Someone Else's Love Story (17 page)

He wakes up facing the flat green wall, still rolled onto his unshot side. He sucks in a great, heaving breath through his nose. The air is still and quiet and smells only like cheap cleaning fluid.

“Are you awake, Bubba?” Paula’s voice, speaking quietly in case he’s not.

He rolls cautiously onto his back.

The room is full of silent people, looking at him. His jaw aches. He feels woozy and nauseous and all the people in the room are undulating inside their skins. The only one he recognizes is Paula, who is sitting on the other bed in a black skirt and a white blouse, her expensive jacket in a crumple beside her.

She smiles when she sees his eyes and says, “What did I tell you about getting shot? What did I tell you?”

“Nothing,” William says. “Though in retrospect, you meant to tell me not to?” His voice comes out hoarse and overloud.

“I see the bullet missed your smart-ass gland,” Paula says. Her head wavers back and forth on her wobbling neck, and he weaves his own head back and forth, trying to match the movement to hers. “Bubba? Did you get shot in the brain? Or do they have you on the good drugs?” He holds up the box with the button, and she smiles. “Yummy. Okay, but don’t be shot again. Ever.”

“Check,” William says.

The tall, skinny boy standing to her left shuffles impatiently. William doesn’t know him. He’s college-aged, wearing long shorts and flip-flops. His face looks like he is eating something sour.

Closer to his bed, in the room’s only visitor’s chair, sits a familiar dark-haired girl with a little boy in her lap. The boy is holding a tattered, grimy origami bird.

“Hello, Natty,” William says. He picks up the bed remote and presses the button that raises him to sit.

“Hello, William,” the little boy says. “Mommy said you wasn’t killed.”

“How are you feeling?” the girl says, shyly, and the name comes back as he hears that familiar accent. Shandi.

“Yes, William, how
are
you feeling?” says Paula, raising her eyebrows at him. She waggles them significantly. “I see you’ve made new friends. Pretty ones. With . . .” Behind Shandi’s back, Paula hovers her hands over her own small breasts, honking large imaginary ones.

Shandi says, “Natty’s been really worried.”

“Psssh,” says William, looking at Natty now. He waves one hand expansively, which causes a long, shuddering pain to radiate from his side, but the morphine makes this only mildly interesting. “I’m hardly even scratched.”

A lie, but it is oftentimes expedient and kind to lie to children. The last two months that Twyla was alive, he nightly had to shoo away the Hommy-Hom who lived in her closet. It was an idea he resisted at first. Instead he explained the natural world to Twyla, the nonexistence of monsters in general and Hommy-Homs in the specific. Twyla listened and nodded, and at the end he said to her, “So monsters don’t exist, do they?”

She answered, very serious, “No, Daddy. ’Cept dis Hommy-Hom.” And pointed at the closet.

“My bird has blood on it,” the little boy tells him, mournful. “I’m not allowed to keep it.”

He holds it out, showing William the rusty streak on the tail.

“I’ll make you another,” William says.

Paula, sounding very much like herself now, says, “By the way, I’m glad you’re not dead.”

“Me, too,” William says. It is expedient and kind to lie to adults sometimes, as well. “Why aren’t you in court?”

“I need to be. I had to get a continuance, and now my bitch client has decided we should renegotiate and go after that second summer home. All because you couldn’t wait to get shot until tomorrow.”

Shandi says to Natty, “Walcott will take you to the cafeteria to get that ice cream now, okay?”

Natty nods, and Paula is still talking. “You’re very popular. Mrs. Grant—the lady who owns the Circle K—stopped by to weep and abjectly apologize. She’s very, very sorry that she shot you with her foot. Her husband has a couple of cracked ribs, she said to tell you, but he should be fine. He’s in a room down the hall. He wants to say thank you. That clerk came by, too—”

“Carrie,” Shandi supplies. She is handing the little boy up to the much larger one, angry in his flip-flops. All the motion in the room makes William more nauseous.

Paula talks over her. “—on the same errand, one assumes. They didn’t stay, though. Only this one stayed. And watched you sleep. Which isn’t creepy.” She says it in the way that means she does think it is creepy.

“So did you,” William says.

He feels his mouth stretch out long into a smile. Too long. It feels like half his head could yawp open and hinge back entirely, until he is staring upside down at the wall behind him.

“Yeah, but I love your sorry ass,” Paula says.

Shandi startles and draws in her breath, fast and sharp.

The angry boy flairs his nostrils. “We’ll be in the cafeteria, when you get done with this lunacy.”

He carries Natty out.

Natty waves as he goes, and William waves back. So, this is what three looks like, big-eyed and quiet and intense. William has not spent much time with children other than his own daughter, who stopped at two. She was all noise and chaos in glittery pink clothes, a ball of willfulness with short, fat legs. He can see the physiology is different. Three is longer and straighter, the back no longer bowed and the stomach losing its baby roundness.

Paula says, “He’s gone. You can stop waving now, Bubba.”

He didn’t realize he still was. He stops, and stops smiling, too, trying to narrow his mouth back down, make it shorter. He can’t do it, and he deliberately sets the morphine button aside.

Shandi says to Paula, “Could you give us a minute? Alone?”

Paula chuckles. “Absolutely not. Your friend said that you are here for lunacy, and this man is clearly helpless. What if you eat him?”

“William,” Shandi says, like a plea. Her eyes are big and desperate, like they were in the Circle K, fixed on him like she expects him to bang Paula in the head now. It reminds him.

“Did I kill him? When I hit him with the paperweight?” he asks her. He doesn’t want to have killed anyone. Not even Stevie.

“No,” Shandi says. “He was in surgery, they said, and now he’s in the ICU. They put a cop outside his door, but I don’t know why. He’s in a coma.”

She stops talking and looks down at her hands, glancing over at Paula a couple of times. William picks up Natty’s dilapidated paper bird, pulling the tail to make it peck. It’s so rumpled that all it can manage is a lurching, sad movement. Shandi still keeps glancing back at Paula.

Paula says. “I’m not leaving, crazy lady.”

“I’m not crazy.” Shandi turns to William and says, “Or maybe I am. In the Circle K, when you, when you were shot, you looked at me and you said a word.”

William shakes his head. He doesn’t remember.

“You said ‘destiny,’ ” Shandi tells him.

Behind her, Paula sits up straight, and now she is looking at William with intensity. She knows his definition. Her eyes narrow.

“William,” Shandi says, and he sinks back to that moment, when their eyes met over the head of her frightened child. He thought then that she might kiss him. She leans in close again, speaks barely above a whisper. “Do you believe in miracles?”

Behind her, Paula’s eyebrows disappear into her bangs.

“Define the term,” he says.

“Like when the Red Sea parted, or when Lazarus got back up,” she says. She swallows and looks away.

“No,” he says.

She shrugs. “I was a virgin when I gave birth to Natty. For a long time now, I’ve told myself it was a miracle.”

Miracle
is another word for magic, and magic is only science, unexplained. The simplest explanation for her sentence is a need for antipsychotic medication. Paula, twirling her index finger by her forehead behind Shandi’s back, is advocating for this one. William, even in the grips of morphine, doesn’t think so. He was with her in the Circle K. She was steady and cool, doing her best to keep her child safe. She did all the ugly things that needed doing when he took the bullet. She doesn’t strike him, even now, as unstable. Though certainly his judgment is impaired. Right now, it looks as if she has two or three overlapping faces.

“There’s no such thing,” he tells her.

She shakes her head, rueful. “I know. I’m not even sure if I believe in God. But I pretended it was a miracle anyway. It was easier. If there’s something you can’t live with, you have to get it off of you. You do whatever you need to do, to push it far away.” This, of course, makes perfect sense to him. “It can come back, though. You never know what’s going to call it back.”

“Detergent,” he says and Shandi’s eyebrows knit.

“Okay, stop,” Paula says, standing. “He’s in no condition to talk to you about whatever your disturbance is.”

Shandi ignores her and bulls onward, talking faster now, and her voice is fierce, telegraphing urgency. “There was no miracle. I killed it in the Circle K. I killed it dead, and now I only want to know the truth. You said that word,
destiny
. You said you were a scientist. I think that you could help me know.”

“I mean it,” Paula says, looming up over her. “Time to go.”

Shandi retracts under Paula’s glare, sinking herself deep into the chair. She grips the edges with her hands so hard the knuckles whiten. She will not easily be moved, but Paula is about to lay hands on her and make it happen, easy or hard. Someone could be hurt. Probably Shandi.

“Wait,” William tells Paula, and she pauses to boggle at him.

His mind, even soaked in narcotics, is engaging. Something rose for this girl, too, inside the Circle K. She says she killed a miracle, and while he understands that she means this figuratively, the concept pleases him. She wants willfulness and science now, to help her. “I’m interested in doing that,” he tells her.

Paula is so startled she does an actual double take. Shandi only nods. She looks relieved, but not surprised. It’s almost as if she expected him to agree, and this is interesting, too. William himself would not have predicted it, right up until he heard himself say it.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Paula says. She is examining Shandi again. She’s been teasing William about having a young woman hanging around to watch him sleep, but now she’s taking Shandi seriously. Her gaze rests on the girl, appraising, suspicious, and then she’s glaring at him. “William, do you hear yourself? Is your brain in a cloud?”

He shoots her an impatient look. “You know I don’t like metaphors before I’ve had my coffee.”

She laughs in spite of her confusion. “Or after,” she says.

“Or during,” he agrees. He understands what she means, of course, but why should he have to? Why ask if his brain has been encased in a visible mass of tiny water droplets when what she really wants to know is why he’s acting out of character.

“Whew, you’ve bounced back sassy,” Paula says. “I should have shot you months ago. You’ve really thrown me, though. This girl just said the most ass-crazy mess I’ve ever heard, and you’re all in? Just like that?”

William shrugs, though he can tell from a distance that his wound is not reacting well. It also wasn’t the best idea to sit up, now that he’s noticing. The two women undulate in the fuzzy room, each wanting different things. His loyalty is to Paula, but the night was long and black; the morning seems impossible to navigate with loyalty alone.

Shandi may well have saved his life with a borrowed sweater and quick thinking. The common perception would dictate that he is in her debt, although he isn’t grateful. Being saved was not the outcome he was seeking. But now she’s said a lot of things that have left him feeling curious. He’s almost interested, his mind engaging with something far outside himself for the first time in a year.

And why not? It isn’t every day he meets a girl who killed a miracle.

“Sure,” he tells Paula, tells them both. “Just like that.”

P
ART
T
WO

Chemistry

The Brain is just the weight of God—

For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—

And they will differ—if they do—

As Syllable from Sound—

E
MILY
D
ICKINSON

Chapter 7

T
his is what I knew: William would find Natty’s biological father. He would banish the red-clay golem I’d imagined rising, malformed and anonymous, from the earth around the beanbag chair. He would make it have a human face, a human body, a human vulnerability to justice. I had finally become a true believer.

“He’s not Sherlock Holmes,” Walcott told me on the phone. I was hurling a load of laundry into the machine at the condo, getting ready to go back over to William’s. I hadn’t seen Walcott since we’d visited the hospital. I’d told myself it was only because he lived in Lumpkin County in the summertime, working for his momses. But he hadn’t answered my texts, and that was unprecedented. I called the B and B and had Aimee go and get him. Now we were in this stupid fight. He didn’t think William could do it, and he was irked that I’d even asked him to try. “You believe it the same way Natty believes that he saves Tinker Bell by clapping, every time I read him
Peter Pan
.”