After the People Lights Have Gone Off (28 page)

“I’m with you, yeah. That’s pretty okay in my book.”

“I want to be in your book too,” she says, and we draw close but it doesn’t go anywhere, and I think to myself that this is good, that this is right. That this is what I always wanted.

Twenty minutes later her side of the bed relaxes, steadies out, and I change my mind about this “one more night” charade. About this passive suicide I’m consenting to, just by pretending that everything will be all right in the morning.

I rise as silently as I can, go to the open bedroom door, grit my teeth to ignore the draft at my back, wanting to pull me through.

We will sell, we will get out of here. Earlier, before, when Kelly’s other half touched my shoulder at the top of the stairs, that physical contact between worlds—it put Novocaine in my brain all afternoon. It made me suggestible, made me easy, dimmed me like a bulb. Gave me a toolbelt to show my allegiance with. Made me too thankful for not falling down all those steps. Made me feel like I owed something back, like I was part of some circle, some cycle, some secret, timeless dynamic.

“Tomorrow,” I promise out loud.

Tomorrow.

Standing at the door, though, something splashes into the sawdust on the cement of the foyer. One drop, then another.

Tea, lemonade. Racing to the bottom.

From above, giggles.

I don’t want to, but I reach out, catch one of those drops. Lick it from the skin of my palm. It tastes like—

But no, no.

I wipe my tongue on the sleeve of my robe, ease the door shut, lock it.

Because Stan measures twice and cuts once, the brass tongue snicks into place.

I nod yes, that this is good, and walk backwards to bed, feeling my way under the covers, my eyes never leaving that slit of light under the door. It’s from the porch light, bleeding in through the stained glass around the door. There’s no reason for it to waver, no reason for it to waver.

It doesn’t, it doesn’t, and then at some point in the night, it does.

Not a solid shadow like a person would make, even a person made of shadow, a person pulling herself around and around the first floor by hand, but…something lighter, even more insubstantial.

It chatters a noise from its cheek and I open my mouth to scream, can’t even begin to.

A squirrel.

There’s a squirrel out there, its nose to the base of the door, its black marble eyes judging me.

I slither my hand under the sheets, find Kelly’s arm and hold on, keep watching, keep watching, and finally that line of light, it burns into my retinas, I think. I can’t see it anymore in any kind of real way, can only see it as afterimage, and, because it’s still there like that, I can shut my eyes, rest them for a moment.

Sleep.

There’s no clear space I step over to get there, either. Just, at some point, I realize that that yellow line I’m watching, it’s the blurred together stripes on the highway, that I’m whipping down some interstate at night, my head out the window, hair stinging my neck, and the only way I’m keeping straight, it’s by staying fixed on that line.

“Careful,” Kelly says from the passenger seat, and I reach over for her hand, find the top of her thigh instead.

Not wormy and mushy, but firm, young.

It’s how I know I’m asleep. It’s how I know I’ve been tricked, that I’ve been tricked by my other self, that I was setting myself up. Bringing syrupy red wine to bed. Working my muscles all afternoon. Spiking my adrenaline at the top of the stairs, then at regular intervals throughout the day, every time I’d look upstairs. Of course I had to crash eventually.

When I come to, instead of a jolt, it’s slow, like I’m floating up to the surface, like I’m a corpse, the gases of my decomposition giving me lift, the birds singing me up into the moonlight, to feast.

The whirring sound of radial steel on blacktop dies away, the yellow line chunking itself up into hashes, into one single hash, one line of light below the door. It’s unbroken, and the door, it’s still shut, surely still locked.

I nod too fast in desperate thanks—only a few hours to go, right?—and part of my little celebration, I guess, my private little ceremony of gratitude, my way of evening the world out, it’s to rub that rough knob on my left hip, that external, infected hernia, that new sphincter trying to push its way to the surface, my pointy fingertip just feeling through for the way in, pushing hard enough to crack the knotty surface, reach through, touch my bones.

But—no.

I take inventory of both of my hands, all my fingers.

They’re not in my underwear this time.

I turn from the line of light and—

It’s Kelly.

She’s asleep, has her face in my crotch, her lips sucked onto that mole, that patch of skin, that…that hickey.

I hook her thick hair loosely between my thumb and forefinger, smooth it onto her back, and when her eyes look up to me like they have to they’re black, they’re all pupil.

They don’t see me, but they don’t look away either.

I rub my hand along the side of her head.

Her legs, they’re run up alongside me, I can see that now. And my own, they’re tingling, a numb kind of emptiness, like something’s being steadily drawn from them. Something deeper than blood. Something more important, more basic.

For an instant her lips break the suction, slurp up, and I see a sticky line of wet shadow string up from my hip to her mouth. And then that string, the marrow of my dreams or whatever it is, it pulls her back, colors her throat on the way down, branching away for dark pulses, and in this way I know that I’m hers, that she’s mine, that we’re together as we should be. As together as any two people could possibly ever be.

Beside me, just to prove it, her left foot, it curls up against her pillow in the cutest way, those muscles remembering what they’re for, and my face warms into a smile.

Of course.

My wife says she woke falling.

What she doesn’t know, though, it’s that I was already down here, waiting for her. That I was going to catch her all along. That I would never in a thousand years let her hit the ground.

That one of these nights we’re going to walk upstairs together, hand in hand.

That, in some houses, love really can last forever.

in a Western when the camera’s focused down alongside the thigh of a quick-draw artist.

I figured it was the last thing she ordered because it didn’t show up until two weeks after the funeral. On some slow boat from Malaysia, probably. Meaning sending it back was going to be a headache, especially since she’d used her credit card.

Returning it, too—I don’t know. I guess it would have felt like a betrayal, sort of. Like I was passing judgment on this one last thing that was supposed to have somehow made everything better. Like I was telling her it was going to take more than something she saw in an infomercial to fix our marriage.

Before she died, we’d been sleeping in separate rooms for three months already. Keeping our take-out on different shelves in the refrigerator. Only using the ketchup at different times, using our cells instead of the landline, all that.

Neither of us wanted to say it out loud, but it was over, me and her. Not because of any particular revelation or event,
though I could name a few if pushed—her too, I’m sure—but,
stupid as sounds,
it was more like we’d just started going through different drive-throughs. Our tastes had changed. I
mean,
you need difference,
you need friction in a marriage,
sure,
this is talk show gospel,
but what it came down to was that
I
was perfectly content to let her keep on with her chicken tacos with sour cream thing,
and felt zero need to convert over to the goodness of
Caesar salads with a small bowl of chili. I
didn’t care what she was eating,
and
I
don’t think she felt particularly sorry for the heartburn the chili kept leaving me with.

Soon we were watching different shows in different rooms, changing our own batteries in our separate remotes, then falling asleep apart, waking up on our own.

And then, as if to complete the process, she drifted into a busy intersection under the false safety of a green light.

The police came to my office to tell me about the accident, took me to the morgue.

I identified her, I called her parents, we buried her, and now I had a handheld laser IR thermometer to show for our three-year marriage.

I unboxed it, batteried it up and held it to my forearm like a science-fiction hypodermic, pulled the trigger: 98.4 degrees.

Perfectly normal.

•

According to the packaging, home inspectors were big on these handheld thermometers. It made their job worlds easier.

Supposedly you could use it to double-check the temperature in your oven, or track pipes in the wall, or do something I didn’t understand with the hot-water heater. You could find air leaks around windows, too, especially in winter. The living room might be a balmy, draft-free seventy-two degrees, but run this dusty red light around that dried-out caulk line in the sill, and you’ll see where your electricity bill’s really being spent.

I took it to work, checked the heat on the electric pencil sharpener, on the copy machine, on the coffee pot, on my supervisor when he was walking away. My deskmate Randall shoved it down the front of his pants before I could stop him, pulled the trigger to prove how hot he was.

The microwave was nearly the exact same temperature off or not. The only difference was its light bulb, probably.

On the bus a woman across from me screamed when I pulled it from my pocket.

I got off at the next step, my hand still on the pistol grip.

When Teresa and I had first been dating it had been winter. One of our things was to walk to the liquor store seriously bundled-up in scarves and jackets and stocking caps, so that, cutting across the parking lot, we’d joke about how we were going to stick the place up—at least that’s what the clerk was going to think when we walked in.

Walking home after the bus, I stopped by a different liquor store, paid for a six-pack, the thermometer’s grip warm against my stomach.

The beer was Teresa’s brand. I didn’t even notice until my first drink.

I drank it anyway, had two gone by the time I made it home.

Later, I settled my red pointer on the late-show host’s cheek. It made me feel like a sniper.

And then I checked the living room out.

The walls were warmer behind the set, cooler by the door. The lamp that I’d had on while eating was still comparatively hot. The doorway to the kitchen was the same as the wall. My foot was the same as the wall. The late-show host was on fire. The window was the Arctic, the ceiling indifferent, the carpet the same.

I tried to write my name on the wall but wasn’t fast enough.

Finally I was able to draw a heart, slash an arrow across it.

The audience on television exploded with laughter.

I nodded in acknowledgement, sighted along the top of the gun down the hall, to my bedroom, but stopped at Teresa’s instead.

Everywhere else in that darkness, the temperature was hovering around seventy.