A Private State: Stories (6 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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Page 30
"I'd still like to go," Julia said. "Let's clean up later." But Hannah wouldn't leave until she'd swept away all the scraps of the piñata, whose two front legs, not quite severed, tilted from the trash can.
By the time they arrived, the light had changed. "Looks like rain," Julia said, not knowing if this were accurate or not. Something in the air smelled different. It might have been moisture.
All week, Hannah had talked about her picnic grove in the gorge. There were waterfalls, she said, and high cliffs where the Anasazi had likely lived. The way Hannah described the place, Julia expected sacral hush. Instead there was a rutted space where people parked trucks with huge wheels. Yowls filled the air, noise that came from the first pool, brimming with boys in rooster-bright shorts jumping from ledges in the sandstone cliffs. The water burst up white as their bodies slammed into the pool. Julia wondered what the Anasazi would have thought of that. Hannah disapproved. Though sunglasses shaded her eyes, her mouth thinned. Julia thought the Indians might have enjoyed the wildness of the leaps, the immersion. "Looks like fun," Julia said.
Hannah looked at her squarely. Julia had never been good on a high dive and Hannah knew it. But instead of challenging Julia to try the jump, Hannah murmured there'd be fewer people upstream. She was wrong. Swimmers lined the banks of every spot deep enough to wade in. On a sandy spit, in the shade of a willow, she finally said, "This looks like it."
Julia stripped off her shoes, eager for the tingle of deep water, but the river was warm. Weeds flowed along the bed. Triangles of broken bottle were scattered on the bank. Hannah settled her things, then unpinned her bun. Seeing the glow of her sister's hair, Julia felt the sudden lack of her own. "This is where Stephen and I come. During the week when no one's here."
Julia could imagine them making love on the sand, under the gauzy screen of willow leaves. Julia thought of the stuffiness of the afternoons she spent with Henry, how he made sure all the win-
 
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dows were closed so no one could hear them. Then two girls appeared on the opposite bank, below the cliff. They were fourteen or fifteen, hips and thighs already ripe, rippling. Their wet tops clung in bubbles to their skin. Giggling, fleshy, sad, they held chips of rock and turned to the cliff to scratch hearts. Julia looked at them etching the empty curves. Given the chance, she might have been tempted to add one herself. But her sister was fuming beside her. "Don't, Hannah," Julia said. "Let them be." Don't you remember, Hannah, she wanted to ask, the letters we carved in the birch with steak knives? Don't you remember how Mom slapped us?
Julia stared carefully at the way the sun lit the angled edge of the broken glass by her hand, then looked up at the girls filling the hearts with initials and ampersands. Those marks would wash off; the birch was still mending. "Do you wish I hadn't come?" Julia asked and stood up. Hannah said nothing. "I have to tell you I don't think your boyfriend is the nicest guy."
Hannah snapped, "I hear you've taken up with a married man." Suddenly, they were both standing.
"If I'd let him, Stephen would have kissed me," Julia shouted.
The girls stopped scratching and stared. "In your dreams," Hannah shouted back.
In her dreams, Julia wanted to scream at her sister, all she saw was their mother, braid bouncing as she wandered the house. Instead, she ran at Hannah and pushed her backward into the water. The girls fled. Hannah's dark glasses flew off. Her arms flailed, the way they had when she'd first learned to swim. Julia had always been better in water. She waded into the pool, stones and weeds slipping under her feet. She reached a hand toward Hannah, who grabbed it hard, pulling Julia in on top of her.
They splashed in the dead center of the pool, spouting, trying to gain a foothold. It was colder out here than Julia expected, cleaner feeling. They started to push toward the shore, breathing hard, bodies half in water, half in air. Hannah's hair tangled in a wet,
 
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black root straggling down her back. Julia's was drying fast against her cheek. But even in their stumbling, anyone could see they were related, arms tilting just the same way as they tried to balance themselves. As they reached the bank, they looked at each other, motherless, motherless.
 
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Luck
"Duncan's gone," Lillian told Owen. She was standing in the driveway, wearing garden gloves and holding a trowel streaked with dirt.
"He's probably seducing that retriever around the corner," Owen said and hauled his briefcase from the backseat. "Unless of course he's upstairs reading Tolstoy."
"Tolstoy. For God's sake, Owen," Lillian said, though the retriever was an idea. They ought to have had the stupid corgi neutered as a pup. But Lillian phoned the golden's owner and found that a minivan had killed the poor dog last week. "Emma's been run over," she told her husband, who'd come into the kitchen, one hand wrapped mid-stem around a glass, the other trailing the day's mail.
"Bombing started in Sarajevo again," Owen answered. When he hadn't heard her, he sometimes offered summaries of the day's dark events. The raw troubles of the Balkans, already unreal in the southern wedge of Connecticut, were even less believable in the slow light of May. In May, Lillian tossed the sad, fat sections of international news unread in the trash. But tonight, with Duncan gone and Emma dead, Lillian's mind filled with the vision of a woman sprawled in an alley, the frothy greens of carrots spilling from her basket.
"Emma was left for hours on the road," Lillian said, slightly
 
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louder. On the counter sat a can of Duncan's food. Next to it, a head of lettuce flopped against a pair of chicken breasts they were going to have for supper.
"Don't fret, Lillian. How far can a ten-year-old corgi wander?"
"Miles, for all I know," Lillian muttered, putting down the trowel and washing her hands.
"He'll be back," Owen said and slipped a statement from its sheath. "When's the last time you saw him?"
"About fifteen minutes ago. I was weeding, he was there, you know, lolling and panting. Then he wandered out front and when I called he didn't come." Lillian realized then she didn't believe in instantly replacing a pet, as she'd urged Emma's owner to do. It wasn't as simple as deciding the guest room needed fresh curtains.
She looked at Owen. It was 6:30 and Duncan was out there when he should only be here, tangled in her feet, crazy for scraps, and there was Owen deep in some plea from a phone company. Lillian was going to find her dog. She tucked her shirt in tighter and said, "Owen, get the chicken ready, will you? I'm going to look for Duncan."
"Stop fussing. He's out eating someone's trash," Owen said, not looking up from the advertisement.
"I'll just check around the block." She couldn't dislodge the picture of the woman in the alley, the brown kerchief, the basket's tight weave.
"Lillian," he said and looked up. "Stay put." The mail sorted, he wanted to talk, about the lateness of the 5:09, the pollen count, the Serbs. Talk to fill the blue bowl of the evening, while that poor fat dog waddled across streets, testing his blind luck.
"Four minutes both sides," Lillian said. In the garage, she grabbed a box of dog biscuits, then drove slowly through the neighborhood, calling for Duncan through the open window. As she rolled past the neat houses, it struck her how few people they knew here now. Their oldest neighbors, Bob and Claudia Merchant, had moved last month to Chapel Hill. Did that make
 
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Lillian and Owen the unconsulted historians of the area? Objects of musty, bored respect, the kind reserved for cousins many times removed? More likely they had no role at all. "Duncan!" Lillian called, rather more loudly.
A pair of boys were the only ones to answer. They looked much like Lillian's children had, hooting through the dusk on newly mastered two-wheelers. It was soothing to know nine-year-olds still understood the panic of losing things as iconic as pets or fossils found on mountains. But her kids' pockets were lumpy with marbles, not beepers. The boys darted ahead, whistling down streets Lillian had hardly ever noticed, broadcasting Duncan's loss. Then an electronic chirp sounded in the twilight and they told her they were sorry but they had to go.
Lillian turned the car around, steering past a Victorian that a young couple had restored to perfect, ghostless fussiness. Lillian had met the wife at the vet's, their expensive cat coiled inside its carrier. She thought now she should call the vet to see if anyone had reported an injured dog. From a phone outside a new all-night pharmacy, Lillian told the receptionist that Duncan the old corgi was missing. Of course he was licensed. He wore a name tag, too, green and heart-shaped, Lillian admitted. "Do you think he's been stolen?" she asked. The woman sighed.
Lillian drove back past the Victorian and saw in the floodlight the woman waiting in the door for her husband, just returned from work. Two shadows, one perched, one in motion, anticipating contact. Lillian wondered when it was, exactly, that she found more pleasure stroking the notched, velvet thinness of a dog's ear than her husband's back.
It hadn't always been like that. Lillian let herself recall the last time she'd spent the evening in a car, driving about the neighborhood in fruitless sadness. It was just over ten years ago, and she'd recently discovered she was pregnant. Forty-six and pregnant all because the boys, launched at their serious schools, had left the house in pale-blue stillness. Lillian and Owen had started to bump
 
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into each other in the midst of Saturday's most ordinary chores and found themselves, despite topsoil under nails and a frieze of just-cut grass on pant legs, dissolved to uselessness with lust.
They made love everywhere, pausing to close curtains but not to search for birth control. In the den, on the living-room rug, bifocals thrown carefully clear. Owen's ankles printed with ribs of tennis socks, the skin of Lillian's back dented where bra hooks pressed, light spread across their lumps and scars, the folds and puckers of bodies that had slipped, almost without their knowing, past their prime. Lillian opened then shut her eyes, not quite ready to admit the extent of the change but almost excited for the release from pride.
Slightly aroused, if abashed, Owen led her to bed when she told him the news. Afterward, Lillian had asked, "Do we have to?"
Owen propped himself on an elbow. "Do we have to what?" When she stayed quiet, he looked harder at her and said, "You can't be serious."
She sat up and took a pillow to cover her breasts. "I might be," she said. What a chance to blur the picture of the years ahead. The huge, unsteady luck of a child.
He pulled the pillow from her body and said, "Lovey, be reasonable."
"Why?" she'd asked, but he hadn't answered. It was then she'd thrown on her clothes and bolted out of the house and into the car. Down their street of white clapboard and black shutters, then along roads named after brooks, soon to be polluted. At last she'd found herself in a development, staring at a bulldozer whose scoop was caked in earth, peering into the cellars of houses yet to be built.
The next day, on her knees in phlox that sprouted far beyond its bed, Lillian felt a quick spread of dampness between her legs. The stain in her pants rinsed easily away. Wrinkled, soapy trousers and underwear dripping in the sink, she stood in front of the mirror. It was a beautiful day and the light showed every line in her face. "It feels awful," she said to her reflection. That week,
 
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without asking Owen, cramps still twisting her belly, she bought Duncan. She chose him for the lightness of his bite. The milky needles of his teeth hadn't even dented her skin.
Tonight, ten years later, the kitchen was quiet and smelled heavily of old dog. Owen had shut himself up in the library, from which Luck Lillian heard the dull and stately rhythms of public television.
A frog, throat bulging to a veined bubble, filled the screen. Its skin was deadly to the touch, the British announcer droned, as if the English had taken lethal frogs in stride centuries ago. Owen was deep in a book, a tall blond glass of whisky on the table. When she'd told him about the miscarriage, he'd covered her with fast, firm kisses, but their touches had grown more cautious since. They'd started reading classics aloud, and bed had gradually become a place for cool, still sleep. "I couldn't find him," she said. "What are you reading?"
Owen flashed the cover: a paperback of the Brothers K. Bad signs, immersion in the half-light of scotch and Dostoevsky, though there were ways to turn the evening's luck. She could have asked, for instance, if Dosto's wife loved him as much as people said. But Owen shifted his legs as if he were stiff and said, "Lillian, he's an old dog. Maybe he wandered off the way elephants do. Maybe all he wants is peace." Amphibians, hooch, tortured Russians, Lillian thought. If that was peace, he could have it. It looked more like a deep sulk.
In the bedroom, she watched shows on the small
TV
until the news came on. She didn't need to learn any more about besieged cities and dying women. They were all floating around somewhere in the night, them along with liquored-up husbands and Duncan, knocking over garbage cans and barking at leaves. Such a stupid, easy life. Why had he drifted away from it now? All night, she heard Owen downstairs, bumping into furniture, looking for what she didn't know.
He came to the bedroom early the next morning, already pack-

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