Continental Drift (24 page)

“Oh, Jesus, what if she already had the baby! I better phone the hospital. Right?”

“Suit yourself.”

That won’t change anything, Bob thinks. What’s done is done. If she’s had the baby, his calling won’t help her; and if she hasn’t had the baby yet, she’s probably stuck away in a room without a phone. “No, I’ll go right over now. If she calls, Ronnie, or if your wife calls, say I’m on my way, okay?”

“Sure enough. Hey, I might tap me a couple more Colts, if it’s all right with you.”

“Sure, sure, help yourself. Take all you want. And thanks for watching the kids. I’ll call you from the hospital, soon’s I know what’s happening.”

“Suit yourself,” he says, working himself free of the couch, his eyes already moving toward the refrigerator. “I’ll just sleep here on the couch till you get back. I don’t have to work till tomorrow noon. Friday’s night’s busy, after the movies let out and all, so I stay late an’ don’t go in till noon.”

Bob doesn’t hear him. He’s already out the door and running for his car. As he runs, he punches his fist against his thigh, curses himself through clenched teeth. If he could beat himself up, he would. If he could slap himself around, punch himself in the stomach, throw himself to the ground and stomp on his back, kick himself in the kidneys, break his ribs, he would. But he can’t. Elaine needs him, so he can’t punish himself yet. But he will, goddammit, he will.

Bob pushes open the door from the hallway and enters the nearly dark room, walks carefully past the other beds, two of them with women sleeping in them, one empty, to the bed at the end, and as Dr. Beacham promised, Elaine is there, all in white, like an angel, or at least a saint, covered with a sheet and wearing a cotton nightie, her face washed and smooth, her damp hair pulled back by a pair of
Ruthie’s white plastic barrettes. She’s lying slightly propped on pillows, peacefully asleep.

Stopping beside the bed, Bob stares down at his wife, looks down the length of her body to where the baby was and on to her feet. Her left: hand dangles from the bed, as if pointing to the floor, and her thin wrist, circled with a plastic cord and name tag, is like a child’s, and to Bob, at this moment, tells everything. Her slender white wrist carries to him the long, sadly relentless tale of her strength, her patience and her trust. It tells him what he’s been shutting out for months, perhaps for years. Purely and simply, it tells him about the woman’s goodness.

His jumbled thoughts and feelings suddenly clarify and separate, and he realizes in a rush that
this
is what he loves in her. And this is what he’s been denying himself, keeping it from himself so that he could go on thinking he didn’t love her, so that he could go on trying to love a different woman, a woman he thinks is probably not good, or at least she’s a woman whose goodness he’s incapable of seeing, as he sees Elaine’s goodness now, simply by looking down at her wrist.

Shame washes over him, and he feels suddenly cold. He knows, for this brief moment, what he’s done, and the knowledge makes him feel naked. To keep his options open, a man has kept himself from loving his own wife. This is a terrible sin. It’s the kind of sin, worse than a crime, that Satan loves more than a crime, because it breeds on itself and generates more sin. Because of the nature of his sin, it’s been impossible for Bob to see goodness in Marguerite or Doris or anyone else he might like to love. Yet until now, to keep his options open, he’s been willing, he’s even been eager, to trade off the years it took him to lose sight of Elaine, all the years of living with her day in and out, eating, working, sleeping with her, night after night, season after season, until she finally became invisible and he no longer knew what she looked like, until her voice became as familiar and lost to his ears as his own is, until, when he wished to see her, truly see who this woman was, he could only look into the exact center of her eyes and see the exact center of his own eyes looking back and know that he
still had not seen her—until finally, now, years and years later, after what he’s done to her tonight, and perhaps only because of what he’s done to her tonight, Bob is able, when Satan isn’t looking, to glance at the woman’s thin wrist and at last see the woman’s goodness, which is the very thing, the only thing, a man can truly, endlessly, passionately love.

Her eyes flutter open, and she smiles. “Hi, honey.”

Bob can’t speak. He pats her shoulder, then leans over and gently kisses her on the lips.

She brushes his cheeks with her fingertips and whispers, “The baby’s a boy, Bob. It’s a boy.”

He nods. He knows, he knows.

“Have you seen him? He’s real pretty.”

He shakes his head no, turns away from her face and lays his head on her breast.

Tenderly, she runs her fingers through his hair.

“I … I’m sorry,” he says in a muffled voice. “I … I’m sorry I wasn’t able to … to help.”

She smiles and says that she knows he’s sorry, but he shouldn’t feel guilty, the baby came early and quick. “It was real easy,” she says. “Not like the girls. I almost had him in the car on the way over. Poor Ellen, she thought she’d have to deliver him herself.” She laughs, and he laughs a little too.

He stands and clears his face with his fists, like a child, and they smile at one another. “A boy, huh?”

“Yep,” she says proudly.

“Bob junior?”

“Bob junior.”

“Wow. A son.”

“Going to grow up and be just like his daddy,” she says sweetly.

A shade passes over Bob’s face. “No.”

“Oh, come on, honey. Be happy.”

“I am, I am. I just … no, I’m happy, really. A son!”

She tells him he can see his son in the morning, the nurse will
bring him in early so she can feed him, and if Bob wears a face mask, he can see him and maybe hold him too. Then she asks about the girls.

Ellen Skeeter’s going back to Oleander Park to be with them now, he tells her, and she said she’d stay all night and get Ruthie off to school in the morning, if he wants, which he does, because he plans to sleep out in the waiting room tonight. “Thank God for Ellen and Ronnie,” he says.

She smiles and tells him to go on home and get some sleep and come back early tomorrow. “You’re going to be busy the next few days,” she tells him. “I’m on vacation, me and little Bob, but you and the girls, you got to take care of business as usual, you know.”

He understands. She’s right. She’s always right. He does have a lot to do in the next few days. He kisses her lightly, pats her wrist gently and backs from the room.

Late the next afternoon, George Dill spots his daughter’s car as it lurches out of traffic into the parking lot of the liquor store and pulls up by the Dempster-Dumpster in back, and he shuffles forward to the front door, waves good night to Bob and starts out.

“Hey, George!” Bob calls from the register. “Isn’t Marguerite coming in?”

“No, sah, Mistah Bob, she tol’ me this mornin’ she gon’ be in a hurry tonight, so I better be ready.” The old man nods emphatically, as if agreeing with himself, and his Miami Dolphins cap slides forward on his bald head.

“Really?” Bob says. He didn’t see her this morning. He was at the hospital, viewing his son and namesake, and got to the store later than usual; by then Marguerite had already dropped her father off and gone on to the clinic. He wasn’t able to tell her, as he’d planned, that he would not be able to see her anymore.

Bob steps around the counter and peers back through the side window at her car. He can’t quite see who’s inside, though it is clear to him that there is someone other than Marguerite inside the car. A man, evidently. In the front passenger’s seat. A black man.

“George, tell Marguerite I need to speak with her about something, will you? Tell her it’s important. It’ll only take a minute.” He returns to the cash register and starts totaling the day’s sales.

Seconds later, Marguerite appears at the door, opens it and sticks her head in. She’s wearing her nurse’s uniform, looking tired and a little perturbed. “I can’t talk now, honey. I gotta rush. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“No. It has to be now.”

She doesn’t understand.

“Come inside and close the door.”

“Only a minute?”

“Yeah. Only a minute.”

She steps inside and lets the door close behind her, then walks carefully across the floor to the register. “Is somethin’ wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong. But … but Elaine, she had her baby last night. Our baby. She had a boy.”

Marguerite’s face breaks into a quick smile, a flash that catches itself and turns serious again. “That’s real nice, Bob. A boy. Is she okay and all, Elaine?”

“Yeah, she’s fine, fine. But … well, listen, she had the baby when I … when I was with you last night. I got home, and … well, you know.”

“Oh.”

Bob looks down at the cash register keys and drums his fingertips nervously across them, as if trying to type out a message.

“You couldn’a known she was gonna have the baby, honey. Those things happen on their own. The baby don’t know or care what his daddy’s doing at the time.” She tries a faint smile.

“Yeah, well, I know that. But even so, I naturally did a whole lot
of thinking last night … and this morning. I thought a lot about the way things have been going for me.”

“Uh-huh.” She crosses her arms over her breasts and takes one step backwards.

“Yeah, well, I decided we shouldn’t see each other anymore, Marguerite.” There. It’s said. He looks into her eyes hopefully, but they narrow and harden.

She swallows with difficulty, then speaks in a dry, high voice. “You feeling guilty is all. With the new baby and all. And you not being there last night, being with me and all …”

“Well, yeah, of course I’m feeling guilty!” he snaps. “I should, for Christ’s sake. Guilt’s important, you know. It tells you when you’ve done something wrong. And what I’ve been doing lately is wrong. Wrong.”

“No, it ain’t. It just makes you feel all guilty inside, especially right now, with the new baby and all. That don’t mean it’s wrong, Bob. We got to talk this over. We can’t just walk off like this.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “There’s nothing to talk over.”

As if she hasn’t heard him, she brightens slightly and says, “Yeah, we got to do some talking, honey, that’s all. Maybe we take a break, and you just take care of your wife and babies for a while, and don’t worry about me none for a while. Don’t worry about nothing for a while. Then we can do some talking later on.”

“Listen, we can’t.”

She looks into his blue eyes steadily. “You just don’t know what kind of woman I am, do you?”

“Well …”

“And I guess I don’t know what kind of man you are, either.” She extends her right hand toward him, and her eyes fill, and quickly she blinks to cover it and withdraws her hand. “I hafta run,” she says. “I got to work tonight.” She turns abruptly and starts for the door.

“Marguerite.”

She stops but doesn’t turn around. “What you want?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

She leaves at once, yanking the door shut behind her. He stands at the register, staring after her, and when the car passes, he sees the man in the passenger’s seat, sees him clearly. It’s a young man, slumped down in the seat and facing away from Bob and toward Marguerite, who is looking straight ahead. The man has his arm out the open window and is wearing a light blue shirt with geometric designs crisscrossing the billowy sleeve. His hair, Bob sees, is plaited in tiny cornrows from front to back, from forehead to nape of neck, neat, tightly rolled tubes laid parallel to one another and raised against the dark brown skin of his scalp like thick black welts. It’s the kid! It’s Cornrow!

My God, Bob thinks, she
knows
him, she’s known him all along, and now she’s brought him
here
! No wonder she was in such a hurry and didn’t want to come into the store! She
must
have known he was the same kid who tried to rob the store.

No, she couldn’t, he decides. She couldn’t have known. It’s just an awful coincidence. She’s just giving the kid a ride home or something, they all know each other anyhow, and she’s just giving him a ride home.

But she doesn’t know the kid is a killer, then, a thief. She
can’t
! Or she wouldn’t be giving him a ride home. She’s in danger, but she doesn’t know it. By now Bob has got the .38 out from under the cash register and is running wild-eyed toward the door, car keys in hand.

The highway is clogged with cars at this hour, but by weaving between lanes and cutting into openings as they appear in the stop-and-go traffic, Bob is able to get in sight of Marguerite’s red Duster by the time it reaches Eagle Lake, a few miles south of Winter Haven. He falls in line three cars behind hers, turns left onto Route 655 north, bypassing downtown Winter Haven and heading toward Auburndale. He’s never been to her house and knows nothing of the town, so he’s careful not to lose her. At the same time, keeping two and sometimes three cars between them, he’s careful not to be seen by her.

His mind is a stream of thoughts and emotions suddenly thawed
and flowing, a gushing, ice-cold torrent that mixes fear for her safety, anger for her having betrayed him, disgust with himself, desire for Eddie’s approval, rage at the boy who wanted his friend to shoot him with a shotgun, and a strangely impersonal, generalized desire for a clarifying act of revenge. If you ask him what offense or crime he wants avenged, he won’t be able to say, but even so, the desire is there, powerful, implacable, righteous and cruel. He will shoot that boy with the fancy hairdo, and he’ll do it in front of Marguerite Dill, too. In front of her father. He’ll just walk up and pull the gun out of his belt and fire point-blank at the kid’s chest. Then he’ll turn around and walk away, maybe call the police and tell them he caught the guy who tried to rob the store last summer, maybe call Eddie and tell him, maybe call Elaine and tell her. Maybe do nothing, just drive on back to the store and open it up again till nine and then go home and see his daughters and go to the hospital and visit his wife and new son—it doesn’t matter what he does afterwards, as long as he has done it, done the one thing that right now needs doing more than any other thing needs doing, which is shooting his gun at the black kid in Marguerite’s car. The knowledge rides high in his chest, bracketed and bolted there like a steel block, an ingot of desire around which the rest of his body and mind and all the time he has left to live and all the time he has lived so far have been organized and ordered. It’s the absolute clarity of the desire that makes it irresistible to him, and now that he’s engaged it, committed himself to its satisfaction, he can’t turn back. He’s in the wind now, in a kind of free-fall, a rushing, exhilarating plummet toward the very ground of his life.