroom to, as old ladies liked to say, freshen up.

Out in the hall it was very quiet. There was no inkling of anyone else in the house. Perhaps he was alone. A prospect both earned and dreaded but yet, if it came to that, so be it. He’d lived alone a long time. As he inched his way down the stairs he thought Phantoms come and phantoms go.

Jessica lay on the couch. On her back, eyes closed. In long loose shorts that just covered her kneecaps, the shorts with military-style pockets on the front and sides. Above the shorts she was layered. He walked quietly close and saw a white T-shirt under a drooping V-neck sweatshirt with an unbuttoned flannel shirt over that. She was barefoot but other than her dirty soles she was as hidden as a person could
be and still walk around. And he knew she’d worn this all day, perhaps the day before as well.

It was a strange moment. He leaned close enough so he could feel her breath against his cheek. He knew these were probably her preferred clothes, put on as soon as he left; what Walter saw. And standing over her his pain ebbed. It was illumination—this woman trusted him. For the moment he wasn’t interested in any Whys. It was enough to know she did. And she slept. He straightened and looked at his reflection in the window above the couch. Somebody there wavered and pitched about in the glass.

In the kitchen he removed the jack from the phone. The number of new messages disappeared like a magic trick. He filled a quart jar with fresh water and went back to the living room. He sat in the old wingback chair across from the couch and slowly drank the water. The house was quiet enough so he heard the in and out of Jessica breathing as she slept. Twice the cistern pump in the basement kicked on and ran.

The dark was gaining and he went quietly through the house and turned on a few lights. Back in the living room the small lamp of the sort used to illuminate paintings he’d installed over the stereo rack and wall of shelved music—the perfect light to attend to an evening of music while the room itself spread soft from the slight overflow. He considered a drink but decided against it. He was feeling toxic and oddly at peace. Still he felt strange sitting in the barely lit room with Jessica sleeping on the couch—he didn’t want her to wake and see him just sitting there. He was comforted by her presence and had a vivid fear of being mistakenly viewed as predatory, or any lesser degree of how she might consider his silent watching. The only thing for it was music but even the selection held enormous weight. Most simply not to wake her. He went down on his knees and quickly found his father’s old vinyl recording of Borodin’s String Quartet no. 2 in D major. Then went through the ritual of cleaning the turntable and cleaning both sides of the album, turning the volume
low and placing the heavy disc on the table and slowly settling the needle down. There was only the faintest hiss and then the old near forgotten slow beautiful music tempered the room and softened it even further.